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Evolution Quotes by Roedy

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40% Americans are Science Deniers

Approximately 40% of Americans deny science and trust the biblical science of the iron age. If the scientists all died, the Christians would soon starve to death. If the Christians all died, peace and prosperity would break out. Christianity gives students an excuse to slack off in science class, and feel profoundly virtuous about it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

747 in a Junkyard

It is really quite funny when an illiterate Christian quotes the old 747 in a junk yard hurricane argument for the existence of a creator god then smiles smugly. Since they have never read even one book about evolution, they don’t realise they have it exactly backwards. They don’t realise they are parroting a hoary, dishonest straw man argument. The error is like marveling that all the players in the NHL (National Hockey League) are exceedingly good and claiming that the odds of this happening randomly are astronomical. Well you ninny. There is nothing random about the selection of which players get into the NHL. The problem is your naïve misunderstanding of how the player selection process works. Anthony Robbins completely lost my respect when he quoted this old canard.

Here is another analogy. Let us say you set up an aquarium filled with delicious foods (at least to a frog). The only way in is via a 1 cm (0.39 in) pipe. You set the aquarium out in a swamp and you came back the next day and lo, the aquarium was filled with tiny frogs. Miracolo, miracolo! you exclaim. If frogs went into the aquarium randomly, they should be all sizes. But again, the vetting process was not random and it did not require a conscious agent either. It was just a dumb old pipe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abiogenesis

If life arose gradually from chemicals here on earth, it had plenty of time and plenty of space to do it. It only had to do it once. There were no predators. Forms of life that would have no chance today could survive back then without competition. It seems to be also quite possible now we have discovered that earth like planets are common, that life abound in our galaxy. Life was seeded here on earth. For some reason, many lifeforms on earth are so tough they can survive hitching rides on comets. Why would they have such abilities if they never used them?

In that case life has had hugely more time and hugely more places to get started. It could require the freakiest event imaginable and still have happened many times.

Science has not solved this yet, but they have made progress.

Can Science Explain the Origin of Life? click to watch
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Abiogenesis

We are still in the speculation phase on how life got started. The one thing we are sure of it that is would have started very primitively, possibly based on PNA, then graduated to RNA (Ribonucleic acid) then to DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid). A fully formed amoeba would not just have popped into existence. I hazard that when we do understand, will be very hard to decide where in the painfully slow evolutionary process life actually started. The earliest lifeforms will look very unimpressive, hardly worthy of a deity’s attention, more like eccentric organic molecules.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Academic Freedom

Even Christians would agree that school teachers should not be permitted to teach astrology in place of astronomy. Teaching creationism in place of evolution is just as silly from a scientific point of view.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acceptance of Evolution

Within 20 years of Darwin publishing Origin Of Species the debate was over in the scientific community. Evolution was accepted as fact.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acceptance of New Knowledge

There are still people who insist the world is flat and the earth is the center of the universe. We have known otherwise for 2,247 years. Darwin published his book on evolution only 158 years ago. No wonder there are so many troglodytes still clinging to creationism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Acknowledging Cruelty

One of the reasons people are so reluctant to embrace natural selection, is that it forces you to confront just how cruel life on earth is. The process drives whole populations to genocide, overpopulation, greed, betrayal, hypocrisy, hierarchy… There is no advantage to a predator to kill its prey humanely. People would prefer to ignore the evidence and bask in the glow of a kindly imaginary god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Adapt or Die

Marine animals all need salt water for survival. Land animals all need fresh water for survival. A Christian would say How kind of my god to have provided each what it required. Darwin would say, Animals had no choice. They either had to adapt to thrive with the water type available or perish. Scientist say the saltiness of the ocean has nothing to do with divine beneficence. It is simply that evaporation leaves behind the salt, raining fresh water on the land. The salt leached from the soils and transported by the river gradually builds up in the oceans. Creationism was bleeding edge science — 4000 years ago. Modern day Christians are overly attached to antique science because of its ancient holy books covered everything of interest in the day, including science, which in now embarrassingly obsolete.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Adapted to Small Groups

Man’s environment has charged drastically. He was used to living in bands with no more than 170 others. Now he is expected to cope with 7.601 billion. During such times of rapid change you can expect those who cannot cope with the changes not to reproduce. I notice myself avoiding interacting with more than about 20 people to partially sidestep the problem.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Adapting is Hard and Slow

Nature hates change. Evolution adapting to even tiny changes works only very slowly over tens of thousands of years. Unlike man, plants and animals have no artificial means to insulate them from tiny changes in the environment, for example a minute increase in temperature allowed pine beetles to wipe out massive forests that had thrived for thousands of years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Addiction to Soda Pop

Driven by desires shaped by evolution when man was a hunter gatherer in a world where calories were hard to come by, Americans now get most of their calories from soda pop.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Addled Conventions

Man has not been able to agree on which way a toggle is flipped for on, whether you press the top or bottom of a rocker switch for on and the shape and orientation of an AC (Alternating Current) outlet. Man still has not managed to get all the hot taps on the left and cold on the right. How daft to dream of world peace!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Advantage of Consciousness

Consciousness has baffled man since the beginning. We would not have it, if it did not have some evolutionary advantage. Discovering that advantage may be the key to cracking the mystery.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Alcoholic Thinking

Drug addicts and alcoholics can be so frustrating. These self-indulgent, immature brats just don’t get it that the long term consequences of a temporary indulgence are suicidal. That is exactly how environmentalists feel about Conservatives, Republicans, politicians and businessmen who refuse to acknowledge the long term environmental consequences of their actions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Alien Visitors?

Though I find it ludicrous to assert that earth is the only place in the universe harbouring intelligent life, I don’t think intelligent aliens have yet visited earth. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Alternative Theory to Evolution

There is no alternative theory to evolution. The creationism hypothesis was debunked over a century a go. It never made it to the status of theory since it was never able to make any predictions or pass any tests. Consider that there is not a single invention that works on creation science. In contrast, paleontology, agriculture, animal husbandry and medicine all heavily depend on evolution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Amazement

Computers produce results without understanding how they do it. Similarly human produce things from songs, to poems to inventions without understanding how they do it. That is why they tend to worship their own creations, and overvalue them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Amazing Darwin

Genetics are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of evolution, but in Darwin’s day they had not been invented yet. Or more precisely, Darwin was not aware of Gregor Mendel’s work. So Darwin had to develop the theory without using genetics, metaphorically with his hands tied behind his back.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Amazing Darwin

It is amazing how much Darwin got right considering he knew nothing of Mendelian genetics, DNA or gene switches.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

American Idol Metaphor

A modern metaphor for evolution might be American Idol. A motley random assortment of mostly untalented people present themselves to the judges. The judges winnow the pack down to an ultimate winner, who is remarkably talented. The judging process is anything but random. Imagine a world where the next generation of contestants were sired only by American Idol winners. That’s evolution. Nature does the judging and ruthlessly condemns the losers to early death for almost any imperfection.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient Intelligences

Humans are almost identical in intelligence to the way they were 50,000 years ago. The most intelligent man of all time might have lived 40,000 years ago. What could he have accomplished without language, without computers, without a way to communicate with other intelligent people, without books, without a school? It is not so much that we modern humans are particularly smart, it is that we inherit so much knowledge technology from others and because society invests so much effort in our education.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ancient vs Modern Science

You could think of the conflict between science and religion as a conflict between modern and ancient science. Stupid people prefer the ancient notion of gods because they are easier to understand. They don’t require any math.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Anthropogenic Climate Change

We know what climate change is primarily caused by man-made CO₂ emissions. How do we know?

Let’s say for political or religious reasons you refuse to accept that the CO₂ is coming from man-made sources. Even if it is coming from some other source, it is still heating the world up alarmingly. It will not fix itself. We humans have to do something to bring the levels down, e.g.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Antibiotic Resistance

All manner of germs have evolved immunity to antibiotics. This is much more serious than you might guess. If we don’t come up with a replacement for antibiotics, it will mean returning medicine to the state it was in 1917. We won’t be able to treat infectious diseases. Several kids per family will die. We won’t be able to treat premature babies. We won’t be able to do major surgery. We won’t be able to treat cancer (It requires turning off the immune system.) Soldiers will die of infections for even minor wounds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ants Studying the Universe

Humans are like ants exploring a 1 metre (3.28 ft) region around their nest and from that pontificating on the nature of life in the universe. They assume of course that the tree they discover is probably the only tree in the universe, since it is the only one they have studied.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Apple of God’s Eye?

If the Christians are right and Yahweh created all species, but man was the apple of his eye, why did Yahweh give birds 8 times better vision, fish better colour vision, bees the ability to see UV (ultraviolet) ?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Apple Pesticide

Why do apples require more pesticide that any other crop? Apple evolution has stopped. All commercial apple trees are grafts of just a handful of individual trees discovered in the 1800s. Apple trees are clones. Commercially, there are only five genetic configurations. The insects continue to evolve better and better ways to overcome those few trees’ defences. This is monoculture taken to the extreme.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Arrival of the Terminator Species

The most destructive event in the history of planet earth was the arrival of homo sapiens.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Artificial Selection

Ever since I was a boy, I was bothered by the way everyone made a sharp distinction between artificial and natural selection. To my mind, what counted what was the selecting done, not who or what did it. The creature evolving was influenced by the selecting, not the selector. So, to my way of thinking, anything that artificial selection could accomplish, so should natural selection be potentially able to accomplish.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Artificial Selection is a Type of Natural Selection

There is no essential difference between evolutionary natural selection and artificial selection.

All the arguments creationist make that evolution by natural selection is impossible apply equally well to artificial selection. Even creationists admit animals evolve under artificial selection. That suggests that even they know all their arguments are bogus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Artificial vs Natural Selection

Artificial selection and natural selection is the same thing. The only difference is the species putting the selection pressure on the evolving species.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Dr. Dawkins explains the evidence for evolution click to watch

Artificial vs Natural Selection

Artificial selection is a type of natural selection. People do nothing that nature does not do, namely kill some types of animal but not others (or in some other way prevent some animals from breeding). Humans are a sort of super predator that has very specific tastes in prey.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Astounding Amoeba

The evolution of the amoeba from raw amino acids is much more astounding and took far far longer that the evolution of man from the single cell stage.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Backfiring Antibiotics

When bacteria acquire resistance to an antibiotic, not only does that antibiotic fail to keep them in check, it helps them thrive by killing off the competition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Bad Behaviour

One of my least favourite features of evolution in that natural selection favours animals that will overbreed, strip the environment and spread pestilence in the absence of sufficient predators, most notably humans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bad News Overload

We humans evolved over nearly all our history in groups of 1000 or less. Today, because of the Internet and mass communications we are aware of the suffering of all seven billion people on the planet and hundreds of other species as well. We now know about coming catastrophes such as the global warming, the energy crunch, mass extinctions, running out of water, overpopulation, accidental nuclear war, earthquakes, tsunamis, galactic debris crashing into earth… However, we have not evolved a way to recalibrate our sensitivity. No wonder pharmaceutical companies are doing a roaring business in anti-depressants.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Believing the Untrue

One of the key features of humans is they can easily be hypnotised to believe things that are patently untrue. I suspect the original survival advantage of this trait was group consensus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ben Stein, Honourary Surgeon

If Ben Stein were to take after medicine the way he has evolution, he would charge into an operating room without scrubbing up screaming there are no such things as spleens because the bible never mentioned them. They would throw him out. He would complain they were prejudiced and censoring him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bestiality

Why does every culture have such a strict taboo against bestiality? The problem is risking introducing parasites and disease from one species into another. It is a crime against two entire species. However, in the case of domestic animals, it is a matter of closing the barn door after the horse has fled.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Big Flaw in Creationism

The big problem with Creationism/Intelligent Design is that is simply not true. It is like a child’s explanation of why the earth has to be flat. (It originally included a flat earth as one of its tenets.) There is no evidence for Creationism. There is a ton of evidence against it. The competing theory, evolution explains things extremely well.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Birds of Paradise

Birds of Paradise live on an island with almost no predators and plenty of food. Females don’t need males to raise a family. Freed of familial duties, male birds of paradise concentrate an impressing females. I suspect the invention of government support for unmarried females is bringing about a similar change in humans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Blind Loyalty to Children

One of the peculiar things about evolution is it creates a primary loyalty to one’s offspring, even if they are criminal, defective or deformed. Hitler’s mother, even knowing what her child would become, still would have promoted him over everyone else.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Blob

Slime mold is not really a mold. It is a giant single celled amoeba up to 1 metre (3.28 ft) across.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Body Odour Attraction

Researchers have found that women are attracted to the body odour of males as different genetically from themselves as possible. With increased travel between parts of the world, we should see an accelerated mixing of genes and a gradual end to both races and racism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Boggled Intuition

What are the odds of throwing 40 coins into the air and they all come up heads? If you are willing to repeat the experiment every 30 seconds for a billion years, it will happen most likely about 933 times. Our intuition about what is possible and impossible only works for human-sized elapsed times.

Time Trials Number of Coins Expected Successes
one hour 120 3 15
one year 1,026,720 10 1,002
one century 102,672,000 20 97
1000 years 1,026,720,000 20 979
One million years 1,026,720,000,000 30 956
One billion years 1,026,720,000,000,000 40 933
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bogus Reason For Opposing Evolution

Christians originally opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution not because there was any flaw in its logic, but because they feared the moral implications of the biblical creation myth being debunked. In other words, their opposition was based purely on how they wanted things to be, not on any evidence for how they are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bragging about Brain Size

When humans brag they have the biggest brains on the planet (relative to body size), it is a bit like a baseball player bragging he holds the record for the most home runs hit during an eclipse.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Brain Complexity

Humans have 100 billion neurons, but only 19,000 genes. This implies the brain has a much simpler structure than we imagine. Mathematically it must be mostly repetitive patterns.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Brain Evolution

Living Love

A part of your brain has evolved to become a cruel master. It whips you with negative emotions intending to force you to strive for increased security, sexual opportunity and power over others. Its values are purely Darwinian. It does not care in the least about your welfare or happiness other than as a side effect in promoting your survival, reproduction or dominance. As soon as you accomplish one goal, this Darwinian part of your brain permits you a few moments of relief, before taking up its whip again to drive you to some new goal. If you let that part of your brain control you, you may well accomplish many things, but you will be perpetually driven and miserable. It is an utter delusion that it will let you be happy after you accomplish the current goal. You would never dream of driving anyone else so brutally. It is equally wrong and foolish to treat yourself that way.

If what I have said rings true, the big question is, how you do get that Darwinian part of your brain off your back and effectively tackle goals without punishing yourself? There is a practical scientific smorgasbord of techniques for doing so collectively called, to my embarrassment, Living Love.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Brain Purpose

The brain evolved not to discover truth, but to ensure survival and reproduction. It should not surprise us then when we encounter people glued to nutty ideas they believe to be the consensus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Breeding Contest

One of the most ghastly facts of life is that evolution favours those creatures who have the most surviving offspring. This leads all animals try to wildly out breed their fellows, even if it means destruction of the environment that sustains the entire species. It even means that evolution rewards those that brutally kill off the competition. No wonder the world is filled with so many obnoxious people!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Breeding Strategies

In species where the males fight to decide which males get to breed, the males are strong and tough. In species where the females judge displays to decide which males get to breed, the males are brightly coloured and good dancers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Build a Nest

Every male bird knows the best way to attract a mate is to build a nest. Human males waste time with red sports cars that primarily attract younger males.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Bungling Designer

When the Christian sees biological complexity, e.g. a snail shell and announces that could not have happened by chance, it must have a designer, he is right. The catch is the designer is not an invisible bearded man in the clouds; it is natural selection, and it works blindly and incredibly slowly without planning, ruthlessly discarding nearly all of its imperfect work. It is quite bungling compared with a human designer, hardly a god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bungling DNA

You can’t use DNA to write messages. It is not an alphabet. All you can do is provide recipes, lists of a small set of possible aminio acids you want synthesised. The lists came about by a very stupid designer with IQ (Intelligence Quotient) 1 (natural selection) trying out new patterns and keeping the best, working for billions of years. If DNA were the work of a deity, you would expect the work to be perfect. It is not. Nowhere near. It is the result of blatant bungling. It shows no sign of foresight or intelligence, just mindless trying of possibilities. DNA is so impressive merely because it spent so much time polishing its designs, not because it is so clever.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Bungling Evolution

Evolution concedes that life is designed. The question is what designed it? Evolution says natural selection did. Natural selection is very stupid. That is why it typically takes a million years to produce anything to write home about. It has an IQ of about 1. Creationists claim a deity of infinite intelligence did the design. How can you tell which hypothesis is true? If a diety did the designs, they should be perfect. If natural selection did them, they should be bungling. Which is it? The design of life shows no sign of foresight. It always builds on what came before, even if a redesign would work much better. Especially in new species, there are often near fatal flaws, like combining the oesophagus and windpipe, creating a choking hazard.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Cactus Flowering of Intelligence

I feel so privileged to be alive on earth now, to watch a flowering of cosmic intelligence and its almost instant extinction, like a rare cactus flower that blooms for but one night.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Capitalist Errors In Thinking

Capitalists are neo-Darwinists who imagine humans prevail over other species by ruthlessly culling the weak and poor. They fail to notice that individual humans are puny animals. The secret of their success is intelligent co-operation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Carbon 14 dating

By comparing the rations of two isotopes of carbon, carbon-12 and carbon-14 you can tell the age of once-living material. It works only for samples up to 50,000 years old, a mere eyeblink of evolutionary time. It works because living material absorbs carbon-14, which then deteriorates slowly to carbon-12 after death. There are other kinds of radiometric dating useful for dating rocks even billions of years old.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) carbon 14 dating click to watch

Caring For The Sick

One of the most unusual features of humans, (if you don’count Republicans as human) is they care for the sick and disabled. Dolphins do this, but I can’t think of any other animal that does.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cave Brain

Though man has relatively recently in his evolution acquired the ability to make tools, he still experiences and thinks about the world with the exact same body and brain he used in his cave-dwelling days.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Changing the Environment

Evolution works extremely slowly. You have to expect serious trouble if you radically change an animal’s environment because it takes so long for the animals to adapt. For humans, we have cut walking from  per day to 0. We have radically changed our diet. We have changed from living in small groups to living in giant hives called cities. We have introduced thousands of toxic chemicals. We have changed from living outdoors to living inside. We are no longer adapted.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Changing Our Environment Too Fast

So many of man’s misery comes from the fact we have changed our environment far too rapidly for us to adapt to it. Consider:

Then Now
Pick fruits and vegetables and eat them immediately. Eat irradiated, frozen and processed fruits and vegetables that sat in storage 6 months and came from the other side of the earth.
Sleep when the sun is down. Sleep according to work schedules.
Active Sedentary
High calorie fats and sugars hard to come by. High calorie foods in abundance.
Salt hard to come by. Salt in abundance.
Live in small bands. Live in giant cities.
One person does all the tasks to stay alive. Specialisation.
Dealing with predators. Dealing with advertisers and other con men.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Childbirth

What kind of intelligent designer would require hours of screaming agony just to bring a new human into the world?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

One of the key attractions of Christianity is that it tells you the lie that you are special, a member of the most important species in the entire universe. In fact the entire universe was all created purely for your delectation. Everything living and unliving on earth is yours, purely for your pleasure, even if your pleasure is to eat, smash, waste or torture it. You are the ultimate spoiled child. Galileo Galilei gave that notion a major kick in the pants by pointing out the earth is not the center of the universe. Darwin gave it an even bigger kick by pointing out that man is just another primate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Conceit

There are a billion billion earth-like planets in the universe. Life appeared on ours almost as soon as it had cooled. What are the odds the Christians are right and that the only one with intelligent life is planet earth? Why would anyone presume something so preposterously conceited?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Courier

The Christian Courier proposed 5 questions they challenged Darwin could not answer. What is wrong with this picture?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christian Deniers

Though I would never harm Christians, I wish they would all drop dead. When it comes to climate change, they insist their willfully uneducated intuition is superior to a lifetime of research. They are so fucking arrogant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christianity Explains Nothing

Christianity explains absolutely nothing about the images coming in from the Hubble telescope. Science has intricate equations that explain an amazing amount of what you see. Christianity is a primitive attempt at science that was never updated.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Christians Pretend Not to Believe Evolution

Most Christians I think, in their hearts, believe evolution to be true. They pretend otherwise because they are worried if their kids learned they descended from animals they would start eating dog food and humping on the lawn.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Chromosomes

Every human has 46 chromosomes. Other species have different numbers. Each corresponding chromosome ( DNA strand) is exactly the same length, measured in base pairs, in all humans. Each slot along each chromosome has the exact same purpose in all humans. E.g. where eye colour is encoded in the DNA is in the same place in all humans. Other species have different schemes, but similar animals like chimps, are similar to ours (they have 2 extra chromosomes). That addressing scheme is what defines a species.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Clades

Creationism asserts god created each species individually from scratch. Evolution asserts each species derived from an earlier species, forming a nested set of related categories called clades. There categories show up four ways:

  1. In the morphology of plants and animals.
  2. In the similarly of DNA.
  3. In the way fetuses develop, reliving evolution of the species. Ontology recapitulates phylogeny.
  4. In the chronology of the fossil record.

