Dinosaurs and mammals did not coexist. There were some small rat-sized reptiles who were gradually evolving from scales to fur, but they did not take-over until after the dinosaurs were wiped out
No, you're wrong. The first mammals were alive long before 65 million years ago, and even the first placental mammals precede the dinosaurs.
Before the K-T extinction, most of them were believed to be small scurrying critters, but that is not to say they weren't mammals. See for example the Wikipedia categories Triassic mammals, Jurassic mammals, and Cretaceous mammals.
And some of them weren't so small: take a look at Repenomamus.
Anyway, I mean no offence by this and I commend your interest in paleontology, but you would do well to not rely on vague impressions from television specials when citing facts like these. A lot of this info is also checkable with a couple Google queries.
Watch the BBC's "Before the Dinosaurs" to get a better idea of how life evolved on earth. There's basically two "families" of animals and they keep alternating in dominance. First one is dominant, then the other, and then the first comes back to prominence. Next time a major extinction happens, it might be the dinosaurs/birds that take over the planet.
Um, no, that's just your interpretation, presumably taken from the fact that the mammal-like reptiles were "dominant" before the dinosaurs, and they are more closely related to us than were the dinosaurs.
But before that, it was other reptiles which for all we know *may* be more related to us. And before that it was random giant amphibians which are equally distant from us and all other reptiles.
In any case, this narrative about "dominance" is a complete misinterpretation of evolutionary history and suggests you're trying to project some kind of modern military idea of "dominance". It's misleading to just look at apex predators and big vertebrates and think of them as "dominant"... by another equally defensible standard, cockroaches have been dominant for the last 200 million years!
You mean it's actually possible to be more of a socialist for Alaska than Ted Stevens?!
You do know that to be an actual socialist (as opposed to a cable-news caricature of one), you have to do more than just spend bucketloads of money on any random thing, right?
Now, I am going to come off sending sexist here but men go into engineering because it's an economically viable way to live their lives while women go into liberal arts because they're "fun".
Sexist and wrong, to boot. I went into computer science because it's fun. Sure it happens to pay the bills, but I assure you that was not what I was thinking of when I was seventeen. (I did a double-major with pure math because that was fun too, though thus far less commercially applicable.)
Of course people *do* choose liberal arts and engineering on economic motives. But asserting that *everyone* does it, and furthermore that there is a clear gender split on this basis, is simply wrong.
You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.
The GP was not complaining that computer scientists get paid more, but noting that complaints about gender imbalance are more likely to be made here because it's a high-income industry.
That's cool with me, but I bet you don't hold Obama to the same standard. When the shoe is on the other foot, it's "trying to show guilt by association."
Well, Obama's been quite lucky thus far in that he has never been in a position to appoint someone to any sort of position for which he could later be criticized... or at least, none of the scandals that have been attached to him have involved any of his subordinates. (Yet!) That's the plus side of having no formal executive experience!
True, I am more willing to presume involvement because Palin was the boss in this instance. And you can claim that's not because of a real distinction I'm making but because of political bias if you want.
But the Obama/Ayers relationship (which is what I presume you're referring to) *is* of a qualitatively different sort than Palin's relationship with her appointee. Equally, McCain's relationship with Keating, G. Gordon Liddy, or John Hagee is a qualitatively different sort than Palin's relationship with her appointee.
Having said all this, that said, based on what I know and my own politics (which differ considerably from Obama's publicly stated ones) I have essentially no problem with the post-1990 Bill Ayers in the first place. So I'll concede it's a bit hard for me to examine whether I'm correctly assessing how much guilt Obama should bear for his Ayers association, since I don't think it's deserving of guilt in the first place.
But if I didn't like Bill Ayers, then sure, Obama ought to wear a bit of that guilt. But knowing someone (or even "palling around" with him) is a qualitatively different thing than bringing him on as your subordinate.
Isn't it the responsibility of the party claiming something to show evidence, rather than requiring the doubters to prove a negative?
As I wrote elsewhere, I am not asserting that we ought to provisionally believe, to some extent, every unjustified claim about every authority figure. But in this case, when the fellow responsible for this practice was brought in by Palin, I am going to require *evidence* before I believe in Palin's involvement or non-involvement.
Finally, as noted elsewhere, at the very least that fact that she would appoint someone who would institute such a policy (whether or not she knew) can be taken as a statement of her character.
I am trying to point out the difference between fact and rumor. As you stated, the fact check link does not provide evidence she did not intervene. At this point, there is no evidence she was even aware of it. There is only supposition by a politician of an opposing party that she must have known. Personally, I need more concrete information before deciding on this issue.
But you didn't originally say you "needed more information"... you said the person who asserted the fact was true was mistaken, which implies that the claim was demonstrably false.
I am not asserting that we ought to provisionally believe, to some extent, every unjustified claim about every authority figure. But in this case, when the fellow responsible for this practice was brought in by Palin, I am going to require *evidence* before I believe in Palin's involvement or non-involvement.
Finally, as noted elsewhere, at the very least that fact that she would appoint someone who would institute such a policy (whether or not she knew) can be taken as a statement of her character.
I guess they are mistaken: Did Sarah Palin make rape victims pay...?
Your link at best does nothing to dispel the rumour.
Fine, so Palin didn't push the policy personally... it was instead done by Charlie Fannon, her handpicked appointee.
Given that she appointed him and was his superior, it's at least plausible that she provided some direction on this issue. And your factcheck link provides no evidence demonstrating she did not intervene.
The problems experienced can be traced back to the 1913. No, not just since Monday.
By mentioning 1913, around when income tax began to be collected, are you perhaps referring to the fact that mortgage interest is tax-deductible in the U.S.? I was very surprised to hear that, as it's never been true here in Canada.
It's mostly not Christian creationists - they remain a vanishingly small minority. It's Muslims - a substantial number of them do believe that rubbish.
I have no doubt that is true, though its truth is largely a consequence of the fact that old creationist beliefs in Muslim countries have not yet been subjected to the same cultural pressures as Western European ones have.
Respect for science and rational inquiry arose out of seeing firsthand what these things could *do*, and the respect for science was cultivated for centuries before Darwin. The rate of discovery was fast, but not fast enough that most people couldn't adjust.
(If evolution had been "unlucky" enough to have been discovered in the age of Copernicus or Newton, we could well have had a sufficiently large backlash from those who didn't like their worldviews shattered in many & myriad ways to end the Enlightenment altogether.)
In any case, while I have occasionally seen pamphlets, websites, or TV programs by Muslims endorsing creationist views as per the Qu'ran, I've not yet seen any attempt to seriously push for it in Western countries. In my experience, the militant creationist movement is associated exclusively with the American Christian religious right and their fellow-travellers.
I don't believe Reiss is seriously advocating teaching creationism, and I don't think he deserved to lose his job over this; now and then some well-meaning person tries to split the difference and "discuss the controversy" (it happened in Ontario in our last provincial election to the Conservative leader).
Frankly, though, this is one point on which am I quite happy to take a militant position. We don't give the Flat Earthers any free coverage in our classrooms, and I don't see why this ought to be any different.
The 'scientific consensus that has held for decades' is already well on the way out. If a popular (but not yet popular enough - everyone read Jasper Fforde!) author can use the more up-to-date view and achieve decent sales figures, it seems to me that popular culture has already caught up.
The book certainly sounds interesting, but one counterexample does not disprove the trend. Even the hominids in 2001 back in the Sixties were assigned more complexity and grace than the conventional depiction of a "caveman".
If you took a survey of public perception of the term "Neanderthal", I expect that in most cases the responses would give the conventional brutish description.
Finding evidence that may alter the "scientific consensus that has held for decades" is not debunking. It is the normal process of science. Debunking is the process of correcting misconceptions and exposing false, unscientific, or non-evidence based claims.
Furthermore, it's been a very long time since there was any scientific consensus about the "stupid Neanderthal" anyway. As another poster said, popular culture != science. The American Museum of Natural History has a now decades-old depiction of a Neanderthal in a suit & tie as part of an exhibit debunking the old popular-science depiction of Neanderthals as unsavoury brutes.
I recently read one of the more interesting ideas about how Neanderthals' brains differs from ours; this idea is due to Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind as described in Britain BC by Francis Pryor. Basically, his idea from interpreting Neanderthal art and tools is that they were no less intelligent but more "domain specific" than we are; they could excel at specialized tasks but fail to seize upon those very important cross-disciplinary insights involving multiple disparate fields of endeavour, which provide the basis for all our inventions.
In Britain BC, Pryor paints a picture of Neanderthals as a bunch of obsessive and overspecialized collectors. In reading about these somewhat Aspergian-sounding traits, I remember thinking that these guys would probably have made great coders! (Though maybe not project managers.)
However, 400 years after it was written down, it was found to match a random piece that was retrieved from a 150AD bible letter-for-letter.
Okay, it wasn't clear to me from your previous post that the 150 AD texts had been recently found (or, at least, found after Erasmus' time) and thus provided somewhat more objective validation of his text.
By contrast I would like to make the point that, by comparison, for the quran, it is a certainty that there isn't even 1 single letter that matches (because the claimed "original" is a translation made after the original language had been dead for over 500 years), and it's "unchangedness" is accepted on wikipedia without question.
Well, a few points in response to this: 1) A cursory read of Qu'ran and Origin and development of the Qur'an does not bear out this description. There's a reasonable portrayal of scholarly debate about whether Uthman's version of the Qu'ran can be accepted as genuine, and the statement that "The oldest existing copy of the full text is from the ninth century." Nowhere have I found an unqualified assertion that the Qu'ran has not changed since Mohammed's time.
2) This "original language" which had been dead for 500 years... I assume you're referring to classical Arabic? I don't know much about Arabic, but I'm sure it underwent quite a bit of change between Mohammed's time and the ninth century (300 years later), as it had become a major language of scholarship, trade, and imperial administration. But I understand the more ancient form of the language to be intercomprehensible with the Arabic of the Umayyad caliphate, so it doesn't seem fair to regard the older form as a "dead language".
Even though no one today speaks like Shakespeare, his language is not "dead" to us as English speakers; it won't be dead until it needs to be translated to be understood. That said, I wouldn't necessarily trust a modernized Shakespeare to effectively convey the impressions of the original, so your point about the importance of original language stands.
3) If the Qu'ran being expressed in the original language is so terribly important, doesn't this argument come back to bite the New Testament? Jesus was by all accounts an Aramaic or Hebrew speaker, yet much of his recorded words are in Greek.
Even though there are various historical versions of the Bible, the version used as a basis for basically all modern versions is the "textus receptus" from erasmus, created in 1516.
The Wikipedia article on the Textus Receptus does not paint a glowing picture of unimpeachable historicity for the text. I can't figure out which 150 AD text you're referring to. If however it was incomplete, what does it prove that the existing fragments do match? It says nothing about the other parts.
And in any case we have the potential problem of circular logic, if Erasmus used this Greek original fragment or some derivative of it as a source. If he did, the fragmentary portions may be solid because of the age of first attestation, but the provenance of the remaining portions is unknown.
I mean, come on... it's already the brunt of every New York comedian's jokes, and now you Brits are trying to demote it to a mere "city"
Um, the article is from the Victoria Times-Colonist, in British Columbia, Canada. The fact that the domain name is "canada.com" might have been a tip-off. While Victoria is more British than most Canadian cities, it's still run by us colonials.
I'm assuming it was the extra vowels in "phosphorous" which made you think it was British. We Canadians are remarkably inconsistent in our chemical nomenclature... I personally would write "sulphur" (British) but "aluminum" and "phosphorus" (American).
Short of world ending event, which is almost impossible, we will retain most, if not all of our information.
But much of the Romans' information was retained as well... or at least, far more than anybody in the medieval era was willing to extend.
Even if all our data does survive, it's a different question of whether the culture necessary to interpret and use it effectively will. As long as the data survives, *someone* will re-learn things and use it eventually, but we could contemplate a period of medieval-style stasis, during which information is preserved and revered but not extended.
Joe Wilson went on a fact-finding mission to Niger and returned and reported that Saddam was likely trying to get more yellowcake from Niger in his report. Wilson said Cheney sent him on that trip to Niger (lie). Then Wilson wrote the opposite of his report findings in a NY Times Op-Ed, that Saddam wasn't seeking more yellowcake. So either Wilson was lying the first time or the second. Which was it?
I've never seen this argument (that Wilson changed his story) before, and I can't find an easy summary of what his report said. But let's suppose your claim is true: Wilson said Saddam was "likely trying" to get yellowcake from Niger:
Saying that claim X is "probably true" is a far cry from saying that there is proof or compelling evidence for it. There is no shortage of plausible hypotheses in this world which a reasonable person might suspect and which follow deductively but for which there is no compelling evidence because they happen to be false!
In any case, even if we are utterly uncharitable towards Wilson, at worst his report had no intelligence value. Nothing Wilson said or did changes the important point, which was that Bush made a grandiose claim to justify a war based on no solid evidence.
Well, I hope someone is checking whether this thing is truly RFC 2324 compliant.
I was just going to mention that RFC 2324 considered this problem way back in 1998, in section 7 "Security Considerations":
7. Security Considerations
Anyone who gets in between me and my morning coffee should be insecure.
Unmoderated access to unprotected coffee pots from Internet users might lead to several kinds of "denial of coffee service" attacks. The improper use of filtration devices might admit trojan grounds. Filtration is not a good virus protection method.
Let's say homosexuality has no inherant value, since there is no way to produce offspring this way.
What 'value' does homosexuality bring?
First, I never argued that things should be banned merely because they have no value, but because they have no net value. Anyway, your reductio ad absurdum is absurd in itself. I think we've long since realized that sex is about more than procreation, so homosexuality has value as the natural means of sexual fulfilment for homosexuals.
Talking of which, every time Mustafa blows himself up, 72 innocent virgins die, by definition.
Like kittens, but different!
Anyway, for all you know, the virgins could have been hanging out in heaven for ages upon ages prior to his arrival.
I was thinking about how so many virgins ended up in heaven, and the first thought that entered my head was "infant mortality." Now that's just creepy, but then why should dead babies have to remain mewling and puking infants for the rest of their existences? They should be entitled to sentience and some fun as well.
I never thought of this before, but what does being a virgin in heaven even mean? It's a rather corporeal property, no? And, not having bodies to speak of, do they remain virgins afterward their liaisons with the newly arrived fellow?
And yet in North America (or Canada at least) they want to fight murder by banning guns.
That's because they (myself included) believe that knives, books, and privacy have inherent value that exceed the virtue of banning them for the purposes of controlling murder, hate speech, and conspiracies, and further believe that guns do not have such value for most private civilians.
You could argue this by saying, I guess, that declaring that something must have value to be permitted is meaningless, since any dictator who wanted to ban books would just declare that books lack value (and indeed they do). I suppose this notion of "value" has to be defined by popular consensus, so if you can get enough people to say guns have inherent value (e.g. to overthrow the government through a "well-regulated militia") then go ahead. Such a popular consensus in favour of guns does not exist in Canada, so they ought to be banned.
A lot of people in remote northern parts of the UK have been shown to have Viking DNA.
Well, absolutely true, but what is "Viking DNA" anyway?
In the Anglo-Saxon era Britain and Iceland were essentially part of Scandanavia. They had Norse kings, Norse settlers, and in England spoke a language (Old English) which was essentially mutually comprehensible with Old Norse.
There's no easy way to draw a line and say what's Viking and what isn't. It makes almost as much sense to have a genetic test for "Canadian DNA". I'm sure the DNA-testing companies would love to sell you that kit as well, for an extra $29.95!
Their 'private language' turned out to be Old Norse, handed down from their Viking ancestors. A lot of people in remote northern parts of the UK have been shown to have Viking DNA.
The language claim is almost certainly an exaggeration. Languages almost never survive unchanged over a thousand-year timespan when spoken by a small remote group without a literary tradition. As well, such a thing would have gotten a lot of publicity, and I've never heard of it before. It's true that the Norn language, which evolved out of Old Norse, was spoken in Shetland and Orkney until the 1800s, but no new group of Old Norse-descended speakers has been found.
There are a lot of Norse loanwords around, particularly Scots and other northern variants, but also in English too. Even the words "they/their/them" are Norse. (The Anglo-Saxons said "hie/hiera/him".) More likely, the original story is that some British soldier who spoke some English dialect discovered that some weird words which he'd formerly thought unique to his dialect had parallels in Old Norse and Icelandic. It's not quite the same as speaking Old Norse!
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Dinosaurs and mammals did not coexist. There were some small rat-sized reptiles who were gradually evolving from scales to fur, but they did not take-over until after the dinosaurs were wiped out
No, you're wrong. The first mammals were alive long before 65 million years ago, and even the first placental mammals precede the dinosaurs.
Before the K-T extinction, most of them were believed to be small scurrying critters, but that is not to say they weren't mammals. See for example the Wikipedia categories Triassic mammals, Jurassic mammals, and Cretaceous mammals.
And some of them weren't so small: take a look at Repenomamus.
Anyway, I mean no offence by this and I commend your interest in paleontology, but you would do well to not rely on vague impressions from television specials when citing facts like these. A lot of this info is also checkable with a couple Google queries.
Watch the BBC's "Before the Dinosaurs" to get a better idea of how life evolved on earth. There's basically two "families" of animals and they keep alternating in dominance. First one is dominant, then the other, and then the first comes back to prominence. Next time a major extinction happens, it might be the dinosaurs/birds that take over the planet.
Um, no, that's just your interpretation, presumably taken from the fact that the mammal-like reptiles were "dominant" before the dinosaurs, and they are more closely related to us than were the dinosaurs.
But before that, it was other reptiles which for all we know *may* be more related to us. And before that it was random giant amphibians which are equally distant from us and all other reptiles.
In any case, this narrative about "dominance" is a complete misinterpretation of evolutionary history and suggests you're trying to project some kind of modern military idea of "dominance". It's misleading to just look at apex predators and big vertebrates and think of them as "dominant"... by another equally defensible standard, cockroaches have been dominant for the last 200 million years!
You mean it's actually possible to be more of a socialist for Alaska than Ted Stevens?!
You do know that to be an actual socialist (as opposed to a cable-news caricature of one), you have to do more than just spend bucketloads of money on any random thing, right?
Now, I am going to come off sending sexist here but men go into engineering because it's an economically viable way to live their lives while women go into liberal arts because they're "fun".
Sexist and wrong, to boot. I went into computer science because it's fun. Sure it happens to pay the bills, but I assure you that was not what I was thinking of when I was seventeen. (I did a double-major with pure math because that was fun too, though thus far less commercially applicable.)
Of course people *do* choose liberal arts and engineering on economic motives. But asserting that *everyone* does it, and furthermore that there is a clear gender split on this basis, is simply wrong.
You don't get paid based on how much you or anyone else thinks you deserve. You get paid based on what salary you can command, which is regulated by supply and demand.
The GP was not complaining that computer scientists get paid more, but noting that complaints about gender imbalance are more likely to be made here because it's a high-income industry.
Apparently even Jesus had a sense of humour. "Peter you are my rock" is probably the most famous pun in the world (Peter = rock).
Dude, he was called Peter (Petrus in Latin, Cephas in Greek, both meaning "rock") *because* the J-Man said he was his rock?
This is like saying that Snoop Dogg appearing in music videos with a canine companion is a clever pun.
That's cool with me, but I bet you don't hold Obama to the same standard. When the shoe is on the other foot, it's "trying to show guilt by association."
Well, Obama's been quite lucky thus far in that he has never been in a position to appoint someone to any sort of position for which he could later be criticized... or at least, none of the scandals that have been attached to him have involved any of his subordinates. (Yet!) That's the plus side of having no formal executive experience!
True, I am more willing to presume involvement because Palin was the boss in this instance. And you can claim that's not because of a real distinction I'm making but because of political bias if you want.
But the Obama/Ayers relationship (which is what I presume you're referring to) *is* of a qualitatively different sort than Palin's relationship with her appointee. Equally, McCain's relationship with Keating, G. Gordon Liddy, or John Hagee is a qualitatively different sort than Palin's relationship with her appointee.
Having said all this, that said, based on what I know and my own politics (which differ considerably from Obama's publicly stated ones) I have essentially no problem with the post-1990 Bill Ayers in the first place. So I'll concede it's a bit hard for me to examine whether I'm correctly assessing how much guilt Obama should bear for his Ayers association, since I don't think it's deserving of guilt in the first place.
But if I didn't like Bill Ayers, then sure, Obama ought to wear a bit of that guilt. But knowing someone (or even "palling around" with him) is a qualitatively different thing than bringing him on as your subordinate.
Isn't it the responsibility of the party claiming something to show evidence, rather than requiring the doubters to prove a negative?
As I wrote elsewhere, I am not asserting that we ought to provisionally believe, to some extent, every unjustified claim about every authority figure. But in this case, when the fellow responsible for this practice was brought in by Palin, I am going to require *evidence* before I believe in Palin's involvement or non-involvement.
Finally, as noted elsewhere, at the very least that fact that she would appoint someone who would institute such a policy (whether or not she knew) can be taken as a statement of her character.
I am trying to point out the difference between fact and rumor. As you stated, the fact check link does not provide evidence she did not intervene. At this point, there is no evidence she was even aware of it. There is only supposition by a politician of an opposing party that she must have known. Personally, I need more concrete information before deciding on this issue.
But you didn't originally say you "needed more information"... you said the person who asserted the fact was true was mistaken, which implies that the claim was demonstrably false.
I am not asserting that we ought to provisionally believe, to some extent, every unjustified claim about every authority figure. But in this case, when the fellow responsible for this practice was brought in by Palin, I am going to require *evidence* before I believe in Palin's involvement or non-involvement.
Finally, as noted elsewhere, at the very least that fact that she would appoint someone who would institute such a policy (whether or not she knew) can be taken as a statement of her character.
I guess they are mistaken: Did Sarah Palin make rape victims pay...?
Your link at best does nothing to dispel the rumour.
Fine, so Palin didn't push the policy personally... it was instead done by Charlie Fannon, her handpicked appointee.
Given that she appointed him and was his superior, it's at least plausible that she provided some direction on this issue. And your factcheck link provides no evidence demonstrating she did not intervene.
The problems experienced can be traced back to the 1913. No, not just since Monday.
By mentioning 1913, around when income tax began to be collected, are you perhaps referring to the fact that mortgage interest is tax-deductible in the U.S.? I was very surprised to hear that, as it's never been true here in Canada.
It's mostly not Christian creationists - they remain a vanishingly small minority. It's Muslims - a substantial number of them do believe that rubbish.
I have no doubt that is true, though its truth is largely a consequence of the fact that old creationist beliefs in Muslim countries have not yet been subjected to the same cultural pressures as Western European ones have.
Respect for science and rational inquiry arose out of seeing firsthand what these things could *do*, and the respect for science was cultivated for centuries before Darwin. The rate of discovery was fast, but not fast enough that most people couldn't adjust.
(If evolution had been "unlucky" enough to have been discovered in the age of Copernicus or Newton, we could well have had a sufficiently large backlash from those who didn't like their worldviews shattered in many & myriad ways to end the Enlightenment altogether.)
In any case, while I have occasionally seen pamphlets, websites, or TV programs by Muslims endorsing creationist views as per the Qu'ran, I've not yet seen any attempt to seriously push for it in Western countries. In my experience, the militant creationist movement is associated exclusively with the American Christian religious right and their fellow-travellers.
I don't believe Reiss is seriously advocating teaching creationism, and I don't think he deserved to lose his job over this; now and then some well-meaning person tries to split the difference and "discuss the controversy" (it happened in Ontario in our last provincial election to the Conservative leader).
Frankly, though, this is one point on which am I quite happy to take a militant position. We don't give the Flat Earthers any free coverage in our classrooms, and I don't see why this ought to be any different.
The 'scientific consensus that has held for decades' is already well on the way out. If a popular (but not yet popular enough - everyone read Jasper Fforde!) author can use the more up-to-date view and achieve decent sales figures, it seems to me that popular culture has already caught up.
The book certainly sounds interesting, but one counterexample does not disprove the trend. Even the hominids in 2001 back in the Sixties were assigned more complexity and grace than the conventional depiction of a "caveman".
If you took a survey of public perception of the term "Neanderthal", I expect that in most cases the responses would give the conventional brutish description.
Finding evidence that may alter the "scientific consensus that has held for decades" is not debunking. It is the normal process of science. Debunking is the process of correcting misconceptions and exposing false, unscientific, or non-evidence based claims.
Furthermore, it's been a very long time since there was any scientific consensus about the "stupid Neanderthal" anyway. As another poster said, popular culture != science. The American Museum of Natural History has a now decades-old depiction of a Neanderthal in a suit & tie as part of an exhibit debunking the old popular-science depiction of Neanderthals as unsavoury brutes.
I recently read one of the more interesting ideas about how Neanderthals' brains differs from ours; this idea is due to Steven Mithen's The Prehistory of the Mind as described in Britain BC by Francis Pryor. Basically, his idea from interpreting Neanderthal art and tools is that they were no less intelligent but more "domain specific" than we are; they could excel at specialized tasks but fail to seize upon those very important cross-disciplinary insights involving multiple disparate fields of endeavour, which provide the basis for all our inventions.
In Britain BC, Pryor paints a picture of Neanderthals as a bunch of obsessive and overspecialized collectors. In reading about these somewhat Aspergian-sounding traits, I remember thinking that these guys would probably have made great coders! (Though maybe not project managers.)
However, 400 years after it was written down, it was found to match a random piece that was retrieved from a 150AD bible letter-for-letter.
Okay, it wasn't clear to me from your previous post that the 150 AD texts had been recently found (or, at least, found after Erasmus' time) and thus provided somewhat more objective validation of his text.
By contrast I would like to make the point that, by comparison, for the quran, it is a certainty that there isn't even 1 single letter that matches (because the claimed "original" is a translation made after the original language had been dead for over 500 years), and it's "unchangedness" is accepted on wikipedia without question.
Well, a few points in response to this:
1) A cursory read of Qu'ran and Origin and development of the Qur'an does not bear out this description. There's a reasonable portrayal of scholarly debate about whether Uthman's version of the Qu'ran can be accepted as genuine, and the statement that "The oldest existing copy of the full text is from the ninth century." Nowhere have I found an unqualified assertion that the Qu'ran has not changed since Mohammed's time.
2) This "original language" which had been dead for 500 years... I assume you're referring to classical Arabic? I don't know much about Arabic, but I'm sure it underwent quite a bit of change between Mohammed's time and the ninth century (300 years later), as it had become a major language of scholarship, trade, and imperial administration. But I understand the more ancient form of the language to be intercomprehensible with the Arabic of the Umayyad caliphate, so it doesn't seem fair to regard the older form as a "dead language".
Even though no one today speaks like Shakespeare, his language is not "dead" to us as English speakers; it won't be dead until it needs to be translated to be understood. That said, I wouldn't necessarily trust a modernized Shakespeare to effectively convey the impressions of the original, so your point about the importance of original language stands.
3) If the Qu'ran being expressed in the original language is so terribly important, doesn't this argument come back to bite the New Testament? Jesus was by all accounts an Aramaic or Hebrew speaker, yet much of his recorded words are in Greek.
Even though there are various historical versions of the Bible, the version used as a basis for basically all modern versions is the "textus receptus" from erasmus, created in 1516.
The Wikipedia article on the Textus Receptus does not paint a glowing picture of unimpeachable historicity for the text. I can't figure out which 150 AD text you're referring to. If however it was incomplete, what does it prove that the existing fragments do match? It says nothing about the other parts.
And in any case we have the potential problem of circular logic, if Erasmus used this Greek original fragment or some derivative of it as a source. If he did, the fragmentary portions may be solid because of the age of first attestation, but the provenance of the remaining portions is unknown.
I mean, come on... it's already the brunt of every New York comedian's jokes, and now you Brits are trying to demote it to a mere "city"
Um, the article is from the Victoria Times-Colonist, in British Columbia, Canada. The fact that the domain name is "canada.com" might have been a tip-off. While Victoria is more British than most Canadian cities, it's still run by us colonials.
I'm assuming it was the extra vowels in "phosphorous" which made you think it was British. We Canadians are remarkably inconsistent in our chemical nomenclature... I personally would write "sulphur" (British) but "aluminum" and "phosphorus" (American).
Short of world ending event, which is almost impossible, we will retain most, if not all of our information.
But much of the Romans' information was retained as well... or at least, far more than anybody in the medieval era was willing to extend.
Even if all our data does survive, it's a different question of whether the culture necessary to interpret and use it effectively will. As long as the data survives, *someone* will re-learn things and use it eventually, but we could contemplate a period of medieval-style stasis, during which information is preserved and revered but not extended.
Joe Wilson went on a fact-finding mission to Niger and returned and reported that Saddam was likely trying to get more yellowcake from Niger in his report. Wilson said Cheney sent him on that trip to Niger (lie). Then Wilson wrote the opposite of his report findings in a NY Times Op-Ed, that Saddam wasn't seeking more yellowcake. So either Wilson was lying the first time or the second. Which was it?
Wilson has certainly stated more unequivocally false things than your examples, including that his trip to Niger had nothing to do with his wife. If this was indeed false, which it seems to be, he certainly ought to have known this.
I've never seen this argument (that Wilson changed his story) before, and I can't find an easy summary of what his report said. But let's suppose your claim is true: Wilson said Saddam was "likely trying" to get yellowcake from Niger:
Saying that claim X is "probably true" is a far cry from saying that there is proof or compelling evidence for it. There is no shortage of plausible hypotheses in this world which a reasonable person might suspect and which follow deductively but for which there is no compelling evidence because they happen to be false!
In any case, even if we are utterly uncharitable towards Wilson, at worst his report had no intelligence value. Nothing Wilson said or did changes the important point, which was that Bush made a grandiose claim to justify a war based on no solid evidence.
I was just going to mention that RFC 2324 considered this problem way back in 1998, in section 7 "Security Considerations":
Let's play your game for a moment.
Let's say homosexuality has no inherant value, since there is no way to produce offspring this way.
What 'value' does homosexuality bring?
First, I never argued that things should be banned merely because they have no value, but because they have no net value. Anyway, your reductio ad absurdum is absurd in itself. I think we've long since realized that sex is about more than procreation, so homosexuality has value as the natural means of sexual fulfilment for homosexuals.
Talking of which, every time Mustafa blows himself up, 72 innocent virgins die, by definition.
Like kittens, but different!
Anyway, for all you know, the virgins could have been hanging out in heaven for ages upon ages prior to his arrival.
I was thinking about how so many virgins ended up in heaven, and the first thought that entered my head was "infant mortality." Now that's just creepy, but then why should dead babies have to remain mewling and puking infants for the rest of their existences? They should be entitled to sentience and some fun as well.
I never thought of this before, but what does being a virgin in heaven even mean? It's a rather corporeal property, no? And, not having bodies to speak of, do they remain virgins afterward their liaisons with the newly arrived fellow?
And yet in North America (or Canada at least) they want to fight murder by banning guns.
That's because they (myself included) believe that knives, books, and privacy have inherent value that exceed the virtue of banning them for the purposes of controlling murder, hate speech, and conspiracies, and further believe that guns do not have such value for most private civilians.
You could argue this by saying, I guess, that declaring that something must have value to be permitted is meaningless, since any dictator who wanted to ban books would just declare that books lack value (and indeed they do). I suppose this notion of "value" has to be defined by popular consensus, so if you can get enough people to say guns have inherent value (e.g. to overthrow the government through a "well-regulated militia") then go ahead. Such a popular consensus in favour of guns does not exist in Canada, so they ought to be banned.
A lot of people in remote northern parts of the UK have been shown to have Viking DNA.
Well, absolutely true, but what is "Viking DNA" anyway?
In the Anglo-Saxon era Britain and Iceland were essentially part of Scandanavia. They had Norse kings, Norse settlers, and in England spoke a language (Old English) which was essentially mutually comprehensible with Old Norse.
There's no easy way to draw a line and say what's Viking and what isn't. It makes almost as much sense to have a genetic test for "Canadian DNA". I'm sure the DNA-testing companies would love to sell you that kit as well, for an extra $29.95!
Their 'private language' turned out to be Old Norse, handed down from their Viking ancestors.
A lot of people in remote northern parts of the UK have been shown to have Viking DNA.
The language claim is almost certainly an exaggeration. Languages almost never survive unchanged over a thousand-year timespan when spoken by a small remote group without a literary tradition. As well, such a thing would have gotten a lot of publicity, and I've never heard of it before. It's true that the Norn language, which evolved out of Old Norse, was spoken in Shetland and Orkney until the 1800s, but no new group of Old Norse-descended speakers has been found.
There are a lot of Norse loanwords around, particularly Scots and other northern variants, but also in English too. Even the words "they/their/them" are Norse. (The Anglo-Saxons said "hie/hiera/him".) More likely, the original story is that some British soldier who spoke some English dialect discovered that some weird words which he'd formerly thought unique to his dialect had parallels in Old Norse and Icelandic. It's not quite the same as speaking Old Norse!