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The US Public's Erratic Acceptance of Science
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. general population is often the butt of jokes with regard to their understanding of science. A survey by the Associated Press now shows just how arbitrary and erratic the public's dissent can be. 'The good news is that more than 80 percent of those surveyed are strongly confident that smoking causes cancer; only four percent doubt it. Roughly 70 percent accepted that we have a genome and that mental illness is seated in the brain; about 20 percent were uncertain on these subjects, and the doubters were few. But things go downhill from there. Only about half of the people accepted that vaccines are safe and effective, with 15 percent doubting. And that's one of the controversial topics where the public did well. As for humanity's role in climate change, 33 percent accepted, 28 percent were unsure, and 37 percent fell in the doubter category. For a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth and a 13.8-billion-year-old Big Bang, acceptance was below 30 percent. Fully half of the public doubted the Big Bang (PDF).'"
Difference between erratic & erotic:
A whiskery shambles isn't exotic.
Before your fashion goes fully sclerotic,
Have women find you scientifically hypnotic.
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Only half the American public doubted a shaky hypothesis that we couldn't observe, and have very limited evidence for? Truly Amazing.
Vaccines are effective. Safe? I guess you can call crossing the street in a crosswalk safe. Some people do get run over and killed but most come out OK. Not as safe as simply not walking around lots of cars. But safer than jaywalking.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Is this article implying the big bang is something that should be commonly accepted?
Don't ALL scientists doubt the Big Bang and other models for the universe in the sense that they are all subject to comparison with observations? If a model conflicts with observation, the model either must be dropped or modified.
Science isn't about believing something to be true.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Mental illnesses are just what society calls people that do not follow the norm in the way they think or behave.
You are going to see that where Science conflicts with Religion, and in some cases Industry. The Current Science that we have, with the technology and Anthropology we have, rules out the possibility of the Christian religion having any basis in reality. It doesn't rule out the possibility a god exists. It only means that the current dominant Abrahamic religions are not realistic descriptions of the universe we live in.
But these religions justify how we treat other people, why certain social groups are stigmatized, and have a heavy impact on who are leaders are, what our laws are, how we raise our children, and the legitimacy of the standing governments. If the Religions aren't true, then there is no justification for the political positions of MANY people in the US Government.
In other cases, its that we are so dependent on dangerous sources of fuel, like Coal, and Petroleum, that there is the fear of an economic death spiral. So we shut our eyes and want to live in fantasy land, until it kills us.
A lot of idiots in the US, that is unfortunatunate. That's what happens when most of your people believe more in some old book than actual science that can be proved.
The article conflates two very different types of science. One is experimental: cigarettes cause cancer. That's a testable, provable (and proven) hypothesis. The scientific method can be used. Alternate explanations can be systematically disproven.
Then there's the science that says, "because X and Y are true, it makes sense that Z is true". Note that it does NOT say "therefore Z MUST be true", which is what the article is implying. Z is something like the story of the universe from Big Bang through inflation up to today, or the story of manmade global warming. "Science" can project itself in those directions and come up with some answers, but there is no scientific method on a narrative. There are no controlled experiments. Every alternate hypothesis cannot be evaluated. They are at best projections, models. They're not "truth" without faith.
You know you are a follower when you nothing original comes out !!
Pathetic CAPTCHA
You eat organic food, don't you?
This is not news.
Nor is an article about the public's "erratic acceptance" of science news.
Slashdot continues its inexorable slide into complete irrelevance.
I don't think the survey is very fair for the question about the Big Bang. I consider myself well informed and try to keep at least a layman's understanding of scientific breakthrough. I understand the concept behind the Big Bang but cannot understand most of the hard science behind it.
Am I willing to take someone else's word just because? I don't possess the knowledge to verify their research. In my opinion, most people should be uncertain because it's not something we're ever likely to prove.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Just like anything, people will consign to obvlivion anything that doesn't fit to their preconceived notions or the general dogma of the day.
Just look how any science that deals with racial differences (IQ, etc) is handled in the scientific community itself, or how Stephen Jay Gould was able to make a career out of political correctness on accusing past scientists of bias with brain sizes... while being completely off the mark himself.
Various stuff like that happens all the time in every era. Humans remain human.
We should be glad we are a country which does not take the word of "authority" at face value. Surely the best scientists and innovators come from that tradition. If a person does not understand a proof, they should not blindly accept it.
I've never read up on it, so if you asked me I might say "I don't know". That doesn't mean I don't accept a scientific explanation for the creation of the Universe, it just means I don't know enough about it to say "Yep, that's what happened".
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How many can tolerate the obvious truth, supported by thousands of studies, that average differences in intelligence across the various peoples of the world and especially races are due to genetic factors?
How many accept the fact that pervasive poverty and barbarism in the world has little to do with history or materialism, and instead is due to the fact that the poor are so because they have less ability to control themselves; hence their prodigious fecundity?
People are usually unwilling to accept scientific truths that contradict their religious worldview. In the case of the typical slashdot reader, that worldview is the belief in the equality of man and the tablua rasa myth.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Science conflicting with religion isn't the problem, its when some people treat science as if its a religion by having blind faith in theories that have extremely hard to believe data that doesn't match up with common sense.
Common sense can certainly be wrong, but being that the nature of the universe (big bang theory versus god did it) doesn't really make a difference to most people. Doesn't matter which ones true and which one isn't. And lets not ignore the fact that the big bang theory has a metric fuckton of problems with it when you look at where the universe is today. By problems I mean things that don't match up with current observations and can't be tested at all given our current technology.
I personally don't have a problem with the big bang theory in general, but you have to be pretty fucked up in the head to think that everything about the current theories from high level physicists makes sense when they basically end up saying 'well, all these unbreakable rules of physics ... yea, they didn't apply back then ... because' and then they all have varying reasons for it, many of which are simply invented to fit the situation with no evidence that its the way it happened.
You're trying to mix people who use religion to be evil with science. Thats your problem, not a problem of either religion or science. Religion has no place in science, by definition, yet you seem to be pretty religious (i.e. have faith in unprovable things) about science.
You also have a pretty fucked up understanding of Christianity. You might want to start with looking at who actually proposed the big bang theory in the first place, and until you do, shut the fuck up you ignorant twit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
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This is what confidence in evolution, the big bang vaccines, etc mean in the context of the poll.
Smoking causes cancer
A mental illness is a medical condition that affects the brain
Inside our cells, there is a complex genetic code that helps determine who we are
Overusing antibiotics causes the development of drug-resistant bacteria
The universe is so complex, there must be a supreme being guiding its creation
Childhood vaccines are safe and effective
The average temperature of the world is rising, mostly because of man-made heat- trapping greenhouse gases
Life on Earth, including human beings, evolved through a process of natural selection
The Earth is 4.5 billion years old
The universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang
Except, perhaps for the "mental illness" question, there's not much room for quibbling over the meaning of each, imho.
Could skewed surveys be a reflection of a more general lack of technical and scientific familiarity and skill? And, of a growing disregard for rigorous knowledge?
Blanket question. Localized answers.
Is factory food safe?
Is the health system safe?
Are seatbelts, airbags, and whatever cars are going to be recalled for next, "safe"?
Are big pharma for profit health system handled vaccines safe? Any reason for them to have less side effects than the rest of the toxic panoply of wares they hawk relentlessly?
Are there absolutely no scientific theories alternative to the Big Bang theory? Could it be a discontinuity limit, as the speed of light, or absolute zero seem to be? Is Dark Matter a workaround, like phlogsticon, epicycles, and impetus?
And so on.
Compare the two questions:
"Are you confident that the earth is billions of years old?"
"Are you confident that the earth is 4.5 billion years old?"
Version 2 was the version they asked. Frankly, I'd not express too much confidence in that. Just too much precision. Version 1 would have been a much fairer test.
Ad hominem, no true Scotsman, a false analogy, an appeal to authority, some God of the gaps, and straw man arguments---and that's just what I can see off the top of my head. Nice. That is some mighty fine trolling.
Rhapsody in Numbers
My biggest problem with surveys like these is that they public are being asked to reply with certainties that are far greater in clarity and definition than any scientist working on these fields would ever propose. And then the ignorant public are laughed at for doubting scientific truth. No cosmologist would ever state they were 100% certain that the big bang happened, and yet we laugh at the public for not being certain either. True ignorance shows itself as certainty, either for or against supposed "scientific" principles. Being uncertain is okay, as long as you are aware of some of the options.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Until the Christians quit forcing me to fight tooth and nail to keep their lies and bullshit out of my kids schools, I will remain this "ignorant twit" that you seem to see before you.
Don't get pissy when someone learns to distrust a group that kicks me in the nuts every goddam time I fucking encounter them. Go leash your own radical fuckwits and the Senators they have bought and watch how much the hate dies down against the whole group.
Compared to the religious masses of the rest of the world, who subscribe to much stricter tenets which are largely contradictory to science, I call bullshit.
