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Watch the two end up bickering right in the class itself, and end up with the only A’s because the prof is like, “FINALLY somebody gets it! There is no such thing as ‘most evolved’. This skit these two did shows the stupidity in it as it can be defined in SO MANY WAYS!”
What if Galasso ends up being the comic’s big bad? Like the pizza (and subs) restaurant has been a front the whole time, and Galasso has been obfuscating stupidity while running both the Korean mob and Dargon’s organization from behind the scenes.
It’s not really a thing. It’s drawing a distinction based on extent of changes, without acknowledging that the big changes are simply many small changes.
Those many small changes altogether need millions of years to happen. Evolution Denialists attack the straw man of “macroevolution” to continue believing that the earth is only a few thousand years old.
Ooh! Ooh! Let me give the answers to those that I was told during my own upbringing!
L-R, T-B:
– Plate tectonics are correct as they exist today, but the world lacked any oceans pre-Flood; post-Flood, it was a Pangaea-esque supercontinent until the world was divided in Peleg’s day, around the time of the Tower of Babel. (This is also when Atlantis sank.)
– Paleontology is correct insofar as the creatures it excavates actually exist/existed, generally speaking. Of course, this doesn’t disprove that the universe is 6000 years old.
– The Big Bang Theory is completely wrong. Next!
– The speed of light is exactly as science tells it to be. No problems with that!
– Radioactive dating doesn’t work because carbon-dating is unreliable because of all the nuclear weapons detonated in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s in particular.
– The solar system formation theories are wrong, because God created the planets as they are now. Next!
– General relativity? I guess it works. No problems with that!
– Heisenber…wha?
– Only macroevolutionary theory is wrong. You don’t see half-giraffe half-elephants or cat-dogs walking around, do you?
– Only evilutionary astronomy!
– Quantum mechanics? What are those?
– The table of elements exist in their perfect order and arrangement because that’s how God made them.
– Well clearly GPS systems do work, so obviously some of the “scientific” assumptions made previously aren’t actually necessary for them to function.
– Ditto computers and electronics in general.
– Alchemy is the Devil’s work, while chemistry yields many useful discoveries.
– Weren’t you listening? Seismology works because plate tectonics are a thing! How do you not understand something as simple as plate tectonics?
– Only evilutionary biology! Like macroevolution!
– Don’t trust everything the “doctors” say is good anyway. Trust in God above all else!
I notice that manipulative groups always develop these kinds of strategies to put critics in no-win positions. If we fail to persuade, we lose. If we succeed at persuading, it means we must be “cheating” somehow, therefore we lose.
I once heard of a group that told its members that atheists used “satanic mind control” to get people to loose their faith. I look at this and I think, “isn’t it less convoluted to accept that people can be persuaded by legitimate counter-arguments”?
Wow… I thought I had heard all the nonsensical creation-“science” arguments before, but “radiocarbon dating doesn’t work because nuclear weapons” is a new one on me.
Even then, these arguments can be used to support not just ANY religion, but the alleged existence of ANY interventionalidt beings that hide all proof of their existence. How do you know that there aren’t giant alien gerbils are controlling our minds to keep us from finding their planet made of gold? How do you know that all of existence isn’t just a game played by alein scorpions, and that all of history is just the game’s backstory?How do you not know the Bible you read was deviously designed by the devil to lead you on a path away from salvation?
It makes perfect sense if you know absolutely nothing about carbon dating. See, those nuclear explosions add neutrons to carbon atoms. All over the earth. Uniformly. To any depth. Solar flares do this, too. So do volcanoes. And supernovas. And other stellar activity. And the magnetic field of the earth. How does this work? By really, really fast hand-waving. Don’t ask any questions.
It is even more uniform when we consider the effects on a single artifact or fossil, with those neutrons evenly distributed throughout the minerals that were already subjected to thousands of years of radioactive decay.
We just measure the radiation of the materials surrounding the artifict, and then use that measurement to discern the original radioactivity of the artifact.
What about the delightful Flat-Earther standby of ‘we’re using it correctly and it’s giving the right answers but that would suggest that the Earth is round so clearly it’s broken’?
If I took a shot everytime someone made an equivocation between the “faith” of believing in something that can never be proven and the “faith” that means just plain “confidence”, I’d get blackout drunk in no time flat.
…not that I’d ever do that, but you get the point.
I wrote about this here before but i once watched a long debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham (very satisfyingly monosyllabic names) (Ham is a creationist) and beyond the actual arguments what really stayed with me was the difference in attitude between them.
Ham seemed invested in the intellectual safety that comes from having decided that everything you will ever need to know is inside that one book, and that the root cause, the explanation of everything is “God’s will”, and that you simply can not be proved wrong because you have faith.
Nye otoh exuded this passion for intellectual adventurousness and wonder at the vast, uncharted expanse of nature. To Ham’s barbs like “well do tell us then, how does sssscience explain this, huh?!!” he would never hesitate to say “we don’t know!” and it just felt like so much more FUN to not know and have so much left to find out, than to just sit there all smug and say “the explanation is, because God decided it should be so”.
Approximately 50% (numbers not final) of the Bible is at least Greek-influenced, and about 90% of non-biblical Christianity comes from heathen cultures.
In 2010 I had occasion to review the book “Dragonspell” by Donita K. Paul. It is aimed at preteen girls and is essentially religious indoctrination. It suggests that church leaders communicate with God and should always be obeyed, and that evil should be shunned even when its arguments “sound like truth”.
I remember being appalled (and I still am) at the setup for sexual abuse and the suggestion that they should not believe their own common sense when presented with logical arguments. As far as I am concerned this is evil.
(as a child who was a young earth creationist, i was also super into atlantis, which is why my purple alien guys headquartersed in the bermuda triangle)
(for seriously, YECs assume there was a vast technologically-advanced civilization before the flood that was wiped out due to its sin, the idea of atlantis fits right in there so long as you file those dates off)
Actually macro-evolution need not take millions of years. It can and has been observed under lab conditions. For example, this is a cool paper demonstrating evolution of multicellularity in a matter of weeks.
The authors seem to have forgotten that yeast is secondarily unicellular. It has multicellular ancestors and probably retains some multicellularity-related genes that are still functional or nearly so.
I disagree that it’s not a thing. I do think there’s value in acknowledging the difference between the smaller changes and larger ones. Especially in regards to human since our lifespan and generation length means larger scale evolution happens a helluva lot slower than in, say, fruit flies.
The more we learn about genetics and develop the technology to study it the more we can recognize the small scale changes that aren’t easily evident but can end up having a big impact on population and a massive impact on individuals’ quality of life.
It’s been a decade but I feel like I legitimately studied micro evolution in my university courses. Like something termed “micro evolution” unironically as a thing professional scientists monitor.
I think you are confused.
Fruit flies are Definitely NOT “micro evolution” .
They are very complex animals with chromosomes , visible traits, short life spans and many offspring: thus making them a good model to study genetic MACRO evolution in humans.
Pretty sure Z knows what they are talking about too, but you are (intentionally or not) misunderstanding them. Z’s not saying fruit flies are a candidate for studying both micro and macro evolution because they’re small. Rather, because they’re short lived, you can observe how many small micro-evolutionary (the smaller) changes can build up, and then have a macro-evolutionary (the larger changes) impact on the population. Essentially, you seem to agree with them, but maybe not in how you read what they wrote.
There is more to the science than ‘big changes are just made of small changes plus iteration/time’.
Like, that’s gradualism, which is a model, and punctuated equilibrium is also a model for how you get big changes when only small changes seem to be permitted by a genetic system.
Those would be my two terms for googling to learn more about what a spectacular pain in the arse evolution is =) For a REALLY simple premise, FUK there’s a lot of thinking and work required.
By the way, in regard to one of your posts last strip…. do you really do cannabis? Not that there’s anything wrong with that (after all, it was only banned in America out of pure racism and the desire for a scapegoat), I’m just curious.
lol. in retrospect i don’t know why i wrote that, it didn’t work comedically.
but yeah i smoke/ingest pot fairly regularly. i love it. it gives me good ideas, it makes me have more belly laughs in a 3-hour high than in entire months, and fuck does music taste good on weed.
in fact i may love it a little too much. i’m on a cannabis hiatus at the moment.
what about you then, do you have a recreational drugs practice? what are your thoughts?
Indeed I do. I make it a point to wait at least three weeks or more between sessions in order to minimize tolerance to the substance. I usually take it infused in butter, drizzled on oat waffles or popcorn.
Whenever I take it, I sometimes experience a form of synesthesia where I see/feel/hear/taste this internal continuously evolving geometric hallucination (internal in the sense that I can still perceive the real world; its almost like trading with your eyes open). Most of the time I reach this state where I can feel the energy of the fluids coursing through my body; it feels amazing!
All in all, taken properly, cannabis can provide marvelous experiences and be very effective at expanding consciousness!
Not to mention the fact that the substance has been proven to be less addictive than alcohol (just on par with caffeine in fact), and thousands of times less toxic (even less so than caffeine!).
If need be, I’d be glad to provide citations to those last two findings.
Indeed, smoking it is very much inefficient as 85% of it winds up as second-hand smoke. Edibles and sublingual tinctures are by far more efficient, and much better for your lungs!
Also, I have a bizarre question. Is the Mensa constellation visible where you live?
wow, you are just strapped with data on this, aren’t you ^^
yeah, but the other thing i also didn’t mention that makes smoking an attractive option is it’s easy to pace yourself. you take a hit, wait a few seconds, and with a bit of experience you know if you’re gonna want to get more stoned or if you’re good. with digestive delivery it’s not as easy to estimate. which mind you can be part of the fun =)
re Mensa constellation, is this a trick question? you know where I live =)
In regard to pacing, I always measure whatever I’m gonna take beforehand. When it comes to edibles, patience is key. On his first time doing it, my uncle made the common mistake of redosing a bunch of times in the absence of any immediate effect, only to have it hit him all at once!
Some might worry that whatever they taken may have been a “dud”, and don’t get the effects in their available time window. One of the most assuring ways to tell if it’s working before the major effects set in is that the substance almost always elevates the heart rhythm at first, then substantially slows it down.
By the way, I don’t know where you live, but I’ve narrowed it down to somewhere in Europe or South Africa. Not that I didn’t think you would reveal it to me if I asked you directly; I just wanted to challenge myself with a Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego kind of puzzle, mainly for the intellectual thrill of it!
Given that there’s no agreed upon standard of “different species”, the Creationists’ Evolution Denialists’ argument in regard to “macro-evolution” amounts to no more than attacking a straw man.
From what I understand, it’s that simple organisms like bacteria can evolve, but not complex ones. If that sounds like ass-covering, that’s because it is.
the micro has nothing to do with the size or complexity of the organism, but rather the degree of change. Wallabies can develop thicker coats when they live in Ireland, peppered moths change colour according to environmental pollution, but peppered moths do not, by slow accretion of minor changes, become wallabies.
As I understand it, they acknowledge minor, observable changes in appearance like the ways in which you can breed new breeds of dogs or horses but claim that that’s distinct from any kind of phenomenon that would create new species.
The scientific meaning of the micro/macro-evolution distinction has shifted over the years. Originally it came from an early disagreement with Darwin, almost a century ago. The author agreed with microevolution, meaning evolution within a single species — eg, the allele frequencies of cheetahs changing through natural selection so that the average traits of the whole species changed — but disagreed with macroevolution, the evolution of new species, which he characterized in an utterly absurd way. Evolution-deniers have latched on to the early meaning of this distinction (see, they can read science too, why do these ungodly evolutionists ignore their own science?), and this is the way Joyce is using it now.
Nowadays, there are two other meanings for the word macroevolution, both of which fit within the framework of modern evolutionary theory. The first is essentially microevolution on a grand scale (geological time), and there’s not much of a distinction between the two beyond the scale.
The second new meaning is about natural selection forces that are intraspecies (micro) vs interspecies (macro). If, for example, the size and coloration of a peacock’s tail affects his success in attracting mates, that’s microevolution, because the pressures (and hence the changes) are internal to the species. If the size and coloration of his tail affects the ease with which predators catch and eat him, that’s macroevolution, because it involves pressures between species and thus affects both. One species out-competing another and driving it to extinction works out a lot differently than one set of alleles out-competing another within an individual species, because the individuals with the advantageous alleles can interbreed with the ones without, and that’s not something that can happen with interspecies competition. Peacocks with genes for advantageous courtship coloration can (and usually will) breed with peahens without those genes, causing them to be shared and competing lines to merge, but can’t interbreed with their predators (and would be wise not to make the attempt).
oooh i’d never heard that distinction made. well, not the inter/intra-specific selection distinction, that yes, but calling microevolution the evolution of allele frequency within an interbreeding population. thanks for taking the time to explain this!
Evolution that we can observe and thus can’t reasonably be denied is microevolution. This leaves us free to deny evolution that can only be deduced from the results – existing species and the fossil record.
The problem isn’t that there’s a specific difference between macro- and micro- evolution that we’ve yet to uncover. The problem is that we humans are trying to draw lines on top of what’s actually a spectrum.
I thought long and hard about the answer to what is the highest evolved organism and determined it to be a microscopic alga called a diatom, which according to this article, is the highest up an organism has ever been discovered.
Then that’s basically all of them. Empirical evidence had revealed that it’s nigh impossible to overdose from cannabis. You’d have to consume 80% of your weight in pure THC to induce a lethal response.
Too bad they aren’t well-protected against threats that they are actually likely to encounter. What’s the point in being able to survive in a vacuum if a mite eats you before you have a chance to board the rocket?
I mean she’s only been flirting with athieism for a couple months max vs over a decade of engrained miseducation. It’s not gonna be a quick transition. Becky’s even struggled rejecting her false information and Joyce is nowhere near as eager for it.
Ah, the denialist staircase. People can seldom handle an inconvenient truth all at once, so they often start by believing in smaller and smaller lies that get closer to the truth.
that or the other thing, whatever you call it, it may have to do with a personality type, but you’ll see some people yank themselves from a shrill, loyal, card-carrying Xist to a loud, unwavering, true-blue Yist, overnight. Because I guess being intensely committed to any one set of beliefs might matter more to some than the beliefs themselves.
This kind of behavior evidently has a link to human tribalistic tendencies, especially in politics.
In 2003, social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen recruited liberal and conservative college students with strong opinions on welfare for a study in group influence (Party over policy: The
dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs). He presented them with one of two versions of a welfare policy: one provided generous benefits; the other offered slender, stringent benefits.
Whenever one of the policies was presented to a participant, half the time it was claimed to be supported by the Democrats;
half the time it was claimed to be supported by the Republicans.
Cohen found that when policy and party support conflicted, participants showed a strong tribal bias, focusing on the party support rather than the content of the policy. Liberals strongly favored conservative
policies labelled Democrat over liberal policies labelled Republican, and conservatives strongly favored liberal policies labelled Republican over conservative policies labelled Democrat.
To know that group identity can effectively nullify group values in this way should give us
serious pause.
oh cheers, i’d never heard of that study. that said the results are extremely unsurprising to me.
but i also don’t think these sorts of findings are as appalling or sinister as they’re often framed to be. what i would like to know, is how did the subjects justify their support for a policy that their stated values would normally clash with? was it because they didn’t know anything about that particular field of policy and trusted their party leaders to use their greater expertise as they would want them to? did they grumble but still think supporting their party mattered more in the big picture than being on the right side of every issue? there’s a lot of sensible reasons for making this sort of choice.
when i first read about the Asch experiment it shook my faith in humanity or something, but the more i thought about it, the more i was like, wait a minute. If i believe the answer is A while literally everyone else in the room thinks the answer is B, doesn’t it actually make sense to think that i might be wrong, like that doesn’t sound so irrational. In real life of course it’s good to keep that effect in mind and look for reasons that might skew a majority of people towards the wrong answer, but on principle, doing a reality check when you’re drastically outnumbered in your position doesn’t feel like a bad thing.
I suspect that they didn’t justify their support. That their perception of the policy changed, based on who supported it.
