How to not get a project started: (1) Get on the front page of Slashot in front of tens of thousands of programmers (2) Not say what the project is (3) ??? (4) No profit!
Have you tried having a conversation with some of the posters around here?
I have a very very bad habit of trying to have productive discussions on the evolution issue. I have succeeded twice.... may three times. You really don't want to read the rest. One time I ran into an honest-to-god Taliban-wannabe.
when I see such an incredibly strong emotional reaction to something like astrology
I often have a particularly strong emotional reaction whenever anyone starts with the anti-evolution stuff. Not because I see any danger in scientific research testing evolution, but because of long experience that people who buy into the anti-evolution stuff tend to be quite unreasonable and irrational. "Normal people" are unreasonable and irrational enough already, chuckle.
An excellent point, which tells us that we should never, ever explore astrology.
You repeated this theme several times, and I don't think it fair. You know and directly mentioned that I am fully open to science exploring and testing it.
I was giving reasons why it doesn't hold up, and reasons why people so often believe it even if there is nothing to it, but I guess I overlooked my main reason for rejecting it. Because it HAS already been exhaustively explored and tested, and failed.
Many hundreds of astrologers have been tested and when given personality profiles they consistently fail to pair them with birth charts any better than random chance. Studies have been done on thousands of people born within minutes of each other and tracked for decades, and they don't show any more correlation with each other than the general public. It only takes a few moments on Google to find this sort of info.
Scientists generally aren't inclined towards re-researching something that has already been researched and refuted to death, but astrology is such a large persistent social phenomena that new work and new results keep trickling in on it.
IIRC, the classic example is that you own a lot of land. Your neighbor parks his dump truck on a part of your land that you don't use and you don't see. After several years, you want to develop that land. Since you allowed his to park there for years he can argue that he has your permission.
Correction... You own a lot of land with a truck on it. You sell to your neighbor both the land and the truck. Your neighbor removes the truck and parks a car there.
Yes, I can see your point. Apple HAD to do this to avert a disaster of biblical proportions. What do I mean, "biblical"? What I mean is Old Testament, real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
You know the ones which end up with people saying, "Yeah, I took the Myers Briggs test, and I'm an I N T P."
Yeah, I took the Myers Briggs test, and I'm an I N T P.
Chuckle.
I have the impression that INT's are generally pretty disinclined to astrology and the like, so I'm wondering if you selected that particular combo because that is what you tested as?
I read stuff like your post and I get all pumped up about putting together a big study.
Kinda amusing that I got you all fired up for it. My thoughts the whole time writing it were "Astrology is pure superstition, and here's why".
I am majorly about "Science is right and the rest is bunkum", and so big on the science view that I am philosophically dedicated to the number #1 rule of science that everything is open to testing and revision based on the evidence. Like, atoms are real and proven and it is absolutely insane to doubt it, but heay, if you want to challenge atoms go right ahead and waste your time, go do some good science and let me know when you have sufficient results to disprove atoms and I'll be more than happy to learn the new and better science and jump on board that atoms don't exist.:)
So in an odd way I'm both supremely confident against your entire endeavour, but also completely helpful towards doing your test in a solid scientific manner absolutely expecting it prove astrology is empty superstition. Hehe.
A friend of mine was challenging my sweeping dismissal of everything supernatural, and he asked "Well, what would you do if Scott (a mutual friend) were to start shooting fireballs?"
The question did not phase me in the least... without thought or reaction I totally blandly uttered the blatantly obvious one and only answer... "I would want to figure out how he was doing it".
A completely bland reaction that if he's doing it then there's a scientific basis for it. And if somebody can shoot fireballs then duh, it kinda goes way at the top of the list to study it and figure it out.
I don't know if it came across well in writing, but it was kinda funny how I was so totally blasé answering his superduper HaHA-gotchya! challenge against my total dismissal of supernatural stuff. He thought he had some great superduper what-if challenge to put a dent in my supernatural-dismissing attitude.:) Shooting fireballs! Ya can't casually dismiss that! Heh.
the basic end result is 2,488,320 different rough combinations.
And where did all of that those rules and combinations and everything come from? Thousands of years ago a couple of superstitious farmers and goat herders looked at the stars and didn't understand them and pretty much just made stuff up.
people who never want to look at Astrology seem to hinge on the fear
I'm no more afraid of Astrology than I am afraid of the Tooth Fairy.
Wait, that's not quite true. I have a tiny fear of Astrology for the same reason as my greater fear of religion... people don't do irrational things because the Tooth Fairy told them to. However people often do irrational things because religion told them too, and some people might do irrational things because of what Astrology said to them. And yes, people doing irrational things around me can constitute some sort of problem or threat to me and can constitute a legitimate "fear" towards religion and Astrology.
the world of astrology is far, far more complex and rewarding than is understood by those who have never explored it.
Yes, complexity supplies an abundance of details and opportunities to find some random false positive connection to actual people and actual events. Complexity also supplies an effective mechanism washing away negative results. If it doesn't work then the problem isn't that it doesn't work, the problem is that you did the complex reading wrong. The astrological reading didn't match the person... oh I should/shouldn't have have applied Mercury rising in c
And to clarify, I absolutely recognize the distinction of teaching about religions. That can be done by the government, so long as it is done carefully and appropriately. In principal a teacher could even use the Bible as literature in an English class, however the only teacher who would make such a problematical selection is exactly the teacher who most needs to be prohibited from doing so.The only teacher would would want to make such a problematical selection is the teacher attempting to abuse his official position and powers to evangelize his religion.
Your post mentioned "teaching religious beliefs alongside science". I see no way to read that in an acceptable manner. Yes you can cover the impact of religion in a history class, and you could have some sort of comparative overview of religions in some social studies class, but no, I don't see any legitimate way teach religious beliefs alongside science in a science class. (I think "in science class" is clearly implicit in "alongside science", and especially where we all know we are talking about the evolution conflict.) What could you possibly have had in mind for religion alongside science? You're going to teach the Hindu creation story, and then run down a list teaching an assortment of other religions, and then eventually get around to covering some science? And what does any of that have to do with teaching science?
If a student brings up some religious issue during a science class the teacher may need to address it in some manner, but in general that manner should mostly consist of explaining that science explains the workings of the physical world and this is the accepted understanding and practice of professional scientists and science is silent on the subject of God & spiritual matters, and that if the student feels there is some conflict between science's understanding of the physical world and their religious beliefs about the physical world they need to talk with their parents or priest about their religious concerns.
The teacher is teaching facts - this is what the field of chemistry consists of and this is how chemistry is understood and practiced by professional chemists. And the teacher explains that science can only address the physical and cannot directly say anything about God and cannot directly address religion. And the teacher, acting as an official agent of the government, has no place trying to change or "fix" any religious beliefs or religious implication or religious concerns of the student. If the student feels his religious beliefs conflict with science, that is a religious matter that must be resolved outside of public school. The teacher can clear only up any confusion and explanations on the science side. The student has to learn what science is and how science works and what science says, and he is perfectly free to believe that atoms do not exist so long as he does understand the subject and can pass the chemistry tests.
fossil evidence is no longer referenced to support evolution - no transitional species fossils.
Someone gave you misinformation. We have a perfect record of transitional forms fossils for a significant chunk of the tree of life. See my post here.
Actually, there is considerable debate over the validity of Evolution (sometimes referred to as Darwinism).
Again, you have been misinformed. As I said last post there is political debate over evolution and social debate over it, there is no SCIENTIFIC debate over evolution. And if you look at the list of scientific organizations in my post and follow the link I gave for them you would see that they have all issued statements confirming the scientific status of evolution as absolutely established by the evidence with no scientific rival and no scientific dispute over the fundamentals of evolution.
It requires more faith to accept Evolution than it does for Creationism.
Science is about EVIDENCE. All the EVIDENCE backs up evolution.
The only form of "Creationism" that is compatible with the evidence is that God created the universe and all of the laws of physics and everything else, and that just like gravity and chemistry and everything else, evolution is another one of God's chosen mechanisms for running that universe.
Take your time, do some more research.
Not only have I spent quite a lot of time studying the abundant evidence backing up evolution in a multitude of ways, not only have I spend far too much time researching the arguments against evolution and finding them all to be invalid, I have in fact spent significant time dabbling in my own amature experiments with evolution and I have personally witnessed the fact that evolution is right and works.
I suggest you follow your own advice. And I suggest you expand your research beyond answersingenesis and Discovery Institute propaganda.
How do they know that each layer is not a successive storm of which there are an unknown number each year?
No problem.
We know Pompeii was destroyed in 79 A.D. If you count down 1929 layers you get a layer from 1929 years ago. That layer has faint traces of volcanic ash. You can even match the mineral and chemical and isotropic content of the ash to the eruption at Pompeii.
Beyond any reasonable doubt, 1929 layers down equals 1929 years ago.
The hundred thousands of layers also have traces of a hundred thousand+ of years worth of prehistoric volcanic eruptions.
It takes time for volcanic ash to settles out of the atmosphere, most of it comes down over that year and extremely fine particles the following year or so. So we can look at how ash is deposited in prehistoric layers and compare it to how ash is deposited in modern layers. Trying to lay down multiple snow layers in a volcanic year and for the following year or so would show up in the settled ash.
Each layer also contains a half year worth of settled dust and pollen.
In addition to the dust and pollen, it's the six months of baking under the summer sun that changes the texture of the snow and forming the visible-layer effect.
We know the bronze age began around 3300 B.C., and starting about 5300 layers down we find faint traces of lead contamination in the snow. The advent of bronze age mining and smelting released lead contaminated dust and smoke into the atmosphere. This is a beautiful example of just how the arctic snow layers record all sorts of historical and prehistorical evidence. ~5300 layers down is about 3300 B.C.
I'm sure professional scientists that specialize in this area could list dozens of more such items for the arctic layers, but the point is that there is a multitude of evidence and reasons backing it up. There just isn't any way around it, the Earth is Old. And the arctic record is just one tiny sliver of evidence. There is an entire planet worth of evidence, and it all says the same thing, the Earth is Old. The handful of people publishing "science" for a Young Earth are highly motivated to the point of willful blindness. They are bending and twisting the facts beyond the breaking point, relying on wishful arguments, ignoring all the facts that don't fit their desired story, and creatively picking and choosing convenient details to weave a wishful web for their case.
We see these yearly layers being put down. The simple direct interpretation is that 1 layer = 1 year. The 1 layer = 1 year equivalence is clearly and directly verifiable thousands of layers down by multiple means, and pretty well to the beginning of recorded history. The layers run smoothly and continuously all the way down with absolutely no indication or evidence of change in their pattern or their nature. All evidence backs up 1-layer = 1 year all the way down, a hundred thousand years of volcanic record and more. In fact all evidence runs smoothly down about 800,000 years worth, but the layers just get to thin and blurred to directly count beyond about 174,000 layers down, but does record about 800,000 years worth of dust and pollen and volcanic layers.
I do not think there is any reasonable rational way to look at this blindingly obvious evidence and dismiss it.
Do you have any basis whatsoever to the contrary, other than merely wanting to throw it out?
If DNA could be considered a programming language would it make more sense to write everything from scratch for each specific creature or to reuse and modify/add-on to existing code?
Right. However examining DNA across species shows that it the "reuse and modify/add-on to existing code" is *not* done in a programmer manner. The "reuse and modify/add-on to existing code" evidence points exactly and strictly to evolution. If there was a programmer then it shows that he used evolution - or some method indistinguishable from evolution - as his chosen process for writing the code.
I can dig up a detailed explanation of this from one of my old post, but first I'd like to see how you respond to the Foraminifera evolution post I wrote to you a few minutes ago. To be honest I don't want to spend time on this one unless you have some reasonable response to the other one. Sorry, it's just that I've had some very frustrating experiences in the past. I'd be more than happy to go into detail on this if there's honest&reasonable interest in the evidence.
Ok, start listing the evidence for macro-evolution then.
Much of the fossil record is indeed random spotty, however there is a good chunk of the record that is perfect continuous and complete. There are tiny animals in the ocean called Foraminifera. They are generally a tiny fraction of an inch in size, they grow intricate mineral skeletons called 'tests', and they literally number in the trillions. Vast numbers of them die every day and their tests settle to the sea floor in a continuous rain. A vast continuous rain of perfectly layered tiny fossils in the sediment that slowly builds up on the sea floor. In the 1970's deep see oil exploration lead to advanced deep see drilling technology, and that exploration drilling started bringing up sediment drill cores to be analyzed. Cores to be analyzed for oil purposes, but incidentally loaded with an effectively limitless supply of tiny Foraminifera fossils. A perfect continuous record tracing the branching tree of diversification and speciation over many tends of millions of years. Not merely a continuous sequence of transitional species, but a hyper detailed record of entire populations along each speciation split. Scientists are studying exactly how long each speciation split took, and examining in detail how populations behave and change during speciation events, and studying how and why the rate of speciation increases after mass extinction events. A perfect record tracing diverse currently existing species back to their common ancestor.
A hundred million+ year perfect record of the evolutionary tree spanning thousands of species from herbivores to carnivores to species evolved to raise algae farms inside their shells and diversified to live in virtually every wet habitat and every wet ecological niche on earth. In evolutionary terms talking about foraminifera is like talking about mammals. And an amusing point is that one branch of foraminifera evolved to live in damp soil on land, much like dolphins and whales are mammals that evolved to live in the sea. Technically foraminifera are a HIGHER biological category than the category of mammals.
The entire fossil record does in fact show a tree of intermediate forms, and this chunk of the tree is a perfect case proving that the rest of the tree really does work the same way. It's just that fossil fines are really rare for most of the tree, so the rest of the tree is very spottily sampled.
So yes, "macro" evolution is directly documented for this substantial chunk of life. And it would be ridiculous beyond reason to seriously doubt that the rest of the evolutionary tree of life and the rest of the fossil record work in exactly the same way. Yes, common decent is directly documented as true for this chunk of life, and yes it is true beyond any reasonable doubt that common descent is true for earth life in general.
There are other examples of evidence that is just as conclusive, but that example should do for now.
Here is a post of mine covering that chunk of perfect fossil evidence, along with a couple of other good items.
I'm thrilled to say it got the following reply:) Thank you for this intelligent post. I never expected my when I posted my original comment that my views would shift so dramatically in only 8 short hours. So, thanks to you and all the other members of the Slashdot community who took time to post intelligent comments. I really appreciate it.
Small number of Atheists? try pretty much all Atheist
The category was evolutionists. Yes pretty much all atheists are evolutionists, but of evolutionists a relatively small percentage are atheists. In the western world, the overwhelming majority of evolutionists are Christians.
The intended message you should take from my mention of "small number of atheists" is that people who implicitly or explicitly equate evolution with atheism or equate Christianity with Creationism are at best confused and at worst delusional or logic-brain-damaged.
Many Atheists won't come out becasue they will be treated like pariahs, and could quite possible come to bodily harm caused by the peace loving religions.
I don't usually mention "invisible sky wizard", but when I do it is generally because I would consider it a blessed relief for some particularly offensive person to treat me a pariah and voluntarily remove themselves from my vicinity. And fortunately the region I live doesn't give me much cause to use that phrase and doesn't give me much cause to fear bodily harm.
There are good scientific methods for testing most of these sorts of things. For example tester expectations and unconscious bias can have a huge effect, and it is a particular point were the situations you described do not meet reliable testing standards. It can be surprising how strong this effect can be. Test subjects can subconsciously pick up on and react to extremely subtle body posture and breathing and anticipation signals from the tester. There is a famous example of the effect known as Clever Hans. A an owner and his horse named Hans tours the world giving demonstrations of the horse preforming math and other advanced intellectual tasks. Careful testing showed that the horse Hans would get the right answer when the human asking the question knew the answer, and give wrong answers when the asker didn't know. People give of detectable anticipatory stress signals of the "right" answer, and it is almost impossible to avoid sending these signals even when one is awere of them and specifically trying not to do them. With training people can learn to pick up on these signals quite well, and many magicians base preformances on exactly this... if the audience or some individual knows who has some object or other "secret" information, the magician ran read the audience or read a specific individual to "mindread" the secret information when the identity or location of the object. In fact it's a skill I'm really itching to study. It could make for a real fun magic trick performance for picking up women:)
If you would like to repeat your experiment in a more scientifically reliable way, the first thing you should do is use a couple of test subjects where *you* do not yet know their birth dates. Then randomly shuffle some cards or something with the personality descriptions on them and no indications of the associated chinese-signs. Don't even look at the cards they are reading, you don't want any possibility of your own knowledge and your opinions of the cards leaking back to the test subject. Just have them pick the one best card.
You also really need to define in advance a non-trivial number of test subjects. Trying it with a single person is completely meaningless, you very easily get a pot luck match. If for example there are 12 signs and you only test three people, there is a 4% chance that two out of three test subject will chose the one "right" sign by pure chance. A 4% chance is unlikely, but there is a very real chance it will happen and it tends to lead to powerful confirmation bias. There is a 4% chance you would powerfully "prove" the result you were looking for, and if it fails the first time the experimenter is quite likely to try again with another three test subjects with ANOTHER 4% chance of a false positive "proving" the result. Confirmation bias is that you forget the first negative result and the second positive result is a hugely exciting result and has a huge mental impact. It is easy to mentally gloss over and forget boring failures and to remember exciting successes. You wind up with a 4% chance of false "proof" the first time PLUS 4% chance of false proof the second time. That is a rather significant 8% chance of powerfully convincing yourself based on a purely random false positive. Now imagine you do two tests like that for the chinese system, then two tests for our usual zodiac system, then two tests for some other astrological system. You very quickly run into large probabilities of producing a false proof for one of them.
If you have 6 test subjects there is a 1% chance that three or more of them will get a 1-in-12 sign pick "right" by pure chance. (Less than three hits out of six is a negative result, more than three hits a powerful positive). If a hundred people like you did this sort of experiment, one person would be hugely excited and telling everyone "it works and I did a scientific test proving it!". And no one would ever hear about the 99 negative results, but you would all hear about t
Where did you ever get the idea Creationists don't believe dinosaurs existed; and you believe Christians think "satan planted dinosaur bones"?
He said essentially "I saw a red car". Your response was "Where did you ever get the idea cars are red?".
He was absolutely right. Yes, there are red cars. No, he did not claim ALL cars were red.
There are two teams here. The pro-science team and the anti-science team.
On the pro-science team we have: The majority of Christians, accept God and accept evolution; plus a small number of atheists, accepts evolution.
On the anti-science team we have: Young Earth Creationists (YECs) who think dinosaur bones were planted by satan to deceive us, reject evolution; plus YECs that accept dinosaur fossils as real and think they dino's failed to get onto Noah's ark and all drowned, reject evolution; Old Earth Creationists, accept dinosaur fossils millions of years old, think humans were planted on earth in our current form, reject evolution.
Hmmm, I think that pretty much covers it but it's certainly possible I missed some other category. I didn't mention Jews and Muslims and others, but they fall into the equivalent of one of the Christian categories. It boils down to the pro-science evolution side and the anti-evolution anti-science side. It's just that some of the anti-science people are more wacky than others.
Even Christians believe in science, and a lot of them believe that god made physics!
Right. In fact the MAJORITY of Christians accept God and evolution. The usual term for that is theistic evolution. They would be called theistic evolutionists, or often simply called theists.
ID is SO vague
In the most common usage ID is identified with a particular group with a particular agenda, actively pushing their agenda in politics and in schools under the title Intelligent Design.
In common usage ID refers to the agenda of attempting to specifically undermine or disprove evolution. ID refers to trying to get textbooks into highschool science classes with content such as "Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics".
If your position is that god created the universe and created physics etc., and you do NOT subscribe to anti-evolution attacks like claiming it violates thermodynamics, then my recommendation is that you not attach yourself to the label "ID". Just stick with the label Christian or theist, and help oppose the anti-science cranks trying to push junk science into highschool classrooms.
You shouldn't pigeonhole anyone who believes in something you can't possibly prove or disprove as someone who is inherently stupid and who rejects science.
Right. Christians are not anti-science. Or, at least most of them aren't.
The literal 6-day YEC'ers are stupid(*) and reject science. The ID-iots mostly consist of literal 6-day YEC'ers, plus some non-YEC but still anti-evolutionists, are stupid(*) and reject science.
(*)Footnote: Actually the problem is often merely that our highschools are failing to teach biology properly rather than an individual being "stupid".
I find it much more insightful "who" is feeling threatened than anything else.
Yes, but one must be insightful about exactly who that "who" is.
As scientists, no one is the least bit threatend by this. Many many "threatened" posts on here make exactly that point - that this is no threat to anything in science.
As citizens subject to a government, and as people subject to a surrounding population, yes, we have "whos" who are threatened. You will notice that many of the "threatened" posts directly address the issue of this sort of thing being used to confuse and mislead people.
They don't see this story as any sort of threat to anything in science, they see it as a propaganda and misinformation threat. That it may be used to mislead non-scientists, that it may be misunderstood and misused to justify government action degrading our education system.
I have no problem with that. You can do that at home, or in a private school.
You just can't do it in a public school. If my public school princial is a hindu, or a muslim, or a scientologist or whatever, he can't hijack the force of his governmental powers to push his religion upon my children. The constitution guarantees my right (my children's right) of religious freedom. A right against the force of government being used against me (or my children) to promote a religion (or any religious practice or any religious belief above others or to oppress one.
And that is not merely a protection against a "rogue" principal or teacher doing that. If I happen to be in a neighborhood that is 51% hindu, or 51% muslim, or 51% scientologist or 51% whatever.... a democratic 51% majority vote is also prohibited from doing that. The constitutional protection of religion prohibits the force of government being used against us to favor or oppress any religion (or practice or belief thereof).
Public science classes should teach an accurate overview of the various fields of science as understood and practiced by the professional scientists of those fields.
Claiming that the word "theory" degrades evolution's status
"Theory" no more degrades the status of evolution than it degrades the status of the theory of relativity or atom theory. However if someone says something like "atoms are just a theory and should not be taught in school as fact", I think it quite reasonable to attempt to clear up their misunderstanding. Teaching a chemistry class without teaching atom theory as being "true" is just as silly as teaching a biology class without teaching evolution as being "true".
There are pretty much only two groups on the "age of the earth" issue. There are people saying the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and there are people saying the earth is ~4.5 billion years old.
If you go to the arctic or antarctic and dig, you'll find that there are quite visible yearly layers in the snow. During the summer the snow surface bakes under 6 months of constant sun changing its texture, and it builds up a slight layer of settled dust and pollen blown in from across the globe. In particular whenever there is a major volcano anywhere on earth a faint dusting of volcanic ash blows in and can be found in that yearly layer. If you dig and count down 1929 visible layers, you'll find traces of volcanic dust from the 79 A.D. Mt Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii. You can see and count the layers to find traces of ash from every major eruption in recorded history. Each visible layer down equals one year earlier in history.
There are more than 100,000 visible countable layers in the arctic and antarctic icepack. Actually there's about 800,000 years worth, but the deeper you go the layers get squeezed thinner and thiner and more than about a hundred-odd thousand years down they get too thin and blur together and you can no longer individually count them. But they are visible and countable well beyond 100,000 years. And those deeper layers also show 100,000+ years worth of prehistoric volcanic eruptions scattered in various levels exactly as you'd expect from 100,000+ years worth of volcanic history.
Of the two groups of people I mentioned above, the young earth group and the old earth group, one group is just plain wrong. One group is engaging in wishful thinking, grossly twisting and distorting the facts to manufacture the result they want to get. One group is engaging in total junk-science and making invalid claims. The statements and arguments from one sided and completely non-credible.
The other side is the entire scientific community. The other side is engaging in careful legitimate scientific work. The other side builds up a timeline and checks it and cross validates it in dozens of ways based on endless evidence from a variety of fields of science. Radiometric dating is but one of a variety of methods they use for dating and to build that timeline.
One of the standard rules of science is that you don't place heavy trust in any single test or any single method. We might misunderstand something in some particular field, we may make incorrect assumptions about some particular method, or people may just make an error in their methods or measurements. HOWEVER you know you have extremely solid science when you measure something by multiple independently methods. If radiometric dating comes up with about the same date as astronomical cycles recorded in geological layers, it is absurdly unlikely two completely different methods will both give the SAME wrong result by mere chance. When you crosscheck it by a third or fourth completely different method and the timeline matches up, there is essentially no chance all of those methods will give the SAME wrong result. There must be some real cause accounting for those matching results. When you have that sort of multiple cross-validation, then the result is "proven accurate" beyond any reasonable standard of doubt.
Science is deeply interconnected web. All fields of science build up a single coherent timeline of history. That timeline is established and cross-checked and cross-validated by countless methods based on endless evidence from every single field of science. All the evidence and all the dating methods hang together and match up in one coherent picture. If the timeline were radically wrong there is no way ALL of the methods could all be matching up by accident. If that timeline were radically wring, it is impossible beyond all reason that all of those errors would fit together to paint a functional and coherent fictional history. If all of the methods were wrong, the fictional history they paint would be a ran
No one has won the war, but the evolution side is winning the battles a few people at a time.
I personally have won a few people to the evolution side amidst the noise and rantfests of the Slashdot stories. A few people who have issues challenges or questions against evolution, people who honestly care about the particular points they raise and who honestly evaluate the answer. People who are then amazed at the evidence that does exist to back up the science, People who suddenly realize which side has been pushing bogus claims.
Of course I have sadly run into a larger number of people whom just fling random attacks and don't care if any particular argument against evolution is wrong, people who just keep flinging random attacks presuming that sooner or later one of them MUST stick, and not caring about any particular issue and not caring about the answer and not caring that their favorite website for the cause just fed them 4 false arguments in a row. They KNOW and ADMIT the the arguments they used were wrong, and they go back to the same website they KNOW is feeding them junk arguments, and they don't care, they just grab a 5th junk argument they don't understand and they don't care about the answer. That is extremely rude and annoying, but the people who make honest challenges and *do* care about the answer make it worth it.
There could have been evolutionists who have changed their opinions as well
Possible, though I have never seen it. I guess it's fair to say many people on the evolution side haven't really looked at the evidence might be persuadable. In my experience the anti-evolution arguments are only good for preaching to the highly motivated choir, or to present the uninvolved uninformed general public with a general impression that a scientific controversy exists. The claims never hold up under informed critical review.
The debate has been more heat than light
Yes, sadly. However there is still some light amidst all the heat. I personally have completely won over a few converts to the evolution side. There are many many people convinced evolution==atheism or somesuch, people who rant against evolution with no interest in mutually discussing and honestly considering each other's evidence on the subject, and of course conversations with them go nowhere. However I have also had people come in asserting some doubts, challenges, questions against evolution and honestly examining the response. And such people are inevitably amazed by the examples of science and evidence that exist backing up evolution. People saying wow, I didn't know all that was out there. People suddenly coming to a very strong decision about which side is grossly guilty of pushing false claims.
Just to cite a single example and to squeezed it down to a single sentence, there is a chunk of the fossil record that is completely continuous and gap-free showing the intermediate forms spanning thousands of species - a chunk of evidence which is pretty well sufficient all by itself to establish the validity of evolution beyond any reasonable doubt. If you want me to back that up I can copy-past a several paragraphs from one of my old posts explaining it in detail.
I've never read any Dawkins, but from the few clips I've seen of him on TV he seems like a bit of an ass.
People who claim to believe in evolution on the internet have quite clearly never read any science
Hmmm. Willful trolling, or incredibly misinformed?
Every national or international science organization with an an official position on evolution state that evolution in overwhelmingly confirmed by all evidence. Just a sampling of such scientific bodies that have made such statements on the subject: Academy Of Science Of The Royal Society Of Canada Alabama Academy Of Science American Anthropological Association American Association For The Advancement Of Science American Association Of Physical Anthropologists American Astronomical Society American Geophysical Union American Institute Of Biological Sciences American Astronomical Society American Society Of Biological Chemists American Chemical Society American Geological Institute American Psychological Association American Physical Society American Society Of Parasitologists Association for Women Geoscientists Australian Academy of Science Botanical Society of America California Academy Of Sciences Ecological Society of America Genetics Society of America Geological Society Of America Geological Society of Australia Georgia Academy Of Science History of Science Society Iowa Academy Of Science Kentucky Academy Of Science Kentucky Paleontological Society Louisiana Academy Of Sciences National Academy Of Sciences North American Benthological Society North Carolina Academy Of Science New York Academy Of Sciences Ohio Academy Of Science Ohio Academy Of Science Ohio Math and Science Coalition Oklahoma Academy Of Sciences The Paleontological Society Society For Amateur Scientists Society For Integrative and Comparative Biology Society Of Systematic Biologists Society Of Vertebrate Paleontology Southern Anthropological Society Virginia Academy Of Science West Virginia Academy Of Science
You can read the statements from each of them collected here.
Actually the "National Academy of Science" for almost every major nation on earth has made such a statement, but I don't have a handy link for all of them.
There are minor activist groups dedicated to both sides of the issue, but as far as National or International organizations dedicated to science or particular fields of science, non-biased organizations that incidentally issues position statements on the issue as an incidental action aside from their actual mission of preforming and promoting other science, every single one has come down on the side of confirming the scientific legitimacy of evolution and categorizing the anti-evolution side as invalid or pseudo science.
In fact I personally have dabbled in some evolution experiments and I have personally witnessed the fact that it's right and works.
On your side you have the crackpot answersingenesis website, and you have the Discovery Institute activists and a couple of other minor activist groups, and not one single legitimate scientific body, not one recognized International or National body dedicated to general science.
If you think the science is against evolution, you have been wildly misinformed. Except for a tiny fraction of a single percent, actual professional degreed scientists across all of the earth and life sciences come down on the side of evolution being valid and established by the evidence.
You can cite Michael Behe and a small handful of other actual degreed professional biologists who dispute evolution, but as I said they represent a minuscule faction of a percent. And not a single major body dedicated to general science acknowledges any credible scientific results from any of their attempts to refu
Slashdot Mirror
How to not get a project started:
(1) Get on the front page of Slashot in front of tens of thousands of programmers
(2) Not say what the project is
(3) ???
(4) No profit!
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Unless of course, I was making a joke...
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Have you tried having a conversation with some of the posters around here?
I have a very very bad habit of trying to have productive discussions on the evolution issue. I have succeeded twice.... may three times. You really don't want to read the rest. One time I ran into an honest-to-god Taliban-wannabe.
when I see such an incredibly strong emotional reaction to something like astrology
I often have a particularly strong emotional reaction whenever anyone starts with the anti-evolution stuff. Not because I see any danger in scientific research testing evolution, but because of long experience that people who buy into the anti-evolution stuff tend to be quite unreasonable and irrational. "Normal people" are unreasonable and irrational enough already, chuckle.
An excellent point, which tells us that we should never, ever explore astrology.
You repeated this theme several times, and I don't think it fair. You know and directly mentioned that I am fully open to science exploring and testing it.
I was giving reasons why it doesn't hold up, and reasons why people so often believe it even if there is nothing to it, but I guess I overlooked my main reason for rejecting it. Because it HAS already been exhaustively explored and tested, and failed.
Many hundreds of astrologers have been tested and when given personality profiles they consistently fail to pair them with birth charts any better than random chance. Studies have been done on thousands of people born within minutes of each other and tracked for decades, and they don't show any more correlation with each other than the general public. It only takes a few moments on Google to find this sort of info.
Scientists generally aren't inclined towards re-researching something that has already been researched and refuted to death, but astrology is such a large persistent social phenomena that new work and new results keep trickling in on it.
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they do not detract from the logic (science) that he presents.
Agreed.
People need to evaluate his opinions on merit, and not on how he sounds.
People need to do a lot of things.
Unfortunately I live on earth.
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Microsoft++
Compiler error: invalid operand to 'operator++'
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IIRC, the classic example is that you own a lot of land. Your neighbor parks his dump truck on a part of your land that you don't use and you don't see. After several years, you want to develop that land. Since you allowed his to park there for years he can argue that he has your permission.
Correction...
You own a lot of land with a truck on it.
You sell to your neighbor both the land and the truck.
Your neighbor removes the truck and parks a car there.
Yes, I can see your point. Apple HAD to do this to avert a disaster of biblical proportions. What do I mean, "biblical"? What I mean is Old Testament, real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes... The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
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Link?
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You know the ones which end up with people saying, "Yeah, I took the Myers Briggs test, and I'm an I N T P."
Yeah, I took the Myers Briggs test, and I'm an I N T P.
Chuckle.
I have the impression that INT's are generally pretty disinclined to astrology and the like, so I'm wondering if you selected that particular combo because that is what you tested as?
I read stuff like your post and I get all pumped up about putting together a big study.
Kinda amusing that I got you all fired up for it.
My thoughts the whole time writing it were "Astrology is pure superstition, and here's why".
I am majorly about "Science is right and the rest is bunkum", and so big on the science view that I am philosophically dedicated to the number #1 rule of science that everything is open to testing and revision based on the evidence. Like, atoms are real and proven and it is absolutely insane to doubt it, but heay, if you want to challenge atoms go right ahead and waste your time, go do some good science and let me know when you have sufficient results to disprove atoms and I'll be more than happy to learn the new and better science and jump on board that atoms don't exist. :)
So in an odd way I'm both supremely confident against your entire endeavour, but also completely helpful towards doing your test in a solid scientific manner absolutely expecting it prove astrology is empty superstition. Hehe.
A friend of mine was challenging my sweeping dismissal of everything supernatural, and he asked "Well, what would you do if Scott (a mutual friend) were to start shooting fireballs?"
The question did not phase me in the least... without thought or reaction I totally blandly uttered the blatantly obvious one and only answer...
"I would want to figure out how he was doing it".
A completely bland reaction that if he's doing it then there's a scientific basis for it. And if somebody can shoot fireballs then duh, it kinda goes way at the top of the list to study it and figure it out.
I don't know if it came across well in writing, but it was kinda funny how I was so totally blasé answering his superduper HaHA-gotchya! challenge against my total dismissal of supernatural stuff. He thought he had some great superduper what-if challenge to put a dent in my supernatural-dismissing attitude. :) Shooting fireballs! Ya can't casually dismiss that! Heh.
the basic end result is 2,488,320 different rough combinations.
And where did all of that those rules and combinations and everything come from? Thousands of years ago a couple of superstitious farmers and goat herders looked at the stars and didn't understand them and pretty much just made stuff up.
people who never want to look at Astrology seem to hinge on the fear
I'm no more afraid of Astrology than I am afraid of the Tooth Fairy.
Wait, that's not quite true. I have a tiny fear of Astrology for the same reason as my greater fear of religion... people don't do irrational things because the Tooth Fairy told them to. However people often do irrational things because religion told them too, and some people might do irrational things because of what Astrology said to them. And yes, people doing irrational things around me can constitute some sort of problem or threat to me and can constitute a legitimate "fear" towards religion and Astrology.
the world of astrology is far, far more complex and rewarding than is understood by those who have never explored it.
Yes, complexity supplies an abundance of details and opportunities to find some random false positive connection to actual people and actual events. Complexity also supplies an effective mechanism washing away negative results. If it doesn't work then the problem isn't that it doesn't work, the problem is that you did the complex reading wrong. The astrological reading didn't match the person... oh I should/shouldn't have have applied Mercury rising in c
Canada
Sorry if my post was US-centric :)
And to clarify, I absolutely recognize the distinction of teaching about religions. That can be done by the government, so long as it is done carefully and appropriately. In principal a teacher could even use the Bible as literature in an English class, however the only teacher who would make such a problematical selection is exactly the teacher who most needs to be prohibited from doing so.The only teacher would would want to make such a problematical selection is the teacher attempting to abuse his official position and powers to evangelize his religion.
Your post mentioned "teaching religious beliefs alongside science". I see no way to read that in an acceptable manner. Yes you can cover the impact of religion in a history class, and you could have some sort of comparative overview of religions in some social studies class, but no, I don't see any legitimate way teach religious beliefs alongside science in a science class. (I think "in science class" is clearly implicit in "alongside science", and especially where we all know we are talking about the evolution conflict.) What could you possibly have had in mind for religion alongside science? You're going to teach the Hindu creation story, and then run down a list teaching an assortment of other religions, and then eventually get around to covering some science? And what does any of that have to do with teaching science?
If a student brings up some religious issue during a science class the teacher may need to address it in some manner, but in general that manner should mostly consist of explaining that science explains the workings of the physical world and this is the accepted understanding and practice of professional scientists and science is silent on the subject of God & spiritual matters, and that if the student feels there is some conflict between science's understanding of the physical world and their religious beliefs about the physical world they need to talk with their parents or priest about their religious concerns.
The teacher is teaching facts - this is what the field of chemistry consists of and this is how chemistry is understood and practiced by professional chemists. And the teacher explains that science can only address the physical and cannot directly say anything about God and cannot directly address religion. And the teacher, acting as an official agent of the government, has no place trying to change or "fix" any religious beliefs or religious implication or religious concerns of the student. If the student feels his religious beliefs conflict with science, that is a religious matter that must be resolved outside of public school. The teacher can clear only up any confusion and explanations on the science side. The student has to learn what science is and how science works and what science says, and he is perfectly free to believe that atoms do not exist so long as he does understand the subject and can pass the chemistry tests.
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fossil evidence is no longer referenced to support evolution - no transitional species fossils.
Someone gave you misinformation. We have a perfect record of transitional forms fossils for a significant chunk of the tree of life. See my post here.
Actually, there is considerable debate over the validity of Evolution (sometimes referred to as Darwinism).
Again, you have been misinformed.
As I said last post there is political debate over evolution and social debate over it, there is no SCIENTIFIC debate over evolution. And if you look at the list of scientific organizations in my post and follow the link I gave for them you would see that they have all issued statements confirming the scientific status of evolution as absolutely established by the evidence with no scientific rival and no scientific dispute over the fundamentals of evolution.
It requires more faith to accept Evolution than it does for Creationism.
Science is about EVIDENCE.
All the EVIDENCE backs up evolution.
The only form of "Creationism" that is compatible with the evidence is that God created the universe and all of the laws of physics and everything else, and that just like gravity and chemistry and everything else, evolution is another one of God's chosen mechanisms for running that universe.
Take your time, do some more research.
Not only have I spent quite a lot of time studying the abundant evidence backing up evolution in a multitude of ways, not only have I spend far too much time researching the arguments against evolution and finding them all to be invalid, I have in fact spent significant time dabbling in my own amature experiments with evolution and I have personally witnessed the fact that evolution is right and works.
I suggest you follow your own advice. And I suggest you expand your research beyond answersingenesis and Discovery Institute propaganda.
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How do they know that each layer is not a successive storm of which there are an unknown number each year?
No problem.
We know Pompeii was destroyed in 79 A.D. If you count down 1929 layers you get a layer from 1929 years ago. That layer has faint traces of volcanic ash. You can even match the mineral and chemical and isotropic content of the ash to the eruption at Pompeii.
Beyond any reasonable doubt, 1929 layers down equals 1929 years ago.
The hundred thousands of layers also have traces of a hundred thousand+ of years worth of prehistoric volcanic eruptions.
It takes time for volcanic ash to settles out of the atmosphere, most of it comes down over that year and extremely fine particles the following year or so. So we can look at how ash is deposited in prehistoric layers and compare it to how ash is deposited in modern layers. Trying to lay down multiple snow layers in a volcanic year and for the following year or so would show up in the settled ash.
Each layer also contains a half year worth of settled dust and pollen.
In addition to the dust and pollen, it's the six months of baking under the summer sun that changes the texture of the snow and forming the visible-layer effect.
We know the bronze age began around 3300 B.C., and starting about 5300 layers down we find faint traces of lead contamination in the snow. The advent of bronze age mining and smelting released lead contaminated dust and smoke into the atmosphere. This is a beautiful example of just how the arctic snow layers record all sorts of historical and prehistorical evidence. ~5300 layers down is about 3300 B.C.
I'm sure professional scientists that specialize in this area could list dozens of more such items for the arctic layers, but the point is that there is a multitude of evidence and reasons backing it up. There just isn't any way around it, the Earth is Old. And the arctic record is just one tiny sliver of evidence. There is an entire planet worth of evidence, and it all says the same thing, the Earth is Old. The handful of people publishing "science" for a Young Earth are highly motivated to the point of willful blindness. They are bending and twisting the facts beyond the breaking point, relying on wishful arguments, ignoring all the facts that don't fit their desired story, and creatively picking and choosing convenient details to weave a wishful web for their case.
We see these yearly layers being put down. The simple direct interpretation is that 1 layer = 1 year. The 1 layer = 1 year equivalence is clearly and directly verifiable thousands of layers down by multiple means, and pretty well to the beginning of recorded history. The layers run smoothly and continuously all the way down with absolutely no indication or evidence of change in their pattern or their nature. All evidence backs up 1-layer = 1 year all the way down, a hundred thousand years of volcanic record and more. In fact all evidence runs smoothly down about 800,000 years worth, but the layers just get to thin and blurred to directly count beyond about 174,000 layers down, but does record about 800,000 years worth of dust and pollen and volcanic layers.
I do not think there is any reasonable rational way to look at this blindingly obvious evidence and dismiss it.
Do you have any basis whatsoever to the contrary, other than merely wanting to throw it out?
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If DNA could be considered a programming language would it make more sense to write everything from scratch for each specific creature or to reuse and modify/add-on to existing code?
Right.
However examining DNA across species shows that it the "reuse and modify/add-on to existing code" is *not* done in a programmer manner. The "reuse and modify/add-on to existing code" evidence points exactly and strictly to evolution. If there was a programmer then it shows that he used evolution - or some method indistinguishable from evolution - as his chosen process for writing the code.
I can dig up a detailed explanation of this from one of my old post, but first I'd like to see how you respond to the Foraminifera evolution post I wrote to you a few minutes ago. To be honest I don't want to spend time on this one unless you have some reasonable response to the other one. Sorry, it's just that I've had some very frustrating experiences in the past. I'd be more than happy to go into detail on this if there's honest&reasonable interest in the evidence.
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Ok, start listing the evidence for macro-evolution then.
Much of the fossil record is indeed random spotty, however there is a good chunk of the record that is perfect continuous and complete. There are tiny animals in the ocean called Foraminifera. They are generally a tiny fraction of an inch in size, they grow intricate mineral skeletons called 'tests', and they literally number in the trillions. Vast numbers of them die every day and their tests settle to the sea floor in a continuous rain. A vast continuous rain of perfectly layered tiny fossils in the sediment that slowly builds up on the sea floor. In the 1970's deep see oil exploration lead to advanced deep see drilling technology, and that exploration drilling started bringing up sediment drill cores to be analyzed. Cores to be analyzed for oil purposes, but incidentally loaded with an effectively limitless supply of tiny Foraminifera fossils. A perfect continuous record tracing the branching tree of diversification and speciation over many tends of millions of years. Not merely a continuous sequence of transitional species, but a hyper detailed record of entire populations along each speciation split. Scientists are studying exactly how long each speciation split took, and examining in detail how populations behave and change during speciation events, and studying how and why the rate of speciation increases after mass extinction events. A perfect record tracing diverse currently existing species back to their common ancestor.
A hundred million+ year perfect record of the evolutionary tree spanning thousands of species from herbivores to carnivores to species evolved to raise algae farms inside their shells and diversified to live in virtually every wet habitat and every wet ecological niche on earth. In evolutionary terms talking about foraminifera is like talking about mammals. And an amusing point is that one branch of foraminifera evolved to live in damp soil on land, much like dolphins and whales are mammals that evolved to live in the sea. Technically foraminifera are a HIGHER biological category than the category of mammals.
The entire fossil record does in fact show a tree of intermediate forms, and this chunk of the tree is a perfect case proving that the rest of the tree really does work the same way. It's just that fossil fines are really rare for most of the tree, so the rest of the tree is very spottily sampled.
So yes, "macro" evolution is directly documented for this substantial chunk of life. And it would be ridiculous beyond reason to seriously doubt that the rest of the evolutionary tree of life and the rest of the fossil record work in exactly the same way. Yes, common decent is directly documented as true for this chunk of life, and yes it is true beyond any reasonable doubt that common descent is true for earth life in general.
There are other examples of evidence that is just as conclusive, but that example should do for now.
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Here is a post of mine covering that chunk of perfect fossil evidence, along with a couple of other good items.
I'm thrilled to say it got the following reply :)
Thank you for this intelligent post. I never expected my when I posted my original comment that my views would shift so dramatically in only 8 short hours. So, thanks to you and all the other members of the Slashdot community who took time to post intelligent comments. I really appreciate it.
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Agreed.
I'm just afraid that he may be a walking talking boomerang effect.
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Small number of Atheists? try pretty much all Atheist
The category was evolutionists.
Yes pretty much all atheists are evolutionists, but of evolutionists a relatively small percentage are atheists. In the western world, the overwhelming majority of evolutionists are Christians.
The intended message you should take from my mention of "small number of atheists" is that people who implicitly or explicitly equate evolution with atheism or equate Christianity with Creationism are at best confused and at worst delusional or logic-brain-damaged.
Many Atheists won't come out becasue they will be treated like pariahs, and could quite possible come to bodily harm caused by the peace loving religions.
I don't usually mention "invisible sky wizard", but when I do it is generally because I would consider it a blessed relief for some particularly offensive person to treat me a pariah and voluntarily remove themselves from my vicinity. And fortunately the region I live doesn't give me much cause to use that phrase and doesn't give me much cause to fear bodily harm.
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There are good scientific methods for testing most of these sorts of things. For example tester expectations and unconscious bias can have a huge effect, and it is a particular point were the situations you described do not meet reliable testing standards. It can be surprising how strong this effect can be. Test subjects can subconsciously pick up on and react to extremely subtle body posture and breathing and anticipation signals from the tester. There is a famous example of the effect known as Clever Hans. A an owner and his horse named Hans tours the world giving demonstrations of the horse preforming math and other advanced intellectual tasks. Careful testing showed that the horse Hans would get the right answer when the human asking the question knew the answer, and give wrong answers when the asker didn't know. People give of detectable anticipatory stress signals of the "right" answer, and it is almost impossible to avoid sending these signals even when one is awere of them and specifically trying not to do them. With training people can learn to pick up on these signals quite well, and many magicians base preformances on exactly this... if the audience or some individual knows who has some object or other "secret" information, the magician ran read the audience or read a specific individual to "mindread" the secret information when the identity or location of the object. In fact it's a skill I'm really itching to study. It could make for a real fun magic trick performance for picking up women :)
If you would like to repeat your experiment in a more scientifically reliable way, the first thing you should do is use a couple of test subjects where *you* do not yet know their birth dates. Then randomly shuffle some cards or something with the personality descriptions on them and no indications of the associated chinese-signs. Don't even look at the cards they are reading, you don't want any possibility of your own knowledge and your opinions of the cards leaking back to the test subject. Just have them pick the one best card.
You also really need to define in advance a non-trivial number of test subjects. Trying it with a single person is completely meaningless, you very easily get a pot luck match. If for example there are 12 signs and you only test three people, there is a 4% chance that two out of three test subject will chose the one "right" sign by pure chance. A 4% chance is unlikely, but there is a very real chance it will happen and it tends to lead to powerful confirmation bias. There is a 4% chance you would powerfully "prove" the result you were looking for, and if it fails the first time the experimenter is quite likely to try again with another three test subjects with ANOTHER 4% chance of a false positive "proving" the result. Confirmation bias is that you forget the first negative result and the second positive result is a hugely exciting result and has a huge mental impact. It is easy to mentally gloss over and forget boring failures and to remember exciting successes. You wind up with a 4% chance of false "proof" the first time PLUS 4% chance of false proof the second time. That is a rather significant 8% chance of powerfully convincing yourself based on a purely random false positive. Now imagine you do two tests like that for the chinese system, then two tests for our usual zodiac system, then two tests for some other astrological system. You very quickly run into large probabilities of producing a false proof for one of them.
If you have 6 test subjects there is a 1% chance that three or more of them will get a 1-in-12 sign pick "right" by pure chance. (Less than three hits out of six is a negative result, more than three hits a powerful positive). If a hundred people like you did this sort of experiment, one person would be hugely excited and telling everyone "it works and I did a scientific test proving it!". And no one would ever hear about the 99 negative results, but you would all hear about t
Where did you ever get the idea Creationists don't believe dinosaurs existed; and you believe Christians think "satan planted dinosaur bones"?
He said essentially "I saw a red car".
Your response was "Where did you ever get the idea cars are red?".
He was absolutely right. Yes, there are red cars.
No, he did not claim ALL cars were red.
There are two teams here. The pro-science team and the anti-science team.
On the pro-science team we have:
The majority of Christians, accept God and accept evolution;
plus a small number of atheists, accepts evolution.
On the anti-science team we have:
Young Earth Creationists (YECs) who think dinosaur bones were planted by satan to deceive us, reject evolution;
plus YECs that accept dinosaur fossils as real and think they dino's failed to get onto Noah's ark and all drowned, reject evolution;
Old Earth Creationists, accept dinosaur fossils millions of years old, think humans were planted on earth in our current form, reject evolution.
Hmmm, I think that pretty much covers it but it's certainly possible I missed some other category. I didn't mention Jews and Muslims and others, but they fall into the equivalent of one of the Christian categories. It boils down to the pro-science evolution side and the anti-evolution anti-science side. It's just that some of the anti-science people are more wacky than others.
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Even Christians believe in science, and a lot of them believe that god made physics!
Right.
In fact the MAJORITY of Christians accept God and evolution.
The usual term for that is theistic evolution. They would be called theistic evolutionists, or often simply called theists.
ID is SO vague
In the most common usage ID is identified with a particular group with a particular agenda, actively pushing their agenda in politics and in schools under the title Intelligent Design.
In common usage ID refers to the agenda of attempting to specifically undermine or disprove evolution. ID refers to trying to get textbooks into highschool science classes with content such as "Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics".
If your position is that god created the universe and created physics etc., and you do NOT subscribe to anti-evolution attacks like claiming it violates thermodynamics, then my recommendation is that you not attach yourself to the label "ID". Just stick with the label Christian or theist, and help oppose the anti-science cranks trying to push junk science into highschool classrooms.
You shouldn't pigeonhole anyone who believes in something you can't possibly prove or disprove as someone who is inherently stupid and who rejects science.
Right. Christians are not anti-science. Or, at least most of them aren't.
The literal 6-day YEC'ers are stupid(*) and reject science.
The ID-iots mostly consist of literal 6-day YEC'ers, plus some non-YEC but still anti-evolutionists, are stupid(*) and reject science.
(*)Footnote: Actually the problem is often merely that our highschools are failing to teach biology properly rather than an individual being "stupid".
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I find it much more insightful "who" is feeling threatened than anything else.
Yes, but one must be insightful about exactly who that "who" is.
As scientists, no one is the least bit threatend by this. Many many "threatened" posts on here make exactly that point - that this is no threat to anything in science.
As citizens subject to a government, and as people subject to a surrounding population, yes, we have "whos" who are threatened. You will notice that many of the "threatened" posts directly address the issue of this sort of thing being used to confuse and mislead people.
They don't see this story as any sort of threat to anything in science, they see it as a propaganda and misinformation threat. That it may be used to mislead non-scientists, that it may be misunderstood and misused to justify government action degrading our education system.
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teaching religious beliefs alongside science
I have no problem with that. You can do that at home, or in a private school.
You just can't do it in a public school. If my public school princial is a hindu, or a muslim, or a scientologist or whatever, he can't hijack the force of his governmental powers to push his religion upon my children. The constitution guarantees my right (my children's right) of religious freedom. A right against the force of government being used against me (or my children) to promote a religion (or any religious practice or any religious belief above others or to oppress one.
And that is not merely a protection against a "rogue" principal or teacher doing that. If I happen to be in a neighborhood that is 51% hindu, or 51% muslim, or 51% scientologist or 51% whatever.... a democratic 51% majority vote is also prohibited from doing that. The constitutional protection of religion prohibits the force of government being used against us to favor or oppress any religion (or practice or belief thereof).
Public science classes should teach an accurate overview of the various fields of science as understood and practiced by the professional scientists of those fields.
Claiming that the word "theory" degrades evolution's status
"Theory" no more degrades the status of evolution than it degrades the status of the theory of relativity or atom theory. However if someone says something like "atoms are just a theory and should not be taught in school as fact", I think it quite reasonable to attempt to clear up their misunderstanding. Teaching a chemistry class without teaching atom theory as being "true" is just as silly as teaching a biology class without teaching evolution as being "true".
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There are pretty much only two groups on the "age of the earth" issue. There are people saying the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and there are people saying the earth is ~4.5 billion years old.
If you go to the arctic or antarctic and dig, you'll find that there are quite visible yearly layers in the snow. During the summer the snow surface bakes under 6 months of constant sun changing its texture, and it builds up a slight layer of settled dust and pollen blown in from across the globe. In particular whenever there is a major volcano anywhere on earth a faint dusting of volcanic ash blows in and can be found in that yearly layer. If you dig and count down 1929 visible layers, you'll find traces of volcanic dust from the 79 A.D. Mt Vesuvius eruption that destroyed Pompeii. You can see and count the layers to find traces of ash from every major eruption in recorded history. Each visible layer down equals one year earlier in history.
There are more than 100,000 visible countable layers in the arctic and antarctic icepack. Actually there's about 800,000 years worth, but the deeper you go the layers get squeezed thinner and thiner and more than about a hundred-odd thousand years down they get too thin and blur together and you can no longer individually count them. But they are visible and countable well beyond 100,000 years. And those deeper layers also show 100,000+ years worth of prehistoric volcanic eruptions scattered in various levels exactly as you'd expect from 100,000+ years worth of volcanic history.
Of the two groups of people I mentioned above, the young earth group and the old earth group, one group is just plain wrong. One group is engaging in wishful thinking, grossly twisting and distorting the facts to manufacture the result they want to get. One group is engaging in total junk-science and making invalid claims. The statements and arguments from one sided and completely non-credible.
The other side is the entire scientific community. The other side is engaging in careful legitimate scientific work. The other side builds up a timeline and checks it and cross validates it in dozens of ways based on endless evidence from a variety of fields of science. Radiometric dating is but one of a variety of methods they use for dating and to build that timeline.
One of the standard rules of science is that you don't place heavy trust in any single test or any single method. We might misunderstand something in some particular field, we may make incorrect assumptions about some particular method, or people may just make an error in their methods or measurements. HOWEVER you know you have extremely solid science when you measure something by multiple independently methods. If radiometric dating comes up with about the same date as astronomical cycles recorded in geological layers, it is absurdly unlikely two completely different methods will both give the SAME wrong result by mere chance. When you crosscheck it by a third or fourth completely different method and the timeline matches up, there is essentially no chance all of those methods will give the SAME wrong result. There must be some real cause accounting for those matching results. When you have that sort of multiple cross-validation, then the result is "proven accurate" beyond any reasonable standard of doubt.
Science is deeply interconnected web. All fields of science build up a single coherent timeline of history. That timeline is established and cross-checked and cross-validated by countless methods based on endless evidence from every single field of science. All the evidence and all the dating methods hang together and match up in one coherent picture. If the timeline were radically wrong there is no way ALL of the methods could all be matching up by accident. If that timeline were radically wring, it is impossible beyond all reason that all of those errors would fit together to paint a functional and coherent fictional history. If all of the methods were wrong, the fictional history they paint would be a ran
If memory serves no one "won" the last time.
No one has won the war, but the evolution side is winning the battles a few people at a time.
I personally have won a few people to the evolution side amidst the noise and rantfests of the Slashdot stories. A few people who have issues challenges or questions against evolution, people who honestly care about the particular points they raise and who honestly evaluate the answer. People who are then amazed at the evidence that does exist to back up the science, People who suddenly realize which side has been pushing bogus claims.
Of course I have sadly run into a larger number of people whom just fling random attacks and don't care if any particular argument against evolution is wrong, people who just keep flinging random attacks presuming that sooner or later one of them MUST stick, and not caring about any particular issue and not caring about the answer and not caring that their favorite website for the cause just fed them 4 false arguments in a row. They KNOW and ADMIT the the arguments they used were wrong, and they go back to the same website they KNOW is feeding them junk arguments, and they don't care, they just grab a 5th junk argument they don't understand and they don't care about the answer. That is extremely rude and annoying, but the people who make honest challenges and *do* care about the answer make it worth it.
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There could have been evolutionists who have changed their opinions as well
Possible, though I have never seen it. I guess it's fair to say many people on the evolution side haven't really looked at the evidence might be persuadable. In my experience the anti-evolution arguments are only good for preaching to the highly motivated choir, or to present the uninvolved uninformed general public with a general impression that a scientific controversy exists. The claims never hold up under informed critical review.
The debate has been more heat than light
Yes, sadly. However there is still some light amidst all the heat. I personally have completely won over a few converts to the evolution side. There are many many people convinced evolution==atheism or somesuch, people who rant against evolution with no interest in mutually discussing and honestly considering each other's evidence on the subject, and of course conversations with them go nowhere. However I have also had people come in asserting some doubts, challenges, questions against evolution and honestly examining the response. And such people are inevitably amazed by the examples of science and evidence that exist backing up evolution. People saying wow, I didn't know all that was out there. People suddenly coming to a very strong decision about which side is grossly guilty of pushing false claims.
Just to cite a single example and to squeezed it down to a single sentence, there is a chunk of the fossil record that is completely continuous and gap-free showing the intermediate forms spanning thousands of species - a chunk of evidence which is pretty well sufficient all by itself to establish the validity of evolution beyond any reasonable doubt. If you want me to back that up I can copy-past a several paragraphs from one of my old posts explaining it in detail.
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It's one thing to read some Dawkins
I've never read any Dawkins, but from the few clips I've seen of him on TV he seems like a bit of an ass.
People who claim to believe in evolution on the internet have quite clearly never read any science
Hmmm. Willful trolling, or incredibly misinformed?
Every national or international science organization with an an official position on evolution state that evolution in overwhelmingly confirmed by all evidence. Just a sampling of such scientific bodies that have made such statements on the subject:
Academy Of Science Of The Royal Society Of Canada
Alabama Academy Of Science
American Anthropological Association
American Association For The Advancement Of Science
American Association Of Physical Anthropologists
American Astronomical Society
American Geophysical Union
American Institute Of Biological Sciences
American Astronomical Society
American Society Of Biological Chemists
American Chemical Society
American Geological Institute
American Psychological Association
American Physical Society
American Society Of Parasitologists
Association for Women Geoscientists
Australian Academy of Science
Botanical Society of America
California Academy Of Sciences
Ecological Society of America
Genetics Society of America
Geological Society Of America
Geological Society of Australia
Georgia Academy Of Science
History of Science Society
Iowa Academy Of Science
Kentucky Academy Of Science
Kentucky Paleontological Society
Louisiana Academy Of Sciences
National Academy Of Sciences
North American Benthological Society
North Carolina Academy Of Science
New York Academy Of Sciences
Ohio Academy Of Science
Ohio Academy Of Science
Ohio Math and Science Coalition
Oklahoma Academy Of Sciences
The Paleontological Society
Society For Amateur Scientists
Society For Integrative and Comparative Biology
Society Of Systematic Biologists
Society Of Vertebrate Paleontology
Southern Anthropological Society
Virginia Academy Of Science
West Virginia Academy Of Science
You can read the statements from each of them collected here.
Actually the "National Academy of Science" for almost every major nation on earth has made such a statement, but I don't have a handy link for all of them.
There are minor activist groups dedicated to both sides of the issue, but as far as National or International organizations dedicated to science or particular fields of science, non-biased organizations that incidentally issues position statements on the issue as an incidental action aside from their actual mission of preforming and promoting other science, every single one has come down on the side of confirming the scientific legitimacy of evolution and categorizing the anti-evolution side as invalid or pseudo science.
In fact I personally have dabbled in some evolution experiments and I have personally witnessed the fact that it's right and works.
On your side you have the crackpot answersingenesis website, and you have the Discovery Institute activists and a couple of other minor activist groups, and not one single legitimate scientific body, not one recognized International or National body dedicated to general science.
If you think the science is against evolution, you have been wildly misinformed. Except for a tiny fraction of a single percent, actual professional degreed scientists across all of the earth and life sciences come down on the side of evolution being valid and established by the evidence.
You can cite Michael Behe and a small handful of other actual degreed professional biologists who dispute evolution, but as I said they represent a minuscule faction of a percent. And not a single major body dedicated to general science acknowledges any credible scientific results from any of their attempts to refu