The return of catastrophism to geology was marked by the widespread acceptance of the bolide impact at the K-T boundary. An excellent book on this subject is "Mass extinction debates: How science works in a crisis" William Glen (ed.). Most geologists accept that there are events in the geological past that have no present analog.
As to your rather narrow vision of "the scientific method", this falsificationalist view is that of the earlier works of Karl Popper. Historical science is inferential, and tries to assign probabilities to what happened, just as human histories do. As for what experiments can tell you, the Miller-Urey experiment told us something about how the possibility of complex organic molecules emerging. That is an experiment that tells us something about what might have been going on 4 B.a.
As to the rates of eruption quoted in the article, there is abundant radiometric dating evidence from the Siberian Trappes. The rate of eruption is then simply the change in rock area or volume over the calculated time. The links to the mass extinction may be more tenuous, but there is no question that a major change in the marine organisms occurred aroudn the Permo-Triassic boundary.
The attempt by the BBC to link the rise of the dinosaurs to the Permo-Triassic extinction is a mistake. Both synapsids (mammalian lineage) and diapsids (dinosaur lineage) coexisted during most of the Triassic. Then at around 210 M.y. there was a sudden shift in the diversities of the two groups, which allowed the dinosaurs to dominate the terrestrial ecosystems until the end of the Cretaceous. This does not seem to be related to competitive interactions between the two groups, and may have been driven by an extinction event towards the end of the Carnian (a Triassic subdivision). The full reference is:
Benton, M. J. 1983b. Dinosaur success in the Triassic: a noncompetitive ecological model. Quarterly Review of Biology, 58, 29-55.
I went and looked at JunkScience.com. As a working scientist I am always on the lookout for sites I can refer people to that debunk bad work. I had a hunch about the quality of this site from the tone of the post, but being the enquiring type I am off I went.
JunkScience seems very selective in the issues it describes as examples of junk. I looked at the sites definitions of who uses "JunkScience", and was entertained to read that gun-control advocates did, but not anit-gun control advocates. I have seen statistics from both lobbies that are flawed.
I fear "JunkScience" is a blatantly political site that has a (not very) hidden agenda. The point is to reinforce political views, not debunk bad statistical practice. For an exmaple of a site that does demolish bad science try
http://www.badastronomy.com/
This is the sort of tenor I would expect from a site genuinely concerned with debunking the abuse of science. Compare and contrast.
As a geologist and paleontologist, who happens to work in a department where a significant amount of research goes into both "ground truthing" climate models, I find the image of lab rats and cancer the usual confusion between experimental science and historical science. Historical science is largely a case of examining trends and variation around mean values. The fact that the UK Met office simulations do a very good job encourages us to take modelling seriously. The fact that all of the IPCC models agree the mean annual global tempertature will increase is fairly convincing evidence that an upward trend is on the cards.
The comment by on the other reply to the thread is a good one, and I would add that weather forecasting has become much better than it used to be. Doppler radar WILL tell you if it going to rain in the next 5 mins.
As a scientist who works in a (notional) democracy I don't think it should be up to scientists to make public policy, but I hope the voters are more informed on the issues than this post would suggest.
Although extinction is a vital component of natural selection (there must be more indiviudals born than can survive), it can also be a rather random process. A species could be hanging out down in Yucutan, and suddenly a large fiery rock falls from the sky and vaporizes water, rock, and your entire gene pool. Bad genes or bad luck, as Dave Raup so succintly put it. Evolution is not all "invetiable progress", luck has a lot more to do with it than any of us would like to admit. Just like people who makes a fortune on the stock market, but has very little skill. SOMBODY has to win all those coin tosses. It isn't that much different at macroevolutionary timescales.
I take it by pseudoscience you are refering to the Gaia hypothesis. If not you may disregard my reply. While I don't agree with the strong hypothesis of planet Earth as a single "superorganism", the notion that the biosphere has been shaped by a feedback between selection on organisms, and the effects that their metabolic products have on geological systems, is entirely reasonsable. The shift in atmospheric oxygen levels can be linked clearly to the rise of cyanobacteria, which produced oxygen as a by-product of their metabolic activities. This gave rise to ozone, that handy compound that stops UV playing too much pinball with metazoan DNA.
Why all the fuss about Columbus? He wasn't the first European to "find" the "New World". It was either the Norse (Leif the Lucky and Erik the Red move west after perpetrating the "Greenland" real estate scam). Or some lunatic Irish monks in the sea-going coracles. And the Clovis beat them both by playing the old "Bering landbridge" card. Time to rename Columbus Day I think.
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The return of catastrophism to geology was marked by the widespread acceptance of the bolide impact at the K-T boundary. An excellent book on this subject is "Mass extinction debates: How science works in a crisis" William Glen (ed.). Most geologists accept that there are events in the geological past that have no present analog. As to your rather narrow vision of "the scientific method", this falsificationalist view is that of the earlier works of Karl Popper. Historical science is inferential, and tries to assign probabilities to what happened, just as human histories do. As for what experiments can tell you, the Miller-Urey experiment told us something about how the possibility of complex organic molecules emerging. That is an experiment that tells us something about what might have been going on 4 B.a. As to the rates of eruption quoted in the article, there is abundant radiometric dating evidence from the Siberian Trappes. The rate of eruption is then simply the change in rock area or volume over the calculated time. The links to the mass extinction may be more tenuous, but there is no question that a major change in the marine organisms occurred aroudn the Permo-Triassic boundary.
The attempt by the BBC to link the rise of the dinosaurs to the Permo-Triassic extinction is a mistake. Both synapsids (mammalian lineage) and diapsids (dinosaur lineage) coexisted during most of the Triassic. Then at around 210 M.y. there was a sudden shift in the diversities of the two groups, which allowed the dinosaurs to dominate the terrestrial ecosystems until the end of the Cretaceous. This does not seem to be related to competitive interactions between the two groups, and may have been driven by an extinction event towards the end of the Carnian (a Triassic subdivision). The full reference is: Benton, M. J. 1983b. Dinosaur success in the Triassic: a noncompetitive ecological model. Quarterly Review of Biology, 58, 29-55.
I went and looked at JunkScience.com. As a working scientist I am always on the lookout for sites I can refer people to that debunk bad work. I had a hunch about the quality of this site from the tone of the post, but being the enquiring type I am off I went. JunkScience seems very selective in the issues it describes as examples of junk. I looked at the sites definitions of who uses "JunkScience", and was entertained to read that gun-control advocates did, but not anit-gun control advocates. I have seen statistics from both lobbies that are flawed. I fear "JunkScience" is a blatantly political site that has a (not very) hidden agenda. The point is to reinforce political views, not debunk bad statistical practice. For an exmaple of a site that does demolish bad science try http://www.badastronomy.com/ This is the sort of tenor I would expect from a site genuinely concerned with debunking the abuse of science. Compare and contrast.
As a geologist and paleontologist, who happens to work in a department where a significant amount of research goes into both "ground truthing" climate models, I find the image of lab rats and cancer the usual confusion between experimental science and historical science. Historical science is largely a case of examining trends and variation around mean values. The fact that the UK Met office simulations do a very good job encourages us to take modelling seriously. The fact that all of the IPCC models agree the mean annual global tempertature will increase is fairly convincing evidence that an upward trend is on the cards. The comment by on the other reply to the thread is a good one, and I would add that weather forecasting has become much better than it used to be. Doppler radar WILL tell you if it going to rain in the next 5 mins. As a scientist who works in a (notional) democracy I don't think it should be up to scientists to make public policy, but I hope the voters are more informed on the issues than this post would suggest.
Although extinction is a vital component of natural selection (there must be more indiviudals born than can survive), it can also be a rather random process. A species could be hanging out down in Yucutan, and suddenly a large fiery rock falls from the sky and vaporizes water, rock, and your entire gene pool. Bad genes or bad luck, as Dave Raup so succintly put it. Evolution is not all "invetiable progress", luck has a lot more to do with it than any of us would like to admit. Just like people who makes a fortune on the stock market, but has very little skill. SOMBODY has to win all those coin tosses. It isn't that much different at macroevolutionary timescales.
I take it by pseudoscience you are refering to the Gaia hypothesis. If not you may disregard my reply. While I don't agree with the strong hypothesis of planet Earth as a single "superorganism", the notion that the biosphere has been shaped by a feedback between selection on organisms, and the effects that their metabolic products have on geological systems, is entirely reasonsable. The shift in atmospheric oxygen levels can be linked clearly to the rise of cyanobacteria, which produced oxygen as a by-product of their metabolic activities. This gave rise to ozone, that handy compound that stops UV playing too much pinball with metazoan DNA.
Why all the fuss about Columbus? He wasn't the first European to "find" the "New World". It was either the Norse (Leif the Lucky and Erik the Red move west after perpetrating the "Greenland" real estate scam). Or some lunatic Irish monks in the sea-going coracles. And the Clovis beat them both by playing the old "Bering landbridge" card. Time to rename Columbus Day I think.