Seven Dirty Words Redux
Back in 2005, Nat Torkington stirred up a storm of comment with a video in which his young children did their version of George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" routine, in which the seventh dirty word was "evolution." Whatever you think about Nat's use of his kids to make a political point (something about which many commenters had serious reservations), his political statement seemed eerily prescient when I read [via slashdot] about the PLoS article, Evolution By Any Other Name:
The increase in resistance of human pathogens to antimicrobial agents is one of the best-documented examples of evolution in action at the present time, and because it has direct life-and-death consequences, it provides the strongest rationale for teaching evolutionary biology as a rigorous science in high school biology curricula, universities, and medical schools. In spite of the importance of antimicrobial resistance, we show that the actual word “evolution” is rarely used in the papers describing this research. Instead, antimicrobial resistance is said to “emerge,” “arise,” or “spread” rather than “evolve.” Moreover, we show that the failure to use the word “evolution” by the scientific community may have a direct impact on the public perception of the importance of evolutionary biology in our everyday lives.
They say that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Here, the story appeared the other way around, first as farce, and then as tragedy.
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Comments: 9
[03.03.07 10:42 PM]
"The pathetic thing is that we have scientists who are trying to prove evolution, which no scientist can ever prove."
(Dr Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize winner and eminent evolutionist)
"The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, but it has spawned a science because it is distinguished by two factors which inflate its apparent relevance far beyond its merits. First, the fossils hint at the ancestry of a supremely self- important animal - ourselves. Secondly, the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmented and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present. Hence the amazing quantity of literature on the subject ever since Darwin's work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man."
(John Reader, Whatever Happened to Zinjanthropus? New Scientist Vol. 89, No.12446 (March 26,1981) pp 802-805))
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
(Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, chapter "Difficulties")
[03.03.07 11:02 PM]
Here's one... "In all the thousands of fly-breeding experiments carried out all over the world for more than fifty years, a distinct new species has never been seen to emerge ... or even a new enzyme." (nor even a new color of fruitfly eye, for that matter)...
(Gordon Taylor, The Great Evolution Mystery (New York: Harper and Row, 1983, pp 34, 38)
[03.03.07 11:23 PM]
Maybe some of the geniuses espousing every facet of evolution should theorize for the rest of us poor ignoramuses about the mechanics of a few of the existing mysteries right in front of our faces, such as gravity, magnetism, and light (particle or wave) --- and don't tell me that scientists have explained those phenomena, because I know enough about science to know that they have NOT been explained (only theorized, measured and utilized). It's amazing to me how this generation is so supremely superior to all the other generations of scientists who, as we well know, have been proven frequently to be quite embarrassingly wrong. For instance, it was only 10 years ago that virtually everyone in the medical community swore that gastric ulcers were a disease and not an infection. As it turns out, they were completely wrong, and proven so by a couple of near amateurs in the field of medical "science". So before you go thinking we got it all figured out and everyone else is so stupid, put your egos away and do a little open-minded inquiry of your own on the subject instead of simply gulping down the current fad like so much Coca Cola.
[03.03.07 11:33 PM]
What's wrong with using the word "adaptation"? Is that not, in actuality, both what is happening and a term everyone can agree upon?
[03.04.07 06:29 AM]
Paging Ann Coulter... Ann Coulter to the white courtesty telephone please....
[03.04.07 09:23 AM]
Nat may have intended to stir up "a storm of comment" by using the word evolution in his video, but I'd speculate that most scientists don't intend to stir up controversy about their choice of words. As I see it, scientists' choice of words has evolved to avoid unwanted controversy.
Such behavior, involving adapting to the environment and learning from experience, is the essence of intelligence.
By the way, the "first as tragedy, then as farce" part of your final paragraph is attributed to Karl Marx. Of course he didn't say exactly "history repeats itself."
[03.04.07 12:23 PM]
Daniel -- what is happening in bacteria is not just adaptation, but adaptation being passed down to successive generations (i.e. evolution).
Brian -- I see no conflict between evolution and being a Bible-believing Christian. If you believe that the Bible is a literal document, then the date of creation, as calculated from all the generations laid forth there, is 4004 BC, as the Archbishop of Usher once famously noted. Why could God could not work through such a marvelous mechanism as natural selection? We do our best to understand and tell stories about the way the world works, but they are all -- religion, science, or personal philosophy -- imperfect reflections of the thing itself.
Charles, I suggest you read The Beak of the Finch.
[04.01.07 05:13 AM]
I know I'm ages late to this but I'd just like to correct the misquote from "Spanky" above which has to be one of the most common misquotes behind "beam me up, Scotty" and "Play it again Sam". Darwin did say what "Spanky" said, but he went on to say something slightly further:
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound.
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Brian Yamabe [03.03.07 09:31 PM]
I know I am an oddity in the industry as I am a Bible believing Christian (Proud Lutheran). I hope before people start pinning this on Christians, they realize that Christians don't deny micro-evolution which explains variation in species and resistance to pathogens. It's macro-evolution, single-cells morphing into multi-celled animals etc., that we have a problem reconciling.