SoFla8
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Does anyone on here not hate Ann Coulter?
- Thread starter Mem
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Shelby
Experimental Member
Sorry. It was meant to be a litmus test. There are some people on the right who think Michael Moore is just as out of touch as some leftists think Coulter is.
That's a relief. I don't know much about Moore. I haven't seen any of his productions.
But for a moment, I thought you were doing that binary thing... you know, where someone on one side thinks everyone is either a repub or a dem; a Coulter or a Moore, etc. Some of us really and truly are "none of the above."
Shelby
Experimental Member
How does natural selection explain homosexuality?
Jeremy Rifkin was 26 years ahead of Al Gore with a bunch of sky is falling predictions of doom and gloom Entropy: A New World View - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. And his arguments were way more convincing than divinity school washout/internet inventor/climate scientist Al's. I was once a true believer myself. Trouble is they didn't come true.
I don't go along with much of what Ann believes. But I never deny that her points are arguable.
At least as well as creationism does?
Ah, I love that one. Can you find a complete, in-context, quote of Al claiming to have invented the internet? If so, please provide a link for me.
I think Coulter is far worse than Moore. They are both out of touch, but the way Coulter's ignorance and bias manifests itself is more dangerous and hateful in my estimation. However, my disdain for Moore has been well documented on this site. I'd put Moore on the same level as, say... Rush Limbaugh or maybe Sean Hannity.
Just that one stupid thing that she says isn't going to make a difference in your perception if you have, as you say, been listening to her for years.
Shelby
Experimental Member
JustAsking
Sexy Member
Shelby, I think you lost the thread. The comment was that Ann Coulter made a fool out of the BBC announcer. To which I replied by quoting Ann Coulter verbatim saying that there "is no proof for 'Darwinism'". My point in pointing that out is that the BBC announcer did not have to do anything to debate Ann Coulter when she was so glibly doing such a good job in making a fool of herself. The announcer knew full well that his audience was laughing at the idea that Ann Coulter held the secret to the diversity of life on the planet that somehow Darwin and five generations of scientists somehow missed.
I have not had many occasions to agree with you, but I always admire your intelligence. This homosexualty vs natural selection response does not belong in that category, however. It is called an "Appeal to Ignorance", which is a rather dishonest form of debate when it comes to the status of scientific theories.
The trick is to create a kind of smoke screen by pointing out where the application of a scientific theory might be incomplete. The underlying premise is faulty in that it implies that if a theory has not yet completely explained everything in its domain, it must be false. For example, "Medical science must be wrong about everything because they can't even cure the common cold." Or the theory of Thermodynamics must be completely wrong because we can't predict where a hurricane will land five days in advance.
Fortunately, only laymen and idiots fall for it otherwise scientists wouldn't spend their time all day diligently finding more and more applications for their foundational theories such as the Theory of Evolution (ToE).
As in Evolution and other branches of science, we understand a thousand times more about the application of our foundational theories than we did 100 years ago, and we will undersand another thousand times more in probably just 20 years from now.
The other thing that disappointed me was your choice of areas in which you appealed to ignorance. The presence of homosexuality is not a challenge to natural selection or any other aspects of ToE. There are plenty of species in which some percentage of the population exhibit homosexuality. The reason why Creationists pick that one is that it works great in challenging the simplistic straw man notion that anything that hinders the reproductive possibilities of individual members of a species would naturally be selected out because their genes would not be propagated.
If this were the basis of ToE, then this might be so. But anyone who studies ToE, even as far back as Darwin knows that natural selection is not about the individual, but rather it is about the group when it comes to higher order species. And anything about group behavior that improves the chances that offspring from the group reproducing in large numbers is strongly selected for.
A number of species (bees for example) even have group members that fill a practical role in survival of the group, but have no reproductive organs of their own.
In "pack" animals, it is not unusual that only the alpha male in the group is ever allowed to inseminate the females, unless he is unseated by a physically and mentally superior male in the group. In that case, the new alpha male will often kill the offspring of the deposed alpha male. You can see that in this way, the pack itself imposes a strict and ruthless selection criteria far beyond that which is supplied by the environment. So ironically, in these species where almost no males are allowed to reproduce, the fierce competition for the privilege to reproduce produces superior organisms after many generations of this.
Another thing that has been known for at least a hundred years, even before Mendel, Watson, and Crick, that traits in an organism are coupled in complex and interesting ways. So one will find traits emerging which would ordinarily seem undesirable and therefore would be counter to what natural selection would produce. However, when one weighs the benefits of the other traits it is linked to, it is easy to see why the tradeoff was made by natural selection.
A good example of that is Sickle Cell disease. Sickle Cell is a genetic problem that causes all kinds of bad stuff, but it is now clear that it was emergent in the selection process because it is linked to an immunity for malaria. This is well known and understood both practically and now genetically. The mechanisms of Sickle Cell are well understood and how the genes that cause it infer malaria immunity are also well understood.
Not surprisingly, ToE would suggest that Sickle Cell disease would then be most selected for in areas where malaria is prevalent, and what do you know, it definitely is. When it comes to having offspring who in turn survive in sufficient numbers to reproduce, the benefits of malaria immunity in areas where malaria is prevalent outweigh the disadvantages of Sickle Cell.
My point in all of this is that homosexuality is only a challenge to natural selection for those who an appeal to ignorance would be persuasive and those who don't understand the mechanisms of natural selection in groups.
In order for that to be a persuasive counter example to natural selection, you would have to show that homosexual behavior is not linked to anything that is beneficial either physiologically or behaviorally in the survival of groups in the species.
This one is even more disappointing. The thread here was that Ann Coulter said to the BBC interviewer that concern for the environment was merely a religious belief. Your response was a cheezy ad hominem attack on Jeremy Rifkin and Al Gore. The first underlying premise of this seems to be that since an economist/journalist was wrong about one of his solutions to energy production and distribution then we don't need to have concern for the environment. Another premise seems to be that since Al Gore didn't complete divinity school, we needn't be concerned with the environment. The final premise is that since Al Gore is not a climate scientist we shouldn't be concerned about the environment. That final one is called a "straw man". The idea is to trick people into believing a false version of the the other person's argument and then knocking it down.
The truth is that Al Gore is not and never claimed to be an environmental scientists. His job was once a Senator whose role is to understand enough about a subject to create, recommend, and implement public policy (the value of a global computer network, for example). Now that he is no longer a Senator, he still feels that as a responsible citizen, he, like everyone else, should show leadership in recommending policy. It might come as a surpise to people, though, that Al Gore not being a climate scientist is not a cogent argument against being concerned about the environment.
Half of that made sense to me.
skypylot
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Dave NoCal
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Belonging to an organization that would throw you over a cliff for five extra votes SHOULDN"T be easy.
No, why would I hate her? I agree with everything she says. She is very intelligent and realistic. She does not live in a dream world like the liberals do.