Which honestly isn’t that surprising. The parties have staked strong opposing ideological positions. It’s not just tribalism coming into play when you’re told they support a policy that strongly conflicts with that position. If I was told Republicans supported a liberal policy – like the generous welfare benefits, if I didn’t simply laugh it off, I’d assume there were catches I didn’t see in the brief overview.
Predictably, the participants in the experiment later denied being influenced by the party labels, although many of them believed other people would be influenced, especially their ideological adversaries.
Part of life is learning how to separate concepts that have been blurred together. Things like nudity and sex, blood relatedness and obligation. We often blur together ideas and people, and we need to separate them.
The source of an idea does not negate the idea itself. Even tyrants on one occasion express worthwhile thoughts.
The listing of the author of an idea is only about giving credit where credit is due. Multiple people will have converged on the same thought.
Ideas ALWAYS stand and fall on their own merits. The author is incidental. If they fail to live up to their proclaimed values, they get an entertaining smack of irony.
Amazing how the world changes once that realization spreads.
The problem with the experiment is that they’re suggesting nonsense. They’re suggesting cognitive dissonance. Which means they’re lying, even if I can’t see how. If you know what the parties stand for and the history of what kinds of policies they’ve supported and enacted, the scenarios just don’t make any sense.
i’ve started reading the paper, one interesting thing they hadn’t predicted is that,… well i’m just gonna quote it:
“One unpredicted finding was that each party was more persuasive when its actual position differed from its expected one (i.e.,when Democrats supported a stringent policy, and when Republicans supported a generous one). This result could reflect people’s preference for moderates over extremists (see Keltner & Robinson,1996), their tendency to consider the merits of expectation-violating messages more carefully than those of expectation-consistent messages (Maheswaran & Chaiken, 1991), or their trust of communicators who express positions contrary to their assumed biases, beliefs, or self-interests (see Eagly, Chaiken, & Wood, 1981; Walster, Aronson, & Abrahams, 1966). While future research could profitably investigate the issue, this result suggests that participants noticed the inconsistency between the stated position of their party and the expected one. Yet they conformed, even though the stated position plainly defied their party’s (and their own) prevailing ideological commitments.” (emphasis mine)
i just think that digging into the actual meat of the experimental data, in this as in many similar cases, reveals way more interesting insights than what any surface reading of the data might suggest. like, what, “people = sheep”? i’m sorry to say i personally find that to be a boring conclusion.
(it should also be noted that these are all psychology students (as in 99% of psychology studies lol. 2 of the subjects actually guessed what they were really being tested on^^) and that they tested a lot more liberals than conservatives. make of that what you will!)
(to be clear, @thejeff, i’m backing up your point that what is being tested here is people’s way of dealing with cognitive dissonance, and in the conclusions the researchers suggest that though they didn’t use the cognitive dissonance paradigm, it would be interesting to do so in further research on this phenomenon.)
She’s an atheist, but by the looks of it she has yet to come out to Joe. She’s just pretending to believe in the Creationists’ version of microevolution to maintain the impression that she’s a still Biblical Literalist barely compromising her beliefs.
Maybe, but she was taught this under the guise of science, not pure creationism. It’s not really a surprise if she wasn’t easily able to shake all the influence.
Didn’t she say that she was gonna embrace empirical evidence in the Birthday Pursuit arc?
If it really is significantly painful for her to think about, that suggests she may very well be stuck between atheism and theism. When it comes to the deconversion process in the real world, this intermediary phase is actually pretty common (and I speak from experience).
As a neopagan, which is an immensely casual religion, the idea that some former Christians need to “deconvert” – which sounds like something undercover spies or brainwashing victims undergo – is rather alarming.
When I was younger, I went to a Methodist school and I went to church for a few years. My parents weren’t overly religious, so we stopped going after a while and I haven’t been back to church in years, but Christianity is still the religion I’m most familiar with.
But in recent years, whenever I watch online sermons, especially from US pastors, I find myself being a iittle alarmed by the message they preach. It’s not that they preach hate or anything like that, but the message is usually “Trust in God. God will provide. Obey the Bible. You’re not doing anything wrong.” And to me, that feels very irresponsible because it’s sending the message that there is nothing wrong with the world. That the Bible and Church teachings are infallible. Nothing needs to change. Things like racism, poverty, climate change… It’s not something you need to worry about. God will fix it. And I think this attitude also bleeds over into other topics and areas that traditionalists feel uncomfortable with or threatened by, such as the role of women in the church, or LGBT+ rights, or changing religious demographics. There is no impetus in Christian doctrine to adapt or investigate these new things, to learn that they’re either harmless or how to welcome differences, because things are always perfect the way they are and doesn’t need to change.
This attitude is extremely short-sighted, I feel; the world is constantly changing and evolving, and allowing oneself to get complacent and stagnate has been the downfall of not just individuals, but also entire nations or even empires. The last Chinese emperors believed that China was perfect and could do no wrong, and they were willing to shut themselves off from the world and pretend that it wasn’t changing all around them. They got a rude awakening in the 20th century, and now it seems like the US is falling into the same trap with MAGA and Trumpism-style politics.
That’s not to say that former Christians don’t convert to other religions. It’s that it’s surprisingly common for former members of Abrahamic religions in particular (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc) to undergo complete disillusionment and subsequent complete loss of belief in ANY religion. I suspect several reasons for this.
1. The process was started by a tragedy that caused them to come face to face with one form or another of the problem of evil (i.e. if there is a God that is all loving and all powerful, why does he not prevent suffering in his universe? How could I suffer? I followed all the rules!!!). This problem inevitably stems from Abrahamic religions monotheistic nature; they are forced to combine the source of all good and source of all evil into a single god, thereby creating a god with conflicting attributes.
2. It happens after they start reading scripture, and finding that their holy passages are monuments to pure barbarism and sadism (if commands to kill people for picking up sticks on the wrong day of the week on top of countless calls for genocide isn’t nigh perfect fuel for disillusionment, then what is?).
Although it’s also not uncommon for them to sort of cycle through other religions until they reach atheism.
I’ve observed a process where people from strictly ritualized denominations tend to migrate to very happy-clappy, “authentic” feeling denominations and vice versa. This often, but not always, leads to atheism in the end.
As a former Christian I think a part of it is that harsh bible literalism in all things really shoots Christianity in the foot sometimes, especially since it’s common in mainstream denominations and not just weird little sects. Like some things can weather that storm but not everything. The creation story sure as hell can’t. It perhaps could work as like the Jesus parables if people wanted to go that way but it’s more common to take it literally than go for that thought process. And it becomes an all or nothing mentality eventually like it was for Joyce unless say you become like Becky in the matter.
Like it probably helps in keeping control on those who remain but it becomes like that building on sand versus rock parable for some. Bible literalism is literally sand. It crumbles under too much scrutiny.
It works much like that for the leaving of any manipulative group.
It all starts with some conflicting idea has managed to get through our automatic defenses. Like a pebble in a shoe, we can’t quite shake it loose. When we look to our ideology
for answers, we start noticing flaws we never spotted before. The problems then begin to multiply. Before long, the ideology is breaking apart. Then flying apart. Psychologically, it’s like throwing a rock through a spider’s web; the foundations of one’s reality are ripped apart, leaving them in a kind of limbo.
It can take time to recover from a state of such all-encompassing disillusionment.
Eventually, we feel ready to face the task of rebuilding our world piece by piece. We get the chance to build better foundations. In the place of dogmatic certainty, mindless compliance, and emotional thinking, we start to use honest doubt, mindful resistance, and critical thinking.
Literalism is certainly one of Christianity’s main problems. Even some of the other Abrahamic religions are more allegorical, and other world religions certainly are.
Which is too bad since Christianity does have some good core concepts (like forgiveness and being nice to people and treating others with respect). It’s just that some people/many churches tend to bury those concepts beneath piles of stupid, bigoted, poorly researched bullshit.
Yeah I agree on that take, especially on other religions. Quite frankly I sometimes wonder if I’d have made a pit stop into Judaism at least for a little while if I’d actually researched it more during my faith crisis rather than after I realised I was now an atheist and had emotionally accepted that. I mean there’s even arguments that Abraham was in fact wrong to try to sacrifice Issac or that the fact people are so horrified at such a concept now is a good thing because it shows good societal moral progression because these stories are old, old as balls. Or even the fact you’re‘allowed’ to argue with God.
Granted this is more stuff I’ve absorbed from internet interactions with various different people who follow it from likely different ways of following it rather than hard core research (so perhaps: grain of salt and I’m getting things wrong) but like. It’s wild how Christianity views Judaism in such a generally simple and condescending way as if it’s just Christianity without Jesus (and thus sad and even scary because like Jesus and some of his teachings about forgiveness is probably like the only bright spot in the mainstream Christian take on things) when ehhh, Judaism is diverse in its opinions and much more complicated than that at least it seems.
Granted Christianity from the Presbyterian form while I was in it kind of tried to make everything without Jesus was just dark and scary and had something missing (at best they’d be considered‘seductive’ if not). So yeah.
Though literalism in the modern sense is relatively rare in the history of Christianity and still limited to a fairly small, if politically powerful, population.
It varies from individual to individual, but those two patterns crop up fairly frequently. A third frequent one would be reading the scripture for the first time (or with fresh eyes) and seeing how it either contradicts the reality of the world around them or contradicts itself or how the religion contradicts it. (“Hey, wait a minute, stars aren’t actually fixed in a firmament” or “Hey, wait a minute, Jesus couldn’t have been crucified both before and after Passover, one of these gospels must be wrong…” or “Hey wait a minute, my preacher said that camel through the eye of a needle thing was about how easy it was to lead a camel through a canyon named the Eye of the Needle, but read in context Jesus is clearly saying how difficult it is.”)
The key ingredient seems to be jump-starting the questioning, regardless of what mechanism causes that.
I’ve never heard of that supposed canyon. I wonder if some Prosperity Gospel preacher just made it up.
I have heard the idea that the Eye of the Needle is actually a tiny side door in the city wall of Jerusalem, where a camel either wouldn’t fit through at all or only with great difficulty.
I’ve also heard the idea that the “camel” is a scribal error for a tow, a very similar word in the original Greek.
Or it’s just a literal expression about how hard it is for the rich to get to heaven. It was in response to the rich man asking how to make it into heaven. Jesus told him to give his possessions to the poor and follow him, which he wasn’t willing to do.
These other explanations seem like excuses to avoid facing what Jesus was saying.
The eye of a needle metaphor appears in the Talmud as well, with an elephant instead of a camel. That makes the “rope” mistranslation version less likely. It doesn’t rule out the gate theory, but that idea doesn’t appear for centuries afterwards.
People in such all encompassing manipulation tend not to question until they’re ready to see bullshit for what it is. They risk pulling the bottom out from their entire worldview otherwise and that can be extremely hard to do before you’re ready. People can rationalize almost anything.
I have discovered that Relativity and Quantum Mechanics cannot both be true. Physic contradicts itself, and so I shall give up my faith in physics. Oh, no. Logical paradoxes are a thing. I henceforth denounce rationality entirely and will be guided by ignorance alone.
What that actually means is that they can’t both be true in the main situations that they model.
Physical principles like F = ma are descriptors, not controllers. Scientific models of all fields are used not because they are absolutely representative of the “truest true nature of the universe”, but because they are useful to us in that they help us more and more accurately predict the outcome of natural phenomena and create technology that harnesses their nature (cars, clocks, computers, etc.).
Newtonian mechanics works very well in everyday situations where objects don’t even come close to the speed of light. However, the model tends to break down when we approach they speed of light, and that’s when relativity is used.
Saying that Newtonian mechanics are “wrong” because of that or any other similar complaint is really looking at physics and pretty much all of science in the wrong way. Models in science are always discerned not by how well they reflect the “true nature of reality”, but as tools that are useful in predicting the outcomes of situations, and how well they can inspire future investigation of their respective phenomena. A model, much like a tool, may be modified or even overhauled replaced entirely if it can help us predict the unfolding of a phenomena that much more accurately.
Look at that contradiction you mentioned not as an excuse to give up confidence in science, but as an opportunity for further investigation. WHY do forces become more or less dominant on different scales? What would be the LEAST convoluted explanations behind that? If any explanation were true, what else would you expect to see in observation or experiment?
These are the kinds of questions that will get you into the most important part of the scientific mindset: acknowledgement of epistemology. That is, honestly reckoning with the very nature, origins and limits of knowledge itself.
(i’m joking. because you are too serious. the balance of the universe was in peril, so i had to)
(but thanks for that primer anyway)
(note that by now, anyone who’s been paying attention knows you only have to make any ridiculously irrational claim for you to provide a free science lesson =P)
(i see you’ve even gone and researched the species concept since the other day btw, and found out it had no single agreed upon definition, good on you!!)
I’m glad to inform! It’s one of my most important duties as a scientist, after all!
By the way, when I stated the “official” definition of species the other day, I meant that it was “official” in the sense that it was the one most commonly taught in high school science classes. I should have been more clear on that.
which brings me to this thing i think i would have had to tell you eventually, so let me say it now.
you take your duty to inform very seriously and that is pretty awesome.
but maybe you get carried away sometimes? like, maybe, try not to automatically assume that people know less than you do and need to be educated? it’s just ever so slightly vexing when that happens.
if you’re not like 100% positive that someone is being wrong on the internet (which happens a lot, so i understand getting a bit trigger-happy after a while) maybe try hedging by saying something like “perhaps i misunderstood, but are you saying X? Because actually,…”
Thanks milu. I don’t intend to imply that people are undereducated or anything by elaborating like this.
Many people who are reading comics like this may be under the influence of manipulative groups, who when their members are in states of disillusionment or crisis will use strategies to make sure said dissonance falls in their favor and rope them back in to the group. My hope is that by providing information like I have, I give these people the tools they need to start thinking for themselves and breaking free of their group’s influence; in essence, I intend to empower everyone with information, which they can use to think more clearly, make better decisions, and lead better lives.
Even educated people can make epistemological mistakes, and find themselves roped into manipulative groups because, like all humans, they have brains that have evolved to resolve dissonance in favor of consistency.
Even without manipulative groups implicated at all, I believe that all people, of all education levels never stop learning.
Misunderstandings like the ones I have adress may cause even ordinary, educated people to distrust science, at a time when science is most important to our advancement as individuals, as a society, and civilization itself.
When I elaborate like I have done, I do not intend to address only person who made the comment I am responding to, but to everyone who ever reads them, in the name of public service.
I hope this clarifies things. Thank you for taking the time to give valuable, specific, constructive criticism on one of my methods. On top of informing others, this is also one of the most important duties of a scientist!
Hey, Milu. Wagstaff is fulfilling an important function here.
As he points out, physical theories are not about Truth with capital T. They are pragmatic tools for prediction and understanding. The fact that they are not about the “true nature of reality” means that the incompatibilities of our two major theories of physics is not a reason for concern. Which is not to say all physical theories are equally good.
So too are religions a tool. A different kind of tool. They provide a different kind of guidance and understanding. Looking at internal contradictions kind of misses the point and there is much throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. Which, again, is not to say all religions are equally good.
So, my point was not precisely to disagree with Reltzik, but to parody the process they described. And Wagstaff with their informative post amplified the point of my inanity much better than I would have done. Though I do miss the opportunity to ask someone, what’s the difference between the two situations.
Regardless, I find Wagstaffs urge to educate admirable, and if he misses the humor from time to time … well, no-one is perfect except myself, and sometimes I wonder about me.
I regard to the alleged guidance religion provides, addressing milu’s curiosity on my history with religion, that’s kind of one if the reasons I quit.
It’s not even exclusive to religions that evoke the concept of gods.
I reckon that over half of all human misery to date can be traced to one basic behavior:
The tendency to attribute justice to a universe that has no inherit justice.
When people try to rationalize why so many good people suffer under the reign of a higher power, logical pathways repeatedly lead to divine narcissism, persecution games, division and suffering.
