Neil Tyson On The Politics Of Science Denial

Science 2.0 ^ | 9/1/2014 | Hank Campbell

[JimSEA]

Spend any time in American science media and you may find some of them are pretty far out of the political mainstream; so far out, they may not even be friends with anyone who has not always voted the same way as them.

So it's unsurprising that much of science media once perpetuated the claim that 'science votes Democrat.' Humans are fallible and confirmation bias is sneaky. As was apocryphally attributed to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael after the 1972 Presidential election and a Richard M. Nixon landslide victory, "I don't know how Nixon won. No one I know voted for him." (1)

[BroJoeK]

BrandtMichaels: “Code does not write itself nor is it capable, on it’s own, to re-write the genetic code.”

The fact is that every generation, without exception, is born with usually minor mutations to it’s genetic code.
A small number of mutations actually improve chances for survival and so get passed on to future generations.
And that is “evolution”, pure & simple.
Multiply those small mutations by millions or tens of millions of generations, and that’s where new biological species, genera, families, etc. come from.
So... It’s mutation plus selection, not your “self writing codes” which drive evolution theory.

BrandtMichaels:”Information theory disproves evolutionary theory, as do a number of other scientific laws [i.e. biogenesis & thermodynamics].”

Only in your own fantasy world, not in real science.
In real science, which you loathe far too much to actually learn, those ideas support the findings of evolution & related theories.

BrandtMichaels: “Soft tissue found in dinosaur fossils and even Carbon 14 - sheesh!”

Soft tissues (simple collagen) only demonstrate that under ideal conditions, organic material can be preserved a very long time indeed.
As for alleged carbon 14, there is no confirmed “dino-14”.

BrandtMichaels: “Even the math alone shows your evolution is truly devolution [as genetic code keeps accumulating more and more mutations].
Therefore evolution imho even violates common sense.”

Math alone cannot “disprove” evolution, so that is ridiculous.
What physical evidence shows is MOST mutations are harmful or harmless, but a small number actually benefit.
Natural selection kills off the harmful mutations, while harmless and helpful get passed on.

Really, it’s so simple, even a caveman could figure it out.
So why can’t you?

[kevkrom]

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a serial fabulist.

[BroJoeK]

BrandtMichaels: “BTW I’m not your pal”

What, is English your second language?
In ordinary usage, the word “pal” means something else, which certainly describes you, pal.

BrandtMichaels: “what I loathe and despise is how many have abandoned their faith supporting what they think is science.”

No, what they KNOW is science, your legally-illegitimate efforts to redefine it notwithstanding.
I’ll say it again: you are totally entitled to believe whatever you wish, just so long as you don’t call your religious beliefs “science”.

BrandtMichaels: “All ‘historical science’ violates the scientific method.”

Only in your illegitimate fantasies.
In the real world, all of science is based on certain assumptions, including naturalism and uniformitarianism.
And just because you loathe & despise those assumptions does not make them “unscientific” or your religion a form of “science”.

[JimSEA]

I haven’t been back to this thread in a while before I was pinged this morning. I’m certainly no fan of the pseudo science of the young earth creationists. At the same time I’m not invested in a few of Tyson’s opinions.

However, there is an assertion by the young earth types that is particularly troublesome and that is some imaginary divide between “observational” and “historical” science. That is particularly nonsensical. I’m hard pressed to think of any science devoid of observations. If you’re out looking for gold, you use your current observations to reconstruct the past. Maybe you want to pan so you go to where others have found it and search in the portions of the stream were others have had luck. I’d guess we’ll agree that that meets your definition of observational science.

Let’s say you are tired of panning for meger rewards and want to go after the mother lode. Now, no one was around to see the formation of quartz veins and gold has been found in a number of host rock. You will have to engage in a bit of forensic science if you want a good result. Maybe you find a piece of granite with a tiny vein of quartz in it. You’ll want to know just how a vein of quartz got there in the first place because your observation has been that not all granite has quartz veins. If you follow this inquiry long enough, you get to areas no one has observed - the formation of veins in the rock through the precipitation of silica and gold from heated water into cracks or joints in the host rock. So you go looking for such veins. Perhaps you see similar veins in slate. Now you’ve got another host rock to explore.

