HASSNERS.org highlights
In the light of that knowledge the idea that we humans are the ultimate and privileged product of a purposeful, divine creation can be seen as the purest fantasy. So why do so many people still cling to such beliefs?
Now perhaps it would not matter that religion teaches nonsense (or perhaps, being charitable, I should say “that religion makes unsubstantiated claims”) if that nonsense was totally benign.
But scratch any religion and you find violence lurking just beneath the surface. Every successful religion has evolved memes for self-protection. Whether it is the promise of eternal damnation or the death penalty for apostasy, the promotion of faith over reason, or the demonization of science, these memes have helped sustain the hegemony of religion.
The fact that our political masters find religion useful is, I would suggest, the primary reason for the continuing dominant position of religion in society. We can see this happening today not only in dreadful authoritarian states like Iran and Saudi Arabia but in the world’s great democracies such as India, the United States and even France. Just a few years ago the President of the United States said that, in his view, unbelievers should not be considered citizens.
We must recognise that the March of Atheism is not an end in itself but a step on the way to understanding ourselves, the world, and our place within it; a step on the road to caring for others as we care for ourselves; and a step towards the ultimate goal of Humanism and enlightenment.
1. I would point out the importance of uncertainty, of doubt, as the mainspring of human progress. Humanity has only ever made progress when an individual has stood out from the crowd and cast doubt on the received wisdom of the day.
2. While Rationalism and Atheism are, well, rational, concern for others, the second leg on which Humanism stands, is difficult to explain by reason alone. Yet altruism, or empathy, is an important part of what makes us human. We have evolved to be compassionate. The apparent irrationality of altruism can be explained by evolution. We have evolved to show kindness to strangers. Even though we feel that altruism may be driven by emotion rather than reason, it would not have evolved if it did not confer on us some evolutionary advantage.
It doesn't matter if it's a tiny bacterium, a growing tree or a gigantic mammal – it seems most groups of organisms favour the same optimum metabolic rate.
Previous studies had shown that, within many groups of organisms, smaller species generally produce more energy within each cell than larger species. But according to Anastassia Makarieva from Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in St Petersburg, Russia, no studies had compared resting metabolic rates across the whole range of life on Earth.
Makarieva's team trawled through a database of 3,006 different species, ranging from bacteria to elephants. They found that the average resting metabolic rate per unit mass varied by a factor of 10,000 – despite the fact that body mass varied by a gigantic factor, 1020.
For most species, the metabolic range was even narrower, with the majority lying between 1 and 10 Watts per kilogram – a factor of 10 difference. There was no consistent relationship between metabolic rate and body mass.
"The largest organism we studied is the elephant, which has a metabolic rate of 1 Watt per kilogram, and the smallest is a bacterium with a metabolic rate of 4 Watts/kg," says Makarieva.
Using the formulae that had previously been used to calculate the metabolic rate within separate classes of animals, you would have expected a multimillion-fold difference, she says.
Since such a large number of species falls within this narrow range, she hypothesises there may be an optimum metabolic rate for all organisms. "Organisms that lie close to this value may be the fittest to survive," she says.
Although the team don't yet know what evolutionary advantage it may offer, they believe the need to stay close to this value may help explain certain aspects of evolution, such as the size at which invertebrates needed to evolve a breathing mechanism, or the shape and size of tree leaves.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0802148105
Evolution - Learn more about the struggle to survive in our comprehensive special report.
In 1866 (just seven years after publication by Charles Darwins' "The Origin of the Species" in 1859) Haeckel's published his 'Tree of Life' showing the relationship between Plantae, Protista and Animalae.
