Dude! Nice post! I wish I had mod points today. I have only one criticism.
In any case, you need not fear alternative ideas (even blatantly false goofy ones) in your school systems. If anything you should fear people trying to coopt the boards to ensure goofy ideas are taught in a non-critical fashion.
You should be wary of any idea being taught in a non-critical fashion, whether you think it's a good idea or a bad one. Critical thinking skills are much more important than indoctrination in good ideas. The major difficulty you face in this regard is that Evolution is presented as an incontrovertible fact, which tends to dull the critical faculties.
In the immortal words of John Stuart Mill:
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. This is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of, else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty.... So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up.
So flat-Earthers and creationists are actually pretty useful. As you've already pointed out, if you can't defend your view that the earth is a globe against the arguments of a flat-Earther, you really don't know your subject! The same applies for Evolution and Creation.
I note that Microsoft has invested heavily in the German Government (see the end of the article linked in parent). What's with that? Is it damage control in relation to the Munich migration to Linux?
Even if I dealt out every card in suited descending order, that doesn't prove anything because the meaning we apply to the cards doesn't make it more or less likely than any other order.
It makes it no more or less likely as an outcome, but the number of possible orderings which have special meaning for us is a vanishingly small fraction of the total number of possibilities. Sure, the cards can be grouped by suit or grouped by rank (2 possibilities), and the suits can be in ascending or descending order (2 possibilities), possibly with aces high or low (2 possibilities), and we don't care about the order of the four ranks (24 possibilities). That's still only a very very tiny percentage of all the possible outcomes. If you managed to shuffle a deck such that it was placed in any of these orders it would be perfectly rational of me to assume that you cheated, precisely because the explanation that it happened by chance is astronomically low.
Every outcome is as likely as every other outcome, but the set of "sorted and grouped" outcomes is miniscule compared to those which aren't. I've described 192 possible orderings of a deck, but this doesn't even make a dent in the 8e67 space of possible outcomes. Sure, it brings us down to 4e65, but there's only 3e8 seconds in a year, so I would expect to see one of these orderings happen at random once in 1e58 years if I shuffled a deck per second for that length of time. Popular theory at the moment is that the universe is around 2e9 years old, so if you claim that you've shuffled a deck and it appeared in one of these orders, I'd have to be a gullible twit to believe you!
This is the shell game you're playing here, whether you realise it or not. You could shuffle and deal out royal flush after royal flush after royal flush, then try to dismiss it with "each outcome is equally likely". That's disingenuous, because if each outcome is equally likely, then we expect it to follow a certain statistical distribution, and your card dealing sure isn't following that pattern! Yes, you can always say post hoc that an outcome was "unlikely" because it was one of BIGNUM possibilities, but the fact that you can always do that is what makes it uninteresting. It's the vanishingly small percentage of outcomes that have some special significance which are interesting, not so much because they have special significance -- that's quite incidental -- but because they are part of such a vanishingly small group that we rationally expect them not to turn up at random. If 50% of all outcomes had special significance, we wouldn't be at all surprised by them (unless they turned up at some frequency markedly different from 50%).
Gah! I can't figure out how to make this concept any clearer. Even scientists who should know better get it wrong with alarming regularity.
There are problems with falsificationism, but it's a popular stance, so let's adopt it for now. The first problem I see with your argument is that an instance of evolution (ignoring questions of scale, for now) does not falsify Intelligent Design theory, because ID is a theory about the past, and the possibility of evolution (at any scale) in the present does not preclude the possibility of intelligent design in the past. Similarly, although it is a documented instance of evolution, it does not confirm the Theory of Evolution to the extent that the theory talks about historical events. The observation proves that a certain kind of spontaneous change is possible, but that's quite a long way from proving that the same kind of changes (in large quantities over long periods) are responsible for the state of the world as we know it.
As to whether either of these theories can be falsified, they probably stand or fall together. At some broad level, ID and Evolution are binary alternatives, lacking a third possibility. Either intelligence was involved in the creation of life, or it was not. Evolutionists can argue over natural mechanisms, and ID theorists can have debates over the nature of the intelligent designer, but the two camps are mutually exclusive and offer full coverage of the possibilities. Thus if you falsify one, you prove the other, and vice versa. They are either both falsifiable, or both not falsifiable -- and if they are falsifiable, they are also provable.
That doesn't answer whether ID and Evolution are scientific theories by Popper's standards, but it narrows us down to, "either they are both scientific, or neither of them is." That's a valuable outcome, if you can accept it, given the sheer quantity of "we are science, they are not" going on.
But in science, there's really no such thing as a "fact", simply theories with greater levels of evidence supporting them.
The facts are the things that provide the evidence to support the theories. Facts are individual, isolated things. Theories weave them together into a coherent story. Facts are events. Theories are things which explain those events. Evidence is a relationship between a fact and a theory.
Gravity is a theory (sufficiently well formulated and reproducible to be deemed a "law"); instances of things falling are facts. The sun-centered (and earth-centred, for that matter) solar system is a theory; planetary motions are facts. Radio waves are a theory; instances of current induced by an antenna are facts. Some of these are really useful theories, aren't they? (Not too sure about the solar system theories, though: do we even care if the solar system has a centre?)
The phrase, "evolution is a fact", is just a really bad way of saying, "history really did happen the way the theory of evolution claims it did". I say it's bad because you can't argue with facts, but you can argue with the assertion that a theory is accurate. In that sense, saying "evolution is a fact" is more like saying, "history really did happen the way the theory of evolution claims it did, la la la can't hear you!"
Evolution is a theory (as is creation or intelligent design); fossils and biological organisms are facts.
Macroevolution would be if you could drive your car all the way to another country. This is, as everyone in America knows, impossible.
I'm Australian, you insensitive clod! How was I supposed to know that international car travel was possible? Every experiment I've conducted resulted in failure and sogginess. Just you try driving your SUV over here, ya damn yank! (Be sure to drive on the left side of the road if you do manage to get here, though.)
First, the unlikely happens. If I flip a coin 1,000,000 times, the odds of that exact sequence of results is astronomically small (1/2^1,000,000). If something happened against the odds, that isn't magic its happenstance.
I see this fallacy repeated a lot. If you flip an ideal coin N times, the odds of repeating the outcome of that run is 1/(2^N) per trial. The initial run has no probability associated with it, because no "success" and "failure" cases were specified: every possible outcome was equally acceptable. There is nothing at all remarkable about the initial run: it simply reached one of the 2^N expected outcomes.
