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Can Science Ever Be "Settled?"
StartsWithABang writes "From physics to biology, from health and medicine to environmental and climate science, you'll frequently hear claims that the science is settled. Meanwhile, those who disagree with the conclusions will clamor that science can never be 'settled,' and then the name-calling from 'alarmist' to 'denier' ensues.
But can science legitimately ever be considered settled, and if so, what does that mean? We consider gravitation, evolution, the Big Bang, germ theory, and global warming in an effort to find out."
all attempts to disprove it have failed and until evidence can be presented to disprove or bring the results into question it is settled
it doesn't mean "this is doctrine never challenge it" it means challenge it knowing that it has been challenged before and the theory has held
Will never happen
There is always, always, an infintesimally small chance you're wrong. And on a universal scale, that means you will be wrong at some point somewhere.
It would require that the fringes of an issue become so boring, and the overhead of getting involved so high, that no one wants to investigate it anymore.
That is, until "validating boring issues" becomes retro-vogue and bad scientists start arguing bad conclusions.
Newton's laws have been pretty much settled. Einstein found a way to get more precision under certain circumstances, but Newton is good enough most of the time.
Because if God had intended science to work, he would not allow that Dolby guy to be blinded by it!
That's not a summary, that's a click bait.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It will ensure there's plenty of work to do on both sides.
Where ignorance attempts to shroud the light of reason, the light of reason must endeavour to shine thus more brightly.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It is quite well settled scientific fact that those who find themselves at a business disadvantage due to the existence of facts they don't like will immediately lobby for legislation to overturn these silly facts in the interest of being pro-business.
Short of that, then the next best thing is to create a controversy. Since it is a creative work, shouldn't the controversy be copyrighted? Or even better . . . patented to protect the idea! Or maybe the observations underlying scientific advancement should be made privately owned, or subject to a government auction. I wouldn't have expected anyone to take these suggestions seriously twenty years ago. But today? Who knows?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
you'll frequently hear claims that the science is settled
No, you don't. Science is, by definition, always ready to accept a better theory. Nothing is settled. It's just that there are, at this moment, no better theories to explain observations.
When a better model (or theory) comes along, nobody is going to hang on to the old model. Science is never settled and always ready to accept change.
That said, in some fields you better come prepared with a very good model/theory to change the current model. Some parts of science are well understood and it takes extraordinary evidence to back up extraordinary claims.
Claiming that a topic is "settled" is, typically, a tactic to shut a viewpoint down as no longer being a live option the community will consider in its collective deliberations.
At best, this is a necessary pruning tactic, so that old, disproven arguments can't be repeatedly raised. Without some mechanism like this, it would be difficult for groups to proceed when they have a majority, but not unanimous, consensus.
At its worst, "settled" talk is a rhetorical trick, to shut someone with a potentially valid point out of a public deliberation. We see this somewhat with climate science (since new data are regularly obtained), and also in law / public policy. For example, Marbury vs. Madison may have "settled" the law regarding whether or not court decision trump the other two branches' judgment in matters of law. But that doesn't mean the position is correct, or that the count-arguments were ever adequately resolved. One could argue that it's a thin veil over the military victor's (the North's) version of history.
Of course it will never be settled. Even if we are capable of comprehending all the laws of the universe and we do eventually figure them out to explain all observable phenomenon, it will always be logically valid to say there is something we haven't observed yet. Induction does not lead to logical truth. It is even possible (but unlikely) that the universe is actually completely chaotic with no laws, and what we see as gravity and the other forces just a really big coincidence.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
It's a process.
I think I read there really is no more "chemistry" left to investigate. Apparently it has moved on to molecular physics. Kind of like Newtonian physics are as settled as can be. The bordlines have moved far beyond them by now.
"evolutionary criticism . . . is completely forbidden in US schools."
Well, unless you go to school in one of those states where the school boards also don't think children should be trusted to learn about puberty, carbon dating, and history that wasn't vetted by the Club for Growth and the Daughters of Confederate Heroes.
"The bible says it. I believe it. That settles it."
Bukowski said it. I believe it. That settles it.
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
-- Albert Einstein
First class example is that evolutionary criticism (missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them, Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics, etc) is completely forbidden in US schools.
They're not "completely forbidden", and they're certainly not forbidden in private schools. What is forbidden is using petty nitpicking of details, which are at best only marginally relevant to the validity of evolutionary theory, to advance religious doctrine, which is the only reason these issues are ever raised in the first place. If you want religion taught in public schools, move to Iran or some other country where superstition is mandated by law.
For well over a thousand years Aristotle's work in the physical sciences (including zooology) was considered settled... until people started testing his theories
We called that period the "Enlightenment"
You approach closer and close to the "absolute truth", but never get there, and every pi microns there is an e chance that there will be a step function and the whole convergence has to start again.
And then the cylons show up (;-))
davecb@spamcop.net
People come up with theories, they get refined, debugged, and eventually tagged as a release candidate.
If the theories seem solid enough, there is a major/product release as something which is solid enough for other people to use in production environments.
As people keep using it, it gets minor patches/revisions. If people find a serious enough flaw/bug, then people start working on creating another major version release (or competing product.)
And, just as in software, if the new version of the theory/science is not backwards compatible to the previous one, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Not a result. Thus, attempts to claim that the science is settled are attempts to shut down the scientific process.
If the results of the scientific process are good, they're reproducible, and there's no point in trying to build up a religious dogma of belief on something that simply is.
Questioning the "settled science" is science. Shut it down at the cost of shutting down science.
The summary confuses "science", as in the process of discovery, and the various discoveries themselves and the knowledge obtained.
Science is settled with respect to we have the process and principles of exploring the rules of the universe. That has nothing to do with whether e.g. climate change exists or does not.
Various topics on the other hand, some are considered accepted fact, and others are not. The chemical composition of water, and the second law of thermodynamics are accepted as being 'settled'.
A process, not a product?
Many things in science are settled beyond any reasonable doubt as false simply because they contradict obvious observed facts. Sorry, Earth is not flat and was not created literally 6000 years ago in literally 6 days.
Stalinism
Is it petty of me to wish that people who accuse their political opponents of being Nazis, Communists, etc., could live for a little while in the world of their paranoid fantasies? If they survived the experience, a month in the actual USSR under Stalin, for example, might give them much more perspective.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The answer is obviously only when we have observed all that there is in the universe, and given the universe is expanding there is that which we never see: so no.
Once a theory or even a law becomes unfalsifiable its not longer science. Until every observation has been made, it remains possible a contradiction will be discovered. Therefore nothing can ever be settled.
With that said there are lots of cases like inertia where the evidence in support of it is so strong and so complete; we can reasonably depend upon its truthfulness and pretty much reject anyone who disputes it unless they have some really really solid independently reproducible observations to the contrary.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
a scientist who isn't interested in writing the next chapter in the text is a disciple.
A common definition of science is "knowledge, as of facts or principles; knowledge gained by systematic study."
Science is never stable. There is always layer upon layer of detail that is waiting to be discovered. The "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" is the underlying concept. Our level of scientific understanding is driven by our current understanding and our needs to go deeper. The knowledge can change and grow based on deeper systematic study.
In the middle ages, when transportation was limited to horse, cart and walking. The naivety of a geocentric university was sufficient for the time. And for the most part motion of planets was fairly accurately explained by epicycles. The "Science" of the age was sufficient. As travel and migration required more detailed knowledge, the science improved to explain what was seen. New models were formed, and tides, winds and so on became more accurate and combined into a deeper understanding.
The beauty of science is that as the foundations of one area is broken down and rebuilt, what replaces it must not only encompass what was there, but also link deeper into other areas that caused the original science to fail. It doesn't make the previous science and knowledge bad, just incorrect. One can't deny that a model that explained a known phenomena for that point in history was bad science.
In 40 years time*, we'll look back at the misguided fools at the start of 21st century and our futile and plain incorrect approaches to fusion. We may not be there, but we'll probably dealing with all sorts of funky and interesting materials on the way to get there.
Those of us who will have children should know that their science *will* be different in a lot of areas than our science. That is a good thing.
* Bonus points for replies that say why I chose the "40 years time".
Evolution is taught in U.S. schools. Once in a while some gray haired old man in some podunk backwoods county tries to change that and makes us all look bad. So don't believe everything you read on Slashdot.
:wq
Or maybe Evolution is just supported by so much overwhelming evidence that 99%+ of scientists accept it as the best theory. Most of the scientific discussions around Evolution are centered around how we dot the i's and cross the t's, not whether Evolution is a better theory than "last Tuesday God said 'abracadabra' and the Universe was formed as is with its 'history' as an illusion."
In a school's science class, students should learn what the prevailing scientific theories are. They should learn why those theories are the prevailing ones. However, school is not the place for students - who are just learning the material and who will have a highly incomplete knowledge of the subject - to make a determination of which theory is the "right" one.
Whenever someone says "we need to teach the weaknesses of Evolution", what they really mean is "I would like schools to teach Creationism, but that was struck down by the Supreme Court... as was Intelligent Design... so maybe if we sow enough doubt about Evolution in the students, they'll grow up believing that God created it all 10,000 years ago."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Science can never be settled even if all that is knowable about the current set of knowable things is known. There simply may be more knowable things in the future. However there is an argument that says the universe of all things that are knowable must by definition be both finite, and therefore also discrete. So it must be shown eventually that we have found all knowable things, and we know all about all knowable things, and how they interact.
A finite and discrete universe would necessarily lead to the entire future as already planned, and we have no recourse except to experience it regardless of our personal desires or will (since a will to change something would already be in the plan).
A finite and discrete universe also would be required to eventually repeat, and any memories collected in such a universe would eventually be required to be dumped. Especially since remembering an infinite amount of things would not be possible. The question of "What was your first memory?" in an infinite universe would simply be absurd.
The alternative to knowing things about the universe, and how it works, is just to experience it anyway.
Is it petty of me to wish that people who accuse their political opponents of being Nazis, Communists, etc., could live for a little while in the world of their paranoid fantasies? If they survived the experience, a month in the actual USSR under Stalin, for example, might give them much more perspective.
Yes, it's petty, but I do it too, all the time. For instance, just last week I was thinking about how helpful a smallpox epidemic would be in demonstrating why we have vaccines. Likewise, I'd like to see the American Christians who claim to be persecuted spend some time in Saudi Arabia or China so they could understand the true meaning of persecution. I don't actually think any of these people deserve this, but I can't think of anything else that would convince them of how stupid they sound.
College is WAY WAY WAY too late to start handing kids academic journal access. Copyrighted science? COPYRIGHTED SCIENCE!? This isn't real science. Just wait 20 years for the 'real' scientists to take over & you can keep your cute little lab coat you spent $80K/8 years on just so you can skip internal medicine altogether & work for a pharmaceutical company to poop out a new chemical analog that gets you high by curing backpain or whatever but then the class-action lawsuit comes from the stump babys or the new boobies or whatever. Fuck you, currently-still-existing-"science"-community. Fuck. You.