The creationists can offer no evidence at all for their hypothesis. Science can offer four independent, mutually-confirming lines of evidence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Coffee As Pesticide

Why does the coffee plant give us a pleasant buzz? God’s beneficence or the plant has evolved a stimulant to defend itself against insects?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Colonising Other Planets

Stephen Hawking suggests humans should colonise other planets to avoid putting all their eggs in one basket and having humans go extinct if a natural disaster like an asteroid or supernova were to wipe out life on earth. I disagree. I don’t think humans are ready for prime time. We behave like bone cancer in any new environment. I don’t think we have a moral right to metastasise until we become civilised.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Colour is Not About Physics But Human Anatomy

I was so astonished to discover that, to physicists, colour is a wavelength even though to my subjective sense, one colour being longer than another is meaningless. I was astounded to discover everything I learned in elementary school about mixing pigments and beams of coloured lights had nothing to do with physics, but with the anatomy of the eye. Even later, I learned that red, green and yellow-detecting cones were a simplification. Cones are sensitive to a wide range of colours, just more sensitive to some. Wetware sorts it all out by comparing the signals from different kinds of cones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Common Ancestor

One of the astounding, yet obvious, consequences of evolution is that any two creatures, if you go far enough back in time, have a common living breathing individual hairpin ancestor. This is true even if one of the starting creatures of the pair is a lobster and the other a Republican.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Competition for Food

Humans believe they own all the food on the planet and need to prevent other species from stealing it. From the point of view of other species, the food supply of earth is up for grabs and they want a slice of the pie. When a strawberry rots, chalk one up for the fungi in this deadly resource war.…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Conquering Nature

Do those people who talk of conquering nature ever stop to think what it would be like if they succeeded.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Consensus

Humans have evolved a habit of consensus. The minority, who doubt the consensus, pretend to agree with it, for group cohesion and coordinated group effort. Unfortunately, this mechanism works just a well when the consensus is wrong. So for example, all Republicans claim to be climate change deniers. It is requirement for belonging to the party. All Pentacostalists claim the earth is about 6,000 years old. The consensus, peer-pressure, group think holds the beliefs in place long after it is clear they are false.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Consequences of Correcting a Defective Heart

If society spends $1 million to correct an infant’s heart defect, we are setting up a potential problem 30 years later when that infant has a child, passing on the genetic defect. If the problem in inheritable and we can’t fix the genetic problem, we really should do something to prevent that person from having a defective child.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Craving Salt

Animals that do not live near the ocean live with constant sodium shortage. They will go to great lengths to seek out salt. We humans have this same salt hunger. We never needed to evolve a mechanism to tell us when we have had enough salty potato chips and so we overconsume to the point it causes deadly hypertension.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creationism Counter Evidence

Christian fundamentalists claim that an intelligent designer created each species individually. Why then did he put tiny useless leg and finger bones in whales? No designer would include random junk. Ditto human appendixes, non-working eyes in cave fish and adipose fins on salmon. The designer came up with a much better way of circulating blood through the lungs for the alligator. Why would he put inferior designs in all other creatures? If there were a designer, he was incompetent, hardly intelligent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creationism is Not Science

Creationism, aka Intelligent Design, is not a science. By definition a science needs to be testable and hence potentially falsifiable. Creation science is based on the assumption of the infallibility of the King James bible. Such absolute certainty and dismissal of any conceivable contrary evidence disqualifies it as a science. It is a blind religious faith. On the other hand evolution is not a moral system. It says absolutely nothing about how one ought to behave.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creationism Rejected by Science

95% of the world’s scientists accept evolution and reject creationism. The people promoting creationism are either professional con men, or stupid people who don’t know anything about evolution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creationism the Usurper

There is no scientific controversy at all about evolution. Creationism wishes to usurp evolution’s position. However, it has no chance. There is no evidence to support it and roomfuls of evidence against it. Christians do not care. They want it taught nonetheless for religious, not scientific reasons.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creationist Climate Change Deniers

Creationists deny climate change. Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Creationist Opposition to Evolution

The creationist case against evolution is:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Criteria To Consider a Hypothesis

For an idea to be considered as a valid hypothesis in science it needs four things:

  1. Evidence it is true.
  2. No evidence it is false.
  3. It must make predictions than can be tested.
  4. It is falsifiable. At least in principle the outcome of some experiment would prove it false.

Creationism is a non-starter by (1), (2) and (4). It predicts:

Of course, it fails all those predictions. From a scientific point of view, creationism is beyond idiotic. It has absolutely nothing going for it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruel Mothers

Human mothers are much more likely to abandon their infants or kill them than other apes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Cruelty Is at the Core of Existence

In the game of evolution, it is not enough that you win, others must lose because there are limited resources for the next generation. Cruelty of competition is at the very core of life. I find this fact a life a convincing argument that life could not have been designed by a benign god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dandelion Wishes

My hope is life in the universe is like dandelions here on earth. No matter how hard we try to wipe it out, it will reseed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dark Side of Natural Selection

It quite depressing thinking about the obnoxious behaviours in humans and animals that you might expect to be caused by natural selection.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Darwin Awards

Americans are big believers in young earth creationism, so they don’t understand that Darwinian natural selection works on them too. In particular, it works to eliminate from the gene pool, those who get themselves killed or maimed in war. Those who are maimed are impaired in their ability to find mates and have children. The good news is people who get off on hunting fellow humans for sport are gradually being eliminated.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Darwin Online

You can read Darwin’s books and papers on-line for free at http://darwin-online.org.uk/. It is the work of the Darwin historian John van Wyhe.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Darwin Is Too Obvious to be Wrong

Darwin says that fitter plants and animals tend to reproduce more offspring than plants and animals with defects that harm their survival and reproductive success. How could it be otherwise? It is a tautology, just the definition of fitter. This means over time plants and animals will gradually adapt to survive in any given environment. It is like a process of always eating the darkest jellybeans from a bowl. Eventually you have only white ones left. How could it be otherwise? Further, we know this is so because have watched the process greatly speeded up when we create artificial environments for guppies, small decorative tropical fish, for example, that require bright colours for survival when we humans interfere with the least colourful males from breeding. Those who reject evolution don’t understand it, or more commonly, don’t want to understand it. They prefer to believe some straw man caricature of it. Christians will still bet on the horse with the best bloodlines, while pretending they don’t believe in the evolutionary selection process that created him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Darwinian Bigotry

It is a revolting thought, but perhaps racial prejudice is an unconscious urge to preserve genetic diversity. Perhaps humans are attempting unconsciously to split themselves into several species to speed up evolutionary adaptation. Whatever it is, it seems to be unconscious rather than rational.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Darwinism is Inaccurate Terminology

Darwinism and Obamacare were originally coined as insults. Oddly, both terms where embraced by the opposition, even by Richard Dawkins, perhaps as a strategy to take the insult out of them. Darwinism is inaccurate since it ignores all we have learned in the last century and the contributions made by many besides Darwin. Science is not about the cult of the personality or authority. The proper term is the theory of evolution. Darwinism is a ploy to focus debate on the theory of evolution as it stood in the 18th century.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Darwin’s Privilege

Even though he suffered from ill health, Darwin was able to visit many of the unspoiled ecosystems of the world, including the coral reefs. No one can do that anymore.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dating

There are 40 different radioactive dating methods to detrimine the age of ancient objects. You can get the age accurate to 2%. There are also methods that do not rely on radio-active decay such as tree ring chains. One takes advantage that when the moon was closer there were 400 days in a year.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dead Ends in Evolution

Natural selection works to spread the most fit genes. This is usually for the good of the species, but not always. It can drive a species to extinction, e.g. mosquito fish with barbed penises. Natural selection favours ever nastier barbs to ensure the female cannot get away before being impregnated.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debunking Creationism

According to creationism, if you dig straight down, every skull you find should be a modern skull. God made only one design for humans and never changed it. However, you find skulls gradually changing, aka evolving.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Debunking Evolution

Why would I want to help you debunk evolution?

The biggest mistake people make in debunking evolution is misunderstanding what the theory of evolution says, or deliberately misrepresenting what it says with a straw man argument.

If you go to AnswersInGenesis you will learn only gross distortions of the theory. They are not very honest or very informed. What they do is the equivalent of debunking the bible by quoting a non-existent verse Jehosophat 99:99. Anyone who knows anything about the bible would dismiss the argument immediately. Some of the common errors creationists make in talking about evolution include:

To get a fairly deep understanding, including how DNA chemistry makes it all work see Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters by Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks.

Here is an idea I have been chewing on that you might like to develop to find a fault in evolution. There are way more species than there are niches. You’d think natural selection would generate standard utilitarian animals, without any quirkiness, all pretty much alike. But if you look at coral reef fish, they are a riot of shapes and colours. Does sexual selection account for all this? What happens when there is no sexual selection?

If you do manage to poke a hole in evolutionary theory, don’t expect evolution as a whole to topple and creationism to reign. Evolution will likely remain much as it is with a patch. Creationism already has thousands of holes that nobody has been able to patch. So it is not going anywhere.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deep Future

The sun is only half way through its lifespan. There is plenty of time left for evolution to shape us into something completely different, even if we drive ourselves extinct and evolution has to pick up with some surviving species.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Default Birth Control

Predators, disease and hunger provide birth control services for species that refuse to provide their own.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definition of cringe

Cringe: verb, what one does on viewing science fiction written by Christians.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Definitions of Proof

There are at least three kinds of proof, legal, mathematical and theological. The concept of proof is not used in science. It is not that evolution in unprovable. It is that nothing is provable in science.

Legal proof means certain within reasonable doubt, where reasonable doubt is deliberately left undefined.

Mathematical proof is the strongest. It only claims that something is true if a set of postulates are true. It is about reasoning, not facts.

Theological proof is the weakest. It really just means evidence for emotional plausibility.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Degrees of Cooperation

There are three kinds of animal:

  1. Single cell such as bacteria
  2. Multi-cell such as sponges and orangutans.
  3. Hive, such as ants and bees

I wonder what life would be like that evolved a fourth level of co-operation where groups of hives acted like a single entity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deliberately Passing on Genetic Disease

When I hear someone with a serious genetic disease has had three children and one of them is saddled with the disease, I wish I could beat him to a pulp for his selfishness. Such people should be given vasectomies. They have no right to risk their children or grandchildren that way.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dendrochronology Bottleneck

Trees grow one ring per year. Warm damp years cause the tree to grow faster and lay down a thicker ring. You can count the rings to find out how old a tree is. You can look for a matching pattern of thick/thin tree rings from the core in other older trees. We can work back 10,000 years. Creationists tell us (without evidence) that there was a global flood in 2304-01-01BC. Drowning trees for a year should have killed the trees or at least interrupted their growth. There is no sign of any such interruption in the tree rings anywhere. Therefore the flood could not have happened. The flood is a creationist lie.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Denying Evolution

Creationists deny evolution, but to do that they have to carefully avoid ever looking at the fossil record. If they looked, they would see gradual change in the fossils. Instead of purposeful design, they would see meandering development without foresight. They would see how everything comes about by modifying some previous organ, sometimes repurposing it. With a bit of study, they would see how the changes are always reacting to adapt to the current environment. You would see how fossils are laid out in thin layers, with the more advanced plants and animals on top. You would see a tree of life. You would see 90% of species going extinct.

You could learn how to date fossils with radiometric dating, tree rings, volcanic ash layers, proximity to other well-known fossils.

All you would see is in perfect agreement with the theory of evolution. On the other hand, nothing about what you would discover matches the creationist view.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Design is Ambiguous

We need to retire the word design because of its ambiguity. A design can be something planned on a drawing board then constructed, either by a human on an imagined deity. You might also casually also say the eye is designed to accommodate both close and distance division, meaning it has features that work together to provide both functions. There is no implication somebody planned this. It just gradually came into being by evolutionary pressure. You can also say things like red wood tree rounds are perfectly designed for making coffee tables. Even a theist saying that is talking about useful a purpose for redwood rounds, not Yahweh’s foresight. Perhaps scientists could substitute the word evolved instead of designed when they did not mean to imply human planning or intent. Scrupulous avoidance of the word design would avoid unwittingly promoting medieval superstitions. In a like manner, scientists should avoid the use of the word God when they mean laws of nature. Einstein caused so much trouble with that fanciful metaphor.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Designing A Giraffe

Consider a giraffe. It is certainly complex. It looks designed. It was, by something with IQ 1. If you look carefully at the innards of a giraffe, you will discover all manner of bungling, including the laryngeal nerve that takes a pointless 4.57 metres (15 ft) detour. A deity has infinite intelligence. The design of a giraffe is far too sloppy to be the work of a deity. If it were not a deity, what designed it? Natural selection.

Natural selection uses a mindless technique to design. It makes many tiny changes to the best design so far. It then makes prototype creatures and tries it out in the real world. The survivors become the base prototypes for the next generation. Progress is unbelievably slow. However, with billions of generations, the prototypes come to look nothing like what they did originally and they are a much better fit to the environment.

Natural selection is very dumb. It has no foresight, no planning, no ability to restart a design from scratch.

In summary, if you look carefully, living things are not perfectly designed like watches. They are kludges, the result of a really dumb natural selection design process.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Destroyer of Species

Humans drive other species to extinction by hunting, by taking over their habitat, by carrying diseases, by bringing in invasive species from afar, by competing for food, by polluting, by causing climate change… Instead of homo sapiens perhaps we should have called ourselves homo deleotus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Deviation From Darwinian Fitness

Darwinian evolution has arranged things that animals sacrifice themselves for the next generation. This is usually also true of humans. However, corporate propaganda has convinced millions of people to sacrifice their grandchildren by leaving them no oil, oceans without fish and a world made uninhabitable by greenhouse gases.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Did Yahweh Create Biodiversity?

Because creatures are so badly designed, we know the designer had an IQ less than 1. For example, humans have a spine suitable for a quadruped, human eyes attach the nerves on the wrong side, giraffes have a neck vein that takes a huge unnecessary detour. Yahweh is reputedly much brighter. This is like saying Stradivarius created some pink plastic violins sold at Walmart. This is clearly not his work.

Evolution and natural selection have an IQ less than 1. They use a mindless way to create new creatures. What we see is what you would expect from such a try-all-possibilities, no-foresight, pedestrian design method.

There may be a god, but it did not need to have anything to do with the variety of life on earth. It happens all by itself given a few billion years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Die Humans, Die

I often wish our species would go extinct quickly before they do any more damage. We humans are the biggest disaster to hit earth since the KT asteroid. Our best hope is artificial intelligence, which just might make us come to our senses in time or which could also terminate the human experiment abruptly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Difference between Human and Wolf Hunting

When wolves attack a herd of caribou, they go after the sick, weak and deformed. This actually helps the herd by removing defective genes and removing infection. When humans attack a herd of caribou, they go after the biggest and healthiest animals.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Disproving Evolution

Even if creationists managed to disprove evolution, they would be no further ahead because there is no evidence to support creationism and truckfuls of evidence to disprove it. They have no hope because, except for quantum mechanics, evolution is the most tested theory in science. Every attempt I have seen is either based on a lie, or deliberately misstates the theory of evolution, e.g. that it predicts dogs should give birth to cats.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Distant Signals

If we ever receive signals from an intelligent civilisation, it will most likely be much older than ours. We humans have been sending signals out for only 111 years, spreading out at the speed of light. Our Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across. Our own signals have thus reached just a tiny corner of our own galaxy. If signals from the opposite side of the galaxy reached us, they would necessarily have been sent 100,000 years ago. Of course, the civilisation that sent them might have been no more advanced than us at the time they broadcast. They may have gone extinct shortly after sending the signals, a victim of their own clever technology, just as we soon will.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Distortions in Human Perception

Humans seem universally prone to a number of delusions and thinking errors. They are so pronounced, I don’t think they could be defects, but rather distortions that have some evolutionary value. For example, people like to vilify rivals to justify mistreating or killing them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Distraction

Distraction is a modern invention. We are not yet evolved to cope with it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

DNA Diagnosis

If you are sick, the doctor takes a culture. Perhaps five days later he finds out what is infecting you. He cannot treat you until then. If, however, he could do DNA analysis of the infecting agent right in his office, he might know within hours. In principle, such machines should already exist. It is probably just a matter of mass production bringing costs down.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

DNA for Dummies

I am quite old — 70 years. When I first started programming computers, we wrote in machine code (aka machine language) using the code the computer itself used. Machine code told the computer which circuit to use next. Nowadays, almost no one writes machine code. They use languages such as Java more convenient for people. These are, through a complex chain of operations, converted into machine language. Some machine language is composed directly by computers (e.g. genetic algorithms). Today there is no human writing or reading machine code. Only computers do that.

DNA is like the machine code to a lab machine that produces proteins. You put in a recipe listing the proteins you want and out pop the proteins. DNA is also the machine language for a cell. Pop in the recipe, out pop the proteins. DNA itself is just a list standard nucleotides to code the proteins you want. Three nucleotides encode one protein. It is way simpler than a list of ingredients for Grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. It is just a string of beads where there are only four kinds of bead. Your 2-year old could create an analog. Some of the recipes produce the proteins for salamanders, some elephants, most just mush. The world has had billions of years for evolution to find some interesting ones using natural selection (which is not random).

DNA is not a language a deity could use to tell you stop masturbating. All it can do is manufacture a set of proteins. It is very specialised. It is so silly, the way the religious keep wanting hire choirs to sing praises to a string of beads imagining it contains message from Yahweh telling them which stocks to buy. DNA is simple enough even for creationists to understand. It certainly does not require a deity.

Even the term programming language is too grandiose. DNA is more like a list of phone numbers without names in your cellphone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dogs Into Cats

Have you ever seen a dog turn into a cat? No. That is exactly what the theory of evolution predicts. Dogs do not morph into cats, dogs do not give birth to cats and dogs, even after many generations, do not give birth to cats. If you expected otherwise, some creationist must have lied to you about evolution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Domestication is a Type of Natural Selection

It is unfortunate that the terms natural selection and domestication came into use. Lay people erroneously think they are completely different mechanisms. Domestication is just a special kind of natural selection where the pressure comes from one particularly oppressive species.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Don’t Play With Lions

Anything parents are absolutely sure is true and important, they tell their kids as soon as they can talk. Don’t play with lions. Don’t set your grandmother on fire. These commands are like firmware, permanently burned in. It is almost impossible to change such beliefs.

If somewhere along the line a command gets burned in, Don’t do anything that would piss off Yahweh or he will torture you (us all) for eternity. It will get passed as a prime directive to subsequent generations. It is like an intergenerational virus.

This suggests the best way to rid the world of religion is to do as much as possible to stop religious brainwashing of children, or to get counter messages embedded as young as possible.