The Dark Side Of Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy47OQxUBvw&list=UU8v2umWI9I7sqAIG1xGjVCQ
The Moon? Been there, done that. Got the rocks and T-Shirt to prove it. We'll be back in spades once we get this budget silliness sorted out
The transistor? yeah, hi. We did that too.
The Integrated Circuit? You're welcome.
The Internet? Surprise! Conceived,, born and built in the USA.
Need I go on?
Yes, we have a fair amount of stupid fucks in the U.S. population. I'll bet you have a fair amount too.
Per capita, I'll bet you've got more stupid fucks than we do.
Poke fun all you want, but there's a lot of stupid fucks in the world that would believe anything they were told. Americans don't have a lock on stupid, it's pretty much the universal condition.
The day that I trust an Associated Press survey to tell me anything unbiased about public opinion is the day I accept the flying spaghetti monster as my lord and savior.
Sadly, the rest of your claims are pretty much true.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
And, your eloquence certainly helps to sway those who might be persuadable.
As opposed to what? Inorganic?
Have gnu, will travel.
Much as most don’t understand the scientific definition of “theory,” you seem to be using the wrong definition of “doubt.”
Proper scientists recognize that a currently held theory is merely the best explanation we currently have for a phenomenon. In light of the evidence, they believe it’s PROBABLY MOSTLY true, but they are willing to easily accept that it isn’t if new evidence demonstrates that the older theory doesn’t explain all the facts. This isn’t “doubt” so much as “critical thinking.”
The doubters the article is referring to are people who, DESPITE the evidence, believe the theory is NOT true. Of course, most of them are painfully unaware of the evidence, they have no idea how to get to it, and they wouldn’t know how to interpret it if they had it. A lot of that is due to a broken educational system.
People say there’s “mounds of evidence” for evolution. So I’ve asked biologists if there was a compendium of major publications in the area, but I didn’t get very far. There are decent college text books, but many don’t present the original evidence; they only recount the findings from the literature. Part of the problem is that most of the “evidence” is boring tables of measurements of fossils and bones. If you won’t know what the numbers mean and how they relate, they’re just numbers. They are the evidence, but it doesn’t help they layman at all. Another part of the problem is that any summary of the evidence would leave out too much. A proper treatment of the topic would be on the order of “every peer-reviewed publication on the topic since Darwin.” This is because publications cite each other so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They make “assumptions” they don’t have to justify because someone else already did, but it’s a major undertaking to follow all the rabbit holes. Biology PhDs have trouble with that. A farmer will be hopelessly lost.
With most sciences, most people are clueless. But since they have no other reason to doubt it, this doesn’t cause any conflict. People have heard of chemistry and astronomy and mostly just consider them to be overly difficult or esoteric. It’s only biology (and some of cosmology) that makes any statements that go against things people have been taught to believe. They have no hope of understanding the science, but they do believe what their religious leaders tell them, and there is nothing intelligible to the that says otherwise.
It’s this lack of understanding of what “common folk” go through that makes me really angry with people like Richard Dawkins. As far as many people are concerned, he’s nothing more than an arrogant jerk who thinks that everyone who believes differently from him is a moron. I’ve seen dozens of videos of him on YouTube, and I never see him present evidence. He merely claims that it’s there and believes that it should just be obvious to everyone what it means. It’s like me (the computer nerd) when I was in high school who treated people unkindly because they didn’t understand computer as well as I did. Now I’m a CS professor, and I have to teach basic CS concepts to young adults. It’s VERY challenging to get some concepts across, but I work hard to do it. Dawkins is terrible at this. Perhaps if he deigns to teach an undergraduate course now and then, he might do okay, but he strikes me as one of those all-too-common lecturers who has no patience for anyone who questions what he says. His attitude reminds me of so many religious people who insist that you’ll go to hell if you don’t believe blindly exactly as they do. I guess calling someone a moron isn’t as bad as telling them they’re going to hell, but it’s a similar intolerant attitude, intolerant to people who don’t share your same training
You eat organic food, don't you?
Non-organic food is too crunchy, to the point of being really bad for my teeth.
Not much nutrition, either.
You also have a pretty fucked up understanding of Christianity
So do a lot of Christians. See "Christian economics", "protestant work ethic", and similar.
You might want to start with looking at who actually proposed the big bang theory in the first place, and until you do, shut the fuck up you ignorant twit.
Yes, a Catholic priest. As a general rule, Catholics seem to be significantly more sane than various American protestant sects on several issues.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The biblical interpretation is easier, thus more readily accepted.
Consider the physics you need to understand for the Big Bang Theory to make sense.
The science required to understand carbon dating, relativity, or how evolution actually works.
Some of that shit is hard for some people. Especially liberal arts majors.
But "magic-man done it" as an explanation for the world as it is, that's simple and satisfying, without being too taxing on the limited gray-matter.
Without too much effort, it's possible to imagine that you understand the universe, and these fancy-pants professors are just trying to over-complicate things to ensure they remain employed.
From Dr. David Goodstein, 1994: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world. There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard. How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.
The question of how we educate our young in science lies close to the heart of the issues we have been discussing. The observation that, for hundreds of years the number of scientists had been growing exponentially means, quite simply, that the rate at which we produced scientists has always been proportional to the number of scientists that already existed. We have already seen how that process works at the final stage of education, where each professor in a research university turns out 15 Ph.D's, most of those wanting to become research professors and turn out 15 more Ph.D's.
Recently, however, a vastly different picture of science education has been put forth and has come to be widely accepted. It is the metaphor of the pipeline. The idea is that our young people start out as a torrent of eager, curious minds anxious to learn about the world, but as they pass through the various grades of schooling, that eagerness and curiosity is somehow squandered, fewer and fewer of them showing any interest in science, until at the end of the line, nothing is left but a mere trickle of Ph.D's. Thus, our entire system of education is seen to be a leaky pipeline, badly in need of repairs. The leakage problem is seen as particularly severe with regard to women and minorities, but the pipeline metaphor applies to all. I think the pipeline metaphor came first out of the National Science Foundation, which keeps careful track of science workforce statistics (at least that's where I first heard it). As the NSF points out with particular urgency, women and minorities will make up the majority of our working people in future years. If we don't figure out a way to keep them in the pipeline, where will our future scientists come from?
I believe it is a serious mistake to think of our system of education as a pipeline leading to Ph.D's in science or in anything else. For one thing, if it were a leaky pipeline, and it could be repaired, then as we've already seen, we would soon have a flood of Ph.D's that we wouldn't know what to do with. For another thing, producing Ph.Ds is simply not the purpose of our system of education. Its purpose instead is to produce citizens capable of operating a Jeffersonian democracy, and also if possible, of contributing to their own and to the collective economic well being. To regard anyone who has achieved those purposes as having leaked out of the pipeline is silly. Finally, the picture doesn't work in the sense of a scientific model: it doesn't make the right predictions. We have already seen that, in the absence of external constraints, the size of science grows
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It's gratifying to see that the public's general acceptance of scientific theories is roughly proportional to the actual evidence to support the theories themselves. For things which there is good evidence, there is broad understanding; for things which are highly questionable and politicized, there is much skepticism.
Good for the US population. :)
People who agree with vaccines without understanding how vaccines do what they do should be put in the same category as people who do not believe in vaccines. Science is not about believing or disbelieving, it is about understanding.
You might want to start with looking at who actually proposed the big bang theory in the first place, and until you do, shut the fuck up you ignorant twit.
The fact that Lemaitre formulated this theory doesn't buy him any credibility for his religious beliefs. Aside from his work with mechanics and optics, Newton was more than a bit of a crackpot what with all his alchemy and wierd religious beliefs.
Also, keep in mind that Lemaitre was Catholic. And that particular branch of Christianity isn't held in high regard in the USA specifically because of its pragmatism (in recent times) regarding the absolute infallibility of the Bible. That's the primary thing that gets Americans laughed at. A 6000 yer old earth, created in 6 days, etc.
Judeo-Christianity's beliefs can be traced back to the Egyptians.
Religion was created by primitive man to explain nature and to delude himself into thinking he had some control: "If I pray to the rain god, then we'll get rain - as long as I don't piss Him off!"
It sickens me that in the 21st century, people still believe in Iron Age god(s). Humanity created science to learn about nature and our Universe.
And yet, folks insist on sticking to primitive beliefs and values.
We as a species haven't developed for 3,000 years (Confucius invented the Golden Rule that was plagiarized for the New Testament - pretty much all of Christianity is plagiarized from other religions and philosophies.). We just have fancier tools, but emotionally and spiritually, we're no more advanced than the Ancient Greeks.
And until we get over this childish need to believe in super natural/magical nonsense, we will never get beyond being petty cruel bald apes with fancy tools.
IIRC it was a pope who said that the bible should be used as a guide for getting into heaven, not as a guide to find out how the heaven works (in reply to the question whether the whole Big Bang thing could be real).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You are no longer a man of science. Calling the minority completely wrong is presumptuous and incredibly short sighted...the earth used to be the center of the universe and anyone who thought differently was insane and stupid. That being said...Americans are incredibly ignorant about science...it is the fault of the federal school system and entertainment industry.
