Slashdot Mirror
Scientific American Gives Up
IvyMike writes "The April issue Scientific American opens with a Perspectives column titled Okay, We Give Up. It opens, 'For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.'"
Ya think? Our oldest daughter was just yesterday telling me about intelligent design, which she learned about from her SCIENCE teacher. It's insidious, this faith-based truth, and is popping up in far too many places where it doesn't belong.
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
No, you just decribed trust in your wife. If you are shown a polaroid that she has been adulterous, she gets divorce papers; we show creationists "polaroids" all the time, but they choose to remain in their "marriage" to their imaginary friend.
Post-rock/Ambient/Drone and other noise.
If you critisise them for `not sticking to science' then you deserve to be called an idiot, as they rightly say it's impossible to isolate science from the social context in which it happens. Eg. if you don't know what is being funded, you can't know whether it's significant that there are a lot of results in some area recently; if you don't see reports of scientists being pressured by the state top change their results, how will you know what weight to put on those results?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
"Worst of all was the behavior of the Scientific American, which seemed intent on proving the post-modernist point that it was all about power, not facts. The Scientific American attacked Lomborg for eleven pages, yet only came up with nine factual errors despite their assertion that the book was "rife with careless mistakes." It was a poor display featuring vicious ad hominem attacks, including comparing him to a Holocust denier. The issue was captioned: "Science defends itself against the Skeptical Environmentalist." Really. Science has to defend itself? Is this what we have come to?"
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Because all the theory of "Intelligent Design" says, is, "since I don't understand how this could have evolved, it must have be designed, not evolved." For at least two hundred years, the "perfection" of the eye was given as evidence of design, until computer models should how easy it is for eyes to evolve, and molecular biology showed us eyes have separately evolved at least forty times.
Now the "Intelligent Design" proponents having had the eye explained, talk about freely rotating flagella in certain bacteria. They hang their "theory" in the contention that since "half a rotation" isn't useful, organisms with "half a rotation" could not have ben favored by evolution, and so a freely rotating flagellum could not evolve. But it turns out several of the components of that wheel are the same as components of a "needle" used by parasitic bacteria to inject chemicals into host cells, a so-called Type Three Secretory Apparatus.
All "Intelligent Design" is not a useful theory, in the sense that science uses the word "theory", because all it is able to do is say "I can't figure this out". It has no explanatory or predictive power.
Compare the "theory" of Intelligent Design to Boyle's law: a physicist on being told about changing temperature in a room full of some gas, knows there's a relation between temperature and pressure because Boyle's law predicts it. The physicist doesn't have to go to the room himself, or ask what mechanism is responsible for the temperature change, or in what direction the temperature is changing, or really even what kind of gas in the room -- the physicist can with confidence predict that pressure and temperature are dependent on one another.
It's not just that evolution is consistent with what we know, it's also consistent with what we don't know.
It has predictive and explanatory power: using evolution, we are able to say, "assuming evolution is correct, we ought to see this", and then when we do look, we see what evolution predicts.
We say, evolution tells us that meiosis helps to keep each paired chromosome like its opposite pair, because genes are exchanged in meiosis. Because meiosis only takes place in sexual reproduction, this allows us to predict that in asexual reproduction, paired chromosomes will diverge. when we look at bdelloid rotifers, we see what was predicted: their chromosomes do diverge, and we can even compare the chromosome divergence between pairs against the to the total mutational change in the entire bdelloid rotifer genome, to come up with a good idea of how long bdelloid rotifers have been reproducing asexually: abut 80 million years.
We say, evolution predicts that, since workers bees born to a queen with only one mate share more genes, on average, with their haploid nephews -- that is, males born to other workers -- than with their diploid brothers born to the queen, the workers will favor their nephews. And the prediction turns out to be true. We can also predict, using Trivers' work, that if the queen mated with more than one male, a nephew isn't necessarily more related, so the workers in that case won't favor nephews. And that also turns out to be true. (Bee examples from here).
Note that in the bee example, we don't know what mechanism allows a worker to "know" how many mates her mother the queen has had, or the mechanism that, given that "knowledge" allows the worker to modify her behavior. We just know that the worker behaves "as if" she understood the genetic math involved, and knew the mating history. Of course, bees don't do genetics or math and probably don't even remember matings -- but we don't need to see the mechanism to predict that it and the behavior must be there: evolutionary theory predicted that bees would act like "as if" geneticis
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?