Posted on 04/21/2014 2:52:15 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Few Americans question that smoking causes cancer. But they express bigger doubts as concepts that scientists consider to be truths get further from our own experiences and the present time, an Associated Press-GfK poll found.
Americans have more skepticism than confidence in global warming, the age of the Earth and evolution and have the most trouble believing a Big Bang created the universe 13.8 billion years ago.
Rather than quizzing scientific knowledge, the survey asked people to rate their confidence in several statements about science and medicine. […]
About 4 in 10 say they are not too confident or outright disbelieve that the earth is warming, mostly a result of man-made heat-trapping gases, that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old or that life on Earth evolved through a process of natural selection, though most were at least somewhat confident in each of those concepts. But a narrow majority—51 percent—questions the Big Bang theory. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
In that case, CO2 should have an overall negative effect on temperature, by emitting proportionally more IR upwards than it receives from that direction.
The description that mlo copied from Wikipedia is absolutely correct. Scientific theory pulls together countless observations into a coherent framework that both links together the observations and provides a basis to make testable hypotheses.
BTW, Wikipedia may be editable by anyone, but if someone tries to insert incorrect information, it will almost instantly be corrected. So many educated people use Wikipedia that it would be nearly impossible for factual inaccuracies to remain. Also, anything posted in Wikipedia must be referenced; if you suspect you have seen inaccurate information posted there, you can check the references for yourself and make a correction if you think it is necessary. I’ll warn you up-front, though: if you try to alter Wikipedia by removing scientific references and replacing them with nonsense references from Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute, etc., you will have little success.
Evolution is a process that happens according to immutable physical laws. Every time I compare a sequence of, for instance, flu viruses isolated from two different patients, and I see that there is a 2% difference in the genetic material between the two different isolates, I am directly observing the process of evolution.
The theory of evolution (which is not the process) ties together all of the evolutionary observations (alteration of genetic material, the observed differences between fossils of different ages and currently living animals, etc.) into a framework that we use to make predictions that we can work from. Science simply cannot proceed without hypotheses. If there is a better explanation of the countless millions of observations that led to the theory of evolution, please let everyone know. Otherwise, the theory stands.
I must say, I am intrigued by the creationist (not Christian) fascination with Karl Popper. It is mind-boggling that anyone could possibly believe that a philosopher who never did a single scientific experiment in his life could know more about the scientific method than actual scientists who spend all day every day testing hypotheses. But, whatever.
I know what happens when one engages with a devout creationist.
I do not typically seek to engage in debates with creationists. Those usually happen because I post a comment on something related to science (e.g. the poll discussed in the article on top of the thread) and someone starts attacking me for presenting scientific information. I can only surmise that there is a great deal of frustration in trying to maintain belief in something that is contradicted by scientific observation, and that the appearance of an actual scientist provides an outlet for all that frustration. The chance of pressuring a single scientist, let alone the entire scientific community, into renouncing science and the scientific method is just about nil...
It appears that the entirety of your "scientific education" consists of reading creationism literature. That stuff not only is not scientific, it isn't even based in the Bible.
There is a lot of real scientific literature out there, much of it written for lay people. If you have a real interest in science and genuinely want to learn, I would suggest looking into it. Science Daily (www.sciencedaily.com), Live Science (www.livescience.com), Science magazine (www.sciencemag.org), etc., are all places to start. I am pretty confident, however, that you will not be running to those websites to read about real evolutionary science...
BTW, Science magazine is one of the top scientific journals in the world. Although you need a subscription to read the research articles, it has plenty of open access articles written for lay-people.
Argumentum ad verecundiam. That’s a logical fallacy, for the record.
Never mind the religious-sounding language (”for the lay people” and suchlike). If I keep getting more of that instead of the scientific method, it reinforces my perception that the off-topic theory in question is actually the religion I mentioned before with Hellenic roots.
Here's the thing about logical fallacies that most of the people who pounce on them don't seem to get: they don't in and of themselves render an argument incorrect. They're formal errors, not substantive ones.
Besides, exDemMom didn't make an argument from authority anyway.
"There's more infrared coming from below than above."
"In that case, CO2 should have an overall negative effect on temperature, by emitting proportionally more IR upwards than it receives from that direction."
When an individual CO2 molecule absorbs a photon it can emit one in any direction. But the aggregate of an entire layer of CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't have that behavior.
