ID advocates equivocate not necessarily by disparaging the theory of evolution for being a mere "theory," but by calling ID itself a theory and putting it on seemingly equal footing with ToE. Creationists use the word "theory" to denigrate evolution, to create a false impression of uncertainty. IDers use the word "theory" to elevate Intelligent Design and create a false impression of scientific credibility. Same basic trick, same basic fallacy.
I don't know if it's necessarily a "trick" or a "fallacy." Saying "it's just a theory" is just another way of saying "there's not enough proof to compel belief." They're not trying to imply that it's taken less seriously by the scientific community than other theories, just that they have reason to believe something else, and the evidence doesn't exist of such a nature that would "invalidate" their belief.
In this day and age, I think "it's just a theory" is a useful reminder, equally applicable to all areas of science, given a populous who increasingly treats scientific theories as if they were divine dictates handed down from a priesthood.
ID says nothing about who created the universe, and it certainly says nothing about the Bible.
No, it talks about an 'intelligent designer'. Now who could that be?
You could say it claims a "creator" or at least designer of biological systems, but extrapolating from that to claims of a creator of the universe or any connections to the biblical God are well outside its claims and arguments.
It is a scientific argument that primarily contends that the observable evidence in biological systems is incompatible with the theory of them being created by random mutations combined with natural selection.
how would you falsify something like that? What predictions does it make? You have to be able to answer those questions or it isn't a theory.
Fair questions, but if a theory has to be falsifiable, then String Theory (and variants) aren't theories either, and neither is much of neodarwinism, for example the claim of "random" mutation. I think much, both in neodarwinism and ID, may start to be falsifiable through computer modeling and simulation in the future. If we could ever completely simulate something like a bacterium down to the molecular level, we could answer a lot of these questions, I think. As for predictions, it predicts that the driving force behind evolution is something beyond only survivability and reproduction, and that there are additional laws or forces that direct it that have yet to be discovered. To me, the truth of this prediction is self-evident, as the continually increasingly complex life forms do many things astonishingly better than bacteria from which they came (such as math and philosophy, for random examples), but the two things they do NOT do any better at is reproduction and survival.
It's entirely possible that observed complexity is a result of multiple systems merging and then simplifying down into the present state, which leaves us with a system that appears 'irreducible'.
That is certainly something to keep in mind when thinking about the possible origins of any particular system. Hopefully in most cases we'd know enough about the earlier forms to know if something like that happened. If not, we probably need less debate and more discovery of evidence.
Right, because everybody knows we don't have any non-functional systems in our bodies....
It's besides the point, but I don't think we do. Systems thought to be non-functional in the past, such as the appendix, have long since been found to be otherwise.
Seriously, the premise of "irreducible complexity" is flawed in that it assumes that everything must have an immediate purpose, and that purpose must be the same as any future generations.
No, it's the theory neodarwinism that believes that every feature must have an immediate purpose (though not necessarily the same purpose as past or future generations) or it otherwise cannot evolve, as otherwise there's no natural selective pressure on that feature. The point of Irreducible Complexity is to attempt to prove that there are systems which could not have had a function at an evolutionary step before some critical point, and therefore the existence of those systems are incompatible with the neodarwinian theory. While it is an exceedingly difficult thing to prove, it is at least strongly suggestive, and in my mind puts the burden of proof on the neodarwinists to offer evidence that such systems in fact evolve "blindly" rather than with some "end in view," so to speak.
Who else was expecting a Holy Bible implemented in OpenGL?
*raises hand*
I was getting psyched. Plus the implications of the new direction for/. were mindblowing. I guess it's world-shattering enough that/. published my submission of the puke saber the other day, which is a story on Fox News, which I found on the Drudge Report.
I think it's a beer-based planet, and it's still fizzing up because it's young yet. I can't prove this yet.... but anyone who doubts me is a closed minded religious zealot!
Evolution is a theory that has so much evidence in its favor that the IDers are essentially nutcases who can't read or reason properly.
You either don't know the claims of ID, or you are a nutcase yourself.
It is the IDers that try to equivocate the position by using the common parlance flavor of the word "theory" when discussing science.
