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Just so we're clear: I respect Dr. Roy Spencer. But he's not immune from Getting Things Wrong. Even so, all things considered, he has been less wrong than you.

Venus proves nothing about CO2-based warming on Earth. If you ASSUME it's causing warming here, then you can ASSUME it causes warming there, in proportion. Such assumptions prove nothing.

For some reason, you seem to think these continuing comments of yours prove something. The only reason I'm reading them at all is for a daily laugh, and to record them so others later can laugh with me.

When you say that, it just makes me want to quote Asimov on The Relativity of Wrong. In other words, our society with taxes doesn't have great schools...but a libertarian society will have NO schools. Similarly, this is why trickle-down economics does NOT work.

Don't take my word for it: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/1...

So the earth really was flat for awhile?

To the limits of measurement at the time, yes From the link - Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long

You're arguing that people put their faith in the title people wear rather than the diametrically opposed philosophies they follow. The fact that you have so many people disagreeing with you demonstrates that is not the case. What you are claiming is that what Karl Popper called the "republic of science" (AKA scientific consensus) has no place in Science and that you must personally test each and every claim. That is a ludicrous claim, it demonstrates an immature understanding of philosophy and epistemology. It's also the same old argument climate deniers and creationists use when they claim that "consensus" has no place in Science, it's simply an emotional reaction that puts ones mind at rest when confronted with evidence that unsettles it.

Of course the real problem with your argument is that unlike religion, Science does not claim absolute truth. It claims to have the most accurate answer available at this point in time. A point more eloquently expressed by Asimov in his essay The Relativity of wrong

As for being "correct", Schmidt himself said: "Models are not right or wrong. They are always wrong. They are always approximations. The question you have to ask is whether a model tells more information than you would have had otherwise. If it does, it is skillful."

And this is EXACTLY why the models are bullshit. Because they have not been JUST consistently wrong, but consistently HUGELY wrong.

I actually DO give credit to the models as being "guesses". But if we are to accept them as science, they are terrible guesses. If you have ever read Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong, and actually looked at how weel the models have reflected reality (or, more properly, failed to do so), you could only conclude that we are going back to the Stone Age in our understanding of what is correct.

Wrong may be relative, but when it's that wrong, it's just wrong. Period.

I think you might be surprised at some of the case studies surrounding mobile/cell phone use in central Africa.

here's a study from Tufts showing farmers in Ghana establishing the market price for crops, and labourers searching for job opportunities.

There's lots of more recent coverage too if you do some Google searches.

I seem to recall that when I was at HS in the 70's, astronomers were claiming it was physically impossible to ever detect an exoplanet but they were confident that they existed. The reason they thought it was impossible was because of atmospheric distortion, "wobble mirrors" had not been invented. The author has a reasonable point but I think Asimov has a much better one based on the same observation that widely held scientific beliefs are often shown to be wrong by future generations. I agree with Asimov that we have the basic mechanics of the universe correct.

I have been interested in astronomy since primary school, back in the 60's the astronomy books in the adult section of the local library were still speculating about canals on Mars and tropical jungles on Venus, black holes were widely viewed as a "mathematical curiosity". Our knowledge about the universe has exploded like no other time in history, Hubble happy snaps are posted on the walls of libraries and the home encyclopedia has been replaced by the home computer. If I want to take an astronomy course from the best universities on the planet I can simply fire up youtube and start watching the lectures, less than a decade ago that was not possible, just finding the right text books was a challenge.

Scientific knowledge has experienced exponential growth in the last half century, I feel privileged to have been born at a time where I can witness scientific discovery unfolding before my eyes on a regular basis. Communication technology is undeniably the major driver of that growth and I'm proud of the small role I've played building that technology.

Aha! An admission at last!

Yes, an astrologist making the claim that Cancers get along with Leos may have a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement for their research, but of course, even if they're proven wrong, that doesn't prove astrology wrong, correct? :)

Correct, that does not prove astrology wrong.