A CO2 molecule at the bottom of the layer will emit a photon in a random direction. If it emits downwards then there's no CO2 to interact. But if it goes up it can hit another CO2 molecule, which will in turn emit it back in a random direction, which might be back downwards again.
This is a very simplified picture of course, but it illustrates the point. A CO2 layer in the atmosphere isn't like a single CO2 molecule. It's like a thin insulating blanket that has a slight tendency to reflect more infrared back.
That doesn't mean AGW is valid of course. It takes more than this. Some of the reasons I'm still skeptical of AGW are:
CO2 is a relatively minor greenhouse gas in our atmosphere. So say we double the amount of CO2. If CO2 makes up only 2% of greenhouse effect then we've only increased the effect by 2%.
We are talking about relatively minor changes in temperature over long periods of time. But we don't have reliable long term temperature records. Even recent ones made by recording devices are subject to other effects that have to be estimated and corrected. Long term records have to be constructed by indirect means. That's all fine, but every correction factor and every layer of indirection introduces a margin of error. I'm not convinced that the changes being discussed are larger than the margin of error in the measurements.
The global climate may include self-regulating mechanisms. For example, an increase in temperature may increase cloud cover, reflecting more heat outwards. Or an increase in CO2 may cause greater plant growth. Effects like that would act as regulators.
Even if we accept that temperature has risen, the evidence for a human cause seems to be entirely an argument of, correlation equals causation, which is probably the single most common logical fallacy encountered in science. And the correlation isn't that great anyway. We know global climate was getting warmer coming out of the Little Ice Age so how can we distinguish that natural trend from human effects?
None of that disproves AGW, but they are reasons I don't think we should be confident in it.
Yes they do, and yes she did.
Sorry, no. "My position is right because all the top scientists agree with me" is an argument from authority, but that doesn't make my position wrong. "You're wrong because you're a creationist" is an ad hominem, but that doesn't make your position right.
exDemMom didn't say she was right because those sources agreed with her. She made her own arguments for evolution. She just recommended further reading if you wanted to understand them.
I don’t recall her making any arguments, however. And they certainly do not match my own college experience with respect to being taught about evolution, which comes from community and state colleges; the professors there were (and still are, to my recollection) very even-handed and emphasized the scientific method.
Never mind the religious-sounding language (”for the lay people” and suchlike). If I keep getting more of that instead of the scientific method, it reinforces my perception that the off-topic theory in question is actually the religion I mentioned before with Hellenic roots.
It is a pretty typical and common response of devout creationists that when they cannot refute an argument with facts, they start falling back on cries of "logical fallacy." Of course, claiming logical fallacy (while having hardly any comprehension of what a true logical fallacy is) does not invalidate the factual argument. It is merely a diversionary tactic.
I point out that articles from certain sources are written for lay-people because I know perfectly well that pure scientific language is dense and incomprehensible to those who have not been educated in it. I'm interested in educating people, not snowing them with incomprehensible jargon.
I have no clue what you are talking about, "some religion with Hellenic roots." But I will point out that if you feel the need to dismiss science as a religion--a common trait of creationists--it says more about your feelings towards religion than it does about science. If you want to illustrate that something is vile, you compare it to something that you consider equally vile.
Anyway, none of your creationist objections to science are very original or interesting. You don't like science--I get it. You really don't have to keep illustrating it.
That’s your most projectionist response thus far. You haven’t brought any facts to the table here; only opinions, and observations tenuously described as “evidence”. Furthermore, you steered this thread off topic for no reason, and are trying to justify it by self-righteousness and smugness.
Please explain how an advocate of this particular off-topic subject is utterly unfamiliar (or feigns unfamiliarity?) with its roots? The ancient Greeks were the first to come up with notions of development of one species from another and natural selection. How is it that names such as Empedocles and Anaximander do not spring to mind at once, not to mention Aristotle?
Seriously, drop it.
You cannot change the evidence by pounding me with material that you have internalized from some creationism website. You cannot convince me to just blindly disregard the evidence of evolution, especially when I work with it every day. I’ve already pointed you to some resources that explain complex scientific topics in terms that lay-people can understand. If you do not want to look at them, that is on you, not me. I have no real interest in continuing to discuss science with someone whose only interest in the topic is to try to debunk it.
Off-topic? Let me revisit: the thread started with an article discussing a poll on Americans’ attitudes towards anthropogenic global warming, the age of the earth, evolution, and the big bang. To which I commented regarding the strength of the scientific evidence supporting each subject. Then you leapt in with a lot of creationism. Thus, you diverted me from the topic of discussing the poll.
