I think we should be clear with this:
Denier: doesn't buy the entire premise of global warming, usually citing the data to be wrong. Conspiracy between scientists and politics.
Skeptic: Doubts that global warming is human made, or that CO2 is the issue.
Strict creationism has been disproven to anyone with half a brain. Certainly there are less strict interpretations that cannot be disproven but where science and god disagree, god loses, assuming you have at least half a brain, which for anyone that believes in *strict* creationism is a rather large assumption.
Oh, I don't know. Being on the side of insufferably arrogant, stereotyping jerks doesn't appeal much, maybe?
That was faux-ho mode, not flaming homo mode; a subtle distinction, I admit.
I was also too terse. The numbers I'm curious about would describe the 'spewed misinformation.' Having grad students trawl through publications and tag things according to a coding schema is slightly more science-like than fucking opinion polls.
Seems like a bit of pot-kettle there. Makes me wish I'd stuck with my formal logic class so I maybe could hit you accurately with a big word like tautology. But given the general tenor of this thread, maybe it's better for me just to type the word without any real confidence about how I'm using it.
p.s. Using a sloppy slash-compound like conservatives/republicans is still basically stupid single-label thinking. Insulting groups and abstractions is part of the problem, not helpful at all. I admit that from my POV, there aren't very many sensible folks left on the front lines of the national GOP, but that puts them only slightly behind my own maddening excuse for a party. Sure, LBJ schooled us on how important it is to have people inside the tent pissing out vs. outside pissing in. But he had no answer for our great and enduring love of forming circular firing squads at crucial moments. See that--I named someone specifically. Is it so hard?
As for creationists, it is human arrogance which assumes he is so superior that he must have been created by some all powerful being.
As for evolution, some of the bad attitudes on display here give reason to believe humans have not evolved at all in recent times...
Oh, come on. Don't go spoiling the fun just before Christmas!
I just want to point out that it’s only a *literal* interpretation of the genesis creation myth that is obviously false and anyone accepting it as such clearly has some sort of mental deficiency.
I mean there are clearly positions that do not require the bible and science to be at such odds. For example a day need not be a literal day nor does the evolution of species through intervening steps in and of itself deny the existence of a creator.
However anyone that insists on a literal 6 to 7 thousand year history of the earth with all species created in their final form in 6 literal days is simply a nut case who is beneath any serious discussion.
Im a believer in God, but Genesis is obviously a fairytale. It was meant to convey a reason as to why things were so rough for mankind. Why we only lived for so long. Why we needed each other. Where we came from, being that we not only looked, but acted and thought differently then the animals around us.It was to explain that God had given us a gift. I fully believe evolution was a device of God. Nature being like a computer, it can only do as its programmed. And God being behind the keyboard making sure to keep the Computer on task.
People take Genesis literally because of 1 reason. Its in the bible, theyre brainwashed as young children (and sometimes adults) to believe every word of a book that was stitched together by a man looking to influence the rest of the world with his idea of what God was with a single manifestation of Gods word. I think people would be appalled to learn what the original Christians thought and practiced as Christianity. Infact, I think theyd be disillusioned with Jesus if they knew that his "feats" werent as mighty and infact were merely magic tricks that you could see at a Magic Show in Las Vegas.
Creationists are blind fools trying to lead other blind fools. I cant say I know for certian that my view is the real one. And I think both Creationists and Evolutionists are arrogant pieces of shit if they think they have all the answers. We have not been able to observe evolution as its described. So to say that its FACT just goes to show how much Science has lost its way by moving towards religions "my word is the law" concept. Both sides needs to STFU and STFD.
I deny your skepticism!
Look at the implications of the text. Naturalism is the thought that one natural process is caused by another natural process. Science actually doesn't work outside of this context.
I'll dig a bit more after this part:
Of course it does. Where in that 5 step process you outlined of "observe, hypothesize, test, etc." does it say "doesn't allow for the supernatural?" Nowhere. That's your naturalist philosophy creeping in.
While it may look to you as though science is accepting of the supernatural, it actually isn't. It does, however, filter out the supernatural very well.
Perhaps you are getting confused by definitions: Supernatural events are events that occur outside of nature. If you observed what you thought was supernatural event, you would not be able to model it.
Natural events, on the other hand, are the ones that can be modeled. You can predict their occurrence and measure them. There is a clear causal relationship around which you can build an experiment.
In other words, if you can create a reliable method to reproduce a certain effect, you've just described a rule (or more accurately, theory) that describes a property of the universe, automatically making it natural.
Really? You believe that everything was designed. That's all fine and dandy, unfortunately for you there are no scientific theories for it.
I haven't really seen a good ID argument against evolution. There are many back-and-forth websites about this. But that doesn't concern me. What concerns me is that there seems to be a basic misunderstanding of what the output of the scientific process is.
Well, it does matter, because you can't just stop at how we got here. If there was a designer and there was a workable theory for it, we'd now be tasked with explaining how the designer got here.
So let's say the designer turns out to be nothing supernatural, he's just an alien, say from Mars. The next question is, well, how did he get to be on Mars? Did me migrate there? Did he form spontaneously from quantum effects like a Boltzmann Brain? Did he evolve? Was he designed, and by what? And so on.