Nothing is ever settled. There are axioms that can be used to conduct further science and base theories on but without constantly proving something we'll never find out if something is wrong.
People who say something is settled want the exact opposite. They don't want anyone to test their hypothesis because the findings might be different, not necessarily the opposite, but at least different from the observed original answer.
The best explanation I've ever heard of for science's progression as explained to a non-scientist is an analogy to the coastline paradox. The coastline paradox goes like this: What is the length of the coastline of Great Britain (or any other island/continent/thing with a coast)? If you use a kilometer long measuring stick, you'll get one answer, but you'll miss some coastline that zigs and zags a bit under the scale of 1 km. Ok, you say, so let's use a half-kilometer measuring stick, or even better a one meter measuring stick, that'll give us a more precise answer! But wait, you'll still miss features that are smaller than a meter. Science operates under the same principle. First, we take a very large look at a question, and find a minimally acceptable answer. Then, as our understanding gets better and we can refine our analysis, we move down to a smaller measuring stick and get a more precise answer, a better model for what reality is. However, just like getting to the meter measuring stick, our answers will never be precisely correct, our models for the natural world will never be completely correct, encompassing every little zig and zag of the problem. Therefore, the models can always get better and there will always be job opportunities for people who ask questions about our world.
This is obvious flame bait.
But adequately settled, like a scientific consensus? Sure that happens often.
OK, missing species. Because things get eaten by other things, get buried deep by land slides, volcanoes, asteroids, etc, or because this planet is so fucking big, and the animal density is so small, we can't dig it fast enough to find more. But if you question evolution based on missing links (fuck that otherwise it makes sense), what is your suggestion? Magical man in the sky did it with his, err... magic wand? :) Does he kill for worship by any chance? If so, I have a counterclaim: we all came out of a magical teapot - at least it's more peaceful and doesn't want my money. You drink its blood each time you have tea. Coffee is Satan's, err... juice in this story. I know this because I received a vision from this holy teapot while writing this comment. Don't believe me? No problem. The holy teapot is all forgiving, and wishes you to live your life in peace. It would never hurt anything living.
Also, I can't find that "doubled-down denial of genetics" thing anywhere.
The challenge is to provide a theory that is capable of being dis-proven.
As we have seen with the theory that is the obvious subject of the post, there is no way to disprove it since all possible outcomes are claimed as products of the theory. Even when it blatantly fails the empirical test, it still managers to survive as yet another caveat is bolted on to accommodate the failure.
"I predict this will happen"
"Well, it didn't happen, but that's because of this thing here, so I was still right." ad nauseam.
It's like arguing with your ex, there's always a "but" in there somewhere.
Science doesn't have views.
Still, I liked how you used this as an opportunity for some moral relativist attempt to defend your anti-science religious doctrine.
I really liked the way one person put it to me a while back. Some people used to have some idea the earth was flat, but then some people realized that wasn't true and said it was a sphere. Well, that was clearly wrong too but a sphere is a lot closer to the truth than flat; treating wrongness as a boolean would just label them both wrong but, one is clearly a lot less wrong than the other.
So to some degree, it was settled...possibilities were excluded. Then, well its clearly not a sphere, it bulges in the middle, I have heard "slightly pear shaped" is a good description.... then you have the satellites that have precisely measured variations in gravitational field...they have an even more complex picture.
Whether it is settled or not depends on to what degree you need the answers.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Knowledge is Infinite, therefore Science will NEVER be "settled."
Science is a process (journey) to reach a goal (destination).
Science is about removing Falsehood.
Gnosis is about adding Truth.
Same goal, different paths. The best way to is to combine complementary paths but the Western world is too stuck on an incomplete Materialistic perspective to understand the Strengths and Weaknesses of BOTH systems.
There are many questions outside the domain of Science. But just because Science and Scientists will NEVER be able to answer them doesn't mean that we don't have other ways to find out the answer.
Everything we know about Gravitation, Evolution, the Big Bang will be turned upside down in ~ 10 years.
Can "science" ever be settled?
No, almost certainly not, since that implies perfect knowledge of all existence--all that is, was, or ever could be.
Can science settle particular questions? Yes.
The point of science is to develop a better understanding of the world/universe/whatever we live in. That understanding can be refined and improved. This question doesn't even make any sense.
In the past 30 years Darwinists suppressed information about inheritance of acquired traits. The Lamarckian-looking genetics that explain this are now FINALLY being accepted as science and are called, as a group of phenomenon, "epigenetics".
It is true that valid scientific criticism of Darwinian evolution was supressed.
Some of this suppression was because epigenetics at times looks like Intelligent Design as proposed by some people.
But the real science behind it was never wrong. The religious fear of real problems in the Darwinian model that suppressed all criticism, whether coming from legitimate scientists or creationists, was wrong.
Or to put it another way, if someone feels the need to say "XYZ is settled science" that's a clue that it might not be.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Absolutely. Settled doesn't mean True - science is unconcerned with Truth, perhaps even actively opposed to it. Because there is no theoretical way to distinguish between Truth and an extremely accurate and reliable misunderstanding. Accepting something as Truth denies the ability to challenge it - and those challenges are the very essence of science.
Settled means it has so thoroughly withstood all challenges that nobody much even bothers to challenge it anymore, and you'd better have some really solid new evidence to back any new challenge or expect to be laughed off the stage.
This is why the vast majority of anti-AGW positions are considered so ridiculous: The studies they're based on are almost universally either so laughably bad as to be obvious paid "science" propaganda, or are so badly misrepresented that the researchers themselves object to the claims being made by the pundits. Meanwhile the handful of potentially legitimate challenges are largely ignored by the media, presumably because they're either so esoteric they can't be expressed in sound bytes, or so outlandish that only other scientists could take them seriously. Unlike the propaganda being fed to the public, the larger climatology community generally treats those challenges with polite skepticism and constructive criticism because they are at least plausible, even if they need a *lot* more supporting evidence before they could be considered viable alternative explanations.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Am I buying or selling?
Employee Of the Month - Cyberdyne Systems Corporation - September 1997
Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. -- Bertrand Russell
You are not really expecting any useful answer to your question? You do not give a definition of what settled means. If it means a theory has been proven right, then by all means science is never settled. See Karl Popper for details. If it means a theory has been proven useful to us to understand a certain aspect of what we call reality, then yes there are many fields in science which are considered settled.
When I say theory, I mean scientific theory. Not that "theory" which people often use to describe that they have an opinion. If you do not know the difference then see Karl Popper again.
By the way even in religion there is no absolute truth, as the absolute truth varies between people and over time even in one person. So in general settled is only a vague term used in real life to describe some inter-subjective object of thought which is believed not to change. And in that definition many things in science are settled.
Don't feed the trolls, kids.
My experience has been that people who invoke Hitler, Stalin, etc. when presented with differing viewpoints tend to have room-temperature IQs and body weights that average around 320 pounds. While it's amusing to entertain the notion of subjecting these people to the indignities that they're channeling, the correct response to these sorts of people is to mock them. Mock them, mock their belief systems, and (most importantly) mock their families.
I came up through public education back in the 70s. When evolution was taught, it was made clear up front that it was a theory, that some didn't accept it for religious or other reasons, then the basis for the theory was taught. That worked for me to decide for myself and works just fine today. Sure, there was always controversy, but folks on both side had to make it a political battleground. Some atheists push to have religious references removed through schools and government, scaring the crap out of religious conservatives , who respond by trying to push religion back in everywhere possible, thereby scaring the crap out of the atheists. The chicken and egg battle continues, while moderates on both sides just shake their heads in frustration.
Science is never settled. But it can be accepted by the large majority given overwhelming evidence. The world was once flat.
... they'll grow up believing that God created it all 10,000 years ago.
Ah, I see you're a fan of Fermi estimation, too. :)
If you can't handle other people having opinions, your views are weak.
Excellent point! One that is lost on most in more than just scientific arguments.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Because that's exactly what third graders are doing when they ask questions in the classroom. Advancing their religious doctrine. Down with inquisitive third-graders!
It's not the third-graders who are campaigning to have theology taught in biology class, it's grown adults who should know better. And there's nothing wrong with students asking tough questions, but I doubt any third grader has actually read Darwin, or done any research into "missing" intermediate species other than whatever nonsense they were told in Sunday school.
speaks to this issue. Here's a link, and here's their link to the essay.
missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them
The "missing intermediate species" boils down to moving the goalpost. Creationists, such as yourself say "Find a link between these two thing you claim are related." An intermediate species is found and they say "Find one one between that one and this then!". It is a handful of unqualified crackpots, such as creationist engineers, disputing the claims.without evidence. Their personal incredulity is not evidence against anything.
Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics
I have no idea what you are talking about with this. Nothing in Darwin's theory denies genetics. In fact, the Theory of Evolution relies on genetics for both a mechanism and evidence.
What we don't need is a return to the dark ages creationists would love.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
What you're effectively saying is that a little bit of taking away people's freedom to choose is not so bad as the Stalinism of the USSR.
That's sounds bland to me. It's like you're asserting it's OK to raise recommended dosages of hemlock from 0 to some small amount. Even if you're right, so what?
In a worst case, of course, you are advancing Stalinism.
I could see if some result is not repudiated in thousands of years or more, then it becomes settled for all practical purposes. The scientific method is still very young - only a half millennia with a few spurts in earlier civilizations. A hundred thousand years from know it could be different.
taking away people's freedom to choose
Stop being hyperbolic. No one is advocating taking away your freedom to choose; you have every right to believe what you want, and to home-school your children or send them to fundamentalist private schools. You do not have the right to have your ancient superstitions treated as equivalent to scientific research, or to push your theology on a captive audience of other people's children.
Science is settled until new contrary evidence comes along to unsettle it.
There is an obvious contextual reference here to the contemporary scientific debate raging around global warming. If I may push back against the OP's question for a moment: The question "is the science ever settled" is not framed in a useful way. I think it is more useful to ask "does the science ever prove a political position"? I frame it this way because typically, when partisans point out that "the science is settled" on some subject, what they are really trying to do is put the weight of scientific authority behind their political positions.
Furthermore, I think this has demonstrable, detrimental effect on science. There has been a recent uptick in global warming disbelief. The typical response to this kind of thing falls into one of two categories: either Americans are unwashed idiots or the effort to disseminate scientific knowledge is somehow flagging in the internet age. But there is a third explanation which receives little attention; namely, the relentless push by partisans to make science speak for particular political ends brings science itself into disrepute. In this view, rising skepticism of scientific consensus comes from backlash induced by, essentially, partisan bullying on scientific issues. With respect to global warming, people see partisans making statements attempting to link currently held scientific views to political ideas that run the gamut from signing bad treaties like Kyoto, adopting economically ruinous policies, or enriching crony operators of new "carbon" exchanges. And then they conclude that maybe the science wasn't all that necessary or important to these partisans after all.