But on a topic I'm not an expert in, I'm more likely to believe a consensus of scientists, because I understand how the general process of science and its testing and its refinement works, and I buy that process as the best mechanism we have for getting more reliable information about stuff; what it is and isn't and how it works.
More likely than I am to believe
a) a bunch of self-interested amateurs (or specialists in different areas than the subject in question), for example, those for whom a status quo way of doing things is lucrative, affordable, or comfortable and convenient, and for whom a fact if true would be inconvenient/costly.
or
b) Some people whose methodology is to follow old traditional teachings without questioning or testing.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Climate change: A theory about very complex system to model with the most famous proponent being a politician [with vested interests and suspect behaviour]. Of course there will be some doubters.
Thank you for summing up the core of the problem: too many people think celebrities are more believable than science, when it comes to being told what to think.
If Al Gore had "discovered" climate change, and was the only significant person promoting the theory with little convincing evidence, then people would certainly be right to doubt. But when Gore is only one notable figure of many that's echoing what the huge majority of climatologists have been telling us for decades, and when those climatologists have reams of peer-reviewed studies summarising multiple lines of evidence to back up their conclusions, then who gives a flying fuck about Gore?
Sadly, the answer is "the public", or more specifically, that sector of the public that don't want to accept any responsibility and would rather reframe the debate to be about celebrities and their credibility. Same goes with vaccines - much of the focus is on McCarthy instead of the evidence. Plus of course the Bible itself is probably the biggest celebrity ever, in a way.
Solution? Dunno. Stop clicking on every damn story with a celebrity in it, maybe, and perhaps then "news" outlets might not give such weight to their opinions. Won't help people face facts, but it will reduce the noise levels at least.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Right now, in the states, there are two dominant (political) tribes, and one of those tribes has very strong (even if unscientific) positions on several of the issues canvassed.
It is not surprising that people parrot the accepted and expected storyline that their tribe tells about those issues.
Tribal following is what people do, a lot of the time. Who knows what they really think, or even whether they bother to think. Parroting takes a lot less effort, and ensures you're a member of the in-group.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Your post proves my point. You care more about moral posturing and displaying your conformity with a bankrupt ideology than you do about the truth.
I wonder what is going to happen when cats like you read Nicholas Wade's new book! .
You'll probably have a heart attack. And you still won't live in a majority black neighborhood. And you won't wonder why Slashdot doesn't run a story about the major New York Times Science writer admitting that yes, it's true. Intelligence is genetic. In fact, any behavioral attribute that can be reliably measured has a genetic component.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I don't think that's even the point. If people doubted the big bang because they carefully considered the arguments and found some flaws that made them doubt it, that would be fine. They doubt it because they can't imagine the terms involved, because a religious book says it isn't true, or mainly just because they don't want to think about it. For the same reason that people think low frequency radiation from their computer is dangerous but Gamma radiation from water at a hot spring isn't. For the same reason people use IE instead of Firefox or Chrome. It usually isn't that they've educated themselves and weighed the evidence - it's that they can't be bothered - and yet at the same time, they feel a need to express their uneducated opinion.
Anecdotal Evidence/Case in point: A friend of a friend who lives in Kansas, USA started trying to buy up bottled water after the Tsunami incident in Japan. Because, you know, the water in the US was going to be contaminated soon. Riiight. Here I live in Tokyo and the water is generally safe, but the water in Kansas was to be undrinkable. Yet he was going to solve this by somehow buying enough water to last a lifetime? I guess food wasn't to be affected. People are just, in general, stupid and illogical - and it doesn't seem to bother many of them.
People in society need to start doing two things:
1. Educate themselves so that they can do some critical thinking about the world in general and enlarge their world view. Start actually caring about things other than which celebrity is cheating on who.
2. Recognize when you don't know and don't care to put forth the required effort and defer to the experts instead of talking bullshit. Sure, the experts may be wrong occasionally - especially about models of the universe or financial predictions - but they have in general a much better chance of knowing what they are talking about than you do, if you can't be bothered to do #1 above.
As opposed to food that is fertilized with a substance that does not come from the excretory organs of an animal.
A huge issue is that even the people claiming to be intelligent can not differentiate between theory and fact. I blame our horrible education system and 'reward everyone including people that get it wrong' methodology. These same people lump inductive and deductive reasoning into one category because they are not taught the difference. Unless of course they happen to take an elective college class or by happenstance figure out the difference on their own.
Hell, if they took 10 seconds to look at the Wiki page for the inductive reasoning they would realize their idiocy.
Inductive reasoning forms the basis of most scientific theories e.g.; Darwinism, Big bang theory and Einstein's theory of relativity.[2][3]
Good luck getting these morons to think, I gave up long ago because these same idiots get mod points so if you debate them you must be a troll.
In my opinion, articles like TFA make matters worse. They don't point out that these theories are just that, it's expected that everyone has an absolute belief in what ever theory they are handed. Interestingly there are thousands of doctors that question the massive vaccination policies today, but we are not allowed to debate any of their merits because it's taught as fact that vaccines cause no harm. (also makes a few companies assloads of money, go figure...). We still have no idea what caused the Universe to exist, and if you ask that question you must be one of those religious people and not believe in the big-bang theory.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Well I don't thin it's unreasonable to declare Vaccines "safe" and still have a few people die from them every year.
People die from placebo pills. People die from injections of saline solution. People die from nothing or from unrelated things.
"Safe" means that your chances of dying are less after the vaccine than before it. If the vaccine has a 1% chance of killing you, but you have a 50% chance of dying from a horrible disease without it - then the vaccine is safe and effective. If the vaccine has a 1% chance of killing you, but you have only a 0.001% chance of dying from the disease it prevents then it may be a bad deal (not "safe") even if it is effective at preventing the disease from killing you.
From the numbers I have seen, most vaccines are both safe and effective by those criteria. Of course, the more the disease numbers go down through the use of vaccines, the less danger you will be in to start with, so in the short term, it may start to look like some vaccines are a bad deal. The POINT though is that the vaccines have a very low "incidence" rate and they don't cause half the people who take the vaccine to develop autism or anything like that.
have been running the public school system for over 50 years to this story can't possibly be true. Romans 1:16!!!
I'm not a Christian, but I'm pretty sure that Jesus Christ existed. There's plenty of historical evidence that points to him having lived. You can throw God, the whole resurrection thing, spirits and whatnot out if you want, but as far as I can tell the man himself was real.
That would be Caesar Baronius, a Cardinal. It appears that the exact quote is:
I'm glad that you brought this up - religion and science by definition exist to provide answers to very, very different questions. The Dalai Lama approaches the differences between Science and Religion, their similarities, and how they can learn from each other in his book, The Universe in a Single Atom. It's a great read for scientists and religious people alike.
One of his very important points is that when people were first trying to figure out the world, they didn't have all of the mathematical knowledge or fancy tools or computers or even a good way to describe how things worked. Some of this was included into religious texts and that's okay, but if we can prove that something is true or false, and a religion teaches the opposite, then the religion should be updated. People make mistakes, we're only human, right?
Pay attention! There are people around you that do not conform to the current orthodoxy. They are, at best, ignorant twits, and at worst, enemies of the people. It is your duty to ridicule them and mock them. If they do not recant, you may need to increase your efforts.
Be careful about dehumanizing people that you disagree with. Someone disagrees with you too, and we all know what comes next in this movie.
There are damn few scientists doing science these days, but "scientists" willing, for a buck, to spread a thin veneer of justification over your own bias and hate are readily available.
See that "Preview" button?
As opposed to food that is fertilized with a substance that does not come from the excretory organs of an animal.
You say that like its a bad thing.
But isn't one of the precepts of science, the ability to freely question and investigate a claim and make up ones own mind a cornerstone of the foundation of science itself?
Since when do I have to stop thinking because someones says for example Evolution is proven and because we can make iPhone's and send people to the moon God is dead all because a PhD says so?
That is not science, that is doctrine and I think most people who are free and thinking, understand the difference.
To chracterize the idea that people are ignorant and stupid because they question evolution is simply doctrine.
Evolution has lots of problems to solve for itself before a model can be show that overcomes simple entropy for example in Biochemistry and Nuclear Chemistry.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
If you have to believe in something, you have to go all in. Faith is the universal power, but science may define certain laws of nature, tried and true, but where does it take you in the end? You have to have faith in something that will lead to something rather than nothing, I believe.
Acceptance of basic science is much higher among people who vote human.
When funded (ie: paid-off) studies flood the science and medicine fields, why should we care that new drug xyz is safe?
In High-School we would be given survey's weekly. My friends and I laughed at the "Survey" from the 'Teachers.'
Then we decided, "give the most ridiculous answer to the 'Survey.'" This was our way to 'Fight Against The Evil U.S.A. and their war of Slavery in Southeast Asia at the time.'