If it turns out he is supernatural, unfortunately for us we can't analyse him using the scientific method. We'd never get anywhere, and would require a completely new framework for the problem - science will break down. This hasn't happened yet. Personally, I doubt it ever will.
I'm not an evolutionist. I'm a physicist. I do know that the concept of ID is recent, and unfortunately for you it was an idea founded by creationists. It is bound by the same problems as creationism.
Do you have any evidence to present that suggests we were designed? A link with some real observational data would probably be just fine.
I understand the theory of evolution just a statement that traits are passed from parents to offspring, and sometimes errors pop up in the process which leads to mutations. Sometimes you get beneficial mutations. I also understand that there is a reasonable amount of evidence to support this, such as the fossil record. I also understand that there is a working model, though it it not yet complete. I can relate to that, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are incompatible in certain situations, but that doesn't mean they don't work the rest of the time: We'll just keep building on them until we can figure out how to solve the incompatibilities.
amazing how grimunk can explain all my arguments in such a clear and eloquent way.
I really like this graphic.
Evolution is a great counter-example of the global warming argument because one does not have to resort to "the wise scientists have a consensus" to support the theory.
The theory of evolution makes intuitive sense to me as well as makes a number of predictions that have been shown to be true.
When evolution was first a hypothesis, we did not even know what DNA was for instance. As time has gone on and new technologies have come up, evolution becomes increasingly compelling.
By contrast, AGW is a pretty sketchy hypothesis. I read this today http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2009/12/22/post-copenhagen-is-man-made-global-warming-a-dead-issue/ which argues that the CFCs have had a significant impact on temperature.
What most people of the "AGW" camp don't realize is that a lot of the objection to AGW has to do with its focus on CO2 and not the basic concept that humans might be affecting the climate (heck, humans have been affecting the climate for thousands of years).
I feel pretty confident that further research will make the CO2 hypothesis look even sillier than it already is.
Just so its clear, the sum your arguments is:
Darwinian evolution is fact because science > God, the supernatural?
Darwinian evolution has been turned on its head. Its not even the same as it once was. The evolution scientists refer to is what was built off of Darwin ideas.
Naturalized epistemology (or Methodological naturalism or scientific naturalism) which focuses on epistemology: This stance is concerned with knowledge: what are methods for gaining trustworthy knowledge of the natural world? It is an epistemological view that is specifically concerned with practical methods for acquiring knowledge, irrespective of one's metaphysical or religious views. It requires that hypotheses be explained and tested only by reference to natural causes and events.[1] Explanations of observable effects are considered to be practical and useful only when they hypothesize natural causes (i.e., specific mechanisms, not indeterminate miracles). Methodological naturalism is the principle underlying all of modern science.
God you moron. Supernatural explanations are not science.
Obviously I need to simplify what I said
You said that a post debating supernatural origins (bad) versus science (good) summarized your arguments
The point that has been argued is Darwinian evolution which you accept as fact
My post made no claim that supernatural explanations are science. None of my posts can be construed that way. I do appreciate the irony that you invoke the name of God in your last sentence.
While I am impressed you can quote Wikipedia; generally in a scientific debate it is acknowledged as good behavior to reference what you quote
I'd like that graphic too, but, like most school texts, it's wrong.
Homo Neanderthalensis is alive and well in the balkans, strangely confused for homo sapiens. It probably has something to do with the actual differences between the two species being little more than the difference between white boy me and someone from Africa or Asia.
This is why I have to spend an hour fact checking every little thing I hear before I buy anything an evolutionist says, the amount of wrong information far surpasses the accurate information. 99% of the population thinks the Neanderthals died out because it's still being taught and propogated in scientific magazines, news sites, encyclopedias... You have to dig deep to find the work that disproves it simply because it got lost in the mess. At least when I'm talking to a young earther, I know everything hinges on God making the history of the world appear at the same time just to fool us.
Do you have any sort of evidence for this? And is this using the classical* definition of a species, or one of the many alternerative versions that mainly related to microbiology?
*The classical definition of a species in sexually reproducing organisms is a group of individuals capable of producing fertile offspring. For reference, closely similar species can often interbreed to form infertile offspring. To my knowledge there are no groups of humans known today that are not interfertile with the rest of the race, and given human behavioral tendencies it is extremely likely all possible combinations have been tried.
I'm not the one that labeled them a different species and decided they were extinct. Geneticists mapped out a whole bunch of Neanderthal DNA a few years back, in the current native population of the Balkans. Someone with less irritating internet connectivity can go and hunt for a brief on it, but it's known that they weren't exterminated, but are integrated into the current population. The only reason I know about it is because I was curious about the actual differences between the two species and ran into it. It might have been big news somewhere in the world, but it never made much of a splash in the US.
Maybe not, but you are the one playing fast and loose with intellectual history. Saying that "Homo Neanderthalensis is a alive and well" is not at all the same thing as saying you think that current taxonomy has some serious flaws, at least not in the terse and feisty terms you chose to raise the question.
