Creationists often assert that "macroevolution" is not proven, even if "microevolution" is, and by this they seem to mean that whatever evolution is observed is microevolution, but the rest is macroevolution. In making these claims they are misusing authentic scientific terms; that is, they have a non-standard definition, which they use to make science appear to be saying something other than it is. Evolution proponents often say that creationists invented the terms. This is false. Both macroevolution and microevolution are legitimate scientific terms, which have a history of changing meanings that, in any case, fail to underpin creationism. ...
In evolutionary biology today, macroevolution is used to refer to any evolutionary change at or above the level of species. It means at least the splitting of a species into two (speciation, or cladogenesis, from the Greek meaning "the origin of a branch", see Fig. 1) or the change of a species over time into another (anagenetic speciation, not nowadays generally accepted [note 1]).
And yet you want them forced at gunpoint back into those hard situations?
1.) There are no simple answers.
2.) I honestly don't know the best way to handle people who are already here. It might work to simultaneously make the immigration process easier and then require illegal immigrants to go through it if they want to stay. Or something along those lines.
3.) By "hard situations", we're not talking about war-torn refugees, we're talking about lower standards of living. Depending on how low...possibly, yes.
4.) That their desire to bypass the system is understandable doesn't mean eliminating the system is the best thing. I sympathize with a poor man who steals food to improve his hungry family's situation, but my solution is not to make it effectively legal to do so--my solution is to ensure there are better ways for him to help his family. (And yes, to exercise discernment and mercy in the punishment.)
In much the same way that religious voters will tolerate massive corruption and sexual perversion from politicians who claim deep religious convictions (of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant variety only please).
Eh? I honestly don't know what you have in mind here. Can you name a name for me? Either for the massive corruption, or the sexual perversion?
When have religious voters tolerated corruption after it was made public? Don't the politicians in question usually resign in disgrace?
And that means you support restrictions on immigration? I take it you didn't like your family that much...?
No, it doesn't mean he supports any particular set of restrictions on immigration; it means he supports enforcing the laws we do have.
In my case, I want to enforce our immigration laws. (Though I recognize there are some tricky problems involved, particularly with how we deal with the children of illegal immigrants.) But I support making immigration easier. It takes too long & it's too expensive. I can't really blame illegal Mexican immigrants for bypassing the system; many people are in hard situations, and don't have good options.
First, let me say that it saddens me to read some of what you've had to deal with. Racist & nationalistic assholes piss me off. And I do believe in enforcing immigration laws, but I also believe in making the immigration process quicker, easier, and cheaper--so that time & economic status will not be a barrier to anyone who wants to join our country. We will be enriched, both by their labor and their culture.
That said,
The US government does not want people to abandon culture or country affiliation, they have simply forbad you commit crimes motivated by the hate you have.
Sadly a bunch of Chinese miners dying isn't particularly unusual or newsworthy, either. That's what happens when you have hardly any safety measures at all.
I agree with your point, the GP was trollish.
However, in one sense, the idea that it's not unusual for large groups of miners to die due to insufficient safety measures...is itself newsworthy.
I actually do have a problem with judicial activism, as in legislating from the bench, as in a judge deciding what he wants to be law instead of ruling on the law as it is. Your brand of trolling just makes serious objections look stupid.
What this judge did was overturn a law on Constitutional grounds. (And hallelujah for that!) Even if you don't think the Patriot Act provision really was unconstitutional, you can't call it judicial activism unless you think that the judge invented a new "constitutional right" or some such. Otherwise, you should just say the decision was wrong.
(I know, I know, I'm feeding the troll. I can't help myself.)
Again, with the caveat that I haven't actually done any cosmology coursework, so I could be wrong:
Does matter itself expand?
No.
Do galaxies and celestial bodies become bigger as the universe expands?
No. Galaxies and celestial bodies (including clusters of galaxies) are gravitationally bound. Even though the space inside a galaxy is expanding (so that you would expect the stars to get further apart), this is counteracted by their gravitational interaction. So they stay together. Same thing for clusters of galaxies.
or it is only the space between matter that expands?
