Summary:
Before Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, what did the scientific community believe?
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Mohammed: Before Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, what did the scientific community believe?
Michael: Well, before Darwin, there was no cogent accepted theory of evolution. There were other theories of evolution but nobody had a mechanism for explaining how it could happen.
So before Darwin, really it was just a top-down designer and this, of course, everybody thought was God.
And there was a field called natural theology and a famous book by that title written by a guy named Paley, William Paley, who was a theologian and a minister.
And he argued that if you were walking down a pathway and you came across a stone, you wouldn't think anything of it.
It looks like it belongs there out in nature just with a bunch of stones. But if you're walking along the path and there's stones and trees and whatnot and there was a watch.
You know, and you said, 'Oh look, there's a watch', you wouldn't think, 'Oh that just belongs there naturally' because that looks like elements of design to it.
It's too complex, it's too specified in its complexity to have come about naturally.
So Paley argued that's signs of an intelligent designer or a God.
Darwin read that book but he was an undergraduate, not much older than you guys, and he thought about that for decades.
What would be the explanation for a watch, short of a watchmaker from the top down who makes watches and then plops them down into pathways?
And his answer was natural selection, that is, just a bunch of organisms, running around, trying to make a living and get their genes in the next generation.
Out of that arises this complexity, slowly, gradually, given enough time, you will get a watch eventually, or the equivalent of a watch.
Maybe an eye, maybe a wing, a hand, and so, I'm willing to concede the point that creationists/intelligent designers make, that there is design in nature.
Eyes look like they were designed to see, yes? Wings look like they were designed to fly. So the question is who or what is the designer?
Before Darwin, everybody thought it was an intelligent designer from the top down, and Darwin said 'No, actually, there is a bottom-up designer. That designer's called natural selection'.
Summary:
The controversy relating to intelligent design has been waged since Darwin's time.
Will there be a time where evolution by natural selection will be accepted as fact or will this controversy persist in society?
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Ruby: So, let's go to our schools joining us by videoconference.
Do we have a question from Heathcote High?
Student: Yes, hello Michael.
Michael Shermer: Good morning.
Student: The controversy relating to intelligent design has been waged since Darwin's time.
Will there be a time where evolution by natural selection will be accepted as fact or will this controversy persist in society?
Michael: Yeah, that's a good question.
I think in Darwin's own time there was many critiques along the lines of which we hear today and yet Darwin really rebutted all those and still there are creationists around.
Now, in America they're hugely popular, although I noticed that in my travels in Australia that every one of my talks some creationist/
intelligent designers have come here to challenge me.
And so I realised in New Zealand, Australia, especially in America, in the UK and a few of the continental countries, the creationists are getting a toehold.
Now my hope is that, of course, with good science education, this will fall by the wayside.
The problem though is not just that people don't understand, what the theory of evolution is, although they mostly don't because it's a
science and to understand any science you have to like take a class in it or read some books on it, that sort of thing.
The problem is that people think that somehow it's in conflict with their religion.
If I accept this Darwin guy, I have to give up God?
Ruby: Yeah.
Michael: That's what people are afraid of and so one of the messages, in my lectures and in my book and 'Skeptic' magazine and so on,
is that religion and science are really mostly two different things.
And that, if you give somebody a choice, if you have to pick one or the other, most people, religion's important to them, for emotional
reasons, for social reasons, psychological reasons that have nothing to do with science.
So I say, if you believe in God, why can't you accept the idea that God used evolution to create life?
Just like he used gravity to create solar systems, something like that.
And so I would hope in the long run, everyone will just accept the theory of evolution because it's true, it happened, I mean that's just the way it is.
And science is in the business of telling us on how the world really is, not the way we want it to be.
So we have to learn to accept it.
Summary:
Was it easy for Darwin to present his ideas?
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Mohammed: Was it easy for Darwin to present his ideas?
Michael: Well, Darwin took a long time to come around to actually publishing his book. He got the idea first after his famous voyage around the world on 'The Beagle'.
This is a myth that he discovered evolution in the Galapagos. It didn't quite happen that way. It makes a nice mythic tale, but no.
He thought about it for a long time, many years, and he made notes. He had a little notebook he opened, 1836 when he got home.
And it wasn't really until the early 1840s that he started putting it all together and by the late 1840s he had it mostly solidified.
And then he just did a lot of work through the 1850s until he got a letter from this guy named Alfred Russell Wallace
who was in the Malaya Archipelago, who came up with this idea, phum, right out of his brain.
And it was very similar to Darwin's idea and Wallace knew Darwin and he wrote him this letter and sent it to him and said 'Hey, I got these ideas, what do you think?'
