God's role in extinctions?

[B_crackoff]

Let me see if I have this straight. Your complaint is that science continues to constantly submit its theories to challenges and correct or replace them when they fail a new challenge.

Then from this you arrive at the conclusion that science is dogmatic and has too many sacred cows.

Does anyone see the irony in this?

I can see that you can't understand the paragraph I wrote!

The point is that anything that involves the massive, or minute, be it, time, space, size etc, should never be considered factual, when it includes enormous probablistic determination. Too many people seem to rely upon it for decision making.

E.g - the 1 in 100,000 probability of a nuclear meltdown in any core, has only today been reduced to one in a few hundred by one well known scientific advisor.

A bit fucking late for a cautious estimate. AGW is another area where observation has failed the theory, & has just led to more rejigging of variables in models to try & make them work.

This is not systematic, or a coherent programme - this is trying to make a belief structure work.

Where these beliefs can cause unnecessary economic or physical damage, & the politicization, & monetized incentivization of scientists occurs, & also where emotive & irrational words like "Denier" & "Heretic" are bandied about - it's hard to belief that it's objective.

^^^^^^^
Hard to miss.
He doesn't understand the project of science at all.

You never write more than a couple of forgetable lines in any post. There's clearly not a lot you have to say, but you're good at it.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

You never write more than a couple of forgetable lines in any post. There's clearly not a lot you have to say, but you're good at it.

I think JustAsking did a very good job of expressing the confusions about science that blemished most of your posts in this thread.
And in that "couple of forgettable lines," I expressed agreement with him, something I virtually always feel when reading his posts. He cares about the truth and knows what he's talking about. It's in his marrow.
I wouldn't want to address you at length, crackoff, because I find a kind of dishonesty ... or maybe simply immaturity ... in your way of presenting yourself on this board.
Often, points you have made are devastated by the rejoinders of better informed and more honest posters. But it's very very rare to see any concessions of error from you.
You are, in short, a waste of time.
(To give you even these many lines is a waste of time ... so I suppose I am bathing in futility here.)
My hope is that you are very young and that this deflective, dishonest way of arguing is something you will outgrow.

 

[B_crackoff]

Except for the fact that we have prolific fossil records in the geologic column that change pretty abruptly at the KT boundary. Dinosaurs below the KT bounday and mostly mammals above.

Things we know so far.


Wrong. Scientific findings and theories are always accepted as provisionally true, provided they accumulate the most accurate record for falsifiable prediction when compared with competing theories. None are accepted as fact, and we expect to have to improve or change them.

Well you're no scientist then - read the heading Fact here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact

If you think this is somehow a bogus approach to understanding the natural world, you might ask yourself how it is we can predict the behavior of the tiny EM fields in the 500 million transistors in your computer's CPU using a theory that was developed in 1860 by Maxwell who was probably using a whale oil lamp to light his laboratory.

I don't - you're quite ignorantly misunderstanding me. If you were a scientist, & leaped to such conclusions, I'd think your work would be useless.

You are confusing findings with theories. If we find no evidence of European activity in America before the 1400s we conclude that so far we don't think there was any. It is only the summation of our findings that lead us to make that provisional claim. But when we discover evidence that there was earlier activity, we push the date back further and publish our new findings far and wide.

I thnk the term for it is "intellectual honesty".

Not really, they'd discovered suspected European skeletons before, & allowed them to be buried by Native tribes. Again another agenda from one side or the other. I'd say that they got caught with their pants down. Then they "invented" a 3,000 mile fishing trip across sea ice to make the story work. It doesn't mean it's true at all.:wink:

There's no evidence of life on other planets. Would you accept that as fact?

I suggest you reread the link - & the primary documentation. Scientists confuse theories with fact. I'm all for theories - love 'em. I also accept the way you articulate your position. However, it isn't generally held.

My position is the same as this fine chap.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html?_r=2&sq=Freeman%20Dyson&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1287586833-dv2G0ajksJEBJykFwDApSQ

As old doubting Thomas said to big J. "Prove it". As Tom Cruise said "Show me the money". I love science. I just don't like false prophets of doom, or proselytizers of any belief structure whatsoever. Especially, when they think that their belief systems are of any more value, morality, or purpose.

 

[B_crackoff]

Blah, blah, blah

Again, more off topic personal haranguing. I forgot that you do actually know a lot about that.

You know how to prove a point. Please put your prejudices in your bedside drawer along with your brain.

Sweet dreams lover!

 

[Drifterwood]

I wasn't aware, Crackers, that they had found any DNA evidence of my ancestors the Solutreans surviving or ever having been to the Americas. I think it's the M253 if you want to research it properly.

I am aware of the clovis connection and theory. I also saw that documentary.