Astrology isn't a single hypothesis but a general model for human interaction. It's a poor model as virtually every astrology related hypothesis is shown to be wrong. Then again your month of birth has a definite and quantifiable influence on your chances of making the NHL. It's the totality of evidence that shows that the model is wrong.

This is *exactly* not science. Asserting that AGW is supported by all these lesser hypotheses, and that it survives no matter how many of these lesser hypotheses are disproven, is the textbook definition of unfalsifiable :)

The lesser hypothesis aren't disproven, they're refined. AGW related theories predicted the ice caps would melt, they are. The ice extent increased which requires refinement, but to say the hypothesis was disproven is imprecise.

And just what part of that required that physicists maintain a consistent message? :)

So do you see biologists trying to create a consistent message as evidence that evolution is faulty science?

No, I'm saying newtonian physics got proposed, was generally accepted, and then decades later everyone threw it away and accepted relativity :)

But surely you're not asserting that climate science is anywhere near as useful, reliable, or scientific as relativity, are you? :)

Someone should have my physics 114 prof that Newtonian physics was thrown away because he spent a lot of the course teaching us Newtonian physics.

I suggest a little Asimov on the relativity of wrong.

Very good point. Seems impossible to rule out natural climate change, doesn't it, given those uncertainties :)

Natural climate change is certainly quite possible. That's why the IPCC estimates its probability.

That's cargo cult science :) Thousands of papers. All of them "consistent with". None of them "consequential" if they're disproven.

Take the ten million people who read their astrological chart today. Take the fundamental complexity of people. Say even a small fraction, just several thousand, had astrological charts that matched *perfectly* with reality.

Is this science? :)

That's what you are but what am I?

That's the essence of your argument. A handful of bloggers and scientists are doing real science while a major scientific field has gone cargo-cult.

But you don't even have a consistent model of what you're complaining about. In one instance its cargo cult because they won't allow any contrary information to be published, in the next instance its cargo cult because they're constantly disproving all their theories.

Asimov said what I think you are trying to say. Science is a major branch of philosophy, in fact in when Newton was kick starting the enlightenment, it wasn't called science, it was called "Natural Philosophy". Assuming scientists make a good faith effort to follow the principles of their chosen philosophy then nobody has to "back down". Both sides of the argument have a strong faith that absolute truth is a worthy but unattainable goal..

What a load of frog shit!.

Seriously, don't pay any attention to the beautiful mathematics and painstaking research that created the dancing hurricanes on the screen and go straight to the quote at the end of that Ted talk, roughly translated into politics, it means you're a luddite using creationist debating tactics.

Do you not realise that these models work on the same finite element analysis techniques and "physical laws" (mathematical models) used to successfully model everything from atomic bombs, to the flow of molten metal in an engine block cast. These everyday and exotic engineering models are so successful that over the last 30yrs (just over half my lifetime) it has become virtually impossible to finance an engineering project without them. And if you do realise that, then why are you so quick to argue these methods cannot provide useful insights into the behaviour of Earth's climate but are presumably ok with passenger jets flying around that were designed by these techniques? Perhaps Boeing added one molecule too many to the missing jet's wing tip? Turbulence is the physical manifestation of chaos , so it's like totally unpredictable, right? - Please, give rational discussion a fucking break and shut the fuck up with this tiresome "scientists are know-nothing morons" nonsense.

In the philosophy of Science ALL models are "wrong" by definition, what matters is the degree of "wrongness" (or "truthiness" as it's known in the US). When we look at observations of water vapour over the past few decades they are a very good match for model outputs from 1980's models, they are a much better match for the average of ALL 1980's model outputs. Why? - because the models are just as likely to be "wrong" in either direction.

There are plenty of solid examples on google detailing phenomena that were first seen in climate models and later observed in nature, but I doubt you have heard about phenomena such as "polar amplification" or "stratospheric cooling", Why? - because google will tell you "anything you want to hear", right?

Gigacide. Say the word to yourself until you understand what's coming.