@clif @Wagstaff
oh no actually i kinda love it when someone is making a joke and Wagstaff just completely ignores the humour and launches into why it’s inaccurate =D i agree it a) is useful PSA, b) may actually contribute to the joke as you pointed out Clif, c) or at least is just kinda goofy and precious <3
no, i'm fine with that. a couple times what i found distracting and frustrating is when trying to make a serious point, and someone on here (and that's not always been you Wagstaff in fairness) comes in and nitpicks at a surface detail i may have glossed over for expediency and because my posts can get quite long enough as it is.
but also, eh, you're probably right to do so anyway. i guess in a generalist forum such as this, rehashing the basics matters more than any attempt at being a bit profound. this is just me being huffy at the wrong person for the wrong reasons and probably i should just go out more lol.
so. sorry about that! you go on doing the Lord's work and i shall endeavour to ~chill tf out~
(…not to mention i did the exact same thing to a/snow/mouse on this very page, except very ineptly, and will now proceed to go apologize to them as well ^^)
Yeah i mean their are other options athiesm isnt for everyone. Just because i thonk the christain god is a abusive monster doesnt mean the concept of a higher power has to be thrown out the window.
Even outside any scripture, an all-knowing, all-powerful being who brought suffering into this universe by its very nature would be the most inhuman being conceivable.
Suffering only had to be part of being human because of the rules that such a being would make. But if it really wanted to, it could have changed that rule, considering that an all-powerful God would have the ability to do that.
There are times when we humans have the desire, the knowable urge to help others who are suffering, but have not the means or knowledge to do so.
Meanwhile, and all-knowing, all-powerful God, if he existed, would have literally everything he anyone would ever need to help all who are suffering, yet conspicuously choose not to help.
This means that an all-knowing, all-powerful God would by its very nature be the most callous, inhuman monster conceivable.
I agree that such a being would be callous. Incredibly so. I am just not convinced that people are incapable of inflicting such horror upon themselves. To flip around the christian belief (and I think nail it down rather accurately): man created god in his own image.
But isn’t conversion to religion gaslighting in and of itself?
I mean, with thousands of years of practice, the Abrahamic religions have gotten gaslighting down to a fine art. They proclaim us indebted and guilty because of events before our birth. They put followers in impossible double binds by condoning and condemning the same behaviors. They propose inconsistent values that are impossible to observe consistently. They declare acts and thoughts that cause no conceivable injury to be worthy of punishment, torture or death.
These maneuvers erode our sense of judgement, making us more susceptible to being manipulated.
Theists are compelled to develop a relationship with God, a being who we’re told withholds all evidence of his existence because he wants people to have the option of not believing he exists.
If a human parent deliberately withheld all evidence of their existence from their child, while claiming to want a good relationship with the child, we’d immediately see the chaos that would arise from that scenario.
Substitute “human parent” with “Heavenly Father” (or any other divine being for that matter), and we get exactly the same chaos.
The most likely way to reject beliefs based on past experiences is by re-evaluating those past experiences based on new understanding. A good example being someone who experienced an unexplained and scary stranger visiting them in the night who believes strongly that it was an alien finding out that sleep paralysis is a fairly well-understood phenomenon that explains the experience better than aliens.
I know I had a similar experience growing up. I had a million experiences I used to convince myself that I was straight and cis. However, I now know pretty damn clearly that I’m neither. Looking back, I see the experiences that lead me to those conclusions very, very differently. The experiences remain, but my interpretation of them and what I learn from them doesn’t remain static.
Many religious people from all kinds of faiths have powerful lived experiences to point to, and some of those people still end up rejecting those beliefs down the road.
I wouldn’t presume to say anything about your specific experiences, but “This belief is based on X lived experience, therefore that belief will never change” isn’t really true unless you plan to keep yourself cut off from any knowledge that might change how you interpret those experiences. Which I guess you could do if that’s what you want, but at that point, you’re specifically working to prevent a belief from being challenged or changed, which you can do whether you have some defining experience or not.
The sad thing is, a lot of those fundie “Christian groups” are so cult like that those who leave do have a lot of deprogramming to do. Even if converting into less… closed off shall sleep say Christian denominations
No, the use of the term “deconversion” simply refers to the fact that becoming an atheist is wholly unlike converting from one religion to another; it means to leave religion entirely.
Now if Einstein had just set the speed of light slow enough that it took an entire day for the information to move from one time zone to another, it would be the same time in each time zone, just different days. Problem solved, so blame Einstein,
That would be impossible. You can’t “indoctrinate” someone into being an athiest. “Athiest” can be used to describe ANYONE who doesn’t believe in the existence of any gods for whatever reason. Atheism is not a religion, nor is it an ideology. Atheism and Atheists altogether have to unifying doctrine, no common faith, no dogma, no ritual, no system of worship, no symbolism, no scripture, no mythology, no sacred objects or
concepts.
Some people fallaciously make the claim that believing no gods exist is a “faith” position. However, this is an equivocation between the “faith” of believing in something that cannot be proven and the “faith” that when casually used just means “confidence”. Athiests are as confident that there are no gods as much as they are confident that there isn’t a giant alien hamster on a distant planet controlling all our minds, making us hallucinate all of our lives and all of science. That latter outlandish claim can’t be disproven by its very nature, but are you gonna believe that, too?
Some atheists have built up a large body of refutations against flawed arguments and claims for the existence of gods. But refuting arguments and claims doesn’t amount to doctrine or faith. It’s just a response to other people’s attempts at persuasion.
Joyce might be more comfortable and functional at that point… but what she needs (IMO and on a psychological level) is to clean mental house, putting everything in either a “keep” or “toss” or “quarantine then assess” box. And I don’t think a-creation would end up in the keep box. It wouldn’t work for her.
A happy endgame for her would, I think, be found in some version of secular humanism and/or existentialism.
Now Joe sees why two hours is not enough time to do homework: sometimes you will need to make up for your partner, who is still coming to grips about how science actually sees things.
Answers In Genesis. Absolute barf. I partake in Viced Rhino’s YouTube content (very much like Willis/Joyce in terms of background btw), and they’re a frequent occurrence on his channel.
All but one of my exes haven’t been particularly into sexually exploring their bodies, so I don’t have a solid body of evidence on which to support the hypothesis that I might know where it is. (Setting aside the amount of reading I have done on the subject) But then I don’t know if you’re refering to the G-spot and making a bilingual frenglish joke, some other joke, a typo, or actually referring to something of which I am truly ignorant.
Yeah I don’t know what happened there. I made a throw away joke, essentially forgot about it, then read clif’s comment and my brain went in a completely different direction and tangled up in bad bilingualism.
I’d say whoosh, but I dug a tunnel, built and closed the hatch, and wasn’t even aware of the airtraffic.
Do not forget to take the necessary preparations before using Seven-League Boots, as doing otherwise result in spectacular but tragic incidents. As one would expect of a mode of locomotion that consists in putting one foot 21 miles ahead of the other.
Our eyes evolved to see under water. Their ability to function out of water is a pretty inefficient adaptation. Just one tidbit I remembered which guess Joyce’s textbooks will explain in detail.
Is it a coincidence today is a good day to take a stick and measure its shadows to prove the circumference of the Earth? Flat Earth and Young Earth conspiracists ought to get together and compare notes. Maybe they’ll both find the other’s arguments insupportable and also find they’re the same arguments.
It is, I think, equal parts wanting to hear arguments against the beliefs she’s realizing she has to reject, and wanting to annoy Joe, ‘cuz that’s what people do when they like someone.
I’m so disappointed by Joyce right now. Joe has every right to leave in disgust. But he probably won’t, a but for the assignment a bit for Joyce’s sake.
The internet has informed me that this is not the widely accepted term for it so I’ll clarify.
I’m talking about the idea that if even one thing was out of place human life would not have come to exist on Earth so it makes sense to believe that someone at least orchestrated the Big Bang.
I think that is what is sometimes referred to as the theory of “Intelligent Design”. which dates back as far as the days of Thomas Aquinas. Basically, it posits that “wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer.”
From there it is but a short step to designating ‘God’ as the Intelligent Designer as stated in the Jewish Pentateuch and the Book of Genesis in the Christian Bible.
But that… simply doesn’t follow. If humans wouldn’t exist, humans wouldn’t exist. You seem to be smuggling in an assumption that humans somehow have to exist.
basically, the argument says, look at the fundamental physical constants, look at the matter/antimatter asymmetry, look at how unlikely everything was to be exactly the way that it happens to be, notice that if you simulate the universe with slightly different physical constants it becomes an empty wasteland or it crumples in on itself in femtoseconds or whatever.
It’s a long complicated debate that i am entirely unqualified to do any more than link to the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry to, which i haven’t read because i’m too busy reading about punctuated equilibrium and microevolution today.
Plus, you’ve debunked all actual known religions once you get to the point where you concede “Well maybe some entity caused it all to start 14 billion years ago and that’s all it did.”
oh definitely, if theistic metaphysics was limited to “god engineered the big bang” the entire conversation would be open and closed in minutes and we’d all just move on. you haven’t necessarily debunked panpsychism though, which is the one spiritual belief i sometimes feel drawn to. but again, it’s basically defined by not having any bearing on material reality, at least in the version that appeals to me.
@thejeff, there is no reason to believe that the big bang had to be initiated by some conscious entity. If all things have a cause, and this alleged being caused the big bang, what caused or created the being? And if that, just how far back would the chain of causes creating causes go?
Theists tend to justify this just by saying, “well, [God] was always there”. The notion that the chain of creators necessary has to stop at some unproven point that happens to align with dominant monotheistic beliefs at the time amounts to no more than special pleading. You may as well say, “the big bang was always there”.
@milu, why do you feel drawn to panpsychism? The only way we can really know if others besides ourselves have experiencing minds is through behavior we can observe (hence, Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”).
Inanimate objects don’t really have any behavior we can observe, so there really is no experiment we can do to falsify the prediction that they have minds, making said predictions unscientific.
nah man, thejeff agrees with you probably, they were just like “meh why do i care what caused the big bang”. i was the one who brought this up, or well, PB was and i was backing them up or something.
honestly, saying that the chain of causality has to stop at God having caused the Big Bang doesn’t really strike me as special pleading, because we’re talking of what might very well be a special event, from where we stand. I feel like “what caused the big bang” is really a metaphysical question in the truest sense of the word, you know? not one that physics has much of a claim to, beyond proposing models that, who knows, we might one day figure out how to test. tha’s my understanding anyway, am i off the mark?
so yes, it’s a metaphysical question. and sure if your philosophical allegiance is to rationalism then you might insist that there’s got to be some material cause, but if someone wants the universe to be imbued with some form of intentionality, then they might safely believe that that’s where it resides.
i personally don’t find that topic of “what caused the BB” particularly interesting in itself, but i do enjoy the meta-topic of “is there an atheist argument to be made here”. later in your very same comment you point out that unfalsifiable predictions are unscientific. well….
re: panpsychism, the fact that it’s an unfalsifiable proposition is exactly what makes it attractive as a spiritual belief to me. i think i just like the poetry of it. i don’t really think about it much, but there have been times when i’ve wanted to express gratitude for being alive, and the idea that there was a kind of conscious universe that i was experiencing being a part of heightened the bliss of the moment and produced some pleasant tingles ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
…not “conscious universe” in the sense of a decentralized yet united conscience, more like… everything matters, every little thing. so in that moment, i find that I matter exactly as much as every last atom at the other end of the universe, therefore, i do matter but also, not very much at all. i matter in just the way an exquisite little flame in a fire matters, or the crest of a wave.
…is what that experience is like. i guess it’s not actually about consciousness, after all. is it even spiritual? meh, idk
That is exactly the point that religious folks are uncomfortable with. There have been many variations of it, but it always boils down to a need to have someone to be responsible for it. In the process they can never see how a ‘creator’ adds an infinite stack of layers of complexity beyond ‘and that’s the way it is’. i.e. If you need god to have created things, how did god come about? How did /their/ creator come about? And so on. They typically stick to some variant of ‘god just is’, at which time one can point out that’s the same argument, with added and unnecessary complexity, that scientists make.
YES fundie rejection of evolution is highly motivated and mostly absurd, but there is genuinely a huge gulf between the product of natural selection and the phenomenon of speciation. The absence of ‘missing links’ in the fossil record does have some consequence for our models of evolution. on the one hand, the fossil record is spotty af. on the other hand- we really only see distinct species. They show up, persist mostly unchanged for x millennia- minor, metric changes like over all size, or legs get a bit longer- then they disappear. We don’t see slow gradual change. Is that because the record is trash? Or is it because speciation is Fast?
Maybe it happens all at once- which would require some means of accumulating silent mutations that are expressed all at once according perhaps to some trigger. Epigenetics might go some way to fleshing out a model for this ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model. But is such a model even necessary when occam’s razor says, there’s plenty of time in the gaps in the record for transitional forms to have existed and not been preserved.
It’s EXTREMELY interesting, please don’t let mocking denialists get in the way of a potentially beautiful side hobby in reading cool evolution shit.
Oh bullshit. We don’t see species alive or in the fossil record. That’s exactly why there are some 150 different definitions of “species” out there that all lead to different counts – just two of the more commonly used ones mean there are either 101 or 249 endemic bird species in Mexico, and the area of greatest diversity is either on one coast or on the other.
Here’s a twenty-year-old scientific paper on speciation in the fossil record and very gradual change. Go ahead and read it.
ok i’m gonna read your paper but just from the abstract i can tell its position is more nuanced than “gradualism good, punctuated equilibrium bad”, or “species not a thing”. (tbf, i’m not sure which of carms’s claims you’re calling bullshit on.)
You sound vehemently anti-species, which is interesting and not a take i’ve read very much.
don’t get me wrong, i’m not arguing for the ontological reality of species, but are species not a useful shorthand in biology? i’m not a biologist, mind. i’m just fascinated by the philosophical debate about the species concept.
if i were to reframe the paleo record problem brought up by carms as “populations appear to have conservative morphological features for long stretches of time, then we see morphological innovations appear within a very short time” does this still sound wrong? i think carms’s main point wasn’t a defence of the species concept, but to point out that there is at least a good argument for statis/rapid divergence in evolutionary history of any lineage.
of note (again based only on the abstract) the paper you pointed to seems to support BOTH gradualism (in plankton) and punctuated equilibria (in some animals)
yes yes, as i’ve said.
though i guess it does bear repeating (over… and over… and over…)
i’m genuinely interested in eh whatever’s take though, if they care to expand, because it sounds like they don’t, in fact, believe the concept of species to be useful.
One of the best examples of this that I can think of, (sorry no citations) is neighboring populations of northern seagulls. Bear with me as I can’t recall where the actuall barrier is, but it goes something like (and I’m going to compress the example here):
Seagulls in Alaska can breed with seagulls in Canada. Canadian Gulls can breed with Greenland Gulls, Greenland Gulls with European Gulls, Euro-Gulls with Russian-Gulls, and Russian with Siberian Gulls, but in all that, apparently Siberian Gulls can’t breed with Alaskan Gulls.
To extend the example beyond reality (the gull thing was reported in an article somewhere, I think). If there were an event (meteor, disease, predation) to wipe out all the canadian, greenland, euro and russian gulls, we’d be left with two gull species who could not interbreed. Boom. New species, neither of which are significantly different from their ancestor, but which cannot breed with each other.
@eh, whatever: ok so i haven’t read the whole review paper yet (what with one thing and another and also, stuff) but i do want to report one precious quote, coming as it does after two pages of extremely dry prose:
“The punctuated equilibria versus phyletic gradualism debate of the 1970s and 1980s was huge fun for all concerned, not least because the protagonists kept shifting ground and revising their claims.”
Sounds like the authors had a grand old time in the 70’s and 80’s themselves XD
I don’t think there’s much need for new mechanisms to explain relatively fast transitions and missing links in the fossil record. Punctuated equilibrium doesn’t need to rely on silent mutations and epigenetics, but just on differences in selective pressure. A species may exist for millennia well adapted to its niche, but then the niche changes or a portion of the species is isolated and the species either goes extinct or adapts becoming something distinct.
