Intelligent Design is a (very) little bit different. The Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching of "Creation Science" is unconstitutional in part because teaching of Creation Science has no legitimate secular purpose. Or to put it another way, teaching Creation Science has no secular purpose because it has no scientific content. Intelligent Design began life immediately after this landmark case as a word processor find-and-replace term for creation science in "Of Pandas and People," which was intended to replace science textbooks in public schools and elsewhere. This fact was brought to light in 2005 in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District". Intelligent Design is exactly the same as creationism, except that in public it tries to "Ixnay on the Esusjay" but in the churches drops that facade.
Another thing: "creationism" is a fairly broad term encompassing Young-Earth Creationism, Old-Earth Creationism, and other assorted beliefs (again wikipedia's pages aren't too bad). And unless you want to advance the position that Christianity is anti-science (like perhaps Richard Dawkins) it is possible that a Christian's answer to evolution is, well, evolution. This view is supported by the 10,000 plus members of the clergy over at the Clergy Letter Project.
"I have to wonder what the produce would be like given the general air quality in that area."
Well, I've a friend in LA and another in NYC. They've got a competition going via email over who's got the strangest colored boogers due to the chemical weapons-grade gas the locals call "air." I kid, I kid...but not about the booger competition.
"Another little mystery is why snails survive. Their method of locamotion seems rather expensive and slow compared to legs. Being able to pull into a shell helps, but what about slugs? The insects should have wiped their niche out long ago."
I was out hunting in Oregon's coast range once and came across a fresh coyote poop. Clearly visible (I ain't poking around in poop, especially one this nasty!) was the remains of a slug. Other than being bitten in half it had gone through the entire digestive tract without visible damage. Slugs are really nasty and hardly anything will eat them. That poor coyote won't try it again either--with as slimy as the things are it probably was tasting the slug for a week.
Also in Oregon the slugs can reach lengths of up to 9 inches, maybe more, so there's a whole lot of predators that just look at them and try not to barf.
"Do you think scientists like traveling to "important" meetings all over the world and having those meetings covered by the BBC and CNN, or do they like to have monthly meetings in Des Moines Iowa at the Motel Six so that they can share their findings on cockroach habits with the local pest control company?"
I've been to a few scientific meetings, some of which were fairly large (a few thousand attendees). Neither the BBC, CNN, nor any other news source was at any of them. Usually they're hosted by some university or research institute, or occasionally money is pooled to rent out a conference center. The very nicest meeting I've been at was at Asilomar, a converted YWCA camp. Lodging was in the old cabins--little more than a bed and a shower, but quite nice. Food was what you'd expect at a middling restaurant, nothing to write home about. Location was excellent, just off the beach. Total outlay per person was approximately $400 for three days/two nights. Science conferences don't really get more upscale than that--sometimes lodging is in student dorms (I've also stayed at a Motel Six for a conference). That and this particular conference at Asilomar meets only every other year in part to defray the high cost.
"
If you scream "fire!" at your job, and more money comes to your research project, are you more apt to yell "fire!" again next year?"
Funding in academic science doesn't work that way. If I scream "Fire!" and there is one, I might get money (but probably not since funding's been scarce for about the last six years or so). If I scream "Fire!" and there isn't one once, well, that's not good but my stature's only going to be dinged a little as long as it's an honest mistake. If I scream "Fire!" and there isn't one again, that's going to really piss people off and certainly inhibit my ability to get funding. Much more than that and I'll be considered a crank and ignored, and never get funded again. Reality controls what funding is available. What sort of a job do you have where yelling out bullshit gets you more money?
junkscience.com is the home of the notorious corporate shill Steven Milloy, who's corrupt enough to deny the link between tobacco smoke and lung cancer on behalf of big tobacco.
If you want to check out various creation myths, go right ahead. First you ought to define what agent(s) you've got, when/how/why they do whatever it is that they do, how we detect such agents and their actions, and how your particular whatever is different from currently accepted science. All that and, of course, evidence. Without that, you've got Bond Pixies.
"You could assist me by denying that evolution deals with Fact, and I will feel much more relaxed about it. I'll settle for "evolution (in the sense of molecules-to-man) is a theory based on an assumption of naturalism". If you can assent to that, we have no disagreement about the nature of evolution itself."
If you require that facts not have the "assumption of naturalism," then fine, don't call evolution a fact. However logical consistency demands that you no longer consider "the sky is blue" to be a fact for the exact same reason. Really none of our interactions with the entire, everyday world can be considered factual without methodological naturalism. After all, a supernatural entity could be tricking us in ways that we could not possibly even imagine. Maybe this morning I ate my Cheerios with a fork because Loki tricked me into thinking it was a spoon. But such speculation I'll cheerfully leave to the sophists and postmodernists. Also, we must be very careful with our terms. Science is not possible without methodological naturalism, for the reasons in my previous post as well as the above. Philosophical naturalism on the other hand is irrelevant to science as the supernatural can't be studied using science. For somebody who says they've got a graduate degree in philosophy, your posts read messily on this distinction. Also I urge you to better inform yourself on what evolution actually says. "Molecules to man" is a phrase that instantly tells me that you've read little about evolution from pro-science sources. I recommend Berkeley's evolution website and talk.origins as good starting off places, wikipedia's got a decent page as well.
"As to explaining your "enzymes" and their behaviour, you are merely using the accepted terminology of your field. That paradigm includes "amino acids" and "protons" and other such mythical elements. Whether you believe in those or "bond pixies" doesn't really matter much if the predictions and whatnot come out the same. Whether you say, "an amino acid pops a proton off a substrate carbon," or, "a bond pixie smacks a frobnockle off a slithy tove," matters only in that the former language is that which your peers speak. If, on the other hand, you felt that you had a better model for enzyme behaviour which involved differently behaved basic entities and operations, you'd best present those ideas using new words. Good luck with that: paradigm shifting is backbreaking work."
