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Evolution No Longer Worth Learning, Says Government
Davemania writes "New York Times reports that the Evolution biology subject has disappeared from a list of acceptable fields of study for recipients of a federal education grant for low-income college students. The Education department has described this as a Clerical Mistake but others are skeptical about this. 'Scientists who knew about the omission also said they found the clerical explanation unconvincing, given the furor over challenges by the religious right to the teaching of evolution in public schools. "It's just awfully coincidental," said Steven W. Rissing, an evolutionary biologist at Ohio State University.'" As someone who made use of one of those grants to study Evolutionary Biology, I find this more than a little galling.
Hey Bud! Its just a part of Evolution of schools. Its closed minds like that, that hault the ability to learn more perspectives.
Clerical?
oops, can't teach that any more.
Because it's argubly one of the most important fields in biology. Every field in biology has some sort of tie in to evolution. We're talking at the molecular level, biochemical structure (selective influence on DNA stability), enzymes, proteins, all the way up to the evolution of species and the evolution of populations. In short, it's the unifying factor of biology.
Lets not take into account the fact that it's extremely useful too. Evolutionary algorithms are argubly one of the next things in software development. The evolution of diseases like HIV/AIDS has mass implications on the quality of life for millions of people out there. Anyone hear about bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance? Considering how widely used antibiotics are for everything from the common cold to parasite infections to lethal infections like tuberculosis or the fact that antibiotics are prescribed standard treatment for ANY invasive surgery is good enough reason to study evolution.
The stakes are too high to stop advancing the study of evolution because they find the idea of common descent morally repugnant.
Talk about the country moving in the wrong direction. What next Dubya, claiming democrocy will solve our problems in other countries? That would be a good one cause you know it's promoting tolerance, openness, love, and peace in the US. Right?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
University officials around the country will seriously question the quality of students from Kansas. ...until they start to notice that Kansas universities are getting a disproportionately greater share of the grant money and that the conservative parents of those ignorant students are willing to shell out twice as much in tuition so that their children can go to a school with "strong traditions" and "a good Christian culture." Swing by Texas A&M University some day and you'll see what I mean.
But the scientific method isn't consistent: it changes over time, or "evolves", if you like. One hopes that such change constitutes improvement.
Given that the scientific method isn't written on stone tablets by the finger of Newton, but is something that exists as a "best current practice", how do we actually know that the methods are working as advertised? It's only reasonable to assume that our existing methods aren't perfect, because we believe that none of the superseded methods were. What selection process do we use in deciding which methods produce "truer" results?
Well clearly they've been teaching an oversimplified view of science itself if that's your understanding. Study a little of the philosophy of science, and come to an appreciation that "the scientific method" is not the magical pixie dust of truth that some make it out to be.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
There isn't any scientific proof of either, because there isn't any such thing as scientific proof. You're right, that concept simply isn't taught, or at least isn't taught very well.
Science classes seem to take the lazy approach too. Science is taught as being a body of knowledge when it isn't -- it's a process and a central part of that process is critical thinking.
Intelligent design lacks critical features of a scientific theory. Evolution is a scientific theory, but like all such it may be overturned tomorrow. At the moment it's the best thing going (scientifically) but it's being refined constantly. Which makes it really silly to hold up as one side in a theological debate.
Of course, science classes aren't the place for theological debates. They are a place for learning critical thinking skills, objectivity, and why science is a very different thing from religion.
"Oil is traded on free commodities markets and is a near perfect supply and demand model."
Mod parent +1 funny.
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.
Well now, that is a different story. I'm all for the removal or reduction of goverment subsidies.
But, as we are all aware, the windfall taxes weren't proposed to fix an economic problem, they were punishment for the oil companies being successful and having the balls to make profit while we are paying *market* prices for gas. Windfall taxes would have never lowered the price of gas at the pump, created less demand for oil or created new sources of oil. In reality, the taxes would have raised the price of gas, since those taxes would have been passed along to the consumer, as all taxes to businesses are. As I stated before, windfall taxes on the oil industry have been tried in the past during the Carter administration and have had disastrous results.
Both sides can agree to this since it neatly wraps up all the arguments in a three word solution. Get over it, move on to more important things like why we are killing our fellow man.
"Question everything, including this!" - http://technoracle.blogspot.com/
I'm trying to figure out what your comment has to do with the point being made by the Grandparent post?
Fact is, evolution is a THEORY. It is held on to because it's a safe position. It cannot be disproved because disproof relies on the same science that forwards the theory. If you think that there is solid proof to the theory, ask for someone to show you a 'transient species'. You will receive one of two replies-"You are a simpleton who doesn't understand how the 'theory' works", or "Well, it's just a theory, and we as a community have decided on this one point to remain blissfully ignorant to the fact that in 0.0% of cases has there been a 'transient species' found." From Lucy and the Piltdown Man to the T-Rex with feathers, the Hobbits, Nebraska Man, Ramapithecus, the Professor and Mary Ann!
Evolutionists will allow you to believe that "science" means "irrefutable facts", when they really mean "a bandwagon I got on and will defend to the death, but you better not ask for proof, or I'll call you an ignorant Fundamentalist for holding onto something (whether your argument is creationism or just a factual debate) without 'proof'"
Take the evolution v. creation argument , and if the book is "Origin of the Species" substitute "The Bible" and vice-versa. Also use "evolution science" and "the Crusades" in a similarly interchangeable manner.
Science has elevated evolution to a religion, and the "religious right" has made a poor attempt at imitating science with the term "Intelligent Design"-It's kinda like having to qualify a conversation with phrases like "I have a lot of black friends", or "I know a lot of gay people"
C'mon(fellow) Christians, let's call this what it is. God Created, not intelligently designed. Calling it ID profanes the work God has done. Jesus didn't set up a table in the temple and undercut the moneychangers out of business, he went in and cleaned house!
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Sometimes it just has to be said.
I didn't know you Amish were allowed to use computers.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yes, scientists can be just as dogmatic about their theories as creationists are about their beliefs. That still doesn't justify bringing overtly religious dogma into science education.
If you want to participate in the scientific process you've got to base your theories on the scientific method, not dogma. Including Atheist dogma.
The evidence against evolution has been laughably weak. The best you could do is prove the evolution is false, not that creationism is true.
The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. - Edward R. Murrow
We all way's here about the EVIL religious right and they're dastardly deeds ... never a thing about the secular left ...
Any time I see that term - I smell bias and ignore the rest of whats said.
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Perhaps. Perhaps not. When one is caught doing something slimey, one calls it a clerical mistake, corrects it, and tries again another way. Even getting caught, it helps shore up the fundamentalist support that has been vital to this administration.
The main reason so many people here think this is most likely deliberate is simple: this administration has a track record of gutting science when that science goes against their doctrine. They do this through a systematic and deliberate campaign of misinformation, suppression, and using funding as a weapon.
When a group has a history like that, it's hard to trust them when they claim innocence.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Another thing that really makes me mad is the softening up via privacy rules.
If you flunk a test, only you and the teacher know about it. You can't let boys fail in private! That completely kills the entire spirit of competition that boys thrive on. (my personal theory also for part of the reason why girls are completely outpacing boys in academics in the lower levels of education).
If you spark the competitive spirit in a class (not just inside a class but on a larget scale), then the students will be screaming at the teachers to teach them properly or just leave them so they cna learn the stuff themselves.
There is no faith involved; god's existence doesn't matter.
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It would be naive to think that all things being equal, a student from such an educational background is more fit for an intellectual environment. But I guess you don't believe in the concept of evolutionary fitness.
You were doing fine until you leaped into Social Darwinism there. "Evolutionary fitness" vs an intellectual environment? If anything, being a good social fit for an intellectual environment is an evolutionary handicap, as the #1 factor against having children is education level: the higher the degree the less likely one will have children.
You may want to get your facts straight yourself.
Freedom OF religion is not Freedom FROM religion.
There's no getting away from the fact that the Pilgrims established a theocracy.
"The Massachusetts Bay Colony operated as a theocracy dominated by the Puritans throughout much of the 17th century."
Yeah, there were guys like Roger Williams who advocated separation between church and state. They were banished. And the penalty for being a Catholic priest in Massachusetts was death.
Oh yes, those guys sure loved that freedom of religion...
Well if he's rich, he's probably a Jew. So that's option 2.
You lost me with, This particular argument is a poor choice for an evolution debate because immunities can be attained by an individual (as opposed to a gene pool) through exposure and not necessarily by evolution.
The ability of individuals to acquire immunity through exposure is explained by evolution. How do ID/Creationists, FSMists explain it?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
Science has repeatedly disproven the stories found within the religious tomes in the world. Still, that doesn't mean that a god doesn't exist in some form or another; it simply means that he can't be trusted.
Meanwhile, god's existence doesn't\H\H\H\H\H\H\Hshouldn't really matter one way or another when it comes to making policy decisions.
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No the null hypothesis is purple unicorns DON'T exist. Somehow being a "balanced moderate" is the fashionable position to take these days on all matters controversial. Yet there is no obligation to endorse nonsense and "creationism" is just purple unicorns stated in a more pretentious, impenetrable, and obscure fashion and is the exact mirror image of the lefts gobbledygook post-modernism. "Standing on the sidelines" is PRECISELY what the medievalists are counting on to use an endarkening (opposite of enlightenment) to seize power. If we don't FIGHT them vigorously then the 300 year old enlightenment experiment will end in an age of corporate feudalism with plasma t.v. stained glass windows for the ignorant masses. Is that really the way we want to go?
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Sometimes you have to choose between the lesser of two evils. Sometimes it's the evil of two lessers.
To quote:
"If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."
"He who controls the classrooms today controls the future."
That is why there is a huge movement, growing by 8% a year, somewhere close to 2 million, of home schoolers. Christians understand this very well. Homeschoolers are smarter than their publicly educated peers. For the most part, they focus on the three Rs - Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic the good ol' fashioned way with great rigor. I homeschool my 3 boys. My 10 year old is doing 8th grade math because he has the freedom and opportunity to do it. He's read every classic piece of literature available in Barnes and Noble. We've literally run out of material. Family members joke that he is a walking encyclopedia.
For a good example of hard-core Christian curriculum that focuses on science and math, check out robinsoncurriculum.com. The author is a tenured scientist for a large state University. He's no dope. Several of his kids graduated from college 2 years early because of their home education. That's quantitative proof something is right with his thinking and system.
We believe in some form of evolution (nobody agrees what that is these days - punctuated equlibrium, spontaneous mutation, who knows?) and are devoted Christians. Not every Christian is a literalist. Children like mine will lead the way in the future. We are doing everything we can to see that that happens. What are you doing?
Read the NEA's manifesto on their website. They have in their bylaws that they don't believe parents can teach their children. But look at the results? Someone is not doing their science very well, and it's not Christians, in regard to basic education and ability to think / read / write / do the math.
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I'm pursuing a physics degree at the moment, but I am not a supporter of evolution, I am not a supporter of Bush either though. While the fields are unrelated, I would ask the Slashdot community a question, if the Bush administration was attacking "science" as some have been so bitterly protesting, why is it just evolutionary science he's attacking? Evolution has a great many valid points, but it is far from flawless, and by far I would have to say that there are certain holes within it that if they cannot be explained show a failing for the theory, not in reference to natural selection or in mutations producing species, but in the macro-evolutionary perspective of "ape to man." Let the flames begin....
Exactly what I was trying to say. Thank you for putting it clearly.
This is an interesting essay that I think sums up the public education system's problem nicely.
What is interesting about this is that it doesn't stick with the "clerical error" bit. (Which, if you look at the PDF, is ridiculous -- the line, and just that line, is blanked out. Tough to do accidentally.) Now this sounds like a draft that was not meant for the public. That suggests this sort of nonsense is at least being talked about. Sad.
This is simply a logical fallacy. If A != B, and B != C, A does not necissarily equal C.
Not to get too technical, but I think the GP's argument was A = ~B and B = ~C ==> A = C.
Seriously though, if progress means anything, its that genetic "disabilities" are gradually becoming meaningless, as we can compensate for more and more of them with drugs, prosthetics, or therapy. And it's an accelerating process.
Actually, the whole concept of the "dark" ages as a backward period has been discredited by modern historians who no longer use the term.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
If you disagree with what the taxes are being spent for, then you are holding your nose.
I was hoping that the republicans would at least cut some of the more obvious waste out of the federal budget (AmTrac, Coporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts, NASA, Headstart, Department of Education, etc.) The budgets for all of these things should be zeroed out.
Also, our military spending is too high. I don't think it should be zero, but I think it is too high now. And too much of it goes to redundant stuff and new weapons systems and not enough to paying the troops decently.
There are so many ways in which our tax money could be better spent, but personally I think we should really cut the budget down, get the debt paid off, and then have a nice tax cut across the board and stop spending on stupid things like the ones I've mentioned.
However, I'd still rather pay taxes to support these things that I think are a waste of money than have the feds BORROW the money.
We pay taxes like chumps in this country. What we SHOULD be doing is investing the tax money in a "national endowment" and letting Congress spend the interest. I would probably have an exception in the case of a DECLARED war - but that would be it. (We have not had a delcared war since WWII.)
And don't get me started on how bad the democrats are when they try to "out mean" the republicans. For example, Hilary Clinton recently came out with a new initiative to bad video games. I can't support that. The "war on drugs" has lots of excesses related to it. Much of these can be traced to pissing contests where the democrats decide they can be more tough on crime than the republicans. So, they vote in things like "rules of evidence" where you don't need any evidence to convict someone of a drug crime in federal court. The sentancing for drug crimes are totally crazy - mostly the fault of the democrats.
Also, the democrats have always supported disarming law abiding citizens in order to make them better prey for criminals. I'm talking about the gun and knife laws. The people who are elected are not completely sans clue. They know that crooks don't care about the laws, but still they want to disarm us so that we're easy pickings.
There are idiological points where I agree with each party, but far more often they are both completely wrong when it comes to results.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I tend to attribute something to stupidity rather than malice if at all likely.
Well, I attribute just about everything the Bush administration does to stupidity, not malice. Doesn't mean it doesn't deserve notice or criticism, though i'd think it was just as likely done by a democrat trying to make the Republicans look bad as it was by a Republican trying to actually take evolution out of the curriculum.
Likewise, the vast majority of liberals voted for Kerry. However, that doesn't mean that they actually liked him.
I did, and you can. One of my main reasons was that my wife is a doctor and there was no way I was going to vote for a malpractice lawyer. Beyond that, flawed as Bush is, he was closer to what I wanted than Kerry. Maybe not a lot, but a little. It doesn't mean I support him, though.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
>Uh, you're aware that the organisms that cause disease evolve?
And nobody disputes that. People have known about selective breeding for ages.
But you don't need to believe this huge untestable historical theory of single cells evolving into all life on earth to understand that, either.
"Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false? This simple question is splitting America apart, with a growing proportion thinking that we did not descend from an ancestral ape. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact." http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9786
But in fairness, there are other subheadings in other fields (e.g., see "26.09 Physiology, Pathology and Related Sciences") that have similar jumps in numbering, probably because of harmless rearrangement and desire to preserve past numbers that have remained the same. For example:
26.0907 Cardiovascular Science
26.0909 Vision Science/Physiological Optics
26.0910 Pathology/Experimental Pathology
26.0911 Oncology and Cancer Biology
The missing one used to be the category 26.0908 Exercise Physiology.
This compares with:
26.13 Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology
26.1301 Ecology
26.1302 Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography
26.1304 Aquatic Biology/Limnology
Where the missing one is 26.1303 Evolutionary Biology.
I'm sure reorganization like this happens all the time. It is still a rather big goof.
Clerical error? Somewhere there is a typist, who, proud of his or her work, should be saying "this was no error, I was told by _NAME_ to remove it from the list."
The person should be saying to, oh, the Washington Post.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
And they all end the same - with death. Supposedly "pro-life" people "value life above all else". I'd also like to point out the fallacy that "pro-lefers" don't really value life, they value telling others what to do. Now that scientist have dicovered a way to take a single cell from an unborn fetus without harming the fetus in any way (it could still be implanted and produce a baby), it will be interesting to see what other bullshit arguement the "pro-life" crowd will come up with to once again, tell others what to do (with the bonus of passing judgement while doing so!)
"But this one goes to 11!"
So why don't we find the author of the pdf?
t e>
<pdf:Author>OPE</pdf:Author>
<pdf:Producer>Acrobat PDFWriter 4.05 for Windows NT</pdf:Producer>
<pdf:ModDate>2006-05-02T09:15:53-03:00</pdf:ModDa
<pdf:Sponsor>Opus Dei</pdf:Sponsor>
OK. I made up the last one, but the rest are in the pdf.
OPE = Office of Postsecondary Education, at www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
The system of incorpration in a capalist system is a principle by which capital can be accumulated to allow reinvestment in industry and to make more money. Companies are not supposed to make a profit only people. The whole point of a company is to allow capital accumulation for reinvestment. There is nothing wrong with the oil companies distributing their profits to the owners "shareholders" but for any company to sit on profits is a useless exercize that causes economic stagnation. Taxes are the tool by which government can prevent that sort of stagnation. Not that I agree with taxes but the oil companies are showing signs of orginazational decay by sitting on huge sums of cash without using it to develop business or distributing it to the rightful owners.
I prefer a solid and complete defense of the scientific method to the feel good relativism of "your belief is just as good as my belief." See the Sokal thread I posted for the pernicious effects of realativistic philosophy. News flash if your belief is an ignorant myth it is NOT as valid as my rigorously tested scientific theory. And I only have a stock of scientific theories to know about at all if the scientific method as a whole is defended against superstition such that scientific progress may continue. Your feel good moderate relativism is just the wedge towards undermining the scientific method that the theocrats are looking for, screw that.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/r/relativi.htm
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Vocational training as in 8 1/2 weeks of basic training, then off to the wars to take the American Dream to the ends of the world at bayonette point. Who cares if your kid can't read or write as long as they can pull a trigger? It's to the government's advantage under the current way of thinking to keep kids dumb and broke and show them the military as a way out of poverty.
They tried something like this during Vietnam, called Project 100,000. They took 100,000 men that would qualify for service if only they could read and write, and promised them the world, to teach them a trade, promised them they wouldn't end up in a rice paddy, the works. What they gave these suckers was 11 1/2 weeks in what the Army called 'Special Training Company', where the Army put all its fatties, weirdos, and teenaged malcontents to either make them or break them, then off to Vietnam with a rifle in their hand. The ONLY skill taught to the Project 100,000 volunteers was basic infantryman.
Let's face it, the current stringpullers believe that unless you're rich enough to send your kids to college with THEIR kids, your kids are only worth flipping burgers for the ruling class. And the underclass is only good for supplying the ruling class with their toys, dope, sex, whatever. Doesn't matter what political party is acting like they run things, they're all the same when you get down to it. Their watchwords are stay in power and stomp the underclass. You'll never see THEIR kids in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It's the same thing as happened to the Roman Empire, according to Gibbons (who I read way the hell back in the 60's growing up). Find a copy of Gibbons in your local high school library. Hell, find a copy in your local COLLEGE library. Basically, the Empire lasted until the patrician class realised they could vote themselves privileges, using barbarian troops to push the edge of the Empire ever forward while it was party time at home.
Sound familiar?
I hate to toss in a 'me too' comment, but do you find it odd that this got no replies from the ID idiots you always see trolling around here?
You'd think they'd pull something out of their collective asses to contend with the meat of this post.
Mod Parent Up!
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I'd be with you if we could throw farm subsidies and the War on Drugs on the pile.
Sig cannot be found.
Our government has always been honest and benevolent, so there's no reason to suspect any foul play. Oh, wait...
Countering Evolution Theory is a total short circuit of scientific method. Even assuming that evolution is untrue, there needs to be a new scientific theory that can better explain the diversity of life on earth, and the extreme coincidences that point to common ancestry. The very tightly linked genome information is really hard to just explain away with some alternate scientific theory..
Evolution is a theory that is brutally hard to poke any real holes in.. Most people try to counter with statistical arguments that skip some of the in between steps.
Anyway, the point is that rational people are afraid of whats happening, and arent going to simply look away when they see neo-theocracy coming closer.
Storm
You know, I realize that I have allowed my passion and my personal opinions to cloud my judgment from time to time - and in this instance as well. It can be very difficult to separate passion from understanding; if one makes a statement based on faith and another counters that statement citing that faith is irrelevant and they are able to keep their statement free from passion - that would be dandy. It's hard to do. However, the simple fact that someone does not share another's faith and felt it necessary to voice that difference does not qualify them as one of the faithful. The difficulty I have with this whole situation has been pointed out beautifully by you without actually saying it; we have freedom OF religion - what we need is freedom FROM religion. That's my opinion and I believe it to be wholly correct and accurate. As an opinion, it does qualify as a belief, and therefore a statement of faith. I have every faith that were humanity truly free from religion the world would be a better place - everyone could believe in their gods, squirrels or trees as they see fit and we could be truly happy. How does one make that statement without being passionate? The passions of the religious majority influence everything. If one does not agree they have the choice to just sit and take it, get over it or do something about it. In my own small way, I was approaching my argument as if I was actually doing something about it and I know that I was not. However, my friend, if you read your own posts, you should realize you are guilty of the same - you wish to point out the flaws of others without accepting any responsibility yourself. I wouldn't know what to do if I truly needed to do something about it and therefore I'm just going to sit and take it until I'm able to get over it or have become wise enough to do something about it. My opinions also include that people should do whatever makes them happy so long as that pursuit of happiness does not impede the happiness of others. That makes it too sticky.
The stories in religious tomes are irrelevent since they are all written by man. The fact that they were disproven or not doesn't really mean anything except those that wrote the stories cannot be trusted. Said books do not offer evidence of god at all.
We have no scientific evidence of any kind of god at all, so we have no reason to think there is a god.
I agree on your last point, religion should affect public policy.
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I'm looking for the button that marks the entire topic -1 Troll, but I can't seem to find it...
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*Off-topic and coherency-free since 2004!*
"Supreme Court would get the necessary replacements to overturn Roe v. Wade"
Never happen.
Why would the republicans give up something thats been getting them elected for years ?
and nixon also still maintains that he never did anything wrong.
Yeah, I've noticed he's been pretty close-lipped about the whole thing for the past couple of years. The nerve of some people...
To me, questioning evolution is about as sane as questioning the earth being round. By all means go ahead, but don't expect evidence in support of either alternative theory to outweigh those of the established counterpart.
Agreed.
So we should not try to learn about our biological history? Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, so I'd rather avoid the risk of becoming another "puddle of goo" thanks.
As for a lot of your "fundamentals of the human mind", many of those very behaviors are based in biology. Violence, stealing, self-promotion at the expense of others, and trying to screw everything in sight... before the advent of society, these things made you better off, enhanced your standards of living, all in the interest of spreading your genetics. Basically, without the trapings of society, those who cheat will win, and those who win will have more progeny, which are more likely to win as well. Only with a structured society and a sense of "right" and "wrong" did these behaviors begin to be seen in a bad light. What you speak of is a desire to affect a cultural change, an intellectual one, and one running counter to our biological instincts to do "bad things" to better ourselves.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
Why not? All the Europeans who couldn't hack the diseases which thrive in these cities would have died off and have been out of the gene pool. The ones who could hack it stuck around and reproduced some more. Seems pretty clear to me.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
then it's not exactly a clerical 'mistake,' is it? ;-)
Forgive me, I can't help myself. I have APD - Awful Punning Disorder.
I think it would be an *excellent* idea to teach kids a little of the philosophy of science because it's not done at all as far as I can see. Not in public schools, and, for most, not even in college.