Same agenda-driven bullshit. Different day. Next.
Contrast this with the scientific method: This can be applied widely. But do not confuse a solid body of science like in physics with something that changes when being observed. Unfortunately, envy and the limitations of language (add to this the missing understanding in much of what is published) conspire to make real science look bad in the public eye.
You know it's time for the next revolution when your rulers' names end with roman numerals.
Honestly, how many high schoolers can actually understand a typical journal article? The target audience is experts in the field.
Also, it's quite common for physics or astro articles to appear on arxiv or similar, and a lot of bio articles are open access thanks to a US NIH mandate.
First class example is that evolutionary criticism (missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them, Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics, etc) is completely forbidden in US schools.
They're not "completely forbidden", and they're certainly not forbidden in private schools. What is forbidden is using petty nitpicking of details, which are at best only marginally relevant to the validity of evolutionary theory, to advance religious doctrine, which is the only reason these issues are ever raised in the first place. If you want religion taught in public schools, move to Iran or some other country where superstition is mandated by law.
The idea that questions about evolution are only raised to advanced religious doctrine is a bit of a religious doctrine in and of itself. Literally the moment that anybody questions anything main stream the immediate response is that those people must be backwoods religious extremists. You see it EVERYWHERE. Somebody raises questions about monetary policy and excessive spending and people immediately go straight to conservative therefore religious. Anybody had the gall to suggest that it was possible for some people to be predisposed to have a negative reaction to something in a vaccine you'd immediately hear "right-wing-religious-nut-job" thrown into the conversation somewhere.
At some point public branding began happening that if you ever dare to discuss an issue, point out flaws, or raise dare I say "valid" discussion points that your question was invalid simply by invoking "right-wing-religious-nut-job" in the conversation.
The sheer fact that so many people immediately use that as a go-to rather that even thinking of defending any questions would seem to indicate that those people feel their own doctrine is being questioned, which makes the idea of those people calling others extremist nut jobs kind've ironic.
One of my all time favorite quotes:
"The test of first rate intelligence is to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - Dwight Whitney Morrow
There's a lot of people who believe themselves to be intelligent who cannot allow themselves to try to see things from another angle. Nobody holds a viewpoint strongly without having a good reason for doing so. If more people recognized that and tried to understand the other side you'd see a lot less vocal hostility.
Odds are very good that if you feel strongly about something there are a whole lot of times where you're right and a whole lot of times where you're also wrong.
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
Why does it matter how we look? On your deathbed, are you going to regret that we all didn't look a different way?
Why would I want to be lumped in with everyone else?
On the one hand it seems poor to accuse others of being sheeple, but then to justify something in the name of all becoming sheep?
There's little point in trying to figure out when science can be settled in questions like gun control, climate change, and evolution. When one or both sides dig in, there's no way either is going to be convinced. Evolution, for example: the yelling match is only going to stop when the last creationist dies, or when God comes down and tells us "Uh, hello? I TOLD you I made the world in six days. How did you think it was a metaphor? The devil CLEARLY put those bones there! I even sent a bunch of prophets to tell you. Did you not see them in the parking lot of walmarts throughout the deep south?"
"99% of scientists" is pretty monolithic for a claim that can't be reproduced (not to mention probed, imaged, corraborated with evidence that isn't disputed by the proponents thereof or missing altogether, etc).
Any claim that refuses to allow other people their God-given right to their opinion is too weak to deserve to live.
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory, which states that this has already happened." - thhgttg
Hence, never be settled.
So any one prior to the modern school system is a pundit? Which i take is someone who has an interest in a subject, scientific or not. Newton was a "hobbiest", doing it for fun. Einstein was a minor savant, who had a hard time in school, and barely passed the "required" courses, but a savant on theory. So, what makes one's opinion more worthy then another?
Science is a "way of gaining knowledge" not the actual knowledge gained. As a way of gaining knowledge it's methods are not settled but constantly being debated by philosophers since Thales of Miletus (~600bc). Contrary to popular belief the history of science isn't, "..before the late middle ages we were dumb, then science happened and now we really know how the world works..."
So we just ignore all scientific progress from like 1900 to the NIH mandate!? There's shit 3x older than I am that I have to have my friends steal for me just to read. Also, how many highschoolers actually understand calculus? Should we take away calculus? WILL IT HURT THEIR BRAINS TOO MUCH OH NOOO. I might not be with some expensive managed IT firm or anything, but I got where I am today by studying college-level course material when everyone in the grammar 'school' "system" thought I was outright retarded.
Look it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Darwin's theory rested on oversimplifying the complexity of life, so he came up with a bizarro view of heredity reminescent of how the Nazi's invented the "frost" cosmology because they were embarrased by all the advances made by Jewish cosmologists (who incidentally were mostly Germans themselves).
My money is being used to expose children to views I don't agree with.
And the federal courts disallow criticism of these views.
How is this better than living in a state of nature?
In Mathematics we have different techniques to actually prove propositions. Once you have found a valid proof to a proposition, it becomes a theorem and it is settled. There is no possibility to disprove or question that theorem afterwards.
In any other science than Mathematics, ideas are supported by data. If enough data is supporting your idea, it becomes a theory. But as the theory is based on data, it will never be settled. No matter how much data you have to support the theory, there always remains the possibility that a counter-example could be found. The low probability of finding a counter-example in the current state of the sciences is irrelevant to this fact.
First class example is that evolutionary criticism (missing intermediate species or disputed claims of finding them, Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics, etc) is completely forbidden in US schools.
Much like that sentence was unadulterated bullshit.
My interpretation is that there is enough confidence from the scientific community for anyone who is not a scientist researching the topic to accept the current understanding as fact. It doesn't mean they should think it is a fact, just that they should lead their life and form opinions based on the assumption that it is a fact.
Research should of course continue, probably until the end of time, but at a certain point the general population should no longer question the findings. They simply are not trained enough to form an opinion that differs from the general consensus.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
You have all the freedom to choose to be an inbred moron if you like. You do not have the right to demand that the state teaches others to be inbred morons.
In the past 30 years Darwinists suppressed information about inheritance of acquired traits. The Lamarckian-looking genetics that explain this are now FINALLY being accepted as science and are called, as a group of phenomenon, "epigenetics".
This simply demonstrates your ignorance of the field. Epigenetics is far more fundamental and complicated than Lamarckian inheritance - it's a basic mechanism of genetic regulation in all multicellular organisms. This wasn't even remotely controversial 15 years ago, when I started studying biology; any freshman biology course would cover the subject. It still isn't terribly well understood, but what can you expect when we still don't know the function of half of our genes?
What was genuinely controversial was the extent to which epigenetic regulation affected germ cells and was therefore heritable. It was not controversial because "Darwinists" (whatever that means) tried to suppress information, it was because none of the loudest proponents of the theory had found molecular evidence to support it. This is now slowly changing, as biologists are realizing (yet again) that genetic regulation is even more complex than they imagined.
In any case, none of the new information contradicts modern evolutionary theory; likewise, it does not have any relevance to the issue of whether modern life forms were designed or evolved. It also doesn't overturn the "central dogma" of molecular biology or prove that Lamarck's overall hypothesis was correct. We still have every reason to continue to believe that the unmodified genome is the most important carrier of genetic information and determinant of phenotype, and the extent to which epigenetics is heritable is still an unsolved debate. That makes it a fascinating target for more research, and I'm sure there will be more startling discoveries (and perhaps Nobel prizes) in the near future. I'm also very confident that any new discoveries will be made by actual scientists doing actual research, not theologians.
lawsuit comes from the stump babys or the new boobies
I, for one, welcome our new stump baby or new boobies overlords.
Careful - your ignorance is showing... I love the conspiracy theories you just go and jump to as well. "Suppressed indeed." Yes - biologists hired a gang of oppressors who run around knee-capping people who espouse theories they have not yet come to agree upon.
WTF.
Darwin's doubled-down denial of genetics
I have no idea what you are talking about with this.
Neither does he!
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
No.
I'm not saying your view depends on assertions and swearing ...
... but you're kind of presenting your view that way, right?
At least I gave some examples.
Not in the traditional sense where you gather everyone involved, hear them out, make a decision and then the matter is settled. In science things are settled when nobody sees a reason to argue anymore, the prevailing theory adequately explains everything in its scope. After all it's mostly mathematical formulas which happen to match the real world, if my contact lenses curve light the way optics say they should what's there to argue? In that sense, I find the resistance to evolution incredible because all it really says is that there'll be more of those who reproduce more and less of those who reproduce less. Sounds to me like a "well, duh" statement, particularly when you look at what we have done with domestication. If you shape the environment, you shape the animals and nature's been doing it much longer than us.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Settled Science though is not generally referred to as settled. Who goes around saying that the sun "rising" tomorrow. is settled science.
The problem with much of modern "science" is that it is being done by politicians pretending to be scientists for political purposes and making the claim of certain things being settled.
I have no idea how monetary policy or vaccine reactions are relevant to this debate, or what they have to do with religion. Nor are politics particularly relevant, since you can find scientists of all ideologies working productively without making extravagant pseudo-scientific claims.
As a biologist, I do know that nearly every single objection I have ever encountered to evolution - and, in particular, common descent, especially as applied to humans and apes - has ultimately been driven by a religious viewpoint, usually a belief in the literal truth of the Old Testament. (I was going to say that the panspermia advocates were the biggest exception, but even they aren't really arguing with the fact of evolution, but the origin of life, which is a different matter.) This goes doubly for the age of the earth, which is even less controversial than common descent. The creationists are also almost uniformly not practicing scientists (or even trained as biologists, in all but a handful of cases); I have yet to meet any biologist who continues to be productive while completely ignoring 150 years of scientific evidence. Conversely, I've known a decent number of biologists who were religious, but did not see the need to distort every scientific finding to fit into their theological worldview. (Francis Collins and Ken Miller are two of the most famous examples, but I've never met them, although I think I used Miller's textbook in high school.) In fact, the one who found "intelligent design" the most infuriating was a conservative Catholic.
In summary: why shouldn't I assume that creationists are religious? You've given me absolutely no reason to think otherwise.
I wish I could remember who it was who said that.
Oh wait! It was you!
I was quite please to get so far through the comments before a post by an idiot denier.
Then you find the "proof" of warming down at the bottom. A carefully excised anomalous temperature chart that. 0.5C total range with a tail pointing down.
The "tail" seems to be wagging your dog.
This graphic illustrates the stupidity of your view. http://www.skepticalscience.co...
Plot the temperature folks. It ain't hard. BEST has it available for free. http://berkeleyearth.org/data
BEST, a study financed by deniers, hiring the team and setting the goals in the hope of producing an anti-AGW result. And the conclusion was: AGW is real.