The fossil record is sparse enough that we often only have a handful of specimens from millennia. It’s not at all a surprise that we’re missing a complete chain of transition.
There are species of Homo that we only know from a tooth and a couple of fragments.
To focus in on an arbitrary and useless point, I think you mean the _presence_ of ‘missing links’, else you have a double negative and are arguing that the continuity of the fossil record implies cosequences for our modelling.
That idea of ‘missing links’ exist at all is implied by the presence of fossils on either side of an apparent transition providing reason for hypothesis of the intermediate creature’s existence. The over-all fossil record provides the evidence to hypothesize of the existence of missing pieces in the same way that the earlier periodic tables of elements helped us (and the current table continues to help) identify many elements before they were discovered or created. The presence of the gaps helped us fill them in, first by hypothesis (educatedly guessing what to look for), then experimentation/exploration, and finally finding evidence in support, or that disproves a particular hypothesis.
fwiw thejeff’s sentence worked fine for me. in context, it’s perfectly clear what “explain missing links in the fossil record” means, while “the presence of missing links” would actually make me do a double-take. can something missing be present? ó_Ô but ultimately it’s a matter of personal preference probably.
Referring actually to carms original post I was replying to: “The absence of ‘missing links’ in the fossil record”
It was clear to me at least, though I can see how it could be seen as a double negative. I read it as “missing links are transitional fossils and we don’t see those in the record”, as opposed to “there are no links missing in the fossil records”.
I know all too well about micro-management …. for the record, it sucks so hard it could pull a tennis ball through a garden hose …. so I automatically have a bias against something called “micro-evolution”.
it might be a little TOO bare boneset–i don’t really think it’s very accurate. ok, so i majored in genetics, but uh i guess i need to refresh myself a little bit on microbiology considering i wasn’t sure if “microbe” was a synonym for “microorganism” (it is, but the term “microbe”/”microorganism” is not super well defined, partly because “life” is not well defined). at any rate, it is certainly an oversimplification to say a virus is “just a molecule”–they are not free-floating nucleotides, being housed in a capsid. the capsid is sometimes surrounded by a lipid envelope, although that doesn’t come from their genetic material. the capsid just wraps some of the host cell membrane around itself. it protects the virus, and is involved in getting the virus into the cell. (a lot of viruses bind to membrane proteins, but these can just come up, press their little bubble up to the cell membrane, and gain entry that way. this is similar to how vesicles carrying proteins (or sometimes RNA) operate inside the cell–they leave one membrane-bound organelle by wrapping themselves in the membrane and bubbling off, and then they enter the next by doing the opposite.
but yeah, the reason that viruses aren’t considered living is because they require a host to propogate to new generations–they have genetic material, and they might even have the genes for proteins like polymerase or reverse transcriptase, but they don’t HAVE the polymerase enzyme so they can’t replicate, and they don’t have genes for ribosomes (or tRNA for that matter), so they can’t make proteins themselves and have to rely on the host ribosomes to make proteins.
(so when i said they don’t have membranes, i forgot that some have envelopes… that’s my bad. anyway being self-contained isn’t really the important part–they all have caspids anyway!)
anyway. sorry if i’m being pedantic, it just seemed like you were saying “They aren’t microbes because they aren’t in membranes.” and then i was like “huh, does ‘microbe’ mean ‘membrane bound microorganism?’
but maybe you were actually just saying “They aren’t microbes because the cell is the smallest unit of life, and they don’t have cells–in fact, they’re smaller than any cell because there isn’t much actual genetic material in a virus.” so maybe i just missed the point there. oops
omg thank you,
and no no, you made a great, uh, “first impression” (i mean i’ve seen you around, so i already knew you were cool ^^) by being a total nerd and also poking holes in my throwaway comment and linking to an article which i have read and found interesting.
turns out i was just plain wrong, not so much because i take a strong stance on the “are viruses alive” debate (i don’t) but because i’d always just thought (based on what? can’t remember now) that “microbes” referred strictly to single-celled organisms, and therefore excluded anything smaller.
the article does a fine job of explaining that it’s actually a vague umbrella term, and viruses or even prions are routinely included, and it’s often just not a very useful concept precisely because it includes extremely disparate categories of, um, things.
anyway, thanks for taking the time to do all that digging and writing!
…that ought to teach me a lesson. it won’t though smh
<3
(yeah i uh apparently thought i was an allergen, huh? i went to bed right after and i was like "oh no i meant IMPRESSION")
luckily i already knew capsids and vesicles and "viruses aren't considered alive because they can't self-replicate" from university. and i was pretty sure i remembered that the lipid envelope is used for entry — lemme just check… yep, it’s legit.)
Anyone else hoping that Joyce is trolling him (and us)? Because it would be hilarious for next strip to be “Heh. Gotcha!” Lol. She basically said a few strips ago that she no longer believes a Christian god exists. It seems unlikely she’d still buy into religiously motivated crap like “micro evolution.” Maybe she hasn’t done research to really understand the details, but I imagine she’s done believing her upbringing over what she’s learning now. Plus, that pose in the last panel is totally one step removed from a troll face.
It’s also possible I put too much faith in humanity and plenty of people continue to buy into even ridiculous bits and pieces of what they were taught even after the foundation comes crumbling down like Barad Due in Return of the King.
Those who believe that religion is the primary impediment to pseudo-science sadly don’t live in my area. Plenty of rural Americans are atheists but then just state they’re libertarian and know that the government created evolution as a theory to control your minds alongside the flouride.
This, but on the other hand Joyce made it pretty clear in an earlier strip that her belief in religion and her belief in creationist pseudoscience and evolution denialism are so intertwined she can’t have one without the other. I hope she’s trolling too
I think part of it may simply be Joyce has a lot of unexamined prejudices that removing the religious angle doesn’t remove. Then again, quite a lot of her prejudices were JUSTIFIED by religion but not CREATED by them.
Willis is a master of unpacking this sort of thing. Kudos to the Cheese.
Joyce challenging her previous faith and subscribing to empirical evidence is reasonably why she enrolled in a course call “Evolutionary Biology” in the first place. ergo: it seems very likely she’s having a go at Joe.
It would be interresting to us as readers, and obviously we need conflict to move forwards or the comic would be in danger of become meaningless (well… more meaningless than anything already is in any of this absurd expanse). However, I would also be rather content for her to have some easier time of some things, as I think she’s had significantly more than her share of difficulty (as if such can be broken up into fair amounts shared, in an arbitrary and absurd existence).
yo Demo, I’m never completely sure if your occasional gushes of nihilism are a) intentionally hysterical or b) a bit alarming, so i find myself torn between lmao’ing and wondering if you’re ok. You ok?
Hey milu. I’m not really sure how to answer this. I’m not willing to lie, and am not willing to give an honest answer even pseudo-nonymously yet publicly attached to me. Um… I have supports and try and be supportive? And I reckon a and b are both true.
well listen, i just think you’re a really sweet and unique person. i hope you get through whatever you need to get through. shit gonna be shit yeah, but shit’s never forever. non-shit cycles keep happening? in my experience? ok, take care.
The hatred of evolutionary teaching is one of those things you have to wonder if it was Qanon of its day because you have a bunch of really-really faithful Protestants and Catholics going to look at them weirdly.
Man: Animals are the same as they’ve been since Creation!
Scottish Presbyterian: Lad, you’re saying Dog Breeding doesn’t exist?
Exactly. In every generation there are denialists, con-men and loons. They’ve had different names and factions in the past, but they keep cropping up. They adapt their message and methods to the time they live in, but they somehow manage to always find an audience. Almost like their methods and message *ahem* evolves to remain enticing to those who would be deceived.
Maybe they can justify dog breeding because “they’re still dogs”. The dogs aren’t “turning into other animals”, just different-looking dogs with physical deformities and the debilitating health effects they cause.
I think that would indicate a lack of big-picture thinking. They don’t see past the end of their own noses, so they can’t conceive of cumulative gradual change over eons. Unless it’s something they can perceive in the short term, or at least within their lifetime, it “just can’t be real”.
The Patreon banner photo shows Willis drawing a strip where it looks like Joyce and Becky are wearing the shirts they have on in this chapter. Is that strip coming up?
Given the professor’s way of putting down egos, he might appreciate saying a microbe with a chance of evolutionary changes several times a minute is more evolved than a mammal that has a chance to change once every 15-50 years.
Regarding your username, if I may enquire: are you lacking a berverage, a faerie, energy, an image element allowing you to be rendered by a computer, or other?
The third one. I started using this name posting on sprite comic fan forums. I had no edited sprite of my own, and could not bear the thought of being presumed male, then having to correct people, then the predictable jokes that come from that, uggh.
The correct response to you is “cool story sister” but that seems to carry some negative or sarcastic connotation. I enjoyed the tale and the throwback to sprite comics. Thank you for sharing.
Best answer to a creationist who says they only believe in “micro-evolution” is to ask them what they call a series of micro-evolutions that happen over time.
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“then I’m micro-going-back-to-bed”
I’d be macro-going back to bed after that line so Joe still has a little patience
micro-patience
Does this count as a micro-agression?
More of a micro-tease I think.
This can only end well.
Watch the two end up bickering right in the class itself, and end up with the only A’s because the prof is like, “FINALLY somebody gets it! There is no such thing as ‘most evolved’. This skit these two did shows the stupidity in it as it can be defined in SO MANY WAYS!”
Joyce: “Skit?”
Joe: “Shh, don’t ruin this”
Joe: ‘If we play our cards right we can keep getting A’s like this ALL SEMESTER.’
Alternatly the professor is like.
“FOOLS! THE ANSWER WAS ME!”
He begins rising into the air and glowing while cackling.
Professor Galasso
What if Galasso ends up being the comic’s big bad? Like the pizza (and subs) restaurant has been a front the whole time, and Galasso has been obfuscating stupidity while running both the Korean mob and Dargon’s organization from behind the scenes.
What if Professor Brock turns out to be Galasso in a wig?
What if he’s been Walkyverse Galasso in exile all along?
That would legit be a Community quality scene.
And now I’m more or less expecting it to happen.
If I taught biology and could pull off the special effects, I would totally go for it.
I’ve been thinking of Betty White’s tools assignment since this homework was brought up.
I only wish Joyce were making up that term and excuse….
I mean it’s a real thing. They don’t understand it but it is a real thing
It’s not really a thing. It’s drawing a distinction based on extent of changes, without acknowledging that the big changes are simply many small changes.
That ‘not acknowledging’ bit is what I mean when I say not understanding it.
Those many small changes altogether need millions of years to happen. Evolution Denialists attack the straw man of “macroevolution” to continue believing that the earth is only a few thousand years old.
However, such a suggestion of recent creation on its own has a huge denialist domino effect on many other proven scientific models, including those behind our modern technology.
Ooh! Ooh! Let me give the answers to those that I was told during my own upbringing!
L-R, T-B:
– Plate tectonics are correct as they exist today, but the world lacked any oceans pre-Flood; post-Flood, it was a Pangaea-esque supercontinent until the world was divided in Peleg’s day, around the time of the Tower of Babel. (This is also when Atlantis sank.)
– Paleontology is correct insofar as the creatures it excavates actually exist/existed, generally speaking. Of course, this doesn’t disprove that the universe is 6000 years old.
– The Big Bang Theory is completely wrong. Next!
– The speed of light is exactly as science tells it to be. No problems with that!
– Radioactive dating doesn’t work because carbon-dating is unreliable because of all the nuclear weapons detonated in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s in particular.
– The solar system formation theories are wrong, because God created the planets as they are now. Next!
– General relativity? I guess it works. No problems with that!
– Heisenber…wha?
– Only macroevolutionary theory is wrong. You don’t see half-giraffe half-elephants or cat-dogs walking around, do you?
– Only evilutionary astronomy!
– Quantum mechanics? What are those?
– The table of elements exist in their perfect order and arrangement because that’s how God made them.
– Well clearly GPS systems do work, so obviously some of the “scientific” assumptions made previously aren’t actually necessary for them to function.
– Ditto computers and electronics in general.
– Alchemy is the Devil’s work, while chemistry yields many useful discoveries.
– Weren’t you listening? Seismology works because plate tectonics are a thing! How do you not understand something as simple as plate tectonics?
– Only evilutionary biology! Like macroevolution!
– Don’t trust everything the “doctors” say is good anyway. Trust in God above all else!
I notice that manipulative groups always develop these kinds of strategies to put critics in no-win positions. If we fail to persuade, we lose. If we succeed at persuading, it means we must be “cheating” somehow, therefore we lose.
I once heard of a group that told its members that atheists used “satanic mind control” to get people to loose their faith. I look at this and I think, “isn’t it less convoluted to accept that people can be persuaded by legitimate counter-arguments”?
Wow… I thought I had heard all the nonsensical creation-“science” arguments before, but “radiocarbon dating doesn’t work because nuclear weapons” is a new one on me.
Even then, these arguments can be used to support not just ANY religion, but the alleged existence of ANY interventionalidt beings that hide all proof of their existence. How do you know that there aren’t giant alien gerbils are controlling our minds to keep us from finding their planet made of gold? How do you know that all of existence isn’t just a game played by alein scorpions, and that all of history is just the game’s backstory?How do you not know the Bible you read was deviously designed by the devil to lead you on a path away from salvation?
It makes perfect sense if you know absolutely nothing about carbon dating. See, those nuclear explosions add neutrons to carbon atoms. All over the earth. Uniformly. To any depth. Solar flares do this, too. So do volcanoes. And supernovas. And other stellar activity. And the magnetic field of the earth. How does this work? By really, really fast hand-waving. Don’t ask any questions.
It is even more uniform when we consider the effects on a single artifact or fossil, with those neutrons evenly distributed throughout the minerals that were already subjected to thousands of years of radioactive decay.
We just measure the radiation of the materials surrounding the artifict, and then use that measurement to discern the original radioactivity of the artifact.
I mean its a step up from “Because when we use it wrong it gives wrong results.”
What about the delightful Flat-Earther standby of ‘we’re using it correctly and it’s giving the right answers but that would suggest that the Earth is round so clearly it’s broken’?
You should say: “Heisenberg was pretty uncertain about his work, so we shouldn’t put any faith in it.”
If I took a shot everytime someone made an equivocation between the “faith” of believing in something that can never be proven and the “faith” that means just plain “confidence”, I’d get blackout drunk in no time flat.
…not that I’d ever do that, but you get the point.
I wrote about this here before but i once watched a long debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham (very satisfyingly monosyllabic names) (Ham is a creationist) and beyond the actual arguments what really stayed with me was the difference in attitude between them.
Ham seemed invested in the intellectual safety that comes from having decided that everything you will ever need to know is inside that one book, and that the root cause, the explanation of everything is “God’s will”, and that you simply can not be proved wrong because you have faith.
Nye otoh exuded this passion for intellectual adventurousness and wonder at the vast, uncharted expanse of nature. To Ham’s barbs like “well do tell us then, how does sssscience explain this, huh?!!” he would never hesitate to say “we don’t know!” and it just felt like so much more FUN to not know and have so much left to find out, than to just sit there all smug and say “the explanation is, because God decided it should be so”.
But… but Atlantis wasn’t in the Bible. It was made up by a heathen Greek. How was it there to sink?
Even the heathen Greeks can be right twice a day.
Probably because hubris.
Approximately 50% (numbers not final) of the Bible is at least Greek-influenced, and about 90% of non-biblical Christianity comes from heathen cultures.
… the fuck?!
In 2010 I had occasion to review the book “Dragonspell” by Donita K. Paul. It is aimed at preteen girls and is essentially religious indoctrination. It suggests that church leaders communicate with God and should always be obeyed, and that evil should be shunned even when its arguments “sound like truth”.
I remember being appalled (and I still am) at the setup for sexual abuse and the suggestion that they should not believe their own common sense when presented with logical arguments. As far as I am concerned this is evil.
