I've never observed an occasion where I pushed a ball off of a table and it fell to the ceiling. Would it be unscientific to form a theory of the behavior of balls pushed off of tables that predicted they always fall to the floor?
That depends. Does your theory say that a ball can't fall up to the ceiling merely because it's never done so before? If so, then yes, that would be unscientific.
In contrast, if you came up with a theory that explained why the ball fell to the floor, and as a logical consequence, could not fall up to the ceiling, then that would not be unscientific. The actual theory of gravitational attraction (i.e., that the ball falls to the floor because it's attracted to the large mass of Earth, and the Earth is in the direction of the floor) would be an example of that.
So in order to prove that evolution is scientific, you must reproduce the entire chain from the beginning to the end.
That's not correct, for several reasons.
First, there is a difference between proven and provable. "Provable" means that, given sufficient data (which could exist, but is not required to), the theory could be proven if the data were applied to it. "Proven" means that the theory in question is not only provable but also that the required data actually does exist, has been found, and has been applied to the theory. To be scientific, a thing has to be provable but not necessarily proven.
Second, extrapolation is a valid and integral part of science. Otherwise, the scientific method makes no sense: what's the point of forming a hypothesis when the rules of cause and effect don't apply? Or in other words, scientists don't have to prove each and every link in the evolutionary chain from microbes to humans to prove that evolution is a viable concept; they only have to prove any single link (or perhaps, few links) to do that. Then they can extrapolate the rest.
Third, evolution has been proven on the limited basis I just described. Speciation has been observed among bacterial populations in labs, DNA testing works (and could only do so if evolutionary theory were correct), etc.
Where does that say anything about a school board?
It doesn't. And it doesn't have to, either. Why? Because complaints would be generated about any teacher trying to teach "ID" on the grounds that it wouldn't be protected by that "affirmative right" (since it's not scientific), and those complaints would work their way up the school administrative hierarchy to the school board (and probably beyond it, to the courts).
In other words, even if you can't challenge the teacher on the basis of whether he has a right to teach a "full range" of scientific information, you can still challenge him on the basis of whether the information he's teaching is actually within that range.
Actually, there is good science to support ID also.
No, there's not. "ID" boils down to "irreducible complexity," right? Okay, then: devise an experiment capable of proving or disproving whether the complexity is, in fact, actually irreducible or not.
Can't do it, can you? Guess what: that's because it's not possible to devise such an experiment. And because of that, the whole thing is not scientific!
In case you don't understand, let me explain again a slightly different way: the "good science" you cite talks about how there's a "gap" between the complexity observed in non-biological processes and the complexity of living organisms. That gap is due to the fact* that no evidence has been found for the existence of "pseudo-biological" (my term) processes that would fill it. So far, so good. But here's where "ID" goes off track: it assumes that, because no evidence has been found, that no evidence could ever be found. In other words, it presumes that it is impossible for such evidence to exist. This is not scientific! As they say on The Boondocks, "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." You can't scientifically prove that something can't exist merely by noting that it hasn't been proven that it does exist; you can't prove a negative.
But hey, it's not so bad (from your perspective): by exactly the same reasoning, science can never disprove the existence of a deity (or anything else "supernatural," for that matter). After all, supernatural stuff exists outside of science by definition, in exactly the same way "ID" does. Not only that, but for all we know, you religious folks might even be right! It just can't be proven, either way.
I agree completely... but if the summary is to be trusted (a dangerous assumption, I know), then "fairy tales" and "mysticism" (such as "Intelligent Design") wouldn't be allowed anyway!
If I'm not mistaken, doesn't the existance of an intermediate life form (monkeys) show that "natural" selection lost, as we now have humans (selected appearantly) and monkeys together (the life form that "lost").
Well, you are mistaken.
Here's a hint: if evolution really predicted that every time a speciation event occurred there would be a "loser" species that would go extinct, then it would predict that there would be exactly one species of organism on the entire planet. Obviously then, either evolution is absolutely ridiculous (since there is obviously more than one species in existence) or you don't understand it. Which is more likely?