Just in case you've missed the point, here's another illustration. When you shuffle a standard deck of 52 cards, it winds up in one of 52! (fifty-two factorial, which is about 8e67 in scientific notation) possible orderings. Although only one outcome is possible per shuffle of the deck, each outcome is expected equally, so there is no surprise when the deck winds up in one of these states. If you manage to shuffle a deck so that it matches another deck, then that is a highly improbable outcome precisely because every possible outcome was equally expected, and only one of them satisfied the conditions of success.
had you had engineering physics II (electric and magnetic theory)? the stuff in circuits makes much more sense if you've had the physics/calculus -- because then it makes sense why a capacitor integrates voltage and an inductor differentiates it. I'd had enough physics and calculus, but being told that a capacitor integrates a voltage and an inductor differentiates it never really gave me any comprehension of how circuits behaved. I'd have to sit down and do a bunch of maths that I particularly disliked in order to determine what was going on in even a simple circuit. Once I was able to visualise the things in terms of non-mathematical analogies, the behaviour became much clearer, and mathematics was relegated to its rightful place: calculating component values (e.g. "how big a resistor do I need here?").
Your advice is probably very helpful for someone who has a natural talent for electronics. In my experience, however, very few people have a talent for both the discrete logic realm of computing and the real calculus realm of electronics. The typical software whiz can stare blankly at the simplest of electronic circuits for weeks without comprehending a thing.
I first came to realise this truism when I did an introductory university course in electronic and computer engineering. This was actually two half-subjects with two different lecturers, lab classes, and exams rolled together into one subject. During the lectures, I snored through the computing part on the basis that there was nothing new to me, and I'd furrow my brow in the electronics part because it wasn't making any sense. I followed the concepts through to Ohm's law and Thevenin equivalence, but he lost me with AC circuits and transistors. So far as I could tell, this was a common issue, with about half the class having the converse problem.
I'm just naturally wired for discrete logic, not real calculus, and I'll never be much of an electronics boffin precisely because of that.
The gap is not impossible to cross, however: I'm now capable of designing (or at least understanding) simple electronic circuits involving transistors and such like -- it just took an exceedingly long time for the penny to drop. Once I finally started to grasp how electricity behaved, "The Art of Electronics" started to make sense to me. Note that it didn't teach me electronics, as such: rather, I had to first grok the nature of electricity, and then I was able to understand what it was talking about.
I didn't properly understand electronics until I was able to map various basic electronic concepts into other physical systems. I don't know whether my analogies are very sound, but they gave me a sufficiently good understanding that I can now build working interface circuitry of various kinds, and turn to "The Art of Electronics" for guidance. These analogies include such concepts as "voltage is like pressure or tension; current is like fluid flow or mechanical motion; a capacitor is like a spring; an inductor is like a flywheel." With the aid of these sorts of analogies, I was able to comprehend the behaviour of electronics in a manner that raw mathematical descriptions could never achieve.
On the lowest physical level there are only individual atoms... Up to now I described only physical process which don't per see have any "free will". Then comes a level higher with even more complexity where neuron form complex path and mass, and that is the brain. Show me an ounce of free will. All I see is a very complex system...
That's because your model of the world is rooted in determinism: the idea that the universe behaves in a mathematically predictable way. If this is true, then you need only know the laws of physics and the exact state of the universe at any moment, and predicting the future becomes a matter of doing the sums. [See Laplace's demon]
The model has tremendous appeal for the mathematically and logically inclined, but there are many reasons why one might object to it. The first and most obvious is to object to the assumption of determinism at its roots. In this age of Quantum Mechanics, it seems quaintly classical to believe in ultimate determinism. Still, scientific wisdom is a moving target, and you can hope for the eventual triumph of determinism over quantum hocus pocus if you so desire -- good luck to you.
Beyond that, we have niggling little problems such as our inability to measure the state of the universe (even locally) without altering its state in unknown ways. Precise measurement is necessary because many of the deterministic laws have chaotic properties. But even if we could know exact values, how would we represent them in computers? To make matters worse, many of the physical laws are such that we can not compute exact answers, but only find approximations. These problems are merely practical barriers to the production of Laplacean demon, though; they are not arguments against the incompatibility of determinism and free will. This incompatibility can be addressed by weakening the definition of "Free Will", but can we take the bull by the horns and reconcile determinism and free will without playing semantic games? I think so.
It seems that there is a chink in the armour of determinism: the initial conditions of the system. Given initial conditions and laws, the fate of the system is sealed, but whence come the initial conditions? This question can not even be answered in deterministic terms unless you hypothesise a deterministic meta-system which produced our system, and commit to an infinite regress of such systems. Thus, the setting of initial conditions looks like a good escape from determinism, even if we grant that the system is entirely deterministic in every other respect.
But what does this say for free will? That some free will was responsible for setting the initial conditions of the universe? How could such a remote possibility impact whether I have free will here and now? This brings us to another set of assumptions: those relating to personal identity. If you consider the extent of your "self" to be the matter of which you are composed, then this remote exercise of free will was certainly not yours. A lump of matter, such as yourself, can not possibly have a free will, since its behaviour is fully determined by environmental considerations. Indeed, the notion of "self" under such circumstances is quite vague, since the material "self" has no precise physical bounds, but interacts with the remainder of the environment under exactly the same set of rules that it operates internally.
So what sort of thing must the self be in order to possess free will in a purely deterministic universe? Clearly it must be the sort of thing that influenced the initial conditions of the deterministic universe (or perhaps its laws, but "initial conditions" will suffice). Thus the "self" must be something at least partially outside the universe as we know it, and the universe as we know it is simply t
I'm more inclined to require that it be ISO recognised and have at least one open source implementation. After all, part of the reason for the standard is to allow governments to publish electronic documents without the populace being forced to pay some corporation in order to read it. If there's no open source implementation, it hardly matters how open the standard is -- you're going to be shelling out something to someone (under the terms of some unconscionable EULA to boot).
According to this video, the pages are being inserted via SQL injection attacks.
When this news broke last night (my local time), my heart skipped a beat because one of my phpBB instances isn't totally up to date, so I did a quick bit of research to see if I could fill in the massive blanks left by this report. Yes, it does look like an SQL injection attack: the attack appends a SCRIPT tag to the forum's main title, which is inserted into various locations on every page from a database field. Due to one thing and another this results in some hideously malformed HTML, but it has the desired effect (of executing the Javascript) in the major browsers. I suspect that the search in question is a Google "intitle:" search which keys off the domain name of the site carrying the exploit code, since this becomes a visible part of the title.