Much of the apparent insanity of believers comes when they hold rational beliefs that counter these burned in ones. They can’t make sense!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Doomed Attraction

An animal may experience rejection. He might persist fruitlessly, but only a human can feel doomed to be attracted only to those who will never be attracted back.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Dr. Richard Dawkins

Dr. Richard Dawkins has had two distinguished careers. He set the world of evolution on its ear in 1976 when he published The Selfish Gene that explains how evolution is not so much a competition of individuals, but a competition of genes. Then much later in life in 2006-10-02, he got fed up with religious people trashing science and took dead aim at their delusions with The God Delusion. His works include:

The Selfish Gene Explains how evolution is the competition of genes 1976
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design How we know there was no designer 1986
Climbing Mount Improbable How tiny changes add up to huge changes over time 1996
Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder How evolution simulates a designer 1998
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution Trace your ancestry all the way back to the origin of life. 2003
Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science and Love collected essays 2003
The God Delusion Why belief in god is a delusion. 2006
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution Evidence for evolution 2009
The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True Aimed at children. 2011
Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science Autobiography 2015
The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene Elaboration of The Selfish Gene 2016
Science in the Soul collected essays 2017
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Early Conditioning

Evolution demands that young humans accept whatever their mothers tell them without question. Logic has nothing to do with it. That is why religious belief is so impervious to the usual techniques of logical persuasion. Religion is more akin to a phobia than a belief.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Early Insight

The Roman poet Lucretius in his poem The Nature of Things asserted that matter was made of tiny particles called atoms and that they were always in motion. Given enough time they would rearrange to form pretty well anything imaginable. This meant than new species had to come into being and when things changed to be hostile to a species, it would go extinct. There was no need for a deity to direct this world to create interesting forms. All you needed was sufficient time. This was not just lucky idle speculation. The Romans had their reasons for holding these views.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) click to watch

Early Life

Early life can be pathetic, because there is nothing better to compete with it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Early Life Had It Easy

When life started out on earth, it did not have to be competent or efficient. It had all the real estate, all the nutrients, no predators, no diseases, no parasites and no competition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Earthworms

An individual earthworm over its lifetime disturbs the universe only a minuscule amount. Yet the entire population of earthworms over the centuries shapes the landscape and makes the soil. If you can understand this, you should be able to understand evolution and the way microscopic changes add up over hundreds of millions of years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Egg On Our Face

There is a song in the musical Oklahoma Everything’s Up To Date in Kansas City about a hick who goes to Kansas city and is amazed by the technology. When humans finally make contact with an off-world intelligent species, we are going to be such gawking hicks, astounded that marvels could have existed all along without us suspecting them. Our certainty that we are the best there is in the universe, the very reason it was all created, based on nothing but pride without a single fact to back it up, will make us a laughing stock.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eggs In a Basket

One of the lessons evolution has burned into life is that you must not put all your eggs in one basket. We humans have decided to unlearn that lesson. With globalisation, we have so interlinked our fates that the majority idiots of our planet are taking us all down. Our other mistake is to give extravagant power and wealth to a few fallible individuals. Even in the colonial insects, no individual has that sort of power for harm.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Elderly View of Sex

Why do the elderly take so much pleasure is poking fun at the strong sexual desires of the young? Have they forgotten what it was like to be so horny your hands shook and it felt like your teeth were sweating? Perhaps it is just envy. We old timers need to be reminded that this hormonal surge has been time tested through millions of years of natural selection.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Emphasis on Short Term Danger

Evolution has left us with people who focus on the immediate danger. We have eliminated most immediate dangers from our environment, so this keenness is not nearly as crucial as it once was. Unfortunately, we have as a side effect evolved to ignore the long term dangers such as nuclear war, climate change and the end of oil which now threaten to extinguish us entirely.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Encountering Alien Technology

Even as recently as the 1950s, we were using horses in my city to deliver milk in glass bottles and ice for iceboxes. If we encounter an alien technological civilisation, it will likely be millions of years more advanced than ours. We will be far more dazzled than nomadic shepherds from 0 AD marvelling at an iPhone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Encouraging Rape

In a society that does not automatically abort fetuses created by rape, rape becomes ever more prevalent. Normally, the male must prove himself worthy, a good provider, a good husband and a good father before he gets to sire the next generation. The rapist short-circuits all that. We should not take this lightly. Rape has become the standard mode of reproduction for many other species. Rape in humans is just under the surface. Look what is happening in Africa, India and Pakistan where policing has broken down.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Endangered Great Apes

Every single species of great apes is endangered. That is one heck a rotten way to treat your closest relatives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Energy Hog

Our brain is an incredible energy hog. The brain uses 11.2 watts per kg. Ordinary body tissue uses only 1.25 watts per kg. A typical adult human brain is 1.3 to 1.4 kg. That is one reason we did not evolve an even bigger brain. We could not scrounge enough food to support it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Energy Pigs

Animals evolved to use energy a much faster rate than plants. They supported their energy habit by stealing it from plants (aka eating plants). Mammals evolved to use energy ten times faster than cold-blooded animals. The consume ten times the usual share of food to do it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Enough Babies Already!

If everyone on earth lived the way a European does, we would need three extra planets to provide the resources. If everyone on earth lived the way a North American does, we would need five extra planets. Let us not kid ourselves, our lifestyle depends on most of the world living in dire poverty. That is why we exploit them so viciously.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Equal Time

Creationism has no more right to demand equal time in science classes than evolution has to demand equal time in Sunday school.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ernst Haeckel

There was a biologist back in the 1800s prior to Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, who drew some embryos, and doctored them a little to illustrate his pet theory. Creationists claim that this dishonesty, long ago detected, somehow invalidates the work of Darwin who had nothing to do with the drawings. But every creationist has been caught in even worse deception. Oddly, this does nothing to weaken their faith in creationism.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Estimating Probabilities

Humans are utterly incompetent when it comes to estimating probabilities. Consider how hopeless they are at estimating the odds of having a motorcycle accident, of their home being flooded, of there being a hurricane or tornado. They are utterly incompetent when predicting odds important to the stock market, to personal finances or to personal health. They lose their shirts gambling because of preposterously optimistic estimates of odds. Yet these same bumbling humans imagine they know the odds of things like the spontaneous creation of a DNA molecule which might happen only once in a billion years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Eugenics

In the 1930s there was a eugenics movement. It hoped to eliminate genetic diseases and disabilities including mental retardation from the human race by sterilising people, sometimes without their consent. Hitler took up the idea and sterilised and also killed perfectly healthy people that he hated including Jews, gypsies and gays. This put any form of eugenics into disrepute.

In modern times, couples having trouble conceiving can resort to an expensive procedure called IVF (In Vitro Fertilisation). The church and Christian families pressure couples to have as many children as possible, so Christians are more likely to use IVF than atheists. The procedure creates perhaps a dozen fetuses then implanting the most promising ones in the womb. The rest are discarded. For some reason, Christians do not consider this abortion. This procedure can filter out some genetic diseases and can let you chose the sex of your child. Potentially it could let you produce a designer baby where you select any trait of your child you please. This is the modern form of eugenics.

Eugenics could be thought of as artificial selection piggybacked on natural selection in an attempt to control ultra-short-term evolution. Darwin never mentioned it. However, Christians tar Darwin’s name by falsely claiming he advocated Hitlerian eugenics.

Christians also like to falsely accuse all atheists of promoting Hitlerian eugenics. Atheists are just as horrified as anyone else. Christians also like to accuse atheists of promoting modern eugenics even though Christians use it more frequently than atheists do.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evanescent Humans

I look on civilisation as a sort of cactus flower, a fireworks burst, the result of a long buildup meant to last but a moment in the stillness of space.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evidence We Were Not Intelligently Designed

If humans were intelligently designed, surely they would not become incontinent, or senile, or toothless long before their bodies as a whole wore out.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution 101

Most creationists have been repeatedly lied to about how evolution works by the likes of Eric Hovind, Ken Ham and Ray Comfort. I hope to tell you enough of the truth that you are willing to read a textbook or two about how it works such as Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution or Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks’ more advanced Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters

What Evolution Is Not

Evolution is the study of how populations of plants and animals change over long periods of time. It has nothing to do with the big bang, the creation of stars, abiogenesis (the origin of life) or plate tectonics. Creationists are taught to conflate all science that contradicts the bible as evolutionism. Some creationists insist the earth is flat and the sun revolves around the sun and there is a celestial ocean. Creationists lump any science that denies that is also lumped into evolutionism.

Werewolf Morph

If you have ever watched a movie when a man morphs into a wolf, you might have imagined this is an example of evolution. It is not. Why?

Variation

Evolution would not work if all animals in a population were identical. There are two main sources of variability:

  1. Sexual reproduction. Each offspring has a random combination of half the father’s genes and half the mother’s.
  2. Mutations. These are tiny one-molecule errors in copying DNA. Two-headed calf-type mutations are much rarer. Most mutations are neither beneficial nor harmful. Fetuses with harmful mutations nearly always die in the womb early in gestation without being noticed.

Puppy Evolution

Consider a litter of puppies. They will not all be identical. They will have different patterns of spots. Some will be bigger. Some will be more active. Some will be friendlier. There will probably be a runt of the litter. Some will sleep more. Some will like to fight with their mates. What caused these differences?

Even creationists agree that litters of puppies are not identical and it happens because the puppies are not genetically identical. This is half of the theory of evolution. Bloody obvious, eh?

Let’s imagine distemper infects the puppies. It is a horrible thing to behold. However, typically, some of the puppies will survive. Why? Some have better immune systems. Some are better at staying hydrated. Some are just generally stronger. These traits are controlled by their genes. Evolutionists refer to this horrible winnowing as natural selection the other half of the theory of evolution.

So lets imagine the puppies grow up and have puppies of their own. When distemper strikes the new batch of puppies, a greater proportion of them will survive because they are offspring of dogs that survived distemper, and probably passed on the genes for that resistance. The effect confers better and better resistance with every successive generation. We have seen the same thing happen with humans with extremely virulent diseases. Evolutionists refer to this gradual improvement over generations as evolution. If you are a creationist, what in any of this do you deny?

Cumulative Changes

Creationists sometimes concede that rabbits could evolve buck teeth, but never that a clam-like creature could evolve into an octopus. They don’t understand that the creation of new species usually requires billions of generations. Imagine the difference between two clam species. Imagine you create a morph of a billion intermediates between them. The intermediates would look absolutely identical. Morphs on TV are done with perhaps only ten intermediates. Nothing detectable changes at each generation, but after a billion generations you have a whole new species that looks quite different.

Imagine evolution were slowed down by a factor of 100 million, so a that a billion years of evolution occurred in ten years. If one clam species morphed into another, it would be still way way too slow to see anything happening. No matter how big a change you need, if you have enough tiny changes, if you are patient, you will reach your goal. Consider the mere 80 million sediment layers of the Grand Canyon add up to quite an impressive gorge. An inch is pretty small, but a billion inches is 15,783 miles. Even a whale is composed of microscopic cells. A second is insignificant, but you if add up 31,540,000 of them you get a year.

If a clam evolved into an octopus, it would take billions of years. It would take billions of the tiniest imaginable steps. It is too slow to watch in real time, but you can follow it in the fossil record.

Clades

All plants and animals can be organised into a family tree. Morphology and genetic similarity are used to group species into categories and subcategories. This is a refinement of the original Linnaean system. Each nested category is called a clade. Creatures do not evolve outside their clades. No matter how long you wait, a wolf will not evolve into something that looks like a rabbit. Rabbits live on a distant clade in the tree of life. Creationists like to falsely claim the theory of evolution predicts this. However, a wolf can evolve into something you would never recognise at first glance as belonging to the wolf family — like a whale.

Misconceptions

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution and Altruism

The lay public often imagine that evolution is about the proliferation of selfishness. Microscopic genes are in a sense selfish, but evolution of humans favours altruism. Whom would you rather marry, a considerate, helpful partner or a selfish, vain, self-absorbed one? Evolutionists call that sexual selection. Altruism is sexy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution and Monogamy

There are competing evolutionary pressures both toward and away from monogamy. In general, in pairing species, one of the pair tries to stop the other from straying, while straying themselves. If humans were naturally monogamous, like the large sea birds, we would not need ceremonies, laws and social pressure to enforce it. Most species drive off an interloper, but would never dream of attacking their mate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution and the Soviet Bureaucrat

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night worrying that there may be a big hole in evolutionary theory. I don’t mean that the Christians were right, but that evolutionists may have overlooked something big. Here’s the problem. Ever since I was a child I have loved looking at brightly coloured fish, frogs, salamanders and insects. As an adult, I am similarly fascinated by brightly coloured marine invertebrates and the bizarre world of fluorescent deep sea creatures. I ask evolutionists how does evolution works to create such beauty? I ask why are deep sea creatures so elaborately shaped? Why do deep sea creatures fluoresce? There seems to be no practical purpose for the riot of invention and artistic ingenuity. I would have expected such a mindless, non-planning process, (as evolution is advertised) totally obsessed with survival, to produce grim featureless creatures, the sort you might have expected to arise from the imagination of a Soviet bureaucrat.

The evolutionist give two answers:

  1. Sexual selection. The colours, patterns and elaborate shapes appeal to potential partners.
  2. The colours warn potential predators of defensive weapons. They warn off predators.

My main objection to sexual selection as the explanation is that species which do no sexual selection are often also brightly coloured. Consider the corals. My other objection is, the theory of sexual selection does no prediction. It is an after-the-fact rationalisation. It does not help me figure out why one species would embark on some particular bizarre competition in a body part and other species do not. Insects have gone madly off in all directions. Is there any pattern about which unique direction of sexual beauty each species heads off? The theory does not tell me under what conditions which body part will become sexualised. (Then again, maybe it does and I have simply not been exposed to it in the popular press.)

The use of bright colours can work, even when the wearer has no defensive weapons. The bluff works even better if there is exists a similar-looking species that is poisonous or foul-tasting. With bright colours being so ubiquitous, I would think the bluff would no longer work. I would expect they would become a net disadvantage, making it easier for predators to detect the prey species.

Are there any other explanations? Why do you find the standard answers satisfying?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution of Bickering

Most animals, especially primates, bicker. They have frequent fights or attacks that last a few seconds. We humans have used technology to magnify these petty squabbles into decade long wars involving millions of people and millions of deaths. We have even evolved weapons that, if ever used, will drive our species to extinction or near extinction. At the very least, we will be reduced to pre-technological levels. Our prized cleverness and natural malice is our own undoing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution Denial

The USA is second only to Turkey in the percentage of people who deny evolution. Americans know nothing about it, but that does not stop them from declaring it invalid. Because of fundamentalist Christians, the USA is rejecting science generally. They wish to become more anti-science than Islamic hell holes and withdraw from modern technology.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution Deniers

I can understand why some people might find DNA mind-boggling. It is just so incredibly clever. It took billions of years to evolve. Those who are boggled have no intuitive concept of just how long a billion years is, and just how excruciatingly slow that evolution was.

But what I find so utterly weird is their alternative to evolution: a magic fairy, a guy who walks on water, a magic trick turning water into wine, a woman impregnated by a shower of gold flakes, a magic human sacrifice… None of this has the first thing to do with DNA much less explaining it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Evolution of the Eye

The evolution of the eye has been progressing perhaps 2 billion years. (It evolved separately 42 times). Assume your average animal generation is 2 years, how many generations is that? 1 billion. Do realise how little has to change in each generation? just 1 billionth of the job. Evolution is incredibly slow and stupid — IQ 1. It has no ability to plan or design. It works entirely by trial and error. The only reason it works at all is because it is so patient and relentless.

The key to understanding is that even the most primitive eye (a set of light sensitive cells) is better than no eye. The evolutionary chain is a series of continuous improvements each a tad better than the last. There are animals living today at all these intermediate stages.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution is Glacially Slow

Evolution boggles the mind because of the huge time scales involved and its glacial slowness. For example, life has been evolving on earth for about 3 billion years. The youngest parts of the Grand Canyon started forming relatively recently, about 5.5 million years ago. The canyon descends 1.61 km (1 mile) deep. To do that it only had to erode away only 182 microns (7,165.35 microinches) each year, about half the thickness of a sheet of paper. Life had 600 times as long to evolve its marvels.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution Just Provides Survival

The purpose of evolution is survival, not rapid innovation or living comfortably.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution of Life Unlike Ours

Life as we know it could only have evolved on a planet exactly like earth. However, life as we don’t know it could evolve on a planet quite different from earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution Metaphor

Evolution is like a ghastly American Idol contest where the winners are forced to mate to create the next generation of contestants and the rest are killed. There is nothing random about it other than the motley crew of contestants.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution Mystery

Why would creatures that live in dark ocean depths or creatures that are colour-blind have such spectacularly colourful bodies?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution is Not a Matter of Chance

Since 1859-11-24, dishonest Christians have drummed the lie that the evolution is purely a matter of chance. Even many atheists have swallowed it. Granted, random mutation provides the contestants in the game of life, but natural selection decides who goes on to the next round. The judgment by natural selection is anything but random. It is an exhaustive life-long test of all-round fitness. If Christians were sincere, they should be equally astounded that the winner at Wimbledon each year is such a remarkably good tennis player since the process starts off with a set of players of randomly varied ability.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution is Not a Religion

How do you know that evolution is not a religion?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution on Islands

Only on islands does evolution get to wildly improvise.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution Passes Me By

I’m a male senior citizen. Evolution is not much interested in perfecting me or extending my lifespan. Thankfully, science is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution of Shoes

For most of humanity’s existence, we did not wear shoes. Then we invented sandals then shoes. However, today many people no longer wear shoes. Instead, they wear socks and prepare the floors in their dwellings to be clean, smooth, safe and comfortable.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution is Slow

Laymen have no intuitive feel for how slow evolution is. Millions of generations pass by without any detectable change. The changes are unbelievably slow, yet because the earth is so old, the microscopic changes have had plenty of time to add up to astound. Think of the thin layers of strata that go for miles deep in the Grand Canyon. Each one represents a year’s worth of sediment.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution is Utterly Obvious

Evolution is so obvious, the only way not to believe in evolution is to deliberately misunderstand what it is. You cannot even use the excuse it is too complicated to understand. Even a second grader can. Once you understand how it works, ask yourself How could it possibly not be so?.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution vs Creationism

There are two schemes to explain how the variety of life arose — evolution and creationism.

Evolution Creationism
Evidence for
Evidence against

To prefer creationism you must:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution vs Religion

Though evolution is often associated with atheism, you can both believe in god and believe in evolution without conflict. You will have to give up creationism though.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution of Weapons

The natural course of things is for weapons to evolve to ever greater efficiency. It is only a matter of time until they evolve to any imagined degree of lethality. If a technological civilisation is not to do itself in with its own cleverness, it must firmly resolve to stop and reverse the evolution of weapons.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution: the Cruel Game

Evolution is a cruel game that entraps all life, forcing it to play or have their genes discarded. Even intelligent species will breed to the maximum, destroying all that sustains them, if possible, in a mad dash to be the one to provide a bigger slice genetic base for the next generation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution?

Do I believe in evolution? Strictly speaking no. Belief is accepting without evidence. Over the last 54 years I have looked for myself at reams of evidence for evolution and I can’t see how evolution could not be true. I have even traced it happening with HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus) DNA sequences in my own body. Conversely, I have found not a spec of evidence to support creationism and wheelbarrows full of evidence to refute it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolutionary Diet

We humans have evolved for feast and famine. Whenever food is available we eat as much as possible. This suggests the way to successful weight control is simply to make food unavailable periodically.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolutionary Enigma

The most puzzling example in evolution for me is an Australian frog. When the father sits on the eggs, the coatings liquefy and the tadpoles are released. They then curl up inside pouches on his hips. Three separate behaviours had to evolve together. I can see how a small pouch could evolve into a large one, but not how a flat surface could evolve into a pouch. As the creations might say, what use is 1/10 of a pouch?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolutionary Mystery

Scientists tell me the graceful moves, elaborate colours and patterns of the sea dragon are the result of millennia of sexual selection, but how could such a primitive creature evolve such an elaborate and refined aesthetic sense? Why?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolutionary Rôle of Mothers

You would think natural selection would favour mothers who were supportive of their children and who helped keep them out of trouble. But in practice, mothers usually are a drain on their children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolutionary Solution to Drug Addiction

If you have enough patience, drug problems tend to correct themselves. Consider that:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolutionary Time

Even when the continents were all crammed together as Gondwanaland, evolution had already been long underway. The reptiles were already roaming the land. Evolution has been continuing its glacial change as the continents slowly drifted to the their current locations. They are still moving just as fast as ever. That gives you an inkling of the inconceivably vast amount of time that evolution has had to work its magic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolutionary Time

Evolution has had a staggering amount of time to produce its wonders. If you descended in an elevator 0.85 km (0.53 mile) deep into a salt mine, every second you would pass over sediments representing 2 million years of evolutionary change.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolutionary Time

We have all seen morphing in videos. Imagine a morph that took 1,000,000,000+ years to play out. S-L-O-W. B-O-R-I-N-G. Far more boring than watching paint dry. That is the sort of speed that the origin of life and evolution work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolutionary Vice

So many of our what we consider human vices, e.g. gluttony, lust and sloth are actually successful survival strategies honed over millennia of evolution for living as hunter gatherers in small groups.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolution’s Drive To Overpopulate

Whenever animals (including humans) have sufficient food, water and territory, they reproduce more until they are back into insufficiency. Evolution replaces any animal that refuses to participate in this insanity by those that will.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolved for Hunting

Man is the prisoner of evolutionary strategies that worked brilliantly when he was a hunter gatherer. But in a highly technological global village, they are suicidal. They lead us to strip the environment bare, focus on only the present moment, make war on our rivals and procreate like locusts.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolving Bipedalism

sitting person horse

We tend to think of humans evolving to upright posture as just like a horse or dog walking on its hind legs. I think these images of a sitting horse and a sitting human will make it clear we humans made some major shifts from the basic quadruped design. Note:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Evolving Intelligence

I wonder what possible mechanisms are possible in evolution to create large-brained intelligent creatures.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Expanding Space

The reason the notion of space itself expanding so boggles the human mind is that the effect is so tiny on earth, that it is completely undetectable. Our intuition never gets any exercise to get used to the idea.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extinction

99.8% of all species are now extinct. The odds for us are not that great.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extinction

About 99.9% of species that ever were are now extinct. The odds are thus that we too will go extinct relatively soon. We are working hard for our own early extinction a number of ways such as:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extinction by Delusions

Nations, groups and individuals who fanatically embrace cults, religions, lies and delusions are at a great Darwinian disadvantage. They are like a virus of the mind. These mass movements have been with us only a tiny fraction of the time our species has spent on earth. Evolution has barely started removing them. Unfortunately, they likely will drive our species extinct first.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extinction of Man

Humans will be one of the most short-lived species of all time. If we can invent something, even if it is fatal, we do it. We create weapons, poisons, industrial processes, harmful addictive drugs… We take almost no concern with avoiding misuse. No other animal is that stupid.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Extremophiles

Why would tardigrades have evolved the ability to live in the vacuum of space, if at some point, this did not aid their survival? This suggests they float around the universe colonising suitable planets.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fact Sheet for Visitors to Planet Earth

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fake Aliens

Have you noticed that nearly all photos of alien ships are mere dots of light or blurry blobs? The best quality fake alien I have seen is Yoda in star wars. So I demand any alleged real photo of an alien be better quality than that.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

False Values

Natural selection has given man the value that no other species is of importance other than how it serves man. Now that value is killing us because we failed to see how simple biodiversity serves man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Family Tree of Species

You can draw a family tree of species much like a family tree of humans. The difference is each species has only one parent species.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fasting

Humans evolved in an environment where the optimum strategy was to eat whenever food is available and to eat as much as possible. In our modern world, this leads to obesity, diabetes and cardio-vascular disease. Christianity with its Lenten fast and Islam with its Ramadan fast may unconsciously have been trying to artificially restore the environment for which we are adapted.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Faulty Intuition

Because we only live at most a century, our intuition is does not work estimating the likelihood of things that happen less often than once a century. We must abandon intuition and use math. In particular, abiogenesis happens only about once every billion years. Our intuition about it is way, way over its head.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fear of Christians

Though Darwin had formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection by 1837, because of his fear of Christians, he procrastinated publishing it until 22 years later in 1859-11-24 in Origin Of Species. Even as it was, they mercilessly personally attacked him.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fertility Plague

The best thing that could happen to mankind would be a plague that lowered fertility to 10% of what it is now.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Flowers

Flowers invented advertising and payment for services rendered. Blossoms convince insects and hummingbirds to spread pollen. Fruits convince animals to spread seeds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

For Evolution To Be False…

For there not to be evolution you would need:

  1. offspring would have to be absolutely identical to parents.
  2. or any differences that did occur should not in any way help or hinder survival. Offspring would have to be absolutely identical to parents.
  3. or siblings would have to look like a random sampling of children of the generation, with no family similarities.