Wow. That's scary. It's a good thing I'm only of average height!

"If you have the good sense to see the meta-story, it's unchanged: "Americans are dumb"."

As Isaac Asimov famously wrote, Wrong is Relative.

On the contrary, the "meta-story" is changed a great deal. Given a choice, I would far rather people be scientifically literate than English-literate. (As long as they are basically literate to begin with.)

Mistaking one word for another that has only one letter difference is a FAR lesser error than, for example, mistaking Creationism for real science.

Of course he did. Newton's laws of motion are wrong...

Sure, but there's being wrong and there's being wrong.

Asimov wrote that great letter - the relativity of wrong.

Any new theory has to account for why the old theory worked for the cases it did. General relativity simplifies at low speeds to Newtonian mechanics for example.

Or from the letter - the Earth is round, but assuming it's flat over short distances is perfectly valid (and we do it all the time - the idea of building level or flat floors for example).

Afaik whether raising the body temperature in humans is effective at fighting infection by killing temperature-sensitive bacteria still isn't well established, but there's an interesting example in bees that is pretty well established, at least if you treat the bee colony as a whole as a macroorganism capable of developing a "fever": pdf link.

Um... TFA is about a study showing that the flu replicates slower (and is less easily communicated) when you have a fever.

Afaik whether raising the body temperature in humans is effective at fighting infection by killing temperature-sensitive bacteria still isn't well established, but there's an interesting example in bees that is pretty well established, at least if you treat the bee colony as a whole as a macroorganism capable of developing a "fever": pdf link.

The REAL split is between the Cities and Not the Cities. And goes back quite a while, at least half a century. The operating level of political difference is really at the County Level, not the State level

Right on. Red versus Blue is becoming less important as time goes on, yet false paradigms are used to rally them against one another like opposing teams. Bread and circuses.

Megacities and the urban sprawl which surround and connect them create zones of provincial sentiment. It really is a mind-set. At a certain point the city becomes the state (New York, California, Maryland) and views in opposition to those of the urban voting block go to margin.

The urban-rural schism is the most pervasive, but there are regional differences that also transcend party. Look at Colin Woodward's 11 Nation-States of America, which paints a few large swaths across the continent by county which represent waves of immigrant settlers, who seeded these geographic areas with attitudes that, just as with dialect, influence voters today. Even those who re-settle into those areas (and especially their children) adopt the flava. With whimsical names like Yankeedom, New Netherlands, Midlands and Tidewater one can almost imagine a Tolkienesque retelling of the American Tale, and I wish this concept may some day grow into an alternate-selection textbook of history that follows these waves without so much distracting clutter of place-names. On this map South Florida does not even make the list, it is a grey zone labelled 'Part of the Spanish Caribbean'. Hilarious!

Urbanites are more accepting of incremental erosion of personal liberty and a pattern of ever-increasing (but never abrupt) government involvement. I see this described in derogatory fashion as if they are simple sheeple or something, but I don't subscribe to such a vulgar character judgement. I think it may simply be that they are more often exposed to utopian ideals and idealists which say, we're this-close to solving this problem, all we need to do is this one more thing. Urbanites see their government as a machine that just needs a little tuning here and there. And it is a machine of sorts, one that gathers distant water rights and political power. Eventually the political sway of populous megacities will be complete, but in the United States it is not happening fast enough for them.

Which is why they are attacking the Constitution directly, seeking an end-run play to nullify the effect of electoral college via the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. I find this to be an insidious -- almost evil -- self-castration of a state's right to choose a President. If there is a battle between the Cities and Not the Cities, this is the front line. Look at the green (passed) and yellow (pending) states on the map. There are your cities vying for political domination.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact was started by disenfranchised supporters of Al Gore who decided that if they lost it must mean that the system was broken. So now there are climate people who wish Gore would stick to politics and political people who wish he would stick to climate. I always wished he would become un-stuck from everything, and found it egregiously obnoxious that this NSA stooge who pushed the Clipper Chip was considered to be presidential material.