I had an interesting discussion with my wife about this, just a few weeks ago. She loved science, took every science class her high school offered, went on to receive a BA in biology, and then taught science in high school and junior high. While teaching, she taught the scientific method every year to hundreds of kids. You would think she'd know something about it, right? Amazingly little. She had never heard of the notion of falsifiability, much less heard of Karl Popper, or thought seriously about what differentiates a scientific theory from a non-scientific theory. For that matter, she didn't really even know understand the (lack of) real distinction between laws and theories!
My wife is not a stupid woman, by any means (except perhaps in her choice of husband, but let's not go there). She's intelligent, thoughtful and well educated, but the ideas that underpin the scientific method are not at all obvious. You have to be introduced to them and I was floored by the realization that in some 17 years of education no one had ever discussed them. Personally, I read some stuff about the philosophy of science in Scientific American years ago when I was a kid, otherwise I'd probably never have been introduced to it either, in spite of my college degrees.
What she learned as the scientific method was the old "hypothesis, prediction, test" procedure, which is perfectly accurate as far as it goes, but doesn't take that next step, which is to point out that only hypotheses that generate predictions that can be tested are of any use in a scientific context.
Whatever examples you use, and you could probably pick some less inflammatory ones, but, hey, whatever you need to hold the kids' interest, I think it's critically important that we find a way to teach kids the difference between science and non-science.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
It irks me that so many children in the US learn that "Columbus discovered the Earth was round." Everyone he went to for financing laughed at him because his circumference was about a third (I think) of the real number, which had been known for what, 2000 years? Spain was desperate, so sent him to die on a journey twice as long as he was prepared for. But no, no one knew the Earth was round until Columbus discovered it when seeing masts disappear over the horizon, isn't that right Timmy? The worst part is that any books a grade school kid would read say the same thing. I didn't learn the truth until my high school US I teacher untaught us.
I just downloaded the PDF and subject number 26.1399 reads, "Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology, Other." Does this mean someone has put it back since the time this was slashdotted?
Yeah, so?
Burning a house down with a family inside and burning the house down without the family inside both have the same outcome: the house is burned down. That doesnt mean that they are equal events. Speaking of fallacies, the one you brought up would be cum hoc ergo propter hoc. "Pro-Lifers approve of war and the death that results from it, therefore they are hypocrites for being pro-life". Nice.
My first post was just to point out the obvious differences separating your examples, but you choose to work around logic. You can keep pretending everyone you dont agree with is a hypocrite, I dont really care.
Actually the scientific method itself has not changed in over a century. Individual theories HAVE changed precisely because of the CONSISTENT application of the scientific method itself has shown that we need changes in individual theories as we have new insights into the fundamental laws of nature and new mathematical and technological tools to refine and the theoretical statement of those laws with. Mostly we are at the point of refining theories and not radically overthrowing them, for example Newtons laws of gravity are still true at the macroscopic level, it's only at extreme speeds or scales that relativistic effects show up. Those relativistic effects don't invalidate Newton's laws but extend them into realms that were not testable in Newton's time period. We may come up with further refinements in physics, but we can also be quite confident that they will not completely turn over the empirically verified theories of Newton and Einstein. Further applications of the SAME scientific method Einstein used will yield refinements and that's all to the good.
Note again I'm not really a rocket scientist or physicist would some hard core scientist please jump in here and confirm what I've said? Thanks.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Reminds me of an old joke. A meteor is about to collide with earth, killing everyone. The NYT headline reads:
Meteor to Annihilate Mankind
Women and Minorities Worst Affected
Seriously though, all one needs to do is go to spring break at Daytona Beach to find out the American mainstream is completely uninterested in hearing moral admonishments from anyone. By and large the sky-magic crowd is content to tsk-tsk amongst themselves and talk loudly from time to time. But the States is far too modern to put up with anything seriously restrictive for long.
For example, lets say by some mir...er I mean unlikely occurrence, Roe v Wade gets overturned and things go back to the way they were in the '50s. That would just get young people (notorious non-voters) interested again and in a few years we would have another '60s. Frankly I'd be all for that.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
THAT is the antithesis of all this damn moral posturing about whether it's murder, whether the fetus is a baby, blah blah blah. You have no right to force me to accept your belief that a mother cannot choose to terminate her pregnancy because of arguments over when life begins.
Let the mother decide if it's ending a life or not - let the mother grapple with the moral and philosophical questions. That is her responsibility as a human being.
And let's not waste time with moral relativism by trying to claim I'm saying "Oh, so if I say I'm not murdering you when I stab you in the chest, it's ok?" because I am making no such point.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Yes, women should have control of their reproduction. That's why they make condoms and birth control pills and depo and morning after pills and blow jobs. Abortion should not be used as a means of birth control.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
The question was "Why teach either?", referring to why bother teaching evolution at all. Please go back and reread the thread, then you might get a better idea of how the post addresses that question.
Wow.
So, if a piece of valid, well-supported scientific research disagrees with your personally held beliefs, it's a competing religion. Right. How about checking your definition of 'religion', 'kay?
Yeah, sure, evolutions's a theory, but then, so is relativity. Evolution is actually better-tested than general relativity. It's testable; the only thing we can't test about it is scale, but there's no evidence supporting the idea that genetic change over time is not scalable. Meanwhile, being testable kind of differentiates it from religion (which is, by its very nature, not).
Reality disagreeing with your imaginary friend? I don't care, and I doubt the federal government does either.
Meanwhile, your entire rant smacks not of red state bumpkinism, but of psychotic zealotism. I know a good doctor, maybe you should see him.
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"Caro thinks", and now it is fact. Darwin wrote, so it must be so.
So sayeth the shepherd, so sayeth the flock
That doesn't mean arts and ethics aren't important, they are, but they don't map reality in the same way science importantly does. In order to fully utilize the subjectivity enhancing insights of ethics we must FIRST have the firm grounding in empirical reality
provided by science.
No, we just need to be able to let go of limiting beliefs when it becomes sufficiently clear that they are most likely incorrect. Subjective ethics and intuition must necessarily come before objective reality because humans aren't able to empirically test all things all of the time. Most of us have never personally conducted the research that produced our modern understanding of objective reality, yet we accept this science based on intuition, trust, and logic.
Otherwise, what you say is true. Real science gives us a commonly accepted mapping of reality in accordance with those physical aspects that humans know how to quantify. But it doesn't tell us how to behave in relation to those things, or whether or not they are right or wrong. What scientific knowledge can do is bias our intuition, and hopefully refine our ethics, which must have preceded the objective evidences.
This doesn't tend to be the case, though. On the one hand, zealous theocrats put down science by subjective judgement, and on the other hand, zealous objectivists reject the notion of ethics because it can't be quantified at all. So we tend toward either oppressive theocracy, or law-of-the jungle selfish-ism where anything goes, so long as it doesn't infringe anyone else's right to be selfish.
Even assuming it wasn't a clerical error, no one said to ban the study of it altogether. It was just being removed from the list of areas funded by a grant for low-income folks. If you dont' need that grant, then go ahead and knock yourself out.
As a side note, I find it interesting how on one hand the government can't show support for Christianity at all, but it MUST provide funding for everything else, even atheistic dogma guised as 'science' - like the "theory" of evolution. To date, evolution is more of a belief system than it is a science.
1. The fossil records do not show the transitionary fossils required by the theory.
2. The sudden appearance of all the various phylum is currently beyond any evolutionists explanation.
3. No one has ever observed a species 'mutate' into another species in the last 200 years.
4. No one has been able to scientifically cause one species to change into a new species in a lab.
Until one or more of those things can happen or be explained scientifically, then evolution is really no more than a set of beliefs - not at all unlike a religion. So it is apalling to me that my tax dollars HAVE to go to fund this study, while they absolutely cannot be used to provide bibles to those that want them.
Let the flames begin.
Touche! That occured to me as I was writing...wasn't sure anyone out there would catch the contradiction.
Damnit, boy, I was trying to be cheeky.
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"You can keep pretending everyone you dont agree with is a hypocrite, I dont really care."
No, everyone I don't agree with are morons, but "pro-lifers" are hypocrites. Well, technically I would label them as "moronic hypocrites", for the record.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I'm for funding PBS, NEA, NASA, and whatnot, as their budget lines are miniscule compared to our big fuck-off DoD budget. When you are on a diet, you don't stop drinking diet pop, you stop eating a whole cake at a sitting. But I essentially agree: get rid of the debt. Now.
And let's throw out corporate welfare, too. No more bailing out failed corporations (yeah, I mean you, Chrysler, and you too, airlines) to the tune of billions a year.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
No the Bush Administration was stupid enough to falsify the intelligence leading to the Iraq War because they were stupid enough to believe that they new better than the experts and stupid enough to assume that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction because former Republican Administration were stupid enough to sell the weapons to Saddam Hussein in the first place. They were stupid enough to lie to congress and were stupid enough that they couldn't surpress contrary opinions in the intelligence comittee without making a big fuss over it. And they were stupid enough to use evidence that was obviously wrong.
There's no contradiction here because no part of their idiotic bumbling could ever be qualified as smart.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
One of my main reasons was that my wife is a doctor and there was no way I was going to vote for a malpractice lawyer. Beyond that, flawed as Bush is, he was closer to what I wanted than Kerry. Maybe not a lot, but a little. It doesn't mean I support him, though.
Umm.. what? You could have voted for Mickey Mouse, nobody, or some nutjob third party candidate. But, you decided to vote for G-dub. At least have the courage to stand by your choices and not try to weasel out of them by trying to have it both ways. You can't vote for someone who's supported policies which you dislike for 4 years, then claim you don't support them. Obviously you do support G-dub, even though you were only voting for your more preferred candidate. In the rest of the world we call that "supporting the current administration".
AccountKiller
"medievalists"
I love it.
I gotta use that sometime... Too bad it's today and not last week since the Jehova's Witnesses showed up at my door over the weekend.
Is it any surprise they don't want you to learn about Evolution?
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Not the ones in this day and age. They all dump WIS in favor of CHA so they can get more money and followers. That's why they can't cast spells like they used to thousands of years ago =\
Hail oh powerful and wise Slashdot mono-culture.
Mono-culture? Is that International Whine Language for "anyone who doesn't agree with me?" Guess what? Freedom of speech does not guarantee you the right to be respected for what you say. Or even believed. And insulting your target audience is not likely to get them to agree with you.
Saying that everybody who posts on slashdot thinks the same is just a thinly veiled insult. It's basically implying that (unlike the 'free thinking' poster) no one here can think for themselves. It is implying that only easily-led sheeple would hold that particular opinion, that no one could have arrived at that opinion through logic or introspection, only through surrendering to the hive mind.
It's a very hypocritical stand to take. It's trying to get everyone to agree with you by saying that if they don't, they are somehow not individuals, but mere pawns. Face it, you aren't upset that "slashbots" are pawns. You are upset that they're not your pawns. You don't want free thinking individuals, because you aren't one yourself. You project your own inadequecies onto others. You've bought a certain line of thought hook, line and sinker, and when anyone questions that line of thought, it can only be because they aren't a "free thinker" like you.
How droll. It's like the counter culture kids who rebel by all dressing alike.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There will always be debate about the origin of the world. I'm a devout Christian and this I think this is retarded. There should be religion classes in public high schools, sure. Religion is an important part of history, you can't do away with it. It's stupid to say Jesus wasn't real, and try to hide/remove any pictures of him, just because you don't believe he was the son of God. He's still an important historical figure (ACLU, I'm looking at you.). It's also stupid to say that Evolution isn't a well tested, well done theory. It's realistic, and it makes sense. What happened to the Enlightenment, a time when people could have a secular outlook for the purpose of scientific advance? It's also stupid not to teach that.
So what happened to people being able to make choices about what they wanted to learn, instead of having evolution (or Christianity, or Bhuddism, or WHATEVER) shoved down their throughts?
The invading Mongol hordes decimated Islam, just like Russia. And religion cultivated thought in both Christendom, and Islam. The difference is that Islam rejected Greek Reason for orthodoxy, while Christendom embraced the Greeks, and had the enlightenment.
It is not back on the list. See the comments above.
I completely agree - those things just didn't come to mind while I was typing the post. There are probably hundreds of other things that could be cut.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Why wait? Go now!
C'mon this discussion has become too polarized on both sides. I am leaving the country because we stopped providing grants to study evolution? That is a bit extreme.
We do expend a large portion of money in science education dedicated to evolution (diproportionate to some more practical pursuits). Yet we fail to spend on some of the human sciences such as Psychology and Sociology that may benefit us as individuals and as a society. So we could as easily move in the direction of putting this money elsewhere and I think that would be ok. I disagree that this is "dumber" or justifies abandoning country. It is in fact simply a different opinion.
Evolution is important to understand and discuss but not necessarily in such a polarized way. No one needs to leave the country because grant money might be stopped. Write some letters to your elected representatives and make your views known. If they don't do the job then use your vote to make a change.
I argue that education money should go to this but maybe should be cut in many areas. It is difficult to see the practical applications of evolution and the study of it in our lives. Sure genetics has some roots in evolution but should the money be marked for the study of evolution or the study of genetics?
Let's put the education money where it is intelligent to do so! Let's ensure science is a priority but let's mark the money for the pursuit of education that benefits society and not the pursuit of answering the question "Where do I come from?" whether it is from a theological perspective or from a scientific one.
Goverment should be focused on the betterment of society and it's people. There is more to science than evolutiona and there are far more practical and useful pursuits than the study of pure evolution.
If this was not a mistake what a slime ball way to push an agenda without public discussion!!!!
The problem with teaching evolution is that it is shining a very bright light on the flaws in every religion in the world today. The atheists cheer, but I watch with reservation. Let me explain...
First of all, the atheists cheer because atheists are some of the most religious people I've ever met. They are FURIOUS in their belief that God does NOT exist, with as much proof as the religious have that God DOES exist. We are contained in this universe like a lead box. And for now and all of the foreseeable future, we cannot look outside of it. We cannot even determine if there is an outside of it, but I digress...
More importantly, why do I watch with reservation at the revelation of our own ignorance? Because, every society in the world is built on some form of religion. From the smallest tribe in Africa, to the great United States of America (in God we trust), all these societies have been formed by people who believed in something strong enough to fight for it. So, the evolutionists are playing a game of Jenga with the social fabric of our current world.
There is a story in old Superman comics about a scientifically advanced alien race that became so intelligent that it eventually discovered the meaning of its own existence, and everything. It went on to say that they then destroyed themselves -- they lost the motivation to live. They saw the world as being meaningless, pointless, animalistic, and found neither pleasure nor adventure in it.
We are facing a similar problem. Many, many people in the world live for their beliefs. You take that away, and what do they have? Porn? Video games? Extreme sports? These things are fun, but do not bring meaning or focus to our lives. And if these people lose all purpose then they will either become self-destructive, or will rebound into extreme beliefs.
Everything you see around you was built because of religion. Turn your back on everything we've done and learned over our existence and we will undoubtedly repeat history. Only, we might not make it this far next time.
Essentially, we are bringing ourselves back into a spiritual kind of Dark Age. We spent thousands of years arguing over WHY we are here. We killed each other, we committed horrendous atrocities, and we didn't even have any definition of morality. (They had to make a law 'thou shalt not murder'??)
Now, perhaps the band-aid fix of religion wasn't a perfect solution, but it was some kind of solution that allowed the human population to flourish. We are building sky-scrapers, we are watching cells divide, and we are beginning to understand the birth and death of stars.
Religion isn't such a big issue/concern/problem because it exists. It is these things because WE exist and are unable to stop asking and searching for the answer to this one question: Why?
Science is great, but science does not help a mother cope with the pain of losing her son. And mood altering drugs dehumanize us by taking away our emotions, or giving us fake ones. If you think the religious have a loose grip on reality, just look at people on a cocktail of mood adjusters and stabilizers.
These are not solutions, these are more band-aid fixes. You cannot use science to comfort a child when their dog dies. I think I've beaten this point to death.
I for one am more comfortable with the devil we know, than a world of robotic people living on pills that turn us into, excuse the irony, only God knows what. And while evolution isn't the cause of these problems, it is bringing them into the light long before we have solutions.
I'm not saying that the study of evolution is fruitless. I am saying that it represents a danger to our social fabric much the same as the discovery of atomic energy.
So please, show some respect to our past and try to understand that the world is made up of many confused people who will spend their entire lives searching for happiness, and meaning, things which the theory of evolution does not bring them.
Let me leave you with one last analo
Ok, Ill give ID a chance.
:)
So the general concept is that the Bible is 100% correct and god created all things on heaven and earth. All in a 7 day span (6 and 1 to rest). There is no way that genesis could just be a story, told to teach a moral point.
If that is the case, then the rest of the bible must be 100% correct. Why would God lie to us?
So, I hope you are ready for HELL! The conservatives seem to think that bringing about the end times will accelerate them into heaven and bring about heaven on earth. So in Revelation 7:3-4
3"Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God." 4Then I heard the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel.
If the bible is 100% correct and genesis is to be an accrete telling of the creation. Then revelation is an accrete telling of the end times and only 144,000 will be called up to heaven and miss the end of the world! When the rapture comes there is a good chance that YOU will be left behind! Think about it.
Now add to that the 120,000 go missing in California each year. I would say YOU HAVE BEEN LEFT BEHIND! This is HELL on EARTH!
Enjoy!
if I was to say how I really feel about evolution (micro and macro)and what should be taught that I would be modded -5 troll
Seeing as the distinction between "micro" and "macro" evolution is nothing but a troll in the first place, I can understand why.
Hint: define "species", or "kind", in a way that satisfies both a scientific definition, and those folks in the micro/macro evolution camp.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The creationist argument isn't that we've never seen a species evolve into another species, because, as you say, that is easy to debunk by the simple fact that we've seen it happen many times in e.g. bacteria. The argument they use now is that we've never seen a species evolve into a completely different and vastly more complex species. Intelligent design accepts evolution on the small scale -- one kind of finch to another kind of finch, one kind of bacteria to another kind of bacteria.
I outlined a few words here to show one very important thing - before microscopes they did claim that. And if they're accepting one kind of finch to another, it's another admission they've made even more recently. They haven't accepted anything, they have been dragged into it kicking and screaming because the evidence is overwhelming.
Religious science - if there was ever a contradiction in terms - has been losing countless claims ever since they had to accept the earth was circling the sun, and probably before that too. Every time they lose a claim, they go on to fuzzier and weaker claims that are harder and harder to prove false. Once they claimed the earth was 6000 years old - we've got so many fossil records, tree rings, ice samples and whatnot to prove that's blatantly false it's hilarious.
First they denied the small changes like inheriting hair color etc. could lead to speciation at all, but we discovered microscopes and observed it in microorganisms. Then they denied it could happen in complex organisms, but we've observed it in fish and butterflies and many others. Now they claim it can't make organisms more complex?
If creationists ever went to see a psychiatrist, they would be diagnosed with some sort mental disorder for making up wild and unfounded stories but despite being constantly debunked, they keep on making up new ones. I mean how much bullshit should you take before you accept that the crystal ball or tea leaves or monkey's butt they pulled it out of has no credibility at all? Even if God did tell them the truth, whoever wrote it down obviously got wasted, had a complete blackout and decided to make something up instead because it's wrong, wrong, wrong.
That is my big problem with taking any of their claims seriously - if the book was full of facts those people couldn't possibly have known, but then got confirmed by modern science I'd take that as proof of God, scientific method or not. That's not what happening though - they're losing ground time and time again. I just see more and more evidence that whoever wrote that book didn't have a clue about Creation.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
How soon we forget the abortion clinics laid seige to and the physicians MURDERED by our own homegrown taliban types.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Mod parent up that is my two points exactly.
1. That statements of faith are different from theories derived from repeatedly testing reality. Some theories are less valid because they aren't testable. The reason that's true is there are an infinite number of untestable theories. For example I could say the magic snot of the purple unicorn provided the "energy" to make life possible. As an untestable theory it has the EXACT same epistemological status as the monotheistic creation myth. Basing ANY sort of political theory on an untestable by it's nature theory about reality is not wise. There are NOT an infinite number of equally provable scientific theories as the untrue ones TEST as untrue and are eliminated as Lamarckism and "ether" in space were. Therefore we have a solid way to tell if scientific theories are true very unlike the subjective feeling that faith requires you to privilege one of infinite number of by their nature unprovable theories above another unprovable theory. Sorry if that hurts your feelings sometimes reality plays hardball.
2. You can believe any damn stupid thing about the tentacles of the flying spaghetti monster feeding "energy" to your brain that you like as long as you don't interfere with people who are working hard to figure out the fundamental laws of the universe by theories substantiated by repeated testing. Or to put it bluntly Dr. Martin Luther King is one of my heroes but I wouldn't want him teaching my biology class.
Finally note I'm not saying various cultures creation myths aren't beautiful or don't have valuable ethical lessons to teach, just that we shouldn't use these fundamentally unprovable myths to squelch the pursuit of more provable knowledge.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Don't forget to buy lotto tickets and get extended warranties on electronics. You'd be stupid not to....
So, which one of the government agencies blew up the twin towers?
Or was it the jews?
Or was it the Masons?
Or was it ______ ?
Which crackpot idea you gonna support?
Or was it the one where two planes flew into the buildings that caused them to collapse, within an hour (Never mind that they were designed NOT to collapse in this case).
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You know, I read all these comments and it gets me wondering. What happened to the diversity of our Nation? I mean, the United States was founded with the intent of providing Political AND Religious freedoms to it's citizens. But as time goes on all I see is the exact opposite.
Everyone harps on the current government party as being ignorant, and blames them for our War over seas. Apparently our current government is inept, and articles like this, it would seem, aim to point out this fact as much as possible. However what everyone overlooks is the fact that we have been at a political civil war ourselves for decades. We ourselves have been at an anti-religious war for decades as well.
Our school system is the front for much of this war. A war where minority rule is the dogma of the times. If anyone speaks out agains Evolution being taught in our schools they are branded a religious zealot and waved to the side. But if anyone speaks out against Religion being taught in our schools they are branded to be the voice of the people and given every bit of attention they could desire.
I hate to break it to you, but Evolution, however you look at it, is not a majority voice. I completely agree that evolutionary science is invaluable. I completely agree that it should not be thrown to the wayside. I do however know that the majority of this country is religious, all different flavors of religion, and they are force fed Evolution with every mouthful of "Education" they get from our school system. I just cannot sympathize with articles like this one when most of our scientific community obviously garners some deep seeded hatred for religious belief systems. Most notably a hatred of Christian belief systems.
Now to be quite fair, the Christian community has done quite enough to alienate the Scientific community. They are just as close minded as the Evolutionists when it comes to acceptance of the other's belief system. And amidst it all the political arrows fly all the more between the political parties, and people wonder why the other countries of the world deem America to be an inept political entity.
All this just goes to say, look at the root cause of the strife before pointing fingers. I would bet good money that we find ourselves to be the reason so many things fail, not the political puppets we ourselves put into power.
According to the Bible Adam and Eve had 3 sons: Cain, Abel and Seth. So, to populate the Earth, the 3 boys had do it with their Mother, then with their own daughters, Adam with his granddaughters, etc, etc... Way to go Creationists! Let's all promote and revel in incest and perversion. It's a small step, but in the right direction... Now, what about that guy Jesus and these 12 other men...
You didn't accurately read what I said, I said ethics WERE subjective and important. Being subjective they themselves cannot be derived from science, yet once they are derived if we do not act on decsions based on empirical sense data we will act in a suicidal fashion. How we derive ethics is an interesting topic but it really seems outside the scope of this discussion.
Ethics rally have NOTHING to do with the subject at hand which is whether the government ought to be interfering with the research it funds based on ASSUMPTIONS of faith.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Com'on hit and run AC... come back and fight you yellow belly coward...