    None of these things are true. So evolution inevitably follows, the same way it does for dog breeding. If you doubt, show me a scenario where evolution (gradual drift toward favourable characteristics) would not inevitably occur.

    ~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Fossil Gaps

One of the many reasons there are fossil gaps is a creature may evolve in a territory unfriendly to Fossilisation, then after it has made significant changes invade a territory friendly to Fossilisation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Function of Aggression

Aggression is common in animals. It is used to compete for food, territory, mates and to establish a pecking order. Except in rhinos, the aggression is rarely fatal. Humans have so much trouble with it because they have artificially amplified it with technology — from spears to guns to nuclear weapons.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Game of Life

Life can be looked on as a 3D game where the goal is to maximise the total amount of carbon stored inside the collective bodies of one’s species. Right now, humans, rats, krill and ants are winning. Whales, elephants, lions and frogs are losing.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gaps

Every time you find a fossil to fill in a gap between two existing creatures, you create two new gaps. It is a never ending game to satisfy the creationists. You only need to fill in the gaps to the point the changes between successive frames are trivial.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Generic Life

Life is anything that reproduces itself faster than it is destroyed. It is not all that mysterious. Once you get reproduction, you get some things reproducing faster than others. Now you have natural selection and evolution to take it from there.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Genetic Bottleneck

When a population gets as low as 30, the population loses its genetic diversity. The next generation is weak. Usually the population heads off to extinction.

The creationists insist that Noah’s ark reduced the population of each species to two. Further that pair had to make a stressful journey back to its native land. I could not be eaten. It had to find suitable food en route. All species would have gone extinct. They didn’t, therefore the Noah myth cannot be true. It is a creationist lie. Further, it takes about 600,000 years to recover genetic diversity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Genetic Medicine

If you extrapolate where medicine is heading, I suspect when feel ill in future, the doctor will sequence your DNA and the DNA of whatever ails you. Then AI (Artificial Intelligence) will concoct a treatment, not necessarily a drug, customised to that matching pair.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Genetic Morality

Imagine a beautiful young woman of 20 told she you has an inoperable brain tumor. Within two years she will go blind and die. A compassionate woman would carefully avoid pregnancy so she would not abandon her child. Yet a woman following the Darwinian imperative would have two babies, abandon them and hope others would raise them, even if she knew there was a high probability they too would have brain tumors. Dr. Richard Dawkins called his book The Selfish Gene.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Genetic Similarity

If you pick two people at random from the earth, even of different races, they will differ in only 1/1000 of their DNA genetic code. If you did the same thing with chimpanzees, they would differ in 5/1000. We have such low genetic diversity because a small group of humans left Africa and spread over the entire earth. We, as a species, have about the same amount of diversity as that small band.

Surprisingly humans and bananas share 50% of their genes. Evolution, when it has worked out a solution to a problem, rarely abandons it for another.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Gerontology Recapitulates Pediatric Development

Gerontology recapitulates pediatric development, only in reverse — wispy hair, loss of hair, bulging tummy, crankiness, loss of teeth, loss of ability to speak coherently, loss of ability to walk, atrophied soft muscles, loss of ability to handle solid foods, loss of bowel control…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Global Impatience

Our technology is doing us in. We evolved the ability to change the entire planet without the necessary patience to thoroughly test an innovation before globally applying it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Global Warming Is Not New

The closest parallel we have to today’s global warming was 50 million years ago. It was a much more gradual rise by 6.0°C (10.8°F). It resulted in mass extinction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Goal of Life

We live in a hell where each species tries to fill every cubic metre of the universe with its own likeness and kill off all the competition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Does Not Want You to Believe Creationism

If god wanted you to believe creationism, wouldn’t he have at least provided one piece of physical evidence to support it rather than stacking it all for evolution?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God Explains Nothing

We know for sure that something exists. So the existence of something clearly is possible independent of whether we think it was possible or believe we know how it happened. Either the universe was always here, or it appeared spontaneously from nothing, or it was formed from some primal universe building stuff recycled from some previous universe. I can’t think of any other possibility, but there’s lots about the universe I don’t understand.

Even if you presume the assistance of a god in the creation process, the universe contains all that is, which would include any gods. So how did the universe get started to its first stage where it contained nothing but a god?

We are right back where we started. The catch is a universe containing only a god is a heck of a lot more complicated and improbable to just spring into existence than one without any gods containing just some hydrogen that math and physics that fits all the data. We have gotten rid of one messy problem and replaced it with an even bigger more difficult mystery. We are just spinning our wheels. The notion of god does not explain anything; it makes the puzzle even more difficult to solve. Christians like to pretend introducing the notion of god is the answer to the mystery, yet all they are doing is giving up on the problem as too intractable. They still have nothing to say about the origin of the universe. They have performed a bar bet trick.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God the Gardener

If God were like a gardener, who designed a garden and created it. Why would he then hide and refuse to tend it and leave it to vandals to destroy?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

God-Driven Evolution

Darwin pointed out that evolution runs on automatic without any tweaking. A god would be superfluous. By Occam’s razor, we exclude that needless complication.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Group Competition

Why did humans come to dominate earth while chimpanzees are headed for extinction? Humans learned to co-operate while chimps remained stuck in individual competition. Like ants, humans have a group loyalty and are murderous to other groups. As our technology advances, we will do ourselves in. We are unable to move to the next level of global co-operation, such as needed to handle problems like global warming, global pollution, global water supply and global habitat preservation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Haikouichthys and Tiktaalik

There are two animals I think deserve to have statues erected to them: Haikouichthys the first vertebrate and the Tiktaalik, the first animal to venture out onto land. You can get Tiktaalik Tee shirts from Zazzle, CafePress, MeeTees, 6DollarShirts and spreadshirt.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Help Yourself

You may have noticed how quotations pop up at random all over my website, aimed at explaining how evolution really works and why Christian notions are idiotic. You are welcome to use any or all of the quotations in my quotation collection in a similar way on your own website. To get your point across these days, you have to shrink it to a sound bite.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hiding the Food

Natural selection long ago lead humans to eat whenever they see food. This suggests, until we learn to fine tune the brain chemicals that control appetite, the only diet plan likely to succeed is one that keeps excess food out of mind. Just as AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) provides socialising without alcohol, fat people need socialising without food. Thanksgiving and Christmas socialising with other dieters would save 8 kg (17.64 lbs) a year.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

HIV Drugs are Proof of Evolution

People who don’t believe in evolution need to talk with someone like me who has HIV. My personal strain of HIV has managed to develop immunity to eight advanced drugs specially designed to destroy it, using ordinary Darwinian evolution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hollywood Hero

Your typical Hollywood hero is a stubborn, uncompromising man. He is bully who takes the law into his own hands. This sort of personality would make a great gorilla pack leader, but not a great human. Humans have prevailed because they are good at working in groups and creating consensus.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Homo Avarus Extinction Event

Species are going extinct 100 faster than normal. We humans are like the asteroid that wiped out life on earth and the end of the age of dinosaurs. We insist on expropriating every square inch of earth leaving no habitat for other species. We insist on eating every fish leaving none for other species.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

homo procrastinatus

I have often despaired that humans refuse to take measures to ensure their future such as reduce greenhouse gases, get rid of nuclear weapons, develop alternative energy, reduce population, prepare for earthquakes, volcanoes and floods… It is as if we should be called homo procrastinatus. I suspect evolution has made us this way. During most of our species time on earth man had little ability to predict the future. There was so much that had to be done to deal with immediate threats, that it was counter productive to fret about future ones.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How to Avoid Extinction

The creatures that have avoided extinction longest are those like the crocodilians that learned to conserve energy. They can go years without food.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Big Is The Universe?

Just how big is the universe? It big enough that pretty well any logically consistent creature you could imagine must exist on at least 1000 planets.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Could Evolution Be Wrong?

So how could evolution be false? It is too obvious to be wrong. We have seen it working. Creationists claim it is false. What about it is false?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Did Homo Sapiens Wipe Out the Neanderthals?

The Neanderthals left Africa for Europe long before Homo Sapiens did the same thing. The Neanderthals, shortly after the arrival of Homo Sapiens, went extinct. What happened? This is still hotly debated.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Evolution Equipped Man

Evolution has left man a bit like a robot, equipped with a 745.70 kilowatts (1,000 horsepower) motor, no brakes and only a rudimentary safety interlock.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Man Cheats in Competition With Other Species

Mankind has prevailed against all other species using an unprecedented dirty trick to annihilate the competition — they destroy the habitat of competing species.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Many Genes

Humans have 23,000 genes, the same as a chicken or a nematode worm, less than a corn plant. Some of the earliest animals had only 8.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Religions Delude With Flattery

Imagine a group of frogs philosophising that their pond contains all the life in the universe. It is absurd for the frogs to do that without first examining a very large number of other ponds. Humans would never have even considered such questions had it not been for religions stroking their egos with notions of grandiose importance. Flattery is an integral part of conning.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

How Science Textbooks are Composed

Novel science does not make it into textbooks until the ideas have been succinctly formulated into a theoretical structure, have been well tested, have accumulated evidence, have survived challenges, have published research in peer reviewed publications and beat out competing theories, but the intelligent design people want to bypass all this verification and even bypass creating a formal theory and go straight to student textbooks. They have no interest in science. They are interested only in religious indoctrination and discrediting evolution which more clearly than other sciences debunks the bible. Evolution is the target because it is one of the simplest sciences to understand.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Are Not Up To The Task

Using technology, we humans have managed to create massive problems that we are not capable of solving. It is as hopeless as expecting a pack of dogs to solve the problem of soil erosion. Humans are not up to the task:

I can see three possible solutions:

  1. The development of artificial intelligence that simple overwhelm humans and tricks them into doing the right thing.
  2. Some sort of technology to amplify intelligence, the ability to concentrate or the ability to look at problems from a planetary perspective. A think of these people might be able to overwhelm ordinary humans.
  3. A think tank of the brightest people funded by billionaires who see our planet is in peril. People are selected for their intelligence and global perspective. It is one thing to create a solution, but quite another to get idiotic FOX viewers to accept it.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Human Cancer

It is painful to realise I belong to a species that is like a cancer destroying earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Hordes

From the point of view of non-human life on earth, humans came out of nowhere like a plague of cybernetic locusts ravaging the earth with unparalleled ferocity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Hubris

Throughout history man keeps making the same error over and over, presuming that what is known is all there is and presuming that which is closest is unique in the universe. I think by now the default presumption should be there is still more to discover until proven otherwise and the way things are here is likely the way they are elsewhere unless proven otherwise. There is likely nothing unique of consequence about us and our location.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Human Sacrifice

From the point of view of the gene pool, sacrificing the best and brightest to the volcano god is the worst thing a society can do. Modern societies are more practical. They sacrifice the unemployable and those with a taste for bullying and mayhem to the gods of war.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans and Roundworms Share the Same Building Blocks

Humans and roundworms use the same chemical building blocks to build their brains and nervous systems. Evolution likes to reuse and reuse any solution it stumbles on.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans are Mammals

We humans are mammals. We have not changed much in hundreds of thousands of years. If we were in a zoo, the visitors would come to laugh at us because of our strange adaptations:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans Are Not Adapted for Modern Life

Evolution works very slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years. We humans have very rapidly changed our world. Evolution has not yet caught up to prepare us to live in this new world. In the meantime we muddle through. Here are some examples.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans are Relatives

All modern humans descended from a group of 2000 people who lived 70,000 years ago and most of us descended from an even smaller group of 150 people. 2000 is about the enrollment of my high school. It amazing how so few people notice how alike we all are and that you can’t help but marry a not-that-distant cousin.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans Deserve Extinction

Humanity is behaving so aggressively stupidly on greenhouse gases, nuclear weapons, overpopulation, environmental destruction…, humanity fully deserves the extinction it is preparing for itself.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans Teach

Young chimps are brighter than young humans. Why then did humans develop technology and not chimps? Humans actively teach their young. Their young unquestioningly accept whatever they are told. Young chimps must learn solely by observing the adults.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humans vs Wolves as Hunters

Wolves hunt the weakest and sickest individuals in a herd. Humans hunt the strongest and fittest. Wolves act like animal breeders to improve the stock. Humans…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Humble Beginnings

Christians are horrified their ancestor is the amoeba. The find shameful they could have such humble beginnings. But if they but understood the amoeba, they would see its evolution from raw amino acids is much more astounding and took far far longer that the evolution of man from the single cell stage.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hunger is the Norm

We humans evolved under conditions of food deprivation. We evolved hunger to prod us to spend much of our time seeking out food. The catch is, we now live under conditions of superabundance. We interpret hunger as a signal we should eat and thus quickly become obese. You must’t eat just because you are hungry! And you especially have to learn not to eat when you are not even hungry. You have to stop eating, even in the middle of a meal, when you are no longer hungry. It is as simple as that. To implement this, you need to perform an experiment. Refrain from eating for a week unless you are at least slightly hungry. Monitor your weight. If you don’t lose fat, you must turn it up a notch and refrain from eating unless you are at least moderately hungry. If that does not work, turn it up another notch and avoid eating unless you are at least very hungry. By experimenting, you will come to know the hunger tipping point at which you can maintain your ideal weight. You don’t have to count any calories or follow any special diet, other than common sense nutrition. Unfortunately, the ideal point is uncomfortable. Evolution made it that way to keep you from starving to death. One advantage of living at the ideal point, with a hunger edge, is food tastes much better.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Husband and Wife Bond is Secondary

Christians imagine the primary bond is between husband and wife, yet the bond crucial to survival is the parent’s bond to his or her children, just as it is in other mammals and the birds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Hypervigilance

I leave out seeds for small birds outside my window. I notice they spend considerably more time checking for predators than they do eating. I imagine telling them Relax. Nothing is going to hurt you. But evolution knows far better than I what the optimum degree of wariness is. Without that hypervigilance, they would rarely make it to laying eggs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Idiocy Of Be Fruitful and Multiply

Most of the time, be fruitful and multiply is a sound strategy for survival. However, in today’s world, it is insane, selfish and suicidal. The earth cannot sustain anywhere near the number of humans already born. We must stop looking procreation (as opposed to sex) with such rose-coloured glasses. It is more deadly on a planetary scale than taking crack.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Idiotic Humanity

Humans have no more wit than tent caterpillars when it comes to slowing down reproduction when resources get tight.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If Evolution is True, Why Don’t Dogs Turn Into Cats?

In a nutshell, evolution makes no such prediction. In fact it says the opposite; it cannot happen.

If a dog did suddenly turn into a cat, I would consult a magician not an evolutionist. Everything in evolution is glacially slow. If dogs turned into cats over a million generations, that would be evidence evolution is wrong. At least for mammals, the tree of life has no cross connections, e.g . from the canine branch to the feline. All cats evolve from feline ancestors. Dogs and cats have a common ancestor. The tree diverges into felines and canines. It never reconverges by dogs evolving back into their common ancestor or a cat.

Further cats and dogs have evolved for quite different environments and lifestyles. They are always getting slightly fitter for those two different environments, in other words more different. Evolution is not random as the questioner imagines. Natural selection ensures evolution does not run in reverse toward more similar but less fit animals.

On the other hand, convergent evolution sometimes pushes wildly different animals such as sharks and dolphins toward the same external shape, even though they have completely different innards, because they live in the same environment.

The question indicates the questioner has not yet had any exposure to a scientific education. They have heard only straw men descriptions of evolution. If you are serious about what evolutionists really have to say, see Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters by Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks. You will learn that evolution is a fact, observed in the body, in lakes, in fossils and in the test tube. You will learn how DNA mediates the whole process. You will learn about chromosome splitting and fusing. You will learn about the types of error DNA makes while copying itself. These errors are the source of variation in future generations.

Evolution is also a theory, in the same sense as music theory or the theory of gravity, not in the colloquial sense of just a hunch, but in the scientific sense of a precise mathematical explanation of how and why animals and plants gradually change over time.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

If There Were a God…

If there were a god interfering with evolution, the god should have an effect. You would see violations of Darwinian behaviour e.g.

If there is a god, he seems to have a hands-off philosophy. He might as well not exist in terms of understanding evolution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Ignorant Have No Right To An Opinion

Religious fundamentalists have absolutely no right to criticise evolutionary theory. They have carefully avoided learning anything about it their entire lives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ignorant Opinions

Essentially what evolution claims is that the makeup of the gene pool changes slowly over time as animals with less fit genes are less successful at reproduction. It is so odd that fundamentalists claim to have an opinion on the matter without having the foggiest clue what a gene is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Implication of the Extinction of Hominids

One of the darker things to contemplate about evolution is we are discovering more and more extinct species on the hominid tree. Did homo sapiens wipe out its cousins with the same ruthlessness that today it is exterminating the gorillas, chimps and bonobos? If so, it implies genocide, war and brutality are in our bones, hiding just below the surface in all of us. It is only a matter of time until our essential nature drives our own species extinct.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Implied Commitment

The biggest favour a human can do for another, bigger even than saving their life, is to ensure their genes live on in the next generation. When a female allows a male to impregnate her and tacitly promise to raise the child to adulthood, that is a huge favour and commitment. It is amazing that human females hand it out so casually.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Inadvertent Implied Intent

Zoologists pull their hair when lay people say something along the lines: The pitcher plant evolved purple and brown colouration and a rotting odour to resemble rotting meat in order to attract insects. The problem is language improperly implies conscious planning and cunning. To say that same thing accurately takes several extra sentences. We need new vocabulary to say this both accurately and concisely, suitable for lay use. Perhaps something like: The pitcher plant evolved purple and brown colouration and a rotting odour resembling rotting meat, mindlessly driven by the need to attract insects. where driven gets a precise evolutionary context definition.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Incompetent Design

If a cosmic designer with infinite intelligence had designed the human brain would he have made the following errors?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Insects with Good Taste

We imagine that our aesthetic sense is transcendent. Yet oddly even insects with tiny brains have almost the same preferences in flowers. In fact, the flowers evolved to please insect notions of beauty not ours.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent Crystals?

Though rivers grind round the rocks and cave springs create fantastic crystals, there is no reason to believe they do it with intelligent intent.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent Design

If humans were intelligently designed, surely testicles would have some sort of armour plating.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent Design

If humans were intelligently designed, surely they would have a spine properly designed for upright walking, not a recycled quadruped design.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent Design

If we were intelligently designed:

This looks more like bungling trial and error to me, things you might expect from evolution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intelligent Life on Earth Improbable

Astronomers studying earth from the other side of the galaxy might dismiss it as unlikely to harbour intelligent life because it is so large its gravity caused huge asteroids to smash into it ten times, each time sending life back to square one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Interfering With Evolution

The thing that evolution has the most trouble dealing with is a very rapidly changing or varying environment. Perhaps that fact could be used to slow down the ability of HIV to develop drug immunity. Perhaps even changing the amounts of non-toxic chemicals in the blood could confuse it. Or perhaps rotating the HIV drug regimen on a daily basis.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Interlopers

When the environment changes suddenly, it upsets the species balance. A newcomer species can then take over in a population explosion because it has elsewhere previously adapted to the new local conditions giving it a competitive advantage over the native species. For example, global warming has allowed a virulent tropical fungus Cryptospordium Gattii to overwhelm the native fungi species on eastern Vancouver Island. One microbiologist said she was as astounded to see it so far north as she would at Godzilla making an appearance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intermediate Forms

On 1859-11-24, when Darwin wrote Origin Of Species a relatively few fossils had been found. Darwin’s evidence for evolution was not fossil based. However, Darwin predicted that in future many intermediate fossil forms would be found. He turned out to be right. Thousands of them were found. In particular, paleontologists found a continuous evolutionary set for whales, horses and humans. This is both strong evidence for evolution and strong evidence against creationism which claims species were created in their current form and never change. The discovery of intermediate forms was one of the major confirmations of his theory. In addition, we have an absolute record of the evolution of diatoms, year by year. Creationists pretend there are no intermediate fossils, no matter how many times you correct them or point them to photos of them. Their objection to evolution has nothing to do with science. The existence of intermediate forms blows their religious superstitions out the water.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intermediate Forms

One of the favourite creationist lies is that we have no intermediate forms. We have skeletons of 21 species of hominids intermediate between the common ancestor of apes and humans and modern humans. The gradient is so smooth, you can barely tell them apart.