> (This is also when Atlantis sank.)
Not only is Atlantis not part of Christian mythology, according to Plato it sank in the 9400s BC, a year which Christians assert does not exist.
don’t underestimate the capacity for Young Earth Creationists to assume any given pre-4000BC date is erroneous out-of-hand
(as a child who was a young earth creationist, i was also super into atlantis, which is why my purple alien guys headquartersed in the bermuda triangle)
(for seriously, YECs assume there was a vast technologically-advanced civilization before the flood that was wiped out due to its sin, the idea of atlantis fits right in there so long as you file those dates off)
Actually macro-evolution need not take millions of years. It can and has been observed under lab conditions. For example, this is a cool paper demonstrating evolution of multicellularity in a matter of weeks.
The authors seem to have forgotten that yeast is secondarily unicellular. It has multicellular ancestors and probably retains some multicellularity-related genes that are still functional or nearly so.
The English Pepper Moth
I disagree that it’s not a thing. I do think there’s value in acknowledging the difference between the smaller changes and larger ones. Especially in regards to human since our lifespan and generation length means larger scale evolution happens a helluva lot slower than in, say, fruit flies.
The more we learn about genetics and develop the technology to study it the more we can recognize the small scale changes that aren’t easily evident but can end up having a big impact on population and a massive impact on individuals’ quality of life.
It’s been a decade but I feel like I legitimately studied micro evolution in my university courses. Like something termed “micro evolution” unironically as a thing professional scientists monitor.
I think you are confused.
Fruit flies are Definitely NOT “micro evolution” .
They are very complex animals with chromosomes , visible traits, short life spans and many offspring: thus making them a good model to study genetic MACRO evolution in humans.
Pretty sure Z knows what they are talking about too, but you are (intentionally or not) misunderstanding them. Z’s not saying fruit flies are a candidate for studying both micro and macro evolution because they’re small. Rather, because they’re short lived, you can observe how many small micro-evolutionary (the smaller) changes can build up, and then have a macro-evolutionary (the larger changes) impact on the population. Essentially, you seem to agree with them, but maybe not in how you read what they wrote.
There is more to the science than ‘big changes are just made of small changes plus iteration/time’.
Like, that’s gradualism, which is a model, and punctuated equilibrium is also a model for how you get big changes when only small changes seem to be permitted by a genetic system.
Those would be my two terms for googling to learn more about what a spectacular pain in the arse evolution is =) For a REALLY simple premise, FUK there’s a lot of thinking and work required.
i thought punctualted equilibrium was pretty much unanimously accepted now?
I may be taking all my info on the subject from SJ Gould books though °3°
welp, 5 minutes later and i already have 6 tabs with massive amounts of text open. damn you carms ^_~
All too fascinating!
By the way, in regard to one of your posts last strip…. do you really do cannabis? Not that there’s anything wrong with that (after all, it was only banned in America out of pure racism and the desire for a scapegoat), I’m just curious.
My impression is that most people born in the 80s or later do cannabis.
lol. in retrospect i don’t know why i wrote that, it didn’t work comedically.
but yeah i smoke/ingest pot fairly regularly. i love it. it gives me
goodideas, it makes me have more belly laughs in a 3-hour high than in entire months, and fuck does music taste good on weed.in fact i may love it a little too much. i’m on a cannabis hiatus at the moment.
what about you then, do you have a recreational drugs practice? what are your thoughts?
Indeed I do. I make it a point to wait at least three weeks or more between sessions in order to minimize tolerance to the substance. I usually take it infused in butter, drizzled on oat waffles or popcorn.
Whenever I take it, I sometimes experience a form of synesthesia where I see/feel/hear/taste this internal continuously evolving geometric hallucination (internal in the sense that I can still perceive the real world; its almost like trading with your eyes open). Most of the time I reach this state where I can feel the energy of the fluids coursing through my body; it feels amazing!
All in all, taken properly, cannabis can provide marvelous experiences and be very effective at expanding consciousness!
Not to mention the fact that the substance has been proven to be less addictive than alcohol (just on par with caffeine in fact), and thousands of times less toxic (even less so than caffeine!).
If need be, I’d be glad to provide citations to those last two findings.
*almost like dreaming with your eyes open.
yeah, i think all of my best experiences were with ingested cannabis rather than smoked (smoking it is just more expedient ^^).
though i don’t think i’ve ever experienced any of the consciousness-expanding phenomena you describe, at least not on pot. now mushrooms, though…
Indeed, smoking it is very much inefficient as 85% of it winds up as second-hand smoke. Edibles and sublingual tinctures are by far more efficient, and much better for your lungs!
Also, I have a bizarre question. Is the Mensa constellation visible where you live?
wow, you are just strapped with data on this, aren’t you ^^
yeah, but the other thing i also didn’t mention that makes smoking an attractive option is it’s easy to pace yourself. you take a hit, wait a few seconds, and with a bit of experience you know if you’re gonna want to get more stoned or if you’re good. with digestive delivery it’s not as easy to estimate. which mind you can be part of the fun =)
re Mensa constellation, is this a trick question? you know where I live =)
In regard to pacing, I always measure whatever I’m gonna take beforehand. When it comes to edibles, patience is key. On his first time doing it, my uncle made the common mistake of redosing a bunch of times in the absence of any immediate effect, only to have it hit him all at once!
Some might worry that whatever they taken may have been a “dud”, and don’t get the effects in their available time window. One of the most assuring ways to tell if it’s working before the major effects set in is that the substance almost always elevates the heart rhythm at first, then substantially slows it down.
By the way, I don’t know where you live, but I’ve narrowed it down to somewhere in Europe or South Africa. Not that I didn’t think you would reveal it to me if I asked you directly; I just wanted to challenge myself with a Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego kind of puzzle, mainly for the intellectual thrill of it!
Could someone refresh my memory on what “micro-evolution” is supposed to be in fundie language?
Basically acknowledging that adaptation and the mechanics of evolution work, while denying speciation.
Given that there’s no agreed upon standard of “different species”, the
Creationists’Evolution Denialists’ argument in regard to “macro-evolution” amounts to no more than attacking a straw man.It means viruses and bacteria can evolve to resist anti-biotics or new diseases, but “real” animals don’t change into whole ‘nother specieses.
This pretty much nails it as far as I’m concerned.
I wonder how many of those types have pet dogs. (And how many of them are ‘purebreds’ like pugs.)
From what I understand, it’s that simple organisms like bacteria can evolve, but not complex ones. If that sounds like ass-covering, that’s because it is.
the micro has nothing to do with the size or complexity of the organism, but rather the degree of change. Wallabies can develop thicker coats when they live in Ireland, peppered moths change colour according to environmental pollution, but peppered moths do not, by slow accretion of minor changes, become wallabies.
As I understand it, they acknowledge minor, observable changes in appearance like the ways in which you can breed new breeds of dogs or horses but claim that that’s distinct from any kind of phenomenon that would create new species.
Basically admitting the existence of trees but not forests.
C’mon! Forests are supposedly these HUGE environments, taking us acres of land! No mere tree can do that! Nice try, though, nice try.
Oh, sure, you expect us to believe that if you put enough trees together, they maaaaaaagically turn into a forest?
Of course. If trees could become a forest, you’d be able to see it, but you cannot, because of all the trees. qed
checkmate, treetheists
You have to have a million micro-evolutions to equal one evolution, and that can’t happen in 6000 years.
The scientific meaning of the micro/macro-evolution distinction has shifted over the years. Originally it came from an early disagreement with Darwin, almost a century ago. The author agreed with microevolution, meaning evolution within a single species — eg, the allele frequencies of cheetahs changing through natural selection so that the average traits of the whole species changed — but disagreed with macroevolution, the evolution of new species, which he characterized in an utterly absurd way. Evolution-deniers have latched on to the early meaning of this distinction (see, they can read science too, why do these ungodly evolutionists ignore their own science?), and this is the way Joyce is using it now.
Nowadays, there are two other meanings for the word macroevolution, both of which fit within the framework of modern evolutionary theory. The first is essentially microevolution on a grand scale (geological time), and there’s not much of a distinction between the two beyond the scale.
The second new meaning is about natural selection forces that are intraspecies (micro) vs interspecies (macro). If, for example, the size and coloration of a peacock’s tail affects his success in attracting mates, that’s microevolution, because the pressures (and hence the changes) are internal to the species. If the size and coloration of his tail affects the ease with which predators catch and eat him, that’s macroevolution, because it involves pressures between species and thus affects both. One species out-competing another and driving it to extinction works out a lot differently than one set of alleles out-competing another within an individual species, because the individuals with the advantageous alleles can interbreed with the ones without, and that’s not something that can happen with interspecies competition. Peacocks with genes for advantageous courtship coloration can (and usually will) breed with peahens without those genes, causing them to be shared and competing lines to merge, but can’t interbreed with their predators (and would be wise not to make the attempt).
oooh i’d never heard that distinction made. well, not the inter/intra-specific selection distinction, that yes, but calling microevolution the evolution of allele frequency within an interbreeding population. thanks for taking the time to explain this!
Evolution that we can observe and thus can’t reasonably be denied is microevolution. This leaves us free to deny evolution that can only be deduced from the results – existing species and the fossil record.
“Joe you”re fine….I mean we”re fine! I believe in nice ass….I mean evolution!”
Assvolution?
Joe’s ass is NOT micro, tho.
The problem isn’t that there’s a specific difference between macro- and micro- evolution that we’ve yet to uncover. The problem is that we humans are trying to draw lines on top of what’s actually a spectrum.
I mean.
All evolution is, is micro-evolution over extended periods of time.
Would Joyce hate Catholicism even more if she found out they don’t deny evolution exists?
There are too many songs titled “Primordial Soup”. :/
How about this one?
What about “All Always Was” by Historian Himself?
https://youtu.be/o6x-EqIOg5c
How about Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Nightwish?
omg that Nightwish song is simultaneously awesome and kind of hilarious XD APPROVE
I thought long and hard about the answer to what is the highest evolved organism and determined it to be a microscopic alga called a diatom, which according to this article, is the highest up an organism has ever been discovered.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150428-secrets-of-living-high-in-the-sky
By another definition, the highest evolved organism is whoever can do the most weed at once.
That is the correct answer.
Then that’s basically all of them. Empirical evidence had revealed that it’s nigh impossible to overdose from cannabis. You’d have to consume 80% of your weight in pure THC to induce a lethal response.
Who said anything about overdosing?
It would have to be measured proportional to body weight, otherwise elephants get an unfair advantage.
Dehydrated tardigrades survived in the vaccine of space and 2/3 successfully were revived – ergo tardigrades are the highest form of life.
Also. Just. Seriously. Tardigrades. Like. Damn.
Well of course they survived, they got a space vaccine. If you gave them a sun vaccine they’d survive being deorbited into the Sun, too.
I also vote for tardigrades.
Too bad they aren’t well-protected against threats that they are actually likely to encounter. What’s the point in being able to survive in a vacuum if a mite eats you before you have a chance to board the rocket?
I know evolution is random, but whoever came up with the percentile dice tables for tardigrade evolution just took random way too far.
Tardigrades are the Wild Magic Sorcerer of evolution.
mite can eat what mite wants
there will always be more tardigrades
Joyce I know it hasn’t besn easy for you losing your faith; but since you have, don’t you think it is possibke they lied about evolution too?
I mean she’s only been flirting with athieism for a couple months max vs over a decade of engrained miseducation. It’s not gonna be a quick transition. Becky’s even struggled rejecting her false information and Joyce is nowhere near as eager for it.
I think she’s messing with him, at least some.
Yep.
Babysteps, I guess.
If she can’t fully wrap her head around it yet, she at least needs to know how to BS it.
Ah, the denialist staircase. People can seldom handle an inconvenient truth all at once, so they often start by believing in smaller and smaller lies that get closer to the truth.
that or the other thing, whatever you call it, it may have to do with a personality type, but you’ll see some people yank themselves from a shrill, loyal, card-carrying Xist to a loud, unwavering, true-blue Yist, overnight. Because I guess being intensely committed to any one set of beliefs might matter more to some than the beliefs themselves.
This kind of behavior evidently has a link to human tribalistic tendencies, especially in politics.
In 2003, social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen recruited liberal and conservative college students with strong opinions on welfare for a study in group influence (Party over policy: The
dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs). He presented them with one of two versions of a welfare policy: one provided generous benefits; the other offered slender, stringent benefits.
Whenever one of the policies was presented to a participant, half the time it was claimed to be supported by the Democrats;
half the time it was claimed to be supported by the Republicans.
Cohen found that when policy and party support conflicted, participants showed a strong tribal bias, focusing on the party support rather than the content of the policy. Liberals strongly favored conservative
policies labelled Democrat over liberal policies labelled Republican, and conservatives strongly favored liberal policies labelled Republican over conservative policies labelled Democrat.
To know that group identity can effectively nullify group values in this way should give us
serious pause.
oh cheers, i’d never heard of that study. that said the results are extremely unsurprising to me.
but i also don’t think these sorts of findings are as appalling or sinister as they’re often framed to be. what i would like to know, is how did the subjects justify their support for a policy that their stated values would normally clash with? was it because they didn’t know anything about that particular field of policy and trusted their party leaders to use their greater expertise as they would want them to? did they grumble but still think supporting their party mattered more in the big picture than being on the right side of every issue? there’s a lot of sensible reasons for making this sort of choice.
when i first read about the Asch experiment it shook my faith in humanity or something, but the more i thought about it, the more i was like, wait a minute. If i believe the answer is A while literally everyone else in the room thinks the answer is B, doesn’t it actually make sense to think that i might be wrong, like that doesn’t sound so irrational. In real life of course it’s good to keep that effect in mind and look for reasons that might skew a majority of people towards the wrong answer, but on principle, doing a reality check when you’re drastically outnumbered in your position doesn’t feel like a bad thing.
I suspect that they didn’t justify their support. That their perception of the policy changed, based on who supported it.
Which honestly isn’t that surprising. The parties have staked strong opposing ideological positions. It’s not just tribalism coming into play when you’re told they support a policy that strongly conflicts with that position. If I was told Republicans supported a liberal policy – like the generous welfare benefits, if I didn’t simply laugh it off, I’d assume there were catches I didn’t see in the brief overview.
Predictably, the participants in the experiment later denied being influenced by the party labels, although many of them believed other people would be influenced, especially their ideological adversaries.
Of course. I’m more suggesting that it’s not irrational to be influenced by party labels, because the party labels actually mean something.
Part of life is learning how to separate concepts that have been blurred together. Things like nudity and sex, blood relatedness and obligation. We often blur together ideas and people, and we need to separate them.
The source of an idea does not negate the idea itself. Even tyrants on one occasion express worthwhile thoughts.
The listing of the author of an idea is only about giving credit where credit is due. Multiple people will have converged on the same thought.
Ideas ALWAYS stand and fall on their own merits. The author is incidental. If they fail to live up to their proclaimed values, they get an entertaining smack of irony.
Amazing how the world changes once that realization spreads.
Theoretically, sure.
In practice, it’s bullshit.
The problem with the experiment is that they’re suggesting nonsense. They’re suggesting cognitive dissonance. Which means they’re lying, even if I can’t see how. If you know what the parties stand for and the history of what kinds of policies they’ve supported and enacted, the scenarios just don’t make any sense.
i’ve started reading the paper, one interesting thing they hadn’t predicted is that,… well i’m just gonna quote it:
“One unpredicted finding was that each party was more persuasive when its actual position differed from its expected one (i.e.,when Democrats supported a stringent policy, and when Republicans supported a generous one). This result could reflect people’s preference for moderates over extremists (see Keltner & Robinson,1996), their tendency to consider the merits of expectation-violating messages more carefully than those of expectation-consistent messages (Maheswaran & Chaiken, 1991), or their trust of communicators who express positions contrary to their assumed biases, beliefs, or self-interests (see Eagly, Chaiken, & Wood, 1981; Walster, Aronson, & Abrahams, 1966). While future research could profitably investigate the issue, this result suggests that participants noticed the inconsistency between the stated position of their party and the expected one. Yet they conformed, even though the stated position plainly defied their party’s (and their own) prevailing ideological commitments.” (emphasis mine)
i just think that digging into the actual meat of the experimental data, in this as in many similar cases, reveals way more interesting insights than what any surface reading of the data might suggest. like, what, “people = sheep”? i’m sorry to say i personally find that to be a boring conclusion.
