I enjoyed the article you linked, but the chagas numbers don't make any sense. Another quote in the article claims that 15 million people in latin america are "suffering" from chagas. And Wikipedia claims that 18 million people in latin america are "affected" by chagas. Also according to wikipedia, there are 100 million people in Mexico. Then if the entire 15 million people infected (assuming "affected" and "suffering" means infected) with Chagas are in mexico, that is only 15% of the mexican population. It doesn't make any sense to me that 10% of the mexican aliens could have chagas. My guess is someone is being imprecisely quoted here. I wonder if 10% is an upper limit (the quote does say "as many as"), which would mean that not more than 10% are infected, but it could be much lower. That seems much more sane. Also, sorry to nit pick, but this doesn't make you 5X more likely to die of you live in LA; it just makes you 5 times more likely to get blood infected with Chagas if you get blood from an anonymous doner.
The fact that these outbreaks are college kids in the midwest implies to me that there significant vaccination problems with groups outside of illegal aliens. Do you ever go to Whole Foods? If you do, take a look at some of the literature there sometime. I remember seeing a magazine with a cover story about a pregnant woman who had proudly refused AZT and other AIDS medicine because, i guess, she didn't "believe" in it. Of course, to be fair I guess, the idea that you even might be giving your kid autism is scary as hell.
From TFA: According to the suit, the record company is treating digital downloads like traditional record sales, rather than licensed music, triggering a different royalty deal.
So it seems the legal issue is whether these music sales should fall under the contract for traditional record sales, or licensed music. I have no idea how much legal merit this has. However speaking as a layman, if the contract for record sales do agree record sales, whatever they are exactly, are affected by things like restocking fees, then it seems harder to think that online music sales, which don't seem to be affected by restocking, are also record sales, and should fall under those contracts.
It seems to me that the debate is really over who gets to decide what is in each tier. There is finite bandwidth. Maybe for example comcast will have to move to a model where I pay more for a larger average MB/month in some way, just as I now pay more for larger instantaneous MB/sec. Then I will decide whether google, or microsoft, or comcast, or whatever gets priority (most of) with my limited total bandwidth each month. Maybe these are the kind of tiers you are imagining. This is very different from google, or microsoft, or comcast having to pay comcast to even get access to me. Then the control is in comcast's hands, and they will presumably be tempted to give themselves an advantage. Imagine if a few companies could control how fast other companies could drive on roads. Those companies would instantly get a large amount of power. In that respect, the internet seems to be no different.
You seem to assume we only have two options: a cartesian style dualism of body and soul, and this very strong reductionism where we are only chemical reactions. There is a lot of middle ground. For example, chess is a game played with only a collection of atoms, but arguably physics and chemistry can't describe all the subtleties of chess. Similarly, while our brain may be a collection of chemical reactions, that doesn't mean that we will ever be able to talk very effectively about our behavior using the language of chemical reactions, and that in some ontological sense chemical reactions may not be enough to define consciousness. In other words, the chemical reactions certainly make our consciousness possible, but that doesn't mean they completely define our consciousness. If they did, then I wouldn't think we should be able to have any hope of creating artificial intillegence that we could describe as conscious, since silicon transistors are chemically different from neurons in so many ways that are very important as far as chemists and physicists are concerned. I think there could be room there for scientific concepts that are similar to or are connected with the traditional ideas of a "soul" and "free will." Of course, traditionally the soul and especially free will are metaphysical concepts, so its difficult to imagine how science could ever address the concepts, one way or the other, directly.
(*) Even though 99.9999% of all gods are about as real as the Easter Bunny.
Um, you should really think about what feelings you might hurt before making a comment like this. I just hope the Easter Bunny doesn't read slashdot...
In general, the laws of thermodynamics that I know about state something along the lines of "given system A, that system A must now do this, or that, etc." In general science has to take the 'initial conditions" as a given, although we can keep pushing back farther and farther in time. So if science were to understand a universe before the big bang with less energy or more entropy than the big bang had, then the laws of thermodynamics would have something to say, namely that there would be a lot of explanation needed for how the universe increased its energy or decreased its entropy. However, right now, we more or less take the big bang as the first thing in the universe we can explain, and maybe the beginning of time itself (not that I understand what Hawking really means by that...), so thermodynamics only has something to say about what happened after the big bang.
Throughout history, philosophers and theologians have recognized that every cause must have a prior cause, and that cause a prior, etc, all the way back to infinity, or to some first cause (God). I believe Aquinas also claimed that even if time had no beginning, so the universe would be infinite, there would STILL need to be a "cause" of the entire infinite timeline, and we would still need God. What I think you are saying echoes that, so you are in good company. However, I personally was quite convinced by Kant's argument against the validity of arguments like this for proving God's existence. Essentially (and I'm not doing him very much justice here), Kant said that we must assume in our thinking that every cause has a prior cause, which is why the argument is so compelling, but that doesn't mean that this assumption is true. It may simply reflect the nature of our thought. Then this argument doesn't show that God exists, but only that as a practical matter, we must assume that he does.
