Now now, that's not being fair. Labeling him a creationist is a bit premature. He could be a simple troll who's having a giggle, or one of the less than common atheists who pose as creationists to make them look bad. Still, no matter which one/s is right it's still painfully obvious that Leopold simply refuses to listen to reason.
Denial of Evolution VI.
- Thread starter garbonzo
- Start date
- Status
Now now, that's not being fair. Labeling him a creationist is a bit premature. He could be a simple troll who's having a giggle, or one of the less than common atheists who pose as creationists to make them look bad. Still, no matter which one/s is right it's still painfully obvious that Leopold simply refuses to listen to reason.
Excuse Me but because of this theat...evolution...you should know that the SCIENCE WILL NEWER GET ANY ANSWER FOR THAT QUESTION
THAT HAS AN ANSWER IN ANYONE OF THE 3 MASTER RELIGIONS ! ! !...Have a nice day
THAT HAS AN ANSWER IN ANYONE OF THE 3 MASTER RELIGIONS ! ! !...Have a nice day
Do you mean to say the meaning that is clear is that you will knowingly say any untrue thing in an alleged pursuit of truth, thus requiring us to determine if you are sad (too stupid to know that you undermine your own reputation), mad (too driven by irrational impulses to stop and actually read whole paragraphs and write coherent essays), or bad (deliberately trolling people who know better because you know they feel an obligation to humanity that will force them to contradict your dangerous anti-science lest other people think you are correctly stating the record).
Your reading and exposition skills are so poor, it is irresponsible for you to say "the meaning is clear" and expect us to have any common understanding of your sentence fragments and out-of-context quotes.
Nothing in the journal Science including the non-peer reviewed articles in the section marked "Research News" is meant for the Layman, but rather for people with at least partial work towards a Master's degree or better in a related scientific field.
Thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, laymen have a strong tendency to dramatically underestimate the difference between their skills and those of an expert.
---
I seek to clarify. In science, I would say a "law" is an empirical rule-of-thumb relating to a particular phenomenon. Being empirical it may be only approximately true or true in a particular limit.
The ideal gas law holds nearly true at very low pressures, Newton's Law of Universal Attraction holds nearly true at low velocities and low densities.
A theory comprehensively comprehensively describes empirical observations over wide classes of related phenomena and thus "explains" a law in more universally applicable principles.
Both kinetic theory and quantum field theory explain the idea gas law, with quantum field theory applying even when the "gas" is made of light. Einstein's General Relativity explains how Newton's law of gravity seems to have infinite propagation speed (it doesn't) and why Mercury slightly diverges from Newtonian's prediction.
In this understanding of "law" not being superior to "theory", Arioch and I are not alone:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=just-a-theory-7-misused-science-words
http://www.livescience.com/21491-what-is-a-scientific-theory-definition-of-theory.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-misconceptions.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA201.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA202.html
---
Since the first law of holes is prescriptively codified in the practice of science, then yes he is immunized against this particular form of stupidity.
What is "that question?"
How is the historical fact of life forms changing over billions of years with the introduction of new forms and the extinction of others any real threat to any real thing? How can anything threaten a fact? Are we to conclude that what is being threatened is no fact but merely an iota of opinion?
Or did you mean the empirically vetted scientific model of population change and adaptation which explains the history of recorded evolution is an impediment to answering a question? You should probably write that up as an essay for the scientific journals then so that biological theory may advance. Because with what little you have written, I honestly can't see that you have properly described the issue and therefore you are the one holding up the advancement of science.
Sorry, I am already a slave to reality, so as Jesus said (as related in Matthew 6:24) I cannot substitute three masters for the one I have, nor may I add three masters.
Also, it is objectionable for you to enumerate "master religions" as three. It demonstrates a certain profound ignorance of the world as well as that of the work of Charles Stross who recent work describes the One True Religion.
(The Apocalypse Codex, (Ace, 2013), p. 67)Charles Stross said:
Last edited:
Denialism is dangerous anti-science because it introduces false uncertainty into public debate. This takes time and resources to counteract.
Dunning-Kruger underestimation of one's own incompetence is dangerous anti-science because it unfairly elevates voices of unreason in public debate. This takes time and resources to counteract.