"thinks" that the act of using your brain - ID or not, in your case probably not.
Read the rest Further, stotting gazelles have never been seen to be caught that is called "observation". Thinking and Observation are essential components in the advancement of knowledge.
I agree that the clerical error needs to be fixed, but just to play devil's advocate for a second, under the overall category "26.13 Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology" the Evolution Biology should be 26.1303. The last option in this category is "26.1399 Ecology, Evolution, Systematics and Population Biology, Other". Wouldn't be simple to just choose this "Other" category, and have it be over and done with?
It seems like a simple solution if the problem is not fixed... which as I stated earlier I believe it should.
TheDarkener (198348)
You're not? Wake me up when you've been around since 1997.
I never said I was smart... Yeah, yeah, the I before E... Gah
Yay, I have a sig.
----
Big Bang Theory: God decided to create life and BANG, it happened.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Sure, because deaf and blind children don't need additional infastructure. They can hear/see if they want to...
There are specialized (private) schools for handicapped kids, but they aren't paid for. The Voucher thing sounds promising, but more government programs don't fix fuckups.
How about sufficiently large tax breaks/bonuses to low income families who put kids in private/specialized school? What eliteist application process??
Don't trust the government to fix this. Public schools need to be made transparent, not to mention everything above municpal street sweepers.
Don't get me wrong, I'm with you most of the way. Just the last sentence is fault-ridden. -H
Did anyone read the list, go take a look http://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN0606A .pdf
Search for evolution, you'll be amazed...
Science and nonsense should be provided in equal amounts, for the sake of balance?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
What you truely feel about the subject can likely be inferred due to your use of the "micro and macro" statement. Micro and macro evolution are primarily terms used by those with an poor or incorrect understanding of evolutionary science in an attempt to try to reconcile percieved small and large scale changes (thus micro and macro). Some also use the terminology to allow them to accept some observed evolutionary changes (labeling it micro) while still allowing them to reject the idea that different species come from common ancestors (or if they have a very poor understanding of the subject, the old and tired "I didn't evolve from an ape!" arguement). The problem is that the percieved large changes, such as "species change" are the result of millions of years worth of small changes. Also, the whole field of speciation and cladistics arbitrary (to a degree) anyhow, as these are man-made labels and cut-off points. Our current understanding of the way things work says that micro- and macro- prefixes are unneccesary. There is only evolution. Evolution is fact - we can observe it. The Theory of Evolution is our study of Evolution, and our attempts to uncover the how's and why's of it.
Now, I'm not saying that I know what you believe, but your statement gives some clues. If I have read those clues correctly, then my above statement, I hope, clears up any misconceptions you may have about the subject. I am not, however, an evolutionary biologist, and I encourage you to look up the subject on your own (using reputable scientific sources) so as to better understand it.
As for the rest of your comment, I too believe that it was likely a clerical error, as it has already been fixed. I would say that it is absolutely necessary to fund this subject of study - not because of any "us vs them" arguement against those with faith, but rather simply because this is the study of how we came to be what we are, to say nothing of how the rest of life on earth came to be in its current form. This is the history of life! This is the study of where we have been, and where we are going! It also makes for great TV on the Discovery Channel.
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
They've publicly stated that it was a mistake. They are obviously going to fix it. The point is that this list may have been intentionally sabotaged.
If this is indeed your perspective, there is nothing that this scientist (or others I suspect) could say to you except to suggest taking some classes in bioscience. ID does not count.....
I will tell you that people *do* have problems with #1 in that they do not believe even in selective pressure. As to what you believe about a "historical" theory about events happening over millions of years, I would encourage you to read about paleontology, geology, botany, molecular biology and genetics among a myriad of other sciences that help to support the theory of evolution.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Abstracting away "any kind of god", the statement "We have no scientific evidence of foo, so we have no reason to think foo" is just bad logic. Humans are experts at pattern recognition because in practice it works, even though correlation doesn't equal causation.
Summary: People who do not study evolution are not suitable for "high caliber" education.
I agree and disagree. I agree that the study of evolution is important. So are many other aspects of science.
On the flip side. . . Rejecting students because of a single issue / single theory / single area reflects exactly what is wrong with our education system and our nation as a whole.
Complete disgregard of a student on a single criterion is short sighted. There are great scientists who have had little background with evolution. That is no indicator that they are flawed or have some broken logic that segregates them from the rest of society and higher education. To reject a student based on this one criteria indicates your logic is flawed and you are as limited in understanding education as you claim others may be regarding science.
How can we foster an educated public that innovates and invents if we slap them with a mandate that they must study and accept everything that we accept now? Innovation is discovery and challenging what we think we know now. If we had not challenged hard science at one point the world would still be flat.
Again the flip side. . . How can we innovate and challenge something if we turn our back on it and refuse to discuss it? This is the same logic that prompted religous institutions to execute people because of their notions on whether the Earth was the center of the universe or not.
We must study evolution as much as we need to study Psychology and Sociology BUT we need to stop being so polarized about it. Denying someone education because they lack a background in a single area is the complete opposite of the other side and both are equally wrong.
Haha, right. I'm sure that wal mart will stop using illegals for janitorial.
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I think you mean three hypotheses for the price of one..
Given the circumstances of this discussion, this is not mere quibbling.
Government spending generally helps out a lot more than it hurts. States which higher taxes and higher spending do better in a whole host of things than states which don't. There's not a lot of wiggle room for libertarian theories when you've got a whole bunch of actual states to look at. The real world has a very surprising and well-known liberal bias.
Also, Hillary is going to get bitchslapped in the future, because the Democratic party is moving left while she is not. She's part of the old Democratic leadership which believed that the best way to get elected was to be Republican lite. Look at how we're fucking Lieberman. He's the first. The rest had better become real liberals, or just join the Republicans.
The war on drugs is going to be harder to deal with, but the left elements of the Democratic party, of which I am one, are HIGHLY against the war on drugs. I personally believe that even heroin should be legal. Pot should be sold in the grocery stores right next to the bottles of vodka.
Gun control isn't even an issue in the Democratic left. Take a look around. There's no major gun control cases anywhere on the national scene. Nobody's even introducing a bill to control guns. I can tell you that in the groups I hang around with, we have a VERY serious issue with prohibitions of any kind. We cannot rationally justify it. We're liberals through and through.
Finally, take a look at the results. Bill Clinton gave us budget surpluses, and all the Republicans going back 25 years have pushed us into 10 trillion dollars worth of debt. Frankly, I am encouraged that you're holding your nose and voting Democratic, but I'm dismayed that you split the blame equally between the two big parties. I hope that will change once you see what the more liberal Democratic party does in future years. We understand and can communicate our moral values in a way that Democrats haven't done in 50 years.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Yep, and fun too
What you think is #2 should really read, "A bunch of data about events happening over millions of years." The data is merely a bunch of facts in need of explanation - we have fossils, we have to come up with the best explanation for why they exist. What's the *only* scientific explanation that anyone has ever been able to come up with? With good ol' #1.
Hope that clarifies your confusion about anyone "believing" your theory #2. We don't "believe" anything - we have data that we collect, and we try to explain it via theory.
Here's a quick and dirty way to check my viewpoint - try to disagree with any one of these three statements:
1. We have data spanning millions of years that shows many intermediate forms of organisms that are similar in many ways to modern organisms. This data can be arranged chronologically into a tree structure based on morphological similarity. (If you disagree about the existence of this physical evidence, then you can stop reading and go back to whatever it is you do.)
2. We have a theory that explains how organisms can change over time, and (as you mentioned yourself) said theory is well understood and quite easy to demonstrate.
3. The theory of how organisms can change over time (evolution) is a possible explanation for the physical evidence that we have. In fact, the theory explains the evidence so well that most scientists accept it as fact, in the same way that we accept relativity as fact. No, the theory is no more perfect than relativity is, but most people are pretty positive that a perfect theory (which we may never discover) would be a modified evolutionary theory, rather than another theory entirely.
Now tell me, what's the best scientific explanation for all of the fossils we've dug up? (Hint: it's not an "untestable, unrepeatable historical theory" like the imaginary one you called #2. It's Evolutionary Theory, which you called #1.)
[javac] 100 errors
...when people try to apply to that field of study and get denied because it's not on the list.
Read my short stories - You won't regret it.
I think that's natural. With a society like we have, where race is thrown out continuously, it's natural for people to associate with their own race. I'd argue that's bad. But nevertheless, the people who are well to do in the white community are embarassed by and have a dimmer view of those "trash" elements of the white community. Likewise, I've known plenty of black people who are equally, if not more, disgraced by the "trash" in their communities. (i.e., welfare moms, gangbangers, etc.) (And yes, for reference, the SAME applies to whites, but I think they're more tolerant of it, to their detriment.)
Look, it isn't a race issue. It's a social and cultural issue, and it's one that revolves around social values. Take race totally out of the equation, and you get the same result, therefore race is independent. Sure, perhaps proportionally some races are "worse off" than others and abuse the system more than others, but that isn't the point at all. The point, in fact, is that there are people out there who believe that everyone else should support them. That's the bottom line.
I don't care if you're white, black, hispanic, asian, purple, or Martian. I honestly couldn't care less. I just care what you do. That might have something to do with why I have a lot of Nigerian (read: BLACK) friends who are just as disgusted as I am. Or Mexican (read: HISPANIC) friends, who are just as disgusted as I am.
Now, if someone wants to call me a racist (beyond the typical Slashdot oneliner dare-counter of "Racist!"), feel free. But I care what people do, not what color their skin is.
This seems a very naive, "outside looking-in" statement to me. Who says there is no debate within the evolutionary community? I'm not a biologist, but I'm sure there is quite heated debate within the community, though to outsiders it may not be obvious. It's true that few scientists contend that evolution is a fundementally flawed theory, and that most contention is about the details of the mechanisms. That doesn't make the theory "dogma", it just makes it a pretty good theory. It's like fluid dynamics. Very few people will come out and say "the Navier-Stokes equations are wrong!" Does that make it a dogma? Does that mean there is no more debate? Of course not. There's lots of debate about the exact mechanics of phenomena like turbulence. However, there's not a lot of debate about the basic principles of the field, because most people believe them to be sound.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Given that most liberals espouse a nuanced, shades-of-gray worldview, that seems especially monochrome. The reality is that I found Bush's actions less bad than Kerry's planned actions. Put another way, I think the country would fare less poorly if it continued on its current course than if Kerry enacted everything he claimed to support. Given that the race was going to be close, I chose to vote for Bush rather than a third party that I liked more because our current election system is broken that way.
I understand and accept that you chose differently. Please at least recognize that I voted as I did for researched, meditated reasons, and not because "Dub is teh 1337 and Kerry suxx04z."
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Personally, I find this kind of behavior outrageous! There should be no federal education grant for low-income college students. Doing so shows an innately unscrupulous descrimination between individuals based solely on income. If talent is insufficient justification for a grant in this egalitarian society, then such a grant should not be provided by the government. Anything less is merely showing favoritism; leave the charity to private institutions.
Yes, but this only applies using modulo 2 arithmetic. Jesus and evolution are not a binary choice.
And what's this about not getting too technical. We're geeks and nerds. Technical is what we do!
Problem is that very few people have a basic understanding of the $3 thing hanging off their keychain. It might as well be magic... Or an act of god to the uneducated.
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how those who oppose evolution seem to have no problem believing in social darwinism.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
As a scientist and global citizen (who also has spiritual beliefs) ... As an American...
According to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, you are also a citizen of the state in which you reside. What are your feelings as a State citizen? If some States feel a field of study is more important, can they not choose to fund them locally?
I am disturbed by this continued assault on science
How do you distinguish between a "continued assault on science" and people in a democracy deciding where they want the tax money spent? Both the scientist and the farmer from Ohio mentioned in an earlier post get equal say.
I am disturbed by the implications of this for our country and its ability to effectively compete in an economy that is increasingly globalized.
At what point, if any, does a population decide that it no longer cares to compete, and that it is content with the status it has achieved? In most United States, the citizens have all of the food, shelter, air conditioning, and entertainment they can handle. Where is the incentive to do more?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
I never suggested in my response that you said that ethics were not subjective and important. I fully realize that is not your argument at all, and I agree with you. However, you must have expected an antagonistic reponse, because you hardly spent a minute thinking about what I wrote before shooting off your rebuttal. Perhaps you should more accurately read my response.
I was merely responding to your assertion that a firm foundation in science is necessary _before_ ethics can be really useful. I agreed with your idea that an understanding of science can contribute to the sense of ethics, but I disagreed that understanding objective reality has to come _first_.
Repeat after me, "would you like fries with that?"
Being able to say that in a foreign language may prove to be helpful in two or three generations...
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Science can indeed make a lie out of religion, to the extent that religions traditionally make numerous claims about the nature of the material world. For example, its quite clear that all of humanity is not descended from a single couple, even though the Bible says so. Some religions (eg: Catholicism), have learned that its pointless to fight science, and have indeed shifted the boundary of their influence to contain only the metaphysical, moral, and ehtical realms. Other religions, notably most brands of Protestantism as well as Islam, have not been so wise.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I think the problem is, you're thinking about the religious fanatic (and I am NOT here referring to normal religious people, in any sense whatsoever) group as one that wants to have "their way", but not realizing that "their way" includes MURDERING (by the directive of "God") every person they do not think is "worthy". Clearly this view is absolutely irreconcilable to any sane government system, and must be crushed utterly before it is allowed to destroy the lives of millions of people (which is their end agenda: murdering anyone they do not agree with through a legal system designed to persecute such people, and cow others that would otherwise speak out). Even if it was a plausible that such a group would peacefully separate from the sane people left in the country, their agenda will have not changed, and require them to murder any citizen of another country who does no share their exact beliefs. You can't try to apply rational thinking to their actions, because they are not rational. They view those that disagree with them as direct (not metaphorical) agents of "Satan".
The answer is mindfuck.
Pupils should not believe what they are told in school and 60% of leading scientific teachings are bogus as we will be told in 20 years - in fact the teachings which are considered bogus today were bogus 20 years ago as well. So thinking different is important in evolutionary theory. And maybe the alternative teachings are more entertaining and pupils learn something important for life: resistance against indoctrination.
Social darwinism is crap and was crap but society also follows evolutionary principles.
Let's consider them:
1) mutation
2) recombination
3) selection
4) isolation
Very good principles, also for US society. The current mindfuck approach follows "4) isolation" but real fucking mindfuck is based on 2) recombination. Scientific purity approaches follow 3) selection which is the most problematic one because pluralism is essential for evolutionary progress. But, ehemm it makes it easier to separate wheat from chaff. Just aks them about their opinion. Ehmm, and 4) mutation is just a new braindead idea in the field of evolution... (sorry alien theory is already existing). Should not happen too often.
The example of the stoting gazelle is from Richard Dawkins excellent book, "The Blind Watchmaker." Or maybe it was in "The Selfish Gene." I'm going to assume it's in "Selfish Gene" because I have my copy of "Blind Watchmaker" handy and the only mention of Gazelles is in another context.
If you're interested at all in evolution/genetics, read the latter. If you're interested in evolution vs. creationism, read the former. In any case if you haven't read Dawkins, you don't know evolution as well as you think you do*.
I'd love to tell you the reason proposed for stoting but I forget - there's a lot of information in those books!
(* exceptions made for actual evolutionary scientists)
I didn't see how your post related to this tangent, although it clearly related to the over-all thread.
I'm sorry, but I couldn't let this kind of ignorance go unanswered. It's just such a false view of the world it's not even funny. The church-men were the only ones who *knew* the Earth was round during the middle ages because they were the only ones with an education.
OK; I suppose I really should challenge that one. They weren't the only ones. And it didn't require an "education" to know the Earth's shape.
Sailors on large bodies of water have always known that they were on a more-or-less spherical body. After enough time on the water, even if you don't go out of sight of land and just sail up and down the coast, you start to "see" the shape. Your brain infers it from the way that things appear and disappear behind the horizon. Any competent sailor will see this. I can attest that even on smaller bodies like Lake Michigan, a few hours of actively sailing around will make the people controlling the sails very aware of the shape of the surface and shores. Their passengers might not see it, but the sailors will.
The academic and clerical crowd has traditionally considered people like sailors "uneducated". But the idea of a flat world would have been laughable to any good sailor at any time in history. Or prehistory, for that matter. By the time you've become good with a sail, you've spent enough time studying the water that you know without thinking what shape it's in.
If you read the histories of Columbus' trip, you'll find that there was no dispute about the world's shape then, especially not among sailors. The dispute was over its size. It turns out that Columbus was badly wrong. He thought the world's circumference was only about 2/3 of what it really is. If he hadn't run into those continents out in the middle of the ocean, he and his crew would most likely have died before they made it to land.
Some time ago, I read a cute puzzle: Using only technology available to the classical Greek and Roman engineers, and standing in one place, how can you measure the size of the Earth? The answer turns out to be quite simple.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Stephen Rissing seems to think this couldn't possibly be a random occurence because the probability is too high. Is he detecting an intelligent design in this mutation of the Federal Grant Code?
http://metapundit.net
Wow, indeed.
'Intelligent Oversight'?
The stem cell policy of the US is bad enough but this takes the biscuit if its anything other than a typo. Frankly, it would not surprise me if areas of the mid-west became the breeding ground for the next generation of religious extremists, assuming it isn't already, and religious extremists are hardly favour of the month at the moment.
For example, did you learn in school that William Harvey discovered how blood circulates through the lungs and heart? Actually, it was ibn Nafis, in the 13th century. His writings first reached Europe in 1547. Suddenly, by 1553 Servetus was giving an accurate account of how it works. Harvey came later with some direct observations on animals.
The lesson is that a vibrant intellectual and scientific culture can be destroyed and its benefits lost.
Why is evolution being touted here like a bunch of propaganda? Evolution sounds more like science fiction than science, and is every bit as impossible to prove or disprove as religion. Evolution can't explain where matter comes from, or how it just happened to become oriented in just the right way to allow life (and very complex life at that) to 'happen'. To overcome this shortcoming, we told that everything has happended over millions and billions of years, making it impossible to prove. Scientific experiments that support the theory really only show that under controlled, laboratory conditions, x and y can happen. Looking at the evidence, evolution has as many or more things against it as there are for it. In short, evolution is just as much a matter of faith as any religion, so quit saying that only 'ignorant, uneducated' people would not believe it.
No, No, No .... You need to teach the children how to pass a TEST in readin', 'riting, and a'rithmetic so that we can prove the teacher, principle, and school board are doing their job and can get their bonus. It doesn't matter if they can apply the knowledge in the real world or slowly build on the concepts to develop understanding, they just need the test scores. Who cares if there is one less subject. I doubt there is a question about evolution on the test so it doesn't matter.
Bloody hell why do I not have mod points? Your statement is far more well thought, and probable compared to all the kneee jerk reactions I've seen.
Sorry..just a 2000 number..I guess i'm a n00b. =p
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
>In order to fully utilize the subjectivity enhancing insights of ethics we must FIRST have the firm grounding in empirical reality
provided by science.
Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance artists would back you up on that statement. They were creatives, they were esthetes, and to underpin their art they mastered anatomy first.
Don't come to Australia. It's also in major decline. We're generally just behind the US and aspire to the stupidity.
* We have a lapdog for PM who aspires to be friendly with your Mr Dubbya. We also have one political party controlling both houses of parliament at the moment. Very bad. At one stage we had an entire political party gaining seats that based its policy on racist views. (I use to think on the who our multiculturalism was wonderful, but recent incidents like the Bondi "race riot" seem to have proven me very wrong).
*We have had a ridiculous decline in the sciences in the last few years, but we never had the population or funds to do major research on the scale you see in the US. (We have no space program to speak of for instance so we're intensely proud of our one current shuttle astronaut who of course has moved to the US).
* Our public health is not what it use to be (give it 5-10 years and I suspect it'll be as bad as the US).
* We've never had fair use laws. Technically its illegal to even time shift here (though it's rarely policed, you wouldn't want to annoy anyone in power if you taped TV shows).
* Our industrial relationtions laws have just gone to shit. We've actually removed a lot of the protection people enjoyed in the last century. Now if you work for a small company you can be sacked without reason, but then rehired at below the old minimum wage.
* We've got a police force actively campaigning against their own oversight. Law enforcement here is terrible. Just looking at policing our raods: In NSW at least most people speed most of the time despite zero tolerance (technically you can lose half your license if you're going 1km over the limit when "double demerits" are in effect - which is every major public holiday and surrounding days).
In fact I suspect you need to do your homework before you move to any country. The way things are at the moment I think all you'll be doing is swaping one kind of awful for another, only you get to lose any friends and contacts and have to start again.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Well many of you will take offense to this, but if your first paragraph is your belief then get out now!
I am tired of hearing all these people say I'm going to leave the United States cause it sucks so bad, well then go and leave the rest of us idiots to fend for ourselves. Does my country have issues? Heck yes, but I'd rather be here then anywhere else on this earth. If this place is so bad why are so many people trying to get in? I say you leave now and make room for the ones that want to show up. Have a good day and leave your passport at the borer.
Ken
Stop calling it The "Theory" of Evolution! It'a a FACT! We have fossil remains, carbon dating (how I love dating Carbon... so Black!), genetic maps, etc, it is proven! When we still call it a "Theory", we shoot ourselves in the foot.
You are right in some ways, but in an important point you are wrong: Science in itself has to be atheistic, and theistic pre-suppositions can never be a part of science.
Scientists - as people - may entertain religious / theistic ideas, and there is nothing wrong with that. Science does not need to rule out the possibility of a god at all, and any scientist who decides on being an atheist doesn't do so out of genuine scientific reasoning, but out of personal "taste" (which may be influenced by scientific thought, but is not truely scientific). But introducing any theistic ideas into sience - quite simply - isn't science any more. It crap. Always.
Why is that so? Three important reasons (generalizable beyond Evolution vs. ID, but it's convenient to use that as an example):
1) Any thought of "someone made it be that way" is a crass violation of Ockham's razor. "Intelligent Design" may be just two small words, but it actually means establishing a highly complicated mechanism: A being not directly observable to us, having unknown extreme powers, creating - out of some unknown motivation - whatever we observe in just the way we observe it, by some unknown means.
2) Any thought of "someone made it be that way" is not falsifiable. That's in part due to the many unknowns mentionend in 1). Most importantly it's because whatever seemingly contradictory evidence you may find, whichever evidence supporting alternative hypotheses you may find, "well HE just made it be that way" is an excuse you can never get around. In contrast, while I think it's highly unlikely, the basic assumptions of Evolution theory will turn out to be wrong, these assumption can be challenged by evidence. If we were to find out, the eye really just popped out of nowhere, not being there at all in one generation, then suddenly there in the next, that would be a strong case against evolution. If we were to find out measured rates of mutation are too high or too low to support our model, that would be good falsifying evidence. If we were to find a human sceleton 100 million years old, that would seriously challenge everything evolutionist believe in. So evolution theory can be challenged scientifically, that's being tried constantly, and sometimes those criticism even lead to identification of weak spots in the current models, to subsequent small adjustments made here and there, just (so far) nothing important enough to prove all the basic assumptions wrong.
