It's called a post hoc fallacy and is by far the most common form of magical thinking. Shermer is correct, for such thinking is indeed hardwired. As Richard Dawkins points out, a false positive might waste your time, a false negative could kill you. Such thinking is evolutionarily advantageous, but unfortunately, not so much in modern society. Overcoming this cognitive bias (to the best of your ability) is a very important skill for a good critical thinker, and as such, it is possible to recognize such thinking for what it is, despite its hardwiring, as Shermer himself demonstrates.

So this leads me to another question: is an effort to educate most people, not even all people, an impossible goal? I mean that's a huge revolution in the entire species thinking, despite the fact that we're programmed against it. I think we'd all like to see everyone wake up to the truth, but it looks like a very long, very steep path, maybe impossible.

As a lifelong atheist, and a person who's always the fact of evolution for granted, and, just as importantly, as a person who has lived in a society where most, if not everyone is do the same, I can attest to the fact that evolution can make sense, even on an intuitive level.

I think evolution is self evident. There are many, many ways in which evolution is instinctively, intuitively obvious. Since I've never been taught otherwise, I regocnize myself in animals. That is, when I observe the behavior of my fellow animals, like cats and dogs, chimpansees, and the like, it is very difficult to me to believe that I am not an animal myself. They get tired, scared, angry, hungry, and, an important point of comparison: horny, just like me.

Having learned about evolution since I was born (obviously not all the details at once, but just the basic fact that the world is what it is) that's the most obvious way to view the world for me.

The anecdotes people tell eachother are shaped by what they know, and people here know evolution, so the tell their anecdotes to confirm evolution, not the contrary. That's not to say that everyone in Denmark are biologists, and indeed many laypeople, including myself, can fall into many of the pitfalls of misunderstanding.

The most common of these is the idea that evolution has a direction, or purpose, which of course is a very wrong way to look at it.

But few people here are capable of accepting that they are not animals. It really is self evident.

Just think about this for a moment: do you think a dog wonders wether a cat is an animal, when it sees one? Dogs don't have intellect, only their hardwired instincts. And I think animals readily recognize animals of different species, as animals, just like themselves. Different, certainly, but animals, none the less.

yeah mrjonno, dogs are god too ....   

WOMEN UNDERSTAND MEN; FEW MEN UNDERSTAND WOMEN

     I had to google that ,  palindrome!  WOW   Jill ,  thanks   

http://norvig.com/palindrome.html

<emo>No one understands me!</emo>

Actually, I think if you consider people from an evolutionary perspective, both men and women are relatively easy to understand. But anyway......

I've noticed in this thread and others I generally look at changing a culture to be impossible, and after a bit of reflection it's probably because of the theists I'm used to here, generally bigger mouths than brains. Or they act that way around me, anyway. But after all things considered it doesn't seem to be the case. It's not easy, but not impossible either.

Go hang a salami.  I'm a lasagna hog.

I talked about this at some length in one of the RRS shows a few weeks ago.  This article is spot on.  Back when we were hunting and gathering on the savannah, it was a very good thing to be a little jumpy.  If there was a pattern of spots in the tall grass, and it happened to belong to a tiger, it was in our best interest to run very fast in the other direction.  If there was a pattern of spots and it was just grass, it didn't particularly hurt us to get a little exercise.  On the other hand, those of our ancestors' kin who didn't run when if was a tiger are no longer represented in the human gene pool.

This tendency towards false positives backfires a lot in modern society.  Astrology, wicca, crystal healing, tantra, rhino horns, funky cole medina, penis enlargement pills, fasting, freudian psychology, god, and at least ninety thousand more cultural banes are all essentially the result of humans' tendency to make associations where none really exist.

That is precisely why skepticism is the most logical philosophical position.  Since we know we tend towards false positives, we should always suspect our intuition of being unreliable when we think we see patterns.

Actually, it's been proven.  We're evolving faster in the last couple thousand years than previous years.

In modern phylogenetics, rates of evolution are quantified in terms of base pair substitutions. According to the principle called the molecular clock, the differences in any two homologous nucleotide sequences is directly proportional to the time since those two sequences diverged. Also, according to the hypothesis, the rate at which base pair substitution occurs in any nucleotide sequence is determined by how conserved the sequence is. The more conserved the sequence is, the less substitution there is. For example, in eukaryotes, a protein called Histone H2 is extremely highly conserved because it is extremely important to all Eukaryotic organisms and virtually all point mutations in the protein are fatal. As such, the difference between the human H2 and, say, the histone H2 in cows, is 2 nucleotides per 1000. This is tiny. The reason that some sequences will mutate at faster rates than others is because in certain more conserved sequences, mutations are more deleterious, therefore eliminated by natural selection. On the other hand, a sequence which has no conservation whatseover will mutate solely on the basis of purely random frequency. This principle is very important. Sequences which have no use or conservation will simply mutate out of existence. There is no such thing as "dormancy" in evolutionary biology. If selection pressure is relaxed, it (the sequence) will be destroyed.