No, what they do is to point out that the "random mutation" aspect of the neodarwinian theory of evolution is unsupported, and in fact unsupportable, by the evidence presented in actual biological systems. They don't necessarily argue against evolution in general, but present evidence that precludes evolution from being driven by the forces accepted to be its cause in the more widely-held theory.
ID is not science. It's an argument (against no-one) about who created the universe and/or something in it. The how of the matter is not considered. Scientists don't care, since they want to know how. And worst of all, the ID-ers misquote, misread, and malign the Bible in all of their stupid shenanigans.
You've obviously never actually read about ID. ID says nothing about who created the universe, and it certainly says nothing about the Bible. It is a scientific argument that primarily contends that the observable evidence in biological systems is incompatible with the theory of them being created by random mutations combined with natural selection. Specifically in analyzes specific systems or structures which exhibit "irreducible complexity," meaning any possible reduction in complexity of those systems would yield a non-functional system, which implies that if that system indeed evolved, it evolved with some purpose of what it would become in the future.
See, the thing about evolution is, by most scientific standards of today, a good majority of the principles Darwin outlined in The Origin of Species are actually provable.
Really? Including the principle that God created the first organisms?
Yes, but although it could never be assessed perfectly, the more personalized the risk assessment is, "fair" it is, because it comes closer to requiring a person to pay for the benefit they are actually getting, and only that benefit. The point is no insurance business could succeed if they changed everyone the same rate, unless they were a monopoly or forced to work that way by law, with no alternatives available to the consumer, since it is not worth the money to people who know that they're low-risk. So the bottom line is that what is REALLY not fair is forcing people to buy something that they don't want to buy.
Well, why not? The small-ticket items are usually the ones that delay or prevent big-ticket expenses from happening. If Bob decides to skip his yearly prostate exam to save a couple hundred bucks, and as a result adds $40,000 to the cost of his cancer treatment, then who benefited from making him pay for it himself?
The consumer benefits the most from making him pay for it himself, hospice providers would benefit a tiny bit, and cancer treatment providers suffer a tiny bit. The exams gets cheaper for everyone who wants them if its cost becomes subject to market forces, meaning that changes in its price affect changes in how many people buy it. Since everyone isn't already forced to pay for them, you'd have a slightly lower number of people taking them, and so a slightly lower number of cancers caught in time to treat, so a little bit more business for hospice and a little bit less for cancer treatment centers. Some will argue that it's good to force people to buy things if those things could possibly save their lives, but IMHO that reasoning is insane. Live free or die.
And the only reason it took so long is that we men did everything in our power not to let them.
We're equal in number, twice as physically strong, and we held all government positions. We did EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER to stop them from entering technical fields and the government, but they did anyway? Wow, women are either REALLY tough, or we're REALLY stupid, or maybe we didn't actually do everything in our power to stop them. Maybe we actually set up set-asides and quotas to ensure that women got into degree programs and became astronauts.
AFAIK the immune system isn't set to kill known bacteria, it's set to kill any unknown cell. Your own cells have a "self" marker, meaning "it's mine". Anything identified as lacking this marker is instantly marked for termination with extreme prejudice.
Well, if you're describing MY immune system, you're partially right, since I have numerous food allergies. In general, no, because otherwise we couldn't eat organic matter. The immune system needs to code for everything it wants to kill. It doesn't code for kinds of cells, it mostly codes for kinds of proteins. If it needs to kill a new thing, it needs to learn to code for it first. Generally it can only learn to code for it well if it's similar to something else it's already coding for. The whole point of immunizations is to code up the immune system for specific proteins that it doesn't come pre-programmed to kill.
I don't give a shit about politics, about Al Gore, about Green Peace or a pack of greasy university kids marching to save the planet. What I do care about is that the vast majority of climatologists, while rejecting some of the doomsday notions of the activists, state very clearly that the evidence for climate change being caused by human activities is compelling and growing. To call these scientists "political" is nothing more than an invokation of a conspiracy theory.
And appealing to scientists instead of appealing to science, is the fallacy of appeal to authority.