And Darwin went 'Awww, that's my idea! This guy is going to steal my idea! Oh my god!' and so he rushed into print 'The Origin of Species.'
Which turned out to be a great book, and he was right and then he deserves the credit for it.
But it took him, we're talking two decades to get all that down and that is really a good lesson for us because great ideas are not just pooff, overnight.
You really have to think about and develop it and test it and make sure it's right, bounce your ideas off other people, rather than just rush into print.
I mentioned Bigfoot. Last weekend in America there was a big story about these two guys that said they found Bigfoot and they held a press conference,
they went on radio shows where they announced it with them. And I kept saying, 'This is not how great scientific discoveries are made'.
You don't go on a radio show or a talk show and announce ... that's not how it's done in science, right? You present your ideas to other scientists.
Summary:
What parts of Darwin's theory were most persuasive?
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Ruby: Now I think we have a question from Homebush Boys High?
Student: What parts of Darwin's theory were most persuasive?
Michael Shermer: In Darwin's own time: the fossil record.
Darwin said, 'If my theory is true, then you should see a sequence of transitional fossils between species', and in fact two years after
Darwin published 'The Origin of Species' they found Archaeopteryx, which is this sort of half-reptile half-bird.
It's a nice transitional fossil between reptiles and birds.
It has feathers, it has reptile-like tail, there's reptile-like claws but there's feathers on there.
And ever since then we have found millions of fossils, transitional fossils. So in fact by now, the last statistic I heard was, we have over
a billion fossils, a thousand million fossils in the world's museums.
So when creationists say, you know, 'Show me just one transitional fossil', well, in fact there's, you know, an abundant rich of this.
In fact, I'll show you a funny example, if I can borrow your two glasses there for a second.
Ruby: Yeah sure.
Michael: We'll move some of this apparatus away.
They'll do something like this or they'll say, like, 'Here's a fossil and here's a fossil, and look! There's a gap in the fossil record'.
'Show me just one transitional fossil in the fossil record there.'
And so when you do this you debate them and I'll put a fossil there and go, 'Look, there's a transitional fossil'.
Without missing a beat, these creationists will go, 'Oh, now there's now two gaps in the fossil record'.
And this is such a classic example of counter-science, pseudoscience, because in fact the more fossil evidence you present, the more
gaps they think that there are and therefore evidence doesn't count.
In fact evidence counts against the theory and that's not how science works.
That's why we call that pseudoscience.
Summary:
We've developed many technologies since Darwin's time.
Have these changes supported Darwin's theories?
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Ruby: We've developed many technologies since Darwin's time.
Have these changes supported Darwin's theories?
Michael Shermer: What's really been amazing, since the cracking of the human genome in 1953, is how well correlated all the DNA
research and genetic research has gone along with the fossil record.
That is, in the fossil record you can date these fossils by the rocks that they're in.
For example, we now know that humans and chimpanzees and gorillas, the great apes, us and the great apes, separated from a
common ancestor about five to six million years ago, based just on the fossil record.
Then if you look at the DNA between humans, chimps and gorillas, they diverged, that is, the number of sequence similarities with the little mutations and differences in them.
It looks like, by that kind of molecular clock, they diverged on that clock about five to six million years ago.
That's about how different, because you can compare, like, humans and dogs, humans and mice, you know, and all the way back, and the
differences become more and more as we go further back in time.
And it matches the fossil record, so there you see geneticists and palaeontologists coming up with the same answer to the question of
how old we are, how similar or dissimilar we are from other animals.
And that's how we know evolution really did happen, because it's not like these guys are meeting on the weekends going, 'Okay, we got to get our
story straight because those creationists are coming', you know.
No, they independently come up with those answers.
Summary:
People have different viewpoints. How does this influence the acceptance of concepts such as evolution?
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Mohammed: People have different viewpoints. How does this influence the acceptance of concepts such as evolution?
Michael: Oh boy, that's a good question because clearly the data don't just speak for themselves.
We have to interpret data through our ideas, through our models, our theories, our hypotheses, our guesses, our biases and so on.
What makes science stand out above everything else is that there is a way to get around that. That is, you test, you run experiments and you have peer review.
That is, you can't just submit your articles to any old journal, it has to be a peer-reviewed journal,
in which your colleagues, who are just as smart as you and know the data just as well as you do, can evaluate your data and say 'I don't think so, I'm sorry' or 'Yes, I think you're right'.
And a good example is global warming, right. I mean, there is still global warning sceptics out there but not as many anymore.