Glad to see the tradition lives.
Ha ha
Whenever someone says "obvious truth", they're almost certainly not talking about science. Particularly if it's in relation to something very complicated and notoriously difficult to measure.
How many can tolerate the obvious truth, supported by thousands of studies, that average differences in intelligence across the various peoples of the world and especially races are due to genetic factors?
Because we don't know how to measure intelligence accurately enough and control for all the other factors to narrow it down to just genetics. And that's just the problem of genetics: when you start talking about race, you're grouping people together who are vastly different genetically. Race isn't a useful category for generalizing about genetics.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It's all about how people perceive the different theories affecting them. If uncle joe who smoked gets cancer, then sure, why not believe the cancer stick theory. But for 99.99% of society, history before 100 years ago doesn't matter. Is the world 6000 years old or 4 billion? Who the £%Ð#Â¥ cares? It makes no difference. It has no effect on their lives one way or another, so they'll affect a feeling about it because you, the silly scientist, is forcing them to care about something they never will. It's just not always the feeling you want them to have. Vaccines are a weird anomaly here, but I'm guessing it's because people hear about their friend who never was vaccinated and never got sick. Or just no one they know has polio, so vaccines are useless.
" ... due to the fact that the poor are so because they have less ability to control themselves ..."
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/dr-raj-persaud/cocaine-use-uk_b_4391374.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23265091
I don't think so.
btw, unlike crazy nutters like yourself I don't make the colour of peoples skin in the neighbourhood a deciding factor in anything. Though I have to admit, traveling through the states I felt a little uncomfortable being surrounded by so many big white USians.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
If you are reaching for your fainting couch, you were never persuadable to begin with.
Look at the history of science and the Roman Catholic Church! What your our talking about has gone on for a over hundreds of years. The Church controlled what it felt the scientific community could share with the public, and a lot of their findings are still under lock and key. Hell scientists and many others are still uncovering theories from the top names, and lesser named scientists.
Science is an evolving thing, it never sits still, and all theories whether there used as the 'standard' or not are always questioned. Religion ironically enough is the same way, they keep changing their views over thing like slavery, woman's rights, abortion, 'safe sex'. Even they do not follow the 'good book' words, and even modified the book to fit their own views on what God would want. Think about that 'what God would want'. Even tho God is fairly clear on treating all men, and women equally, and allow God to judge those that oppose his 'word'.
Science has become the same way, most stick with Einstein theories and if anyone opposes them they are almost shunned from the community. One could say they are in fact one in the same. However you have people from both sides that try to little avail, that religion and religious leaders should be there to keep the 'word' fairly unified. While scientists should be be unified in reminding people no theory should be taken serious, or become a belief but always be an evolving idea because that's how science is suppose to work.
The Current Science that we have, with the technology and Anthropology we have, rules out the possibility of the Christian religion having any basis in reality. It doesn't rule out the possibility a god exists. It only means that the current dominant Abrahamic religions are not realistic descriptions of the universe we live in.
Which science is that then? Is it the science that claims we live in a multiverse where there are infinite universes where every possibility happens? Is it the science that claims our universe is a hologram? Is it the science that claims we popped into existence through a fluctuation in quantum probability? Is it the science that claims to explain what the universe is and how it came about, except that it doesn't know what the dark matter and dark energy are that constitute the overwhelming majority of it ... assuming it exists at all and the explanation isn't actually a modified theory of gravity like TeVeS or some such? Is it the science that claimed that the coelacanth was dead for 66 million years .... until one was caught in 1938? Is it the science that claimed the city of Troy didn't exist ... until it was found? Is that the science that said that the Antikythera Mechanism shouldn't exist? Is it the science that claimed that the walls of Jericho falling outward was a myth ... until it was proven? Is it the science that claimed it was impossible that the Bible was transmitted accurately through the centuries.... until the Dead Sea scrolls and other document fragments were found to prove that it had been?
Perhaps you should prepare yourself for further "refinement" in the understanding of science on various matters?
But these religions justify how we treat other people, why certain social groups are stigmatized, and have a heavy impact on who are leaders are, what our laws are, how we raise our children, and the legitimacy of the standing governments. If the Religions aren't true, then there is no justification for the political positions of MANY people in the US Government.
Shall we contrast Marxism or Marxist-Leninism which has been claimed to be a "science" by countless millions over the last century, and which has been the governing philosophy for a large percentage of the earth's population into the 1990s (and still governs China and three lesser nations) with the Bible? Marxist principles (14:16-23:16) call for the destruction of the class enemy in the revolutionary struggle, and the destruction of primitive societies that were too far behind to catch up with the revolutionary struggle which at the time would have included groups such as the Serbs, Bretons, Basques, and Scottish Highlanders. The National Socialists, another set of socialists inspired by Marx, exterminated the "unfit," the deformed, gays, Jews, and many others.
Should we branch off into the Progressives and their ideas about eugenics?
And what of the Bible?
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” -- Mark 12:28-31
Your views seem very questionable on both the science and the question of religion.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
So, plants that are fertilized by the ammonia released by diazotrophs (i.e. not animals) are, by your definition, non-organic. Remind me not to take any Chemistry or Biology lessons (or any lesson, really) from you.
The people not "believing" science are not thinkers. They don't reject science because they have not examined the evidence themselves. They reject science because their mother or father told them it's crap, because their religion says it's crap, because their favourite politician(!) thinks some thing should not be true. The biggest group of science denialists are exactly the people who take autohority at face value, and then proclaim they don't. Also, it's not authority if it explains why something is thought to be like it is, and freely allows, and even invites everyone to find a better explanation. It's authority if the only explanation is "because I say so" or "god made it".
Your definition of organic is non-scientific.
Apart from water and salt very few things we digest are inorganic.
Oh wait. Those are sciences that the environmentalists claim are corrupted by big corporate interests hence the almost complete lack of evidence that any of the two are are harmful. But we've got to ban those anyways science be damned! Bill Nye will even agree with you because his scientific analysis is that having fish DNA mixed with non fish DNA sounds just too creepy, thus government should ban it.
There is no scientific proof that is does.
You can prove that smoking increases the chances of getting some types of cancer and that most lung cancer is caused by smoking.
Yes, all scientists doubt the Big Bang. We don't know what happened, exactly, at that time. But all with a brain can see the evidence that something similar to some sort of Big Bang/Explosion/Expansion happened. We are still trying to find out how this thing exactly looked and how it started. Maybe it spawned from nothing. Maybe it was the remnants of an older universe, somehow recollapsing. Maybe it was aliens in a higher cosmic plane playing with brand new shiny UniVerse(TM) marbles. (LOL)
Anyway, just because we don't know exactly what happened, doesn't mean we should go on to believe fairy tales saying the world and the universe are 10,000 years old, just because our other theory is imperfect or incomplete.
"As for humanity's role in climate change, 33 percent accepted, 28 percent were unsure, and 37 percent fell in the doubter category."
How is that 'not accepting science'? There is no such thing as catastrophic man-made global warming, and there's nothing scientific about NOT questioning other scientists' hypotheses and research. What a ridiculous article.
"Only about half of the people accepted that vaccines are safe and effective, with 15 percent doubting."
Well that is kind of a loaded question, because every vaccine is different.
SOME vaccines are safe and effective, SOME are safe and not effective (i.e. a placebo, the drug companies most favorite kind of drug), SOME come with a greater risk than the disease itself.
To give the pharmaceutical industry a blank cheque by believing that ALL vaccines are safe and effective is just as stupid as proclaiming that "all drugs are safe and effective".
Every vaccine is different and the safeness and effectiveness is completely undefined for vaccines in general.
It amazes me how many people in the survey doubt that human activity is causing climate change. We have big corporate conglomerates that conveniently own both wind and solar companies as well as big TV broadcasters and newspapers. These people have "green week" once a month to show just how badly we are ruining the environment with our air conditioning, fast food, SUVs, and "throw away" lifestyle. All this bombardment of AGW and 37% of people are doubters. How can this be?
I have an idea. The scientists that have shown support for AGW have been caught cooking the numbers. We've just come out of an extended winter, one of many in the last decade or so. Every tornado, hurricane, earthquake, disease outbreak, or lightning strike is blamed on AGW. The "scientists" that support AGW are a bunch of cheaters and quacks.
Despite this overload of AGW hysteria from every news outlet the world around us does not reflect the hysteria. Things are pretty much like they were since the AGW "pause" that began in 1998. How long is a "pause" a "pause" and not a "stop"? AGW stopped being anthropogenic global warming when the globe stopped warming. It's rather difficult to claim we're warming the globe if there is no warming to show for it.
I've been playing along with the AGW thing so long as it supports my cause of an energy independent USA. It's hard to make that case when recent climate data does not show warming. This means I have to make my case for nuclear power by other means. I propose we use nuclear power to drill for natural gas and oil, and mine coal, so that we can sell it to other nations that lack the means to build up a nuclear power infrastructure.
