Posted on 12/27/2004 2:34:25 PM PST by Ed Current
"all you have to do is do a search here in Freerepublic and find many scientific sources that doubt 'global warming'. one example is
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1248429/posts"
Anecdotes of anecdotes of what the scientific community says about global warming is supposed to be more convincing than directly referencing what the scientific community says? Come on!
You admitted yourself, even provided a link, that the AAAS and NAS say global warming is happening and is caused by man. That is already a significant portion of the most respected scientific institutions. The IPCC, as well as NSC, likely the most important environmental groups, also post official statements saying global warming is caused by man.
Please post direct links to ACTUAL scientific authorities that deny global warming. Skip all the "he said/she said" and see what the authorities have to say on the subject.
ROFLOL! You have just totally shredded any respect whatsoever I might have had for you for your ability to think.
Only complete idiots believe that the tiny, insignificant climate changes that man makes to the planet are SIGNIFICANT compared to what nature does. The most basic understanding of long term solar cycles and activity makes one understand that that man's "influence" on global temperatures is laughable in comparison. Once again, you have to be some type of "religious environmental nut job" to believe in GLOBAL WARMING. It's a religion, NOT SCIENCE.
So as long as she only reads Darwinist sources she's fine? That's a cool theory.
So as long as she only reads Darwinist sources she's fine? That's a cool theory.
You might want to work on your reading comprehension before you attempt to post again. Thanks.
"You believe in the "theory" of global warming?
ROFLOL! You have just totally shredded any respect whatsoever I might have had for you for your ability to think."
Ok, you guys have adequately presented your ability for pointless rhetoric and hyperbole, can we move on to substance now? Like backing up all your mouthing off with some actual data?
Post links to actual scientific institutions or journals that say global warming is not caused by man.
And another thing, if you do not know the difference between a scientific 'theory' and a 'theory' in common conversation then you have no right posting on science issues.
Science doesn't stop when you say it does or when any group of scientists say it does. If it did there wouldn't be any tetanus but there would be plenty of leech farms. Uh, you get it now?
Don't shoot me - I'm just the messenger (or is that the piano player)
How about I post links to ACTUAL scientific authorities that were screaming hystericaly about GLOBAL COOLING 30 years ago?
The New York Times (Aug. 14, 1975) saw "many signs" that "Earth may be heading for another ice age." Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned about "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." "Continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) could herald "a full-blown 10,000 year ice age" (Science, March 1, 1975). The Christian Science Monitor reported (Aug. 27, 1974) that Nebraska's armadillos were retreating south from the cooling.
These same intellectual idiots are the ones that you bow down to? Good God, how embarrassing!
10 minutes is long enough to tap out a coherent thought. Good night.
Mrs. Schlafly led the pro-family movement to victory over the principal legislative goal of the radical feminists, called the Equal Rights Amendment.
Ah, yes, radical feminists like moi, devoted mom of five beautiful male and female human beings, married to the same man for twenty five years, who actually has the ovaries to believe the radical proposition that women are human beings too.
Really radical moi. Chuckle.
Ah, sorry, my bad.
You may use my ammo if you like.
Pace!
Forget about it, Alacarte says the Scientists have spoken on global warming. In Alacarte's world, that's the end of the story.
"Science doesn't stop when you say it does or when any group of scientists say it does. If it did there wouldn't be any tetanus but there would be plenty of leech farms. Uh, you get it now?"
No I don't get it, because what you said makes no sense... I had no idea tetanus shots were first used by the church. I had also forgotten that the scientific community fought their use because they liked using leeches... WHat do leeches even have to do with tetanus? WHat are talking about period? Why do you never make any sense?
Science never stops, what are you talking about? I'm not asking anyone to believe what I say about science. I'm asking you to look at what the actual scientific community says on these issues. We could all agree that quantum mechanics is a lie, that would not change the fact that we are all wrong! WHat we know about the natural world is defined in the scientific literature. This literature is by no means comprehensive, but there are fundamental things we know for sure.
ROFL!!! The "True.Origin Archive" is one of the largest loads of crap I've ever found in one place on the internet. "Intellectually honest"? Ooookay...
Let's look at the very first "rebuttal" linked on their main page, shall we? It's Ashby Camp's attempt to attack 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent , from The Talk.Origins Archive website.
Here's something I wrote and posted a while back on FreeRepublic in response to another Freeper who was unjustifiably impressed by "TrueOrigins":
So you think that the True.Origin Archive is "an intellectually honest response" to the claims of evolutionary biology? Go ahead, pull the *other* leg now...which has been thoroughly debunked in A Critique of 29 Evidences for Macroevolution as well as on several threads right here on FreeRepublic.
