It isn’t just biology that creationists like to mangle—watch how one of our IDist pals completely screws the pooch on the subject of “stellar evolution”. She trots out the whole menagerie of creationist canards in a bizarre attempt to defend the wacky Walt Brown and dismiss whole chunks of physics and astronomy.
It just goes to show that there’s something about the word “evolution” that unhinges these kooks. Everyone does know that biological evolution and stellar evolution are completely unrelated processes that don’t share any mechanisms, right?
Nope.
If stars evolve, produce heavier elements, die, and scatter those elements across the galaxy, this could provide the raw chemical material for the origin of very simple protolife…all without a god getting involved.
I think that is one reason why they hate stellar evolution as well.
There’s an awful lot of people who use the word “evolve” to signify something changing over time. Today the lexicon, tomorrow the world!
what the f!!! no more skippy on pharyngula’s roll???
scuse me for being “tired” and “uninteresting.”
yes, i’m taking you off my roll, but not because i don’t read you every day, or because i don’t think that my readers might want to read you.
i have a strict “reciprocal link only” policy.
pz, you cut me to the quick!
I think there are people who become very confused when the same word is used in different contexts.
My Texas chili recipe has evolved over the years. After being weeded out in competition for being too bland, or too spicy, or too salty or not salty enough, my recipe has settled down to a regular winner in at least the top three.
Recently, however, I was met with this comment.
Well, Bill, this is a good chili and I’m glad that your recipe has settled in, but, you know, I think it was better when you just created it on the fly.
There you have it, folks, Creationism trumps Evolution. Even in chili.
Why, that’s not right — Skippy the Bush Kangaroo is still right there on the complete blogroll, filed under “Lefties”. I have no plans on ever removing that one.
sorry, pz, i over-reacted…after atrios and kos and jesus general dumped me in three days time, and i heard pharyngula joined the bandwagon of amnesty day, and i couldn’t find my blog on yours, i jumped to the most immature conclusion possible, and i humbly apologize.
you are definitely on my roll, and you are my fav science blogger!
These people are like Humpty Dumpty.
— Humpty Dumpty
I love you skippy. I would add you to the blogroll too if I had a blog.
These are the same people who hate Nintendo’s Pokemon because the little guys “evolve”. Never mind that Pokemon “evolution” has nothing to do with real biological evolution.
It just goes to show that there’s something about the word “evolution” that unhinges these kooks.
There’s something about the word “marriage” that sends them over the edge too. Being a reactionary and working yourself into a frenzy due to cue words (liberal!) is very important in the lives of a lot of kooks. Why do you think that Fox is so popular?
Well, hey there PZ. Are you after me again?? Don’t you know by now that I just love all the attention?
Bear in mind, sweetie, that I’m not saying that stars don’t evolve. I’m saying that the evidence we have in regard to stellar evolution is speculative. What’s sad is that the evolutionary paradigm has stifled science in many aspects because everything we explore ~has to be~ squashed to fit within these narrow confines.
Carry on, big guy!
If Adam & Eve were made from carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and heavier elements that came from dying stars, that would mean that death preceded the Fall, which completely contradicts scripture. Hence, a man eating an apple caused supernovae, not the other way around. (Also, the effects of sin radiated away from the Garden of Eden faster than the speed of light, so that distant supernovae could be visible to us today.)
Of course, it’s also possible that the first humans weren’t made from heavy elements, but were themselves made from pure hydrogen. Only after the Fall did they acquire more protons.
I don’t think FTK understands this post, or the comments to it…
I don’t know too many astrophysicists who consider their research into star formation to have been stifled by the ToE.
FtK sez: evidence we have in regard to stellar evolution is speculative.
No. It’s built on very solid physics. Brown just mangles the living hell out of it. His understanding seems to be below that of a high school level. Did you read the part where he claimed that, just as planets don’t fall into the sun, a gas cloud shouldn’t collapse to the center of mass?
Wow, way to completely ignore energy transfers…
Religion has evolved over time.
People see evolve and freak out, its an overrated word.
These are largely the same people who have problems with geology -the earth isn’t older than 6000 years, only these wacky scientists have manufactered a bunch of fiction about radioactive dating … Of course stellar evolution, and big-bang type ages of the universe are even more threatening. And of course, if you can’t believe anything from geologic reasoning, then the case for global warming goes away….
Yeah, we should squash everything to fit within the narrow confines of a 6,000 year-old universe, instead. To hell with evidence.
Hey, now, he’s got a good point. If a gas cloud with significant angular momentum collapsed into a star, it’d have to dump a lot of that momentum into at least a small part of itself, which would then gradually condense and accrete while orbiting the parent star. You know, like planets do.
Oh. Wait.