So I suppose there are two types of global warming fundamentalists, those who are radical socialists promoting it for political ends, and those caught up in the fallacy of appeal to authority. I can speculate as to why some scientists support the bad science promoted by Al Gore and the IPCC, but it's really beside the point. The point is that the science is bad and/or non-existent.
well the issue is that Ice starting to melt faster and in areas that normally don't melt seasonally. This could all be part of a natural cycle but not a part of a cycle that has happened during the course of human history, so it's hard to tell what kind of immediate impact it will have.
This isn't true. The places they get 8 myo ice from is not melting, and do not melt seasonally, but accumulate ice during both ice ages and the in-between warm periods, summer and winter. Moreover, there is no old ice that is melting now that wasn't melting in the last warm period 120,000 years ago, when it was MUCH warmer....warmer even that all but the most drastic global warming predictions. And at that time there was not one, but at least two human species around to enjoy the weather and the bugs. Surviving warm periods is easy, bacteria and all. (Unfortunately, the Neanderthals didn't survive the subsequent ice age in enough numbers to persist as a species, though.)
Despite many of the paranoid ravings here the human body is an incredibly hostile environment to micro-organisms. It is highly unlikely that any randomly selected bacterium would be a threat in any way at all to a human - not least of which because it would have to compete with the various micro-organisms that already reside in you.
That's true enough. Of course nothing as tasty as, say, corn, existed 8 million years ago either, and corn stalks aren't nearly so hostile as the human body...... Point being there's only about a billion ways a new foreign organism can screw up an ecosystem.
Furthermore, the bacteria in question is almost certainly safe because it evolved 4 mya, in the ocean, in the absence of humans, and likely in absence of a dense population of mammals of any kind. Now ask yourself, how many bacteria are there, and how many are harmful to humans. Further, probe how the few harmful strains became that way, and you'll find that they almost all developed as a result of centuries to millennia of interaction with dense populations of humans and other domesticated animals. The likelihood of a bacteria isolated from humans that is harmful to humans is so small as to be negligible. We might as well be worried about pushing asteroids off course...
Exactly, what harm could possibly come from cloning the velocaraptors? We'll keep them in cages!
If you really want real discussion, then work at getting people to admit that global warming exists. Until that happens there can't be any discussion of what actions to take, or even if we should take any action at all.
No, if you want a real discussion, present evidence that increased CO2 concentration causes increased temperatures. It hasn't been done, and I surmise that it can't be done, because it just ain't so. Until there is evidence for that, the discussion will not be anything besides "yes it does," "no it doesn't," "you're a big oil stooge," "you're a socialist stooge," "I'm telling! MOM! Dr. Schwartz called me a socialist stooge!"
Mutuals are better perhaps. But they're still companies, they still have a profit motive. THat means they still seek to game the system and discourage coverage for those who need it most. So no, they aren't a good thing- better than nothing, but far from good. We still need national health care.
Yeah, and since private individuals operate on the profit motive too, we need national personal decision making too. We need to move all personal decisions out of private sector where profit corrupts, so we can follow the enlightened and morally pure wishes of the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court. Actually, since money pays for elections, we should eliminate the elected branches. We can all follow the wishes of the Supreme Court, and with no President and Congress, we can let them just assign their successors in perpetuity. THEN we would have a pure government and utopian society. Every morning the Court would convene and assign the profit-neutral tasks of the American subjects. What could possibly be wrong with that?
We could just put all the unhealthy people in gas chambers and kill them. Oh yea, that was tried in the 1940's and for some reason people didn't like that. (don't flame me, I am being sarcastic.)
For someone who is sick or with a family member who is sick, just keeping a job and earning money is difficult, then add to that charging more health insurance costs, even if they could afford insurance would just push more people over the edge.
Increasing insurance costs would just be a slower, less obvious and more politically correct way to kill them off.
But it would be just as immoral, maybe even more so!
Anyhow Sick-o the movie already points out how screwed the system is.
Interesting theory: The immorality of charging risk-based health insurance premiums is equal to or greater than that of exterminating people in gas chambers. And your a fan of Michael Moore films too... well, there's a shocker!
