There is another effective framing technique that I almost never see used that might be worth considering because I’ve seen it used well in the past.
Most people think evolution is a purely biological concept and it is virtually always framed in such ways. This runs headlong into the mystical beliefs many people attach to living organisms. Making evolution a property of an organism is no different than making a “soul” the property of an organism to them, and fits in the same cognitive pigeonhole. A lot of the jumbled chemistry and thermodynamic arguments follow from this as well; biology is special precisely because it can violate the laws of science.
Evolution is fundamentally a systems dynamic from mathematics. If you have a system—any system—with a certain set of abstract properties then there are certain required mathematical consequences. The result of 2+2 is always 4, no matter where in nature we find it. Biology is just one type of system to which this mathematics is applied; it has the prerequisite properties on the left hand side of the equation that require the system dynamic biologists call “evolution” on the right side of the equation. Mathematics asserts that evolution should exist in biology whether or not science has found evidence of it (fortunately, we have found much evidence). When evolution emerges from mathematics instead of biology, it has a sterilizing effect on the concept.
It turns out that very few creationists are willing to dismiss mathematics in the same way they dismiss science. Mathematics is neutral territory, it does not have a political or religious affiliation in the minds of most people, and almost everyone tacitly “believes” in it because they use it every day. The few times I have seen this strategy used—completely divorcing evolution from science—even the militant true believers found themselves at a loss for a counter-argument (not that it changed their minds).
This was definitely what solidified my position a few years ago, changing my stance from “evolution is very likely to be right” to “it’s basically impossible for it to NOT be right.” The defining moment was learning about the Avida code, which demonstrate that “irreducible complexity” was basically inevitable.
For this e-mail, I’m thinking of glossing over most of the pre-genetic evidence. Point out that it DID heavily lean towards evolution being true, but the ultimate test was genetics. Evolutionary theory made predictions about how genetics would turn out to work, and if that prediction had turned out to be wrong, we would have had to make major changes to the theory or scrap it completely. But it didn’t. Related species shared the percentage of genes we’d have expected them to, and the rate of mutation that we’ve observed demonstrates that it’s mathematically inevitable.
I’m not sure that’s the “best” argument in an absolute sense, but I think it makes the most sense to focus on in the allotted space/attention-span.
The problem with some creationists (the ones who get the basics), as I understand it, is not that they don’t think evolution is happening, but that they don’t think it’s fast enough to transform proto-bacterial zero-cellular balls of chemicals into people in a mere three billion years. Although, personally, I think it’s a really long time.
There is another effective framing technique that I almost never see used that might be worth considering because I’ve seen it used well in the past.
Most people think evolution is a purely biological concept and it is virtually always framed in such ways. This runs headlong into the mystical beliefs many people attach to living organisms. Making evolution a property of an organism is no different than making a “soul” the property of an organism to them, and fits in the same cognitive pigeonhole. A lot of the jumbled chemistry and thermodynamic arguments follow from this as well; biology is special precisely because it can violate the laws of science.
Evolution is fundamentally a systems dynamic from mathematics. If you have a system—any system—with a certain set of abstract properties then there are certain required mathematical consequences. The result of 2+2 is always 4, no matter where in nature we find it. Biology is just one type of system to which this mathematics is applied; it has the prerequisite properties on the left hand side of the equation that require the system dynamic biologists call “evolution” on the right side of the equation. Mathematics asserts that evolution should exist in biology whether or not science has found evidence of it (fortunately, we have found much evidence). When evolution emerges from mathematics instead of biology, it has a sterilizing effect on the concept.
It turns out that very few creationists are willing to dismiss mathematics in the same way they dismiss science. Mathematics is neutral territory, it does not have a political or religious affiliation in the minds of most people, and almost everyone tacitly “believes” in it because they use it every day. The few times I have seen this strategy used—completely divorcing evolution from science—even the militant true believers found themselves at a loss for a counter-argument (not that it changed their minds).
This was definitely what solidified my position a few years ago, changing my stance from “evolution is very likely to be right” to “it’s basically impossible for it to NOT be right.” The defining moment was learning about the Avida code, which demonstrate that “irreducible complexity” was basically inevitable.
For this e-mail, I’m thinking of glossing over most of the pre-genetic evidence. Point out that it DID heavily lean towards evolution being true, but the ultimate test was genetics. Evolutionary theory made predictions about how genetics would turn out to work, and if that prediction had turned out to be wrong, we would have had to make major changes to the theory or scrap it completely. But it didn’t. Related species shared the percentage of genes we’d have expected them to, and the rate of mutation that we’ve observed demonstrates that it’s mathematically inevitable.
I’m not sure that’s the “best” argument in an absolute sense, but I think it makes the most sense to focus on in the allotted space/attention-span.
The problem with some creationists (the ones who get the basics), as I understand it, is not that they don’t think evolution is happening, but that they don’t think it’s fast enough to transform proto-bacterial zero-cellular balls of chemicals into people in a mere three billion years. Although, personally, I think it’s a really long time.