The Debate Continues

There's been some complaining on the original thread about hijacking, so I'm offering a chance for you guys to continue the debate without all the distracting comments. I'd suggest not pinging anyone until the debate is finished.

Here's a rcap of the debate so far. The first argument is in brown; the reply to part one of the first argument is in green.

Yes, but previously you MISQUOTED me; stated that I said that a single nucleotide polymorphism in the GULO pseudogene that is common between all primates was ‘smoking gun’ evidence, when I only pointed out that ‘some say’ ERV data is ‘smoking gun’ evidence of common descent (I try to not use sensationalist language when speaking about data interpretation). At that time I asked you to please refrain from quoting me unless you were actually putting “ “ marks around something I had actually posted.

Now I find you saying that I said ‘evolutionists say...’; when I never used that word. If you wish to quote me please do so by actually quoting me (the aforementioned “ “ marks around something I have posted), not putting words in my mouth. Given your previous defense of quote-mining I would hope that you would quote me as fully and accurately as possible when you find it convenient to do so.

My point was not that you misrepresented my argument, this time you had that essentially correct as I pointed out. What I object to is you putting forth misquotations of what I say, that point stands. However much accolades you might earn for the improvement in not misrepresenting my argument while paraphrasing what you think I said this time, I reiterate my request that you not do so.

Robert Wilson’s remarks to Senator John Pastore in testimony before the Congressional
Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 17 April 1969.

Senator Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of the country?

Robert Wilson: No sir, I don’t believe so.

Pastore: Nothing at all?

Wilson: Nothing at all.

Pastore: It has no value in that respect?

Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.

I do not often find myself in disagreement with you js1138. But I think anyone can assess the evidence of ERV and genetic data of nested hierarchies of interrelatedness and divergence. If you don’t believe Science is a conspiracy, then one can check the published works on pubmed and read about research in the field. The sequences they compare are publicly available. If you wish to check their work you can find the sequences yourself on Pubmed and BLAST them for a sequence comparison.

The high level math comes in determining rates of change, and the significance of the data. When discussing the GULO pseudogene I actually did a sequence search and Blast and posted the results to show that even the little segment we were talking about supported the nested hierarchies of primate and murine (rodent) clades.

It might take a few hours of figuring out the subject and a few hours of work, but ANYONE with a room temperature I.Q. (in F)could assess the statement that “humans and chimps are 98% similar in their gene sequences, humans and chimps both differ from gorillas by a greater amount than they differ from each other, and all three have closer sequence alignment than with an orangutan” is correct no matter how many sequences of sufficient length you compare. It, like anything else, just takes some work.

So I humbly disagree. Anyone can do it. But do read the primary literature. Those guys are experts in the field, peer reviewed, and (in the case of Evolutionary Biology) working with publicly available sequences. If you doubt their conclusions or results get their paper and check their work. Nothing to it.

==It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets?

I don’t want painters, sculptors, poets, or any other aspiring culture-monger subsidized by the government either.

“A ‘faith in culture’ is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from those very things which culture and religion are about. ‘Culture’ as a collective name for certain very valuable activities is a permissible word; but culture hypostatized, set up on its own, made into a faith, a cause, a banner, a ‘platform’, is unendurable.”

-C.S. Lewis, Lilies that Fester

Is supporting the efforts of painters, sculptors, and poets to learn and practice their craft in public Universities subsidization? Much of the money spent by the government for Science comes in the form of education and grants to Universities.

The quote in context was about a particle accelerator. It is in our national interest to have the best particle accelerators available to our physicists and physics students. If the government builds one and pays out grants to teachers who set to work students is this somehow government waste, or is it something that we can be proud of as Americans? I say we should build particle accelerators, and superconducting supercoliders, and help fund a Genome project.

Lets not forget though that it was private industry that beat everyone to the punch on the composition of the human genome. Go America!

==Is supporting the efforts of painters, sculptors, and poets to learn and practice their craft in public Universities subsidization?

In the context of government funding...yes.

==I say we should build particle accelerators, and superconducting supercoliders, and help fund a Genome project.

I’m all for it if there is a market for it. But not a penny of taxpayer money should go towards science unless it is directly related to national defense.