3) Any thought of "someone made it be that way" prevents deeper understanding. Science is all about trying to push back the borders of the unknown. So let's assume there is a god, and let's assume He created the universe and all life. But how did He do that? It's not just not good enough for science to say "well, it's alive". A scientist wants to know, how all the organs function to keep it alive. What all the organs do. How they are controlled by strands of DNA, how they are built up from DNA. How the DNA is passed on, and how it changes. How the DNA is structured, where the DNA came from. What conditions on earth allowed the first DNA to form. How those conditions were achieved on earth. How earth came into being. How planets form, how the universe was 5 billion years ago. How the universe is held together. What's inside an atom, what is a quark?... Much of this we already have a pretty good idea of, and many things are left to find out. But at any point of progress we could as well have stopped and said "well, He just created DNA", "He just keeps those atoms from disintegrating", "He just makes apples fall to the ground". Maybe He even does. But the only way to advance our understanding is to keep trying to spy yet another trick from Him / nature, try to understand how the great magician does his show. Assume there is no magic, and nothing that cannot be understood. So what if we never find out about the grand unified theory, or just why the sky is blue (ok, we've got that one figured out, already
The Chinese pegged their currency at 1/8 of a dollar, thereby keeping their own people and products artificially cheap. The US government could have slapped tariffs onto the imported chinese products to make up for the fact that the Chinese don't allow their currency to float on the currency exchanges. Did they? Nope.
Deleted
Religion doesn't tell us anything about the way things are...
Not true. Read here or here here.
>faith finds challenges to it's ideology threatening
Not all faith, and I'd argue that feeling threatened is a mark of insecure faith.
"It was not as a child that I learned to believe in Christ and to confess His faith. My 'Hosannah' has burst forth from a huge furnace of doubt." == Dostoyevsky
Pat Robertson and other insane fanatics happened to the Republican Party.
Big words? Try getting lost in one big paragraph... It's very difficult to see the point in all of that. Maybe I'm just not smart enough... ;)
Not after the next election there won't be. Illegal immigration is the number two annoyed topic that people will be voting on come november(the first is the stupid interventionist war). Globalists seeking to second world the US will be voted out, and those illegals will be *going home* as their employment dries up.
Wishful thinking. There is a reason your sort called themselves the "Know nothing" party seven or so iterations back.
Face it. Every attempt to eradicate or exile a given group within a population of humans has failed since the dawn of history*. And thank God because diversity is the greatest strength a population can have. It is one of the main reasons the United States has prospered. It gave us victory over our enemies (The Axis poorly utilized their resources when they refused to let women work and relegated swaths of their population to extermination or forced labour. We on the other hand allowed people of all stripes to work freely and were victorious).
The furor over immigration is just as useless as the other smokescreens thrown by our government to distract us from the fact they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing about the things they can actually work on. It's a canard that gets us all riled up, allows inflammatory discussions involving racism and such to take up time that should be spent discussing what we can do to make our nation better and win / end the war we seem to be fighting. Gay Marriage, Abortion, Obscenity, and Mexican immigrants are all wedge issues that they know will divide us, and which for the most part the government has no business dealing with (and really cannot).
When it comes to the specific issue of immigrants from mexico (because let's face it, for all their talk the Minutemen sure don't seem to care about patrolling the Canadian border which is the only border crossing Al Qaeda has been known to use), there have been migrant workers for centuries and the presence of "undocumented" workers is a simple reality. There's no sense in trying to send 7-25 million (depending on who you believe) people back who are currently working and contributing to our economy. The fact they are outside the system is simply further proof our system does not reflect reality in terms of our economic needs.
The whole system of registering immigrants and control based on quotas originated from provably racist legislation which has since been tweaked but retains its roots. Originally anyone who could come here was allowed to come here and could apply for citizenship after proving they'd lived here a couple of years. If you want control I say you may as well go to the simpler model that anyone who has a job in this country can come here and stay and apply for citizenship after a time; if we're going to keep quotas we're going to need to make them large enough to match the true rate of immigration into this country and speed up the process to match the digital age we live in and again the needs of society.
We need immigrants. They are our only hope of paying off the national debt and social security, and they are the only way we will currently retain the level of population we have. They inject new blood, new ideas, and enrich our cultural experience. The fact that the best people from every country and every field can choose to become Americans, and the fact they often do, makes us all that much stronger. Confucius said that if you treat your population properly people will flock to your country with their children on their backs. That's part of what he described as the ideal state and that is essentially what the United States, for all its faults, became. That's the America we should be protecting.
But again, getting people like me to argue with people like you about immigration is a distraction that keeps you and I from spending time focusing on the things we might agree on, like the fact we are involved in potentially endless conflicts
If you train a person to believe that 90% of what they learn isn't useful for anything and is well below their capacity to learn it when they actually need to, you do two things. First, you make them disrespect education in general. Second, you train people to learn to use information that they can look up, rather than memorizing it mindlessly (this is a good thing).
Unfortunately, our testing system is oriented far less towards reasoning than it is towards rote memorization. The way I look at it, even now as a physician, is that we should train skills, not memorization of facts. Is memorization necessary? Of course it is. But for God's sake, tell the students how to use it. If they get a hook for it, they'll actually remember it!
I think you're overrating the forces of darkness. They don't want to push us into the dark ages, they are genuinely ignorant of why their position doesn't make sense. I have discussed creationism with some fervent adherents, who otherwise seem like intelligent people. When a topic of religious belief comes onto the table, it's as if a part of their brain shuts down when you discuss it. They seem incapable of assessing the arguments against their position. I lay this off to the concept of cognitive dissonance, which I belief is at the root of much of the religious confilct in the wold today. Creationism is just one aspect to the overall phenomenon, which is that when a person holds a non-factually based beliuef, and orients much of their world view and perception of self worth around that belief, facts that challenge the belief must be denied as falsehoods, or the belief risks crumbling. If you don't have an independently supportable world view that can survive these facts, you're going to deny them, and fear/hate those who promote them. This is the case for creationism. If you aren't philosophically sophisticated enough to understand how to mingle your faith and science, or if you are of a fundamentalist belief that holds that the only truth is biblical, then you have to hold to creationism, or your world view is threatened. Hence the lack of ability to hold a rational debate on the subject. We'll see more of this in the clashes between Islam and Christians, the fundamentalists on each side of which just can't ever understand why the other group feels as they do, and hold that the infidels must be forced to adopt 'our' way of thinking.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Hence, faith.
Any Christian, Muslim, Jew, Jehova's Witness, Mormon, Hindu, Buddhist etc. who hasn't ever had a moment where they realised and confronted the fact that in the end you can never prove, let alone conclusively prove, the existance of God or any story of creation is a sad person indeed.
I appreciate everything people do to try to prove God. I enjoy philosophy and science a great myself. The bottom line is, and it's spelled out pretty clearly in most religions, that it comes down to faith. If you believe in God because you think there's empirical evidence to his existance, you're bound for a rude awakening when you frantically search for that evidence as reassurance that you'll still exist in some way, shape or form following the shedding of your mortal coil.
Ultimately, it is a narrow mind and world view that favors one interpretation of scripture over a natural mechanic we can see clearly. Creationism isn't the only way to read Genesis.
And I find it highly unlikely that Jesus is going to say at the Judgement, "That dude? Sure he sinned, but he loved me whole heartedly, followed my teachings as best he could, and hey I DIED for him.... wait... Evolution? You believed in Evolution? What the HELL were you thinking? Where'd I leave my blowtorch..."
Or...
"That dude? I have never seen a more pompous and self-centered jerk. I mean, you thought Sodom and Gomorrah were hellholes? Look in this guy's heart. I can't bear to even gaze upon his face... wait... Creationism? He believed that? Well! That changes everything! Here's a white robe, milk and honey, and a ticket to the pearly gates!"
That's not to say that all evolution believing people are nice/God fearing and all Creationists are arrogant scumbags. The point is I don't see Evolution/Creationism as being a deciding factor in the fate of your soul, or even a straw that breaks the camel's back.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Given that most liberals espouse a nuanced, shades-of-gray worldview, that seems especially monochrome.
Voting is inherently binary, especially in this country. If you vote for a candidate, then you support them. There's no "I voted 49% Bush, 30% Kerry, 10% Nader, 9% nutjob, and 1% Mickey Mouse, so MOST of my support is for not-Bush". You don't get to complain 2 years that you don't support the guy you voted for, especially when he hasn't changed his tune from the previous 4 years. Maybe you don't like Bush very much, but you still voted the guy into office. Excuse me if I hold the conservatives responsible for him being in office right now, but it's just simple mathematics.
AccountKiller
Yeah, because a few dozen women would never die if abortions were legal.
Now that I've matched your inflammatory statement with my own, let's get back to what seems to be the issue: the theocratic leanings of this administration's supporters. Several times, posters on Slashdot will paint Pro-Lifers as religious people wanting to force their view on the world. Although there are many of them, not all Pro-Lifers advocate an end to contraceptive abortion for theological reasons. They have looked at the issue from a scientific view and can see that the embryo/fetus is a separate living organism from the human female. It is also scientifically proven that this embryo/fetus is human, too.
Many Pro-Choicers feel comfortable making value judgments on other human's lives, despite that being a throwback to many of the dark times in human history. (Nazi's "master race" ideals, slave owners' views that black people weren't really human, etc.) Objectively, though, Pro-Choicers have little justifications for keeping abortion legal.
The argument that pregnant women will harm themselves by seeking illegal abortions holds as much water as saying that "no trespassing" signs & high fences harm trespassers because those would-be trespassers can fall while climbing over the high fences. Advocating killing the embryo/fetus (a human being) to guard against the harm the mother (another human being) might do to herself is a trade off of evils. Instead, women need equality and the power in their relationships to keep from being `stuck` with a pregnancy to begin with.
I take it you also consider not collecting stamps a hobby.
But surely as a percentage of the total electorate they're a small number? How can the insane rule over the sane? Makes no sense...
Evolution can't explain where matter comes from, or how it just happened to become oriented in just the right way to allow life
I honestly wish there were a way to mod you up. More people need to realize that those people who "oppose evolution" do so because, at a fundamental level, they just don't understand it. You statments say more than you realize, and they say you don't know what you're talking about.
As a hint, evolution concerns itself with neither of those things... other theories and fields of science do, but not evolution per say.
You might as well say evolution is wrong because it can't explain magnetism.
No one is going to read your post n3IVI0, because it screams "I am an ignorant moron, please disregard anything I say." Try returning to grade school before using these scary computers to talk on the internets.
You are correct that the Creationist/ID gang has now moved the goal posts--and moved them to an indeterminate point at that. This way, no matter how big a change scientists observe, they can come back with, "That's not completely different enough, we mean bigger than that." Since extreme evolutionary change takes thousands if not millions of years, they are now safe from all challenges. From the point of view of propaganda, this is a clever move. Of course, from the point of view of science, it further discredits Creationism/ID. Indeed, "Intelligent Design" is much less scientific that classical Creationism. The original Creationists were sincere and confident enough in their beliefs to actually make predictions. Unfortunately, most of them turned out to be wrong. So ID has been cast in the vaguest possible terms, "Some intelligent entity (we can't say what) at some time (we can't say when) contributed some degree of design (we can't say how or why) to life." While the original Creationism made predictions, the only thing ID can say is "evolution is wrong." This is why Intelligent Design is dismissed as a joke by virtually the entire scientific community.
Once you start adding up the numbers, farmers and businesses are the ultimate welfare queens, at both the State and Federal levels.
The worst part is that any books a grade school kid would read say the same thing.
My grade school books were correct back in the 70s. We even learned about the Vikings coming to America first. However, I did live in a fairly liberal part of the country.
that there's trouble.
An influential cleric and scholar, never mind what religion, said as late as the 60s "The earth is flat , and anyone who disputes this claim is an atheist who deserves to be punished". His country is not a leader in scientific discovery for some reason. But imagine if he'd bent his intellect toward social reform, improved education, and humane government instead of making a fool of himself on an issue that had almost nothing to do with his faith.
Evolution isn't a religion anymore than gravity or atomic physics are.
When Galileo interpreted that he was seeing moons orbiting Jupiter, rather than the Earth, it may have had implications for the religious dogma of the day, but he was not establishing a new Copernican religion as a replacement for it, he was simply doing science, which is independent of religion.
You are quite right that the scientific community *in*other*fields* did fine when it was still thought that the Earth's geology was produced rapidly in a gigantic flood, but geology was a *mess*, and the old idea that the Earth's geology had to conform with a strict, Biblical literalist interpretation hindered the field for a good century or so. Some people realized the problem and questioned it earlier, such as Leonardo da Vinci's bit of work on the subject, but the majority of European scientists who addressed the question of the Earth's origin didn't toss the global flood ideas they were so religiously attached to until the late 1700s, which is relatively late compared to scientific progress in other fields. To put it on par, not realizing the Earth was vastly old would be like not realizing the planets were alot closer than the stars.
You are also quite right that a little rational debate on the subject is no threat, but the problem is, anyone who wants such a debate on the subject of the origin of the Earth is about 200 years too late to the debate, which was largely settled decades before Darwin started talking about his ideas in biology. That hasn't stopped some people from trying anyway, and claiming such debates are legitimate material in a science classroom. They aren't, anymore than the suggestion epicycles and geocentrism might be right after all would be correct in a astronomy class. As a historical novelty or point of contrast with current ideas, or to show why they are wrong, sure, but as a competing modern theory with equal merit? No way.
You are conflating the fact that scientists of the past and present can be religious with the status of the scientific issues themselves, and then surmising that some scientific theories are establishing a religion. That's just silly. Scientific theories are not atheistic, they aren't theistic either, in that theism isn't considered or negated by them. Do theists and atheists accept that the planets move in accordance with gravity? Mostly, yes (though we can rationally scientifically debate whether current theory about gravity is correct, of course). Does the Hand Of God guide the planets in their orbits or is it a purely atheistic process devoid of God's involvement? Guess what: this isn't a scientific question at all, regardless of what you personally think the answer is. Likewise for all the other scientific issues you have raised. Does that make the idea of gravity atheistic and its teaching in school the establishment of atheistic religion? No. Likewise biological evolution or any other scientific theory you wish to consider. I like to use the term *non*-theistic to describe scientific theories -- they aren't theistic or atheistic. If you were storing their status in a relational database, you'd put in a NULL, not a True or False.
To address your final point, the "fruits" of nuclear physics aren't entirely positive either, and our understanding of everything from gravity to chemistry and fluid dynamics has yielded ever more effective weapons that have provided people with the means to kill each other more efficiently if they decide that's what they want to do. What's your point? These are scientific theories. Their validity as scientific theories says *NOTHING* about philosophy or political systems based on them. If they did, why, based on Newton's theory of gravity I could say it is entirely natural to drop anvils on people's heads from tall buildings.
On top of that, most of the philosophy and politics that people have tried to base on evolutionary theory have been based on gross misunderstandings of the theory, so you can hardly blame the theory itself for the problem. If anything, this is grounds for more extensive education about it.
Strong assertion, let's apply a little deductive logic:
:):):):)
toxic -> deadly -> will no longer exist left untreated
toxic to free thought -> free thought will no longer exist
Let p be defined as existence of religion
q be defined as existence of free thought
The assertion is that:
p -> ~q
or
The existence of religion implies the non-existence of free thought (eventual)
We know that from modus tollens
~(~q) -> ~p
simplifying
q -> ~p
Or
Where there is an existence of free thought there is a non-existence (suppression, ban) of religion.
Let r be defined as the location where the non-existence of religion is/was enforced (China, North Korea, Soviet Union, California). Clearly,
~p -> r
So we have,
q -> ~p
~p -> r
By implication
q -> r
Or
The existence of free thought implies that one lives in a country where the non-existence of religion is enforced. We now have mathematical proof of what has always been suspected:
You free thinkers are a bunch of commies
sorry to burst people's bubbles, but its really not hard to grasp the fact that humans, at one point in time were no smarter than your average animal in the african wilderness.. please keep in mind, that animals of all kinds, have been communicating and feeling for MILLIONS of years before we even came in to existence.. these animals could feel energy.. happiness, lonliness, boredom, and fear, were all things that animals have felt for a long long long time.. these are the main emotions that humans fear.. the one thing that differentiates ourselves from those animals, is a larger memory capacity, and better communication.. and THAT is something that the force of "Life" has decided it needed, in order to keep on living.. Life makes decisions on it's own.. whenever it feels the need to explore the sky, it grows wings.. whenever it needs to walk on land, it grows feet to walk on land.. and whenever it feels the need to think, it grows the ability to think.. whether or not someONE or someTHING is actually controlling this, we'll never know.. but its a god damn FACT that we simply evolved from the rest of the respectable creatures on this Earth..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Religion is a method for an opinionated few to control the many. Simply a way to impose one's "moral standards" on others. Crack open any history book and it's plain to see that religion has been the root cause and/or the facilitator of many, if not most, of humankind's worst atrocities.
If you want to live by any particular brand of fiction and fairy tales that's entirely up to you, but I'll be damned if I'm going to allow a narrow-minded minority to dictate their view of morality on me based on a non-existent authority, manifested in a ridiculously illogical and inconsistent book, inspired by a non-existent god.
If you want a fight over this, believe me, you're gonna get one.
I still think it's a woman's right to choose whether or not she brings a child into this world.
And she can certainly (except in cases of rape) make that choice by keeping her legs closed and saying "No".
Riting
:P
You sure as hell didn't get the writing part right.
I think some less inflammatory examples would probably be a good idea. I expect teaching ID in that context would make the controversy over not teaching it look like a minor squall.
I've taken philosophy of science, scientific reasoning and the history of science in university, and even a lot of the professors teaching it don't really directly teach the important concepts. One professor (she was a philosopher, not a scientist) asked me on an exam to tell her what things I would look at if I were doing an environmental assessment of a new dam. My answer was that, having no expertise in environmental assessments, I would look for published and reproduced scientific experiments dealing with the environmental impact of dams. In their absence I would devise and perform experiments. That wasn't exactly what she was looking for.
The problem with science classes is that they usually teach the theory but not the method. The ones that do teach the method don't teach WHY the method is as it is. Nobody seems to teach the limitations.
Lots of scientists (I've worked with a few of them) don't really grasp the why -- they're just very good at following the how (or sometimes not so good). I took a grad class a couple of years ago where one of the guest lecturers explained in detail how and why hypothesis driven science works the way it does. The class of grad students were awe struck.
Yeah, difference being that there is, you know, objective proof that Nixon *did* do something wrong, despite his claims that he didn't... if anybody can provide a shred of evidence that in this case, what happened was anything other than the official explanation of a clerical error, I will be quite pleased to hear it...
Until then, everybody should take a breath, rtfa, and think before that knee jerks. This sort of behavior makes a group of otherwise intelligent people look like mouth-breathing morons.
You're not the only one.
"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been wide
Yah, but it was like, a fucking woman who ate the apple and condemned the human race.
Or something...
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Guess what? Your team runs the country! You won!
Unfortunately this is not true. As a conservative I believe in limited government and individual freedom, neither of which is terribly popular with the current administration.
(Sadly, this is a somewhat bipartisan problem, but the dems don't have enough power to be truly corrupted)
Yet. I'm hoping we can go back to divided government for a while.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
What about adaptability? Genetically undesirable genes may result in a polar bear that can't handle the cold as well as his siblings.
He's in a really good situation right now as the north pole is warming up...
"Undesirable" genes may result in said creature being more adapted to a sudden change in the environment.
As big a geek as I am, I'd hate to see all humans become geeks and breed out the cowboys, and then a sunspot knocks out our electronics... likewise, without the geek gene, how would we ever have known about sunspots?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'm sure the person involved will bring it up at confession, and all will be forgiven.
I would have thought that science, with its emphasis on observation of what actually happens and rational thought would fit in much better with a society that treats people equally than a religion that says you're not a worthy human being if you don't believe.
Considering Phlebas, whoever the hell he is.
Then impeach his ass.
From what I've seen, it's my opinion that he's violated his oath of office, anyway, so impeaching him ought to be easy, especially for his own party, right,? I mean, if a sitting prez can be impeached by his opponents for lying about a blowjob...
Sigh...
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
because of religious dogma.
Really? I'd thought that the breakup of trade leaving collections of introverted villages in Western Europe would have an influence.
The Eastern Empire was under (conflicting) religious dogmas, though. Did it went backwards or just taught the Muslims their basics?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Burning a house down with a family inside and burning the house down without the family inside both have the same outcome: the house is burned down
Huh? I thought the discussion was about "killing" unborn babies, not burning down houses? Where did the house analogy come from, and what does it have to do with the discussion at hand? Is that one of those "I'll say something insightful but totally off topic and hope it makes me look smart" comments?
Look at your pm Steven Harper?
He was supported by Canadian branches of these same conservative think tanks and various churches across Canada. The whole right wing neoconservative is a movement out to take the world. First the bible belt and localities, then the federal government, and now Canada.
Unfortunately I do not think this is strictly an American thing more than a extremists using preachers to look moderate and doing anything possible to change society.
http://saveie6.com/
I BELIEVE!
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
On a side note, I wish that all the people who flip out about schools not teaching evolution would show at least a LITTLE concern when the schools don't teach math, English, economics, history, physics, etc. I don't believe in Creationism at all, but I do know that there are certain people that just want to use this issue to brow beat Christians, because it's the cool Left-wing thing to do.
"In a war, soldiers are knowingly fighting each other."
Tell that to the 30,000+ dead Iraqis civilians who died for no other reason than being born in the wrong country.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
In some parts of the country church going folks represent 40% of the vote. They vote around 75-90% republican depending on the church and which part of the country. They believe Bush was appointed by god or feel he has values and morals similiar to theirs which make them identify with Bush more. They make up a large percentage but never a majority. However they add 20% points in the south in favor of the republican so those who vote liberal or stay at home get drowned out by this minority.
ANd like I said in a previous post its happening in Canada too. Right now only a few churches really love Harper but as the Canadian branch of the 700club and focus on teh family get their act together on Christian radio and TV you will see more of a shift of Canadians voting conservative thinking they are getting pro family candidates.
http://saveie6.com/
You should read the book Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. He explains exactly why the diseases were on the side of the Europeans. In short, Europeans had been living in cities for a long time before they came to America. Since people were living closer together, the chance of spreading disease was very high
Read it again. Tenochtitlan was bigger than any city in Europe.
Eurasians had been living with, on, besides, around, under and behind various types of tamed animals for millennia.
In the Americas, they have a lesser range of tameable animals to get sick from.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
For those who don't believe in evolution, I fully support their right to continue not to practice it.
there was no native American disease that killed large number of the colonists.
Some think syphillis comes from the Americas.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
He is a fair cop.
You can't handle the truth.
Thanks. A very good essay. I disagree with some of the solutions, but definitely agree about the problem.
Same goes with the Republican pandering to the knuckle-dragging hypocrites in the US.
The only strategy that works with those bastards is marginalization and disempowerment, along with close monitoring to be sure they're not cooking up explosives out behind that old clapboard church.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
While I agree Harper's supported on the right, the right certainly doesn't have the influence in Canada that it seems to in the USA. Gay marriage is legal and in Vancouver you can walk past the police smoking dope and no one will care. Harper is going to attempt to re-open the gay marriage debate in Canada and it will go down in flames - He probably wishes he'd never brough the issue up in the first place.
...and there's certainly no creationism debate. It's just weird that I feel more aligned with Holland than I do with our closest neighbour, and it certainly wasn't always that way.
Sorry, but an AC started the whole thread, so that's the way I deal with it.
I admit it, I was trolling, but that doesn't make it any less true. There is a loud (if not large) group of people that believe that even abortions necessary to save the life of the mother should be banned. There is a loud (if not large, or possibly even the same) group of people claiming that we should not give the HPV vaccine out because it would "encourage sex". By their statements, these people apparently do believe that it's OK to kill a few dozen women if that is what it takes to stamp out abortions/promiscuity. And by and large, I have seen very few people from these groups act the least bit apologetic for this. To them, it's "just a miniscule fraction of a percent," and suddenly the eclamptic women who die from paralysis and respiratory failure, or the women who contract HPV from partners who aren't as faithful as they are and then go on to develop malignant cancers don't matter anymore.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
From the folks that brought you the Spanish Inquisition...