I think this is what I wrote... In any case, and you may already know this, I don't think as a practical matter a non-local hidden variable is an option, because nobody has any idea how to do relativistic QM (ie, particles and fields) with a non-local hidden variable, for example Bohm's formulation. And even without a hidden variable, QM still has a kind of weird nonlocality.
Almost all the experiments have gone the way of lack of local realism.
A small nitpick- I would claim that the experiments only show a lack of a local hidden variable, which ruled out local realism for Einstein and many others. However, I think that a sort of realism is compatible with not determinism, although probably not a realism as "comfortable" as we had before the 20th century.
I believe in absolute causality, as random as something appears, that's only because we're missing some/most of the picture.
I think you can believe is causality, and still believe in randomness. I can believe that event A was necessary for the occurence of event B, and later believe that an identical event A was necessary for the occurence of event C. Both events B and C were caused by event A. I think you believe in determinism.
You should take a look at the wikipedia entry on Bell's theorem, and the Aspect experiments. They seem to say that determinism and a local universe is not possible.
Knowing the historical and philsophical background of science is a good thing, and is very interesting as well. However, to teach this in high school requires all, or at least most, of the teachers and students involved to be ready for this kind of discussion. Any sort of discussion of the philsophy of sciences requires a level of competence in philosophy and history, a level of competence in science, and the sensitivity to appreciate why it is all important in the first place. If I remember, most high schoolers are just struggling to reach some elementary competence with science. And there aren't many people, teachers and professional scientists included, who can teach a course in the philosophy of science. So in practice, this would be difficult to do. It is made even more difficult because, I think, there is still very little consensus on what science really is, though there is general consensus that certain statements are not scientific in nature, of course.
Of course, it is somewhat ironic that you bring up that example, because Newton believed that it might take the will of God to keep the small perturbations from causing the planets to go flying off into space:-). I'm believe we undertand the stability of the universe in terms of chaos theory now, but I don't really know what I'm talking about on that.
The campaign against evolution is part of a greater campaign against the authority of science and the concept of a secular state.
I think that this summarizes up your thoughtful reply to me. I agree that this seems to be true for certain groups of people, for example the Discovery Institute. I don't think this is true for most people, though. I don't think they understand biology well enough to know that removing evolution from school curricula does this. You and I understand that evolution and natural selection is an essential component of modern biology, because science is an exercise in critical thinking, and one cannot think about biology critically while leaving out evolution. However, I think a lot of people see science as more or less a collection of facts. Evolution seems to be a very small part of those facts. How can it be that big a deal to leave them out? Most people need to be educated, not confronted as criminals.
I absolutely agree, though, with your sentiment that the authority of the scientific establishment is threatened, and that in turn threatens the US. This is in part due to my own personal beliefs about Science. I think that in practice, most scientists do have faith that if they honestly pursue Truth, they will find it, because Truth is both accessible and compelling. The authority of the scientific establishment is supposed to be the authority of Truth, which scientists have pursued for its own sake. The US is based on similar principles- that the individual can find Truth through critical thinking, and use it to vote in his best interest. This is being attacked with cynicism, not just with regards to evolution, but also global warming, the effectiveness of sexual education, the possibility of an unbiased report on war in Iraq, etc. When we no longer believe that a person can honestly pursue and state Truth, then by default any statement of fact becomes propoganda. We find ourselves with an entire news organization based around the idea of "fair and balanced", which seems to mean that somehow we must hear "every side" of the Truth, as if Truth has a side for every person who has an interest in what it is.
This is why I find myself disliking the sort of positivist, instrumentalist argument that you used (I think I got my philsophical buzz words correct...), saying that evolution "gets results", so it is a valid theory. I know that it is seductive to use this argument to defend evolution. I have used it. However, I have come to think that it loses the war, so to speak. Partly this is because if the knowledge of science is only a tool to get results, this makes it feel uncomfortably close to propoganda. Also, the argument always seems to degenerate into a philosophical argument over whether science is somehow fundamentally more epistemologically justified than religion (scientists just have faith in evolution, so they interpret all data their way!), or over specific paleontological finds, which most of us (certainly myself included) are not really prepared to handle well. In any case, I don't think the point is to convince them that evolution is somehow more justified than creationism. The point is to sell them on the idea that Truth exists, that it can be compelling in its own right, that scientific papers represent the honest, thoughtful beliefs of the scientific community rather than some institutional dogma, and that cynicism is not the way. In other words, we need to educate them, not treat them like they are stupid, or criminals. To teach them, we need them to to trust us, and we can only do that by finding a way to respect them.
