Pope Francis says that the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are accurate and not inconsistent with Catholic doctrine. The Republican Party collectively shrugs and says, “We are not the pope.”
So it goes.
We can’t all be popes, let alone scientists. But we can be politicians who vote on things that will affect the climate.
My guess is that Galileo would determine that the British Petroleum oil spill actually did damage the ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico. But he wouldn’t get asked to write a column in Politico about it. And John Boehner would say, “I am not Galileo.”
So it goes.
I am not a Republican politician.
You shouldn’t vote for them.
Republicans are loathsome creatures and they have gotten used to having free rein in politics, unchastiised and un challenged when they lie and unrepentent when they do get caught. Their arrogance is overwhelming.
But a tiny beam of light broke through here in SW Ohio today. A tough Senate race in the Fifth District has the Republican candidate with the incredible name Bill Beagle running against Democratic candidate Dee Gillis.
Beagle has been running negative print and TV ads accusing Gillis of voting herself a pay raise as a member of the city council and the ads depict her with a martini and a cigar, gloating. They’re pretty disgusting.
But today in our local paper, there’s a bolded headline, “Beagle Ads continue bogus claim” and the article explains at length how the Republican Party has lied and how they are being challenged about the lies.
Hmm. A small thing, maybe, but it sure made me smile this morning.
I really hate that “voted himself a pay raise thing”.
Are politicians supposed to be independently wealthy? If they don’t get pay they will make it up in graft.
In the ’50s, Illinois state assemblymen got something like $200 (total) for a two year session. My father, an ordinary non-union machinist, made $100 a week. How could anyone but lawyers and businessmen run for office?
Well donnah, apparently “everyone knows” the Dayton Daily News is a “liberal rag”. 😉
At least that’s what my Tea Party dad tells me. The DDN is the only paper he can get delivered at his house, and I have to constantly hear that refrain.
Haha! Oh, I know, Mike. My son worked for the paper as an intern when he was going to OU to study journalism. He went to work and wore jeans! He never wore a tie! Lousy Liberal Rag, indeed! 😉
Seriously though, when I read the comments from locals in the Opinions page, I’m heartsick. Everyday there is the bleating of the Republican sheep, crying about how our country has fallen, how we need new leadership, baa baa baa. So many idiots!
So a headline like that will send them into a frenzy. It would be nice if they all ran headlong off a cliff.
I did vote (R) for state rep. Our current (D) state rep is fine with tax breaks for big corporations and taxing retirement income along with cutting state pensions and taking their free health care away. The (R) promises hands off public pensions (he’s a teacher so it’s his ox being gored) and says he’s for cutting property taxes.
Voting blindly for a party is how these corrupt machines took power.
I also would have voted (R) for Cook County Assessor, but he was unopposed (also in the primary). Apparently that office is his by fiat.
P.S. Durbin said he didn’t care if our facility closed or not. Well, he actually said (his staffer said) that he couldn’t get involved in details like that. I only voted for him instead of writing in the Green as a personal favor from Rikyrah.
I wasn’t a parochial school kid, but my catechism teachers were usually nuns. Fifty years ago Sister J, my favorite nun, seemed perplexed that anyone couldn’t see that there was no conflict between evolution and the Bible and Catholic dogma. Pope Pius XXII, far from a modern pope, said it in 1950, and in 1996 Pope John Paul II affirmed it (adding that the evidence was even stronger than it had been forty-six years earlier). Pope Francis is merely affirming a sixty-four year old position of the church.
From the Scopes trial to landing on the moon, it seemed as if Americans were becoming more fact based and sciency and less primitive and ignorant. Then it stopped just like most good and modern things did about the same time.
Marie, I agree with you, and my comment (see below) was really a reply to yours, I just forgot to format it that way.
On evolution, I think most Catholics and most Jews and people of many other religions are on the same page.
The reason it’s a problem for many Protestants is that they are fundamentalists. Creation took six days. But what is a “day” when the sun wasn’t even created until the fourth “day”? And they insist that the earth is 6.000 years old, or just maybe a few thousand years older. With such formulations regarded as literal instead of symbolic, you have to bend everything to fit those dogmas, and if you can’t, you find some way to deny it.
Evolution itself is not the problem for traditional religions, and the article makes this point:
‘Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna … said “Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense — an unguided, unplanned process … is not.”‘
What many people do not know is that this issue is also in debate among biologists, because the idea of “random” selection gives no credit to the abilities of organisms to interact with their environments — which is NOT random at all, but based on intentionality (a much broader category than consciousness, but which in lower organisms and plants can be considered analogous to consciousness.)