No, that's precisely the opposite of insurance. The "entire point" of insurance is to mitigate uncertainty. The way to do this is to charge according to estimated risk. (Not the same amount as you later receive back -- that is what makes it insurance and not just savings.) To ignore known differences in risk when determining premiums is counterproductive and inefficient, and is not a part of insurance per se. Any voluntary insurance system which charged the same amount for varying risk levels would soon be out of business, because those who find themselves overpaying would stop subsidizing the riskier customers, possibly by starting a competing co-op insurance organization with fairer rates.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if it's necessarily a "trick" or a "fallacy." Saying "it's just a theory" is just another way of saying "there's not enough proof to compel belief." They're not trying to imply that it's taken less seriously by the scientific community than other theories, just that they have reason to believe something else, and the evidence doesn't exist of such a nature that would "invalidate" their belief.
In this day and age, I think "it's just a theory" is a useful reminder, equally applicable to all areas of science, given a populous who increasingly treats scientific theories as if they were divine dictates handed down from a priesthood.
You could say it claims a "creator" or at least designer of biological systems, but extrapolating from that to claims of a creator of the universe or any connections to the biblical God are well outside its claims and arguments.
Fair questions, but if a theory has to be falsifiable, then String Theory (and variants) aren't theories either, and neither is much of neodarwinism, for example the claim of "random" mutation. I think much, both in neodarwinism and ID, may start to be falsifiable through computer modeling and simulation in the future. If we could ever completely simulate something like a bacterium down to the molecular level, we could answer a lot of these questions, I think. As for predictions, it predicts that the driving force behind evolution is something beyond only survivability and reproduction, and that there are additional laws or forces that direct it that have yet to be discovered. To me, the truth of this prediction is self-evident, as the continually increasingly complex life forms do many things astonishingly better than bacteria from which they came (such as math and philosophy, for random examples), but the two things they do NOT do any better at is reproduction and survival.
That is certainly something to keep in mind when thinking about the possible origins of any particular system. Hopefully in most cases we'd know enough about the earlier forms to know if something like that happened. If not, we probably need less debate and more discovery of evidence.
It's besides the point, but I don't think we do. Systems thought to be non-functional in the past, such as the appendix, have long since been found to be otherwise.
No, it's the theory neodarwinism that believes that every feature must have an immediate purpose (though not necessarily the same purpose as past or future generations) or it otherwise cannot evolve, as otherwise there's no natural selective pressure on that feature. The point of Irreducible Complexity is to attempt to prove that there are systems which could not have had a function at an evolutionary step before some critical point, and therefore the existence of those systems are incompatible with the neodarwinian theory. While it is an exceedingly difficult thing to prove, it is at least strongly suggestive, and in my mind puts the burden of proof on the neodarwinists to offer evidence that such systems in fact evolve "blindly" rather than with some "end in view," so to speak.
*raises hand*
I was getting psyched. Plus the implications of the new direction for
Wouldn't Congress just become more dangerous if they understood science?
I think it's a beer-based planet, and it's still fizzing up because it's young yet. I can't prove this yet.... but anyone who doubts me is a closed minded religious zealot!
If Issac Newton had mod points, he'd be busy modding down all the people mocking the practice of thinking about God and his role in the universe.
You either don't know the claims of ID, or you are a nutcase yourself.
No, what they do is to point out that the "random mutation" aspect of the neodarwinian theory of evolution is unsupported, and in fact unsupportable, by the evidence presented in actual biological systems. They don't necessarily argue against evolution in general, but present evidence that precludes evolution from being driven by the forces accepted to be its cause in the more widely-held theory.
You've obviously never actually read about ID. ID says nothing about who created the universe, and it certainly says nothing about the Bible. It is a scientific argument that primarily contends that the observable evidence in biological systems is incompatible with the theory of them being created by random mutations combined with natural selection. Specifically in analyzes specific systems or structures which exhibit "irreducible complexity," meaning any possible reduction in complexity of those systems would yield a non-functional system, which implies that if that system indeed evolved, it evolved with some purpose of what it would become in the future.
Really? Including the principle that God created the first organisms?
