Comparisons are odious

The dangers of social media #432: nowhere to hide from being compared with the rest of humanity.

My latest “Compare people” scorecard on Facebook would be really depressing, if I hadn’t had a generally productive week:

#12 best companion on a desert island (lost 1 place)
#29 bravest (lost 2 places)
#41 cutest (lost 1 place)
#43 hottest (lost 1 place)
#43 person with the prettiest eyes (lost 2 places)

At least it’s consistent, not like here.

Creationist victory on Facebook?

UPDATE: WordPress has been crashing on Firefox for some time, with not just mine but lots of other WordPress blogs too.

So far, no one at WordPress seems to care enough about this to let me know why it happens or how to fix it. The result is that the post below crashed in the middle of posting, so it didn’t appear two weeks ago as planned. I apologise for this.

For what it’s worth, ONLY WordPress blogs seem to crash, and they do so less frequently on Safari or Internet Explorer than Firefox.

I’ve just voted in a poll on Facebook as to whether I believe in evolution or creation because I was curious to see the results.

With just over 40,000 votes in (a lot more than any market research company is likely to commission) the results were 39.5% in favour of evolution and 60.5% for creation.

Facebook did not previously strike me as the sort of forum where relious zealots were dominant. So either there is a silent majority that rejects Darwin (I’m guessing this is a reaction against school), or the poll is unrepresentative.

Either way it reminds of this comment I left on Brian Micklethwait’s blog:

I caught snippets of a two-part documentary on twins which made the interesting claim that a belief in God is likely to be genetic (identical twins were a lot more likely to agree the existence/non-existence of God than non-identical twins).

If true, this again raises one of my favourite paradoxes, whether Darwinism as a belief system is viable on strictly biological reproductive grounds. I suspect it isn’t.

If it is true that people carrying the God gene are more likely to reproduce (partly because they believe they’ve been told to by God “Go forth and multiply!”), then it stands to reason that over time the number of people carrying the God gene is likely to expand relative to the non-God gene carrying population.

This could curiously result in a paradigm shift where a Darwinian process (evolution) generates a Creationist hegemony.
Posted by Antoine Clarke on 07 October 2009

As for my own opinion, I can find good reasons to doubt both points of views. What is particularly striking at present, is the stridency of some calls to accept as orthodoxy the Darwinian position and the intolerance of any questioning one might make of it.

I don’t think the fossil evidence is sufficient to demonstrate whether evolution is a gradual or an abrupt process. I cannot see how it is possible to logically demonstrate that the Big Bang (if that theory isn’t shown to be wrong, or incomplete by further research) wasn’t something like a switch being thrown. At the very least, there might be a genetic basis for people to be theists or deists. All of which make me ask: why?

What I am certain of, is that evolution, as a scientific theory, is on the way out for practical purpposes. In 50 years I expect fewer people to believe in it than do today. One reason for this is that the creationists reproduce. Another is that some of them have learned to argue from scientific principles. Leading advocates of Darwinism, on the other, have reverted to name-calling and hectoring. Which, if they don’t procreate, suggests they’re not going to win friends and influence people either.