mmoa_writes

Saturday I was listening to a radio programme on UCB (DO NOT ASK - I still live with my parents, 'nuff said), and was rather suprised to hear some insidious Creationist propaganda in the form of a radio show about an all American family who, well, I'm not sure what they do except for get themselves in really stupid situations where only prayer can help, and travel around town where they bump into people who ever-so conveniently are 'confused' about evolution (possibly because they haven't got round to reading any bog-standard Biology text book. Or maybe it's because of the textbook: this is the Midwest after all...).

Anyway, as I heard them twisting the law of 2nd Termodynamics upon which their entire argument was based, it occurred to me that the biggest problem in the debate is the use of language and the lacking ability for objectivity.

After all, 'better' is entirely relativistic. In the Natural world, outside the sphere of human observation, nothing is intrinsically better or worse. After all, a camel is as evolved as an emperor penguin, but it's obvious that when we say one is better than the other, we mean in terms of the environment in which it lives. Things becoming 'better' is not the same as things becoming more 'chaotic', and just because we are complex and quite like ourselves this way, does not mean that all more complex and thus chaotic things are 'better'. After all, if there's one thing we know for sure is that there is only one truly 'super-being' who can survive regardless of envrionment, and that is the bacterium.

And they're pretty damn simple (can't ennumerate on the meaning of Wittgenstinnian ethics for jack).