I have been pawing through the data from each station.
As you're not a scientist, that's a sure sign that your denial comes from mental illness.
The best story about "settled science" I've ever heard was about ulcers. Barry Marshall was ridiculed for this hypothesis that peptic ulcers and gastric cancer could be related to bacteria, because other scientists didn't believe that bacteria could live in the stomach with all that acid. So what did he do? He DRANK A PETRI DISH containing the bacteria he suspected of causing the problem and.... he was proven right Got a Nobel prize in Medicine in 2005 because of it too. And that's just one of the reasons when I hear someone screaming "the science is settled", I just laugh.
Science is, by definition, always ready to accept a better theory.
New ideas can meet stiff resistance even in the sciences.
David Attenborough: ''I once asked one of my lecturers why he was not talking to us about continental drift and I was told, sneeringly, that if I could I prove there was a force that could move continents, then he might think about it. The idea was moonshine, I was informed.''
Geological maps of the time showed huge land bridges spanning the Atlantic and Indian oceans to account for the similarities of fauna and flora and the divisions of the Asian continent in the Permian era but failing to account for glaciation in India, Australia and South Africa.
Continental drift
To make the case for continental drift, you shouldn't have to demonstrate a priori that there is a force that can move continents, if you can produce sufficient evidence that the continents have, in fact, moved.
My money is being used to expose children to views I don't agree with.
My money is being used to enforce laws I disagree with, and buy weapons I don't approve of. It's called representative democracy; deal with it, or move somewhere else. We do, however, have a specific clause in our constitution about establishment of religion, and the courts have decided that teaching religion in taxpayer-funded schools is included in this prohibition. (This does not equate to disallowing all criticism of science; you are welcome to spout any nonsense you wish, as long as you do not expect the government to pay for it.) If you're unhappy with that, work on getting the 1st Amendment repealed, or move to another country. I'm sure you won't find much support for teaching evolution in, say, Somalia. (But they're probably not going to be wild about your religion either.)
Science is never settled. But it can be accepted by the large majority given overwhelming evidence.
On the contrary, there is a lot of settled science. That doesn't mean it's always right, instead it means exactly that it's been accepted by the majority of scientists because of the overwhelming amount of evidence supporting it.
The world was once flat.
Is it Ironic that you're repeating one of the examples that the article explicitly cites as a stupid argument presented by ignorant people? European and Middle Eastern societies have known the world was round since the 3rd century BC. Other cultures may have taken longer to reach the same conclusion, however, I'm not sure how that relates to science. Do you really intend to conflate pre-science beliefs about the world with actual scientific discoveries? Or are you trying to imply that tomorrow we may find that the world is actually a giant disk floating through space on the back of four elephants standing on a turtle?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Creationists are religious, however opposing view points in discussion are not always. The more discussions go on around the web the more "religion" is assumed to be the only reason for having an opposed view point. Goes with every hot topic that isn't easy to publicly validate.
See Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
10,000 years ago.
No, No, NO! 6,000 years ago! Heretic!
Even if it were settled, why would it have to remain so?
From the Guide:
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
Three is my favourite number
I was arguing with a Physicist friend of mine who was adamant that most of Physics is known and the rest only knowable via number crunching. The Physicist was adamant that dark matter was real.
When I illustrated that we have no idea what gravity is, the physicist blew up.
Seriously how can we consider our knowledge nearly complete when we cannot understand the mechanics behind gravity ?
It will either be "We didn't listen!" if we ignore it to catastrophic levels, or "It was just a hoax" if we manage to do something about it and avoid catastrophe. Willful Ignorance - http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/willful-ignorance
In general, if someone is saying 'the science is settled', it means they have run out of arguments.
Even though there have been so many scandals in science lately, I still believe it is our greatest hope for future happiness.
how is one taught to be inbred exactly? are the midterms hard?
In all of these matters, definitions are critically important. For example, the scientific definition of evolution is along the lines of population genetics and how gene frequencies change over time due to reproduction, geographical and mutative influences. Its a very innocuous definition and I am not aware of anyone who questions it.
But, many scientists, conflate the scientific definition, with very little empirical evidence, to include the notion of "goo to you" evolution being an entirely natural and undirected process, starting from a single common ancestor. This is a valid scientific hypothesis, but there's very little evidence for it, and quite a bit of evidence against it. This is where the battles regarding evolution occur. Think about it - why a single ancestor? Why purely natural and undirected? Consider all of the work going on today in labs around the world to genetically engineer various derivative life forms - these are all efforts to unnaturally direct the evolution of life.
Evolution is also mute on the origin of life. Origin of life science has been stalled for decades, and so we don't really know how life originated (or originates since there's no reason why it couldn't happen multiple times). While it may be unscientific to hypothesize a creator, that doesn't mean that life wasn't created by some intelligent agent. (Again, think of all the labs trying to synthesize derivative life forms - is it unreasonable to conjecture that one day a complete life form might be synthesized?)
I think it is unfortunate that this field of science has been hijacked by religionists - atheists as well as creationists, because the science is so unsettled, it can only advance with completely open and critical discussion and evaluation.
How is asking critical questions about view points being pushed onto children with my money establishing religion?
Representative democracy only works when government is minimally intrusive. When government takes initiatives in stealing (i.e. redistribution by another name) or murder (abortion by another name) then it is pursing the very things it was intended to prevent. So I say minimal government or a state of nature for me please.
As you noted there are no government-free zones because governments want to collect as much as they can.
This discussion turned out mostly useless because the concept of "settled" was not well defined. Taking the definition to be "completely describes reality", all evidence points to this being impossible. My question is why is this so? Is this a fundamental property of nature? Has this property itself been studied?
so he came up with a bizarro view of heredity
According to your own link, his "provisional theory"(this should really be labeled an hypothesis) was replaced by Mendel's laws of inheritance. In his time, no one knew the mechanism of inheritance and genetics. Darwin proposed a possible answer, but his possible answer was replaced by current genetics. It may surprise you to learn that science is not religion and if a better explanation of observations and facts can be found, then the new explanation is adopted. Darwin proposed his hypothesis in 1838. Mendel proposed his in 1865.
reminescent of how the Nazi's invented the "frost" cosmology
You do know that the Nazis came about 100 years after Darwin came up with his hypotheses, right? Darwin didn't copy them as you seem to imply.
because they were embarrased by all the advances made by Jewish cosmologists (who incidentally were mostly Germans themselves)
I am not sure what this has to with anything. I can only guess the entire Nazi thing was just a pathetic combination of red herring and poisoning the well
To put it bluntly, your entire post is bullshit and shows your ignorance of both the scientific method, how scientific advancement works, and the current state of the Theory of Evolution. You should go read an actual scientific book on the Theory of Evolution before you spout off and make a fool of yourself again.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
How is asking critical questions about view points being pushed onto children with my money establishing religion?
Stop playing dumb. We all know that the only reason these "critical questions" (which never come from actual scientists) are ever introduced into a classroom is to promote a religious alternative. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous and insulting. At least Ken Ham has the honesty to admit this is his goal.
Conceptual, qualitative, or practical? All very different things. Things with mass are attracted to other things with mass. That's settled, because that's how we define it. All the math that goes into that attraction? Will always be open to further refinement. Will a rock always fall if you drop it? Well, antigravity is theoretically possible, so maybe not.
This is about as useful a question as "have you stopped beating your wife."
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Weaknesses of Evolution that are okay to mention:
-The fossil record is incomplete, and will always be incomplete because we will never be able to catalog everything that ever lived.
-The fossil record can occasionally be misleading, because sometimes animals that look similar aren't as closely related as we thought. (DNA and genome science has fixed a lot of this problem with molecular clocks.)
-The fossil record only captures creatures that have hard parts - soft bodied fossils are difficult to find since the soft tissue is so rarely preserved.
-There are no fossils of life before the Cambrian explosion. (I'm leaning toward the "God interference" part of evolution as being when a prokaryote ate an archaea and they merged into a eukaryote 3.5 billion years ago. ID people and Creationists alike hate that idea, but we have evidence it happened and the miracle of complex life was born.)
The problem is that these are not the weaknesses that they want to discuss, at least not completely. They'd rather go on about eyeballs and "irreducible complexity" and the Earth coming into creation in the first place, which is planetary science and not biology.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
It's the only fair way to settle science!
Two scientists in, only one comes out!
It would also have the added benefit of over time creating a species of super strong buff scientists that are designed for fighting... oh wait...
Humans are simply incapable of agreement, even in the face of observable fact.
Here are some things we know as fact:
1) Geologic timescales can neither be measured nor predicted from 15 years of observation
2) No one pair of variables is dependent absent input from all other variables in a system with billions of variables. In other words, the notion that CO2 concentration is the only variable that drives climate is just stupid. Even expanding that to CO2, H2O, and CH4 and thinking you have the answer is stupid.
3) Humans cannot grasp the enormity of our system, so we invent this thing called religion to explain it. Whether it be a diety, or the first church of AGW, it's all religion and dogma.
4) You are not a scientist unless the answer you give for every question of science is "I don't know."
Calling Darwin's view of heredity a "provisional theory" is very gentle indeed.
His view basically said that organisms can pass on characteristics acquired during their own lifetime (see Lamarckism).
Prima facie observations show this is just bad, bad, bad. You don't even need the scientific method to throw this out. In calendar time Darwin was in a different place, but qualitiatively speaking these guys were true contemporaries.
Anyway, Darwin had no knowledge of DNA during his lifetime because evolution (and the spontaneous migration of non-life to life) is tightly coupled to life being vastly, vastly more simple than it is.
This is why there are no more people calling themselves "darwinists". There are neo-darwinists who are basically saying, "Yeah, I don't agree with all the wierd, euguenticist, Lamarkian, racist nonsense that the original guy came up with". Many of Darwin's assumptions that he needed to get the exalted academics cover have been abandoned.
There are no fossils of life before the Cambrian explosion.
Not true! But it's very, very sketchy and weird compared to what comes afterwards, and doesn't provide a neat, continuous path to the animal phyla we're more familiar with. We certainly don't have a fossil record that explains the origin of complex multicellular life - just lots of small clues and educated guesses based on modern forms and molecular evidence. It's a fascinating scientific question but extremely difficult to study, unfortunately, which is why it's almost always going to be an easy target for nitpicking creationists.
A different way of saying this is that laws make a statement of what happens without explanation, and theories are explanations of what happens.
Gravity is one of the best examples, but it exists as both laws and theories simultaneously.
The law of gravitation is that two masses will attract to each other with a force proportional to their masses and inversely proportional to their distance. This makes no explanation of what is causing this - just that it occurs.
The theory of gravity is general relativity, which is an explanation of why the attraction occurs.
I did, however, say that because things LOOKED Lamarckian there was a knee-jerk response against it. I distinctly remember a college biology teacher explaining the case of field mice who developed webbed feet in one generation after a field was flooded.
