Well, actually there's something like 18 states with med laws (though most of them are functionally useless)...but polling on allowing medical marijuana alone goes as high as 80% or more...and only 2 states have 'legalized' for recreational purposes...in neither case is the political success even close to reflecting public opinion. So again, I'd say that shows that just because a belief is widely held *doesn't* mean it will translate proportionally into policy. And I'd also posit that the *only* reason for the success of MJ advocates is because of ballot initiatives where the people can directly vote on the issue. Creationists, on the other hand, have had to influence elected school boards and legislatures (I am unaware of anywhere where these issues were decided by referendum), which makes it much harder for even a powerful minority to buck the system. And since the polls show creationists are *not* a majority as is the case with people favoring MJ legalization (or an overwhelming majority for medical MJ laws), whatever lack of success you think the creationists have had in comparison can easily be explained along those lines, as well as a number of other plausible factors i can think of, some of which I expressed earlier. The bottom line, as I see it, is that you are effectively arguing that the translation of a widely held public opinion into *successful* political action is *so certain* that the lack thereof is conclusive proof that the polling of that opinion is consistently overstated by a factor of 3-5. I find that patently absurd.
I think there's a simple explanation. The polls are wrong. I don't pretend to know exactly why.
If you invoke Occam's Razor to discount evidence (as opposed to hypotheses), you're using it wrong. That you "don't pretend to know exactly why" is an tacit admission of an unexplained mechanism that makes all of these polls *massively* overstate creationist beliefs. (Highlights: only the Scanadinavian countries seems to poll in approx the range you claim; even the UK, Canada, and Australia report closer (in the 25% range) to the US numbers than what you posit; and "A study published in Science compared [34 nations'] attitudes about evolution...the only country where acceptance of evolution was lower than in the United States was Turkey.") Yet instead you offer up a lot of (IMO mostly unfounded) speculation as to why the prevalence of these beliefs "must" be lower, as if such outcomes are so certain that they override all of the other evidence (which IMO, they certainly are not). You therefore conclude that *all* the poll data must be not just inaccurate, but wrong to the point that 75-80% of people on multiple polls by multiple pollsters in multiple nations who choose the unambiguous creationist option *don't* really believe it. But you don't even claim to know why nor have you really articulated any credible way in which either the Gallup or Pew questions (which IMO were entirely clear and unambiguous) "may have contributed" to being misunderstood by the vast majority of respondents. In the language of Occam's Razor, that is quite a few unfounded assumptions.
In other words, your "simplest explanation" really seems to be the one that fits your pre-existing belief even though you have no evidence for it or any explanation why all the polls are so very wrong. My "simplest explanation" for the poll numbers is that they are correct (or at least reasonably accurate), and since all of your counter-arguments are at best speculative and IMO not conclusive of anything at all, you give me no reason to even entertain an unknown explanation in order to reject many years worth of consistent polling results.
Feel free to disagree, but don't expect me to tell you that you're making a rational argument, because you're not.
I see a lot of speculation and assumption here, but still no hard evidence that the polls are overstating creationist belief by 300%-500% (and not just Gallup, I never seen any poll that supports your <10% figure).
I don't buy the argument that if X% of people believe Y, then you`d *certainly* see it manifest politically as Z. As one example off the top of my head, polls have shown a majority of Americans favoring full recreational legalization of marijuana for a good 8-10 years now. And though the laws are slowly changing to reflect that, I`d say that success in the political arena is quite limited compared to what people say they believe, much like you are stating about creationism. That doesn't prove that the polls are wrong; it just means there are many reasons why a prevalent belief might not manifest as strongly in the political arena as you'd think. (E.g., entrenched interests, constitutional restraints, the fact that just because someone believes something doesn't make it the person's primary political concern at the voting booth, etc.) So sorry, how you think these beliefs would manifest politically is mere speculation and not hard evidence of anything.
I don't take any offense of your opinion of Gallup as I have nothing to do with them, nor do I think polls can't often be biased. I'll even concede there's a pretty big gap between Pew and Gallup (33% vs 45%) on what are nearly equivalent creationist answers, so I don't regard these numbers as gospel (pun intended). But as someone who's followed Nate Silver through the last few election cycles, I can say with confidence that polls, especially in aggregate, do have some basic level of accuracy. So when you say *all* of these polls are overstating creationist beliefs by 300%-500%, I'd call that an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, and you've provided nothing of the sort.