I call Hitchens final point 'regressive evolution' (their is probably a better term already in use).It is extremely seldom that one has the opportunity to think a new thought about a familiar subject, let alone an original thought on a contested subject, so when I had a moment of eureka a few nights ago, my very first instinct was to distrust my very first instinct.To phrase it briefly, I was watching the astonishing TV series Planet Earth (which, by the way, contains photography of the natural world of a sort that redefines the art) and had come to the segment that deals with life underground. The subterranean caverns and rivers of our world are one of the last unexplored frontiers, and the sheer extent of the discoveries, in Mexico and Indonesia particularly, is quite enough to stagger the mind. Various creatures were found doing their thing far away from the light, and as they were caught by the camera, I noticed—in particular of the salamanders—that they had typical faces. In other words, they had mouths and muzzles and eyes arranged in the same way as most animals. Except that the eyes were denoted only by little concavities or indentations. Even as I was grasping the implications of this, the fine voice of Sir David Attenborough was telling me how many millions of years it had taken for these denizens of the underworld to lose the eyes they had once possessed.
The creationists (to give them their proper name and to deny them their annoying annexation of the word intelligent) invariably speak of the eye in hushed tones.How, they demand to know, can such a sophisticated organ have gone through clumsy evolutionary stages in order to reach its current magnificence and versatility? The problem was best phrased by Darwin himself, in his essay "Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication":
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.
Evolution also posits that modern organisms should show a variety of structures from simple to complex, reflecting an evolutionary history rather than an instantaneous creation. The human eye, for example, is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years. Initially a simple eyespot with a handful of light-sensitive cells that provided information to the organism about an important source of the light …
Vestigial eyes, for example, are clear evidence that these cave salamanders must have had ancestors who were different from them—had eyes, in this case. That is evolution. Why on earth would God create a salamander with vestiges of eyes? If he wanted to create blind salamanders, why not just create blind salamanders? Why give them dummy eyes that don't work and that look as though they were inherited from sighted ancestors? Maybe your point is a little different from this, in which case I don't think I have seen it written down before.
For example, to the old theistic question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" we can now counterpose the findings of professor Lawrence Krauss and others, about the foreseeable heat death of the universe, the Hubble "red shift" that shows the universe's rate of explosive expansion actually increasing, and the not-so-far-off collision of our own galaxy with Andromeda, already loomingly visible in the night sky.
So, the question can and must be rephrased: "Why will our brief 'something' so soon be replaced with nothing?"
It's only once we shake our own innate belief in linear progression and consider the many recessions we have undergone and will undergo that we can grasp the gross stupidity of those who repose their faith in divine providence and godly design.
February 12 2009 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, and 24 November 2009 is the 150th of the publication of his book On the Origin of Species, which laid out the theory of evolution by natural selection.
The BBC announcement dovetails with the anniversary of the first public reading of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's papers on evolution to the Linnean Society on 1st July 1858.
A new study – the largest analysis of birds to date using modern genetic methods – has turned up numerous surprising relationships that will force biologists to reevaluate much of what they thought they knew about avian evolution.
Until now, this evolutionary history has been something of a mystery, because most modern orders of birds arose in a sudden burst of innovation sometime between 65 and 100 million years ago. This left few intermediate forms to help biologists discern the evolutionary relationships among orders.
"It's one of the last big mysteries of birds – trying to figure out how these orders, which look so cohesive in themselves, are grouped together," says Sushma Reddy, an evolutionary biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, US.
The few genetic comparisons among orders have tended to focus on one or a few genes, and have yielded inconsistent results.
To resolve this problem, Reddy and her colleagues
sequenced 19 regions of the genome of 169 species of birds – a total of 32,000 DNA "letters" per species – then used the sequences to construct the most robust avian evolutionary tree ever made.
This new tree contains several notable surprises. For example, falcons are more closely related to songbirds than to other hawks and eagles. The closest kin of the diving birds called grebes turn out to be flamingos. And tiny, flashy hummingbirds, according to the new tree, are just a specialised form of nighthawks, whose squat, bulky bodies make them an unlikely cousin.
In fact, the new tree ended up regrouping about a third of all the orders in earlier phylogenies of birds. "That shows you how inconsistent it has been," says Reddy.
