Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

[kyonides]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

Let the void, the best representation of nothing ever, try to make out a single atom or a single electron out of nothing, meaning out of itself, for a couple of trillions of years and the void will still be void, nothing, it'll lack of any atom or electron or gamma rays or anything else.

If discussing about any congress usefulness, let's say many of them just produce crap as result of extended discussions, accusations, (over or under-) statements and so on most of the time. Curiously, they can provide a lot of money to their (personal or company or corporative) bank accounts. We hardly get an explanation on this kind of modern miracles.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

Kyonides wrote;

Let the void, the best representation of nothing ever, try to make out a single atom or a single electron out of nothing, meaning out of itself, for a couple of trillions of years and the void will still be void, nothing, it'll lack of any atom or electron or gamma rays or anything else.

Methinks Kyonides was trained by a venerated sage and has learned to walk on rice paper without leaving footprints!

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

What you said, Woodsmoke! 8)

But, it goes deeper than that.

I was "taught" Evolution in HS and graduated HS as a confirmed Atheist. During my studies in college I realized that everything isn't as black and white as some make it out to be.

First, no amount of experimentation can prove a theory (hypothesis) right, but it takes only one experiment to prove it wrong. If that is so, and it is, why would a scientist want to design an experiment to prove an hypothesis correct? A scientist assumes his hypothesis is correct and designs an experiment to prove it wrong, i.e., to test it. IF she didn't think her hypothesis was correct she'd reformulate it till she believed it was correct before testing it. Secondly, an hypothesis which cannot be falsified is not a scientific theory, it is a belief. The hypothesis may turn out to be true, but it is still a belief. Beliefs are not necessarily wrong. The rims of science are layered with beliefs which cannot be proven but, like axioms, they are accepted as true without proof. (Biology has advanced because of advances in Chemistry, which has advanced because of advances in Physics, which has advanced because of advances in Math, and all of math is based on Axioms, to say nothing of Godel's Theorem.) Third, a good hypothesis allows for predictions of things which never before have been observed. A poor hypothesis makes no predictions except that which is obvious and patently simple. Einstein predicted an event never before seen or even imagined: the bending of light. In 1911, using his new theory of general relativity, he calculated how much light from a star would be bent by the Sun's gravity. In 1919 Arthur Eddington traveled to the island off the coast of Africa to observe a full solar eclipse. He produced photographic evidence that Einstein's conjectures had been correct within experimental error; light from distant stars had turned a corner around the sun, making them appear to shift their positions in the sky.

A scientific law is merely an hypothesis which has survived over the years countless experiments designed to prove it wrong.

But, it goes deeper than that.

In much, if not all, research more than one hypothesis can explain the data. Just like the Sun "appears" to revolve around the Earth, science kneels before Occam's Razor because it demands the more simple of two explanations be chosen. Or, in one of its variations, the choice which agrees most with the "Standard Model", or the most universally accepted explanations. Because Einstein could not believe what the equations of his General Theory were telling him, that the universe was either expanding or contracting but was not static, he introduced a "cosmological constant", a fudge factor. Einstein later called it his "biggest mistake" after he heard of Hubble's work. Edward Hubble is famous for Hubble's Law: redshift increases with distance and he concluded that the Universe is homogenous, isotropic and expanding. The information is written so clean and neat (the victors write the history) but it wasn't so then, nor is it today. In doing the math Hubble encountered solutions which led to two possible solutions. One solution described a Universe in which our galaxy is at or near the center of abounded universe and what the universe looked like depended on which direction you looked. The other solution described a universe which looks the same in all directions, is uniform, and unbounded, like the surface of an expanding balloon. He chose the latter, not because of Occam's Razor or scientific principles but because the former was "too horrendous" to consider. Hubble's constant varies by as much as 30% and isn't much of a constant. It all depends on who you are reading. Recent research with COBE in mapping space has shown that what you see does depend on where you look. Instead of uniformity regardless of direction, one sees concentric shells of galaxies, all of which have our galaxy near the center, just as one would expect from a single point explosion. Google "explaining red shift without dark energy" and see all the theories explaining dark energy, or explaining it away, depending on which school of thought you subscribe to. Just because the majority agrees with you doesn't make you right.


