Empire of the Iguanadons

It brings comfort to me knowing there are still kids out there who are being brought up right. I know this particular video is dealing with gay marriage, and it's a subject I feel strongly about, but the point here is that, yes, there ARE still young conservatives. The left hasn't driven them fully from the world. I hope such a thing never comes to pass, because if it does, there won't be an America left to have this debate in.

Also, no, I'm not looking to engage a debate about the issue of gay marriage either. It just happens to be what brought this girl into the limelight. Her explanation of it is more or less where I stand on it and she's explained it far better than I ever could.


(Yes, this post is mainly to answer the sound of crickets heard elsewhere.....)
.........................
RIP United States of America

July 1776 - November 2012.

Heh, no, because once we're there the answer will be pretty apparent

The problem with the scientific literature argument is that it's gateways are all controlled by the very people with a vested interest in making sure Evolution is never challenged in a serious way. So to claim that because nothing is in the literature therefore the theory is balls is a rather convenient thing.

If you put that argument to the test, you will see that it has to be false. Look at all the big names you can think of in science, everyone of them has something in common. Specifically they all came up with some radically new idea that was not the consensus view.

Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Popper, Weinberg, Hawking, you name it, they all came up with some revolutionary idea. That said, the way to become famous in science, is to have a dissenting view which the evidence supports.

Dissent is as much part of the scientific method as testing the null hypothesis is, all major break throughs in understanding have come from one person who disagrees with the consensus and then puts forward a better theory which the evidence supports.

If the evidence supported ID, then guys like Meyers, Behe and Dembski would have nobel prises, be house hold names and be more famous than any current living scientists. The fact that they are not, means that either the science does not support their claims or that 150,000 scientists in 100 different countries and in countless different institutions conspired to bury the truth.

Apply Occams Razor to these and there is only one answer, their science does not stand up to testing.

Or perhaps Hitchens Razor might be equally as useful here, "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

And yet, you rattle off names of a bunch of people in unrelated fields (other than Darwin) that aren't blockaded by gatekeeper types intent on suppressing the actual truth.

If dissent were part of the scientific process then there wouldn't be a cabal of climate scientists running around calling anyone who does so a crank, crazy person, or simply labeling them a "denier". The AGW people are as bad as the Darwinists, if not worse, and it's no coincidence that these guys employ nearly identical tactics in calling anyone who challenges the supposed "consensus" on their views. Considering how much of a closed system they both run, there's no way to prove that you just asserted a blatant falsehood.

The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of ID, and news flash, the Nobel bunch are part of the problem. The science passes all the smell tests - except one. It doesn't promote Evolution. Therefore since it doesn't support one of the two big agenda blocks of pseudo-science, it won't ever get into the literature.

Fortunately the public isn't required to play this game and Evolution continues to be challenged in the court of public opinion. That's why given another 100 years or so this debate will seem utterly foolish and ID will be the established norm. Much like when scientists in the 1500s proved the Earth revolved around the sun and such.

Wow, I was just trying to catch up and, especially, respond where appropriate to posts that mentioned me.. I wasn't expecting to start all this.

Btw, Fury, while I mostly side with you on this one, that evolution is a scientific theory while creationism, or even intelligent design, is a religious argument, I am with Samson in that when I was taught scientific method back in high school the idea was that you had to have a theory that was at least plausibly correct to call it a hypothesis and it became scientific fact when you could prove it to be true; you could use scientific method to disprove someone's hypothesis, but that wasn't the general idea.

Personally, I'm also in the camp that says that while evolution is a perfectly plausible theory, it'll never be fact until someone actually discovers the elusive "missing link" and it can be verified as authentically the actual "missing link", which may or may not ever come about and thus creationism, while clearly not the end all of the story, is as plausible a theory for the origin or life as any other. (Even if creationism does rely heavily on faith in a supreme being and a bit of fantasy, or the assumption that the biblical version includes a tremendous amount of allusion rather than direct fact.)

Once upon a time, I read a really neat book on the subject called First Man, Then Adam! by Irwin Ginsburg that I strongly recommend you read if you ever get the chance for a most entertaining take on the creationism side of things in which Dr. Ginsburg proposes that what really happened was evolution did it's thing and somewhere in the cycle it got interrupted by aliens who bred with "man" and then genetically altered the offspring to produce folks who lived up to 900 years... Adam and Eve were the aliens who did the genetic meddling and so forth and they lived in the Garden of Eden (their spaceship that was left behind to provide them a safe (experimental laboratory) home until they partook forbidden fruit from the tree of life (the ship's computer) and so on.. really a fun read regardless of which side you stand on, unless you're so steeped in your religion as to feel it's purely blasphemy, in which case there's no point in entering a debate about the two sides anyway.