No matter exactly what the framers intended, the Electoral College creates a swing zone within which the growing influence of urbanized areas may (yet) reach a balance point with the desires of the sparsely populated rural peoples. This balance point, in which everyone becomes aware that the popular and electoral results diff

How is that supposed to be logically consistent?

It's perfectly consistent. He's not approaching it as a moral question, but as a legal and practical question. The NSA is in violation of our laws and its practical purpose was to spy on other people.

This indicates a lack of empathy, and suggests that you may be on the autism spectrum or suffering from sociopathy.

Your naiveté is refreshing. International relations is not governed by empathy. It's governed by the quest to secure national interests. Sometimes that quest means interests coincide and nations can cooperate. Often, however, relationships are more complicated. To this end, in any case, nations create agencies which do many immoral things the citizenry would not like to know about. Ostensibly, they do these things so that the citizenry can sleep, safe and secure. They do them in secret so the citizenry can actually sleep at night.

We are all ruled by Machiavelli. Your surprise indicates you haven't read the Prince or that you haven't realized it's the basic rule book for governance in the modern age. I commend it to you. Old Nick is one of the defining teachers of the modern age.

So, if you'd like to object to what our friend is saying above, I'd recommend you do so on his terms. Do not argue that it is bad to spy on citizens of other countries, but that it is disadvantageous. After all, how badly have the NSA revelations damaged our reputation and relationships? It is harder to cooperate toward common goals when allies are suspicious and enemies feel justified. If you've empathy for others, let it inspire and define your goals. And then show how goodness and reciprocity is advantageous (as saner men have always held). Thus you will be as wise as a serpent and as harmless as a dove.

The interpretation put on the ancient greek math and accepted as "gospel" by medieval scholars was shown to be deficient in the 1600's, the Greek math itself gave more accurate results for at least a century after Copernicus went to his grave. This was the beginning of the enlightenment which told us there's no way to prove any particular interpretation is correct, all you can really do is compare the scope and accuracy of the predictions between competing theories, (including the theory that "god done it").

Yep, when I was at school black holes were considered a "mathematical curiosity", it was considered "impossible" to detect planets around nearby starts with an Earth bound telescope, the phrase "big bang theory" was still a derisive comment about said theory, there was still a debate about the reality of tectonic plates....the list is long and I'm only in my 50's. - This phenomena is what Asimov referred to as The relativity of wrong

Science is wrong by definition, most of the "neckbeards" I've met understand that but are unlikely to express it as eloquently as Asimov. Skepticism is a fundamental skill for scientists and engineers alike, sensationalism is a fundamental skill for journalists and professional propagandists...err, I mean,...lobbyists. If you can't tell the difference then you really should hand in that vintage geek card you have on display.

The new age explanation is bullshit but let's not confuse their observational claims with their conclusions.

For example, I saw a bright "aura" around my headmaster when I was in grade 3. That was close to 50yrs ago but I still remember it clearly because it was the first and by far the brightest aura I've seen, hot Aussie summers day, assembly yard was giant concrete oven, the sun was high in the sky with heavy shade forming a backdrop to the podium, I wasn't the only kid to see it and I believed I had seen an aura well into my twenties, I went to university in my late-20's, now I'm convinced it was a "rainbow" effect caused by the evaporating sweat of an "Englishman in the midday sun", combined with just the right viewing angle and backdrop.

Other examples from my childhood, Meteorologists claimed "ball lightning does not exist" until it was observed melting a hole through a window of the NY meteorological centre. Black holes were a "mathematical curiosity". It was a "physical impossibility" for exo-planets to be observed with a telescope. At the end of the day, "Science rocks" because it has something no other philosophy offers, the balls to admit when it's wrong.

As for TFA. Most of the comments here simply don't "get it". Japan is renowned for wacky inventions, it's more of an art form than anything else, the (cheap) inventions are intended to be impractical, a kind of "fart cushion" for the Japanese sense of humour. The more impractical the invention, the more the fans it will love it. This one is a fine example, it involves cars, computers, exposed wires, and a silly hat with a jelly coating on the inside. Although it probably won't make as much money as the "baby mop" which offers more value to a western sense of humour.