I think you make a very good point. I think that part of the problem is that the human mind has very poor intuition for probabilities that involve very large and small numbers, and natural selection involves both. For example, this article http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/1 7/2224223 shows a study that claims that about 100 boulders have hit Titan from Earth. This is, to me, mind blowing. Space is so huge- how is this possible. But, we are talking about a lot of time, and a lot of boulders, so the results are unintuitive. Similarly, while it isn't too hard to imagine that 1000 monkeys sitting at 1000 typewriters could eventually type MacBeth, it isn't too difficult to calculate how long this would take. I don't remember the exact number of years- 10^30 comes to mind, but in any case, I remember it was far longer than the history of the universe (assuming they typed one letter/second.) So large numbers can play funny tricks on you. While a bacteria evolving into a man via natural selection is completely inconceivable, the amount of time and numbers of generations is also completely inconceivable.
If I could add a little more. It is not very well understood how quantum probability affects the macroscopic world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodingers_cat ). We do know that the macroscopic world more or less obeys classical physics. So it's not clear if God would be capable of using quantum strangeness to affect our lives in the manner the GP post seems to mean (without violating the laws of nature, which I suppose in principle God can always do.)
As a professional scientist I don't believe that the scientific method unviels truth. I don't have to. It isn't my job to get truth. I get scientific facts, and model them with scientific theories. They don't have to be true because I don't care about them being true. I care about the uncertainty of my facts and my theories predictive power.
I agree absolutely that when evaluating scientific validity of a theory, predictive power is more important than anything else. But do you honestly, deep down so to speak, believe that science is only a tool to make predictions? Don't you think that the scientist should be trying to describe the true world? To me, what I read as your vision of science reduces it to a kind of machine for creating new technology because I only care about my prediction for its own sake if that prediction connects with reality in some way. If it doesn't connect with reality, then what good is it, except maybe to make the next vaccine, or the next airplane, or whatever.
Evolution is an established set of facts, and an excellent theory. And if Christian Churches want a fight on this one, I and many others with a distate for their religion relish the thought, because it will add to the long history of Christain failures and crimes against humanity, which will be used against them again and again in the future.
I agree that evolution is an established set of facts. You seem, though, to have a strange anger towards the people who don't believe evolution. I think it is good to remember sometimes that, sadly, this is 50% of the US! Most of these are good, honest, hard working people, who love their kids and want to do the right thing, but simply don't have the knowledge, intellect, or intellectual courage to accept something they perceive as contradicting what they already believe to be true. I hardly think that disbelieving evolution and natural selection qualifies to be lumped together with "crime against humanity." Yes, they often use terribly flawed arguments and always compare the scientific establishment to the Church during the time of Galileo, which is even more annoying, but there are much worse things to do, and be. Anger doesn't help anything, though.
Evidently, I wasn't clear enough in what I meant by "circular reasoning." I don't think that science is tautological. (Frankly, in my heart I don't even believe mathematics is tautological.) And I don't think scientistis take anything "on faith," exactly. However, I don't think that in practice, science is justified piece by piece, from the ground up, as like some kind of cartesian or mathematical enterprise, but grounded in experience. Please, see my other post, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182360&cid=150 82915 , except that you weren't rude, which I thank you for:-).
I am in physics. I am also a realist. I believe that science describes real things. However, we can never prove our theories, only disprove them, but we need portions of certain theories to understand other theories. So when evaluating whether theory A is consistent with our latest experiment, we must assume theory B to be true, even when we don't necessarily know this to be the case. Ultimately, all we can do, roughly speaking, is to test our entire theory for self consistency. So to verify the existence of the electron, we must assume we understand the machine we use to detect it. This doesn't mean this is easy. This doesn't mean that science is all some language construct, or whatever that postmodern interpretation science says. However, it does mean it involves some degree of circular thinking all the same.
Science isn't about "thinking about stuff", it's about hypotheses supported by factual findings. Read a book.
This comment was just rude. You are part of the whole intelligent design problem. Most of the ID'ers are just ignorant, and they don't trust us, the scientific community, in part because they perceive us as elitists who want to tell them what religion to teach their children. Comments like this don't help. The IDers can't help it if they are ignorant, and don't have the judgement to know it. We can keep ourselves from being rude, however.
I wasn't trying to say that X is on par with Quantum Mechanics. The equations of Quantum Mechanics are empirically verified, and that puts them in another class all together. I was simply saying that we can never completely remove our personal bias, even when talking about something as objective as the equations of quantum mechanics.