Right.
what about the space between particles?
Same thing. A molecule, atom, or nucleon (proton/neutron) is in the same situation as a galaxy. The space between individual bits of matter gets bigger, but their attraction counteracts that--whether it comes from gravitational, electromagnetic, or strong and weak nuclear forces--so that they stay together.
I haven't really studied the math of General Relativity, so take this with a grain of salt.
I don't think it's correct to say that distance itself is shrinking.
The size of a proton, for instance, does not expand with cosmological inflation or shrink with deflation. Suppose expansion were to reverse toward a Big Crunch. All the galaxies are getting closer and closer, but the galaxies and stars themselves aren't shrinking. Suppose you're sitting there with a ruler. As space contracts and all the matter gets closer together, it would eventually get crushed by all the other matter being jam-packed against it--but it won't shrink.
I'm not sure how to explain this in terms of the math--the distinctions between metrics of distance and the nature of space-time, etc. But I think what I've said is correct as far as it goes.
...well, I have a MS in Physics, anyway. Well, Applied Physics. In semiconductors. Anyway...
I think another poster said it a bit more intuitively, that the point is now smeared out everywhere. That sounds roughly right to me.
Another thing to realize is that the Big Bang doesn't mean that an explosion happened in a single point in empty space, and then everything expanded outward. It's that space itself was compressed down into a single point, and then expanded. There was nothing outside the Big Bang for it to expand out into. Every point in the universe was infinitely closer together. All the energy was really close together--really dense--so it was really hot. Then as things got less dense, the temperature decreased. In one sense, everywhere is the center of the Big Bang.
This is also why distant galaxies can be receding away from us faster than the speed of light. Because expansion doesn't mean that galaxies are moving through space. (In relativity, nothing can move through space faster than c.) Instead, the distance between us is increasing as space itself expands. (You can visualize that as making two marks with a pen on a deflated balloon, and then blowing up the balloon. The two marks don't move on the balloon, but they do get further apart.)
I doubt many people at the time expected that research to develop into solid-state physics, which is what the guys over at Intel rely on to make their CPUs...
As opposed to the guys over at AMD, who use phlogiston theory to make their CPUs.
You don't, of course. Statements on Slashdot don't require it. That doesn't affect my point: My statement to the contrary was as meaningful as yours was.
I've never met a Christian whose reason for believing that there's something special about Jesus was that Mary claimed to be a virgin when she got pregnant.
Funny how everyone wants to impeach Bush for doing things that Clinton got away with[...]
What a strange ethical logic you conservatives have. O.J. Simpson got away with murder (apparently), does that mean I am allowed to murder now also, and nobody can object because O.J. did it first?
For the party that is always yelling about "traditional values", and "strict constructionalism", you are starting to sound an awful lot like the moral relativists you like to condemn.
Oh my, I'm impressed. You managed to take the gp's claim that "your side" is being hypocritical or inconsistent, and somehow turn it into a presentation of moral relativism. Bravo, sir!
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think the gp deserved his troll rating. But I don't think your response was particularly rational.
Quote button? There's no quote button on my screen. I tried opening it the page in both IE and Firefox, but don't see a quote button on either. Not sure what's going on there, if you have one. At any rate, I could be using the blockquote or quote tags, too. Instead I used the italics. No particular reason.
If you take each famous case of church repression of science and downplay it to dismiss the horrors they have made, you might as well do that with every single case of religiously motivated misdeed, leading to the ridiculous "no Christian ever persecuted anyone".
The intentional spelling and grammatical error of the original "quote" should have clued you in.
OK, thank you for answering my question. The answer is that you do not understand "reductio ad absurdum".