I have no idea exactly how the SQL injection is being effected, but my phpBB forum was not impacted. This may be because my version is not too old, because I lack a vulnerable add-on module, or because my custom anti-bot mechanisms deflected the attack. I couldn't see anything in the past few days of log activity which contained key strings used in the exploit, but I didn't search very hard once I determined that my instance was unaffected.
Yang has been exploring different ways to ward off Microsoft.
TFA doesn't say whether he's tried such approaches as garlic, holy water, etc. What is the appropriate ward against Microsoft, anyhow? Come to think of it, I suspect it might be the GPL: their attitude towards GPL'd software is a lot like a vampire's reaction to a cross. So if Yahoo really wants to ward off Microsoft, they should spin off some of their software into a GPL project run by a separate non-profit entity, something like the Mozilla Foundation. Microsoft will recoil in horror. (Not that Yahoo has any software the rest of us would care to see, so far as I'm aware -- but that's beside the point.)
In short, it has none of the hallmarks of a religion.
Except for the inescapable fact that its subject matter -- God -- is religious. The most prominent atheists are prominent precisely because of their religious fervour with regards to their atheism, proclaiming it as a great truth, and a great liberator of the mind. They denounce the heathen theists, and proclaim their belief as the one true way. Your argument that atheism lacks the hallmarks of a religion is truly compelling, and yet it does not match my actual experience with atheists. I guess it comes down to the difference between atheism in theory and in practice.
The least religious people I know are not atheists, but those who simply aren't willing to think about such abstract philosophical matters at all. The kind of people who, when asked, "do you believe in God?" answer, "I'm not religious" -- meaning that they don't want to think about it or talk about it, since they subconsciously fear that any conclusions they draw might impact the plans they have to go partying later this evening. I have less respect for that than I do for reasoned atheism.
I think the problem is that some people aren't committed to finding out the truth, whatever it turns out to be. There are some religious organizations, such as those promoting creationism that are using intellectually dishonest arguments and some outright lies to spread a world view that has been thoroughly disproven for hundreds of years.
It's not true that any particular world view has been disproved. It's not even true that some other world view has been more dominant for "hundreds of years". Charles Lyell popularised the principles of uniformitarianism starting in 1830, and Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859. Young earth creationism was the dominant position until these works had a chance to penetrate mainstream thought. Long-age naturalistic evolution is still slightly less than one hundred and fifty years old as a respectable scientific theory.
This would be a minor correction on my part if not for the overall tone of your post, which harps so heavily on the dishonesty of your ideological opponents, and implies that you and your like-minded peers have such a great commitment to truth and accuracy. I'm not going to accuse you of lying to promote your cause (I don't think you're a liar -- just sloppy), but it's only fair to draw attention to the unmitigated hypocrisy in your post.
I'll leave it to someone else to address the other problems.
Most people won't encrypt when given the option to do so, because encryption requires keys and keys are inconvenient. Laziness wins, so Google won't lose significant ad revenue through offering the possibility.
They already offer things like POP service on Gmail which performs an end run around ads. They are introducing IMAP as well, which is worse from a simplistic ad revenue perspective. Google are not as blinkered by revenue prospects as you suppose.
Having refined the service on a voluntary army of beta testers, they can sell a "pro" version (probably bundled into Google Apps), as they do with Gmail.
They can still target ads on the basis of file names and types, even if the content is inscrutable.
I'm more interested to know what file access protocol they'll offer. Yes, they'll have a web interface, of course, but I suspect they'll also offer CIFS access (using Samba derivatives at their end). If they did that, then encryption would be possible at the client end, which is where it ought to be (for various reasons) in any case.
That gives me an idea. Attach permanent magnets to the corpse of W. C. Fields, wrap coils around his coffin, and then say you've found a way to turn alcohol into water. Bingo: free electricity.
Morality is about the way things ought to be, and a "moral wrong" is a situation where things are not as they ought to be. This does create a dilemma for people who are both moral realists and strict physicalists (denying that there is anything other than the material realm). The problem is this: if you're a physicalist/materialist, then all real truths are truths about physical things -- about the way things are. Any statement about the way things ought to be can not be a real truth or falsehood, since there is nothing real to which it refers. A genuine physicalist can't consistently make absolute claims about morality for this reason. That's not to say that they can't be moral actors, but their moral code is necessarily fictitious because strict physicalism is incompatible with non-physical realities such as real morality. Physicalism is incompatible with moral realism.
A belief that science provides any kind of access to truth requires considerable faith. Especially given all the evidence to the contrary. "Evidence to the contrary?", you ask, with unconcealed incredulity. Yes -- it's called the "pessimistic meta-induction" -- the idea that new scientific theories so often overthrow older scientific theories that the safe bet is to believe that all current science is a load of bunk that will be overthrown eventually (its usefulness notwithstanding).
In fact it is a method through which provides it's own falsifiable test of itself.
You have to start with the belief that it is effective in the first place for that to work! Can't you see that? In any case, I think you've massively overstepped the boundaries to which science can be validly applied. A scientific method is not a scientific theory which makes predictions and faces the prospect of contrary evidence: it is a prescriptive thing which tells you how you ought to go about a process. A scientific method can't be "wrong", because it doesn't make any claims, any more than a recipe makes claims. The "faith in science itself" to which the GPP referred is an attitude that people (like yourself) have towards science, rather than a thing intrinsic to science. Richard Dawkins, for example, asserts, "if science has nothing to say, it's certain that no other discipline can say anything at all." This is a very bold philosophical claim, and well outside the bounds of scientific test. It's only fair to describe such a claim as an "article of faith".
As I understand it, Australia (and probably everyone else, for that matter) has been getting reamed by the USA as regards Internet peering arrangements. Bandwidth costs have always been higher here, and it's not all to do with a lack of local competition, although that used to be a credible story back when Telstra was charging twenty cents a megabyte for permanent dial-up connectivity. These days the economic pressure is mostly conspicuous for the fact that local hosting services are so expensive. If Google busts up that cosy little oligopoly, I'll love them to bits for it. To gigabits, even. (Sorry. Preemptive pun. Someone had to do it.)
Is this a part of Google's answer to the whole carrier sabre-rattling about non-neutrality and wanting a slice of Google's profits? There's no better way to ensure fair treatment than to provide your own infrastructure. Is this Google's way of saying to the carriers, "get over it, guys -- bandwidth is a fricken commodity now, and we're going to compete with you to make it so, so kiss your old monopoly profits goodbye." There's a high barrier to entry in this market, and you'd be mad to buy your way in only to compete all the profits out of it -- unless you happen to be a major consumer of bandwidth yourself, like Google.