If you use this “historical” science, you are far, far more likely to be successful. You also are building a picture of past, often long past events. The reading of the fossil record begins with observation in much the same way as does the geology of ore deposits. Forensics are at the heart of science because we need to reconstruct the past to understand the present.

[JimSEA]

It’s very frustrating because the young earth types will scurry back to their creationist web sites rather than listen to anything you say, regardless of how reasonable. I’ve gone to the web sites and listened to some of the videos. All patent nonsense. However, I can see how it can be attractive to someone with a strong faith in literal reading of the Bible and with a poor understanding of science.

I guess I’m irrational myself as I often reply regardless of a great lack of success.

[BrandtMichaels]

Just the same macro-evolution has never been observed nor has the fossil record given us any transitional life forms.

[JimSEA]

The fossil record provides mostly transitional fossils. You just won’t recognize them as you refuse to comprehend deep time and the accumulation of “small” changes. Like your ICR buddies, you are still looking for the famous crocoduck. The history of earth is one of incrementalism punctuated with catastrophic instances and intervals.

[BrandtMichaels]

Lame argument - can’t find any so they are all transitional.

Never heard of stasis in the fossil record, Jim?

How about polystate fossils? Here’s some quotes for you to think about.

“Being a world-renowned fossil expert, Patterson’s frank admissions were embarrassing to adherents of the ‘religion of evolution’—including himself, it would appear. But there were even more devastating revelations to come from Dr Patterson.

During a public lecture presented at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History on 5 November 1981, he dropped a bombshell among his peers that evening, who became very angry and emotional. Here are some extracts from what he said:

‘ … I’m speaking on two subjects, evolutionism and creationism, and I believe it’s true to say that I know nothing whatever about either … One of the reasons I started taking this anti-evolutionary view, well, let’s call it non-evolutionary, was last year I had a sudden realisation.

… One morning I woke up … and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff [evolution] for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it.’ He added:

‘That was quite a shock that one could be misled for so long … I’ve tried putting a simple question to various people and groups of people: “Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that you think is true?” I tried that question on the geology staff in the Field Museum of Natural History, and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago … and all I got there was silence for a long time, and then eventually one person said: “Yes, I do know one thing. It ought not to be taught in high school.”.’6

Although these are only excerpts from Patterson’s very frank and startling lecture that evening (the full text is even more revealing), it is plain to see the doubts he was having. It also shows that creationist usage of such quotes by Patterson does not amount to ‘creationist foul play’.

Dr Patterson’s penchant for openness did not do him any service with the pro-evolutionary scientific establishment, who often expressed anger and dismay at his comments when they could not make excuses for them. His experience and expertise as holder of one of the most prestigious scientific posts in the world did not grant him immunity from pressure for having dared to express doubts about the evolutionary worldview. It is a sad reminder that political and ideological correctness can be more important than any so-called ‘objective facts’ in determining scientific acceptance of an idea.”

[BrandtMichaels]

Polystrate fossils [sp error above] - these are often in the form of tree trunks that supposedly were fossilized covering several different stratas usually several million year yet appeared like the ones they found from Mt. St. Helens 1980 eruption.

Evolutionists are the ones deluding themselves...

[BrandtMichaels]

JimSEA if you truly know anything regarding geology and science you ought to set BroJoeK straight regarding this statement...

“In the real world, all of science is based on certain assumptions, including naturalism and uniformitarianism.”

If that were so we would actually know much less than we do and could not truly call it science rather mere speculations.

[JimSEA]

polystrate fossils are fossils which were buried in a geologically short time span either by one large depositional event or by several smaller ones.
Note: polystrate is a creationist term which is used to group together unrelated or poorly related phenom.

An set of examples from Yellowstone are trees consumed by lahars and other volcano related rapid depositions of materials. You can find similar tree fossils in the process of formation near Mt. Saint Helens. The coal mine’s upright trees is even more easily described as coal originated most often from plant decay in a swamp. As successive layers of decaying material surrounded the tree a low oxygen environment preserved the tree as well as other fossils. The tree would naturally be held upright in the midst of the numerous layers of organic material. Bingo, a natural explanation for polystrate trees in coal.