I’m all for it if there is a market for it. But not a penny of taxpayer money should go towards science unless it is directly related to national defense.

That is one of the most ridiculous things I have seen you post.

It seems that you are so against "evilution" that you are willing to trash all of science to kill off the small part that you disagree with for religious reasons.

I am sure glad that you, and thinkers like you, are not in power in this country and likely never will be.

You folks would have us living in a theocracy so fast we wouldn't know what hit us.

And you, of course, will deny wanting to impose a theocracy on this country. Sorry, from your posts, such as the one above, I don't believe a word of it.

Paging Nehemiah Scudder. Pick up the white courtesy telephone please.

Universities turn out graduates who can work in the industry doing research without a totally new education. This is because of grants to University Scientists which enables graduate students to perform experiments researching cancer, signal transduction, cardiovascular disease, gene function, synthetic chemistry, mass spectrometry etc, etc. This all involves expensive equipment and reagents. Not all of it involves being better able to kill people, but enables us to save lives.

Wilson was perhaps a little sensitive to the idea that all a particle accelerator was going to do was enable us to make bigger bombs because he worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the Atomic bomb.

At some point there is pride to be taken in pure research, pride in discovery, national pride that it takes place in the U.S.A. more than in any other nation. I have pride that I am doing my part to discern a small part of this great and glorious creation. I am proud to be looking for small molecule therapeutics to heal the sick. But not all research needs to be packed into pills or bombs to be of value. Where will the next generation of Scientists be trained? Alumni seem willing to spend millions on new football stadiums, but springing a few thousand for a DNA sequencer and some DNA purification kits seems to be beyond their realm of interest. A few elite Universities could work on endowments but they would have to curtail the scope of their research efforts without funding from the Fed.

I am sure India and China are willing to train the next generation of Scientists and Engineers for us. I already enjoy working with many people from other nations who have come to the U.S.A. to work, but I would like to continue seeing American graduates of American Universities.

Why Not a Free Market in Education?

A free market? Organized around what principal? Science and technology and what it has taught us, or religious fundamentalism?

The latter is what you appear to be advocating.

You seem to want science totally defunded at the federal level because it (the free market in science) does not conform to your religious beliefs. It seems that you would be willing to turn this country into a third world theocracy if that is what it took for your religious belief to become dominant. Take a look at the religious states around the globe--their records aren't so great lately.

Sorry, I can't buy that. I'll stick with the real "free market" instead. And that has supported science in this country for 200+ years.

==That is one of the most ridiculous things I have seen you post.

Coming from you, that must mean I’m right on track.

==It seems that you are so against “evilution” that you are willing to trash all of science to kill off the small part that you disagree with for religious reasons.

Not all science, just government science. True science should be completely market-driven.

==You folks would have us living in a theocracy so fast we wouldn’t know what hit us.

We are already living under a quasi-theocracy...it's called Darwinist Materialism. We need a complete separation of Darwin and State. And I speak for millions upon millions of Christians when I say I would never want a Christian theocracy under any circumstances. Not only is theocracy forbidden in the New Testament, but history has shown over and over that a merging of religion and state only serves to corrupt religion. Thus, the vast majority of Christians are against theocracy—this is especially so with regard to Darwinist theocracy (which you cheerfully endorse).

==A free market? Organized around what principal? Science and technology and what it has taught us, or religious fundamentalism?

Are you conservative even in the slightest degree? What do you mean “organized around what principle”? Around the free market of course! Duh! The Evos would be free to set up their own institutions, and Creationists would be free to set up theirs. The free market would determine their success or failure. Read Adam Smith.

And I speak for millions upon millions of Christians when I say I would never want a Christian theocracy under any circumstances. Not only is theocracy forbidden in the New Testament, but history has shown over and over that a merging of religion and state only serves to corrupt religion.

But you still feel free to dictate your religious beliefs in the political world.

But, you will most likely respond, "I don't want my religious beliefs to be dominant, I just want that nasty anti-god materialist science stuff to be defunded and to go away."

Sorry, you can't have it both ways.

Paging Nehemiah Scudder. Pick up the white courtesy telephone please.

