tmh wrote:I've been really bothered lately by something... Bush speaking about the potential pandemic bird flu outbreak we need to spend $7billion to prevent.

How can he talk about this fear of a new strain of the virus that jumps human to human? How can that concept be brought into the national dialogue with NOBODY paying attention to the fact that he is unequivocally stating that he believes in evolution?!?! What is one strain of a virus versus another? It's fucking evolution!! Why is nobody talking about this??

Grrr?

unarmedman wrote:Hey tmh, I'm not following your line of thought here. Maybe I'm just totally missing something.

How does fear of bird flu = belief in evolution?

Sorry if I'm slow in picking this up!

unarmedman wrote:

tmh wrote:I've been really bothered lately by something... Bush speaking about the potential pandemic bird flu outbreak we need to spend $7billion to prevent.

How can he talk about this fear of a new strain of the virus that jumps human to human? How can that concept be brought into the national dialogue with NOBODY paying attention to the fact that he is unequivocally stating that he believes in evolution?!?! What is one strain of a virus versus another? It's fucking evolution!! Why is nobody talking about this??

Grrr?

Hey tmh, I'm not following your line of thought here. Maybe I'm just totally missing something.

How does fear of bird flu = belief in evolution?

Sorry if I'm slow in picking this up!

So is bird flu evolving? In a sense, this is a semantic trap. If ‘evolution’ is defined to mean ‘change’ or ‘genetic change within a population’, the answer is a clearcut ‘yes’. But most people hear the word ‘evolution’ and think that it means the fullblown story—molecules to mathematicians, and so on. And it simply does not follow logically that demonstrating that organisms can change shows that they are capable of the sort of change required to turn microbes to microbiologists.

At the risk of sounding trite, all ‘change’ is not equal. For example, I can change clothes. I can also change nationalities. But it does not therefore follow that I can change into a dragonfly, or a hobgoblin—such a proposition would require separate demonstration. The issue is not only with the amount of change, but with the type of change (e.g. the direction of change), as shown in our article on AIDS some years ago—see Has AIDS evolved? The answer depends on the sense in which you mean to use the word ‘evolved’. Unfortunately, evolutionists often equivocate with the meaning of ‘evolution-words’.

The waters are muddied still further by the fact that viruses are not really living organisms as such—they require the machinery of other life forms to replicate. Viruses are therefore conspicuously absent from evolutionary ‘tree of life’ diagrams. The AIDS article mentioned above goes into all this and more. The principles are the same, so you can still use it if anyone throws the ‘bird flu is evolving’ argument at you.

The account of Noah and the flood is often criticised by the claim that God must have wanted pathogenic viruses in the world: because they exist today, God must have brought them on the ark.

Elizabeth Culotta and Elizabeth Pennisi wrote:Equipped with genome data and field observations of organisms from microbes to mammals, biologists made huge strides toward understanding the mechanisms by which living creatures evolve.

Andrew L. wrote:BBC 4's most recent edition of Analysis, " Is God on Their Side?", tackles the centrality of religion in American politics and mythology. I'd be very interested to hear any responses from Americans.

BROWN: Since then the religious vote has become enormously important—and self-conscious; the process perhaps started when President Reagan, who defeated Jimmy Carter, told the National Association of Evangelicals that: “You can’t endorse me. But I endorse you.” They couldn’t endorse him because of the constitutional separation between Church and State, something which has almost Biblical force for patriotic and devout Americans.

This separation doesn’t mean that the State should be separate from Christianity. In fact, certain political symbols become almost sacred—the flag, the constitution. Deface them at your peril. But complete separation of the state from holiness is a prospect to be regarded with horror. Joseph Bottum is the editor of First Things magazine in New York, one of the intellectual powerhouses of religious conservatism.

BOTTUM: Liberalism needs someone in the culture, a good chunk of the culture, that believes that human existence has a purpose; human history has a goal. Without that, liberalism, it seems to me, naturally kind of decays.

BROWN: But what does liberalism decay into in your scheme?

BOTTUM: Well, France, I think! It decays, in some sense, into a country that cannot bring itself even to reproduce and have children; it decays into a country that no longer is certain about its own identity or why it should believe in its own identity.