Yes if I replaced "abstract a proton from the terminal methyl group" it wouldn't be any different than "a bond pixie smacks a frobnockle off a slithy tove" provided "The Famous Brett Wat speak" could be translated into acceptable terms. You've missed the argument completely. The argument is that just in my little field a whole host of observations using a great many different techniques done by a great many different individuals over the course of many decades have been done. It all builds on itself, it all interrelates, and major contradictions are not seen. The explanatory and predictive power is enormous. Along comes somebody who wants to know why supernatural Bond Pixies haven't been considered. Yet who and what Bond Pixies are, and how/when/why they make an enzyme work, how this is different from the established view, and what exactly are the predictive and explanatory powers of this concept are not defined, nor is any observed evidence presented. Until those terms are defined, and somebody comes up with an objective way to detect and measure Bond Pixies and how they make an enzyme function, they are not a useful concept. Same goes for evolution, cosmology, dermatology, or any other field of scientific inquiry and any other undefined supernatural entity acting in any undefined way.
As you say paradigm shifting is hard work. But instead doing any work at all, creationists come in claiming without evidence
I was going to write a response to the whole of your post, but darnit there's so much wrong with it that I don't have the time. Instead, I'll cut at what I think is the very core of the problem: "...if science is necessarily naturalistic, then how do we know that a naturalistic explanation like "big bang + evolution" is true, as opposed to a credible falsehood? Why do scientists such as yourself disparage supernatural proposals as though they were false, when you are yourself not in honest pursuit of truth, but of credible naturalistic explanations?" Science does not deal in Truth. Religions and philosophies do, or more cynically perhaps just claim to. Science deals with evidence and reasonable interpretation of the evidence. Absolutely everything in science could be to use your term a "credible falsehood." That includes evolution, the Big Bang, germ theory, gravity, and when you get right down to it the theory that the sky is blue. Anybody who's ever had an intro to philosophy course can come up with objections to the sky being blue. Could be we're brains floating in jars hooked up to an artificial reality under a sky that's neon orange. Could be space aliens doing some odd experiment, just waiting to turn off their machines that hide the sky's greenness to see what effect that has on earthlings, or could be a god playing a practical joke. They're all the same, though: useless. It is reasonable to think that the sky is blue. My eyes tell me that it's blue, and have told me the same thing every day that I can remember. I can ask other people, and except for the random smartass (like me when I'm in that mood) I'll get the same answer. I don't even have to use my eyes--I can rely on spectrometers to measure wavelengths for me, I can check out the chemical composition of the sky, and I can read all the descriptions in history about the sky's blueness. Could that all be a "credible falsehood?" Yep. Does it matter? Nope. At least not until there's new data of some form that comes along making our "credible falsehood" suddenly less credible.
I'm a biochemist. I've extensively studied an enzyme, solved a pair of crystal structures of it with different compounds bound to its active site, done mutagenesis and kinetics to pin down the excruciatingly small details of the reaction mechanism. I know that compound A binds to the enzyme at site A, with interactions A1, A2, A3... in the order of their importance, followed by compound B with its site and interactions. I know which amino acid pops a proton off which substrate carbon, followed by what bond rotations occur, and blah blah etc. blah to sum up five years of my own work. Now suppose that all that's a credible falsehood and the real explanation is actually supernatural: bond pixies. Bond pixies might be really real, even in the real world, or not, but it just doesn't matter to science. How do I study bond pixies, study what they're doing, when they're doing it, why they're doing it, and really to begin with how do I even know that it's really bond pixies and not Elmer the Ghost? How do I do it so that I can publish my Bond Pixie Theory in the Journal of Molecular Biology and reasonably and with evidence differentiate it from standard enzymology and Elmer the Ghostism? The supernatural as a scientific explanation is disparaged by scientists because it adds nothing, explains nothing, predicts nothing, is unfalsifiable, and thus not useful in the slightest.
A score -1 Ignorant would be entirely appropriate. All the parent post is saying is that oooh, nasty little scientists got it wrong 500 years ago, therefore they're equally full of crap about things I don't understand. We got a pretty fucking good idea about the inner workings of our planet. We got a damn good understanding of meteorology and climatology, and we're progressing nicely in cosmology despite ignorance peddlers like you. Your post isn't even logically consistent--poor dumbass scientists got it wrong with a flat earth, got it wrong with the four elements (it's called alchemy...what eventually turned into the science of chemistry once all the religious/mystical woo woo was ripped out), can't predict with 100% accuracy the weather, the fuckers can't grab their asses with both hands. But they can build a rocket...
<br> So, since scientists are a bunch of idiots, how about you, and your expertise in, uh, something or other come up with a brand new rocket fuel. Might I suggest penguins? Worked fine on whaling ships near Antarctica. *Houston, we need more speed* *Roger that, Epimetheus. Toss another penguin in the burner*
"GM, Chrysler and Ford announce that they'll transition to "thinking about possibly getting some of those battery-rechargey cars" into production by 2015."
More like: "In the most recent bid to stave off bankruptcy, the remaining fragments of 'merkin motors (formed by the merger of GM, Chrysler, and Ford) announced today a new SUV for 2015, complete with passenger space for 35, and powered by a wood-burning external combustion engine. Rumors are that the new 65-ton SUV gets an impressive 5 A.F.B.P.M. (acres of forest burned per mile), and that "Canyonero" is the likely name of the behemoth. Shares dropped slightly on the news of the vehicle to a 3-month low of $0.01, following a 4-year high of $0.02 per share when K. T. "Rusty" Clown was named CEO of 'merkin motors. Mr. Clown's health problems were considered by analystis as "fictitious" and not detrimental to the job, at least in comparison to outgoing CEO Ruprecht Jameson, who after losing an impressive $10 billion (Approximately $9.9 Billion more than the net worth of 'merkin motors) cost shareholders a futher $20 billion when he deployed his golden parachute after doing a "heckuva job" according to the chairman of the board of directors."