Germany, France, and the UK all decided they would do away with nuclear power. It's going to get real cold and dark there this winter with no nuclear and no Russian natural gas. I say the USA can provide their power cheaper and without the guilt of supporting communists and dictators. Well, we'll get rid of the communists in November. The dictators will be gone in 2016.
Not only would the USA be producing cheap energy for the world with nuclear power we can burn up their nuclear waste in our waste annihilating molten salt reactors. Go shut down those nuclear power plants in Europe. The USA will buy your nuclear waste and sell you energy.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
None of the questions asked about 100% certainty. They asked how confident the respondents were that particular propositions were true, ranging from "Not at all confident" to "Extremely/very confident"; I think most scientists in the relevant fields would be able and willing to answer them as they were put.
Another thing that the American public is confused about, is the difference between the way science uses the word "theory," and the colloquial use of the word. In other words, most Americans think "theory" means "hypothesis." They hear "the theory of evolution" as "the hypothesis of evolution" because they have that idiom, "it's just a theory," (meaning mere speculation), at the front of their minds. This gives rise to specious arguments, even from otherwise intelligent people, such as, "Gravity is just a theory, too!" Better to explain the difference between an hypothesis and a theory, if you're going to say anything at all.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
The reason we have the scientific method is that common sense is useless when trying to discern fact from fiction. The world is constantly more bizarre than common sense dictates. It sounds like you simply don't understand what scientists claim happened back then, and so to deal with that, instead of accepting the limits of your intellect, are attacking those scientists (and those who *do* understand, or who realise the experts might know more than them). You are the ignorant twit, it seems.
How do you figure out what the consensus of scientists / experts in the field is, without simply following what the majority of the non-educated public thinks the majority oppinion is?
How many can tolerate the obvious truth, supported by thousands of studies, that average differences in intelligence across the various peoples of the world and especially races are due to genetic factors?
Interesting question. The TV tells that evolution exists but race differences (especially in morality, behaviour and intelligence) don't exist. But evolution requires race differences - what now?
Also the TV admits that race differences exists for things that are too obvious to deny (like appearance, body size, blood pressure, testosterone levels, etc.) but deny any differences for things that may have been tested and confirmed countless times but are touching on the subject of what makes us human and what distinguishes us from animals (intelligence, behavior, morality, etc.). Essentially the TV claims that evolution works on the human body, but not on the human brain.
People who are raised by the TV (and there are a lot of those) actually believe these contradictions, it is what Orwell called "doublethink".
"As for humanity's role in climate change, 33 percent accepted, 28 percent were unsure, and 37 percent fell in the doubter category."
I call that a minor success. I know most of you lean more comp-sci than physical science, so this might not mean much to you. But it's great that we are, slowly, winning back physical science from 'consensus' scientists that claim AGW will destroy the world. Imagine if someone told you the consensus was that 45nm architecture was impossible. Would you trust them? (Hint: it's decade-old tech)
In other words you agree with your TV-set that the human body is formed by evolution (= genes), but the human brain is not influenced by evolution?
That kind of proves benzapp's point completely.
Because we don't know how to measure intelligence accurately enough and control for all the other factors to narrow it down to just genetics.
That is a nonsense argument and you know it.
If the human body is influenced by evolution, then so is the human brain, simply because the brain is part of the body.
When you propose that for some reason all brains are functionally the same and are not influenced by genes, then the burden on proof is on you.
Speak only for the reactionary american churches; descendants of the worst lunatics europe had ever seen. The catholic church, with all it's faults, has long accepted the Big Bang and Evolution. They even accepted that there might be life elsewhere in the universe.
All religions in their core are social defense mechanisms. They are irrational, illogical, but extremely resilient. There are reasons for that. Applying to reason is not the best way to convince a illiterate peasant not to kill his neighbor, rape his wife and steal his chicken. It works a lot better if you say "don't do it, or you burn in hell for all eternity". Its not rational, or logical, but it works. As social defense mechanism religions have had thousands of years to evolve, those that made the lessons stick better survived and prospered. So that is where the resilience comes from.
Lots of these guidelines have long lost any meaning. For example premarital sex. Well why would that be forbidden? Put it in historical context and it starts making sense, girls were married off in early teens or even before that. What in ancient times was considered premarital sex we would today call pedophilia. And that would have resulted in girls father burying an axe in your head etc. Or why would muslims use burkas? Well lets say you send your pretty wife to market, at these times some guy was likely to clog her on the head and haul her off to his own harem. Well next wife you send you wrap up to prevent that. Very sensible social survival tactic. Doesn't make sense anymore, but these customs were never proliferated through rational thinking in the first place.
Nothing is 100% safe. The trick is picking something that is more "safe" than something else.
Would you rather go the no-vaccine route and run the 95% chance of getting sick along with a 25% severe affect/death rate or pick the vaccine route and run the 1.3% chance of having a bad reaction and the .01% child mortality rate?
The problem is industry and gov't like to sell us supposedly perfect solutions and then try to hide the down sides, which always exist, and then are completely shocked when the public reacts with alarm and ignorance once they learn about the side affects.
I know, well, I know, I know ... beta and all sorts of things, lazy editors, many downsides ...
But still, this is the site I love to come back to. As a last (AFAIK) resort of sanity in an unsound world!! - Thanks, Slashdot.
When I read the post, I had about the same feelings that our commentators have already exposed to a large extent.
It would be overly arrogant; and counterproductive, to assume that only we in the 20th/21st century have an exclusive right on science and knowledge. An alienable right, that cannot be challenged nor overruled by science and knowledge of future research.
Think back into the eighteenth century; think back when there were no microscopes to see bacteria or viruses. How the heck was it 'bad science' then, not to know about bacteria and viruses then? Pure observation assumes a flat Earth, and a sun actually rising in the morning. There is nothing wrong at all with using whatever is available to deduce about the universe.
Wrong is only, when dogma, and more so religion, stand in the way of scientific progress. It was Galileo to discover planetary movements. Until then, a geocentric approach was completely valid. The obstacles to progress were thrown in by the christian churches.
It is pure arrogance on the side of the original authors to assume authority on the frontiers of knowledge. Yes, including global warming. While I - I dare say: of course - believe that it exists and is probably man-made, it also is not an insight produced by a genius. It rather is nothing but a result of an observation, like the path of the sun across the skies of the old days, which is currently being analysed.
The misery is not, and can never be, to have different, opposing, theories. The misery only starts, when counter-intuitive theories take a grasp in science, teaching, etc. Nothing against someone's own, and very personal religion; but assuming an invisible higher being that created the universe, including stars and planets up to the human race within 7 days; yes, that is unhelpful to progress. Doubting vaccination, big bangs, and whatnot, however, ought not become scientific outlaws per se.
Americans in "we're fucking ignorant" drama! World faints from shock!
Very few of the "scientists" opining about climate change have that as their specialty. And even bona fide climate scientists often talk about areas they know next to nothing about (e.g., climatologists talking about statistics).
In most cases, "consensus" means that a couple of people did an experiment, a few more people were on a couple of papers, and the rest of the community just thinks the results are plausible but has no independent evidence to support them.
Science and religion try to answer very different questions. Science tries to find the answer to "how". Religion tries to find the answer to "why". They may appear similar, but their intention is a completely different one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sadly, this affliction is rampant in the USA. Happily, it is a dwindling number, and perhaps will soon be eradicated.
I wish you were right. I wish it was a dwindling problem, soon to be eradicated. I want to believe that. However, conservative Christians (which should make heads explode with paradox) aren't going away anytime soon. I think you are right that most Boomers that hold these beliefs will be departing in the next decade or so. But they have grandchildren, many of whom listen. I have been teaching middle school geography for ten years. This year was the very first time I had 2 sets of parents question my teaching of the Big Bang as they didn't believe it. I teach at a private school with intensely involved parents so this was not an issue of some parents just happen to start paying attention. While not a strong example, it does lead me to believe that the idea that Young Earth/ID types are fading away is simply not true.
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
You want to believe the Earth is 5000 years old? Great. Hand in your mobile phone and GPS device, relinquish all rights to CAT scans and other modern medical technology. We'll keep vaccinating you for public health and we'll provide sanitation so you don't spread cholera. Other than that, enjoy the technology of the goat herders who created your religious beliefs.
IIRC it was a pope who said that the bible should be used as a guide for getting into heaven, not as a guide to find out how the heaven works (in reply to the question whether the whole Big Bang thing could be real).
"Orthodox Christians do not believe the Bible to be a scientific textbook on creation, as some mistakenly maintain, but rather God's revelation of Himself and His salvation. Also, helpful as they may be, we do not view scientific textbooks as God's revelation. They may contain both known facts and speculative theory. They are not infallible. Orthodox Christians refuse to build an unnecessary and artificial wall between science and the Christian Faith. Rather, they understand honest scientific investigation as a potential encouragement to faith, for all truth is from God."
from: http://www.protomartyr.org/believe.html
>The Current Science that we have, with the technology and Anthropology we have, rules out the possibility of the Christian religion having any basis in reality.