So what do you suggest? No one discus science or perform studies because there's a good chance in the future more information will come to light?

Let me suggest some reading for you: Relativity of wrong.

tl;dr :

... when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

That's exactly how science is supposed to work.

The master said it best:

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
— Issac Asimov, The relativity of wrong

http://www.chem.tufts.edu/science/franksteiger/grandcyn.htm

AiG's claim was long ago debunked. At this point, the Weekly World News is probably a more reliable source of information than the lying mentally ill nutbars who write for AiG.

There is a difference between "revised" and "refined". Newton's idea of gravity being some invisible pull between two objects is radically different than Einstein's notion that gravity is the curvature of space-time around an object.

In a word: NO. Read it, understand it, be enlightened. Don't be stupid. Please.
At the moment, you're the English Lit friend.

In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.

So what you are saying is that an electron is not subject to the same laws of physics in different locations?

Yes and no. The electron exhibits quantum behavior. The classical notion of motion "around" the nucleus simply makes no sense. It doesn't apply in such circumstances. Demonstrably so - you can argue all you want, but what we see is precisely that what you have a problem with. I can't get over people who just won't accept reality for what it is. When the electron is free, its behavior often matches the classical theory, or even non-quantum relativistic theory, nevertheless it's still being described properly by quantum electrodynamics. When the electron is around the nucleus, quantum electrodynamics describe its behavior properly, while the classical theory doesn't anymore. For an introduction to this conundrum, you need to read Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong and listen to Feynman's QED lectures.

You didn't have such a submission system? The one we used was, and I'm not kidding, written in the 60s: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/comp150fp/archive/jb-hext/hext-automatic-grading.pdf

Obviously it's had a bunch of changes since then, but it did basically what you describe. I see it is still being used:

; givelist
Name Sufx Category Until Cse Description

COMP3520_Assignment1_2013 .tar Ontime Fri Apr 26 23:59 Assignment 1
INFO5990_AssignmentOne .doc ontime Tue Apr 9 18:00 Article Precis
comp5114.project_p1 .zip OnTime Thu Apr 18 17:00 Project-Part 1 (COMP5114, Semester 1, 2013)
comp5114.project_p2 .zip OnTime Thu May 30 17:00 Project-Part 2 (COMP5114, Semester 1, 2013)
comp5425.part1 .zip OnTime Wed Apr 17 17:00 Part 1 of COMP5425 Assignment, 2013S1
comp5425.part2 .zip OnTime Wed May 29 17:00 Part 2 of COMP5425 Assignment, 2013S1
comp5426_Assignment1_2013 .tar ontime Fri Apr 19 23:59 COMP5426 Assignment 1 - Parallel Collapse Sets of Integers
; submit f.tar COMP3520_Assignment1_2013

Name: COMP3520_Assignment1_2013
File suffix: .tar
Description: Assignment 1

Due dates and their categories are:

                Currently -> Ontime Fri Apr 26 23:59
                                          Late Mon Apr 29 09:00

Is this the assignment you wish to submit ? [yn default y] n
submit: Submission has been cancelled at your request
;

Hopefully they've made some updates in the last decade since we playing with the submit was a common past time when I was using it as a student (and I assume for my students when I was using it while teaching). When you have a system that takes a programming assignment, builds it, and runs it that's not unsurprisingly easy. "I wonder if I could just do system("(whoami;pwd;ls -l) | mail someaddress"); in my program" being the fist obvious thing. "I wonder if I could fork a child and have it make a tcp connection to X:Y and hook a shell to it" being a quick second when an email arrives...

Mind you, one could argue that taking 33 mil from people who are clearly prepared to gamble it away is less immoral than mugging a tramp...

To paraphrase Asimov:
To mug a tramp is immoral. To cheat in a high-stakes card game is immoral. But if you think the two are equally immoral, your view is wronger than the both of them combined.

