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let's not forget that she was an anti-cult cult leader :) http://www.2think.org/02_2_she.shtml

I think that Carl Sagan has pretty much nailed it in his essay, published in Billions and Billions. To summarize: the extremes (all-on pro-life or all-on pro-choice) are just political stances and are thoughtless positions to take; we need to think of what makes us human -- what's the difference between us an say, a chimpanzee which we share more than 99% of the active genes with. He concludes that the breaking point is the emergence thinking -- thus third-semester abortions are out, unless mother is in danger.

But the "killing babies" argument is getting old and tired, and is not relevant because nobody kills babies for the express purpose of acquiring stem cells. That's just a lie, pure and simple. They're discarded embryos that have no hope of ever being born ...

You're to be forgiven, since this is not something that is generally known. The abortion industry fuels trafficking in human organs. There are many sites that document this, but here's one http://www.lifedrum.org/abortion_industry_and_planned.htm You might desire a link from a "non-biased" source, but if you found something in the general press, then the information wouldn't be "little known." An industry that uses aborted fetuses as sources of organs will have absolutely no compunction against using that same source for stem cells. And this is not from "discarded embryos." This is from abortions.

Now, I understand that my addition here is somewhat tangental to your main point, which is that we should be engaging in rational discourse, not attempting to inflame the debaters. I do realize that the information above is likely to inflame. However, it's not really rational discourse unless the full extent of the information is clear to all participants.

And this gets to some of your other repliers. They suggest that you are not addressing the same argument that people who argue the pro-life stance. I'll be the first person on the pro-life side to entirely agree with you that this is a "complex psycho-socio-economic problem that has no easy answer." Some of the solutions have to do with societal norms and changes that won't be enacted by laws or other edicts.

As an offer to the entrance to rational debate, I offer a very thoughtful essay written by Carl Sagan, one of the strongest scientific minds in our lifetimes and someone who was in neither the pro-life nor pro-choice camp: http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtml

Well, not so secret! James Bond broke into one of their vaults in Kuala Lumpur, and walked off with Billions and Billions back at the turn of the false century.

1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality
2. Epistemology: Reason
3. Ethics: Self-interest
4. Politics: Capitalism

If you're one of those Reality-Denoying Looters who doesn't want to pay for a book, the gist is also in Michael Shermer's essay, The Unlikeliest Cult in History. Shermer's name and reputation might be familiar to folks who travel in Objectivist circles too.

As to her moral code, it may be out of whack with yours, but not with her own. Please be specific.

Mr. Branden presented me with a written statement which was so irrational and so offensive to me that I had to break my personal association with him. ... About two months later Mrs. Branden suddenly confessed that Mr. Branden had been concealing from me certain ugly actions and irrational behavior in his private life, which was grossly contradictory to Objectivist morality

As a software developer myself, that article reminds me of one software developer looking at someone else's code. Why did he do this? That was stupid. Why did he do that? I would never have done that. This must be the worst code I have ever seen.

Just because you don't like someone else's design, or think it is faulty in many ways, or think you could do better, does not in any way eliminate the fact that it was a design.

And many of the problems he points out are just as much problems for evolutionary theory as well.

The human eye has six muscles instead of the minimally required three? What is the evolutionary explanation for that? If so many mutations were occurring which produced all of these amazing facilities, why didn't the three-muscle configuration win out over the six-muscle configuration?

The problem with evolution is that it does not explain the selection of non-functional mutations. Since the three-muscle configuration is more efficient, why didn't evolution select for that? Or is it that maybe there is some advantage to the six-muscle design.

Since a "better" eye was apparently selected-for in mollusks and squid, why didn't the same thing happen in primates? Did "selection" fail to work? Did "selection" fail to work? The existence of mammalian wolves (in North America) and marsupial wolves (in Australia) certainly shows that "evolution" can do the same thing in disparate locations. Why didn't this happen with the eye?