I once took half an LSD tab. Your mind as expressed on this board, reminds me of that experience.

 

[Drifterwood]

I don't have an issue with a deist or theist system to bridge that apparent gap between our physical and spiritual experience of existence.

My problem comes with those who can not embrace our growth in understanding from our primitive creation myths to the awesomeness of the now known, but still hardly known universe.

I think that there are many reasons why some will go so far as to deny this knowledge. Some are too invested in previously held truths, some feel that our place in the enormity of existence undermines our specialness and intimacy with God.

The problem for fundamentalists is that if they do not move forward with our understanding of the physical, then their explanation of the spiritual connection to it, becomes untenable. Other systems, such as Daoism, Buddhism and Wiccanism, to name just a few, become more relevant as a bridge within human nature.

Christianity and Islam have tried to have these roads, but they have largely been sidelined and persecuted when they have questioned the received dogma. Our great Universities would not be great today if they were still teaching what they were when they were founded.

 

[Calboner]

Not really, they'd discovered suspected European skeletons before, & allowed them to be buried by Native tribes. Again another agenda from one side or the other. I'd say that they got caught with their pants down. Then they "invented" a 3,000 mile fishing trip across sea ice to make the story work. It doesn't mean it's true at all.:wink:

Such claims require substantiation.

 

[B_crackoff]

I wasn't aware, Crackers, that they had found any DNA evidence of my ancestors the Solutreans surviving or ever having been to the Americas. I think it's the M253 if you want to research it properly.

I am aware of the clovis connection and theory. I also saw that documentary.

I once took half an LSD tab. Your mind as expressed on this board, reminds me of that experience.

Then you're also aware that any skeleton pre dating about 14C in the US is not allowed to be examined, & instead is delivered to "native" burial grounds.

How about this?

http://www.utexas.edu/courses/stross/ant322m_files/1stpersons.htm the implications are very clear.

And this: red hair & green eyes
http://www.atlantisquest.com/America.html

I never tried LSD - my mind's already free, & that's a stoner drug anyway.

There's no proof whatsoever of ET life, but scientists believe that. Theories are great & often compelling. But there are too many zealots leading science - & this fundamentalism is as bad & as false as any religious one.

Open your minds.

 

[Drifterwood]

There's no proof whatsoever of ET life, but some scientists believe that. Theories are great & often compelling. But there are too many zealots leading science - & this fundamentalism is as bad & as false as any religious one.

Name some who lead others in their field.

Big word, bad. What do you mean?

I added the some and to talk in terms of scientific belief is to wholly miss the point. Can't you understand things in their own terms?

 

[Calboner]

There's no proof whatsoever of ET life, but scientists believe that. Theories are great & often compelling. But there are too many zealots leading science - & this fundamentalism is as bad & as false as any religious one.

Open your minds.

(1) On what grounds do you say "scientists believe that," where by "that" you seem to mean (ungrammatically) the proposition that there is extraterrestrial life? Do you mean that some scientists believe this, or that they all believe this? Either way, how is this supposed to show anything about "zealots leading science"? I would bet that the great majority of scientists believe that a mattress is more comfortable to sleep on than a plank of wood, that the stars at night are beautiful, that freedom of expression is preferable to government control of expression, and that computers are useful. So what?

(2) "There's no proof." How is this supposed to be relevant? Proof would be conclusive evidence. Conclusive evidence is not necessary for a belief to be warranted. The principal grounds for belief that there is extraterrestrial life are the known facts about the existence life on earth and the enormous number of stars in the universe (3 to 100 × 10^22, according to an article in Wikipedia). In light of this knowledge, the supposition that life has only occurred on one planet in the entire universe is utterly improbable.

(3) "But there are too many zealots leading science - & this fundamentalism is as bad & as false as any religious one." You have said nothing to substantiate this claim.

(4) "Open your minds." To have an open mind means to rely on the available evidence in determining one's conclusions and the degree of one's confidence in them. It does not mean assuming conclusions that are opposed to those that are accepted by the great majority of those who are in command of the evidence and the scientific techniques pertinent to a given question, as you do.

 

[fire77]

7500 years ago the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (Iraq) said there were visited by species from out of space which they called the Anunnaki or (Those who from the sky came), they also said that the Anunnaki used their DNA to improve the human race where they can be used as slaves for their mining operations on earth (according to the Sumerians they need gold), also they said those space people come from a planet called Nibiru.

Are there other life forms in this universe, well use your imagination.

God is a myth created by humans to be used as an excuse to justify everything we don't understand.

 

[JustAsking]

Well you're no scientist then - read the heading Fact here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_as_theory_and_fact

Yes, I understand that people like to make that distinction, but it is all really just an excercise in relative certainty. Science considers all of its knowledge to be provisional, pending a situation where its findings or theories are falsified by new information.