One problem is for certain, and that certain climate "researchers" are playing politics rather than science.

Yep, Deming is known for making extraordinary claims with less than ordinary evidence, he's a "conservative think tank" scientist who abandoned peer-review years ago. Nobody has "edited history", science has self-corrected on the issue in the manner one would expect.. In other words, at first it was thought that the MWP was a global phenomena, further scrutiny by intellectually honest skeptics (ie: scientists) did not support the claims, so the claim has been refined. It's not a fucking conspiracy, it's how science works and why we no longer believe the earth is flat.

Exactly!

He meant it was unlikely that classical physics was profoundly wrong in the realms we observe and inhabit but there could be great physics out there.

"John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." - Asimov, The relativity of wrong.

Read Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong and stop being so stupid, mmkay?

It doesn't matter that you call it false. Either the theories have predictive powers and thus work sufficiently well, or they don't. If you think some theories are bad, well, there's some prizes to be claimed, go ahead.

is actual fact independent of scientific consensus?

The problem with this common question is that way too many people do not understand what the word "fact" means in a scientific context. Outside of axiomatic systems we don't have any "facts", we only have observations, also note that the fundamental axioms of mathematics are assumptions agreed by "consensus", not fact.

"Scientific consensus" is just the modern term for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science". It means that no single authority/observation/calculation has the strength of "scientific fact" (or "well established science" if you prefer). At no point in the process of strengthening a "scientific fact" does it become "actual fact", but that's ok because we do not pursue science as a path to absolute truths, we pursue it because of its track record of utility to mankind (and the 'fact' that humans are more curious than the proverbial cat).

As for the "flat world" canard, the well known skeptic Asimov had something to say about that in his short essay The relativity of wrong.

The shifts - if they truly exist - have tended to become smaller asymptotically as science progresses.

This was explained very well by Isaac Asimov in his essay The Relativity of Wrong. Aristotle and Newton were both wrong about gravity. But, relatively, Aristotle was much more wrong.

Actually Newton was not wrong. He found a mathematical model that fit all the data. He didn't have a physical explanation for what gravity is or why his model held true. He used handwaving about God and talked of a clockwork universe, and THAT was wrong...but the model - F=Gm1m2/d^2 fit all the data he had at the time.

The shifts - if they truly exist - have tended to become smaller asymptotically as science progresses.

This was explained very well by Isaac Asimov in his essay The Relativity of Wrong. Aristotle and Newton were both wrong about gravity. But, relatively, Aristotle was much more wrong.

FictionPimp opined:

It's really no different than making a programming tutorial site and calling it code university or.

Well ... no.

As someone who is currently enrolled in a Coursera class in Greek and Roman Mythology - which is taught by Dr. Peter Struck of the University of Pennsylvania, perhaps THE premiere college for students of ancient history and the classics in the USA - I think I can speak with a certain degree (pun intended) of authority on this question.

Dr. Struck's course demands the same amount of reading from a student as he would be required to do in a class for which he would receive university credit. It also includes approximately two hours of video lectures per week, and a weekly quiz, as well. There are two, short writing assignments (350-450 word essays) over the 10-week course, one of which is due this Sunday. (Unlike a for-credit class, these assignments are peer-graded - a necessity when there are over 50,000 students registered for this particular course.) There's also a final exam. Students with questions regarding the lectures or the reading are encouraged to take them to peer forums, where there are, in fact, some extremely knowlegeable participants who seem eager to provide explanations. Those who successfully complete the course will receive a certificate of completion - which is meaningless to me, because I'm taking the class strictly for the content.

