There is absolutely no evidence for this. As a matter of fact, "extended" families would be likely to provide greater stability for the children - whose welfare is, of course, the greatest argument for legal contracts between people.
I haven't seen any statistics either way, but back in the 60's and 70's a lot of people experimented with such extended relationships and I hardly ever saw one that lasted very long. It seems to be one of those things that tends to work better in theory than it does in practice. I never knew anybody who wanted to try it a second time, so the practice seems to have mostly died out. Maintaining a relationship with only one other person seems hard enough; it really does seem like the difficulty of maintaining such an extended union goes up with the number of individual relationships within the group. That's probably why, despite the dire predictions of the gay-marriage-phobic, there seems to be very little clamor for the legalization of multiple spouse relationships.
ot that silly. (IANAL, but...) It means that legally same sex couples can't be 'married'.
One does not have to be a lawyer to know that the dictionary does not have the force of law. They don't even all agree. For example, in Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd Edition Unabridged, the 4th definition under "marriage" is: "Any intimate or close union."
The state exists to perpetuate a culture and a people. Culture is the shared beliefs, values, tastes, and aesthetics of a given group of people.
If that people does not reproduce in an efficient and prosperous manner, their culture will cease to exist.
Homosexuality, as a sexual act is not the issue here, marriage is. Marriage, in the legal sense, is a state sanctioned license that exists to designate a man and a woman as constituting a family unit for the purpose of reproduction. Since the state exists to foster this reproduction, the state clearly has a vested interest in promoting healthy marriage.
News flash: we don't have an underpopulation problem, we have an overpopulation problem. So if the sole function of civil marriage is to increase the population, then it should be abolished--for everybody.
In the modern world, our culture propagates not by out-reproducing our neighbors but by teaching our culture to our neighbors.
If inability to reproduce were grounds for refusal of the right to marry, then women past childbearing age would not be allowed to get married. To impose a fertility requirement upon one group of people but not upon another is an obvious violation of Equal Protection Under the Law.
Besides, there are plenty of ways for homosexual couples to have kids. Adoption, artificial insemination. And studies consistently show that those kids turn out just fine.
Traits occur randomly. Their continued presence in the gene pool is not wholey dependant on the traits survival/reproductive value.
In the absence of selection at the level of individual reproduction, the frequency of a trait will exhibit a random walk around an approach to steady state determined by the rates at which it arises and is eliminated by mutation.
If a trait does not effect either, or does affetc them in a small way but has the attribute that is incrases it's own spread ie. a triat that causes individuals to mate farther away from it's own line, then it will spread.
A trait that causes individuals to mate away from their own line will increase in frequency over the entire population only if individuals that possess that trait reproduce more than those that don't.
One of the great misconceptions is that natural selection improves things. It's the result of statistics.
It is the result of statistics, but it is still an optimizing mechanism. Natural selection works to optimize reproductive success by altering gene frequency. Whether that constitutes an "improvement" depends upon your value system; it is not necessarily to the benefit of any individual or even to the species as a whole. Moreover, it does not follow that the existence of a trait means that it is the product of natural selection. Many traits are probably selectively neutral, and therefore invisible to natural selection.
Natural selection is simply the by product of survival/non-survival in a population. A diverse gene pool means that there are more combinations of genetic traits in the populace. It's statistical. so something that influences the statistics of genetic traits can be favored.
Only if it provides a differential reproductive advantage to those who have the trait over those that do not. A trait that benefits the entire population equally will not (except in some fairly specialized circumstances not relevant to humans) be favored by natural selection.
I find it funny you attempt to shoot down each of his arguments with reasons like "Because of the increased risk of birth defects" or "it depletes the supply of heterosexual mates" but you fail to mention that homosexual unions potentially decrease the number of births, which may result in a decline of the population.
We suffer from overpopulation, not underpopulation, so a decline in the population is not a particularly bad thing. However, in practice, I doubt if it makes much difference. If anything, homosexuals in stable unions probably have slightly more children than homosexuals who are not in stable unions, so encouraging such unions would probably slightly increase the birth rate.
But of course there's ample documentation that homosexual unions last, at least as much documentation proving a 11 way union is reasonably stable, just ask the Mormon church.
I'd have to see the data. Of course, old data from a time when divorce was difficult and women could not survive very well outside of a marriage would not be relevant, because there was likely an element of coercion. And there still is the issue of people monopolizing mates, which strikes me as a potential source of problems. I'm not saying that a case couldn't be made for it, but I'd have to see the evidence, and it would obviously be very different from the case for homosexual marriage.
After all, isn't that the primary argument for homosexual marriages: "we're adults and we'll marry if we want to"?
It seems to me that the primary argument, from a public policy point of view (which is really the only valid point of view when it comes to lawmaking) is that people in stable relationships are healthier, happier, and better able to provide for themselves and their children than people who are not, so it serves the public interest to support such unions.
So what about a man marrying his brother? There's no risk of birth defects since they're both male and the relationship is not exploitive. Furthermore, marriage licenses aren't given out to only people who seem to have stable relationships. So if you allow "gay marriages", why wouldn't a man be able to marry his brother?
It hardly seems to matter, considering that hardly anybody wants to do this, anyway. I can't imagine anybody going to the trouble to make a case for changing the law when there is so little demand. But certainly, if you are dying to marry your brother, and want to accumulate a body of data showing that such relationships tend to be be stable and reasonably happy, comparable to the evidence that already exists for other types of heterosexual and homosexual unions, and that there is not an issue involving exploitation of younger sibling by older, I'd be willing to listen.
The concentration of genetic defects only occurs if the deffects are already in the genetic pool.
Of course. But since many defects are recessive, or even offer heterozygote advantage, they will be in the gene pool. From a point of view of genetics, a species pretty much has to strongly favor one strategy--either do a lot of inbreeding, so that detrimental genes are kept at a low level (this reduces the frequency of genetic defects, but imposes the hazards of monoculture, such as increased risk from parasites and epidemics), or do it very little. Humans fall into the "very little" category.
instead, it a selective trait that most people find it distateful to have children with close family because this preferences ensures a more diverse geentic pool.
Natural selection does not care about the "gene pool," it only cares about the survival and reproductive potential of the individual's offspring. So if there is an instinctive avoidance of consanguinity, then it is because it benefits your offspring's chances of surviving and reproducing.
Without taking a political position, let me just point out that the English word marriage already has a definition: "The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife".
This has to be the silliest objection yet! Meanings of words change and evolve over time. The dictionary merely records current usage.
"Can I get married to my mother/sister/brother/father/son/daughter? No? Why not?
Because of the increased risk of birth defects, which imposes costs on society, and because some of those unions (e.g. parent/child) involve potentially exploitive relationships in which freedom of choice is not clear. Neither is there a body of data indicating that such relationships are likely to be stable.
Can I get married to two women? Why not?
This is obviously a separate issue, and a case for it would have to be made separately. One obvious objection is it depletes the supply of heterosexual mates for other men. In addition, a three-way union is likely to be less stable than a two way union simply because the stability of a two way union requires maintaining the relationship between only one pair of people, whereas a three-way union depends upon three such relationships.
"Can we five men and six ladies all get married in an eleven-way arrangement? Why not?
Again, it is a separate issue, and you would have to make a separate case for it. You would need to document that such relationships are likely to be reasonably stable. This seems unlikely, considering that in an 11 way union requires maintaining 55 pair-wise relationships.
"What about my dog? Can I marry my dog? We love each other?"
No, because (a) your dog is in a subservient relationship to you and therefore cannot be said to have free choice, and (b) your dog does not have the intellectual capacity to understand and make contracts.
None of these, of course, have any relationship whatsoever between marriages between two people of the same sex. There is ample data to establish that such relationships can be comparably stable to heterosexual relationships, and issues of power or consanguinity do not arise.
I'm just curious, but would you agree to the killing of a person in the midst of a stroke? Their brain functions cease (in some cases), but they haven't ceased permanently (well, not always).
You are mistaken. Brain function does not cease in a stroke, unless irreversible brain death occurs. When that happens, the person is considered "dead" even if other organs continue to function, and we turn off the respirator.
You were getting music for free. Now you are paying for music. Why does this look better to you?
This is the sort of simplistic comment that makes sense only to somebody whose own time is worth almost nothing. The more your own time is worth to you, the more you are willing to pay for convenience, speed, and reliability.
This whole "Eistein was right after all" angle is misinformed. He wanted a static universe because that was the historic conception of the universe. His own science didn't allow for it, but he wrangled an equation for one out of it anyway. Turns out he was wrong, is wrong, and will always have been wrong. Einstein's motivation for putting in the cosmological constant was ideological, not observational -- and that's a recipe for Dumb Science.
Not exactly. Einstein didn't "put in" the cosmological constant; it emerged naturally from the derivation of the equations of General Relativity. But the theory did not provide its value; it was a free variable. It needed to be given some value, and there was at the time no firm observational data to do that. The mathematically simplest course would have been to arbitrarily assume that it had a value of zero, effectively "getting rid of it." That would have implied an expanding universe, and Einstein would have scored quite a coup by predicting the expansion well before the data came in to confirm it. Instead, Einstein chose to assume a value that brought his theory into line with the then-current astrophysical view of the universe--i.e. that it was static. So Einstein didn't "put it in;" he merely chose not to arbitrarily take it out. Yet another possible value of the cosmological constant yields an accelerating expansion. But that is different from the value that Einstein assumed. So the only sense in which the "Einstein was right after all" statement applies is that the correct value may not be zero, after all.
An unloaded test doesn't really address the stability concerns with a rider. The weight distribution is going to be a lot different with a rider. They should try it with a "crash test dummy". Like the Segway, it may need gyroscopes and a computer to keep it from flipping over.
I'd say that apoptosis is better characterized as "natural cell death". It's a natural and essential part of the cell's life cycle, and certainly isn't as alarming as the article's tone suggests.
Yes and no. There are certainly cells that naturally undergo apoptosis (a.k.a. programmed cell death) in their life cycles. If not for apoptosis, we'd all have webbed fingers. But apoptosis also seems to function as an "emergency self destruct" circumstance in which something has gone catastrophically wrong with a cell. And just as in the movies, it's likely that occasionally something manages to push that big red button by mistake...
The difference between a priesthood and a craft is that the practitioners of a craft actually produce something that can be objectively verified. The product of science is knowledge about the world that can be used to develop tangible technologies; indeed, the products of scientific investigation and discovery have transformed our culture.
No. "Theory" is another word for "hypothesis." You're confusing inductive and deductive reasoning.
Hypothesis means "an especially tentative theory." Theories are derived from inductive reasoning--they are generalizations that tie together individual observations. All scientific generalizations are theories, some more detailed than others. Once a theory is constructed, deductive reasoning is used to derive predictions that are used to test the theory. For example, if your theory is "objects fall when dropped," you could then try to test the theory by dropping different types of objects that have not previously been observed to fall.
I said that creation beliefs deserve equal time, because they're just as valid as evolution.
A theory is an intellectual tool for doing science, and its validity resides in its usefulness--its ability to make predictions that lead to experiments that result in discoveries about the world. To teach creationism on an equal footing with evolutionism in a science class would be like teaching accounting students that the abacus is just as important as the computer in modern accounting. It would simply be a lie, because the reality is that all modern biology is based on evolutionary theory, and every major discovery in biology for decades has been made by scientists who used evolutionary theory as a tool for discovery. Creationism's place in modern biology is about on a par with the flat earth's place in geography. That is the fact, and to teach anything else is to be dishonest.
Incidentally: science is not a religion. Please stop acting as if it were. You speak as if you're delivering tenets handed down from on high.
No, science is not a religion, because scientists to not claim to have any special access to Truth. Science is more of a craft, with methods that have been refined empirically and handed down, not from on high, but from mentor to student, by generations of scientists, until today it has become a finely honed tool for discovery.
Evolution is a theory. That's all. Teaching it as if it were a fact of nature would be wrong.
What religious zealots have difficulty understanding is that science does not claim to be privy to any kind of knowledge of absolute truths. "Facts," as the religious zealot imagines them, do not even exist in science. There are just observations and theories.
In science, "theory" is just another word for "generalization". For example, if I drop a pencil and it falls to the floor, that is an observation. If I generalize to say "Everything falls when dropped," that is a theory. A "fact of nature" is just a theory with an overwhelming number of observations to support. Examples would include gravitation, the earth's orbit around the sun, and--yes--evolution.
Creation beliefs deserve respect, like any other theories. They deserve equal time, or at least acknowledgment.
The notion that "all theories deserve equal time" is hostile to the very nature of science, and reflects a fundamental ignorance of science. To teach such a doctrine to children is to be profoundly dishonest about the very nature of science. The nonscientist might imagine there are only a few theories in competition, but this is false. For any given set of observations, there is a literally infinite number of possible theories to explain them. If we gave them all equal time, we would never get anywhere. So science prioritizes: theories with strong evidence and a strong history of predicting correct evidence get priority over theories with less evidence or less predictive power. And simple theories get priority over theories that have more complexity than required to explain the known data. This rule of prioritization is absolutely fundamental to science--abandon it, and you are no longer doing science.
the agenda pushed by the talk.origins crowd is distinctly anti-religious.
Not that I've noticed. Like most biologists, they are hostile to Creationists, whom they perceive--correctly, I believe--as being engaged in an intentionally deceptive campaign to force science teachers to lie to children about the scientific status of evolution.
Sort of, yeah. But phrased differently: the agenda they're pushing is the anti-religious agenda.
There is nothing "anti-religious" about evolution; most of the major Christian denominations have no problem with it. It only troubles some fringe sects with a rather narrow literalist interpretation of the Bible.
And as for their primary reference material... go read it sometime. The cited article, for example, points to only some very weak evidence in favor of one interpretation of the observations.
As a biologist, I have done so, and a lot more besides. I find the evidence for evolution overwhelming, roughly on a level with the evidence for the existence of gravity. Of course, in a certain sense, all generalizations can be regarded as theories. What we have are a huge number of observations of things falling, and we theorize that there is a general tendency for things to fall. Carried to extremes, we don't actually know anything but our personal experience, so the notion that our perceptions reflect anything about exterior reality is a kind of theory. In practice, however, our confidence in some things, like the existence of the external world, gravity, or evolution is so strong that we refer to them as "facts."
Any balanced discussion on the subject of the origins of life has to start with this proposition: nobody knows what happened before humans began observing the world. Here are some observations about what we've seen, and some theories to explain how things became the way they are.
Science doesn't presume to know exactly what happened. It works by figuring out what didn't happen. So nobody claims to know every detail about how life evolved. Some things we do know is that it did not appear all at once, and that life forms present at later times differed radically from those that were present at earlier times.
If "evolution was accepted as fact" why would "Darwin advanced a theory to explain it"?
For the same reason that Newton and Einstein advanced theories to explain gravity. It wasn't that anybody doubted that things tended to fall down, they just didn't understand why. Similarly, scientists knew that life had evolved over time before Darwin came along; they just didn't have a good explanation for it.
The talk.origins folks are pushing an agenda. Try a more objective source and get back to us, okay?
The "agenda" they are pushing is the scientific agenda--drawing conclusions based on the data rather than your preconceived notions. But their "agenda" is not at issue, because I'm not asking you to take their word for it. The talk.origins folk have kindly provided an archive containing citations of the primary scientific literature, where you can look up the actual evidence.
"Whaa? How can that be?" It's like this: evolution refers to the process of change over time as a response to natural pressures that results in speciation.
False. Evolution has been observed. The professional Creationists no longer make this claim. These days, they accept that species can arise by Darwinian mechanisms, but insist that a new "kind" cannot arise. This puts them on safe ground, since "species" has a scientific definition, but "kind" is scientifically meaningless.
There is no such thing as the "fact of evolution". You should really check your sources on that one. It's called a theory for a reason.
Actually, evolution was accepted as fact even before Darwin advanced a theory to explain it. Before Darwin, there actually were real scientists (as opposed to religious ideologues masquerading as scientists) who took creation seriously as a theory of the origin of species. But even before Darwin, they had rejected the Biblical notion of creation as patently inconsistent with the data that clearly demonstrated evolution over time. The creationist theories before Darwin tended to postulate multiple creation events at different times and places. Of course, after Darwin, all the real biologists embraced the new theory, leaving behind the Biblical zealots who wouldn't even accept creation theories that didn't agree with Genesis.
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There is absolutely no evidence for this. As a matter of fact, "extended" families would be likely to provide greater stability for the children - whose welfare is, of course, the greatest argument for legal contracts between people.
I haven't seen any statistics either way, but back in the 60's and 70's a lot of people experimented with such extended relationships and I hardly ever saw one that lasted very long. It seems to be one of those things that tends to work better in theory than it does in practice. I never knew anybody who wanted to try it a second time, so the practice seems to have mostly died out. Maintaining a relationship with only one other person seems hard enough; it really does seem like the difficulty of maintaining such an extended union goes up with the number of individual relationships within the group. That's probably why, despite the dire predictions of the gay-marriage-phobic, there seems to be very little clamor for the legalization of multiple spouse relationships.
ot that silly. (IANAL, but...) It means that legally same sex couples can't be 'married'.
One does not have to be a lawyer to know that the dictionary does not have the force of law. They don't even all agree. For example, in Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language, 2nd Edition Unabridged, the 4th definition under "marriage" is: "Any intimate or close union."
The state exists to perpetuate a culture and a people. Culture is the shared beliefs, values, tastes, and aesthetics of a given group of people.
If that people does not reproduce in an efficient and prosperous manner, their culture will cease to exist.
Homosexuality, as a sexual act is not the issue here, marriage is. Marriage, in the legal sense, is a state sanctioned license that exists to designate a man and a woman as constituting a family unit for the purpose of reproduction. Since the state exists to foster this reproduction, the state clearly has a vested interest in promoting healthy marriage.
News flash: we don't have an underpopulation problem, we have an overpopulation problem. So if the sole function of civil marriage is to increase the population, then it should be abolished--for everybody.
In the modern world, our culture propagates not by out-reproducing our neighbors but by teaching our culture to our neighbors.
If inability to reproduce were grounds for refusal of the right to marry, then women past childbearing age would not be allowed to get married. To impose a fertility requirement upon one group of people but not upon another is an obvious violation of Equal Protection Under the Law.
Besides, there are plenty of ways for homosexual couples to have kids. Adoption, artificial insemination. And studies consistently show that those kids turn out just fine.
Traits occur randomly. Their continued presence in the gene pool is not wholey dependant on the traits survival/reproductive value.
In the absence of selection at the level of individual reproduction, the frequency of a trait will exhibit a random walk around an approach to steady state determined by the rates at which it arises and is eliminated by mutation.
If a trait does not effect either, or does affetc them in a small way but has the attribute that is incrases it's own spread ie. a triat that causes individuals to mate farther away from it's own line, then it will spread.
A trait that causes individuals to mate away from their own line will increase in frequency over the entire population only if individuals that possess that trait reproduce more than those that don't.
One of the great misconceptions is that natural selection improves things. It's the result of statistics.
It is the result of statistics, but it is still an optimizing mechanism. Natural selection works to optimize reproductive success by altering gene frequency. Whether that constitutes an "improvement" depends upon your value system; it is not necessarily to the benefit of any individual or even to the species as a whole. Moreover, it does not follow that the existence of a trait means that it is the product of natural selection. Many traits are probably selectively neutral, and therefore invisible to natural selection.
Natural selection is simply the by product of survival/non-survival in a population. A diverse gene pool means that there are more combinations of genetic traits in the populace. It's statistical. so something that influences the statistics of genetic traits can be favored.
Only if it provides a differential reproductive advantage to those who have the trait over those that do not. A trait that benefits the entire population equally will not (except in some fairly specialized circumstances not relevant to humans) be favored by natural selection.
I find it funny you attempt to shoot down each of his arguments with reasons like "Because of the increased risk of birth defects" or "it depletes the supply of heterosexual mates" but you fail to mention that homosexual unions potentially decrease the number of births, which may result in a decline of the population.
We suffer from overpopulation, not underpopulation, so a decline in the population is not a particularly bad thing. However, in practice, I doubt if it makes much difference. If anything, homosexuals in stable unions probably have slightly more children than homosexuals who are not in stable unions, so encouraging such unions would probably slightly increase the birth rate.
But of course there's ample documentation that homosexual unions last, at least as much documentation proving a 11 way union is reasonably stable, just ask the Mormon church.
I'd have to see the data. Of course, old data from a time when divorce was difficult and women could not survive very well outside of a marriage would not be relevant, because there was likely an element of coercion. And there still is the issue of people monopolizing mates, which strikes me as a potential source of problems. I'm not saying that a case couldn't be made for it, but I'd have to see the evidence, and it would obviously be very different from the case for homosexual marriage.
After all, isn't that the primary argument for homosexual marriages: "we're adults and we'll marry if we want to"?
It seems to me that the primary argument, from a public policy point of view (which is really the only valid point of view when it comes to lawmaking) is that people in stable relationships are healthier, happier, and better able to provide for themselves and their children than people who are not, so it serves the public interest to support such unions.
So what about a man marrying his brother? There's no risk of birth defects since they're both male and the relationship is not exploitive. Furthermore, marriage licenses aren't given out to only people who seem to have stable relationships. So if you allow "gay marriages", why wouldn't a man be able to marry his brother?
It hardly seems to matter, considering that hardly anybody wants to do this, anyway. I can't imagine anybody going to the trouble to make a case for changing the law when there is so little demand. But certainly, if you are dying to marry your brother, and want to accumulate a body of data showing that such relationships tend to be be stable and reasonably happy, comparable to the evidence that already exists for other types of heterosexual and homosexual unions, and that there is not an issue involving exploitation of younger sibling by older, I'd be willing to listen.
The concentration of genetic defects only occurs if the deffects are already in the genetic pool.
Of course. But since many defects are recessive, or even offer heterozygote advantage, they will be in the gene pool. From a point of view of genetics, a species pretty much has to strongly favor one strategy--either do a lot of inbreeding, so that detrimental genes are kept at a low level (this reduces the frequency of genetic defects, but imposes the hazards of monoculture, such as increased risk from parasites and epidemics), or do it very little. Humans fall into the "very little" category.
instead, it a selective trait that most people find it distateful to have children with close family because this preferences ensures a more diverse geentic pool.
Natural selection does not care about the "gene pool," it only cares about the survival and reproductive potential of the individual's offspring. So if there is an instinctive avoidance of consanguinity, then it is because it benefits your offspring's chances of surviving and reproducing.
Without taking a political position, let me just point out that the English word marriage already has a definition: "The legal union of a man and woman as husband and wife".
This has to be the silliest objection yet! Meanings of words change and evolve over time. The dictionary merely records current usage.
"Can I get married to my mother/sister/brother/father/son/daughter? No? Why not?
Because of the increased risk of birth defects, which imposes costs on society, and because some of those unions (e.g. parent/child) involve potentially exploitive relationships in which freedom of choice is not clear. Neither is there a body of data indicating that such relationships are likely to be stable.
Can I get married to two women? Why not?
This is obviously a separate issue, and a case for it would have to be made separately. One obvious objection is it depletes the supply of heterosexual mates for other men. In addition, a three-way union is likely to be less stable than a two way union simply because the stability of a two way union requires maintaining the relationship between only one pair of people, whereas a three-way union depends upon three such relationships.
"Can we five men and six ladies all get married in an eleven-way arrangement? Why not?
Again, it is a separate issue, and you would have to make a separate case for it. You would need to document that such relationships are likely to be reasonably stable. This seems unlikely, considering that in an 11 way union requires maintaining 55 pair-wise relationships.
"What about my dog? Can I marry my dog? We love each other?"
No, because (a) your dog is in a subservient relationship to you and therefore cannot be said to have free choice, and (b) your dog does not have the intellectual capacity to understand and make contracts.
None of these, of course, have any relationship whatsoever between marriages between two people of the same sex. There is ample data to establish that such relationships can be comparably stable to heterosexual relationships, and issues of power or consanguinity do not arise.
I'm just curious, but would you agree to the killing of a person in the midst of a stroke? Their brain functions cease (in some cases), but they haven't ceased permanently (well, not always).
You are mistaken. Brain function does not cease in a stroke, unless irreversible brain death occurs. When that happens, the person is considered "dead" even if other organs continue to function, and we turn off the respirator.
You were getting music for free. Now you are paying for music. Why does this look better to you?
This is the sort of simplistic comment that makes sense only to somebody whose own time is worth almost nothing. The more your own time is worth to you, the more you are willing to pay for convenience, speed, and reliability.
What version of MacOS was your professor using? You never just see "scrolling text" take over the GUI.
I've seen crashes like this OS X, although not in some time. I don't know if it can happen in Panther.
This whole "Eistein was right after all" angle is misinformed. He wanted a static universe because that was the historic conception of the universe. His own science didn't allow for it, but he wrangled an equation for one out of it anyway. Turns out he was wrong, is wrong, and will always have been wrong. Einstein's motivation for putting in the cosmological constant was ideological, not observational -- and that's a recipe for Dumb Science.
Not exactly. Einstein didn't "put in" the cosmological constant; it emerged naturally from the derivation of the equations of General Relativity. But the theory did not provide its value; it was a free variable. It needed to be given some value, and there was at the time no firm observational data to do that. The mathematically simplest course would have been to arbitrarily assume that it had a value of zero, effectively "getting rid of it." That would have implied an expanding universe, and Einstein would have scored quite a coup by predicting the expansion well before the data came in to confirm it. Instead, Einstein chose to assume a value that brought his theory into line with the then-current astrophysical view of the universe--i.e. that it was static. So Einstein didn't "put it in;" he merely chose not to arbitrarily take it out. Yet another possible value of the cosmological constant yields an accelerating expansion. But that is different from the value that Einstein assumed. So the only sense in which the "Einstein was right after all" statement applies is that the correct value may not be zero, after all.
An unloaded test doesn't really address the stability concerns with a rider. The weight distribution is going to be a lot different with a rider. They should try it with a "crash test dummy". Like the Segway, it may need gyroscopes and a computer to keep it from flipping over.
I'd say that apoptosis is better characterized as "natural cell death". It's a natural and essential part of the cell's life cycle, and certainly isn't as alarming as the article's tone suggests.
Yes and no. There are certainly cells that naturally undergo apoptosis (a.k.a. programmed cell death) in their life cycles. If not for apoptosis, we'd all have webbed fingers. But apoptosis also seems to function as an "emergency self destruct" circumstance in which something has gone catastrophically wrong with a cell. And just as in the movies, it's likely that occasionally something manages to push that big red button by mistake...
Yeah. Just like the priesthood.
The difference between a priesthood and a craft is that the practitioners of a craft actually produce something that can be objectively verified. The product of science is knowledge about the world that can be used to develop tangible technologies; indeed, the products of scientific investigation and discovery have transformed our culture.
No. "Theory" is another word for "hypothesis." You're confusing inductive and deductive reasoning.
Hypothesis means "an especially tentative theory." Theories are derived from inductive reasoning--they are generalizations that tie together individual observations. All scientific generalizations are theories, some more detailed than others. Once a theory is constructed, deductive reasoning is used to derive predictions that are used to test the theory. For example, if your theory is "objects fall when dropped," you could then try to test the theory by dropping different types of objects that have not previously been observed to fall.
I said that creation beliefs deserve equal time, because they're just as valid as evolution.
A theory is an intellectual tool for doing science, and its validity resides in its usefulness--its ability to make predictions that lead to experiments that result in discoveries about the world. To teach creationism on an equal footing with evolutionism in a science class would be like teaching accounting students that the abacus is just as important as the computer in modern accounting. It would simply be a lie, because the reality is that all modern biology is based on evolutionary theory, and every major discovery in biology for decades has been made by scientists who used evolutionary theory as a tool for discovery. Creationism's place in modern biology is about on a par with the flat earth's place in geography. That is the fact, and to teach anything else is to be dishonest.
Incidentally: science is not a religion. Please stop acting as if it were. You speak as if you're delivering tenets handed down from on high.
No, science is not a religion, because scientists to not claim to have any special access to Truth. Science is more of a craft, with methods that have been refined empirically and handed down, not from on high, but from mentor to student, by generations of scientists, until today it has become a finely honed tool for discovery.
What religious zealots have difficulty understanding is that science does not claim to be privy to any kind of knowledge of absolute truths. "Facts," as the religious zealot imagines them, do not even exist in science. There are just observations and theories.
In science, "theory" is just another word for "generalization". For example, if I drop a pencil and it falls to the floor, that is an observation. If I generalize to say "Everything falls when dropped," that is a theory. A "fact of nature" is just a theory with an overwhelming number of observations to support. Examples would include gravitation, the earth's orbit around the sun, and--yes--evolution.
Creation beliefs deserve respect, like any other theories. They deserve equal time, or at least acknowledgment.
The notion that "all theories deserve equal time" is hostile to the very nature of science, and reflects a fundamental ignorance of science. To teach such a doctrine to children is to be profoundly dishonest about the very nature of science. The nonscientist might imagine there are only a few theories in competition, but this is false. For any given set of observations, there is a literally infinite number of possible theories to explain them. If we gave them all equal time, we would never get anywhere. So science prioritizes: theories with strong evidence and a strong history of predicting correct evidence get priority over theories with less evidence or less predictive power. And simple theories get priority over theories that have more complexity than required to explain the known data. This rule of prioritization is absolutely fundamental to science--abandon it, and you are no longer doing science.
the agenda pushed by the talk.origins crowd is distinctly anti-religious.
Not that I've noticed. Like most biologists, they are hostile to Creationists, whom they perceive--correctly, I believe--as being engaged in an intentionally deceptive campaign to force science teachers to lie to children about the scientific status of evolution.
Sort of, yeah. But phrased differently: the agenda they're pushing is the anti-religious agenda.
There is nothing "anti-religious" about evolution; most of the major Christian denominations have no problem with it. It only troubles some fringe sects with a rather narrow literalist interpretation of the Bible.
And as for their primary reference material... go read it sometime. The cited article, for example, points to only some very weak evidence in favor of one interpretation of the observations.
As a biologist, I have done so, and a lot more besides. I find the evidence for evolution overwhelming, roughly on a level with the evidence for the existence of gravity. Of course, in a certain sense, all generalizations can be regarded as theories. What we have are a huge number of observations of things falling, and we theorize that there is a general tendency for things to fall. Carried to extremes, we don't actually know anything but our personal experience, so the notion that our perceptions reflect anything about exterior reality is a kind of theory. In practice, however, our confidence in some things, like the existence of the external world, gravity, or evolution is so strong that we refer to them as "facts."
Any balanced discussion on the subject of the origins of life has to start with this proposition: nobody knows what happened before humans began observing the world. Here are some observations about what we've seen, and some theories to explain how things became the way they are.
Science doesn't presume to know exactly what happened. It works by figuring out what didn't happen. So nobody claims to know every detail about how life evolved. Some things we do know is that it did not appear all at once, and that life forms present at later times differed radically from those that were present at earlier times.
If "evolution was accepted as fact" why would "Darwin advanced a theory to explain it"?
For the same reason that Newton and Einstein advanced theories to explain gravity. It wasn't that anybody doubted that things tended to fall down, they just didn't understand why. Similarly, scientists knew that life had evolved over time before Darwin came along; they just didn't have a good explanation for it.
The talk.origins folks are pushing an agenda. Try a more objective source and get back to us, okay?
The "agenda" they are pushing is the scientific agenda--drawing conclusions based on the data rather than your preconceived notions. But their "agenda" is not at issue, because I'm not asking you to take their word for it. The talk.origins folk have kindly provided an archive containing citations of the primary scientific literature, where you can look up the actual evidence.
"Whaa? How can that be?" It's like this: evolution refers to the process of change over time as a response to natural pressures that results in speciation.
False. Evolution has been observed. The professional Creationists no longer make this claim. These days, they accept that species can arise by Darwinian mechanisms, but insist that a new "kind" cannot arise. This puts them on safe ground, since "species" has a scientific definition, but "kind" is scientifically meaningless.
There is no such thing as the "fact of evolution". You should really check your sources on that one. It's called a theory for a reason.
Actually, evolution was accepted as fact even before Darwin advanced a theory to explain it. Before Darwin, there actually were real scientists (as opposed to religious ideologues masquerading as scientists) who took creation seriously as a theory of the origin of species. But even before Darwin, they had rejected the Biblical notion of creation as patently inconsistent with the data that clearly demonstrated evolution over time. The creationist theories before Darwin tended to postulate multiple creation events at different times and places. Of course, after Darwin, all the real biologists embraced the new theory, leaving behind the Biblical zealots who wouldn't even accept creation theories that didn't agree with Genesis.