I've read various "proofs" of Evolution through the years, or read of them, which weren't what folks thought they were. The Peltdown Man, for example, which every creationist points at, was used as a club for most of 40 years to beat on those who didn't accept Evolution. It is interesting in that its recounting has received considerable "rehabilitation" by current authors to minimize its commentary on scientific methods and biases. Wikipedia's article is filled with statements by made by "disclaiming" scientists from almost the date of its discovery, 1912 through to the time it was proven to be a hoax, 1953. Even then they attribute the work to a joker, and not Dawson.

Piltdown is discussed very well here, and mostly fairly, even though it explains away the possibility that PhD's were awarded for work on Piltdown between 1912 and 1953. It seems plausible that over that 40 year period of time at least a few PhDs were earned using Piltdown, considering it was such an important find and the cornerstone for the proof of Evolution. During those 40 years most Evolutionist were fooled by Piltdown and people of Faith were ridiculed for being ignorant or stupid because they didn't accept it or Evolution.

From talk-origins:

Robert Parson pointed out in a talk.origins posting that the Piltdown hoax was a scientific disaster of the first magnitude. He said:

Piltdown "confirmed" hypotheses about our early ancestors that were in fact wrong - specifically, that the brain case developed before the jaw. The early Australopithecine fossils found by Dart in South Africa in the 1920's failed to receive the attention due to them for this reason. The entire reconstruction of the history of the evolution of humanity was thrown off track until the 1930's.

Prominent anthropologists, such as Arthur Smith Woodward, Arthur Keith, and Grafton Elliot Smith, wasted years of their lives exploring the properties of what turned out to be a fake. The lingering suspicion that one of them might have been involved in the forgery will cloud their reputations forever.

More than five hundred articles and memoirs were written about the Piltdown finds before the hoax was exposed; these were all wasted effort. Likewise articles in encyclopedias and sections in text books and popular books of science were simply wrong. It should be recognized that an immense amount of derivative work is based upon a relatively small amount of original finds. For many years the Piltdown finds were a significant percentage of the fossils which were used to reconstruct human ancestry.

It is a black mark on science that it took 40 years to expose a hoax that bore directly on human ancestry.

Lastly, the best arguments against Cladists are those made by those who advocate Punctuated Equilibrium, and visa versa. The "dirty little secret", as Gould called it, was that the Geologic record did not support gradual evolution because it was filled with periods of stasis. http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/...ted_equilibria

The concept of punctuated equilibria (Fig. 1) was developed to explain a pervasive and intriguing evolutionary pattern: most species change little if at all after they first appear in the fossil record. In many cases, individual species lineages persist for millions of years without showing any significant morphological change. The idea was described in detail in Eldredge and Gould (1972), where the term was coined, although important aspects of the idea were first developed in Eldredge (1971). Punctuated equilibria actually comprises several different and related observations. These include:

1. the fossil record contains a rich source of data useful for developing important evolutionary hypotheses;
2. speciation typically happens allopatrically, in narrow and geographically restricted populations containing relatively few individuals;
3. species are not slowly and gradually adapting and evolving over long stretches of geological time;
4. species lineages that show stasis – or an absence of morphological change – dominate the fossil record and provide useful information about the tempo and mode of evolution;
5. the first appearance of a new species in the fossil record usually does not represent its point of evolutionary origin but rather the migration of a new geographically isolated species back into its ancestral range, with concomitant expansion in abundance; and
6. speciation typically takes on the order of 5,000 to 50,000 years to occur – far shorter than the average duration of species in the fossil record.

Punctuated equilibria’s significance extended beyond explaining patterns of within species evolution. It opened up several new avenues of research and helped spawn a new discipline: macroevolution; it further led to a greater appreciation of the hierarchical structure of nature and its implications for understanding evolutionary patterns and processes. Finally, it helped re-integrate paleontology with the mainstream of evolutionary biology.