Sun really revolves around the earth
Man at the center of the universe
Stars are just angels holding candles
Burning of heretics that dare to disagree
2 cents,
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
Evolution is a THEORY! remember that.
Gravity is a theory, too. Why don't you go jump off a tall building, I'm sure God will keep you from falling. Or isn't your faith that strong?
When was the last time an anti-abortion, pro-war advocate chatted you up about how awesome it was that innocent civilians were being killed by their own countrymen? The key word separating people here is "innocent".
I dont mean to use your words against you, just to illustrate my point here:
Tell that to the 30,000+ [aborted fetuses] who died for no other reason than being [concieved] in the wrong [woman].
You gotta keep the populace stupid if you want to bend them to your will. Educated people tend to develop all sorts of crazy ideas like self-determination, equality, and my personal favorite, that humans evolved from monkeys! So, obviously the best way to snuff out these crazy ideas is to get 'em while they're young.
Geez, it's like you people -want- to be smart.
I've heard from some English historians that the Pilgrims didn't exactly flee England, it was more of them being kicked out.
Your post demonstrates a complete lack of historical knowledge regarding the creation of the United States and her constitution.
Let's go through your post point by point... and shatter it to pieces.
In your opinion, it is not science. Many may disagree with you. Who decides what is and is not science. Last I checked, science was simply a process of making a proposal called a hypothesis, gathering data from research and experimentation, and finally reaching a conclusion that either confirms, disproves, or clarifies your hypothesis. Intelligent design is a reasonable field of study. If it had been originally marketed as being a study of whether an alien intelligence deposited life here on Earth rather than being presented as creationism, you would agree. The only reason you claim it is not a science is that you are a religious bigot.
It was intended to provide citizenship to newly freed African slaves. The wording is vague enough that it was used in the Warren court to incorporate the bill of rights to apply against state & local government.
Completely incorrect. Please do study American history sir. The states are individually responsible for deciding in their state constitutions what powers are allowed and withheld from the state government.
Again, this is merely your rather bigoted opinion. If federal moneys are to be used to study evolution, the same opportunity should exist to those of the dissenting view.
I do so await your witty rebuttal.
Until Then,
Yours Truly,
AC
Way to be open minded about.
Well, the original poster was actually being somewhat agreeable with the pro-life argument that he so fervently opposes by equating war, death row inmates, and unborn babies as more or less the same because "they all end with death".
The houses analogy was to show that despite the end result being the same (burned house), the examples were far from the same event. It doesnt make sense to compare things like that.
The macro/micro evolution view would have a place within the "Punctuated Equilibrium" as opposed to the gradualism that most people initially think of when talking about evolution. That is if, as at least some of the fossil records would seem to indicate, evolution occurs in bursts with periods of relatively little change in between, then these bursts would seem to be analogous to "macro" and the rest "micro" evolution. To my knowledge we have not seen one of these bursts in progress (if you can cite such an occurance, I would be happy to recant this criticism). There is merit in teaching scientific 'laws' or theories as fallible, specifically to allow and encourage fresh ideas and improvements. Any observation which does not fit known theory should be examined, replicated (if possible) and hopefully explained by an improve understanding of the current theory or introduction of a new theory. Teaching evolution strictly as 'fact' is not a prudent approach to improve science knowledge, rather we should teach it like we do Newtonian physics, that is explain how the world works under this theory and then acknowledge shortcomings (relativity in the physics case) and show how refinements have been made with time. It is a disservice to indoctrinate our primary school students with the idea that theories were correct since their proposal without any changes or refinements along the way.
I think not. You are probably referring to another unique subset that is probably nowhere representative of the conservative population.
Yes, women should have control of their reproduction. That's why they make condoms and birth control pills and depo and morning after pills and blow jobs.
You mean the morning after pill isn't abortion?
Abortion should not be used as a means of birth control.
Fortunately, abortion isn't used as "birth control" for the most part. None of the women who I know who've had abortions took it lightly. It is not an easy decision to make.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
My point was that freedom of speech is as much a freedom guaranteed by the constitution as a woman's right to controll her own body and what grows in it.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Erm, in India, Susrutha knew about this stuff a couple of thousand years back.
The best way to put frame creationist theories are that its conclusions are true BY DEFINITION, that is, it possesses a circularity that has no real explanatory power.
In fact John Howard (Australian Prime Minister) has his head so far up George Bush's arse he can see Tony Blair's ankles!
Fine. What is the NAME of the "clerk" who made the mistake? Ask him if it was indeed a "clerical" mistake. But first, remind him that the baby Jesus hates liars.
A great read, how people can object?
http://www.forbes.com/asap/1999/1004/235.html
Here's a quick and dirty way to check my viewpoint - try to disagree with any one of these three statements:
I'm game :)
1. We have data spanning millions of years that shows many intermediate forms of organisms that are similar in many ways to modern organisms.
Not really - we have things we can look at now. Our theory says that they span millions of years. You can't just assume what you're trying to prove.
This data can be arranged chronologically into a tree structure based on morphological similarity. (If you disagree about the existence of this physical evidence, then you can stop reading and go back to whatever it is you do.)
I don't disagree with the existence of physical evidence, but again, arranging it chronologically is not really something you can form testable hypotheses about. You do the best you can, but the claims of certainty (that are made in these discussions/debates) are not justifiable.
2. We have a theory that explains how organisms can change over time, and (as you mentioned yourself) said theory is well understood and quite easy to demonstrate.
Sure, to an extent. Unfortunately, nobody can run a trial or three of "single cell to planet full of biodiversity".
3. The theory of how organisms can change over time (evolution) is a possible explanation for the physical evidence that we have.
Yes.
In fact, the theory explains the evidence so well that most scientists accept it as fact, in the same way that we accept relativity as fact.
Well, no, not the *same* way, because we can do some experiments regarding relativity.
I wouldn't say that an untestable theory which requires a sort of deus ex machina to explain 1. inobservable and 2. absurdly improbable things "explains the evidence so well".
The deus ex machina of the evolution story is incredibly vast periods of time. We don't observe simple species turning into more and more complex species, so we explain that lack of observation by saying that this occurs over vast stretches of time, and is therefore inobservable. We don't see, and have no explanation for, life arising from unliving material. So we explain the absurdly low probability of spontaneous generation by stretching it over unimaginably vast periods of theoretical time. This trick, of course, could be used to make any implausibly low probability event seem plausible.
It is not back on the list. See the comments above. The line where "Evolutionary Biology" used to be (26.1303) is now blank.
Faith monger. Lol. Nice addition to my vocab.
:)
The fact that you mentioned fellatio and not cunnilingus displays how you really could care less about a woman's interest, pleasure, or health, as long as you get what you want.
) for the truth of that. For the vast majority of women who chose abortion, it's usually a last resort, and a desperate one at that.
And the number of women who "use abortion as birth control" is stunningly low. Go read "The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion" (http://mypage.direct.ca/w/writer/anti-tales.html
I'm not sure if you were serious about this option, but if the US defaulted on its debt, it would completely assrape the world economy, especially the US economy. Look at the impact of the Russia default, and their debt was nothing compared to ours.
The only way to go is for the government to run a balanced bugdet. There's nothing wrong with short-term debt (in fact, there's a lot of good things about having a certain amount of debt); it's long-term debt without a plan to pay it off that will hurt us.
In your opinion, it is not science. Many may disagree with you.
And most scientists agree with me. ID is a conclusion in search of justification, and has no real testable assertions, makes no predictions, and is not falisifable. It's Creationism with a new coat of paint.
If it had been originally marketed as being a study of whether an alien intelligence deposited life here on Earth rather than being presented as creationism, you would agree. The only reason you claim it is not a science is that you are a religious bigot.
Its religious roots aside, if it were aliens, I'd still laugh. The alien life hypothesis is a result of finding genetic material embedded in meteorites and is really orthogonal to the theory of Evolution.
It was intended to provide citizenship to newly freed African slaves.
"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" - looks fairly clear to me.
The states are individually responsible for deciding in their state constitutions what powers are allowed and withheld from the state government.
True, provided that these rights are not enumerated in the constitution (10th ammendment).
Again, this is merely your rather bigoted opinion. If federal moneys are to be used to study evolution, the same opportunity should exist to those of the dissenting view.
I don't consider ID to be science, so I'm a bigot? How's that work? If you want to disagree, you'll need something better than ad hominems. I would suggest you start by refuting my bit about ID not being a scientific theory.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Odd and disappointing, yes. I was genuinely curious to see if I would get any intelligent rebuttals. Maybe it's because the post is so damn long, but brevity has never been one of my virtues. :)
So the best way to shrink the governemnt is to spend as much as possible so that it fails. Yeah, that makes sense...
Learn to love Alaska
If you want to study that stuff on your own dime, go right ahead.
If the rest of us are paying though, it's a different matter. We need:
math, engineering of all types, accounting, computer science, economics...
What is going to drive our economy? I'm sorry to say this, but evolutionary biology is some rather expensive and unnecessary training for a fry cook.
Such thinking is why this country's population "enjoys" an average reading level of a (rather poor) seventh-grade student. It is also why we lag behind so many other societies in the sciences.....
As another poster said, this isn't what evolutionary theory is concerned about. Nonetheless, I am going to use it here, propriety be damned:
According to evolution, matter is naturally combined and oriented in all sorts of ways. Some of those ways end up as something vaguely life-ish, and through chemical action, starts clumping together, forming bubbles, and attracting or repelling other chemicals. The rest ends up as dirt, crystals, oil, or whatever. The life-ish stuff continues to recombine and orient through chemical action. The non-life-ish stuff does too, but we are no longer concerned with it, it can turn into gravel or whatever but we don't care. And often the life-ish stuff recombines or orients into something simpler and more non-life-ish -- but then we don't care about it anymore.
Now, the chemically active life-ish stuff that we are interested in has come together in ways that don't come apart easily. But the stuff is still chemically active and still moves molecules around, maybe combining them or breaking them apart. Usually, nothing interesting happens. But sometimes, a particular combination of molecules is chemically active on its own, and moves other molecules around. And maybe this new molecule is trapped inside the protective life-ish stuff, and ends up working on other random molecules that find their way in. Or maybe this molecule is attached to the outside of the life-ish stuff and tends to attract other molecules, and maybe other molecules, also attached to the outside of the life-ish stuff, are able to shove the attracted molecules inside the protective barrier.
Now, I said that this life-ish thing doesn't come apart easily. But eventually, after a long time, it will get damaged enough through chemical action that it falls apart. Unless, by that time, some of the accessory molecules that the thing has accumulated happen to attract spare parts and glue them on, thereby inadvertently prolonging the life-ish thing's so-called life.
Well, this can continue a long time. We now have something that effectively eats and grows, and maybe, yes, it still falls apart and dies. It is still only life-ish.
But, let's say that a life-ish thing randomly assembles some molecules that destroys it (a pretty common occurance), but destroys it by splitting it in two without ruining the protective qualities of the two halves (think of soap bubbles). The molecular machinery that made the destructive molecules are evenly scattered between the two halves, so that each half can still assemble these destructive molecules. Well, waitaminnit, now we've got reproduction! The life-ish thing is now, effectively, alive.
Of course, there are many similarly life-ish things that ate less, or grew less, or died faster, or never developed the reproduction trick. And again, we don't care about them. They've fallen by the wayside. They all fell apart, died out, went extinct.
The one we care about is the one that can reproduce. Since each one of these things can generally assemble its reproductive equipment before being destroyed, we have a growing population of them. Let's call it a species.
But this species (and remember that we are still just talking about a protected bunch of molecules that happen to do life things) is still chemically active, and still ends up with new molecules that either do interesting things, or causes some sort of self-destruction. The ones that self-destruct, we don't care about.
Now, these things, let's call them critters, though they don't yet approach even bacterium in complexity, are floating in a sea of matter that varies from totally non-life-like to the life-ish things that have died out along the way. Some of our critters have ended up with molecules that are really good at pulling in spare parts. Others have ended up with bette
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Just out of curiosity, every time you jack off, do you consider that wasting what "could have been a life"? Sinner!
P.S. I'd love to tell that to the 30,000 aborted fetuses, but they don't develop the ability to hear until the second trimester.
Piltdown man
A tooth of a pig drawn into an apeman!
A lie and a fake 5 years by 1927.
Nebraska man
A lie and a fake for 40 years.
By then everyone in the world thought they were from apes.
How did it take 40 years for the scientific community to find it was a clumsy fake?
Javaman (homo erectus)
Discovered by Dr Dubois and he himself declared in 1938 that it was just a monkey (gibbon).
He had found human skulls in the same stratum did not tell anyone for 30 years!
A lie and a fake. He eventually renounced the javaman as a fraud himself.
Peking man
Dr. black discovered it, a tooth and some ashes.
Soon after human remains were found mixed with animal remains. The animal remains were the food of the humans.
Hey but they wanted an apeman! so they grabbed bits of both and made Peking Man!
1972
Richard Leaky
Found a skull that supposedly blew evolution out of the water by 2.5 million years. The only thing left was
Ramapithecus. Just some fragments of jaw bones and some teeth. The same size and shape as a babboon in Ethiopia.
It never has been found and it never will be found a creature that is more than brute and less than human.
Also there is such little evidence for apemen that the amount would not be accepted in any other field of science.
And there's plenty more evidence for the non-existenance of evolution!
It's part of the group punishment we deserve because some nudists ate God's fruit without permission.
those illegals will be *going home* as their employment dries up.
Would you care to place money on that?
Twenties Retirement
At least as I, an American see it you do have one saving grace that may keep you from falling into our pit of stupid: the average Aussie would appear to hate their politicians. All of them. All of the time.
Here, we have a good chunk of population that thinks Shrubby is basically Jesus Jr. I don't think anyone would accuse Howard of being God's messenger . . . . . . .
How can we possible know where we're going if we don't know where we've been?
The point is, if you are mature at 13, you stay mature, right? If people used to die at 40, then it was a quarter life...but I don't see why it couldn't be a much smaller proportional fraction now. Thirteen wasn't that far off for even the American colonial period (they pushed it maybe to 15).
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
You know, I have followed this entire thread and just needed to raise a point. So often, "religion" is castigated, and often correctly, for its narrow-mindedness. But please don't equate "religion" or "the religious right" with truth-seekers who have chosen to follow the teachings of Christ.
I believe that God WAS instrumental in the formation of the universe. How he did it is beyond my comprehension, but I am fascinated by our journey to try and explain it, and applaud those scientists who have devoted their lives to help us unlock those mysteries. Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I don't, and I am not sure that we will ever really comprehend the mechanisms (I could be wrong, I have been before, and will be in the future).
I would just ask those of you who have been turned off by "religion" to not be so quick to judge those who have a divergent viewpoint. "Religion" is arrogant, many Christ-followers are not. They are on a journey towards truth just like you.
Then who voted him in twice? The Greens? Show some integrity, take responsibility for the monster you created and fix it. Might as well because no amount of the hindsight blameless bullshit displayed here will absolve you anyway.
The important question that we should ask for each subject is not, as an earlier poster mentioned, why teach geography or literature. There are a lot of subjects that are useful and/or interesting enough to merit a course. The question should be "why should we require students to take certain courses over others?" For example, why require that students take geography rather than literature?" Mandating that students take certain courses means that education is more uniform, but it also means that they have less time to explore other subjects.
So in regards to this discussion, ask
- What is the goal we want to achieve by teaching evolution (or biology more generally)?
- Is that goal important enough to require a course on this?
- Is requiring this course the best way to achieve this goal?
Those shouldn't be too difficult for any side of this argument to answer.Based on the fact that we CANNOT survive without being symbiotic with other lifeforms (relying on miroscopic organisms to create most things we need). And having the majority of our body composed of non-human lifeforms that in many ways dictate who we are is DEFINATELY a step away from non-evolutionist beliefs (that we were spit out 100% intact and independant of other lifeforms). Clearly we evolved along with our suroundings in such a way that we have become dependant on them and they on us.
Forget about creationism for a minute. Have you considered that there might be a good reason for kids not to study evolutionary biology? Old-school field studies are dying. The days of people like Darwin & Audobon (or even WD Hamilton) are over, the world is too small now. Funding is easier to find for molecular biology, and other fields that can be easily conscripted by pharmaceutical companies - and these are companies where you can start working with a MS in Chemical Engineering. Plus, as much as I hate to say it, there may not be much left for evolutionary biologists left to find. Ever since we reached a definition of inclusive fitness, I've thought that the details of the mechanisms involved don't really matter in day-to-day life.
I agree, lower IQ persons are more likely to commit crime, less able to perform skilled jobs. That also beautiflly explains why all the american jobs are being sent elsewhere.
I am all for not allowing a "race" that can't pinpoint its own country on map, to mix in the global gene-pool. :p
Hats off to you.
I disagree with your point, "religion is toxic to free thought." Indeed a lot of bad stuff goes on in the name of religion. However, the term "religion" is so diluted now that it has no meaning. And what is free thought? Are we not all free to *think* whatever we want?
Also, your argument ends up sounding much like the type of dogma that you preach against - you make broad generalizations and leave no room for exceptions. It would be easier for me to agree with you if you held off on that sort of talk.
According to the Constitution we don't!
Article I Section 8 does not say ANYTHING about Congress and the Fed dealing with education.
And then it goes on further to say that anything not specifically entitled to the Fed is reserved for the states.
I don't see how shit like the the Feds and education, or agriculture, or the FDA, or the BATF, etc etc ever got passed. Could we PLEASE have some politicians with integrity that stick to the founding documents and principles of this country!?!?
Libertas in infinitum
How did this get modded insightful?
Why feed the troll?!
Libertas in infinitum
Oil is traded on free commodities markets and is a near perfect supply and demand model.
Microeconomics 101: In the long run, it is impossible for any one company to sustain a profit in a perfectly competitive market. Big Oil has been sustaining profits for years. Therefore, it cannot possibly be a "near perfect supply and demand model." In fact, the enormous profits alone are enough to show that the market is either oligopolistic or monopolistic (through illegal collusion, of course).
Might as well say that Jesus' doctrines lead to the slaughter of Jews and Muslims during the first crusade. Jesus' teachings were used as a power-play by the pope, and ideas put in the language of Darwin were used as part of a power grab by Hitler.
This argument is too long and complicated. I offer a simpler one, based on a goal-oriented view of science:
The purpose of science is to make useful, accurate predictions. Can a given idea make any useful predictions? No? Then it's not science.
(The distinction between 'hard' and 'soft' sciences lies in the degree of accuracy of the predictions)
Religion is toxic to free thought
Cults are toxic to free thought.
Free thought and tough questions, accompanied by sincere, innocent desire for truth, are nourishing water to true religion.
The most heretical questions are followed (after praying, Bible reading, thinking, and discussion with other truth-seekers) by the most glorious, faith-building "A-ha!" moments.
"What the hell happened? I want my old USA back."
/. headline for this article reeks of #3 & #7)
You and me both.
I think maybe there are many causes including:
1. Religious fundamentalism spreading like the plague.
2. It being "cool" to be stupid. Widespread anti-intellectualism.
3. News media gave up on prestige and reporting what is important in favor of getting rich on nude tits and other irrelevant but fun stories and sound-bites.
4. Educational system based on pseudoscientific sociological and psychological mysticism.
5. The Southeast rose again spreading its culture of #1 and to a lesser extent #2.
6. Widespread belief that all politicians are horribly corrupt and there isn't a thing that can be done about it--apathy.
7. Conspiracy theories widely presented as fact. (Incidentally, I think the omission of Evolution from the list was most likely was an honest mistake, or maybe done by some low ranking bible thumping government employee on purpose. The
These things tend to feed off each other. #4 brings #2 plus leaves the mind defenseless to #1. #2 makes #3 cool. #3 makes #2 seem acceptable. #1 promotes #2. It is a tangled web of interactions.
As someone else pointed out, watch out, it's all coming your way. I suggest fighting every instance you see of it while it is a small problem in Canada.
http://www.marxist.com/
I'm sorry if I gave you the impression that I'm against all government spending. I'm not - really. Its just I hate to see big budget deficits and I hate to see money being wasted on stupid things.
This year, I'll actually be voting for a republican for the first time ever - in the New York senate race. I just can't support Hilary Clinton and that vote is mostly because of her stance on wanting to outlaw video games.
Whether drugs are legal or not - I don't really care. I just don't like the civil rights violations that have gone along with the drug war. And the fact is that it was democrats - specifically Tip O'Neal and his group in the 80s that put those ridiculous laws through.
Also, you look at states like California and New York on gun issues vs. places like Arkansas or Oklahoma. I'd much rather deal with Arkansas's gun laws than New York's.
When it comes to whom I'm with philosophically, it would be, at least more traditionally the republicans. However, they have proved over and over that they say one thing and then do another. When it comes to results, the democrats are significantly better. I think we would be much better off with Al Gore as president than W. (Although, I've never been a fan of John Kerry - I voted for Edwards in the Washington state caucas in 2004.)
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
THe states were like Canada back in 1980. It will happen as grass movements become more and more indoctrined with conservatice ideology without realizing from their peers at church. Before you know it they will think everyone around them will become super liberal in idealogy because they dont think like them.
Still a minority but if you have a 50/50 vote for a liberal vs conservative candidate the church goers will always tip the tide ot the conservative one. For example 80-90% of the american public do not oppose an all out ban of abortition but all levels of government support it. This is due to the influence of these groups but they are not dumb enough to pull that card which would cause a huge backlash. I pray that abortion is banned in the US. You would see a whole liberal response not seen since the 1960's and 40 years of democratic rule.
http://saveie6.com/
is DEFINATELY a step away from non-evolutionist beliefs (that we were spit out 100% intact and independant of other lifeforms).
I've never seen this in creationist logic, infact, if you look at the Christian version of things it's clearly stated that there was a multitude of other lifeform before humans. Oh well. I'm not going to argue it because I don't see any clear basis of your arguement. If you can quote someone saying otherwise I'd be glad to entertain it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I agree there is ground to be gained in education. I have no doubt about that. However. . . The ability to read above a 7th grade level has practical applications in our everyday lives. I am not convinced the study of evolution is quite so pragmatic. If we spent more time, effort and money on reading and other fundamentals and less of the time and money studying important but less pragmatic putsuits (evolution) we might make strides in the more practical areas of education. I do not think that these are mutually exclusive but we have to admit that we only have so much time and money.
Yes the active person with solutions and a practical approach might try to change what they feel is wrong instead of giving up and leaving for such utopian societies as Germany!
I know you're only jesting, however I'm not an American and don't live there.
Anyway, America is an odd country in that it is so diverse that you can't call it a 'race'. It has got a disproportionate distribution of wealth/success correlated to certain races (ie a high proportion of nobel prize winners are of jewish descent), in part due to the wide gaps in IQ.
Now a lot of solutions to current problems can be derived from this idea without resulting to eugenics. For example the "don't leave a child behind" policy is actually detrimental to education as it treats all children equally, the result is dumbing down education. Communism had a similar problem regarding distribution of wealth. Humans aren't equal, nor will they ever will be, only a small percentage of the population controls the rest. But people at the top are there for a good reason.
However:
[... that someone who "followed my teachings as best he could" would be condemned for believing in Evolution, and that a "pompous and self-centered jerk" who believes in Creationism will be saved.]
Sadly, the central points of Calvinism are extremely commonly expressed in U.S. fundamentalism. In particular, the theme of there being an elect group of people whom God has chosen to save, that God will save all of these elect people through His irresistable grace no matter how much they resist the call of the gospel.
The net result is that many religious people who believe that they are already in the category of "saved" also believe that they cannot fall out of that category.
Nitpicky, I know, but that particular view of science is a pet peeve of mine.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
I'll respond to your main points.
