Andy’s whereIstand Blog

What Nick says here:

One of my problems with religion is that it’s just too damned convenient. Every single civilization or even group of humans that has ever inhabited any part of the Earth has had a myth that explains how life came to be the way it was for them.

reflects something I’ve been formulating for some time now, since my days as a Anthro scholar. In studying other people we really learn more about ourselves, and if there is one characteristic of all humans it is that the last thing a person wants is to be ignorant. People use the word ignorant all the time. But what they usually mean is differentially informed, and what I am usually accused of after saying this is playing with semantics. Okay yes it may be semantics, but it is fairly true. I can’t believe I just used the T word.

But what I mean is that the first thing people do when they see something they don’t understand is try to understand it. This becomes their culture. A child asks their parent where people came from and the parents says, well long ago there was this garden…. or there was a god that crafted men from mud…. or well 4 billion years ago life began on earth as self-reproducing carbon compounds called proteins. Science is part of this. We sometimes forget that Science didn’t come from nowhere - it is a culturally specific invention, supporting a culturally-specific world view - decidedly modern and Western.

So yes, religion seems convenient, but so can Science. I mean in Science, a hypothesis is taken as true and becomes truer the more it is tested, but it starts as truth. Religion has only gained it’s legitimacy through years and years of believers saying it is true - a process that seems infinitely more difficult than starting with a truth. I mean Ancient Israelites had to fight the Assyrians and Babylonians for their little strip of land and for their little god Yahweh (later unnamed) besieged at all times by Marduk and Ishtar, not to mention the Egyptians. The religions of the book, have fought for their authority, and their claims are soaked with blood and history. This is why they deserve respect, but this is also why they will never convince me of their truth, and why I will continue to believe my very convenient Science - even if I don’t buy String Theory or even Black holes.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• nick
• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?

Joe C brings up very interesting points in his latest points, and this is one of the few posts I totally feel where Joe C is coming from. Hell yeah I’m crazy, but most of the time you know where I stand. Hell yeah I’m liberal, and educated, but  for those of you who have met me, I’m totally not evil; I’m trying to have a music career in rap; I wear my hair in a rattail; I have a horribly adolescent ’stache; I was born in a very red state; I wear the same denim vest with my made-up personal insignia on the back every day; I love rock n’ roll. I’m bat shit insane, and I’m totally aware of it, I’m totally self-aware. I want to kill myself riding a unicorn off a tall building and have a Viking funeral in the East River. I think women have the right over their own bodies and I’m sick of men making laws challenging this right. I think when I go senile I want to eat raw stem cells of my clones so that I can get my mind back and live forever. I believe in Benjamin Franklin and I think the Patriot Act was drafted by the Sixth Reich. I think marriage is a religious institution and that the government should stay out of it. I think the death penalty should not exist. I think child molesters are the lowest form of life. I think the war in Iraq in unconscionable. And most of this is gut-feeling-driven examination

Is WIS for me? why not? Hell yes it’s tiring getting in the rhetorical debates we have for hours every week. It’s damn exhausting having to make yourself consider all the crap that is out there. And that’s what this site is. I said as much at our last rendezvous - WIS is for the self.

What is it in aid of to convince people of something? Well Donovan may have an agenda to convince a jury in court of something, but on this site - we’re not deciding the fate of his client. I think WIS is a place to ask questions of yourself. If you are a creationist, and will never change your mind, fine, no problem, but do you want to be a creationist with certain beliefs without ever having those beliefs challenged and examined? Not by other people on this site, but by yourself. Persuasion from other people may be dead. Maybe every believes what they believe and only hang out with others of like mind, but sometimes those things we absolutely know we believe are thrown into a crisis of horrible doubt. When that happens, looking to those who come at the issue from a completely different place are not such evil proselytizers as much as they are just regular Joe Cs that are looking for the same answers to different questions, and hoping for something you say to give their opinions perspective.

I think the demographic should be everyone on the internet, and those who want to be intellectual and academic can be that, those who are not concerned with what nineteenth century Germans or the Ninth Circuit Court circa 1963 have to say about crap, well they can speak to each other and others who have a potential home here. 