(it should also be noted that these are all psychology students (as in 99% of psychology studies lol. 2 of the subjects actually guessed what they were really being tested on^^) and that they tested a lot more liberals than conservatives. make of that what you will!)
(to be clear, @thejeff, i’m backing up your point that what is being tested here is people’s way of dealing with cognitive dissonance, and in the conclusions the researchers suggest that though they didn’t use the cognitive dissonance paradigm, it would be interesting to do so in further research on this phenomenon.)
https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/party_over_policy_0.pdf
But if Joyce is an atheist now, how does she think all the stuff happened?
She’s an atheist, but by the looks of it she has yet to come out to Joe. She’s just pretending to believe in the Creationists’ version of microevolution to maintain the impression that she’s a still Biblical Literalist barely compromising her beliefs.
Joe knows, she told him
Perhaps more importantly, this lets her piss off Joe a bit more.
Maybe, but she was taught this under the guise of science, not pure creationism. It’s not really a surprise if she wasn’t easily able to shake all the influence.
I suspect she hasn’t thought about it too hard lately, since it’s probably a pretty painful topic
Didn’t she say that she was gonna embrace empirical evidence in the Birthday Pursuit arc?
If it really is significantly painful for her to think about, that suggests she may very well be stuck between atheism and theism. When it comes to the deconversion process in the real world, this intermediary phase is actually pretty common (and I speak from experience).
As a neopagan, which is an immensely casual religion, the idea that some former Christians need to “deconvert” – which sounds like something undercover spies or brainwashing victims undergo – is rather alarming.
I grew up in a rather conservative church in Oklahoma, it is and should be alarming. America’s in a bad place.
I think a lot of the rest of the world is also in that bad place.
The bits that aren’t are mostly ocean.
Oh haven’t you heard? Vast fields of microplastics, deoxygenation, overfishing… the oceans are fucked.
Yeah, the oceans are definitely feeling a bit salty about it.
it’s gonna cost them a lot to clean up all that mess, so meanwhile they might help to tide them over.
*need help. dammit
When I was younger, I went to a Methodist school and I went to church for a few years. My parents weren’t overly religious, so we stopped going after a while and I haven’t been back to church in years, but Christianity is still the religion I’m most familiar with.
But in recent years, whenever I watch online sermons, especially from US pastors, I find myself being a iittle alarmed by the message they preach. It’s not that they preach hate or anything like that, but the message is usually “Trust in God. God will provide. Obey the Bible. You’re not doing anything wrong.” And to me, that feels very irresponsible because it’s sending the message that there is nothing wrong with the world. That the Bible and Church teachings are infallible. Nothing needs to change. Things like racism, poverty, climate change… It’s not something you need to worry about. God will fix it. And I think this attitude also bleeds over into other topics and areas that traditionalists feel uncomfortable with or threatened by, such as the role of women in the church, or LGBT+ rights, or changing religious demographics. There is no impetus in Christian doctrine to adapt or investigate these new things, to learn that they’re either harmless or how to welcome differences, because things are always perfect the way they are and doesn’t need to change.
This attitude is extremely short-sighted, I feel; the world is constantly changing and evolving, and allowing oneself to get complacent and stagnate has been the downfall of not just individuals, but also entire nations or even empires. The last Chinese emperors believed that China was perfect and could do no wrong, and they were willing to shut themselves off from the world and pretend that it wasn’t changing all around them. They got a rude awakening in the 20th century, and now it seems like the US is falling into the same trap with MAGA and Trumpism-style politics.
That’s not to say that former Christians don’t convert to other religions. It’s that it’s surprisingly common for former members of Abrahamic religions in particular (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc) to undergo complete disillusionment and subsequent complete loss of belief in ANY religion. I suspect several reasons for this.
1. The process was started by a tragedy that caused them to come face to face with one form or another of the problem of evil (i.e. if there is a God that is all loving and all powerful, why does he not prevent suffering in his universe? How could I suffer? I followed all the rules!!!). This problem inevitably stems from Abrahamic religions monotheistic nature; they are forced to combine the source of all good and source of all evil into a single god, thereby creating a god with conflicting attributes.
2. It happens after they start reading scripture, and finding that their holy passages are monuments to pure barbarism and sadism (if commands to kill people for picking up sticks on the wrong day of the week on top of countless calls for genocide isn’t nigh perfect fuel for disillusionment, then what is?).
Although it’s also not uncommon for them to sort of cycle through other religions until they reach atheism.
I’ve observed a process where people from strictly ritualized denominations tend to migrate to very happy-clappy, “authentic” feeling denominations and vice versa. This often, but not always, leads to atheism in the end.
As a former Christian I think a part of it is that harsh bible literalism in all things really shoots Christianity in the foot sometimes, especially since it’s common in mainstream denominations and not just weird little sects. Like some things can weather that storm but not everything. The creation story sure as hell can’t. It perhaps could work as like the Jesus parables if people wanted to go that way but it’s more common to take it literally than go for that thought process. And it becomes an all or nothing mentality eventually like it was for Joyce unless say you become like Becky in the matter.
Like it probably helps in keeping control on those who remain but it becomes like that building on sand versus rock parable for some. Bible literalism is literally sand. It crumbles under too much scrutiny.
It works much like that for the leaving of any manipulative group.
It all starts with some conflicting idea has managed to get through our automatic defenses. Like a pebble in a shoe, we can’t quite shake it loose. When we look to our ideology
for answers, we start noticing flaws we never spotted before. The problems then begin to multiply. Before long, the ideology is breaking apart. Then flying apart. Psychologically, it’s like throwing a rock through a spider’s web; the foundations of one’s reality are ripped apart, leaving them in a kind of limbo.
It can take time to recover from a state of such all-encompassing disillusionment.
Eventually, we feel ready to face the task of rebuilding our world piece by piece. We get the chance to build better foundations. In the place of dogmatic certainty, mindless compliance, and emotional thinking, we start to use honest doubt, mindful resistance, and critical thinking.
that’s well put.
wanna expand on your personal history with religion? i’m curious!
*like sand, damn I wish there was an edit button.
i thought “bible literalism is literally sand” sounded pretty good ^^
Literalism is certainly one of Christianity’s main problems. Even some of the other Abrahamic religions are more allegorical, and other world religions certainly are.
Which is too bad since Christianity does have some good core concepts (like forgiveness and being nice to people and treating others with respect). It’s just that some people/many churches tend to bury those concepts beneath piles of stupid, bigoted, poorly researched bullshit.
Yeah I agree on that take, especially on other religions. Quite frankly I sometimes wonder if I’d have made a pit stop into Judaism at least for a little while if I’d actually researched it more during my faith crisis rather than after I realised I was now an atheist and had emotionally accepted that. I mean there’s even arguments that Abraham was in fact wrong to try to sacrifice Issac or that the fact people are so horrified at such a concept now is a good thing because it shows good societal moral progression because these stories are old, old as balls. Or even the fact you’re‘allowed’ to argue with God.
Granted this is more stuff I’ve absorbed from internet interactions with various different people who follow it from likely different ways of following it rather than hard core research (so perhaps: grain of salt and I’m getting things wrong) but like. It’s wild how Christianity views Judaism in such a generally simple and condescending way as if it’s just Christianity without Jesus (and thus sad and even scary because like Jesus and some of his teachings about forgiveness is probably like the only bright spot in the mainstream Christian take on things) when ehhh, Judaism is diverse in its opinions and much more complicated than that at least it seems.
Granted Christianity from the Presbyterian form while I was in it kind of tried to make everything without Jesus was just dark and scary and had something missing (at best they’d be considered‘seductive’ if not). So yeah.
Though literalism in the modern sense is relatively rare in the history of Christianity and still limited to a fairly small, if politically powerful, population.
It varies from individual to individual, but those two patterns crop up fairly frequently. A third frequent one would be reading the scripture for the first time (or with fresh eyes) and seeing how it either contradicts the reality of the world around them or contradicts itself or how the religion contradicts it. (“Hey, wait a minute, stars aren’t actually fixed in a firmament” or “Hey, wait a minute, Jesus couldn’t have been crucified both before and after Passover, one of these gospels must be wrong…” or “Hey wait a minute, my preacher said that camel through the eye of a needle thing was about how easy it was to lead a camel through a canyon named the Eye of the Needle, but read in context Jesus is clearly saying how difficult it is.”)
The key ingredient seems to be jump-starting the questioning, regardless of what mechanism causes that.
I’ve never heard of that supposed canyon. I wonder if some Prosperity Gospel preacher just made it up.
I have heard the idea that the Eye of the Needle is actually a tiny side door in the city wall of Jerusalem, where a camel either wouldn’t fit through at all or only with great difficulty.
I’ve also heard the idea that the “camel” is a scribal error for a tow, a very similar word in the original Greek.
wow, i’d never heard of these versions but hm! interesting!
what’s a tow?? *looks it up* oh you mean like a big rope??
Or it’s just a literal expression about how hard it is for the rich to get to heaven. It was in response to the rich man asking how to make it into heaven. Jesus told him to give his possessions to the poor and follow him, which he wasn’t willing to do.
These other explanations seem like excuses to avoid facing what Jesus was saying.
The eye of a needle metaphor appears in the Talmud as well, with an elephant instead of a camel. That makes the “rope” mistranslation version less likely. It doesn’t rule out the gate theory, but that idea doesn’t appear for centuries afterwards.
…..
*forgoes the “camel tow” pun*
*0* you’re so brave
People in such all encompassing manipulation tend not to question until they’re ready to see bullshit for what it is. They risk pulling the bottom out from their entire worldview otherwise and that can be extremely hard to do before you’re ready. People can rationalize almost anything.
I have discovered that Relativity and Quantum Mechanics cannot both be true. Physic contradicts itself, and so I shall give up my faith in physics. Oh, no. Logical paradoxes are a thing. I henceforth denounce rationality entirely and will be guided by ignorance alone.
ignorance shall be my shepherd; i shall not have a fucking clue.
What that actually means is that they can’t both be true in the main situations that they model.
Physical principles like F = ma are descriptors, not controllers. Scientific models of all fields are used not because they are absolutely representative of the “truest true nature of the universe”, but because they are useful to us in that they help us more and more accurately predict the outcome of natural phenomena and create technology that harnesses their nature (cars, clocks, computers, etc.).
Newtonian mechanics works very well in everyday situations where objects don’t even come close to the speed of light. However, the model tends to break down when we approach they speed of light, and that’s when relativity is used.
Saying that Newtonian mechanics are “wrong” because of that or any other similar complaint is really looking at physics and pretty much all of science in the wrong way. Models in science are always discerned not by how well they reflect the “true nature of reality”, but as tools that are useful in predicting the outcomes of situations, and how well they can inspire future investigation of their respective phenomena. A model, much like a tool, may be modified or even overhauled replaced entirely if it can help us predict the unfolding of a phenomena that much more accurately.
Look at that contradiction you mentioned not as an excuse to give up confidence in science, but as an opportunity for further investigation. WHY do forces become more or less dominant on different scales? What would be the LEAST convoluted explanations behind that? If any explanation were true, what else would you expect to see in observation or experiment?
These are the kinds of questions that will get you into the most important part of the scientific mindset: acknowledgement of epistemology. That is, honestly reckoning with the very nature, origins and limits of knowledge itself.
…nope. still prefer Clif’s cop-out
(i’m joking. because you are too serious. the balance of the universe was in peril, so i had to)
(but thanks for that primer anyway)
(note that by now, anyone who’s been paying attention knows you only have to make any ridiculously irrational claim for you to provide a free science lesson =P)
(i see you’ve even gone and researched the species concept since the other day btw, and found out it had no single agreed upon definition, good on you!!)
I’m glad to inform! It’s one of my most important duties as a scientist, after all!
By the way, when I stated the “official” definition of species the other day, I meant that it was “official” in the sense that it was the one most commonly taught in high school science classes. I should have been more clear on that.
oh! ok my bad! i misread then.
which brings me to this thing i think i would have had to tell you eventually, so let me say it now.
you take your duty to inform very seriously and that is pretty awesome.
but maybe you get carried away sometimes? like, maybe, try not to automatically assume that people know less than you do and need to be educated? it’s just ever so slightly vexing when that happens.
if you’re not like 100% positive that someone is being wrong on the internet (which happens a lot, so i understand getting a bit trigger-happy after a while) maybe try hedging by saying something like “perhaps i misunderstood, but are you saying X? Because actually,…”
Thanks milu. I don’t intend to imply that people are undereducated or anything by elaborating like this.
Many people who are reading comics like this may be under the influence of manipulative groups, who when their members are in states of disillusionment or crisis will use strategies to make sure said dissonance falls in their favor and rope them back in to the group. My hope is that by providing information like I have, I give these people the tools they need to start thinking for themselves and breaking free of their group’s influence; in essence, I intend to empower everyone with information, which they can use to think more clearly, make better decisions, and lead better lives.
Even educated people can make epistemological mistakes, and find themselves roped into manipulative groups because, like all humans, they have brains that have evolved to resolve dissonance in favor of consistency.
Even without manipulative groups implicated at all, I believe that all people, of all education levels never stop learning.
Misunderstandings like the ones I have adress may cause even ordinary, educated people to distrust science, at a time when science is most important to our advancement as individuals, as a society, and civilization itself.
When I elaborate like I have done, I do not intend to address only person who made the comment I am responding to, but to everyone who ever reads them, in the name of public service.
I hope this clarifies things. Thank you for taking the time to give valuable, specific, constructive criticism on one of my methods. On top of informing others, this is also one of the most important duties of a scientist!
Hey, Milu. Wagstaff is fulfilling an important function here.
As he points out, physical theories are not about Truth with capital T. They are pragmatic tools for prediction and understanding. The fact that they are not about the “true nature of reality” means that the incompatibilities of our two major theories of physics is not a reason for concern. Which is not to say all physical theories are equally good.
So too are religions a tool. A different kind of tool. They provide a different kind of guidance and understanding. Looking at internal contradictions kind of misses the point and there is much throwing out of the baby with the bathwater. Which, again, is not to say all religions are equally good.
So, my point was not precisely to disagree with Reltzik, but to parody the process they described. And Wagstaff with their informative post amplified the point of my inanity much better than I would have done. Though I do miss the opportunity to ask someone, what’s the difference between the two situations.
Regardless, I find Wagstaffs urge to educate admirable, and if he misses the humor from time to time … well, no-one is perfect except myself, and sometimes I wonder about me.
Thanks, Clif!
I regard to the alleged guidance religion provides, addressing milu’s curiosity on my history with religion, that’s kind of one if the reasons I quit.
It’s not even exclusive to religions that evoke the concept of gods.
I reckon that over half of all human misery to date can be traced to one basic behavior:
The tendency to attribute justice to a universe that has no inherit justice.
When people try to rationalize why so many good people suffer under the reign of a higher power, logical pathways repeatedly lead to divine narcissism, persecution games, division and suffering.
@clif @Wagstaff
oh no actually i kinda love it when someone is making a joke and Wagstaff just completely ignores the humour and launches into why it’s inaccurate =D i agree it a) is useful PSA, b) may actually contribute to the joke as you pointed out Clif, c) or at least is just kinda goofy and precious <3
no, i'm fine with that. a couple times what i found distracting and frustrating is when trying to make a serious point, and someone on here (and that's not always been you Wagstaff in fairness) comes in and nitpicks at a surface detail i may have glossed over for expediency and because my posts can get quite long enough as it is.
but also, eh, you're probably right to do so anyway. i guess in a generalist forum such as this, rehashing the basics matters more than any attempt at being a bit profound. this is just me being huffy at the wrong person for the wrong reasons and probably i should just go out more lol.
so. sorry about that! you go on doing the Lord's work and i shall endeavour to ~chill tf out~
(…not to mention i did the exact same thing to a/snow/mouse on this very page, except very ineptly, and will now proceed to go apologize to them as well ^^)
It’s not bad, it’s just that their education was all wrong so they need to be re-educa… wait
But it’s sp much simpler to do away with the people we think are wrong.
