Hey, it all starts with a few layers of cells. Development is amazing. Some people say they’d rather have “a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” but I’ve always said I’d rather be “a mate with a Sealyham than an acoelomate.”
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I think maybe I wasn’t clear. I think the evidence itself, as you and others have described in this discussion is compelling.
What I find missing is a good and logical description of the evidence that someone with no background in the sciences can pick up and understand. This is the “elevator pitch” I’m looking for. Again, my primary audience is the people around me who would say, “I’m comfortable with my YEC view, give me a good reason to think about investigating the alternative”.
I’m going to try to write one if my own words based on the various posts in this discussion, and I’ll happy with any critiques once I do. However life is busy, so it might take a day or two for me to get around to it.
But again, if anyone is aware of one already written down, I’d love to be pointed to it.
Talk Origins has a good page on the statistics of incongruent phylogenies.
Looking at the table, phylogenies with 10 taxa and 3 incongruencies have a p value of 0.012. 10 taxa have ~35 million possible rooted trees, so it is significant if the data falls onto a relatively few trees close to what is predicted.
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Like my post above, I would suggest the Talk Origins pages for a decent “elevator pitch”.
Also:
Figure 1.2.1. A plot of the CI values of cladograms versus the number of taxa in the cladograms . CI values are on the y-axis; taxa number are on the x-axis. The 95% confidence limits are shown in light turquoise. All points above and to the right of the turquoise region are statistically significant high CI values. Similarly, all points below and to the left of the turquoise region are statistically significant low values of CI. (reproduced from Klassen et al . 1991, Figure 6).
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Is it possible that the most effective initial response might not be about the evidence? If we change the topics/terms here, would our conversation look different?
Here’s what I mean. If someone says “I’m comfortable with my anti-vaxx view, give me a good reason to think about investigating the alternative,” would we begin with an “elevator pitch” about the immune system?
If someone says “I’m comfortable with my view about the conspiracy to fake the moon landings, give me a good reason to think about investigating the alternative,” would we begin with an “elevator pitch” about orbits?
I hope I don’t give you the impression that I think this conversation about elevator pitches is worthless or misguided completely. But I am thoroughly unconvinced that an elevator pitch is typically the best way to have a fruitful conversation with a YEC. The only exceptions would be when the person has credibly asserted that they hold to YEC because of evidence and that they are curious about what evolution actually is.
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How about this?: In the Cambrian Period, 500+ million years ago, there were no animals on land at all. Not until the Silurian Period, millions of years later, are there any land animals, and they’re all just arthropods. Finally, in the Devonian, some vertebrates venture forth (there were vertebrates in the water already), but they’re closely tied to the water. In the Carboniferous come the first amniotes, vertebrates that can reproduce on land. But the first mammals come along only in the Triassic. We could tell a similar story for any other group of organisms, whether animals, plants, or whatever. The life in every period is different from that in previous periods and later periods, but more similar to periods close in time than to periods far apart in time. Species could of course have just been created that way, but why would we expect that sort of ordered pattern in such a case?
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Two very different elevator pitches.
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Reminds me of the adage that you can’t use reason to change someone’s mind if they didn’t use reason to arrive at their current beliefs. Perhaps it could be as simple as saying there are thousands and thousands of Christian scientists who accept evolution and see no conflict with their Christian beliefs.
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That’s a nice idea, but I’ve had my salvation questioned by YEC’s more than once.
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Yeah, I certainly know a lot of people who would question that. And it’s odd, isn’t it? I should think that if one can only imperfectly understand the divine, then the gods would naturally be expected to understand that their ways have not in every case been perfectly interpreted by us. So the idea of a singular god who not only insists that we must have arrived at him and him only and rejected all the others, but who also insists that we had better have our history-of-earth details exactly right, seems like sort of an unreasonable a-hole. Not the sort one would find worthy of reverence.
No, one would suppose that a reasonable god would recognize that people would be liable to arrive at differing opinions in the face of ambiguous evidence, and would not wish to make the products of this sort of guess-work into iron-clad conditions for favorable afterlife treatment. If Jesus could say that a man who was not a Christian at all was “not far from the Kingdom of God,” surely one would not figure that this god was sitting at the door of the kingdom, holding up his hand in a “halt” gesture, and saying, “naaaaah…not FAR, admittedly, but not close enough. You lose.”
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You might respond by asking them why they have to question your salvation if YEC is scientific and well evidenced.
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I’d rather travel back in time to witness the Diet of Worms than to watch a worm go on a diet in my own era.
Obviously I’m a heretic out to lead poor, unsuspecting students astray. I don’t use the KJV either, further evidence of my wicked ways.
My standard response is to ask them if they’ve ever considered that there are over 350,000 species of beetles. Does God just really like beetles? Usually they respond with something about created “kinds” and microevolution, which opens the door to a discussion of how much evolution they are willing to accept. I can’t say I’ve ever converted anybody, but it defuses the situation and plants the seed.
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But, you know, that’s what good argument does.
I spent a couple of decades in active litigation practice, and in that context, argument really is meant to convince. But it’s not meant to convince an adversary. It’s meant to convince a referee, and that’s a very different thing. In most argumentative contexts “in the wild,” as opposed to “in court,” we are not seeking to persuade a referee. Debate club, perhaps, but that’s about it.