"Only if you assume that scientists aren't human. Eventually, discrepancies between evidence and belief get ironed out, but it often takes a while (a generation or so). Science is just as prone to faddishness in the short term as any other human endeavor."
Science is replete with examples where new ideas overtook old ones after a struggle lasting as much as a few decades. Evolution is an excellent example of this process. By the 1880's it was undeniable that evolution occured, although the importance of natural selection was still debated. In the 1920's it came to be realized that Darwin's mechanism of natural selection could act on mutable genes, finally killing off vitalism and Lamarckism. The modern synthesis occurred from the 1920's to the 1950's. Recent decades have seen epigenetics, endosymbiosis, punctuated equilibrium, and other additions to evolutionary biology. So it's been 130 years since the fact of evolution ceased to be a scientifically debateable position. Scientists from that time are all long dead. It's been 90 years since natural selection and mutation was debateable. Scientists from that time are also long dead. It's been 60 years since the modern synthesis period ended. The major architects have been dead a while, and the very youngest scientists from the end of that period are now in their 80's. It was a generation a few generations ago, even for the modern synthesis.
"Yet there's still lots of room for disagreement about processes, results and their interpretations, and many of them are not as well-supported, yet are widely accepted..."
There's disagreement, but not over the main points: evolution occurs, and that natural selection, random mutagenesis, and genetic drift are among the most important mechanisms. This brings us back to question 13: "Do you think the scientific theory of evolution is well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?" Unless you can offer evidence that major processes, results, and interpretations are not well-supported yet widely accepted, the only accurate answer is "yes."
"But mostly it's a political issue because it happens to be one area in which a couple of significant and otherwise opposed groups disagree."
It is this I disagree with and why I responded to your post in the first place. To claim that question 13 is political implies the equivalency of answering yes or no. However answering yes to question 13 is the simple acknowledgement of the fact that evolution is well-evidenced and has not been in any doubt in the scientific community for many, many years. Answering no requires that the respondent is unaware of those two facts, has some conspiracy belief as to the motivations of scientists, or (most commonly) has a religously fueled disbelief, or some combination thereof. Only for those answering no could question 13 be political, and only in that religious conservatism currently correlates with political conservativism. This is what I was alluding to with geocentrism: if there were a significant political party out there that had a plank in its platform stating that the earth is the center of the universe and all other bodies orbit it, that still would not make geocentrism a political issue. It just be a particular group of people rejecting science.
"Personally, I'd have had a hard time answering yes to the question "Is evolution well supported", not because I don't believe it is, but because I *know* it's a political question, not a scientific question, and I know that if I say "yes" I'll be indicating assent to a much broader range of ideas than those I actually believe are supported."
The actual question was: "13. Do you think the scientific theory of evolution is well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?" Even though the question is a two-parter, the answer to the second half logically follows from the first. In science, evidence is the only thing that matters when it comes to whether or not a theory is accepted. And if you ask scientists the answer is overwhelmingly yes nearly to the point of unanimity.
As a biochemist, I encounter evolution's fingerprints on a daily basis at work, as do all those who work in life sciences fields no matter what their personal political and relgious beliefs are. Whenever a DNA or protein sequence is BLASTed, enzymatic or signalling pathways between different organisms examined, protein structures overlaid and analyzed, morphology and the patterns of development investigated, the underlying principle of evolution through common descent by mechanisms such as mutation, selection, genetic drift, horizontal gene transfer is required to explain our observations. Evolution to a life scientist is an inescapable conclusion. Where the controversy in science occurs is in disputes over ideas like the relative importance of those different mechanisms and exactly which species split off at precisely what time and in what order, not if evolution occurs. In ten years I've worked with people with political views ranging from communism to neoconservatism, and religious beliefs including Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, neopagans and newagers (oddly no Jews as of yet).
In all that time with all of those different people, I've only come across one person, a lab mate of mine, who didn't "believe" in evolution. Sure he'd read papers in our field of study describing with molecular phylogenetics and mutagenic experiments how our protein family had evolved over the course of the last few million years. He'd also see that the conclusions would be used by another lab mate of ours to engineer a related protein demonstrating, in vibrant color (we worked on colored proteins), the reality of those evolutionary events and predictions. On a more basic level, he'd observe natural selection in action if one of the undergrads forgot to include the antibiotic kanamycin in a bacterial culture, as by morning bacteria with the plasmid encoding the resistence gene would be handily out-competed by those who had no plasmid. Or that spontaneous mutation also (frustratingly) happened by comparing his protein structure to the gene he sequenced a year prior.
My labmate happened to be a conservative Republican and an evangelical christain. His rejection of evolution was due to his religious beliefs and in spite of the evidence. My and most of our peers acceptance of evolution is driven by the evidence. So is the question "is evolution well-supported" a political (as American tendency to be religious evangelicals currently correlates with political conservatism) one just because a certain political/religious minority says it is? If so, would acceptance of the proposition that the Earth orbits the Sun be a political issue because a political/religious group says the Earth is the Center of the Universe (yes geocentrists still exist--even on slashdot)? Or is it instead an incidence where political/religious dogma trumps evidence for some people?
"If your conscience is merely something that society has taught you, then logically you have no reason to comply with society's proscribed values other than avoiding retribution for your anti-social actions. This tends to lead toward the moral relativity direction, which I think most people find uncomfortable and counter-intuitive."
If your conscience is merely something that your religion has taught you, then logically you have no reason to comply with your religions's proscribed values other than avoiding retribution and/or obtaining rewards for your actions. This tends to lead toward the moral relativity direction, as a religion could arbitarily declare some actions immoral and some actions moral, which I think many people find uncomfortable and counter-intuitive.
"Evolution" is a fine word for the masses, but when someone learned is supposed to be specific, a vague word isn't the best choice. It has nothing to withing appealing to religion any more than it is appealing to middle school math teachers."