On the other hand, I love the mole rat example. It proves one frequently overlooked point. Natural selection is the observation that certain biological characteristics are more useful in some environments than in others. An animal with fins and gills is not likely to survive in the desert. An animal with wings and feathers is not likely to survive in the ocean. Natural selection, therefore, is a process that eliminates characteristics which are not useful. It is a process that reduces variety. It is not a process which increases variety. The mole rat is a perfect example of the reduction of variety. I have no problem with natural selection. It eliminates unused or useless functionality within a given environment. The problem is when the term "natural selection" is used in a way in which it seems to have the power to introduce new variety. It doesn't.

And neither can random events produce form of variety containing irreducible complexity.

He talks about "contrivances without contrivers". He suggests that "trial-and-error tinkering" could have produced the observed results. What he doesn't point out is that trial and error can never produce a system with irreducible complexity. He doesn't even mention irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity exists when the functionality of the system as a whole crucially depends on subsystems -- each subsystem having no useful functionality of its own. Irreducible complexity is so pervasive that it is hard to find any system (living or otherwise) of any complexity which does not exhibit irreducible complexity.

The problem is that irreducible complexity cannot be achieve through tiny random incremental changes accompanied by natural selection. That contradicts the whole notion in evolution that each incremental change gets selected for or not. If an intermediate stage (a "subsystem") has no direct use to the organism as a whole, there is nothing there whereby it would get "selected". And if you need a number of subsystems (photo receptors, optic nerve, retina, lens, pupil, muscles, eye sockets, eye ball having internal air pressure, brain capable of synthesizing stereoscopic vision, etc), then each of these independent subsystems would be competing for selection against the others. And since none of these subsystems have any use on their own (what good are eye sockets without eyes balls) there is no reason for any of them to get selected, let alone all at the

What about the evolution of the eye?

John Searle advocates a position that symbol manipulation isn't intelligence. Rather that consciousness is an emergent property of patterns in neural firing.

You're equating "intelligence" with "consciousness"...that's problematic, as I can infer your intelligence by your words and actions but I cannot infer your consciousness by anything other than analogy to my own. Intelligence is functional, consciousness is purely experiential.

Searle's view falls down on two counts: it requires us to say that a symbol manipulation system that seems to be presenting intelligent output (like the Chinese room example) isn't intelligent; and it requires some unspecified "magic" property of brains.

I recommend the discussion in Hofstadter and Dennett's The Mind's I .

There is no intentionality for 1 + 1 = 2. But there is for the statement "I believe in the validity of axiomatic mathematicaly systems."

I know that there is intentionality when I make statements about belief. But there's no way that I can know that you're not just a clever but "dark inside" symbol manipulator when similar statements come out of your mouth.

Yes, that way lies solipsism, but we need not go all the way down that road, just enought to establish what we really can and cannot know about other minds.

Some pages on the topic of Einstein's statements about god and religon:

http://condor.stcloudstate.edu/~lesikar/einstein/p ersonal.html
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/quotes_einstei n.html
http://www.skeptic.com/archives50.html
http://www.2think.org/einstein.shtml

An opposition to abortion does not necessarily have to be a religious one. There is a lot of purely scientific evidence to suggest that a fetus (depending on the gestational age) has brain functionality identical to a newborn baby, sees, smells, thinks, reacts, lives in the same way that you or I do.

The scientist Carl Sagan, definitely not a religious figure by any stretch of the imagination, wrote an essay looking at this from a scientific point of view. His conclusion is somewhere in the middle, that it doesn't make sense to say that a conceived zygote is a human, but that it does make sense to say that a third-trimester fetus is.

Consequently, one may believe that abortion (especially late term) is murder purely from a scientific and medical viewpoint.

Interesting read about the subject

The real religious opponents to evolution, at least in this country, are the evangelicals, not the catholics.

I think, though, that they are a little unnerved by the fact that all these great, objective, scientific minds arrived at the conclusion that a god exists.

No, I think that most people read it as an argument from authority. I think you would get similar responses if the sig was:

"Linus Thorvalds, Bruce Perens and RMS all vote Democrat."

This either means they have to wonder what these "great minds" were smoking or what they themselves are smoking to not see it.