You could say that it is a fact that the earth attracts stuff when you drop it. Science would call that a fact, but only because it has been corroborated so many times.

But in actuality it is a general statement that is applied to all objects on the earth. And since we have not tested all objects on the earth to see if they fall, even that claim is a hypothesis. Consider that 1000 years ago, it would have been considered a fact that heavy objects fell faster than lighter objects. It seemed self-evident, obvious, and reasonable. It just happened to be wrong.

You and the wikki article are confusing colloquial and even colloquial technical terms for the real epistemology of empirical knowledge.

The notion of common descent was considered a fact by early naturalists. It still seems to be true, but they simply observed it in enough places to make that generalization. We colloquially call that a fact, but it still is a hypothesis since we have not tested all lfe on the planet both living and dead. So we rely on the property of scientific hypotheses that they produce falsifiable predictions as a logical consequence of their axioms. Where there is only one axiom, it becomes its own prediction (e.g. objects fall to the earth if dropped).

Then we force the hypothesis to produce these falsifaible predictions for various situations and we compare those predictions against our observed results.

What Darwin supplied was a hypothesis for the mechanism for how life becomes so diverse from a common ancestor. We consider it a hypothesis or a theory but we corroborate it in the same way we would the "facts" or findings that someone proposes they have discovered.

We subject their predictions to situations and we attempt to falsify them. When we have enough failures to falsify from enough independent investigators such that their predictions prove superior to competitng hypotheses, we accept them as the provisionally true explanation for the phenomenon they address.

Although there seems to be a distinction between fact and hypothesis, for the strict epistemology of empiricism, there really is not.

 

[legionking]

everything dies

galaxies, stars and planets die all the time. nothing can escape death. so deal with it.

 

[JustAsking]

Ironically, it is the theory that is created for the "facts" that allow us to develop more certainty than with the facts alone. In other words, scientific theories can be urged into producing more certainty about a subject than we could get from the simple findings or facts we generalized from simple observations.

Consider the "fact" that objects fall to the earth. Then consider Newton's Universal Gravitation (UG) theory. UG makes its claim for all objects in the universe, not just for things we have on earth. One would think that we have less certainty about that than we would for our simple "stuff falls" fact.

What allows UG to produce more certainty for itself is that it makes falsifaible predictions that take on considerably more risk than our fact about falling. With increased risk comes increased probability of falsification, though. Since the scope of its claims are much broader than our simple falling fact, there is a much wider range of observations we can make to verify it. But that increases the chance that we can falsify it if it is wrong.

For example, we can drop stuff from a high place and confirm both our falling fact and UG for things we drop from high places on earth. But we can go much farther with UG. We can combine it with rigorous logic and math with Newton's other laws of motion. When we do that, the combination of the axioms generate even more precise predictions about many more properties of things under gravitational force in space.

For example, this set of laws including UG can be shown to demand that any object in orbit around any other object will follow an elliptical path. And that if you measure the orbital parameters of that system, you can predict the location of each of the objects in respect to each other thousands of years into the past or the future.

And so on. So what seems to be an excercise in increasing uncertainty, where we create overarching theories to explain our facts, and then combine them with other hypotheses, we actualy end up with more certainty, not less.

Evolution is a good example. The fact of common descent is simply a single axiom with a single prediction. We can look at different organisms and confirm it pretty easily. But the theory of evolution is a collection of axioms that actually produce common descent as one of its highly precise and highly falsifiable 25 or more predictions about the nature of all organisms and their relationship to each other.

In other word the simple fact demands one thing be true if it is true, whereas the theory demands that 25 or more things be true if evolution is true, and one of them is the fact of common descent. And the converse of that is that evolution forbids any other outcome than what those 25 predictions demand.

So when you come to realize that all 25 or so predictions of evolution have been observed in every organism we have studied (over 1 million now), and that some of those prediction involve precise mathematical relationships between the genes of different organisms, you come to realize that there is more certainty in the more elaborate theory than there is in the one axiom we call a fact.

The same goes for the UG example. One can derive the "objects fall to the earth" fact as a logical necessity of the axioms of Newtonian Mechanics. It not only says that objects will fall to the earth, it demands that they do so and requires them to fall at a particular accelerating rate.

And at the same time the same theory predicts the orbit of the planets and the positions of galaxies in orbit thousands of light years away. Which gives you a better feeling of certainty? The fact or the theory?

 

[Drifterwood]

Thanks JA.

Do you think that there is any need to have a connection between the physical and the metaphysical?

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

A remarkably clear post, JA.
Thank you.

 

[Calboner]

You could say that it is a fact that the earth attracts stuff when you drop it. Science would call that a fact, but only because it has been corroborated so many times.