No matter how many times we show the creationists the intermediates, they repeat the same old lies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Intuition

When we were hunter gatherers, change was slow, linear and usually cyclic. These are the conditions under which our intuition evolved and became hard wired. In the technological age, most change is exponential (ever speeding change) e.g. improvement in technology, arms races, climate change, pollution, population growth… Our intuition boggles. It insists tomorrow will be almost the same as today.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Invasive Species

Scientists are working to contain the electric ants that man accidentally introduced to New Caledonia. They are pushing out all other insects and killing off species after species of plant. Similarly scientists are trying to control the explosion of crayfish accidentally introduced to Cape Breton National park. Will we someday get a visit from the GBA (Galactic Biodiversity Agency) to thin the human herd and restore biodiversity?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Invention of Fires

Imagine if a rabbit evolved that liked to set fires. What a frightening creature man must have been for the other animals when he first learned to use fire!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

IQ of Evolution

Mindless natural selection is estimated to have an IQ of 1. It is what designs natural creatures so painfully slowly and ineptly. I guess by Christian standards that still counts as intelligent design.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Irreducible Complexity

Irreducible complexity is a bogus argument that creationists use to counter evolution. They claim that some features in animals could not have evolved gradually, but must have evolved all at once, in full complexity. For example, creationists tried to claim the eye was irreducibly complex. They argued a partial eye was useless. Yet you can find living creatures with every stage of eye evolution who find the intermediate stages useful. Half sight is better than no sight. More recently, creationist Hans Behe claimed the flagellum was irreducibly complex. He ignored that various intermediate stages had uses other than a flagellum. Evolution cannot plan ahead. Evolution borrows from whatever structures exist already rather than evolving new ones.

There are no known legitimate examples of irreducible complexity. These are a fiction of the creationists. If you think you have found one, google it to find out why it not irreducible.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Junk DNA

Circa 1990 we have discovered, that even though junk DNA is snipped out in DNA⇒RNA transcription and has no function creating proteins, some of it still has a function turning genes on and off. It is not nearly as junky as we first thought. 98% of the human genome is such non-coding DNA.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Just Right vs More Is Better

Evolution works toward the optimum, not too much, not too little. Man works on a different principle, more is better. He pursues this goal even when it destroys his environment, ruins his health, bankrupts him or condemns his offspring to extinction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Just So Stories

It bothers me that so much of evolution is making up rationalisations for what it so. The explanations are a bit like Kipling Just So stories for adults. I would like it so much better if we concluded based on experiments or running simulations.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Just A Theory

Creationists like to disparage that evolution is just a theory. They are playing a dishonest game based on the two meanings of the word theory.

  1. Informally, a hunch.
  2. In science, a comprehensive explanation of why phenomena behave the way they do, e.g. the theory of gravity, or the theory of evolution. There is nothing in science with more prestige than a theory.

In contrast, a law is mathematical formula describing how some phenomena usually behaves. First laws are discovered, then someone comes up with a theory to explain them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kangaroos Not Intelligently Designed

If the kangaroo were intelligently designed, surely the young lima-bean-sized kangaroo should have emerged directly into the pouch, rather than forced to make a long journey through the mother’s hair along the outside of her body.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ken Ham’s Vanity

The only argument that Ken Ham has ever put forward for creationism is that he is handsomer than the people he is debating.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kepler Expectations

Scientists estimate the Kepler project will discover at least 50 planets very similar to earth. Bit by bit, the conceited notion that earth is unique in the universe is crumbling.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Kill the Distant

Otherwise gentle people will drop large rocks from bridges onto passing ships or from overpasses onto cars, or drop bombs from airplanes onto schools. I suspect the ancient hard-wired morality is: if they are small and distant kill them, if large and close, treat them as kin.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Killer Patents

In the USA, it is possible to patent parts of the human body, namely the genes. The patent holder gains the legal right to block anyone from doing research on that gene or developing any drugs which might have an effect on the gene or prohibiting any test that checks for genetic anomalies in that gene. It is similar to a legal right to stop anyone from doing any research of any kind on some other part of the human body, e.g. the knee.

Normally, a patent is awarded for developing something novel (no prior art) and non-obvious. In theory, you can’t patent something like granite or orange juice that you did nothing to create. However, the US courts are so corrupt, that they allow wealthy unscrupulous corporations like Monsanto to patent plant strains that clearly do not in any way belong to them, strains that have been in the public domain for thousands of years. All they have to do is be the first to think of patenting some pre-existing object, plant or animal. In principle, by this relaxed reasoning, they could patent kitchens, shoes, blood, ring fingers, knees, haircuts or even the ocean and thereby gain exclusive use to them. It has not got quite that silly yet, but similar insanity has already happened in principle.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Large Number Anaesthesia

When I was a child, there was a politically incorrect joke: How do Newsiest [people who live in Newfoundland] count fish? One fish; two fish; three fish; anudder fish; anudder fish… Though most people can do arithmetic with large numbers, their intuitions are at sea with them. For example, the biggest government scandals involve under $100,000 because people can relate to what that number means. Scandals in the billions or trillions are just big numbers.

In particular people have a problem with time intuition. About the longest span they can intuitively grasp is 80 years. They have absolutely no intuitive feel for just how long a billion years is. When evolutionists talk about a change that took a billion years of natural selection and tens of millions of generations, all they can envisage is the same change happening in a few seconds, like a movie of a man morphing into a werewolf, without any generations. Because they can’t picture such a long gradual evolution, they idiotically postulate an evil old man building creatures in his workshop in the sky.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Last Man Standing

There have been 17 species of hominids. All but one, homo sapiens (us), have already gone extinct. With odds like that, I think it rather optimistic to imagine we will prevail forever.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Late Comers

Humans are one of the most recent species to step out on earth. Long before we appeared, birds had perfected their extravagant plumage, monkeys learned to swing effortlessly from branch to branch and cheetahs achieved speeds of 33.33 metres/sec (74.56 mph).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Laws of the Universe are the Same Everywhere

It would be a bit eccentric to presume the laws of chemistry and physics are completely different on other planets otherwise identical to earth, without some evidence. Since the laws of biology derive from chemistry and physics this is what Christians do when they claim only earth, the center of the universe, harbours life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Laws of the Universe are Universal

Mathematicians, physicists and chemists consider the notion that mathematics, physics and chemistry work differently elsewhere in the universe, an absurd notion, one that would need strong evidence to even consider. Yet, because of religious brainwashing, many biologists presume life on earth is unique until proven otherwise, even though biology could be a considered a special branch of chemistry.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Layman Estimates Age of Earth

Anyone without any scientific education could still notice the way rivers lay down a new layer of sediment each year, or a volcano lays down a new layer of lava each time it erupts, or a glacier a new layer of snow-ice each year. Now count the layers. There are way, way too many to have been laid down in 6,020 years, as Bishop James Ussher claimed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Legitimate Sources of Energy

Plants get their energy from the sun. Herbivores get their energy by stealing the reserves of plants. Carnivores get their energy by killing then stealing reserves from the herbivores. Bees, fruit bats and hummingbirds are among the few animals that get their food legitimately, by working for it by pollinating the plants or disbursing their seeds.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Lie About Evolution

No matter how many times they are corrected, Muslims and Christians repeat the lie that evolution is pure chance, and hence impossible. It is possible they are too stupid to understand. It is possible they carefully guard their ignorance by never reading even one book about evolution, but I think most of them are simply lying.

Evolution is not random. Here is an analogy. Your little brother throws coins. You come along and remove any coins that landed tails. After a day or two of this, you have a long string of coins all heads. Then a Muslim comes along and says That is impossible. Only Allah could do that. No random process could produce that. But it is not random. Yes, there is randomness in it, but, much more importantly there is highly non-random selection removing the bad results. The outcome is no more random than a dog show or a beauty contest, where a judge winnows the lower quality candidates. In evolution, nature is the judge and ruthlessly decides which creature variants are wanting.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life May Have Come From Elsewhere

Scientist try to figure out how life originated on earth. I think this is wrong-headed. It is not as though earth sits in a vacuum bottle. Material from all over the solar system pummels it every day. It would make more sense to also study how life could have arrived on any of that material. Allowing for that possibility greatly expands the field of study to well outside the solar system to find the initial sparks of life. Bits of it could well have come about in widely separated parts of the universe under vastly different conditions.

That life came from elsewhere on earth is our default assumption whenever we find life on earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life on Earth is Impossible

I can imagine scientists on some planet arguing, But how could earth possibly support life, much less intelligent life? It has almost no arsenic or germanium. Consider the temperature. Water is a liquid there for nameless one’s sake! It even falls from the sky!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life is Ordinary

Life is not as nearly as magical as we imagine. Craig Ventnor synthesised the DNA for a bacterium with a genetic sequencer, then inserted it into a cell without DNA. It was able to reproduce and produce new bacteria cells.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Life-Friendly Universe

It is important to note that the universe is not designed for life. You would die instantly dropped down almost anywhere in it. It is made of vacuum, stars made of H-bombs, airless planets, black holes… Even much of earth is uninhabitable, (mountains, sea beds, deserts, polar caps). There are just a few tiny slices of the universe where we humans can cling to life.

Imagine designing a hamster habit with 99.999999% of it uninhabitable to hamsters. Some god you are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Limitation of Evolution

The biggest limitation of evolution is that it cannot, even in the simplest way, plan ahead.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Limitation of Evolution

A living being has no way to prefer adaptive mutations. All it can do is try out random mutations in the next generation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Limits to Growth

Animals cannot increase their population unless it has recently been decimated. There is limited territory and food. Humans try to increase their numbers indefinitely anyway exploiting temporary food sources.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Living With Starvation

Imagine living in a time or place where starvation was a constant threat. You would collectively have to decide how much food each member of the group should get based on how much food they bring in relative to the amount they consume and how violent they would become if deprived.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Looking Ahead

Humans have created tools to predict 100 years into the future and even further for some things such as astronomy. Unfortunately, psychologically, we have almost no ability to react to that information. We are creatures of the here and now. The species that replaces us may have no more ability to predict, just a propensity to act on the predictions, considering the well being of future generations as more important than the current one — the way most other animal species behave.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Macro Evolution

Macro and micro evolution are not terms scientists use. Micro evolution refers to evolution within a species and macro evolution refers to evolution that results in a new species. Scientists refer to macro evolution as speciation. Creationists eccentrically insist speciation is impossible, even though it has been observed hundreds of times, not counting the fossil record. The mechanism for both is exactly the same. It is just with speciation there is more time, and more change, change so big that the original population and the new one gradualy drift apart so the two populations can no longer successfully interbreed. It is a gradual process. Creationists falsely imagine for speciation to occur, the animal has to undergo some sudden change to flip to a new species all on one day, or all in one generation. In evolution, no individual animal changes during its lifetime.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mad Deniers

A scientists says to a climate change denier You must stop burning fossil fuels or your homeland will become uninhabitable. The denier responds Oh, that’s fine. Think of how much money I will make. That is as nutty as someone who agrees to drink a bottle of strychnine for $1 million dollars.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mad Overpopulation Pressure

The fundamental vanity built into every animal to see its DNA predominate over the earth at the expense of all other life forms is what drives humans to overpopulate the earth past its breaking point.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Male Displays

Exobiologists studying humans might characterise our species by its unique habit of males displaying feats of genetic fitness for other adoring males without females present.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Male Shyness

A female human is looking for a male who can be counted on to help her raise her offspring to maturity, someone who will not abandon her and who has the resources to be useful. Thus the sexual allure of male shyness. The male is advertising, perhaps falsely, that not only will he stay faithful, but also that he could not stray even if he wanted to. Evolutionary natural selection sometimes plays a cruel trick on males, making them so shy that they cannot even approach one female.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Male Strutting

In most species, the males strut, dance and decorate themselves to impress the females, but in man, it is largely the reverse. This is because, for most animals, all the male contributes is sperm. In man, the male contributes almost all his income to the raising of the young and supporting his mate. As the human two-parent family breaks down, you can expect to see a reversion in humans to the peacock pattern of male beauty and sartorial splendour.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mama Pizza

The first large animal that evolved on earth looked like a pizza.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Man is Driving Himself Extinct

Man will have one of the shortest reigns on earth of any species. Usually a species goes extinct through competition, predation or inability adapt to changing climate. In contrast, man is busily doing himself in. He has too much power to change the planet and not enough wisdom to know what is safe to change. Man is like a 4-year old child with a chainsaw.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Meaning of Lust

When you encounter an individual who makes your teeth sweat, makes you shiver and bite your hand in lust, you have just unconsciously computed that your genes merged with theirs would create an individual with optimal survival and reproductive success. Your genes are screaming Go for it!

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Megadeath

Thomas Malthus (1766-02-13 1834-12-29 age:68) noticed that plants and animals have more offspring than strictly needed to replace them. If none of the offspring died, the population would grow exponentially and bury the earth in flesh. Some animals produce thousands or more replacements each. Plants are even more profligate. This means that nearly all plants and animals die an early death by being eaten, dying of diseases, starving, freezing, dehydration… Charles Darwin (1809-02-12 1882-04-19 age:73) read about this and wondered which animals die and which are the lucky few to spawn the next generation. Obviously, the lucky ones are those clever at escaping death either by more intelligent behaviour or some physical advantage. Further, they would have to be attractive to the opposite sex or they might live to a ripe old age but have no progeny. Since offspring resemble parents, these lucky individuals will pass on their superior lucky behaviours and physical advantages to the next generation. The next generation will thus be slightly luckier than the current one. If you repeat that ferocious winnowing, generation after generation, the tiny generational advantages will stack up. How could it be otherwise?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Micro vs Macro Evolution

Creationists will often concede that micro evolution (evolution within a species) is possible, but macro evolution (what scientists call speciation — the creation of a new species) is impossible. They never explain why they think speciation cannot happen. It is like conceding you can travel 16.09 km (10 miles) by bicycle, but you cannot travel 160.93 km (100 miles) given enough time. Speciation usually happens when a population drifts in two different directions, e.g. when some geckos in a population specialize to live in the grass and others in the trees. Eventually they are so different they can no longer interbreed. At that point you have a new species. It is no more astounding than micro evolution. Perhaps creationists imagine it requires a cow turning instantaneously into a goat, like some magic trick.

There are five different kinds of speciation: allopatric, peripatric, parapatric, and sympatric and artificial. You can read up on the details in Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters by Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Micro vs Macro Evolution

Micro and macro evolution are creationist terms. Scientists talk of evolution and speciation the creation of new species. Creationists usually concede that species can evolve, but cannot split off into new species, even though the creation of new species has been observed over and over. They object on biblical grounds. They refuse to look at the data.

How does speciation work? There are five different types of speciation: allopatric, peripatric, parapatric, and sympatric and artificial. Here is one of the most common: Consider the common ancestor of the Brewer’s Duck and the Mallard. The population of the common ancestor gets separated geographically. Over time, one group gradually and continuously evolves into the Brewer’s duck. It does not suddenly change into a Brewer’s duck. While this is going on, the other group gradually evolves into a Mallard. It does not suddenly change into a Mallard. At some point in this process, if you collected a pair of ducks from each group, they would no longer be able to reproduce. They would have become too different. At this point we consider the two populations to be two species.

The loss is gradual, via stages: loss of ability to produce fertile young, loss of ability to produce viable young, loss of ability to mate. There is not some sharp dividing line when a new species forms. It is a gradual loss of the ability of separated populations to interbreed. Nothing special happens to the populations themselves. They don’t make any leap in evolution. Creationists falsely imagine the theory of evolution claims that new species are created when a pair Brewer’s ducks lay a batch of Mallard eggs, which evolution says is impossible.

Creationists claim we have never directly observed evolution or speciation but we have, hundreds of thousands of times:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mind Boggling Science

There are many things in science that boggle the layman’s mind: the immense size of the universe, the fact the universe has a finite size, that you eventually get back to where you started if you head off in a straight line, that space itself expands, quantum mechanics, that time is not universal, that the Grand Canyon was dug by a river, that satellites don’t fall down, the big bang, evolution… That does not make them any less true. There is no law that says the universe has to be simple enough for even a willfully ignorant Southern Baptist high school dropout to understand.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Misconceptions

Which of these statements does not belong?

Answer: none of them. They are all popular misconceptions that science has thoroughly debunked.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Misleading Vocabulary

It is misleading to talk about how the universe was created or how the elephant was created. To avoid childish presumptions of creationism, instead we should ask about how the universe and the elephant came to be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Links

Creationists keep complaining we don’t have fossils for missing links. There are only two I can imagine creationists having any interest in — the common ancestor of apes and man (Lucy), and the common ancestor of lemurs and the anthropoid apes (Ida). Both have been found, but creationist lie that they have not.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Missing Warning Bells

The body sets off alarm bells when there is too little food or too little blood sugar, but has no equivalent for too much food or too much blood sugar. The problem came up too rarely over our time evolving to create a solution. Now in our world of abundance that lack is killing us.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Modern Society is Disease Friendly

From the point of view of a new disease organism, our technological civilisation seems custom-tailored to help it spread. We transport diseases around the entire planet within hours on airliners; we move them around in food transported tens of thousands of miles; we congregate in tight spaces like buses, elevators and office buildings each day to exchange microorganisms. Even our greeting ritual, the handshake, exchanges more germs than had we ritually drunk each other’s urine. We have undone all we have evolved/learned in millions of years to control disease, namely live in small groups and be wary of contact with strangers.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Monitoring Humanity

Imagine being a member of an ancient intelligent species living in the local Milky Way galaxy. You would be aware of earth’s rapid military evolution. You would probably not be too concerned. The math would show the evolution is so fast it will almost certainly drive humans to extinction long before they start making a mark off planet.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mostly Extinct

There are about ten times more extinct species that extant ones. Some sources say the ratio might be ten times higher.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mutation Rate

On average, every person has 4 mutations that were not present in either parent. The rest of the 3 billion base pairs are reproduced exactly.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mutations

At conception, humans have an average of 128 mutations. This sounds like a lot, but these flaws usually don’t interfere. We have about 20,000 genes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Mutations

Most mutations you cannot even see. They are a change to just one chromosome. Most are neither beneficial nor detrimental. A rare few are beneficial. Natural selection eliminates those seriously detrimental, usually while still in the egg or womb. Because life is so fecund, detrimental mutations don’t cause a problem for the species or even the individual There are plenty of other fitter individuals without the mutation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

My Antievolutionary Choice

The whole business of evolution sounds like so much sturm und drang, but really it is quite relaxed. Most of what I do has no effect at all on whether I survive and leave offspring. I made the conscious decision about age 12 never to have children. That is the ultimate sin from an evolutionary point of view, but it did not have that drastic effect on my experience of life. I had more than enough to keep me occupied without raising children.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

My Personal Encounter with Evolution

I have had HIV since 1985. I am still alive. Most of my friends at the time are now dead. I am alive because of the theory of evolution.

Every month I get my HIV viruses sequenced. Doctors can monitor mutations which confer immunity to various drugs. We get early warning of a drug failing. We can also tell which drugs I have not tried might work and which will not. The theory of evolution predicted that a multi-drug cocktail would reduce the ability of HIV to evolve immunity. I take a whopping cocktail of 5 drugs. HIV has usually been able to evolve to defeat each drug within two years.

Doctors tell me I will probably die, not of HIV but of something more ordinary like a heart attack or diabetes.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

National Geographic Betrays Trust

Once upon a time you could trust what you read in the National Geographic to be true. However, in a mad dash for more subscribers they have padded the pages with biblical myths disguised as archaeology.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Natural Selection is a Designer of Sorts

Given enough time, evolution will come up with some pretty impressive designs. Most of the time though, it is pretty sloppy, just enough to get by. (This is how you know humans were not divinely designed.) You might wonder at my use of the term designs. Yes, evolution does design. It is quite stupid, about IQ 1, but it is not just random. By analogy, your wife might learn to drive the family car, without any instruction, but just randomly pressing buttons and pedals, making small changes one at a time. Whenever the car drives better, she keeps that setting or pedal pressure. This is a considerably cleverer strategy than trying random combinations. Give her a decade and she will drive better than you.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Is Natural Selection a Form of Intelligent Design?