Except this is not what the case at all. Instead there is a great deal of difference between evolutionary biology and genetics journals on one hand and biomedical journals on the other when it comes to using correct terminology: "In research reports in journals with primarily evolutionary or genetic content, the word "evolution" was used 65.8% of the time to describe evolutionary processes." Versus "...60.0% of the time antimicrobial resistance was described as "emerging," "spreading," or "increasing"..." for biomedical journals. Biomedical journals are also much more likely to use nontechnical (ie less accurate, more vague) words than evolutionary biology/genetics journals. This widespread failure to use correct and concise language in biomedical journals is extremely disturbing. What's more disturbing is one of the reasons why: "It has been repeatedly rumored (and reiterated by one of the reviewers of this article) that both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word "evolution" in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy." Except there is no scientific controversy, and so no reason not to use the word "evolution." It's encouraging though that the study found that usage of proper terminology has been increasing, with the biomedical journals making the most improvement...although they are also the furthest behind.
A final quote from the article: "This brief survey shows that by explicitly using evolutionary terminology, biomedical researchers could greatly help convey to the layperson that evolution is not a topic to be innocuously relegated to the armchair confines of political or religious debate." Damn straight.
It looks like sanity may have temporarily prevailed and funding's been increased for some American science. Science 23 February 2007:Vol. 315. no. 5815, pp. 1062 - 1063 (sorry no linky-unless you're at a uni you probably gotta pay) says that the NSF's budget increased by $334 million, matching it's 2007 request (NSF they say has a $4.4 billion budget). NIH also got a boost of $612 million, and the DOE $200 million. So that's about 1.1 billion, or for the median 'merican that increase is less than half a Big Mac a year--truly a fucking bargain. However according to the article science is still expecting hard times in 2008. Not that the last couple of years have been a picnic by any means...
"Most US advances are not made with government money. It just doesn't work that way."
Open up any science journal of your choice. In the acknowledgements section of each article the funding that supported the study will be stated. If you found a journal where even just 10% of the articles were supported in part or in full by non-governmental funds, I wouldn't believe you until I had that journal in my hands to verify it.
Government funding of research is only half of the story. When I am funded by the government, I am expected to publish my findings so that other researchers may learn from them. Contrast that to industrial researchers, who often if they find something of interest it becomes a trade secret. Sure that company the corporate scientist works for might use that knowledge to generate a better, cleaner, faster, whatever product which ain't a bad thing at all...but they might just stuff it in a report in their knowledge base and sit on it forever. Either way, nobody outside the corporation knows exactly how they do that voodoo they do so well, and those corporate scientists will be basing a large part of their background knowledge for their study on publicly funded research. Goverments cut public funding of science at their own peril.
"...researchers typically now conduct their research with an eye toward its commercial practicability."
This is not true. I think that, as you say you've worked as a lawyer advising startups that want to commercialize university research, you've got a selection bias. Recently I went to a meeting between members of different life-sciences departments and the university's technology transfer office, along with reps from one of the companies it partners with. Of about 50 researchers there, only a handful had something that might be turned into a commercial product--even as reagents for other researchers from similar labs to buy. Everybody there though was involved in basic research. I think it is true that university researchers are looking more towards commercialization than in the past in my field (biochemistry), but that is at least partially because it's been getting harder and harder to get funding from traditional resources like the NIH or NSF. More work from university researchers into actual products isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most of us (grad students, postdocs, techs) aren't going to stay at a university doing basic research for the duration of our careers, so the whole process might be useful as professional training, besides the money to pay salaries and buy equipment.
A quick search turned up an article from 1966 which suggests quantum tunneling in a protein, so the idea of quantum mechanics in biology isn't all that new (and probably predates the article). Disclaimer: I've only read the abstract, I don't do research in that area, those without a university hookup might not get to read it even if they really wanted to.
"[oversight] authority has been given to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and [it] already has approved one request for monitoring the communications of a person believed to be linked to al Qaeda or an associated terror group.""
That's nice. How many requests has this court denied, or is it just a rubber stamp like FISA?
"I would very much like to see a return to using scientists expertise in more areas of society and policy, perhaps even increasing the numbers of consultants for politicians..."
I'd also like to see that. Specifically, I'd like to see the Office of Technology Assessment resurrected. It's purpose was to give Congress objective advice about science and technological matters, as Congress is more likely to make good policy decisions when it has trustworthy information to help guide it. Sadly, Congress killed it in 1995 in a measure to lower government expenditures ($22 million/year, IIRC). This act has been described as a "self-induced lobotomy" by Chris Mooney in his "The Republican War on Science" which I'm currently reading. It's hard to imagine that individual lawmakers could hire their own technical and scientific consultants and be better informed for less money than what this one central body did up until its untimely demise.
Re:Is the ACLU actively against the ban?
on
2006's Bill of Wrongs
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· Score: 4, Funny
"I haven't heard of the ACLU jumping in to defend anyone's rights in this case."
Or the American Center for Law and Justice, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cato Institute, Greenpeace, the local Rotary club, the 700 Club, Sam's Club, Met Life, or the Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things.
"kay, first you pin this sort of behavior on "ambitious, young-republican types". Then you cite a bunch of names - "Rove, Gannon, DeLay, A[]bramoff" - who don't actually fit that mold, all of them being well-established, somewhat aged participants in the political arena."
I doubt that's what Gannon's male escort ads would say. Maybe a well-endowed, professional-looking, male looking for a strange bedfellow (politics, get it?), but I'm uninformed on such matters.
The proof's in the Wedge Document, among many other places, another great thing to check out is the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial where the fact that Intelligent Design and Scientific Creationism are identical was established in a court of law.