He said that regardless of the data, we were to reject the idea that an adaptation emerged as a response to stimuli.
If that's not suppression, I don't know what is. Of course I'm probably just making this up, because I like to develop detailed conspiracy theories between different branches of sciences I have no stake in.
No, it is how we stretch ourselves.
Every single person here learns word(s)...from everywhere, including this site. Are we supposed to jam them in a can under the sink?
Only a jerk would complain about someone trying to use a new word, a word they might not be intimately familiar with.
Someone used "dimensionful" and I proceeded to use it a bunch of times (in a physics paper) right after I read it.
I come here for the love
I don't think the government has an obligation to push religion. Really. Paying people to be religious leads to phony religion (see Eusebius History of the Church, the writings of Kierkegaard, etc).
I don't want the government to promote religion (since the government can't do anything very well). I want it to stop saying this view I don't agree with is beyond question.
The European model my ancestors left was one where only the expert's opinion mattered. American thrived because it abandoned that and let people pursue their business without telling them what to believe.
Get the government out of policing ideas!
I distinctly remember a college biology teacher explaining the case of field mice who developed webbed feet in one generation after a field was flooded. He said that regardless of the data, we were to reject the idea that an adaptation emerged as a response to stimuli. If that's not suppression, I don't know what is.
So, one college biology teacher, discussing an anecdote that I can't seem to find on Google, is evidence of "Darwinists suppress[ing] information about inheritance of acquired traits" as a monolithic group? Surely you can do better than that.
That post read like a conversation gone wrong between me and my wife.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Thanks for the correction. I also note I mistakenly put eurkaryotes as 3.5 billion years old, when I meant 1.5 billion. Stupid keyboard, not reading my mind properly!
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Look it up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Darwin's theory rested on oversimplifying the complexity of life, so he came up with a bizarro view of heredity reminescent of how the Nazi's invented the "frost" cosmology because they were embarrased by all the advances made by Jewish cosmologists (who incidentally were mostly Germans themselves).
Baby...bathwater. Darwin was trying to posit a mechanisim to describe his observations on hereditable traits. Remember, Mendel was a contemporary, and his work developing genetic theory wasn't to gain general acceptance until after his death...which was two years after Darwin died. Once genetic theory was developed and refined, it was simply applied to Darwin's Theory of Evolution and found to be a better description of how observed heredity actually works than his original hypothesis.
Claiming that "Pangenesis was wrong, therefore evolution is wrong" is akin to claiming that Copernican theory is incorrect because Galileo thought tides were caused by variations in the motion of the earth as it revolved around the sun.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
He insists that since scientists just attribute whatever they can't explain to "random chance" (Can't recall ever hearing one actually utter those words) there must be an intelligent designer. Yeah, I'm dropping the class and complaining to the department head. 'Merica.
.... pronounce something you've only seen written! :D
Nothing after "evolution is a fact" that you said is actually a true statement.
If you have no way of showing that the truth is the truth then how do you know it is the truth?
Evolution is a fact. The method of evolving is what is in dispute. What kills me is when people assume that there can be only one primary method, ie Natural Selection. I don't see much difference between most 'Darwinists', ie Natural Selection explains everything, to 'Creationists'.
How narrowly are you defining Natural Selection?
What other candidates do you have for a primary method?
When there is nothing left that would or could challenge it, then Science would truly be settled.
OK, missing species. Because things get eaten by other things, get buried deep by land slides, volcanoes, asteroids, etc, or because this planet is so fucking big, and the animal density is so small, we can't dig it fast enough to find more.
For me, the mathematics are just too improbable. For example, we have Tyrannosaurus, which undoubtedly evolved from something else, although from what I am not able to find in my research. Allosaurus is apparently a disproven theory. But whatever it evolved from, it seems that we ought to have some fossil examples. I mean what are the odds that we would have more than 30 examples of Tyrannosaurus fossils, while having zero examples of anything leading up to a Tyrannosaurus? Is this the evolution in spurts approach where the change from some other species to Tyrannosaurus happened so fast that fossils were unlikely, but then the species Tyrannosaurus happened to be incredibly stable and so we found lots of examples from one side of the Earth to the other.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Long answer is nooooooooooooooooooo.
The "missing intermediate species" boils down to moving the goalpost. Creationists, such as yourself say "Find a link between these two thing you claim are related." An intermediate species is found and they say "Find one one between that one and this then!".
Has an intermediate species ever been found? I know there are plenty of unsubstantiated "may have beens" and plenty of related species, but I can't think of a case where we had a missing link that was subsequently found.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What the hell is an "intermediate species"? Just out of interest?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Religion is something that is stated as fact, and with the label it holds, does not allow changes. If you follow a particular faith, then you follow it, you interpret it, but you don't question it. Science is the exact opposite. There are measured facts. There is information based on the best available information, the best measurements, the best observations, and the best interpretations. You can go a long way with the information that you have. Buildings can be engineered, likewise cars, trains, planes, etc. You can build computers, phones, clocks to very exacting standards based on the available information. Medicine, biology, chemistry likewise all follow. Some people don't care for evolution, but don't mind the latest heart transplant or cure for cancer. They sue if the earthquake comes and the scientist doesn't tell them in advance, or the rain comes on what's supposed to be a sunny day. Science is a thing where the more you know, the less you know about. As more discoveries are made, people learn more, and can do more. Challenges are welcome, since they have to account for everything that comes before. Its easier to re-write books now than ever before. When I was in high school (about 30 years ago), a kid raised his hand and asked 'how does the cell division know its going to be a heart or a hand'. And the teacher didn't know, although the 'discovery' of stem cells actually happened in 1969 (before I was in school). Now they can use a mild acid to create millions of stem cells from a swab from you cheek. This is new. So some science (like classical physics) is really old, but some is really new. Its ok to challenge each with new ideas.
They are doing a lot of it at the moment and have had a fair bit of political muscle since the 1980s. At this point, if someone steps into a field they are totally unfamiliar with and publicly questions the mainstream it's an almost certain bet that they are a backwoods religious extremist or bankrolled by them.
Students are a different story and are supposed to question stuff to help them get a handle on what is going on - which is why I bolded "publicly" above.
No. It's rarely about "feelings" or other relativism bullshit where anybodies opinion is supposed to be as valid as anyone else's. When you spend a lot of time on a topic you get to know a lot about it, which skews your "odds" and makes your above comment have little or no relationship with how people do things. It should be obvious that people get better at things with experience instead of it being random as you seem to suggest.
Everything Science Produces is a Theory through the use of application.
To see how this works consider a cave man, who theorizes fire isn't terrifying, but could be controlled for warmth in the cave.
So the brave soul takes some fire from a lightening struck tree and keeps using it to heat the cave by feeding it wood.
His theory is true, and everyone in the cave thinks he is a genius.
Does he understand how fire works, ultimately?
No.
He is considered an expert given the state of knowledge about fire for the time. Should he consider researching it further?
Yes, to continually refine the theory of fire and its applications.
Now I would like you to consider todays science in all of its vast corruption. Article after article says Man Made global warming is settled, all parameters about climate, and its impact for the past 15 years now by these experts have been telling us, if we do not kill 1/3rd of humanity (usually the poor and politically unwanted), we will turn the planet into Venus.
Decades go by, no change in fact it gets colder. Yet they proclaim supreme and ultimate knowledge of the entire Biosphere...short of proclaiming themselves infallible like the Gods.
Meanwhile, any further investigation to the theory of Man Made Global warming would be considered highly disadvantageous to ones academic career, if not fatal.
All of this is of course due in part to Al Gore's carbon exchange credits system they cooked up for an elite few bankers to get wealthy from, and to provide an income for a private army and world government since all nations would be taxed for carbon output.
All of this after decades go by and these people can't even tell you what the weather is going to be like next week, yet they want you to believe that if you do not pay your carbon taxes as a nation, the earth is doomed in about 10-15 years "snow will be a thing of the past".
Even so far as to going to FAKING FOOTAGE in contrived hollywood productions.
Science has lost its way in just about every single area in the the spectrum of research. Nature and other RAGS, publish frequently fake papers based on computer generated fake research and herald them as ground breaking for publication.
By review boards that consider themslves to be also some kind of infallible elite.
Here my words: Scientists of NATURE. You are usurpers and destroyers of science.
The last thing I would want to be is a industrial college complex produced scientist now days, and I work every day to defeat the companies that hire these worthless pieces of sh*t and put them out of business using open source.
Thankfully, with all of the PhD's that are on the dole at Microsoft, for example I (as well as many others) am well on my way to doing that. I and about a million other people world wide that don't need their crappy NSA contrived software, their crappy software products or customer service/monopoly patently illegal business.
In my case, open source allows me to continually review ideas in information science in my daily business and work, free from the crap I would have to put up with if I was in a college setting, including and up to accepting bribes from corporations to fund my lab and pushing pandering white papers on product endorsements that suck it and could not hold a candle to many open source equivalents.
Continual review of a scientific theory in the open, is what science is about. You can never claim something is a fact in science.
The best you can claim is that a theory is able to produce useful affects from nature to either build a product, or reduce human suffering...
Which is what science is suppose to be about ultimately addressing the human conditions of food, water, shelter, so that nobody goes without.
Once those things are taken care of, time and time again it is shown people pretty much almost stop breeding and turn inward to improve themselves intellectually as well as spiritually.
A goal that I guarantee you, absolutely frightens the global elite, and the panders of death, called "science" today.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Anyone who looked out from a high mountain or a mast top and thought about it for a bit would laugh at anyone who suggested the Earth was flat.
Yeah, and Newton believed in a bearded sky fairy who controlled the universe but could be influenced by muttering into ones hands, so obviously his laws of motion and the theory of gravity are just complete bollocks.
The scientific way to disprove the hypothesis that objections to evolution come from religion would be to provide examples of such objections that are clearly not religious in nature. Got some? ("Questions about evolution" are asked all the time by a lot of people. They range from attempts to understand to serious research about the details.)
That some people might be predisposed to a bad reaction from something in a vaccine is well accepted. For example, some people are allergic to eggs, and therefore are expected to have a bad reaction to certain vaccines. Every time I get a flu shot, I get asked questions to determine whether I'm likely to have problems.
I agree that it's a good idea to try to see things from other viewpoints, but to do that you really need to understand the viewpoints. You obviously understand the normal viewpoint on vaccines as little as many /.ers understand any sort of religious viewpoint.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
That isn't true. The term law was used in the past with the expectation that certain things were settled. The philosophical underpinnings of science have advanced since then and the term law is no longer used.
I find this funny because many of our laws change more frequently than our theories.
We're pretty damn lucky to have the fossil record that we do have since it takes special conditions to turn something dead into a fossil.
Besides, Mendel and microbiologists have documented changes in much shorter time periods which blow the claims of the hard core creationists out of the water. Let's see them try to question the piety of Mendel?
