Posted on 02/17/2012 4:17:50 PM PST by wagglebee
How does erosion form a mountain instead of wearing it down?
/quibble>
Or, since you seem fond of quoting Mein Kampf, let's compare your statement to the paragraph *before* the one you cherry-picked to associate Hitler with Creationism:
The favourable preliminary to this improvement is not to mate individuals of higher and lower orders of being but rather to allow the complete triumph of the higher order. The stronger must dominate and not mate with the weaker, which would signify the sacrifice of its own higher nature. Only the born weakling can look upon this principle as cruel, and if he does so it is merely because he is of a feebler nature and narrower mind; for if such a law did not direct the process of evolution then the higher development of organic life would not be conceivable at all.
Cute.
If you are going to speak of "utility" it is necessary to agree on what constitutes Good.
Science strikes me as having been perverted into a Faustian bargain:
O what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, of omnipotence
Is promised to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command: emperors and kings
Are but obeyed in their serveral provinces,
Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;
But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man:
A sound magician is a mighty god.
Here Faustus, try thy brains to gain a deity.
The mistake is thinking that one *must* deny the existence of the Supernatural, or of God or Satan, to practice science: still less that one must (in effect) sell one's soul to do so.
That part is only necessary to feed the concomitant intellectual pride.
Cheers!
The goal posts historically *started* with abiogenesis vs. the hand of God, they didn't get moved there.
Quite an odd statement on your part.
Cheers!
I've never heard of the zeroth thermodynamic law -- do you mean the 2nd Law of Thermal Documents? ;-)
And molecular activity does not cease at absolute zero: due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the non-commutation of the quantum mechanical operators for position and velocity, polyatomic species still have vibrational energy even at absolute zero (hence the name "zero-point" energy).
Try rewriting that so it makes sense, please?
Cheers! Cheers!
Snapback PLACEMARKER.
They're too stupid to realize that if the ENTIRE population is reduced to college professors, UN parasites, telephone sanitizers, diversity coordinators, and the like, that there will be nobody left to grow the food, maintain the sewer lines, take out the garbage, and other such unsavory but necessary tasks.
And if (as sounds all too likely from their present behaviour) they insist on sodomy most of the time, and abortifacents or abortion for the few times they practice heterosexual coitus, then they will face extinction themselves in short order (on evolutionary time scales, of course).
What *is* the survival value of an abortion or of fellatio, anyway? It doesn't propagate the species...
Cheers!
Welllll there’s documentation for those who are interested in the truth . . . certainly of their goals and methods.
http://twoday.net/static/omega/files/quotes_from_people_who_consider_us_subjects.htm
I’m sure they are quite smug in their deception that THEY are uniquely qualified as elites to further the species . . . as the only ones allowed to procreate and give birth.
Then there’s the cloning technologies the fallen angels have given them . . .
They don’t think they need that many serfs and slaves to populate their slave/servant roles in vast areas of restored ‘national parklands’ from reclaimed metropolis areas voided of exterminated ‘useless eaters.’
At the time of the construction of the GEORGIA GUIDESTONE, the target population for the globe was 500 million. Purportedly it has been lowered since to 200 million.
Thankfully, Scripture indicates they won’t get that low . . . but with 1/3 to die early on in the END TIMES/TRIBULATION period and 1/3 of what’s left later to die . . . someone calculated that to be about half of the starting population . . . there will still be tons of blood flowing.
The greatest assumption is the one which assumes that the systems and mechanisms which produce what we observe necessarily 'evolved'.
Apply the fallacy of affirming the consequent to that bit of begging the question and voila, evolution.
See also Dawkins, Pharyngula, etc.
I am aware of such people. They do scientists and science a grave disservice by their actions. Because, unfortunately, the general public sees those people and assumes that they represent the majority of scientists, when in reality, they represent only themselves and their beliefs (and I count atheism as a belief). Whether you are devoutly Catholic, or devoutly atheist, science cannot validate your beliefs. That's not what it's for.
Most people have never seen scientists in their natural habitat--where we represent all religions--where, for example, a new intern was coming to our lab, and we did our best to accommodate her religious need to pray several times a day (we ended up making an arrangement with a Muslim scientist who also needed to pray several times a day). As far as I can tell, the only thing that sets scientists apart from other people as far as beliefs, lifestyles, etc., is that we chose science for a career instead of something else, like accounting or firefighting.
Not at all. There is no religion of "scientism", and there are no gatekeepers. In fact, the scientific community in general makes great efforts to bring more people into our community. We try to engage kids at school and do our durndest to ignite that spark of curiosity which drives people into science careers. I can think of no other career where one has the opportunity to routinely discover new things that no one else has ever found before.
Of course there is. Philosophical naturalism is the religion of scientism. The gatekeepers are the peer-reviewed publications that are committed to scientism.
Darwin's theory isn't about “stronger” and “weaker” but only variations that are well suited for conditions or not.
Hitler was a rather strict Creationist - he doesn't even allow that a canine “kind” could give rise to foxes, dingos, coyotes, and wolves - all in record time when needed. Nope - to him “a fox is always a fox”.