Basically, you look for rapid deposition of rock, mud, etc.(perhaps a landslide or yes, a flood). And you get trees or other things poking up through several strata.

Stasis is merely a period of no perceptible change. Horseshoe crabs or alligators are often used as examples. In fact such is not rare, odd or inexplicable.

Dr. Patterson’s “revaluation” refutes nothing about TOE other than that the good doctor was having a crisis of faith. Actually, the truth is that Dr. Colin Patterson has been repeatedly and falsely quoted. The actual quote was merely:

“”I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. . .I will lay it on the line, There is not one such fossil for which one might make a watertight argument.”
— Dr. Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History.”
Dr. Patterson’s book “Evolution” (1978, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.) has the quote from Dr Peterson:
“
In several animal and plant groups, enough fossils are known to bridge the wide gaps between existing types. In mammals, for example, the gap between horses, asses and zebras (genus Equus) and their closest living relatives, the rhinoceroses and tapirs, is filled by an extensive series of fossils extending back sixty-million years to a small animal, Hyracotherium, which can only be distinguished from the rhinoceros-tapir group by one or two horse-like details of the skull. There are many other examples of fossil ‘missing links’, such as Archaeopteryx, the Jurassic bird which links birds with dinosaurs (Fig. 45), and Ichthyostega, the late Devonian amphibian which links land vertebrates and the extinct choanate (having internal nostrils) fishes. . .”

A 1993 letter of Dr. Patterson is, as follows:

Dear Mr Theunissen,
Sorry to have taken so long to answer your letter of July 9th. I was away for a while, and then infernally busy. I seem fated continually to make a fool of myself with creationists. The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues “... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test.”

I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists’ is false.

That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous “keynote address” at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the “Systematics Discussion Group” in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on “Evolutionism and creationism”; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.

I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still maintain that scepticism is the scientist’s duty, however much the stance may expose us to ridicule.

Yours Sincerely,

[signed]

Colin Patterson

In other words, the creationists’ dishonestly represented Patterson’s position and, made a lot of stuff up. They do that sort of thing a lot.

[BroJoeK]

JimSea: “It’s very frustrating because the young earth types will scurry back to their creationist web sites rather than listen to anything you say...”

I “get” all that, have long argued that they are perfectly entitled to believe whatever they wish, so long as they don’t call their religious beliefs “science” or pretend to judge science they don’t like (I.e. “historical sciences”) as somehow “not science”.
By US law, science is what scientists say it is, and it certainly includes assumptions like naturalism and uniformitarianism.
If **some people** don’t like it, that’s fine, but they can’t just define it away.

As for their arguments themselves, those are all easily answered, by anyone with time and patience to devote — time I sometimes do have, but not always.

[onedoug]

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. --Richard P Feynman

[BroJoeK]

BrandtMichaels: “Just the same macro-evolution has never been observed nor has the fossil record given us any transitional life forms.”

First of all, “macro - evolution”, by definition, is nothing more than the effects of “micro - evolution” extended over millions & tens of millions of years.
And those effects can be observed everywhere by anyone willing to see them.
The fact that you close your eyes and refuse to see doesn’t mean they’re not there.

Second, every individual, without exception is a “transition form” between it’s ancestors and descendants.
Fossils are also all “transition forms”, though there are often millions of generations which lived between one type of fossil and the next fossils found in sequence.
And as we can see with human selected dog breeds, under the right conditions huge changes in appearance can be made in just a few generations.
So where are the “transition forms” in, for example, dog breeds?
For most older breeds, we no longer know what were the “transition forms”, though we are absolutely certain they once existed.
The same is true of ancient fossils.

[JimSEA]

My opinion matches yours. They have a right to their beliefs but not to their facts.

[BroJoeK]

BrandtMichaels: "Lame argument - can’t find any so they are all transitional."

No, the "lame argument", indeed the insane argument here is the one you people make about "no transitional forms".
In fact, the fossil record is chock full of "transitional forms", and yet you insanely point at each saying, "see, no transitions, no transitions...", and the more "transitions" you're shown, the more you declare "no transitions" because now you need to see the "transitions between the transitions!"

