We are occupying a country with 150K troops, with another 20K civilian "security" personnel, all of whom have total immunity from Iraqi law. The 20K "security" personnel apparently have immunity from all law, since they aren't even under the UCMJ. Anyway, we're occupying this country, but there are no fronts, no armies, no battle lines, no stated objectives, no milestones, nothing. What is this "war" you speak of? As far as the mission goes--what is it? We went there to disarm Saddam, fearing his massive stockpiles of WMD. We were successful, so much so that he was disarmed years before we arrived. Check. Then we wanted regime change. We got that. Check. Now what is the objective? Peace and prosperity? Would you like a pony? Iraq is screwed, they're going to fall apart when we leave, and we know it.
Bush is just trying to hold on for the rest of his Presidency so, when there isn't an Iraq on the map anymore, he can act as if he did his best and what came later wasn't his fault. This isn't a liberation, it's a dim little man who stumbled into the Presidency trying to protect his name in history. He's surrounded by a few incompetent but impervious-to-facts-and-reason would-be "visionaries" who have long histories of being wrong about just about everything and being completely insulated from any concept of responsibility or self-doubt. What would you really have us do here?
You didn't get the memo, it seems. The A now means "All." Big merger. They also are the CIA now. Analysts were fired to free up office space for shredders, and all raw intel is funneled into Dick Cheney's office, where it is sorted into two piles, "reality," and "tomorrow's talking points." The first pile is thrown out, where Colbert Report operatives posing as facts (so they won't be noticed) smuggle the reality over to Comedy Central, where it is broadcast and uploaded just in time to highlight the perspicacity of today's (formerly tomorrow's) talking points.
And no, I have no idea how that tangent ended up the way it did. Good or bad, I had to follow it. My muse isn't very talented, but she's mine, and I love her.
I wonder why the average American (or Brit) doesn't demand the same level of privacy that many of the mainland Europeans now have?
Well, Germany actually had a dictator lie his way to power by using fear and patriotism as bludgeons against his opponents. They know firsthand what dangers lie at the end of that road. We still think we can have everything along the road (the exaggerated nationalism, the fear-mongering, the reduction of freedom to save freedom, etc) without necessarily arriving at the same destination. Continental Europeans know better, at least for now. In time they'll forget, because people always do, but for now they are more vigilant in defense of freedom than the Brits or Americans.
Similarly, Stanley Milgram, in his Obedience to Authority experiments and book, found very high obedience levels in Americans, but less so in the nations that had to live under Hitler. People sometimes do learn from history, though the knowledge probably gets diluted with time and distance. But for now Europeans seem a bit more disillusioned with the idea that you can give government unlimited power and still protect freedom, ergo they restrict government more. We seem to think the opposite, at least for the moment, which is why you're considered a terrorist appeaser if you think the government should have to get a warrant before putting people under surveillance, you oppose torture, or you think people should get a trial before being locked away. I only hope the pendulum starts swinging the other way soon. I'd like my nation to oppose torture and support habeus corpus. Strange that my pulse quickens while typing that--why should it be controversial?
Actually, if you think the Republicans have driven us into an open-ended, pointless war based on bullshit reasons, run up the highest deficits in history, endorsed torture, put Americans under surveillance without a warrant, locked people in secret jails without a warrant or trial, and pretty much all the things that they have, in fact, done, then "for the love of God can we have someone else, ANYONE ELSE, in power?" might just work. It worked for me. This is not a normal election, and this is not a normal administration. All decades have political controversies, but what is going on now is one of the darker periods of American history, at least as bad as Manzanar, and I would like to put it behind us as quickly as possible. I'll take good-old-fashioned petty corruption over messianic, visionary incompetence combined with corruption any day of the week.
Saddam wasn't "let" into power--he was put into power by the British. And if the Repubs disliked Saddam so much, why did Rumsfeld fly to Iraq to shake his hand and open diplomatic relations a year after he gassed the Kurds? Why would I want to vote for a party that welcomes such a madman? We sold him weapons, for god's sake. YOUR PARTY sold him weapons. Where do you get off pretending that your party is the bulwark against people like Saddam, when you sent us to war alongside him? Do you remember when a US Navy ship shot down an Iranian airliner--that was when the Repubs were having us help Saddam fight Iran.
pay higher taxes
Well, the moral choices are to pay higher taxes or have a smaller government. Which choice have the Republicans picked? Oh, that's right--neither. They want big government, but they don't want to pay for it, so we get to pass the cost on to our kids and grandkids. That's not the choice a moral party would make.
Libs..flame away..
I'm not a "Lib," you moron. I'm a conservative, and you're the problem, not the solution. I'll vote for the party that last gave me a balanced budged, thanks. They aren't perfect, but they aren't saddled with this messianic vision crap that the neoconservatives bring to the table. If you let the conservatives run your party again, call me. I ain't voting for anyone the Christian Dominionists put in office.
I thought the VMs would be protected by the security of the host system, since they're connecting through it. Am I wrong about that? That's not a rhetorical question--I don't actually know, and I'm curious. If I install VMware on Linux, then install Win98 in a VM, doesn't the Win98 internet connection get handled by the host OS?
There is always a danger in being more or less ethical than your employer. If you're more ethical you're a troublemaker and they'll fire you, and if you're less ethical then you're a scumbag. Obviously the ethical thing to do would be to notify the customers. But executives don't really work for the customer--they work for the stockholders, and "doing the right thing" doesn't figure very large in the balance sheet. I don't envy your friend's position, but it's a common one--look at Sibel Edmonds. Employers, public or private, seldom want you to have actual integrity. They want you to do and say whatever makes them look good.
No, you're overestimating the role of randomness. Whether or not the females prefer one trait or the next may be random, but if they consistently select for a trait, it will cause accumulated changes, and possibly speciation. But other selection factors, such as which antelope or bird gets eaten, are even less random--whether it's the slowest one, the flashiest one, the noisiest one, whatever, there is a statistical difference in who gets eaten, and that drives the accumulation of changes in one direction or another. Whether or not a light-sensitive cell develops may be random, but whether or not that cell confers an advantage is not.
So randomness is a component in that it is a factor in normal variation in the gene pool, but the difference a trait makes in the statistical likelihood of reproduction is not random. If evolution were "just randomness" there would be no evolution, because no changes would be continually selected for, allowed to accumulate, and cause divergent change and speciation. The only people who think evolution is exclusively random are creationists, and they don't understand evolution. If you read Darwin or Dawkins or any number of books by actual evolutionary theorists, you'll see that randomness is only one of the components.
Really, I meant "only for themselves." They don't consider the Catholics, Mormons, or the touchy-feely "Jesus is Love and Tolerance" Christians to be actual Christians. There are varying degrees of this, and not a lot of uniformity. The further you get into the Dominionist/Reconstructionist movement, the more pronounced it is. So when they call themselves "Christians", they don't mean what you think you're hearing--they aren't calling themselves a subset, but the totality of "real Christianity." At some point it becomes a starkly binary worldview, and everyone who isn't in their clique is essentially working for the devil, deliberately or otherwise.
If natural selection were purely random, there would be no speciation. I've read several books by Dawkins, and Darwin's Origin of Species and randomness, though present, is not the driving factor. There is a random variation in the gene pool of any population, but the selection process, which favors or disfavors certain traits, is far from random, and drives change in the population by predisposing individuals with certain characteristics to be more likely to leave offspring than their competitors. Yes, the randomness is a component, in that if there were no variation there would be no foothold for the selection process, and thus no evolution. But randomness with no selection does not drive speciation, just as variation with no selection would also fail to drive it.
Well, the evolution naysayers think they are on a mission from God, so they're a bit more passionate. Christians who DO believe in evolution just consider it a non-issue, and aren't going to buttonhole you on the street and subject you to a tirade on the lies of Darwinism. It's like judging the pushiness of CHristians by the ones who come to your door when you're trying to eat dinner. The sample gets skewed because you only notice the pushy ones.
I feel some compassion for the Christians who do believe in science, because they get a lot of hostility, a lot of accussations of not being a "real" Christian, from their wacked-out brethren and sistren. So though we are in a cultural battle with the fundamentalists for the broader culture, another culture battle is going on within the ranks of Christianity over their culture as well. Even if we don't share their faith, they need our help, at least to the extent of not lumping them in with the biblical literalists.
Well, technically ID doesn't preclude common descent or vestigial organs (or limbs). ID doesn't preclude much, because it doesn't assert much, other than pointing at something or other and saying "evolution doesn't explain that." Behe himself believes in common descent, though not many of the ID advocates, many (most?) of whom are closet Creationsists, think about that much. The article would rankle Creationists, but they're already rankled by just about everything since Copernicus, so I don't see the big deal.
I'm not one, but that is neither here nor there. Believing in evolution is not mutually exclusive with believing that Christ died for your sins. Most Christians do beleive in evolution, just as they believe in an old Earth, etc. Granted, the subset of Christians who are Creationists do refer to themselves as Christian, trying to claim the label for themselves, so I know it isn't easy, but don't go insulting everyone over a few (million) oddities. That's like insulting conservatives by saying they all support the Iraqi occupation and torture.
Well yes, replenishmenet programs exist, because scientists have warned that the status quo would deplete the fish supply. If all warnings were brushed off, there would be no replenishment programs. All of the efforts at improvement spring from the recognition that what we are doing is unsustainable. What's more, all of the improvements are implemented in spite of, not because of, the "Scientists are full of it! They've been wrong before!" crowd. Science is fallible, but it's all we have.
I don't know and I venture to say that neither do you.
Yes, I said that in my post. I never said or implied I had all the answers, only that I trust science, fallible though it is. The difference is that my admitted ignorance leads me to place more trust, not less, in science. Again (third time) I'm not saying that it's infallible, only that, as a system, it's more dependable than any other analytic model we have to figure out the world and come to predictions. Actually it's the only model we have. I'm very glad that all these replenishment programs exist, and I truly hope they make a difference and prevent this prediction from being accurate. It's not as if want doom-n-gloom predictions to be right just to prove how smart I am. I'm such a negative person that I'm truly happy being wrong--it means the world is a better place than I thought it was.
The reasons the petrol forecasts were off is that we found new ways of drilling, new ways of exploiting oil we couldn't reach before. Are you saying we're going to find new ways to fish that will catch fish when there aren't any more fish?
Doctors are fallible, but we still go to them because the alternative is worse. Engineers are fallible, but we still ask them to design our bridges and airplanes, because the alternative is worse. Scientists are fallible, and you seem to be suggesting that this bare fact refutes any possible projections they can make, and we shouldn't go to them anymore for analysis. I don't think you're thinking this case through too carefully. If we're taking fish out faster than they can be replenished, and the supply is finite, what will be the result? You know this one--everyone with an ounce of analytic thinking knows this one.
This isn't a case of some scientific high-priesthood or whatever you want to call them prognosticating from tea leaves and telling you some obscure, bizarre conclusion. It's obvious. I don't know what to DO about it, granted, but that doesn't mean they're making it all up. Yes, attempts are being made (fish farms and such) to remedy this, and hopefully they'll work out. That doesn't refute what they're saying, or even address it. If we continue exactly as we're doing now, the oceans will be devoid of fish. Hopefully we won't collectively continue exactly what we're doing now.
You capture my frustration as well. There are many things I can't fix but I'm concerned about. What can I personally do to prevent torture? Not much, beyond giving money to anti-torture organizations. The environment is much the same--I know I can't fix it, and I don't even know that my actions have any impact at all. For me, at least on this forum, the subject is more of an intellectual exercise in honesty. I know I can't fix anything, and our little debate won't matter a jot in the final doom or recovery of the planet, but it matters to me that people face problems squarely and honestly, even if the truth is that we can't do a damned thing about it.
I realize that we collectively aren't going to give up cars and the modern conveniences we've grown used to. I don't expect (or ask) that we abandon the modern world and wander off into the bush to live off of berries and nuts. I realize that a lot of the environmental talk seems to expect some proto-arcadian, "back-to-nature" utopian living, and that just isn't going to happen. The case may be that global warming is going to happen, we're going to continue to make it worse, millions/billions will be displaced, wars will result, millions will die, and we'll go on as we've gone on, as best we can.
But even then, I and people like me will still try to talk honestly about the problems we face, even if we can't fix them. The truth matters to me, even if it doesn't change our final destiny. The truth is an absolute good, at least to me. I'm weird that way.
Actually we have data going back hundreds of thousands of years, via ice core samplings and similar scientific methods. But you do highlight a problem, in that there are pseudo-experts out there, mainly working for industry, who muddy the waters by pretending that we just don't "really" know.
We have no idea if it's really getting hotter
The temp is rising, and we do know that. Ice shelves in the arctic and antarctic are melting. Ice shelves that are tens of thousands of years old, if not older. There is a vast amount of data to support this, and none to refute it. The ONLY question that we're unsure of, to the best of my knowledge, is the precise degree to which mankind's actions are accelerating the warming. We didn't cause it altogether, but the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere does make it worse. We just don't know how much worse, and the numbers there vary.
You make an excellent point. I don't think full-fledged expertise is actually necessary to make the right decisions (or at least to vote for and support the people who can and will) but a respect for learning is necessary. If we had a citizenry who respected learning, and people as a rule tried to learn something about the big issues, I could have some faith in our success. But I think we're squarely in the "bread and circuses" phase, and I'm not too optimistic. This is definitely one of the dangers of democracy, and I think you're absolutely right. I wish I didn't think that democracy sucks less than every other way of running a country.
...we need to engage them in discussion. But generally when they give an uninformed opinion, they are assaulted with personal attacks,
It depends on what you think their motives are, to tell the truth. I'm scarred enough by evolution/creationism "debates" to know that many of the people who bring up ill-informed arguments will still bring them up again and again and again, forever, even when they have been soundly refuted. I can flip to a dozen blogs right now and find arguments made today that no transitional fossils have been found, which is demonstrably false. But the argument is still made. It isn't really a debate, because in actuality no one who is curious about the subject is going to dismiss out-of-hand the consensus of the scientific community. No one shows up on blogs and demands that you or I defend plate tectonics or the germ theory. So I think I can infer that someone posing as a hard-nosed skeptic about environmental change or evolution isn't really a hard-nosed skeptic. At BEST they're an ill-informed teenager, and that's unfortunate, but me directing them to reams of evidence isn't going to stand up to the indoctrination they get at home or at church. While I don't disagree with you in principle, and I concede that in a perfect world we would calmly present the same arguments time and time again, ad infinitum, I don't share the optimism to make that possible.
a poster commented on Crichton's State of Fear and was told not to cite it if he wanted to be taken seriously. That's a quick way to end a productive conversation.
If I were to cite Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in a discussion about the Religious Right's plans for America, I doubt they would find my source worthy of discussion. There is such a thing as a bad source. I just did a google search on Crichton's book, and it took me only a few seconds to find out why. Again, though I agree with you in principle when you say we should reasonably listen, then respond kindly, I myself have a minimum threshold. If you're quoting Hovind on Darwin, or saying that the Nazis were "perfect Darwinists," then I know where you stand, intellectually and philosophically, and there isn't going to be a productive debate, even if God blesses me right that second with breathtaking patience and fortitude. I know I keep going back to Darwinism, but I admit that the frustration I've developed with those "debates" has carried over to the "debates" on climate change. Why? Because largely the same demographic, the same types of people, are involved. This isn't really about the latest climatalogical data, and most people know it. We're just too frightened to just say we have an unbridgeable epistemological gulf, and give up on any efforts at communication.
My pre-school does indeed have Zeno's paradoxes in the syllabus. What's relevant about his paradox here is that it is purely verbal--in reality, you do actually travel from A to B, fascinating verbal paradox to the contrary. Similarly, the arrow shot upward does fall to earth, paradox notwithstanding.
My only point was that if sea creatures die faster than they are replenished, and the number is finite, eventually you end up with zero. The only "reverse" we could have in this situation would be an increase in population, either by a change in human behavior allowing time for the numbers to rise through breeding, or mass Special Creation--i.e. magic. You wait for magic if you want. I'm not too optimistic about changing human behavior, to tell the truth. It's more likely that we're just doomed, because people will never consistently overcome the lure of short-term self interest, even at the cost of long-term mass pain and death.
You do know, I suppose, that if you deplete your supply faster than it can be replenished, this "supply" you speak of will be gone? That would be the point you were looking for. Good luck with that.
there is a vocal group of supporters of the global warming theory who are unwilling to engage in a conversation on the issues
Actually there is a forum for the conversation--it's science. The scientific community is one big ongoing conversation. On this particular subject, the evidence is so overwhelming that all the scientific organizations, though they disagree on the finer points at times, agree that the actions of humans are accelerating global warming. There are plenty of people from outside the scientific community, particularly faux-grassroots, industry-financed organizations, acting as if there is a controversy, but the scientific community is in agreement. You may disagree with them, the original poster to whom I responded may hold them in little regard, but this is about as significant as me and a buddy of mine saying that I want to hold a "conversation" with the medical community over the validity of the germ theory.
try to put your arguments and evidence on the table.
How many times must the evidence be presented? Again, the scientific community is in consensus. Are they infallible? No. Nor are scientists infallible when it comes to the germ theory, plate tectonics, a heliocentric solar system, etc. This is a specious argument, because it demands that the case be presented again, from scratch, on demand, as if we are just introducing a new, shaky idea to the table and we need to prove our assumptions to the healthy-minded skeptics.
This worldview fascinates me, though in a disturbing way. We live in the modern world, surrounded by the fruits of science, kept healthy by medicine and technology developed by the scientific method, communicating via electronics developed by science, yet at the same time there is this grassroots suspicion of the scientific method, as if they're just making it all up as part of a political plot to do something or other vaguely sinister. One demographic I understand--religious fundamentalists/biblical literalists have a worldview that I guess requires a hostility to the materialistic scientific method. Also, a belief that I'm going to be raptured to heaven any second might make me a wee bit indifferent to the fish population off Puget Sound.
But the hostility is wider than that one demographic, and I don't really get it. What do people think--that scientists are just making it all up as a big joke? That the entire scientific community is so blinkered by environmental dogma that they're ignoring all the evidence? How can such a large number of people embrace all these fruits of the scientific method, but then reject one or two ideas (global warming and evolution, usually) out of the blue, as if these two subjects were magic, and undermined science's routinely successful methods of analysis?
Re:what a hard-nosed skeptic you are
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Oceans Empty By 2048?
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Oh, get over yourself.
Yes, the fact that I respect scientific evidence and am concerned about its implications definitely indicates that I have an overly inflated opinion of myself. I'm so arrogant that I accept the scientific consensus about climate change and its potential effect on our lives. If I only had enough humility to summarily dismiss the conclusions of scientists, the very people who gave me medicine, technology, etc. If I had a slightly lower opinion of myself I'd be arrogant enough to think I knew more than people who have more education and knowledge on this particular subject. Thank you for your acute and insightful assessment of my character.
People have been predicting the Malthusian doom of mankind and the planet forever
Ah yes, the hand-waving "they're making it all up, and scientists have been wrong before!" rebuttal. Are you saying the temp is not increasing, or that it will have no effect on human life? I can understand (though disagree with) the point that the temp is increasing but it just doesn't matter, but I can't quite figure out your position.
with less species there is less competition. with less competition other species flourish. without evidence, my theory is just as likely.
The food net is more delicate than that, and species are heavily dependent on each other. Also, species survival depends on a certain population level--if you cut too far, individuals will have a harder time mating, and so on. I'm no expert, but I took a class on Oceanography, and it was surprising how delicate the balance is. Yes, the earth's oceans will recover from depletion--in thousands or millions of years. Scary "the sky is falling" stories like this aren't predicated on the idea that the earth will never recover, only that it won't recover in enough time to prevent serious harm to our (human) way of life. This goes a bit beyond shrimp being an extra dollar a pound.
Slashdot Mirror
Bush is just trying to hold on for the rest of his Presidency so, when there isn't an Iraq on the map anymore, he can act as if he did his best and what came later wasn't his fault. This isn't a liberation, it's a dim little man who stumbled into the Presidency trying to protect his name in history. He's surrounded by a few incompetent but impervious-to-facts-and-reason would-be "visionaries" who have long histories of being wrong about just about everything and being completely insulated from any concept of responsibility or self-doubt. What would you really have us do here?
And no, I have no idea how that tangent ended up the way it did. Good or bad, I had to follow it. My muse isn't very talented, but she's mine, and I love her.
Well, Germany actually had a dictator lie his way to power by using fear and patriotism as bludgeons against his opponents. They know firsthand what dangers lie at the end of that road. We still think we can have everything along the road (the exaggerated nationalism, the fear-mongering, the reduction of freedom to save freedom, etc) without necessarily arriving at the same destination. Continental Europeans know better, at least for now. In time they'll forget, because people always do, but for now they are more vigilant in defense of freedom than the Brits or Americans.
Similarly, Stanley Milgram, in his Obedience to Authority experiments and book, found very high obedience levels in Americans, but less so in the nations that had to live under Hitler. People sometimes do learn from history, though the knowledge probably gets diluted with time and distance. But for now Europeans seem a bit more disillusioned with the idea that you can give government unlimited power and still protect freedom, ergo they restrict government more. We seem to think the opposite, at least for the moment, which is why you're considered a terrorist appeaser if you think the government should have to get a warrant before putting people under surveillance, you oppose torture, or you think people should get a trial before being locked away. I only hope the pendulum starts swinging the other way soon. I'd like my nation to oppose torture and support habeus corpus. Strange that my pulse quickens while typing that--why should it be controversial?
Actually, if you think the Republicans have driven us into an open-ended, pointless war based on bullshit reasons, run up the highest deficits in history, endorsed torture, put Americans under surveillance without a warrant, locked people in secret jails without a warrant or trial, and pretty much all the things that they have, in fact, done, then "for the love of God can we have someone else, ANYONE ELSE, in power?" might just work. It worked for me. This is not a normal election, and this is not a normal administration. All decades have political controversies, but what is going on now is one of the darker periods of American history, at least as bad as Manzanar, and I would like to put it behind us as quickly as possible. I'll take good-old-fashioned petty corruption over messianic, visionary incompetence combined with corruption any day of the week.
Saddam wasn't "let" into power--he was put into power by the British. And if the Repubs disliked Saddam so much, why did Rumsfeld fly to Iraq to shake his hand and open diplomatic relations a year after he gassed the Kurds? Why would I want to vote for a party that welcomes such a madman? We sold him weapons, for god's sake. YOUR PARTY sold him weapons. Where do you get off pretending that your party is the bulwark against people like Saddam, when you sent us to war alongside him? Do you remember when a US Navy ship shot down an Iranian airliner--that was when the Repubs were having us help Saddam fight Iran.
Well, the moral choices are to pay higher taxes or have a smaller government. Which choice have the Republicans picked? Oh, that's right--neither. They want big government, but they don't want to pay for it, so we get to pass the cost on to our kids and grandkids. That's not the choice a moral party would make.I'm not a "Lib," you moron. I'm a conservative, and you're the problem, not the solution. I'll vote for the party that last gave me a balanced budged, thanks. They aren't perfect, but they aren't saddled with this messianic vision crap that the neoconservatives bring to the table. If you let the conservatives run your party again, call me. I ain't voting for anyone the Christian Dominionists put in office.
I thought the VMs would be protected by the security of the host system, since they're connecting through it. Am I wrong about that? That's not a rhetorical question--I don't actually know, and I'm curious. If I install VMware on Linux, then install Win98 in a VM, doesn't the Win98 internet connection get handled by the host OS?
Run them in Virtual Machines. VMWare is just awesome. Not that this fixes the problem after it happened.
There is always a danger in being more or less ethical than your employer. If you're more ethical you're a troublemaker and they'll fire you, and if you're less ethical then you're a scumbag. Obviously the ethical thing to do would be to notify the customers. But executives don't really work for the customer--they work for the stockholders, and "doing the right thing" doesn't figure very large in the balance sheet. I don't envy your friend's position, but it's a common one--look at Sibel Edmonds. Employers, public or private, seldom want you to have actual integrity. They want you to do and say whatever makes them look good.
So randomness is a component in that it is a factor in normal variation in the gene pool, but the difference a trait makes in the statistical likelihood of reproduction is not random. If evolution were "just randomness" there would be no evolution, because no changes would be continually selected for, allowed to accumulate, and cause divergent change and speciation. The only people who think evolution is exclusively random are creationists, and they don't understand evolution. If you read Darwin or Dawkins or any number of books by actual evolutionary theorists, you'll see that randomness is only one of the components.
Really, I meant "only for themselves." They don't consider the Catholics, Mormons, or the touchy-feely "Jesus is Love and Tolerance" Christians to be actual Christians. There are varying degrees of this, and not a lot of uniformity. The further you get into the Dominionist/Reconstructionist movement, the more pronounced it is. So when they call themselves "Christians", they don't mean what you think you're hearing--they aren't calling themselves a subset, but the totality of "real Christianity." At some point it becomes a starkly binary worldview, and everyone who isn't in their clique is essentially working for the devil, deliberately or otherwise.
If natural selection were purely random, there would be no speciation. I've read several books by Dawkins, and Darwin's Origin of Species and randomness, though present, is not the driving factor. There is a random variation in the gene pool of any population, but the selection process, which favors or disfavors certain traits, is far from random, and drives change in the population by predisposing individuals with certain characteristics to be more likely to leave offspring than their competitors. Yes, the randomness is a component, in that if there were no variation there would be no foothold for the selection process, and thus no evolution. But randomness with no selection does not drive speciation, just as variation with no selection would also fail to drive it.
I feel some compassion for the Christians who do believe in science, because they get a lot of hostility, a lot of accussations of not being a "real" Christian, from their wacked-out brethren and sistren. So though we are in a cultural battle with the fundamentalists for the broader culture, another culture battle is going on within the ranks of Christianity over their culture as well. Even if we don't share their faith, they need our help, at least to the extent of not lumping them in with the biblical literalists.
Well, technically ID doesn't preclude common descent or vestigial organs (or limbs). ID doesn't preclude much, because it doesn't assert much, other than pointing at something or other and saying "evolution doesn't explain that." Behe himself believes in common descent, though not many of the ID advocates, many (most?) of whom are closet Creationsists, think about that much. The article would rankle Creationists, but they're already rankled by just about everything since Copernicus, so I don't see the big deal.
I'm not one, but that is neither here nor there. Believing in evolution is not mutually exclusive with believing that Christ died for your sins. Most Christians do beleive in evolution, just as they believe in an old Earth, etc. Granted, the subset of Christians who are Creationists do refer to themselves as Christian, trying to claim the label for themselves, so I know it isn't easy, but don't go insulting everyone over a few (million) oddities. That's like insulting conservatives by saying they all support the Iraqi occupation and torture.
Yes, I said that in my post. I never said or implied I had all the answers, only that I trust science, fallible though it is. The difference is that my admitted ignorance leads me to place more trust, not less, in science. Again (third time) I'm not saying that it's infallible, only that, as a system, it's more dependable than any other analytic model we have to figure out the world and come to predictions. Actually it's the only model we have. I'm very glad that all these replenishment programs exist, and I truly hope they make a difference and prevent this prediction from being accurate. It's not as if want doom-n-gloom predictions to be right just to prove how smart I am. I'm such a negative person that I'm truly happy being wrong--it means the world is a better place than I thought it was.
Doctors are fallible, but we still go to them because the alternative is worse. Engineers are fallible, but we still ask them to design our bridges and airplanes, because the alternative is worse. Scientists are fallible, and you seem to be suggesting that this bare fact refutes any possible projections they can make, and we shouldn't go to them anymore for analysis. I don't think you're thinking this case through too carefully. If we're taking fish out faster than they can be replenished, and the supply is finite, what will be the result? You know this one--everyone with an ounce of analytic thinking knows this one.
This isn't a case of some scientific high-priesthood or whatever you want to call them prognosticating from tea leaves and telling you some obscure, bizarre conclusion. It's obvious. I don't know what to DO about it, granted, but that doesn't mean they're making it all up. Yes, attempts are being made (fish farms and such) to remedy this, and hopefully they'll work out. That doesn't refute what they're saying, or even address it. If we continue exactly as we're doing now, the oceans will be devoid of fish. Hopefully we won't collectively continue exactly what we're doing now.
I realize that we collectively aren't going to give up cars and the modern conveniences we've grown used to. I don't expect (or ask) that we abandon the modern world and wander off into the bush to live off of berries and nuts. I realize that a lot of the environmental talk seems to expect some proto-arcadian, "back-to-nature" utopian living, and that just isn't going to happen. The case may be that global warming is going to happen, we're going to continue to make it worse, millions/billions will be displaced, wars will result, millions will die, and we'll go on as we've gone on, as best we can.
But even then, I and people like me will still try to talk honestly about the problems we face, even if we can't fix them. The truth matters to me, even if it doesn't change our final destiny. The truth is an absolute good, at least to me. I'm weird that way.
The temp is rising, and we do know that. Ice shelves in the arctic and antarctic are melting. Ice shelves that are tens of thousands of years old, if not older. There is a vast amount of data to support this, and none to refute it. The ONLY question that we're unsure of, to the best of my knowledge, is the precise degree to which mankind's actions are accelerating the warming. We didn't cause it altogether, but the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere does make it worse. We just don't know how much worse, and the numbers there vary.
You make an excellent point. I don't think full-fledged expertise is actually necessary to make the right decisions (or at least to vote for and support the people who can and will) but a respect for learning is necessary. If we had a citizenry who respected learning, and people as a rule tried to learn something about the big issues, I could have some faith in our success. But I think we're squarely in the "bread and circuses" phase, and I'm not too optimistic. This is definitely one of the dangers of democracy, and I think you're absolutely right. I wish I didn't think that democracy sucks less than every other way of running a country.
It depends on what you think their motives are, to tell the truth. I'm scarred enough by evolution/creationism "debates" to know that many of the people who bring up ill-informed arguments will still bring them up again and again and again, forever, even when they have been soundly refuted. I can flip to a dozen blogs right now and find arguments made today that no transitional fossils have been found, which is demonstrably false. But the argument is still made. It isn't really a debate, because in actuality no one who is curious about the subject is going to dismiss out-of-hand the consensus of the scientific community. No one shows up on blogs and demands that you or I defend plate tectonics or the germ theory. So I think I can infer that someone posing as a hard-nosed skeptic about environmental change or evolution isn't really a hard-nosed skeptic. At BEST they're an ill-informed teenager, and that's unfortunate, but me directing them to reams of evidence isn't going to stand up to the indoctrination they get at home or at church. While I don't disagree with you in principle, and I concede that in a perfect world we would calmly present the same arguments time and time again, ad infinitum, I don't share the optimism to make that possible.
If I were to cite Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in a discussion about the Religious Right's plans for America, I doubt they would find my source worthy of discussion. There is such a thing as a bad source. I just did a google search on Crichton's book, and it took me only a few seconds to find out why. Again, though I agree with you in principle when you say we should reasonably listen, then respond kindly, I myself have a minimum threshold. If you're quoting Hovind on Darwin, or saying that the Nazis were "perfect Darwinists," then I know where you stand, intellectually and philosophically, and there isn't going to be a productive debate, even if God blesses me right that second with breathtaking patience and fortitude. I know I keep going back to Darwinism, but I admit that the frustration I've developed with those "debates" has carried over to the "debates" on climate change. Why? Because largely the same demographic, the same types of people, are involved. This isn't really about the latest climatalogical data, and most people know it. We're just too frightened to just say we have an unbridgeable epistemological gulf, and give up on any efforts at communication.My only point was that if sea creatures die faster than they are replenished, and the number is finite, eventually you end up with zero. The only "reverse" we could have in this situation would be an increase in population, either by a change in human behavior allowing time for the numbers to rise through breeding, or mass Special Creation--i.e. magic. You wait for magic if you want. I'm not too optimistic about changing human behavior, to tell the truth. It's more likely that we're just doomed, because people will never consistently overcome the lure of short-term self interest, even at the cost of long-term mass pain and death.
You do know, I suppose, that if you deplete your supply faster than it can be replenished, this "supply" you speak of will be gone? That would be the point you were looking for. Good luck with that.
Actually there is a forum for the conversation--it's science. The scientific community is one big ongoing conversation. On this particular subject, the evidence is so overwhelming that all the scientific organizations, though they disagree on the finer points at times, agree that the actions of humans are accelerating global warming. There are plenty of people from outside the scientific community, particularly faux-grassroots, industry-financed organizations, acting as if there is a controversy, but the scientific community is in agreement. You may disagree with them, the original poster to whom I responded may hold them in little regard, but this is about as significant as me and a buddy of mine saying that I want to hold a "conversation" with the medical community over the validity of the germ theory.
How many times must the evidence be presented? Again, the scientific community is in consensus. Are they infallible? No. Nor are scientists infallible when it comes to the germ theory, plate tectonics, a heliocentric solar system, etc. This is a specious argument, because it demands that the case be presented again, from scratch, on demand, as if we are just introducing a new, shaky idea to the table and we need to prove our assumptions to the healthy-minded skeptics.This worldview fascinates me, though in a disturbing way. We live in the modern world, surrounded by the fruits of science, kept healthy by medicine and technology developed by the scientific method, communicating via electronics developed by science, yet at the same time there is this grassroots suspicion of the scientific method, as if they're just making it all up as part of a political plot to do something or other vaguely sinister. One demographic I understand--religious fundamentalists/biblical literalists have a worldview that I guess requires a hostility to the materialistic scientific method. Also, a belief that I'm going to be raptured to heaven any second might make me a wee bit indifferent to the fish population off Puget Sound.
But the hostility is wider than that one demographic, and I don't really get it. What do people think--that scientists are just making it all up as a big joke? That the entire scientific community is so blinkered by environmental dogma that they're ignoring all the evidence? How can such a large number of people embrace all these fruits of the scientific method, but then reject one or two ideas (global warming and evolution, usually) out of the blue, as if these two subjects were magic, and undermined science's routinely successful methods of analysis?