I think the vehicle is fine - like a super-Autobot from Transformers - it can be a tractor trailer like Optimus Prime or a VW bug like Bumble bee, or a Rolls Royce or an Escalade or a 1987 Dodge Dynasty. Whatever. It will never be a Megatron though, it will never turn into a gun (isn’t it weird how the arch bad guy had to be fired by his second in command, whom he hated?).

WIS is for everyone. Perhaps the ranking systems and the emphasis on objectivity need to be worked on, but Nick is doing it, he’s making changes and I think we’ll continue to see improvement.

I would be a liar, on top of being crazy, if i said this site hasn’t aggravated me before. Not the design - I’m getting used to that, but engaging with people in debates is grueling. I feel like I’m on the school yard playground again, except everyone has much bigger words than "doo-doo head" and much more grandiose concepts than "I’m not picking you for my dodge ball team." What’s funny is that I’m supposed to be one of those Ivory tower liberals, and I end up defending my own extremism more on a site that has been called part of the problem rather than the solution.

For all the bleeding hearts we liberals get accused of having, it’s the Christian Right that seems most sensitive in this country. It’s this backlash, that has seriously crippled the Democratic party, and for good reason - the Dems were never supposed to be the harbingers of academic snobbery, but the party of the proles. Far from twisting the knife, however, I really do care what the religious and the multitude in this country have to say, and it is only for my own edification, it is only in aid of my own process of figuring shit out.

WIS is for the solipsist, and I think rightly so. Joe C changed his mind on the Cuban Embargo. Fine, good for him, he is a better human than I. I have yet to change my position on something here, and I desperately want to. I want to have Where I Stand challenged and shaken up, and either find myself in a new, better place or on firmer ground.

I just care that much about myself.

So is the needle buried on your Bullshit Detector yet?

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Donovan
• JoeC
• Can whereIstand.org be successful?

Just a bit of nepotism on my part. I have written for this website:

www.metaphilm.com

And my compandres on this site are dedicated to interpreting film, not reviewing it. They view film as texts, and like any good/interesting po-mo scholarship read between the lines(frames). Film is a huge passion of mine and I think a discussion of interpretations of films on WIS perhaps alongside technical reviews would serve the purposes of this site and its aims more than just reviews and an objective scale by which to rate movies. The George Bush commentary or lack thereof issue would also be under this, and the issue wording itself could be the thesis of someone’s interpretation. It’s not going to be an issue that you can get people to actually change their mind on, and its not so copasetic with Nick’s rapid love of objectivity, but interpretation-counter-interpretation could be a very interesting direction to go in on this site. In fact, most of the blogging so far has been people debunking each other’s interpretations of words, laws, basics, etc. I think this is the tendency. Check out metaphilm and see if we could blog like those essays on WIS.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• What is the best way to objectively review movies?

Of course not. All it denies is that sacred texts are to be taken literally, instead of literarily.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Does acceptance of evolution deny a belief in God?

It just seems that those who view creationism as literal, and look for extra-Biblical evidence for it’s plausibility (like ID proponents), are putting forth a view of the immutability of the universe as god made it. Evolution is nothing more than change on a broad scale - constant, unpredictable, and only really visible in hindsight. Everything about science tells us that things are always changing - stars are being born; stars are dying; everything, every molecule is always in motion because no one can perfect a state of absolute zero; creatures are born, creatures die, and none of them look exactly like their parents, nor like each other; identical twins don’t even stay the same after differing experiences take their toll on the organism. Those that deny evolution even through a god-friendly lens (evolution-as-the-tool-of-god’s-unfolding-design) in favor of static creationism or ID are just deluding themselves of that old chestnut - that the only constant state in the universe is change.  Even when we have hard-and-fast immutable rules in front of us like those Newton gave us, someone like Einstein shows us that while gravity may not be changing, our perception of it always is. It’s really magical. This is why I propose that creationism be put under the scrutiny of the lit crit. Only there can it be shown that in fact change, evolution, not only in humanity, but also in the Bible’s story of humanity’s relationship with the divine is constantly changing - Abraham laughs in God’s face all the damn time, Moses can barely look at God’s ass. Sort that one out, then teach ID in a science classroom.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Mike
• GuyCatelli
• Amir
• JoeC
• Donovan
• Does belief in Creationism or Intelligent Design (ID) contradict the acceptance of evolution?
• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?

