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Study Highlights Gap Between Views of Scientists and the Public
ZeroSerenity was one of many to write with news of a survey from the Pew Research Center which sought to find out how Americans feel about science and contrast that with the opinions of actual scientists. The study showed that "nearly 9 in 10 scientists accept the idea of evolution by natural selection, but just a third of the public does. And while 84% of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, less than half of the public agrees with that." 27% of the respondents said that the advances of the US in science are its greatest achievement, down from 44% ten years ago. The study is lengthy, and it contains many more interesting tidbits. For example: scientists decry the level of media coverage given to science, and they also think research funding has too much influence on study results. 32% of scientists identify themselves as Independent, while 55% say they're Democrats and 6% say they're Republicans.
32% of scientists identify themselves as Independent, while 55% say they're Democrats and 6% say they're Republicans.
Ahh, reality with it's damned liberal bias again...
We always try to keep in mind that correlation does not equal causation, but if that is so, what does the "55% of scientists are Democrats" statistic mean?
And if we also look at global warming with the same critical eye, can we really say that humans are responsible for global warming when all we can really show is a strong correlation?
I'm not a global climate change denier. There is definitely something going on. Whether it is caused by humans or not, it doesn't really seem to matter. Let's focus on making this place a nice place to live. Clean air, clean water, clean land. These are things no one is going to argue with. Let's start making this a better world for you and for me.
32% of scientists identify themselves as Independent, while 55% say they're Democrats and 6% say they're Republicans.
Selecting a party instead of a candidate seems rather unscientific to me. I've probably voted for more Democrats than Republicans in my life, but it seems to me that the scientific approach is to study the evidence and select a candidate based on his record, stated positions, etc.
Frankly, lately, it strikes me that the most scientific approach might be to vote against the incumbent regardless of party. Incumbency seems to strongly correlate with making decisions based on things other than evidence. Incumbents seem inclined -- increasingly over duration of incumbency -- to base their decisions on favors they owe and promises of future favors they can collect rather than on evidence and deep, objective consideration.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Being a scientist is linked very closely to being educated at graduate level or higher. These views (acceptance of evolution, belief in human caused global warming, etc) are linked to the replacement of a prior belief (whatever the Bible implies) with a belief in a complicated theory that often doesn't make sense without serious study. A casual textbook explanation of evolution leads to questions of how complicated mechanisms such as sexual reproduction came into being, which leaves serious doubts about the validity of "scientific theories" in the minds of individuals with high school education.
Should we be surprised at all that increased levels of education help people critically analyze and accept/deny scientific theories? Should we still be surprised that the more educated someone is, the more liberal (generally speaking) their political views tend to be? So long as the cutting edge of science involves far more math or heavy statistical theory than the average human is educated in, the layman who doesn't take time to research issues will have to either take faith in the word of "experts", or take faith in the "word of God, as brought to you by $Preacher.)
Signatures are the new names.
Yes, the the patrons of those scientists had a vested theological interest in those positions. Not that any actual science was really conducted to validate them...
No they didn't. Catholicism was the major driver behind geocentrism, and no-one with any sense ever believed the earth was flat.
Pew used the AACS membership list to generate their list of "scientists" to poll. Anyone that wants to fork over $99 can join the AACS, including kindergarten teachers. Would you call the opinion of a kindergarten teacher the opinion of a scientist? The stated goals of AACS essentially define it as a left-leaning organization, so it's no surprise that 55% say they are Democrats.
Perhaps Pew could not do their research on such a decidedly biased sample to begin with -- but I suppose that is asking too much these days.
The disparity between the views of scientists and 'the public' is another illustration of the generally poor quality of education. This is evident here in the UK, and perhaps even more in the US, where the base quality of education is often questionable, and often the subject matter is 'taught' in a far from sensible way. Just look at the debate over how (or even if) evolution should be taught. The populace are never going to be able to participate in informed debate from a position of ignorance, but that is exactly what is currently happening. This whole mess is made even worse by those in power (politicians) putting their own agendas before fact and truth, and by putting short term (political) considerations above the long term good (see the 'debate' raging over global warming for a good example of this). The public will never catch up with the level of appreciation and understanding scientists have of these matters unless their underlying knowledge and education is adequate, and right now it clearly isn't.
Smivs on the intertubes!
Hrm... I'd like to see exactly how they arrived at *that* number...
They're not counting engineers as scientists, are they?
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
The majority of European scientists used to agree that the earth was flat, and at the center of the universe. The Mayans, Incas, Egyptians, and Indians knew better, evidently well before Galileo.
BTW, the general gist of TFA can correctly be summarized as "average modern human still a superstitious boob, status quo maintained".
Caveat Utilitor
A lot has changed since then and even the term scientist as well. There are however still biased scientists today as there were back then, scientists whom receive their paychecks from tobacco companies to supply data that brings doubt to lung diseases caused by smoking tobacco. Still to gain the acceptance of the majority of scientists today should not be taken lightly, as it is not an easy task.
I am the lawn!
Yes, the the patrons of those scientists had a vested theological interest in those positions. Not that any actual science was really conducted to validate them...
Perhaps not unlike the corporate interests of some scientists these days.
The "Pew Research Center" canvassed the membership of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS publishes the Science journal which has a distinctly liberal bias.
Note carefully: I'm not saying that's a bad thing. However, it means that the sample is biased. I'm actually surprised that as many as 6% of respondents identified themselves as Republicans.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The fact that the media gives equal time and access to creationists, conspiracy theorists, homeopathic medicine and various other tinfoil hat whackmobiles does the body politic no favors whatsoever. There's no emphasis on rigorous thought. Sentiment and ratings trump accuracy and logic.
Critical thinking should be a required course in every high school in the land, and if you fail you don't get a diploma. But the churches would scream bloody murder. The last thing they want is children thinking for themselves.
I piss off bigots.
This is just plain wrong. Even the ancient greeks knew that the earth was spherical. This has been the dominant scientific position for a long time. The wikipedia article on it is quite good flat earth.
The majority of scientists used to agree that the earth was flat.
That's just a modern myth about olden days people. People have known the world was round for thousands of years.
This is really depressing. :( But at least it's still scientists doing the science and not the 66% of the population that does not even understand where we come from (evolution).
Valtor
"Sockets are the standard networking API, also useful for stopping your eyes from falling onto your cheeks" zeromq.org
When? Where?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
While I was living in Britain in the late 1970s, the BBC announced a new evening radio programme to cover the Arts & Sciences in more depth. For a few weeks it looked promising, but the ratio or Arts to Science gradually tilted towards the Arts and the Science withered to a few occasional short items. I assumed that this was due to the Beeb being inhabited primarily by Arts people, who love to talk about their work, whereas the Science people were busy elsewhere doing their science. Here in Canada the CBC has an hour of science a week (Quirks & Quarks, Saturday mid-day & repeated one late evening), which is quite decent (at the interested lay people level). They cover three or four topics in some depth. But the CBC's Arts programming greatly exceeds it.
Don't just blame malice. There will be a slight bias to the people who pay you most of the time. It may not be intentional. But if you work for "The Cap and Trade Working Group" you are more likely to support the CO2 cause of global warming, than if you work for the "Natural Gas Producers Association."
Out of curiosity why are you accusing the Pew Research Center of systematic unethical and deceptive practices?
Do you think they always engage such behavior? Or is it just certain studies?
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Eratosthenes calculated the radius of the earth back then in 240 BCE, thats long before science as we know it today even existed.
I found it very revealing to see the statistics about what the public thought the scientific consensus is. Paraphrasing from the original article:
- Public thinks 60% of scientists agree that evolution occurred, but actually 97% of scientists support evolution.
- Public thinks 56% of scientists agree that global warming is human caused, but actually 84% of scientists support the theory that human activity has and is causing global warming.
This nearly 50/50 split in the public's view leads me to think: what is the primary source of science news for most of the public? The press. And most of the time, particularly on controversial issues, the press just presents two talking heads with opposing views as the current state of affairs. If you didn't know better from other sources you'd have to assume that the scientific consensus was split 50/50.
It's too bad the Global Warming debate is being hijacked by politicians. Al Gore recently described the new climate bill out of the US Congress as 'helping to bring about global governance'
The problem with the folks not buying into this global warming crap isn't so much the science it's the new taxes and other restrictions of freedom it will impose combined with other countries smart enough not to get involved.
I think there is building evidence that the scientists that believe it is happening are wrong. No one can explain why global temperatures have flat-lined. The models aren't working. It seems some agencies are adjusting data to agree with their models, when in reality we aren't experiencing the warming we've been warned about. Here is an article that illustrates this problem.
The debate isn't over and the folks understand that, especially considering the burden that will be imposed on them if they go along with it.
You don't have to be computer scientist to use a computer. Likewise, folks know they don't have to be scientists to understand that it is very unlikely that we have the power to affect the climate of the earth. Additionally they are seeing the data and they are seeing that reality isn't agreeing with scientists models.
Satellite data is starting to show a bunch of negative numbers. The (false) notion that this planet is warming is starting to give way to reality , and the regular folks understand that.
Kevin
I think that whats constantly being passed on tv as science in US is eclipsing any real discovery. They need to realize that most real discoveries come in small parts ususally building on some one else's works. It's not woops we suddenly have warp drive. That and any real discoveries are being covered up by media hype of who died this week and who is dating who. A media discovery might get 2 minutes on CNN where as a funeral is playing on 16 channels for 2 weeks straight.
scientists may be bought. science cannot. if you falsify results for money, anyone reproducing the experiment will demonstrate your flawed conclusions.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
The research for these types of stories is horrible.
What do I care if 84% of scientists believe the earth is getting warmer from human activity? My father's a scientist who studies product safety. His opinion on global warming is no more educated than the rest of the public's but he's a "scientist." A marine biologist might observe changes in habitat and deserve an opinion, but a chemist at a drug research lab probably doesn't rank above my own knowledge of global warming.
Polling groups of people with a similar job title in totally different fields is misleading at best.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
... how any *real* scientist could be anything but independent. Political parties subscribe to belief systems that are principally about self-preservation and perpetuation. Aligning oneself with one party or the other would seem to violate everything science is about. FWIW, I am registered unenrolled (a.k.a. independent) and typically vote anti-incumbent unless one or the other candidate truly inspires me (rare) or scares me (frequent).
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Mod parent up. Just because you are educated in one thing does not mean you are educated in all things.
Hear is an anecdotal news flash. I have my BS in theoretical physics. Every one of my Physics friends (including those who went on to their PhD) and anything I have heard from my professors and their professors (except for one) says global warming smacks of bad science.
So, it'd be interesting to see this study broke down by discipline so we could look at their educated opinions.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
It's still not great (The iPlayer currently lists 57 "Science & Nature" programmes and 116 "Arts & Culture" shows, but it's still more than: Antiques (26), Beauty & Style (6), Cars & Motors (6), Cinema (5), Consumer (12), Crime & Justice (7), Disability (1), Families & Relationships (2), Food & Drink (17), Health & Wellbeing (12), History (36), Homes & Gardens (37), Money (51), Pets & Animals (10) & Travel (2)).
That said, there are some excellent examples (though mostly on the radio, rather than TV); I'm a great fan of Radio 4's Material World and there are also shows like Digital Planet, Fossil Detectives, Leading Edge, Science Cafe & Science In Action.
The sad truth is that most people either don't give a shit about science as long as their internets work or would be interested but struggle with the exclusionary aura that a lot of science programmes exude - which is why I like Material World as it makes a effort to be accessible to everyone.
Bullsh*t. The Greeks computed the size of the earth (within 5%) some 3,000 years ago. Get your facts right Neocon...
Try moving to the midwest, son. I lived in Kansas for five years and boy I'll tell ya I met more than a few folks who don't accept it. I once had a conversation with somebody who literally believed the Earth was only six thousand years old. When I brought up that carbon dating of fossilized dinosaurs revealed their age to be millions of years old and radiometric dating of the oldest rocks on Earth revealed their age to be in the billions of years old, this person replied with, "God creates false readings to test our faith." There's really no winning an argument like that.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
The majority of European scientists used to agree that the earth was flat
Not even that. The greeks knew the Earth was round and had calculated its size pretty accurately. Since then, there hasn't been serious disagreement among scientists or sailors or educated people generally. There may have been some denial from the religious and the simply ignorant, but the story you hear about Columbus being the one who proved the world was round --or whatever the story is-- it's BS.
Yes, you need to look at the bigger picture dude, it's a big conspiracy to suppress the Libertarians, dude! Because if the majority of scientists doesn't share the same political affiliation as I do (and everyone knows how big libertarianism is outside of IT nerd circles), then it must be that the Pew Research Center has a secret agenda of suppressing libertarians. Because everyone knows The Man has a big thing against libertarians. Like anyone cares about libertarians... hehe
Like Shivetva when I don't like a fact I discard it by claiming that the fact was obtained by discarding other facts. I distort reality by accusing others of distorting it in the first place. It really works, in my version of reality.
You just got troll'd!
Humans bred commercial varieties of bananas for size, flavor, texture and seedlessness (they may have some seeds, but not compared to wild bananas). So not a magical creator, but pretty much a creator.
Anyway, mostly pointing out that that particular argument is dumb.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The last thing they want is children thinking for themselves.
That applies to any self-perpetuating group. If you catch people when they're too young to make distinctions, you can implant your ideas down at the level of attitudes where they're very, very hard to get at later. Relatively few people who were raised in a non-religious environment ever acquire faith later in life: such an adult will perceive much of a typical religious belief system to be as corny, fictitious and unjustifiable as it really is.
Conversely, the bulk of people who were raised in religion die still believing it. As one of the aforementioned people who was not brought up in a God-fearing household, I often wonder how people who have strong religious beliefs manage to accommodate such cognitive dissonance. That is, how they rationalize the very evident inconsistencies between their programmed view of the Universe, and what actually is.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
True- but whats often reported as 'science' is analysis, modeling and extrapolation of small scale independently reproducible Science.
That kind of 'science' certainly is falsifiable.
You really think one of the following is true:
-We understand everything that could possibly effect our atmosphere well enough to model it with certainty?*
or
-We have a couple planets sitting around we could experimenting with?
*Not saying we can't learn from models and predictions of less than complete info, but don't try to sell it to me as the indisputable Truth.
If a scientist is evaluating subjects (often well) outside their sphere of study, how does that make their opinion any better than anyone elses?
"And while 84% of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, less than half of the public agrees with that."
So "all" the non-climate related scientists evaluated the GW claims and read the papers and make their own opinions?
OR
Do they rather simply believe what they're taught in school?
I would say that actually there are more republicans in science than what that study found. Granted I cannot survey all the scientists in America. However, in the blue state where I am working on my PhD more than 6% of the scientists I know have conservative leanings. In my entering class of 22, there were two students who viewed Rush Limbaugh as a legitimate news source and blamed everything wrong in the universe on Bill Clinton, personally. And those were just amongst the fraction of students who were open with their political views.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
One surprising trend I found in this survey was that among scientists, young scientists between the ages 18-34 believe in God more than older scientists aged 65 or more (42% vs 28%).
If I'm not mistaken I think that in America (and in a lot of other countries) the number of believers in God is greater among elderly people than among the younger generations. So why the noteworthy discrepancy with scientists? Would it be that scientists 'find out' that there's no God some time during the course of their life/career? Would the 65+ year old scientists have been as religious when they were young as the current young scientists? Or could it be something else?
You just got troll'd!
Of course there will be a slight bias, the question is what it will lead to. Sometimes it leads to further studies due to unsatisfactory results, and sometimes it leads to false data. As long as one doesn't temper with the results the proper conclusion can be made by anybody.
I am the lawn!
While evolution by natural selection and global warming and both fairly fundamental phenomena that should concern anyone who is trying to understand the world at large, they are both still scientific topics. That is, they were both discovered by scientists, explained in the language and culture of science, and are justified with scientific methods. No matter how much the layman should understand these topics, should it really be a surprise that people who are extensively trained in science, otherwise known as scientists, understand scientific topics much better than the public at large? Scientists have expertise in science, and that is clearly shown in the numbers here.
Pew used the AACS membership list to generate their list of "scientists" to poll
I looked to find this "aacs" you refer to. I came up with several organizations:
None of those organizations seem particularly scientific to me. Perhaps you meant the AAAS - American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. And if we look at their membership requirements for the US we'll see that only students can sign up for full membership at $99 per year. A K-12 teacher would pay $146, the same as the professional rate, though they do have a low-frills option at $99.
The stated goals of AACS essentially define it as a left-leaning organization
Not sure where you got their goals from, but we'll read their website:
The same page continues on with some broad goals:
That doesn't really seem particularly liberal or conservative from a political standpoint, unless conservatives have a decidedly anti-science-education standpoint.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
It used to have REAL documentaries about serious subjects. Nowadays I amazed between the endless blowing things up stuff to find a tiny morsel of information I already knew when I was 10.
Take the slashdot population. Most are drooling over the mythbusters especially since they added tits for ratings. But the series has REALLY gone down. Gone is any sense of serious myths, or getting experts to explain the background. Now it is all about blowing things up to the point where a lot of the stuff they do becomes very bad science.
The world is dumbing down because we allowed marketing to control what is on TV and marketing always seeks the easiest path to the largest audience. If a marketeer has 9 people: 3 get it, 3 barely get it, 3 will NEVER get it. Then the marketeer will aim for the bottom 3, thinking that the result will include the top 3. Nope, they will hangup in disgust.
The BBC is experiencing this. It once had excellent programs but it has been a LONG time since a new BBC show was a guaranteed sale across the world. There is a reason we report a new season of Red Dwarf with such fervor. Because there has been NOTHING like it since. Reality programs... sure. They are a dime a dozen and if you really have no clue whatsoever about how a building is blown up, one might be intresting to watch. But after the 6th season, I think I know how a bike is build thank you very much. I know that all american bikers are openly gay (ever seen any of them with a woman?) and applaud them for their confidence in expressing their sexuality in the heartland of the US but can we PLEASE get some real information back on the Discovery Channel?
And no, real information is NOT 3 sentences endlessly repeated time and time again in a serious voice.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yet, they still mostly agree. Which points to there being a common reason for their agreement. This is the interesting thing. The reason may well be their higher average level of education and the fact that their day job requires critical thinking.
Sorry, bud. You've been censored by the inquisition of the church of global warming.
Your comment is actually insightful or informative, or something, but politically incorrect.
Critical thinking should be a required course in every high school...
Obligatory link.
The gap does not occur just because evolution or climate change are so hard to understand you have to be a life long scientist to understand them, no, the gap occurs because peoples brains are actively protecting their religion by refusing to believe those scientific results that contradict whats holy (aka untouchable, even by hard evidence) to them.
In several eastern european countries, or in east germany, you wont find especially many american-style religious people because communist regimes tried several decades long to get rid of organized religion after WW2 and they partly succeeded. Now, this clearly was against holy religious freedom blablabla, and religions are slowly comming back after the iron curtain disappeared, but it nonetheless rendered many people quite immune against organised religion's pseudo-sience bullshit.
The reason you'll find very few people there that are refusing evolution or earth warming isnt because many of them are scientifically educated, no, but simply because they werent religiously indoctrinated strong enough to refuse to accept scientific reality when it contradicts religious scriptures.
The only reason evolution is discussed in the US _at all_ is the strong grip of organised religion and its struggle to stay the major repository of knowledge about life. Religions lost the "sovereignty of interpretation" (what would be a better translation of "Deutungshoheit", someone?) of science to.... science, with evolution they're losing the Deutungshoheit on _life_ itself, knowing theres not much left for them to interpret. Even Darwin himself hesitated for freaking 20 years to publish his results about evolution of species because he knew that it would be the last, or one of the last nails in religion's coffin.
Even New Jersey.
I went along to some church (Methodist) adult classes on Genesis once. The preacher did a good job, walking the fine line and not interpreting Genesis too literally. But, some of the people there, my neighbours in suburban NJ were not happy with this. A few people were really asking him and pushing him on the reality of the flood and creation in seven days. And how to squeeze dinosaurs into it.
I was shocked. I ended up going into a little speech on radioactive dating and geology, pointing out that there was a lot of evidence for the age of the Earth, and asking if they really wanted to believe in a God who would plant misleading evidence in the rocks. I don't know if I convinced anyone or not. (Though, I must say, no one seemed particularly upset.)
I am a student of neuroscience at the graduate level, find religion to be extremely valuable at a philosophical level and as an important tool to buttress a healthy society, and I understand that a drive toward equilibrium and low energy states is the driving force behind all interactions. I have seen the evidence that the world is globally warming, and that one of the main causes of that is the introduction of greenhouse gases by human activity.
... but also understand that there needs to be some laws to stifle monopolistic corporations, or innovation will be just as stifled as if it were a socialist system (because large corporation is practically the same as large government, just with a different location of power). I also understand that capitalism and society do not work quickly enough at all times, but they are the ideal methods. Perhaps the 4 year terms should be evaluated more closely, because society definitely moves more quickly than every 2 years.
But I also find the idea of large government to be entrapping and without any verifiable benefit to society. I prefer the self regulation of capitalism
And really, who can disagree with the idea of renewable resources, either from an environmental, social, or military perspective? I enjoy listening to Rush Limbaugh as an entertainer only.
I find that my political objectives are aligned with the "Democratic" party, but my prefered method is much more similar to the "Republican" party (I prefer the terms "socialist" and "privatist" as they more accurately reflect the ideas, but the party names are what they are unfortunately). So, philosophically or functionally I am a Republican, but my goals are socially liberal (not to be confused with the political Democratic Party).
Basically, I want my personal freedom.
I wasn't trying to sell anything as the indisputable truth, since the scientific method deals solely in the disputable. The scientific consensus, no matter how well supported is always open to dispute and scrutiny.
What if I don't think either of those statements are true? How does that undermine my claim?
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Here's a totally unfounded theory:
Capitalism and marketing is at the root of this evil. Over the last few decades, marketing has grown to be more efficient and more ubiquitous.
Science isn't groovy, compared to other ways of life a marketer can conjure up images of with which to influence young minds to become good consumers.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Indeed. Columbus had difficulty getting his expedition funded not because people thought the world was flat, but because they thought it was sufficient large that he would run out of supplies in the middle of the ocean. They were right; if there hadn't been a continent in the way then he'd have starved to death.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't know if the media really is clueless (though many 'journalists' believe anything you tell them with a straight face) but more just out of ideas. The Michael Jackson coverage was a prime example, eventually, just to fill time CNN had on some psychics/astrologers on. I don't think having unpopular ideas reported or discussed in the news is a bad thing, so long as you look at it critically just as you would with people with differing views on the economy.
The thing that really worries me about journalism, especially on TV is allowing opinion to run right alongside actual reporting. Fox news is the most blatant with this type of coverage, but MSNBC and CNN are pretty close in this lazy time killer. Just do 10 seconds of reporting on an issue, then cut back to someone just saying "this is stupid and it'll ruin society!" and eventually people start viewing all news through a quick-reaction filter.
"I'm thinking it's the part where people arrive at a conclusion regarding matters of science from a path dictated by politics and or religion."
I'm thinking your thinking is irrelevant to the science. Why not try to answer the question with data or reasoned argument rather than a nice sophistic non-denial denial?
There was nothing in the post concerning what we know about the effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is in any way the product of politics or religion, so exactly what's your point about there only being a "correlation" and not a well understood cause and effect relationship?
Do you actually have to observe someone hitting you on the head with a hammer before you can notice that your head hurts? That might be a pretty rigorous form of hypothesis testing, but like the case of study of global warming, your approach is going to be both far more expensive and painful than it needs to be.
Two points:
1) There is no carbon in fossils, it's just rock; and
2) Carbon 15 can disprove the six thousand year old limit, but not for dinosaur bones. You'd need another isotope.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090509045939AAwdJU0
shamelesly stolen from another website, i am not plagiarizing this, (i lay no claim to authoring it, but i love it)
So here's the thing: We have 46 chromosomes. Our nearest great ape relatives have 48. On the surface, it looks like we must have lost two. But that's actually a huge problem. Made up of organized packs of DNA and proteins, chromosomes don't just up and vanish. In fact, it's doubtful any primate could survive a mutation that simply deleted a pair of chromosomes. That's because chromosomes are to the human body what instruction sheets are to inexpensive, flat-pack furniture. If you're missing one screw, you can still put that bookcase together pretty easily. But if the how-to guide suddenly jumps from page 1 (take plywood panels out of box) to page 5 (enjoy bookcase!), you're likely to end up missing something pretty vital. All this left scientists with a thorny dilemma: How could we have a common ancestor with great apes, but fewer chromosomes?
Turns out: The chromosomes aren't missing at all. Genetic investigators caught the first whiff of the prodigal chromosomes' scent in 1982. That year, a paper published in the journal Science described a very funny phenomenon. Researchers knew all chromosomes had distinctive signatures; patterns of DNA sequences that can be reliably found in specific spots, including in the center and on the ends. These end-cap sequences are called telomeres. Telomeres are like the little plastic tips that keep your shoelaces from unravelling. They protect the ends of chromosomes and hold things together. Given that important function, you wouldn't expect to find telomeres hanging out on other parts of the chromosome. But that's exactly what the 1982 study reported. Looking at human chromosome 2, the scientists found telomeres snuggled up against the centromere (the central sequence). What's more, these out-of-place human telomeres were strikingly similar to telomeres that can be found, in their proper location, on two great ape chromosomes.
This evidence laid the groundwork for a brilliant discovery. Rather than falling apart, the two missing chromosomes had fused together. Their format changed, but they didn't lose any information, so the mutation wasn't deadly. Instead, scientists now think, the fusion made it difficult for our ancestors to mate with the ancestors of chimpanzees, leading our two species to strike out alone. In the two decades since the original study, more evidence has surfaced backing this up, which leads us to 2005, when the chimpanzee genome was sequenced around the same time that the National Human Genome Research Institute published a detailed survey of human chromosome 2. We can now see extra centromeres in chromosome 2 and trace how its genes neatly line up with those on chimpanzee chromosomes 12 and 13. It's a great example of evidence supporting the common descent of man and ape. [EOF]
So all you christians are wack thinking some imaginary god did it.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
That is, how they rationalize the very evident inconsistencies between their programmed view of the Universe, and what actually is.
Easily.
II Corinthians 5:7 For we walk by faith, not by sight
In Christianity at least, faith is supposed to be different than what you see. For context, the next verse:
We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.
How do you suppose people can believe that their dead friend/relative is still alive and in heaven when they themselves are at the burial? The existence of a more important, more enduring reality than what is observed is a central concept, not an aberration adopted to defend the worldview.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
The Half Sigma blog points out a serious flaw in the design of this poll...
There is a Pew research study purporting to poll "scientists." The question I immediately want answered is, what's a "scientist?" The answer, as far as Pew is concerned, is anyone who is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The AAAS is a liberal organization with stated goals such as "Increase diversity in the scientific community," "Use science to advance human rights" (sometimes in collaboration with leftist-sympathizing Amnesty International), "Sustainable Development" and "Women's Collaboration".
You don't in any way have to be a real scientist to be a member of this organization. All you need to do is send them $146. School teachers are especially encouraged to join, and no one should confuse a grade K-12 school teacher with a real scientist.
The key sequence to access my Slashdot bookmark in Firefox is Alt-B-S. I don't believe this is a coincidence.
"And if we also look at global warming with the same critical eye, can we really say that humans are responsible for global warming when all we can really show is a strong correlation?"
By this type of argumentation one can argue that the earth is not really an oblate spheroid, but instead it is flat as after all there is still only a correlation between all measures of its shape taken to date. After all, all photographs taken to date from outer space show it as just a flat circle.
One could take a similar approach and say we somehow know "nothing" about the warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere and it really doesn't matter how much CO2 will add as after all, its "only correlated" with global warming. In the meantime, being able to make the mental jump between extremely strong correlation and "causation", we slowly cook the planet and ourselves.
Demonstrably false. First, no educated person in approximately 3,000 years has believed the earth to be flat--that's how long it's been since the Greeks calculated the circumference of the earth (to within 10% of the actual number IIRC). Second, while there were philosophers and theologians who believed the earth to be at the center of the universe, none of them could be called scientists. Science is a coupling of an epistemology and a methodology derived from that epistemology. The idea that the earth was at the center of the universe predates the science's existence, and the idea met its demise with the rise of science during the Enlightenment period.
No need to find a couple of other planets to experiment with, we are happily experimenting with planet earth.
Global warming deniers would have us believe that the mean global temperatures over past decade has been getting cooler, although the thinning of Arctic ice, the retreat of every single world glacier, the more rapidly break up on Antarctic ice shields, the increased drying of continental interiors, increasing acidification of the world's oceans, and global mean temperatures and number of record temperature days tell a dramatically different story.
The track record of those predicting global warming has also been shoddy, as recent revisions earlier model have been required, because they fail to account for the unexpected increase in the amount of warming observed. However, model accuracy does seem to be improving.
The lack of global leadership or conversely the over-sized influence of those who stand to financially benefit by a "go slow" approach to carbon dioxide reductions are placing humanity in a tough spot. It looks increasingly as if human destiny is riding on which side of this bet it takes. Given the momentum of the forces involved, if the earth continues to warm faster than expected humanity may soon face some grim choices with respect to food production (both agricultural and primary oceanic productivity) with very little it will be able to do about it.
If you think political discourse and human ability govern world affairs are unstable now wait until billions, rather than mere hundreds of millions as is the case today, can find to little food and turn their hungry attention to politicians and global warming deniers. If, or more likely when, they do, it will be a fitting tribute to their contribution to having waited too long to see what has now become the obvious.
If this means that the other one does accept creationism, then he is by definition not a scientist. :)
So my guess it, that that number is trash all by itself.
Oh, and this shows how sad of a time it really is.
Hmm... how many "scientists" did state that the sun revolves around the earth?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I work at a university and so work with PhDs all the time. There are a good many of them who think they know everything, but in reality have extremely limited knowledge outside of their narrow field. They'll be happy to tell you how you should of all sorts of thing, but if you investigate, you discover they know fuck all about what they are talking about. That they have a PhD means they are highly educated in a very specific field. It doesn't mean they are masters of everything. Some understand that, others do not.
As an example we have a massive amount of wireless APs on our campus, hundreds per building. The idea is to provide total coverage. This necessitates they be placed all over, and not just in wiring closets and such. There are some in offices. We have a few professors that demanded the APs be moved, or who placed shields over them to "protect" themselves from the radiation. These are engineering professors, by the way, not art professors. So while this is even in their general domain, they still don't know about it and are as subjected to the same pseudo-science BS as the general public.
While it might be a comforting idea to think scientists are all very smart, reasonable people, that just isn't the case. They are human like the rest of us, and there are plenty of them who don't know what they are talking about save for a small area, and even some who don't know what they are talking about in their area. Science works not because scientists are superhuman, but because the process of strong inference allows us to test and refine our knowledge. The process of science is what is amazing, not necessarily the people who work in it.
Feynman's biography has some great commentary on this and the dangers of "averaging" opinions with people. That just because you ask a lot of people, doesn't mean that you got the right answer.
As an example, suppose around the 1950s you asked 100 scientists about an atomic theory and 90% thought it was right, 10% thought it was wrong. Must be right huh? Now what if I told you the 10 that thought it was wrong were Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bethe, and so on. Maybe then you aren't so sure. Just because 90 random scientists think something, doesn't mean they are right and the people who actually developed the technology are wrong.
Science is not a democracy, you don't vote on what the right answer is.
So I'm with you, I really hate these stories of "Well X% of profession Y believe this!" That is marketing bullshit. "4 out of 5 dentists agree this is the toothpaste for you!" Ok well so what? Maybe 4 out of 5 dentists are just mediocre and the top 20% know that it is bunk. Any time I hear something telling me what percentage of peopel like something or believe something, I feel like I'm being sold something, not being informed.
Terms like Liberal, Conservative, Independent, Socialist, Marxist, Republican, Democratic, Strict Constructionist, Social Liberal, Financial Coonservative etc. mean little or nothing unless one has a specific context of outcomes to discuss them in, both those that occurred in the past and those expected in the future.
However, such terms are highly valued and widely used in sophism to distinguish those who are on "your team/advocates" or "the opponents team/opposition"
i don't know if this is the case in other cultures, but in America, we seem to hate anyone who is better than us at anything. We are incapable of simply being happy for each other or grateful for what we have. This seems especially true of intelligence/education. We HATE smart people. If you correct someone's grammar, spelling, punctuation or the like... instead of making a note to try to do it right... they'll call you pedantic or a grammar snob or elitist or something else. A semi-educated person will call you a prescriptivist. Anything to avoid admitting ignorance or that you're right. It's odd to me that a nation so obsessed with accomplishment, despises anyone who accomplishes.
Then there are the one uppers. If you tell them your house is yellow, their house is yellower... or they've seen a house that was yellower. Can't you just nod and say, "oh, yellow house, nice"? If you have a headache today, they have migraines everyday!
There was a study saying that most Americans would rather that all their coworkers make 50K and for them to make 100K, than for everyone at the company to make 200K.
We also hate anyone/thing that makes us question our beliefs. We think that because we have the right to have any belief that our beliefs should be unquestioned. That somehow we have the right to spout our beliefs at others, while anyone disagreeing with us must be silent. Free of speech/religion seems to apply only to the privileged Christians. The rest of us should just shut up and be grateful to be allowed to live. After all, we'd be put to death in Iran, right?
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Working in computers, binary systems, it always amazes me how in three dimensional reality most thought processes are 2 dimensional. Evolution vs. Creation, Republican vs. Democrat, Communism vs. Capitalism, and the 2 dimensional idiots always pick 1.
In my profession working with binary systems, choosing just one or the other, in other words programming with just 1's or programming with just 0's is ludicrous. Both 1's AND 0's must be used to bee effective.
Relating that to the original article it seems that both the scientific and religious communities that have brainwashed the subjects of the poll fail in the same way. One offers science, the 1's, as absolute, while the religion offers the 0's as absolute and they are both wrong.
It took "scientists" 1,000 years to discover that the earth was not flat, it took religion equally as long to discover the error of their misguided faith. Is their failure not equal?
It took "scientists" almost 2,000 years to figure out what we are made of, it took religion equally as long to discover just how mysterious the ways are in which the creator works.
What is a few thousand years when you're working on a scale of infinity or eternity?
Creation isn't some conjurer of cheap tricks, like poof now we have a human. Religion would relegate their own God to some cheap magic show.
For all the empirical evidence about evolution scientists have yet to explain or recreate original life
For all it's discoveries "science" still has more questions than answers
The earth is still flat my friends and both science and religion are to blame for their two-dimension myopia.
Hope is the currency of fools
Science is a collaborative effort that relies on peer-review to separate the wheat and chaff. Individual viewpoints are fairly irrelevant. It is also quite competitive (limited funding, search for prestige, a better position); even scientists that agree on issues or share viewpoints don't cut each other any slack.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
We've only got one planet to experiment with, but that's enough.
So we've observed a correlation between warming and CO2 concentration. That leaves three possiblities:
1. CO2 causes warming.
2. Warming causes CO2.
3. Something else causes both.
We've worked up a bunch of climate simulations and models (hypotheses) to test these different scenarios and we're pretty sure we have an idea which it is. Now we need an experiment to test.
So in an experiment you try to keep all the variables except one constant, and you manipulate that one. In our case we'd like to manipulate the amount of CO2 in the air. Since we've already increased it, the most interesting experiment to do first would be to cause it to decrease. Lots of people are trying to figure out how best to do that.
See, Kyoto etc. are all just the run up to the very experiment you suggest!
Counting engineers as scientists may not be all that material as the vast majority of engineers are not citizens of the US and wouldn't be engaged in US electoral politics anyway..
Most ancient philosophers, like Aristotle, believed that the earth was spherical. Aristotle reasoned that this was so because some stars were visible at certain latitudes but not others.
Modern science is not a wholesale repudiation of ancient philosophy, but a selective rejection of certain flawed aspects of it. Modern science shares the broad conception of rationality developed by the Ancient Greeks and their naturalistic approach (it's one reason why most of our words to do with science and rationality are inherited from Greek). Both modern science and ancient philosophy have a much bigger contrast with pre-philosophical mythic thought than they do with each other.
Aristotle had a scientific method set out in his Posterior Analytics. It's the first attempt to provide a general account of the structure of scientific reasoning, and in its broadest respects it is the model for all others. Of course, our scientific method is much better than his, but his is still recognizable as a scientific method appealing to reason and evidence, rather than revelation, tradition or oracles.
You can be arrogant and dismiss it, but future people will probably look at our science and scientific method and wonder how we could have been so dumb. That would be unfair, and it is unfair to do the same to our ancestors.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
Columbus also dazzled Ferdinand and Isabella with graphs and fancy (incorrect) math showing that the world was half as big as it actually is. You can see documentation of this technique here: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=41
The media is reporting their theories as fact.
Which is, of course, why Columbus met the Caribs on Hispaniola and thought they were Indians.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean the average person in the dark ages ever knew it. We know that the people at the top knew it, but what about the 99% who were plowing fields every day? Did they have any clue what the aristocracy was thinking?
EVen the greek a few millenia ago KNEW that the earth was not flat. All scientist knew it was round, and I dare say all educated persons, and all sailor educated or not. Recent scholarship, particularly since the 1990s,[3] has shown that with extraordinarily few exceptions "no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat" and that the prevailing view was of a spherical earth.[1] wiki quote. And again, it was known from 4 BC from greek.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Scientists "outside their field" may not do direct experimentation or modeling that occurs in another scientific discipline. However, they can take such assumptions and and such conclusions test them in the context of their own expertise using the scientific method. Biologists do not routinely take temperature measurements and evaluate systems of linear and non-linear differential equations as do climate modelers, but they can for example, observe the changes in the distributions of many organisms and conclude that such changes are consistent with a model of global warming and inconsistent with either stable or cooling temperatures. Indeed, if you look at the composition of fish species taken at oil rigs off the north-central Gulf of Mexico coast, you will observe that there has been a significant increase in the number of species that were formerly only know to occur in Central America and that species requiring cooler waters, such as stripped bass are largely disappearing, despite heroic restocking efforts. Likewise, those who study ice cores and the dissolved gasses within them can also convincingly generate a detailed record of temperatures over the past 10,000 - 20,000 years and like-wise conclude that global warming is a fact. The wonderful thing about science is that it is interdisciplinary. You don't have to be a scientist in one particular field to address issues central to the scientific debate concerning global warming. Phenomena, such as global warming can be studied from a variety of perspectives by many different kinds of scientists.
The reason there are so many scientists on one side of this debate and few on the other, is that data drive their conclusions. The scientific community has now moved well past the question of whether global warming is occurring, this is a largely settled issue scientifically. They are now focusing on how fast it is occurring and what the consequences the warming will be. Actually, this has become far more worrisome and with much broader implications than simply recognizing that we will have to begin to live with increasingly higher temperatures.
That the "opinions" of these scientists are either consistent or inconsistent with a variety of kinds of data and expectations regarding such data and that such "opinions" have a "special weight" afforded them, stems from the predictiveness of these "opinions", not the fact that scientists have them.
Your false choice between scientists making "their own opinions" or "simply believing in what they are taught in school" underscores a misconception in your mind as to what science is. Science is not sophism. Science is not about what you know. It is about how you know. It is not the conclusions that matter, it is how those conclusions are reached and the implications of these conclusions have to "likely outcomes" that make what scientists have to say important.
If you were a betting man, this might tell you something worth listening to. If you are not, or simply like to bet only on the long odds, you can ignore scientist's "opinions" with respect to global warming and instead accept those of any preacher, witchdoctor, republican politician, or random number generator you please. However, as a caution, should you prefer the latter approach, you might want to consider hedging your bet, just in case those pesky scientists turn out to be right. Don't say you weren't warned.
It probably isn't as cut and dried as evolution vs creationism -- the question included a mechanism -- "natural selection" so there were probably some that think evolution, but with some other mechanism (I have no idea what it might be, but I also don't give a damn about how we got to be here either).
I'm Catholic yet I don't believe the earth is flat. Since I wasn't alive back then, I don't know if the earth was flat or not. Maybe, back then, the earth was in fact flat. Your dad and probably yourself also believed that the earth travels in circles around the sun. That is of course false, we know today that the earth travels in a straight line in curved space-time.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
I am also very confused by this attitude.
I was attempting to have a debate with a person from my community recently, (the actual issue is irrelevant here) and this person kept throwing bible verses at me as evidence. Now, I respect the bible for *some* of it's teachings, but I have problems accepting the bible literally, particularly if you consider that the actual books were not written by god/jesus/any supreme being, but rather by a person's recollections, which were later translated, sometimes poorly.
It's very difficult to argue with this kind of person. They use evidence which I do not accept, and can not understand why I don't appreciate it. If you want to use that for your own life that's fine, but when it begins infringing on the rights of others, you better be able back up your assertions with more than "I can give you X numbers of bible verses which prove Im right."
If there's one thing I've learned, don't try to argue with religious nutjobs.
"Every one of my Physics friends (including those who went on to their PhD) and anything I have heard from my professors and their professors (except for one) says global warming smacks of bad science."
Yes, and Einstein went to his grave not believing in quantum electrodynamics. There are a number of theoretical physicists who will go to their graves denying global warming. So What? Education levels and the disciplines of the scientists involved are largely irrelevant to the science. Perhaps, much to the discomfort of theoretical physicists, they do not sit at the top of a lofty scientific food chain, which from the apex of their perspective allows the quality of all science to be ascertained.
The question is: are global mean temperatures rising and rising as a result of CO2 in the atmosphere? So far, the overwhelming empirical results across disciplines suggest that the answer is yes. Would it be wise for the world to wait for string theory to confirm to this observation before it begins to address the implications of this fact. No. Might we hope that theoretical physicists might assist in building fusion reactors to address this crisis in time to matter? Lets hope so.
Lemme help you a bit with nr. 1. ;-) CO2 causes between 9% and 26% to the greenhouse effect (compared to 36%-72% by water vapor for example).
CO2 absorbs strongly in the infrared part of the spectrum because of its 2 C=O bonds. (C=O asymmetric stretch at 2400 cm^-1). This *fact* was discovered by Svante Arrhenius more than 110 years ago (dunno if he knew it was because of the C=O double bonds though).
Simplest hypothesis would then be, because atmospheric CO2 absorbs IR light from our Sun (either directly or reflected back from the surface), it causes the planet to warm. More CO2 in the atmosphere warms the planet more. It's a "greenhouse gas" and according to that Wikipedia article at the moment I read it
Another hypothesis would be, yes atmospheric CO2 absorbs IR light from our Sun, but that is too simplistic, factor X (caused by/related to the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere) counteracts this effect and is also an equally strong or stronger "forcing" or effect, so therefore more CO2 = less warming.
IANAClimateScientist, so if you can name any such factors X, feel free to speak up and enlighten us.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Since if you hear about some group being against either Genetically modified anything or civilian nuclear energy most people will think that group leans one way and it isn't conservative.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I mean it's alot easier to point at a festering pond and get people to agree to clean it up over a gas that turns out to be colorless and odorless and at the levels we're talking about also tasteless. (Actually at very high levels CO2 has a sour taste when it disolves in the mouth for what it's worth.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
While Galilleo was big on heliocentrism he really couldn't give a way to demonstrate it was true. (You know, a scientific way through actual evidence. He had this idea that the tides demonstrated it but his explaination would have only caused 1 tide per day which was a bit of a problem.) Actually Tycho gave a way to disprove his system by pointing out if the earth didn't move there should be no stellar parallax. He saw none so he took it as evidence the earth didn't move. (In reality there is parallax but it's smaller that Tycho could measure.) Of course if you know how big the various objects in the solar system are or had a foucault pendulum you'd pretty much know the earth moves. (Too bad Galilleo didn't know the sizes and the foucault pendulum wouldn't come around until the 1800's.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
first, if you doubt evolution by natural selection, you're delusional. You should be barred from holding public office and affecting society in any way.
second, doubting evolution by natural selection is the same as doubting gravity or photosynthesis. they're all theories. Our proof of their validity comes from our observation of them.
still doubt evolution by natural selection? iguanas taste like chickens. proof positive.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The poll says more about Democrats than about scientists. Whether causally or casually, Democrats want to be perceived as being the "Smart Party". On the other hand, the Republicans have been referred to as the "Stupid Party" (http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004449). One could argue that there is more evolutionary advantage for a party that appeals broadly to the uneducated than for a party that appeals narrowly to the educated. And hence the lack of enthusiasm among the Republican elites for educating the masses.
Some subset of the religious far right in America have difficulty reconciling the overt word of God with the covert evidence of God's creation. Again, this says more about human nature than it does about Nature's God. An all powerful deity certainly could have planted pre-aged fossils underground - as well as layered the bedrock of the world with metamorphic, sedimentary and igneous strata that tell a coherent worldwide tale of deep time. The innumerable celestial clocks of planets, stars and galaxies could have been set in vast logically interconnected ways stretching back billions of years before James Ussher assures us the Universe first drew breathe. But again, doesn't this say more about the good Bishop than it does about He to whom the tetragrammaton refers?
We share the world with the few who share our individual ideas and ideals and with the many who will dispute us. Every one of the faithful from every one of the world's great and small religions is an atheist - toward all the other religions. Who now believes in Jupiter and Ra, Zeus and Odin? A poll of what scientists believe is as pointless as a poll of spiritual beliefs. The defining difference, rather, is that at the end of the day (or aeon) there is now and ever shall be one science, but many religions.
To deny religion is commonplace - at least the denial of specific religions belonging to others. To deny specific facts uncovered through scientific methods is also commonplace - even more so from other scientists. But the real world is ever ready to overcome all arguments. Humans will most likely be long gone before the supervolcano under Yellowstone reasserts its own scientific world view. But however long that Apocalypse is in coming, one can be confident that it will arrive before the Rapture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture).
another point.
proof of evolution comes from understanding.
belief of creation comes from lack of understanding. You call it faith, I call it ignorance.
true faith comes from believing something you know can't be proven.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Hmm... how many "scientists" did state that the sun revolves around the earth?
To be fair, at the time, using the scientific method, all evidence pointed to such a conclusion. Then, as new evidence was discovered, the idea that the earth revolves around the sun took hold. I am of course simplifying here, but this is what occurred, and this process is how we know that science works. You see, if we removed all religion and all science from humanity, and allowed them to come back, science would eventually reach the same conclusions that we have historically (ie we would eventually come up with evolution once again), but religion is a crapshoot.
The important part of your post has been left out - why one who accepts creationism is not a scientist. Of course, it is because that person's findings are not supported by evidence, are not repeatable, and thus, those findings would not be accepted by the scientific community and that scientist would not be respected by his peers.
If anything in the study should bother you, its that 84% of "scientists" believe that the earth is warming because of human activity. The scientific community believes that the earth is warming, as it has over the past century (1 degree C), it is seen as likely that over the next century the earth could warm as much as 2 or 3 degrees C. This is not, however, attributed to human activity, but rather to the natural fluctuations of the earths temperature. Otherwise, we would have to conclude that the last ice age was caused by dinosaurs not burning enough fossil fuels.
So this means that more than 10% of people identified ad scientists in the USA believe in the Flying Spagetti Monster or something?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
of course they're different
When you recognize love in another and realize how precious it is, everything else seems so insignificant.
The "correlation does not equal causation" argument works only with some degree of ignorance, whether intentional or not.
In the case of global warming, there is a clearly identified causative mechanism: the greenhouse gas effect. The GHG effect clearly explains how the addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere results in atmospheric warming. This cause-effect mechanism and it's role in climate change has been described in 1824 by Fourier, in 1859 by Tyndall, in 1896 by Arrhenius, in 1897 by Chamberlin, in 1938 by Callendar, in the 1960s by Keeling, and from the 1970's to present by modern climate scientists.
Some climate denialists who truly are uneducated in science can honestly claim ignorance, but then they shouldn't be doubting the conclusions of those who are not ignorant: the climate scientists. Most climate denialists are not truly uneducated in science. I consider these people on various levels from "intentional ignorance" to "malicious ignorance", to "ignorant with extreme prejudice".
The "whether not it is caused by humans... doesn't seem to matter." is a cop-out. It does matter. Human behavior (releasing massive, steady streams of naturally sequestered carbon) is the driving factor in climate change. We cannot effectively mitigate climate change without modifying this human behavior.
The "clean air, clean water, clean land", argument is a distraction from the role of GHGs. It's easy to design car engines that minimize smog-forming emissions like hydrocarbons and nitrous oxides. It's not so easy to design a combustion engine that reduces GHGs like carbon dioxide. In fact, there is a fundamental proportion of CO2 emitted to energy produced in a combustion engine that cannot be violated by the laws of physics and chemistry.
Historically, the group that has denied anthropogenic climate change is the same group that has opposed efforts for clean air, water, and land.
If we want to start making the world better for you and me, we have to stop being ignorant, acknowledge the role of human GHG emissions, and act to reduce those emissions. Ignorance (intentional or not) of the human role in climate change IS tantamount to being a climate change denier.
Given the poor quality of the questions in that poll, almost any results are possible.
Electrons are smaller than atoms. (True/False)
46% of the general public said true.
Actually I would say this question is completely useless. The size of an atom is defined by the size of the electron field, which in a certain sense is the "size" of the electron, i.e. the space that it occupies. You know, that whole uncertainty principle thing. So the right answer is more like False.
Maybe they had their reasons for not simply asking whether an electron was more massive than an atom - or maybe whoever put the survey together some gaps in their own science education.
When I read this question I decided that the people doing this survey obviously have some major gaps in their science knowledge and probably also don't know how to do surveys and so it should be ignored.
I think this is both true and focusing on a tree, not the forest. There's a lot more than this going on.
And the hilarious thing is that Native Americans are still called Indians! Hahaha!
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Just because a banana fits into a human hand nicely, doesn't mean there was some magical creator.
Does someone actually use that argument? That is pretty crazy because until we started cultivating bananas, the largest bananas in the world were only 3 or 4 inches long. There are over 500 varieties of bananas and most of them are much smaller than the ones we are used to eating.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
That story is bunk. Europeans, back to the Greeks (and probably before), knew that the world was round.
The debate that Columbus had wasn't whether it was round, but whether it was *small enough* that a ship could sail westward to reach "the Orient" before running out of provisions, instead of taking the long and dangerous eastward route. It turns out the answer is: "no, it's not." So Columbus was wrong, but lucky.
And to dispell another commonly-held myth, North America had long been visited by Norse explorers. The evidence for this is extremely, extremely strong. (Even if you don't count their Greenland and Iceland colonies as being in North America.)
Comment of the year
I see you have Doctorate in Sytematic Theology.
Nope, no lack of understanding or ignorance in you.
Someone better tell that to Eratosthenes.
This whole ordeal always reminds me of the tv show V back in the day. One of the first things the alien invaders did, while they were still friendly of course, was to round up all the scientists under the conspiracy of helping humanity.
Religious fanatics are dangerous.
*DrugCheese rants*
The reason scientists are likely to have a better understanding of reality is that they understand what the scientific method is. Atmospheric scientists, geophysicists, climate modelers, etc. have had their work subjected to the rigors of peer-review. A scientist understands that this level of scrutiny is what improves the quality of knowledge (and brought civilization into the Enlightenment). While creationists like to tout Mike Behe and global warming deniers roll-out somebody with a Ph.D. as their "proof" that scientists disagree, most non-scientists have no clue how much critique goes into "scientific consensus." We hear that evolution is "just a theory" -never mind that a theory is a hypothesis that has survived rigorous challenge before attaining that status.
Yes. These are excellent hypotheses. The poster I replied to is absolutely correct that we don't yet have a gold standard experiment to determine the relationship between carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere and global climate. We've got computer models, and we have miniature green house style models, but we don't have a good planetary scale experiment.
As a good scientist, he's thinking that we should do the experiment, and that means manipulating the atmosphere's CO2 concentration, perhaps by introducing some sort of tax on carbon emissions, or otherwise convincing everybody to emit less CO2. Regardless of the actual method we use, we can monitor CO2 emissions, CO2 concentration and global temperature, and determine precisely what the relationship is.
98% of scientists will agree that a freeze ray is impossible to build with our current understanding of science. 80-some-odd percent of the public will believe a scientist who tells them that thing he is pointing at them is a freeze ray.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm all for believing random slashdot user's claims about their various degrees, and I'm not usually a grammar Nazi. The problem is when a person claims to have a bachelor's degree in theoretical physics in the sentence after, "Hear is an anecdotal news flash." That sort of thing destroys all credibility I would have given your post.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
Since one of the most famous anti-vax nutjobs is RFK jr. (A guy who was rumored that he was being considered by Obama for the position of the head of the EPA.) Before anybody says anything, yes I know there's quite a bit of anti-vax hysteria on both sides of the political spectrum.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Critical thinking should be a required course in every high school in the land, and if you fail you don't get a diploma. But the churches would scream bloody murder. The last thing they want is children thinking for themselves.
The last thing the Teachers' Unions want is children thinking for themselves. An important thing to remember is that the only way to teach critical thinking is for the TEACHER to teach it. A course in critical thinking would accomplish nothing if the teacher teaching it did not actually teach critical thinking. A teacher who is capable of and willing to teach critical thinking does not need a class specifically on critical thinking in order to teach it. As a matter of fact, IMO it is much easier to teach critical thinking in a class on some other subject matter than in a class on critical thinking.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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Seeing that Engineering is basically the application of Pure & Applied Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics, I find it odd that they don't clarify that a lot of Engineering Research is Pure Scientific Research, then phase II is designing practical application of such research. I'll cite the very recent Positron Research for Anti-Matter at WSU [Washington State University] where a Professor of Mechanical Engineering who is also a Professor of Particle Physics with his team are on the verge of making anti-matter a practical reality. That work covers my prior statement to a tee. The area between Scientist and Engineer is far more grayer than this black and white categorization.
Indeed. In the words of Stalin: "Death solves all problems - No man, no problem."
A course in critical thinking would accomplish nothing if the teacher teaching it did not actually teach critical thinking.
This would seem to be a tautology.
I don't see why you think it couldn't work. I took a class specifically on critical thinking in high school. It was one of the best I ever took. The teachers' union did not object. We learned to analyze the media and recognize sloppy reasoning, propaganda, and appeals to sentiment, among other things.
I piss off bigots.
Even this is seriously misleading, in that it suggests that religious institutions were some sort of hotbed of flat-earthism. In fact, spherical Earth has pretty much always been the dominant model within Christianity. For example, Saint Augustine's argument that the southern hemisphere (a.k.a. "the Antipodes") must be uninhabited, because (a) all humans descend from Adam and Eve; (b) the equatorial regions of the Earth have a "torrid" climate that's inhospitable to human beings, and thus are unpassable; (c) Jesus would have had to come a second time to the Antipodes in order to save the Antipodeans, and that would contradict the Gospel.
Sure, to us that sounds like a very silly argument, but the important thing to note is that it takes for granted that the Earth is spherical. This was in the late 300's.
Are you adequate?
My question is, why did you need a class specifically on critical thinking? Shouldn't your science teachers, social studies/history teachers have taught you critical thinking?
If these teachers don't already teach critical thinking, what makes you think that they would teach it in a class on critical thinking?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Geocentrism comes from Aristotle and Ptolemy, who rejected the Pythagoreans' heliocentric model on theoretical and empirical grounds. Theoretical grounds because Aristotelian mechanics requires that there exist a frame of reference that is truly at rest, and that frame of reference has to be the Earth. Empirical because Ptolemy had a model that predicted the motions of the heavens as accurately as could be observed for over two thousand years, and was not improved upon until after Galileo's death.
When Galileo wrote his work, astronomers correctly pointed out that his theory contradicted Aristotelian mechanics, and that it predicted stellar parallax, which wasn't observed until 1838. Strictly speaking, geostaticism (the idea that the Earth doesn't move) wasnt refuted until 1725.
The Church rejected Galileo's theory on a combination of both religious and scientific grounds. The Galileo affair is a prime example of why the Church shouldn't be allowed to regulate science, but it is not an example of Church obscurantism and Biblical fundamentalism; the Church did not in fact claim that "it says so in the Bible" was evidence enough to refute Galileo. Galileo was tried for pissing off the Pope, and for telling people that the Bible ought to be interpreted in a different way on the basis of his theory.
Are you adequate?
One thing research into scientific subjects doesn't often take into account is that the average person on the street just doesn't care about evolution or global warming. Evolutionary biologists and many others in the scientific community get all worked up about evolution like it's some fundamentally important idea that is so amazingly important that if only everyone believed in it, our lives would be so much better, and the fact that only a third of Americans do buy off on it is somehow devastatingly depressing. The truth of the matter is that scientific research into evolution is meaningless to the average person because it's not going to put food on the table or change lives for the better in any way. It's kind of like research into dinosaurs: fascinating subject, ultimately a useless waste of time from any practical standpoint. Evolution, creationism, or being sneezed out of Douglas Adam's mind, it doesn't change the fact that we're here now, and food needs to be put on the table and the mortgage needs to be paid. Scientists really live in their own weird little world wherein stuff like dinosaur poop research funding and evolution actually matter. Back here on Planet Earth, however, the average person really doesn't much care.
carbon dating of dinosaur fossils eh....
32% of scientists identify themselves as Independent, while 55% say they're Democrats and 6% say they're Republicans.
I think it is funny how that percentage doesn't add up to 100% (even if you include the 4% "Other/None" from TFA).
And as a scientist who is frustrated with the current political party offerings in the US and doesn't really like any other county's situation any better, I think it would be pretty cool if someone would start a country for scientists, run by scientists.
Learn some statistics.
Mart
Mart,
The error for the scientist numbers was +/- 2.5%. So 55% is more than half with 95% confidence level.
Your terse (and rude!) replies make it look like you are trying to live up to your suggested mod category though. Cheers!
If there's one thing I've learned, don't try to argue with religious nutjobs.
Most people will deny reality to avoid admitting being wrong, religious or not. The [religious book] thing does add a different dimension though. You can probably find numerous examples if you read any given story on slashdot.
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
'Slightly more than half' is not quite the same as 'more than half', now is it?
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
24 news is a scam. There is not 24 hours of newsworthy events in a day. On an average day 1-2hours. On an extreme day maybe 6.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
"And while 84% of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity.." and "and they also think [4]research funding has too much influence on study results" make perfect sense to me. regards, gekozoid www.youtube.com//gekozoid
Science and social studies teachers are not paid to teach critical thinking, they are paid to teach the officially designated curriculum, which generally consists of facts and a few equations. That's what happens with your basic state-sponsored public education at the moment.
My critical thinking teacher was paid to teach critical thinking, and he did. Is that difficult to comprehend?
I piss off bigots.
Hardly startling news. To be a scientist one must be intelligent and prove it through academic success and subsequent research. To be a member of the American public.........'nuff said.
Since when did scientists âoevoteâ on science? One scientist can move ahead the understanding in the back of an envelope. Politics has hijacked science many times . Please examine the cited graph and explain the cyclivity demonstrated over the past 450,000 years in terms of human anthropogenic causes. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Vostok_420ky_4curves_insolation.jpg If you are able to take the leap that what we are looking at is a cycle then the hysterics are amusing. Too bad we are shooting ourselves in the foot over this new religion. Not unlike predicting Noahâ(TM)s flood based upon each dayâ(TM)s rising tide. For those who fear that this one time, in spite of all evidence it should be comforting to know that if the same hysterical predictions came to pass in the last three cycles we would not be examining 450,000 year old ice in Antarctica, 750,000 year old perma- frost in the arctic and possibly Permian aged ice in the Beacon Valley in Antarctica. I think that there is a large strategy to feed disinformation to the public.A disinformed public is allowed to vote and unfortunately fantasy decsions have real world consequences. Also not unlike the concept of the earth being the center of the universe. Poor GALELEO!
OK I get you now, I misread. :-)
I also think that lowering our global CO2 production to levels at or below that of 1990 is a worthwile scientific experiment
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
You have just described some of the effects of what Christians call "sin."
The study does not, as stated in the summary, cover 'how Americans feel about science', and only briefly looks at how they value scientists or their work (per TFA).
For the most part it looks at whether (non-scientist, one assumes) Americans agree with (American?) scientists. More precisely, it illustrates what Americans believe, compared to what scientists understand or at least accept that science more-or-less 'accurately describes'.
Pew does some good work sometimes. Too bad they don't verbalate it gooder.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
"nearly 9 in 10 scientists accept the idea of evolution by natural selection, but [2]just a third of the public does. And while 84% of scientists say the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, less than half of the public agrees with that." That's because, unlike 94% of scientists, the public is both willing and able to read the other half of the story.
Cranky educator.
To start with. If we want to get really comprehensive data we really should explore the low end as well. Perhaps take the planet back to 1800 levels.
Now all we need is funding.
I think the reason behind why more scientists believe in natural selection and global warming caused by humans is because they actually know the truth. The public a lot of the times just plainly ignore the truth. They can't accept the fact nature lets the stronger of the species live or that the reason why the world might be a hard place to live for posterity is because of their own fault. This isn't true always though but it is very common.
No one claimed that Cathoilics today believe the earth is flat. Your comment is basically superfluous (and misleading).
Clever signature text goes here.
I see you have never used Wikipedia before. The article is not the proof, the sources of the article are. Welcome to the 21st century, AC.
Except that there are many variables other than CO2 that affect temperature. We probably aren't monitoring or understand them all. One in particular is the energy output of the sun. We have very little historical data, and it will have an effect on global temperatures (quite possible its so small as to not worry about short term, but long term its going to dwarf any CO2 problem)
Another reason we should do an experiment. You say we have little data historical data about solar output, making it hard to untangle the effect of CO2 from insolation. Great! Let's manipulate the CO2 concentration while we're monitoring insolation with modern equipment!
Does someone actually use that argument?
Ohboy, you're in for a special treat.
The first thing to note, before you get the notion that this might be a parody, is the Wikipedia biography page for Ray Comfort. This guy is as serious as they come. He's offered a few tens of thousands of dollars to debate Richard Dawkins for an hour. He's an honest-to-god Christian Evangelical Minister of some extremely minor fame, with some 64 books to his name, including "You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think", "Russia Will Attack Israel: a 'For the Thinking Mind' Publication", "Hell's Best Kept Secret", "Scientific Facts in the Bible: 100 Reasons to Believe the Bible is Supernatural in Origin", and my personal favorite "Scratch & Sniff (Creation for Kids)".
An honorable mention for Truth in Advertising goes to "Comfort, the Feeble-Minded: Consolation for People Who Do Dumb Things: an Autobiography".
This guy is the poster boy for Poe's law. No, let me take that back. This guy climbed on stage at the Poe's law telethon and fucking ATE the poster boy for Poe's law, turned around and laid a steaming shitburger, and somehow in trying to walk offstage he managed to accidentally step in his own steaming shitburger. Twice.
Before you watch this video... I must warn you to put down any food or beverages you may be holding/consuming. In fact, that goes for anyone within earshot. This guy proves the existence of god - with a banana. And holy fuck he's serious. All the things you're currently imaging about this video... they don't come close. Oh, and bonus points to you if you somehow manage to make it through the video without ever picturing the banana as a phallic symbol.
Behold: The Atheist's Nightmare featuring Ray Comfort and silent pal Kirk Cameron
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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're missing my point...
The Earth is more than a container of CO2 with a light bulb pointing at it.
Feel free to experiment (and use my tax dollars to do it even), but don't claim you know the The Truth and ridicule people who don't accept it on faith, until you have a model that reproduces the real thing, and can prove it.
I think you missed the point. I'm being facetious.
The original poster made some comment along the lines of "we've observed a correlation, but that doesn't prove causation, and we don't have any convenient planets to experiment on."
When you have such a situation, to be sure, you have to do an experiment. That is, purposely manipulate CO2 and see what happens. As you point out, if you want it to be anything more than a clever (or not so clever) model, you'd better do it on a whole planet.
We've only got one of those. So, to determine how atmospheric CO2 affects climate, we should change the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere, preferably over a fairly short term. Since we've already raised, it, the logical choice for the start of the experiment would be to lower it.
So in other words, model shmodel, let's experiment on the planet and get some real results.
I realize it was a pretty subtle joke, but it seems the climate change deniers are mostly the ones who didn't get it and felt they needed to respond. Interesting.
I stand corrected. My point should have been on geocentricism (not flatness).
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
I would really like to see some backing for your claims. From my experience the most convincing and most radical christians I have met have been people that were converted to christianity at a later stage in life rather than born in a "God-fearing household".
My experience has been just the opposite. However, if it were so easy for religion to be picked up by otherwise non-religious adults ... why the focus on training children?
... or the faithful to lose it.
... and that makes them fundamentally the same regardless of which particular brand of dogma they prefer. In my original comment, I was referring to people, like myself, who were not given any significant religious instruction as children, and were allowed to form their own belief system into adulthood. Those are the people who rarely find religion. Yes yes, it does happen and I can point to a couple of examples myself, but it's a rarity.
... focus on bringing your children up it. They're easy targets and odds are, they'll never escape.
I also have known a number of people that have converted to Christianity later in life. However, they invariably came from another Christian sect, or from some other religion. I've yet to encounter a dyed-in-the-wool atheist who, as an adult, at some point found himself able to swallow a metric ton of inconsistency and contradiction. It's much easier when you are a child and have little or no critical-thinking capability and accept unquestioningly whatever worldview fed into your neural circuits. Granted, I've known many adults who had the critical-thinking skills of a small child, but that's another story.
Furthermore, as an unbeliever (and one who never has believed) I'm not limiting my comments to individuals who convert to Christianity or any other faith, as you seem to assume. Conversion is a matter of exchanging one set of religious protocols for another. It's not a basic shift in perception, as is required for an atheist acquire faith
From my perspective, a person who was raised in the Jewish faith who decides to become a Christian is still someone who believes. They have the mental ability to accept faith, to believe in God
My point is that if you want your belief system to propagate from generation to generation, especially if it's, well, basically irrational and full of logical fallacies
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
you'd better do it on a whole planet
Sure let me know what your control is, and what you're going keep constant, and what you're to change. Then let me know how it is your going to do either of those things with the processes that influence the Earth.
Or have you never actually preformed an experiment?
So we're left to models, which can be influenced by politics, personal beliefs and money.
I realize you're probably trolling, but people misrepresenting the scientific method because of ignorance or malice needs to be called out.