Contextomy is dangerous anti-science because it introduces distortions portrayed as authority. This takes time and resources to counteract.
Repetition of debunked hoaxes is dangerous anti-science because repetition mirrors the learning process and thus takes time and resources to counteract.
It's all first law of holes stuff. This is dangerous to yourself because you are harming your own intellectual development. You are exposing your misconceptions to an audience who may be harmed. And as this is an important matter of public debate, you are harming human society because if you haven't noticed we are deep in Red Queen territory and must run as fast as we can just to keep our present advances. We don't have time and resources to spare for nutters, trolls and fools.
Dunning-Kruger underestimation of one's own incompetence is dangerous anti-science because it unfairly elevates voices of unreason in public debate. This takes time and resources to counteract.
Contextomy is dangerous anti-science because it introduces distortions portrayed as authority. This takes time and resources to counteract.
Repetition of debunked hoaxes is dangerous anti-science because repetition mirrors the learning process and thus takes time and resources to counteract.
It's all first law of holes stuff. This is dangerous to yourself because you are harming your own intellectual development. You are exposing your misconceptions to an audience who may be harmed. And as this is an important matter of public debate, you are harming human society because if you haven't noticed we are deep in Red Queen territory and must run as fast as we can just to keep our present advances. We don't have time and resources to spare for nutters, trolls and fools.
Last edited:
Through mutation.
I'm sorry...
Your response, in the context of this exchange... I'm having difficulty parsing it in a meaningful way.
On the other hand. No. Really? You don't say...
...But what, precisely, are you going on about?
Your response, in the context of this exchange... I'm having difficulty parsing it in a meaningful way.
On the one hand, I'm almost insulted by this response.
On the other hand. No. Really? You don't say...
1) Genetic information is discrete and thus 50% + 50% does not imply blending or averaging. It's more analogous to shuffling two pack of cards and taking 26 from each deck.
2) The process of making sex cells (meiosis) has a recombination phase that means two alleles on one strand in the parent's DNA could wind up on different strands in the sex cells and therefore even when traits are linked historically doesn't require that they be linked in the offspring and its descendants.
3) Information doesn't mean what you think it means. The new combination can easily have traits (and combinations of traits) that neither parent had.
4) DNA replication is not perfect, and neither is the error correction which all modern organisms use to correct first-level errors. Since random mutation is information in the information-theoretical sense, even if the child is parthenogenetic offspring of a single parent it can have traits that the parent didn't have genes for.
5) Evolution doesn't happen to individuals but to populations.
6) Thus with all the shuffling of alleles and new combinations the offspring is (with quite modest requirements of original variation) a unique individual in the population with a unique combination of traits to be exposed to the winnowing process of natural selection and thus sexual reproduction with recombination is strongly effective as the mechanism of heritable variation required for evolution.
A simpler mechanism of asexual reproduction is used by some bacterial populations and even those can evolve significantly beneficial complex multi-mutation traits in thousands of reproductive cycles. Asexual reproduction requires many more generations to develop a complex trait than sexual reproductions because sexual organisms like humans have dual copies of most genes available and so many mutations are not instantly fatal.
me?
what exactly am i denying?
ok.
what have i been unreasonable about?
define contextomy, not have or stating the entire 9 yards?
you are never guilty of such a thing?
i brought up piltdown for a reason.
people see what they expect to see and find what they expect to find.
paleontology learned a hard lesson from it.
i belive there are some that would say the thread has been intellectually stimulating.
my misconceptions about what?
i wouldn't worry about it, evo hasn't much, if any, competition.
in my opinion the really interesting question is "can evolution be reduced to an equation".
plug in some numbers and out pops the organism.
this would imply a "direction" were none exists.
No you're not. You're a denialist; a manufacturer of controversy. Your posts follow the "wedge strategy" of the Discovery Institute, an intelligent-design political activist group.
The "wedge strategy" was an attempt to recover after creationists had been almost destroyed in the realm of public debate. As science education improved, it was harder and harder for creationists to maintain their claims against an overwhelming amount of proof to the contrary (and against a more educated public.) Thus they gave up on that. Rather than push creationism, they decided to merely manufacture doubt about evolution. Then when there was enough doubt they could say "why not teach alternatives, if there's doubt about evolution?" It was fairly successful - at least until the wedge document was leaked.