My point was that they don't reveal your IP address to third parties. There seems to be a bit of clouded thinking on this issue. Privacy is not about how much the company knows, but how much it keeps secret. I share information with Google, and they promise to keep it a secret. So long as they do that, they have upheld their end of the bargain. I'm in control of how much information I decide to give to Google, but I have to trust them not to share it with others. Most webmail services reveal the HTTP client IP to the recipient as a matter of course, using either a "Received:" trace field or the informal "X-Originating-IP:". Google keeps this a secret. They seem to understand the concept of nondisclosure quite well, and have more respect for privacy than I've seen in any other company of its type.
I tried to install Kubuntu on a software RAID array...
I've had a related experience with software RAID and loss of data. What a miserable experience that was. Let's just say that I am never again going to attempt an upgrade where any live filesystem is using software RAID (unless I truly don't care whether I lose the lot). And now back to the topic at hand.
...it's clear that you think evolution produces no predictions and is not falsifiable.
Broadly speaking, you are correct. The "Message Theory" book spends quite some time criticising the theory on this front. The blog I linked to in that other post does a good job (IMO) of criticising the very proposed falsifications to which you link. As for Darwin's remarks, I don't believe that support for his theory would buckle in the slightest under such evidence. After all, the situation he describes could easily be attained under a scenario of neutral evolution, don't you think? Under that explanation, the structure wouldn't have evolved for the other species, but just evolved as a matter of neutral drift. We could even argue that this benefit to the other species may have resulted in a symbiotic benefit of some sort in return, and then we have a selective benefit.
I think that evolution is almost infinitely adaptable like this, and is thus unfalsifiable. Evolutionists are willing to claim that certain scenarios would invalidate the theory, but in practice it's just certain specifics that get abandoned in the face of such evidence -- if anything. The broad, naturalistic shape remains the same.
Actually, I wrote an essay in 2005 on the subject of creation/evolution and the distinction between science and metaphysics. I've just re-read it, and I'd wind up repeating a fair slab of it here in response to much of what you say. Perhaps you'd care to read Don't Shoot the Creationist and see how much it clears up my position for you. Certain of your questions aren't so directly relevant to it, though, and I'll try to answer them here.
I noticed your link to "Message Theory"...
I do so having read the book. I probably still have it here somewhere. Message theory in short is the hypothesis that life was designed specifically to look as though it (a) was not the product of a natural process, and (b) was the product of a single designer. The author discusses how these design goals conflict: emphasising the unity of design can lend weight to the "all life is related" hypothesis present in evolution; emphasising the differences in design can lend weight to the "multiple creators" hypothesis. Much of the evidence for evolution can also be presented as evidence for the "single designer" hypothesis; the interesting part is the "not a natural process" hypothesis, which is where it diametrically opposes evolution.
Of course this re-raises the interesting question as to whether we can discern, scientifically, the difference between a natural process and one that involved agencies not in evidence (like a creator, or a factory, or whatever). As we've seen in this very discussion, strongly held metaphysical beliefs tend to substitute for evidence. Further, although we recognise manufactured products in our daily lives, we don't seem to have any agreement on whether life looks like such a thing. The evolutionist says that life resembles a smooth pebble, easily explained by natural processes; the creationist says that life resembles a stone arrowhead, shaped by a force with a purpose in mind. How do you tell the difference?
...Sagan's heroine discovers an obvious, indisputable message encoded in the digits of pi.
For the sake of scope containment, I'm not going to discuss this from any angle, other than to say
So basically because I am not God, I cannot find fault in God's creations?
No, you can't find fault in God's creations because you don't understand 1% of how it works. The chances that your "design flaws" are correctly explained in terms of you having made an ignorant error are just way too high.
The fact that humans still have gills in early development is a great example of that kind of evidence.
The fact that you think humans have gills in early development is a great example of what I'm talking about here.
A mechanic can tell if a set of wires is in a place that will make it likely to short, and can tell that it should have been put somewhere else. He doesnt need a PhD in mechanical and electrical engineering to tell that it is a bad design. He may not be able to do better, but he can tell a mistake when he sees one.
And he'll sound perfectly credible about it right up until the designer shows up, calls him an arrogant asshat, and explains in great detail all the decisions and trade-offs that went into placing the wires in that way, up to and including the cost to risk ratio of the short happening versus modifying the design to prevent it. That is unless, of course, the designer is a bit of a git -- but weren't you trying to show that bad design is evidence of no designer rather than a bad designer? Your mechanic friend would look pretty silly if he said, "this is a terrible design, so obviously it wasn't designed at all."
Fossil evidence is a type of evidence (it is the second word, right after fossil).
The fossil record is absolutely stunning evidence for the evolutionary history of our planet if you rule out all non-naturalistic alternative hypotheses. Of course, if you've ruled out all non-naturalistic alternative hypotheses, all you're left with is arguments over how we evolved, not whether we evolved. It's not the evidence itself that rules out such hypotheses: it's arbitrary rules regarding the kind of hypotheses that we are allowed to entertain. Bad rules, so far as I'm concerned -- rules which result from philosophical naturalists co-opting science as a whole.
Well, that's part of the problem with attempting to falsify evolution. What was once a valid objection becomes invalid because the target moves.
Evolution in particular, or science in general?
Yes. It's a problem with science in general, but evolution is a particularly hard case. It's a very malleable theory in the broad, and entertains some diverse possibilities. It can move at the speed of a just-so story, whereas physicists are generally constrained in their storytelling by a lot more mathematics and experimental data. It's much easier to find counterexamples for theories of physics that miss the mark, so long as technology is keeping up with the problem. Evolution has it around the other way: it can be hard to find data that contradicts a theory -- or even find enough data to make people consider that the evidence might actually contradict the theory -- but new theories only have to adjust the story to fit that new data. This can be as simple as, "so maybe the dinosaurs were wiped out by famine rather than a big impact, then" -- and now the falsifier (having just persuaded everyone that it wasn't an asteroid) has to demonstrate that it couldn't have been a famine.
I should point out that this isn't unique to evolution. I like to think of science having a spectrum from "harder" to "softer". "Harder" sciences provide falsifying data more readily than the "softer" ones. Mathematics is perhaps the hardest of all sciences, and metaphysics the softest (if you'll allow the looser use of "science" to cover non-physical subjects). Bits of evolution are modestly hard -- where it has hard data like genes, for instance. Bits of evolution are really soft -- fossils are soft data that aren't very amenable to experiment, and are more or less compatible with a lot of explanations. The sciences that Popper accused of being Pseudoscience I think were just too soft for his tastes. There is no real cut-off point.