Yes, but although it could never be assessed perfectly, the more personalized the risk assessment is, "fair" it is, because it comes closer to requiring a person to pay for the benefit they are actually getting, and only that benefit. The point is no insurance business could succeed if they changed everyone the same rate, unless they were a monopoly or forced to work that way by law, with no alternatives available to the consumer, since it is not worth the money to people who know that they're low-risk. So the bottom line is that what is REALLY not fair is forcing people to buy something that they don't want to buy.
The consumer benefits the most from making him pay for it himself, hospice providers would benefit a tiny bit, and cancer treatment providers suffer a tiny bit. The exams gets cheaper for everyone who wants them if its cost becomes subject to market forces, meaning that changes in its price affect changes in how many people buy it. Since everyone isn't already forced to pay for them, you'd have a slightly lower number of people taking them, and so a slightly lower number of cancers caught in time to treat, so a little bit more business for hospice and a little bit less for cancer treatment centers. Some will argue that it's good to force people to buy things if those things could possibly save their lives, but IMHO that reasoning is insane. Live free or die.
What??? A high school principle who wouldn't obey the dictates of the Supreme Court? BURN HIM! ALL MUST OBEY!!!
"Vista sux" => +5 Insightful /. mods suck.
We're equal in number, twice as physically strong, and we held all government positions. We did EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER to stop them from entering technical fields and the government, but they did anyway? Wow, women are either REALLY tough, or we're REALLY stupid, or maybe we didn't actually do everything in our power to stop them. Maybe we actually set up set-asides and quotas to ensure that women got into degree programs and became astronauts.
Are you serious? I thought she was hot.
Well, if you're describing MY immune system, you're partially right, since I have numerous food allergies. In general, no, because otherwise we couldn't eat organic matter. The immune system needs to code for everything it wants to kill. It doesn't code for kinds of cells, it mostly codes for kinds of proteins. If it needs to kill a new thing, it needs to learn to code for it first. Generally it can only learn to code for it well if it's similar to something else it's already coding for. The whole point of immunizations is to code up the immune system for specific proteins that it doesn't come pre-programmed to kill.
And appealing to scientists instead of appealing to science, is the fallacy of appeal to authority.
So I suppose there are two types of global warming fundamentalists, those who are radical socialists promoting it for political ends, and those caught up in the fallacy of appeal to authority. I can speculate as to why some scientists support the bad science promoted by Al Gore and the IPCC, but it's really beside the point. The point is that the science is bad and/or non-existent.
This isn't true. The places they get 8 myo ice from is not melting, and do not melt seasonally, but accumulate ice during both ice ages and the in-between warm periods, summer and winter. Moreover, there is no old ice that is melting now that wasn't melting in the last warm period 120,000 years ago, when it was MUCH warmer.
That's true enough. Of course nothing as tasty as, say, corn, existed 8 million years ago either, and corn stalks aren't nearly so hostile as the human body...... Point being there's only about a billion ways a new foreign organism can screw up an ecosystem.
Exactly, what harm could possibly come from cloning the velocaraptors? We'll keep them in cages!
No, if you want a real discussion, present evidence that increased CO2 concentration causes increased temperatures. It hasn't been done, and I surmise that it can't be done, because it just ain't so. Until there is evidence for that, the discussion will not be anything besides "yes it does," "no it doesn't," "you're a big oil stooge," "you're a socialist stooge," "I'm telling! MOM! Dr. Schwartz called me a socialist stooge!"
Yeah, and since private individuals operate on the profit motive too, we need national personal decision making too. We need to move all personal decisions out of private sector where profit corrupts, so we can follow the enlightened and morally pure wishes of the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court. Actually, since money pays for elections, we should eliminate the elected branches. We can all follow the wishes of the Supreme Court, and with no President and Congress, we can let them just assign their successors in perpetuity. THEN we would have a pure government and utopian society. Every morning the Court would convene and assign the profit-neutral tasks of the American subjects. What could possibly be wrong with that?
Interesting theory: The immorality of charging risk-based health insurance premiums is equal to or greater than that of exterminating people in gas chambers. And your a fan of Michael Moore films too... well, there's a shocker!
Thank you!
and Amen and Hallelujah!