Does fundamentalist religion cause the rejection of evolution?or is it the other way around?
OK, I'm not abandoning my fundamentalist Christianity. But this was a well written article explaining a non-religious reason that some people reject evolution. Go see the full article here.
The article is a not an easy read, but if you read it like a school paper, it's not too hard. Basically, it suggests that the way to convert those of us who are anti-evolution is to address the conceptual difficulty in accepting evolution. Rather than go into details on how to do this, the article defends the process by showing three areas that are "evolution-like" that have the dubious honor of everyone believing would fail, but actually work.
The article uses as a reference a book called "Wisdom of the crowds", a book I read in my MBA. I found the book interesting and believable, but when I tried one experiment from the book, it failed miserably (if interested, I'll blog about that another time). The author suggested many references to back up his work, I have to assume my failure was an anomoly.
The article looks at Wikipedia and the fact that it is exceptionally high quality (higher than Encyclopdia Brittannica) even though it can be edited by people with little or no education. Then it goes on to look at predictive markets and explain how they work and recommendation systems (like Netflix - one of my favorite systems).
The article concludes that pro-eveolutionists should use different teaching methods to teach evolution and avoid the conceptual difficulties.
So what's my point here? Well, first it is NOT to suggest I believe in evolution. Second, it is NOT to alert my anti-evolution friends of some new method of disputing the Truth. Instead, my point is to share a well written article about the Wisdom of the Crowds and how it can help in some practical way. Hope you enjoy it.
2 comments:
At one time it was believed that a race of men existed “with their heads beneath their shoulders.” Returning travelers from distant lands were asked about these wonderful people and all replied that they had not seen them. “Oh,” said the believers in the monsters, “the men with heads beneath their shoulders live in a country that you did not visit.” And so the monsters lived and flourished until all the world was known. We cannot know the universe. We cannot travel infinite distances, and so, somewhere in shoreless space there will always be room for gods and ghosts, for heavens and hells. And so it may be that superstition will live and linger until the world becomes intelligent enough to build upon the foundation of the known, to keep the imagination within the domain of the probable, and to believe in the natural — until the supernatural shall have been demonstrated.
Robert Green Ingersoll - “Myth and Miracle”(1885)
I always find missionaries of Darwin amusing. True that there's nothing scientific whatsoever about believing in an Old Testament-type creator, but last I checked nobody has EVER been able to demonstrate that an organism can develop completely new cells, tissue, or body structure without intelligent interference. And that's only the beginning of the problems with Darwin's theory.
Why can't we admit that we don't have a satisfactory explanation for the origin of life yet?
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