The new tree may have profound implications for our understanding of the major innovations in the evolutionary history of birds, says Joel Cracraft, curator of ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, US.
For example, the new tree puts an order of flying birds, the tinamous, squarely in the midst of the flightless ostriches, emus and kiwis.
If true, this implies either that flightlessness evolved at least twice in this lineage, or else that the tinamous re-evolved flight from a flightless ancestor. "A lot of us actually don't believe their result," says Cracraft, who says that further studies will be needed to resolve the issue.
The new family tree adds a further novel twist by suggesting that the closest relatives of perching birds, or passerines, are parrots. This needs further corroboration but, if true, evolutionary biologists will at last have a firm starting point for understanding the evolution of the perching birds, which are by far the largest and most successful order of birds.
Journal reference: Science (DOI: 1.1126/science.1157704)
Scientists are split over the theory that natural selection has come to a standstill in the West. Robin McKie reports
Observer
Sunday February 3, 2002
For those who dream of a better life, science has bad news: this is the best it is going to get. Our species has reached its biological pinnacle and is no longer capable of changing.
That is the stark, controversial view of a group of biologists who believe a Western lifestyle now protects humanity from the forces that used to shape Homo sapiens.
'If you want to know what Utopia is like, just look around - this is it,' said Professor Steve Jones, of University College London, who is to present his argument at a Royal Society Edinburgh debate, 'Is Evolution Over?', next week. 'Things have simply stopped getting better, or worse, for our species.'
This view is controversial, however. Other scientists argue that mankind is still being influenced by the evolutionary forces that created the myriad species which have inhabited Earth over the past three billion years.
'If you had looked at Stone Age people in Europe a mere 50,000 years ago, you would assume the trend was for people to get bigger and stronger all the time,' said Prof Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, London. 'Then, quite abruptly, these people were replaced by light, tall, highly intelligent people who arrived from Africa and took over the world. You simply cannot predict evolutionary events like this. Who knows where we are headed?'
Some scientists believe humans are becoming less brainy and more neurotic; others see signs of growing intelligence and decreasing robustness, while some, like Jones, see evidence of us having reached a standstill. All base their arguments on the same tenets of natural selection.
According to Darwin's theory, individual animals best suited to their environments live longer and have more children, and so spread their genes through populations. This produces evolutionary changes. For example, hoofed animals with longer necks could reach the juiciest leaves on tall trees and therefore tended to eat well, live longer, and have more offspring. Eventually, they evolved into giraffes. Those with shorter necks died out.
Similar processes led to the evolution of mankind, but this has now stopped because virtually everybody's genes are making it to the next generation, not only those who are best adapted to their environments.
'Until recently, there were massive differences between individuals' lifespans and fecundity,' said Jones. 'In London, the death rate outstripped the birth rate for most of the city's history. If you look at graveyards from ancient to Victorian times, you can see that a half of all children died before adolescence, probably because they lacked genetic protection against disease. Now, children's chances of reaching the age of 25 have reached 98 per cent. Nothing is changing. We have reached stagnation.'
In addition, human populations are now being constantly mixed, again producing a blending that blocks evolutionary change. This increased mixing can be gauged by calculating the number of miles between a person's birthplace and his or her partner's, then between their parents' birthplaces, and finally, between their grandparents'.
In virtually every case, you will find that the number of miles drops dramatically the more that you head back into the past. Now people are going to universities and colleges where they meet and marry people from other continents. A generation ago, men and women rarely mated with anyone from a different town or city. Hence, the blending of our genes which will soon produce a uniformly brown-skinned population. Apart from that, there will be little change in the species.
However, such arguments affect only the Western world - where food, hygiene and medical advances are keeping virtually every member of society alive and able to pass on their genes. In the developing world, no such protection exists.
'Just consider Aids, and then look at chimpanzees,' says Jones. 'You find they all carry a version of HIV but are unaffected by it.