What the fuck?
No. Not in the slightest.
You can certainly argue against literal interpretations of Genesis, but most Christians do not and have not believed in a literal interpretation. Biblical literalism is a very modern phenomenon, dating to the start of the Fundamentalist movement with the publication of The Fundamentals in 1910.
1910 AD. Not BC.
Only someone with no understanding of either science methodology or history would make the claim that you did.
"Catholics seem to be significantly more sane" - wow most people would say the opposite.
I take it your entire understanding of Christians is based on stereotypes rather than knowing actual people. I live in the heart of the bible belt and know a lot of very conservative Christians. They pretty much all believe in evolution. Most bible stories are interpreted for the moral of the story not some literal scientific explanation of events. In Genesis for example "7 days" could mean 700 trillion years or whatever, the concept of days did not exist until after the earth was created. I have heard it said that trying to find the meaning of religion through science was like trying to find the meaning of a song by disassembling a piano.
I have run into a few die hard every literal word of the bible people, but they are very rare. Since they are controversial and loud they get all the media attention and are the basis of a lot of stereotypes.
The big bang is a little more esoteric and few people really understand what it means.
Surveys like this are always carefully designed to get the result the journalist has already decided he wants. In this case, there is a hell of a lot of wiggle room in these questions. For example, contrast "The Earth is 4.5 billion years old" with "the Earth is millions of years old" Might we get a different result? As other posters pointed out, someone might not be sure about 4.5 billion as the figure, and so might have answered with less confidence. Or "The average temperature of the world is rising, mostly because of man-made heat-trapping greenhouse gases" as opposed to "The average temperature of the world is rising". As other posters pointed out again, the survey here is conflating two questions.
There's also the question of sampling. Who would even participate in this survey? All these results describe is the part of the population that is willing to participate in surveys like this. I am not too confident that this adequately represents the American public.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Don't believe anything. What is true will withstand the test of your continued skepticism, until it doesn't.
If all mental illness is "known by science" to be rooted in brain chemistry, then why haven't scientists invented a pill to repair disbelief in the core scientism dogmas, such as the Big Bang?
But according to cargo-cult Christians (i.e., fundamentalist "religious-right" types), the Bible is the "literal Word of God" and therefore cannot be wrong (even when it's self-contradictory).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Those 80% are simply parroting back what the government and various anti-smoking groups flood every source of media with. They don't have to understand science to parrot something back. Some do, but most don't.
Besides, saying smoking causes cancer is a lie. Or at best a less-than-accurate statement. Smoking doesn't cause cancer. Smoking increases the risk of cancer. People have cancer cells in them all the time, and the immune system fights it.
If smoking caused cancer, everyone who smoked for some period of time would get cancer. A small portion of smokers lives to a ripe old age, at which time getting any disease is roughly the same as if they had never smoked at all.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Lots of minerals though
"Catholics seem to be significantly more sane" - wow most people would say the opposite.
I take it your entire understanding of Christians is based on stereotypes rather than knowing actual people. I live in the heart of the bible belt and know a lot of very conservative Christians. They pretty much all believe in evolution. Most bible stories are interpreted for the moral of the story not some literal scientific explanation of events. In Genesis for example "7 days" could mean 700 trillion years or whatever, the concept of days did not exist until after the earth was created. I have heard it said that trying to find the meaning of religion through science was like trying to find the meaning of a song by disassembling a piano.
I have run into a few die hard every literal word of the bible people, but they are very rare. Since they are controversial and loud they get all the media attention and are the basis of a lot of stereotypes.
The big bang is a little more esoteric and few people really understand what it means.
Are you kidding? Here in the actual bible belt, its hard to find someone that doesn't believe in creationism. You think its a stereotype, but here it is the reality.
Figure out why observed acceleration for certain objects was higher/lower than the model showed? Explain how viable a theory was relied on unproven dark energy/matter/gigantic rounding error? say that the big bang was more plausible than an expanding universe that has always existed?
So why the surprise when they Pick & Choose what to believe from Science?
Much as most donâ(TM)t understand the scientific definition of âoetheory,â you seem to be using the wrong definition of âoedoubt.â
You are using the wrong definition of "wrong". As far as I can notice, the survey doesn't define "doubt". So any definition that fits the context cannot be said to be "wrong".
Doubt could mean the slightest chance of it being false, or a reasonable chance of it being false. Both definitions fit the context. Note people doubting things just because they weren't there during the big bang - they are just expressing their inability to be absolutely certain.
It is just a bad survey, like most others. See questions are lumping multiple assumptions - "universe beginning with a big bang". So one has to doubt it if one doubts universe didn't exist before big bang, and also doubt it if one doubts there was a big bang at all.
There is possibly, or likely a science ignorance in the US public. But this survey proves nothing either way.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
QUESTION AUTHORITY
Listen to Authority's response
If Authority is right, accept it
Most people stop at the first step.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Don't ALL scientists doubt the Big Bang and other models for the universe in the sense that they are all subject to comparison with observations? If a model conflicts with observation, the model either must be dropped or modified.
Science isn't about believing something to be true.
Obligatory
I think it is important to note that in the 80's, Steven Weinberg wrote something to the effect of "It is shame that the Big Bang Theory is the most likely form of cosmology, since that theory most resembles the description in Genesis."
The ultra conservative Christian people people do not scare me much. I get where they are coming from ( mostly, of course there is the occasional Westborro church ) and most just want to believe what they believe and teach their kids so.
The scary people are the people who make science their religion usually without knowing what the science says and also criticising religion without knowing what the religion says. Or knowing who the scientist they make their new high priests are. They might as well be following Immanuel Velikovsky.
I proposes you suck at reading comprehension.
What I did not say is "all brains are functionally the same and not influenced by genes," go read what I wrote again.
Furthermore I assess that you are a complete retard for even thinking that's what I said. Learn to read.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Typical gibbering theist.
Science doesn't know everything, therefore science doesn't know anything.
What drugs are you on? I'm not a USian!! Some of us aren't involved in your manufactured divisive wars because we live in a different reality.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
A typical strawman constructed by an atheist? Let me guess, you're certain you're right? Because, "Science!!"?
My point is that the entire organic food movement is not based in science.
Fortunately for gravity, those who doubt this theory seldom stick around long enough to argue the point. Poor evolution doesn't. ::sniff::
Still, I find the detractors a bit funny. Science can't explain everything. The big bang, for instance, actually causes more questions then answers, this is just what the evidence points to. It's an acceptable model because it follows (and provably follows) observation. The detractors would say it's not definitive, and in a way they are right. But what do they use as evidence that our observations are incorrect? A book that has been translated into many different languages, many different time, and before that existed by word of mouth. Give me observation even with the limits of understanding any day.
Science does disprove itself continually:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/8/21/4595712/gut-feelings-the-future-of-psychiatry-may-be-inside-your-stomach
Relative to something like the Big Bang, while it is the predominant theory in cosmology today, it is not an established fact. If half the public doubts that the Big Bang as it is currently understood, was the causal factor in the creation of the universe, they shouldn't be that much different than cosmologists who are constantly searching for better ways to understand how our universe came to be. Doubt is not evil. For that matter, neither is believing that every single scientific conclusion or currently popular scientific theory must be treated as fact. However, sometimes I think the news media and their surveys overstate their point and expect all currently held scientific positions to be treated by the general population as immutable fact that should never be questioned. It's as if the news media wants its audience to accept the statement: "Trust me, I'm a scientist." Science is all about questioning and never about blindly accepting someone else's conclusions.
The poster has a number of statements where he tries to prove his point. You know, big bang, smoking, and vaccines. I think in some cases, the American Population is being mis-represented.
Take smoking, for example. I worked at the CDC in Atlanta in the early 2000's and spoke with some of the people involved in the studies later used. To say x causes y (as in smoking causes cancer) requires a 50% or better increase in the rate in incidence between the test group and the control group. That kind of clear-cut evidence is needed to say it causes cancer. They were able only to say the evidence shows they are definitely related.
What about vaccines? Once again it boils down to what questions you ask and with what intent. I seriously doubt most Americans would disagree with the principle involved in vaccinations. Once you have had the measles as a small child, you rarely get it later on. You are immune. That's how the immune system works. It's what people experience. What people question is not how a vaccine should work. They question the quality control of the companies who make the vaccines. Or, what ingredients are in them and why? And why are there so many for grade school kids and why are they always adding more and why is it that parents are looked at as if they are terrorists if they question the school system about them. Really guys, it's their kids they are concerned about. Not the science.
I could go on. But I'm not trying to start an argument or debate to win or lose. How about understanding from Slashdotters about why people do not agree with every stance you may take on what you believe to be 'Science'. People care about Their kids. People question the potential for greed and shoddy work by people making a product. People question the intents and purposes of people who, just because they say they have it all figured out, may just want to get $$'s out of their pocket for just another cause. I used to think I had everything figured out. Then I had kids. Heh! Heh!