To refer to something that I didn't refer to in the last post, the interpretation of those QM equations, on the other hand, which I think is necessary to really understand them in any sort of satisfying way as more than number crunching machinery- this is going to involve at least some amount of inevitable bias. However, to advance physics, this has to be done all the same. For example, the current quest in elementary particle physics for a single fundamental equation of nature is motivated ultimately by Einstein, who himself was motivated in the belief of Spinoza's God as Nature. So this quest for a fundamental equation, which has been so fruitful for physics, can be understood to be religiously motivated. I don't think most physicists would use that language, and Einstein's God was not a personal one. All the same, I think this illustrates that in any sort of creative endeavor involves bias, which in my experience is any endeavor except perhaps for mechanically checking the validity of a mathematical proof, or that, after it is done, a scientific experiment agrees with theory. However, we do it anyway, and often we are right.
Also, again, there is bias in believe that life is absurd as well.
ID can take the complexity of life and the structure of the universe itself and explain it in terms anybody who has ever been to church can understand.
I'm a little confused as to why you made this statement. My understanding is that you don't believe in any sort of objective truth. Then we can't really talk about life and the universe having complexity, except from the stories we tell about it. The ID story (or perhaps its tellers) happens to cause a reaction in some people that causes them to trust the person they hear it from more than the biology story. How is this sad or not sad? An analogy: I understand where Luke's powers come from in Star Wars (the mitochlorians *SHUDDER*.) I don't understand where Neo's powers come from because its not part of the story. It's not sad though.
You must test all possible statements of the theory, and if one contradicts another or proves incorrect in an experiment, then that theory can be disproven. (That being that the experiment is correct and repeatable.)
I think that you may have just described another way to prove a theory. Certainly you do not need to do that much work to disprove (or in the more typical jargon, falsify) a theory because you do not have to test every possible prediction. If a theory is supposed to predict what can happen in the future, this would take, literally, forever. To falsify a theory, you need to only find a single prediction that is not true. I can list several that would disprove evolution right off the top of my head, and I am not even a biologist: if the world were found to be only a couple thousands of years old, this would disprove evolution; if all creatures did not share DNA this would disprove evolution; if our DNA were closer in composition to that of a plant than a chimpanzee, this would disprove evolution. I have not heard a single such example given for ID. If you have one, I would like to hear it (seriously.)
You (and by that I may mean a person in general, as I don't know your view on the subject) are certainly welcome to be a skeptic. Perhaps there is something about evolution or natural selection that offends your sense of scientific beauty. Fine. Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics for this very reason. However, I think you have to acknowledge that evolution and natural selection can in principle be falsified, and have not been, based on the fact that professionals who devote their lives to this have reached that conclusion. They are most certainly wrong about certain details, and they surely don't have the whole story. However, they are the same people who develop your antibiotics and other drugs, and your vaccinations, and to me it seems hypocritical to trust them on those things (I assume you do), and not trust them on the judgement that evolution and natural selection can in principle be falsified, but has not been.
I heard a lecture on the Shroud of Turin once. Of course, the carbon dating was brought up as invalidating its authenticity. And of course, there were those who claimed the tests had been tampered with. The interesting part was who was claimed to have tampered with the results- the Catholic Church. This is because the techniques you mention to replicate the Shroud involved heat. If the Shroud were authentic, one could imagine that Jesus's face is actually imprinted on the Shroud. Tradition holds, I think, that it was formed as his spirit left his body. However, as you mentioned, there is some evidence that heat and Jesus' face could have caused the image. However, a dead body wouldn't produce heat, only a live one. So if the Shroud were authentic, it might be imagined to lend credence to the idea that Jesus never actually died, but just entered a coma. His body heat would then imprint his face on the Shroud. Since Christianity doesn't believe in an almost-dead Jesus, but a truly dead one, this would cause a lot of problems. So, the Church faked the results to make sure this type of argument could never be had. I have no idea how plausible all this is, but it is very interesting.
I'm fine with some God creating the Universe. And why not mess about setting the right genes for mankind to thrive while he's at it, but why the hell did he create so much evidence to prove the contrary?
I don't think that God in some sense "set the right genes". I am not a deist. The process of evolution itself is God's process of creation. Natural selection seems to tell us that our evolution is contingent. I think we can interpret that to imply that we are a genuine addition to the universe since its conception. In a sense, our existence was not written in the Big Bang. I don't think this is as consistent with your, and Einstein's, and Spinoza's God as Nature, because it is very strange to me to think of such a God randomly deciding to create us some time after the Big Bang.
