Subject: Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children
Post: Thank you, Bill Nye, the Science Guy! www.youtube.com/watch

My response after watching the short piece :

Great clip, friend. Bill Nye is great. He ends his short editorial with the phrase “there is no evidence for it”. Something in this caught in my craw.

World views, culture, the human soul is not only objective evidence based.

This remains the problem with the rhetoric, the world view, of the western world view, rational humanists, the scientists, people who only believe in things if there is evidence. They consistently deny the world of the unseen, of the “no evidence” to support a belief. And of the billions of humans who believe many things without the western version of “evidence”.

I personally believe in (most of) the evidence the scientific world presents regarding how the Universe (and everything in it) came to be.

However, the tremendous psychic energy that is welling up in (conservative) people is in fact trying to address, name, describe, point to, identify something very fundamental, another way that the world also works. That show of psychic energy is as much “evidence” for something else that the small world of science cannot address.

Yes, science explains many things but it cannot explain non-believers.

To science, which is only one way of knowing the world, I say, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – Hamlet, Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene V.

www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-michael-dowd/tedx-talk-why-we-struggle_b_1605802.html

by Rev. Michael Dowd, the religious naturalist, evidential mystic, big history evangelist, and author of ‘Thank God for Evolution’

Faith traditions offer conflicting beliefs about our inner nature and challenges. Fortunately, a knowledge-based view is emerging that offers fresh and realistic hope for improving the quality of our lives and relationships.

Ignorance of our inherited drives has been one of the greatest causes of suffering throughout human history — individually and collectively.

Every religion offers mythic beliefs about our inner workings. But until recently, we had no measurable knowledge about how our minds and emotions actually work — what drives us, and why.

Now we know, through a wide range of evidence, that the powerful biological instincts we inherited are ‘mismatched’ for the supercharged environments we have created. Honoring this now indisputable fact can help us channel our deepest drives in ways that serve, rather than sabotage, our joy in life and the quality of our relationships and legacy. As well, we can appreciate how this inspiring, science-based perspective REALizes, or naturalizes, ancient mythic insights.

I delivered the following TEDx talk in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in May 2012. Beneath the video player is a brief description of some of the main points I covered.

www.youtube.com/watch (20:27)

Most of us, including evangelicals, know that our trials and temptations, our inner struggles, our troubling habits of thought and behavior, our personal and relational challenges, are not literally the result of our great-great-great-great… grandmother eating an apple.

Within each of us are instincts molded by millions of years of evolution to have us think and behave in ways that certainly benefitted our ancestors. Indeed, all of us alive today owe our existence to those very same instincts. But what have they done for us lately? To be blunt, they’ve made many of us fat, some addicted, and most of us in denial about how we are impacting the planet.

Our instincts can hardly be faulted. We are surrounded by ‘supernormal allurements’: processed foods, feel-good drugs and alcohol, Internet porn, and media sources that are no longer tethered to reality. Our ancestors faced none of these challenges.

Our ways of getting news, interacting with friends, and dealing with enemies have been altered beyond recognition by modern technologies. Our opportunities for indulging romantic or sexual urges, or wasting time and distracting ourselves, would be unrecognizable even to our great-grandparents.

The cultural contexts have changed enormously — but our brains and bodies have not. We still have the same fears and desires as our ancestors, but now those instincts are out of sync with life conditions.

Compounding the problem is that we’ve all inherited exquisite skills for self-deception. The human brain not only distorts perception and memory; it then uses its extraordinary powers to rationalize or justify the distortion. In essence, our brain regularly tricks us — and then masterfully hides the evidence!

Consider: Prior to microscopes, it wasn’t just difficult to understand infection; it was impossible. Prior to telescopes, it was impossible to understand the Universe. The same is true of our inner world. Without an evolutionary grasp of why our instincts and emotions are the way they are, it isn’t just difficult to wisely choose and live our priorities in this fast-paced, modern world. It’s effectively impossible.

Our long history of living in primitive conditions and in small tribal groups did not give us instincts or equip us to deal with the supernormal allurements surrounding us today.

Especially for the young, trying to master one’s animal urges (physical or social) without first learning why they evolved, and without appreciating the purposes they once served, is like trying to figure out why your car is running poorly when you’ve never been taught what’s going on under the hood.

As Edward O. Wilson has written, “We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.”

We cannot, of course, change our instincts — but we can change how we relate to them, how we manage them. Thanks to the evolutionary sciences, we now can understand our instincts and finally face our challenges with a measure of lightness and compassion and with practical tools that actually work.

The process begins with distinguishing fault from responsibility. We can thereby free ourselves of the burden of guilt, shame, and self-condemnation from choices we’ve made in the past, while stepping up to the responsibility of making amends for our wake and fashioning a better future.

When we honor our inherited drives (which is nearly impossible when referring to them as “inner demons,” or our “shadow” or “ego”) we can feel our heart expanding in gratitude, generosity, and compassion for self and others — and our inner state will not only match but strengthen the ways in which we already are serving our community and the world.
* * *

NOTE: My 27-year-old son, Shane (an athletic trainer and life coach), and I are in the process of creating an online support structure for men who want to explore this subject more deeply, individually or collectively, titled, “Men Evolving Men.” If you’d like to be notified when this is available, email me at Michael@TheGreatStory.org

Also see:

• Our physical instincts: Our reptilian brain’s cravings for safety, sustenance, and sex
• Our social instincts: Our old mammalian brain’s drives for bonding, status, and play
• Our interpretive instincts: Our neocortex’s quest for knowing, meaning, & morality
• Doing the harder thing: Our prefrontal cortex’s zeal for wholeness & contribution
• Evolutionize Your Life: Free hour-long online teleseminar

from the New York Times

www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/science/lynn-margulis-trailblazing-theorist-on-evolution-dies-at-73.html

Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 24, 2011

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

Paul Hosefos/The New York Times

Lynn Margulis, wearing her National Medal of Science Award.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis, who had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988, drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”

The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.”

A revised version, “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,” followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine.

“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.”

Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway.

She earned a master’s degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University.

Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.

Dr. Margulis’s marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996.

In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; two half-brothers, Robert and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren.

“More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,” Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in “Microcosmos,” a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, “but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm — trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.”

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