>The Current Science that we have, with the technology and Anthropology we have, rules out the possibility of the Christian religion having any basis in reality.
>>Only someone with no understanding of either science methodology or history would make the claim that you did.
Rarp! Rarp! Straw man alert!
Seems to me that the first poster was right on the money. The second poster apparently has some ax to grind. Despite being raised Catholic, I'd be surprised if even the Pope would doubt the first poster's statement. I suspect that the Pop would respond that scientific knowledge is imply not relevant to Christianity's faith-based belief system. "Having no basis in reality" is kind of a major point of religion.
Need some examples? Try:
- the Immaculate Conception
- the Resurrection
- the multiplication of loaves and fishes
- the story of Lazarus
- the mystery of the Holy Trinity
- and don't start me on the Old Testament.
It's endless. Throw a dart at any page of the Bible.
Now, nit-pickers can argue specific points ("There actually is a recorded, historic basis for the Great Flood, for the parting of the Red Sea, etc.") but the issue is that Christianity, and nearly all god-based religions, are based largely in myth and, judged by the same standards by which we evaluate other postulates every day -- in areas that range from science to economics to political beliefs (well, maybe not political beliefs) -- such religions are dense with preposterous assertions. This is pretty obvious -- no one can contest that statement. And as for "Literalists" -- who claim to believe that every word of the Bible or Koran or Bhagavad Gita whatever is literally true -- such people are likely either mentally disturbed or are part of some bizarre insular culture; in either case, their weird beliefs have no role in discussions among rational, aware individuals. At the risk of being politically correct, I hope we can all agree that such belief systems are so nutty that we can simply dismiss them as background noise.
Look, people believe whatever they need to get them through the day. If the prospect of dying, for example, generates paralyzing fear, then belief in the afterlife can be a useful tool for helping a fearful person live his or her life. God bless ya. And moral codes, many of which derive from religious beliefs, are useful social controls. The problem arises when complex, fantastic, belief systems must be constructed to rationalize or justify such teachings, and when these belief systems are promoted as the "word of god," thus making it difficult for them to be adjusted to keep up with changing cultural mores and advances in scientific knowledge. When that happens, you wind up with these weird disconnects, with people clinging desperately to superstitious beliefs that were plausible in the Middle Ages, but which are incongruous and counter-productive today. And that result in excruciating and unnecessary discussions like these.
A lot of what has been stated from science in the past was wrong. Not all genetic characteristics are Mendelian, for example.
I read a story recently where the characters on cereal boxes were said to be looking down at the children in the grocery store aisle.
http://www.scientificamerican....
Try this yourself. Take a cereal box and hold it up high. The Trix rabbit will never be looking down at you, because it is a 2D picture. Science can be downright flawed and stupid.
I do agree with the practice of using dead material for vaccine. However I question the use of adjuvants. Many things have been introduced to us in the past which were said to be safe and later the scientists flip flop. Who else flip flops? Politicians! Maybe this is the issue: politics within science are causing science to promote one view and quash any dissenters. There is also the corporate line. Who makes and tests the vaccine? Do I trust corporations to look out for me? No. If you say yes to that question, you must be young and naive. I can tell you that within a corporation, there is no freedom to exercise one's opinion. So you a reliant on the opinion of whoever is boss. Are all of your bosses right all the time? What kinds of people tend to become bosses? Yes people, not critical thinkers. Therein lies the flaw.
As for the big bang... What difference does it make if I agree with that or believe in a steady state universe or whatever? Anything that insists on 100% conformity is a cult. So I question why is there a hunt down on those who disagree with the big bang? If big bang is truly science, has it been replicated in a study using the scientific method? No, it is just a conjecture. Like the way Nietzsche conjectured the reabsorption of semen into the blood with monks makes them strong.
I think this is great that people are not ready to accept everything that is supposed to be true to the mainstream view of science. Anyone who believes science is always right has just found a belief system to replace the religion they said they could do without.
The problem is the "science for sale" syndrome. You can get a scientist to do a study published "proving" just about anything. Consider reading these rebuttals to published studies "proving" various things:
http://www.lef.org/featured-articles/Flawed-Research-Used-to-Attack-Multivitamin-Supplements.htm
http://www.lef.org/featured-articles/Response-to-Media-Reports-Associating-Testosterone-Treatment-with-Greater-Heart-Attack-Risk.htm
http://www.lef.org/featured-articles/Fish-and-Prostate-Cancer-Risk-Fact-or-Fiction.htm
http://www.lef.org/featured-articles/1014_Flawed-Study-Used-To-Discredit-Multivitamin-Mineral-Supplements.htm
Then you get to specific issues where there is a lot of valid scientific debate like human contribution, or lack thereof, to climate change (30,000+ scientists, 9,000+ with PhD) http://www.petitionproject.org
Then you get into contentious issues like vaccines and read what was said at the Simpsonwood conference by the scientists who in public say "all is well"
- Quotes from Simpsonwood and Puerto Rico Conferences (vaccines & metal toxicity)
http://www.autismhelpforyou.com/Simpsonwood_And_Puerto%20%20Rico.htm
Then you have the other scientists researching various vaccines and they show that the seasonal influenza vaccine isn't anywhere near as effective as we are told
- Cochrane Review - Vaccines for preventing influenza in healthy adults
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001269/vaccines-to-prevent-influenza-in-healthy-adults-
- Dr Lisa Jackson's out of season influenza vaccine research (healthy user effect accounts for almost all benefits claimed by all cause mortality studies)
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/2/337.short
And you wonder why people are not able to tell heads from tails? Seems pretty obvious to me. Science is for sale.
You do realize, don't you, that the term "protestant work ethic" was coined by a sociologist to attempt to describe a certain sociological phenomenon, right? It's not a religious term.
What strawman?
cf claimed science made mistakes and then claimed lots of people called something science so that must make it science too. And then finished of with a bible quote, because we all know the bible never got anything wrong ---> Jesus > Science.
Anyway You're certain you're right because of Jesus, I'm certain I'm right because of intelligent thought (science helped a little).
I wonder who is really right?
Actually not you, because you have faith on your side and that stops you from thinking any-more.
The public's response to AGW accurately reflects the scientific status. More and more evidence shows AGW to be minimal or actually stopped, ad the human factor is based entirely on computer models. The warming trends, if any, are lost in the random noise.
Beware, there is no such thing as a "solar constant" as the models assume.
If you want to discourage a public belief, tax it.
...smoking causes cancer; only four percent doubt it.
...vaccines are safe and effective, with 15 percent doubting.
...mental illness is seated in the brain; about 20 percent were uncertain on these subjects
...humanity's role in climate change, ... 28 percent were unsure, and 37 percent fell in the doubter category.
...For a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth and a 13.8-billion-year-old Big Bang ... Fully half of the public doubted the Big Bang
So the larger the size or more complex the system in question, the more uncertainty and doubt people show? Doesn't seem erratic or arbitrary at all.
Expecting the average person to confidently discuss chaotic things like global weather patterns and the expansion of the universe is asking a bit much.
It is quite surprising that those outside of the US are so gungho "believing" in hypothesis and theories before they have become proven laws.
Gravity:
Hypothesis, Theory, or proven Law? Law
It is proven. It has a test. Take any object. Raise it above the ground with nothing but grown underneath. Let it go. It falls to the ground. All objects, regardless of magnetism do this. It is a law. It has a proof.
Big Bang:
Hypothesis, Theory, or proven Law? Theory
Why is it just a theory? We have very little proof of this. Just a little mathematically calculations based on the expanding universe. I've never met a scientists who fully believes this.
Climate Change being causes by humans:
Hypothesis, Theory, or proven Law? Theory
It started as a hypothesis. Some evidence exists which allowed it to graduate from hypothesis to theory, but not enough evidences of the past exists to compare it to. Also evidence shows that one volcanoe can do more damage in one eruption that humans have done in hundreds of years, so this one is harder to prove than those scientists studying it admit. Not to mention all the controversial falsification of data that came to light a few years ago. Fudging the numbers to prove human caused global warming is going to increase disbelievers.
The earth being 4.7 billion years old:
Hypothesis, Theory, or proven Law? Hypothesis/Educated Guess
There is some evidence but it is based on controversial dating techniques that have been proven to be fallible. There is no proof that some of the earth doesn't appear this old because it was floating matter in space for billions of years. Scientists are doing their best trying to determine that though. Also, the rate of decay may have been far greater before the atmosphere or due to any of a million unforeseen reasons. Basically we do some carbon dating and a few other advanced dating techniques and then we've pulled a number out of are butt for this hypothesis.
So it isn't that in the US we don't believe in these scientific hypothesis. It is that we believe when it is a law. We are taught the scientific method year after year and we understand that a bunch of hypothesis make it to theory before finally being proven false.
This sounds like instructions given for a test, not a survey. With these instructions I'm not surprised that people lacked confidence over hyper specific questions such as "The Earth is 4.5 billion years old". Maybe they thought the earth was 5.5 billion years old.