There are those who cannot accept that smart people can believe in God. I'm not one of those, nevertheless, I don't think that the sig contains very good examples. Take Galileo for instance, he was living in a time when freedom of religion did not exist and the church kicked him around pretty badly when he published 'atheist' theories. Even after Enlightment, a choice for atheism often had negative consequences (and still has for some people). Even if someone didn't believe in God, it may have been wise to pretend they did. In short, it's hardly certain that all of the people on the list really believe in God or chose so freely.

A second problem is that God is not a well-defined concept. If you define 'God' as the structure of the world, then many atheists would 'believe' in that. Einstein used this definition when he said that "God does not play dice." Still, Einstein has always said that he didn't believe in a religious God.

I'm sure that you can easily come up with a list of contemporary western scientist who freely believe in a religious God, but the parent's sig is pretty meaningless as it is.

I myself am in the "Everything I have seen leads me to believe in God" camp of thought. If you want to know more of how people can *gasp* actually arrive at this conclusion, I'm sure myself or Doesn't_Comment_Code will be happy to entertain any legitimate conversation.

How do you define God? What is his relationship with 'everything you have seen.' Unless you answer those questions, your statement is completely meaningless.

How is this measure, which is entirely legal and non-violent "terrorist-like"? Or is everything we don't like supposed to be referred to as "terrorism" now? I didn't get the memo...

Slave owners in the South routinely made examples out of troublemakers by severely beating or killing them. Even more recently, the Nazi regime routinely scared the Jewish community into submission before they began to eradicate them. Both instances were legal and both instances were undeniably forms of terrorism.

terrorism (n.): "The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons."

I'm willing to argue that, if the laws are unjust, acts which are lawful may still be a form of terrorism. As its been stated on here numerous times in the past in a number of different ways, the idea that one can own an intangible object that, at the same time, they wish to be distributed to the world is absurd and unjust given the way humans think and interpret information. Even if you don't agree with this, however, you can agree with the fact that our legal system unfairly favors the rich, and when you're involved in litigation against an entity with nearly unlimited funds, you have little to no chance (even if you have a good case). This too is unjust.

Staring down the barrel of multi-million dollar lawsuit that could ruin the lives of you and your loved ones that you additionally have virtually no chance of winning over a couple songs that were may have been recorded up to 75 years ago seems like terrorism to me, and its legality makes no difference.

-Grym

Einstein didn't believe in "God".
See here

In the book 2061 it talks about humans capturing a huge shard of the diamond core that was ejected after jupiter was ignited at the end of the 2010 book. We (humans) use this shard to cover earth structures with diamond coverings and a build huge ring around the earth from it for use as a space platform if I recall correctly (read the book 10+ years ago).

...or I could all be f'd up...

Carl Sagan wrote a book called Billions and Billions, so your story is doubtful.

Hmm... I think you're asking for evidence.

Yes, you cracked the secret code in my message.

Let me first say - you need faith to please God - that is how he sorts out the wheat from the chaff.

This is putting the cart before the horse. There's no point in discussing methods of pleasing an entity for which there is no evidence of existence.

Firstly, read about the Bible - how it describes history, read how, in the past few hundred years, multiple scholar were proven wrong and the Bible was proven right as archological evidence was gathered. How the Book of Job describes the earth as a sphere. How Genesis describes a supercontinent.

Which scholars? Which peer-reviewed journal describes these archeological finds? Why would think that a book that describes the world as a sphere or describes a supercontinent in earlier times would automatically be non-fiction? Are you honestly claiming that you believe that any book that describes the world as a sphere is non-fiction or are you simply being disingenuous and hoping I was too stupid too notice?

Next look up at creation.

Describing everything as "creation" before you've proven that it was created is an error.

See yourself - see how you're put together. See a worm. Note, we still have been able to create even a worm.

I assume you meant we have not been able to create a worm. Five hundred years ago we couldn't fly. Only an idiot would think that this meant that it required divine intervention for a human to fly.

Note that theories of evolution are in constant flux, trying to account for new information - how bats, birds, and one more species evolved flight separately.

Scientific theories are constantly refined; this is nothing new. What is it about bible-thumpers that makes them think that scientific theories are required to be absolutely correct in every detail the first time they are proposed in order to be correct? Newton's laws have been discovered not to be completely correct at the quantum level or at high (near light) speed. No one with a brain calls them wrong; they're just recognized for what they are: an accurate description of physics in a subset of all cases.