Do you disagree?
Yeah i mean their are other options athiesm isnt for everyone. Just because i thonk the christain god is a abusive monster doesnt mean the concept of a higher power has to be thrown out the window.
Even outside any scripture, an all-knowing, all-powerful being who brought suffering into this universe by its very nature would be the most inhuman being conceivable.
Being all-knowing and all-powerful is pretty inhuman.
Bringing suffering into the universe by it’s very nature, however, seems all too human to me.
Also, not every deity is supposed to be all-knowing or all-powerful, let alone both.
Suffering only had to be part of being human because of the rules that such a being would make. But if it really wanted to, it could have changed that rule, considering that an all-powerful God would have the ability to do that.
There are times when we humans have the desire, the knowable urge to help others who are suffering, but have not the means or knowledge to do so.
Meanwhile, and all-knowing, all-powerful God, if he existed, would have literally everything he anyone would ever need to help all who are suffering, yet conspicuously choose not to help.
This means that an all-knowing, all-powerful God would by its very nature be the most callous, inhuman monster conceivable.
I agree that such a being would be callous. Incredibly so. I am just not convinced that people are incapable of inflicting such horror upon themselves. To flip around the christian belief (and I think nail it down rather accurately): man created god in his own image.
Neopagan isn’t that casual. The only way I could “deconvert” is if I systematically erased a vast majority of my lived experiences.
I can, and have, tell various entities that I’m not working with them anymore – but I can’t become an atheist without gaslighting myself.
But isn’t conversion to religion gaslighting in and of itself?
I mean, with thousands of years of practice, the Abrahamic religions have gotten gaslighting down to a fine art. They proclaim us indebted and guilty because of events before our birth. They put followers in impossible double binds by condoning and condemning the same behaviors. They propose inconsistent values that are impossible to observe consistently. They declare acts and thoughts that cause no conceivable injury to be worthy of punishment, torture or death.
These maneuvers erode our sense of judgement, making us more susceptible to being manipulated.
Theists are compelled to develop a relationship with God, a being who we’re told withholds all evidence of his existence because he wants people to have the option of not believing he exists.
If a human parent deliberately withheld all evidence of their existence from their child, while claiming to want a good relationship with the child, we’d immediately see the chaos that would arise from that scenario.
Substitute “human parent” with “Heavenly Father” (or any other divine being for that matter), and we get exactly the same chaos.
The most likely way to reject beliefs based on past experiences is by re-evaluating those past experiences based on new understanding. A good example being someone who experienced an unexplained and scary stranger visiting them in the night who believes strongly that it was an alien finding out that sleep paralysis is a fairly well-understood phenomenon that explains the experience better than aliens.
I know I had a similar experience growing up. I had a million experiences I used to convince myself that I was straight and cis. However, I now know pretty damn clearly that I’m neither. Looking back, I see the experiences that lead me to those conclusions very, very differently. The experiences remain, but my interpretation of them and what I learn from them doesn’t remain static.
Many religious people from all kinds of faiths have powerful lived experiences to point to, and some of those people still end up rejecting those beliefs down the road.
I wouldn’t presume to say anything about your specific experiences, but “This belief is based on X lived experience, therefore that belief will never change” isn’t really true unless you plan to keep yourself cut off from any knowledge that might change how you interpret those experiences. Which I guess you could do if that’s what you want, but at that point, you’re specifically working to prevent a belief from being challenged or changed, which you can do whether you have some defining experience or not.
From which I conclude that the only reason that I wound up mostly cis and straight was because in my case it really was aliens.
The sad thing is, a lot of those fundie “Christian groups” are so cult like that those who leave do have a lot of deprogramming to do. Even if converting into less… closed off shall sleep say Christian denominations
No, the use of the term “deconversion” simply refers to the fact that becoming an atheist is wholly unlike converting from one religion to another; it means to leave religion entirely.
Obviously magic.
or CGI. We are living in a simulation after all.
A magical simulation.
I’m with Joe.
Same.
KISS KISS KISS KISS KISS KISS KISS KISS.
God, right?
Joyce is an atheist now, she’s not going to kiss God.
Would that even matter in light of the notion that God is already inside everyone?
Woah, there. I didn’t give consent.
*reach out and touch faith*
Neither did Mary. (Coerced consent is not consent)
Luke 1:26-38 #MeToo
(or maybe #HerToo?)
*grinds Transformers together*
I’m 85% certain that Joyce is teasing Joe here, and I love it
This actually seems like one of the more likely scenarios, considering that she did say she was gonna embrace empirical evidence quite a bit ago.
Provided of course that doesn’t mean she’s stuck in a Rationalization Hampster Wheel.
Joyce can believe in micro-evolution if Joe can believe in micro-doing-his-gosh-darn-homework.
Two hours? Seriously?
yeah! fuck you Joe! for some reason!
I just moved to a different time zone and I have to wait an extra hour for DOA and I’m not okay with this.
the way you framed it it sounds like you only have yourself to blame, and who wants to blame themself??!
pro tip: yell at DOA for moving one time zone away from you. it’s called einsteinian morality, it’s so liberating
Now if Einstein had just set the speed of light slow enough that it took an entire day for the information to move from one time zone to another, it would be the same time in each time zone, just different days. Problem solved, so blame Einstein,
Micro-evolution IS evolution, dang it!
Calling microevolution the only form of evolution is like believing in raindrops without believing in rain!
Calling microevolution the only form of evolution is like believing in Micro Machines without believing in machines!
Calling microevolution the only form of evolution is like believing in microwaves without believing in waves!
I like y’all’s analogies.
I am so excited for more Ex-Fundie Comix. I hope it’s been cathartic to write them, too.
She’s joking, right??
I mean she’s basically an atheist now
sure she is, but is Joe in on the joke?
This storyline is gonna be 100% deadpan trolling between tongue-in-cheek frenemies.
She wants to be indoctrinated with atheist ideas.
She wants Joe to indoctrinate her.
She wants Joe
That would be impossible. You can’t “indoctrinate” someone into being an athiest. “Athiest” can be used to describe ANYONE who doesn’t believe in the existence of any gods for whatever reason. Atheism is not a religion, nor is it an ideology. Atheism and Atheists altogether have to unifying doctrine, no common faith, no dogma, no ritual, no system of worship, no symbolism, no scripture, no mythology, no sacred objects or
concepts.
Some people fallaciously make the claim that believing no gods exist is a “faith” position. However, this is an equivocation between the “faith” of believing in something that cannot be proven and the “faith” that when casually used just means “confidence”. Athiests are as confident that there are no gods as much as they are confident that there isn’t a giant alien hamster on a distant planet controlling all our minds, making us hallucinate all of our lives and all of science. That latter outlandish claim can’t be disproven by its very nature, but are you gonna believe that, too?
Some atheists have built up a large body of refutations against flawed arguments and claims for the existence of gods. But refuting arguments and claims doesn’t amount to doctrine or faith. It’s just a response to other people’s attempts at persuasion.
When I left my basically a cult upbringing I just assumed everything they said about science was wrong *shrug*
Joe is way more patient than Joyce deserves. I stopped suffering fools and religious fanatics gladly decades ago.
I believe in both creation and evolution
Joyce just needs to get to that point.
Joyce might be more comfortable and functional at that point… but what she needs (IMO and on a psychological level) is to clean mental house, putting everything in either a “keep” or “toss” or “quarantine then assess” box. And I don’t think a-creation would end up in the keep box. It wouldn’t work for her.
A happy endgame for her would, I think, be found in some version of secular humanism and/or existentialism.
*a belief in creation
Right, but what parts does she put in which boxes and what criteria does she use to decide? It’s not as easy as it sounds.
Which is why that would be a happy ending to her story, rather than a happy story. (Er, story of this part of her life.)
If you believe in evolution, you’re doing it wrong.
Now Joe sees why two hours is not enough time to do homework: sometimes you will need to make up for your partner, who is still coming to grips about how science actually sees things.
You’re kidding right?
….
You’re kidding right?
I’m with Joe – god fucking dammit.
If she’s not kidding, I’m definitely with Joe. I really hope she’s kidding.
Answers In Genesis. Absolute barf. I partake in Viced Rhino’s YouTube content (very much like Willis/Joyce in terms of background btw), and they’re a frequent occurrence on his channel.
Oh, hey, another VR sub.
Quick poll: Who’s more annoying to listen to? Ken Ham or Kent Hovind or Ray Comfort?
So, which is the most microevolved organism?
There is a joke in there about organs and orgasms, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
You haven’t found the J-spoy?
All but one of my exes haven’t been particularly into sexually exploring their bodies, so I don’t have a solid body of evidence on which to support the hypothesis that I might know where it is. (Setting aside the amount of reading I have done on the subject) But then I don’t know if you’re refering to the G-spot and making a bilingual frenglish joke, some other joke, a typo, or actually referring to something of which I am truly ignorant.
pretty sure that was a J for joke ^^
it made your line even funnier, i might add =D
plus you know Clif. They wouldn’t just ask that sort of thing out of the blue
Yeah I don’t know what happened there. I made a throw away joke, essentially forgot about it, then read clif’s comment and my brain went in a completely different direction and tangled up in bad bilingualism.
I’d say whoosh, but I dug a tunnel, built and closed the hatch, and wasn’t even aware of the airtraffic.
I believe in micro-stepping, not macro-stepping. I can walk to the store, but not to another country.
You good sir/ma’am need Seven League Boots!
Do not forget to take the necessary preparations before using Seven-League Boots, as doing otherwise result in spectacular but tragic incidents. As one would expect of a mode of locomotion that consists in putting one foot 21 miles ahead of the other.
Our eyes evolved to see under water. Their ability to function out of water is a pretty inefficient adaptation. Just one tidbit I remembered which guess Joyce’s textbooks will explain in detail.
Is it a coincidence today is a good day to take a stick and measure its shadows to prove the circumference of the Earth? Flat Earth and Young Earth conspiracists ought to get together and compare notes. Maybe they’ll both find the other’s arguments insupportable and also find they’re the same arguments.
Is it just me or are Joe and Joyce wearing similar coloured clothing? Doesn’t seem the normal colour clothing Joes wears….
It’s not just you. Perhaps dressing in similar colors is an attraction indicator like laughing at her jokes or imitating her movements.
Oh god, couple outfits.
yeah, get a room already
With a walk-in closet, to hold all the couple outfits.
dammit joyce that is not really a thing and you should read some actual sciencey books
This is known to Creationism-watchers as “the Micro-Macro Mambo”. ;P
She said that just to annoy Joe, didn’t she? Because she likes him when he’s exasperated like that!
KAWAII DESU ≠3
It is, I think, equal parts wanting to hear arguments against the beliefs she’s realizing she has to reject, and wanting to annoy Joe, ‘cuz that’s what people do when they like someone.
I’m so disappointed by Joyce right now. Joe has every right to leave in disgust. But he probably won’t, a but for the assignment a bit for Joyce’s sake.
I’m not completely sure she isn’t trolling him.
Serious question:
How would Joyce feel about the Conscious Creator theory? That usually allows for believing in God while also accepting science and evolution.
The internet has informed me that this is not the widely accepted term for it so I’ll clarify.
I’m talking about the idea that if even one thing was out of place human life would not have come to exist on Earth so it makes sense to believe that someone at least orchestrated the Big Bang.
I think that is what is sometimes referred to as the theory of “Intelligent Design”. which dates back as far as the days of Thomas Aquinas. Basically, it posits that “wherever complex design exists, there must have been a designer; nature is complex; therefore nature must have had an intelligent designer.”
From there it is but a short step to designating ‘God’ as the Intelligent Designer as stated in the Jewish Pentateuch and the Book of Genesis in the Christian Bible.
But that… simply doesn’t follow. If humans wouldn’t exist, humans wouldn’t exist.
You seem to be smuggling in an assumption that humans somehow have to exist.
no no, i’m pretty sure they’re referring to the fine-tuning argument.
basically, the argument says, look at the fundamental physical constants, look at the matter/antimatter asymmetry, look at how unlikely everything was to be exactly the way that it happens to be, notice that if you simulate the universe with slightly different physical constants it becomes an empty wasteland or it crumples in on itself in femtoseconds or whatever.
It’s a long complicated debate that i am entirely unqualified to do any more than link to the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry to, which i haven’t read because i’m too busy reading about punctuated equilibrium and microevolution today.
Do let us know your conclusions.
Seems like a God of the Gaps argument to me.
We don’t know how or why the physical constants are the way they are, so God must have done it.
Hasn’t that always been a creationist/religious argument about anything science related?
“We don’t know how or why, so God must have done it.”
That is in fact exactly what I was referring to, thanks for finding it.
@milu btw
yeah, it’s always seemed to me that atheists don’t really have a leg to stand on when trying to debunk the idea that maybe God caused the Big Bang.
I don’t believe it, but that’s just it, at that point it really is just one belief against another.
“I have no need of that hypothesis.”
Plus, you’ve debunked all actual known religions once you get to the point where you concede “Well maybe some entity caused it all to start 14 billion years ago and that’s all it did.”
oh definitely, if theistic metaphysics was limited to “god engineered the big bang” the entire conversation would be open and closed in minutes and we’d all just move on. you haven’t necessarily debunked panpsychism though, which is the one spiritual belief i sometimes feel drawn to. but again, it’s basically defined by not having any bearing on material reality, at least in the version that appeals to me.
@thejeff, there is no reason to believe that the big bang had to be initiated by some conscious entity. If all things have a cause, and this alleged being caused the big bang, what caused or created the being? And if that, just how far back would the chain of causes creating causes go?
Theists tend to justify this just by saying, “well, [God] was always there”. The notion that the chain of creators necessary has to stop at some unproven point that happens to align with dominant monotheistic beliefs at the time amounts to no more than special pleading. You may as well say, “the big bang was always there”.
@milu, why do you feel drawn to panpsychism? The only way we can really know if others besides ourselves have experiencing minds is through behavior we can observe (hence, Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”).
Inanimate objects don’t really have any behavior we can observe, so there really is no experiment we can do to falsify the prediction that they have minds, making said predictions unscientific.
nah man, thejeff agrees with you probably, they were just like “meh why do i care what caused the big bang”. i was the one who brought this up, or well, PB was and i was backing them up or something.
honestly, saying that the chain of causality has to stop at God having caused the Big Bang doesn’t really strike me as special pleading, because we’re talking of what might very well be a special event, from where we stand. I feel like “what caused the big bang” is really a metaphysical question in the truest sense of the word, you know? not one that physics has much of a claim to, beyond proposing models that, who knows, we might one day figure out how to test. tha’s my understanding anyway, am i off the mark?
so yes, it’s a metaphysical question. and sure if your philosophical allegiance is to rationalism then you might insist that there’s got to be some material cause, but if someone wants the universe to be imbued with some form of intentionality, then they might safely believe that that’s where it resides.
i personally don’t find that topic of “what caused the BB” particularly interesting in itself, but i do enjoy the meta-topic of “is there an atheist argument to be made here”. later in your very same comment you point out that unfalsifiable predictions are unscientific. well….
re: panpsychism, the fact that it’s an unfalsifiable proposition is exactly what makes it attractive as a spiritual belief to me. i think i just like the poetry of it. i don’t really think about it much, but there have been times when i’ve wanted to express gratitude for being alive, and the idea that there was a kind of conscious universe that i was experiencing being a part of heightened the bliss of the moment and produced some pleasant tingles ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
…not “conscious universe” in the sense of a decentralized yet united conscience, more like… everything matters, every little thing. so in that moment, i find that I matter exactly as much as every last atom at the other end of the universe, therefore, i do matter but also, not very much at all. i matter in just the way an exquisite little flame in a fire matters, or the crest of a wave.
