How can evolution explain body symmetry?

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There are a few reasons which set evolutionary indoctrination as a class apart:

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It is the most prevelent form of mass scientific indoctrination around.

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No, I would say that the idea that the Earth is a sphere is the most prevalent form of mass scientific indoctrination around.

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I have never watched a programme on Gravity on tv. Neither has my mother or sisters. Mass media is awash with Evolution

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But Gravitational Throry and the Sperical Earth Theory are so well indoctrinated into Western culture that nobody even questions them. There's no need to have TV programs on something that people accept so completely, is there? People accept these things without most of them ever having examined the evidence for themselves, though, right?

You don't agree that most people, who haven't learned the tools to critically evaluate the evidence for themselves believe in evolution through a process of indoctrination. If not that, on what basis do you think they believe it. Maybe do as I've done and give a mechanism rather than an assertion. Remember it 'most' not you. that you heard two indoctrinations and one held sway doesn't influence the fact the indoctrination was the method by which you believed in evolution either then or when it was awakened later. I suggest you were indoctrinated (see methods by which later) How can a person be led by facts before they are in a position to critically evaluate whether the facts are indeed facts? Let's not kid ourselves here and think that evolution can be proven by headlines. It's the nitty gritty that differentiates between one conclusion and the other. Not headlines. Prior to reaching the point of being sufficiently educated to evaluate, the person who is interested in science is only being more exposed to indoctrination. Take a 10 year old who has developed enough to reach the pinnacle for his age and is fascinated by evolutionary natural history programmes and child books with pictures of dinosaurs and neandrathals battling it out. He is closer to science that the kids out skateboarding but miles away from critical analysis. Immersed in indoctrination naked when it comes to evaluating. Is he not? And how precisely does one do that? Like, suggest a mechanism that'll work for an 8 year old? You would be unusual in that. Think 'most' not 'you' when it comes to the argument. But talking about you for a second. Ever hear, as a child, the words 'Neandrathal man', 'ape turned into man', 'original of the species' 'evolution is a fact' then as a teenager 'mutation was the mechanism along with' 'natural selection'? You may be right but that's just an assertion and I'm inclined to think it may not be that simple. You don't agree then that there are paleantologists, biologist,biochemists etc, etc, who have all the same training to evaluate data - yet don't agree with evolution. Forget why they don't for a second - that's a different issue. The point is a claim that anybody who doesn't agree with evolution must be ignorant or religious doesn't gel with the facts. Maybe you have to go outside this forum to find that out - but find it out you will. By the time they don't trust you anymore they have already heard the doctrine. Kids rebel all right but they don't reject everything they've learned. Anyway there are plenty of other authorities (like peers, tv programmes, science books, an interesting science teacher) besides you, which they will continue to listen to and respect.

I don't agree either. I was raised in a strict religeous household. Up until the age of 16 I had never even heard of evolution other than from my mother who claimed that it was some evil Godless scheme to undermine religion. I had this view repeatedly beaten into me for more years than I care to remember. As soon as I had any degree of freedom at all I went to the library and started taking out books on evolution and other sciences. I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about and why the evil scientists were trying to screw us all over.
Guess what I discovered. The whole field of Evolution, Chemistry, Biology and Physics all just began to fall into place as a perfectly merged whole. Suddenly everything made sense and at about this time I decided to continue my education into college and beyond. Absolutely not!
Anyone entering college to study any of the sciences has to have a very inquisitive nature and has to be able to formulate their own questions and find their own answers right from the start. These are exactly the kind of people with the greatest resistence to any kind of "indoctrination".
In order to reach PHD level and beyond, students usually have to come up with a completely novel idea and pursue it to its conclusion through postulation and experimentation. They are given guidence where needed but on the whole they are on their own. No indoctrination is going to survive that.The only indoctrination that I was ever exposed to was the church and due to my inquisitiveness and sheer pigheadedness, it didn't stick.