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I enjoyed the article you linked, but the chagas numbers don't make any sense. Another quote in the article claims that 15 million people in latin america are "suffering" from chagas. And Wikipedia claims that 18 million people in latin america are "affected" by chagas. Also according to wikipedia, there are 100 million people in Mexico. Then if the entire 15 million people infected (assuming "affected" and "suffering" means infected) with Chagas are in mexico, that is only 15% of the mexican population. It doesn't make any sense to me that 10% of the mexican aliens could have chagas. My guess is someone is being imprecisely quoted here. I wonder if 10% is an upper limit (the quote does say "as many as"), which would mean that not more than 10% are infected, but it could be much lower. That seems much more sane. Also, sorry to nit pick, but this doesn't make you 5X more likely to die of you live in LA; it just makes you 5 times more likely to get blood infected with Chagas if you get blood from an anonymous doner.
The fact that these outbreaks are college kids in the midwest implies to me that there significant vaccination problems with groups outside of illegal aliens. Do you ever go to Whole Foods? If you do, take a look at some of the literature there sometime. I remember seeing a magazine with a cover story about a pregnant woman who had proudly refused AZT and other AIDS medicine because, i guess, she didn't "believe" in it. Of course, to be fair I guess, the idea that you even might be giving your kid autism is scary as hell.
From TFA: According to the suit, the record company is treating digital downloads like traditional record sales, rather than licensed music, triggering a different royalty deal.
So it seems the legal issue is whether these music sales should fall under the contract for traditional record sales, or licensed music. I have no idea how much legal merit this has. However speaking as a layman, if the contract for record sales do agree record sales, whatever they are exactly, are affected by things like restocking fees, then it seems harder to think that online music sales, which don't seem to be affected by restocking, are also record sales, and should fall under those contracts.
It seems to me that the debate is really over who gets to decide what is in each tier. There is finite bandwidth. Maybe for example comcast will have to move to a model where I pay more for a larger average MB/month in some way, just as I now pay more for larger instantaneous MB/sec. Then I will decide whether google, or microsoft, or comcast, or whatever gets priority (most of) with my limited total bandwidth each month. Maybe these are the kind of tiers you are imagining. This is very different from google, or microsoft, or comcast having to pay comcast to even get access to me. Then the control is in comcast's hands, and they will presumably be tempted to give themselves an advantage. Imagine if a few companies could control how fast other companies could drive on roads. Those companies would instantly get a large amount of power. In that respect, the internet seems to be no different.
You seem to assume we only have two options: a cartesian style dualism of body and soul, and this very strong reductionism where we are only chemical reactions. There is a lot of middle ground. For example, chess is a game played with only a collection of atoms, but arguably physics and chemistry can't describe all the subtleties of chess. Similarly, while our brain may be a collection of chemical reactions, that doesn't mean that we will ever be able to talk very effectively about our behavior using the language of chemical reactions, and that in some ontological sense chemical reactions may not be enough to define consciousness. In other words, the chemical reactions certainly make our consciousness possible, but that doesn't mean they completely define our consciousness. If they did, then I wouldn't think we should be able to have any hope of creating artificial intillegence that we could describe as conscious, since silicon transistors are chemically different from neurons in so many ways that are very important as far as chemists and physicists are concerned. I think there could be room there for scientific concepts that are similar to or are connected with the traditional ideas of a "soul" and "free will." Of course, traditionally the soul and especially free will are metaphysical concepts, so its difficult to imagine how science could ever address the concepts, one way or the other, directly.
(*) Even though 99.9999% of all gods are about as real as the Easter Bunny.
Um, you should really think about what feelings you might hurt before making a comment like this. I just hope the Easter Bunny doesn't read slashdot...
And arthropods. (Did arthropods come on land before vertebrates?)
In general, the laws of thermodynamics that I know about state something along the lines of "given system A, that system A must now do this, or that, etc." In general science has to take the 'initial conditions" as a given, although we can keep pushing back farther and farther in time. So if science were to understand a universe before the big bang with less energy or more entropy than the big bang had, then the laws of thermodynamics would have something to say, namely that there would be a lot of explanation needed for how the universe increased its energy or decreased its entropy. However, right now, we more or less take the big bang as the first thing in the universe we can explain, and maybe the beginning of time itself (not that I understand what Hawking really means by that...), so thermodynamics only has something to say about what happened after the big bang.
Throughout history, philosophers and theologians have recognized that every cause must have a prior cause, and that cause a prior, etc, all the way back to infinity, or to some first cause (God). I believe Aquinas also claimed that even if time had no beginning, so the universe would be infinite, there would STILL need to be a "cause" of the entire infinite timeline, and we would still need God. What I think you are saying echoes that, so you are in good company. However, I personally was quite convinced by Kant's argument against the validity of arguments like this for proving God's existence. Essentially (and I'm not doing him very much justice here), Kant said that we must assume in our thinking that every cause has a prior cause, which is why the argument is so compelling, but that doesn't mean that this assumption is true. It may simply reflect the nature of our thought. Then this argument doesn't show that God exists, but only that as a practical matter, we must assume that he does.