…is what that experience is like. i guess it’s not actually about consciousness, after all. is it even spiritual? meh, idk
That is exactly the point that religious folks are uncomfortable with. There have been many variations of it, but it always boils down to a need to have someone to be responsible for it. In the process they can never see how a ‘creator’ adds an infinite stack of layers of complexity beyond ‘and that’s the way it is’. i.e. If you need god to have created things, how did god come about? How did /their/ creator come about? And so on. They typically stick to some variant of ‘god just is’, at which time one can point out that’s the same argument, with added and unnecessary complexity, that scientists make.
It typically doesn’t get one anywhere however.
YES fundie rejection of evolution is highly motivated and mostly absurd, but there is genuinely a huge gulf between the product of natural selection and the phenomenon of speciation. The absence of ‘missing links’ in the fossil record does have some consequence for our models of evolution. on the one hand, the fossil record is spotty af. on the other hand- we really only see distinct species. They show up, persist mostly unchanged for x millennia- minor, metric changes like over all size, or legs get a bit longer- then they disappear. We don’t see slow gradual change. Is that because the record is trash? Or is it because speciation is Fast?
Maybe it happens all at once- which would require some means of accumulating silent mutations that are expressed all at once according perhaps to some trigger. Epigenetics might go some way to fleshing out a model for this ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model. But is such a model even necessary when occam’s razor says, there’s plenty of time in the gaps in the record for transitional forms to have existed and not been preserved.
It’s EXTREMELY interesting, please don’t let mocking denialists get in the way of a potentially beautiful side hobby in reading cool evolution shit.
Oh bullshit. We don’t see species alive or in the fossil record. That’s exactly why there are some 150 different definitions of “species” out there that all lead to different counts – just two of the more commonly used ones mean there are either 101 or 249 endemic bird species in Mexico, and the area of greatest diversity is either on one coast or on the other.
Here’s a twenty-year-old scientific paper on speciation in the fossil record and very gradual change. Go ahead and read it.
ok i’m gonna read your paper but just from the abstract i can tell its position is more nuanced than “gradualism good, punctuated equilibrium bad”, or “species not a thing”. (tbf, i’m not sure which of carms’s claims you’re calling bullshit on.)
You sound vehemently anti-species, which is interesting and not a take i’ve read very much.
don’t get me wrong, i’m not arguing for the ontological reality of species, but are species not a useful shorthand in biology? i’m not a biologist, mind. i’m just fascinated by the philosophical debate about the species concept.
if i were to reframe the paleo record problem brought up by carms as “populations appear to have conservative morphological features for long stretches of time, then we see morphological innovations appear within a very short time” does this still sound wrong? i think carms’s main point wasn’t a defence of the species concept, but to point out that there is at least a good argument for statis/rapid divergence in evolutionary history of any lineage.
of note (again based only on the abstract) the paper you pointed to seems to support BOTH gradualism (in plankton) and punctuated equilibria (in some animals)
Species are a useful shorthand, but it is important to remember that they’re a human conception layered on top of reality, not reality itself.
yes yes, as i’ve said.
though i guess it does bear repeating (over… and over… and over…)
i’m genuinely interested in eh whatever’s take though, if they care to expand, because it sounds like they don’t, in fact, believe the concept of species to be useful.
One of the best examples of this that I can think of, (sorry no citations) is neighboring populations of northern seagulls. Bear with me as I can’t recall where the actuall barrier is, but it goes something like (and I’m going to compress the example here):
Seagulls in Alaska can breed with seagulls in Canada. Canadian Gulls can breed with Greenland Gulls, Greenland Gulls with European Gulls, Euro-Gulls with Russian-Gulls, and Russian with Siberian Gulls, but in all that, apparently Siberian Gulls can’t breed with Alaskan Gulls.
To extend the example beyond reality (the gull thing was reported in an article somewhere, I think). If there were an event (meteor, disease, predation) to wipe out all the canadian, greenland, euro and russian gulls, we’d be left with two gull species who could not interbreed. Boom. New species, neither of which are significantly different from their ancestor, but which cannot breed with each other.
@eh, whatever: ok so i haven’t read the whole review paper yet (what with one thing and another and also, stuff) but i do want to report one precious quote, coming as it does after two pages of extremely dry prose:
“The punctuated equilibria versus phyletic gradualism debate of the 1970s and 1980s was huge fun for all concerned, not least because the protagonists kept shifting ground and revising their claims.”
Sounds like the authors had a grand old time in the 70’s and 80’s themselves XD
I don’t think there’s much need for new mechanisms to explain relatively fast transitions and missing links in the fossil record. Punctuated equilibrium doesn’t need to rely on silent mutations and epigenetics, but just on differences in selective pressure. A species may exist for millennia well adapted to its niche, but then the niche changes or a portion of the species is isolated and the species either goes extinct or adapts becoming something distinct.
The fossil record is sparse enough that we often only have a handful of specimens from millennia. It’s not at all a surprise that we’re missing a complete chain of transition.
There are species of Homo that we only know from a tooth and a couple of fragments.
To focus in on an arbitrary and useless point, I think you mean the _presence_ of ‘missing links’, else you have a double negative and are arguing that the continuity of the fossil record implies cosequences for our modelling.
That idea of ‘missing links’ exist at all is implied by the presence of fossils on either side of an apparent transition providing reason for hypothesis of the intermediate creature’s existence. The over-all fossil record provides the evidence to hypothesize of the existence of missing pieces in the same way that the earlier periodic tables of elements helped us (and the current table continues to help) identify many elements before they were discovered or created. The presence of the gaps helped us fill them in, first by hypothesis (educatedly guessing what to look for), then experimentation/exploration, and finally finding evidence in support, or that disproves a particular hypothesis.
fwiw thejeff’s sentence worked fine for me. in context, it’s perfectly clear what “explain missing links in the fossil record” means, while “the presence of missing links” would actually make me do a double-take. can something missing be present? ó_Ô but ultimately it’s a matter of personal preference probably.
Referring actually to carms original post I was replying to: “The absence of ‘missing links’ in the fossil record”
It was clear to me at least, though I can see how it could be seen as a double negative. I read it as “missing links are transitional fossils and we don’t see those in the record”, as opposed to “there are no links missing in the fossil records”.
I know all too well about micro-management …. for the record, it sucks so hard it could pull a tennis ball through a garden hose …. so I automatically have a bias against something called “micro-evolution”.
I like where your mind goes and would like to subscribe to your magazine.
Oh well, Micro Baby Steps
Joyce: No it’s fine, I also believe in other evolution.
Joe: Oh thank god.
Joyce: Social evolution.
Joe: Oh come on!
But does she believe in microbe evolution? https://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/flushots/
(do viruses count as microbes? does it depend on whether you consider them to be living?)
no, microbes are single-celled organisms, that is, they have a membrane that separates them from the outside world.
viruses are just strands of DNA or RNA, so that’s just a molecule. If microbes are small, viruses are much, much smaller.
that’s the bare-bonesest of a definition, mind =)
i mean they’re strands of DNA housed in a protein capsid, but yeah definitely no membrane
(or RNA, of course. depends on the type.)
it might be a little TOO bare boneset–i don’t really think it’s very accurate. ok, so i majored in genetics, but uh i guess i need to refresh myself a little bit on microbiology considering i wasn’t sure if “microbe” was a synonym for “microorganism” (it is, but the term “microbe”/”microorganism” is not super well defined, partly because “life” is not well defined). at any rate, it is certainly an oversimplification to say a virus is “just a molecule”–they are not free-floating nucleotides, being housed in a capsid. the capsid is sometimes surrounded by a lipid envelope, although that doesn’t come from their genetic material. the capsid just wraps some of the host cell membrane around itself. it protects the virus, and is involved in getting the virus into the cell. (a lot of viruses bind to membrane proteins, but these can just come up, press their little bubble up to the cell membrane, and gain entry that way. this is similar to how vesicles carrying proteins (or sometimes RNA) operate inside the cell–they leave one membrane-bound organelle by wrapping themselves in the membrane and bubbling off, and then they enter the next by doing the opposite.
but yeah, the reason that viruses aren’t considered living is because they require a host to propogate to new generations–they have genetic material, and they might even have the genes for proteins like polymerase or reverse transcriptase, but they don’t HAVE the polymerase enzyme so they can’t replicate, and they don’t have genes for ribosomes (or tRNA for that matter), so they can’t make proteins themselves and have to rely on the host ribosomes to make proteins.
(so when i said they don’t have membranes, i forgot that some have envelopes… that’s my bad. anyway being self-contained isn’t really the important part–they all have caspids anyway!)
anyway. sorry if i’m being pedantic, it just seemed like you were saying “They aren’t microbes because they aren’t in membranes.” and then i was like “huh, does ‘microbe’ mean ‘membrane bound microorganism?’
but maybe you were actually just saying “They aren’t microbes because the cell is the smallest unit of life, and they don’t have cells–in fact, they’re smaller than any cell because there isn’t much actual genetic material in a virus.” so maybe i just missed the point there. oops
(btw you seem pretty cool going by your recent comments, milu! sorry if i’ve given a bad first reaction by being a mess and ranting at you…)
omg thank you,
and no no, you made a great, uh, “first impression” (i mean i’ve seen you around, so i already knew you were cool ^^) by being a total nerd and also poking holes in my throwaway comment and linking to an article which i have read and found interesting.
turns out i was just plain wrong, not so much because i take a strong stance on the “are viruses alive” debate (i don’t) but because i’d always just thought (based on what? can’t remember now) that “microbes” referred strictly to single-celled organisms, and therefore excluded anything smaller.
the article does a fine job of explaining that it’s actually a vague umbrella term, and viruses or even prions are routinely included, and it’s often just not a very useful concept precisely because it includes extremely disparate categories of, um, things.
anyway, thanks for taking the time to do all that digging and writing!
…that ought to teach me a lesson. it won’t though smh
<3
(yeah i uh apparently thought i was an allergen, huh? i went to bed right after and i was like "oh no i meant IMPRESSION")
luckily i already knew capsids and vesicles and "viruses aren't considered alive because they can't self-replicate" from university. and i was pretty sure i remembered that the lipid envelope is used for entry — lemme just check… yep, it’s legit.)
Anyone else hoping that Joyce is trolling him (and us)? Because it would be hilarious for next strip to be “Heh. Gotcha!” Lol. She basically said a few strips ago that she no longer believes a Christian god exists. It seems unlikely she’d still buy into religiously motivated crap like “micro evolution.” Maybe she hasn’t done research to really understand the details, but I imagine she’s done believing her upbringing over what she’s learning now. Plus, that pose in the last panel is totally one step removed from a troll face.
It’s also possible I put too much faith in humanity and plenty of people continue to buy into even ridiculous bits and pieces of what they were taught even after the foundation comes crumbling down like Barad Due in Return of the King.
Those who believe that religion is the primary impediment to pseudo-science sadly don’t live in my area. Plenty of rural Americans are atheists but then just state they’re libertarian and know that the government created evolution as a theory to control your minds alongside the flouride.
This, but on the other hand Joyce made it pretty clear in an earlier strip that her belief in religion and her belief in creationist pseudoscience and evolution denialism are so intertwined she can’t have one without the other. I hope she’s trolling too
I think part of it may simply be Joyce has a lot of unexamined prejudices that removing the religious angle doesn’t remove. Then again, quite a lot of her prejudices were JUSTIFIED by religion but not CREATED by them.
Willis is a master of unpacking this sort of thing. Kudos to the Cheese.
P.O.E.
Joyce challenging her previous faith and subscribing to empirical evidence is reasonably why she enrolled in a course call “Evolutionary Biology” in the first place. ergo: it seems very likely she’s having a go at Joe.
I hope not. It’d be a cool twist that her issues go beyond fundamentalism.
It would be interresting to us as readers, and obviously we need conflict to move forwards or the comic would be in danger of become meaningless (well… more meaningless than anything already is in any of this absurd expanse). However, I would also be rather content for her to have some easier time of some things, as I think she’s had significantly more than her share of difficulty (as if such can be broken up into fair amounts shared, in an arbitrary and absurd existence).
yo Demo, I’m never completely sure if your occasional gushes of nihilism are a) intentionally hysterical or b) a bit alarming, so i find myself torn between lmao’ing and wondering if you’re ok. You ok?
Hey milu. I’m not really sure how to answer this. I’m not willing to lie, and am not willing to give an honest answer even pseudo-nonymously yet publicly attached to me. Um… I have supports and try and be supportive? And I reckon a and b are both true.
aight, i understand.
well listen, i just think you’re a really sweet and unique person. i hope you get through whatever you need to get through. shit gonna be shit yeah, but shit’s never forever. non-shit cycles keep happening? in my experience? ok, take care.
it’s easy, he said. It’s gonna take five minutes top, he said
These two are going to end up together, aren’t they?
The hatred of evolutionary teaching is one of those things you have to wonder if it was Qanon of its day because you have a bunch of really-really faithful Protestants and Catholics going to look at them weirdly.
Man: Animals are the same as they’ve been since Creation!
Scottish Presbyterian: Lad, you’re saying Dog Breeding doesn’t exist?
What do you mean “of its day”? They’re still pushing that today.
Because Qanon is the Qanon of today.
Creationism of today would be Creationism.
Exactly. In every generation there are denialists, con-men and loons. They’ve had different names and factions in the past, but they keep cropping up. They adapt their message and methods to the time they live in, but they somehow manage to always find an audience. Almost like their methods and message *ahem* evolves to remain enticing to those who would be deceived.
Maybe they can justify dog breeding because “they’re still dogs”. The dogs aren’t “turning into other animals”, just different-looking dogs with physical deformities and the debilitating health effects they cause.
I think that would indicate a lack of big-picture thinking. They don’t see past the end of their own noses, so they can’t conceive of cumulative gradual change over eons. Unless it’s something they can perceive in the short term, or at least within their lifetime, it “just can’t be real”.
While true, I kind of think there’s always, “Maybe we’re putting more thought into this than they have.”
I admit I do know people who DID think heavily on it and it’s kind of sad.
She can’t believe in evolution because SHE ISN’T capable of it.
Joyce: It’s okay, I don’t have to believe in God to know science is lies and globalism!
Becky and Dina: *stare in horror*
… NOBODY INTRODUCE JOYCE TO FLAT EARTHERS.
Joyce looks really cute in that plaid shirt.
Yes. Very.
The Patreon banner photo shows Willis drawing a strip where it looks like Joyce and Becky are wearing the shirts they have on in this chapter. Is that strip coming up?
Given the professor’s way of putting down egos, he might appreciate saying a microbe with a chance of evolutionary changes several times a minute is more evolved than a mammal that has a chance to change once every 15-50 years.
Regarding your username, if I may enquire: are you lacking a berverage, a faerie, energy, an image element allowing you to be rendered by a computer, or other?
Alternatively. She has no sprits to e-give.
she’s probably saying she doesn’t have a gravatar
The third one. I started using this name posting on sprite comic fan forums. I had no edited sprite of my own, and could not bear the thought of being presumed male, then having to correct people, then the predictable jokes that come from that, uggh.
Sprite comics are old enough to drink in USA.
*fourth one.
The correct response to you is “cool story sister” but that seems to carry some negative or sarcastic connotation. I enjoyed the tale and the throwback to sprite comics. Thank you for sharing.
Oh ducks, Sprite comics. I haven’t read a good one since 8 bit theater ended.
Joyce is micro-evolving really fast. She even grew glasses.
Best answer to a creationist who says they only believe in “micro-evolution” is to ask them what they call a series of micro-evolutions that happen over time.
it’s like Zeno’s paradox–we just have to keep shrinking the micro-evolution by 2 each time, and it’ll never lead to speciation!
Yes, yes, cranky banter, but dig those color-coordinated shirts!
…I’m going to regret Googling that, aren’t I?