Here's an example of the predictive usefulness of the molecular clock

 The other thing to stress is that evolutionary rates are highly constrained. Populations need to be able to adapt to the environment by means of changes in the lineage caused by the propagation of advantageous variations in individuals due to genetic makeup, otherwise they will die out. On the other hand, if the rate of mutation is too high, the deleterious mutations will be overwhelming and the organism will be rapidly destroyed, as high levels of cancers and premature deaths result from an excess of deleterious mutations. As such, changes in evolutionary rates need to fall within this balance.

No way. The timescale is far too short. A decade is a microsecond in genetical terms. The real reason that cancer has risen to such prominence is simply because of increased lifespan. Prior to advanced medical care and sanitation, most people died before they got old enough to get cancer.

Cancers can beset any multicellular organism.

It's not that simple. The conservation of a sequence can change depending on other alterations in the genome (such as a homologous duplication). But if a sequence has a function, then it will be conserved, and if conserved, then those conserved sequences will persist. In some proteins, only small regions of the actual amino acid sequences are highly conserved as essential to the function and structure of the protein, these are sometimes called signature sequences. In general, if a sequence has a function which is characterized by that sequence, then most changes (but not all, or evolution wouldn't work) are deleterious. In addition, homologous duplication of a gene can relax conservation on both copies, making them more amenable to mutation.

Cancer is neither natural nor godly. Indeed, by definition, cancer is fundamentally unnatural (of course, we can philosophically quibble about the definition of "unnatural" but from the perspective of the organism, cancer is unnatural, in the sense that it shouldn't, by definition, be there). What cancer represents is a very fundamental breakdown in the response of rogue cells to the normal intercellular signalling pathways that maintain cells in a multicellular community, producing deadly clusters of cells that do not properly respond to signals such as the ones inducing apoptosis, creating mutant cell clusters called tumours which if malignant can lodge in vital areas and proliferate at the expense of normal cells, a process called metastasis, which, depending on the type of cancer in question, and hence where it lodges and proliferates, can kill the patient.

Thus prompting the question I think everyone wants answered: Do you even listen to yourself when you talk? (Or rather, that should be: Do you even read what you type?). If not, maybe it's time to start.

Thanks you all, and yeah DG, I mean most every word I post !   Thanks for being a sharing scientist DG.  

   Yin Yang  .... natural, un-natural , the flow is ONE !

   We can mess with the flow , so thanks again , damn cancer, God Dammit ! 

A couple of things to mention:

When breeders intentionally breed for specific traits (or try to breed traits out) they are speeding up the process significantly.  For instance, the change from wolves to dogs took a long damn time in the wild, but once breeders got a hold of dogs, the time between breeds went way down.  This is not a normal population, nor is it normal genetic drift.  It is directed selection.  Because of the speed with which we can alter species when we control their reproduction, it is possible to create a breed with a genetic predisposition to cancer in a few generations.

Speaking of cancer, one thing to take into consideration is that in addition to increased age, humans are also exposed to more potential and proven carcinogens now than anytime before.

While you're thinking of selective breeding, consider some of what we've learned about heritability.  The trait I'm going to mention is weight gain.  Rapidity of weight gain is about 40% heritable, if memory serves.  That is to say, potential for weight gain is largely genetic.  It is not to say that there is a "fat gene."  However, if someone with a high genetic propensity for weight gain eats the same as someone with a low genetic propensity for weight gain, the former will get fatter than the latter.  (HA!  I made a rhyme...)  Now, bearing in mind that this is talking about individuals, not a species, consider that cancer is also hereditary in some cases.  In studies of identical twins reared in separate households, there is a very high correlation between certain illnesses, even down to the age of onset.  This includes cancer.  That doesn't mean that humans all tend to get cancer at 35, or whatever age it was.  It means that these humans tend to get cancer.

Now, suppose you take these humans and interbreed them for about ten generations.  You'd have an entire population that was genetically predisposed to a certain cancer.  That's what dog breeders are doing, essentially.  They take a dog that has a nice trait -- say a good temperament -- and breed him with as many females as possible.  In the next generation, they take all the dogs that exhibit the same trait and do the same thing with them.  Within a few generations, they've weeded out almost all of the nasty tempered dogs.  Unfortunately, the combination of genes that manifests in a good personality might also manifest in cancer.

Not likely in the way you described.