That is just the difference between an observationalist induction scientific method and an empirical falsification scientific method. Induction makes claims based on observation and calls them true, falsification attempts to prove the observation wrong. Pretty much its a pissing match based on statistics. Something can only be fact if you have all knowledge, and the fact is we do not have all knowledge, so we cannot prove that something is true, but we can prove that it is false by making observations that show it is false.
Pretty much falsification is the ducks nuts because it overcomes the problems associated with induction.

Translation: They cooked up a new scientific method for the politically correct to be able to feel better about science.

All science I was ever taught made mention of only one scientific method - you propose a hypothesis. Conduct experiments to validate it. Publish your findings. Other scientists repeat your experiments and either confirm your findings as true, or demonstrate them false. If true, your work moves into the theory stage. If false, you scratch your head and wonder WTF was wrong, and either try again or conclude that it's not worth it.

The bottom line being that yes, the scientific method is intended to be used to prove something is true, not to play around with philosophical arguments about being able to demonstrate something is false. What you're trying to convince us with is not science, it's philosophy.

@Conner: That book sounds fascinating. I'm not so hung up on religious dogma to dismiss the existence of aliens out of hand and I love a good sci-fi scenario as much as the next person.

One, LOL there is no one method. But the underlying principles remain the same, observe, question, predict, test, draw conclusions. How you understand how all this works together depends on if you were taught Hume or Popper, induction or falsification.

Induction says a theory is scientific if it can be verified. Falsification says a theory is scientific if it can be falsified. So when you look at these in relation to evolution, Darwin used induction to come up with his theory of evolution, and for the last 50 odd years the scientific community has been using falsification to prove that it is wrong. So far it has stood up to the challenge.

ID fails both induction and falsification, it fails induction because it cannot be verified, nobody can prove there is a god, we accept there is a god as a matter of faith. But this is also the problem with induction, just because we cannot prove an aspect of a theory, does not mean that the theory is wrong. So when you look at ID as a theory, and examine the predictions it makes about the observable world, you find that its predictions are false, and so the theory is false also, because we can falsify its predictions, and prove they are wrong.

I get the argument you're making, I really do, I just can't accept it because it defies all known logic.

If a theory cannot be proven, how the hell did it ever get to become one? That would mean the underlying hypothesis was also invalid. Therefore this "falsification" BS people keep throwing around as though it's science and not philosophy makes zero sense.

The scientific method means you propose a hypothesis, test it, and if it DOESN'T work, that's it. You're done. It NEVER reaches the point of being a theory because theories have to have evidence backing them up first.

As you're describing it, Falsification may as well be another religion since it assumes the hypothesis is true even with no evidence to back it up. You are tasked with the impossible - to disprove something. That shit doesn't even work in legal cases, so how it ever became acceptable in modern science is just plain crazy.

Of course, I know the answer to that already but the lefties won't ever admit it.

Its a philosophical question, one that is supported by religion as well, there is only one entity that has all knowledge, and that is god and god alone. If we do not have all knowledge, we cannot prove something is right with all certainty, but we can prove that it is wrong with all certainty very easily.

Ever seen an atom? No? Neither have i, but i assume you accept atomic theory as being correct, you cannot prove an atom is true, because you cannot see it. So we test the predictions made by atomic theory and so far no one has been able to prove it false, but if you could falsify atomic theory, you would be the scientific version of a rock star.

You cannot prove what you cannot see, but you can surely falsify what you cannot see by testing its predictions. Atomic theory is at best a 99.99% certainty, it is accepted as proven because it has yet to be proven false.

Conservatives seem to think about things in terms of black and white, unfortunately, things like this are more about shades of grey, and not that porn novel about vampires either. LOL



It accepts the hypothesis to be true if through testing its predictions it has not been proven false.

I personally haven't seen an atom. No, I don't take their existence on blind faith. Actual scientists have done actual experiments to prove their existence, and the invention of the electron microscope verified them via direct observation. So nothing about atomic theory fits the Falsification philosophy.


And how is this different from claims that God exists and being unable to prove His existence false? See, it's a philosophical argument. Not a scientific one. This is the difference modern day education is refusing to acknowledge even though they clearly know the difference and selectively apply it against things they don't like. Like God, or like ID, which would challenge their belief structure.

Everything is, Dalton proposed atomic theory in the 1700's and it stood the test for the next 200 years though testing its predictions until the 1950's when we could actually observe the atom. So for 200 odd years nothing that Dalton proposed was tested to be false. And when we had the technical means to observe the atom, it was proven to be true.

So are you saying that for 200 years Dalton was full of shit and should not have been taken seriously because you could not see it?




It is because of how the question is formed, "There is a god" or "There is no god" there is no test to show that that either of these can be wrong. "All swans are black" can be shown to be wrong by finding a swan that is not black. You can only show your statement is true by proving it is not false.

