Friday, August 8, 2008

MythBusters to do a show on Creationism?

That's right. They are discussing it and hopefully they will do it next season!!

MythBuster Adam Savage said on the Skepticality Podcast,

"My goal this year is to prove natural selection on the show. It's gonna take a while, it's gonna be very hard to make it fascinating on film in the context of our narrative structure, but I figure screw it. The sky's the limit. Let's do, Let's do natural selection. I'm sick of fifty percent of this country thinking creationism is reasonable. It's appalling. And I have the unique ability, maybe, to sell this idea to Discovery, and they'll, they might allow me to do it, and I'm gonna try as hard as I can."

The thing about doing a show on Natural Selection is that most creationists already accept it. I think it might be a good idea to create an evolutionary computer algorithm for the show to demonstrate that mutation and selection can and do produce complexity.It would also be a good idea to show that cerain things (homologous structures, vestigial organs, atavisms, etc.) are present when evolution from common ancestry is simulated, and that these things are present in the real world.

6 comments:

Newsletter template said...

vestigial organs? Name one!
And please don't say the appendix, it is part of your immune system.

AIGBusted said...

KJ,

"Vestigial" does not always mean nonfunctional. For instance, some whales have a pelvis and small leg bones. They are there for a reason: attatchment points for reproductive organs.

Yet why would whales be dependent upon those bones being there? God could have created reproductive organs that did not need attachment points, after all. The reason whales still need those bones is because they evolved from land mammals, which used them for walking, and the muscles used them as an attachment point.

Lee Vegas said...

Hey, KJ. Want a vestigial organ? You're sitting on it! Where your ancestors had a tail, you have coccyx, or tail bone.

LV

http://theistsanonymous.blogspot.com/

Olorin said...

kj: "And please don't say the appendix, it is part of your immune system."

A few hundred people die yearly from an infected appendix. If the appendix did not contain lots of immune cells, EVERYONE would die of an infected appendix. The appendix has an immune function because the appendix needs it, not because the rest of the body needs it. When you remove the appendix, you remove the need fo its immune capability. Find another argument.

Anonymous said...

KJ, is your comment supposed to imply that evolution is a load of crap?
Want evidence its not? How about cultures with large amounts of incest, that have had such for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years tend to result in humans that have features of primates. For instance, incest has been prime in the middle east for as long as humans have lived there, both with the idea of retaining 'genetic purity' and the wide spread decentralisation of human habitation until more recent centuries/mellenia.
They tend to have more prominent jaws and eyebrow ridges, as well as larger amounts of body hair, more reminiscent of our genetic cousins. The same features are found in the royal families of europe which had large amounts of incest to retain royalty with the royal.

More proof? How about our closest genetic cousin is around a 97% genetic match.

Unknown said...

"vestigial organs? Name one!"

Easy, for approximately four weeks of your life, you --like all humans-- had a tail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_vestigiality