1. Creationists such as myself would not call evolutionism a theory. I would call it a hypothesis; one that must be accepted by faith. Evolutionism is hopeful speculation founded upon naturalist philosophy. It is a Tower of Babel consisting of layers of bricks of faulty conclusions, each set of accepted fallacies giving rise to a new set of fallacies.
2. Speciation is a pillar of Biblical creationism.
3. Many (most?) Biblical creationists are not greatly enthused by the Intelligent Design movement. Some oppose it, although not actively.
As of the time of this posting, 26.1303 is still missing.
This isn't fark.com, so why is the headline to this story so sensational and innaccurate?
what most people fail to see is that even mathematics is a religion. you can't prove Euclid's axioms ;) it's a common mistake to believe that scientists actually know what they are talking about. what you believe in is just a matter of taste. me, for instance, i choose to believe in people which are not talking out of their asses :)
Interestingly some people think that the current Golden Age (Meh?) of medicine is built upon the biopsies and human testing of the nazi's.
Behind every great pharmeseutical and all that.
Ah well... Only time will tell.
Put up or shut up, primary time buddy.
I believe the constitution precludes any case the scientist would have against what is taught in a church
Contrary to what you may believe, the Constitution doesn't give religions freedom to do whatever they choose. The only thing the Constitution prevents is government interference in the practice of religion. Additional laws give some protections against discrimination.
The Constitution does not guarantee that you can practice your religion free from criticism or free from any interference whatsoever.
Government no longer worth using, says evolution.
Everytime the subject of evolution vs religion comes up to /., someone will come up with a comment saying that science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and they will be modded insightful.
Well, that is just so wrong. Science and religions (please note the plural form; we are not talking about christianity only) are totally mutually exclusive.
The reason is pretty simple: each religion has a dogma. Most dogmas, if not all, contain assertions that are opposite to what is proven by science.
For example, eating pork is not harmful as Islam says.
The earth was not created in 7 days, as Christianity says. And if that is taken as a metaphor, then the Bible has a much wider and variable translation.
There are so many points in religions that are proven wrong by science!
Of course that does not mean that the inner meaning of religions is bad. "Love thyself as your neighbour" is a strong message that should be the basis of our actions. But instead of focusing on that, people focus on what serves their interest, i.e. pick and choose from religion whatever suits their purposes.
This racism crap always gets in the way of a serious discussion on immigration. Large-scale immigration of low-skills workers into the USA depresses the wages of lower-income Americans, even affects their ability to find work. Illegal immigration is a terrible dilemma, for most illegals only want to better themselves, yet they do so to the detriment of American workers and the American economy. I'm selfish, I want us to look out for our own people first. American citizens and legal immigrants are my first concern. I have no problem with legal immigrants; I have no problem with integrating illegal immigrants into our economy over a five or ten year period. But there have to be controls on how many people can come in at any one time and how they got here. It's one thing to have open borders for everyone when the population is only a few million; it's another when our population is 300 million. Lastly, to quote a famous punk band: "All Nazi skinheads can f**k off!" Please make the appropriate gesture in their faces as they leave.
Did you hear about the village idiot who left Tocuaro for LA. He raised the average IQ of both. Why is it that people who stand against the teaching of eveolution seem so, I dunno ... un-evolved
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
Do not make the mistake of thinking that Bush represents the conservatives in America. He does not, and most of us are as tired of him as you are.
That's why he was elected for a second term by about half the U.S....
ook ook!
So your investing in the oil companies? Are you opening a competing oil company? Are you just sitting on your ass complaining that someone else is making more money than you?
If there is a large margin, then find a way to get a peice of it:
- sell alternative energy devices and vehicles
- get into the oil business (either work for the big guys, or start your own)
- sell telecommuting equipment and services
- invest in the oil companies
Oh, you think it is too risky to take any of those steps? Then the margin is not worth the risk; they must deserve the returns. If the returns outweight the risk, then you and your neighbor ought to jump in there and grab some of it.
There are lots of ways to get in on the winnings, instead of just complaining about someone else winning. Your participation will result in a better world for all of us (I assume you will spend any of you profits saving the whales or planting trees).
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
Interesting when woman are ovulating they become more horny, and the desire to have sex with a partner other than their husband increases. You can explain this from the view of evolution (Best for a woman to be fertilised by the best man she can, but best for her to actually stay and live with her partner), but I think it would be hard for a fundamentalist to explain.
Is always 100% fatal to the fetus. A fetus is not a baby; a fetus isn't even a human being. It's a slurry of cells that has the potential to produce a human being, but that doesn't give it any more rights than a fungus - or shouldn't, depending on where you live.
We don't observe simple species turning into more and more complex species, so we explain that lack of observation by saying that this occurs over vast stretches of time, and is therefore inobservable.
We do and have observed it through fossil records, as well as populations which have changed within recorded human history.
...says free-thinking people.
g redneck.
Another one for the preservation of the fear-mongered-shotgun-under-the-pillow-bush-votin
I'm pretty sure that embryo didn't have two beers yet.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
So what i stopping the Education Department from sending out an update to all the schools?
Hmm, you can hardly pull logic when your argument is that we have three completely different proposals in completely different areas of knowledge put forward at around the same time, and because two of them are 'dead' the third one is too. The logic is dreadful.
Besides, it's arguable about these. True much of Freud has been superceeded, but his essential insight about there being an unconcious as well as concious mind remains, and while Marx hardly proved himself to have 100% forsight his analysis of economic history up until the 19thC still has some merit. Furthermore you are being very selective - Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism easily stands with Freud, Marx and Darwin as great 19thC theories and that's been spectacularly successful.
I knew that...I was making a rhetorical arguement....kind of a what if line of thought.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Actually, we're having a rather heated immigration debate in the UK too, at the moment. Actually, there's a stronger argument against it in the UK because this island is incredibly overpopulated already, whereas the US isn't. However, my main problem is the language barrier. I'm of the strong belief that it's a good thing for everyone in a country to speak one language; ideally, i'd have everyone in the world speaking one language. Immigrants coming in and speaking Spanish in the US sounds like a bad idea. The language barrier is, IMHO, the biggest barrier to human interaction and telling most Americans to learn Spanish is a really stupid way to solve the problem rather than vice versa.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Even if the evidence made a designer just as likely as evolution, the idea of a designer is vastly more complex than the idea of random mutations and selection. Some people think that saying "God did it" is simple but that's because they know what God is supposed to be. Try defining God to e.g. a computer and see how long it takes until you've reached a complete definition. In science, God is undefined and as such needs to be defined before use. Never mind that noone can even answer the questions of where God comes from, where he is, what he is (scientifically accurate! What is God made of, Godium?), why he is all-powerful or why he created the world.
I think that's why Intelligent Design hypothesises never define that designer properly. Saying that life was created through design necessitates the question what created that designer since he's obviously alive lest you want to attribute intelligence to inanimate objects.
I'd consider any machine alive for this purpose. We haven't observed machines in nature outside of lifeforms and if we assumed some intelligent machine as the designer we'd need a theory how that machine came into existence. Random, spontaneous combination of elements that turned out to form a machine? Evolution of machines? Or another designer?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
What's macro evolution? Can you eat that?
Science only knows evolution, no macro or micro variant thereof. Mostly because there is no reason to differentiate between such things as all evolutionary steps are small and only through accumulation can create a difference large enough to be considered "macroevolution". Since that means you'd have to draw the line at an arbitrary number of steps the concept of separating macro and micro evolution is nonsense.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Doesn't sound like you're even trying. What does "evolutionism" whatever that is, have to do with the genuine theory of evolution? The latter is a well-defined, falsifiable theory that makes concrete testable predictions. Further, it has copious interlocking evidence on many different levels supporting the theory. So saying it is just a "hypothesis", which BTW is a type of theory usually with the connotation that it has little supporting evidence, is misleading. Saying the science surrounding evolution, geology, and related fields depends on fallacies based on fallacies is also misleading. If there truly was some fundamental problem with the theory of evolution, we have enough data to see the error clearly. As far as I can tell, most counterarguments are based on ignorance. Eg, claiming something is too complex (eg, irreducible complexity) because we can't see at the time how that would evolve naturally. Ultimately, what theory best represents the world as we see it? Evolution fits far better than its competitors and requires far less unobservable assumptions.
Then we can glance at the fossil record and see that speciation long predates the presence of humanity which is contrary to your assertion and goes back to very simple organisms. This also brings up the point of how old the Earth is. Concensus is that it's between 4 and 5 billions years old based on examination of rocks from the Earth, Moon, and elsewhere in the Solar System (usually in the form of meteorites). Some creationists claim the Earth is as young as 6,000 years old despite copious evidence to the contrary.
I'm not sure I see the relevance of part 3. If the weaker claim of intelligent design as put forth by the Discovery Institute cannot be scientifically demonstrated, then that doesn't bode well for any theory that depends on it, like that of biblical creationism. More it seems the disagreement is in how the argument is pursued. In a similar fashion, I find the obnoxious and dogmatic atheism of people like Richard Dawkins to be counterproductive, but that doesn't make their scientific arguments any more or less correct.
My take is that once you allow for microevolution and some additional technical details like changing the numbers of chromosomes, you allow for evolution. Lots of small changes lead to large changes.Pardon me, I'm only a college professor. I'm under the impression that federal grants for low income students are for undergraduate study -- Pell grants. In my experience, schools give Biology degrees, not degrees in subfields of biology. At most, they say "such-and-such focus". The student gets the grant for being enrolled in an approved/accredited degree track program. The classes they study are irrelevant. If this were not so, many many students would have deductions taken from their grants for studying things irrelevant to the degree -- those things we MAKE them study by putting empty slots in their study plans that say "electives". If they can take some of anything they want, they can take some of something that's relevant but not on the list.
And if there are cases where an undergraduate can obtain a degree specifically in evolutionary biology (someone point me at that college's catalog, please), and the goobermint wants to nix it, then they just get a degree that says "biology". When they go to grad school or to get a job, the necessary people can read the transcript and see what they studied. That is, after all, how they already do it. They don't ask to see your diploma, they ask to see your transcripts.
There has always been good reason why college professors get lumped in with all sorts of other "liberals". It's because, fuck 'em, we'll work around 'em.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
We've never had fair use laws. Technically its illegal to even time shift here (though it's rarely policed, you wouldn't want to annoy anyone in power if you taped TV shows).
Those are actually on the way now, or at least I believe so. You're right about the rest of it though.
In SA, now that Labor has a lower-house majority, they're considering a referendum to try to ditch the upper house. Hilarity will ensue if that gets through.
This happened during Stalin's reign. On the peak of Cold War, the USSR had long abandoned Lysenkoism.
Oh horror! A government that does what the people want!
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I find it curious that creationists routinely accuse scientists of believing in evolution based on faith (a word which, in an epistemological context, I take to mean "belief without, or against, evidence or reason"). Faith is precisely the difference between science and religion; the intellectual foundations of most religions are built on faith, whereas science is completely incompatible with faith. As a matter of fact, I consider the most insulting phrase in the English language to be "You're just taking that on faith." (but I realize it's nothing personal)
In the interest of brevity, I'll simply note that at the very least your claim is grammatically correct, which is all I was really talking about.
2. Speciation is a pillar of Biblical creationism.
The link you provided is essentially a rephrased version of the argument I mentioned regarding evolution of "kinds" of animals. For instance, from the link: "...present-day species representative of the 'dog kind'" This concept of a 'kind' seems to be defined with respect to some vague idea of information content: "The creationist assumes that real, substantive increases in information (that is, specifying for an increase in what might be called 'functional complexity') will never arise without intelligent cause."
This "information theoretic" objection seems to be more common in creationist literature in recent years. I find this baffling, because there are numerous examples of mutations adding information (as defined by the standard Shannon information/entropy definition).
At this point, I'm reminded of astrology apologists. Whenever confronted with direct evidence that double-blind studies don't support their pseudo-science, most astrologers respond by making their claims vaguer- and thus less susceptible to criticism. I believe that something similar is happening in creationism. The information argument is becoming more common precisely because it's so vague that it can't be directly countered without extensive, and very technical, discussion regarding the definition of "information".
3. Many (most?) Biblical creationists are not greatly enthused by the Intelligent Design movement. Some oppose it, although not actively.
I've never heard of this before. Do you have any references? For instance, do you have a link to a web page written by a creationist who outlines the reasons he dislikes Intelligent Design? I'm curious to see why there would be a disconnect between the two groups.
Doh.. I seem to be having a problem parsing that kind of stuff lately..
Take hike? None necessary. Just spend the money wisely.
Where were you when the voynix came?
How is it bad logic? We have no scientific evidence of Santa Claus either. Is it valid to think he's real anyway?
I think believing in something without reason is bad logic, and that's exactly what all these cultists do.
Dark matter theories didn't come out of no where; scientists started observing phemonenon they could not explain. So they came up with theories to explain it, and then tried to test their theory. THAT is valid scientific method. To date, no tests have come close to proving the existence of a god or gods, nor have we observed anything that even justifies the theory of a god.
Who said the money wasnt being spent wisely? Things like sealing the roof of the high school, buying pens, upgrading from a lab of macintosh LC II computers, things like that are what the federal money got spent on last year. If that DOE money was gone, the local taxpayers would be flipping the bill for those items. It wasnt cheap.
Sorry, I don't think you have been learning George W's lessons well:
"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."
This was the point in history when it was clearly proved that everything is binary.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
You're confusing abiogenesis with evolution. Evolution makes no claims about how life came about. It provides a description of how life changes not how it originates.
"If atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby."
That fits agnosticism, but not strong atheism (which "collects stamps", so to speak).
Where were you when the voynix came?
I have to wonder what they have been teaching in the schools in the last 20 years that this sort of nonsense is possible? I'm not even a science guy but a graphics geek and I know these things are true because there is a method for providing proof they are true.
I think it has to do with the number of people being taught in schools. It used to be that only the smart guys went to college. Now we've elevated everyone's kids to college material. The everyone group includes a lot more stupid, religious people than did the smart guy group.
This is exactly why we need seperation of Church and State. Religion is a system of belief, and faith, whereas science deals with observation, research, and facts. The two are seldom compatible. Keep religion in Church and those homes that wish it, and keep science in our schools.
Evolution doesn't explain where matter comes from. Nor does it explain how life began. These issues fall outside the scope of the theory. It's a theory that attempts to explain how and why life changes.
Evolution does happen. The three conditions are that 1) there are traits (observable characteristics of the organism) that are inherited, 2) that this inheritance isn't perfect, changes do occur (eg, mutations in the DNA, chromosome shuffling, etc), and 3) that some of these traits have a measurable impact on the survivability of progeny (there is "selection" for traits that improve survivability and reproductive success of the species). We have inheritance, mutation, and selection, the basic ingredients predicted and required by the theory. This leads to the dynamics of what is commonly called "microevolution".
Having said that, there is a compelling fact that all life on Earth uses the same basic template of RNA and DNA to pass on traits, cells (for everything except viruses), and the same general biochemical systems. At the biochemistry level there is a lot of similarities between yeast and human cells. This reasonably leads to the theory that all life on Earth has a single origin which is quite compatible with the theory of abiogenesis (that life sprang from non-living chemical processes). If there were multiple independent biological foundations, then any theory of abiogenesis would have to explain how these were able to coevolve with each other. They probably would have to spring up almost simultaneously. And of course, there's the lab experiments which have been able to produce amino acids through pretty basic physical processes (like lightning, UV radiation, etc).
My advice: less attempts at pithy humor, more reading of TFA. You'll save yourself lots of embarrassment.
What an amazingly retarded post! First, you haven't established that the US is going "downhill". Then you propose sabotaging your own life because somehow that'll break things faster. And breaking things is good because you think, despite evidence to the contrary, that corrupt, disfunctional governments have no staying power.
I do NOT need a piece of paper to give me my inalienable rights.
The Constitution may put it in writing, but the freedom of speech, religion, travel, press, assembly, petition, and, yes, PRIVACY are not given to us by the government. The right to a fair trial, the right to remain silent, the right to bear arms, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - these are not given to us by the Powers That Be. They are our rights as humans, in every county of the world. People who deny you these rights are 100% in the wrong, and you should not feel beholden to your citizenship beyond any duties that YOU feel incumbent upon to act.
And ultimately, you either believe that a woman's right to PRIVACY exceeds an unborn child's right to LIFE, or you do not. If medical evidence suggests the child is, in fact, not a human, then they have no rights. If the evidence suggests it is human, then the original question remains. THAT is where the fight lies; not in whether or not the Constitution allows it. The Constitution allows nothing; it only AFFIRMS the inalienable truth of being a human.
And yep you are certainly free to mod me down, but what would be better is to see if you have any sort of argument that is rationally better than mine and to post it here for public scrutiny. I'm not afraid of that challenge are you faith mongers afraid of the challenge?
Let me toot my own horn here. Note an argument that is considerably better and more rational than the flamebait or perhaps troll that you put up. It also is an argument in that I argue points, ie, make assertions and then provide reasons for my assertions. I don't resort to strawmen ("neo-cons", "my god is better than your god"), nor do I make unscientific claims ("there is no god"). Finally, a humane and energy efficient society might be a good idea, but you, of course, provide no support for your assertions.
Macro evolution is, as far as I understand it, the transition from one species to another. An example would be the transition from say a mouse to a cat (poor example I know). I think there is an abundance of proof for micro evolution, which is the variation within a species but I have yet to see any proof that a species can, through the process of evolution, eventually change into another species even in very small steps. If you have any documentation of this I would seriously love to see it.
I have recently converted to christianity and have been struggling to get my new found christian friends to open thier minds to the possiblity that evolution isn't complete BS. But the more I look the less proof I find.
I personally feel that evolution is only part of the answer and that we don't yet have all the information. This is where the debate arises because there are many who think that evolution is a complete and airtight theory and get very agitated when it's questioned. Conversley, while I do believe that God created the universe, he did it according to a set of rules (Physics?) that He created and those rules are worth exploring from a scientific standpoint.
Two reasons:
1) Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack
2) Most things that we accept exist don't have scientific evidence for their existence. Nonscientific evidence outweighs scientific evidence by a large margin. In practice, nonscientific evidence (personal experience, secondhand accounts, even hearsay) often allows us to make useful predictions about life.
The Constitution may put it in writing, but the freedom of speech, religion, travel, press, assembly, petition, and, yes, PRIVACY are not given to us by the government.
I said, "guaranteed" by the constitution.. not granted or given. Please read more carefully before you rant. Of course a right cannot be given. Otherwise it is just a privilige.
And ultimately, you either believe that a woman's right to PRIVACY exceeds an unborn child's right to LIFE, or you do not.
Privacy??? You think that forcing a woman to give birth against her will, risking her own life and health, is a matter of PRIVACY? Please.
If medical evidence suggests the child is, in fact, not a human,
Too subjective. There can be no such medical evidence.
then they have no rights. If the evidence suggests it is human, then the original question remains. THAT is where the fight lies; not in whether or not the Constitution allows it. The Constitution allows nothing; it only AFFIRMS the inalienable truth of being a human.
The truth is that it is wrong to force a woman to give birth... even if by some subjective view a fetus is human. That fetus is under the private care of the mother. It is similar to how we treat born children under parental care... but much more extreme. Parents are generally allowed to restrict the rights of children... but children are citizens so we still protect their basic right to life and some other things. Inside a woman's body, however, all bets are off. In the case of pregnancy, all control is given to the mother. A fetus is no citizen or even resident of the US. We make no death certificate if/when it dies (either miscarriage or abortion). We generally don't hold funerals, etc. Think of a person's body as a sort of "international waters" within which US law doesn't really apply.. even if a fetus is human.
There are 4 stages of a human in the eyes of the law:
1) Unborn and under the private care of the mother. Fetus lives or dies by the mother. Mother calls all the shots.
2) Born, under parental care, but now a citizen. Parents have a lot of authority over teh child, but the child now has the basic protections of the law.
3) At 18 years old, human is an adult and parents have no real authority. All contitutional rights are protected to their fullest (ideally).... except:
4) At 21, drink!
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Two words: Ring Species. Macroevolution, as it's happening.
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
This sounds a bit like an Evolution of American Education.
As a researcher on Evolution I would say the fitness function on the evolutionary process seems a bit flawed though...
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Other posters have filled in. Stoting is a survival mechanism.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Face it. Every attempt to eradicate or exile a given group within a population of humans has failed since the dawn of history*.
Face it. Charlemagne eradicated the Avars with some help from the Bulgarians. ...the Avar people the language the civilization. ...all gone.
Chandragupta II also did his share of ethnic cleansing. Also known as "Vikramaditya, he "unburdened the sacred earth of the Barbarians like the Shakas, Mlecchas, Kambojas, Yavanas, Tusharas, Parasikas, Hunas, etc. by annihilating these sinners completely."
I wouldn't advocate such public policy here, but never underestimate what your fellow humans are capable of doing to your other fellow humans.
I also think that you must have read somewhere that evolution is "untestable" because you keep using that word. Perhaps you mean that the entire history of life on Earth is not a repeatable experiment -- but if that's what's holding you up then you can give up on trying to understand *anything*. Almost all of the universe is either way in the future, way in the past, or really far away from us. Does that mean we can't understand it? Hardly. Anyway, just because something already happened doesn't mean you can't "test" a theory about it. Say, for example, you think evolutionary theory is a good explanation for the diversity of fossil evidence. Can you test that hypothesis? Of course you can! If your theory predicts a transitional form, and you eventually find an example of that transitional form, then you have strengthened your theory. If you find a fossilized modern human and (according to theory) it dates back to 200 million BC, then one of your theories is wrong. Just to keep score, we *have* found many transitional fossils, and we *have not* found any fossils that cause a major contradiction. Sure, there are conflicts and debates about exactly what happened when, but the big picture is pretty scientifically indisputable right now.
That's abiogenesis, not evolution. It's an interesting topic also, but way too much of a tangent.[javac] 100 errors
1) Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack
The great spagetti monster exists. I don't have any evidence but that doesn't mean he doesn't, right? I don't think you have a firm grasp of that statement nor of the scientific method.
2) Most things that we accept exist don't have scientific evidence for their existence. Nonscientific evidence outweighs scientific evidence by a large margin. In practice, nonscientific evidence (personal experience, secondhand accounts, even hearsay) often allows us to make useful predictions about life.
Really, like what? There's a reason hearsay is not allowed in criminal trials. Its not reputable. Secondhand accounts are also crap as well. I was in an accident once and there were some widely different accounts of what happened, many of which were flat out wrong... and those were 'firsthand' accounts.
Personal experience often leads to wrong conclusions as well. Which is why many people argue from points which seem to make sense, but science actually proves the non-intitutive conclusion is the correct one.
Almost all definitions of English words are completely subjective, by definition. That's how human languages work. You can only form a truly objective description in maths, and few English words are amenable to a mathematical definition. 'Science' is not one of them. (An example of a word that can be given a truly objective definition is 'zero').
The word 'useful' is not strictly required for this definition to function, but it is included to eliminate corner cases such as speculation on non-existant laws of physics (like Star Trek physics), which can produce predictions but is more sensibly classified as 'science fiction' than 'science'.
That's a flaw in your 'naturalism', which falsely excludes much of computer science (as it's a pure thought-experiment invented by humans, and therefore its laws are often subjective, not objective), scientific studies of literature (like some branches of computational linguistics), almost all branches of psychology, etc. It's a better definition precisely *because* it doesn't make these mistakes.
This is also an intentional improvement. Focusing on 'understanding' the phenomena leads to rejecting statistical inference as 'unscientific' because it simply predicts patterns without understanding their causes. A reasonable definition of 'science' should not exclude such methods. Education is about understanding, but science does not have to be. There is a specific term for science that focuses on understanding and not just useful predictions: this is known as 'pure research' (or 'basic research'). The fact that we bother to classify research into pure and applied variants emphasises that 'understanding' is not fundamental to science, only part of it.