What you just described is not accepting JonathanBoyd's argument and reasoning forward to an absurd conclusion. If you think it is, then what's the premise? That we can downplay horrors of religious repression of science? Are you really trying to tell me you think that was the proposition JonathanBoyd was putting forward? Even assuming you're right--assuming he was doing it, downplaying horrors--that would simply mean that he was whitewashing history. The "revisionist" label would apply. But by no stretch of the imagination was he arguing that it's valid to whitewash history, which is the only way "reductio ad absurdum" would even marginally describe what you're doing.
An argument by contradiction would have the form: "OK, let's suppose that what you say is true. Let's suppose that Copernicus was a Roman Catholic who was encouraged by his bishop to spread his research about heliocentrism, and let's suppose that Galileo ran into trouble because of remarks he made about the pope - politics was the problem, not science. That would imply X, which is obviously untrue. Therefore your premises are wrong."
Apparently you're unable to get past the word "absurd". Here's a cluestick, take it up and beat yourself with it a few times. Accusing your opponent of saying absurd things, using bad grammar as mockery, or saying "You're revising history! Why not go ahead and do it even more?" are not examples of proof by contradiction. Trying to make someone look absurd or to show absurdity in their views is not reduction ad absurdum.
OK, so apparently in your mental categories, any spiritual being with power is a "deity". Even if that being was originally created by God, it's still another god.
You can define "deity" that way, I suppose, but you should not assume that your meaning is relevant to the historic issue of monotheism vs polytheism. What's more important to me is the Judeo-Christian worldview--what are the categories of divinity and spirituality used by the people to whom and for whom the Bible was originally written? What's their definition of divinity? On that basis, I do not see how you can reach the conclusion that the devil is a deity.
As for Satan's successful opposition and power "on par" with God--again, you're not being true to the biblical portrayal. In Job, for instance, Satan is portrayed as only being able to do what God does not prevent him from doing. Yes, that brings up one aspect of the Problem of Evil--why does God allow evil to occur--but my point is that the Bible does not allow for the kind of dualism you're presenting.
Does it matter? Well, partly it matters just because it contradicts the biblical claim of monotheism. Another way that it matters is that dualism conflicts with the idea of God's sovereignty, which has implications for the outworking of history.
Um...Where do you get the idea that the devil is a deity? Most people think that the devil is a fallen angel, though I don't think the passages they get that from actually teach it. Myself, I think the Bible doesn't clearly address the nature of Satan, but calling him a god just isn't in the running.
As for "other gods"...Well, you're right that "You shall have no other gods before me" does not imply that there are no other gods, and does seem to imply that there are some. So if all we had were the 10 commandments, we couldn't conclude monotheism from the Bible. But other passages expand on it, like Jer. 2:11, "Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit." Paul said something similar in Gal. 4:8. Or check out the confrontation between the prophet Elijah and the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18, where Elijah taunts them because the "god" is merely a mute idol, powerless. Or read Isaiah 46, where God compares himself to idols.
In other words, in the 10 commandments God talks about other gods the way I sometimes do--he doesn't explicitly add, "and they are not really anyway" after every single mention.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm pretty sure it wasn't Moridin.
Yes, there is. It's a legitimate term, with a useful meaning.
From Talk.Origins:
Don't be vacuous.
Pshaw! Blow off work. Arguments are more fun.
The yes-or-no question was "Can you name a name for me?"
So the answer to my question was "no"?
And yet you want them forced at gunpoint back into those hard situations?
1.) There are no simple answers.
2.) I honestly don't know the best way to handle people who are already here. It might work to simultaneously make the immigration process easier and then require illegal immigrants to go through it if they want to stay. Or something along those lines.
3.) By "hard situations", we're not talking about war-torn refugees, we're talking about lower standards of living. Depending on how low...possibly, yes.
4.) That their desire to bypass the system is understandable doesn't mean eliminating the system is the best thing. I sympathize with a poor man who steals food to improve his hungry family's situation, but my solution is not to make it effectively legal to do so--my solution is to ensure there are better ways for him to help his family. (And yes, to exercise discernment and mercy in the punishment.)
In much the same way that religious voters will tolerate massive corruption and sexual perversion from politicians who claim deep religious convictions (of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant variety only please) .