Of course it's insane, but clever as h*ll, because nine out of ten, indeed 99 out of 100 people can't see that, by taking over the terms of debate, you've rigged the argument before it even starts.
Similarly with the alleged distinction between "micro-" versus "macro-" evolution.
In reality, these words describe nothing more than the effects of short-term versus long-term evolution.
But by making it sound as if one can be "observed" while the other not, anti-evolutionists can pretend that "macro-evolution" is just a myth.

In reality, long-term effects, macro-evolution, can be seen in every living thing on Earth, if you're willing to look.

BrandtMichaels quoting someone named 'Patterson': "One morning I woke up … and it struck me that I had been working on this stuff [evolution] for twenty years, and there was not one thing I knew about it."

Obvious hyperbole from the good doctor, said for drama & effect -- certainly not true in any except a metaphysical sense.
The real truth is: science does the best it can with the data it collects, but even under the very best of circumstances, scientific theories, hypotheses, laws etc., are not reality itself, but merely a model of reality, a model which may be more or less accurate, but is still only ever a model.

Reality itself is quite different, and every good scientist knows that.
The good doctor Paterson is simply telling us that science claims no metaphysical certitude about anything it reports on.
So if you believe in a different metaphysical grounding than basic scientific assumptions (i.e., naturalism, uniformitarianism) then Dr. Paterson can't say with absolute certainty that you are wrong and science is right.

Indeed, that most basic of scientific assumptions, known as "methodological naturalism" is far from a religious belief in atheism, rather it's simply a working agreement that we will set aside our prior religious/philosophical/metaphysical beliefs for purposes of whatever scientific project we're working on.

So the good doctor is simply pointing out what science doesn't know, rather than crowing about what it does know.
Nothing wrong with that, it's the way scientists are supposed to view things.

[BroJoeK]

BrandtMichaels: "Evolutionists are the ones deluding themselves..."

No.
In the past 150 years science has accumulated literal mountains of data supporting & confirming evolution & related theories, while at the same time finding no data -- none -- to seriously falsify it.

So the delusion practiced here is the increasingly desperate hope of anti-science folks like yourself that something -- anything -- can be found to deflate science's bubble.
In reality, the greatest of scientists have never held super-high opinions of their enterprise, as I have often posted here:

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Isaac Newton, c.1720

[BroJoeK]

quoting BJK: "In the real world, all of science is based on certain assumptions, including naturalism and uniformitarianism."

BrandtMichaels: "If that were so we would actually know much less than we do and could not truly call it science rather mere speculations."

Michaels, your fundamental core root problem here is totally obvious: because you loathe and despise science you refuse to study it, and therefore know nothing about it.
So you concoct cockamamie nonsense.

In fact, "speculations" are a basic part of science -- because they can lead eventually to formal scientific hypotheses.
A formal hypothesis is a testable speculation, which if strongly confirmed can become a recognized theory -- that's what science is.

Further, compared to the total nature of reality, we know very little, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just exaggerating.
Science does not know the ultimate basis for what we see, it only assumes such basics as "naturalism" and "uniformitarianism" -- assumes because those ideas have been shown to work consistently in the material realm.

My point again is: science is supposed to be a humble enterprise, and where you detect scientific hubris, it's out of line and should be called out.

[BrandtMichaels]

You keep saying that but you know next to nothing about my scientific background, nor IQ, nor have you studied extensively any of the arguments against evolution.

YOU, SIR!

Need to be called out for what you assume about creation and evolution - I know plenty of science both from the evolution perspective and then later in life from he creation perspective.

What I detest are folks who use ridicule instead of sound reasoning. I detest folks who think evolution is settled science. Eventually evolution will be completely exposed for the fraud that it is [and always was since it completely contradicts the Holy Bible] along with naturalism [no God] and uniformitarianism [we know even with occasional catastrophes things do not progress uniformly].

God has declared one major worldwide natural disaster from our past - the flood. You folks blindly and blithely claim no evidence but then the vast majority have not even examined the evidence from a creation perspective.

[BrandtMichaels]

You keep repeating this most ridiculous statement:

“By US law, science is what scientists say it is.”

It speaks volumes about your background and intelligence.