Oh, puh-leaze... "Frantically denounced" is not the same thing as "thoroughly debunked". Let's take a look at your link, shall we?
Ashby Camp attempts to "debunk" item "4.2 DNA Coding Redundancy", but he screws it up royally. First, he attempts to summarize the argument as:
The alleged prediction and fulfillment are:This COMPLETELY misses the point of the DNA Coding Redundancy argument. In fact, it practically *reverses* the actual argument entirely. It's a downright laughable attempt at summarizing the actual argument, and grossly misrepresents the original point being made.1. If universal common ancestry is true, then ubiquitous genes will have the same or a similar codon sequence in two or more species.
2. Ubiquitous genes have the same or a similar codon sequence in two or more species.
Ashby Camp can hardly "debunk" an argument if he doesn't even understand it to start with.
Instead, the actual argument which Camp is misrepresenting goes like this: If modern life arose through common descent, then the redundancy in the DNA coding (which allows *many* different DNA sequences to produce *identical* protein results) should result in very similar DNA sequences between recently-related species (for the same protein), less similar DNA sequences for less-recently-related species, and very less similar DNA sequences for distantly-related species. For *all* species relationships and *all* coding sequences.
That's *quite* a bit different than Camp's ridiculously oversimplified version, which grossly distorts the above into "some sequences will be found to be similar, somewhere". The *actual* prediction is *far* more specific, and *vastly* less likely to occur by chance or some other method which does not involve common descent. The actual prediction makes testable, narrow predictions about *every* ubiquitous gene sequence in *every* species. It's extremely specific, and leaves no wiggle-room for observations which might violate the prediction.
Camp then uses his own skewed version of the argument to say, "It is not a prediction of the hypothesis of universal common ancestry or the more specific hypothesis of Neo-Darwinism that ubiquitous genes will have the same or a similar codon sequence in two or more species." That's true enough for Camp's distorted version, but *NOT* for the original.
Camp further claims: "If the codon sequence in such a gene was not the same or “similar” in two or more species, evolutionists simply would vary the time of divergence and/or the mutation rate, which is claimed to vary for different genes, to account for the differences." No, absolutely not. What Camp is missing is that this line of evidence applies not to absolute amounts of differences, but *relative* amounts of differences. Yes, the neutral mutation rate for some genes is larger than others. But that's irrelevant to this line of evidence, because whatever the mutation rate for a given gene, what's being compared is larger differences versus smaller differences when examining multiple pairs of species. "Larger" is distinguishable from "smaller" no matter what the absolute sizes might be.
Camp reveals his further misunderstandings when he writes: "Once again, the real argument being made is theological, not scientific. The claim is that, since God could make a gene for a protein with many different codon sequences, he would not have used an identical or similar series of codons in the cytochrome c gene of separately created species." No, Camp blows it again. There is, in fact, absolutely no argument of any sort in 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution about what God might or might not choose to do. That's Camp's own hallucination. What's worse, he obviously entirely misunderstands the *evidenciary* arguments being made in 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. What makes this even more unforgiveable is that the points that Camp misses are spelled out explicitly in one of the "29+ Evidences" pages (this one).
What Camp entirely misses is that the 29+ lines of evidence for macroevolution are *not* given as "proofs". Nowhere is the argument made that there could be no other possible explanation for a particular type of observation, or that any given observation might not match the predictions of some other theory as well. That's *always* a "given" in science, because there's *always* some other theor(ies) which could likewise explain the evidence (if nothing else, some sort of unrecognized variation on the current theory, or even something radically different that no one's thought of).
What Camp misses entirely, because he's not a scientist (he's a lawyer) is that you don't "prove" a given theory by allegedly presenting something which can't be explained any *other* way (because this is almost always impossible to do even in principle), instead you *support* a theory by working out as many of its implications (i.e. predictions) as you can, and then check to see (via examination of known evidence, and experiment, and other methods) whether all observations you can manage to do actually "fit" the theory (and more importantly, whether any are found which *don't*).
The more evidence which falls into line to match the expectations of the theory, the more the theory is strengthened. Any evidence which appears to be a blatant violation of the expectations of the theory weighs *very* heavily against it. Furthermore, a theory is very much strengthened if the evidence which matches its predictions are from not just one type of prediction or line of argument, but from many. In the 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution page, there are over *29* independent lines of evidence, all of which beautifully match the predictions of the theories of common descent and macroevolution. And each line of evidence is supported by *thousands*, and in some cases *millions*, of individual pieces of evidence.
In short, evolution has an enormous amount of evidence supporting it.