A quote from one of its leaders:
"I have built an intellectual movement in the universities and churches that we call The Wedge, which is devoted to scholarship and writing that furthers this program of questioning the materialistic basis of science. . . . . Now the way that I see the logic of our movement going is like this. The first thing you understand is that the Darwinian theory isn't true. It's falsified by all of the evidence and the logic is terrible. When you realize that, the next question that occurs to you is, well, where might you get the truth?"
Thus they do not CLAIM anything, just as you have not claimed anything. Thus they cannot be disproved. They simply cast doubts on evolution. Suggest that it's not "all there is." Claim that there are no transitional fossils. When they can't claim that any more, they claim there aren't ENOUGH transitional fossils. They claim that the mechanisms of evolution simply can't work, that they are too complicated to work well _or_ too simple to produce a wing from a leg. They claim that of course microevolution works, and that existing traits can change, but macroevolution is something completely different and can't be explained by evolution.
Sounding familiar yet?
heil heetla !!!
Why waste my time with a historical example when a future example is all the more telling.
Here you incompetently misunderstand equations, evolutionary theory and the nature of science.
An equation of numbers can only relate numbers, therefore if you plug in some numbers what pops out must be the number or numbers that solve the equation.
Evolution is already a theory, which means an empirically tested precise, communicable and useful model covering all phenomena in a wide domain. As such it already has many equations associated with it, chiefly the probabilistic statement relating how beneficial a mutation is to how likely that mutation will become fixed in a population in a certain size. Such equations quantify the qualitative lessons of evolution like "use it or lose it" and how migration and speciation are related.
Ability or inability to derive the shape and nature of life on Earth from first principles has no bearing on the question of whether evolution has a target if those first principles are wrong, and if the first principles that we have today are even approximately correct then your question of whether evolution has a target and evolution of man-like or god-like beings is all but inevitable is answered in the emphatic negative. So your question is predicated on the assumption that reality is far from what science describes and that humans are capable of accessing and understanding this hitherto invisible reality and reduce it not just to a scientific model but to a prescriptive formula or equation and this you hold out as a scientific question. Such a baseless predicate is the height of unreason -- in science we start with evidence and when are done with the model-making we let evidence decide how well it fits reality.
You seem to be reality- and reason-adverse.
Last edited:
leopold
That something has been learned in the last 30 years that negates and falsifies the ideas expressed by a conference in 1983(or more accurately, that falsifies the OPINION of a biased reporter in the editorial section of the magazine Science).
Everything, every statement you have made about the subject, every response you have made and your facts aren't.
Piltdown was a hoax promoted in the media, it was paleontologists who exposed the fraud. The promoter had to be FORCED to allow scientists to examine the "fossil" and it was then that the scientists pronounced it false. No real scientist who examined the "fossil" ever called it legitimate, it was the newspapers and side show hucksters that fooled the public(and made a lot of money doing it), they never fooled the scientists. But as you know and practice, a lie has reached the other side of the world before the truth even gets it's boots on.
Only because of the contribution of others as opposed to the stupidity you have posted.
Everything, evidently(we only have your posts to go by).
The point is correcting your idiocy uses effort better used to learn something new. Like a little, yappy type dog nipping at your heels, there's no danger that he will do any real harm, but he irritates the hell out of you with the noise and interferes with the adults trying to have an actual intellectual discussion.
Grumpy
That something has been learned in the last 30 years that negates and falsifies the ideas expressed by a conference in 1983(or more accurately, that falsifies the OPINION of a biased reporter in the editorial section of the magazine Science).
Everything, every statement you have made about the subject, every response you have made and your facts aren't.
Piltdown was a hoax promoted in the media, it was paleontologists who exposed the fraud. The promoter had to be FORCED to allow scientists to examine the "fossil" and it was then that the scientists pronounced it false. No real scientist who examined the "fossil" ever called it legitimate, it was the newspapers and side show hucksters that fooled the public(and made a lot of money doing it), they never fooled the scientists. But as you know and practice, a lie has reached the other side of the world before the truth even gets it's boots on.
Only because of the contribution of others as opposed to the stupidity you have posted.
