If your product is on the market before the slimy scum bag files for a patent, he'll be rejected at the patent office, because your product is prior art.
Assuming that they're doing their job, which conventional wisdom says they haven't been.[*] And still won't, unless the bill vastly increases the funding for patent examiners.
So now Mr. SSB will often get patents that he shouldn't, and it will take an army of lawyers to get them revoked.
[*] No affront intended. It's just that it's a lot more lucrative for qualified people to work in industry than at the Patent Office. (Again, this according to conventional wisdom.)
Even passing a good review doesn't mean that a paper is correct. Reviewers are not expected to re-do the authors' work, and some ideas that seem sound at the time of publication just turn out to be wrong.
But if a paper states something that is known to be wrong at the time it is reviewed, the reviewers should catch it. Assuming they're qualified.
I don't know why you guys argue about this. The world's gonna end in 2012 anyway, who cares about the climate?
Actually, Jesus is (re)scheduled to come back before this year is out, so all us Lisp programmers won't even care about next year's weather, let alone climate change.[*]
[*] Lisp being God's preferred programming language, as everyone should know. (Presumably making the righteous choice on that will get you rapturized as surely as making the righteous choice about which religion to join.)
For most journals this wouldn't be an editor's fault, unless they used bad judgment choosing the reviewers, or ignored negative reviews and published it anyway.
Reviewers wouldn't resign because they're not part of the staff, but the editors should avoid inviting someone to review again if they passed a bad paper. (And that can happen for non-ideological reasons. It's really hard to get qualified people to invest the time required for a thorough review. I've gotten feedback where one reviewer wrote two pages and another wrote two sentences.
It's going to get even funnier when we find out that the US State Department leaked it to The Guardian as payback for all the diplomatic cable leaks...
Have you heard of this schmuck "Einstein!?!" He EVEN SAID "I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
Even worse, he got the "I before E" rule wrong *twice* in an 8-letter name!
Simon Baron-Cohen has made many a theory on the etiology of Autism. And all of them have fallen by the way side.
I don't understand why he is regarded as a scientist since he keep coming out with these stupid ideas.
A few years ago it was a "Too neanderthal brain". Then a few years later it was "Too much male hormone in the uterus". And now it is is this. *sigh*
He comes up with one idea, and once that is shown to be false, he just throws a new one out there.
As a professional in this area. And as someone with autism. I totally disregard anything and everything he has to say.
If his hypothesis is correct, we should observe that the increase in autism is among the children of paired geeks. Is there any evidence to suggest such?
Can *any* demographic be associated with parents of autistic children?
So do the refutations. For example, a perfect God should have no problem inducing genetic diversity.
Then the whole discussion has been pointless, since everything can be explained away by simply saying "A perfect God should have no trouble making it appear so and so." Why go to the trouble of finding scientific arguments for creationism, when you already have a catch-all explanation for everything?
What's funny is that these people will eagerly embrace the idea that God is pulling a prank on everyone by faking the evidence about the nature of the universe, but they won't consider for a second that the same God might be pulling a prank on *them* with the text of their holy book.
I really don't know for sure; I never spoke to anyone even peripherally connected to those people at all, they were like the uber Christians that the regular Christians even found a little creepy, like the main character and the mom from Carrie...but we conjectured that they got together and talked about how awesome not having sex is and read stories about other people who loved not having sex so much they wanted to talk to others about it.
Probably the guys bragged about how many girls they didn't score with since the last meeting.
So is creationism science, or is it religion? I thought that creationists argued that their ideas were "scientific" or was that the intelligent designers?
It's a religious belief.
There was once a Creation Science movement (in the 1980s, IIRC), which tried to use real science to support the modern interpretations of the myths in Genesis, but since (unlike ID) they mostly tried to be honest with it, it failed - the evidence doesn't support biblical myths - and thus the movement died.
Scientology pretends to be a religion, in order to obtain the privileges traditional religions have.
IMO, that's one of the main arguments for taking away privileges such as tax exemptions: then the government could stay out of the business of deciding what is a "real" religion and what isn't, and scams such as Scientology wouldn't be nearly so profitable.
(FWIW, the other IMO main argument is that religious organizations and activities enjoy the same blessings of liberty that the rest of us sponsor with our tax money, and they should damn well pay their share too.)
which, at least in principle, makes ID quite falsifiable.
I don't know if it is falsifiable, because it's "not even wrong". When you build up a pseudoscience on manifestly incorrect assumptions and logically flawed arguments, all you have to do is point those out and it collapses. I don't know if that qualifies as falsification, in they way you're talking about. And I'm not sure I can wrap my mind around "falsification by observation" for something that's just a web of bullshit.
And from reading your post above, I don't see where you point out any falsifiable claim that any of the IDologists have actually made. ID isn't about the origin of life. It's just an attempt to prove that "somewhere, somehow, some intelligent entity has intervened in some biological systems", and they offer a very few examples, such as some specific bacterium's flagellum. It didn't need to make any falsifiable predictions, because it was just a scam to make the rank-and-file creationist believe that science doesn't actually refute their beliefs, and to provide cover for teaching creationism in schools while pretending to not be teaching creationism. It wasn't science at all; it was just some armchair logic-chopping to get God's foot in the door. But the assumptions and the logic itself were grotesquely flawed.
You really should read up on the Kitzmiller court case, where it was demonstrated that an explicitly creationist textbook under development for (hoped) use in public schools was suddenly redesigned as an intelligent design textbook for use in public schools -- immediately after the SCOTUS ruled that the US Constitution does not allow teaching creationism in schools.
And while I'm on a rant, I'll mention that one of the leading proponents (Dembski) appears to be a dyed-in-the-wool Platonist, both in his bizarre notion of 'forms' (i.e., his implicit view that after The Designer has designed it, natural processes are now able to implement it), and (as far as I can tell) in a view from The Republic that hoi polloi should believe a bunch of religious myths in order to make them behave, under the oversight of a Guardian class who know better. (I'll let you figure out which class he thinks he represents.)
ID doesn't have anything to do with science. It's a social construct, with social goals. It met some of it's goals - you still meet creationists who invoke it as an excuse to ignore all the science that refutes their religious beliefs - and it failed at others, such as getting the pretend-its-not-creationism textbook into public schools.
It was established in Katzmiller v Dover that Intelligent Design is nothing more than creationism in new packaging. This was concluded based on testimony by Behe himself, when he admitted that, if you assumed intelligent design were scientific, you'd have to conclude that astrology was also scientific.
There is no distinction between intelligent design and creationism. ID is an attempt by creationists to hide behind a facade of scientism.
The sloppy "cdesign proponentsists" edit to drafts of an originally blatantly creationist textbook was the best part.
Regarding "new packaging", on talk.origins they used to say "creationism in a lab coat", or "creationism with the serial number filed off".
Having read the work of (for example) Behe and Dembski, I think that ID is a legitimate scientific point of view, although I think it's probably ultimately incorrect.
Both build their arguments out of bullshit. All they were trying to do is (a) hide the fact that they were peddling creationism (due to a Supreme Court ruling just before ID got invented), (b) make hoi polloi think their technobabble was Real Science, and probably (c) confuse anyone who tried to actually wade through all the BS and understand their arguments.
I haven't looked at this for several years, so I'd have to scratch my head to remember their arguments and what was wrong with them. But one glaring case that comes to mind is Dembski's calculation of the probability of a certain bacterium's flagellum occurring by natural causes. First off, he doesn't address evolution of the flagellum but rather the construction of an individual bacterium's flagellum (which he can hardly argue doesn't happen by natural processes all the time). Second, his calculations are based on throwing all the necessary molecules into a bucket and having them randomly associate to form a flagellum. I.e., he does not consider mechanisms. His argument ultimately boils down to "ID must be true because random chance couldn't have produced it". However, we know that the universe is not an utterly random place, and that things in biology actually do happen according to mechanisms.
Behe's main argument is based on the flawed assumption that evolution always builds up structures by adding one piece at a time, and that dysfunctional half-built structures cannot be generated as intermediate steps. But in fact evolution most often creates structures by re-tasking existing bits rather than building them up one step at a time, and it also removes stuff which could have served as "scaffolding" to produce a structure over evolutionary history. And evolution *does* leave crappy dysfunctional parts littered all over the place, which can perhaps be re-tasked to make something new and useful.
What's sad is that you don't really need to know very much to see what's wrong with most of the pro-ID arguments. You just have to be willing to step back and see what's *really* being said instead of what they are pretending to say, and then think critically about that really-said stuff. But since the IDologists were targeting creationists with their arguments, they could rely on the fact that almost none of their audience would feel the slightest motivation to deconstruct the bullshit.
Please post any other ID arguments that you think carry water, and if I'm watching we can discuss them. Better yet, try deconstructing them yourself - exercise is good for the brain.
and the real funny thing is that science by definition can not tell us anything about say the first 20 picoseconds of "Time" since that event is not repeatable so you have to answer by Faith with either
In The Beginning GOD or In The Beginning BANG
a) Science (and history, and other disciplines) can tell us a lot about a lot of stuff that isn't repeatable - if the event left evidence. "Can't repeat it in the lab" is increasingly the desperate last defense of reality deniers.
b) We conclude the existence of the "BANG" on the basis of the evidence it left; the same cannot be said for "GOD", or any other gods.
c) Even if "BANG" and "GOD" were both just arbitrary assumptions, "GOD" would be a wilder assumption than "BANG", because he/she/it/they have to be able to create the universe *and* do all the other stuff attributed to them. Or, if all he/she/it/they did was create the universe, he/she/it/they become useless middlepersons that contribute nothing toward an explanation.
I think the idea is that the current US government is as much a part of the problem and that you must replace it with one that appreciates science, like the one that built a space program from scratch and got us on the moon in less than ten years, in order to have a decent flag-bearer for human civilization.
We don't need to replace the government; we need to reject a certain political party that deliberately caters to the beliefs of the people most prone to jerking their knees, so that they can get enough votes to rule the country for the benefit of the richest 1/2% of the population.
Also, they've been doing it so long that the inmates are starting to take over the asylum. (Cf. Michelle Bachmann, who appears to be a genuine nutter rather than a politician cynically exploiting other nutters.)
In China, executions can be rushed so the local police department can make a quick buck from organ harvesting.
Whereas in the USA, we like to keep them alive as long as possible so that the commercial prison industry can earn their due profits and make a good showing on Wall Street.
Slashdot Mirror
If your product is on the market before the slimy scum bag files for a patent, he'll be rejected at the patent office, because your product is prior art.
Assuming that they're doing their job, which conventional wisdom says they haven't been.[*] And still won't, unless the bill vastly increases the funding for patent examiners.
So now Mr. SSB will often get patents that he shouldn't, and it will take an army of lawyers to get them revoked.
[*] No affront intended. It's just that it's a lot more lucrative for qualified people to work in industry than at the Patent Office. (Again, this according to conventional wisdom.)
It should be about what's best for the nation and the General Welfare.
I suspect this is going to boil down to "Congress Screws the Little Guy, Again".
It used to be Microsoft that got caught relying on other people's software. What's the world coming to?
[Queue Jon Stewart clip about Apple kicking down doors in Palo Alto while Bill Gates fights AIDS in Africa.]
And I should add...
Even passing a good review doesn't mean that a paper is correct. Reviewers are not expected to re-do the authors' work, and some ideas that seem sound at the time of publication just turn out to be wrong.
But if a paper states something that is known to be wrong at the time it is reviewed, the reviewers should catch it. Assuming they're qualified.
I don't know why you guys argue about this. The world's gonna end in 2012 anyway, who cares about the climate?
Actually, Jesus is (re)scheduled to come back before this year is out, so all us Lisp programmers won't even care about next year's weather, let alone climate change.[*]
[*] Lisp being God's preferred programming language, as everyone should know. (Presumably making the righteous choice on that will get you rapturized as surely as making the righteous choice about which religion to join.)
For most journals this wouldn't be an editor's fault, unless they used bad judgment choosing the reviewers, or ignored negative reviews and published it anyway.
Reviewers wouldn't resign because they're not part of the staff, but the editors should avoid inviting someone to review again if they passed a bad paper. (And that can happen for non-ideological reasons. It's really hard to get qualified people to invest the time required for a thorough review. I've gotten feedback where one reviewer wrote two pages and another wrote two sentences.
Their quantum processor made up of two superconducting quantum bits can use a 2-bit "quantum RAM" to save entangled bit values into.
And you thought your 32-bit system needed upgrading.
It's going to get even funnier when we find out that the US State Department leaked it to The Guardian as payback for all the diplomatic cable leaks...
Is it going to be "slashdot.xxx", or "xxx.slashdot.org" ?
Have you heard of this schmuck "Einstein!?!" He EVEN SAID "I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
Even worse, he got the "I before E" rule wrong *twice* in an 8-letter name!
Simon Baron-Cohen has made many a theory on the etiology of Autism. And all of them have fallen by the way side.
I don't understand why he is regarded as a scientist since he keep coming out with these stupid ideas.
A few years ago it was a "Too neanderthal brain". Then a few years later it was "Too much male hormone in the uterus". And now it is is this. *sigh*
He comes up with one idea, and once that is shown to be false, he just throws a new one out there.
As a professional in this area. And as someone with autism. I totally disregard anything and everything he has to say.
If his hypothesis is correct, we should observe that the increase in autism is among the children of paired geeks. Is there any evidence to suggest such?
Can *any* demographic be associated with parents of autistic children?
So do the refutations. For example, a perfect God should have no problem inducing genetic diversity.
Then the whole discussion has been pointless, since everything can be explained away by simply saying "A perfect God should have no trouble making it appear so and so." Why go to the trouble of finding scientific arguments for creationism, when you already have a catch-all explanation for everything?
What's funny is that these people will eagerly embrace the idea that God is pulling a prank on everyone by faking the evidence about the nature of the universe, but they won't consider for a second that the same God might be pulling a prank on *them* with the text of their holy book.
And when someone hassles you too much, you just set it on 'stun' and give them a blast with it.
Okay, if you insist, both (or all) those arguments go back to (and predate) the Greek philosophers.
Yeah. 'Cause as everyone knows, the Greek philosophers and their predecessors were very exercised over the topic of genetic diversity.
I really don't know for sure; I never spoke to anyone even peripherally connected to those people at all, they were like the uber Christians that the regular Christians even found a little creepy, like the main character and the mom from Carrie...but we conjectured that they got together and talked about how awesome not having sex is and read stories about other people who loved not having sex so much they wanted to talk to others about it.
Probably the guys bragged about how many girls they didn't score with since the last meeting.
So is creationism science, or is it religion?
I thought that creationists argued that their ideas were "scientific" or was that the intelligent designers?
It's a religious belief.
There was once a Creation Science movement (in the 1980s, IIRC), which tried to use real science to support the modern interpretations of the myths in Genesis, but since (unlike ID) they mostly tried to be honest with it, it failed - the evidence doesn't support biblical myths - and thus the movement died.
or also about sects like Scientology?
Scientology pretends to be a religion, in order to obtain the privileges traditional religions have.
IMO, that's one of the main arguments for taking away privileges such as tax exemptions: then the government could stay out of the business of deciding what is a "real" religion and what isn't, and scams such as Scientology wouldn't be nearly so profitable.
(FWIW, the other IMO main argument is that religious organizations and activities enjoy the same blessings of liberty that the rest of us sponsor with our tax money, and they should damn well pay their share too.)
which, at least in principle, makes ID quite falsifiable.
I don't know if it is falsifiable, because it's "not even wrong". When you build up a pseudoscience on manifestly incorrect assumptions and logically flawed arguments, all you have to do is point those out and it collapses. I don't know if that qualifies as falsification, in they way you're talking about. And I'm not sure I can wrap my mind around "falsification by observation" for something that's just a web of bullshit.
And from reading your post above, I don't see where you point out any falsifiable claim that any of the IDologists have actually made. ID isn't about the origin of life. It's just an attempt to prove that "somewhere, somehow, some intelligent entity has intervened in some biological systems", and they offer a very few examples, such as some specific bacterium's flagellum. It didn't need to make any falsifiable predictions, because it was just a scam to make the rank-and-file creationist believe that science doesn't actually refute their beliefs, and to provide cover for teaching creationism in schools while pretending to not be teaching creationism. It wasn't science at all; it was just some armchair logic-chopping to get God's foot in the door. But the assumptions and the logic itself were grotesquely flawed.
You really should read up on the Kitzmiller court case, where it was demonstrated that an explicitly creationist textbook under development for (hoped) use in public schools was suddenly redesigned as an intelligent design textbook for use in public schools -- immediately after the SCOTUS ruled that the US Constitution does not allow teaching creationism in schools.
And while I'm on a rant, I'll mention that one of the leading proponents (Dembski) appears to be a dyed-in-the-wool Platonist, both in his bizarre notion of 'forms' (i.e., his implicit view that after The Designer has designed it, natural processes are now able to implement it), and (as far as I can tell) in a view from The Republic that hoi polloi should believe a bunch of religious myths in order to make them behave, under the oversight of a Guardian class who know better. (I'll let you figure out which class he thinks he represents.)
ID doesn't have anything to do with science. It's a social construct, with social goals. It met some of it's goals - you still meet creationists who invoke it as an excuse to ignore all the science that refutes their religious beliefs - and it failed at others, such as getting the pretend-its-not-creationism textbook into public schools.
It was established in Katzmiller v Dover that Intelligent Design is nothing more than creationism in new packaging. This was concluded based on testimony by Behe himself, when he admitted that, if you assumed intelligent design were scientific, you'd have to conclude that astrology was also scientific.
There is no distinction between intelligent design and creationism. ID is an attempt by creationists to hide behind a facade of scientism.
The sloppy "cdesign proponentsists" edit to drafts of an originally blatantly creationist textbook was the best part.
Regarding "new packaging", on talk.origins they used to say "creationism in a lab coat", or "creationism with the serial number filed off".
Having read the work of (for example) Behe and Dembski, I think that ID is a legitimate scientific point of view, although I think it's probably ultimately incorrect.
Both build their arguments out of bullshit. All they were trying to do is (a) hide the fact that they were peddling creationism (due to a Supreme Court ruling just before ID got invented), (b) make hoi polloi think their technobabble was Real Science, and probably (c) confuse anyone who tried to actually wade through all the BS and understand their arguments.
I haven't looked at this for several years, so I'd have to scratch my head to remember their arguments and what was wrong with them. But one glaring case that comes to mind is Dembski's calculation of the probability of a certain bacterium's flagellum occurring by natural causes. First off, he doesn't address evolution of the flagellum but rather the construction of an individual bacterium's flagellum (which he can hardly argue doesn't happen by natural processes all the time). Second, his calculations are based on throwing all the necessary molecules into a bucket and having them randomly associate to form a flagellum. I.e., he does not consider mechanisms. His argument ultimately boils down to "ID must be true because random chance couldn't have produced it". However, we know that the universe is not an utterly random place, and that things in biology actually do happen according to mechanisms.
Behe's main argument is based on the flawed assumption that evolution always builds up structures by adding one piece at a time, and that dysfunctional half-built structures cannot be generated as intermediate steps. But in fact evolution most often creates structures by re-tasking existing bits rather than building them up one step at a time, and it also removes stuff which could have served as "scaffolding" to produce a structure over evolutionary history. And evolution *does* leave crappy dysfunctional parts littered all over the place, which can perhaps be re-tasked to make something new and useful.
What's sad is that you don't really need to know very much to see what's wrong with most of the pro-ID arguments. You just have to be willing to step back and see what's *really* being said instead of what they are pretending to say, and then think critically about that really-said stuff. But since the IDologists were targeting creationists with their arguments, they could rely on the fact that almost none of their audience would feel the slightest motivation to deconstruct the bullshit.
Please post any other ID arguments that you think carry water, and if I'm watching we can discuss them. Better yet, try deconstructing them yourself - exercise is good for the brain.
P.S. I am an Australian and I find it sad that I know more about the US constitution than most Americans and the talking heads on TV.
There's nothing that someone can't misunderstand if there's any profit or other advantage to be had by misunderstanding it.
In the U.S. they do fall under the Constitution because attendance is mandated by law.
And funded by taxpayer dollars.
and the real funny thing is that science by definition can not tell us anything about say the first 20 picoseconds of "Time" since that event is not repeatable so you have to answer by Faith with either
In The Beginning GOD
or
In The Beginning BANG
a) Science (and history, and other disciplines) can tell us a lot about a lot of stuff that isn't repeatable - if the event left evidence. "Can't repeat it in the lab" is increasingly the desperate last defense of reality deniers.
b) We conclude the existence of the "BANG" on the basis of the evidence it left; the same cannot be said for "GOD", or any other gods.
c) Even if "BANG" and "GOD" were both just arbitrary assumptions, "GOD" would be a wilder assumption than "BANG", because he/she/it/they have to be able to create the universe *and* do all the other stuff attributed to them. Or, if all he/she/it/they did was create the universe, he/she/it/they become useless middlepersons that contribute nothing toward an explanation.
See also, Ockham's Razor.
I think the idea is that the current US government is as much a part of the problem and that you must replace it with one that appreciates science, like the one that built a space program from scratch and got us on the moon in less than ten years, in order to have a decent flag-bearer for human civilization.
We don't need to replace the government; we need to reject a certain political party that deliberately caters to the beliefs of the people most prone to jerking their knees, so that they can get enough votes to rule the country for the benefit of the richest 1/2% of the population.
Also, they've been doing it so long that the inmates are starting to take over the asylum. (Cf. Michelle Bachmann, who appears to be a genuine nutter rather than a politician cynically exploiting other nutters.)
In China, executions can be rushed so the local police department can make a quick buck from organ harvesting.
Whereas in the USA, we like to keep them alive as long as possible so that the commercial prison industry can earn their due profits and make a good showing on Wall Street.