'But a few thousand years ago, when the first chimps became infected, things would have been very different. Millions of chimps probably died as the virus spread through them, and only a small number, which possessed genes that conferred immunity, survived to become the ancestors of all chimps today.
'Something very similar could soon happen to humans. In a thousand years, Africa will be populated only by the descendants of those few individuals who are currently immune to the Aids virus. They will carry the virus but will be unaffected by it. So yes, there will be change there all right - but only where the forces of evolution are not being suppressed.'
However, other scientists believe evolutionary pressures are still taking their toll on humanity, despite the protection afforded by Western life. For example, the biologist Christopher Wills, of the University of California, San Diego, argues that ideas are now driving our evolution. 'There is a premium on sharpness of mind and the ability to accumulate money. Such people tend to have more children and have a better chance of survival,' he says. In other words, intellect - the defining characteristic of our species - is still driving our evolution.
This view is countered by Peter Ward, of the University of Washington in Seattle. In his book, Future Evolution, recently published in the US by Henry Holt, Ward also argues that modern Western life protects people from the effects of evolution. 'I don't think we are going to see any changes - apart from ones we deliberately introduce ourselves, when we start to bio-engineer people, by introducing genes into their bodies, so they live longer or are stronger and healthier.'
If people start to live to 150, and are capable of producing children for more than 100 of those years, the effects could be dramatic, he says. 'People will start to produce dozens of children in their lifetimes, and that will certainly start to skew our evolution. These people will also have more chance to accumulate wealth as well. So we will have created a new race of fecund, productive individuals and that could have dramatic consequences.
'However, that will only come about when we directly intervene in our own evolution, using cloning and gene therapy. Without that, nothing will happen.'
Stringer disagrees, however. 'Evolution goes on all the time. You don't have to intervene. It is just that it is highly unpredictable. For example, brain size has decreased over the past 10,000 years. A similar reduction has also affected our physiques. We are punier and smaller-brained compared with our ancestors only a few millennia ago. So even though we might be influenced by evolution, that does not automatically mean an improvement in our lot.'
Their efforts, powered by the capacity of the evolutionary worldview to invest their lives with direction and purpose, will bring forth a great wave of evolutionary activism that will change life on this planet forever.
Socially, the next great step in human evolution is the emergence of a unified and sustainable global society.
Psychologically, the next step is to free our behavior from the dictates of our biological and cultural past, so that we can do that which is necessary for future evolutionary success.
It demonstrates the capacity of the worldview to make evolutionary activism the most significant political force on the planet.In particular, it shows that philosophical arguments such as the 'naturalistic fallacy' do not diminish the force of the evolutionary worldview presented by the Manifesto.
accurate observations with telescopes determined that an exact balance exists between the positive energy of matter and the negative energy of gravity. So, no energy was required to produce the universe. The universe could have come from nothing.
Independent scientific support for a creation was also provided by a basic principle of physics called the second law of thermodynamics, which asserts that the total disorder or entropy of the universe must increase with time. The universe is growing more disorderly with time. Since it now has order, it would seem to follow that at some point in the past, even greater order must have been imparted from the outside.
The universe and life look to science just as they should look if they were not created or designed. And humanity, occupying a tiny speck of dust in a vast cosmos for a tiny fraction of the life of that cosmos, hardly looks special.
The universe visible to us contains a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. But by far the greatest portion of the universe that expanded exponentially from the original chaos, at least fifty orders of magnitude more, lies far beyond our horizon. The universe we see with our most powerful telescopes is but a grain of sand in the Sahara. Yet we are supposed to think that a supreme being exists who follows the path of every particle, while listening to every human thought and guiding his favorite football teams to victory. Science has not only made belief in God obsolete. It has made it incoherent.
Victor Stenger pdf.
I found this site via a link in New Scientist article on Evolution. If you think you understand it, you don't know nearly enough about it
It will soon be 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin and 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species, arguably the most important book ever written. In it, Darwin outlined an idea that many still find shocking – that all life on Earth, including human life, evolved through natural selection.