Creationism is about having a simple God that build stuff and buggered off. It's the Christianity-Lite fluffy, feel-good crutch for those that never want things to change and want to be assured that a lack of change is hard coded into reality.
Whether the "world is flat" was a fully accepted principal or not through all societies, or what time its acceptance came to pass, is of less import to my point than the progress of human activity, where its passing was inevitable based on what became common knowledge. You can try to make more of it if you wish, but that was not intended. There was not a defined point in time where beliefs in any given society could be cited as transitioning from "that of the ignorant" to "scientific". That progress in the understanding of what we observe in the world around us varied from one group to the next is even more irrelevant.
I suppose the list of what science is 'settled' would likely vary from person to person. In that regard, what is actually settled would need to be common to all those lists. If settled means we see no possibility that it could change, then maybe some science is settled to most. If that is your point, then I would concur. It is in our inability to see all possibilities that I hold the door slightly open on any given scientific principal, however impossible it is to imagine it not being absolutely correct.
There's nothing that makes one more stupid than being too arrogant to learn from one's mistakes. Accept corrections, like compliments, gracefully and move on.
Not so. Arrogance bothers us emotionally and the inability to learn from mistakes bothers us as scientists. Yet I could pick out dozens of people easily who would remain smarter than the vast majority of the population if they never learned another thing.
Stupidity is relative, and at any given moment, we all have different starting points.
Maybe those proto-Tyrannosaurus examples didn't get stuck in the mud for some reason. They could have been in a different habitat, light enough to not get stuck, or there just was not a vast amount of sediment getting laid down where they were living.
Or on the other hand maybe the rocks their fossils are in are just a bit more inaccessable than the ones where those T-Rex's were found. Note that it's more than 30 examples but a lot less than 30 sites.
Anyone who looked out from a high mountain or a mast top and thought about it for a bit would laugh at anyone who suggested the Earth was flat.
You would think so. Its amazing to see how societal belief systems impact the perception of the surrounding world.
https://theconversation.com/no...
Now, there are a lot of articles that you can read across the web that talk about the "debunking" of Lamarck. Implied in this is a rejection of the data which now seems irrefutable. I like this quote, "Although it has been known for a long time that the inheritance of genetic traits does not always follow Darwin’s laws of inheritance, the majority of molecular geneticists disregarded these findings.", from:
http://www.bio-pro.de/magazin/...
But yeah, I totally make this stuff up. It's my hobby.
And the neo-Darwinists? They are today described by eminent scientists and scientific historians as ‘hopelessly out of date’. Evolution has entered a new era of scientific agnosticism, freed from prejudice, bigotry and the idolatry of dogma. Lamarck has emerged intact from two centuries of doubt, adulation, criticism and hope.
http://lamarcksevolution.com/e...
... But concerning theories with a lot of evidence supporting them, you had better present a comprehensive argument.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You seem to be confusing the implications of "theory" with "hypothesis". Theory is the highest title that can be bestowed upon an understanding of the reason that things behave the way they do. Law is the only thing arguably higher, and as a rule that only gets applied to purely descriptive statements, i.e. it describes *how* things have been consistently observed to behave, with no attempt made to explain why they do so. And even then it's not bestowed much anymore.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This seems to suggest that a theory must be complete to have utility, which is absurd. General Relativity and quantum mechanics aren't complete and in some ways are even contradictory and yet both are incredibly useful at describing physical phenomena. Hell, even string theory, which may not even describe a real physical system at all, has created useful mathematical and conceptual tools for physics.
The fact of the matter is that AGW models while not perfectly matching up, all generally agree on certain trends, so this idea that you have all these models with wildly contradictory and incompatible predictions is wrong, and is exactly the kind of hyper/pseudo-skepticism which isn't deserved.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The Bible doesn't say anything about a flat Earth so societal belief systems don't come into it at all. What does come into it is some Victorian era writing designed to make people feel "modern" by building a strawman and pretending it was the people of the past.
What made Aldrin's calculations by slide rule for docking Eagle with Columbia so impressive was that he couldn't rely on Newton's laws of motion alone. However that was his thesis topic so he was probably better prepared than anyone for docking after the computer had failed.
Nothing is really ever settled until nobody wants to do more research. That may be an open source view of things, but as long as scientific research is being done in an area then you can't claim it is settled. For example, I doubt anybody would say that the Linux kernel is "settled" even though it is in wide spread use and well understood.
Actually, I don't believe schools should focus on specific theories anyway, I believe this is largely a waste of time as students that wish to study these areas can do so as their educational careers advance. It's best to teach the scientific method and critical thinking and adoption of well established theories will follow naturally. I'm annoyed when scientists are pulled into a debate on weighting the "rightness" of any theory. Chances are, everything we know today will be re-written by the next generation and so on. Teach the fundamentals and let the students do the rest.
Yes, it's annoying when I see reports nowadays that attribute freak storms to global warming. I agree that humans are warming the planet but it's completely scientifically vacant to link short term weather to climate change. The science is nowhere near that level of precision to be able to attribute short term weather to climate change. (As of yet)
Okay, so you have a single example from the 1920s, well before the basic principles of molecular biology were discovered. Plus a couple of vague examples like this:
Ten years ago a colleague of mine working in epigenetics at a large genomic institution was told by the boss that epigenetics was not a real part of genetics and that he should change subjects to “something more serious”
This is a favorite ploy of pseudo-scientists: anonymous references to someone working in mainstream science whose revolutionary work is suppressed by the hostility of the rest of the faculty. I call bullshit. You can always dig up a few geriatric senior scientists, whose best work was done decades ago, willing to pooh-pooh some newer field of research. Most scientists have their own favorite examples. This is not evidence for an organized conspiracy of suppression. As I said before, epigenetics was already a well-established and growing field when I started - and people were already doing "epigenome sequencing" ten years ago.
And I repeat: the importance of "Lamarckian evolution" to the process as a whole has still not been demonstrated. Again, it is important not to conflate the role of epigenetics in organismal development and cellular regulation with the issue of inheritance. Clearly epigenetics is more important to inherited traits than was previously assumed, but we have a handful of examples versus a huge amount of evidence for Darwinian evolution. Presumably we will eventually converge on some new "modern synthesis" that incorporates elements of both, but anyone who argues for the primacy of Lamarckian evolution is grossly overstating the case.
Honestly, how many high schoolers can actually understand a typical journal article?
Depends on which state they are from.
Texas, nope.
Kansas, nope.
.
.
.
When teaching science to the rest, we have to be clear about the fact that the high school level stuff is simplified, although still useful. And a few decades out of date. If they want the up to date view, go to grad school, specialize in a field and catch up with the current thinking. Until then, its not that we are lying to you. This is just all we expect you to absorb between cigarette breaks in the high school parking lot.
Have gnu, will travel.
A theory is science that's been proven one or more times. A law is science that was proven a very long time ago. But it seems like we need a name for settled theories.
I suggest a scientific "conviction". How do you get a conviction? You prove something beyond a reasonable doubt. Of course, a conviction can be overturned. One piece of solid evidence can do it. But there is strong reason to believe that for most convictions such evidence will never appear.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
As a [whatever], I do know that nearly every single objection I have ever encountered to evolution - and, in particular, common descent, especially as applied to humans and apes - has ultimately been driven by a religious viewpoint, usually a belief in the literal truth of the Old Testament.
You can find a new lie to spread:
http://answers.yahoo.com/quest...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.rationalskepticism....
http://whyevolutionistrue.word...
http://prince.org/msg/105/3323...
Happens all the time. When a coworker expresses skepticism in the moon landing or the official 9-11 explanation, I don't jump to religion as cause.
BTW, I'm an atheist.
An intermediate species is one that fills the gap between one species and another one that it supposedly evolved from but is clearly so removed that there must have been one or more species in between.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Representative democracy only works when government is minimally intrusive.
That sounds good, but I do believe it's not a true statement.
I believe that it's possible for an elected government to become so intrusive that it's no longer truly representative, but I'm also sure that a minimally intrusive government will NOT be representative. That is to say, a representative democracy can exist and function on a wide range of government power/authority/intrusion.
That is to say, if you're going to have multiple countries with representative democracies, then some people will elect to have a nanny state because that's what they want, and others may choose to live in near anarchy.
Science can be settled. This happens when there is a consensus that the evidence for a theory is overwhelming. When there is a consensus that the current theory doesn't explain observations, then it is settled that a new theory is needed.
The atomic theory of matter is an example. Atomic theory was once nothing more than conjecture. Experimentation and observation determined that matter is made of atoms. All modern industries involved in biology and chemistry as well as manufacturing rely upon this theory. We can now "see" atoms with a variety of different tools, but their presence is still inferred much like I infer that there is a computer screen in front of me because light reflected from it is hitting my retina.
Atomic theory being wrong has the same probability as someone discovering that a 2013 Prius is not made from parts.
hows that for settled?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
The fact of the matter is that AGW models while not perfectly matching up, all generally agree on certain trends, so this idea that you have all these models with wildly contradictory and incompatible predictions is wrong, and is exactly the kind of hyper/pseudo-skepticism which isn't deserved.
The problem is not that they don't agree with each other, but that they have trouble agreeing with what we actually observe.
and is exactly the kind of hyper/pseudo-skepticism which isn't deserved.
You ignore here that the stakes are about as big as they can get for a scientific debate. Nobody's multibillion dollar business model is based on string theory being an accurate description or not of some part of reality. But AGW is, both for its supporters and detractors. Either side can buy a lot of science and scientists, including all of climatology. As a result, the AGW theory really does need to be able to pass inspection by this degree of skepticism.
So AGW matches up with 17 years of non-warming? Sounds like it's falsified.
Prove that you love your children or your wife?
The shortcoming or fallacy of logic is that there needs to be a proof for everything.
I stand corrected. Choices of pick up, put down, or pick up in such a way that everyone wishes they'd never picked it up at all sound like a pretty fucking silly third choice to me.
Someone proved even any axiomatic system of more than trivial complexity cannot be proved. I understood it the other day and now my head hurts.
Al Gore's global warming science.
I wouldn't give much on a statistic that only works if you arbitrarily choose a specified starting point. And yes, you can manipulate every trend by choosing your starting point accordingly. So I call all claims that "since 1998, we don't have a warming trend anymore" manipulated statistics.
That phrase is meaningless since science does not really have an end state where you're no longer allowed to question something. More importantly, it's a totally uninformative thing to say. If you think the evidence for or against something is compelling you should be explaining that evidence, not shutting down debate with some pithy remark. If a person doesn't want to discuss the evidence with you it's unlikely saying something vague like this will turn them around.
Science isn't like religeon or law, there isn't some ultimate arbarter who can settele a debate once and for all. It's up to the individual do decide whether or not he's convinced.