Anybody object if I try to tidy things up a bit and state some fundementals by which I argue? If there are points which can be put to bed it would help progress as they wouldn't have to be re-visited so frequently.Debate can easily turn into an argument as some of the previous posts have demonstrated eg: "did your physics father not teach you about gravitational theory". There are many reasons why a Ph.D qualified father didn't teach his son about gravitional theory: a bad father, an uninterested son (the applicable one), the son lived with his mother and seldom saw his father etc., to name but a few. I don't want to spend my time typing responses like this, telling the person who posted this that they could have thought of this themselves. I'm here to debate not argue. I'll reply to debate style response not arguement. There are after all only 24 hours in the dayWhat I mean by 'Evolutionary Indoctrination' (EI):
A very large proportion of the people around the world who are exposed to scientific influence believe that evolution is the way it happened. A small proportion of these have a level of scientific training which would allow them to critically evaluate the evidence for themselves. The rest, the large majority, believe it (with varying degrees of interest) simply because they are told it by folk they have no apparent reason to distrust. Not being able to evaluate for themselves, they can only have been EI'd.The Mechanism of Indoctrination (MI):
The way by which indoctrination occurs is lifelong and repeated exposure to statements which say or imply that Evolution is true. The mechanism starts at a very early age, when there is little to prevent it applying a force. MI takes many forms: kids nature programmes, tv ads, friends taunts, games played, science lessons all the way through school, popular science books, science fiction, natural history programmes,toys,eminent scientists saying it's true, early interest hobbies in things scientific, films, magazines, ..even the dog in the street knows it. The MI has virtually nothing which opposes it. There is no scientific alternative presented which says our existance is the result of another mechanism (or if there is, it's, relatively speaking, a side issue and not comparable to the mass-influence of the MI - the cogs and gears of which are listed above). Not even religion will necessarily affect it's workings. Many who have a faith: Christian, Buddist, Hindi etc will not consider there to be conflict between their belief and the acceptance that Evolution is true. The effectiveness of the MI and my contention that it has operated over many generations, is such as to have ensured that the majority of scientifically-influenced people believe that Evolution is as true as the fact the world is round. And they believed this BEFORE they were in a position to evaluate the data for themselvesThesis 1 (T1)
Nobody who believes in Evolution, up until the time they have sufficient training which offers them the potential to evaluate the facts for themselves, is in a position to know if Evolution is true - other than by the MI which has been operating on them all their lives. The level of belief may be mild, a vague belief that it is true, which they don't think about or consider throughout their lives. Or the level may be high, high enough to interest them enough to enter a field of science concerned with Evolution and thereby gaining the tools by which they might be able to critically evaluate it. Or the level may be anything in between those particular extremes. Whichever level it's at, the contention is that, up until they have had the training to evaluate, the only basis on which they can say they believe in Evolution, is EI.Other terminology: I would suggest E for Evolution. Any others that can be thought of to speed things up as we go are fine.Has anybody got anything they would like to say specifically about any of the three fundementals above. And only these three. Either that they are wrong or that they can be accepted as being accurate enough reflections on the way it happened. In either case, deal on a macro basis: the many, not your personal experience. There will be individuals who can say it doesn't apply to them but just as one swallow doesn't make a summer neither do a few scattered points on the graph deflect the direction and curve of a graph when the vast majority of points support a particular curve... should that be the way the debate turns out to show it is.This message has been edited by iano, 29-Jul-2005 06:55 PM

Religious indoctrination begins at the earliest possible age. Kids are asked to believe the most amazing stories, and encouraged to think that accepting those tales without any evidence is a virtue called faith. Similarly, many children are indoctrinated in the cult of Santa and Fairy, beliefs strongly reinforced with material rewards.Nonetheless, with predictable regularity and at early ages, children see through the Santa/Fairy fictions, despite the positive reinforcements, and realize there is a real world truth to where those presents came from and why their tooth under the pillow was replaced with a quarter. They reach those conclusions by critically assessing the evidence. Our brains are pretty good at that.Despite religious indoctrination during their most formative years, millions of folks abandon the tenets of their parents' faith to become agnostics, atheists, or adherents of a radically different faith.I was raised in a Southern Baptist household and believed the Bible narrative fiercely. At about the age of 8, I began having reservations about the savagery of the Old Testament, and by age 10 I had decided that evolution made more sense than Poof the Magic Creator.Rest assured that no teachers or TV shows urged me to believe in evolution; in the Bible Belt in those days we were excused from public school to attend Bible classes twice weekly. I endured much abuse from both school authorities and peers, and church authorities and peers, because I began asking questions about the rightness of, say, god slaughtering 40 children via a she-bear because they teased a prophet about his bald head, etc. I was banned from my parents' church because I refused to stop asking critical questions.My point? The most common forms of indoctrination are religious and folk myth, yet many children reject them at an early age and always have, long before mass media. The children who reject them soonest are in general precocious and the most disposed--not by indoctrination but by capability--to pursue careers in science.Social and religious opposition to the theory of evolution has always been fierce, and it is prima facie absurd to suggest that anyone has been indoctrinated into blind acceptance of it. The argument being made to that effect in this thread is self-contradictory, made in bad faith, way off topic, and a waste of time.EDIT: IMHOThis message has been edited by Omnivorous, 07-29-2005 11:03 AM

Most people who "haven't learned the tools to critically evaluate the evidence for themselves" don't "believe" in evolution. That's the problem, really. Wait a minute, now. Your "mechanism" is just an assertion. I've been asking you: why do you think that you are immune to the supposed "indoctrination"? I have also asked where you think the "indoctrination" was in my life. You got a lot of 'splainin' to do before you can call your bare assertion a "mechanism". You seem to have as low an opinion of children as you do of Ph.Ds. No. You have it backwards.You are proposing an almost universal "indoctrination". I am telling you that I was never "indoctrinated". That's one exception to your "rule" and I am sure there are many more like me - including many on this board.It is up to you to "explain away" the exceptions to your rule. If you can't do that, you don't have a rule. No.My father was a creationist (but before Morris turned it into a commercial enterprize). I grew up hearing, "radiocarbon dating is crap", "we're not related to the Flintstones", etc.And yet I was able to overcome that indoctrination. Can you explain that, please? Now, there's an assertion that you should be able to back up. Name a few hundred of them and we'll talk. Trot out yer facts, son.