Another big problem I have with evolution (there are so many) is that there is no mechanical process which can "evolve" an organism into another organism. Let's just use a hypothetical example - a snake-like creature with no arms, and we want to transform it into more of a lizard-like creature with arms and legs. How would this happen according to evolution?
Perhaps an appendage such as an arm or a leg would start with a mutation which forms a "bump" at the site of the future appendage. Evolutionists would say that this bump would, over millions of years, transform into the appendage. But how, through magic? There has to be a mechanism. "Natural selection is the mechanism" evolutionists claim, but let's examine it critically - something that evolutionists always fail to do.
Evolution states that any mutation must be beneficial to the organism in order for natural selection to "select for" that mutation. The mutant cheetah which is faster catches his prey better, thus survives better, thus passes on his genes better. This makes sense. But what is the benefit of the useless bump which has just formed on our snake? Nothing. In fact, if anything it is a detriment and would be "selected out" by natural selection, not "selected for."
It is impossible to build up a complex machine piece by piece through evolution because, until the machine is fully-formed, it doesn't do anything beneficial for the organism, and in fact is a detriment and would always be selected out according to the theory. Imagine trying to evolve the flagellum on the end of a bacteria - something that e. coli and other bacteria possess. It is an electric outboard rotary moter. It possesses a rotor, a stator, a u-joint, etc. - all the parts that an electric outboard motor possesses. So start with an e. coli which doesn't have this. How do you build this thing for the e. coli step by step according to evolution? What part are you going to evolve first? The u-joint? The rotor? The stator? The propeller (tail?)?
You can start anywhere, but for the sake of argument let's start with the propeller (tail). Let's say a mutation happened which formed a tail on the end of the bacteria (it's worse than that because the tail would actually start as a bump, but I'll give you evolutionists a head start to make it easier on you). WHAT'S THE BENEFIT? It doesn't do anything yet, because the rest of the outboard motor hasn't evolved yet. IT'S NON-FUNCTIONING DEAD WEIGHT, IT IS A DETRIMENT BECAUSE IT TAKES RESOURCES TO FORM IT THAT COULD HAVE GONE SOMEWHERE ELSE, IT WOULD BE SELECTED OUT BY NATURAL SELECTION.
EVOLUTION AND NATURAL SELECTION CANNOT BUILD YOU A MACHINE STEP BY STEP. Just a tiny bit of critical thinking is all that is needed to see that the mechanism fails.
To all the evolutionists arguing on this thread, go ahead. Show us how to build a machine step by step using your theory. YOU HAVE TO EVOLVE EACH PIECE - no evolution of whole working machines at once. And you have to show at each step of the process WHAT THE BENEFIT IS so that natural selection can "select for" the mutation.
Go ahead, we are waiting.
You'll wait a long time. Evolution is not a 'mechanical process.' It doesn't 'need' to build anything.
Obviously someone who is unwilling to see past their own nose will be unable to be convinced, but since you asked for a step by step list;
1) Bacterial DNA mutates to provide twitch functions. Natural selection occurs due to these bacteria with this mutation being able to reach food sources slightly quicker than those without.
2)Bacterial DNA mutates to provide nubs on the end of the new strain of "twitchy" bacteria. Again, Selection picks these bacteria over nubless twitchers because they can acquire sources of energy quicker than others.
3) Repeat step 2 ad nauseum with longer nubs at each step. Presto! Instant flagellum in an easy 14 million generations.
I fully expect you to pull some bullshit argument out of your ass as to why the twitch function couldn't possibly occur naturally before the tail was there to begin with.
I now pose a question to you; If this Intelligent Designer of yours created everything, would it not have made more sense to create humans that are capable of surviving in every environment, such as underwater (especially considering that the planet is 70% water), instead of us squishy, fairly weak sacks of meat?
The two following sources found no evidence of this but was based on mitochondrial DNA which as everyone knows is passed only through the female. Both of these sources are not particularly recent.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3023685.stm http://www.promega.com/profiles/402/ProfilesinDNA_402_0...
I also recall a PBS special recently that claimed that everyone today is descended from a isolated population of about 600 individuals off the coast south africa that had a diet consisting largly of seafood. The following is the link of that show and you can click near the bottom of the page to view the transcript of Hour 3 of Becoming Human.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/becoming-human-part-3.html
This aired in Nov, 2009 and indicates that the entire neanderthal genome has been mapped, that we share a common ancestor but that there is no evidence of interbreeding between neanderthals and modern humans.
The only thing I could find indicating a neanderthal human connection is the following which itself provided no links. Plus it's the telegraph which makes it somewhat suspect.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/evolution/6430494/Modern-man-had-sex-with-Neanderthals.html
Actually here's a bit more from the BBC.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7886477.stm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal
Find mention that geneticists have found Neanderthal specific DNA in the modern native population of the Balkans. You can check other encyclopedias, applicable college text books, etcetera. I've read a few that were published after the discovery, no mention. We already know what happened to the Neanderthals, but they're still teaching and propogating wrong theories of extinction. I see nothing terse or feisty in my dislike for not being able to trust information sources that should be accurate and up to date.
LOL. What an idiot.
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