And I will also point out, you started out this exchange on the appropriateness of the poll question...only to shift back to every reason you believe such high numbers can't be accurate. Like I said earlier, I'd be overjoyed to see hard evidence that less than 10% of people believed such nonsense, the difference for me is that I can't simply dismiss hard data out of hand because it contradicts what I want to believe. And while you may not think so, in my view you are doing exactly that.
My take is that believers in creationism at best make up 10% of the US population.
Yet over this entire exchange, you have yet to produce one shred of solid evidence for this, and dismiss out of hand all of the evidence indicating otherwise. Kind of like the creationists, actually.
You are pretty much reduced to (a) claiming that accurate polling is impossible on the matter (rendering the question unanswerable, how else can you measure the prevalence of beliefs?), and (b) claiming an unfounded number based upon your mere supposition of how those number would manifest politically, even though I (and the AC above, which I'm amazed anyone would still be following this thread) offered explanations why that would not necessarily be true. (Not even to mention, I think you overstate your general premise that creationists have a "really hard time" promoting their agenda, I assert they do quite well at it, especially in the areas where they are politically dominant).
Obviously, at this point I'm not going to convince you to accept any evidence that contradicts your belief. But you have made it clear that all you have to contradict that evidence is your belief, much like the creationists. So unless you have some actual contrary evidence as opposed to speculation and your unfounded "take" on the prevalence of creationist beliefs, I declare this horse fully beaten to death.
Pretty much any position. IMHO a lot of people just randomly pick poll choices when their viewpoint isn't accurately represented or when they don't understand the poll question in the first place.
That's a weak cop-out. You know full well that anyone who accepts the general scientific consensus of the timeline of natural history would not choose the creationist option in either of the polls I cited, no matter what role that person leaves for an omnipotent hand in the process. Oh, you may have few jokers or idiots who don't understand the options, but that kind of noise is in every poll. You may as well say that no poll result (or in this case, 30 years worth of consistent results) can ever be trusted at all because people just answer randomly. If so, your argument ends there.
If there really were that many people with those beliefs, then they'd have better luck getting their agenda into classrooms. And they'd be a lot more overt about it too.
Well, now you're just coming up with rationalizations why the polls *can't* be true. In my view they *have* had significant success promoting their agenda, quite overtly, especially in the areas where these beliefs dominate. (And make no mistake, it is to a large extent a geographically and demographically concentrated worldview.) Even if I concede that with those numbers they should be even more successful, that doesn't prove anything about how prevalent they are. I would argue a large part of what keeps them from promoting their beliefs any further than they do is a functioning (at least somewhat) separation of church and state.
Believe me, I'd love nothing better than find some credible evidence that full bore denial of evolution was just some fringe belief of a tiny obnoxious minority, and all the polls consistently showing them as widespread are just an NSA-sponsored psyop designed to drive rational people into despair. And if you have such evidence, by all means, bust it out. If not, though, then I have to go with the best evidence I have, which states otherwise.
It's an easy way to get higher poll numbers for an extreme position when there is no intermediate position to echo actual peoples' viewpoints.
OK, then, please enunciate a nuanced position on evolution that would cause someone to choose the extreme position of "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time" over "humans and other living things have evolved over time". There's certainly none I can think of.
Not to mention, compared to other polls I've seen that *do* offer more nuanced options, this poll actually shows a *lower* number for the number who reject evolution (other polls show 45% or more). If anything this poll is biased towards showing people *favoring* evolution, not rejecting it.
For instance, look at Gallup's polling on the subject over 30+ years. They offer 3 options...
- Humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced life forms, but God guides the process.
- Humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced life forms, but God played no part.
- God created humans pretty much as they now exist at some point within the past 10,000 years or so.
Yet with these more nuanced options, the creationist position has consistently averaged around 45% going back to 1982, 12 points higher than the Pew poll which you assert forces people into the more extreme position. Kind of blows a hole in your hypothesis, I'd say.