In his discussion of Chaucer’s intentions, Donovan belies his predilection for the po-mo discipline of comparative literature. Maybe not.

Notice though, I used the term creationism (writ large) not ID to be taught in Literature classes (not grammar courses). The proponents of ID may present it as a science, and use semi-scientific methods to speak the language of it’s observed opposing theories - in fact couching creationism in scientific terms only strengthens the nest of assumptions ID’s proponents actually make about the supposed antagonism between science and religion. The problem is that any theory of creationism lends itself best to literary criticism because at some point, at it’s most fundamental point creationism comes from a written source - the Bible (The Book), literature if it’s anything. I dare someone to show me an IDer who hasn’t read the Bible, and got the idea of creationism from that source before looking for other evidence. This is not a horrible approach, in fact Biblical Archaeology does just that with excavations, using the Bible as a written point of comparison and contrast. But this is not a class that was offered through the natural sciences (or even archaeology) department when I took it. Perhaps English or even Literature class isn’t the BEST place to put the study of creation myths, but until they offer a comparative literature, comparative religion, or an Anthropology course at the high school level, I’m just trying to find a non-science place to put this if people do insist on teaching such ill-formed drivel. If that’s what it takes to get a proper treatment of evolution in public schools, then it is worth the trade-off. Of course that requires a leap of faith on my part that our future students aren’t the utter retards pop culture treats them as.

This as been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Mike
• GuyCatelli
• Amir
• JoeC
• Donovan
• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?

I hear what Donovan is saying, and I like his response to Mike, I just don’t think ID should be taught in a science class. Religion is a humanity if the current taxonomy of curricula is to be followed, and I don’t think a science teacher could do creationism justice coming as it does from un-scientific sources, just as an English teacher couldn’t do Biology justice while teaching Chaucer. Keeping the two separated in schools if they are to be taught at all is key in letting students reconcile their beliefs for themselves.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Mike
• Donovan
• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?

Hey Donovan, I’m not claiming any legitimacy as a scientist - fact is I’m not. The title for my post "Back Off Pal, I’m a Scientist" is from Ghostbusters - Bill Murray’s character Peter Venkman says it, and I’m about as much a scientist as Venkman is. Really. I critique science as much as I buy into it.

I love anthropology because as a social science, it is the lone proponent of qualitative methods over quantitative methods as any responsible discipline should when dealing with the human experience - you can’t quantify humanity. That’s why we don’t like psychoanalysis and parts of sociology (the parts that require stats classes). And it’s true, applying science to culture just doesn’t work because culture is an ever-changing process, and things are not repeatable.

All that said, I buy evolution. Domestication/artificial selection is not a thing without context and Darwin’s observations of artificial selection in formulating natural selection is totally understandable - he was simply theorizing and observing how life works, how populations and mutating individuals react to changing environmental pressures and stimuli - starting with humans as the primary environmental pressure. He was never "just looking." This helped him explain a finch on the Galapagos Islands could subsist off of blood - a diet unknown to finches everywhere else in the world. Domestication was never taken by Darwin out of this context of environmental pressures, a population’s reaction to them, and the uncanny ability of life to change-to mutate- in unexpected ways - usually to the detriment of the individual - but playing the odds, sometimes to the success of a species.