If the object is to persuade, one of the clear lessons of argument is that argument seldom DIRECTLY brings someone around. Argument tends to do that only in particular situations: when, for example, someone has misunderstood your point and now accedes to it because clarity has repaired the situation. But when viewpoints really are opposed, the object of argument should always be the sowing of those seeds. People do not let you convince them. They have their fists up and are in the battle, and the last thing they’re going to do is give up. But people do convince themselves, and you can help them. You want them to be left, after feeling that they have defended their corner well, with that uneasy recognition that something in here doesn’t quite fit, or isn’t fully resolved. From that, wonderful things come.
P.S. My apologies for persnicketiness, but I think that you’ve said “diffuses” when what you mean is “defuses.” The expression comes from the world of explosive devices, and the last thing you want to do, when endangered by an explosive is to “diffuse” it, which will not only diffuse it but diffuse you in the process. Defusing it, however, can be very helpful.
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Surely the name “Diet of Worms” must have been chosen because they didn’t really want anyone to come. Either that, or they were badly in need of a marketing firm to focus-group it. “So, we’re thinking of hosting an event. Ideas for the name include ‘Diet of Worms.’ How do you like that name? What does it bring to mind?”
You make a good point. My late husband was an attorney and he used to practice his closing arguments on me. He told me that you never want to tell the jury that the other side is lying or wrong. Rather, you want to lead them to the point at which they can draw that conclusion themselves. And I appreciate the grammar check.
I tried to stay away from jury trials, as juries were so doggoned unreliable. When I was a plaintiff’s-side civil rights lawyer, I was always hoping to keep it to a bench trial because I was more concerned with the risk of losing a case where I was absolutely right than I was with the risk of not getting a chance at a runaway damage award. Of course, my adversaries, being in the wrong, usually opted for a jury, as one does when either (a) in the wrong or (b) hoping for a runaway damage award.
Judges have heard a lot of everything, so the caution against pointing out that people are lying is not as relevant there. In fact, the main reason not to mention it may simply be that you know the judge is already so very, very well aware of it. I can’t help but think of the time Buckingham got caught lying in the Kitzmiller case – a flaming disaster if ever there were one, and plainly indicative of motive, which was not lost on the judge. The hilarious bit was that what he was lying about was no big deal: that the creationist books had been paid for by a collection taken up at his church. Nothing wrong with that, at all. But the fact that he THOUGHT there was something wrong with that, because he knew the motive for the purchase of the books had been purely religious rather than scientific, spoke volumes.
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Returning to the “elevator pitch” topic at the head of this thread, a thought:
When we can avoid it, we should avoid feeling that evolution is anything we need to “pitch” at all. Obviously we are all familiar with situations in which one must pitch it, but the very fact of our being forced to take up a sort of “advocacy” stance for the obviously-true has a way of shifting it from feeling like a question of fact to feeling like a question of point of view. This is unhelpful, in part because it is precisely one of the goals of the anti-biology movement to make it seem like it’s some sort of ideological commitment.
When that becomes the flavor of the conversation, it is sometimes not a terrible idea to point it out. I have had many occasions to say to creationists that I do not actually “care” whether evolutionary theory is more or less correct or not. I don’t have a position and I don’t have a stake. I don’t want evolution to be real, or to not be real. What I want is to correctly apprehend whatever IS real.
Now, admittedly the resistance to ideologically driven movements has a way of putting you in an ideological position itself, but this ideological position is defensive only. I want my teenaged daughter, whose collection of animal skulls is a source of great interest and joy to her, to be free to learn real science in her school. Beyond that, I don’t want my tax dollars spent to lie to children. But these are not aggressive, grasping, controlling ideological commitments. And if YHWH, Ineffable Shuffler of Genomes, turns up in a shark-skin suit and a celestial Cadillac with a pair of fuzzy dice over the dash and shows us how he designed and built it all and fooled us mortals into believing evolution did it, I’m happy for the schooling to change to reflect this new reality. If our Squid Overlords turn up and show us that they intelligently designed the human race to be their principal food source, and tell us that they’ve now come for the harvest, likewise. “Evolution” means absolutely nothing to me as a cause, except and only to the extent that the word does appear to signify the only credible body of theory which explains the diversity of life, at least until the Squid Overlords show up.
So, instead of acting as though we wish to “sell” evolution – which really is not the point as such – perhaps we just need to be able to say, “this is why biologists think this is how the diversity of life arose.” Not “this is why you should believe it,” though that’s somewhat implicit in the fact that these are the views of the people best situated to know something about it.
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I’m in a different position than many of you. The YEC’s I have discussions with are family, friends & fellow church members. I have no interested in convincing them their position is wrong. I’m interested only in having discussion, and where appropriate pointing out that some of what they believe to be true, isn’t supported by good evidence.
Many of them have never considered acceptance of evolution to be compatible with the theology we share. So I’m the weird one in my environment, though as someone who agrees with them theologically and has some lay leadership responsibilities, I’m also trusted. I also know them (for the most part) to be great, honest people. As part of these conversations, having a elevator pitch that describes why I believe the evidence for evolution needs to at least be considered is helpful. It’s a hook for more conversation, but not appropriate for all cases.
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I’m very comfortable talking to the evidence of an old earth, as that was the starting point for me to question YECism. However I’m much less clear on explaining the biological question. Hence the way I phrased my OP.
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