I think this is what I wrote... In any case, and you may already know this, I don't think as a practical matter a non-local hidden variable is an option, because nobody has any idea how to do relativistic QM (ie, particles and fields) with a non-local hidden variable, for example Bohm's formulation. And even without a hidden variable, QM still has a kind of weird nonlocality.
Almost all the experiments have gone the way of lack of local realism.
A small nitpick- I would claim that the experiments only show a lack of a local hidden variable, which ruled out local realism for Einstein and many others. However, I think that a sort of realism is compatible with not determinism, although probably not a realism as "comfortable" as we had before the 20th century.
I believe in absolute causality, as random as something appears, that's only because we're missing some/most of the picture.
I think you can believe is causality, and still believe in randomness. I can believe that event A was necessary for the occurence of event B, and later believe that an identical event A was necessary for the occurence of event C. Both events B and C were caused by event A. I think you believe in determinism.
You should take a look at the wikipedia entry on Bell's theorem, and the Aspect experiments. They seem to say that determinism and a local universe is not possible.
Knowing the historical and philsophical background of science is a good thing, and is very interesting as well. However, to teach this in high school requires all, or at least most, of the teachers and students involved to be ready for this kind of discussion. Any sort of discussion of the philsophy of sciences requires a level of competence in philosophy and history, a level of competence in science, and the sensitivity to appreciate why it is all important in the first place. If I remember, most high schoolers are just struggling to reach some elementary competence with science. And there aren't many people, teachers and professional scientists included, who can teach a course in the philosophy of science. So in practice, this would be difficult to do. It is made even more difficult because, I think, there is still very little consensus on what science really is, though there is general consensus that certain statements are not scientific in nature, of course.
Of course, it is somewhat ironic that you bring up that example, because Newton believed that it might take the will of God to keep the small perturbations from causing the planets to go flying off into space :-). I'm believe we undertand the stability of the universe in terms of chaos theory now, but I don't really know what I'm talking about on that.
The campaign against evolution is part of a greater campaign against the authority of science and the concept of a secular state.
I think that this summarizes up your thoughtful reply to me. I agree that this seems to be true for certain groups of people, for example the Discovery Institute. I don't think this is true for most people, though. I don't think they understand biology well enough to know that removing evolution from school curricula does this. You and I understand that evolution and natural selection is an essential component of modern biology, because science is an exercise in critical thinking, and one cannot think about biology critically while leaving out evolution. However, I think a lot of people see science as more or less a collection of facts. Evolution seems to be a very small part of those facts. How can it be that big a deal to leave them out? Most people need to be educated, not confronted as criminals.
I absolutely agree, though, with your sentiment that the authority of the scientific establishment is threatened, and that in turn threatens the US. This is in part due to my own personal beliefs about Science. I think that in practice, most scientists do have faith that if they honestly pursue Truth, they will find it, because Truth is both accessible and compelling. The authority of the scientific establishment is supposed to be the authority of Truth, which scientists have pursued for its own sake. The US is based on similar principles- that the individual can find Truth through critical thinking, and use it to vote in his best interest. This is being attacked with cynicism, not just with regards to evolution, but also global warming, the effectiveness of sexual education, the possibility of an unbiased report on war in Iraq, etc. When we no longer believe that a person can honestly pursue and state Truth, then by default any statement of fact becomes propoganda. We find ourselves with an entire news organization based around the idea of "fair and balanced", which seems to mean that somehow we must hear "every side" of the Truth, as if Truth has a side for every person who has an interest in what it is.
This is why I find myself disliking the sort of positivist, instrumentalist argument that you used (I think I got my philsophical buzz words correct...), saying that evolution "gets results", so it is a valid theory. I know that it is seductive to use this argument to defend evolution. I have used it. However, I have come to think that it loses the war, so to speak. Partly this is because if the knowledge of science is only a tool to get results, this makes it feel uncomfortably close to propoganda. Also, the argument always seems to degenerate into a philosophical argument over whether science is somehow fundamentally more epistemologically justified than religion (scientists just have faith in evolution, so they interpret all data their way!), or over specific paleontological finds, which most of us (certainly myself included) are not really prepared to handle well. In any case, I don't think the point is to convince them that evolution is somehow more justified than creationism. The point is to sell them on the idea that Truth exists, that it can be compelling in its own right, that scientific papers represent the honest, thoughtful beliefs of the scientific community rather than some institutional dogma, and that cynicism is not the way. In other words, we need to educate them, not treat them like they are stupid, or criminals. To teach them, we need them to to trust us, and we can only do that by finding a way to respect them.