Darwin presented compelling evidence for evolution in On the Origin and, since his time, the case has become overwhelming. Countless fossil discoveries allow us to trace the evolution of today's organisms from earlier forms. DNA sequencing has confirmed beyond any doubt that all living creatures share a common origin. Innumerable examples of evolution in action can be seen all around us, from the pollution-matching pepper moth to fast-changing viruses such as HIV and H5N1 bird flu. Evolution is as firmly established a scientific fact as the roundness of the Earth.
And yet despite an ever-growing mountain of evidence, most people around the world are not taught the truth about evolution, if they are taught about it at all.
Even in the UK, the birthplace of Darwin with an educated and increasingly secular population, one recent poll suggests less than half the population accepts evolution.
For those who have never had the opportunity to find out about biology or science, claims made by those who believe in supernatural alternatives to evolutionary theory can appear convincing. Meanwhile, even among those who accept evolution, misconceptions abound.
Most of us are happy to admit that we do not understand, say, the string theory in physics, yet we are all convinced we understand evolution. In fact, as biologists are discovering, its consequences can be stranger than we ever imagined. Evolution must be the best-known yet worst-understood of all scientific theories.
So here is New Scientist's guide to some of the most common myths and misconceptions about evolution.
There are already several good and comprehensive guides out there. But there can't be too many.
Everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection
Natural selection is the only means of evolution
Natural selection leads to ever-greater complexity
Evolution produces creatures perfectly adapted to their environment
Evolution always promotes the survival of species
It doesn't matter if people do not understand evolution
"Survival of the fittest" justifies "everyone for themselves"
Evolution is limitlessly creative
Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality
Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution
Evolution must be wrong because the Bible is inerrant
Accepting evolution undermines morality
Evolutionary theory leads to racism and genocide
Religion and evolution are incompatible
Half a wing is no use to anyone
Evolutionary science is not predictive
Evolution cannot be disproved so is not science
Evolution is just so unlikely to produce complex life forms
Evolution is an entirely random process
Mutations can only destroy information, not create it
Darwin is the ultimate authority on evolution
The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex
To Kroto, and mainstream scientists like him, the idea that humans evolved from the world's earliest life forms is as obvious as the laws of gravity.
"The bedrock of all biology," Kroto calls it. "It's beautiful."
But Florida lawmakers and a national movement of mostly religious-based groups believe evolution is less absolute.
He fears the recent debate over evolution is a sign science is becoming irrelevant.
"As far as I'm concerned, it's an abuse of position not to teach science correctly to children," Kroto said. "Today they don't need to know how anything works. The technology is so good if something breaks they get it fixed. There's a large number of kids probably prepared to accept something without being too careful."
American men's magazine Best Life has a short piece by comedian Ricky Gervais on how he became an atheist.
After saying how, at the age of 9, he was a massive fan of Jesus – "More than pop stars. More than footballers. More than God" – Gervais describes the day his 19-year-old brother, Bob, walked in just as he was drawing Jesus on the cross as part of his RE homework:
"There I was, happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked, 'Why do you believe in God?' Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. 'Bob,' she said, in a tone that I knew meant 'shut up.' Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong, it didn’t matter what people said. Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist."
So, a fairly rapid conversion then. And Gervais goes on to describe the "gifts" that opened up to him as a result of his "newfound atheism":
"The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. Not a world by design, but one by chance. I learned of evolution—a theory so simple and obvious that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals, and us—with imagination, free will, love, and humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer, and pizza are all good enough reasons for living. But living an honest life—for that you need the truth. That’s the other thing I learned that day, that the truth, however shocking or uncomfortable, in the end leads to liberation and dignity."
Nice one, Ricky. And thanks for giving me a great excuse to put up a clip of the hilarious Genesis scene from stand-up show Animals:
