Preposterous wishful thinking.

I noticed a link to a blog in a Google ad earlier while reading my e-mail and decided to have a look. What I found both saddened and angered me while simultaneously causing me to laugh out loud at its claims.

Answer The Skeptic

I felt compelled to write a lengthy comment denouncing what I read, which led me to notice something else; almost every overtly religious blog I've run across moderates their comments and tends to only allow comments that they agree with. This shouldn't really be a surprise, considering that it is precisely the mentality of such religious people; to only acknowledge points of view and information which seem to support their belief while willfully avoiding at all costs acknowledging any information or facts to the contrary. Confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance at their most pronounced.

With that said, I'm including my comment below as I'm not sure it will show up on the other site. Here is the original post that prompted my initial response (which grew to encompass other points on that site etc.): Humans are different from other animals

I think the important thing to note here is the obvious statement that "I don't care if the evidence proves that we are related to monkeys and just another animal, I don't want to believe it because I don't like it, so I'm going to argue that my feelings are more important than factual reality."

Science proves that we are related to the great apes etc, and are just another animal in the animal kingdom, evolved in the same way as the rest. Religion on the other hand is still trying to cling to the ancient mythology that we are some magical, divine being created wholly separately from the rest of the animal kingdom.

They only grudgingly, and wholly hypocritically, admit pieces and parts of the truth while still trying to hopelessly cling to the ancient myths.

My frustration with this behavior is such things as teaching Evolution still being outlawed in more socially behind the times areas such as the southern states etc... Creationist mythology being dressed up to pretend that it's not just religious wishful thinking and pawned off on our children under the false pretense of it being scientific... a claim which has been soundly disproven in courts of law.

This kind of primitive and dishonest thinking is slowly turning our country into an intellectual backwater where scientific research and education is taking a backseat to primitive mythology and superstition. Modern technological and medical advancements are now being made overseas and the United States is losing its place at the forefront of human scientific progress. Our children are left a mockery to more educated industrialized countries, left unable to fully comprehend global scientific, political, social and cultural issues... being blinded by the cognitive dissonance and fog of internally conflicting facts and myths, reality in front of their eyes and heads full of ancient fairytale stories about the world they perceive. When these things inevitably conflict, they are left in a sort of cognitive daze.

It's not hard to look and see what this religious wishful thinking and desperate denial of reality is doing to our country.

As final food for thought in response to some of the desperate and off-base claims made by the article referred to in the post... consider that dolphins have been shown to understand time, the concept of future rewards in relation to investment etc... and other animals such as elephants and gorillas have been shown to understand the concept of mortality. The dolphins were trained to pick up litter in the pool and return it to the trainers for a reward. The dolphins on their own came up with the idea of hiding a piece of litter at the bottom of the pool and tearing off pieces of it to get more fish at later times. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2003/jul/03/research.science

Here is another good article that covers this general theme: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/23/10551/6579

In short, your wishful thinking, despite the reality around you, is a problem. If you simply started accepting the facts of reality around you, you could open your eyes to the vast and mind boggling wonders of the universe that REALLY EXISTS around you. This is vastly more wondrous and awe inspiring than the small minded myths invented by ignorant and primitive sheep herders thousands and thousands of years ago when people still thought the earth was flat, the sky was a mechanical dome, the sun was a light that orbited the earth, that the world was only a few thousand years old, that knew nothing of other continents, dinosaurs, atomic structures, physics, sickness and health, flight and on and on and on.

Putting that mythology behind us and pursuing real knowledge of the world around us has enabled mankind to fly, to leave the bonds of mother earth and step foot upon other worlds, gazing back at our planet through the vastness of space... to understand the world we cannot see in provable ways which enable us to harness atomic energy, to create the very computer you're reading and typing on at this very moment, that allowed us to send out probes which have flown far beyond the reaches of our solar system into the vast expanse of interstellar space...

Clinging to primitive myths despite facts and evidence proving otherwise is blasphemous to the very nature of the human mind. Reprehensible to human progress. Such religiously based willful ignorance and defiance of reality would have all of us still living in mud huts, fearful of a vengeful sky god who would smote us with spears from heaven if we were bad, or strike us down with plagues for our sins... sicknesses which we would be ignorantly praying for salvation from rather than harnessing our scientific knowledge to cure them ourselves.

Religion is the ceaseless denial of the greatest accomplishments of mankind, of mankind's greatest potential. It would have us all remain servile and ignorant sheep and that, to me, is an abomination.

Reading some of the other articles on this blog saddens, frustrates and even angers me with the insult it does to humanity and our own common sense at the very least. Arguing about evil when the bible itself states that God CREATED evil... a vengeful, jealous god that creates good and evil, creates sin, lives in darkness, lies to his creations, creates a flawed angel whom he allows to rebel and take one third of all the angels with him to earth to further torment his less loved creations, angels being held closer to him in both favor and locale, allowing humanity to sin and then punishing them for it when he created that sin to begin with... refusing to forgive the sin or simply remove the sin, but preferring to subject humanity to an eternity of suffering for what HE CREATED... then creating a son to be sent to earth to suffer and die horribly for nothing more than a show... STILL not removing that punishment for sin... leaving humanity no better off than the moments after Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil... the list goes on and on... and what's worse is that it's ALL A STORY! A provably ridiculous myth written by primitive people thousands of years ago! And you people still cling to it as FACTUAL REALITY!?

Articles about science not being able to YET fully explain the origin of the universe, or FULLY understand the physical functioning of the human brain... SERIOUSLY!? ARE YOU KIDDING ME!? Science has taken mankind from believing the ignorance of the bible to being able to travel between planets! To fly through space! Science has allowed us to map the functions of the brain, enabling advanced brain surgery and greater understanding of mental impairments and diseases etc...

Your desperate claims to point to Science not FULLY explaining some of the most profoundly complex problems of our time when you have NO PROOF WHATSOEVER for your beliefs, and not to mention that they are even more ridiculous in light of the MOUNTAINS of scientific PROOF to the contrary... you have the audacity to point to modern astrophysics and call it a fundamental failure that they haven't PROVEN the creation of the universe when the best your ignorant shepherds millennia ago have come up with is that a man in the sky created everything one day!? LISTEN TO YOURSELF!

If the Universe requires a creator because of its complexity, then how can the creator, being necessarily more complex than the universe, not also require a creator? And if the creator does not require a creator, then the universe, being less complex, would certainly not either and would be more likely to have simply sprung into existence.

The logic behind that simple statement is enough to explain the foolishness of your beliefs to even a child. And fortunately we have mountains and mountains of scientific evidence and proof from centuries of research and understanding and human achievement to bring us, through a preponderance of convergent evidence, to the enlightened understandings we have today of the REAL WORLD AROUND US, an understanding that compels us to leave the ignorant and primitive myths of our ancient ancestors where they belong... by the wayside along with all the other gods and myths man has worshipped, believed and inevitably left behind on the road of human progress.

Case in point.

Discovered: the missing link that solves a mystery of evolution.

Quirky "fishapod" crawls onto our family tree. (Thanks Jen!)

Let's see how many creationists want to talk about this. ;-)

(Not to mention Archaeopteryx etc...)

It should also be pointed out, as someone else commented, that there really isn't such a thing as a "missing link". This terminology was invented by creationists trying to find a way to argue against science. It takes a rather in-depth ignorance of the subject to think that evolution is a single chain from *poof* having life begin, and *tada!* having us as the end of the evolutionary chain. And that is putting it -very- nicely.

Starting with the concept of "life", which is something religious wackos have essentially no real grasp of... we have something that is actually a progression of proteins, molecules etc... those which "work", stay. Those which don't... don't. For instance, the protein that causes mad cow disease (and mad deer) isn't a living thing... although it acts like one. It's simply a protein that has found a way to travel and reproduce as such... where does this fall?

Religious nuts like to think of "life" as this magical gift from god that just starts... magically... at some point... when God chooses to give you a soul or something... (explain plants? explain bacteria? are they alive? how about viruses? where do you draw the ARBITRARY line?)

In actuality, those with any real scientific understanding know that "life" is an arbitrary classification we give things that portray certain characteristics. For instance, let's look at the criteria listed on Wikipedia's Life page:

Although there is no universal agreement on the definition of life, the generally accepted biological manifestations are that life exhibits the following phenomena:

1. Organization - Living things are comprised of one or more cells, which are the basic units of life.
2. Metabolism - Metabolism produces energy by converting nonliving material into cellular components (synthesis) and decomposing organic matter (catalysis). Living things require energy to maintain internal organization (homeostasis) and to produce the other phenomena associated with life.
3. Growth - Growth results from a higher rate of synthesis than catalysis. A growing organism increases in size in all of its parts, rather than simply accumulating matter.
4. Adaptation - Adaptation is the accommodation of a living organism to its environment. It is fundamental to the process of evolution and is determined by the individual's heredity.
5. Response to stimuli - A response can take many forms, from the contraction of a unicellular organism when touched to complex reactions involving all the senses of higher animals. Plants also respond to stimuli, but usually in ways very different from animals. A response is often expressed by motion: the leaves of a plant turning toward the sun or an animal chasing its prey.
6. Reproduction - The division of one cell to form two new cells is reproduction. Usually the term is applied to the production of a new individual (either asexually, from a single parent organism, or sexually, from two differing parent organisms), although strictly speaking it also describes the production of new cells in the process of growth.

I don't see any mention of a magical gift from God... or a soul in there... do you? I do however, see a set of scientifically testable criteria. Funny that...

Moving on...

From these beginnings, fitting the theory of "Survival of the Fittest", as atoms followed the laws of physics and molecules formed... and proteins etc... and these continually followed the mantra of the best "surviving" and the imperfect ones failing... we grew. "Life" grew. There was no magic moment when Life Began^TM. Things simply progressed... and this progression, from the start... was as a tree with a multitude of branches... ever growing. Not a single chain... but each "offspring" having it's own offspring... and essentially all of them slightly unique... and as these branches grew... some grew ever further apart from each other as each found different traits beneficial to survival... either through reproductive traits... or survival traits.... depending on geography, habitat, "food", mate availability etc... any number of different factors... and so we progressed from organic compounds... proteins... single celled organisms... multicellular organisms... towards things like primitive plants and animals as the first "major" branches of the tree of life started diverging in more dramatic ways. (See Wikipedia's article on "Evolution" for another thourough explanation.)

Many of these branches exist simultaneously, in similar forms. Some reach essentially efficient stable forms and remain unchanged for millions of years, such as Sharks. Some have been merely a twinkle in the eye of time... some have held sway over the earth for millions of years... only to be eventually unseated by a different form... such as the transition from the dinosaurs to mammals as we now know them as the dominant life forms (leaving out insects and such, who ridiculously outnumber us).

But back to what I was saying... as someone earlier said... as much as such a "missing link" is a transitional life form... which essentially all live on earth is... then we must not forget that we are simply a transitional life form between our more ape like ancestors and relatives, and some future "super-human" form. We are a chronospecies... one that will inevitably cease to exist simply due to the passage of time. Any real study of the fossil record will demonstrate innumerable species that have changed so dramatically over the course of time, that if you took the animal now, and one of it's ancestors from millenia past... they would not be able to interbreed, having changed so dramatically in the interim.

I have no problem addressing these complex issues scientifically, and adjusting the models as evidence and data requires... but oversimplification and rote denial of mountains of factual data and scientific evidence in pursuit of elevating a belief, based on ignorance, to the level of supposed credibility... I have a rather serious problem with that.

For instance, there has been an issue of an evangelical nutcase archaeologist who claims to have discovered organic "tissue" inside T-Rex bones etc... while I think that she is a nutjob, given many of her public statements... I won't discount her findings over it... I simply want to see more research done along those lines. If the models of biological material decay were wrong, address them... if there really is some other problem with the models... address them. Failure to address an issue when it doesn't fit the expected guidelines, out of a fear of what it might mean, is to completely fail the goals of science.

(Read this article about the T-Rex, from the perspective of some Creationists, to get an idea how ridiculous these people's beliefs are. For instance, take every living species of animal alive today, and take a single male and female from each (not to mention that the bible specifies that SEVEN of every type of clean animal and SEVEN of every type of bird... AND food enough for themselves and every single animal... aside from "every kind of food"... or the fact that the waters were so deep that they covered the entire earth COMPLETELY, 20 feet deeper than the tip of the highest mountain on earth... or that all mankind was killed except for Noah, his wife, their 3 sons, and their wives... and all of humanity is supposedly now descended from those 8 people... or maybe more, as polygamy was accepted in those days... the list goes on and on and on...) and see if you can fit them all onto a single boat of the size Noah built. Not to mention ignoring the fossil record and archaeological evidence concretely dating when these animals lived. Or ignoring the fact that due to inbreeding, almost all of these species would die off etc... it's simply scientifically ludicrous bullshit... but that doesn't stop these nutjobs from throwing mountains of science out the window, while clinging to straws... even scientific ones... to try to prove they're right.)

We have creationists scrambling to cling to this issue as supposed proof of young earth theory etc... and others denying the evidence outright, without even looking into it, for fear that it might give the young earthers ground to stand on.

(Let's not forget that the bible explicitly lists the animals created during creation; cows, birds etc... and fails to mention the kind of life we know actually came about, billions of years after the formation of our planet, which in turn came billions of years after the beginning of the universe as we know it... to put this a little more clearly for you... sit down in front of a nice old analog wall clock, and starting at midnight, watch the second hand sweep around... second after second... as it travels around the face of the clock 1,440 times over the next 24 hours... and just before midnight, 24 hours later, as the second hand ticks off that one final second... that single second, in relation to the previous 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds, represents more time than cows as we know them, and ourselves, have existed in relation to the age of the universe as we know it.)

UPDATE - WEDNESDAY, APRIL 12, 2006:
Please see my later post Visual timeline of evolution that has a link to a much better visual example then my clock metaphor. (Evolutionary Timeline)

I think it's pretty safe to say that fundamentalist Christians are broken in the head... but let's not let our fear of their delusional rantings prevent us from addressing what could be shocking findings about fossilization and such. Keep our eyes on the truth for the sake of the truth, the whole truth, wherever it may lead us.