Consciousness itself, in its different degrees, can be seen as an evolutionary adaptation to enhance the ability of the organism to respond flexibly to its environment.
I don’t think evolution is branded as randomness but as a reaction to the environment. On NDT’s Cosmos they did a great job showing how polar bears came to be as a reaction to their environment.
or maybe I misunderstood what you were trying to say
I think he is selling Lamarckism.
I refer you all again to John L.Casti’s “Alternate realities:Mathematical Models of Nature and Man” and the two volume expansion “Reality Rules” in which he demonstrates clearly and mathematically that random mutation combined with natural selection (differential mortality) produces exactly the same set of matrix differential equations for the time evolution of a genome as that of two intelligent players (i.e. organism and universe) repeatedly playing a zero sum game. You can choose either the simple model (Darwin or rather post-Darwin evolutionary theory) or Genesis. It all depends on whether or not you think a bunch of middle eastern goat herders five thousand years ago knew more about the Universe than the culmination of 5000 years of Western Science from Socrates to Sagan.
The whole discussion reminds me of people who had a hard time with High School Algebra deciding that Einstein, Hawking et al. just must be wrong about General (and Special) Relativity. Of course, Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg et al. were also smoking dope to think up Quantum Mechanics. The whole argument boils down to “I can’t understand this, so it must be wrong.”
The fact of Evolution is much more firmly established than Global warming and that is highly established as fact. Unless one is an ignorant goat herder, Genesis is just a made up set of fairy tales intended to keep the populace under the thumbs of the prophets.
right there is a randomness I guess in the genetic mutations but even that isn’t as random as we think I’m sure as we learn more and more about genetics there’s probably a mathematical way to identify the mutations that happen
Chaos looks a lot like random but is really something else. Surprisingly, predictions can be made about chaos. Weather is chaotic but not random. That’s why predictions can be made. Pseudo-random number algorithms are pseudo-random because they are not random, they are chaotic, a definitive algorithm exists. True random number generators are things like hardware counters that measure the time between emissions of a weakly radioactive source. I don’t know your mathematical background but if you studied calculus and differential equations you can get through the books I recommended above. If not, read some of the non-mathematical or weakly mathematical popular books on chaos. I recommend “Searching For Certainty: What Scientists Can Know About the Future” also by Casti. He covers a wide range of topics from the stock market to historical determinism (or is it?). Not a lot of answers but discussion of very interesting questions.
absolutely, thanks
I think you did misunderstand what I was trying to say.
Darwinism is the idea of evolution based on random genetic mutations, some of which turn out to be favorable in relation to the environment, some not, some neutral.
The view of chaos theory is that organisms function purposefully within their environment. What may seem random actually follows patterns.
Is genetic mutation the only factor predicting survival? To a much greater extent, the day to day activities of the organism are important for survival, and these are extremely variable and responsive to changes in the environment. It is well known in neuroscience that learning, and every particular kind of learning, changes the structure of the brain. Not genetically, but biologically nevertheless.
Darwin never argued for randomness alone. Only when random mutations conferred a differential and more environmentally adaptive trait to an organism was it and its descendents more likely to survive. Sponges and jellyfish are really old creatures and a couple of sharks more than 50 times older than Humans and they are times older than Homo Sapien Sapien. And if the environment changes rapidly — so long species.
Right, it is random change AND natural selection that produce change. i.e. Tigers without claws or teeth will not propagate that change. Bears that are larger with thicker coats in a climate changing period (such as an ice age) WILL survive better and propagate the change changing from a woodland bear community into Great Cave Bears. In a warming period they are at a disadvantage and die out. In the same time period humans changed from tropical precursors into Neanderthals. Later when climate changed yet again, the Neanderthals were replaced/subsumed by southerly hominids like the Cro-Magnon people. Lines appear branch and die out like a fractal tree (also determined by a simple equation).
Did you ever experiment with predator-prey simulations on a computer. It’s humbling how many simulations wind up with both species extinct. The biological balance is fragile.
The mechanism of natural selection, according to Darwin, is randomness.This is very much disputed in modern biology.
Ket’s put it like this, if an animal survives to reproduce, it’s not simply because of random genetic mutations that happen to be favorable. It’s because of the BEHAVIOR of the animal. The behavior of the animal is not random, it is goal-oriented.
That is not Lamarckism.
The basic point is that virtually all scientists accept evolution, but there is a lot of disagreement about how evolution actually works.
Dear God, of course Galileo would recognize basic facts and reality. That’s what he’s famous for.