PunkEeek is not against Evolution, it is also the first honest attempt (IMO) to correlate theory with facts rather facts with theory. For the first time in almost 100 years Evolutionists took the blinders off and discarded whole planks of the Darwin platform. In fact, they built a whole new stage. They are arguing terms and mechanisms, but they've reduced any particular evolutionary change to a range of between 5K and 50K years. If Evolution is taking place that date range is sufficiently small enough that real evolutionary changes can be observed. My criteria for a successful evolutionary change is simple. As long as an organism can breed with its descendent evolution has not taken place.
The black moth and the white moth are still the same moths.


So, basically, science is wide open. IF you have the money or the funding you can research anything. Getting published is another matter. As the AGW fiasco has shown, if your work doesn't agree with the approved paradigm you won't get published. If it does, your peer reviewers won't be disinterested 3rd party experts in the field of study, it will be your buddies down the hall, who agree with you 100%. More than one scientist/teacher has lost their teaching position and/or their job because they proposed a project or submitted a paper which questioned something carved in stone by the other side, and the other side currently controls the press and funding.

[kubicle]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

Let the void, the best representation of nothing ever, try to make out a single atom or a single electron out of nothing, meaning out of itself, for a couple of trillions of years and the void will still be void, nothing, it'll lack of any atom or electron or gamma rays or anything else.

If, by a "void", you mean a volume of space that has no matter in it, then the contemporary view is that the void is not "nothing" at all, but quite a busy place where virtual pairs of particles/anti-particles form and annihilate all the time, and in some conditions (like in the early stages of the universe, where energy was abundant), these particles can become "real" particles which form the matter/antimatter we're more familiar with.

On the other hand, if you mean "void" literally as "nothing" (without spatial dimensions), speaking of trillions of years is pointless because the laws of physics (as they are understood today) dictate there is no time without space.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

.....
We can't because there aren't just two sides. You're forgetting the tooth fairy, santa claus, unicorns, all the various Indian gods, the great spaghetti monster, the celestial teapot, all of which have equal evidentiary weight. There would be no time left to teach anything that is backed by actual evidence. The superstition of God is not an alternate theory that carries equal weight as evolution. You have to lump the belief of a god, any god, with the countless other superstitious beliefs.

You're not a scientist, are you? I saw a coin of science once. Darwin on one side, and PunkEeek on the other. Which is right? Some physicist believe strings explain everything, others the "Standard Model". Who is right? Can String Theory even be falsified? One group of climate scientists promote AGW, another equally qualified group call it rubbish. Who is right? Is sociology or psychology even a science?

NOVA presented a documentary in which they reported that 48% of scientists cheat. The two Fed Gov scientists which were asked to check and did the research were sent to useless desk jobs in the sticks. The cheats they uncovered had falsified medical research, among other things. The whistle blowers NOVA presented lost their federal funding for revealing the cheating.

The research by the British scientist which attributed autism to vaccines proven to be faked. Ditto for powerline research which claimed that cells were affected by high tension lines. Ditto for clone studies.
In fact, there is more fraud by American scientists than others. And, that article just researched the reports that were withdrawn, not the ones that were not unmasked.

There is no difference between a "spaghetti monster" and false science.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

Why can't they teach both sides and let students decide for themselves?

Quite simply because the "two sides" are not of the same coin. There is no logical connection between the two.

They are not? Christianity posits an answer to the question of where we come from. Science poses Evolution as the answer to the same question. So, the "coin" is "where do we come from?" Or, "How did we get here?" There are two sides to that coin. Two chairs at the table. You can't win by denying the other side a chair. Saying that the other side has too many representatives for one chair doesn't work either, because science offers more than one answer too. Are you a Cladist or PE? Or, something in between?

(Not all science is represented by Western culture, either.)

[drooghead]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

"There is no difference between a "spaghetti monster" and false science."

Of course there is a difference as you yourself have shown that the science was revealed to be bad but how do you prove the non-existence of the spaghetti monster or other gods? Of course there is bad science and scientists who don't adhere to the ideal but at least good science will change as a better theory or more evidence is revealed. You have shown that false science can be revealed. This is a good thing and the revealing is a positive.

Rigorous scientific method just cannot be compared to blind faith, except maybe in USA.

[kubicle]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

Why can't they teach both sides and let students decide for themselves?