It’s true that dog breeders didn’t have an end-product in mind, like all domestication it is a step-by-step or even gradual process, one trait or suite of traits or tendencies at a time. Another reason dogs are totally boss - they are the domesticated species where there usefulness as food or pack animals (except in Korea/China and the Arctic respectively) has given way to their status as "pet" or where the forms of their morphology are beholden to human aesthetic choices or tastes. The royal breeders of china bred pugs because that’s what dogs should look like in China. Shih Tzus are a cross between Lhasa Apsos - the royal dog of Tibet - and Pugs - the royal dog of China - symbolizing a thousand-year old peace treaty between the two nation (pre-Maoist revolution of course). I’m not sure about the Dalmatian thing Donovan, but I’ll check on that. I know some aggression has been bred into them because it’s not recommended to have them around small children because they might bite them, kind of like me.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Mike
• GuyCatelli
• Amir
• JoeC
• Donovan
• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?

Having explained my background as an Anthropologist, it follows that while I buy the theory of evolution in my own search for answers, I cannot and do not seek to foist upon or convince anyone of the benefits or reasonable superiority of evolution. I really don’t care what other people believe, as long they leave me alone. As such, I don’t believe scientific should nor are meant to take the place of cultural explanations for history simply because who are scientists to tell anyone that what they believe is wrong. This is my po-mo critique of science that tries to supplant origin myths of indigenous peoples for example. Science does a huge disservice to itself and its aims when it tries to ape an evangelical system. As Donovan has pointed out, science does not engage in the business of morality, nor should it.

That said, in the case of evolution being taught in public schools, which is one practical concern in the conflict between evolution and ID/creationism, I am a proponent. Science is a required subject in public school curricula,  and biology is usually a separate required class. In a society where science is ordain to be worthy of occupying at least two semesters of every student’s life, why should part of scientific theory, a significant scientific theory at that, be purposefully excluded from publicly-funded education? In the same society, creation stories and myths (the world-supporting turtles-or-tortoises, Adam and Eve, and Atlas holding up the sky included) might be covered in a unit during one semester of English or Social Studies class in the seventh grade (when they covered these in my school). So when a whole subject already deemed beneficial to a well-rounded education - science - already includes subject matter that is contradictory to young earth creationism like the whole discipline of geology, then why exclude evolution specifically?

The point is that science is taught in public schools, religion isn’t, and this is by the consent and better judgment of both the government and the majority of citizens. Still, one part of science is left out. It shouldn’t be. Exposure to something in a pedigological situation does not mean the thing is taken as law - one doesn’t read the poems of William Blake and start to hate humanity. Students are not the undiscerning sponges of the popular imagination.

Hell, I would have no problem with creationism taught in schools, or any number of creation myths being taught. They simply don’t belong in a science class alongside evolution. They belong in the humanities, under current taxonomies of curriculum.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Mike
• GuyCatelli
• Amir
• JoeC
• Donovan
• nick
• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?

I have degrees in both Anthropology and Religious Studies. I’m not saying that to lend myself legitimacy in this discussion, but for full disclosure, there it is. I wrote my thesis on human-animal interaction in different cultures, specifically with dogs. As such I read much about the evolution of dogs, and feel I can answer Joe C’s response to Mike’s words on artificial selection. Artificial selection was indeed Darwin’s model for natural selection and is "artificial" only in name - all the artificial means is that humans were a huge part of the selective pressures on these organisms. Read Guns Germs and Steal for a simple explanation of domesticating plants - basically Emmer Wheat and Barley, the first two domesticated plants, had traits in the wild like a seed pod that would shatter to spread the seeds further that got flipped on their heads when humans got a hold of the plants. People started selecting for the mutant that don’t shatter, because they could harvest the easier, and of course all plants have been selected to have bigger fruit/seeds/edible parts over the generations. This is why wild strawberries and the maize ancestor teosinte are soooo much smaller than their domesticated counterparts/descendents. You can see this not just from the fossil record but at the modern analogs of our domesticated species - wild boars are totally dwarfed by the largest pigs in the world (which I saw every summer growing up at the Indiana State Fair) and all of their domesticated cousins, because we humans bred them to be bigger and fatter for more meat (even before we started using hormones). Darwin saw how human farmers and animal husbandry practitioners selected for different traits over time and relaxed the pressure on others (wild goats have straight horns and domesticated goats have curly horns, simply because on the farm, the horn shape doesn’t matter, and farmers don’t seem to care). This contradicts Mike’s assertion about the "design" of artificial selection - it is still processural. Farmers are selecting for certain traits hoping to reproduce those traits in the next generation, but there is no end product in mind as other, non-harmful mutations happen all the time and are over-looked by farmers. No one "designed" the animals fully.