But so what? The question is still entirely unambiguous by its construct, essentially, "do you believe humans and other species are unchanged from the beginning of time, or not?" There's no credible gray area there; if you answer in the affirmative, you deny or ignore all evidence of the evolution of species.
So while you can't draw any nuances from the views of those who chose the evolution option, it does quite clearly identify those who reject evolution entirely, right down to the fossil record. And the poll indicates an overwhelming majority of evangelicals and a very substantial percentage of self-identified Christians in general quite clearly, again, reject evolution *entirely*.
Which was *my* point, as counter-evidence to the OP's assertion:
Most Christians believe in evolution. Even the fundamentalist ones.
...where it appears the first assertion is at best marginally true (it shows a slim majority of Christians don't reject evidence of evolution entirely), and the second seems to be demonstrably false. I understand the inclination of the Christians who don't accept young earth creationism to distance themselves from it and to downplay its significance in the Christian faith, but that doesn't change the fact that by all estimates YEC is a very widely held belief among US Christians (your denomination may vary) and the dominant belief of US evangelicals.
Really? While it doesn't make any distinction between anywhere on the spectrum from "I fully accept the theory of natural selection and the timelines of mainstream paleontology" to "I accept scientific observations that the earth is billions of years old, but I believe God intelligently designed the process", it does provide a properly binary choice: either you believe that the factual evidence for the evolution of species is real, or you don't. What third option is there?
Sorry, but if one agrees with "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time", then then that person *is* by definition the most extreme form of evolution doubter, i.e., the young earth creationist. (OK, I guess there might be some old earth creationists out there that believe that life has continued for billions of years in unchanged form, but that makes about as much sense as the the young earth evolutionist.)
If you want to disagree with the actual results/methodology, fine, but as I've noted, these numbers are not out of line with other polls I've seen. But it's disingenuous to attack the wording of the question when so many respond affirmatively to a statement that is unambiguously equivalent to "the evolution of species never happened".
Read the link from the previous post. Respondents had two choices: "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time" or "humans and other living things have evolved over time". That's about as binary a choice as is possible on the subject, and the former choice pretty well defines 'creationist', that is, that one rejects all evidence of the evolution of species.
These results are pretty much in line with all other polls I've seen over the last 25 years. Do you have any contrary evidence to show that these numbers are massively overstated? Otherwise your clutching at straws to dismiss such data as just something to validate a deeply held hope that there are many "dumb people" out there (I, for one, find no hope at all in the idea) strikes me as a mere rationalization to deny that it could actually be true.
Most Christians believe in evolution. Even the fundamentalist ones.
Those statements are questionable without some significant disclaimers. Are you taking about worldwide or just the US? What qualifies as 'Christian' 'fundmentalist' or 'believing in evolution'?
Consider the latest highly publicized Pew Research poll on the subject. One-third of Americans believe "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time". Note that's not disagreeing with the theory of natural selection or postulating 'God's hand', this is utter denial that species evolved over extremely long periods of time. For those that identify as white evangelical Protestants (a good surrogate for 'fundamentalist', I'd say) , that number is 64 percent. Also, FWIW, only 43 percent of Republicans agree that "humans and other living things have evolved over time".
So at least in the US, it would appear that most 'fundamentalists' (and Republicans) *do* reject the evolution of species outright. And while I can't say that third of *all* Americans that would represent a majority of Christians, it is safe to assume that those people would overwhelmingly skew Christian, and therefore if most Christians *do* believe in evolution, it's a slim (and apparantly shrinking) majority, at least in the US.
Clearly, deniers of evolution are not just a fringe minority with a loud voice, these beliefs are frighteningly mainstream.
"Sugar may be mechanistically similar to crack in terms of addictiveness, but I have never heard of someone stealing a car radio to get a Twinkie."
I've never heard of anyone stealing a car radio to get alcohol or tobacco either, even though both are clearly addictive and are both highly regulated and quite expensive compared to sugar. Seems to me that legality is the main difference between drugs that people commit petty crimes to procure.
Just because a quote is on scienceblogs does not make it rational.