Eh? I honestly don't know what you have in mind here. Can you name a name for me? Either for the massive corruption, or the sexual perversion?
When have religious voters tolerated corruption after it was made public? Don't the politicians in question usually resign in disgrace?
In my case, I want to enforce our immigration laws. (Though I recognize there are some tricky problems involved, particularly with how we deal with the children of illegal immigrants.) But I support making immigration easier. It takes too long & it's too expensive. I can't really blame illegal Mexican immigrants for bypassing the system; many people are in hard situations, and don't have good options.
That said,So it's OK if I commit crimes motivated by greed?
However, in one sense, the idea that it's not unusual for large groups of miners to die due to insufficient safety measures...is itself newsworthy.
Please, shut up.
I actually do have a problem with judicial activism, as in legislating from the bench, as in a judge deciding what he wants to be law instead of ruling on the law as it is. Your brand of trolling just makes serious objections look stupid.
What this judge did was overturn a law on Constitutional grounds. (And hallelujah for that!) Even if you don't think the Patriot Act provision really was unconstitutional, you can't call it judicial activism unless you think that the judge invented a new "constitutional right" or some such. Otherwise, you should just say the decision was wrong.
(I know, I know, I'm feeding the troll. I can't help myself.)
Again, with the caveat that I haven't actually done any cosmology coursework, so I could be wrong:
Does matter itself expand?
No.
Do galaxies and celestial bodies become bigger as the universe expands?
No. Galaxies and celestial bodies (including clusters of galaxies) are gravitationally bound. Even though the space inside a galaxy is expanding (so that you would expect the stars to get further apart), this is counteracted by their gravitational interaction. So they stay together. Same thing for clusters of galaxies.
or it is only the space between matter that expands?
Right.
what about the space between particles?
Same thing. A molecule, atom, or nucleon (proton/neutron) is in the same situation as a galaxy. The space between individual bits of matter gets bigger, but their attraction counteracts that--whether it comes from gravitational, electromagnetic, or strong and weak nuclear forces--so that they stay together.
I haven't really studied the math of General Relativity, so take this with a grain of salt.
I don't think it's correct to say that distance itself is shrinking.
The size of a proton, for instance, does not expand with cosmological inflation or shrink with deflation. Suppose expansion were to reverse toward a Big Crunch. All the galaxies are getting closer and closer, but the galaxies and stars themselves aren't shrinking. Suppose you're sitting there with a ruler. As space contracts and all the matter gets closer together, it would eventually get crushed by all the other matter being jam-packed against it--but it won't shrink.
I'm not sure how to explain this in terms of the math--the distinctions between metrics of distance and the nature of space-time, etc. But I think what I've said is correct as far as it goes.
...well, I have a MS in Physics, anyway. Well, Applied Physics. In semiconductors. Anyway...
I think another poster said it a bit more intuitively, that the point is now smeared out everywhere. That sounds roughly right to me.
Another thing to realize is that the Big Bang doesn't mean that an explosion happened in a single point in empty space, and then everything expanded outward. It's that space itself was compressed down into a single point, and then expanded. There was nothing outside the Big Bang for it to expand out into. Every point in the universe was infinitely closer together. All the energy was really close together--really dense--so it was really hot. Then as things got less dense, the temperature decreased. In one sense, everywhere is the center of the Big Bang.
This is also why distant galaxies can be receding away from us faster than the speed of light. Because expansion doesn't mean that galaxies are moving through space. (In relativity, nothing can move through space faster than c.) Instead, the distance between us is increasing as space itself expands. (You can visualize that as making two marks with a pen on a deflated balloon, and then blowing up the balloon. The two marks don't move on the balloon, but they do get further apart.)
You don't, of course. Statements on Slashdot don't require it. That doesn't affect my point: My statement to the contrary was as meaningful as yours was.
Yes, Eve ate the apple first. But Adam is held responsible for the Fall.