So kind of like how a donkey, horse & cow are all clearly related but different, or every single different breed of dog? Stuff like that: that's what you need to see to believe that evolution is a real thing?
If only those things existed so you could see them. It's such a shame donkeys, horses, cows and dogs are imaginary creatures.
The question is: when does skepticism turn into shilling? There is a point when a subject area becomes so well explored that there is nothing to be gained by taking potshots at the fundamentals. Claims against the foundations become extraordinary and require extraordinary evidence. So, when you hear a lot of noise about a well explored field with claims that the experts are frauds etc... it is pretty easy to infer that the noise is coming from money being spent to raise doubt to protect commercial interests. The link between smoking and cancer was very well established, but many shills were employed to question it in public, as an example. That is not debate, it is a fraud perpetrated on the public.
Natural selection comprises two types: ecological and sexual. Both work the same way: An individual passes its genes down more successfully by surviving longer and in good enough health to produce more offspring.
Ecological selection is what we normally think of as "natural" selection (survival of the fittest). In this case the "selection pressure" is determined by fitness for the environment where one lives. In sexual selection, the selection pressure comes from other members of the species.
Though they work in similar ways, the two may often be at odds with each other. The classic example would be the peacock's tail, which is "costly" to produce and maintain, and actually makes the bird less well adapted to the environment -- dragging all that plumage around slows him down, making him more susceptible to predation. The only useful purpose it serves is to attract peahens. The peahen's preference for a large, showy tail creates a positive feedback, pushing the peacock's tail to its maximum "survivable" size.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
You make an excellent point. Giraffes also have the same type of selection pressures. People assumed that giraffes had long necks because it allows them to reach higher leaves. There's some truth to that but it's also true that male giraffes compete by pushing each other with their necks.
Anyone seeing a giraffe eat would make the first assumption, only someone seeing male giraffes during rut would notice the second.
Unlike the peacock, the long or thick neck may not hamper a male giraffe's viability
Claiming that there's powerful monetary interest in proving AGW true is paranoid delusions.
Claiming that there's powerful monetary interest in proving AGW true is paranoid delusions.
Abengoa SA is a powerful counterexample. Their business model is based on providing various sorts of renewable energy solutions on the public dime. It doesn't matter which public those dimes come from as they have a number of pricy projects on several different continents. Without the threat of "climate change", they'd be out of luck.
There's also the carbon emission markets traders. That's at least two counters to your argument that it is "delusional".
One model of the Earth's atmosphere is to assume that Earth is a perfect blackbody with no atmosphere. This tells you that, if Earth perfectly absorbed light, the global temperature should be about 279 K, or 6 degrees C. Factoring in an albedo of about 30% (as measured by satellites), however, gets us down to a chilly -18 degrees C. The difference between that and the observed surface temperature is almost entirely due to the 'greenhouse' effect of our atmosphere.
Now, this may come as a shock, but we can't actually calculate every effect of everything on the planet. It's not going to happen soon, either. So climate scientists have been working on successive approximations, essentially. One way to simplify the problem is to consider the atmosphere as a column of air extending from the surface; you can divide this up into layers with various compositions and physical properties, and there are certain radiative transfer equations that would allow you to get a pretty good idea of how exactly the atmosphere acts to trap heat. Somewhere fairly early into these calculations you would start to worry about CO2.
Water vapor absorbs the greatest amount of outgoing long-wave radiation, but we have these huge deposits of liquid water pretty much everywhere and can't do much about that. However, increasing the global partial pressure of CO2 seems to be well within our abilities. Arrhenius was the first to calculate that a doubling of CO2 would raise the surface temperature by several degrees, but here's a basic history of climate models.
What people mean when they say "the science is settled" is that CO2 traps heat in a specific way, which has been observed both in the lab and in situ, and measured to an exacting standard. The effects and degree of that warming are not known to that same degree of accuracy, but people have been working on better estimates for about a century now. Models may change or they may be updated, but the parts that indicate that we are warming are relatively simple, very well-studied, and unlikely to change. No one wants our understanding of CO2-induced forcing to be true, and there has been a great deal of effort trying to disprove it over the last century or so.
You seem to be stupid. Science for you is an answer machine, which can be right or wrong. The truth is that there is no "right", there is only "least wrong". I sympathize if a world of uncertainties seems disturbing, but keep in mind that "least wrong" is often a very, very, very good approximation of "right". In the cases of evolution and climate science, we've been refining the approximations for quite a while now -- hence, "settled science".
Phlogiston was proposed as an explanation of why a fire would stop even though fuel was still present. Then, Priestly and Lavoisier explained the properties and function of oxygen. So, did this kill phlogiston? Not quite; see thermodynamics (2nd Law) and physical chemistry (free energy) which brings back part of the phlogiston explanation. So, the Global Warming / Climate Change people have two interesting things to deal with: Yes, carbon dioxide can act as a "greenhouse" gas. But, why is it that carbon dioxide increases are leading events prior to ice ages as revealed by the ice and sea bottom mud cores? This is why that science is still about as settled as the San Andreas fault.
Citation needed: "studies they're based on are almost universally either so laughably bad"
As a geoscientist with an advanced degree that has spent years studying global biogeochemical cycles and paleoclimate, I would not agree with your statement. There is so little evidence used by climatologists that has a statistically valid set of data in comparison to the time frame of the conclusions that the idea that we actually can predict or even understand global climate is the one that is laughable. Your hyperbole does not convince me that you have any real understanding of these issues.
Yeah, because "scientists" are infallible and deserve a degree of authority and influence that exceeds the right of the public to question.
Excuse me, but your bullshit ideal of "science" sounds a little to much like the fucking Inquisition.
What's disingenuous is ignoring your own arguments logical fallacies, and presenting it just like a fucking religion.
Thanks, but no thanks, you both suck.
a purely "scientific" pursuit, entirely separate from culture, religion, politics, natural inquisitiveness, and simple greed.
That way we can gloss-over the entire history and current state of scientific development and discovery, including the nasty little things about "science" and the way people perceive it, thus making it indistinguishable from religion.
Thanks, but no thanks.
It is really not possible to prove hypotheses in science. We can only disprove hypotheses, and "proof" only occurs when all other current hypotheses are eliminated except for one.
We can also create models, often with mathematics, that are just another form of hypotheses. So being "settled" is only a transient state until someone else proposes a consistent model with the evidence.
As such, we must embrace "deniers" that challenge the standing hypotheses and ask them to propose their own testable hypotheses.
Religion is often another hypothesis, but it is often not one that cannot one that can be scientifically disproved. An all powerful deity can alter our reality to erase or manipulate evidence.
If we disallow standing hypotheses to be challenged, then Science becomes an institutional religion. True science must always allow hypotheses to be constantly challenged by well formed alternate hypotheses.
"Settled" is a subjective word, and not a formal description of anything scientific. Scientific theories can be disproved (falsified) but not proved (unlike mathematical theories which can be proved). So science doesn't prove things, and nothing is truly "settled".
But from a practical standpoint, some things are for most purposes settled. For instance relativity (both special and general) is settled to the extent we stake our lives on it holding every time we take an air flight guided by GPS. And before we were staking our lives on relativity's predictions, relativity had survived so many attempts at falsification, most scientists considered it settled.
But the term "settled" has come up recently in the politics of climate science. I would say this climate science is not "settled", certainly not to the extent something like relativity is "settled". But the fact that one can argue that climate science is not "settled science" is basically a red herring, we don't need "settled science" to drive policy - the overwhelming consensus on climate science is a good enough to drive policy.
You do realise that in measuring or analysing if you will anything, you can become incredibly precise, but so wrong you may as well not have bothered.
Throughout my long career supporting decision makers I have always contended that "action defines truth". So, if I am on top of a tall building, the science of gravity is "settled" in that I would not step off the top expecting to hover like Wiley Coyote. In that sense, then settled is a function of the importance of the decision I am making. So, is the science of evolution settled? With respect to actions that allow bacteria to evolve yes, and I use that "settled" state to inform actions regarding overuse of antibiotics. But I seldom make decisions that need to know if Neanderthals could interbreed with Homo Sapiens Sapiens, so that science need not be considered settled. Global warming? Of course it is not "settled". But I do note, and act on, the fact that insurance companies are adjusting rates to reflect the new risks that global warming has introduced (see FL and wind insurance, see MN and house insurance rates). So it is settled in that sense. Beginning of life? Not a scientific question, this is all about where a life deserves protection at the expense of another. Because I believe in the sovereignty of the individual (don't force me to donate my spare kidney, thank you very much), there really is no scientifically answerable question. But there the "settle3d" question is removed from the table by the sovereignty question. My final point? Arguing about when scie3nce is settled in the absence of an actionable question makes as much sense as arguing about angels dancing on the head of a pin.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Isn't it True most of our Science are Theory?
WE know Gravity is Proven and the Laws of Thermodynamics; we see these laws in action everyday.
But unless we can slice it dice it and see it, it's just a Theory waiting to be proven,
and if we continue to believe in things we cant see or prove, science is just another religion.
The problem is not that they [climate models] don't agree with each other, but that they have trouble agreeing with what we actually observe.
And yet they come closer to agreeing with what we observe than any other methodology we have. When you have something that does a better job than current climate model I'll start listening to you.
Maybe you can pay for lots of scientists but all the money in the world won't change the underlying empirical truth of science and in the end that's what wins in science. Most scientists are intelligent enough to know this and thus won't promote science they know to be wrong.
As Sique says you started with the outlier year of 1998 which is called cherry picking. The fact is that if you statistically analyze the trend from 1998 it's impossible to say whether the warming trend has continued as before or the warming trend has stopped. Both statements fit within the uncertainty of the statistical analysis. That just shows that 17 years is too short a time for conclusive statistical statements in this area.
Some day in the future "He" will come down and
let us all know how foolish or clever we have been.
Until that day -- settled science might be settled in the context
of known data. Add a body of "new" knowledge and data
then revisit what is known.
Newtonian physics is a good example. It solved most if not all of the
problems at hand within the reach of instrumentation of the day. There
were however a number of later measurements that were unexplained as
methods improved. Orbit of Mercury was one IIRC... at which
point Albert and friends explored new solutions.
Today... with the exception of dark matter and dark energy there are
rare examples of unexplained data. Some particle physics research
has taken a different approach and by the exploration of a model attempt
to discover something that has yet to be observed.
Molecular biology is odd in that we know that we do not know very much at all.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
If people would get over their fear of not knowing Truth, be it scientific or otherwise, then we might not invest so much in it once we believe we have found it, and might have an easier time chaining our beliefs when they become outdated.
If it is settled, it ain't science.
Science produces imperfect models of the world it measures.
If you believe there is no way to improve the measurements or to put forth a better model, you are a believer, not a scientist.
--
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" - Isaac Asimov
I don't suggest it's random at all. All that I suggest is that nobody feels strongly about something without having a good reason for doing so and the intensity is usually largely derived from a lack of understanding of the opposing view point. Abortion and guns are great examples.