Slashdot Mirror
Intelligent Design is a (very) little bit different. The Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Aguillard that teaching of "Creation Science" is unconstitutional in part because teaching of Creation Science has no legitimate secular purpose. Or to put it another way, teaching Creation Science has no secular purpose because it has no scientific content. Intelligent Design began life immediately after this landmark case as a word processor find-and-replace term for creation science in "Of Pandas and People," which was intended to replace science textbooks in public schools and elsewhere. This fact was brought to light in 2005 in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District". Intelligent Design is exactly the same as creationism, except that in public it tries to "Ixnay on the Esusjay" but in the churches drops that facade.
Another thing: "creationism" is a fairly broad term encompassing Young-Earth Creationism, Old-Earth Creationism, and other assorted beliefs (again wikipedia's pages aren't too bad). And unless you want to advance the position that Christianity is anti-science (like perhaps Richard Dawkins) it is possible that a Christian's answer to evolution is, well, evolution. This view is supported by the 10,000 plus members of the clergy over at the Clergy Letter Project.
"I thought checks and balances were entirely optional now."
Don't worry, Bush made sure he checked in with the Cheney branch. They concurred with Bush's decision.
"I have to wonder what the produce would be like given the general air quality in that area."
Well, I've a friend in LA and another in NYC. They've got a competition going via email over who's got the strangest colored boogers due to the chemical weapons-grade gas the locals call "air." I kid, I kid...but not about the booger competition.
"Another little mystery is why snails survive. Their method of locamotion seems rather expensive and slow compared to legs. Being able to pull into a shell helps, but what about slugs? The insects should have wiped their niche out long ago."
I was out hunting in Oregon's coast range once and came across a fresh coyote poop. Clearly visible (I ain't poking around in poop, especially one this nasty!) was the remains of a slug. Other than being bitten in half it had gone through the entire digestive tract without visible damage. Slugs are really nasty and hardly anything will eat them. That poor coyote won't try it again either--with as slimy as the things are it probably was tasting the slug for a week.
Also in Oregon the slugs can reach lengths of up to 9 inches, maybe more, so there's a whole lot of predators that just look at them and try not to barf.
"Do you think scientists like traveling to "important" meetings all over the world and having those meetings covered by the BBC and CNN, or do they like to have monthly meetings in Des Moines Iowa at the Motel Six so that they can share their findings on cockroach habits with the local pest control company?"
I've been to a few scientific meetings, some of which were fairly large (a few thousand attendees). Neither the BBC, CNN, nor any other news source was at any of them. Usually they're hosted by some university or research institute, or occasionally money is pooled to rent out a conference center. The very nicest meeting I've been at was at Asilomar, a converted YWCA camp. Lodging was in the old cabins--little more than a bed and a shower, but quite nice. Food was what you'd expect at a middling restaurant, nothing to write home about. Location was excellent, just off the beach. Total outlay per person was approximately $400 for three days/two nights. Science conferences don't really get more upscale than that--sometimes lodging is in student dorms (I've also stayed at a Motel Six for a conference). That and this particular conference at Asilomar meets only every other year in part to defray the high cost.
" If you scream "fire!" at your job, and more money comes to your research project, are you more apt to yell "fire!" again next year?"
Funding in academic science doesn't work that way. If I scream "Fire!" and there is one, I might get money (but probably not since funding's been scarce for about the last six years or so). If I scream "Fire!" and there isn't one once, well, that's not good but my stature's only going to be dinged a little as long as it's an honest mistake. If I scream "Fire!" and there isn't one again, that's going to really piss people off and certainly inhibit my ability to get funding. Much more than that and I'll be considered a crank and ignored, and never get funded again. Reality controls what funding is available. What sort of a job do you have where yelling out bullshit gets you more money?
junkscience.com is the home of the notorious corporate shill Steven Milloy, who's corrupt enough to deny the link between tobacco smoke and lung cancer on behalf of big tobacco.
If you want to check out various creation myths, go right ahead. First you ought to define what agent(s) you've got, when/how/why they do whatever it is that they do, how we detect such agents and their actions, and how your particular whatever is different from currently accepted science. All that and, of course, evidence. Without that, you've got Bond Pixies.
"You could assist me by denying that evolution deals with Fact, and I will feel much more relaxed about it. I'll settle for "evolution (in the sense of molecules-to-man) is a theory based on an assumption of naturalism". If you can assent to that, we have no disagreement about the nature of evolution itself."
If you require that facts not have the "assumption of naturalism," then fine, don't call evolution a fact. However logical consistency demands that you no longer consider "the sky is blue" to be a fact for the exact same reason. Really none of our interactions with the entire, everyday world can be considered factual without methodological naturalism. After all, a supernatural entity could be tricking us in ways that we could not possibly even imagine. Maybe this morning I ate my Cheerios with a fork because Loki tricked me into thinking it was a spoon. But such speculation I'll cheerfully leave to the sophists and postmodernists. Also, we must be very careful with our terms. Science is not possible without methodological naturalism, for the reasons in my previous post as well as the above. Philosophical naturalism on the other hand is irrelevant to science as the supernatural can't be studied using science. For somebody who says they've got a graduate degree in philosophy, your posts read messily on this distinction. Also I urge you to better inform yourself on what evolution actually says. "Molecules to man" is a phrase that instantly tells me that you've read little about evolution from pro-science sources. I recommend Berkeley's evolution website and talk.origins as good starting off places, wikipedia's got a decent page as well.
"As to explaining your "enzymes" and their behaviour, you are merely using the accepted terminology of your field. That paradigm includes "amino acids" and "protons" and other such mythical elements. Whether you believe in those or "bond pixies" doesn't really matter much if the predictions and whatnot come out the same. Whether you say, "an amino acid pops a proton off a substrate carbon," or, "a bond pixie smacks a frobnockle off a slithy tove," matters only in that the former language is that which your peers speak. If, on the other hand, you felt that you had a better model for enzyme behaviour which involved differently behaved basic entities and operations, you'd best present those ideas using new words. Good luck with that: paradigm shifting is backbreaking work."
