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Evolution Named Scientific Achievement of 2005
lazy_hp writes "The BBC reports that research into evolution's inner working has been named rtop science achievement of 2005 From the article: 'The prestigious US journal Science publishes its top 10 list of major endeavours at the end of each year. The number one spot was awarded jointly to several studies that illuminated the intricate workings of evolution. The announcement comes in the same week that a US court banned the teaching of intelligent design in classrooms.'"
Nominated for 2006, GRAVITY!!!!
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Not that I support Intelligent Design (I think it's hokum, personally), but I can't help thinking this decision is politically-motivated. Doesn't mean it's not deserved, but it sure is convenient, coming on the heels of the ID court decision.
Aw, what do I know?
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I thought the mail client Evolution was named "Scientific Achievement", until I got past the headline...
And, hello -- how about the HapMap?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
For example,"I think the planets should be renamed because they're named after fake gods."
Given that you Christians believe in one God (or is it three?), won't it get rather confusing if you name all the planets after him?
You won't be able to tell Uranus from Urelbow.
The elements that created everything had to come from somewhere.
Where did the Intelligent being come from? The elements that comprise the being had to come from somewhere.
Whatever you reply to this "he always existed" or whatever, is the same reply I'll give you to you about where the elements came from. It's just as logical as yours.
"I think the planets should be renamed because they're named after fake gods."
You are free to call the planets whatever you wish.
But clearly what you really want is the power (through government dictate) to force others to use names that are approved by your particular religion.
I hear a lot of Christians complain about how oppressed they are.
In the end the complaints turn out to be about wanting the power to control others.
Maybe that was a Good Thing, but should decisions like identifying the Best Scientific Achievement of a year and medical decisions of vast importance be something we leave open to the whims of politics? I realize that in this case there was no "buckling" from pressure but it apparently was intended to reflect political shifts of our time. Whatever the case, it just doesn't sit well with me.
Are you deliberately feeding the fire, or are you genuinely that close-minded?
Why is it scary to you that so many geeks might actually believe religion? An awful lot of brilliant math and science has been performed by people who firmly believed religion...does that terrify you, too?
Or do you just assume that, if someone believes in religion, they're supporters of ID and incapable of rational thought?
I don't understand the anti-religous crusade so many people seem to take on as their own little holy war. Why the hell can't you leave me alone? You believe what you want, and I'll believe what I want. I won't teach your kids to believe what I do, and you can just stay away from mine.
If you want to talk about testable hypotheses, we can do that. You produce evidence contrary to my understanding of the universe, and I'll change my understanding. I'd hope you could do the same thing.
But if you want to get into a contest of faiths, don't even bother. And don't think that atheism isn't a faith: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You can prove to me that we as a species evolved, ultimately, from a tiny pile of organic slime clinging to a rock in some antediluvian sea. Check. You can't prove to me that no god exists, any more than I can prove to you one does.
Your railing against religion (and everyone else's) as a whole (as opposed to railing against statements made based on religion that are demonstrably false, which is, of course, appropriate) is no better than any other zealot demanding that his religion is right and everyone else's is wrong.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
the ancient greeks did for sure. And the dimentions they gave was pretty close.
r se.htm /it's elephants all the way down
In fact during the middle ages most people I understand thought it round as well.
The middle-eastern view seems to be that it was flat.
http://sol.sci.uop.edu/~jfalward/ThreeTieredUnive
As a liberal Christian, I have a certain passionate hatred for creationism. I despise creationism because it makes Christians look like a bunch of narrow-minded idiots. For example, I was reading in a Christian newspaper an article about the ICR, which stated the earth was young, and cited four reasons for this. All four reasons [1] have been long-since refuted over at Talkorigins.org or the Evolution Wiki. I was able to refute three of the four points off of the top of my head.
I have seen creationist after creationist come to this Creation-Evolution debate board I lurk on, tell us the Earth must be young because of XXX and that we are all wrong. Once we present to them some scientific evidence that the Earth is old, they get real quiet real fast.
Basically, believing in an old Earth is only possible when a creationist is in a serious state of denial. Case in point: The only people who believe in a young Earth have a religious reason for doing so. Many Christians believe in an old Earth; not one atheist believes in a young Earth.
[1] The original offending article can be seen here. The refutations can be found here (just because you can come up with one case where we got different dates doesn't mean the 99+% of cases where we get the same age via different techniques is invalid) here, here, and here (the refutation is for creationist claims for c14 levels in coals, but the process in question can make diamonds have c14 atoms also).