Some vaccines are safe, some are deadly; 98 million Americans were given polio vaccine contaminated with cancer-causing virus, admits CDC. Don't believe me, go read it for yourself; http://www.naturalnews.com/041...
And that is just one of many! I sometime think the average person could not understand science were they given the tools. They do not have the mental make up to understand science. Even when you take them through step-by-step, they get lost. They don't have to do the math. They can accept you do, but given all the numbers, step-by-step they still don't understand. When it reaches that level, it's not only frustrating, but a lost cause.
Science is about empirical evidence, not about theories. The end.
It's really, really hard to measure intelligence in any meaningful way, partly because we really don't know what it is. We can look at intelligent people, and find they score higher on some tests, but since we can't rate it objectively we can't show how reliable our tests are. (We can determine that different tests are measuring the same thing, such as IQ, which is not proof that they measure what we want them to.)
Measuring traits like IQ across different populations runs into real problems. The ones I've seen have cultural biases, so you're likely to score higher if you're of the same culture as the test maker. Measuring the genetics runs into much greater problems. Say we determine that two populations have different IQs, and the population with the higher IQ is also wealthier. There's probably a relation there, and it likely runs two ways. Smart people are likely to make more money, and people raised in better conditions are likely to have higher IQs. Individual IQs are partly genetic, we know that, but that doesn't mean there's a statistically significant difference between racial groups. The fact that some are going to be generally taller doesn't mean that some are going to be genetically smarter, the brain being a much more delicate thing than the bone structure. In general, genetic diversity within racial groups is much greater than genetic diversity between racial groups, This doesn't mean there aren't racial traits (people who look like me digest milk a lot better than people who don't, for example), but there's no good reason to conclude that intelligence is affected.
In short, there is no "obvious truth" here. There are possibilities, but I haven't seen a good study that rejects the equality of genetic intelligence hypothesis.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Um, no, if you want to claim something positive (that racial groups differ significantly in intelligence due to genetic factors), you have the burden of proof. Human brains are known to be different, and are influenced by genetics, so that's a straw man. The population statistics are far more uncertain.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Ignorance about the difficulty of getting scientifically meaningful results from surveys often causes the "results" to be blown out of proportion.
Any idiot can create a survey, and many do.
Doing non-trivial measurement is not easy, especially in the social sciences. True measurement requires an understanding of the differences between accuracy and precision, between a sample and a population, of why correlation is not causation, of the ambiguity of natural language, and of the many systematic errors that can bias results.
Few have the research design and statistics background to know how unreliable the survey is as a general measurement technique, and how much work is required to get anything useful from a survey.
Since we can't be bothered to teach social science as a standard part of the high school curriculum, this state of widespread ignorance regarding the difficulty of social science measurement will continue.
A product bearing the USDA Organic certification mark "has been produced through approved methods that integrate cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. Synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, irradiation, and genetic engineering may not be used."
You're attacking a strawman. Christianity is more than Genesis. Most Christian denominations I'm aware of will avow to the Apostles' Creed, which asserts, among other statements:
"He [Jesus] was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary"
"He [Jesus] descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again."
"I believe in...the resurrection of the body"
So the Creed includes statements that a virgin birth happened, and that people can be raised from the dead. Modern science rules out that these beliefs have any basis in reality.
I was raised Christian--my dad, in fact, is a pastor--and although our church was fairly liberal about beliefs, these statements were to be believed literally. So I think it's a fair claim by GP that Christianity includes beliefs that contradict science.
when science gives me antibiotics and cell phones, i believe in it totally. when it tells me i need to be careful about where I toss my waste products, it's a hoax. I've found this rule to be easy to follow.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I dunno, seems like both sides of the argument are deliberately being dumb. No, you can't find logical explanations of what are put forward as miracles. if they had explanations, they wouldn't be miracles. And by the same token, you can't find scientific evidence of how your miracles happened. If you find scientific evidence, then God didn't reach down from the heavens and make it happen to show His power. Science is belief, but based on the preponderance of continuing evidence of an impersonal logical system of predictable repeatable operations. Religion is belief, based on at most sporadic evidence of individual occurrences which stand out from the daily routine operation of the universe, but doesn't require them.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You might want to start with looking at who actually proposed the big bang theory in the first place, and until you do, shut the fuck up you ignorant twit.
Yes, a Catholic priest. As a general rule, Catholics seem to be significantly more sane than various American protestant sects on several issues.
Now, if the rightwingers would look up who actually proposed global warming and anthropogenic global warming in the first place; hint, not Al Gore.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
We have hard scientific evidence that marijuana changes your brain's structure, changes the grey matter distribution in your brain, is addictive, causes depression and paranoia, inhibits motivation, and leads to schizophrenic and psychotic episodes. These are the results of international peer-reviewed research published in reputable journals. These are matters of fact, not opinion.
What's the US response? We legalized weed in two states. We gloss over the science and let major media outlets like CNN run pro-drug propaganda pieces that completely ignore the health risks and focus purely on the alleged "benefits" that entirely consist of anecdotal evidence or extremely specific situations that in no way apply to the public at large, and have zero connections to recreational use. We turn a blind eye to misleading society, notably young people, that marijuana use is a "right" and absolutely no ill can come from using it.
So yeah, we do a lot of stupid stuff even when science makes it obvious we shouldn't.
It's obvious that autism is directly related to the amount of piracy, and HD tv. We must stop before it's too late, if 4k tv catches on all our children will die.
I'm done having children, but if I wasn't I'd surely take up arms and fight the advances of technology like any other luddite would do. Grab your pitchforks everyone, it's the scientific thing to do.
This is not what he claimed, however.
He said that science, quote, "Rules out" the possibility of the Christian religion being true, which is utter and complete bullshit.
It does not.
I can sleep under an apple tree till an apple falls on my head. Therefore I can believe the Theory of Gravity.
I can breed a bunch of fruit flies and select for specifically colored eyes. Therefore I can believe in Evolution.
But can you create a pocket universe from nothing and demonstrate a Big Bang?
Never trust a poll until you can see how the questions are worded.
Also: Many people, when asked a question they have not thought of recently, will not want to admit ignorance and will make something up for an answer. That applies to everyone, including the scientists !
WTF, most people don't even need science to rule out Christianity being true, you only need common sense.
Science is what we use to discredit the rusted on Christians who believe so strongly that you need to show them in detail how batshit crazy they are.Unfortunately sometimes even that doesn't always work. (None so blind as those who refuse to see.)
I just adore the sneaky way people lump in "climate change" and other liberal talking points with things like the Big Bang to try to cloak them with more scientific validity than they deserve. http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/23/11144098-gaia-scientist-james-lovelock-i-was-alarmist-about-climate-change - there you go, a liberal admitting alarmism on a liberal news channel. Climate hasn't warmed or cooled significantly in 17 years, it's long past time to admit that we need more science in our global warming theory and stop pretending the "consensus" is good enough to wager trillions of dollars people don't have on "solutions" to it that only enrich crony capitalists.
Any-one capable of being persuaded would have been by now. Now its time for fire and acid, banish them once and for all.
What question does the bible try to answer that we dont already know the answer to?
It's no wonder why science is failing. Students "in general" take the easy courses. They earn degrees the would have been better off financially had the went to work right out og high school. I taught while working as a GA on my quest for a masters. This was intro to CS. The lack of knowledge was ...difficult to describe. That these people were going to vote4 with equal weight to intelligent people is scary. The came out of college or a university with an education, but in many cases no more intelligent than when they went in. The old saying about sending a Jackass to college and you get an educated Jackass. Gone are the days when a degree helped. No t5he degree needs to be in a specific field and specifically a science field. They need to make passing a tough money management course a prerequisite for entering college to prevent these huge tuition loans. Can't get a job with a degree so borrow another 50 - 75 thousand for an advanced degree in the same field?. It's hard to imagine people like that ever getting out of high school. Sure college is expensive. I quit a well above average job to earn a degree and earned a full ride GA for a masters. I figured $60,000 a year was probably on the low side, but I paid for it (up front). If you can't afford it, wait till you can and make certain you are cut out for college! This approach would have kept tuition at an affordable level and a lot of people out of debt!
The proof is copious and easily verified. We have well over a century of intelligence tests, thousands of them. Hundreds of twin studies. Lives tracked from birth until death.
There is virtually nothing that has been studied as intensely as intelligence. The fact that you don't know this, is proof alone of the level of propaganda that exists in the West.
There is none of this elsewhere in the world. The Beijing Genomics Institute has 15,000 scientists working around the clock to identify the genetic signatures of intelligence such that the data can aid in their very mature state eugenics program.
While dumb Americans keep hunting down the evil white racists that are the cause of Detroit being a hellhole, China is busy creating a super race of men.
I have hope that Nicholas Wade's new book will finally put a stop to this nonsense. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
'Cept the covering up molestation for decades, might of heard about it? just saying.