I strongly invite readers to ignore Gore3000's "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" attempt, and actually go *read* 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution for yourself (yes, all several pages). It'll take a couple hours, but it's well worth the time. After you read it, you'll understand why creationists are being hugely dishonest when they claim that there is "no" evidence supporting evolution, or that evolution is not a "scientific" or "predictive" theory. The pages at that link show in great detail how empty those claims are, even if you choose argue with a few particular points or disagree with its conclusion. There's an enormous amount of meticulous, well-researched evidence for evolution, and that page gives a large taste. Don't let anyone tell you there's not. And I trust any reader with an open mind will see for themselves how strong the evolutionary foundation truly is, contrary to hte "house of cards" declarations by its opponents. Again, even if you disagree with the conclusion, at least be honest enough to admit there's a lot of good evidence behind it -- if you take the time to look.
Camp blusters in several sections about how "well, maybe God chose to make things the way that the evidence indicates". Fine, maybe he did. Feel free to go off and develop a "scientific theory of creationism". But note that you can't just say (as Camp does), "maybe God wanted to do it in a way that only *appears* to match the expected results of evolution, we don't know why", because that's *not* a *scientific* prediction, because it doesn't let you predict *ahead* of your observations what you think you're going to find and why. As soon as you develop a "scientific theory of creationism" which *does* claim to grasp enough of God's processes and reasons to be able to predict (repeat: *predict*) enough of the details of His works that you'll be able to test your theory against the evidence (and also honestly deal with it if your predictions are falsified), *then* you'll have something that can truly be called "scientific". So far, no one has offered such a theory. "God could make it any way at all if he wanted to for His own mysterious reasons" does *not* qualify, because it is neither predictive nor falsifiable. It is, in fact, a declaration of *lack* of knowledge rather than a contribution to science (which is the *accumulation* of what we know and can confidently count on and predict about the world).
Camp even unwittingly admits this when he writes, "But even if there were no unknown design constraints on the gene for cytochrome c, how could one be sure that God would not conserve codon sequences when creating cytochrome c gene in separate species?" Yes, exactly. If one "can't be sure" -- if there's no way to test the unknowability of God's whims or predict what they will be in a given case -- then it's a philosophical issue, but it's not a scientific theory.
Camp's concluding paragraph for this section of his "debunking" only further reveals his misunderstandings:
Thus, the similarity of codon sequences in the cytochrome c gene of humans and chimps does not “make it look exactly like we are genealogically related.”This quote appears nowhere in 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution. Camp is either summarizing, or was working off an older version of the web page. In any case, he misunderstands it. The meaning is that the gene similarities and differences between man/chimp are exactly the type we would expect to see if we were genealogically related, and closely so. It's not a claim that the gene sequences by themselves are some sort of irrefutable proof that we are.That conclusion only follows if one ignores the possibility of unknown design constraints, insists that God introduce novelty for novelty’s sake, and denies that there could be other divine purposes, such as sending a biotic message, for the pattern of similarity.See above. Camp repeatedly misunderstands the argument(s) which are actually being made in 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution, and thus his "debunking" misses the mark entirely.Similar major flaws are present in the rest of his alleged "debunking" article. And you have "forgotten" to mention that talk.origins itself posts a lengthy rebuttal to Camp's sloppy 'critique'. In it, they describe his attempts to critique their material (and quite fairly, in my opinion), as:
Mr. Camp's critique is error-ridden in various ways, and is primarily characterized by:...and then they go on to very thoroughly document those errors in Camp's critique.
- Straw man arguments
- Red herrings
- Self-contradictions
- Equivocation
- Two wrongs make a right
- Fallacies of accident and converse accident
- Ignoratio elenchi
- Naive theological assumptions
- Insufficient knowledge of basic biology, molecular biology, biochemistry and genetics
- Misunderstanding of the scientific method
- Forwarding of untestable competing "hypotheses"
- Mischaracterization of evolutionary theory
- Misleading mis-quotes
- Fallacies of accent
- Distortion of scientific controversies
- Arguments from authority
- False analogies
The repeated use of these errors and others in Camp's "Critique" will be abundantly clear in the following rebuttal.
Are you sure you know what you're talking about?
I really wish she'd retire. Her statements are far too subject to impartial ridicule.
Cherry picking the few flaws in evolution theory while ignoring what is established evolutionary fact is more of the same "scientific method" of creationism. Someone please explain why Creationists always have to present theirselves as such violated victims.
And, BTW, the Archaeopteryx is undeniably (to those with sufficient a minimal lack of bias) both reptile and bird.
Well, yes, if indeed any Darwinists were teaching that. Are they?
No they're not, but hey, why start letting facts get in the way of a creationist rant now?
Someone please explain why Creationists always have to present theirselves as such violated victims.
... needy, helpless children always need protection from the boogeyman.
For some reason, in this one domain, logic, reason, mental abilities all seem to flip at the throwing of a switch and otherwise reasonable people become....
Bear-sized placemarker.
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