This is why you just buy whatever is cheap and rig up a RAID 5. A drive craps out and you throw another one in and keep on going.
That's exactly what I did...note I did not claim to have lost any data when the drives failed. The point is that when you have a 66% failure rate on brand new drives within a year, you start reconsidering your choice of vendor, no?
Seagate drives are terrible drives now. I've had three of there external drives not last more then a year.
Agree, I bought 3 2TB Seagates for my home server a few years back...2 of them failed within a year. Yet another brand name I used to trust, now shot to shit.
I had an instructor years ago who said his only exception to his "there are no stupid questions" policy was when a student asked him "How do you spell IEFBR14?"
copyright needs a clause that says that if the copyright holder is unable or unwilling to make the work available for a reasonable price then it should fall into public domain.
Summary: A bill is proposed to create a $1.00 per decade tax to maintain copyright on a work starting 50 years after publication. It was opposed by the usual suspects and defeated.
When you're in over your head there are two things you can do. Apologize, admit you were wrong and hope people forgive you and don't throw you in jail. Or you can double-down on the crazy!
As the unofficial rulebook states:
Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations.
Exactly. I am not offended if you want to display the 10 Commandments on your lawn, on your church's lawn, or if you want to tattoo them on your forehead.
But when you want to display them on public property in a country that expressly forbids the state establishment of religion, especially when other creeds do not get the same accommodation (exactly the point raised here), then damn right it's offensive. In fact, being how the motivation for these displays are generally for corrupt politicians to wear a shroud of phony righteousness, I'd say the more you believe in the 10 Commandments, the less happy you should be about them being used a political cudgel.
I assume that he was simply unused to being on his feet all day or maybe overweight or has badly fitting shoes.
Or maybe...like many if not the vast majority of warehouses, they have hard concrete floors, which are brutal on the feet. The husband of one of my co-workers' works at Home Depot with the concrete floor, he is slim and in good shape, and has tried every orthopedic shoe solution available and still it's problematic. And I know for me personally, I can walk or hike for hours on end without a problem, but more than 30 minutes in a Home Depot or Costco on the concrete floors and my feet and calves are aching.
Working at hopelessly automated amazon warehouses where you are treated as a physical automaton with no free will is "similar to" working in a traditional warehouse in the same way ozone is "similar to" O2. It's made of roughly the same thing, but isn't exactly good for you.
My experience as a warehouse worker consists of exactly 4 days from almost 30 years ago. It was a distribution warehouse for a major NJ supermarket chain and reading this article immediately brought me back to that experience.
I was in college and I needed a summer job, as the land surveyor I had worked for the previous summer wasn't hiring. The warehouse job was available and conveniently located so I took it figuring 'how bad can it be?' My recollections:
1) The job was basically to drive a pallet jack up and down endless rows of various products; pick A number of B product, C number of D product, etc.; stack and arrange the boxes so that they didn't all fall off as you continued picking, then bring it to the wrapping machine and finally drop it off in the loading zone. For every pallet you got a computer printout noting the maximum time allotted to fill the pallet. By the end of the fourth day, I was still struggling to get the orders picked in even TWICE the allotted time. It was far and away the suckiest work I ever did.
2) On top of that, the people who worked there were just sad and pathetic. The 'old-timer' union guys looked like they were entirely used up even though none appeared to be past their mid-40s, to a man they all appeared lifeless, joyless, and miserable. Then there were the younger guys, not in the union yet, mullet-headed yokels who *aspired* to be among the 'old-timers' with the blank gaze of death. I was struggling with the idea of tolerating the job for the summer...how one signs up for a lifetime of that...I can't even imagine.
Luckily for me, the evening after that 4th day the surveyor I worked for the previous summer called me and said they had a guy quit and if I still needed a job. I said unequivocally 'Yes!' and called in 'quit' at the warehouse the next morning.