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People who think they have all the answers usually don't understand the questions.

Why on earth do you feel this is peculiar to evolution? I would think that the same statements could be made about virtually any field of science, or technology for that matter. How many people do you think there are who could give you a populist form of the Schroedinger's cat thought experiment but wouldn't know a Schroedinger equation from a hole in the road, I would suggest there are many.Your main objection seems to be that there is an earlier introduction of evolutionary theory because kids like dinosaurs. How is this any different from the cosmological indoctrination of kids who like the stars? Or the engineering indoctrination of kids who like trains or cars?There are a vast array of things that people accept solely on the basis of authority, and not just when they are kids. There are plenty of people who will accept the claims of quack medicines because they are presented in an infomercial by someone who has an M.D..There are any number of things upon people make decisions without the ability to properly evaluate them, surely these can't all be considered indoctrination?TTFN,WK

Ahem....That's not a good start, newbie.First of all, we're off-topic here but we're cutting you some slack.Second, you don't set the rules here. You will get responses that you don't like. You will be expected to back up your assertions.I, for one, will continue to debate and/or argue as I see fit. I offer my wrists for the slapping thereof if the moderators see fit.I look forward to you backing up your thus-far empty assertions.

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People who think they have all the answers usually don't understand the questions.

Presumably you would agree that this also applies to people who disbelieve in evolution. By your own argument, doesn't your admission invalidate any claim you make about evolution, including the claim that it is spread solely or laregly by indoctrination?Mick

Let me repeat the nature of the scientific profession.There are thousands of individuals working in the biological sciences, in many different countries, with many different cultural backgrounds, and many different religious experiences.These individuals work at thousands of colleges and reseach intstitutes, each one with their own independent hiring and retention policies.These individuals publish in hundreds of different journals, each one with its own independent board of editors that decides on their review processes and which papers to publish.That these individuals are funding through hundreds of different governmental and non-governmental agencies, each one with their own independent review boards that decide who gets the money for their research.Now, you are suggesting that this indoctrination that you keep going on about is so thorough that no one is able to break out of it and see that the evidence might suggest a different theory.You are suggesting that this indoctrination is so thorough that this individual is unable to convince a significant number of other researchers that her ideas have merit.You are suggesting that this indoctrination is so thorough that these researchers are unable to present their findings at professional conferences and get a public airing of their views.You are suggesting that this indoctrination is so thorough that these researchers are unable to secure funding to investigate these alternative ideas further and to get their results published.And you are suggesting all of this without providing any evidence that this is actually happening, or even that it is even possible.

Hi there...A retorical question for you. Why someone would continually beat a view into someone to convince of something they had never heard of? Never heard of evolution; no tv, no books, nobody outside the household...see defintion of MI for a more complete list then re-evaluate. I take your statement to be a little hyperbolic. If it's not hyperbole and you've really never ever heard of evolution, yet lived in an average scientifically exposed society, then you would form a very tiny minority. My last post which defines some boundaries refers to what happens to the vast majority. Assuming you were even only very lightly EI'd up to this point, you then delved in deeper. At this point you hadn't the level of knowledge which would discern anything but gross scale argument. For instance, you may have read something like "Uranium dating methods have shown that the earth is in fact 4500 million years old"...and said to yourself "but my mother told me it was only 4000 years old!!" Impressive it may have been, but at this point you were not yet at the level of knowledge to understand the intricacies of Uranium dating to know if it was accurate or whether the folk applying it where using it accurately. In other words, whether Uranium dating is accurate or not is not the point here. The point is, you assumed it was true before you knew it to be true. That's EI at work. In other words, intensive EI but BEFORE you got the education which may have allowed you to evaluate for yourself.I'm saying nothing here about whether E is true or not. Just that you were exposed to EI first. That's all I'm arguing.Do you agree?

In regards to gravity (this is the slimmed down slummers guide) - we have no real idea how it works or what it does. Yet you would never get that impression from school. We know far less about it than we do about the TOE.How come you are more concerned about Evolution than gravity considering our knowledge about the one is more extensive than the other? Surely you should take care of gravity first and then come back to evolution in schools once you have sorted that one? I mean if you are working at this from a rational angle...

I don't deny that other forms of indoctrination exist. Not everybody in the world who believes E lives in such an environment. A minority in fact.You've said very little (if anything) which directly tackles either EI,MI,T1 on the macro scale. By all means do soThis (hopefully) will become a debate not about personal experience but about a world wide experience. Lets keep it macro not micro...

Hi WK. I agree with the tenet of your post that this may appear to create a philosophical problem about other areas of science (like is it all indoctrination??) Be that as it may. We're not dealing about the rest of science here. It's EI that the topic. Have you something to say in debate form about EI,MI,T1?

Hi there Mick. Have you anything to say about EI, MI, T1? That's the topic.