To say "society-inflicted changes" is almost nonsensical.  Humans are social animals.  The lone human doesn't reproduce, and the lone couple seldom survives without support from society.  Consider that even the most devoted hermits make a trip into town every now and then, and they seldom make all their own clothes, cooking vessels, shoes, tools, etc...

The sports culture has caused athletes to be much bigger.  It's happened in less than a hundred years.  Granted, it's hard to tell what the impact of communication has been.  In other words, are people really breeding bigger children because of the popularity of sports, or is global communication aiding sports recruiters in the quest to find the biggest children possible?  It's pretty much certain that it's a combination of the two, but not quite in the way you are thinking.  Let's not forget protein shakes and hi-tech workout facilities.  Heritability of physical size is not 100%!)

What you have to keep in mind when you talk about things like this is that the environment is a big influence on us, and that a large part of our environment is made by us.  In other words, our genes found a way for humans to reproduce very, very successfully.  That method was to give us an irrepressible drive to form societies, and to make them bigger and bigger and bigger.  So, in that sense, every change in humans is a genetic change, even if it's environmental.  Our genes programmed us to make this environment, so any changes the environment produces are linked to genes.

However, we have to be careful how far we extend that statement.  It's fine for coffee tables, but it's scientifically inaccurate.  I can't recall off the top of my head what the heritability of height is, but let's suppose for shits and giggles that it's 50%.  That means that 50% of the average person's height is due to genes for height, and the other 50% is due to environmental factors.  So, if you put a family with genes for above average height in a horrible environment with very little exercise and nourishment, and many negative environmental factors (like pollution), there's a very good chance that their children will not reach the full expression of their genetic capability for height.

We can now ask a very pointed question.  Suppose that you could take all of the modern benefits away from everyone and revert the world to, say, 1500CE, in terms of technology.  If you left everyone to their own devices and came back in a hundred years, would people be tall and strong, like they are today, or would the environment have produced people of the same approximate height and strength as in 1500?

As DG has pointed out, mutation rates are very well established, and they necessarily fall between two mathematical extremes, so there's practically no way that we've evolved past a certain theoretical limit, given a set length of time.  Cancer, like any other trait, is not entirely heritable, nor is it entirely environmental.  Bear in mind that the number of people who die of cancer before reproducing (or at least having the opportunity to reproduce) is very, very small.  Also, realize that longevity after reproducing is pretty much irrelevant today.  If a child has made it out of the womb, it's pretty much certain that it will grow up, barring illness or accident.

Bottom line:  Cancer will likely continue to be a problem, particularly if we continue to increase the number of carcinogens in our environment.  For a genetic adaptation to lessen this effect in the bulk of the population will take thousands of generations at a minimum.  (Consider that with a generation length of 35 years, there have been about 400 generations since the agricultural revolution!)

I'd like to hope not. Certainly people younger than their early-mid twenties can unlearn a thought process in favor of learning something like critical thinking if the education is effective, but the state of education in this country is a joke. Students simply aren't taught to think critically. I think a lot of this problem with education comes down to framing: educators need to start using frames more effectively and more often to communicate ideas to their students. I personally had to overcome years of false reasoning before I basically trained myself to be a skeptic by default, and even that's not perfect, but I feel like knowing and associating with other skeptics provides a kind of check and balance. I'm at the point now where I get a euphoric rush when I admit I'm wrong, and I think that the act of admitting I am wrong is the bravest thing I can possibly do. If everyone thought that way, I think we wouldn't the problems in education that scar this country (I'm speaking specifically of the US, here).

Interesting stuff I assume somewhere there must be some sort of evolutionary advantage for the survivial of genes for their hosts to die (Or do I need to reread 'The Selfish Gene'?)

Yes, you are using the term "evolving" the wrong way.

We cannot avoid natural selection unless we all stop reproducing.  You need to realize that evolution is not limited to a creature vs. the environment.   Mate selection is a form of natural selection, and regardless of anything else, who mates with who is going to determine which genes intermingle.  That's natural selection.  Women, if you missed the memo, are picky about who they screw.  They are agents of natural selection.

Also, there are microorganisms to worry about.  Bacteria are adjusting to us, and we are adjusting to them.  It may not look like much on the outside, but each generation of humans is "evolving" to deal with the bacteria that are evolving new ways of getting around our immune system.  So to use your own words, the "undesirable" trait of susceptibility to bacteria is constantly being dealt with.

Finally, one of the traits that is evolving the fastest in humans involves our diet.  The digestion of lactose is gradually getting better and better in humans as a direct result of milk and milk products becoming such a prominent part of our diet in the last couple thousand years.  That's a really good example of how we're evolving.

Remember, evolution doesn't have a projected goal.  It isn't trying to make humans "better."  It's just the inevitable process of recombination and mutation.  Modern medicine doesn't halt evolution.  It just changes the direction of selection pressure.