What's special about the field of evolution that makes the usual scientific process break down? Every other field of science follows the same basic process: researchers present evidence which is then checked for accuracy by their peers. What is it, specifically, about evolution that requires tacking a separate step onto the process of peer review? Why not give that (limited) funding to people who have problems with modern medicine or plasma physics or heliocentricity?
Well, you kind of missed my point. First of all, I'm not talking about a breakdown in the scientific process: I'm talking about taking falsificationism seriously, since it's frequently accepted as a tenet of science. If you're going to be serious about falsificationism, you need to construct experiments with the intention of disproving a theory. The worst person in the world to whom you can entrust this task is the person who came up with the theory. Even if he's not emotionally invested in it (ha! as if!) then he's still probably got the wrong kind of mental approach to the problem. Ideally you give the task to competent researchers who are inclined to think the theory is wrong, and think they know how to falsify it. If they are any good as researchers, they will provide a great service whether they succeed or fail. They need to conduct experiments which could, in principle, produce data that would clash with the theory. If they fail, they produce data that supports the theory; if they succeed, they demonstrate a flaw in the theory. It's win either way.
This is pretty much how it works in the field of cryptography. Someone comes up with an algorithm they think is pretty neat and has certain properties. Others hack away at it with all the malice they can muster. Most algorithms are "falsified" sooner or later (with respect to the properties they claim to have). This is exemplary applied falsificationism in action.
As for which areas should be funded -- I don't know -- that's a political matter. My point is that there s
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Dude! Nice post! I wish I had mod points today. I have only one criticism.
In any case, you need not fear alternative ideas (even blatantly false goofy ones) in your school systems. If anything you should fear people trying to coopt the boards to ensure goofy ideas are taught in a non-critical fashion.
You should be wary of any idea being taught in a non-critical fashion, whether you think it's a good idea or a bad one. Critical thinking skills are much more important than indoctrination in good ideas. The major difficulty you face in this regard is that Evolution is presented as an incontrovertible fact, which tends to dull the critical faculties.
In the immortal words of John Stuart Mill:
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. This is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of, else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. ... So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil's advocate can conjure up.
So flat-Earthers and creationists are actually pretty useful. As you've already pointed out, if you can't defend your view that the earth is a globe against the arguments of a flat-Earther, you really don't know your subject! The same applies for Evolution and Creation.
I note that Microsoft has invested heavily in the German Government (see the end of the article linked in parent). What's with that? Is it damage control in relation to the Munich migration to Linux?
It makes it no more or less likely as an outcome, but the number of possible orderings which have special meaning for us is a vanishingly small fraction of the total number of possibilities. Sure, the cards can be grouped by suit or grouped by rank (2 possibilities), and the suits can be in ascending or descending order (2 possibilities), possibly with aces high or low (2 possibilities), and we don't care about the order of the four ranks (24 possibilities). That's still only a very very tiny percentage of all the possible outcomes. If you managed to shuffle a deck such that it was placed in any of these orders it would be perfectly rational of me to assume that you cheated, precisely because the explanation that it happened by chance is astronomically low.
Every outcome is as likely as every other outcome, but the set of "sorted and grouped" outcomes is miniscule compared to those which aren't. I've described 192 possible orderings of a deck, but this doesn't even make a dent in the 8e67 space of possible outcomes. Sure, it brings us down to 4e65, but there's only 3e8 seconds in a year, so I would expect to see one of these orderings happen at random once in 1e58 years if I shuffled a deck per second for that length of time. Popular theory at the moment is that the universe is around 2e9 years old, so if you claim that you've shuffled a deck and it appeared in one of these orders, I'd have to be a gullible twit to believe you!
This is the shell game you're playing here, whether you realise it or not. You could shuffle and deal out royal flush after royal flush after royal flush, then try to dismiss it with "each outcome is equally likely". That's disingenuous, because if each outcome is equally likely, then we expect it to follow a certain statistical distribution, and your card dealing sure isn't following that pattern! Yes, you can always say post hoc that an outcome was "unlikely" because it was one of BIGNUM possibilities, but the fact that you can always do that is what makes it uninteresting. It's the vanishingly small percentage of outcomes that have some special significance which are interesting, not so much because they have special significance -- that's quite incidental -- but because they are part of such a vanishingly small group that we rationally expect them not to turn up at random. If 50% of all outcomes had special significance, we wouldn't be at all surprised by them (unless they turned up at some frequency markedly different from 50%).
Gah! I can't figure out how to make this concept any clearer. Even scientists who should know better get it wrong with alarming regularity.
There are problems with falsificationism, but it's a popular stance, so let's adopt it for now. The first problem I see with your argument is that an instance of evolution (ignoring questions of scale, for now) does not falsify Intelligent Design theory, because ID is a theory about the past, and the possibility of evolution (at any scale) in the present does not preclude the possibility of intelligent design in the past. Similarly, although it is a documented instance of evolution, it does not confirm the Theory of Evolution to the extent that the theory talks about historical events. The observation proves that a certain kind of spontaneous change is possible, but that's quite a long way from proving that the same kind of changes (in large quantities over long periods) are responsible for the state of the world as we know it.
As to whether either of these theories can be falsified, they probably stand or fall together. At some broad level, ID and Evolution are binary alternatives, lacking a third possibility. Either intelligence was involved in the creation of life, or it was not. Evolutionists can argue over natural mechanisms, and ID theorists can have debates over the nature of the intelligent designer, but the two camps are mutually exclusive and offer full coverage of the possibilities. Thus if you falsify one, you prove the other, and vice versa. They are either both falsifiable, or both not falsifiable -- and if they are falsifiable, they are also provable.
That doesn't answer whether ID and Evolution are scientific theories by Popper's standards, but it narrows us down to, "either they are both scientific, or neither of them is." That's a valuable outcome, if you can accept it, given the sheer quantity of "we are science, they are not" going on.
The facts are the things that provide the evidence to support the theories. Facts are individual, isolated things. Theories weave them together into a coherent story. Facts are events. Theories are things which explain those events. Evidence is a relationship between a fact and a theory.
Gravity is a theory (sufficiently well formulated and reproducible to be deemed a "law"); instances of things falling are facts. The sun-centered (and earth-centred, for that matter) solar system is a theory; planetary motions are facts. Radio waves are a theory; instances of current induced by an antenna are facts. Some of these are really useful theories, aren't they? (Not too sure about the solar system theories, though: do we even care if the solar system has a centre?)
The phrase, "evolution is a fact", is just a really bad way of saying, "history really did happen the way the theory of evolution claims it did". I say it's bad because you can't argue with facts, but you can argue with the assertion that a theory is accurate. In that sense, saying "evolution is a fact" is more like saying, "history really did happen the way the theory of evolution claims it did, la la la can't hear you!"
Evolution is a theory (as is creation or intelligent design); fossils and biological organisms are facts.
I'm Australian, you insensitive clod! How was I supposed to know that international car travel was possible? Every experiment I've conducted resulted in failure and sogginess. Just you try driving your SUV over here, ya damn yank! (Be sure to drive on the left side of the road if you do manage to get here, though.)
I see this fallacy repeated a lot. If you flip an ideal coin N times, the odds of repeating the outcome of that run is 1/(2^N) per trial. The initial run has no probability associated with it, because no "success" and "failure" cases were specified: every possible outcome was equally acceptable. There is nothing at all remarkable about the initial run: it simply reached one of the 2^N expected outcomes.
Just in case you've missed the point, here's another illustration. When you shuffle a standard deck of 52 cards, it winds up in one of 52! (fifty-two factorial, which is about 8e67 in scientific notation) possible orderings. Although only one outcome is possible per shuffle of the deck, each outcome is expected equally, so there is no surprise when the deck winds up in one of these states. If you manage to shuffle a deck so that it matches another deck, then that is a highly improbable outcome precisely because every possible outcome was equally expected, and only one of them satisfied the conditions of success.
Your advice is probably very helpful for someone who has a natural talent for electronics. In my experience, however, very few people have a talent for both the discrete logic realm of computing and the real calculus realm of electronics. The typical software whiz can stare blankly at the simplest of electronic circuits for weeks without comprehending a thing.
I first came to realise this truism when I did an introductory university course in electronic and computer engineering. This was actually two half-subjects with two different lecturers, lab classes, and exams rolled together into one subject. During the lectures, I snored through the computing part on the basis that there was nothing new to me, and I'd furrow my brow in the electronics part because it wasn't making any sense. I followed the concepts through to Ohm's law and Thevenin equivalence, but he lost me with AC circuits and transistors. So far as I could tell, this was a common issue, with about half the class having the converse problem.
I'm just naturally wired for discrete logic, not real calculus, and I'll never be much of an electronics boffin precisely because of that.
The gap is not impossible to cross, however: I'm now capable of designing (or at least understanding) simple electronic circuits involving transistors and such like -- it just took an exceedingly long time for the penny to drop. Once I finally started to grasp how electricity behaved, "The Art of Electronics" started to make sense to me. Note that it didn't teach me electronics, as such: rather, I had to first grok the nature of electricity, and then I was able to understand what it was talking about.
I didn't properly understand electronics until I was able to map various basic electronic concepts into other physical systems. I don't know whether my analogies are very sound, but they gave me a sufficiently good understanding that I can now build working interface circuitry of various kinds, and turn to "The Art of Electronics" for guidance. These analogies include such concepts as "voltage is like pressure or tension; current is like fluid flow or mechanical motion; a capacitor is like a spring; an inductor is like a flywheel." With the aid of these sorts of analogies, I was able to comprehend the behaviour of electronics in a manner that raw mathematical descriptions could never achieve.
On the lowest physical level there are only individual atoms... Up to now I described only physical process which don't per see have any "free will". Then comes a level higher with even more complexity where neuron form complex path and mass, and that is the brain. Show me an ounce of free will. All I see is a very complex system...
That's because your model of the world is rooted in determinism: the idea that the universe behaves in a mathematically predictable way. If this is true, then you need only know the laws of physics and the exact state of the universe at any moment, and predicting the future becomes a matter of doing the sums. [See Laplace's demon ]
The model has tremendous appeal for the mathematically and logically inclined, but there are many reasons why one might object to it. The first and most obvious is to object to the assumption of determinism at its roots. In this age of Quantum Mechanics, it seems quaintly classical to believe in ultimate determinism. Still, scientific wisdom is a moving target, and you can hope for the eventual triumph of determinism over quantum hocus pocus if you so desire -- good luck to you.
Beyond that, we have niggling little problems such as our inability to measure the state of the universe (even locally) without altering its state in unknown ways. Precise measurement is necessary because many of the deterministic laws have chaotic properties. But even if we could know exact values, how would we represent them in computers? To make matters worse, many of the physical laws are such that we can not compute exact answers, but only find approximations. These problems are merely practical barriers to the production of Laplacean demon, though; they are not arguments against the incompatibility of determinism and free will. This incompatibility can be addressed by weakening the definition of "Free Will", but can we take the bull by the horns and reconcile determinism and free will without playing semantic games? I think so.
It seems that there is a chink in the armour of determinism: the initial conditions of the system. Given initial conditions and laws, the fate of the system is sealed, but whence come the initial conditions? This question can not even be answered in deterministic terms unless you hypothesise a deterministic meta-system which produced our system, and commit to an infinite regress of such systems. Thus, the setting of initial conditions looks like a good escape from determinism, even if we grant that the system is entirely deterministic in every other respect.
But what does this say for free will? That some free will was responsible for setting the initial conditions of the universe? How could such a remote possibility impact whether I have free will here and now? This brings us to another set of assumptions: those relating to personal identity . If you consider the extent of your "self" to be the matter of which you are composed, then this remote exercise of free will was certainly not yours. A lump of matter, such as yourself, can not possibly have a free will, since its behaviour is fully determined by environmental considerations. Indeed, the notion of "self" under such circumstances is quite vague, since the material "self" has no precise physical bounds, but interacts with the remainder of the environment under exactly the same set of rules that it operates internally.
So what sort of thing must the self be in order to possess free will in a purely deterministic universe? Clearly it must be the sort of thing that influenced the initial conditions of the deterministic universe (or perhaps its laws, but "initial conditions" will suffice). Thus the "self" must be something at least partially outside the universe as we know it, and the universe as we know it is simply t
I'm more inclined to require that it be ISO recognised and have at least one open source implementation. After all, part of the reason for the standard is to allow governments to publish electronic documents without the populace being forced to pay some corporation in order to read it. If there's no open source implementation, it hardly matters how open the standard is -- you're going to be shelling out something to someone (under the terms of some unconscionable EULA to boot).
When this news broke last night (my local time), my heart skipped a beat because one of my phpBB instances isn't totally up to date, so I did a quick bit of research to see if I could fill in the massive blanks left by this report. Yes, it does look like an SQL injection attack: the attack appends a SCRIPT tag to the forum's main title, which is inserted into various locations on every page from a database field. Due to one thing and another this results in some hideously malformed HTML, but it has the desired effect (of executing the Javascript) in the major browsers. I suspect that the search in question is a Google "intitle:" search which keys off the domain name of the site carrying the exploit code, since this becomes a visible part of the title.
I have no idea exactly how the SQL injection is being effected, but my phpBB forum was not impacted. This may be because my version is not too old, because I lack a vulnerable add-on module, or because my custom anti-bot mechanisms deflected the attack. I couldn't see anything in the past few days of log activity which contained key strings used in the exploit, but I didn't search very hard once I determined that my instance was unaffected.
TFA doesn't say whether he's tried such approaches as garlic, holy water, etc. What is the appropriate ward against Microsoft, anyhow? Come to think of it, I suspect it might be the GPL: their attitude towards GPL'd software is a lot like a vampire's reaction to a cross. So if Yahoo really wants to ward off Microsoft, they should spin off some of their software into a GPL project run by a separate non-profit entity, something like the Mozilla Foundation. Microsoft will recoil in horror. (Not that Yahoo has any software the rest of us would care to see, so far as I'm aware -- but that's beside the point.)
Except for the inescapable fact that its subject matter -- God -- is religious. The most prominent atheists are prominent precisely because of their religious fervour with regards to their atheism, proclaiming it as a great truth, and a great liberator of the mind. They denounce the heathen theists, and proclaim their belief as the one true way. Your argument that atheism lacks the hallmarks of a religion is truly compelling, and yet it does not match my actual experience with atheists. I guess it comes down to the difference between atheism in theory and in practice.
The least religious people I know are not atheists, but those who simply aren't willing to think about such abstract philosophical matters at all. The kind of people who, when asked, "do you believe in God?" answer, "I'm not religious" -- meaning that they don't want to think about it or talk about it, since they subconsciously fear that any conclusions they draw might impact the plans they have to go partying later this evening. I have less respect for that than I do for reasoned atheism.
It's not true that any particular world view has been disproved. It's not even true that some other world view has been more dominant for "hundreds of years". Charles Lyell popularised the principles of uniformitarianism starting in 1830, and Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859. Young earth creationism was the dominant position until these works had a chance to penetrate mainstream thought. Long-age naturalistic evolution is still slightly less than one hundred and fifty years old as a respectable scientific theory.
This would be a minor correction on my part if not for the overall tone of your post, which harps so heavily on the dishonesty of your ideological opponents, and implies that you and your like-minded peers have such a great commitment to truth and accuracy. I'm not going to accuse you of lying to promote your cause (I don't think you're a liar -- just sloppy), but it's only fair to draw attention to the unmitigated hypocrisy in your post.
I'll leave it to someone else to address the other problems.
I'm more interested to know what file access protocol they'll offer. Yes, they'll have a web interface, of course, but I suspect they'll also offer CIFS access (using Samba derivatives at their end). If they did that, then encryption would be possible at the client end, which is where it ought to be (for various reasons) in any case.
That gives me an idea. Attach permanent magnets to the corpse of W. C. Fields, wrap coils around his coffin, and then say you've found a way to turn alcohol into water. Bingo: free electricity.
Morality is about the way things ought to be, and a "moral wrong" is a situation where things are not as they ought to be. This does create a dilemma for people who are both moral realists and strict physicalists (denying that there is anything other than the material realm). The problem is this: if you're a physicalist/materialist, then all real truths are truths about physical things -- about the way things are. Any statement about the way things ought to be can not be a real truth or falsehood, since there is nothing real to which it refers. A genuine physicalist can't consistently make absolute claims about morality for this reason. That's not to say that they can't be moral actors, but their moral code is necessarily fictitious because strict physicalism is incompatible with non-physical realities such as real morality. Physicalism is incompatible with moral realism.
A belief that science provides any kind of access to truth requires considerable faith. Especially given all the evidence to the contrary. "Evidence to the contrary?", you ask, with unconcealed incredulity. Yes -- it's called the "pessimistic meta-induction" -- the idea that new scientific theories so often overthrow older scientific theories that the safe bet is to believe that all current science is a load of bunk that will be overthrown eventually (its usefulness notwithstanding).
You have to start with the belief that it is effective in the first place for that to work! Can't you see that? In any case, I think you've massively overstepped the boundaries to which science can be validly applied. A scientific method is not a scientific theory which makes predictions and faces the prospect of contrary evidence: it is a prescriptive thing which tells you how you ought to go about a process. A scientific method can't be "wrong", because it doesn't make any claims, any more than a recipe makes claims. The "faith in science itself" to which the GPP referred is an attitude that people (like yourself) have towards science, rather than a thing intrinsic to science. Richard Dawkins, for example, asserts, "if science has nothing to say, it's certain that no other discipline can say anything at all." This is a very bold philosophical claim, and well outside the bounds of scientific test. It's only fair to describe such a claim as an "article of faith".
As I understand it, Australia (and probably everyone else, for that matter) has been getting reamed by the USA as regards Internet peering arrangements. Bandwidth costs have always been higher here, and it's not all to do with a lack of local competition, although that used to be a credible story back when Telstra was charging twenty cents a megabyte for permanent dial-up connectivity. These days the economic pressure is mostly conspicuous for the fact that local hosting services are so expensive. If Google busts up that cosy little oligopoly, I'll love them to bits for it. To gigabits, even. (Sorry. Preemptive pun. Someone had to do it.)
Is this a part of Google's answer to the whole carrier sabre-rattling about non-neutrality and wanting a slice of Google's profits? There's no better way to ensure fair treatment than to provide your own infrastructure. Is this Google's way of saying to the carriers, "get over it, guys -- bandwidth is a fricken commodity now, and we're going to compete with you to make it so, so kiss your old monopoly profits goodbye." There's a high barrier to entry in this market, and you'd be mad to buy your way in only to compete all the profits out of it -- unless you happen to be a major consumer of bandwidth yourself, like Google.
Must... not... get... hopes... up...
My point was that they don't reveal your IP address to third parties. There seems to be a bit of clouded thinking on this issue. Privacy is not about how much the company knows, but how much it keeps secret. I share information with Google, and they promise to keep it a secret. So long as they do that, they have upheld their end of the bargain. I'm in control of how much information I decide to give to Google, but I have to trust them not to share it with others. Most webmail services reveal the HTTP client IP to the recipient as a matter of course, using either a "Received:" trace field or the informal "X-Originating-IP:". Google keeps this a secret. They seem to understand the concept of nondisclosure quite well, and have more respect for privacy than I've seen in any other company of its type.
And yet Gmail is the only public webmail service I know that does not include the IP address of the browser (HTTP client) in the mail header fields.
I've had a related experience with software RAID and loss of data. What a miserable experience that was. Let's just say that I am never again going to attempt an upgrade where any live filesystem is using software RAID (unless I truly don't care whether I lose the lot). And now back to the topic at hand.
Broadly speaking, you are correct. The "Message Theory" book spends quite some time criticising the theory on this front. The blog I linked to in that other post does a good job (IMO) of criticising the very proposed falsifications to which you link. As for Darwin's remarks, I don't believe that support for his theory would buckle in the slightest under such evidence. After all, the situation he describes could easily be attained under a scenario of neutral evolution, don't you think? Under that explanation, the structure wouldn't have evolved for the other species, but just evolved as a matter of neutral drift. We could even argue that this benefit to the other species may have resulted in a symbiotic benefit of some sort in return, and then we have a selective benefit.
I think that evolution is almost infinitely adaptable like this, and is thus unfalsifiable. Evolutionists are willing to claim that certain scenarios would invalidate the theory, but in practice it's just certain specifics that get abandoned in the face of such evidence -- if anything. The broad, naturalistic shape remains the same.
Actually, I wrote an essay in 2005 on the subject of creation/evolution and the distinction between science and metaphysics. I've just re-read it, and I'd wind up repeating a fair slab of it here in response to much of what you say. Perhaps you'd care to read Don't Shoot the Creationist and see how much it clears up my position for you. Certain of your questions aren't so directly relevant to it, though, and I'll try to answer them here.
I do so having read the book. I probably still have it here somewhere. Message theory in short is the hypothesis that life was designed specifically to look as though it (a) was not the product of a natural process, and (b) was the product of a single designer. The author discusses how these design goals conflict: emphasising the unity of design can lend weight to the "all life is related" hypothesis present in evolution; emphasising the differences in design can lend weight to the "multiple creators" hypothesis. Much of the evidence for evolution can also be presented as evidence for the "single designer" hypothesis; the interesting part is the "not a natural process" hypothesis, which is where it diametrically opposes evolution.
Of course this re-raises the interesting question as to whether we can discern, scientifically, the difference between a natural process and one that involved agencies not in evidence (like a creator, or a factory, or whatever). As we've seen in this very discussion, strongly held metaphysical beliefs tend to substitute for evidence. Further, although we recognise manufactured products in our daily lives, we don't seem to have any agreement on whether life looks like such a thing. The evolutionist says that life resembles a smooth pebble, easily explained by natural processes; the creationist says that life resembles a stone arrowhead, shaped by a force with a purpose in mind. How do you tell the difference?
For the sake of scope containment, I'm not going to discuss this from any angle, other than to say
No, you can't find fault in God's creations because you don't understand 1% of how it works. The chances that your "design flaws" are correctly explained in terms of you having made an ignorant error are just way too high.
The fact that you think humans have gills in early development is a great example of what I'm talking about here.
And he'll sound perfectly credible about it right up until the designer shows up, calls him an arrogant asshat, and explains in great detail all the decisions and trade-offs that went into placing the wires in that way, up to and including the cost to risk ratio of the short happening versus modifying the design to prevent it. That is unless, of course, the designer is a bit of a git -- but weren't you trying to show that bad design is evidence of no designer rather than a bad designer? Your mechanic friend would look pretty silly if he said, "this is a terrible design, so obviously it wasn't designed at all."
The fossil record is absolutely stunning evidence for the evolutionary history of our planet if you rule out all non-naturalistic alternative hypotheses. Of course, if you've ruled out all non-naturalistic alternative hypotheses, all you're left with is arguments over how we evolved, not whether we evolved. It's not the evidence itself that rules out such hypotheses: it's arbitrary rules regarding the kind of hypotheses that we are allowed to entertain. Bad rules, so far as I'm concerned -- rules which result from philosophical naturalists co-opting science as a whole.
Yes. It's a problem with science in general, but evolution is a particularly hard case. It's a very malleable theory in the broad, and entertains some diverse possibilities. It can move at the speed of a just-so story, whereas physicists are generally constrained in their storytelling by a lot more mathematics and experimental data. It's much easier to find counterexamples for theories of physics that miss the mark, so long as technology is keeping up with the problem. Evolution has it around the other way: it can be hard to find data that contradicts a theory -- or even find enough data to make people consider that the evidence might actually contradict the theory -- but new theories only have to adjust the story to fit that new data. This can be as simple as, "so maybe the dinosaurs were wiped out by famine rather than a big impact, then" -- and now the falsifier (having just persuaded everyone that it wasn't an asteroid) has to demonstrate that it couldn't have been a famine.
I should point out that this isn't unique to evolution. I like to think of science having a spectrum from "harder" to "softer". "Harder" sciences provide falsifying data more readily than the "softer" ones. Mathematics is perhaps the hardest of all sciences, and metaphysics the softest (if you'll allow the looser use of "science" to cover non-physical subjects). Bits of evolution are modestly hard -- where it has hard data like genes, for instance. Bits of evolution are really soft -- fossils are soft data that aren't very amenable to experiment, and are more or less compatible with a lot of explanations. The sciences that Popper accused of being Pseudoscience I think were just too soft for his tastes. There is no real cut-off point.
Well, you kind of missed my point. First of all, I'm not talking about a breakdown in the scientific process: I'm talking about taking falsificationism seriously, since it's frequently accepted as a tenet of science. If you're going to be serious about falsificationism, you need to construct experiments with the intention of disproving a theory. The worst person in the world to whom you can entrust this task is the person who came up with the theory. Even if he's not emotionally invested in it (ha! as if!) then he's still probably got the wrong kind of mental approach to the problem. Ideally you give the task to competent researchers who are inclined to think the theory is wrong, and think they know how to falsify it. If they are any good as researchers, they will provide a great service whether they succeed or fail. They need to conduct experiments which could, in principle, produce data that would clash with the theory. If they fail, they produce data that supports the theory; if they succeed, they demonstrate a flaw in the theory. It's win either way.
This is pretty much how it works in the field of cryptography. Someone comes up with an algorithm they think is pretty neat and has certain properties. Others hack away at it with all the malice they can muster. Most algorithms are "falsified" sooner or later (with respect to the properties they claim to have). This is exemplary applied falsificationism in action.
As for which areas should be funded -- I don't know -- that's a political matter. My point is that there s