Hint number two: both branches of a speciation event can "win" because they can fill different ecological niches. Monkeys lost out on the "high intelligence and tool-making" niche; humans lost out on the "living in tall trees" niche.
What's the big deal? Stupid teachers still wouldn't be allowed to teach "Intelligent Design" anyway, since -- according to the summary -- the information still has to be scientific (and "ID" fails at that).
The people producing it refuse to even try and be price competitive with PD. They refer to it as a "premium alternative".
The supplier I buy from kind of has that mentality, in the sense that they mark it up quite a lot from their cost. However, they fix the price to be more-or-less equal -- not more than -- dino-diesel. Over the past few months, I've been buying their fuel for $3.45/gal while dino-diesel has varied from $3.30 to $3.60 (in Atlanta).
Maybe good, but definitely not quiet. Remember, it's a Diesel. Although we are rather used to Diesel engines here in Europe they are not exactly known for being sophisticated and smooth movers.
My girlfriend has a TDI Beetle (even though we live in the States), and I think you're overstating the point. Sure, it's not as quiet as an equivalent gasoline Beetle, but it's also not like a big truck either. Heck, it might even be quieter than my gasoline Hyundai!
Actually, diesel-electric hybrid locomotives are new. The older diesel-electric locomotives didn't have batteries and regenerative braking, but instead had big resistors with heat sinks and dynamic braking. It's almost the same thing, except that the energy was dissipated as heat instead of recovered and used for propulsion.
The main issue with running BD was on older engines with rubber fuel lines that the BD would dissolve, leading to clogged injectors and damaged fuel lines.
I'm running a 1998 New Beetle TDI on B50 (to be switched to B100 once winter is over). Do you happen to know if I'll suffer that problem?
Is it that he didn't know the difference, that he assumed intelligence had a normal distribution, or that he realized that the word "average" is ambiguous and can refer to the mean, median, or mode?
AMD's cache sharing and topology of memory access that seems better for true multithreaded applications is irrelevant and occasionally a hinderance when you're running multiple single threaded programs. So they spend oodles on R&D and may not see that much of a return until apps can utilize it better. ..Then they go off and buy ATI?
Imagine sticking an ATI stream processor on the other end of that fancy bus they've been spending all the R&D on, and you'll have your answer.
Looking up how a murder investigation works, once you become a suspect in it, is exactly the sort of behavior you'd expect from a geek. It would be my first impulse, too, except I wouldn't be stupid enough to purchase books and leave them laying around. He purchased them 'surreptitiously', whatever that means, I'd actually go past that and not purchase them at all, just reading them in the library and bookstore.
It would be my first impulse as well, but instead of trying to hide what I was doing, I'd just be very careful to get proof that I bought the books after finding out that I was a suspect so that it would be obvious that that's why I'd gotten them. For example, I'd either make sure to get a copy of a police document referring to it showing a date prior to the purchase date of the books and make damn sure to keep the receipt, or hire a lawyer and instruct him to buy the books for me. Trying to do things surreptitiously would just increase suspicion; I'd try to allay it instead by being as transparent as possible.
"I can write an uncrackable encryption system", "I can write the ultimate compression algorithm" and other statements of their ilk show up around here frequently enough to make me nauseous.
Hey, both of those things are easy! Look, I can even write a single function that does both at the same time:
Frankly, I can't see her staying away for that long, if she has a choice. Unless she really hates Hans (dislike won't do - I dislike a lot of people, none enough to let them go the Chair undeservedly), and isn't too interested in her kids either, then she'll come back long before that.
Actually, if you think about it, saying that she hates Hans enough to let him get executed is exactly equally reasonable as saying that Hans hated her enough to murder her.
Well, aside from differences due to the level of "hands on" interaction required, anyway... I would think that allowing the state to do the dirty work would allow her to rationalize away the feelings of guilt, and thus require less hatred than for Hans to perform the act of killing personally.
Incidentally, in engineering terms a human life is worth a couple of million dollars. Maybe a highly-trained B2 crew would be worth marginally more. But regardless, it doesn't even come close to the cost of the plane itself, so in this case it would have been economically preferable if the crew had died but the plane remained intact.