Oh and you do not really see an atom in an electron microscope, you only see the shape of the electron cloud, you cannot see anything smaller than a photon, and as the electron microscope used photons to illuminate its object, and that the atom is smaller than a photon, we have not really seen an atom at all. So the only way we know that atomic theory is correct, is by falsifying the predictions of the theory.

Nope. I'm saying Dalton proposed a hypothesis that we lacked the technology to verify at the time. It would have been foolish to say though that "yes, this is true" if there's no evidence to back that up. Saying that because nobody has proven it false only gives total validity to anyone claiming you can't discount God since you can't prove God false either.

The God thing is only a problem since you can't prove he DOES exist either.

ID doesn't have this problem though. Evidence is abundant that the systems of life are too complex to have formed through random mutation.

I mean hell, by your logic I can say dragons exist. Since you can't prove it false, it must be true. Watch out for the turds!

Uh, and no, photons are considerably smaller than atoms. Who teaches science down there anyway?

Sorry, not photon, you cannot see anything opticly smaller than the shortest wavelength of light, what the tunnelling electron microscope shows you is the electric field of the electron cloud. The shortest wavelenght of light is 10^-7 and an atom is 10^-11 meters or something like that.



You would still have to base your dragon theory on something you can observe. Dalton could not see atoms, so for all intents and purposes they do not exist to him, but he theorised that everything he can see is made up of fundamental partials, and he set about designing experiments that could disprove his theory or support it.

So, your theory that dragons exist, can be tested by the predictions of this theory, big shits falling from the sky, an animal that breaths fire, well, none of us have been hit by falling shit from the sky, but there is a beetle that breaths hot acid from its mouth to kill its prey, maybe this is the fabled dragon. So i proved your dragon theory false and gave you a new dragon theory where the flying fire breaking creature is small, not large.

Which would be fine, if I hadn't specifically seen the show where they had one of the guys on who imaged an atom directly. So again, I dunno who teaches what down there but they're either about 80 years behind the times or feeding you lot a pile of crap. It's hard to tell which.

As far as my dragon theory goes, that wasn't just an arbitrary joke either. Not just because there have in fact been some big piles of shit found that nobody can readily identify, but because dragons also appeared in what passed for medieval science texts that documented living animals of the day.

The important distinction is that they did NOT breathe fire, nor are any of the academic depictions of them drawn that way. They are otherwise what you'd expect. Big leathery skinned lizards that fly. Although the proportions I remember seeing indicated they're not bigger than whales either. Modern day fantasy has exaggerated them by quite a bit.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/jul/16/electron-microscope-sees-single-hydrogen-atoms

More or less, all the imaging methods are doing are using the predictions of atomic theory and making measurements of those predictions. It is like an xray, an xray shows the bones in your body by making measurements of the reflection of the xrays themselves on a photographic plate, you are not seeing the bones themselves, but a representation of them, which confirms the theory that bones are the supporting structures in your body.



I was being tongue in cheek for sure in my reply, and i know some about those texts you alude to also, but i tell you what, if i saw any of the flying dinosaurs in person, i would think that it was a mythical dragon. With things like loch ness and the like, it is not inconceivable that some dinosaurs or close relatives of the dinosaurs survived into the middle ages. It is not like we can observe everywhere at once, and how much we could observe at one time was even more limited than today.

Medieval science texts are more than a little bit different to those of today (or the sort of stuff that began in the renaissance and the enlightenment) as well as Roman and Greek texts during the classical era. And the distinguishing factor between medieval texts and the rest of them is that the people writing the rest of them were as a rule far better educated and didn't talk of 'dragons'. Or any other big, over sized lizard for that matter (you do find mentions of giants in some classical texts though, although they are invariably second hand at the best and often describe events that occurred quite some time earlier).

Which is about as far as I'm willing to go here; I keep my nose out of creationism/evolution debates.

I must admit that I'd never heard of this distinction, as with Samson, in the days of yore when I was still in high school and Ronald Reagan was still in office we were taught scientific method, not multiple forms of scientific method. In those days there was only one accepted scientific method. So, if they now have more than one form of scientific method, Samson's not so wrong as you're trying to imply in saying:

Like it or not, agree with it or not, this is what we were taught in school back in the 80s.


I thought it was an amazing break from the traditional science/dogma argument back in the late 70s when it first came out, but I'd gotten my copy as a free loaner and hadn't seen a copy of it in a single library since, and, regretfully, it's not a cheap book to buy. It's very well written and nearly every assumption presented is correlated directly with biblical quotation, plus none of it is presented in a way that even raises a flag of implausibility. If you can get hold of a copy, it's a great read and will definitely give you a third perspective for the traditional argument that truly does make sense, and accepting alien influence really isn't any more difficult than accepting a direct divine intervention if you're honest about it.


