Hello Friends

First, apologies if this is the wrong section for this sort of things, but it is to do with Darwin, so I thought I would ask in the Evolution section.

A Muslim guy linked me to a video in Kurdish where some 'Mullah' (Islamic Religious Talker) is talking to young people in a mosque. He basically ridicules Darwin and his theory of Evolution. And he tells a story where after the publication of his book, Darwin gets a visit from a few Christian priests, and the priests ask him how on earth his theory can be right, and if it is right, Darwin should be able to provide some fossil evidence of the intermediate stages.

To which apparently Darwin replies: "I don't have any intermediate fossils, I've just got the initial fossils and today's descendants of them fossils."

As is often the case, these stories are told without any reference, and again as is often the case, no one bothers to ask for references in the mosque.

Has any read a Biography of Charles Darwin ? Did such an event even take place ?

Thank You

It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it doesn't make the trillions of fossils we have today disappear.
Darwin was 150 years ago, we have significant progress since then.

Hehe well said Trubble. It does not matter to me either, because I understand the other evidence for Evolution. But to them youngsters sitting in the mosque, who have no idea what Scientific Evidence means ... showing that their Mullah is actually a liar, can shaken their faith in him a bit and perhaps they'll go less often to hear him utter such things.

Ah, the 'no intermediates' trope. Tell them they're ignorant fuckwits, and that ALL fossils are transitional.

If people are basing their understanding of the natural world on knowledge from 1859 they must crap themselves everytime a lightbulb comes on, a plane flies overhead or a car whizzes past them!

There it is!

Ciwan wrote:Hehe well said Trubble. It does not matter to me either, because I understand the other evidence for Evolution. But to them youngsters sitting in the mosque, who have no idea what Scientific Evidence means ... showing that their Mullah is actually a liar, can shaken their faith in him a bit and perhaps they'll go less often to hear him utter such things.

Oh it does matter to me, but it doesn't matter to the ToE. All I mean is that debating Darwin will be counter-productive as they may well see it as an atheist mullah versus an islamic mullah.
If however, you say that even if what the Mullah says is true (and I doubt it), then it was true 150 years ago, and is certainly not true today.
There are a few good resources which show some of the wealth of fossils that have been unearthed.

Someone with professional knowledge on the subject (Therapod springs to mind) will undoubtably be able to direct you to something relevant.

Hmm I'll try that then, Something tells me that won't be effective either, cause as I see it, that would only make sense if you're familiar with Science a bit and have a bigger picture of things. Where as even if you're not much of a rational, you would still understand being lied to .. I think so at least

How about I mention both points ?

Archaeopteryx and Tiktaalik are the obvious responses.

hackenslash wrote:Archaeopteryx and Tiktaalik are the obvious responses.

They would just say, "Oh these aren't intermediate fossils, they are just two separate organisms that died out long ago". They won't understand what our friend above (oops it was you) said, that "ALL fossils are transitional".

Except, of course, that those two examples are transitional between major clades. All fossils are indeed transitional, but those two examples serve as intermediate between theropods and aves and lobe-finned fishes and tetrapods respectively. They show the development of later features quite beautifully.

When I spent some time on a (mainly creationist) Christian forum one of their most prolific posters had a sig which said "You may doubt God but you may not doubt Darwin". These guys thought atheists treat On the Origin of Species the way they treat the Bible. So complete was their ignorance of scientific method that they couldn't get their head round my saying that Darwin didn't know certain things and was wrong about others. I hope I managed to get a few people to see that science isn't an alternative form of revelation but it was hard going.

The modern Theory of Evolution it is not Darwin's theory. He came up with the idea of natural selection. The theory didn't really get traction until well after his death and it wasn't until the late 1930's that people like Julian Huxley brought together what we now know as the Theory of Evolution, a modern synthesis.

Darwin added one of the major pieces of natural selection but it wasn't the whole theory by a long way. It took another 70 or so years to develop.

Immediately anyone says... Darwin.... Evolution.... then you know that they are ignorant and can simply be laughed at if they are trying to be authoritative.

Ciwan wrote:Hmm I'll try that then, Something tells me that won't be effective either, cause as I see it, that would only make sense if you're familiar with Science a bit and have a bigger picture of things. Where as even if you're not much of a rational, you would still understand being lied to .. I think so at least

How about I mention both points ?

Give an analogy

Only 6 years after the publication of "On the origin of species", Gregor Mendel gave us his laws of inheritance... though at the time was unable to explain exactly what aspect of the organism was responsible. We have since found the proofs for his laws in the very chromosomes and genes in DNA, but we wouldn't think of saying that inheritance is questionable because Mendel couldn't explain the chromosomes.

I understand Byofrcs, but my difficulty lies in making them (the religious) understand

am I wasting my time ? cause that is kind of impossible ?

I should also point out that Tiktaalik in particular is a spectacular vindication of evolutionary theory, not least because it was predicted in terms of features, location and age. It bisected the line between the two groups almost exactly. Theory predicted it's location, they went and looked for it, and there it was (although finding it wasn't quite as easy as I've made it sound).

Ciwan wrote:I understand Byofrcs, but my difficulty lies in making them (the religious) understand

am I wasting my time ? cause that is kind of impossible ?

Perhaps the best you can hope for is to spread the seeds of critical thinking and suspicion toward appeals to authority.