And the reason is that because before, decades ago, there was room for scepticism. It wasn't clear that the Earth was getting warmer, it's human-caused
but over the last, say, the last ten to fifteen years, enough data has been accumulated that more and more scientists have come around and agreed, yes, that is what the data is telling us.
So that shows us that science is a human community process, it's a communal thing, it's not quite like a democracy where we vote but scientists, experts in the field, can look at the data and then decide.
Summary:
Given that humans have slowed the process of natural selection due to the advances in medicine in human health, what might be the next development in human evolution?
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Ruby: So now we'll go back to Heathcote High for a question.
Heathcote High: Given that humans have slowed the process of natural selection due to the advances in medicine in human health, what do you think is the next development in human evolution?
Michael: Right, boy, where are we going? If I was a psychic, if I was really a psychic, then I could tell you, right? But I'm not.
Well, okay, the problem here is that we have largely, as you said in your question, arrested evolution. That is, we've taken over, and where I think the future is, is genetically modified humans.
That is, we will improve ourselves through stem cells, through modifying our own genomes.
This will begin with practical important things, like curing ourselves of diseases, that sort of thing.
But you can add on to that, build just better bodies, stronger bodies, bodies that live longer, and we'll be also doing interfaces, I think with computers.
We've already been able to do this, we implant chips into the brain of Parkinson's Disease patients so that it stops the tremors.
We've done this with paralysed people, even quadraplegics. There is a guy in America who can actually do email by ... they planted this chip in his brain,
and then trained him to think about moving a cursor on the computer screen. And when the chip picks up the neuron firing, it sends a radio signal to the computer which moves the cursor.
And he's able to actually play video games and do email. It is truly amazing. Now, you know Arthur C Clarke's third law? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
If you didn't know this guy had a chip in his brain and he's just thinking thoughts and making something move on the table or on this computer, that looks like telekinesis,
when in fact, all it really is, is computer technology. Ultimately we could interface with artificial computers and improve our intelligence.
And here now, I'm going off the page of science and go into science fiction. In the long run, with nanotechnologies, we maybe able to inject ourselves with
these little nanobots that would improve our health, our longevity, and we could live perhaps centuries rather than decades.
The problem with meat, we are just electric meat, right, it's just protein, it doesn't last very long. If you can ultimately, as I said I'm off the pages of science and just talking science fiction,
if you can ultimately download your thoughts and memories onto computer chips but replace them, neuron by neuron,
you wouldn't even know it, you wouldn't even feel it because you don't feel your brain. And essentially we'd be a silicon brain. It'll still be you,
all your memories, and your thoughts and ideas and so on would still be there, but that would last a lot longer, maybe centuries or a millennium.
Until some new technology came up, and then you could live for maybe tens of thousands of years.
So that's what science fiction writers play with, those kind of ideas. That's the future of evolution. We take over and run it.
Summary:
What is intelligent design?
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Ruby: Now we have a question from Homebush Boys High.
Homebush Boys: Could you explain the concept of intelligent design?
Michael: Yes, good and fair question. In my book 'Why Darwin Matters' here, by the way, this is the first book I've ever published with full-frontal nudity on the cover,
we've been able to get away with this even in America. In the book I present the ten best arguments that the intelligent design creationists make.
I wanted to be fair and not just attack their motives or whatever but their actual scientific, their allegedly scientific argument, okay.
So the argument is this: it goes back to Paley I mentioned earlier and the watch. If you came across a watch like this, you wouldn't think that came about naturally,
you'd know that there was an intelligent designer behind it called the watchmaker, somebody at the Swiss watch company made this one.
And so their argument is that there are structures like that in nature, like the eye, the bacteria flagellum, DNA, that are too complex to have come about through natural Darwinian forces.
Now we have to stop here for a second. Let's not call it Darwinian evolution; let's just call it evolution because Darwin might have been wrong about a number of things.
For example, it turns out that genomes can make sudden and dramatic changes in complexity and increases in information content within the genome, just by acquiring new genomes.
Bacteria, single-cell bacteria, do this; they acquire whole new genomes that become hugely more complex. We can also see this in what is called the Hox genes.
Hox genes are a collection of genes that turn on or off based on some trigger. Now in some cases an environmental change will trigger an actual physical change.
There are fish that start off as females become males and vice versa, if in the environment there aren't any other sex around and, you know, it's more fun with somebody else than yourself, right.
So sexual reproduction is better for evolution than asexual reproduction. So it appears that these sudden changes can happen.
And that's another way where you can get apparently intelligent design from the bottom up by natural forces. So that's the single main argument that intelligent designers/creationists make.