Yes if I replaced "abstract a proton from the terminal methyl group" it wouldn't be any different than "a bond pixie smacks a frobnockle off a slithy tove" provided "The Famous Brett Wat speak" could be translated into acceptable terms. You've missed the argument completely. The argument is that just in my little field a whole host of observations using a great many different techniques done by a great many different individuals over the course of many decades have been done. It all builds on itself, it all interrelates, and major contradictions are not seen. The explanatory and predictive power is enormous. Along comes somebody who wants to know why supernatural Bond Pixies haven't been considered. Yet who and what Bond Pixies are, and how/when/why they make an enzyme work, how this is different from the established view, and what exactly are the predictive and explanatory powers of this concept are not defined, nor is any observed evidence presented. Until those terms are defined, and somebody comes up with an objective way to detect and measure Bond Pixies and how they make an enzyme function, they are not a useful concept. Same goes for evolution, cosmology, dermatology, or any other field of scientific inquiry and any other undefined supernatural entity acting in any undefined way.
As you say paradigm shifting is hard work. But instead doing any work at all, creationists come in claiming without evidence
I was going to write a response to the whole of your post, but darnit there's so much wrong with it that I don't have the time. Instead, I'll cut at what I think is the very core of the problem: "...if science is necessarily naturalistic, then how do we know that a naturalistic explanation like "big bang + evolution" is true, as opposed to a credible falsehood? Why do scientists such as yourself disparage supernatural proposals as though they were false, when you are yourself not in honest pursuit of truth, but of credible naturalistic explanations?" Science does not deal in Truth. Religions and philosophies do, or more cynically perhaps just claim to. Science deals with evidence and reasonable interpretation of the evidence. Absolutely everything in science could be to use your term a "credible falsehood." That includes evolution, the Big Bang, germ theory, gravity, and when you get right down to it the theory that the sky is blue. Anybody who's ever had an intro to philosophy course can come up with objections to the sky being blue. Could be we're brains floating in jars hooked up to an artificial reality under a sky that's neon orange. Could be space aliens doing some odd experiment, just waiting to turn off their machines that hide the sky's greenness to see what effect that has on earthlings, or could be a god playing a practical joke. They're all the same, though: useless. It is reasonable to think that the sky is blue. My eyes tell me that it's blue, and have told me the same thing every day that I can remember. I can ask other people, and except for the random smartass (like me when I'm in that mood) I'll get the same answer. I don't even have to use my eyes--I can rely on spectrometers to measure wavelengths for me, I can check out the chemical composition of the sky, and I can read all the descriptions in history about the sky's blueness. Could that all be a "credible falsehood?" Yep. Does it matter? Nope. At least not until there's new data of some form that comes along making our "credible falsehood" suddenly less credible.
I'm a biochemist. I've extensively studied an enzyme, solved a pair of crystal structures of it with different compounds bound to its active site, done mutagenesis and kinetics to pin down the excruciatingly small details of the reaction mechanism. I know that compound A binds to the enzyme at site A, with interactions A1, A2, A3... in the order of their importance, followed by compound B with its site and interactions. I know which amino acid pops a proton off which substrate carbon, followed by what bond rotations occur, and blah blah etc. blah to sum up five years of my own work. Now suppose that all that's a credible falsehood and the real explanation is actually supernatural: bond pixies. Bond pixies might be really real, even in the real world, or not, but it just doesn't matter to science. How do I study bond pixies, study what they're doing, when they're doing it, why they're doing it, and really to begin with how do I even know that it's really bond pixies and not Elmer the Ghost? How do I do it so that I can publish my Bond Pixie Theory in the Journal of Molecular Biology and reasonably and with evidence differentiate it from standard enzymology and Elmer the Ghostism? The supernatural as a scientific explanation is disparaged by scientists because it adds nothing, explains nothing, predicts nothing, is unfalsifiable, and thus not useful in the slightest.
A score -1 Ignorant would be entirely appropriate. All the parent post is saying is that oooh, nasty little scientists got it wrong 500 years ago, therefore they're equally full of crap about things I don't understand. We got a pretty fucking good idea about the inner workings of our planet. We got a damn good understanding of meteorology and climatology, and we're progressing nicely in cosmology despite ignorance peddlers like you. Your post isn't even logically consistent--poor dumbass scientists got it wrong with a flat earth, got it wrong with the four elements (it's called alchemy...what eventually turned into the science of chemistry once all the religious/mystical woo woo was ripped out), can't predict with 100% accuracy the weather, the fuckers can't grab their asses with both hands. But they can build a rocket...
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So, since scientists are a bunch of idiots, how about you, and your expertise in, uh, something or other come up with a brand new rocket fuel. Might I suggest penguins? Worked fine on whaling ships near Antarctica. *Houston, we need more speed* *Roger that, Epimetheus. Toss another penguin in the burner*
"GM, Chrysler and Ford announce that they'll transition to "thinking about possibly getting some of those battery-rechargey cars" into production by 2015."
More like: "In the most recent bid to stave off bankruptcy, the remaining fragments of 'merkin motors (formed by the merger of GM, Chrysler, and Ford) announced today a new SUV for 2015, complete with passenger space for 35, and powered by a wood-burning external combustion engine. Rumors are that the new 65-ton SUV gets an impressive 5 A.F.B.P.M. (acres of forest burned per mile), and that "Canyonero" is the likely name of the behemoth. Shares dropped slightly on the news of the vehicle to a 3-month low of $0.01, following a 4-year high of $0.02 per share when K. T. "Rusty" Clown was named CEO of 'merkin motors. Mr. Clown's health problems were considered by analystis as "fictitious" and not detrimental to the job, at least in comparison to outgoing CEO Ruprecht Jameson, who after losing an impressive $10 billion (Approximately $9.9 Billion more than the net worth of 'merkin motors) cost shareholders a futher $20 billion when he deployed his golden parachute after doing a "heckuva job" according to the chairman of the board of directors."
