This is a myth. Appropriations come from the congress. The white house submits a budget proposal, but the congress is under no compulsion to follow it. It absolutely drives me up a wall whenever I hear a congresscritter bitching about spending, when they voted for the budget!
It's not a myth when the president has veto power and the ability to wage undeclared war. The president has just as much power to "vote" no on spending as anybody in the house or senate does. In fact, his "no" vote is pretty powerful, and his ability to avoid expensive foreign adventures can trim a tidy sum from the budget.
Sure, congress could refuse to pay for his wars, but what would that get them but a reputation for being "soft" on national defense and un-American for not supporting the troops. Why aren't you taking care of the troops that I sent to die? Why??
Portraying any president as an innocent bystander in any budget battle is simply nonsense, especially when hundreds of billions are being spent on military policy over which he has direct control.
The problem arises at high speeds. If I walk away from a fixed point at 3 m/s and you walk away in the opposite direction 5 m/s, it's reasonable to assume that we will be moving away from each other at 8 m/s. In fact, it's essentially true. The problem occurs when we both take off at speeds more like 200,000,000 m/s away from a common point in opposite directions. The simple addition would say that we're moving away from each other at 400,000,000 m/s. At those velocities, the effects of relativity become important, so the actual velocity turns out to be quite a bit less than 400,000,000 m/s. The equation used to add velocities is described here. If you look carefully at the equation, you'll notice that for velocities significantly less than c (the speed of light), the equations more or less reduce to simple addition of velocities. At high veolcities, relativity becomes very relevant and all bets are off when it comes to intuition.
Thanks to the deadlock between congress and the president, which put some brakes on tax increases for a while, yes. In any case, crediting government for the economy is like giving a flea credit for the dog.
I agree for the most part*, but the voters certainly don't. I thought we were talking strategy. All Gore had to do was play up his time in a very popular administration. I really don't think that Clinton's impeachment took any serious wind out of those sails. The people who actually cared about it were, by and large, not Clinton/Gore supporters anyway.
Gore made a lot of mistakes, but the two biggest I can see are: 1) Distancing himself from an extremely popular administration rather than riding its coattails and 2) Letting Nader pick away at him on environmental issues of all things. Of any mainstream candidates, I can't think of many who had a better environmental record than Gore did. Gore should have done to Nader what Bush did to Buchannan: "I'm a mainstream guy who can appeal to both sides, but when it comes right down to it, I can outdo you on the extremist whacko end of things any day of the week."
*I agree in the sense that a President can't rescue a hosed economy single handedly. He can only contribute to general confidence and try to avoid spending like a drunken sailor. A President has a lot more power to tank a good economy than to rescue a good one. In terms of economically sound behavior, though, I give Clinton significantly more credit than I do to the current administration.
How about blaming the asshole who put Gore in the position of having to defend a perjurer?
He would have had a cake-walk, if it weren't for Clinton.
Yes, because Clinton was amazingly unpopular among the electorate. We wouldn't want the baggage of a 2 term President and an administration that presided over a booming economy with a high approval rating to get in the way of Gore's otherwise charming individual message. I put this on the same list as the actors who leave successful TV shows with the "I'm going to be a star!" attitude only to disappear, never to be heard from again.
But I do understand that "no" is the result of a closed mind that is open to no other possibilities. Fixed in the flat earth Dogma.
I really think that the original response was a deadpan way of pointing out that you're wrong to imply that this new piece of data somehow didn't fit with evolutionary theory. If the data point was in conflict, I'd be right there with you. It's not in conflict, though, so you can hardly chalk somebody pointing that out up to "dogma." In fact, the word "dogma" gets thrown around way too frequently by people who are not familiar with the material. They get upset when their armchair notions of the way things seem to be don't match up with the results of careful study, and when the experts point it out, it's not ignorance on the part of the layman. It's always "dogma" on the part of the experts. Not every idea is a ground shaking notion that turns current theory on its head. Some ideas are just wrong. Like the idea that old, nearly unchanged organisms are somehow a problem for evolutionary theory.
There is recent evidence of organic life forms that have fallen from space recently. If this is so then is it not possible that so called "evolution" mat have happened quite differently than the current Dogma.
Sure, it's possible. It's also possible that the AES encryption algorithm may be broken tomorrow, and that would really shake up the crypto world. It has nothing to do with the original point, though, and it's not what you were shot down for saying. I think that the original subject was a rat-squirrel and whether it had any implications for evolutionar theory. If you can think of any, I'm all ears.
Could this mechanism not have somehow involved with prehistoric epidemics, infections and mutations? And before the big "no" comes up again, where is the evidence that it wasn't? And for that matter what is the scientific explanation for the millions of year old fossils being identical to the present day live species? An answer that stands the test of reason is required here which is not "no".
You've gone off on a complete tangent. Lots of biologists would be fascinated by the idea of organisms from space and how they might have affected the history of life's development on earth. Those same biologists would simply answer "no" to your original question. It was thought about, discussed, and put to rest long ago. The fact that you were dismissed for bringing it up is less of a reflection on the scientific establishment's "dogma" factor than it is a reflecton on the fact that you popped up with the biology equivalent of a newsgroup FAQ. Lots of us saw it coming and just had to shake our heads sadly when it was asked.
It also provides a compelling argument that the world might not be as old as we think it is.
Indeed. With only nuclear physics and such on one side and the full weight of a newly discovered squirrel-rat on the other, it's easy to see that the balance of evidence has just tipped decisively.
The same answer they gave to Pons and Fleischman. The usual Scientific black or white dogma. The "maybe" answer never applies. Just ignore anything that might be contradictory. Very scientific, that's how all the new discoveries get made.
No, I think it's just that you really don't understand what you're talking about. Let's use a different example: "Balloon filled with helium falls upward! Is it time to rethink gravity?"
Answer: No. Reason: Observation does not in any way conflict with currently accepted theory. Only with how some people misunderstand the theory.
When you apply your intelligence to reducing the clutter entropy in your house, you prove that energy alone is not enough. My whole point all along has been that entropy reduction also requires the input of information. DNA is not the information but is merely the information carrier.
You're talking nonsense. What you're talking about is only peripherally related to the physical law you're invoking. Try again: Does boiling salt water to produce salt crystals and steam violate the second law of thermodynamics? Am I adding information anywhere, or am I simply putting energy into a system to create a local state of lower entropy by increasing entropy elsewhere? Time and time again, when the thermodynamics debate gets specific, creationists jump back to these general platitudes that have no basis in the actual physical law. The fact that your arguments are semantically similar to actual thermodynamics does not mean that you're applying the second law of thermodynamics correctly. So what's wrong with the salt water experiment? Does the intelligence of the guy turning on the stove invalidate it?
The principle of entropy has far wider applicability than only thermodynamics. Look it up on WIKI under second law of thermodynamics.
Yes, it does. That doesn't mean that you can just apply it willy nilly without defining any terms or showing that it actually applies to the situation at hand. That's where you're breaking down.
Evolution of simple life forms into complex ones has also never been observed, although not impossible. It is just as unlikely as the atoms all migrating to only one part of a container.
If you have two such containers connected with a pipe, the pressure in both of them will be equal. If you can do an experiment by which you are able to move all or, to make it easy, 99% of the gas molecules into only ONE of the containers, you will have reduced the entropy of the system. The constraint to your experiment however is that you are allowed to use energy alone and be dependent on probabilistic procedures. You may NOT employ any kind of pump or mechanism that has a design component.
If you are hung up with the temperature aspect of the second law you may substitute two copper blocks for the containers and a solid copper rod in place of the pipe. Now you must make one copper block cooler and the other hotter. However, the total thermal energy content of the system may not change, in the same way that the sum total of molecules in the two gas containers never changes. Just one gets hotter, while the other get correspondingly cooler. Again, no designed heat transfer device is permissible. This experiment is harder to do, because whole apparatus must of course be thermally isolated from the environment to prevent heat from "leaking" away which would be equivalent having a hole in one or both of the gas holders.
Those experiments are great and all, but you have completely failed to show that they apply to living systems which DO process energy to reduce entropy. That's exactly what they do. All day long. Your argument seems to be: "All things that convert energy to reduce entropy are designed. Life produces localized reductions in entropy by converting energy. Therefore life is designed." Once again, you're presuming the consequent.
You keep dancing around the issue of real science having to prove theories by experiment. No experiment has ever shown complexity arising from simplicity by *any* purely probabilistic, statistical process. That is what must be shown in some way by experiment. DNA stores the information how to construct enzymes and proteins, yet the DNA is made of these. So what came first, the proteins that make the DNA or the DNA that has the instructions to make the proteins of which it is made. Chicken or egg anyone?
You're going to have to DEFINE YOUR TERMS if you want an experiment that shows particular results. What is "complexity" and "simplicity" in your argument? Does freezing water into ordered ice crystals count? What about boiling salt water to produce steam and salt crystals (highly localized reduction in entropy by pushing the entropy elsewhere)? Why do I get the feeling that whatever experiment I come up with to point out that you're flat wrong, you'll simply say that the experiment was intelligently designed, thus invalidating it? Seriously, explain what you mean by complexity. Then apply it rigorously to life. Then explain how the energy conversion that life does is not a violation of the 2nd law but evolution somehow is. You really have to draw a thermodynamic distinction between what life does every day and evolution. I'm just not seeing it. Neither are the majority of the world's physicists and biologists, as far as I can tell.
If you have a problem with the origin of DNA, I can understand that. Nobody is totally sure how it happened. What you're doing, however, is misapplying thermodynamics in a common way, and it's really annoying. Try taking your arguments over to talk.origins. I'd be very interested in what the physicists there have to say. They're usually pretty helpful when it comes to figuring out thermodynamics.
The second law says that everything goes from order to disorder, from complexity to simplicity. It requires energy and the information or programming to counteract this tendency. Lack of order equates to lack of information needed to create the order to counter the law of entropy. You cannot get around the fact that entropy and information are inversely related.
No, that's not what the second law says. That's the "voodoo thermodynamics" that creationists who have never taken a proper physics class like to apply. You're ignoring the very important fact that local decreases in entropy can be gained by increasing entropy in other areas. Thermodynamics is the study of heat flow, and there is more than ample heat flow in and out of our planet and all over the place to allow all sorts of crazy reactions to take place. Stop learning about entropy from hand wavers with an agenda. It is a mathematical subject that can't be addressed rigorously with metaphors.
The code stored in the DNA molecules is the INFORMATION or program that directs the food and energy to accomplish the end goal of reproduction. You can think of the physical cell as the computer hardware, the food as the energy source to run the circuits and the code in the DNA as the program. All programs are products of thought arising in a mind, both for manmade computers and the programs in the DNA. Having the computer hardware and plugging the computer in the outlet is not enough. There has to be the program that directs the purpose of the computer. Food and water by themselves also are insufficient. The program that exactly tells how to utilize this food and water MUST also be present. There is no way around that fact.
The the structure of the muscles themselves and chemical reactions that allow then to operate upon command from the nervous system are all precisely programmed in the codes of the DNA.
Argh! More tortured analogies! What I asked for was an actual argument that applies entropy (heat flow / absolute temperature) to an actual maethmatical argument with the actual 2nd law. Let me give you a hand: 1) Define entropy and how it applies to this situation. 2) Show how we can estimate the amount of entropy in the system. 3) Show that evolution decreases this amount of entropy without the requisite heat exchange, while the growth of a child does not. What's the mathematical and physical difference? You seem to have a philosophical idea, but you can't apply it rigorously to what is really a rigorous framework.
I'm all ears. There are a lot of physicists who would be very interested in seeing you turn their worldview on its ear. Philosophical hand waving is not going to do it, though. You should either make a REAL thermodynamic argument or stop wrapping yourself in a protective blanket of scientific and mathematical rigor when all you have is analogies and poorly defined terms.
Since neither evolution not ID can prove by experiment where that information or programming originated, they are not true science. Evolutionists delude themselves and others by asserting that their belief qualifies as science. People choose to BELIEVE one or the other, but neither can be proved. Once asserts that there is a programmer of life and the other denies there is.
OK, I think you're applying your private version of "information theory" to the actual origin of DNA. It should be clear from observation that the complexity of DNA strands can increase through purely natural mechanisms. It is, after all, an imperfect replacating molecule. You seem to be concerned less with the transformations that DNA has undergone over millions of years than you are with the origins of DNA itself. Well, there's work being done, but that's really not what evolution is about. It's about how we came to have the diversity of life that we have today, regardless of where the original life came from.
It is you that has no understanding of entropy. Here is a quote from the relevant section of WIKI. Look the whole article up. Pay special attention to the "arrow of time" part.
A quote from the WIKI article: "Unlike most other laws of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is statistical in nature, and its reliability arises from the huge number of particles present in macroscopic systems. It is not impossible, in principle, for all 10^23 atoms in a gas to spontaneously migrate to one half of container; it is only fantastically unlikely -- so unlikely that no macroscopic violation of the Second Law has ever been observed."
So, given your understanding of how the 2nd Law applies to evolution, how does the 2nd Law NOT apply to the assembly of a child from a unicellular structure by simply adding food, water, and energy. The 2nd Law is an inherently mathematical law, so hopefully you can produce some numbers, or at least, equations.
Evolution of simple life forms into complex ones has also never been observed, and although not impossible, it is just as unlikely as the atoms all migrating to only one part of a container.
You're ignoring something here: Life brings with it complex chemical reactions that assemble complex stuff all the time. All you need to do is input energy and matter and, under the right conditions, watch complicated structures arise. It's happening all the time. I think that, like the typical creationist argument, yours takes a very precise mathematical idea and applies it in a hand-wavy philosophical way. That's not at all how these things work.
If you have two such containers connected with a pipe, the pressure in both of them will be equal. If you replace the pipe with an intelligently designed power-driven pump, you can get all or most of the atoms into one container only. If you supply energy only, such as heating the pipe or the container(s), there will be be an equal increase of pressure in both containers. Only the DESIGNED pump, supplying energy does the job. Simply put, the sun supplies the energy for all life, but there is also INFORMATION or knowledge needed how and where to apply that energy.
Well, we have power-driven pretty much taken care of. We have energy a-plenty flowing all over the place, so a surprising number of chemical reactions can take place. The contraction and expansion of your muscles is a good example. Of course, your argument would dismiss the example by presuming your consequent: the muscles were intelligently designed.
Information is a product of mind and evolution denies that there is a mind behind the complexity of life. A computer without a program is a door stop. Programs only arise in minds.
I find it fascinating that people drag in information theory and thermodynamics to lend credibility to their "scientific" arguments and then use ill-defined terms and ignore the mathematics of the theories they invoke in favor of arguments that are no less philosophical than "first mover" and other nonsense. What is your definition of information? How are you measuring it, and why do you say that it's a product of mind?
Regardless of what comes after the ellipses, it is the statement above which is the core of my contention. The state should NOT be forcing your children to do anything. I realize that this is a difficult concept for soem of you, but the state has no right to you children (or you for that matter).
Doesn't that assume that your rights as a parent trump the child's rights in all cases? If I decide that my child should not learn to read, write, or do basic arithmetic until he's 18, should that be tolerated? We could go back to the days of young children going to work in factories because it was more profitable for the family in the short term than forcing an education down their throats. I'm not sure that would be quite the utopia some seem to think it was, though.
Ah, yes. Horvind's challenge to prove "the general theory of evolution which believes these [...] events took place without God:
[...] Time, space, and matter came into existence by themselves."
As outlined in Darwin's little known masterwork, The Origin of Spacetime.
Besides, the $1million challenge to prove God exists hasn't been claimed either. By my calculations that makes God four times less factual than evolution. And you can't argue with math... except where it conflicts with some centuries old fairytale, in which case it must be abandoned in favour of 'Intelligent Division'.
That has to be the funniest thing I've read all day. You rock, sir.
And yet, on it's face, that's all the laws proposed in Utah and Kansas require- and scientists fight against such laws.
No, that's not what they require. They're generally worded to single out a particular body of work as though it's especially suspect in order to erode confidence in it. I know you well enough to know that you're smart enough to see the difference. I think that if you actually saw a school board proposal that was a clearly worded lesson on the general philosophy of science and epistemology, you'd get a very different reaction from scientists.
But it's not a particular theory- Evolution isn't a single theory in this case, it's a cross disciplinary network of circular references.
Given your position of philosophical skepticism, I don't see any reason to debate that point.
From the other side, do you have any serious evidence that the picking at creationism isn't an attack on a single (in my opinion very wrong, but still single) theory of human origins? It's just a bunch of extremeists yelling at each other- doesn't matter which side of the battle you're on, I'm saying both sides are essentially wrong.
No, there are a lot of theories (and I use the word in its broadest sense) on the origins of species that most biologists think are silly and would be more than happy to rebut. Right now, a large group of them are hanging around together (even though they're nowhere near in agreement) to take down their common enemy of evolution. The only reason scientists are picking on creationism so publicly is that creationism has been making a full frontal assault on science education. When somebody tries to get phlogiston theory into classrooms, you can bet that the physicists will start "singling it out" just as biologists are "singling out" creationists.
So what? Isn't the saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? What has evolution got to fear from this "special doubt", if the evidence exists?
What has any good idea have to fear from doubt? Well, I suppose we could prove the fundamental theorems of calculus to students and then cast doubt on them for no particular reason. Sure, most students will probably follow them, but isn't that unnecessarily confusing the issue? Should we put similar stamps on historical material about the Holocaust because a vocal minority thinks that it didn't happen? Your position is that all knowledge is provisional, and that's fine. Holding one idea up to scrutiny while leaving the others untouched is not the proper way to get kids to understand that, though. Doing it that way simply erodes education in general. I'm not willing to do that because some people's diety is angered by a particular theory.
I have no problem with applying the disclaimer universally- Newton's theory of gravity or Maxwell's equation are just as mythical as evolution. I see nothing wrong in saying so.
While I'm generally more utilitarian with my epistemology than you are, I think we're in agreement here. What I would like to see is a class that covers the philosphy of science and logic. Once students understand how science works and have a basic grounding in what good arguments and fallicious arguments look like, there would be no perceived need for stupid disclaimers like these. Picking at one particular theory to satisfy a particular religious faction is not a solution to the general problem that students don't understand the scientific method. I think it would simply make their understanding even worse than it currently is.
More fundamentally, the people who are pushing for this disclaimer are not the slightest bit interested in making sure that students understand what it means to be a scientific theory. If they were, their proposals would be much more universal, and they'd actually be GOOD for science education. Instead, they're more than happy to further confuse the issue, all
Here's a simple counter-example. If you were to study the computer code I've produced over the last ten years, you would find a remarkable similarity. I comment in the same style, I create variable names in the same style, I do loops and branches in a similar way, even when using different languages. Were you to look at the history, you might be inclined to believe the the code could fit some "tree of descent". However, every bit of it was designed by a creator. The fact that yesterday's code looks similar to last years is not due to some evolution taking place, it's due to a similarity of author.
I see this argument on a pretty regular basis, and I think it misses something. If I were to examine two of your programs, would I find completely identical strips of dead code that do not actually execute? Or, to take another interesting example: Imagine you have program A, B, and C. C does everything that A and B do. Looking at the source code to C, you notice that it is a concatenation of A and B (or rather, it appears that the code from A and the code from B has been merged verbatim into a third program that does the same thing). If you saw either of these things, what would you guess about their ancestry?
No, if you assume the big bang, then there are predictions about other things that can be made. Those predictions, in themselves, do not prove the big bang theory, any more than they prove the "God distributed the background radiation at 3.7K (or whatever the actual value is)" theory.
No, but it's infintely more useful than the "God did it" hypothesis. The difference is that the Big Bang theory can predict results before those results are observed, whereas "God did it" can only be applied to results after the fact. If you can come up with a testable prediction based on the "God did it" theory, I'd be very interested in hearing it.
The main value of the scientific method is in its ability to disprove. Evidence does not support theories, it can only "not disprove" them. Evidence only supports a theory to the extent that all other theories might be dismissed as incorrect, and then only until a new theory that also fits the "evidence" comes about.
Yes, that's true. Every time evolutionary theory makes a prediction, one can try to test those predictions. When that prediction comes true, you can say that you've failed to disprove evolution. You seem to think that this is a useless construct. Isn't it true, though, that the more successful predictions that are made, and the more we fail to invalidate the theory, the more likely it is that the theory accurately reflects reality?
Thank goodness for that, because even were one able to create a big bang, it would do nothing to prove that the current universe came about as the result of one. This is a common misconception, that showing that something CAN happen a certain way is proof that it DID happen that way. The "Amazing" Randi takes great pride in duplicating alleged psychic phenomenon using slight of hand and other trickery, pretending that by doing something one way he's shown it cannot be done another.
Turning your example around, it DOES prove that there are ways to do those things other than psychic ability. Sometimes more than one exaplanation is possible (psychic powers vs. a simple trick). How do we decide which one is correct? I'll assume that the one that can be demonstrated as having worked in a concrete case to the exclusion of other possibilities (a trick) is more likely than the one that cannot be demonstrated to the exclusion of other possibilities.
Exactly. And thus, what the requirement in Utah and Kansas claimed is essentialy correct. Which makes me wonder why anybody would bother to argue against it, and what such people are hiding.
I don't know of any scientist who doesn't think that children should be taught that all scientific theories are provisional. What they (and I) do have a problem with is singling out one particular theory because it conflicts with the religious beliefs of a vocal minority. If you have any serious evidence that this picking at evolution is a serious attempt at teaching students the nature of scientific theories in general and not just an attempt to cast doubt on a theory that makes some people uncomfortable, I'm all ears. I would argue that the people promoting these disclaimers want exactly the opposite: They want students to think that being a provisional idea actually casts special doubt on evolution. They certainly don't want the students to understand that its provisional status is not at all special in the scheme of scientific theories.
It's transparent and cynical and insulting. That's why we have a problem with it.
Looking for a short DNA match of length 200 (and 200 is a very short DNA stretch) would be comparable to looking for a 50 letter text match. 50 letters is a sentence longer than this one is. What are the odds you will find the exact text "50 letters is a sentence longer than this one is" in someone else's post or in some book? Possible, but very very remote.
It should also be pointed out that given the rules for spelling and grammer of English text, the entropy is extremely low. In fact, most 50 letter combinations are simply invalid for English, while regions of non-coding DNA should be able to contain any arbitrary combination. Off the top of my head (and I'm not too sharp at the moment), it's reasonable to assume that any arbitrary sequence of non-coding DNA is allowable (and non-coding DNA is one of the most interesting markers of genetic linkage). So, at 2 bits per base pair, we'd get 400 bits of information in 200 base pairs. I think that English gives you something like 2.6 bits per character (this is fuzzy crypto memory...), so to get up to 400 bits, you'd be looking at somewhere around 153 characters. Going back to the original analogy, it's possible to write two articles conveying the same information without overlapping more than a handful of characters at a time. If I saw two articles with 153 bytes of identical writing in them, I'd definitely flag them as coming from a common source. Then again, I'm an evil materialist who is unlikely to attribute such an overlap to a miracle.
[I've chosen to reply under your post, but my comments are applicable to all.] The film A Flock of Dodos would be good viewing for anyone on the topic. Reasonable folks on the evolutionary side of this debate are coming out publicly and noting that their peers are the ones responding in a manner that undermines their credibility. From most of the responses here, I see an outright dismissal of the possibility of ID, because of "overwhelming proof". All I am suggesting is that the facts are and should remain open to reinterpretation.
The facts are very much open to reinterpretation. You'll just generally be laughed at if your reinterpration (which, remember, flies in the face of a LOT of good research) leans on something like... well... how about a terrible misunderstanding of the laws of thermodynamics?
What about the concept of entropy and the Laws of Thermodynamics? Without outside influence (in their natural states), systems move from order to disorder. Under Big Bang theory, we have a cosmic explosion that has gradually become more and more ordered while eons and eons have passed.
Like that one.
Am I somehow "unscientific" for questioning Big Bang theory on this basis? If you will be honest with yourselves, I believe many of you are more offended that some in our society would even suggest that there is a God, because it does not align with your beliefs, than you are that a long established theory has come under attack.
No, you wouldn't be "unscientific" per se, I suppose. Just confused as to the meanings and implications of the laws you're invoking. You're welcome to question the experts on a topic, but you should probably gain some familiarity with the material first. Popular science understandings of thermodynamics don't cut it when you hope to destroy a century of astrophysics. You only make the problem worse when you say that they're dismissing you because of bias, rather than because it's abundandtly clear that you don't know what you're talking about. It's also worth noting that the majority of scientists (at least, in the US) are theists, so the idea that they're simply upset that they can't snuff out the idea of God is paranoid nonsense that stems from some sort of persecution complex that I still can't fathom.
Am I somehow "unscientific" for questioning Big Bang theory on this basis? If you will be honest with yourselves, I believe many of you are more offended that some in our society would even suggest that there is a God, because it does not align with your beliefs, than you are that a long established theory has come under attack
Indeed, teach the controversy! The Man is keeping you down! You've shattered Big Bang cosmology with your dazzling misapplication of thermodynamics! We should also keep an open mind about whether or not the Holocaust happened and whether crack is good for you, but most scholars in the relevant fields won't accept either proposition without MOUNTAINS of evidence to contradict what is already very well accepted.
There are plenty of creation or intelligent design scientists formally educated in the forementioned fields of science. Though much of the public at large (including those who have no formal education) tend to downplay the thoughts a theories of this particular set of scientists because they happen to be outside the scientific "norm".
The word "plenty" is a generous one. Behe is the one that comes immediately to mind, and his ideas are not so much downplayed because they're outside the norm as they are tackled head on in the literature. Behe is not particularly interested in admitting this, but his ideas were not dismissed without being addressed. There is a world full of people who would have you believe that they have the Next Big Thing if only the scientific community would stop suppressing them, but the fact is that most of them aren't right. Until somebody puts up something more than an argument from personal incredulity (or tortured mathematics with fuzzy definitions a la Dembski), those ideas are not going to get very far.
If I recall correctly, many great minds were labelled as kooks and hacks in their time, until someone later proved their points scientifically.
They also laughed at Bozo the Clown. These guys have had a LONG time to publish some decent research, and it's just not happening. And it's not for lack of money or public support. They may well be right, but their tactics (go to the laymen and publish books instead of tackling peer review) and their arguments are not promising.
What I am trying to say is keep and open mind and don't shut down ideas immediately because they don't align with your beliefs. Many scientists are just as guilty at doing this, as are creation scientists who deny factual information.
I don't think that's what happens, for the most part. I think that if you look up any significant creationist argument, you'll see a decent sized group of scientists who address the topic thoughtfully and completely. I really don't think you'll find a single argument that has simply been dismissed because it sounds weird. For all of the "creation scientists" who say that they're being silenced by a biased peer review process, I say: post your paper and the rejection letters you got. Let's see them.
Where are the groundbreaking observations from creationists? I don't see any.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_sci entists#Science_or_Scientists_repressed_by_Christi ans Here is a link to an incomplete list of groundbreaking creationists. Individuals who had a firm belief in God and His creation. One that was not mentioned but was definitely a believer in God was, the father of Genetics, Gregor Mendel. If you want to deny these intellects, that is fine. But the fact remains that some of the most memorable scientists also had a belief in a higher-power not of this natural realm.
Yes, many of our advances in science came from "creationists" but you're neglecting to point out a number of things. 1) You confuse "Christian" with "creationist" I seriously doubt that those examples were all creationists. 2) How many of those who belived in a literal Biblical creation were around before Darwin and modern geology? 3) I was actually asking what research creation scientists have done to support their belief in creationism. I don't see any research to speak of. The idea that creationism is valid and scientific because a number of scientists are/were Christian does not follow.
I'll be more impressed when you can say, "X is a creationist and here is is original research that supports creationism," rather than, "X is a creationist and has published a lot of articles on mechanical engineering, so creationism is well-represented in the scientific literature." Belief in a higher power is all go
I agree that I do not have the knowledge that a formally educated biologist does. However I am still a scientist and apply scientific methodologies not only to my field of expertise but to all aspects of life. This would include debates on evolution. There are many individuals who do not have a formal education in a field of science but are credible and capable of higher reasoning.
There is a world of difference between being smart, logical, and analytical about something and actually being familiar with the body of research. The point is that logic is nothing without data, and the debates I typically see from creationists, however well reasoned they may be, are usually based on totally faulty understandings of the body of research or principles involved.
We see nonsense arguments involving poor understandings of information theory and thermodynamics. Another favorite is the argument that "there are no beneficial mutations." Maybe, "We've never observed X in a lab," when, in fact, X has been observed and written up in the literature. Then, there's my personal favorite, "There are no transitional fossils," coming from somebody who has clearly NEVER looked at a significant portion of the fossil record. The world is full of clever but naiive arguments by intelligent but uneducated amateurs. To really turn an entire branch of science on its head requires a little more background reading than most of the critics have done.
The fathers of almost every field of science, made groundbreaking observations, that no other individual had made at that time. Many of their observations form the foundation for educated scholars today. My point is that you don't have to be an expert in a field to understand concepts or low-level detail.
Where are the groundbreaking observations from creationists? I don't see any. I see a lot of amateurish reinterpretations of observations that were made by real scientists, but no significant independent work done to bring anything new to the table. Applying logic, however flawless it may be, to 5% of the data is unlikely to produce anything groundbreaking, especially if it's the 5% that everybody learns in high school. Most of the scientists I know are more than willing to listen to an amateur's ideas. They need to be show some decent background knowledge, though, and people without that background knowledge shouldn't play the arrogance card. The "I've only seen 1% of the data that you've had a chance to look at and even I can see that you're making an obvious mistake!" argument doesn't play well in expert circles for what should be fairly obvious reasons.
I think the point is that the correllation between denying evolution and not knowing much about biology (as evidenced by making demonstrably false statements of fact that any competent biologist would know to be so) is incredibly high. Making statements impugning the research of scientists outside your field without being acquainted with their research is... well... not very logical behavior.
I'm sure you'd be offended if a biologist who clearly knew nothing about modern memory architectures started bashing the prevailing wisdom on cache design. You'd probably be especially troubled if he waved around his PhD in biology and got a lot of lay people to believe that you and everybody in your field are full of crap.
Dinosaur skeletons can be classified as bird-hipped or lizard hipped. We also have exmaples of bird-hipped and bird footed. Why then do the 'experts' claim without a hint of sarcasm that birds evolved from the lizard-hipped variety (like t-rex)?
Also, if these remains show a feathered crest, and are so much OLDER than the dinosaurs which LATER evolved into birds, then does that mean I can be born before my grandparents?
Perhaps it just means that feathered dinosaurs existed earlier than was originally thought? You seem to think that all dinosaurs must have been feathered or all dinosaurs must have been unfethered--always. There's no reason to beleive that other than the simplistic assumption that there is some sort of linear progression from unfeathered to feathered to birds.
Has anyone else heard of circular reasoning? It goes like this: "The fossils are very old because they were found in very old rocks. We know the rocks are very old because they had fossils in them!"
Of course, no geologist has ever thought about that. You've destroyed the entire theory of evolution by pointing out that the geologists have polluted their science simply to cover for the biologists. Have you really thought about this? Not all strata are dated with index fossils. There are other methods and, not surprisingly, their results AGREE with each other. Also, deciding whether something is older than something else can be done using the relatively simple assumption that stuff at the bottom is older than stuff at the top. The relative ages of the strata were worked out well before the theory of evolution even came to be. There is no conspiracy.
It's about time science made the theory fit the evidence, instead of trying to force the evidence in the theory. Science was SUPPOSED to be about finding a theory which could explain the observable facts. Too often now it's about making sure that only observations which are interpreted according to the most popular theory are allowed to be published.
So what's your interpretation of it all? It looks to me like there was a time when dinosaurs existed but there were no birds. Now we have birds but no dinosaurs. Where did the birds come from? Are we just wrong, and did the birds and dinosaurs coexist? Please point to some evidence either way, or you're just another armchair scientist who hasn't looked at a fraction of a percent of what's actually out there.
Questioning a theory is apparently forbidden by those who point the finger at religion for being fanatical.
It's an interesting coincidence that most of the people who question evolution and the age of the earth have a religious bone to pick. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's also clear that most people who post nonsense like the "circular reasoning" argument for geological dating also don't know their asses from holes in the ground. It's pretty easy to put 2 and 2 together and realize that most of their positions are not based on the evidence.
There is so much competition to find the oldest fossils... it really makes me question the dating on this.
Sometimes, things have been re-dated and re-dated each time coming up with dramatically older dates.
Reference?
As a matter of fact, I've heard of incidents where people took samples from living animals, for example, a mollusk, and the dating shows them as being many thousands of years old.
That's to be expected. Anybody who knows how to actually use the dating tools would not do such a thing and expect reasonable results. Anybody telling you otherwise is clueless or trying to manipulate you.
In a book written by Charles Darwin, he meets with an archaeologist digging on Galapagos Island. He watches in amazement as they routinely discard interesting looking samples because there's no way they can be old enough to be found at the depth. This is done routinely even today... if a scientific measurement is not inline with expectations, it's discarded and assumed to be inaccurate.
Reference? Are you just making these things up, or did you read it on the illustrious Internet?
How can we possibly find the truth when researches are both highly motivated to find older and older fossils, and therefore closed minded to ideas that might jeopardize what the currently believe?
Finding truth is easiest when you actually examine the data rather than parrotting unsubstantiated claims made by others. I doubt you'll find much in the way of primary source data that actuall supports what you're saying. Lots of hand wavy "well-known facts" but no real concrete examples. How can we possibly find the truth when so many random folks on the Internet are making authoritative sounding statements about things they clearly know nothing about?
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Sure, congress could refuse to pay for his wars, but what would that get them but a reputation for being "soft" on national defense and un-American for not supporting the troops. Why aren't you taking care of the troops that I sent to die? Why??
Portraying any president as an innocent bystander in any budget battle is simply nonsense, especially when hundreds of billions are being spent on military policy over which he has direct control.
The problem arises at high speeds. If I walk away from a fixed point at 3 m/s and you walk away in the opposite direction 5 m/s, it's reasonable to assume that we will be moving away from each other at 8 m/s. In fact, it's essentially true. The problem occurs when we both take off at speeds more like 200,000,000 m/s away from a common point in opposite directions. The simple addition would say that we're moving away from each other at 400,000,000 m/s. At those velocities, the effects of relativity become important, so the actual velocity turns out to be quite a bit less than 400,000,000 m/s. The equation used to add velocities is described here. If you look carefully at the equation, you'll notice that for velocities significantly less than c (the speed of light), the equations more or less reduce to simple addition of velocities. At high veolcities, relativity becomes very relevant and all bets are off when it comes to intuition.
Gore made a lot of mistakes, but the two biggest I can see are: 1) Distancing himself from an extremely popular administration rather than riding its coattails and 2) Letting Nader pick away at him on environmental issues of all things. Of any mainstream candidates, I can't think of many who had a better environmental record than Gore did. Gore should have done to Nader what Bush did to Buchannan: "I'm a mainstream guy who can appeal to both sides, but when it comes right down to it, I can outdo you on the extremist whacko end of things any day of the week."
*I agree in the sense that a President can't rescue a hosed economy single handedly. He can only contribute to general confidence and try to avoid spending like a drunken sailor. A President has a lot more power to tank a good economy than to rescue a good one. In terms of economically sound behavior, though, I give Clinton significantly more credit than I do to the current administration.
Answer: No.
Reason: Observation does not in any way conflict with currently accepted theory. Only with how some people misunderstand the theory.
If you have a problem with the origin of DNA, I can understand that. Nobody is totally sure how it happened. What you're doing, however, is misapplying thermodynamics in a common way, and it's really annoying. Try taking your arguments over to talk.origins. I'd be very interested in what the physicists there have to say. They're usually pretty helpful when it comes to figuring out thermodynamics.
No, that's not what the second law says. That's the "voodoo thermodynamics" that creationists who have never taken a proper physics class like to apply. You're ignoring the very important fact that local decreases in entropy can be gained by increasing entropy in other areas. Thermodynamics is the study of heat flow, and there is more than ample heat flow in and out of our planet and all over the place to allow all sorts of crazy reactions to take place. Stop learning about entropy from hand wavers with an agenda. It is a mathematical subject that can't be addressed rigorously with metaphors.
Argh! More tortured analogies! What I asked for was an actual argument that applies entropy (heat flow / absolute temperature) to an actual maethmatical argument with the actual 2nd law. Let me give you a hand: 1) Define entropy and how it applies to this situation. 2) Show how we can estimate the amount of entropy in the system. 3) Show that evolution decreases this amount of entropy without the requisite heat exchange, while the growth of a child does not. What's the mathematical and physical difference? You seem to have a philosophical idea, but you can't apply it rigorously to what is really a rigorous framework.
I'm all ears. There are a lot of physicists who would be very interested in seeing you turn their worldview on its ear. Philosophical hand waving is not going to do it, though. You should either make a REAL thermodynamic argument or stop wrapping yourself in a protective blanket of scientific and mathematical rigor when all you have is analogies and poorly defined terms.
OK, I think you're applying your private version of "information theory" to the actual origin of DNA. It should be clear from observation that the complexity of DNA strands can increase through purely natural mechanisms. It is, after all, an imperfect replacating molecule. You seem to be concerned less with the transformations that DNA has undergone over millions of years than you are with the origins of DNA itself. Well, there's work being done, but that's really not what evolution is about. It's about how we came to have the diversity of life that we have today, regardless of where the original life came from.
No, that's not what they require. They're generally worded to single out a particular body of work as though it's especially suspect in order to erode confidence in it. I know you well enough to know that you're smart enough to see the difference. I think that if you actually saw a school board proposal that was a clearly worded lesson on the general philosophy of science and epistemology, you'd get a very different reaction from scientists.
Given your position of philosophical skepticism, I don't see any reason to debate that point.
No, there are a lot of theories (and I use the word in its broadest sense) on the origins of species that most biologists think are silly and would be more than happy to rebut. Right now, a large group of them are hanging around together (even though they're nowhere near in agreement) to take down their common enemy of evolution. The only reason scientists are picking on creationism so publicly is that creationism has been making a full frontal assault on science education. When somebody tries to get phlogiston theory into classrooms, you can bet that the physicists will start "singling it out" just as biologists are "singling out" creationists.
What has any good idea have to fear from doubt? Well, I suppose we could prove the fundamental theorems of calculus to students and then cast doubt on them for no particular reason. Sure, most students will probably follow them, but isn't that unnecessarily confusing the issue? Should we put similar stamps on historical material about the Holocaust because a vocal minority thinks that it didn't happen? Your position is that all knowledge is provisional, and that's fine. Holding one idea up to scrutiny while leaving the others untouched is not the proper way to get kids to understand that, though. Doing it that way simply erodes education in general. I'm not willing to do that because some people's diety is angered by a particular theory.
While I'm generally more utilitarian with my epistemology than you are, I think we're in agreement here. What I would like to see is a class that covers the philosphy of science and logic. Once students understand how science works and have a basic grounding in what good arguments and fallicious arguments look like, there would be no perceived need for stupid disclaimers like these. Picking at one particular theory to satisfy a particular religious faction is not a solution to the general problem that students don't understand the scientific method. I think it would simply make their understanding even worse than it currently is.
More fundamentally, the people who are pushing for this disclaimer are not the slightest bit interested in making sure that students understand what it means to be a scientific theory. If they were, their proposals would be much more universal, and they'd actually be GOOD for science education. Instead, they're more than happy to further confuse the issue, all
It's transparent and cynical and insulting. That's why we have a problem with it.
What about the concept of entropy and the Laws of Thermodynamics? Without outside influence (in their natural states), systems move from order to disorder. Under Big Bang theory, we have a cosmic explosion that has gradually become more and more ordered while eons and eons have passed. Like that one.
No, you wouldn't be "unscientific" per se, I suppose. Just confused as to the meanings and implications of the laws you're invoking. You're welcome to question the experts on a topic, but you should probably gain some familiarity with the material first. Popular science understandings of thermodynamics don't cut it when you hope to destroy a century of astrophysics. You only make the problem worse when you say that they're dismissing you because of bias, rather than because it's abundandtly clear that you don't know what you're talking about. It's also worth noting that the majority of scientists (at least, in the US) are theists, so the idea that they're simply upset that they can't snuff out the idea of God is paranoid nonsense that stems from some sort of persecution complex that I still can't fathom. Indeed, teach the controversy! The Man is keeping you down! You've shattered Big Bang cosmology with your dazzling misapplication of thermodynamics! We should also keep an open mind about whether or not the Holocaust happened and whether crack is good for you, but most scholars in the relevant fields won't accept either proposition without MOUNTAINS of evidence to contradict what is already very well accepted.Not Cheney. He's been known to enjoy a "canned" hunt here and there. Why do the hunting when you can cut straight to the killing?
The word "plenty" is a generous one. Behe is the one that comes immediately to mind, and his ideas are not so much downplayed because they're outside the norm as they are tackled head on in the literature. Behe is not particularly interested in admitting this, but his ideas were not dismissed without being addressed. There is a world full of people who would have you believe that they have the Next Big Thing if only the scientific community would stop suppressing them, but the fact is that most of them aren't right. Until somebody puts up something more than an argument from personal incredulity (or tortured mathematics with fuzzy definitions a la Dembski), those ideas are not going to get very far.
They also laughed at Bozo the Clown. These guys have had a LONG time to publish some decent research, and it's just not happening. And it's not for lack of money or public support. They may well be right, but their tactics (go to the laymen and publish books instead of tackling peer review) and their arguments are not promising.
I don't think that's what happens, for the most part. I think that if you look up any significant creationist argument, you'll see a decent sized group of scientists who address the topic thoughtfully and completely. I really don't think you'll find a single argument that has simply been dismissed because it sounds weird. For all of the "creation scientists" who say that they're being silenced by a biased peer review process, I say: post your paper and the rejection letters you got. Let's see them.
Yes, many of our advances in science came from "creationists" but you're neglecting to point out a number of things. 1) You confuse "Christian" with "creationist" I seriously doubt that those examples were all creationists. 2) How many of those who belived in a literal Biblical creation were around before Darwin and modern geology? 3) I was actually asking what research creation scientists have done to support their belief in creationism. I don't see any research to speak of. The idea that creationism is valid and scientific because a number of scientists are/were Christian does not follow.
I'll be more impressed when you can say, "X is a creationist and here is is original research that supports creationism," rather than, "X is a creationist and has published a lot of articles on mechanical engineering, so creationism is well-represented in the scientific literature." Belief in a higher power is all go
We see nonsense arguments involving poor understandings of information theory and thermodynamics. Another favorite is the argument that "there are no beneficial mutations." Maybe, "We've never observed X in a lab," when, in fact, X has been observed and written up in the literature. Then, there's my personal favorite, "There are no transitional fossils," coming from somebody who has clearly NEVER looked at a significant portion of the fossil record. The world is full of clever but naiive arguments by intelligent but uneducated amateurs. To really turn an entire branch of science on its head requires a little more background reading than most of the critics have done.
Where are the groundbreaking observations from creationists? I don't see any. I see a lot of amateurish reinterpretations of observations that were made by real scientists, but no significant independent work done to bring anything new to the table. Applying logic, however flawless it may be, to 5% of the data is unlikely to produce anything groundbreaking, especially if it's the 5% that everybody learns in high school. Most of the scientists I know are more than willing to listen to an amateur's ideas. They need to be show some decent background knowledge, though, and people without that background knowledge shouldn't play the arrogance card. The "I've only seen 1% of the data that you've had a chance to look at and even I can see that you're making an obvious mistake!" argument doesn't play well in expert circles for what should be fairly obvious reasons.I'm sure you'd be offended if a biologist who clearly knew nothing about modern memory architectures started bashing the prevailing wisdom on cache design. You'd probably be especially troubled if he waved around his PhD in biology and got a lot of lay people to believe that you and everybody in your field are full of crap.