Natural selection has a IQ of only about 1 but look around the plants and animals on the planet. The results are so impressive many people attributed them to a supernatural being. Granted, natural selection gets billions of years to hone its designs. Anatomists can see the design blunders, but natural selection is about being good enough, not perfection.

Natural selection could be thought of like a minor deity who ran an American Idol-like contest:

  1. Look at all the animals (and plants)
  2. Rank them considering how many living offspring they had, ability to stay alive, how sexy they were to the opposite sex, metabolic efficiency (ability to get fat easily)…
  3. Only the top x% gets to participate in the next generation (ratio differs by species). The rest are either already killed or rejected from breeding.
  4. Repeat

Because every generation is not genetically identical, due to mutations that create individual differences, there will always be a ranking. And every generation will be marginally better than the previous one. Over time, indescribably small differences add up. That is evolution in a nutshell.

Of course, natural selection is just nature as a whole, not a deity. Nature daily plays out the dramas of predator-prey. The interactions are guided by the motivations of the animals involved, not by some bearded man in the sky playing with his toy animals. The struggle for life and reproduction pits all creatures against each other in a huge contest. Only the offspring of victors get to go to the next round of breeding. That keeps upping the quality of the competitors every generation.

Christians insist such microchanges could never add up to anything of significance. How much longer would human penises be after a mere 10 thousand generations if they were on average only a thousandth of an inch longer each generation. Answer 10 inches longer. Evolution is much more patient than you.

What’s optimal changes over time. In an ice age, a long hairy coat is better. During global warming, a coat just long enough to repel insect bites is best. Natural selection automatically changes the selection criteria on the fly, which results in populations growing or losing hair over the generations to best match the changing climate. Ditto for skin colour.

Just in case I have mislead you with analogies, let me make it clear, there is no conscious agency of any kind involved with evolution, mutations or natural selection, other than the evolving animals themselves.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Natural Selection Is Not Random

Natural selection is not random. It has a goal — survival/reproduction. It is very stupid — IQ 1 However, it is infinitely patient. With billions of years to work with and billions of generations, its mindless trial and error strategy comes up with some amazing things (and some crap no deity would create). Natural selection is ruthless. It condemns to death any imperfection. It favours even the marginally better. Consider that a frog lays about 20,000 eggs. On average natural selection will winnow out 19,999 of those offspring. That is quite a pressure to improve. Compare that with the winnowing factor on American Idol.

Computer programs that emulate evolution astound their authors with what they can come up with in mere thousands of generations. Creationists have no experience with such programs. Their intuition grossly underestimates how productive such algorithms are.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Natural Selection Under Your Nose

In 1977 there was a drought on one of the Galapagos islands. The population of one of the Darwin finch species dropped to about 100 individuals. Researchers studied the survivors and discovered they all had significantly larger beaks that usual. The reason: the only food left were large hard seeds. The ordinary finches that could eat only small seeds had starved to death. Here is just one of many examples of natural selection happening right under our noses. Evolution is an observable fact.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Natural vs Artificial Selection

I think the distinction between natural and artificial selection is not nearly as sharp as most people imagine. For example, bees, in their selective pollinating attention to various plants, impose their notion of fitness on them. That is analogous to the artificial selection done by plant breeders. The distinction is more, does the selection come from some other species or from the general environment?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Natural vs Artificial Selection

In evolution, something has to peruse the current population, and decide which tiny fraction of them will live and go on to spawn the next generation. Anything that makes an animal unable to breed e.g. sterilisation, an injury, something that makes it repulsive to the opposite sex is for all practical purposes, the same as death. It takes an animal out of the gene pool.

This something can be a human breeder who makes his decisions based on beauty, meat produced per kg of feed, cuteness… This is called artificial selection.

You could let your cat make the decisions. It swats at the fish in and aquarium and eats the ones it kills. The ones too fast for it, are its fit selections. This is called natural selection. This will select for faster, more agile fish.

You could let nature in general make the decisions. You put your fish outside in a big pond. Various predators will kill some. Sunlight will kill some. Freezing will kill some. Starvation will kill some. Diseases will kill some. Nature has a quite multifaceted notion of what is fit. This too is called natural selection.

What’s the difference? It is just a matter of who is doing the selecting/killing. The pressure on the fish to conform to the arbitrary selection criteria is the same.

Professional fish breeders can get spectacular results in just a very short time, but that is because they cheat. They will do things like breed daughter to father, then granddaughter to grandfather etc. to freeze in a trait. They will also spawn an entire generation from just one individual. They are fanatically focussed on one trait, so they can do it quickly. Nature is more interested in general fitness, optimising all manner of traits simultaneously.

Since both natural and artificial selection work by the same underlying mechanism, if you accept one, you have to accept the other.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Night Light

When I was a toddler I absolutely hated being left in a totally dark room. I pleaded with my parents to leave bedroom door ajar or to leave a lamp on. They told me not to be silly. I was both terrified and furious they would not grant me this tiny concession which would not inconvenience them in the least. Eventually my Dad relented and got me a brown Bakelite night light. This fear was so primal. For a cave-dwelling child, if the fire went out, it probably meant those looking after it had been killed by predators or other bands of humans. Even it if went out from lack of fuel, this too was a major catastrophe. I ask you to consider a night light when you need to buy a baby shower gift. There is no need to put kids through this primal trauma. You can get them inexpensively at Canadian Tire, or Cloud·b. Some project stars or soothing images on the ceiling. Battery-powered ones will need to recharged each day.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Cave Man Ever Saw A Dinosaur

In the popular imagination, cave men and dinosaurs shared the earth. Not so. Dinosaurs were wiped out in 60,000,000 BC and but humans did not show up for another 59 million years in 6,000,000 BC.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

No Contest

It is astounding that there is even any debate over evolution vs. intelligent design. On one side you have all the world’s scientists who have millions of facts about chemistry, molecular biology and biology to bolster their argument. On the other you have the scientifically illiterate whose only argument is that one particular allegedly magically blessed desert tribe living 3000 years ago surely would have guessed correctly about how the world worked.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Non-Intuitive Thinking

Humans have evolved an amazing ability to use belief systems that fly in the face of common sense. It allows people to think about quantum mechanics or particle physics, but it also lets them become trapped by institutionalised insanity such as Mormonism and Christianity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Novelty of Continuous Abundance

Not having enough to eat is the normal situation for any animal. Having enough is a rare, temporary situation to be exploited with gorging. Most humans in North America have created an environment of continuous abundance. Evolution has not yet equipped them for this novelty, but evolution is diligently winnowing the unfit with sexual exclusion and early death by cardiac disease, diabetes…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Observing Evolution

One of the most common lies creationists tell is that evolution has never been observed. Evolution is observed every day:

If creationistis would read even one textbook on evolution, they would know that. I suggest Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters by Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks

~ Roedy(1948-02-04 age:70)

Observing Evolution

There are 5 ways we can observe evolution.

  1. Personally, I got to study evolution going on inside my own body. Every few years, my HIV viruses would evolve immunity to my drugs. Now I take a 4-drug cocktail. It harder for my bugs to evolve immunity to all the drugs simultaneously.
  2. You can study fossils. If you find enough you can see how creatures very gradually morphed. It takes about 200,000 years usually to notice much difference. Creationist Ken Ham has the strange idea you must be present while an animal is still alive to learn anything about it Were you there?. Ken is unaware of what modern forensics can discover by studying murder victims long after they are dead.
  3. You can study the evolution of single-celled organisms in the lab or from fruit-fly experiments.
  4. You can study evolution in the wild. For example, a team watched a new species of fish split off in a Mexican river. Anoles evolve within a decade to be optimally shaped for the local vegetation. You can study ring species such as Ensatina and various birds.
  5. You can study the DNA and how new variants can form from tiny errors.

I suggest you read Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks’ Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters. Creationists have not learned anything new about evolution in 158 years. They make idiots of themselves arguing from such profound ignorance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Obvious Evolution

When you understand evolution, rather than a straw man, it is so obvious, you wonder why it was even made into a theory. I can’t conceive of how it could be wrong.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Obviousness

The theory of evolution does not ever violate any of these obvious observations. If some creationist tells you for example that the theory of evolution predicts cats should give birth to dogs, or that crocoducks should exist, he is simply lying by creating straw men. Creationists like to confuse things by using the term kind but if you read the bible, it is just a synonym for species. Creationists like to use kind as a vague synonym for clade.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Only Humans Refuse to Recycle

Humans are the only animal that does not have a sustainable recycling policy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Only Life In The Universe

I have always found the assertion ludicrous that the only life in the universe is here on earth. Imagine you had another earth-like planet. How could you possibly keep it sterile with thousands of meteorites bombarding it each day?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Only the Most Advanced Civilisations Persist

When we go looking for technological civilisations in space, the problem is they will mostly likely be at least 100,000 years more advanced than us. Most of the ones similar to our level will rapidly go extinct.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Opinions of the Stupid on Complex Matters are Void

Christians claim evolution is false because they cannot understand it and partly because they do not want to. It seems absurd to them. Most Christians do not understand algebra either. It is Greek to them. Why don’t they claim it too is false for the same reason?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Order of Fossils

Fossils are always found with oldest fossils deepest and the most recent fossils on top. This is because there are new sediments each year that bury that year’s dead. Further, the evolutionarily most primitive animals are found deepest, and the most complex is on top. The ordering is extremely precise. Why? because an animal species does not live that long on earth. Its bodies are found only in a narrow band of sediments. In particular we never see dinosaur and human fossils mixed together because they never lived on earth at the same time.

When J.B.S Haldane was asked what would disprove evolution, he said Rabbits in the Precambrian. This incredibly precise ordering of fossils is one of the best evidences of evolution. How do Christians explain it? A swimming contest during Noah’s flood. I kid you not. The idea is so hare-brained I can barely bring myself to refute it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Origin of Life

I suspect within a couple decades we will have proof that primitive life exists on billions of planets even within our galaxy. We could interpret this two ways:

I am looking forward to experiments to be able to tell which is so, perhaps both.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Origin of Life

The number of places life can survive is likely much wider than the number of places it could start.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Other Intelligence In Past?

What are the odds that at some time in the past, another technological species arose on planet earth, but destroyed itself in a couple of millennia, leaving no obvious traces? If it did, what subtle signs might be left?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Other Intelligent Species Have a Huge Head Start

Intelligent life in some other galaxies would have a 4 billion year head start on us. Think of how technology has changed earth in the last 400 years. You can’t begin to imagine what could happen with 10 million times more opportunity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Our Close Relative, the Salmon

We humans are more closely related to a salmon than a salmon is to a shark.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Our Close Relatives

We share 98.7% of our genes with chimps. We share 99.5% of our genes with fellow humans. Chimps and humans are so closely related that they can donate blood to each other. We have the same blood types.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Our Extinction Event

We are in the middle of a global extinction event, the biggest since the end of the dinosaurs, but this one we humans caused. But cheer up; in past, it took the earth only 10,000,000 years to recover.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Our Maladaptation

We humans have all kinds of trouble because we did most of our evolving long before there was technology or even agriculture. For example:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Our Relatives

We humans are genetically very similar to both chimps and bonobos. We are like chimps with our violence and competitiveness. We are like bonobos with our consideration and rampant sexuality. Bonobo society is unusually peaceful. Prudes are horrified to learn that in bonobo society, homosexuality, incest and paedophilia are all compulsory.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Overriding Natural Selection

Evolution by natural selection was able to get us this far by making us act in our own immediate, obvious, self interest and to compete ferociously with others, even when it made everyone miserable. To progress further, we humans have to override this legacy conditioning and use our intelligence to maximise overall welfare and negotiate our own true long-term best self interest. This will require unnatural co-operation. Natural selection is mindless. The process is quite happy to drive a species to extinction as it is doing to humans now with things like arms races, overpopulation and environmental plundering. Natural selection is just a feature of the universe, not a god, not a virtue, not something that has to be endured. We now have the power to influence it to make our lives more pleasant.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Parasites

Every species of mammal on earth has 10+ species of parasite that do nothing but make that animal miserable. What sort of benevolent loving god would design in such a nasty feature as that? Christians do not worship Yahweh because he is kind and good, but because they are terrified their imaginary god will torture them. They worship an evil god out of cowardice and in doing so, they become sadistic and cruel like their god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Parasites

Like any parasite, HIV just wants to eat your body or its nutrients.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pathological Conservatism

Our ancestors made identical stone hand axes for over a million years. You would expect the design to at least drift a little, but no. There must have been something, perhaps some religion, that kept the design identical.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Phony Balance

Teaching creationism to balance evolution is like teaching astrology to balance astronomy, homeopathy to balance pharmacology, crystal healing to balance geology, tarot cards to balance psychology and safecracking to balance bookkeeping.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Phony Probabilities

Whenever someone tells you the probability of something, find out just what it is the probability of happening and ask to see the calculations that derived the estimate. You may quickly find they just pulled a number out of their ass or that in any one of 100 other ways the number is meaningless. One common trick is illustrated here: Getting any particular string of heads and tails is highly improbable (1/2 ^ 100), but every time you toss a coin 100 times, one of those highly improbable patterns has to come up. There is nothing special at all about one of them coming up, just about one particular pattern specified in advance coming up.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Plant Odours

Plants emit odours, not for the delectation of humans, but to attract insects for pollination. We humans have thus come to appreciate subtle odours made of a complex mixture of aromatic organic chemicals. Why then do perfume chemists create overpowering scents made of just a few elements whose psychological effect is like an ice pick rammed into the nose?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Plant Symbiosis

One of the few happy facts you stumble over in the study of evolution is that plants enjoy insects drinking their nectar and animals eating their fruits.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Playing With Statistics

The easiest way to reduce the number of deaths due to cancer is to increase the number of deaths due to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So take care interpreting statistics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pleasing Her

What are the words every woman longs to hear? Would you mind if I did the windows today?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Poetic Justice

It is poetic justice the folk who chose greed over the health of others to mine the tar sands will die of brain cancer. It is too bad the investors and executives will not be hit too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pointless Cruelty

I can understand which humans have evolved to avoid procreating with those who are different or have a deformity, but it makes no sense to be cruel to them in culture of over-abundance.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Power of Evolution

To get an idea of the power of evolution, it manages to convince nearly everyone that the most rewarding activity imaginable is inserting a penis and removing it again over and over. This applies to straight males and females and even gay males. Can you imagine any activity more intrinsically boring?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Powerful Solar

Supporters of big oil give the impression there is something wimpy about solar. Yet 5000 times as much energy falls on earth as we use from all energy sources combined.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Pre-Darwin Science

Prior to Darwin publishing Origin Of Species science did not accept the creationist view. They knew the earth had to be millions of years old. They knew that rocks came in strata with the oldest deepest, with the oldest containing the most primitive forms. They did not understand evolution as the source of the changes. They figured it might be caused by successive creations.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Predominance of Artificial Selection

Whether a species goes extinct is no longer primarily a matter of natural selection, but of artificial selection. Humans decide which species are worth keeping. The best traits for survival are cuddliness and a face similar to a human’s.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Preference For Others To Suffer

I am so disgusted with my species. Humans refuse to even act in their self interest. They would sooner others get less than everyone including themselves get more. They are happy to see the extinction of their species so long as they enjoy a slight relative advantage over others in the interim.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Primate Carnivores

There are only two primates that hunt and eat meat: chimpanzees and man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Prime Directive

Darwinian evolution insists that every plant and animal take as its prime directive Make sure your offspring survive! If a creature deviated, it would soon go extinct.

After hundreds of thousands of years, a minority of humans have decided to abandon the prime directive in favour of making money. As a result, our entire species is doomed to extinction within a century (perhaps two). Even those dedicated to their grandkids will also go because they allow a small minority of powerful individuals to emit greenhouse gases, drive species extinct, deplete soils, overpopulate… in a single-minded pursuit of money.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Primitive Man Too Triggered Extinctions

Paleontologists have discovered many mass extinctions, even before the last ice age. They have discovered the cause. They all happened shortly after man invaded the territory. So much for the myth primitive man was a conservationist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Primitive Twitter

Is Twitter  the primordial ooze from which a planetary consciousness will evolve?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Problem with Creationists

The problem with creationists is they know nothing about evolution. All they are familiar with are How to demolish atheists in 5 minutes essays posted on the Internet by similarly clueless creationists. No matter how many times scientists patiently explain the difference, creationists conflatate abiogenesis, evolution, the big bang and the lifecycle of stars. Creationsist insist on using the archic biblical term kind then flatly refuse to define it. Even though they have done no study of evolution they imagine they know much more than the scientists with PhDs who have spent a lifetime studying it in a rigorous academic environment. It is difficult to debate with creationists because they believe so many untrue things, and they refuse to double check anything when challenged.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Problem With Evolution

The biggest problem evolution has is that creationists shamelessly lie about it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Problems with Evolution

If there were outstanding problems with evolution, of course, they would be taught along with it, just as they are in cosmology. However, there are not any. The so-called evidence against evolution are not legitimate science. It amounts to objections based on the fact Christian dogma and evolution disagree.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Promiscuity

The advantage of sexual over asexual reproduction is the genes get more mixed up. There is more genetic diversity. This means natural selection has a bigger palette to work from for evolution. Promiscuity mixes the genes even further. A bird whose eggs all have different fathers has a better chance of perpetuating its genes, rather that putting all her bets on one male. Most animals are promiscuous.

What are the advantages then of monogamy? It is one of the few defences against STDs (Sexually Transmitted Diseases). Males are more willing to put effort into raising young if they know they are his. Religion has elevated monogamy to absurdly important heights. Partners split over even one incident of straying. Humans claim to be monogamous, but in practice almost nobody is 100% monogamous. We cause ourselves so much grief with this pretence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Propagating Gay Genes

In nearly every species males try to prevent fellow males from breeding, but human Christians attempt to force male homosexuals not only to copulate but to sire children. What motivates this desire to propagate gay genes?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Property Law

Nesting sea birds spend a considerable percentage of their energy squabbling with each other over territory. Humans invented private property and the laws protecting it to reduce the amount of time and energy we need to protect our territories. It is a sort of global cease fire.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Protecting Fish

Every aquarist knows that fish will not breed unless you get the conditions just right including light, water pH, hardness, salinity, depth, food, space, plant cover, rock shape… There are many fish species so picky that no one has ever managed to accurately enough mimic their native environment to induce them to reproduce. Fish are much more sensitive to changes in the environment than lay people would ever imagine. If we humans recklessly change the conditions in the wild even a small amount, fish will stop breeding and go extinct.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Proving Evolution Wrong

If you could show that evolutionary theory was badly mistaken, or even a little bit mistaken, you would be hailed as a hero by the scientific community. However, if you just stated it was wrong, without reasons, without evidence, you would be dismissed as an asshole. There are no brownie points for speculation. If you said evolution was wrong because it was not intuitively obvious to you and you had not even read some textbooks on it, you would be laughed at as an idiot.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Punishing Altruism

The universe works to reward (with preferential survival) those creatures who sacrifice the good of all for personal gain. This bleak fact should, once and for all, nail the coffin lid shut on the nutty idea the universe was designed by a benign god.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Puppy Evolution

Christians are terrified of evolution because they have been told it is synonymous with devil worship. If they ever read Darwin’s Origin Of Species they would discover he never even once mentioned the devil. Christians think they don’t believe in evolution, but that is only because they do not know what it is.

Consider a litter of puppies. They will not all be identical. They will have different patterns of spots. Some will be bigger. Some will be more active. Some will be friendlier. There will probably be a runt of the litter. Some will sleep more. Some will like to fight with their mates. What caused these differences?

Evolutionists refer to this as random variation. Even creationists agree that litters of puppies are not identical and it happens because the puppies are not genetically identical. This is half of the theory of evolution. Bloody obvious, eh?

Let’s imagine distemper infects the puppies. It is a horrible thing to behold. However, typically, some of the puppies will survive. Why? Some have better immune systems. Some are better at staying hydrated. Some are just generally stronger. These traits are controlled by their genes. Evolutionists refer to this horrible winnowing as natural selection the other half of the theory of evolution. Bloody obvious, eh?

So lets imagine the puppies grow up and have puppies of their own. When distemper strikes the new batch of puppies, a greater proportion of them will survive because they are offspring of dogs that survived distemper, and probably passed on the genes for that resistance. The effect confers better and better resistance with every successive generation. We have seen the same thing happen with humans with extremely virulent diseases. Evolutionists refer to this gradual improvement over generations as evolution. If you are a creationist, what in any of this do you deny?

Creationists often deny that small changes could not possibly add up to anything significant, no matter how many changes. They don’t understand that the creation of new species usually requires billions of generations. Imagine the difference between two clam species. Imagine you create a morph of a billion intermediates between them. The intermediates would look absolutely identical. Morphs on TV are done with perhaps only ten intermediates. Nothing detectable changes at each generation, but after a billion generations you have a whole new species that looks quite different.