That was a 'traditional' warehouse job, and I can fully relate to how it would affect workers precisely as the article states. I can only imagine how much worse it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, actually there's something like 18 states with med laws (though most of them are functionally useless)...but polling on allowing medical marijuana alone goes as high as 80% or more...and only 2 states have 'legalized' for recreational purposes...in neither case is the political success even close to reflecting public opinion. So again, I'd say that shows that just because a belief is widely held *doesn't* mean it will translate proportionally into policy. And I'd also posit that the *only* reason for the success of MJ advocates is because of ballot initiatives where the people can directly vote on the issue. Creationists, on the other hand, have had to influence elected school boards and legislatures (I am unaware of anywhere where these issues were decided by referendum), which makes it much harder for even a powerful minority to buck the system. And since the polls show creationists are *not* a majority as is the case with people favoring MJ legalization (or an overwhelming majority for medical MJ laws), whatever lack of success you think the creationists have had in comparison can easily be explained along those lines, as well as a number of other plausible factors i can think of, some of which I expressed earlier. The bottom line, as I see it, is that you are effectively arguing that the translation of a widely held public opinion into *successful* political action is *so certain* that the lack thereof is conclusive proof that the polling of that opinion is consistently overstated by a factor of 3-5. I find that patently absurd.
I think there's a simple explanation. The polls are wrong. I don't pretend to know exactly why.
If you invoke Occam's Razor to discount evidence (as opposed to hypotheses), you're using it wrong. That you "don't pretend to know exactly why" is an tacit admission of an unexplained mechanism that makes all of these polls *massively* overstate creationist beliefs. (Highlights: only the Scanadinavian countries seems to poll in approx the range you claim; even the UK, Canada, and Australia report closer (in the 25% range) to the US numbers than what you posit; and "A study published in Science compared [34 nations'] attitudes about evolution ...the only country where acceptance of evolution was lower than in the United States was Turkey.") Yet instead you offer up a lot of (IMO mostly unfounded) speculation as to why the prevalence of these beliefs "must" be lower, as if such outcomes are so certain that they override all of the other evidence (which IMO, they certainly are not). You therefore conclude that *all* the poll data must be not just inaccurate, but wrong to the point that 75-80% of people on multiple polls by multiple pollsters in multiple nations who choose the unambiguous creationist option *don't* really believe it. But you don't even claim to know why nor have you really articulated any credible way in which either the Gallup or Pew questions (which IMO were entirely clear and unambiguous) "may have contributed" to being misunderstood by the vast majority of respondents. In the language of Occam's Razor, that is quite a few unfounded assumptions.
In other words, your "simplest explanation" really seems to be the one that fits your pre-existing belief even though you have no evidence for it or any explanation why all the polls are so very wrong. My "simplest explanation" for the poll numbers is that they are correct (or at least reasonably accurate), and since all of your counter-arguments are at best speculative and IMO not conclusive of anything at all, you give me no reason to even entertain an unknown explanation in order to reject many years worth of consistent polling results.
Feel free to disagree, but don't expect me to tell you that you're making a rational argument, because you're not.
I see a lot of speculation and assumption here, but still no hard evidence that the polls are overstating creationist belief by 300%-500% (and not just Gallup, I never seen any poll that supports your <10% figure).
I don't buy the argument that if X% of people believe Y, then you`d *certainly* see it manifest politically as Z. As one example off the top of my head, polls have shown a majority of Americans favoring full recreational legalization of marijuana for a good 8-10 years now. And though the laws are slowly changing to reflect that, I`d say that success in the political arena is quite limited compared to what people say they believe, much like you are stating about creationism. That doesn't prove that the polls are wrong; it just means there are many reasons why a prevalent belief might not manifest as strongly in the political arena as you'd think. (E.g., entrenched interests, constitutional restraints, the fact that just because someone believes something doesn't make it the person's primary political concern at the voting booth, etc.) So sorry, how you think these beliefs would manifest politically is mere speculation and not hard evidence of anything.
I don't take any offense of your opinion of Gallup as I have nothing to do with them, nor do I think polls can't often be biased. I'll even concede there's a pretty big gap between Pew and Gallup (33% vs 45%) on what are nearly equivalent creationist answers, so I don't regard these numbers as gospel (pun intended). But as someone who's followed Nate Silver through the last few election cycles, I can say with confidence that polls, especially in aggregate, do have some basic level of accuracy. So when you say *all* of these polls are overstating creationist beliefs by 300%-500%, I'd call that an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, and you've provided nothing of the sort.