They will be picketing Harley-Davidson soon to get them to stop using their evolution motors. Everyone knows that god miracled Harley’s onto the planet they didn’t “evolve”.
Eric Chaisson, Tufts: Cosmic Evolution
http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/cosmic_evolution/docs/splash.html
Stellar Death:
http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/cosmic_evolution/docs/fr_1/fr_1_stel.html
“Nor do stars evolve in the strict and limited biological sense–a subject best examined more closely later, in the sixth, Biological Epoch. Yet close parallels are apparent, including selection, adaptation, and perhaps even generational offspring among the stars….
Those massive stars selected by Nature to endure the fires needed to produce heavy elements are in fact the very same stars that often foster new populations of stars, thereby both gradually and episodically enriching interstellar space with greater elemental complexity on timescales measured in millions of millennia.”
Oh my. If stellar evolution really *were* a complete crock, my classes this year would be SO MUCH EASIER.
Not that my workload is a valid piece of evidence in support of the theory, but still…
The word evolve IS scary. Because, as someone said above, it implies that things change! Over time! And things changing mean maybe…what you think about them has to change! Which requires critical thinking and not nodding in time. Which can be scary if you’re not used to it, I guess.
Most of these lunatics can’t understand the basics of evolution. Lets try and educate them on that before we confuse them with another scientific process. Do you want them to get nose bleeds?
The (current) last post at “Angry Astronomer” comments is worth looking at – I’m reproducing part of it here for information …..
Go here:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html
…and type in stellar evolution and you get 365000 articles. We haven’t just proven that stars evolve, we have dissected it and understand it in minute detail, in most cases based on first principles and verified by peer-reviewed observations. We have models that are ridiculously successful in making predictions with events such as novae, supernovae, pulsating variables, white dwarf systems and gamma-ray bursts.
( posted by “michael” )
watch how one of our IDist pals completely screws the pooch on the subject of “stellar evolution”.
Another typical unthinking Darwinist post, Myers. If Idists screwed the pooch, how come there are still pooches left, huh?
Huh?
There is a wonderful anecdote concerning the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 – 1827) it is in the form of a conversation between Napoleon and Laplace after the former, a great supporter and promoter of the mathematical sciences, had read Laplace’s Exposition du systeme du monde.
Napoleon: You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe.
Laplace: Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.
The problem for Walt Brown and FTK with theories of stellar evolution, galactic evolution and evolution of the universe is that these theories also have no need for that hypothesis.
Now, “stellar evolution” may well be a misnomer (where’s the mutation?), but there’s a hypothesis that the multiverse evolves — don’t laugh –, and this hypothesis is testable. Find one neutron star that is twice as heavy as the Sun, and it’s disproven.
http://www.arxiv.org/hep-th/0407213
And along the way, the anthropic principle falls by the wayside. Here’s more about it:
http://www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0303070
Now, “stellar evolution” may well be a misnomer (where’s the mutation?), but there’s a hypothesis that the multiverse evolves — don’t laugh –, and this hypothesis is testable. Find one neutron star that is twice as heavy as the Sun, and it’s disproven.
http://www.arxiv.org/hep-th/0407213
And along the way, the anthropic principle falls by the wayside. Here’s more about it:
http://www.arxiv.org/gr-qc/0303070
Your hard-core religious reactionary can’t stand the idea of ANYTHING changing. Sky Daddy created everything just so, and it’s supposed to damn well stay that way.
David:
“Stellar evolution” is hardly a misnomer. Darwin didn’t invent the word, it just means “growth”, “development” or generally “change over time”. As such it fits perfectly for biological as well as stellar evolution and many other things, no genes or mutation required.
Of course that melts creationists’ brains and makes them say ridiculously moronic things… No wait. They always do.
“These are the same people who hate Nintendo’s Pokemon because the little guys “evolve”. Never mind that Pokemon “evolution” has nothing to do with real biological evolution.”
What?? Nintendo, you have led me astray!
I think there are people who become very confused when the same word is used in different contexts.
Yes, such people exist. We refer to them as “Morons”.
If someone repeatedly, after multiple corrections, continued to misuse the word “drive” (verb and noun forms), or “play” (confusing music, games, and childhood activity), would you continue to assume this person had near-normal intelligence? What if they consistently had trouble with concepts like “me” and “you”?
Stellar evolution and biological evolution do share one principle in common: ‘the drunkards walk.’ Oh wait, another one: ‘stratified stability,’ Oops, a third, ‘regression toward the mean,’ I’m sorry, a fourth: all properties of physics and chemistry, etc.
Like Eric Chaisson, physicist Michael Burton of the University of New South Wales argues that stellar birth and death cycles are broadly analogous to biological evolution. But is there true selection going on, or just the accumulation of heavier elements?