I don't know about Fury's arguments on this, but I think I see part of the problem here. Based on what you and I were taught, any hypothesis that hasn't been disproven yet is a valid theory, only once it has been actually proven does it graduate from theory to scientific fact.


Whoa! Slow down there, Hos! Are you saying that they don't exist?!? Man, almost every D&D character I've ever played is going to mighty upset to hear this.. most of my mud characters will be too..


Now you're going to bring Nessie into this too?!? Here I was thinking that this was intended as a serious scientific debate going on. :sigh:

@Conner HUSH you, its bloody hard enough for me to debate this with Samson alone without you jumping in with more angles to consider and respond to. LOL



Things change, science changes all the time and attempts to improve how it works. Even the hierarchical way you were taught how things work, hypothesis becomes theory becomes law, is not how things actually work in the real world either. They are terms that do different things, but one does not beget the other, nor is one more important that the other. I think the following quote sums it up nicely as to how things work. http://science.kennesaw.edu/~rmatson/3380theory.html



As for the induction, falsification thing, these wiki links do a good job of explaining it all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

According to a certain door knocking religious organisation, scientists have proven the existence of god, they found him in their large hadron kaleidoscope.

Actually, Fury, I wasn't talking about scientific laws, I was talking about scientifically accepted facts. But, yes, new facts arise that render other facts incorrect or obsolete all the time. Once upon a time it was accepted fact that the universe revolved around the earth and that the earth was flat, we later realized those weren't true and, while it took herculean efforts to prove it to enough people to get the new facts accepted by the world at large, they eventually were. These were derived from theories, they did not become laws, just facts.

As for scientific method itself being evolved, if this really is the case then someone really ought to have made these new methods a little more publicly visible, even my 7th grade son isn't aware of these new developments in scientific method as of yet.

With regard to your assertion that scientists have proven the existence of God in CERN's Large Hadron Collider, I think that would seriously depend heavily upon your definition of God.

Actually, I looked into this assertion of the "flat earthers" once and found that it's not true. At no time did man actually believe the world to be flat. The ancient Greeks and Romans both knew better, and even the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians all knew it wasn't flat. All this crap people have been taught in school about how Columbus was setting out to prove the world was round is bunk. He was simply looking for an alternate trade route to India and it was simply a case of nobody knowing what was west of them. The Catholic church is often blamed for spreading this myth, but their own writings in medieval times say otherwise.

As for the scientific method itself evolving, no, it hasn't. Not among actual scientists who practice science. It only "evolved" in the minds of those treating philosophy as though it were science.

Well they were the scientific consensus at the time, and some of the reason why they came to the wrong conclusion was not so much because they lacked the tools to test the theory, which was also true at the time, but more so because of the scientific philosophy of the time. How you reason is just as and if not more important than the testing of a theory to support or reject a theory. Which is why now days, we assume that a theory is scientific if it can be falsified.



Scientific philosophy is taught to all first year science majors here, from Plato to Popper and even some modern philosophers like Feyerabend. It was one of my favourite first year subjects, as you might have noticed. How you think about the problem is more important than how you test it in my view. Highschool science teaches falsification as well. But other things like hypothesis, theory and law are taught at HS in much simpler terms that what is reality.

A law is something that is universal, and a theory is not. Things like gravity and thermodynamics are laws because they are universal, the gravity here in Aust is the same gravity as you have in the USA, is the same gravity you have on the moon or on Jupiter, the colour of swans are not universal, so you have a theory about the colour of swans not a law. A theory is not a baby law waiting to advance and it is only the scale that makes the difference between the two.

Much more to add, but no time, too many things going on at one time today

@Samson: Duly noted, the point remains valid enough though.

@Fury: Again, I was not referring to laws, I was referring to facts. As for gravity being universal, I would immediately point out that gravity is not the same everywhere. I don't know if it is "universal" planet-wide or not because I suspect we do have some locations on the planet that are not "normal", but it most definitely is not the same on other planets nor upon our planet's only natural satellite, henceforth referred to as the moon.

@Conner Oh i had a point i was trying to make, but between the time i started that post and when i finished it, i had forgotten what it was and just posted what i had on the screen. LOL

@Samson Pythagoras assumed the earth was spherical, and he lived in 600BC, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth in 200 b.c, so it is safe to assume that for sometime prior to that most advanced civilisations at the time and beyond assumed that the earth was spherical.

The whole Columbus thing and history, it is not the first time that history is rewritten. Even the teaching of the beginnings of your own nation is not wholly accurate. Everyone is taught that the puritans on the Mayflower were the first settlers etc, but European immigration to the North Americas had started way before them. The Spanish, French, British and Dutch all had colonies that pre-dated the settlement of the Puritans. Its kind of funny that the whole US national identity is formed around the misrepresentation of history, but without that rewriting of history, the US might not have become the nation that it is today.