And I will also point out, you started out this exchange on the appropriateness of the poll question...only to shift back to every reason you believe such high numbers can't be accurate. Like I said earlier, I'd be overjoyed to see hard evidence that less than 10% of people believed such nonsense, the difference for me is that I can't simply dismiss hard data out of hand because it contradicts what I want to believe. And while you may not think so, in my view you are doing exactly that.
Horse stew for dinner tonight.
My take is that believers in creationism at best make up 10% of the US population.
Yet over this entire exchange, you have yet to produce one shred of solid evidence for this, and dismiss out of hand all of the evidence indicating otherwise. Kind of like the creationists, actually.
You are pretty much reduced to (a) claiming that accurate polling is impossible on the matter (rendering the question unanswerable, how else can you measure the prevalence of beliefs?), and (b) claiming an unfounded number based upon your mere supposition of how those number would manifest politically, even though I (and the AC above, which I'm amazed anyone would still be following this thread) offered explanations why that would not necessarily be true. (Not even to mention, I think you overstate your general premise that creationists have a "really hard time" promoting their agenda, I assert they do quite well at it, especially in the areas where they are politically dominant).
Obviously, at this point I'm not going to convince you to accept any evidence that contradicts your belief. But you have made it clear that all you have to contradict that evidence is your belief, much like the creationists. So unless you have some actual contrary evidence as opposed to speculation and your unfounded "take" on the prevalence of creationist beliefs, I declare this horse fully beaten to death.
Since you kept on this far...
Pretty much any position. IMHO a lot of people just randomly pick poll choices when their viewpoint isn't accurately represented or when they don't understand the poll question in the first place.
That's a weak cop-out. You know full well that anyone who accepts the general scientific consensus of the timeline of natural history would not choose the creationist option in either of the polls I cited, no matter what role that person leaves for an omnipotent hand in the process. Oh, you may have few jokers or idiots who don't understand the options, but that kind of noise is in every poll. You may as well say that no poll result (or in this case, 30 years worth of consistent results) can ever be trusted at all because people just answer randomly. If so, your argument ends there.
If there really were that many people with those beliefs, then they'd have better luck getting their agenda into classrooms. And they'd be a lot more overt about it too.
Well, now you're just coming up with rationalizations why the polls *can't* be true. In my view they *have* had significant success promoting their agenda, quite overtly, especially in the areas where these beliefs dominate. (And make no mistake, it is to a large extent a geographically and demographically concentrated worldview.) Even if I concede that with those numbers they should be even more successful, that doesn't prove anything about how prevalent they are. I would argue a large part of what keeps them from promoting their beliefs any further than they do is a functioning (at least somewhat) separation of church and state.
Believe me, I'd love nothing better than find some credible evidence that full bore denial of evolution was just some fringe belief of a tiny obnoxious minority, and all the polls consistently showing them as widespread are just an NSA-sponsored psyop designed to drive rational people into despair. And if you have such evidence, by all means, bust it out. If not, though, then I have to go with the best evidence I have, which states otherwise.
It's an easy way to get higher poll numbers for an extreme position when there is no intermediate position to echo actual peoples' viewpoints.
OK, then, please enunciate a nuanced position on evolution that would cause someone to choose the extreme position of "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time" over "humans and other living things have evolved over time". There's certainly none I can think of.
Not to mention, compared to other polls I've seen that *do* offer more nuanced options, this poll actually shows a *lower* number for the number who reject evolution (other polls show 45% or more). If anything this poll is biased towards showing people *favoring* evolution, not rejecting it.
For instance, look at Gallup's polling on the subject over 30+ years. They offer 3 options...
- Humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced life forms, but God guides the process.
- Humans evolved over millions of years from less advanced life forms, but God played no part.
- God created humans pretty much as they now exist at some point within the past 10,000 years or so.
Yet with these more nuanced options, the creationist position has consistently averaged around 45% going back to 1982, 12 points higher than the Pew poll which you assert forces people into the more extreme position. Kind of blows a hole in your hypothesis, I'd say.
Yep. That's my point.