"Only if you assume that scientists aren't human. Eventually, discrepancies between evidence and belief get ironed out, but it often takes a while (a generation or so). Science is just as prone to faddishness in the short term as any other human endeavor."
Science is replete with examples where new ideas overtook old ones after a struggle lasting as much as a few decades. Evolution is an excellent example of this process. By the 1880's it was undeniable that evolution occured, although the importance of natural selection was still debated. In the 1920's it came to be realized that Darwin's mechanism of natural selection could act on mutable genes, finally killing off vitalism and Lamarckism. The modern synthesis occurred from the 1920's to the 1950's. Recent decades have seen epigenetics, endosymbiosis, punctuated equilibrium, and other additions to evolutionary biology. So it's been 130 years since the fact of evolution ceased to be a scientifically debateable position. Scientists from that time are all long dead. It's been 90 years since natural selection and mutation was debateable. Scientists from that time are also long dead. It's been 60 years since the modern synthesis period ended. The major architects have been dead a while, and the very youngest scientists from the end of that period are now in their 80's. It was a generation a few generations ago, even for the modern synthesis.
"Yet there's still lots of room for disagreement about processes, results and their interpretations, and many of them are not as well-supported, yet are widely accepted..."
There's disagreement, but not over the main points: evolution occurs, and that natural selection, random mutagenesis, and genetic drift are among the most important mechanisms. This brings us back to question 13: "Do you think the scientific theory of evolution is well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?" Unless you can offer evidence that major processes, results, and interpretations are not well-supported yet widely accepted, the only accurate answer is "yes."
"But mostly it's a political issue because it happens to be one area in which a couple of significant and otherwise opposed groups disagree."
It is this I disagree with and why I responded to your post in the first place. To claim that question 13 is political implies the equivalency of answering yes or no. However answering yes to question 13 is the simple acknowledgement of the fact that evolution is well-evidenced and has not been in any doubt in the scientific community for many, many years. Answering no requires that the respondent is unaware of those two facts, has some conspiracy belief as to the motivations of scientists, or (most commonly) has a religously fueled disbelief, or some combination thereof. Only for those answering no could question 13 be political, and only in that religious conservatism currently correlates with political conservativism. This is what I was alluding to with geocentrism: if there were a significant political party out there that had a plank in its platform stating that the earth is the center of the universe and all other bodies orbit it, that still would not make geocentrism a political issue. It just be a particular group of people rejecting science.
"Personally, I'd have had a hard time answering yes to the question "Is evolution well supported", not because I don't believe it is, but because I *know* it's a political question, not a scientific question, and I know that if I say "yes" I'll be indicating assent to a much broader range of ideas than those I actually believe are supported."
The actual question was: "13. Do you think the scientific theory of evolution is well-supported by evidence and widely accepted within the scientific community?" Even though the question is a two-parter, the answer to the second half logically follows from the first. In science, evidence is the only thing that matters when it comes to whether or not a theory is accepted. And if you ask scientists the answer is overwhelmingly yes nearly to the point of unanimity.
As a biochemist, I encounter evolution's fingerprints on a daily basis at work, as do all those who work in life sciences fields no matter what their personal political and relgious beliefs are. Whenever a DNA or protein sequence is BLASTed, enzymatic or signalling pathways between different organisms examined, protein structures overlaid and analyzed, morphology and the patterns of development investigated, the underlying principle of evolution through common descent by mechanisms such as mutation, selection, genetic drift, horizontal gene transfer is required to explain our observations. Evolution to a life scientist is an inescapable conclusion. Where the controversy in science occurs is in disputes over ideas like the relative importance of those different mechanisms and exactly which species split off at precisely what time and in what order, not if evolution occurs. In ten years I've worked with people with political views ranging from communism to neoconservatism, and religious beliefs including Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, neopagans and newagers (oddly no Jews as of yet). In all that time with all of those different people, I've only come across one person, a lab mate of mine, who didn't "believe" in evolution. Sure he'd read papers in our field of study describing with molecular phylogenetics and mutagenic experiments how our protein family had evolved over the course of the last few million years. He'd also see that the conclusions would be used by another lab mate of ours to engineer a related protein demonstrating, in vibrant color (we worked on colored proteins), the reality of those evolutionary events and predictions. On a more basic level, he'd observe natural selection in action if one of the undergrads forgot to include the antibiotic kanamycin in a bacterial culture, as by morning bacteria with the plasmid encoding the resistence gene would be handily out-competed by those who had no plasmid. Or that spontaneous mutation also (frustratingly) happened by comparing his protein structure to the gene he sequenced a year prior.
My labmate happened to be a conservative Republican and an evangelical christain. His rejection of evolution was due to his religious beliefs and in spite of the evidence. My and most of our peers acceptance of evolution is driven by the evidence. So is the question "is evolution well-supported" a political (as American tendency to be religious evangelicals currently correlates with political conservatism) one just because a certain political/religious minority says it is? If so, would acceptance of the proposition that the Earth orbits the Sun be a political issue because a political/religious group says the Earth is the Center of the Universe (yes geocentrists still exist--even on slashdot)? Or is it instead an incidence where political/religious dogma trumps evidence for some people?
A magic man done it! With "forcey forces" of coursey.
"If your conscience is merely something that society has taught you, then logically you have no reason to comply with society's proscribed values other than avoiding retribution for your anti-social actions. This tends to lead toward the moral relativity direction, which I think most people find uncomfortable and counter-intuitive."
If your conscience is merely something that your religion has taught you, then logically you have no reason to comply with your religions's proscribed values other than avoiding retribution and/or obtaining rewards for your actions. This tends to lead toward the moral relativity direction, as a religion could arbitarily declare some actions immoral and some actions moral, which I think many people find uncomfortable and counter-intuitive.