Everything, evidently(we only have your posts to go by).
The point is correcting your idiocy uses effort better used to learn something new. Like a little, yappy type dog nipping at your heels, there's no danger that he will do any real harm, but he irritates the hell out of you with the noise and interferes with the adults trying to have an actual intellectual discussion.
Grumpy
No idea if anybody else is interested, but I now fully understand the source of my error.
My calculations were based on a specific source.
That source cited an average total N concentration of 125ppm, with a mass flow of 6.4 kgN/person/annum.
The mass flow is correct for the concentration and water usage stated in the paper.
The source I used cited another paper as the source of their 125ppm.
I tracked down their source and read it for myself.
It turns out my source erred in interpreting their source, and that error has caused errors in my paper.
The source that was cited in the source that I used examined 5 tanks and found values in the range 74ppm - 237ppm. It turns. Out that if you take the average of the values listed in the results, you indeed get an average value of 125ppm. But that's the wrong approach because it also turns out that four of the five septic tanks have total N concentrations of less than 130ppm. The 237ppm is an outlier and there is a good reason for this.
The household that generated the outlier is occupied by an elderly couple that divert most of their greywater to their garden an practice a number of water conservation measures - their water consumption is 16-30% of that of the other households. This results in greater retention times and more concentrated effluent resulting in this household consistently being at the high extreme or the low extreme of the data gathered.
Take note Leopold. I've shared my experiences here for a reason. This is an object lesson in science in action. Last week I was utterly convinced in the veracity of my numbers. To day I understand not only that I made a mistake, but what that mistake was and how it occured. If you had asked me last week about nitrogen loading and septic tanks I would have given you an answer as resolute, enthuesiastic and unequivocal as Lewins answer. Now, a mere seven days later, I would give you a different answer because I have new information now that I did not have then. That's in the space of only seven days. 30 years is 1500 times longer than that. That's three orders of magnitude more. Can you imagine how much science could change over such a yawning chasm of time?
My calculations were based on a specific source.
That source cited an average total N concentration of 125ppm, with a mass flow of 6.4 kgN/person/annum.
The mass flow is correct for the concentration and water usage stated in the paper.
The source I used cited another paper as the source of their 125ppm.
I tracked down their source and read it for myself.
It turns out my source erred in interpreting their source, and that error has caused errors in my paper.
The source that was cited in the source that I used examined 5 tanks and found values in the range 74ppm - 237ppm. It turns. Out that if you take the average of the values listed in the results, you indeed get an average value of 125ppm. But that's the wrong approach because it also turns out that four of the five septic tanks have total N concentrations of less than 130ppm. The 237ppm is an outlier and there is a good reason for this.
The household that generated the outlier is occupied by an elderly couple that divert most of their greywater to their garden an practice a number of water conservation measures - their water consumption is 16-30% of that of the other households. This results in greater retention times and more concentrated effluent resulting in this household consistently being at the high extreme or the low extreme of the data gathered.
Take note Leopold. I've shared my experiences here for a reason. This is an object lesson in science in action. Last week I was utterly convinced in the veracity of my numbers. To day I understand not only that I made a mistake, but what that mistake was and how it occured. If you had asked me last week about nitrogen loading and septic tanks I would have given you an answer as resolute, enthuesiastic and unequivocal as Lewins answer. Now, a mere seven days later, I would give you a different answer because I have new information now that I did not have then. That's in the space of only seven days. 30 years is 1500 times longer than that. That's three orders of magnitude more. Can you imagine how much science could change over such a yawning chasm of time?
but yet you go on to say:
can i say you have no understanding of equations, evo theory, or science?
can't i even raise the question of interest in an evo equation(s)?
as a matter of fact it seems impossible for it NOT to be reducible.
can you give some examples where common life reactions do not follow an equation?
like i said, this implies a direction and looking from the OTHER side you could say "directed" but this relation is apparent, not real.
and yes, reality and the science model of that reality are 2 different things.
actually you start with an observation, formulate hypothesis about said observation, then test those hypothesis.
science is a method of discovery, not one of proof.
yes, and i've understood the point you are trying to make ever since grumpy mentioned molecular evolution about 500 posts ago.
- Status