I would be optimistic that in a group as you describe there will be some at least who subsequently go to bed with troubling questions in their minds even if they reject them absolutely in front of their peers.

Sure, many of those seeds might be stomped out by the elders or starved but some will stumble upon or actively seek out nourishment and grow. This is more important, I would argue, than the specifics (although imparting some interesting nuggets of actual science to give a newly awakened reason something to play with might also assist the process).

Ciwan wrote:

A Muslim guy linked me to a video in Kurdish where some 'Mullah' (Islamic Religious Talker) is talking to young people in a mosque. He basically ridicules Darwin and his theory of Evolution. And he tells a story where after the publication of his book, Darwin gets a visit from a few Christian priests, and the priests ask him how on earth his theory can be right, and if it is right, Darwin should be able to provide some fossil evidence of the intermediate stages.

To which apparently Darwin replies: "I don't have any intermediate fossils, I've just got the initial fossils and today's descendants of them fossils."

As is often the case, these stories are told without any reference, and again as is often the case, no one bothers to ask for references in the mosque.

Has any read a Biography of Charles Darwin ? Did such an event even take place ?

Thank You

zoon:
In terms of broad groupings, there is a very clear record of transitional forms in the fossil record. It’s not at all a case of early fishes only, and nothing else, which is what the imams seem to be implying. Theists were having trouble with the fossil record being unearthed by Victorian industrial activities before Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859. For example, Hugh Miller, in The Testimony of the Rocks (published 1857), writes:

Hugh Miller wrote:
Ranged at once chronologically, and by
their mode of reproduction, the various classes of the vertebrata would
run, did we accept the suggested reading, as follows:--First appear
cold-blooded vertebrates (fishes), that propagate by eggs or
spawn,--chiefly by the latter. Next appear cold-blooded vertebrates
(reptiles), that propagate by eggs or spawn,--chiefly by the former.
Then appear warm-blooded vertebrates (birds), that propagate by eggs
exclusively. Then warm-blooded vertebrates come upon the stage, that
produce _eggs_ without shells, which have to be subjected for months to
a species of extra-placental incubation. And last of all the true
placental mammals appear. And thus, tried by the test of perfect
reproduction, the great vertebral division receives its full development
in creation.

Hugh Miller was a stonemason and self-taught geologist with a vast knowledge of the fossils in different strata, and he was also a convinced Christian. It was clear to him that the earliest vertebrates were fishes, land-based reptiles appeared later, and mammals later still, and that the fossil record covers huge stretches of time. He tries to reconcile this with the Biblical account through a wonderful theory that each of the six days of creation in the Bible was actually a sixth of the whole geological timescale.

If arguing with theists, I think this very clear, unarguable, geological record of groups of transitional fossils over very long periods of time might be the thing to emphasise? It clashes with the book of Genesis, unless Genesis is drastically reinterpreted.

I don’t know whether Darwin met a deputation of clergy, but he would certainly not have replied as the imams claim (“just the initial fossils and today’s descendants”), because he was as well aware as Hugh Miller of the transitional groupings in the fossil record. He discusses the absence of more detailed transitional forms at some length. Near the beginning of Chapter 6 (objections to the theory) of the Origin of Species he writes:

Charles Darwin wrote:
Long before the reader has arrived at this part of my work, a crowd of
difficulties will have occurred to him. Some of them are so serious that
to this day I can hardly reflect on them without being in some degree
staggered; but, to the best of my judgment, the greater number are only
apparent, and those that are real are not, I think, fatal to the theory.

These difficulties and objections may be classed under the following
heads: First, why, if species have descended from other species by fine
gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why
is not all nature in confusion, instead of the species being, as we see
them, well defined?

With regard to the rarity of transitional fossils, he says (and modern scientists agree) that this is because only a minute fraction of the animals that have lived have been preserved as fossils (chapter 9 of the Origin of Species is “on the imperfection of the geological record):

Charles Darwin wrote:

ON THE ABSENCE OR RARITY OF TRANSITIONAL VARIETIES.

As natural selection acts solely by the preservation of profitable
modifications, each new form will tend in a fully-stocked country to
take the place of, and finally to exterminate, its own less improved
parent-form and other less-favoured forms with which it comes into
competition. Thus extinction and natural selection go hand in hand.
Hence, if we look at each species as descended from some unknown form,
both the parent and all the transitional varieties will generally have
been exterminated by the very process of the formation and perfection of
the new form.

But, as by this theory innumerable transitional forms must have existed,
why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of
the earth? It will be more convenient to discuss this question in the
chapter on the imperfection of the geological record; and I will here
only state that I believe the answer mainly lies in the record being
incomparably less perfect than is generally supposed. The crust of
the earth is a vast museum; but the natural collections have been
imperfectly made, and only at long intervals of time.

I just saw a video on youtube where a muslim disproved evolution in under 3 minutes, and he had a far more detailed delusion. The proof was that genes work inside cells, make proteins, the cell excretes the protein, hey look at my hand with 5 fingers, how does evolution work through genes to form a hand when the gene can only work inside the cell? Is someone like this who seems to have a modicum of biology at hand easier to convince or the 'no intermediates' guy who's really un-clued? Who is most likely to be lying and actually knows what they are saying is totally wrong?

Thanks Zoon, I hadn't heard of that Hugh Miller guy before.