But so what? The question is still entirely unambiguous by its construct, essentially, "do you believe humans and other species are unchanged from the beginning of time, or not?" There's no credible gray area there; if you answer in the affirmative, you deny or ignore all evidence of the evolution of species.
So while you can't draw any nuances from the views of those who chose the evolution option, it does quite clearly identify those who reject evolution entirely, right down to the fossil record. And the poll indicates an overwhelming majority of evangelicals and a very substantial percentage of self-identified Christians in general quite clearly, again, reject evolution *entirely*.
Which was *my* point, as counter-evidence to the OP's assertion:
Most Christians believe in evolution. Even the fundamentalist ones.
...where it appears the first assertion is at best marginally true (it shows a slim majority of Christians don't reject evidence of evolution entirely), and the second seems to be demonstrably false. I understand the inclination of the Christians who don't accept young earth creationism to distance themselves from it and to downplay its significance in the Christian faith, but that doesn't change the fact that by all estimates YEC is a very widely held belief among US Christians (your denomination may vary) and the dominant belief of US evangelicals.
Sorry, but if one agrees with "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time", then then that person *is* by definition the most extreme form of evolution doubter, i.e., the young earth creationist. (OK, I guess there might be some old earth creationists out there that believe that life has continued for billions of years in unchanged form, but that makes about as much sense as the the young earth evolutionist.)
If you want to disagree with the actual results/methodology, fine, but as I've noted, these numbers are not out of line with other polls I've seen. But it's disingenuous to attack the wording of the question when so many respond affirmatively to a statement that is unambiguously equivalent to "the evolution of species never happened".
How one asks the poll questions is important.
Read the link from the previous post. Respondents had two choices: "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time" or "humans and other living things have evolved over time". That's about as binary a choice as is possible on the subject, and the former choice pretty well defines 'creationist', that is, that one rejects all evidence of the evolution of species.
These results are pretty much in line with all other polls I've seen over the last 25 years. Do you have any contrary evidence to show that these numbers are massively overstated? Otherwise your clutching at straws to dismiss such data as just something to validate a deeply held hope that there are many "dumb people" out there (I, for one, find no hope at all in the idea) strikes me as a mere rationalization to deny that it could actually be true.
Most Christians believe in evolution. Even the fundamentalist ones.
Those statements are questionable without some significant disclaimers. Are you taking about worldwide or just the US? What qualifies as 'Christian' 'fundmentalist' or 'believing in evolution'?
Consider the latest highly publicized Pew Research poll on the subject. One-third of Americans believe "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time". Note that's not disagreeing with the theory of natural selection or postulating 'God's hand', this is utter denial that species evolved over extremely long periods of time. For those that identify as white evangelical Protestants (a good surrogate for 'fundamentalist', I'd say) , that number is 64 percent. Also, FWIW, only 43 percent of Republicans agree that "humans and other living things have evolved over time".
So at least in the US, it would appear that most 'fundamentalists' (and Republicans) *do* reject the evolution of species outright. And while I can't say that third of *all* Americans that would represent a majority of Christians, it is safe to assume that those people would overwhelmingly skew Christian, and therefore if most Christians *do* believe in evolution, it's a slim (and apparantly shrinking) majority, at least in the US.
Clearly, deniers of evolution are not just a fringe minority with a loud voice, these beliefs are frighteningly mainstream.
"Sugar may be mechanistically similar to crack in terms of addictiveness, but I have never heard of someone stealing a car radio to get a Twinkie."
I've never heard of anyone stealing a car radio to get alcohol or tobacco either, even though both are clearly addictive and are both highly regulated and quite expensive compared to sugar. Seems to me that legality is the main difference between drugs that people commit petty crimes to procure.
Just because a quote is on scienceblogs does not make it rational.
People are not physically working harder today than they were in the past
...which has absolutely fuck all to do with worker productivity, which is a measure of *economic* output, not *caloric* output.
This is why you just buy whatever is cheap and rig up a RAID 5. A drive craps out and you throw another one in and keep on going.
That's exactly what I did...note I did not claim to have lost any data when the drives failed. The point is that when you have a 66% failure rate on brand new drives within a year, you start reconsidering your choice of vendor, no?
Seagate drives are terrible drives now. I've had three of there external drives not last more then a year.