"Evolution" is a fine word for the masses, but when someone learned is supposed to be specific, a vague word isn't the best choice. It has nothing to withing appealing to religion any more than it is appealing to middle school math teachers."
Except this is not what the case at all. Instead there is a great deal of difference between evolutionary biology and genetics journals on one hand and biomedical journals on the other when it comes to using correct terminology: "In research reports in journals with primarily evolutionary or genetic content, the word "evolution" was used 65.8% of the time to describe evolutionary processes." Versus "...60.0% of the time antimicrobial resistance was described as "emerging," "spreading," or "increasing"..." for biomedical journals. Biomedical journals are also much more likely to use nontechnical (ie less accurate, more vague) words than evolutionary biology/genetics journals. This widespread failure to use correct and concise language in biomedical journals is extremely disturbing. What's more disturbing is one of the reasons why: "It has been repeatedly rumored (and reiterated by one of the reviewers of this article) that both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have in the past actively discouraged the use of the word "evolution" in titles or abstracts of proposals so as to avoid controversy." Except there is no scientific controversy, and so no reason not to use the word "evolution." It's encouraging though that the study found that usage of proper terminology has been increasing, with the biomedical journals making the most improvement...although they are also the furthest behind.
A final quote from the article: "This brief survey shows that by explicitly using evolutionary terminology, biomedical researchers could greatly help convey to the layperson that evolution is not a topic to be innocuously relegated to the armchair confines of political or religious debate." Damn straight.
It looks like sanity may have temporarily prevailed and funding's been increased for some American science. Science 23 February 2007:Vol. 315. no. 5815, pp. 1062 - 1063 (sorry no linky-unless you're at a uni you probably gotta pay) says that the NSF's budget increased by $334 million, matching it's 2007 request (NSF they say has a $4.4 billion budget). NIH also got a boost of $612 million, and the DOE $200 million. So that's about 1.1 billion, or for the median 'merican that increase is less than half a Big Mac a year--truly a fucking bargain. However according to the article science is still expecting hard times in 2008. Not that the last couple of years have been a picnic by any means...
"Most US advances are not made with government money. It just doesn't work that way."
Open up any science journal of your choice. In the acknowledgements section of each article the funding that supported the study will be stated. If you found a journal where even just 10% of the articles were supported in part or in full by non-governmental funds, I wouldn't believe you until I had that journal in my hands to verify it.
Government funding of research is only half of the story. When I am funded by the government, I am expected to publish my findings so that other researchers may learn from them. Contrast that to industrial researchers, who often if they find something of interest it becomes a trade secret. Sure that company the corporate scientist works for might use that knowledge to generate a better, cleaner, faster, whatever product which ain't a bad thing at all...but they might just stuff it in a report in their knowledge base and sit on it forever. Either way, nobody outside the corporation knows exactly how they do that voodoo they do so well, and those corporate scientists will be basing a large part of their background knowledge for their study on publicly funded research. Goverments cut public funding of science at their own peril.
"...researchers typically now conduct their research with an eye toward its commercial practicability."
This is not true. I think that, as you say you've worked as a lawyer advising startups that want to commercialize university research, you've got a selection bias. Recently I went to a meeting between members of different life-sciences departments and the university's technology transfer office, along with reps from one of the companies it partners with. Of about 50 researchers there, only a handful had something that might be turned into a commercial product--even as reagents for other researchers from similar labs to buy. Everybody there though was involved in basic research. I think it is true that university researchers are looking more towards commercialization than in the past in my field (biochemistry), but that is at least partially because it's been getting harder and harder to get funding from traditional resources like the NIH or NSF. More work from university researchers into actual products isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most of us (grad students, postdocs, techs) aren't going to stay at a university doing basic research for the duration of our careers, so the whole process might be useful as professional training, besides the money to pay salaries and buy equipment.
A quick search turned up an article from 1966 which suggests quantum tunneling in a protein, so the idea of quantum mechanics in biology isn't all that new (and probably predates the article). Disclaimer: I've only read the abstract, I don't do research in that area, those without a university hookup might not get to read it even if they really wanted to.
"[oversight] authority has been given to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and [it] already has approved one request for monitoring the communications of a person believed to be linked to al Qaeda or an associated terror group.""
That's nice. How many requests has this court denied, or is it just a rubber stamp like FISA?
"I would very much like to see a return to using scientists expertise in more areas of society and policy, perhaps even increasing the numbers of consultants for politicians..."
I'd also like to see that. Specifically, I'd like to see the Office of Technology Assessment resurrected. It's purpose was to give Congress objective advice about science and technological matters, as Congress is more likely to make good policy decisions when it has trustworthy information to help guide it. Sadly, Congress killed it in 1995 in a measure to lower government expenditures ($22 million/year, IIRC). This act has been described as a "self-induced lobotomy" by Chris Mooney in his "The Republican War on Science" which I'm currently reading. It's hard to imagine that individual lawmakers could hire their own technical and scientific consultants and be better informed for less money than what this one central body did up until its untimely demise.
"I haven't heard of the ACLU jumping in to defend anyone's rights in this case."
Or the American Center for Law and Justice, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cato Institute, Greenpeace, the local Rotary club, the 700 Club, Sam's Club, Met Life, or the Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things.
"kay, first you pin this sort of behavior on "ambitious, young-republican types". Then you cite a bunch of names - "Rove, Gannon, DeLay, A[]bramoff" - who don't actually fit that mold, all of them being well-established, somewhat aged participants in the political arena."
I doubt that's what Gannon's male escort ads would say. Maybe a well-endowed, professional-looking, male looking for a strange bedfellow (politics, get it?), but I'm uninformed on such matters.
The proof's in the Wedge Document, among many other places, another great thing to check out is the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial where the fact that Intelligent Design and Scientific Creationism are identical was established in a court of law.