Are there shortcomings to this model? Yes, indeed. I'm dubious about the utility of peer grading of essays, for instance, and I think that, in general 350-450 words is nowhere near enough space to propose, explain, and defend an academic thesis. At least one of the weekly exams thus far has included a question derived from the reading for the FOLLOWING week - which hardly seems fair, and indicates to me that Professor Struck is not paying as much attention to coordinating his test questions with his course material as we students deserve. And, for my own tastes, I think Professor Struck's lectures focus too much on the narrative content of our reading, and not enough on the actual mythology it presents and illuminates, given that the course is supposed to be about Greek and Roman mythology. And, while I understand his desire to make the reading material as accessible as possible, I think the students would be better served if the texts on which his lectures are based were open-access versions (such as those on Perseus), rather than on texts that the student has to purchase. (Having said that, I hasten to add that students are free to USE the open-access editions, if they prefer, but Professor Struck's lectures are still based on closed-access versions.)

Anyhow, despite those issues, I think the quality of the information conveyed is at least equal to what a community college student could expect - assuming, of course, that you could even FIND a community college course on Greek and Roman mythology. It might even be as good as a state university's satellite campus offering.

And it's free. As in "beer."

Vue from Tufts university supports cyclic relationships. It also has good tools for plotting routes through a mind map which are good for getting a linear form out of a model. I use it a lot for complex reports and essays, with good results.

The truth is, there are holes in the evolutionary theory.

There are 'holes' in General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, too. (They make conflicting predictions in conditions we can't yet test, so at least one and probably both are wrong.) But we still teach them in schools, because they are the best theories we have and they cover such a huge range of phenomena with such precision that, whatever the truth turns out to be, it'll still look a hell of a lot like GR and QM.

As Isaac Asimov put it, "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

Newton's Laws are wrong, yes... but they are so close to right we still use them every day, and teach them in schools. Hell, NASA still uses plain old Newtonian physics to pilot their space probes, with just a few occasional relativistic fudge factors, because a full GR treatment would be prohibitively complex and add no useful accuracy.

It's the same with evolution. We know that all life is related by common descent, and that life has changed drastically over the course of 3.5 billion years, and that complex structures were built by numerous small tweaks well within the realm of chance. Natural selection has been demonstrated now and over the fossil record.

Evolution is true. Will there be further clarifications and refinements? Sure. But they won't upend evolution any more than GR and QM could possibly be 'overturned'.

The relativity of wrong - Asimov

science doesn't deal in Truth, and its viewpoints and theories change with time.

Wrong. Science deals with levels of truth, approaching towards a slightly truer truth as time passes.

Somebody much more eloquent than myself already explained this in The Relativity of Wrong, by Isaac Asimov.

Excellent article. Someone also pointed to The Relativity of Wrong by Asimov which is worth reading.

Please, for the love of all that is holy, just read this and think about what it says.

To put it simply, right and wrong are not binary conditions. Something can be "more right" or "less right". Evolution, like Newton's laws, may not be 100% be all end all perfect, but it is so much better than any other theory (or psuedotheory) that it is beyond rational debate.

And don't forget reputation. You do fraudulent stuff, your peers will find out. Sometimes quickly, sometimes it takes a while, but science is a self-correcting/self-cleaning mode of operating. Everything is looked at carefully, because there are two ways to become famous
- discover something new
- discover something is not correct (for more on this, read this: http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm)

The interesting thing is that it is fine to have an agenda. Scientific discoveries have been made by scientists thinking it was Yagolah's plan that they cure a disease/figure something out (of course, why didn't the deity tell it right away. Oh well). It is fine as long as you adhere to logic and stick to the facts. Try bending reality and it is you who veers off course.

Bert

And the difference between a useful falsifiable prediction, and a silly one, is that a useful one (or set) will contain all necessary and *sufficient* components to imply that the proposition is true.

Once again, this is a logical impossibility. Since there is no way to enumerate the predictions of every possible model (indeed, the set is almost certainly infinite), there is no possible prediction that is sufficient to show that a model is true. This is the case for any theory about the real world.

In science, a critic doesn't need to replace an existing conceit with one of their own, they only need to show that the proposed conceit is false.