It's God's archenemy, freshman philosophy-major man! ;-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Rubenomnipotenc e.jpg
I think you make a very good point. I think that part of the problem is that the human mind has very poor intuition for probabilities that involve very large and small numbers, and natural selection involves both. For example, this article http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/1 7/2224223 shows a study that claims that about 100 boulders have hit Titan from Earth. This is, to me, mind blowing. Space is so huge- how is this possible. But, we are talking about a lot of time, and a lot of boulders, so the results are unintuitive. Similarly, while it isn't too hard to imagine that 1000 monkeys sitting at 1000 typewriters could eventually type MacBeth, it isn't too difficult to calculate how long this would take. I don't remember the exact number of years- 10^30 comes to mind, but in any case, I remember it was far longer than the history of the universe (assuming they typed one letter/second.) So large numbers can play funny tricks on you. While a bacteria evolving into a man via natural selection is completely inconceivable, the amount of time and numbers of generations is also completely inconceivable.
If I could add a little more. It is not very well understood how quantum probability affects the macroscopic world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrodingers_cat ). We do know that the macroscopic world more or less obeys classical physics. So it's not clear if God would be capable of using quantum strangeness to affect our lives in the manner the GP post seems to mean (without violating the laws of nature, which I suppose in principle God can always do.)
As a professional scientist I don't believe that the scientific method unviels truth. I don't have to. It isn't my job to get truth. I get scientific facts, and model them with scientific theories. They don't have to be true because I don't care about them being true. I care about the uncertainty of my facts and my theories predictive power.
I agree absolutely that when evaluating scientific validity of a theory, predictive power is more important than anything else. But do you honestly, deep down so to speak, believe that science is only a tool to make predictions? Don't you think that the scientist should be trying to describe the true world? To me, what I read as your vision of science reduces it to a kind of machine for creating new technology because I only care about my prediction for its own sake if that prediction connects with reality in some way. If it doesn't connect with reality, then what good is it, except maybe to make the next vaccine, or the next airplane, or whatever.
Evolution is an established set of facts, and an excellent theory. And if Christian Churches want a fight on this one, I and many others with a distate for their religion relish the thought, because it will add to the long history of Christain failures and crimes against humanity, which will be used against them again and again in the future.
I agree that evolution is an established set of facts. You seem, though, to have a strange anger towards the people who don't believe evolution. I think it is good to remember sometimes that, sadly, this is 50% of the US! Most of these are good, honest, hard working people, who love their kids and want to do the right thing, but simply don't have the knowledge, intellect, or intellectual courage to accept something they perceive as contradicting what they already believe to be true. I hardly think that disbelieving evolution and natural selection qualifies to be lumped together with "crime against humanity." Yes, they often use terribly flawed arguments and always compare the scientific establishment to the Church during the time of Galileo, which is even more annoying, but there are much worse things to do, and be. Anger doesn't help anything, though.
Evidently, I wasn't clear enough in what I meant by "circular reasoning." I don't think that science is tautological. (Frankly, in my heart I don't even believe mathematics is tautological.) And I don't think scientistis take anything "on faith," exactly. However, I don't think that in practice, science is justified piece by piece, from the ground up, as like some kind of cartesian or mathematical enterprise, but grounded in experience. Please, see my other post, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182360&cid=150 82915 , except that you weren't rude, which I thank you for :-).
I am in physics. I am also a realist. I believe that science describes real things. However, we can never prove our theories, only disprove them, but we need portions of certain theories to understand other theories. So when evaluating whether theory A is consistent with our latest experiment, we must assume theory B to be true, even when we don't necessarily know this to be the case. Ultimately, all we can do, roughly speaking, is to test our entire theory for self consistency. So to verify the existence of the electron, we must assume we understand the machine we use to detect it. This doesn't mean this is easy. This doesn't mean that science is all some language construct, or whatever that postmodern interpretation science says. However, it does mean it involves some degree of circular thinking all the same.
Science isn't about "thinking about stuff", it's about hypotheses supported by factual findings. Read a book.
This comment was just rude. You are part of the whole intelligent design problem. Most of the ID'ers are just ignorant, and they don't trust us, the scientific community, in part because they perceive us as elitists who want to tell them what religion to teach their children. Comments like this don't help. The IDers can't help it if they are ignorant, and don't have the judgement to know it. We can keep ourselves from being rude, however.
