"Neither have you submitted one shred of evidence that evolution has been proved"
Indeed, I have claimed that neither evolution, nor any other scientific theory, can ever be proved. They can be disproved. They can be shown to be highly probable because they fit with a lot of different evidence. In particular, there should be a large number of facts that support them such that they would not be supported if those facts turned out a different way. My complaint is that you have not offered a single peice of evidence that supports creationism that would not support creationism if it had turned out differently. In fact, you cannot do so, because there is no such thing.
I have thrown out a number of facts that are explained by evolution. Facts you can check yourself, without having to take anyones word for it, not even an apostle. Facts that would call evolution into question if they turned out differently. For example, if I cut up a marine mammal and didn't find a hard bony skeleton, I'd worry about my theory that marine mammals evolved from land-dwellers.
"I do not believe that there are modern human skeletal remains over 6,000 years." Then you are beyond hope. I was about to launch into explaining why you're wrong about radiocarbon dating, and note that you haven't addressed the dozen or so other dating methods that all mysteriously agree. But I won't bother; anyone capable of beleiving humanity is 6000 years old in this day and age has already closed their eyes to more than I could present.
Hell, I can't help myself: Was it possibly a creationist that bothered to radiocarbon date the rocks from Mount Saint Helens? I mean, I took one semester of geology in high school, and I could have told them they'd get a date thousands of years old (if not tens of thousands). Nobody radiocarbon dates rocks. That would be stupid. Radiocarbon dating works because cosmic rays produce C14 in the upper atmosphere, which circulates down to the lower atmosphere. You breathe it in. When you die, you stop breathing (or photosynthesizing if you're a plant), and thus stop taking in C14. C14 decays into C12 at a (statistically) predictable rate, so by looking at the percent of carbon in a previously living thing and comparing it to the fairly constant percent in the atmosphere you can figure out (within a calculable error range) how long ago the thing died. Rocks don't breathe. And volcanic eruptions throw up a whole lot of carbon (mostly in CO2) that hasn't seen the upper atmosphere in a very very long time (if ever), so it's going to be practically pure C12. Really, the only reason I can see to run a radiocarbon date on a Mount Saint Helens rock is because you know it works, so you know what you'll get, and you know you can use that to lie and say it doesn't work.
"As for the prior issues you had with Genesis, it seems that I proved my case, because you've moved on" Yeah, when they give up in the face of your total inability to reason, it means you've convinced them. Definitely.
"And there are many proofs in the Bible of past predictions that came true right on schedule." The Bible is not evidence for itself or anything else. Evidence is something I can go check myself.
"If both evolution and creation are theories, why teach either one to children? Or why not teach both? I have no particular problem with that.
Gravity is only a theory, should we teach that? Yes, because it is supported by all available evidence. Evolution is a theory that is supported by all available evidence. Creation is not a theory at all. It is not supported by any evidence, because it cannot be unsupported by any evidence. I've got a problem with teaching creation in science class, because it isn't science.
"Only the really weak position would argue against hearing alternatives..." So you won't have a problem if I want to teach your children that Joe the Giant Turtle barfed up the universe last Tuesday? That's my "theory", and it has every bit as much evidence going for it as any other creationism.
"What I am endeavoring to say is that it is still at best a theory, and according to the accepted process of Scientific Method, in that it has not been proved"
Evolution has been "proved" in every sense that any scientific fact has been proved.
"Great, now what", the evolutionists said. "What we've found thus far makes the case for creationism equally well." You complimented me on my writing but did you read it? ANYTHING makes the case for creationism just as well as anything else. There's no conspiracy of evolutionists out to discredit creationism. They're too busy trying to explain things, and creationism just doesn't add anything to that.
"I also suspect there was no change to the genetic code of the flies either, also a key requirement for proving evolution."
You suspect wrong.
"If you took a fly and put it in a box and raised the temperature slowly to, say, 180F and they all lived and their genetic code changed so that the change was permanent and the latter were no longer able to breed with the former, then I think you'd have proof of evolution"
Great, then you think we have proof of evolution, because that's what was done and that's what happened (except you only have to go from 70 to 80 or 90).
"Has the missing link ever been found?" Yes. Every early homonid fossil we have found has had a skeletal structure somewhere between those that preceded it and those that came after.
"Prior to the creation of man -- which did happen according to specific Bible chronology 6,000 years ago" So human remains more than 6000 years old would disprove the bible? Or prove that God is a trickster? Are you under the impression that there aren't any human remains from more than 6000 years ago?
"Without abiogenesis, you're a creationist," No. You can also say "I don't know", as any good scientist will frequently.
"The fact that people still debate the wording of the Bible's Genesis account itself is proof that abiogenesis is still unproven."
People can talk about whatever they want. The fact that they do proves nothing. Heck, I don't beleive in Genesis as anything but a somewhat disjointed old story, but I'll still ask a question about it, just because I like baiting you: According to Gen 1:20-27 God creates the animals, and then Adam and Eve. According to Gen 2:7-22 (the SAME PAGE in my copy) it's Adam then the animals, then Eve. You're holding this up as a scientific source? It contradicts itself in the first two pages.
Finally, as far as Creation theory making predictions. What you describe sounds like The Bible making predictions. I said creationism didn't because I was trying to leave religion out and not assume you were equating creationism with only one particular creation myth. I have on my shelf a book containing 57 creation myths. I see no reason to consider yours superior to the others. Any of them could be true. None can possibly be disproved.
So far the only prediction you've offered is the bible predicting events later in the bible. Well there's a shocker. I kind of had in mind an independantly verifiable prediction. Something I could go out and check myself. Like say, "Marine animals that breathe air exclusively probably evolved from land dwellers, so you'd expect them to have hard, bony skeletons instead of cartilage, and for the bones in the fins to bear some resemblance to hand and foot bones." See, that's a prediction. I could go out and cut up some whales and check.
"Hey, look.. It's an object that keeps time synchronized with the rotation of this planet around it's sun, and conveniently it fits right around my wrist. It's very pretty -- in particular I like the random markings that almost seem to form the words, "Hand made in Switzerland". I wonder how many billions of years it took for this thing to evolve into this highly efficient (for telling time) form."
Ahh, that silly analogy. You see, I'm horrendously inefficient at all sorts of things I'd expect
Evolution is not random. Nor is it responsible for "all we know and see", only for changes in populations of living, reproducing things over time. I would guess the transition from non-living matter to living matter did indeed happen by chance, but whether it did or not has no bearing on evolution.
"Evolutionists continually dismiss out of hand evidence that suggests evolution is false or flawed"
No, they don't. Now that we've both made blind assertions, how about an example?
"Moreover, saying that the route a nerve takes is evolutionary because it doesn't seem to be the shortest path is simply conjecture. To me it would make sense that an organ whose function is dependent on aspiration cycles would loop through the chest, if I were the engineer. But that's just conjecture too."
Yours is a fine theory. But the nerve dosen't connect with anything in the chest, so it's out. We could probably come up with several theories that explained this nerves routing. Evolution would be only one of them. At that point, picking any one theory would indeed be conjecture. But say we had hundreds, or even thousands of similar little facts, each of which could be explained in various ways. But they all had one particular possible explanation in common. It could be coincidence, but the safe bet is it's not.
"The simple truth is that without independent verification of the theory by experimentation, both abiogenesis and its codependent theories of evoltion are simply theories"
Evolution is not dependent on abiogenesis. Period.
Evolution is indeed "just a theory". But Creationism is not a theory. Theories explain, predict, and have the potential to be shown false. Creationism explains nothing, predicts nothing, and no matter what happens, can not be shown to be false (or true).
Finally, while obviously the theory that evolution occurred in the past can not be tested experimentaly, the theory that it works now can and has. Numerous people have tried this experiment: Take a bunch of fruit flies. The kind that hatch, are active for a few hours, lay eggs and die. You'll find that they only do this within a certain 1 or 2 degree temperature band. So put them in a box, and keep it right at that temperature all the time. The flies will reproduce again and again, several generations a day. Change the temperature very slowly; say, 10 degrees over 6 months. You will now have flies adapted to an entirely different temperature, incapable of surviving at the original one.
If you have a bit more patience, convince a lot of people that the King Charles Spaniel was a fine breed of dog, and it's really a shame they all got killed off along with King Charles. Have these people find dogs that look kind of King-Charlesish, and breed them. Then have them take the puppies, and only allow those to breed that look most King-Charlesish. Repeat for about a hundred years, and you will have a whole new distinct breed of dog. (Not to mention the really long term dog experiment "Lets breed only the least aggressive wolf pups.")
Evolution works today. It seems fairly reasonable to assume it worked in the past. It fairly neatly explains a stupefyingly vast number of things (bone structure of marine mammals and bats; why birds in totaly different ecological niches in the galapagos are similar; why fossils of homonids look less and less like us the further back in time you go; etc. I could fill a whole page with weird things explained by evolution, just off the top of my head. Still waiting for one thing that contradicts it, or one thing explained by Creationism)
Evolution does not require faith. Faith is beleiving something even when you don't have evidence. Evolution has huge heaping mounds of evidence.
If creationist are so unconcerned about the "how" part when making shit up about the "why" part, why do they feel the need to say evolution is wrong?
I am not concerned about "why" because I have yet to be convinced that there neces
"If Pons or Fleischmann cared enough, they could get a court of law you hand them your ass on a platter for that calumny."
No they could not. Among other things, they would have to prove the statement false, which they have not been able to do in 14 years, despite better motivation than suing someone over a slashdot post.
"These were two highly respected chemists"
Note the past tense.
"they had no interest in promoting the observed phenomena dishonestly"
Yet they did. Credible, competent scientists do not announce their "results" to the press and pursue funding while witholding the details necessary to reproduce their experiment.
Note that I do not say it started out as a hoax. I beleive it started out as an honest mistake. But when they figured out their mistake, they did not retract. They obfuscated, they bluffed, in short, they hoaxed.
"You need about 100 acres of windmills to power one average home"
Uh, my uncle and his family lived for 20 years in a very nice home entirely powered by 1 windmill. Nor has he ever mentioned any particular peroblem with birds.
Maybe you need about 100 acres of blindly asserted bullshit to justify that nuclear is the only real option.
"so long as we can get politicians to stop selling us this 'deregulation' snake oil, and get out there and demand safety and reliability for our infrastructure"
That would be great! Let me know when that works out will ya? Of course, I'll have probably died and gone to hell by then, but at least I'll be able to go ice-skating. Until then, I don't think I'll be a big nuclear power fan.
First of all, you, along with most creationists, seem to think evolution is about the origins of life. It is not. Not even a little bit. Evolution tells us absolutely nothing about how life began in the first place; it doesn't even try. Evolution describes how living things change over time.
"However, the order of events given in the creation account are absolutely in agreement with modern evolution accounts"
Which order of events? Genesis is not in agreement with itself about the order of creation.
"It is important to understand that the Bible explains why things are, not how they were made"
So why do creationists cite the bible on topics of "How"?
"Which leads to a point: Evolution is still a theory and remains unproved"
As with everything in Science. Like the theory of gravity. If you say can prove something, it is not science. If you can back it up, it is mathematics. If not, it is religion.
"The irony is that no one would argue that a laptop computer ever came into existence on its own, out of the random swirlings of sand and oil (an evolutionist's view),"
That is not the view of evolution, partly because, as noted, evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. Let's take you analogy a slightly different direction: We know the laptop is an artifact designed by a human. How did that human go about designing it? No one would argue he sat down with an empty pad of paper and skecthed out designs for every circuit, component, etc entirely from scratch. (a creationists view) Rather he probably started with the design for an earlier model of laptop, and thought about ways to improve it slightly.
"It seems to me that evolutionists and creationists are identical in this way: they both depend completely on faith."
People who beleive in evolution may be depending on faith. But they don't have to. They can examine the evidence themselves. Example: The nerve that controls your larynx emerges between the vertebrae at the back of your neck, travels down into you chest cavity, loops under the aorta, and goes back up to wind up in your neck an inch or two from where it started. So, you don't have to take anybodies word for it, you can make up your own mind: Does this sound like the work of an inteligent creator? Or does it sound like the result of gradual changes which slowly changed the positions of the heart and the larynx, but were never able to make the non-incremental leap of not routing that nerve under the aorta? Perhaps you are not convinced by one example. Good, you shouldn't be. Luckily, the medical and zoological sciences can provide more.
You can probably spend the rest of your life doing nothing but looking up more examples of things for which evolution seems like a good explaination. You will never prove evolution is true, because science doesn't do that. Science says "This seems incredibly likely to be the case. Sufficiently so that if you want to know how something you don't know is going to turn out, you probably want to bet it will turn out the way that is consistant with evolution" Of course, if you found something that wasn't consistant with evolution, you would thereby disprove evolution, or at least part of it.
With creationism, you're never going to prove it either. But you're never going to disprove it, no matter what happens. The potential to be disproved is prehaps the chief halmark of a scientific theory. "It's that way because God made it that way" explains ANYTHING. Hence it useless for explaining evidence and making predictions. That's what science cares about, and in that sense it is equivalent to a falsehood.
Perhaps it is wrong for scientists to say "Creationism is false". Perhaps they should say "Creationism seems really unlikely, since it adds a bunch of assumptions that aren't necessary (or even helpful) in explaining anything, but technically it is possible. What we can say for sure is that regardless of whether it is true or false, there is no reason to care."
"Exploring other star systems? Totally possible, but the centuries-long timescale makes it simply boring"
You (and Spider) should check out Alstair Reynolds. He's written 3 novels and a bunch of short stories in the same universe. It's great because it has got the science. Reynolds is (or was) an astronomer, and is clearly unwilling to throw in stuff he knows can't work.
It's got interstellar travel without FTL, but it's not boring. In fact the thing that really makes it interesting to me is seeing how his furturistic societies are affected by hundred year travel times between them. He assumes extreme longevity and hibernation technology, so the same charachters actually can travel between systems, but even if they take a quick round trip, centuries of social changes have occurred by the time they return. At an outlying colony, visitors from other systems happen by maybe once a century, and bring technology so different from that of the locals that massive sociological uphevals result.
His aliens are, well, alien, and he even has a good explanation for why they haven't found us before we go out and find them.
In short, it's great stuff. It's right up there with the greats whose absence Spider is bemoaning, yet it's not just regurgitating their themes.
It didn't get a "shaky introduction". It was false. It was a hoax. Dream all you want, but if you want funding for your "cold fusion" research, then I want funding for my research into fairy-dust. Cold fusion was given an honest chance. The researchers were found to be dishonest, and cold fusion to be non-existant. Giving cold-fusion reseachers anything at this point is not being "open-minded"; it's being terminally stupid. If you want to fund cold fusion research, I expect you'd like to buy the Brooklyn bridge. From a different guy every day for a month. Call me at the end of that month, I've got the legitimate deed.
Looking "outside the box" for solutions to our energy needs is a fine thing, and we need to do it. But that doesn't mean we should throw money at crackpots fourteen years after we figured out they were definitely wrong.
"If we can still spare capital without draining the rest of our resources"
We can't. By definition, monet spent on one thing may not be spent on another. That said, I'm happy to fund physicists. I'm less happy to fund people who call themselves physicists while mumbling pseudo-scientifically about an effect they can not measure, reproduce, or even define. The original cold-fusion "discoverers" were wrong. All evidence points to the fact that they knew they were wrong well before they stopped making lots of noise about their "discovery".
Whether it's replicable is very much the issue. If it is not replicable, it is not science.
I would certainly not fund an AI researcher who said he had produced an machine that showed evidence of being fully sentient, but which isn't doing so anymore, and he can't build another one (Unless we give him millions, of course). I would fund one who had a machine (and instructions so anyone can build one) that demonstrated some interesting behaviors, and who had some ideas, with clear theoretical backing, about how to improve it further.
Cold fusion started out as either a mistake or a hoax, and within days became definitely a hoax and an attempt to defraud the government for funding. That there are people wacko enough to want to associate themselves with such a famously false field I find amazing. That anyone calls those people "physicists" I find insulting.
"like the time he quit his high school water polo team after the coach encouraged his team to elbow the opposing team whenever the ref looked away"
Um, I suppose the really moral stance would be to object to that, but I think your dad made the right decision: water polo is generally not played by people whos morals are that stringent.
My wife played co-ed water polo in college. I try not too piss her off in the water. She can tread water with a big smile on her face while pulling out your leg hair with her toes.
"As Newton opined 'If I have seen further, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants'"
Offtopic here: It's a great quote. I like it. It's particularly good when taken out of context as you did and everyone else does. But the context is somewhat interesting:
Newton recieved a letter from a colleague he wasn't very impressed with. Said colleague was sucking up a bit, now that Newton was a big shot and all. So Newton wrote the man back a letter containing that quote. Punchline: The man was a midget.
Sorry, my fault. I too use "just recompile" not for C#, but on C++. I lost track of the fact that the topic is.Net vs. Java. On that topic, I guess all I have to say is "Why either?"
YMMV of course. Most of my (C++) code only sees 1 platform. Some has seen several (but not 8), but it was written knowing that, and for that code, building for multiple platforms was just a few keystrokes.
But a lot of my code (in particular the core engine code that needs to target multiple platforms) is very performance sensitive. Several companies do what we do, most are bigger than us. We succeed partly because our stuff blows the doors off theirs, hands down. That just wouldn't happen in Java.
I've heard tell that Java is all kinds of wonderful if performance isn't critical. But I haven't seen it first hand, while I have seen C++ do everything I need, without having any of the problems people tell me I need Java to save me from.
Somebody must have goo reasons for liking Java, so like I said, YMMV.
"I'm sure I'm missing a few, but you get the point" I'm not sure what you mean by the "animated kind", and my start menu doesn't look like that, but I'll give it a try:
The point is that they have made steady incremental improvements to the basic menu bar, while holding the basic behavior (click the menu title, move down and click the item you want) constant.
Wait, you said "fundamentally new look-and-feel as well as behavior", but since anyone who used any of the menu bars you describe would have no problem with any of the others, maybe you picked a bad example? Or maybe you don't realize "fundamentaly" doesn't mean "very slightly, but not enough that you'd even necessarily notice"? I'm confused.
Well some of us (me at least) aren't willing to have our code run slower than necessary, particularly when we really do know what platform we're compiling for. And if for some reason we want a different platform (which we don't and won't), we'll have to recompile. Oh, the horror.
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How about the rate of crime-related fatalities and of gun-accident fatalities? In the US, the vast majority of deaths from assault are from assault by firearm.
Anyway, the point of the analogy was that in Britain, most criminals don't have handguns, because they fairly difficult to get. Similarly, if it were illegal to produce GSM snooper devices, most people who wanted to listen in wouldn't have them, because they couldn't just go down to radio shack and pick them up.
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Your analogy w/ guns is not so bad; just declaring this tech illegal will work similarly to banning handguns (e.g. in Britain). That is to say,not perfectly, but still extremely well.
Patent infringement will prevent any legitimate company from producing a device to listen in on GSM, so while some might be able to build it themselves, for the most part the people who would listen in won't be able to or won't bother.
Similarly, there are places where handguns are illegal (such as England). Some people say "But then only criminals will have guns!", and while this is true, it is also true that in this environment, the vast majority of criminals DON'T have guns. Which sounds nice to me.
Not if you're generating more long lived isotopes during those thosand years. Then you've got some significant amount to store. But really, the problem is not how much you need to store. The problem is storing ANY for say a hundred thousand years. Pretending you have any idea what's going to happen to your storage facility over a time span 25 times longer than the pyramids have been standing is just crazy.
"would likely work without serious environmental issues (for a very small number of launches)."
For a very small number of launches (so what's the point), and only if it doesn't blow up even once.
You're suprised that you're not seeing research into a technology that would be insanely expensive and dangerous to develop, would have to work flawlessly every time (which no technology of any kind ever does) to not be stupefyingly more dangerous, and which we could only use for a small number of launches ever?
So theoretically, 1 person dies every launch. Based on what level of understanding of the ill effects of radiation? I believe the understanding of long term cancer risk, for example, is still somewhat murky, and in any case it would be cumulative (i.e. if one person dies from one launch, a lot more than ten die from ten launches). And all of this is just the deaths from a succesful launch. It's the failure mode that really scares me. Challenger blew up shortly after launch, and thousands watching from the ground were horrified. If it had been packed to the gills with high-grade plutonium, they'd be worse than horrified. Many of them would be dead.
I don't have an answer, but note that conservation of energy is not a law. It is an observed fact. If it was observed that "dark energy", or any other energy was not conserved, their would be no garauntee that the the observation was wrong and the "law" was right.
Frankly though, "dark energy" sounds to me like code for "we don't know WTF we're talking about".
My office paper use consists of a single legal pad every six months or so. I just never print, nor need too. The legal pad is for scribbling short lived notes, if there were such a thing as a whiteboard that didn't get accidentally erased, I wouldn't need that.
"and all that pollution from the chemical rocket exhausts???"
That's supposed to stack up against the radiation and fallout from exploding a series of NUCLEAR BOMBS??? That's the funniest thing I've heard in a while!
Everything looks simple on paper, let me know when you've built one. If you think a vehicle that will hold up to being lofted in this manner, or for that matter is able to control this source of thrust with sufficient precision, need not be "hi-tech", and will be really quick and easy to build, I want some of what you're smoking.
And finally, you forgot one reason Orion was canned: We figured out that the radiation from nuclear explosions is incredibly dangeous, and causes problems for a fantastically long time. So we rightly concluded that exploding a whole bunch of nukes in the atmosphere every time we want to launch something into space would be inconcievably stupid.
Yeah, you could loft huge tonnage that way. We could also do blasting for mining/construction with small nukes instead of dynamite. It would probably be a lot faster. But we don't, because we're not idiots. Well, most of us.
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"Neither have you submitted one shred of evidence that evolution has been proved"
Indeed, I have claimed that neither evolution, nor any other scientific theory, can ever be proved. They can be disproved. They can be shown to be highly probable because they fit with a lot of different evidence. In particular, there should be a large number of facts that support them such that they would not be supported if those facts turned out a different way. My complaint is that you have not offered a single peice of evidence that supports creationism that would not support creationism if it had turned out differently. In fact, you cannot do so, because there is no such thing.
I have thrown out a number of facts that are explained by evolution. Facts you can check yourself, without having to take anyones word for it, not even an apostle. Facts that would call evolution into question if they turned out differently. For example, if I cut up a marine mammal and didn't find a hard bony skeleton, I'd worry about my theory that marine mammals evolved from land-dwellers.
"I do not believe that there are modern human skeletal remains over 6,000 years."
Then you are beyond hope. I was about to launch into explaining why you're wrong about radiocarbon dating, and note that you haven't addressed the dozen or so other dating methods that all mysteriously agree. But I won't bother; anyone capable of beleiving humanity is 6000 years old in this day and age has already closed their eyes to more than I could present.
Hell, I can't help myself: Was it possibly a creationist that bothered to radiocarbon date the rocks from Mount Saint Helens? I mean, I took one semester of geology in high school, and I could have told them they'd get a date thousands of years old (if not tens of thousands). Nobody radiocarbon dates rocks. That would be stupid. Radiocarbon dating works because cosmic rays produce C14 in the upper atmosphere, which circulates down to the lower atmosphere. You breathe it in. When you die, you stop breathing (or photosynthesizing if you're a plant), and thus stop taking in C14. C14 decays into C12 at a (statistically) predictable rate, so by looking at the percent of carbon in a previously living thing and comparing it to the fairly constant percent in the atmosphere you can figure out (within a calculable error range) how long ago the thing died. Rocks don't breathe. And volcanic eruptions throw up a whole lot of carbon (mostly in CO2) that hasn't seen the upper atmosphere in a very very long time (if ever), so it's going to be practically pure C12. Really, the only reason I can see to run a radiocarbon date on a Mount Saint Helens rock is because you know it works, so you know what you'll get, and you know you can use that to lie and say it doesn't work.
"As for the prior issues you had with Genesis, it seems that I proved my case, because you've moved on"
Yeah, when they give up in the face of your total inability to reason, it means you've convinced them. Definitely.
"And there are many proofs in the Bible of past predictions that came true right on schedule."
The Bible is not evidence for itself or anything else. Evidence is something I can go check myself.
"If both evolution and creation are theories, why teach either one to children? Or why not teach both? I have no particular problem with that.
Gravity is only a theory, should we teach that? Yes, because it is supported by all available evidence. Evolution is a theory that is supported by all available evidence. Creation is not a theory at all. It is not supported by any evidence, because it cannot be unsupported by any evidence. I've got a problem with teaching creation in science class, because it isn't science.
"Only the really weak position would argue against hearing alternatives..."
So you won't have a problem if I want to teach your children that Joe the Giant Turtle barfed up the universe last Tuesday? That's my "theory", and it has every bit as much evidence going for it as any other creationism.
"What I am endeavoring to say is that it is still at best a theory, and according to the accepted process of Scientific Method, in that it has not been proved"
Evolution has been "proved" in every sense that any scientific fact has been proved.
"Great, now what", the evolutionists said. "What we've found thus far makes the case for creationism equally well."
You complimented me on my writing but did you read it? ANYTHING makes the case for creationism just as well as anything else. There's no conspiracy of evolutionists out to discredit creationism. They're too busy trying to explain things, and creationism just doesn't add anything to that.
"I also suspect there was no change to the genetic code of the flies either, also a key requirement for proving evolution."
You suspect wrong.
"If you took a fly and put it in a box and raised the temperature slowly to, say, 180F and they all lived and their genetic code changed so that the change was permanent and the latter were no longer able to breed with the former, then I think you'd have proof of evolution"
Great, then you think we have proof of evolution, because that's what was done and that's what happened (except you only have to go from 70 to 80 or 90).
"Has the missing link ever been found?"
Yes. Every early homonid fossil we have found has had a skeletal structure somewhere between those that preceded it and those that came after.
"Prior to the creation of man -- which did happen according to specific Bible chronology 6,000 years ago"
So human remains more than 6000 years old would disprove the bible? Or prove that God is a trickster? Are you under the impression that there aren't any human remains from more than 6000 years ago?
"Without abiogenesis, you're a creationist,"
No. You can also say "I don't know", as any good scientist will frequently.
"The fact that people still debate the wording of the Bible's Genesis account itself is proof that abiogenesis is still unproven."
People can talk about whatever they want. The fact that they do proves nothing. Heck, I don't beleive in Genesis as anything but a somewhat disjointed old story, but I'll still ask a question about it, just because I like baiting you:
According to Gen 1:20-27 God creates the animals, and then Adam and Eve. According to Gen 2:7-22 (the SAME PAGE in my copy) it's Adam then the animals, then Eve. You're holding this up as a scientific source? It contradicts itself in the first two pages.
Finally, as far as Creation theory making predictions. What you describe sounds like The Bible making predictions. I said creationism didn't because I was trying to leave religion out and not assume you were equating creationism with only one particular creation myth. I have on my shelf a book containing 57 creation myths. I see no reason to consider yours superior to the others. Any of them could be true. None can possibly be disproved.
So far the only prediction you've offered is the bible predicting events later in the bible. Well there's a shocker. I kind of had in mind an independantly verifiable prediction. Something I could go out and check myself. Like say, "Marine animals that breathe air exclusively probably evolved from land dwellers, so you'd expect them to have hard, bony skeletons instead of cartilage, and for the bones in the fins to bear some resemblance to hand and foot bones." See, that's a prediction. I could go out and cut up some whales and check.
"Hey, look.. It's an object that keeps time synchronized with the rotation of this planet around it's sun, and conveniently it fits right around my wrist. It's very pretty -- in particular I like the random markings that almost seem to form the words, "Hand made in Switzerland". I wonder how many billions of years it took for this thing to evolve into this highly efficient (for telling time) form."
Ahh, that silly analogy. You see, I'm horrendously inefficient at all sorts of things I'd expect
Evolution is not random. Nor is it responsible for "all we know and see", only for changes in populations of living, reproducing things over time. I would guess the transition from non-living matter to living matter did indeed happen by chance, but whether it did or not has no bearing on evolution.
"Evolutionists continually dismiss out of hand evidence that suggests evolution is false or flawed"
No, they don't. Now that we've both made blind assertions, how about an example?
"Moreover, saying that the route a nerve takes is evolutionary because it doesn't seem to be the shortest path is simply conjecture. To me it would make sense that an organ whose function is dependent on aspiration cycles would loop through the chest, if I were the engineer. But that's just conjecture too."
Yours is a fine theory. But the nerve dosen't connect with anything in the chest, so it's out. We could probably come up with several theories that explained this nerves routing. Evolution would be only one of them. At that point, picking any one theory would indeed be conjecture. But say we had hundreds, or even thousands of similar little facts, each of which could be explained in various ways. But they all had one particular possible explanation in common. It could be coincidence, but the safe bet is it's not.
"The simple truth is that without independent verification of the theory by experimentation, both abiogenesis and its codependent theories of evoltion are simply theories"
Evolution is not dependent on abiogenesis. Period.
Evolution is indeed "just a theory". But Creationism is not a theory. Theories explain, predict, and have the potential to be shown false. Creationism explains nothing, predicts nothing, and no matter what happens, can not be shown to be false (or true).
Finally, while obviously the theory that evolution occurred in the past can not be tested experimentaly, the theory that it works now can and has. Numerous people have tried this experiment: Take a bunch of fruit flies. The kind that hatch, are active for a few hours, lay eggs and die. You'll find that they only do this within a certain 1 or 2 degree temperature band. So put them in a box, and keep it right at that temperature all the time. The flies will reproduce again and again, several generations a day. Change the temperature very slowly; say, 10 degrees over 6 months. You will now have flies adapted to an entirely different temperature, incapable of surviving at the original one.
If you have a bit more patience, convince a lot of people that the King Charles Spaniel was a fine breed of dog, and it's really a shame they all got killed off along with King Charles. Have these people find dogs that look kind of King-Charlesish, and breed them. Then have them take the puppies, and only allow those to breed that look most King-Charlesish. Repeat for about a hundred years, and you will have a whole new distinct breed of dog.
(Not to mention the really long term dog experiment "Lets breed only the least aggressive wolf pups.")
Evolution works today. It seems fairly reasonable to assume it worked in the past. It fairly neatly explains a stupefyingly vast number of things (bone structure of marine mammals and bats; why birds in totaly different ecological niches in the galapagos are similar; why fossils of homonids look less and less like us the further back in time you go; etc. I could fill a whole page with weird things explained by evolution, just off the top of my head. Still waiting for one thing that contradicts it, or one thing explained by Creationism)
Evolution does not require faith. Faith is beleiving something even when you don't have evidence. Evolution has huge heaping mounds of evidence.
If creationist are so unconcerned about the "how" part when making shit up about the "why" part, why do they feel the need to say evolution is wrong?
I am not concerned about "why" because I have yet to be convinced that there neces
"If Pons or Fleischmann cared enough, they could
get a court of law you hand them your ass on a
platter for that calumny."
No they could not. Among other things, they would have to prove the statement false, which they have not been able to do in 14 years, despite better motivation than suing someone over a slashdot post.
"These were two highly respected chemists"
Note the past tense.
"they had no interest in promoting the
observed phenomena dishonestly"
Yet they did. Credible, competent scientists do not announce their "results" to the press and pursue funding while witholding the details necessary to reproduce their experiment.
Note that I do not say it started out as a hoax. I beleive it started out as an honest mistake. But when they figured out their mistake, they did not retract. They obfuscated, they bluffed, in short, they hoaxed.
Well, at least you don't need to resort to ad-hominem attacks...
"You need about 100 acres of windmills to power one average home"
Uh, my uncle and his family lived for 20 years in a very nice home entirely powered by 1 windmill. Nor has he ever mentioned any particular peroblem with birds.
Maybe you need about 100 acres of blindly asserted bullshit to justify that nuclear is the only real option.
"so long as we can get politicians to stop selling us this 'deregulation' snake oil, and get out there and demand safety and reliability for our infrastructure"
That would be great! Let me know when that works out will ya? Of course, I'll have probably died and gone to hell by then, but at least I'll be able to go ice-skating. Until then, I don't think I'll be a big nuclear power fan.
First of all, you, along with most creationists, seem to think evolution is about the origins of life. It is not. Not even a little bit. Evolution tells us absolutely nothing about how life began in the first place; it doesn't even try. Evolution describes how living things change over time.
"However, the order of events given in the creation account are absolutely in agreement with modern evolution accounts"
Which order of events? Genesis is not in agreement with itself about the order of creation.
"It is important to understand that the Bible explains why things are, not how they were made"
So why do creationists cite the bible on topics of "How"?
"Which leads to a point: Evolution is still a theory and remains unproved"
As with everything in Science. Like the theory of gravity. If you say can prove something, it is not science. If you can back it up, it is mathematics. If not, it is religion.
"The irony is that no one would argue that a laptop computer ever came into existence on its own, out of the random swirlings of sand and oil (an evolutionist's view),"
That is not the view of evolution, partly because, as noted, evolution has nothing to do with the origin of life. Let's take you analogy a slightly different direction: We know the laptop is an artifact designed by a human. How did that human go about designing it? No one would argue he sat down with an empty pad of paper and skecthed out designs for every circuit, component, etc entirely from scratch. (a creationists view) Rather he probably started with the design for an earlier model of laptop, and thought about ways to improve it slightly.
"It seems to me that evolutionists and creationists are identical in this way: they both depend completely on faith."
People who beleive in evolution may be depending on faith. But they don't have to. They can examine the evidence themselves. Example: The nerve that controls your larynx emerges between the vertebrae at the back of your neck, travels down into you chest cavity, loops under the aorta, and goes back up to wind up in your neck an inch or two from where it started. So, you don't have to take anybodies word for it, you can make up your own mind: Does this sound like the work of an inteligent creator? Or does it sound like the result of gradual changes which slowly changed the positions of the heart and the larynx, but were never able to make the non-incremental leap of not routing that nerve under the aorta? Perhaps you are not convinced by one example. Good, you shouldn't be. Luckily, the medical and zoological sciences can provide more.
You can probably spend the rest of your life doing nothing but looking up more examples of things for which evolution seems like a good explaination. You will never prove evolution is true, because science doesn't do that. Science says "This seems incredibly likely to be the case. Sufficiently so that if you want to know how something you don't know is going to turn out, you probably want to bet it will turn out the way that is consistant with evolution" Of course, if you found something that wasn't consistant with evolution, you would thereby disprove evolution, or at least part of it.
With creationism, you're never going to prove it either. But you're never going to disprove it, no matter what happens. The potential to be disproved is prehaps the chief halmark of a scientific theory. "It's that way because God made it that way" explains ANYTHING. Hence it useless for explaining evidence and making predictions. That's what science cares about, and in that sense it is equivalent to a falsehood.
Perhaps it is wrong for scientists to say "Creationism is false". Perhaps they should say "Creationism seems really unlikely, since it adds a bunch of assumptions that aren't necessary (or even helpful) in explaining anything, but technically it is possible. What we can say for sure is that regardless of whether it is true or false, there is no reason to care."
"Exploring other star systems? Totally possible, but the centuries-long timescale makes it simply boring"
You (and Spider) should check out Alstair Reynolds. He's written 3 novels and a bunch of short stories in the same universe. It's great because it has got the science. Reynolds is (or was) an astronomer, and is clearly unwilling to throw in stuff he knows can't work.
It's got interstellar travel without FTL, but it's not boring. In fact the thing that really makes it interesting to me is seeing how his furturistic societies are affected by hundred year travel times between them. He assumes extreme longevity and hibernation technology, so the same charachters actually can travel between systems, but even if they take a quick round trip, centuries of social changes have occurred by the time they return. At an outlying colony, visitors from other systems happen by maybe once a century, and bring technology so different from that of the locals that massive sociological uphevals result.
His aliens are, well, alien, and he even has a good explanation for why they haven't found us before we go out and find them.
In short, it's great stuff. It's right up there with the greats whose absence Spider is bemoaning, yet it's not just regurgitating their themes.
It didn't get a "shaky introduction". It was false. It was a hoax. Dream all you want, but if you want funding for your "cold fusion" research, then I want funding for my research into fairy-dust. Cold fusion was given an honest chance. The researchers were found to be dishonest, and cold fusion to be non-existant. Giving cold-fusion reseachers anything at this point is not being "open-minded"; it's being terminally stupid. If you want to fund cold fusion research, I expect you'd like to buy the Brooklyn bridge. From a different guy every day for a month. Call me at the end of that month, I've got the legitimate deed.
Looking "outside the box" for solutions to our energy needs is a fine thing, and we need to do it. But that doesn't mean we should throw money at crackpots fourteen years after we figured out they were definitely wrong.
"If we can still spare capital without draining the rest of our resources"
We can't. By definition, monet spent on one thing may not be spent on another. That said, I'm happy to fund physicists. I'm less happy to fund people who call themselves physicists while mumbling pseudo-scientifically about an effect they can not measure, reproduce, or even define. The original cold-fusion "discoverers" were wrong. All evidence points to the fact that they knew they were wrong well before they stopped making lots of noise about their "discovery".
Whether it's replicable is very much the issue. If it is not replicable, it is not science.
I would certainly not fund an AI researcher who said he had produced an machine that showed evidence of being fully sentient, but which isn't doing so anymore, and he can't build another one (Unless we give him millions, of course). I would fund one who had a machine (and instructions so anyone can build one) that demonstrated some interesting behaviors, and who had some ideas, with clear theoretical backing, about how to improve it further.
Cold fusion started out as either a mistake or a hoax, and within days became definitely a hoax and an attempt to defraud the government for funding. That there are people wacko enough to want to associate themselves with such a famously false field I find amazing. That anyone calls those people "physicists" I find insulting.
"like the time he quit his high school water polo team after the coach encouraged his team to elbow the opposing team whenever the ref looked away"
Um, I suppose the really moral stance would be to object to that, but I think your dad made the right decision: water polo is generally not played by people whos morals are that stringent.
My wife played co-ed water polo in college. I try not too piss her off in the water. She can tread water with a big smile on her face while pulling out your leg hair with her toes.
"As Newton opined 'If I have seen further, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants'"
Offtopic here: It's a great quote. I like it. It's particularly good when taken out of context as you did and everyone else does. But the context is somewhat interesting:
Newton recieved a letter from a colleague he wasn't very impressed with. Said colleague was sucking up a bit, now that Newton was a big shot and all. So Newton wrote the man back a letter containing that quote. Punchline: The man was a midget.
Sorry, my fault. I too use "just recompile" not for C#, but on C++. I lost track of the fact that the topic is
YMMV of course. Most of my (C++) code only sees 1 platform. Some has seen several (but not 8), but it was written knowing that, and for that code, building for multiple platforms was just a few keystrokes.
But a lot of my code (in particular the core engine code that needs to target multiple platforms) is very performance sensitive. Several companies do what we do, most are bigger than us. We succeed partly because our stuff blows the doors off theirs, hands down. That just wouldn't happen in Java.
I've heard tell that Java is all kinds of wonderful if performance isn't critical. But I haven't seen it first hand, while I have seen C++ do everything I need, without having any of the problems people tell me I need Java to save me from.
Somebody must have goo reasons for liking Java, so like I said, YMMV.
"I'm sure I'm missing a few, but you get the point"
I'm not sure what you mean by the "animated kind", and my start menu doesn't look like that, but I'll give it a try:
The point is that they have made steady incremental improvements to the basic menu bar, while holding the basic behavior (click the menu title, move down and click the item you want) constant.
Wait, you said "fundamentally new look-and-feel as well as behavior", but since anyone who used any of the menu bars you describe would have no problem with any of the others, maybe you picked a bad example? Or maybe you don't realize "fundamentaly" doesn't mean "very slightly, but not enough that you'd even necessarily notice"? I'm confused.
Well some of us (me at least) aren't willing to have our code run slower than necessary, particularly when we really do know what platform we're compiling for. And if for some reason we want a different platform (which we don't and won't), we'll have to recompile. Oh, the horror.
How about the rate of crime-related fatalities and of gun-accident fatalities? In the US, the vast majority of deaths from assault are from assault by firearm.
Anyway, the point of the analogy was that in Britain, most criminals don't have handguns, because they fairly difficult to get. Similarly, if it were illegal to produce GSM snooper devices, most people who wanted to listen in wouldn't have them, because they couldn't just go down to radio shack and pick them up.
Your analogy w/ guns is not so bad; just declaring this tech illegal will work similarly to banning handguns (e.g. in Britain). That is to say,not perfectly, but still extremely well.
Patent infringement will prevent any legitimate company from producing a device to listen in on GSM, so while some might be able to build it themselves, for the most part the people who would listen in won't be able to or won't bother.
Similarly, there are places where handguns are illegal (such as England). Some people say "But then only criminals will have guns!", and while this is true, it is also true that in this environment, the vast majority of criminals DON'T have guns. Which sounds nice to me.
Not if you're generating more long lived isotopes during those thosand years. Then you've got some significant amount to store. But really, the problem is not how much you need to store. The problem is storing ANY for say a hundred thousand years. Pretending you have any idea what's going to happen to your storage facility over a time span 25 times longer than the pyramids have been standing is just crazy.
"would likely work without serious environmental issues (for a very small number of launches)."
For a very small number of launches (so what's the point), and only if it doesn't blow up even once.
You're suprised that you're not seeing research into a technology that would be insanely expensive and dangerous to develop, would have to work flawlessly every time (which no technology of any kind ever does) to not be stupefyingly more dangerous, and which we could only use for a small number of launches ever?
So theoretically, 1 person dies every launch. Based on what level of understanding of the ill effects of radiation? I believe the understanding of long term cancer risk, for example, is still somewhat murky, and in any case it would be cumulative (i.e. if one person dies from one launch, a lot more than ten die from ten launches). And all of this is just the deaths from a succesful launch. It's the failure mode that really scares me. Challenger blew up shortly after launch, and thousands watching from the ground were horrified. If it had been packed to the gills with high-grade plutonium, they'd be worse than horrified. Many of them would be dead.
I don't have an answer, but note that conservation of energy is not a law. It is an observed fact. If it was observed that "dark energy", or any other energy was not conserved, their would be no garauntee that the the observation was wrong and the "law" was right.
Frankly though, "dark energy" sounds to me like code for "we don't know WTF we're talking about".
Yes, I know it's a joke but:
My office paper use consists of a single legal pad every six months or so. I just never print, nor need too. The legal pad is for scribbling short lived notes, if there were such a thing as a whiteboard that didn't get accidentally erased, I wouldn't need that.
"and all that pollution from the chemical rocket exhausts???"
That's supposed to stack up against the radiation and fallout from exploding a series of NUCLEAR BOMBS??? That's the funniest thing I've heard in a while!
Everything looks simple on paper, let me know when you've built one. If you think a vehicle that will hold up to being lofted in this manner, or for that matter is able to control this source of thrust with sufficient precision, need not be "hi-tech", and will be really quick and easy to build, I want some of what you're smoking.
And finally, you forgot one reason Orion was canned:
We figured out that the radiation from nuclear explosions is incredibly dangeous, and causes problems for a fantastically long time. So we rightly concluded that exploding a whole bunch of nukes in the atmosphere every time we want to launch something into space would be inconcievably stupid.
Yeah, you could loft huge tonnage that way. We could also do blasting for mining/construction with small nukes instead of dynamite. It would probably be a lot faster. But we don't, because we're not idiots. Well, most of us.