Imagine evolution were slowed down by a factor of 100 million, so a that a billion years of evolution occurred in ten years. If one clam species morphed into another, it would be still way way too slow to see anything happening. No matter how big a change you need, if you have enough tiny changes, if you are patient, you will reach your goal. Consider the mere 80 million sediment layers of the Grand Canyon add up to quite an impressive gorge. An inch is pretty small, but a billion inches is 15,783 miles. Even a whale is composed of microscopic cells. A second tick is insignificant, but you if add up 31,540,000 of them you get a year.

If you read Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters by Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks you will discover that new species appear all the time, even if you refuse to acknowledge the evidence from the fossil record. The only reason I can think to ignore the fossil record is because you have predecided there is no evidence for evolution because it threatens your archaic religious beliefs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of Fruit

From a plant’s point of view, a fruit is payment to an animal for spreading its seeds. The plant makes the fruit delicious to attract the animals and nutritious to encourage the genes of animals that co-operate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of Humanity

From the point of view of a bacterium, the purpose of humans is to convert plant material into easily-digested sewage.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of Pain

Evolution’s purpose for pain is to tell you that you just did a foolish thing that will hurt your survival/reproductive success and to convince you never to do it again. A wise human contemplates what that foolish thing might be and seeks to avoid doing it again in future. Oddly, I have never heard this very basic advice in a self-help book.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Purpose of Post Partum Depression

One of the grimmer facts of human existence was the discovery that post partum depression evolved to give women a hard-nosed look at their odds of being able to raise their newborn. She has to decide if she has enough resources to raise it. If she does not, attempting to raise it could starve her existing children. Sometimes the most life-preserving action is infanticide. We are used to seeing this in birds and animals often when parents sometimes starve one twin. It was a bit of a shock to discover it in humans too.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Radioactive Dating

Radioactive dating lets us date organic material and rocks. This helps us make sense of fossil beds to track the progress of evolution. As you might expect this drives creationists crazy because it debunks their claims in detail.

Creationists claim the earth is 6,000 years old. Science says it is 4.543 billion years old. Creationists offer no data to back up their claim. They claim radioactive dating is inaccurate

, again offering no data. They are not claiming it is out in the third decimal place, but out by a factor of 600. Creationists have no idea about how such clocks can be calibrated and tested against other clocks. For example, we have tree-ring data going back 10,000 years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rape and Natural Selection

From the point of view of natural selection, rape is just a male strategy to bypass female sexual selection. In species where females have no strategy to prevent rapes from resulting in births, rape becomes endemic, such as in ducks. Christians insisting on forcing females to carry rape pregnancies to term are providing even more Darwinian motivation for rape.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rat Curiosity

Evolution has encouraged rat curiosity even when that curiosity leads rats to take significant risks because curiosity leads to knowledge of new resources to exploit and improved knowledge of the terrain to use to evade predators.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rational Terrorism

The only terrorism that would make sense is environmental terrorism — eco-vandalism to destroy the equipment responsible for massive CO₂ emissions or serious general pollution. Unlike regular terrorism, it would save rather than take lives. It amounts to self-defence of planet earth.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reaction to Adultery

Man is the only animal who abandons his mate if she or he is unfaithful. Other animals sometimes try to maintain exclusive access to their mate, but they take their aggression out on rivals, never on their mate.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Recent Evolution

Evolution is incredible slow. Our brains have barely changed at all in the last 40,000 years. We inherited most of our brain wiring from creatures that lives even longer ago. Our babies are interchangeable with little ice age hunter gatherers. Our brains work to keep us in the present moment, to make fight or flight decisions in a millisecond, to think of the half dozen people in our band as us and everyone else as the enemy. We have almost no ability to think ahead years or decades.

Yet we are born and trained to be city dwellers. We are overwhelmed by the numbers of strangers. We can’t get a grip on climate change, fish extinction, soil erosion, river pollution’ They all happen too slowly. We are superstitious and religious, ascribing natural events to supernatural agents. We are far too primitive to succeed in modern civilisation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Recovering After An Extinction

When you despair about man destroying the planet and himself, consider these two things:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Recovery

The good news that comes from the study of evolution, is that even when earth suffers a massive catastrophe that wipes out nearly all life on earth, given enough time, life comes back changed, able to handle the new conditions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Evolution

Evolution works because animals compete for territory, food, mates, status, offspring… Then along comes a being like me who says Screw it! I don’t want to play. It is a stupid game. I voluntarily take myself out of the game, out of the gene pool. I am the ultimate in unfitness. Oddly, nothing too terrible happens to me personally as a consequence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Evolution

Evolution/natural selection has as IQ of about 1. It can design amazing things using only blind trial and error followed by pruning bad designs with natural selection. (no planning. No foresight). Theists imagine this has to happen overnight. It is i n c r e d i b l y slow. It takes millions of years. Even if you watch a movie of it speeded up tens of thousands of times, nothing would appear to be happening.

Evolution is not speculation. It is observed fact. We watch evolution every day in the lab and in the field. It happens most rapidly as viruses and bacteria evolve immunity to medications. Theists stupidly claim only a god could produce the same results of evolution, denying the observed results of evolution. They have refused to keep up with the science of the last 100 years. They are still pretending science has learned nothing since Darwin. We have even learned to mimic the chemical trick using DNA that evolution uses.

See Evolving: The Human Effect and Why It Matters by Dr. Daniel J. Fairbanks for details

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Evolution

There is only one reason people reject evolution — they do not understand it. Creationists work feverishly to fill people with misinformation about evolution to keep them confused.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Evolution

When Christians reject evolution on the grounds it is not warm and fuzzy enough, when Christians claim to believe in god because a godless universe would be too cold, I see a bratty six-year old boldly asserting 2+2=6 because it makes them feel better to imagine they can get a little extra by pretending this is so. Christians have no respect for the truth. All that matters is what they mindlessly think they would prefer to be true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Evolution

When Christians say they are rejecting evolution, just what do they claim about evolution is untrue? The key assertion is natural selection namely: animals and plants that are fitter will tend to show up more frequently in the next generation.

If a Christian claims the keystone is untrue, what is he claiming? that fitter plants and animals will have the same distribution in the next generation, or lower. Christians know from artificial selection (natural selection with human tweaking to speed it up) that this Christian claim is blithering nonsense. It makes no sense at all.

Their rejection in inconsistent, blithering nonsense. Christians know they are supposed to reject evolution, even if doing so makes no sense. They are like children who act out of fear fully knowing they are wrong.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Evolution

Why does anyone reject evolution?

Nobody has a scientific objection. It is always a religious objection based on a misunderstanding of what the theory says.

When I studied it, my reaction was, This does not deserve to be a theory. It is too obvious. How could it possibly be otherwise?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Science

Christians don’t reject all science. They just reject that which debunks the bible. The are OK with physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, metallurgy, aeronautics, agriculture, astronomy, engineering… They react in horror at evolution, cosmology and geology. In earlier times, the big fight was with astronomy. The bible contradicts all the sciences, but Christians focus on just a few of them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rejecting Teens

Mammals drive their young away once they become teenagers. Humans presume it is the children rejecting the parents, but the rejection works both ways.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religion is for Stalling Change

Here is why I think humans evolved religion. In a primitive society, nearly always innovation is a nutty idea. The time honoured way of doing things is better. There is no systematic way of exploring science or systematically testing alternate hypotheses. You need a mechanism to discourage innovation and command social cohesion, to pass cultural knowledge reliably from generation to generation.

Religion does this. It allows a shamanic/priestly class to control the population and enforce the traditional knowledge and valued encoded in myths and stories. The priestly class often selects recruits for the next generation from the entire population.

It long ago outgrew its usefulness. It stifles innovation. It fosters economic inequality and exploitation of the poor. It creates conflict when different religions rub shoulders (originally they were isolated).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Religiously-Protected Misinformation

If you were watching Jeopardy and Alex Trebek said No, the first world war was in 1929 millions of people would write to complain. Yet when equally incorrect assertions appear on TV, in books or even in school lectures, almost nobody complains because this is religiously protected misinformation, with even higher sacred cow status than the existence of Santa Claus. We don’t realise how ridiculous it is because we are so familiar with the religious myths. It is just as silly as if Christians started asserting John McCain were 200 years old and pounced on anyone who dared suggest otherwise, providing, of course, no evidence at all for this bizarre assertion.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Replacement for Evolution

If some new theory ever replaces evolution, it definitely will not be creationism. It is not even a theory, much less a plausible one.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reproducing Human Intelligence

Humans diverged from chimps 13 million years ago. According to the National Geographic we share 96% of our genes with chimps. This means all the fancy thinking ability, language, motor skills evolve in an eyeblink and the changes to implement them packed into a mere 1200 genes. Human superiority can’t be as big as deal as we imagine. We should not imagine Einstein as our typical human intelligence. We should think in terms of Duck Dynasty or Donald Trump.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Requirements for Artificial Life Forms

The last things artificial life forms made of metal want covering their planet are water and oxygen.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Requirements for Life

A species has to do two things to avoid going extinct:

  1. Survive.
  2. Reproduce and ensure the next generation survives.

We humans have violated these rules big time:

We are a defective species. We care more for our own comfort than the survival of our offspring. No wonder we are scheduling our species’ rapid (by evolutionary terms) extinction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Resistant Bacteria

Pretty much all the nastiest disease bacteria have evolved immunity to all the antibiotics. Different species of bacteria spread immunity by exchanging plasmids which encode the immunity.

This predicament came about for a number of reasons:

I have done some study on the great plague that swept through Europe. They were far more horrible than almost anyone realises. Other than our improved sanitation, we are almost as vulnerable as our ancestors were in the middle ages.

Plagues don’t get a foothold until you have groups of 5000 or more people living together. So one way people in the west could deal with a modern plague is to stay home and have no contact with strangers. You would work by telecommuting. You would have your goods and groceries delivered by drone.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Results of Evolution

Opening your eyes at random on the fruits of evolution can’t help but boggle the mind:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Reviving Dinosaurs

Eventually, we should be able to guess what the genome of various dinosaurs was, or at least could have been. Then we might be able to revive species, perhaps pint sized versions you could keep as exotic pets.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Room To Move

Even without mutation, consider how much variation is in the total population of humans:

Natural selection has been chewing away on our species for 200,000 years. There is lots of raw material for natural selection and evolution to work with.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Rôle of Testosterone

When a male primate wins a battle his testosterone level rises; when he loses, it drops. Presumably this helps prevent needlessly refighting a battle because the loser is discouraged. Unfortunately, this mechanism spills over into political battles that never end such as poor against elite, gay against bigot, rationalist against religion, democracy against tyranny, triggering needless capitulation.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Seashells in the Mountains

Leonardo da Vinci went on a hike in the Italian mountains. He discovered huge banks of sea shells. He concluded that the bible must be wrong. How do modern scientists explain this?

There are great continental tectonic plates that move very slowly, floating on the molten core of the earth. When two plates smash into each other, they push up and form a mountain range. The process is very slow, but with satellite laser surveying, it can be measured. Areas that were once the bottoms of seas are sometimes thrust up to become mountains.

On the bottom of the sea, each year, creatures living that year fall to the bottom and a tiny fraction of them fossilize. The process may continue over a million years or so. During this time the creatures change, according to evolutionary pressure. That is why you find the layers finely sorted in evolutionary order.

How do Christians explain this? They say Noah’s flood washed the shells to the top of every mountain. There are three problems with this.

  1. You don’t find shells at the top of every mountain.
  2. It does not explain why the shells at the top of mountains are layered precisely in evolutionary order.
  3. It does not explain why the Burgess Shales got millions of trilobites, but no seashells.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Second Time Lucky

50,000 years ago, climate change almost wiped us out. We were down to under 2000 individuals. What we are doing to ourselves now with global warming, could be even nastier.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Secret Of Life

If you look at our two closest relatives, the bonobos and the chimpanzees, you would conclude the secret to a peaceful society is not religion, but a relaxed attitude toward sex and encouraging female solidarity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Secret of Our Success

Oddly, the reason we humans are so smart (have such a large cranium) is because we have so many monkey genes that fail to work. Other members of the family have big teeth, big biting muscles and a muscle-anchoring crest instead.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Senility is Artificial

In nature, if an animal becomes incapable of running swiftly it soon becomes lunch. There is no old age or senility. Humans suffer a much more terrible and protracted end than being eaten. They are confined and kept barely alive with non-person status, sometimes suffering for decades with no access to death by any possible means.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Seniority and Genetic Fitness

The male moose proudly displays an ever larger rack of antlers with each passing year. It proves his genetic fitness and sexual desirability. The male human hides his signs of seniority with hair dye and a toupée. This is because younger males are more desirable because they have more years in them to help raise the offspring.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Serious Questions for Evolutionists

These questions for evolutionists are not intended to challenge evolution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sex and Population

In prehistoric times, if couples had sex, there would be plenty of babies. With contraception, that is no longer true. However, enough people still want babies (or refuse contraception) that the population is still exploding.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sex Bribery

Most animals don’t seem to get much pleasure from sex, compared with what humans do. Apparently nature has to offer a massive bribe to persuade humans to have children and tend them for two decades.…

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sexual Selection

What changes in the modern world affecting sexual selection are different from the conditions under which we evolved?

I think this means handsome male promiscuous charmers and wealthy older men will rise in perceived attractiveness. Women who like children will become more desirable than women who like sex.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shark Fin Soup

The Spanish are rapidly driving sharks extinct by killing them for their fins used to make a gourmet soup that Chinese pay 120.00 GBP a bowl for. The fisherman remove the fins without killing the sharks first. Canadian courts have shot down laws attempting to ban shark fin soup claiming the laws are racist.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shift to Polygamy

Zoologists wondered why some bird species, such as the Birds of Paradise, were polygamous. The males spend all their time looking beautiful and trying to impress the females. The prettiest, most athletic male impregnates a dozen females, but takes no rôle in caring for the offspring. Because New Guinea is a recently formed island, birds have reached it, but not many bird predators. There is plenty of food. It is a bird paradise. Life is so good that females don’t need the help of a male to raise the young. I speculate that greater ease of existence in the USA is similarly driving the switch to polygamy in the zoological sense.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Shoddy Design

The recurrent laryngeal nerve runs from the brain to the larynx. In mammals, it doesn’t take the direct route, but, even in giraffes, makes a long detour, via the heart. Evolution explanations why this is so. The Bible cannot not explain how a god could design such shoddy work.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Simulating Evolution

It is not that hard to write a computer program that simulates the mindless intelligence of evolution, with mutation and natural selection. This can be used to solve all sorts of problems. The results are indistinguishable from something a person might come up with on his own. The results can look designed because the results were designed, but by a very stupid, but diligent, designer, namely natural selection which has an IQ of approximately 1, not by a god or a conscious intelligence.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Slow Evolution Still Adds Up

The human genome has not changed detectably is the last 40,000 years. Evolution is so slow and the length of time it has had, so long, that our intuition simply cannot get its head around it. The mind cannot comprehend just how drastic change can be when you let a glacially slow process be for three billion years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Smuggling In Science

Creationists have a number of key words such as evolution, god, creationism, intelligent design which trigger their insanity. Perhaps knowledge can be smuggled in by disguising it as just so stories for infants. E.g. how the frog got its spots. Explain camouflage, selective predation by birds all in some mythical pond.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Soil Fairies

Teaching creationism along side evolution would be as fey as giving equal time to the conceit that fairies are responsible for soil fertility.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Sound of the Big Bang

We can hear the actual sound of the big bang (it sounds like a slow trombone glissando). We can even recreate the conditions when it was a billionth of a second old in a particle collider. Unsolved Cosmological Mysteries click to watch

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Source Of Opposition to Evolution

The opposition to evolution is based on religious wishful thinking that the bible be inerrant. It has nothing to do with science.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Spectacle of our Extinction

Man’s technological evolution proceeds much faster than his social evolution. This is leading to his early extinction. How fortunate for our generation to get to observe the spectacle.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Speculation on the Purpose of Depression

Depression is common in humans, especially in winter. I speculate that depression is an adaptation. When we lived in caves, starvation was a major problem each winter. You could pretty well count on some of the people in the group dying each winter. If the people who most likely to die self-identified, became depressed and stopped eating and otherwise stopped consuming communal resources, that would leave more to support the rest of the group. Depression is outmoded in western society. Getting depressed won’t help your fellows in the least.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Squeaking Through

The good news about global warming is the ancestors of plants and animals alive today squeaked through severe global warming events of the past without going totally extinct. Global warming will knock technological man on his ass, possibly even drive him to extinction. The planet will recover in a million years or so, evolving new bio-diversity and rich, balanced ecosystems. The bad news is global warming is just one of extreme stresses technological man has put on the other species and the ecosystems that sustain all life. Most of the of the species we all love will soon be gone forever. I consider that a crime even more serious that genocide.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stable DNA

O.J. Simpson that his DNA sample might have been someone else’s but changed into his by having the analysis delayed a few hours. For some reason the prosecution did not point out that even Neanderthal DNA had been successfully sequenced and there was no record of any such transformation in history.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sterilised Earth

Six times in earth’s history it has been hit by meteorites so large they sterilised the earth and vaporised the oceans (both water and salt).

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stop Rewarding Rapists

If you want to stomp out rape, you must stop rapists from breeding. You could do that with chemical or physical castration or long terms in jail. Catholics work to promote rape by pressuring women to bear the children of rape.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stories Around a Fire

For millennia, we would sit around a fire at night and tell stories to each other and bask in the warmth. I suspect this behaviour by now is hard wired in our DNA. Even today we sit around campfires or sit in front of a fireplace or pot-bellied stove ignoring the high tech alternatives.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Strange Animals

Humans are quite strange animals. What other animal cuts or plucks its hair to create artistic patterns? What other animal paints its face? What other animal persuades others of its species to cut it open and rearrange the muscles to give the illusion of youth? What other animal covers itself in woven plant fibres? What other animal eats so much and moves so little it dies an early death? What other animal hoards things it has no use for, just to deny them to others?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Stupid People Should Have No Opinion on Complex Things

Christians claim evolution is false because they cannot understand it and partly because they do not want to. It seems absurd to them. Most Christians do not understand algebra either. It is Greek to them. Why don’t they claim it too is false for the same reason?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Sturgeon

Under the mathematically precise south pole is a frozen sturgeon, put there to baffle the next intelligent species after man.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Sulking

Man is the only animal who goes off to sulk when his sexual advance is rebuffed. Every other animal gets back in the game immediately.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Super Penises

Why have not all men evolved 38.10 cm (1¼ ft) penises? Humans have evolved very large penises relative to our size. Fleas beat us, but not many other animals. They confer high status on large-penis males, primarily with other males. President Johnson sought every opportunity to display his to establish dominance. There are disadvantages to overly large penises. That is why they deflate and shrink when not in use. We spent a considerable amount of our history running about naked through thorn bushes. The most important disadvantage is that they are uncomfortable to some females. This reduces the breeding opportunities for the super-sized male.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Super Time Lapse

Human intuition fails when we try to study processes that take place over vast amounts of time, such as astronomy, geology and evolution. Time lapse photography now lets us study things like glaciers, plant growth, decay and tides, thereby extending our intuition. Imagine if we had a super time lapse photography that let us watch the birth of stars, or the wobbling of the north pole, the carving of rivers or the evolutionary flowering of life on earth, brutally pruned back to the ground again and again by mass extinction events.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) Quantum Leap: how matter behaves at the atomic level click to watch

Superior Birds

The main reason birds can fly but mammals cannot is that birds have lungs 20 times as efficient that look nothing like mammalian lungs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Superior Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs had lungs 33% more efficient than ours.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Survival

If civilisation collapses, your best bet for survival is to have a son in a criminal gang.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Survival of the Adaptable

It is not so much survival of the fittest as survival of those who adapt most quickly to change.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Survival Of the Fittest

Evolution is like a marathon. It is sometimes characterised as a game of survival of the fittest. However, the contestants have no concern for ensuring the healthiest or most intelligent prevail. They are out to ensure their own genes prevail, wretched as they may be. They are willing to win by hook or by crook. The mother of a psychopathic serial killer soldier or a severely deformed child favours her son over any Nobel prize winner. When there are not enough resources to go around (the norm) it is to one’s advantage to see the competition killed off, crippled or at least denied the resources to live. This explains why herd animals almost never go to the defence of each other during a predator attack. It explains why humans treat the homeless so cruelly. Fitness is defined as the creatures that win this no-rules war.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Survivors

Humans are the last surviving hominids. We all descended from a small band of Africans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Taking Advantage

One of the most impressive things about life is how it will take advantage of the tiniest opportunity, the most microscopic inhospitable living space, the tiniest bit of food, barely suitable conditions that are present only for hours. Life never gets discouraged.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Taste of Dinosaurs

Given that birds and modern day reptiles are close cousins of the dinosaurs, dinosaurs probably tasted like chicken.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Taste of Dinosaurs

We have good reason to think dinosaurs would have tasted like chicken because modern day birds are dinosaurs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Teach the Controversy

For Intelligent Design to become a viable theory to rival evolution, to be taken seriously, to be taught in schools, it would need some evidence to support it. So far, it has none. It would have to explain everything evolution does. It would have to make predictions, better ones that evolution does. If it wants to keep the supernatural designer feature, it would have to provide some hard evidence that a designer exists. From where I stand, it has absolutely nothing going for it but an endorsement in an ancient book. I don’t think it has a ghost of a chance of being accepted as legit by science because it is a religious hypothesis masquerading as a scientific theory. At the current time, it is no more science than astrology.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Teaching the Controversy

Christian: Doctor, you say thorough tooth brushing is the best way to control cavities. I say it is smearing them in a mixture of chocolate and holy water. Let’s teach the controversy! There is no controversy, just a nutcase trying to get free publicity for his nonsense without any evidence for it.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Technological Extinction

We wonder why there are not more signs of technological life in space. The most obvious answer comes from looking at life here on earth. There are at least a dozen ways we are likely to wipe ourselves out before we reach the stars. We will be here on earth for just an eye-blink of evolutionary time. Technology evolved too quickly. We are still using the mindset of the hunter-gatherer band to deal with our fellows.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Theory of Evolution

Evolution is a theory in the same sense that germ theory is. Germs are also observable facts. Evolution is also an observable fact. Rejecting the science of evolution for religious reasons is just as idiotic as rejecting the science of germs.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

A Theory Must Explain and Predict

Darwin’s geological theory explains circular coral atolls. The biblical theory of a very young earth has no explanation. A theory that explains nothing, predicts nothing and that is not even consistent with observation is by definition not even a theory.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

As They Are, or As You Wish Them To Be

Christians sometimes reject Darwin on aesthetic grounds. I too find the consequences of evolution hideous. I am revolted by the cruelty of predators for their prey. I am disgusted by petty territoriality in so many species. I am ashamed of the mindless brutality of my own species. I can see how these traits were inevitable given natural selection. Darwin accurately describes things the way they are, not as I would wish them to be.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Threat Incompetence

We humans have evolved to deal with two kinds of threat, immediate, like tigers and regularly recurring, like winter. We are idiots when it comes to cars, floods, fires and earthquakes. We are complete cretins when it comes to ecological damage we gradually create ourselves like soil erosion, water pollution, air pollution, global warming and overpopulation. Instead, we fret over one-shot, dramatic things like 2001-09-11 which harmed relatively few people.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Three Questions for Dr. Dawkins

I understand that something like eye colour is determined by which combination of 4 nucleotides occur starting at some particular and apparently arbitrary location, e.g. at position 524,287 on some particular chromosome. I further understand that a different combination of nucleotides will manufacture different proteins when that gene is read via RNA transcription. That leaves me with three big questions.