"Scientifically proven" is an oxymoron. No scientific theory has ever been proved. Ever.
Yes there is. The more intellegent people are, the less likely they are to be religious. Pointers to plenty of studies that show this can be found here. The fact that there are indeed famous intelligent and religious people is not a proof of the contrary (as any intelligent person will know :-).
Besides, when refering to people like Da Vinci, one has to take into account the society that they lived in and the corresponding education that they recieved.
Linux user since early January 1992.
I wonder how "Evolution" feels about the award - 4 billion years of hard work, and now it gets recognition.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Why is it scary to you that so many geeks might actually believe religion? An awful lot of brilliant math and science has been performed by people who firmly believed religion...does that terrify you, too?
I don't think we're scared so much as confused. Why would someone intelligent believe in an invisible and all-powerful being for whom no evidence exists, and whose existence is so incredibly unlikely? How could someone intelligent, who would would presumably be well-read and therefore be aware of the incredible range of (blatantly silly) things people have professed belief in throughout history, not simply place modern religion in the same category? How can intelligent people, who dismiss out of hand many other superstitions, believe in the most outlandish things? Is it really that hard to get past childhood indoctrination?
Religion is so clearly a means for uneducated people to explain the world around them, as well as a way of wishing the world was not as it is (ie. denying mortality), that it is very hard to see how someone smart could fall for it.
That's what confuses us.
Wrong. Just because someone presents an alternate conjecture about the accuracy of a scientific principle does not mean that said conjecture is automatically on the same level of legitimacy as whichever principle one seeks to disprove. If that were the case, I could argue that computers run on magic, and then protest when my theory of devine computation was not taught in computer science classes. The antecedents of ID are undoubtedly religious in nature; ergo, the conclusions postulated by ID proponents are derived from sources known to be false, or at the very least untestable. I said "effectively trampled on", because ID was rejected for being unscientific in this particular case.
ID, not being a scientific hypothesis, will *always* be rejected by legitimate scientists, due to the fact that it:
That is the fault of the defense, and I can't actually fault the judge on that count, from what I've heard at least. However, if ID ever gets a decent legal and scientific team on its side, we should make some headway.
While what you say is probably true, I find the truth of the statement to be a sad reflection on public education, and the gullibility of American Christians. Allow me to be blunt-- ID is not science, and no amount of legal or psuedo-scientific doublespeak will make it so. Science is a process wherein the natural laws governing the universe are explored, tested, pulled, stretched, and examined. A key aspect of scientific study is impartiality; which is to say that a true scientist will not endorse any particular outcome to an experiment until that experiment has been performed and tested by many independant researchers. ID differs from science in that the key promoters of its hypothesis begin with their own surity of their ideas, and then disregard conflicting facts.
Literal Creationism has at least four main tenets: - the earth is young, probably around 6000 years old - God created all "kinds" of animals within 6 evening-morning days (fish vs. birds vs. land mammals vs. humans, etc.) - the earth was devastated by a global flood early in its history - all humans descended from a single couple known in the English Bible as Adam and Eve
Allow me to rebut:
The Earth is not young. Carbon dating, fossil records, geology, atomic theory, astronomy, and many other scientific disciplines have all independantly dated the earth at more than four billion years old.
If God did create the world, and all the things in it, in six days, then how were days reckoned before the creation of the sun?
If God created all the animals, why were so many of them such complete failures as to become extinct?
If all humans are descended from Adam and Eve, then why the biblical prohibition on incest? And, furthermore, I am not a genetic researcher, but I'm fairly certain that thousands of generations of familial in-breeding would result in a rather, shall we say, shallow gene pool.
If it could be shown that any one of these propositions does not hold, then Biblical creationism would crumble. The fact that they are extraordinarily difficult to challenge certainly does not mean that creationism is not a scientific theory. Furthermore, all of the evidence we have ever uncovered and understand quite we
Actually thank the bible for that one.
The bible states numerous times that the earth is "firm" and "immovable". Therefore it cannot be a sphere orbiting the sun now can it?
Also the bible references "earths four corners" something that's only possible if the earth was flat, and Daniel 4:10-11 references a tall tree that is visible to the farthest reaches of the earth. Also only possible if the earth was flat.
So if you take the bible literally, then you must believe in a flat earth.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.