I wasn't trying to say that X is on par with Quantum Mechanics. The equations of Quantum Mechanics are empirically verified, and that puts them in another class all together. I was simply saying that we can never completely remove our personal bias, even when talking about something as objective as the equations of quantum mechanics.
To refer to something that I didn't refer to in the last post, the interpretation of those QM equations, on the other hand, which I think is necessary to really understand them in any sort of satisfying way as more than number crunching machinery- this is going to involve at least some amount of inevitable bias. However, to advance physics, this has to be done all the same. For example, the current quest in elementary particle physics for a single fundamental equation of nature is motivated ultimately by Einstein, who himself was motivated in the belief of Spinoza's God as Nature. So this quest for a fundamental equation, which has been so fruitful for physics, can be understood to be religiously motivated. I don't think most physicists would use that language, and Einstein's God was not a personal one. All the same, I think this illustrates that in any sort of creative endeavor involves bias, which in my experience is any endeavor except perhaps for mechanically checking the validity of a mathematical proof, or that, after it is done, a scientific experiment agrees with theory. However, we do it anyway, and often we are right.
Also, again, there is bias in believe that life is absurd as well.
ID can take the complexity of life and the structure of the universe itself and explain it in terms anybody who has ever been to church can understand.
I'm a little confused as to why you made this statement. My understanding is that you don't believe in any sort of objective truth. Then we can't really talk about life and the universe having complexity, except from the stories we tell about it. The ID story (or perhaps its tellers) happens to cause a reaction in some people that causes them to trust the person they hear it from more than the biology story. How is this sad or not sad? An analogy: I understand where Luke's powers come from in Star Wars (the mitochlorians *SHUDDER*.) I don't understand where Neo's powers come from because its not part of the story. It's not sad though.
You must test all possible statements of the theory, and if one contradicts another or proves incorrect in an experiment, then that theory can be disproven. (That being that the experiment is correct and repeatable.)
I think that you may have just described another way to prove a theory. Certainly you do not need to do that much work to disprove (or in the more typical jargon, falsify) a theory because you do not have to test every possible prediction. If a theory is supposed to predict what can happen in the future, this would take, literally, forever. To falsify a theory, you need to only find a single prediction that is not true. I can list several that would disprove evolution right off the top of my head, and I am not even a biologist: if the world were found to be only a couple thousands of years old, this would disprove evolution; if all creatures did not share DNA this would disprove evolution; if our DNA were closer in composition to that of a plant than a chimpanzee, this would disprove evolution. I have not heard a single such example given for ID. If you have one, I would like to hear it (seriously.)
You (and by that I may mean a person in general, as I don't know your view on the subject) are certainly welcome to be a skeptic. Perhaps there is something about evolution or natural selection that offends your sense of scientific beauty. Fine. Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics for this very reason. However, I think you have to acknowledge that evolution and natural selection can in principle be falsified, and have not been, based on the fact that professionals who devote their lives to this have reached that conclusion. They are most certainly wrong about certain details, and they surely don't have the whole story. However, they are the same people who develop your antibiotics and other drugs, and your vaccinations, and to me it seems hypocritical to trust them on those things (I assume you do), and not trust them on the judgement that evolution and natural selection can in principle be falsified, but has not been.
I heard a lecture on the Shroud of Turin once. Of course, the carbon dating was brought up as invalidating its authenticity. And of course, there were those who claimed the tests had been tampered with. The interesting part was who was claimed to have tampered with the results- the Catholic Church. This is because the techniques you mention to replicate the Shroud involved heat. If the Shroud were authentic, one could imagine that Jesus's face is actually imprinted on the Shroud. Tradition holds, I think, that it was formed as his spirit left his body. However, as you mentioned, there is some evidence that heat and Jesus' face could have caused the image. However, a dead body wouldn't produce heat, only a live one. So if the Shroud were authentic, it might be imagined to lend credence to the idea that Jesus never actually died, but just entered a coma. His body heat would then imprint his face on the Shroud. Since Christianity doesn't believe in an almost-dead Jesus, but a truly dead one, this would cause a lot of problems. So, the Church faked the results to make sure this type of argument could never be had. I have no idea how plausible all this is, but it is very interesting.
I'm fine with some God creating the Universe. And why not mess about setting the right genes for mankind to thrive while he's at it, but why the hell did he create so much evidence to prove the contrary?
I don't think that God in some sense "set the right genes". I am not a deist. The process of evolution itself is God's process of creation. Natural selection seems to tell us that our evolution is contingent. I think we can interpret that to imply that we are a genuine addition to the universe since its conception. In a sense, our existence was not written in the Big Bang. I don't think this is as consistent with your, and Einstein's, and Spinoza's God as Nature, because it is very strange to me to think of such a God randomly deciding to create us some time after the Big Bang.