The dog is the perfect and most unique example of this - not only were they the first domesticated organism of plants and animals alike, they are now the most morphologically diverse species on the planet, all thanks to us. This also elucidates both Darwin’s and Mike’s point about the difficulty of defining "species" - now kind of settled on as any discreet breeding populations amongst sexual reproducing organisms (if two members of a population can breed and produce fertile, viable offspring, then they are the same species). Taxonomy is a largely arbitrary and useless manifestation of an Adam-like impulse to name and order things that don’t ask for it.  Anyway. I think this does show that by influencing the genetic stock of an organism, one actually can create a different organism. Technically, dogs and wolves can still breed and produce offspring (a la White Fang). But the rareness of this occurring shows just how different the two creatures are, not only in morphology but also in behavior. One story of the dog goes like this:

About 15,000 years ago, everyone were hunters and gatherers still. Some populations figured out how to exploit more food resources from one environment and eased their nomadic behaviors - they began to settle down for longer periods because they could get enough food from one environment for longer times of the year. Whenever people set up camp long enough, they create a lot of waste/trash, and for some reason they decided to put it all in one place, not close enough to offend their senses, nor far enough that they had to walk an hour to take out the trash. Witness the Birth of the town dump. This town dump is a new food source, and part of a new environment to several species of animals - bacteria, rats, wildcats, and of course wolves. Now because of it’s proximity to humans, the animals with the lowest flight response could get the most food because they wouldn’t be spooked by the humans upon whom the resources of the dump were dependent. So the least skittish got the most food. The sole trait selected for was a receptivity to humans, and this meant less adrenaline.

Now the dog is a mutable species, and the wolf is not. All wolves look fairly uniform when compared with Chihuahuas and Mastiffs. So having dogs come from wolves goes against Mendelian genetics - the traits found in modern dogs are found no where in modern wolves, the closest to a common ancestor. Traits cannot be selected for if they are not present. Enter the lowered adrenaline levels of the first dump-eating wolves. turns out adrenaline restricts mutation. So when dogs began having less adrenaline than wolves, there were suddenly traits previously unavailable in the wolf population (floppy ears, curly tails, spots, etc.) This all goes to show how dogs first domesticated themselves, then when the least skittish of the dogs became hand-fed by humans, the first traits humans selected for was an increased receptivity to humans - those that actually sought out human attention. From there it was no problem training them and breeding them into pugs and terriers and Darwin’s beagle. As far as standard measures of animal intelligence goes, wolves are smarter (re: Joe C’s retarded pet), but dogs in their relationship to humans have become far more populous across the world than wolves.

Of course none of this means anything unless you actually read the scientific literature on the theory of evolution, and it means even less if you subscribe to a Biblical literalist’s view and eschew the science of it altogether.

The intelligence of design, I said in my previous post  could indeed exist, but the fact that most mutations - the guiding force of evolution - are actually detrimental (re: all genetic diseases), and few are benign while even fewer are actually beneficial stack the odds against any intelligence to the design. The point is, very few things are the same from five thousand years ago when the first scriptural texts were written, so why believe in a god-proclaimed stasis? Obviously things have changed since the Garden, and not just in humanity, and the fact that things could change, well that’s argument for things being in constant state of change. I mean, before three hundred years ago the breed of beagles didn’t even exist, and now here are these things called beagles, sharing traits that distinguish them from all other sin the dog breeding community if not in distinct, scientifically-defined breeding populations. The point is, there were no beagles in the Garden of Eden, but there’s one in my back yard. Go figure.

This has been Andy D.

whereIstand Tags

• Mike
• GuyCatelli
• Amir
• JoeC
• Donovan
• Does a belief in evolution necessarily contradict a belief in Creation?