The key part of his phrase was "...and makes it safe for the commerce of all." Unless the American Navy is impressing foreigners, the situations are entirely different.
You do realize that military jet fuel is basically kerosene, right? It might be more expensive than heating oil because of fancy additives or something, but it's not going to be that much more expensive.
Unless you're making a statement about hydrocarbon fuel in general being expensive? That I can agree with!
whatever local groups they have franchise agreements with can decide to terminate their franchise agreement. Also, they might be fined by local authorities.
It makes me wonder what we can do to help speed that process along. Maybe suing Comcast and the local government that gave them a monopoly would help?
people get so damned uppity and assume that I'm either (a) some idiot who can't write code worth a damn, or (b) some kind of evil genius out to dominate the world through the software industry. How I can simultaneously be a bumbling incompetent and an evil genius is somewhat baffling to me
Obviously, if you think "[A] or [B]" means "[A] and [B] simultaneously," you fall into the former category!
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That depends. Does your theory say that a ball can't fall up to the ceiling merely because it's never done so before? If so, then yes, that would be unscientific.
In contrast, if you came up with a theory that explained why the ball fell to the floor, and as a logical consequence, could not fall up to the ceiling, then that would not be unscientific. The actual theory of gravitational attraction (i.e., that the ball falls to the floor because it's attracted to the large mass of Earth, and the Earth is in the direction of the floor) would be an example of that.
That's not correct, for several reasons.
First, there is a difference between proven and provable. "Provable" means that, given sufficient data (which could exist, but is not required to), the theory could be proven if the data were applied to it. "Proven" means that the theory in question is not only provable but also that the required data actually does exist, has been found, and has been applied to the theory. To be scientific, a thing has to be provable but not necessarily proven.
Second, extrapolation is a valid and integral part of science. Otherwise, the scientific method makes no sense: what's the point of forming a hypothesis when the rules of cause and effect don't apply? Or in other words, scientists don't have to prove each and every link in the evolutionary chain from microbes to humans to prove that evolution is a viable concept; they only have to prove any single link (or perhaps, few links) to do that. Then they can extrapolate the rest.
Third, evolution has been proven on the limited basis I just described. Speciation has been observed among bacterial populations in labs, DNA testing works (and could only do so if evolutionary theory were correct), etc.
It doesn't. And it doesn't have to, either. Why? Because complaints would be generated about any teacher trying to teach "ID" on the grounds that it wouldn't be protected by that "affirmative right" (since it's not scientific), and those complaints would work their way up the school administrative hierarchy to the school board (and probably beyond it, to the courts).
In other words, even if you can't challenge the teacher on the basis of whether he has a right to teach a "full range" of scientific information, you can still challenge him on the basis of whether the information he's teaching is actually within that range.
No, there's not. "ID" boils down to "irreducible complexity," right? Okay, then: devise an experiment capable of proving or disproving whether the complexity is, in fact, actually irreducible or not.
Can't do it, can you? Guess what: that's because it's not possible to devise such an experiment. And because of that, the whole thing is not scientific!
In case you don't understand, let me explain again a slightly different way: the "good science" you cite talks about how there's a "gap" between the complexity observed in non-biological processes and the complexity of living organisms. That gap is due to the fact* that no evidence has been found for the existence of "pseudo-biological" (my term) processes that would fill it. So far, so good. But here's where "ID" goes off track: it assumes that, because no evidence has been found, that no evidence could ever be found. In other words, it presumes that it is impossible for such evidence to exist. This is not scientific! As they say on The Boondocks, "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence." You can't scientifically prove that something can't exist merely by noting that it hasn't been proven that it does exist; you can't prove a negative.
But hey, it's not so bad (from your perspective): by exactly the same reasoning, science can never disprove the existence of a deity (or anything else "supernatural," for that matter). After all, supernatural stuff exists outside of science by definition, in exactly the same way "ID" does. Not only that, but for all we know, you religious folks might even be right! It just can't be proven, either way.