Agree, I bought 3 2TB Seagates for my home server a few years back...2 of them failed within a year. Yet another brand name I used to trust, now shot to shit.
Obligatory XKCD
I had an instructor years ago who said his only exception to his "there are no stupid questions" policy was when a student asked him "How do you spell IEFBR14?"
What's the name of this distro? I don't know, but it's built like the shit, and it's good to go.
copyright needs a clause that says that if the copyright holder is unable or unwilling to make the work available for a reasonable price then it should fall into public domain.
Public Domain Enhancement Act
Summary: A bill is proposed to create a $1.00 per decade tax to maintain copyright on a work starting 50 years after publication. It was opposed by the usual suspects and defeated.
When you're in over your head there are two things you can do. Apologize, admit you were wrong and hope people forgive you and don't throw you in jail. Or you can double-down on the crazy!
As the unofficial rulebook states:
Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations.
Enlightenment is a philosophy not a faith.
FWIW, there's another idiotic moron who claims Christianity is not a religion but a philosophy.
Exactly. I am not offended if you want to display the 10 Commandments on your lawn, on your church's lawn, or if you want to tattoo them on your forehead.
But when you want to display them on public property in a country that expressly forbids the state establishment of religion, especially when other creeds do not get the same accommodation (exactly the point raised here), then damn right it's offensive. In fact, being how the motivation for these displays are generally for corrupt politicians to wear a shroud of phony righteousness, I'd say the more you believe in the 10 Commandments, the less happy you should be about them being used a political cudgel.
Why not send marijuana, and then the US could seize the moon under civil forfeiture laws?
Even worse, the 'political affiliation' portion of said straw man is 100% bullshit, for even more Ewwwwyness.
I assume that he was simply unused to being on his feet all day or maybe overweight or has badly fitting shoes.
Or maybe...like many if not the vast majority of warehouses, they have hard concrete floors, which are brutal on the feet. The husband of one of my co-workers' works at Home Depot with the concrete floor, he is slim and in good shape, and has tried every orthopedic shoe solution available and still it's problematic. And I know for me personally, I can walk or hike for hours on end without a problem, but more than 30 minutes in a Home Depot or Costco on the concrete floors and my feet and calves are aching.
Working at hopelessly automated amazon warehouses where you are treated as a physical automaton with no free will is "similar to" working in a traditional warehouse in the same way ozone is "similar to" O2. It's made of roughly the same thing, but isn't exactly good for you.
My experience as a warehouse worker consists of exactly 4 days from almost 30 years ago. It was a distribution warehouse for a major NJ supermarket chain and reading this article immediately brought me back to that experience.
I was in college and I needed a summer job, as the land surveyor I had worked for the previous summer wasn't hiring. The warehouse job was available and conveniently located so I took it figuring 'how bad can it be?' My recollections:
1) The job was basically to drive a pallet jack up and down endless rows of various products; pick A number of B product, C number of D product, etc.; stack and arrange the boxes so that they didn't all fall off as you continued picking, then bring it to the wrapping machine and finally drop it off in the loading zone. For every pallet you got a computer printout noting the maximum time allotted to fill the pallet. By the end of the fourth day, I was still struggling to get the orders picked in even TWICE the allotted time. It was far and away the suckiest work I ever did.
2) On top of that, the people who worked there were just sad and pathetic. The 'old-timer' union guys looked like they were entirely used up even though none appeared to be past their mid-40s, to a man they all appeared lifeless, joyless, and miserable. Then there were the younger guys, not in the union yet, mullet-headed yokels who *aspired* to be among the 'old-timers' with the blank gaze of death. I was struggling with the idea of tolerating the job for the summer...how one signs up for a lifetime of that...I can't even imagine.
Luckily for me, the evening after that 4th day the surveyor I worked for the previous summer called me and said they had a guy quit and if I still needed a job. I said unequivocally 'Yes!' and called in 'quit' at the warehouse the next morning.
That was a 'traditional' warehouse job, and I can fully relate to how it would affect workers precisely as the article states. I can only imagine how much worse it is now.
My take on the name was:
We have met the enemy... and he is US.....intelligence.