Burton, The Galactic Ecosystem, 2002
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/~mgb/Bibliography/iau213_ecosystem_poster.pdf
“Thus the Galaxy is displaying a very simple form of evolution … New types of stars (with higher metallicities) appear as the Galaxy evolves. This arises from a limited form of information passage from one generation of stars to the next, through the changing distribution of the initial
elemental abundances. The stars that form in one generation influence the type and number of stars that form in the next…
There is thus self-replication (i.e. more stars are created) with variation (i.e. a changing IMF and stellar behavioural properties, as the elemental abundances build up in successive generations), and these continue to replicate with variation…”
That Chick tract linked in the first post was incredible.
Who was the professor–Rip Torn by way of R. Lee Ermey? And what legitimate biologist would actually cite Time and NatGeo as sources for a claim?
I think it was funnier than the article itself.
The basics of star evolution can be derived with quantum and statistical methods that were available 80 years ago. I wish the crazies would stick to harassing the biologists.
Check out ftk’s post above. They all desperately want attention from real scientists, because that will make them feel…relevant. A creationist once harassed me by email for over two months. Along with the batshit-crazy assertions, threats and insults, he just *begged* me to pay attention to him, which of course I didn’t, and after being ignored for a while he apparently moved on to another target. A surprising amount of their anger is just the old “so you scientist types think you’re smarter than me” middle-school resentment, nothing more, nothing less. It has to cause some serious cognitive dissonance, on top of what they already have, that they beg for acknowledgment from those they want to tear down.
Those meanings are more recent, based in large part on usage by Darwin, Lamarck, and other biologists. Get a little deeper into the etymology, and you find that “volve” derives from the verb “to turn”, with the “e” prefix signifying “outward”. Thus, “evolving” in earlier times meant something like a scroll opening or a carpet unrolling.
We’re stuck with the word now, but it does carry teleological and progressivist baggage, as if the process goes in a straight line with only one possible direction or outcome. In that sense, it might be more appropriate in astronomy than biology, though the implications of purposefulness and artificiality would still not fit observation or theory. (You’d think the creationists might approve of such connotations, but their grasp of etymology seems no better than their comprehension of science…)
I’ve grown up with “evolution” being a technical term of evolutionary biology, not what the insiders say instead of “change” or “development” so the outsiders won’t understand them.
You’re right that Darwin didn’t invent that word. Literally meaning “unwrapping”, it was used up to Darwin’s time for what is now called “embryogenesis”, “ontogenesis”, or “development” (which etymologically means about the same — compare “envelop” and “develop”) because it was thought that this latter process worked by unfolding what was already there, rather than by building something new. Darwin used the word AFAIK only once (in the modern meaning), at the end of his 1871 book The Descent of Man — in On the Origin of Species you’ll only find words like “transformation” or “transmutation”); maybe the etymology is why he (understandably) didn’t like it.
The modern sense is quite well defined: descent with modification by mutation, selection, and drift. It happens to populations, not to individuals; one organism, language, or (possibly) universe cannot evolve. What stars — individual stars! — do was, I used to think, entirely predictable, more like development.
Now, I didn’t know about the stuff Colugo has mentioned. That sounds a lot more like evolution.
I’ve grown up with “evolution” being a technical term of evolutionary biology, not what the insiders say instead of “change” or “development” so the outsiders won’t understand them.
You’re right that Darwin didn’t invent that word. Literally meaning “unwrapping”, it was used up to Darwin’s time for what is now called “embryogenesis”, “ontogenesis”, or “development” (which etymologically means about the same — compare “envelop” and “develop”) because it was thought that this latter process worked by unfolding what was already there, rather than by building something new. Darwin used the word AFAIK only once (in the modern meaning), at the end of his 1871 book The Descent of Man — in On the Origin of Species you’ll only find words like “transformation” or “transmutation”); maybe the etymology is why he (understandably) didn’t like it.
The modern sense is quite well defined: descent with modification by mutation, selection, and drift. It happens to populations, not to individuals; one organism, language, or (possibly) universe cannot evolve. What stars — individual stars! — do was, I used to think, entirely predictable, more like development.
Now, I didn’t know about the stuff Colugo has mentioned. That sounds a lot more like evolution.
I have not studied biology, where it’s likely that the word “evolution” is used only in the strictly ToE sense to avoid confusion. So this isn’t the first time I encounter the word “evolution” in a different sense and know not to confuse it with the biological definition.
Sure, that’s the biological definition of evolution. That doesn’t mean astrophysicists are wrong when they talk about stellar evolution — unless they mean evolution in the biological sense. Which is what Burton apparantly alludes to, however I haven’t read that page completely.
Besides, all the dictionaries I have at hand right now (meaning online ones, including the 1913 Webster), list the biological definition among more definitions, one of which is (gradual) change or development.