Of course, you're defending a book that thinks bats are birds.

How many species evolved various body parts simultaneously. How there is a genetic bottleneck - all of us trace back to one man and one woman (as in "one") - see how this is the position of mainstream evolutionary geneticists.

Geneticists claim to have found the earliest known ancestors of humanity. They do not claim that these are the first humans; merely that they are the earliest ancestors we've found. Nice try though.

Does this remind you of Noah and his progeny after the flood?

You mean the flood that didn't happen?

See the sun. See the moon. See how the mooon perfectly covers the sun during a full solar eclipse. Ever wondered about the exactness in apparent size? The Bible says God gave the sun and moon for signs and seasons.

The bible says a lot of dumb things for which there is no evidence. Why are you claiming that the seasons involve solar eclipses?

But all this is evidence isn't directly personal.

None of what you've posted is objective evidence.

The most important step is when you, having noticed the evidence does not contradict God, take a leap of faith, and pray to him to help you out. You'll see how a *lot* of very very *personal* evidence accumulates and how that helps you.

Actual, the universe repeatedly contradicts

Wrong! It was called Newton because it sucked as much dick as that fag physicist.

Arthur C Clarke talked about this years ago in one of the Rendezvous with Rama trilogy - technology from the giant spiders IIRC.

Yes! I highly recommend Dawkins, especially The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable.

It's interesting that one of the authors recommended by so many on this thread, David Berlinski, is as famous for writing The Deniable Darwin as he is for A Tour of the Calculus.

You can also read replies to his article in Commentary (including one from Dawkins).

Godel Escher Bach - Not really science. It's about patterns, number theory and such. I get the sense that Niel Stephensen read it before he wrote Cryptonomicon excellent read

Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman - Excellent book on Physics and Quantum Mechanics. Outstanding really.

The Ambidextrous Universe - Really interesting read on symetry and asymetry in nature. Looks at symetry in various biology, physics of the small, physics of the large, physics of the every day. Really good coffee shop science book. (Older title, hard to find.)

Origin of the Species - Worth reading just to see what all the fuss is about.

Also, check out 2thing.org. Basically, it's fairly good site devoted to exactly this topic - good books on a variety of subjects - and most of their recommends are decent. They even have a popular science section.

Transforming the theories' inherent silliness into laughter is the best way to get people to see that silliness. . .and, perhaps, to cause them to think a little more critically the next time they're confronted with an "urban legend."

As for the argument that "nothing will convince the crackpots": If the public can be educated to know they are crackpots, who cares?

DDB (live from the mothership)

it demonstrates that light travels as waves, until you fire only 1 photon then you prove it travels as particles as well.

Actually, it proves that light travels as either a wave or particle.

It depends on the experiment. An experiment looking for particles will show particles, and waves, waves.

Check out The Copenhagen Interpretation

I love Quantum Theory so much I read the same book three times: In Search of Schrodinger's Cat. Might be out of date, but an easy read for us lay men.

Albert Einstein, for instance, was one of them.

Sheesh, not this old myth again. Here's one of the many pages that kill it. To quote Einstein,

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." - Albert Einstein in Albert Einstein: The Human Side

When Einstein used the word "God", he used it as a methaphor for existence.

The crop circles were made by a couple of fellows from Winchester named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley. They made the circles for years at night, and Bower even kept the secret from his wife for seven years. When they finally told the public, few people believed them, and the UFO crowd still insists that the hoax was not the crop circles but the claim of authorship. (ObNeologism: ("cereology" -- those who study crop circles.) Never mind that Bower and Chorley have the original designs and dates, signed the drawings with "DD," and other supporting evidence. Of course, there is also Doug Bower's statement that he was programmed by UFOs to make the circles. Sigh.

Some links:
An interview with Doug Bower
An article by Carl Sagan on crop circles
Circlemakers, an art group creating crop circles

flip

to Lem's work was thru reading Hofstadter & Dennett's Mind's I. Obviously SciFi worthy of leading edge philosophical musings.

His comments seem to be in line with a general trend towards considering science as "just another religion", and that "beliefs" held by the scientific community are arbitrary beliefs in the same sense as beliefs held by members of religions are.