==But you still feel free to dictate your religious beliefs in the political world.

Are you really that thick, Wiley? How could I dictate my religious beliefs if government schools and science institutions were privatized? Earth to Wiley, come in Wiley...

==But, you will most likely respond, “I don’t want my religious beliefs to be dominant, I just want that nasty anti-god materialist science stuff to be defunded and to go away.”

It will never go away...that is, until the Second Coming. In the meantime, we won’t force your children to learn about Creationism...all we are asking is that totalitarian-minded Evos like yourself do the same. That’s how a FREE society is supposed to work. In a free society there would be atheist schools, ID schools, Christian schools, Jewish schools, Muslim schools, New Age/pagan schools, supply side schools, Austrian schools, Keynsian schools, socialist schools, trade schools, and every other kind of school that attracts enough voluntary support to become viable and self perpetuating.

==Sorry, you can’t have it both ways.

You can have it every which way in a free market of ideas. I think you are frightened by what might happen if your Darwinist theocracy is no longer propped up by government coercion.

All around the world the theory of Evolution through natural selection has been adopted as the predominant theory of Biology by Scientists.

It hardly needed the U.S. government deciding that Biological and other Scientific research would be funded, or that Biology as accepted by Biologists worldwide would be taught in Biology class.

It was only long after the theory became the predominant theory of Biology among Scientists that it was taught in American public schools.

Your ‘propping up’ nonsense is exactly that, utter nonsense. It is akin to saying that the government is propping up Atomic Theory and if not for the massively wasteful Manhattan project and particle accelerators and colliders Atomic Theory would be relegated to the scrap heap of useless Scientific theories. It just isn’t even close to being true.

==All around the world the theory of Evolution through natural selection has been adopted as the predominant theory of Biology by Scientists.

We have no idea how many scientists actually believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. They have been brainwashed with evolutionary propoganda ever since their grade school days, and if they dare to challenge the Temple of Darwin, they know they will be ostracized, denied the right to publish (and thus perish), have their grants terminated, will no longer be invited to conferences, have their name dragged through the mud in the press, and even potentially subject their schools/universities to lawsuits by Communist organizations like the ACLU. Given the current climate of hate and intimidation, it is impossible to gauge how many working scientists really, truly believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

As a side note, I find it interesting that in general, the more a country embraces Darwinist materialism the more socialist they become. And while roughly 50% of the US population rejects Darwin’s TOE, it is also true that the more the party of Darwin (the Demorats) win, the more socialist our government becomes. Could this be the natural trajectory of all nations who embrace Darwinist materialism??? The numbers suggest that may indeed be the case.

==It was only long after the theory became the predominant theory of Biology among Scientists that it was taught in American public schools.

If evolution is to be taught at all in public schools, then the public schools should be free to teach the scientific criticisms of Darwin’s theory, and they should also be free to identify who those critics are, and point them to resources that would allow them to compare theories.

==It just isn’t even close to being true.

Then let’s privatize science and see what happens.

Is it a “power play” that Geology is taught in Geology class? Is it a “Temple” of Geology because it teaches only that which is supportable by evidence, and not that the world is very young and there once was a worldwide deluge? Is there something going to “blow up” in the faces of Astronomers who teach that the sun is older than the earth instead of teaching it was created after the earth?

Evolution through natural selection is taught in Biology class because that is what Biologists think is the theory that explains the facts. It is in fact the only Scientific theory of Biological change that has not been falsified. If and when a better theory or a refinement of the theory comes along it will be embraced if and only if it is a better explanation for the facts (such as punctuated equilibrium and the neutral mutation theory).

There are no men in Black Robes setting down dogma for the Temple. There are thousands of individuals worldwide who know the data, do research in the field, and try to come up with something novel or revolutionary. This is how the community of Science works. If what you say is “hot” and people who listen to you find “new hotness” then you will be listened to. If what you say is bovine excrement and the people who listen to you find a dead end, you will be ignored as a cook or a crank. Guess where all the Flood Geologists ended up? How about the Lamarkian Evolutionists? The Geocentrists? (Ooops, are you still agnostic about Heliocentrism? Sorry.) The Flat earthers? The Alchemists?

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