But in actuality it is a general statement that is applied to all objects on the earth. And since we have not tested all objects on the earth to see if they fall, even that claim is a hypothesis. Consider that 1000 years ago, it would have been considered a fact that heavy objects fell faster than lighter objects. It seemed self-evident, obvious, and reasonable. It just happened to be wrong.

Actually (as I'm sure you will grant), things are even more complicated than that.

Now I don't know if it was considered self-evident that heavy bodies fall faster than light ones, i.e., evident from the mere proposition itself, but it was certainly considered evident, i.e., confirmed by universal experience; and, I would say, with perfectly good reason. To say that that belief was "wrong," however, is a potentially misleading simplification. It makes it sound as though physicists--or "natural philosophers," as they were called then--changed their minds about the value of the answer to a single, unambiguous question: "Do heavy bodies fall faster than light ones?" In fact, the change between, say, 1600 and 1700 in what a natural philosopher might have said in answer to such a question reflects a change in the entire theoretical framework of mechanics. In particular, the whole way of thinking of what constitutes motion, and especially uniform motion, underwent a change. The answer to the question changes only when the meaning of the question changes.

To illustrate: Suppose that you could travel back to 1500, say (before Galileo starting making trouble for the Aristotelian natural philosophy), and build a vacuum chamber capacious enough to let you drop two bodies of vastly disparate weights in it, such as a scrap of paper and a pebble. I don't know if any natural philosopher of that day would have accepted the idea of a "vacuum" (as late as the 17th century, many held the idea to be a contradiction in terms), but presumably you could get one to accept that the air in the chamber had been made extremely thin. Now imagine that you demonstrate to your man that the scrap of paper and the pebble fall at the same rate. He acknowledges this fact, and even grants you that if you could build a large enough version of such a chamber, you could make a feather and a cannonball fall at the same rate.

"Well, then," you say to him, "don't you see that this shows that the rate at which bodies fall does not vary with their weight?"

He laughs out loud and looks at you as if trying to decide whether you are a charlatan or an idiot. "Let me get this straight," he says (or whatever is the Latin equivalent of that). "You build a device that creates conditions so unnatural that a feather and a cannonball fall at the same rate; and you take this to prove that a feather and a cannonball always fall at the same rate?"

"No, no," you say to him; "I just mean that their rate of fall is the same under ideal conditions, when all extraneous factors, such as air resistance, are absent."

He stops laughing and wrinkles his brow, as if suspecting that you are in the grip of some sort of madness. "You consider the resistance of air to the motion of bodies through it an extraneous factor? Surely it is the natural condition of motion toward the earth. How can you deny that it is the thinning out of air by this curious apparatus that is the extraneous factor? For heaven's sake, where have such conditions ever been observed in nature?!"

For a moment you consider telling him about the motion of bodies through space far above the surface of the earth, but if you are wise, you give up the task as virtually impossible. To persuade him that the rate of fall of bodies is independent of their weight, you would have to change his conception of a whole wealth of phenomena.

My point, which I take to be in agreement with your position, is that the contrast between "fact" and "theory," while it can be illuminating in some instances of scientific research, can be difficult or impossible to apply without conceptual confusion in other instances. Certainly the idea of a fixed and global distinction between one part of science that is "fact" and another that is "theory" is untenable.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

^^^^^^^^
But wasn't the misconception of the time much simpler?
Without mentioning vacuums, etc., didn't they think that a small pebble would fall more slowly than a boulder?
And they had simply failed to put that sort of thing to the test?
So they didn't have "perfectly good reason ...."

 

[Calboner]

^^^^^^^^
But wasn't the misconception of the time much simpler?
Without mentioning vacuums, etc., didn't they think that a small pebble would fall more slowly than a boulder?
And they had simply failed to put that sort of thing to the test?

Ah, you may be right. But arguably, that is not simpler at all. The medievals thought that the way to resolve such questions was to look them up in the writings of Aristotle and not to make observations. I am pretty sure that this is not because they were lazy but because they considered Aristotle to be a more reliable source of knowledge than observation. I do not know the rationale of this, to me, bizarre epistemological outlook, but I'm sure that there was one.

 

[D_Gunther Snotpole]

Ah, you may be right. But arguably, that is not simpler at all. The medievals thought that the way to resolve such questions was to look them up in the writings of Aristotle and not to make observations. I am pretty sure that this is not because they were lazy but because they considered Aristotle to be a more reliable source of knowledge than observation. I do not know the rationale of this, to me, bizarre epistemological outlook, but I'm sure that there was one.

Well, it all comes down to their having an intuition ... perhaps derived from Aristotle ... that felt certain. Beyond need of testing.
To me, that's simple.