What does it say that the author of this article had to start out with a dishonest attempt at guilt by association. Is he a Nazi - or just intellectually dishonest?
You quoted Mein Kampf.
Except you misquoted it.
And the part you left out was the money quote supporting the central point of the thread.
Here's a hint: when you try to necklace someone with a connection to the Nazis, make sure you put the tire around someone else's neck.
Cheers!
Hmm, do you see the irony in accusing scientists of "dogmatic belief" when the entire field of science is built upon empirical observation? If you can't demonstrate an idea with empirical data, then it's not science. End of story.
Look at the troubles early doctors had in advocated aseptic conditions in surgery; the role of Heliobacter pylori in ulcers; the dogmatism of Ben Santer, Michael Mann, Gleick, etc. in AGW.
This is actually a couple of different issues. It took time to demonstrate the theory of germ transmission of disease, and the role of aseptic surgical techniques in breaking the chain of transmission. But the science was sound, and stood up to rigorous experimentation, so that there is now no question that surgery must be performed in aseptic conditions (although how best to achieve those conditions, and how aseptic any procedure must be--for instance, open chest surgery requires a higher level of care than wart removal--are still subjects of research). The same thing with establishing H. pylori infections as a major cause of gastric ulcers--when the properly controlled experiments were done, and the results communicated to the scientific and medical communities, and other scientists were able to replicate the findings, that, too, was accepted by the scientific and medical communities. That's the hallmark of scientific advance--it may take a while, decades even, for a hypothesis to be rigorously tested through controlled experimentation, but once it is established as being valid, it is accepted.
With AGW, however, there is something else going on. As far as I know, a disproportionate role of carbon dioxide as a component of the greenhouse effect has never been experimentally established. It has been established that CO2 fluoresces strongly within a narrow range of the IR spectrum. Someone hypothesized (in 1938!) that this fluorescence could raise atmospheric temperature. It was also later shown that the carbon dioxide levels have increased slightly. Fast-forward a few decades; some ideologically driven politicians saw in this a way to increase their power over the citizenry (because people who balk at having their lives dictated by a politician who merely wants power will gladly allow their lives to be dictated if they can be convinced that it will save the planet). So the politicians, who control grant moneys, dictated that grants be directed towards AGW research. We now have a situation where AGW advocates point at thousands of papers that supposedly establish CO2 as a driving force of atmospheric temperature; what they don't point out is that the vast majority of those papers use the terminology "X is happening because of global warming", which is a throw-away phrase meant to convince the politicians that the research funding is, in fact, going towards AGW research.
I haven't heard of Ben Santer. What I see happening with Michael Mann is that he became emotionally attached to the hypothesis, which is always a bad thing for a scientist to do. Perhaps one of the harder lessons for a scientist to learn is to let go of a hypothesis when it doesn't pan out, and to move on to something else. Most of us learn that lesson in grad school...but some don't. It doesn't look like Mann did, although he may be figuring it out--I think it was his email that said it was a travesty that the temperature record isn't conforming to their hypothesis, in those infamous leaked emails?
And it is explicitly dependent upon the expenditure of large sums of money and tens of thousands of people being supported with taxpayer money and devoting their lives to nothing else: which, as Heinlein points out in another context, is a very rare circumstance, and not the default condition of human culture.
Guilty as charged. Throughout history, science has been supported throughout government funding. I have come to an uneasy truce between my belief that such matters should be privately funded, and the reality that almost my entire career has been taxpayer funded, from the beginning of grad school up to my current job. Protecting scientific enquiry *is* specifically mentioned in the Constitution, but spending billions of federal dollars on it may be pushing Constitutional boundaries.
So, placeholder: you appear to be discussing mostly in good faith, but with a little bit of unwarranted condescension about "being a scientist."
I've got to do some shopping and cooking (I do the cooking in the house, so I like to know what the ingredients are too), so I'll re-look in maybe by 4:00 PM, and let the answers stew in my tired brain in the meantime.
Cheers!
Not hardly. No matter what your line of work, choosing the right tools for the job facilitates the work. In my case, the toolkit includes the Theory of Evolution, among other tools.
On a local radio station, I hear an ad where a hairdresser is asking a woman how she would like her hair cut and styled. After she explains her wishes, the hairdresser fires up a chainsaw. Trying to formulate workable hypotheses using the literal creation story out of Genesis instead of the ToE bears a lot of resemblance to the hairdresser trying to style the client's hair with a chainsaw.
For science being a supposed religion, with supposed gatekeepers, there sure were a lot of hits when I Googled "science news" just now. Over 4 billion--I have never seen a search show up that many hits before.
Peer-review is a quality-control measure. By having people review an article for scientific plausibility and accuracy, we can filter out the junk science that, if published, would quickly make science lose all credibility. FYI, the databases where scientific publications are catalogued are public-access, and many of the journals give free access to their articles. Other journals charge a fee for accessing full articles, but they don't refuse anyone access if they are willing to pay $35 or so. That whole scenario of "gatekeepers" of science just doesn't mesh with reality.
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