This problematic trend isn't happening by accident either: it seems to be part of an organized, well thought out propaganda campaign by a few particular individuals (e.g. William Dembski).

Richard Dawkins has posted a rebuttal on his web page: Is Science a Religion, for anyone interested.

For another reference on this, http://www.2think.org/Richard_Dawkins_Is_Science_A _Religion.shtml

Stephen Jay Gould, almost everything he's ever written but particularly The Mismeasure of Man.

Then there's the classic, much older but still frequently cited Charles Mackay's _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds_ online.
(entire text available courtesy of Gutenberg)
part 1
part 2
part 3

(Achim's Razor)

You misspelled Mr. Occam's name. See here for nice writeup of Occam's Razor.

Michael Denton's explains this all brilliantly in his book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. Read it extremely carefully THREE TIMES and if you are lucky you will be jolted out of your ignorance

Two thorough refutations of Denton's facts and methods are here and here.

Denton's flawed and dishonest methodology is exposed in this discussion of proteins:
At the molecular level, Denton discredits himself by quoting Emile Zuckerkandl to show that "it is now generally conceded by protein chemists that most functional proteins would be difficult to reach or interconvert through a series of successive individual amino acid mutations"(Denton, 1985, p. 320). Zuckerkandl's quote (Zuckerkandl, 1975, p. 21) seems quite damning to the casual reader, but when one reads the entire article, one finds out that Zuckerkandl largely contradicts Denton. By Zuckerkandl's analysis, most advanced functional proteins cannot interconvert directly, and cannot be reached by some saltational mechanisms, but that they certainly can each be reached through gradual evolution from a common ancestor.

If Denton is the best that creationist can produce, statements like "I can assure you that you are completely wrong" need a firmer foundation.

More than likely these people are hypochondriacs

Critical thinking should be a required subject from elementary school on up; Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark should be required reading for all high school students.

I assume you know the site you pointed to is a Satire? Interestingly I read about the Urban Myth in Professor Pinkers Book The language Instinct
Quote from your Site
Thanks for sending the list--it's hilarious....it is a work of a witty satirist. Indeed, it makes a serious point--some of the entries on the serious lists of Eskimo snow words are as dubious as "wa-ter" meaning melted snow "tlan-na-na" for oldie snow on the radio. Best, Steve Pinker

Why bother typing so many tags if they all lead to fair.org?

(shrug) I was rushed for time; I went somewhere that I was fairly sure would have most of what I needed.

Yes, I have read the letter written by the parents [...] Were you aware that most of them were present *during* the original interviews [...]

Um, yes, that was mentioned in the letter. That is, after all, how they were able to observe that Stossel "asked leading questions to get [the kids] to say what [he] wanted". I asked because you didn't seem to have grasped that point (about which more below).

[...] and only protested after being cajoled by environmentalists?

Riiiiiight. What's your source for this?

Regarding Stossels record, of course I'm aware of the nonexistent test (it was not 'faked', as you claim, [...]

He 'faked' that the tests existed at all. You're engaging in tetrapyloctomy.

[...] rather he was erroneously told by a producer that it had occurred)

Mm-hmm. "It was just a mistake. Honest." Very credible. Not at all the sort of thing one might say to cover one's ass or the asses of one's colleagues.

Furthermore, I find your line about 'just the one he got caught on' quite laughable.

(shrug) A poor choice of words, perhaps; "caught and held accountable for" was what I was aiming for. This one was sufficiently egregious that ABC couldn't just sweep it under the rug, like it's done with so many others.

His every move is scrutinized by people such as you who don't believe any viewpoint other than their own should even be voiced.

Hmm. Calling Stossel out on verifiable errors of fact is now somehow equivalent to attempting to silence him because of his opinions. No presentation of any actual rational connection between these concepts, of course; the point is merely to create the mental association between the two. Associationism, on top of projection of conservatives' (and possibly also the accuser's) censorial inclinations onto amorphous "people such as you" (whatever sort that might be). Are you with the cult, perchance?

As for the resignations of the producers, have you considered that they are as politically biased as you and can't abide the airing of opinions that don't match their own?