Quite simply because the "two sides" are not of the same coin. There is no logical connection between the two.

They are not? Christianity posits an answer to the question of where we come from. Science poses Evolution as the answer to the same question. So, the "coin" is "where do we come from?" Or, "How did we get here?" There are two sides to that coin. Two chairs at the table. You can't win by denying the other side a chair. Saying that the other side has too many representatives for one chair doesn't work either, because science offers more than one answer too. Are you a Cladist or PE? Or, something in between?

(Not all science is represented by Western culture, either.)

You wouldn't mind if someone taught a science class that humans came from the feathers of the Great Swan (without any evidence to back that up) because that happens to be his personal belief? Is he/she only teaching "the other side of the coin"?

Although I'm not religious, I don't really mind teaching religion as part of the curriculum (it's part of culture for many people)...I also think it's possible to be a religious scientist (those things are not mutually exclusive), but beliefs (religious or otherwise) are not science, and should not be taught as such.

science offers more than one answer too

And you can always dispute a scientific theory with another scientific theory, and let the evidence duke it out...disputing a scientific theory with beliefs (again, religious or otherwise), has no scientific validity.

[Ole Juul]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

Rigorous scientific method just cannot be compared to blind faith, except maybe in USA.

I guess they're two sides of the coin.

However, I do have a little complaint about your statement. Why the word "rigorous"? It sounds like you are trying to add something extra on that side of whatever it is. Not only that but faith doesn't have to be blind. I think we're basically in agreement, but I don't think it is a good idea to try to show someone something by using a weighted explanation.

As for the USA culture accepting the idea that it is OK prosthelytize that is indeed a puzzlement to many other cultures.

@kubicle
I'm with you on the difference. In fact I feel that an active scientist will inevitably end up with some understanding of "a greater power". The physical world simply becomes bigger and bigger, and more mysterious, the more you study and observer it. One has to be in awe of this world. However, from there to bible study is a bit of a stretch for me - not that I don't mind having a good read, despite not being a Christian as such.

[Fintan]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

I think I just started something here

But I also think a few are missing the point.

How is it possible that 45% of the inhabitants of THE "Superpower" can even think of seeing any form of creationism as a FACT, scientific or not?

13% of the teachers actually support this. But the scary bit are the 60% that are being "politically" correct.

I think this partly says it:

........it's only our nation's children at stake here.

But I would go a step further.
By extension it is the nations future at stake.

Thanks for the interesting reading

[arochester]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

Many high school seniors believe that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, while a majority of Americans cannot name one of the four Gospels. Jay Leno asked his Tonight Show audience one night to name one of Jesus’ twelve apostles; they came up empty. One in ten Americans believes that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, and only one-third knows that Jesus (not Billy Graham) preached the Sermon on the Mount. One of the most frequently quoted passages from the Bible—“God helps those who help themselves”—actually appears nowhere in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea...04.balmer.html

[woodsmoke]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

Wellll dunno..........but one great and UNambiguous proof of the existence of the Great Spaghetti Monster in the Sky is that one can throw properly cooked pasta against the wall and it sticks!

And we ALL know that we want our Spaghetti Monsters properly cooked!

woodsmoke

[lcorken]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

I had to google "the Great Spaghetti Monster". OK, there's a lot of important stuff I don't know.

Reminds me of the Urantia book. Biggest difference is that many believe the Urantia book is true. Well,... who knows? Maybe it is! I think it could be proven and dissproven in a court of law. One could get grant money to try.

Ken.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

The insanity continues: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...020104097.html

[woodsmoke]

Re: Provocation: Now I know why the USA cannot be competitve!

Made me think of when there was this kid when i was in school that took some of the beans that the teacher brought in for us to make "art projects" with (gluing them on paper and such) and walked around the room "snorting" a bean onto a kid's project when the teacher wasn't looking.

He woulda been kicked out for the year also I guess since it was a "projectile weapon"!

But, back then, the kids took care of it out on the playground during recess! His nose was too bloody to stuff beans in for the rest of the day!

Of course, today those kids would have been kicked out too!

And the teacher would have been reprimanded and put on probation for supplying weapons to students!

woodsmoke