In answer to your question, “How is it that names such as Empedocles and Anaximander do not spring to mind at once, not to mention Aristotle?”, I will say that the names of what I assume are ancient Greeks whom I’ve never heard of (except for the name Aristotle) do *not* typically spring to mind, ever. However, I will say that the ancient Greeks made some important observations and hypotheses in the fields of science and mathematics—they were not stupid. Making various observations and proposing a rudimentary theory of evolution to explain them really isn’t such a big deal—that has been done by many peoples throughout history—but coming up with a rudimentary atomic theory without *any* of the instrumentation that was finally used to demonstrate it—that is pretty impressive.
Stop what? This is getting amusing, with all due respect; the more I respond, the more you sound like a doctrinarian rather than a scientist. Nobody ever taught me about this particular off-topic subject in college in this manner.
I have not “changed” any “evidence”; I merely see the nature of the observations alluded to here in an open-minded way. You OTOH are quite adamant about denying the roots of this off-topic theory—and since you admit not hearing of the “ancient Greeks” I mentioned (how and why?—their names are mentioned on just about all college websites with respect to the off-topic subject rather than “some creationist website”), this undermines your credibility as to your prior claim of being a scientist, again with all due respect.
Furthermore, no “instrumentation” ever “demonstrated” anything that proves any facet of the theory in question. There are no laws related to this theory—only endless hypotheses. Oh yes, and denigrating the philosophers of the past means scrapping the base of a theory—also unscientific.
Right. Names of ancient Greeks may be mentioned on the websites of most colleges, but not likely on their science department websites. It may surprise you to learn that when we study science in college, we only study the history that is directly related to the topic of study, and only briefly. For instance, in one class, we saw a short film about Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos Islands, where he made a lot of observations that were key to his later developing the theory of evolution that is closest to the working theory we use today. We also learned briefly about the competing Lamarkian theory of evolution, which eventually was rejected as a theory because it did not lead to hypotheses that were validated by experimentation.
As a rule, scientists do not spend much time discussing philosophy or ancient history. Some may do so as a personal passion, but in our work, we focus on the here and now in order to make testable predictions (hypotheses). It is a characteristic of creationists--sorry, nothing unique to you at all--that they want to discuss three thousand year old philosophy and use *that* as a basis on which to reject actual observations and theory. I can only surmise this is because the creationism websites like Answers in Genesis, etc. use a lot of space writing diatribes about how ancient history is more relevant to scientific theory than the actual scientific method.
Did you bother going to any of the websites I mentioned, which are specifically written for laypeople to understand, to read up on the latest findings in evolutionary biology? (I'm pretty sure I know the answer.)
BTW, if the theory of evolution is as flimsy as you claim, you should easily be able to bring up any specific evolutionary claim and debunk it. I have not, to date, seen any devout creationist do this--instead, they fall back on debating irrelevant points of ancient philosophy.
Also, you may be truthful when you claim that you have attended college. However, the Bio101 equivalent class you may have taken for your general education requirement was highly unlikely to have covered the topic of evolution in any kind of depth or detail. I recall that evolution took up maybe one or two class sessions when I took Bio101; I can very easily see how someone who wants to reject evolution (and pretty much all of biological science) can do so if that is their entire education on the subject. The thing is, people who actually major in a life science actually see the topic of evolution covered in zoology, in genetics, in molecular biology, in comparative anatomy, etc., etc. (although it is not often mentioned by name). Evolutionary theory is the *core* theory of all biology, and to try to advance biological science without using the theory of evolution is like trying to advance physical science without using the theory of electromagnetism.
I'll give one specific example of how we use evolutionary theory, which I have mentioned before: in microbiology. There are several viruses floating around that cause severe human disease with high fatality rates. However, these viruses are not easily contagious between people. Evolutionary principles tell us a few things. One, since the evolutionary processes are constantly in motion, these viruses can mutate to a form that makes them highly contagious. Two, since the likelihood that a mutation will remain in a population is affected by selective pressures, we need to identify factors that favor mutations that cause the viruses to become contagious so as to mitigate those factors. Three, since we know that viruses mutate all the time, and that not all mutations lead to increased contagiousness, we need to figure out which mutations are important so we can watch for them. Microbiologists who understand evolution are worried. You, on the other hand, may remain blissfully unconcerned, since, in your world view, mutations are a complete fiction invented by evil godless scientists trying to discredit religion.
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