This definition is founded upon the notion of the scientific method, which is the underpinning of science (using the scientific method is a necessary but not quite sufficient condition for something to be science, but one which only a scientist is qualified to understand, so it's not a particularly useful definition). The scientific method does not require understanding, merely a falsifiable hypothesis that makes testable predictions. You can find a more detailed discussion in that article, in and around the section 'Problem of demarcation'. If you compress the ideas in that section into one sentence without using any technical language, you get something roughly equivalent to what I said.
You will note that even this discussion is founded on subjective concepts like 'evidence' and 'pertinent', which have been the cause of many heated debates between scientists - particularly about what constitutes evidence in the more obscure fields of research. A classic example from high-energy physics: if a particular experiment would validate a hypothesis, but the machine to perform the experiment costs X billion dollars and there's only one of them in the world, is it evidence even though nobody else can repeat the experiment and we cannot prove the machine is not introducing a bias in the results? Opinion is divided on the subject; results are traditionally considered tentative until several independent teams have replicated them, because of the problem of instrument bias.
(All matters on which there is significant dissent are of course subjective, by trivial contradiction from the definition of 'objective'; few things in the human experience are truly objective, which is why it's rarely a very interesting observation to make. It is necessary to work with the subjective reality that one has, instead of pining for the objective reality that one wishes one had.)
Actually, we're having a rather heated immigration debate in the UK too, at the moment. Actually, there's a stronger argument against it in the UK because this island is incredibly overpopulated already, whereas the US isn't. However, my main problem is the language barrier. I'm of the strong belief that it's a good thing for everyone in a country to speak one language; ideally, i'd have everyone in the world speaking one language. Immigrants coming in and speaking Spanish in the US sounds like a bad idea. The language barrier is, IMHO, the biggest barrier to human interaction and telling most Americans to learn Spanish is a really stupid way to solve the problem rather than vice versa.
I've spent the better part of my life in places with a heavy influx of hispanic immigrants, legal and otherwise. And I have never ever found a hispanic person who did not agree, as every other immigrant to the US agrees, that learning English and getting a good education is the key to success in the US. The immigrants themselves may not speak English and might have difficulty learning it, but they make damn sure their kids learn it because they don't want them to have to be labourers like they are.
No one is making Americans learn Spanish. There's no way they could; it seems that even with High Schools often requireing one or two foreign languages practically no one manages to learn and hold onto anything other than English. The official language of the United States is English and always will be. All of our laws and signs are written in English and it remains the primary medium of instruction in our schools. Yet politicians want to get people riled up over the issue and try to pass laws declaring this and make speeches as though we might have to speak another language than English. It's the same as the French politicians who try to scare their constituents into thinking that they might be made to speak Arabic as a new primary language just because there are so many (French-speaking, mind!) immigrants from places like Algeria.
And like another favorite topic of these same politicians, prayer in schools,* politicians are using this canard to try to outlaw speaking any other language. You see currently we have programs in public schools ostensibly designed to teach children English so that they can understand the rest of what is being taught. It's somewhat less than optimal and effective because they are taught everything else in English while attending classes on how to understand English, but it is what we have. There are people who want to do away with these programs, supposedly on the basis that only English should ever be spoken and tax dollars spent on teaching the subject are wasted, but the whole idea makes no logical sense unless your goal is to close what little door is open for the children of migrant workers to learn our language and become skilled workers.
It is annoying to me that people whose entire basis for law is supposed to be religion and morality are such damned liars and clearly hate their fellow man. And they claim Jesus is their leader and favorite philosopher. Clearly they were sleeping in class.. or else it was conducted in Aramaic. :P
*(where they claim praying is currently not allowed in school -- a lie because it is curently illegal to prevent people from praying -- in order to pass laws that force everyone to pray to their God in their way)
No, I've not confused them. I know very well that evolutionary theory does not cover the origin of life, hence the disclaimer in my first paragraph.
What I was really doing was using the self-organizing principle to describe how life can arise. a) Some matter removes itself from the general milling throng, b) manages to keep itself separate, c) bootstraps itself up to a point where it can perpetuate its separateness, and d) thereby becomes living, by definition. And then I pointed out that these organisms will now be subject to natural selection.
It is important to distinguish natural selection from evolution. Evolution involves genes and mutation; natural selection does not. Natural selection simply says that reproduction is likely to be carried out by things that survive long enough to reproduce -- obviously true. But even before these things could reproduce, there was still some selection principle at work, it just wasn't natural selection. It probably doesn't have a name. But regardless, no handwaving, no genetics, no Flying Spaghetti Monster, were needed to get to where we are now.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
What he's saying is that, logically speaking, a lack of evidence can never prove a universal negative. While there's certainly justification for claiming that the great and mighty FSM does exist when you have no evidence for it, there's also no justfication for claiming that he doesn't exist because of that same lack of evidence. Perhaps you haven't been looking in the right place, like on the other side of that galactic cluster. Perhaps the evidence was destroyed. There's many possible reasons for a lack of evidence.
As I was taught, the scientific method can only conditionally prove theories, but can certainly disprove them. If a mountain of evidence supports your theory, you may have great confidence in it, and may even claim that it is "true" as a shorthand for "confirmed by a great deal of evidence". However, if you find evidence that cannot be explained by your theory, you must either adjust the theory to accomidate the evidence (if possible), or consider it falsified and look for a better explanation. Newton's long-standing laws of motion were invalidated as a theory because it couldn't account for relativistic speeds and distances.
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
The official language of the United States is English
Wikipedia disagrees with you.
All of our laws and signs are written in English and it remains the primary medium of instruction in our schools. Yet politicians want to get people riled up over the issue and try to pass laws declaring this and make speeches as though we might have to speak another language than English.
Well, frankly, I have a lot of sympathy with this. Why the hell shouldn't English be passed as the official language?
You say you'd never have to speak another language. Maybe. But, at some point, you might get a government like the one here in the UK that has virtually no respect for its own country's culture and lets people speak, and conduct business, in what the hell they want. That publishes everything in about 50 different languages so that nobody has to integrate properly. Then the communities become ghettoized. No, don't complain about them passing it as an official language. I only wish our politicians had the balls to do the same.
French politicians who try to scare their constituents into thinking that they might be made to speak Arabic as a new primary language just because there are so many (French-speaking, mind!) immigrants from places like Algeria.
Maybe the looked over here. Many of our immigrants DON'T speak English, and most of the problem has occurred over the small space of 10 years. It's a great case study in how not to handle immigration.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Am I reading the same PDF everyone else is/did? Page 7, Life Sciences section, Line 26.13 clearly includes "Evolution".
http://ifap.ed.gov/dpcletters/attachments/GEN060 6A.pdf
What am I missing here?
To the extent that we can't solve global poverty through immigration, allowing large-scale immigration from the Third World only makes things worse, by reducing the pressure for reform (e.g. family planning policies) in the poor countries, and often depriving them of their best minds. It is clearly wrong, both for our society and for theirs, even if a few benefit in both (and in particular the ruling elites).
On an individual basis, it's difficult not to have sympathy for those who wish to flee poor countries and come to Europe (or, for you, North America), but when one considers the societal damage that allowing such migration leads to, it becomes very easy to override this emotional perspective with a rational one.
I would be you would NOT be philosophicaly in with the Republicans if you understood the foundations of Democratic, Libertarian, and Republican morality at a deep level. The way people think about politics is through the metaphor of a family. The parent == government and the child == the population. Everybody thinks about politics this way, and it forms the moral story of the party.
Think about what kind of parent would spend all the family money on guns, not spend a dime on starving and uneducated kids, constantly tell lies, and stubbornly stick to their own pig-headed viewpoints when all the facts are against them. That sounds like a Dad that nobody wants. The only reason that people vote for a government that behaves this way is that there's no alternative story that features a better parent.
These moral stories are based in the foundation of how the family is viewed from within that moral story. The Republican family viewpoint is a consistent story and makes perfect sense. Likewise, Democrats have a consistent story (even if we've been too stupid to articulate it) and it makes perfect sense. I see a lot of people thinking that a consistent story means that the story is correct, and is the only correct story possible. That's why they vote for Republicans. Libertarians I think are particularly susceptible to that kind of thinking because they're smart, and they have personalities which respond to logical arguments. Libertarians emphasize the logic and consistency of their story, and logical people respond to that particular quality in the argument. Republicans and Democrats don't emphasize the logic and consistency of their arguments as much, so they don't appeal to logical people. It's all rooted in the metaphor of a family as society. I could get a lot more specific with some examples, but I think you can get the gist of what I mean here.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The problem with god though is that there is always a more simplier explaination for unexplained phenomina. Science doesn't just say 'well yes, everything exists until proven otherwise.' They don't even bother making something up until they hit some observed phenomina that isn't explained by anything else. Then they come up with theories, then they attempt to test the theories.
God was a good explination before we really started embrassing science... but its no longer a good explaination anymore. Let's try to respect Occam's Razor. There's no need for the theory of god at all. What are we trying to explain by saying there is a god? What do you prove without evidence at all?
We can certainly go your route, and everything which doesn't have proof of existence at all exists... but why bother? What will that gain us? Nothing really. So we infer from the lack of evidence that those things don't exist, until we do have evidence. Seems like a good convention to me.. otherwise we'd be drowning in theories which are totally useless.
As far as Newtonian physics goes, it wasn't competely invalidated. He's laws still hold in many situations, which is one of the reasons its still taught (the fact that the math is a bit easier helps too). Does it explain everything? No. Does it explain a fair subset of observed behaviors. Yes, which is why its still useful.
What has believing in god gotten us? Wars over pieces of land that also just happen to have a lot of oil under them? The holdback of culture and science, because some dusty book about a mythical figure says we shouldn't pursue certain ideas? Plan B being held up SOLEY to appease these delusional masses?
I'd argue we'd be better off without god, even if it did exist...
All medical decisions viewed under judicial purview are considered as state interests vs. private interests. Operative word being private. See the recent case where the state attempted to force a minor to undergo chemotherapy by taking him away from his parents who intended to use a nutritional therapy instead.
As an addendum: Now that I think of it, the macroevolution "problem" only exists because "species" is a fuzzy word without a clear scientific definition. The most commonly spouted one is "capable of interbreeding with fertile offspring", but that would make lions and tigers the same species, which they're obviously not. (There are other exceptions, even more numerous, in the plant world.) However, in ring species, you have individuals that cannot directly interbreed, but can interbreed via an intermediary. (Even Canis lupus familiaris, the domesticated dog, might speciate at some point due to human selection. The wide variety in breed sizes means that small and large dogs are physically incompatible and cannot naturally mate, and purebreeding will just make the problem worse as time goes on.) Even worse, bacteria and archaea don't usually reproduce sexually, and when they do share DNA, they often do so by trading plasmids. Plasmid swapping sometimes happens even between distantly related species -- with some DNA comparisons even suggesting that plasmid exchange happens between eubacteria and archaea, two different kingdoms/domains! There's not really any good way to define an asexual species beyond "Hmm, that one looks different from the others".
Most of the fuzziness is due to the Platonic idea of Forms that's inherent in the word "species" -- the idea that each individual is merely an imperfect implementation of a true, perfect, eternal Form, which we can attach a convenient name to. In evolutionary biology, the concept of Platonic Forms is an outright error; individuals are exactly that, individuals. From the perspective of an individual, the species only matters to the extent that (a) the individual can interbreed with other members of the species, and (b) the individual can cooperate with other members of the species for mutual benefit. Everything else that we attribute to the word "species" has more to do with Plato than reality.
(Medieval scholars so deeply infused Platonic ideas into Western philosophy and Christian theology that Forms are sometimes considered a religious or even fundamental truth, when really it's more of a psychological one -- human brains like to neatly stuff things into orderly pigeonholes with cute labels. Sadly, Platonic thinking has boxed in scholarly thinking in many ways, even among scientists, but there's not an obvious way around it. In some fields, like particle physics, it's not a big deal -- leptons pretty much are Plato's Forms given form *cough* -- but in biology it's an issue that sometimes can't be sidestepped. Even if you discard Forms and throw out labels like "species" and "genus", you need to rebuild a common nomenclature so you can talk about biology with other scientists, which puts you back where you started.)
Range Voting: preference intensity matters
Right. Neither you nor I can disprove the existence of the flying spaghetti monster. The closest we can come is to say "there is insufficient evidence to convince me that the flying spaghetti monster exists."
"Smith is terrible. Jones is much easier to work with."
When I drive, if I see a green traffic light ahead turn yellow, I don't know for sure that it will turn red next. Past experience tells me that it will, but nothing proves that it will this time. Nevertheless, I have been conditioned (classical conditioning is a result of pattern-matching ability) to expect it to turn red soon.
I have read about some of the warning signs of identity theft. Nothing scientifically proves that the correlation of events that others say indicate identity theft actually does indicate that; for all I know, I've only read things about identity theft that were written by clueless morons. That won't stop me from taking action if I see any warning signs of identity theft in my own life.
Of course personal experience sometimes leads to wrong conclusions; racism is one result. It is true that correlation does not always equal causation. However, it does often enough for human pattern-matching abilities to have evolved.
Keep in mind too that any scientific knowledge you have not personally verified yourself is, at best, second-hand information. Most of what we believe about life we learn from others, not from science.
"When was the last time an anti-abortion, pro-war advocate chatted you up about how awesome it was that innocent civilians were being killed by their own countrymen?"
Last week I believe. Last time I had an argument with the fundamentalist christians in my office. The ones who advocate a war to eradicate all muslims. And there have been others as well.
"When was the last time an anti-abortion, pro-war advocate chatted you up about how awesome it was that innocent civilians were being killed by their own countrymen?"
Actually, to correct your statement, those 30,000+ dead Iraqis weren't killed by their own countrymen. They were killed by people following orders from people who value an unborn fetus more than a living, breathing child/adult human being who happens to follow a different religion.
"Culture of life" my ass.
Macro evolution is, as far as I understand it, the transition from one species to another.
Then you do not understand it. At all.
"Macro evolution" is a term creationists made up in order to pretend that there is an issue where there is none.
Since you're clearly getting at least some of your information from those sources, it's no surprise that you have such a poor understanding of the issue as that is exactly what the people pushing the creationist agenda are trying to accomplish.
It seems to have worked on you as you are repeating idiotic ideas which have been repeatedly debunked and proven to be nonsense.
I have recently converted to christianity and have been struggling to get my new found christian friends to open thier minds to the possiblity that evolution isn't complete BS. But the more I look the less proof I find.
Well, obviously, when you look to people who do not understand the issue and who further are actively working to disseminate known false information in order to intentionally deceive others, to provide you with "proof", then you aren't going to find any worthwhile information.
The fact that you're repeating this repeatedly refuted nonsense indicates that you really haven't put any effort whatsoever into understanding the ideas or looking for real substantive answers since a simple search would have turned up mountains of facts demonstrating the proven falsehood of the ideas you're promoting.
Youre misusing (probably intentionally, but that makes it fit your argument) the popular term "fundamentalist christian" by suggesting they are extremists. Sort of like the extremist (see how I am specific?) muslims that advocate, I mean declared war on all non-muslims, and the non-extremists simply try to convert people.
Good luck with the nuts in your office, if they truly are as radical as you say they are.
"I have recently converted to christianity and have been struggling to get my new found christian friends to open thier minds to the possiblity that evolution isn't complete BS. But the more I look the less proof I find."
So far, all the evidence supports evolution, and none contradicts it. More information rolls in all the time to make this "theory" all the more strong. Perhaps you are looking in the wrong journals.
Where were you when the voynix came?
"Face it. Every attempt to eradicate or exile a given group within a population of humans has failed since the dawn of history*"
There are hundreds of groups/tribes/etc who have been utterly eliminated. And these are just the documented ones of the past few hundred years.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I was unaware that it was US soldiers that were blowing themselves up in crowded civilian areas at the behest of bush.
I must not be blinded enough by fundamentalist (extreme? nah...) leftist rhetoric, my bad.
If you say to "federate" means for the people to join together to dictate unto another politic (be that other politic greater or lesser), and the standing purpose of the United States in Law is written that the people may not join together; then it would be a crime to federate. Do you not remember that alleged "amendment"? (original defenition of "correction" is "amendment", like a-mend a damaged/torn/ripped fabric, as opposed to alleged "amendment" to cause a lawful act to become unlawful). That alleged amendment was in that criminal jurisdiction (military?) known as the federal government (US CODE Title 27, Section 3002, 15(b) "United States" means a federal corporation). That alleged amendment was written along the scope that slavery (like economic slavery common to debtor nations) was allowed for punnishment of a crime.
Perhaps the reason why Americans are controlled by the United States (plural/federal/criminal politic, not singular "United States" aka corporation) is because they are all implicitly-declared criminals for federating whereas their crime that holds them as slaves to that criminal jurisdiction is to federate.
I don't see why anyone would want to federate as it is now. The several states are California, Nevada, Oregen, Washington, Arizona, and perhaps 47 more. If the people were to federate on land, then that federation would be known as the United States of America; and it would confuse many non-federal state/Citizens to be incorporated and enfranchized with the federal States known as CALIFORNIA, NEVADA, OREGON, WASHINGTON, ARIZONA, and who knows what else. Then by confusion of the misleading jurisdiction obvious by the verry spelling and use of Zone-Improve-Plan (ZIP) Codes in the Post Office commercial mail-matter, would evince as receiving a Benefit to imrprove the rate of mail matter from that criminal jurisdiction. That's not even half of it. Further on, ther people would be confused by a federal corporation in the United States (plural) of America known as "United States" from where that corporation would be trustee for the charter of corporate States of the United States as evinced in certain codes and regulations. The corporate States themselves would reserve their postal trademark in their Post Office(tm); CALIFORNIA as CA, NEVADA as NV, OREGON as OR, WASHINGTON as WA, ARIZONA as AZ, and who knows what else for the 47 others.
All I need to remember for the original charter; by the Law of Nations is the state is the politic/people. All I need to remember for the original charter;
without prejudice
"I was unaware that it was US soldiers that were blowing themselves up in crowded civilian areas at the behest of bush"
You must not get Al Jazeera either, right?
Where were you when the voynix came?
You think I'd leave because of a single sympton? No my friend, it's the DISEASE that makes people leave. Nina Simone was a talented expatriot. One of the most highly decorated member of the military left the country in despair over it's condition as well.
And referring to a 10000 to 1 ratio as a polarization is nonsensical as well. To be polar implies two equivalent sides. The "opposing" side is technically insignificant and not willing to debate using logical methods - it's irrational garbage.
The only polar argument the downward spiral of our country exposes is whether to stay and fight it or go and enjoy life. Now THAT's an equally-sided challenge.
Truth be told, the government doesn't belong in education, corporations do not belong in governments and religioun sure as hell doesn't belong in any of the three!
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Need to start forking money over to political candidates too and sending spam on behalf of candidates.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
All medical decisions viewed under judicial purview are considered as state interests vs. private interests. Operative word being private. See the recent case where the state attempted to force a minor to undergo chemotherapy by taking him away from his parents who intended to use a nutritional therapy instead.
The operative word here being "minor" and not "fetus."
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
"The official language of the United States is English"
Wikipedia disagrees with you.
Even that Wikipedia link says that English is the de facto official language of the United States, mianly for the reasons below. It's the language listed in the CIA World factbook as well. Maybe I'm an insensitive ignorant American and don't know how other countries define their official language. But the same rules that define English as the official language here are those which define English and Hindi as the official languages of India, and would seem to work the same for other countries as well.
"All of our laws and signs are written in English and it remains the primary medium of instruction in our schools. Yet politicians want to get people riled up over the issue and try to pass laws declaring this and make speeches as though we might have to speak another language than English."
Well, frankly, I have a lot of sympathy with this. Why the hell shouldn't English be passed as the official language?
Because it's a smokescreen. Maybe things work differently in the UK's Parliament, but over here the names of bills and stated reasons for passing them bear little resemblance to the contents and effects (see USAPATRIOT ACT for instance, or the Clear Skies Initiative, or No Child Left Behind). There is no need to pass a law making English the official language because it already is and it would have no effect. However laws have been proposed which are claimed to do only this, which upon investigation actually have the effect of legislating racial discrimination, criminalizing translations, or abolishing the English as a Second Language programs I brought up before. That last is the most popular.
By the way what is the problem with there being translations? I mean sure it's funny when I buy something and the manual has every european language and a good handful of the asian ones in there, so that a one-page manual is like 500 pages, and I end up trying to puzzle out the French or something just to get going rather than trying to find the English bit. But still. I mean does it really hurt you that other people might get a chance to understand something because it's printed in their language? It's printed in yours, too you know.
Here you can often get things printed in Spanish or another language; that's true. Major forms and such, especially for benefits or immigration applications, are available in other languages, and so are menus. They're probably just as good translations as those stereo manuals (for instance, because I read slashdot, I happened to notice that some publications confuse "libre" and "gratis" a lot :D ) but at least it's there. And if a police officer arrests you here they have to read you your rights in your language. But that's so you understand. You do want them to understand what their society is asking of them don't you? Like the laws and such?
And people *can* conduct business in other languages here if they want. They can have signs in another language (like little athens or chinatown or little russia or whatever ethnic haunt you like) and they can have menus in other languages. But that's ok. Their culture is contributing to ours. Trust me. They understand the need to learn english, and will gladly speak it in order to do business with you. That;s what the whole world has been going through for over 400 years. That's the funny bit. Even in their own countries, people all over the world know they need to learn to speak English because historically English speakers don't like to learn other languages and for the last 400 years the money and power has been with them.
I think that it scares some people to see people who are different from them who speak another language they don't understand. And yes probably some times you would not be paranoid to think people are talking behind your back in their native tongue. But who cares? Let them hav
(because let's face it, for all their talk the Minutemen sure don't seem to care about patrolling the Canadian border which is the only border crossing Al Qaeda has been known to use)
Hell of a post man, for the most part I whole heartedly agree with you; just this one point I do want to clarify. Al Qaeda has and is known to have come into the U.S. under the guise of Mexican migrant workers trying to come in just to make a buck. There has been at least one instance where a smuggler took the money from two men, brought them into the U.S. but it became obvious when neither of them spoke any spanish that they we're not one of our friends from south of the border but from far, far east of the border. If I remember correctly, the 9/11 commission report also states that a few of the 20 hijackers also came in from Mexico posing as mexican aliens.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that Bush represents the conservatives in America. He does not, and most of us are as tired of him as you are.
You have a funny way of apologizing.
Look up the Taiping Rebellion in China. Started by Christians, it led to the deaths of at least 20 million people. At the same time, get half a brain cell and realize that Eugenics has nothing to do with the writings of Darwin. You stupid fuck.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Please at least recognize that I voted as I did for researched, meditated reasons,
In that case you are one sickening sociopath.
Creationists such as myself would not call evolutionism a theory. I would call it a hypothesis; one that must be accepted by faith.
Despite the fossil record? Despite the fact that genetics has showed the close relationship between taxonomically-similar species? Despite direct observations of evolution in action? Despite the Galapagos finches? In fact, despite all of the evidence supportive of the Theory of Evolution?
I'm sorry, but the faith here appears to be yours. In spite of the overwhelming evidence for evolution, compounded by the evidence from other areas of science (e.g., astronomy, geology), you choose to dogmatically believe in a saviour mythology unimaginatively ripped off from Mithraism and other mid-Eastern religions, that appeals to dolts such as yourself because you're fed the lie that an all-powerful god has created the Universe especially for you? Well, sheesh, there's no convincing you. I guess you'll just have to go back to spiritual masturbation in front of an idol of that mythical carpenter nailed to a dead tree 2,000 years ago, whose storybook has subsequently lead to the death, opression and misery of millions of humans. Bully for you!