(shrug) I considered it, but it seemed far less plausible than their stated reasons for leaving: that they couldn't abide being associated with the airing of opinions that were contradicted by actual evidence (which evidence was indeed thrown out precisely because it contradicted said opinions).

And you *still* have not addressed the point of my original article [...]

Yes, I did; you just ignored it, presumably because you couldn't answer it.

(find it yourself...I'm not as link-addicted as you)

namely that the kids parrotted the opinions of the environmentalists, never acknowledging the merest possibility that alternative views exist.

The kids that were shown. Stossel has a history of dismissing or ignoring evidence that doesn't support the position he wants to present; how much of the metaphorical cutting room floor is littered with kids that didn't "parrot[] the opinions of the environmentalists", or that didn't present themselves as 'scared' by the environmentalists (the position Stossel was pushing), or that responded with actual evidence supporting the environmentalists' positions or refuting the "alternative views" (or that otherwise couldn't be edited to make it look like "parrot[ing]")? And don't forget the "leading questions" from above (not to mention "ask[ing] and re-ask[ing] questions until he got material he could edit [...] to support his position", as described elsewhere); how many of the kids who did say what Stossel wanted to hear were prompted into doing so by Stossel himself? Given his "interviewing" tactics as witnessed by the aforementioned parents, we have no reason to believe that what was shown on air bore any resemblance to what the majority of the kids actually said or believed, and plenty of reason to believe that it didn't.

[...] but you still can't tell me what temperature it will be on August 16th in Berlin, whether 2001 or 2101.

Ooh, nice straw-man misrepresentation of the position you're attacking (another common tactic of the cult; I'm guessing you are a member, then). One does not have to be able to predict the exact temperature in Berlin on August 16, 2101 (morning or evening? you didn't specify) to be able to predict, for instance, what the average temperature of the entire planet is likely to be in the early 22nd century, or that it will be sufficiently higher than the current average planetary temperature to cause significant ecological problems.
--
#/usr/bin/perl
require 6.0;

Scientific Creationism is merely a name given to right-wing bible-thumping zealots who wish schools in our country to not educate our children. See, most reasonable people, even those who believe in some sort of creation story, feel that evolution does actually happen. In fact, there is a popular, middle-of-the-road school of thought that would claim that the whole ball of wax, as it were, came into being via the hand of God, creating blue-green algae all those millenia ago, and then He (or She or It) took a hands off approach and let things get on with things. Frankly, I find this to be the scientific equivalent of being an agnostic. I find it easy to reconcile the two accounts: one is a religious story, meant to provide a direction to moral development, and the other is a scientific investigation, which has no moral to it's story, and is not meant to be believed blindly (emphasis on blind). In practice, the two should have no effect on one another. They don't for me.

Now back to the bible-belt zealots: unsatisfied with miseducating their own children to the nature of science, they want our schools to not teach evolution. But that's stupid. And dangerous. That way, you end up with presidents like Ronald Reagan who go on national television and say, "Well, it's just a theory," when asked about teaching evolution in the schools. So, most schools, at least those outside of Dixie (the South, to those of you in other countries that don't have to deal with this crap), say, "Sorry, no, we're teaching evolution and that's that." So, to muddy the waters (which is what zealots do, be they green or white-sheeted), the thumpers introduce this counter-intuitive bullshit called Scientific Creationism. The word scientific is used in this case to confuse and cajole the unwashed masses who can't tell the difference, kind of like calling Buzz Lightyear the ultimate in playtime fun. But really, it's just religion in a lab coat, so that the government won't notice they're violating the separation of church and state by forcing this steaming load of non-scientific lies down the throat of children, be they christian, muslim, jew or whatever. So, yes, it's just another abuse of the word scientific. A dangerous one at that. If I wanted my children (not that I have any yet, and this kind of thing is not making me want to have any) to learn about creationism, I'd send them to Sunday School to be indoctrinated.

Anyway, even the Pope says that evolution is more than a hypothesis (the link here is the only one I could find where the pontiff's statement was not followed by still more irrational, counter-intuitive, rabid drivelling by the religious right).

In short, my friend, be glad you live in Denmark.