  1. How does whatever it is that is building the eye know to look at position 524,287 for the genetic information to build the eye? I know how a computer would do it, but that requires a whole separate and extremely intricate mechanism from the data storage called a program. Perhaps location does not match. Genes are effectively in random order, with attached markers.
  2. Then why would the presence of any particular protein trigger a particular eye colour? The body is awash in all the possible proteins from all manner of genes being transcribed is it not? There are nowhere near enough proteins it would seem to control all attributes by analog means. Again, I know how a computer making the eyes of a plastic doll could use this digital information, but I have not heard anything about an equivalent mechanism in the body. It sounds like this is still just a digital convention, that has to translated into something analog to control physical reality.
  3. In The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, you describe genomes in terms of Encyclopedia Britannica’s worth of info. I presume a value of about 300 million bytes. I recently bought a hard disk of 1 terabyte, 1,000,000,000,000 bytes for about $100. A genome now-a-days is impressive not for is size, but for its astounding compactness. The blueprints for a passenger jet will easily fill many such disks. This suggests to me that genomes are not blueprints at all, but more specifications. They certainly could not possibly specify the exact wiring plan of even a modest brain. Though Bernard Till once built a model of a nematode, that replicated its behaviour repertoire with something like only 149 neurons. It was a hard wired creature. Such programming compactness boggles Java programmers. When a person grows a freak extra digit, the new digit seems remarkably like the others. This suggest the genome describes some general rules of thumb for creating finger or brain, rather than specifying every bump and wrinkle. Can you give me an idea just what is specified to what level of detail. Do we have any idea yet?
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)
Tiktaalik

The Tiktaalik

One of my favourite animals is the Tiktaalik. It was an intermediate between fish and amphibians. It had four legs and an alligator-like mouth. It is considered to be the first animal to venture from water onto land (other than the insects).

The event was one of the most important in evolution. I think it deserves celebration. I think it would be nice if a life size hollow bronze (or other suitable durable material) Tiktaalik were mounted in a pool crawling out on land in some park, museum or public place. Such a statue might become a signature feature of any place that teaches evolution.

It would also be nice to get sculptures in various sizes in some suitable museum-quality material to decorate desks, homes and offices as symbolic support for evolution education. It would be a conversation-starter about evolution and intermediate forms. The Tiktaalik might become the poster child for evolution.

Do you think this idea has merit? Have you any idea of what budget would be required? Do you know a place that would likely welcome the statue? What would be the best materials? Would you want such a desk sculpture yourself? Where would I get an original 3D model of one?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Time To Evolve

The Grand Canyon is 1.61 km (1 mile) deep. The sediments were laid down 6.10 metres (6.67 yards) every million years. Life had even more time to slowly evolve.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tradition

Early in man’s history, we had very little understanding of how the universe worked. Pretty much all we had was tradition. We knew that doing what we had been doing for generations would work reasonably well. It was safer to stick with it than try something new. We enforced this strategy with peer pressure. People believed what everyone else, including our ancestors, believed, no matter how bizarre. This was a safer strategy than having people try to think things through for themselves. Unfortunately, this survival strategy makes it very easy for the media to manipulate modern humans. It also ensured the survival of cruel and irrational beliefs enshrined in religions.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Traditional Knowledge

I speculate that religion evolved to encourage people to maintain traditions. For most of man’s existence, collective knowledge grew very slowly. Nearly always it was wiser to follow the established tradition than set out on a new untested path. Religion provided all manner of bogus fears to encourage sticking with the tried and true. The problem, of course, is much of that traditional knowledge was simply wrong. Today, knowledge is evolving so quickly and our world is changing so quickly, it is almost suicidal to stick with traditional knowledge. Religion has become toxic.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Transitional Forms

In Darwin’s day, not many fossils had been found. Since we have found warehouses full. For example, we have a fossil to track every tiny change in the evolution of the horse. Lack of transitional fossils was a good creationist argument in Darwin’s day. Creationists dishonestly pretend it still is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Truth My Ass

Fundamentalists proclaim the Truth with a capital T. Why then do they compose their case against evolution with nothing but carefully constructed lies? — most notably straw man arguments to misrepresent what science has to say on evolution:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Tyranny of the Peer Group

Why is man so susceptible to believing nonsense, or pretending to believe nonsense, just because his peers do? Man is a social animal. In times past, if he expressed deviant views he would be outcast from his group. That meant death. Man thus evolved the ability to suppress common sense in favour of group consensus. The key then to dispelling religious superstition is just to let everyone know there is a sizeable number of people to think it is bunk.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ubiquitous Eyes

Since eyes have evolved independently and step-wise at least 7 times on earth, scientists are fairly sure higher life on other planets will have eyes too. Apparently it is not that hard to do, and happens naturally, without the aid of a deity. If Intelligent Design were correct, you eyes should have appeared fully formed, not gradually.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Ugly Animals

After years of watching David Attenborough documentaries, I have love all animals and plants, even the ugly ones. I look on some homely or dazzling creature and wonder to myself what sort of environment shaped a creature into that?

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Uniqueness Is Rare

If some other technological species ever evolved on earth before us, would it have endured long enough to leave any evidence of its passing in the fossil record? We might not see it directly if it had corpse destruction rituals, but we might see remains of its artificially selected domesticated animals. It might even be still here, but not recognisable to us as earth-life because it took control of its own evolution.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Universal Face

I have heard biologists argue that intelligent alien species that evolved off-earth probably would not have a face: two eyes, a nose and a mouth. They see that as an accident of evolution. I am not so convinced. Having the eyes on top gives greater range of vision. Two eyes are needed for 3D or to see to both sides. Having the mouth on the bottom puts it closer to the prey, especially for animals whose ancestors routed in the mud. I could see a single nostril instead of two, but two small ones probably helps keep out insects and debris. Humans have a fatal design flaw, taking air down the same tube as food. I would not be surprised if aliens were free of that defect.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Universe Boggles Intuition

Look at the theories of relativity or Quantum mechanics. The universe does not care if that math makes your head explode trying to make sense of it. The universe is not constrained to make sense to your intuition. Our intuition was honed from a long time living in caves. It has no clue about how the very small or very large are supposed to behave, or how things are supposed to behave over millions or billions of years.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

The Universe Is Not Friendly to Life

Christians claim Our deity, Yahweh, designed the universe expressly for homo sapiens. That could not be so. If you were plopped down at random in the universe you would die instantly. There are only a few extremely rare places where you would have any chance of survival.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Unnecessary God

According to Stephen Hawking, he has proved you don’t need god to create the universe, just gravity. This is not the same as proving there is no god, just that he is unnecessary.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Urban Spiders

Urban spiders are evolving larger and larger. They don’t have to work as hard to find prey. Artificial light attracts it to them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vaccine Vandals

As germs develop immunity to antibiotics, the importance of vaccines in public health become ever more important. There are several villains in this story:

If just a few irresponsible people refuse vaccination, they do little trouble. They can’t very well infect anyone when nearly everyone is vaccinated. However, when the irrational fear of vaccination insanity spreads, we put ourselves back to the 1920s when lots of kinds routinely died.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vanity and Evolution

Christians seem to have much less problem with the first 10 billion years of the universe’s evolution than they do with the last million, even though astounding things happened like the formation of stars and the creation of gold out of hydrogen. Why is this? Vanity. They can’t stand the idea they are just another primate. They are only interested in science where it intersects with Christian dogma.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Verifying Evolution

Evolution has been more thoroughly verified than the theory of gravity.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vestigial Bullying

Some animals have territories. They are constantly attacking each other. Some animals have pecking orders. They fight to establish and maintain that order. I presume these behaviours ensure that the most vigorous animals get the scarce territories, scarce food and help avoid overpopulation. Perhaps human bullying is nothing more than these same competitions for resources, engaged in even though they are not really needed.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Vicarious Pain

According to Darwin, people are competing in a life and death struggle for limited resources. Perhaps that is why even kindly people enjoy watching others experience death, pain and unpleasant experiences in the movies.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Visualising Evolution

Imagine if you saw a single file line of 300,000 people about 182.88 km (113.64 miles) long. This represents all the generations of people since we humans evolved from apes. You can get an idea of how minute the change in each generation is. This gives you an idea how slow and gradual evolution is.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

War Between Science and Creationism

When science and creationism have crossed horns in past, science has always won. Consider the flat earth, the heliocentric solar system, the cause of mental illness, the inferiority of women… Why? Science offers detailed reasons for its claims and points out thousands of reasons why the biblical accounts could not be correct. Creationism offers just the bible, which is full of inconsistency and error. It just says have faith in this twaddle without giving any reason why the bible deserves your blind faith or why it is likely true.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

War Is Killing the Wrong People

In the 1700s, war was fought by gentlemanly rules, almost as a sport, sparing civilians. It had the salutary effect of reducing the population and reducing domestic violence by attracting violent young men to their Darwinian deaths. Today, we have ruined war for this purpose by directing it primarily at civilians and by making it too safe for the combatants.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Watching the Fall of Rome

Through most of earth’s history evolution proceeded with glacial slowness punctuated by periods of excitement called extinction events. We humans are living in the middle of one of the biggest and rapid extinction events ever — one that we are causing. It is like having a first row Colosseum seat to watch ancient Rome destroy itself from excess.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

We Are Evolved For Village Life

For all but a thin sliver of our evolutionary history, we humans lived in groups of less than 1000 people. The strategies we evolved work brilliantly at the level of the village. They go hideously awry when magnified to a planet-sized group of 7,000,000,000 people, especially when technology hugely enhances the influence of an elite few.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

We Are Not Adapted for Modern Life

Humans did 99.99% of their evolving prior to the domestication of plants and animals, let alone civilisation. No wonder our natural urges are so out of sync with our technological way of life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

We Are Not Alone

The assumption that the only life in the entire universe is here on earth is so monumentally absurd, so preposterously self-centered that only a Christian could have suggested it with a straight face. We know that the laws of chemistry and physics here are earth are the same throughout the universe. Why not the biology? This Christian notion man’s universally unique and special status is not only ludicrous, it is odious. It is conceit taken to the nth power.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

We Are Not So Smart

Given that human DNA is so similar to other mammals and given that humans lived pretty much as other animals did until 10,000 years ago, I suspect vanity has made humans exaggerate how much more intelligent they are than other species. Granted there are some clever humans, but the average one survives merely because he lives in a sustaining womb of civilisation that tells him what to do. He has not the sense on his own to even come in out of the rain. Further, we measure intelligence by human goals, e.g. construction and the manipulation of objects rather than the goals of other species such as musical composition or athletics.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

We Are Part Neanderthal

Neanderthals and humans interbred, perhaps as few as six times, possibly through force. As a result, all humans except those in Africa, carry 3% Neanderthal genes. There were never more than about 100,000 Neanderthals on earth at one time, so today there is far more Neanderthal DNA on earth than ever before.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70) source CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Quirks and Quarks

What Aliens Might Look Like

If even cuttlefish and octopodes (relatives of the clam) and cetacea can develop intelligence, I see no reason why intelligent creatures in other parts of our galaxy need look anything like humans.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What is Creationism?

Creationism is not a scientific hypothesis. It is a desperate attempt to defend the absurd claim that a deity penned the incompetent bible with ESP (Extra Sensory Perception). It reminds be of the fanciful lies a student caught forging a paper would use to deny his guilt.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Evolution Covers

The theory of evolution does not concern itself with how life arose on earth. That is a much more difficult question than evolution. A totally different group of scientists tackle it. It is harder because:

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Is Evolution?

The theory of evolution has 5 constituent parts:

  1. Populations change over time. The frequency of various genes changes.
  2. Evolution happens gradually from over a decade to millions of years.
  3. speciation. Species split into two or more species.
  4. Every pair of species have a common ancestor.
  5. natural selection drives evolution. It can even simulate designed creatures.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What Use Is Half A Wing?

Darwin asserted that a new anatomical feature like a wing would have to evolve gradually, directed at each stage by natural selection. That poses the question, what use is half a wing? Why would there be any pressure to evolve a partial wing? The answer comes from watching young birds of many species. They can run up logs and trees of various angles to escape predators by beating their tiny useless wings. They use their wings to push their bodies against the trunks, gaining extra traction.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

What We Say To Aliens

In dramatic fiction, the most common thing humans do to aliens is kill them. We broadcast our dramas to the cosmos. We are broadcasting the message We don’t want visitors. Polite aliens would stay away. Predatory ones, perhaps seeking exotic food species, would follow the scent we laid for them.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

When Suicide Is Justified

Oddly, sometimes suicide attacks make sense from a Darwinian point of view. Attackers are usually male, single, poor and from unusually large families. If they go through with the suicide, they can earn enough money so their brothers can afford wives. Without the suicide none of them could.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Where Are The Aliens?

In The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, Dawkins argues that a theory of the origin of life necessarily has to appear miraculous. The creation of life has to be sufficiently rare to explain why there is so little intelligent life out in the galaxy sending out radio signals. (We still have not found any besides ourselves.) I suggest some other explanations for the paucity of life.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Who Will We Take Down With Us?

There is little chance we humans will avoid driving ourselves to extinction in the next few centuries, but it is possible we can go without taking most of the other multi-celled creatures with us.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are There Still Monkeys?

Creationist troglodytes like to ask If people came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? This is a monumentally stupid question. Creationists ask it out of reflex without thinking. They keep asking it no matter how many times they have heard the answer.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are There Still Monkeys?

If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes? is the most frequently asked Creationist question. You’d think they all would have been exposed to the answer 100 times by now. I think they just like to jerk scientists around.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Are There Still Monkeys?

One of the stupidest things Christians says is If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?. For a start, we did not evolve from monkeys. Both humans and monkeys evolved from a common ancestor that had traits similar to both humans and monkeys. Why are there both humans and monkeys? That is like asking why are there zebras, and horses and lions? Different animals are suited to different environments. Monkeys evolved for life in the trees. Humans evolved for life on the savanna. We diverged and specialised. Having cousins on the tree of life does not make a species die out any more than your aunt having a baby will kill you. That is just crazy. What nutty idea infects Christians to think the presence of humans automatically should make all monkeys go extinct? There is no reason at all to think that.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Do We Die?

Why do we die? I think I have a non-religious answer to that question. Dying is an altruistic behaviour the older generation of animals have evolved to avoid competing with the younger generation for food and territory. If the adults are not likely to have any more offspring, they might as well die and make room. The giant cuttlefish lives only 3 years. Many animals take this to extreme and die before next generation are even born, e.g. the salmon and the octopus. Some sacrifice their bodies as food for the next generation as do some spiders. People live longer than other primates because elderly people provide wisdom that younger people cannot. Most animals don’t have a culture as complex as humans and hence are not as dependent on the elderly. In humans, having a long-lived grandmother enhances your survival. At the very least, she acts as midwife.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why The Egg Came First

The age old question has been solved, which came first, the chicken or the egg. I reasoned this out as a child based on a primitive understanding of evolution. As an adult, I discovered science agrees with me. All animals in a species have the same number of genes, the length strands of DNA in each of the various chromosomes are the same length in all members of the species. Every once is a while there is an error and the new creature has a chromosome with a different length. It is technically a new species, a new species even if it looks very much like the old one. So any change in species has to appear with the egg. Thus the egg came first.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Evolution Is True

Creations will tell you all manner of lies about evolution:

It will take at least five books chock full of evidence to undo the lies you have been told.

You may have noticed that every atheist has a detailed knowledge of the bible and creationism, better than most Christians. However, creationists have not the first clue about evolution. They assiduously learn straw men distortions. That shows you who is more intellectually honest and trustworthy.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why Honey?

Ancient people’s were appreciative of honey, and in their extremely self-centred way imagined gods commanded flowers to make nectar and bees to collect it so they could enjoy its sweetness. It is actually a side effect of evolution. Flowers that produced nectar were most frequently pollinated by insects, and flourished. They evolved to produce more of it. The bees with the mouthparts most suited to collecting the nectar flourished. The bees that saved up a store of nectar for the winter flourished better than those that do not. We humans started stealing part of that store. The bees that saved up extra to compensate flourished.

In a similar ways, plants with signals to attract the attention of bees got the most pollination. The dazzling variety of patterns and colours in flowers are the result of evolution of this attempt at attraction. Some flowers even have infrared patterns than only bees can see. Humans imagine this is all for their benefit, compliments of their gods. Of course, human have hijacked flowers with artificial selection to create beauty to purely human standards.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Why the Rising IQ?

The average IQ of the population creeps up about 3% per decade. The makers of tests have to keep making the questions harder so that the average stays at 100. What could be causing this? better nutrition, better medicine, more mental stimulation, more emphasis on the importance of education… Possibly the stupid people tended to get themselves killed off in the many wars, or damaged so badly they did not reproduce. Intelligent people get student deferments. Stupid people preferentially wipe themselves out with drugs, fast cars, extreme sports… Life has changed drastically in the last century. That is when you see the most winnowing. There is also the matter that stupid people can no longer earn their daily bread through labour. They become homeless derelicts. The scientists say genetic evolution is far too slow to have any noticeable effect. Society as a whole has simply become more familiar with the abstract reasoning and scientific way of speaking used in intelligence tests.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wildebeest Indifference

Did you ever watch a lion attack a herd of wildebeest? The herd watches passively as the lion takes one of the wildebeest down. Surely if they ganged up, the lion would not have a chance, but they don’t. Why? Because it is to their advantage if the herd is thinned. There is more grass and space to go round. Humans behave the same way acting unconsciously for the same reason. They want their neighbours to die. That is why they vote against welfare and universal medical care.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Will Humans Go Extinct?

99.8% of all species that have every lived have now gone extinct. So the odds are not good for us humans. Further, we humans have invented all manner of things to help us on our way:

  1. nuclear weapons.
  2. biological weapons.
  3. greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
  4. environmental collapse.
  5. extreme overpopulation/overcrowding which encourages plagues.
  6. casually stored nuclear waste.
  7. water pollution.

Pretty well everyone goes extinct individually within 80 years. The extinction of humans is probably a tragedy, not for you personally, but only for your offspring.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

Wiping Out Species Deliberately and by Error

It should kick man’s ego in the behind, that he has managed to deliberately drive extinct only one noxious organism (smallpox) while wiping out thousands of beneficial ones inadvertently.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

You Don’t Need Faith

The nice thing about evolution is you don’t need faith. If you think anything about it is iffy, you can see all the evidence. You don’t have to ask anyone. It all out there on the net from reputable sources. If you can find a serious hole in it, you will become rich and famous.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)

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