I agree completely... but if the summary is to be trusted (a dangerous assumption, I know), then "fairy tales" and "mysticism" (such as "Intelligent Design") wouldn't be allowed anyway!
Well, you are mistaken.
Here's a hint: if evolution really predicted that every time a speciation event occurred there would be a "loser" species that would go extinct, then it would predict that there would be exactly one species of organism on the entire planet. Obviously then, either evolution is absolutely ridiculous (since there is obviously more than one species in existence) or you don't understand it. Which is more likely?
Hint number two: both branches of a speciation event can "win" because they can fill different ecological niches. Monkeys lost out on the "high intelligence and tool-making" niche; humans lost out on the "living in tall trees" niche.
What's the big deal? Stupid teachers still wouldn't be allowed to teach "Intelligent Design" anyway, since -- according to the summary -- the information still has to be scientific (and "ID" fails at that).
The supplier I buy from kind of has that mentality, in the sense that they mark it up quite a lot from their cost. However, they fix the price to be more-or-less equal -- not more than -- dino-diesel. Over the past few months, I've been buying their fuel for $3.45/gal while dino-diesel has varied from $3.30 to $3.60 (in Atlanta).
My girlfriend has a TDI Beetle (even though we live in the States), and I think you're overstating the point. Sure, it's not as quiet as an equivalent gasoline Beetle, but it's also not like a big truck either. Heck, it might even be quieter than my gasoline Hyundai!
Actually, diesel-electric hybrid locomotives are new. The older diesel-electric locomotives didn't have batteries and regenerative braking, but instead had big resistors with heat sinks and dynamic braking. It's almost the same thing, except that the energy was dissipated as heat instead of recovered and used for propulsion.
I'm running a 1998 New Beetle TDI on B50 (to be switched to B100 once winter is over). Do you happen to know if I'll suffer that problem?
Is it that he didn't know the difference, that he assumed intelligence had a normal distribution, or that he realized that the word "average" is ambiguous and can refer to the mean, median, or mode?
Imagine sticking an ATI stream processor on the other end of that fancy bus they've been spending all the R&D on, and you'll have your answer.
It would be my first impulse as well, but instead of trying to hide what I was doing, I'd just be very careful to get proof that I bought the books after finding out that I was a suspect so that it would be obvious that that's why I'd gotten them. For example, I'd either make sure to get a copy of a police document referring to it showing a date prior to the purchase date of the books and make damn sure to keep the receipt, or hire a lawyer and instruct him to buy the books for me. Trying to do things surreptitiously would just increase suspicion; I'd try to allay it instead by being as transparent as possible.
Hey, both of those things are easy! Look, I can even write a single function that does both at the same time:
'Course, if you want the intended recipient to be able to decompress and decrypt it, well, that's harder...
Well, couldn't one then remove the traces of the bleach by soaking it in water?
Actually, if you think about it, saying that she hates Hans enough to let him get executed is exactly equally reasonable as saying that Hans hated her enough to murder her.
Well, aside from differences due to the level of "hands on" interaction required, anyway... I would think that allowing the state to do the dirty work would allow her to rationalize away the feelings of guilt, and thus require less hatred than for Hans to perform the act of killing personally.
Incidentally, in engineering terms a human life is worth a couple of million dollars. Maybe a highly-trained B2 crew would be worth marginally more. But regardless, it doesn't even come close to the cost of the plane itself, so in this case it would have been economically preferable if the crew had died but the plane remained intact.
The key part of his phrase was "...and makes it safe for the commerce of all." Unless the American Navy is impressing foreigners, the situations are entirely different.
You do realize that military jet fuel is basically kerosene, right? It might be more expensive than heating oil because of fancy additives or something, but it's not going to be that much more expensive.
Unless you're making a statement about hydrocarbon fuel in general being expensive? That I can agree with!
And by then they had ICBMs anyway, don't forget.
What makes you think "elite" meant "nobles" rather than "clergy" to begin with?
It makes me wonder what we can do to help speed that process along. Maybe suing Comcast and the local government that gave them a monopoly would help?
Obviously, if you think "[A] or [B]" means "[A] and [B] simultaneously," you fall into the former category!