This statement is the hallmark of the scientific crank. You will never hear a successful scientist say this, or a historian of science. Who says this? Evolution deniers. HIV/AIDS deniers. Global warming deniers. It is a one of those deceptive notions that is obviously ridiculous to those who have done actual science, yet can sound plausible to the amateur. After all, it is true in logic, it is true in mathematics, shouldn't it be true in science? And indeed, it would be true in an ideal world without noise, without statistical variation, in which perfectly accurate measurement was possible, one in which it was possible to construct mathematical models at the subatomic level that perfectly reproduced nature and approximations were unnecessary. But of course, we live in the real world in which none of this is true. What a scientist will tell you is that all models are wrong. All models are imperfect representations of reality. That is why we call them models. But as was articulated perhaps most clearly by Isaac Asimov some are less wrong than others. The advance of science has been through a progression of successively less wrong models. It is very easy to nitpick somebody else's model, and pretty much worthless. All models are wrong. The question is whether it is wrong in a way that matters. To show that it is, you need to offer a better one--one that makes better predictions. Predictions are also important because there are some subtle statistical fallacies that it is possible to fall into (particularly for amateurs, but even experienced scientists can sometimes be tripped up) when you examine data after the fact (you'll see a lot of that on WUWT). This is why prediction is the gold standard of science. If you think that the current model is wrong, and wrong in a way that matters, you have to show that when you fix whatever is wrong with it, you are able to make better predictions. When one side of a debate has a clear theory that has been subjected to the discipline of mathematical modeling, with a long track record of making clear, falsifiable predictions, and the other side has nothing but model nitpicking, the former side will have far more credibility with working scientists--which is, of course, why every major elite scientific society in the world, and something like 97% of scientists with any kind of published track record in a relevant field, accept climate theory and its predictions regarding CO2 and climate change.

What is it? Zero change or zero correlation? You seem to believe that zero change and zero correlation are the same...let me demonstrate with some series again.

Zero correlation means that on average, when one variable changes, the other does not. Neither of your series shows statistically significant correlation. Zero correlation with time means zero average change over time. Again, I suggest that you consult a textbook on elementary statistics.

Reading your comment made me think of Isaac Azimov's essay The Relativity of Wrong. To quote from it:

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

"he funny thing about "scientifically established fact", is that it is all so often proved wrong."

Please read The Relativity of Wrong.

Call me an idiot, but isn't the solution to this paradox just Occam's Razor?

Yeah -- practically, I think it is. I mean, that's even what machine learning algorithms do, in essence: They assume a prior that assigns higher probability to lower-complexity models. The details of what Occam's Razor means then becomes a subject for debate -- there are lots of priors one could choose -- but, as an imprecise, guiding principle, it seems to do the job!

More philosophically, I'd say Occam's Razor has a dual, which is the idea that Asimov called The Relativity of Wrong. Put them together and you're looking at the tradeoff between model complexity (Occam's Razor) and model fit (Relativity of Wrong), that is precisely what the theories of learning complexity explore.

Maybe it formally can't be described, except as a simulation. Which gives us hope - our simulations are bound to improve over time as we learn more of the underlying rules. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that reductionism actually works - learning local rules is reductionist, but running simulations using those rules allows us to predict global behaviour - just not in a closed form that might equate to "understanding". But the power of science is in prediction, not in "understanding" things, so it's fine

I think I agree, but I also think that the the lack of "understanding" -- the lack of "mind-sized models" -- is going to get more and more frustrating! (If unavoidable.)

It also seems that reductionalism and holism can and do complement one another. E.g., the results of simulations involving various "reductionalist" pieces can be used to refine those "reductionalist" pieces themselves. The simplest example of this would be, e.g., if there were a real-valued signal of which you had noisy measurements at different times ("local," "reductionalist" information), and then you also were able to obtain an independent measurement of its integral ("global," "holistic" information). Knowledge about the integral would improve your estimates of the signal values themselves. And all we need for this example is standard, least-squares, linear estimation.

This is a great (and very short) essay by Asimov on that very subject:

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Relativity_of_Wrong