But the last laugh is on you. While you spend your life abasing yourself before human dogma, merely to secure your place in heaven with Jeebus, I plan to excercise a little curiosity and humility and find out a little about the world I'm priviledged to live on. Good luck in your quest to learn nothing and understand nothing -- I just sorry that that's the price your god asks for him to let you be with him in the afterlife.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Yes, but by the time Stalin died, many of the biologists had either fled the country, or been sent off to Gulag. It is Lysenkoism, with its anti-evolution dogma, that was ultimately responsible for this -- the effects were felt long after Lysenko was out of the picture.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I find it mildly amusing that we (slashdot users) are all generally intelligent people and that I have not yet found someone who agrees that the evolution theory should not be taught in schools. Does this say something about the people who are pushing the illogical (religion) down our throats? Perhaps it says something about the people who are running the country?
Religion can exist under the scrutiny of the scientific method. Just test the history, claims (explanatory power), and come up with reasonable hypotheses based on observation. But wait, "The Bible is true" isn't an observation, it's an assumption masquerading as opinion based on no evidence whatsoever. But since they give it 'sacred' titles of "faith" and "religious views," they can't be touched. I find it amusing that there are any scientists at all who extol the virtues of the scientific method, how effective it is, and how there's simply no better way to gather information, and then they turn around and create this artificial barrier between the sensible approach they use and their own personal beliefs on the grounds that its religion and thus cannot be treated like any other subject. Hypocrites, children, hardly rational human beings, and yet they have voting rights. Frightening.
Fine until you get to "raised on classic Christian faith". Christianity in its heyday was about holy mysteries in Latin to be interpreted for the oiks by the priest who was well versed in hidden meanings. With the reformation and increasing literacy ordinary people began reading the words for themselves and demanding a literal meaning. That's a relatively modern phenomenon, and has developed into this crazed belief that "kinds" equate to species and have to be created by innumerable miracles. All things vile and nasty, all creatures short and squat, all things dull and horrible, the Lord God made the lot..
Even that Wikipedia link says that English is the de facto official language of the United States
Right, not the actual official language.
don't know how other countries define their official language
By law?
But the same rules that define English as the official language here are those which define English and Hindi as the official languages of India, and would seem to work the same for other countries as well.
Until you get a government that doesn't care about this 'language' thing, like in the UK (can you tell that I hate Labour?).
Maybe things work differently in the UK's Parliament, but over here the names of bills and stated reasons for passing them bear little resemblance to the contents and effects
Yeah, that is retarded. There should be something to stop that.
There is no need to pass a law making English the official language because it already is and it would have no effect.
It would stop English usage being reduced through the backdoor (immigrants not speaking it, or doing business between each other in it).
By the way what is the problem with there being translations?
You talk about a manual for a product being translated; that's because it's being distributed in many different countries, which is fine. Governmental documents aren't, and should only be published in the official language of a country.
I mean does it really hurt you that other people might get a chance to understand something because it's printed in their language?
Indirectly, yes. It encourages the speaking of more than one language in a country, or at least fails to encourage a single language; this I dislike a lot.
You do want them to understand what their society is asking of them don't you?
No! Unless they speak the official language. If not, they shouldn't be allowed to live in the country. In fact it'd be a good way of finding illegal immigrants. You're simply illegal if you can't speak the official language half-decently. You should need to speak it to get in in the first place.
And people *can* conduct business in other languages here if they want. They can have signs in another language (like little athens or chinatown or little russia or whatever ethnic haunt you like) and they can have menus in other languages. But that's ok. Their culture is contributing to ours. Trust me. They understand the need to learn english, and will gladly speak it in order to do business with you.
Not so. There are many ghettoized areas in the UK, I dunno about the US, where no English is spoken. You're treated as a second-class customer unless you speak Arabic or Urdu, that's if you can figure out what the place actually sells from the non-English sign.
Even in their own countries, people all over the world know they need to learn to speak English
Not so in many countries. I don't think most Chinese, Japanese, French, Russians, etc. can speak English. I dunno why this myth perpetuates.
I think that it scares some people to see people who are different from them who speak another language they don't understand.
It doesn't so much scare me as irritate me. I dunno why, it's like loud, noisy music. I can't explain why it irritates me, it just does.
Let them have their language and culture. Let them keep their heritage. They will be assimilated and we will become stronger because of the diversity.
I think this is wishy-washy nonsense, frequently given by supporters of multiculturalism. It doesn't hold up in reality. These two things clash, you can't both keep your culture and heritage and assimilate into a country (ie. adopt that country's culture and heritage).
A big reason more people came to this country is that we have far more lax restrictions historically on immigrants.
Maybe some of us don't want mass immigration into our country. We're already overcrowded here.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Since fair use is being scaled back everywhere else (through a variety of means including US DMCA) I think you'll find those fair use laws either don't materialise, materialise but are watered down or materialise and are taken away in a very short time. I wouldn't hold my breath.
The Westminster 2 party system is flawed, but so are all current political systems. That needs fixing, but again I'm not holding my breath.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Bzzzzzzzzt this should be a part of basic high school biology classes everyone takes. If we have people getting to the college level who are confused as the status of evolution as an accepted scientific theory we are already lost.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
I believe you misunderstood my point. I am a strong atheist and use reason, logic, and critical thinking as my guide in life. I didn't claim that "everything which doesn't have proof exists". I think that you must have evidence in support of a theory for a strong belief to be warranted. However, I stated that it is illogical to state that something can not exist, simply because you have no evidence. For instance, I believe that there is no credible, direct evidence of the existence any extraterrestrial life. It is reasonable to live your life as if they do not exist, despite however many people claim that they do, until irrefutable evidence for their existence is presented. However, it would be illogical to state that they do not exist, simply because we have no evidence, we have only seen a tiny fraction of this galaxy, much less the universe.
And I'm far more skeptical about the existence of gods than of aliens.
That's pre 7-11 thinking....
These people thrive in uninteresting public positions where they can do damage.
Like cockroaches and rats. They also have a lot of other things in common with cockroaches and rats.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Get the smarter and harder-working people to come to Europe, the US and Canada. At the same time we can ship our lazier or criminally-minded people to the third world. Think about how great the USA would be if we replaced all of our homeless with college grads from India! Low unemployment (ship layabouts to Equadore), low crime (third bust for posession -> free [one way] trip to Mexico), and let's see Iran develop nukes when we bribe all their scientists away and replace them with high-school dropouts.
Think of it! A real, honest-to-God meritocracy! No trust fund babies or welfare queens, nor geniuses without labratories or great artists without brushes. And all we'd have to do is let the government decide who gets to live here, and supress our desire to help people that live on the other side of an imaginary line.
Such a glorious, Utopian dream![/sarcasm]
Did you actually read the full page at your own link to Wikipedia Irreducable Complexity?
Evolution opponents are constandly stuggling even to define Irreducable Complexity, because every attempt to define the terms runs into one of two problems. Either it turns out that evolution CAN and DOES produce that sort of Irreducable Complexity, and/or no valid example of Irreducable Complexity appears to actually exist anywhere in biology.
Even the anti-evolution premier scientist Michael Behe testified under oath in court that there is no scientific support for the Irreducable Complexity argument, and that the various efforts to make such an argument have been fatally flawed, and that the various attempts to cite examples of biological Irreducable Complexity have one after another been shown to have evolutionary valid pathways to establish them.
Note that just because you are not aware of an evolutionary explanation for some particular thing and cannot imagine any evolutionary explanation for some particular thing, does not mean that professional biologists studing that thing are not well familiar with an evolutionary pathway to develop it. And whatever example you have in mind, do you seriously think that anti-evolution expert Michael Behe is entirely unaware of that example? Because if he knew of any such valid example, he certainly would have jumped at the chance to name that example in court.
P.S.
For continued discussion of this subject, it would be most helpful if you answer whether you subscribe to a 4.5 billion year earth timeline or a 6000 year earth timeline.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
You left out my pet-peeve scientifically illiterate argument against evolution, the old "Second Law of Thermodynamics prooves evolution is impossible" argument. God I hate that one being brought up over and over and over and over again. It proves evolution is impossible exactly the same way it proves snowflakes are impossible. Sigh.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
This is becoming more and more common lately.. but guess what, it aint gonna fly.
...in lights...hanging underneath...mmm...underneath a giant pig or something...
Sure it will. "Slick George of the Tax 'n Spend Party!"
Truth is, the religious far right and the anti-religious far left are both members of the same party, wether they realize it or not.
Eugenics has nothing to do with the writings of Darwin
From the article:
it has copious interlocking evidence on many different levels supporting the theory. ... Ultimately, what theory best represents the world as we see it?
Interlocking false premises, which result from biased interpretations of observations. Studying the unknown past is fraught with pitfalls. Read The Parable of the Candle.
Then we can glance at the fossil record and see that speciation long predates the presence of humanity which is contrary to your assertion and goes back to very simple organisms. This also brings up the point of how old the Earth is. Concensus is that it's between 4 and 5 billions years old based on examination of rocks from the Earth, Moon, and elsewhere in the Solar System (usually in the form of meteorites). Some creationists claim the Earth is as young as 6,000 years old despite copious evidence to the contrary.
*sigh* This is what I'm talking about. Khallow, you've got to unlearn so much of what you think you know before you can begin to see that our observations are in line with the history that the Holy Bible describes. In fact, they make sense only in light of Biblical accounts. See this article about fast fossils (more at Fossils FAQ).
More it seems the disagreement [between creationists and the ID movement] is in how the argument is pursued.
I think that's it. For Biblical creationists, the Bible is the foremost and clearest authority on how the earth came to be. The waging of a campaign to "fight the good fight" wherein invoking God is taboo and quoting the Bible is off-limits is offensive to some creationists. Moreover, it is seen as possibly being non-productive, as the ultimate goal in creationism is to see more people put their trust in a specific, identifiable, creative God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and accept His gift of salvation that was made possible by sending His Son, the Messiah, to die for our sins on a cross.
I'm curious to see why there would be a disconnect between the two groups [creationism and ID].
See the end of my post to another replier.
Despite the fossil record?
I should be asking you that question, in response to your profession of evolutionism. The fossil record has had a rocky relationship with evolution (no pun intended), but is a helpful friend to the creationist. It is a great witness to the truth of the Biblical Flood account.
Despite the fact that genetics has showed the close relationship between taxonomically-similar species?
Which is not evidence for evolution.
Despite direct observations of evolution in action?
"Evolution" only by the elimination or rearrangement of genes. Show me where genetic information is increased. (Actually, the evolutionist must begin his progression from a point where there is no DNA at all!) By the way, speciation is a pillar of Biblical creationism.
Despite the Galapagos finches?
Which do not provide evidence of evolution. In fact, they are evidence for creationism.
In fact, despite all of the evidence supportive of the Theory of Evolution?
In fact, you have failed to show me any so far.
I plan to exercise a little curiosity and humility
That would be nice for a change. Let me know when you begin to implement your plan. :)
and find out a little about the world I'm privileged to live on.
Oops, you slipped. Cosmic privileges are outside the domain of evolutionist/naturalist doctrine, because they are, by definition, benefits granted by an authority. Fortunately, you are (unwittingly) correct. The Creator God has bestowed us the privilege of living on this world.
>I also think that you must have read somewhere that evolution
... I'm still waiting for few
>is "untestable" because you keep using that word.
Sigh. Everybody in this conversation "read somewhere",
approximately none have done original research, and even the very
very few who have depend on the work of others. So lets
have done with this line.
Anyway, I've heard the word most from creationist-bashers.
Apparently, science involves forming hypotheses and testing
them experimentally (I knew that, of course, but pro-evolutionists
are ever helpful in remedying my supposedly deficient knowledge).
So the irony was a bit inescapable
trials of "single cell to all life on earth".
Yes, I know Galton was Darwin's cousin. But that doesn't change the fact that Eugenics has nothing to do with the writings of Darwin, you moron. Sheesh, do you think that just because Hitler was part-Jewish, the holocaust didn't happen?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
As an astronomer, I know how dishonest Answers in Genesis is about those issue I have expertise on. Having read talkorigins.org, I am aware that they appear to be dishonest about just about everything else. Is lying for Jesus acceptable?
Now, about that flood. Where did the water originally come from? Where did it go? What happened to the energy released when it fell from the skies? Why does the Grand Canyon look nothing like flood erosion? How did the marsupials get to Australia after leaving the ark? What did the animals on the ark eat? What was done with the excrement? If Noah plus family were the only survivors, did they fuck each other to recreate the human race? Why does the fossil record show less developed species in lower strata -- how did the flood selectively kill these species first?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
I have seen the answers to most of your questions on the Answers in Genesis site, or in Genesis itself. You can look them up as well as I can. If you really want to know.
The problem with Australia is that our leader's head is firmly wedged up your leader's butt, and the same religious right are starting to gain ground here as well.
Can anyone comment on the state of EU politics?
Agreed. Where's the USA which led the world in scientific, theoretical and engineering breakthroughs? Where's the America where refugees and immigrants are welcomed with open arms to the land of opportunity? Where's the country that planted the first footstep on the moon, that prided itself on its freedoms instead of gutting their carcasses?
Where is that nation now?
One day, I hope to visit America for more than the few weeks I've been able to manage so far. But I want to visit the country I grew up believing in. America the confident, the strong, one of the major engines driving the world. Not this - this wreck of a nation, this diseased parody.
America has such strength, such potential - it's just heartbreaking to see it wasted like this.
Flamebait? I'd say this is Insightful.
Ah, whatever.
Also, I don't think you really read what I wrote in my previous post.
[javac] 100 errors
BTW, I have not decided whether I believe in a new earth or an old earth but it matters not. I am open to the idea that the earth is 4.5 billions years old. Oceanographers will put this age at a mere 190 million years but whatever. I am open to the earth being infinitely old. I still have problems with the theory of evolution. I do not think that evolution is junk science but I think that there are junk scientists who hold onto the theory as if it were their last breath. We know things evolve and we know that natural selection does act on populations of life. I just personally have a problem beleiving that natural selection explains all the variance of life that we now see and also the complexity of organism which now enhabit the earth. That is why I would like to see Intelligent Design taught somewhere in school. This could be in a science class or a philosphy class. I care not. The statement that the Dover School board drafted up about Evolution and ID was perfect. If did not attack either theory but simply asked students to look at all the evidence from more then one angle. What is wrong with that? Since when did Science say that it had all the answers piled nice and neat in one little theory and start throwing out evidence that didn't fit that theory?
'Let the mother decide if it's ending a life or not"
So, if I kill my annoying neighbor, it's just "me deciding whether it was a life or not"
Idiotic non-logic.
And, for the record, evolution is a clearly proven FACT, religion should be kept out of schools, and I have mixed feelings about the abortion issue. But don't go making insane leaps of logic.
Clearly Genesis implies humans were created "in God's image", independently of other life forms. This has nothing to do with the timeline, and everything to do with whether humans are closely related to animals or not. It falsely flatters people to think their species is "oh so special", which explains the resistance to the facts of evolution.
If you want to educate yourself (unlikely, I'm guessing) read "The Selfish Gene", which clearly explains why this interdependent set of life forms co-existing is assured by evolution. I hope you didn't think it proves the opposite.
No, you're just reading into it what evidence you'd need to fit your model. Very unscientific.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
However, I stated that it is illogical to state that something can not exist, simply because you have no evidence.
I understand that point. However my problem with the notion of a god is that for anything unexplained, we can always devise a simpler, non-supernatural explaination. If that is the case, then its not so illogical to think that god cannot exist.
I agree with you on aliens; its far more logical that some random 'accident' caused life in some kind of form on another planet. There is simply so much matter and energy in the universe to think otherwise.
I said Even the anti-evolution premier scientist Michael Behe testified under oath in court that there is no scientific support for the Irreducable Complexity argument. Court transcript:
Maybe you don't like my phrasing, but I'd say that quote pretty well means what I said. During the transcript there's a segment, too long to quote here, where Behe is about as evasive as possible but effectively conceeds that every major science organisation - including everyone else in his own science department - reject his work as invalid.
His court tesitmony referrs to teh fact that other scientists have pointed out to him legitimate evolutionary avenues to produce apparently Irreducably Complex systems, avenues that he had not thought of, and that it did punch a hole in his previous definition and previous work, and that he had to revise his definition of Irreducable Complexity. But for the life of me I cannot imagine why he thinks his new definition and new work in any way resolve the fatal problem that apparently Irreducably Complex systems can easily arise at that point by perfectly evolvable pathways. And the scientific community also agrees that his new efforts do nothing to fix that error. (Those pathways including the horizonal pathway of arriving at that system from a similar structure for one function modifying to preform a different function that is apparantly Irreducable, and the vertical downwards pathway of a perfectly evolvable perfectly reducable system with *more* components settling downwards losing now-unnecessary components and reaching a more efficient "Irreducable" set of components.)
Behe has submitted many papers on the subject to science journals, and they have all been rejected. In quite a few cases the rejection letters have fully or partially made it online (apparantly by Behe himself in most cases), showing that they discuss flaws in the science of his work as reason for that rejection.
Behe's own work on Irreducable Complexity not only concluded that Irreducable Complexity can and will spontaneously appear through evolution - even under his own revised stricter definition of Irreducable Complexity - and in fact he calculated how fast it would happen. He worked out it would take 20,000 years for his particular selected item of specified Irreducable Complexity would occur in a laboratory flask of bacteria. And I'd like to add two notes to that. One, that selfsame result also means that a *real world* size population of bacteria in a large field would have produced that same specified Irreducable Complexity in a matter of weeks if not days. Second, evolution is not towards any specified result. Working out the chance of a specific result appearing is like working out the chance of one arbitrary tree being hit by lightning, finding many electrically shattered trees across the planet, and concluding that none of them could have been hit by lightning because it would take 20,000 years for one tree to get hit on average. You can't look backwards at the probabilty of having gotten one specific result out of many equally signifigant results. You have to look at the forward probability of getting any one of a near infinite number of different equally signifigant results.
Based on various quotable sources (if you want/need quotes here), Behe accepts (or at least does not dipute, and says he has no reason to doubt) the multibillion year timeline, that he finds common decent of all life on earth convincing, and agrees that humans and gorillas shared a recent common ancestor. He agrees with all of evolution, with the single exception that he is claiming proof that G
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Clerical as in "clerk" or "clergy"? An unintentional double-entendre, I'm sure, but it was intelligently designed nonetheless.
"Al Qaeda has and is known to have come into the U.S. under the guise of Mexican migrant workers trying to come in just to make a buck. There has been at least one instance where a smuggler took the money from two men, brought them into the U.S. but it became obvious when neither of them spoke any spanish that they we're not one of our friends from south of the border but from far, far east of the border. If I remember correctly, the 9/11 commission report also states that a few of the 20 hijackers also came in from Mexico posing as mexican."
Please sir or madam, stop spreading this nonsense. According to the 9/11 Commission Report: all 9/11 hijackers had arrived the US legally (with visas issued by the U.S.) and had been living in this country for quite some time before their attack. NOT ONE CAME POSING AS MEXICAN! ALL OF THEM CAME THROUGH AN AIRPORT. And, most of them were residents of Florida.
"If I remember correctly, the 9/11 commission report also states that a few of the 20 hijackers also came in from Mexico posing as mexican."
Please see the if I remember correctly.. Unfortunatley I read so much crap I can become confused on where I'm quoting from, my bad. However, it may have been something local as I live relatively close to the California\Mexican border. I can also tell you asshole, that I was stationed at Fort Huachuca, AZ for awhile and I know with some relative confidence what the Army, DOD, OHS, Coast Guard among many others were looking for coming in from the Mexican\Arizona, Texas, Louisianna and California border and why some information is withheld from the public. Some reasons are a little silly and there should be more trust that the American people can know more than what they are given credit for however there are also some good reasons\logic on why other information is not shared. It's been several years since I was meagerly involved however the facts of what WAS relative then hasn't changed I'm sure. The concern is real and anyone that thinks people from Middle eastern decent wouldn't have an easier time posing as a Mexican national as opposed to a Canadian eh.. are apparently blind. They may not be Al Qaeda, maybe their hezbollah, Syrian, taliban; regardless they are not stoopid people, maybe ignorant but they tend to take the path of least resistance and that would be one. YES, there are known cases of them backpacking through the woods of Canada and coming into Wyoming and Minesotta and I wasn't denying or arguing that, only the fact that it's easier to come in through the South, ask any of the 1+ Million illegals in California or Carols Mencia. Get a clue and get a life, I love to argue valid points so please try again.
I found these articles in about three minutes: http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page =/SpecialReports/archive/200608/SPE20060821a.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=45203
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=37981
KAREN SCHALER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Since October, more than 800,000 illegal aliens have been caught trying to sneak across the U.S.-Mexico border. Close to 10 percent aren't from Mexico, creating serious homeland security concerns.
SEN. JON KYL (R), ARIZONA: We're concerned about terrorists coming across the border because of the huge increases in other than Mexicans, people coming from abroad through Mexico, across our southern border. We know that al Qaeda specifically desires to bring people across this border.
approximately none have done original research
Then let me remedy that. I have personally run experiments and personally proven that the mutation-replication-selection process does in fact spontaneously generate complex useful new information. And in particular I am well familiar with the nonobvious deep mathematics proving who and why sexual reproduction is almost infinitely more evolutionarily powerful than asexual reproduction.
Every new DNA analysis of another species is a powerful test of the strict family tree structure of common decent and thus of evolution. Every new fossil find is a test of evolution, of the strict tree of common decent and intermediate forms at intermediate times.
It's an absolute waste of time when people try to claim that evolution is untestable and untested.
even the very very few who have depend on the work of others.
WTF? Is that supposed to be a criticism of evolution? It's not. To the extent it's "valid", it is a "valid" critisism of virtually ALL of science.
science involves forming hypotheses and testing
them experimentally
Yes. And evolution has been overwhelmingly tested in the last hundred and fourty-odd years. The testing and evidence has gone from a steady stream to an absolute TORRENT in the last decade or two, with the advent of extensive genetic analysis.
Among experts with degrees in the life and earth sciences, only about 1-in-685 gives any credence to "creation science" (from Newsweek magazine figures). The debate over evolution is a strictly political debate and social debate. There is no genuine scientific debate over evolution. Over the last hundred and fourt-odd years, evolution started out at zero percent and the accumulating and overwhelming evidence slowly and steadily convinced the entire educated expert community. A community that started out 100% creationist.
And that is true even if we throw out every single atheistic or otherwise non-Christian scientists. Any Chistian who goes to college and majors in the field and gets a degree in biology actually learns all the experiments and work that have been done and examins all of the evidence that has been accumulated, there is a 99.6+% probability that at the end he will wind up convinced of evolution, convined that evolution is simply God's chosen mechanism. The evidence really is that powerful, and the current Christial earth and life sciences community really is that unanimous on evolution.
I'm still waiting for few trials of "single cell to all life on earth".
Ahhh. So I guess you're also waithing for someone to form an entire star and spark gravitationally driven nuclear fusion in a laboratory? And until then you'll insist that maybe the sun is powered by electricity rather than nuclear fusion?
And also there is no evidence that the "macro" craters on the earth and moon where caused by big meteor impacts. We've only witnessed "micro" meteor impacts making "micro" craters, and we've only run small laboratory experiments slaming "micro" projectiles and making "micro" craters. The fact that we understand the process, and that we see a "macro" crater with identical structure to "micro" craters is no legitmate reason to suggest that we actually know how big craters were made.
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Cite?