I've seen people trying to draw a connection between religion and guns. Those people also happen to be antigun atheists and because they are antigun by labeling the supporters as religious they mentally invalidate their argument. This is one if those examples too, where idealistically antigun stances sound good but in reality all of the data backs up the gun supporters.
Abortion is a similar thing in the other direction. People assume that if you are pro life it's because you are religious which is not accurate at all. At the same time the people who are pro life usually fail to understand the arguments and realities behind pro choice and the horrors of people being so scared of having a baby they can't afford that they try to do it themselves.
The whole idea of the scientific method is that your theory "HAS" to explain and answer "ALL" questions. If it can't then you have 2 choices. Abandon or modify your theory! Period! If your theory answers ten thousand questions and then question 10,001 comes along and it can't you have to make one of the 2 choices. Settled is a relative term.
Look at quantum theory. 7 freaking decades of use, 7 freaking decades of NEVER failing a test, 7 decades of being correct. It is still questioned by some because it can't scale up. So it is not settled. Useful? Oh yea, bigtime! But settled? No. The whole idea of science being "settled" is for lesser minds who cannot conceive much less accept that everything we know may be wrong.
That is what keeps science real. Keep it real.
gosgog:
Science is perpetually evolving, starting for the most part with observation leading to THEOREMS....(what the hell is a thromes?? a new science?)_ Once the Theorem has been established as fact it then to all intents is proven science. Big problem as I see it between Evolution (for the most part established fact!) and Religions, is the fact that the latter are all Theorems based on a few badly misinterpreted events. However, there exists Spirituality which thus far has never really been explained because it needs and "After DEATH...established fact...(perhaps a muslim bomber will return with a few of his 72 Virgins...heh! Heh!).
Of course there is no such thing as settled law. After 100 plus years, Einstein is still being tested again and again. and anyone who thinks he's a better theory unsettles every theory. Newton, Galileo, even Crick & Watson get questioned again, re-philosophized, and tweaked again .. and again. That's the very nature of science ... Anyone who declares a law (or theory) as settled science either doesn't understand science, or is merely a political hack chasing glory or grants.
Alcaide's Cafe,
Let us see peer review in Religion, let the jews peer review the muslims and the christians, listen to what the budists and hindus to have to say too. See how long it takes for them all to reach a consensus. Science is settled because it embraces, accepts and thrives on new ideas. Don't try to make a religion out of science, you are missing the point.
No theory/science can be settled, except in math. Math proofs, are proofs and valid for eternity. Pythagorean theorem was valid 2000 years ago, and is valid today and will still be valid 2000 years from now.
Physics 2000 years is not valid today. Physics theories today, might not be valid in the future. This is because physics use induction. Math use deduction. Math is the only science that use deduction. All other sciences are using induction - and therefore you never know for certainty.
Sure, as soon as the eventual heat death of the universe stops changing the data!
Why do you need to prove that you love your children or your wife? Your behaviour shows that you do (although you may do it for other reasons). You are a single sample and not a universal model of "loving your wife"
To drive the point home:
Ok, you love your wife, now how much? A lot? A little? Prove it.
The first point is -- it doesn't matter to anyone else, you already _know_ it.
The second point is there are at least 3 different types of knowledge:
* intellectual -- e.g. math, science
* experiential -- as a man you will *never* know what it is like to give birth
* intuitive or subconsciousness (which is mislabeled super-consciousness)
Dismissing intuitive knowledge simply because ones are to fail to understand the concept of a Higher Mind is one of the fallacy of Science & Scientists.
Lastly, ALL Objective truth IS FIRST SUBJECTIVE.
Betteridge says so.
We're at an impasse on that. I attribute the difference to Darwin declining to accept the complexity of biological life to make his theory more persuasive, but your claim is that you don't need to be 100% right about everything to move the field forward (although I think curriculum should note where modern-era people in labcoats diverge from Darwin, but is that establishing religion as well?).
You're painting this as a picture of Darwinian vs. Lamarckian. That's a false dichotomy. I never once argued for the primacy of Lamarckian evolution. That's a strawman. I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge the contributions and relevance of multiple schools of thought. In fact, my original point was not that Darwinists were wrong about many aspects of Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms, but that other schools of thought were rejected by the very wrong attitude that evolutionary mechanisms are exclusively Darwinian.
Naturally, much of the struggle of this was taking place pre-internet and in conversations between student researchers and advisors. If you don't want to accept my contention that there was suppression of these ideas, fine. But don't accuse me of arguing for the primacy of Lamarckian mechanisms, or maintain an ignorant attitude that only one school of thought is legitimate. Which, oddly enough, kind of proves my point.
"Nor is tested or even really testable for that matter. There's no way you can do an experiment that even remotely tests man's impact on climate. The systematic interactions of a planet's climate are beyond what we can conceive of, much less understand, right now. The whole of scientific method is positing an idea and then doing experiments that prove and experiments that fail to disprove. Note the later. The scientific method demands attempting to disprove what you posit. Anything less is Cargo Cult Science [wikipedia.org] rather than scientific method. This is the problem I see with current climate science. Everything I read is about is science looking for evidence that it's happening and man made. I don't read much of anything about science looking for evidence that it either isn't happening or isn't caused by man."
Wow this is just really bad. What you are trying to imply is that because the climate is complex, it is impossible to test.This is just not true. And the very assumption that complexity = difficulty is unrealistic as well. See, we have these great things called tools. And tools let us do things we couldnt normally do. Things like lift things heavier that we could normally lift, or see things we couldnt normally see. Or even think things we couldnt normally think. Oh yeah that thing you are using to write your ignorant comments on that magically translates letters into electricity and back to letters again miles away. Thats called a computer! -And it is the science you trust that takes your voice into a little hand-held box and teleports it hundreds of miles away so you can talk to your mom once a day.
-Wow, had to stop myself there, when into full flame mode. Very sorry.
Anyway, we absolutely have the means to experiment on climate. It is very easy to fill a clear conatiner with methane and another with air, put it in the sun for an hour and see what happens. Or take a temperature reading under a tree, cut down the tree, then take another temperature reading. Yes, global climate is complex, but that does not make it impossible. Computer models and satelite imagry have improved weather forcasts over the years.
"Everything I read is about is science looking for evidence that it's happening and man made. I don't read much of anything about science looking for evidence that it either isn't happening or isn't caused by man."
First off- isnt that what you want? For example, someone studying the polar ice sheet hears about this climate change stuff, and decides to look at ice cores for recorded snowfall over the last 400,000 years and compare it to the climatologists models. "Hmm thats weird, there is a sudden slump in the last 100 year. Best I can tell, this seems to show a dramatic decrease in snowfall that matches the climatologists data. Well maybe i am doing something wrong. I am going to publish my data and see if else sees the same data" -that was just my made-up scenario. But that is exactly what you want from the scientific community.
And lastly, if all you see is scientific studies reinforcing the theory that mankind is affecting the climate, why is it so hard to beleive? Scientists were right about alot of other things right?
just comes down to variables.
current science says act A happens when variable A, B, and C are present.
thing is, act A may also rely on unknown variable X, Y and Z being present in addition, or act A fails. but unknown variables X, Y and Z are say, always present on earth, so scientists dont notice.
so then, for science to correctly state which variables must be present for act A, science must know of all the variables which affect act A, and to do so, science must know all variables possible, and thats a tall drink of water.
in other words, for science to state anything with 100% certainty, science must first be privy to everything, so until then, we're bound solely to the realm of approximation for everything. practicality is cool with that though.
And the very assumption that complexity = difficulty is unrealistic as well.
That has got to be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen written. So your claim is complexity makes things easier? Wow. But I'm the ignorant one. Do you even know what the word means?
See, we have these great things called tools. And tools let us do things we couldnt normally do. Things like lift things heavier that we could normally lift, or see things we couldnt normally see.
So we have these tools which means at this moment in time we understand everything there is to know about the universe. Ok, now you're making sense. I get it.
And it is the science you trust that takes your voice into a little hand-held box and teleports it hundreds of miles away so you can talk to your mom once a day.
Once again the level of ignorance is astounding. You seem to have no concept of what science is even about. Here is a hint. It has absolutely nothing to do with trust. Amazingly it has nothing to do with how often I talk to my mother either.
Anyway, we absolutely have the means to experiment on climate. It is very easy to fill a clear conatiner with methane and another with air, put it in the sun for an hour and see what happens.
No, we absolutely do not. Your experiment is so lacking as to be pointless. Climate is literally billions of types of interactions each of which has a significant affect on the overall system. What happens in a couple containers filled with gasses is about as significant as the affect of my pissing in the ocean would be. We don't even know what we don't know. The complexity of what we do know is way beyond our ability to model. Hell we can't even measure much of it to any degree of accuracy. They take a core sample from one or 2 spots and then try to conjecture the entire worldwide atmospheric conditions going back 100,000 years from that. We have too little information and there is so much more we have no information about because we don't even know what to look for or measure. Add to that the period of time we have any kind of accurate data for is extremely limited. Going back more then 50 years is all pretty much conjecture. Also no where did I say anything is impossible. I said we don't know nearly enough right now.
I am going to publish my data and see if else sees the same data" -that was just my made-up scenario. But that is exactly what you want from the scientific community.
No, it absolutely is not. Nor is is it scientific method. Scientific method requires that you actively try and find faults with your law or theory. Climate science seems to have turned into science by consensus. It's settled. Anything contrary to the conventional wisdom is looked upon as either something to disprove or twisted to fit current theory.
And lastly, if all you see is scientific studies reinforcing the theory that mankind is affecting the climate, why is it so hard to beleive? Scientists were right about alot of other things right?
The problem is no one seems to be actively trying to disprove it. That is the whole of scientific method, actively looking for things that don't fit your theory. Science is far more often wrong than right. Hell, it seems they don't even have gravity figured out yet and that's something we can do quantitative experiments with.
Just the idea that anyone can think any science is settled shows an absolute ignorance of what science is.
Who is John Galt?
People already have paid attention to the variables and inputs, and have stayed open to different possibilities. Time and time again that's pointed to the same science - AGW. Just because the last ice age ended thousands of years ago has little to do with what's happening at the moment. You might as well say there's doubt whether volcanoes are hot, as someone burned their mouth on a particularly hot pizza. The science is in - human industry is to blame.
Jump in an fMRI machine and show them. Or measure your body's chemistry when around them vs. away from them. I don't get your point. Measuring something like love isn't impossible.
The problem is that these are not the weaknesses that they want to discuss, at least not completely.
Actually, I've heard the Cambrian explosion used as "scientific" evidence for "Let There Be Animals".
Of course, the "explosion" part of the Cambrian explosion was, what, tens of thousands of years or something? Some time period longer than a day, at any rate. But I just thought I'd pass that little nugget along.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock