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The Greatest Scientific Hoaxes?
Ponca City, We love you writes "The New Scientist has an amusing story about the seven greatest scientific hoaxes of all time. Of course, there have been serious cases of scientific fraud, such as the stem cell researchers recently found guilty of falsifying data, and the South Korean cloning fraud, but the hoaxes selected point more to human gullibility than malevolence and include the Piltdown Man (constructed from a medieval human cranium); a ten-foot "petrified man" dug up on a small farm in Cardiff; fossils 'found' in Wurzburg, Germany depicting comets, moons and suns, Alan Sokal's paper loaded with nonsensical jargon that was accepted by the journal Social Text; the claim of the Upas tree on the island of Java so poisonous that it killed everything within a 15-mile radius; and Johann Heinrich Cohausen's claim of an elixir produced by collecting the breath of young women in bottles that produced immortality. Our favorite: BBC's broadcast in 1957 about the spaghetti tree in Switzerland that showed a family harvesting pasta that hung from the branches of the tree. After watching the program, hundreds of people phoned in asking how they could grow their own tree but, alas, the program turned out to be an April Fools' Day joke." What massive scientific hoaxes/jokes have other people witnessed?
How about Global warming? That has to be the biggest scientific hoax ever in history
I never said it was a good hoax, I said it was the biggest hoax. No hoax is ever "good" in the sense that it's constructed well enough to fool people who know how to think critically. Most of them play to the lowest common denominator, or play to emotions and feelings which are innate to mankind. What sets apart hoaxes is how well they exploit our weaknesses. And ID is amongst the best in that sense. The basic marketing behind it is the concept of fairness and equality. We're told we need to teach ID because "evolution is just a theory", and because we need to expose our children to the debate so they can make up their own minds about what to believe. Of course, that argument carries no water with those who understand the difference between a scientific theory and an untested (and untestable) belief, but the marketing tactic is ingenious because it appeals to everyone's desire for fairness and open-mindedness.
Of course, now that ID has taken a beating in the courts, they've moved on to an even better version, which is "teach the flaws of evolution". That particular ploy has the advantage of casting doubt on evolutionary theory using creationist dogma, without once mentioning the words "creation" or "designer".
You gotta give it to 'em - they're not a stupid bunch. They're devious as fuck, totally closed-minded, and ignorant of the basic concept of logic, but they're not stupid by any means.
I wouldn't call that clever, I would call it political grandstanding by a politico who is struggling to be relevant while spending at least half the movie taking cheap shots at Bush. Not that I don't enjoy a good cheap shot at Bush, but that is hardly the place to do it. Further, this is EXACTLY why this whole thing is championed by ultraliberal and dismissed by ultraconservative. Once again...political grandstanding instead of serious scientific discourse
The lefties get their little pet champions and trot them out with cherry picked evidence presentations, the right wingers fund a ton of pseudoscience stuff to counter that, and at the end of the day it is reduced to nothing more than a vehicle for vote gathering rather than an issue being addressed.
No my friend...Al Gore is a damned tool and only serves to muddy the water with his nonsense. I will even admit that the video is nowhere as outlandish as the right wingers claim it is, but it still is little more than political grandstanding by someone trying to be relevant. It would have been nice if it was a real presentation with real scientific views rather than stupid jokes about how he should have been president or childhood stories.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
The folks promoting Intelligent Design believe it to be true. They're not lying... they're merely mistaken.
Then they are lying about having proof? A flimsy distinction, a bit like the WMDs.
Were the neocons not lying because they believed their own BS?