I've never met a Christian whose reason for believing that there's something special about Jesus was that Mary claimed to be a virgin when she got pregnant.
There's, it's a tie in the "unsupported claims" game.
And Harry gets killed by bees.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I think the gp deserved his troll rating. But I don't think your response was particularly rational.
Quote button? There's no quote button on my screen. I tried opening it the page in both IE and Firefox, but don't see a quote button on either. Not sure what's going on there, if you have one. At any rate, I could be using the blockquote or quote tags, too. Instead I used the italics. No particular reason.
If you take each famous case of church repression of science and downplay it to dismiss the horrors they have made, you might as well do that with every single case of religiously motivated misdeed, leading to the ridiculous "no Christian ever persecuted anyone".
The intentional spelling and grammatical error of the original "quote" should have clued you in.
OK, thank you for answering my question. The answer is that you do not understand "reductio ad absurdum".
What you just described is not accepting JonathanBoyd's argument and reasoning forward to an absurd conclusion. If you think it is, then what's the premise? That we can downplay horrors of religious repression of science? Are you really trying to tell me you think that was the proposition JonathanBoyd was putting forward? Even assuming you're right--assuming he was doing it, downplaying horrors--that would simply mean that he was whitewashing history. The "revisionist" label would apply. But by no stretch of the imagination was he arguing that it's valid to whitewash history, which is the only way "reductio ad absurdum" would even marginally describe what you're doing.
An argument by contradiction would have the form: "OK, let's suppose that what you say is true. Let's suppose that Copernicus was a Roman Catholic who was encouraged by his bishop to spread his research about heliocentrism, and let's suppose that Galileo ran into trouble because of remarks he made about the pope - politics was the problem, not science. That would imply X, which is obviously untrue. Therefore your premises are wrong."
Apparently you're unable to get past the word "absurd". Here's a cluestick, take it up and beat yourself with it a few times. Accusing your opponent of saying absurd things, using bad grammar as mockery, or saying "You're revising history! Why not go ahead and do it even more?" are not examples of proof by contradiction. Trying to make someone look absurd or to show absurdity in their views is not reduction ad absurdum.
OK, so apparently in your mental categories, any spiritual being with power is a "deity". Even if that being was originally created by God, it's still another god.
You can define "deity" that way, I suppose, but you should not assume that your meaning is relevant to the historic issue of monotheism vs polytheism. What's more important to me is the Judeo-Christian worldview--what are the categories of divinity and spirituality used by the people to whom and for whom the Bible was originally written? What's their definition of divinity? On that basis, I do not see how you can reach the conclusion that the devil is a deity.
As for Satan's successful opposition and power "on par" with God--again, you're not being true to the biblical portrayal. In Job, for instance, Satan is portrayed as only being able to do what God does not prevent him from doing. Yes, that brings up one aspect of the Problem of Evil--why does God allow evil to occur--but my point is that the Bible does not allow for the kind of dualism you're presenting.
Does it matter? Well, partly it matters just because it contradicts the biblical claim of monotheism. Another way that it matters is that dualism conflicts with the idea of God's sovereignty, which has implications for the outworking of history.
Um...Where do you get the idea that the devil is a deity? Most people think that the devil is a fallen angel, though I don't think the passages they get that from actually teach it. Myself, I think the Bible doesn't clearly address the nature of Satan, but calling him a god just isn't in the running.
As for "other gods"...Well, you're right that "You shall have no other gods before me" does not imply that there are no other gods, and does seem to imply that there are some. So if all we had were the 10 commandments, we couldn't conclude monotheism from the Bible. But other passages expand on it, like Jer. 2:11, "Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit." Paul said something similar in Gal. 4:8. Or check out the confrontation between the prophet Elijah and the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18, where Elijah taunts them because the "god" is merely a mute idol, powerless. Or read Isaiah 46, where God compares himself to idols.
In other words, in the 10 commandments God talks about other gods the way I sometimes do--he doesn't explicitly add, "and they are not really anyway" after every single mention.