On the evolution front, I'm curious as to what would be considered "conclusive evidence"? It seems to me that anti-evolution forces have skewed our definition of that to serve their own ends.

1. Evolution is different than natural selection. We see evolution all around us as a result of livestock husbandry. That is not natural selection however (unless we consider a farmer a force of nature...) Evolution is demonstrable, repeatable and falsifiable and is demonstrated every damn day.

2. Natural selection is pretty much conclusively proved. Fossil records, genetic diversity between populations of the same species yatta yatta. It's massively documented. The "missing link" argument of creationists is specious (no pun intended) at best. There will always be a missing link. The missing link in the set {1,2,3} is 2.5... in {1,2,2.5,3} it's 2.75... ad infinitum. There is more evidence for natural selection than there is for black holes...

3. The bible makes a lot of claims about the natural world that are patently false. I would gladly let creationists teach in classrooms if they can show my an insect that has four feet (Leviticus 11:22-23).

Ultimately, if you have enough faith you can believe anything you want... it just doesn't necessarily make it true. If you're really doing the "working through" thing, I would suggest Sagan's Demon Haunted Wordl and, of course, the bible... although I'd keep a copy of Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible handy while reading it.

People always forget the human element though. In the bible we have verbally-reported accounts passed orally through several translations by people who, by the sheer dint of their occupation (bible writer) have demonstrated that they are willing to believe some pretty outrageous things. Add to that the human tendency to hyperbolize for sake of a good story plus the (at that time) very valid concept of rhetoric (whereby hyperbole was completely acceptable if it furthered your argument) and you have a formula for massive distortion. So, first we have to establish some pedigree of fact for these ocurrences.

Not only do science and God not have to be mutually exclusive, they shouldn't be mutually exclusive.

So, basically go with science and then just tack on a footnote saying "As set up by God". Why bother? Violates Occam's Razor.

Is it just me or is most of the stuff that Neilson says just common sense?

You are right. By "common sense" I think you mean simple and logical. This sounds right. The best ideas are usually just this (c.f. Occam's Razor).

What is interesting is to be able to say why a simple and logical idea is the way it is and what implications that idea has. This is the field of expertise. Virtually every field that has experts is like this - the basic ideas are simple and can be understood by anyone. The expertise comes in being able to analyze the ideas, explain exactly what they are, and explaining what impact flows from them.

The test of a great idea is that once you have discovered it people say "well, obviously that is so, it just has to be that way". Then we call it common sense. The genius comes in being the first to see such an "obvious" rule. Newton's laws of gravity seem blatantly obvious to us now, but the guy was still a genius for figuring that out.

But seriously...VB and Delphi are the better choices for writing Windows-based workplace productivity apps, especially for writing apps that access databases and are more UI-centric. You could certainly write the app in Visual C++, but there's you're now in MFC-land, which should be avoided whenever possible. If you're really out to prove your dick size with C++ and still maximize your productivity, use Borland's C++ builder, which has a good IDE builder and a very sane class library.

As for Basic's or Pascal's "simplicity," who cares? In programming, it's always best to follow the principle of Occam's Razor (which is also on eof the guiding principles of all UNIXen): the simplest solution should be the one that is selected.

Some people have tried to argue that the human brain is strictly more powerful than Turing machines...

FWIW, the arguments I've seen along these line have been pretty bogus. Unless quantum effects play a significant role in the operation of neurons, you could simulate a brain to the necessary exactitude with a TM. (Even if QM plays a role, it most likely randomizes certain interactions and you'd just need a TM with a /dev/random hooked up to, say, diode noise.) Douglas Hofstadter takes this to an interesting conclusion in "A Conversation With Einstein's Brain", which can be found in The Mind's I (highly recommended reading). (I think "A Conversation..." was originally in Godel, Escher, Bach, but I haven't gotten through that yet - maybe I'll make it my summer project.)

Is there any light on this issue with quantum computers? Is it "strictly more powerful" than Turing machine, or is it just a faster and smaller (no matter how faster and smaller) version of what we already have now?

I would think that the theoretical version of a quantum computer would be a Turing machine with nondeterminism, which doesn't buy you anything over a vanilla TM in terms of computability.