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Arete

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Everything posted by Arete

  1. Almost all of the contradictions stem from three sources: 1) Religiously motivated assertion of events that are scientifically unsupported - e.g. Noah's ark, miracles, resurrection, immaculate conception as proven. 2)Religiously motivated rejection of observationally supported scientific theorems - e.g. big bang theory, theory of evolution by natural selection. 3) Questioning of methodologies that creat contradictions with religious texts e.g. radioisotope dating. I personally would be happy if it remained at the individual differences in belief I could ignore - however: 1) Science presented as pseudoscience should be rejected by the scientific community. We, as scientists should not comprimise what we accept and reject simply to appease religious discrepancy with observed reality. 2) We should oppose and challenge religiously motivated curtailing of science research and teaching based on the fact it deviates from reality and is fundamentally at odds with religious and secular freedom.
  2. What you're describing is parthenogenesis; a type of clonal or asexual reproduction - mostly seen in fish and reptiles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis There's plenty of sexually reproducing species that are capable of hermaphroditic reproduction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermaphrodite which seems to be more in line with what the OP is describing.
  3. The term you're looking for is "ecological speciation" - here's a review paper with a few examples. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5915/737.full
  4. You've just described the exact opposite of a scientific theory - a theory is a hypothesis statistically supported by replicable, observational data. Examples are gravity, evolution by natural selection, thermodynamics and relativity. http://en.wikipedia....ientific_theory As for answering the title of the OP - 97% of Royal society members and 93% of National academy of sciences members answer "No" to the question "Do you believe in a personal god?" http://www.humanreli...telligence.html www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html, so given the available empirical data, one would have to conclude that faith - as defined as belief in a traditional monotheistic deity is considerably lower amongst the scientific community than the general populous. edit - having watched the video, the attempt to present Einstein as a theist moves it from the intellectually dishonest realm of cherry picking the subset of scientists who support the proposition to plain dishonest.
  5. Human papillomavirus can only be contracted from another human. Your dog could not have given it to you.
  6. Given our sample size of inhabited planets is one, calling statistical significance might be a little premature
  7. Trying to equate a skeptical outlook on exclusive, unfalisifable claims of an absolute diety with a disbelief in unlikely events and then equating that strawman argument with a lack of innovative ability is entirely intellectually offensive. The chance of rolling three sixes with three dice is less than 1%. You seem to be trying to say that if you don't believe is God you can't believe in three sixes and therefore an atheist can't roll dice until it occurs - which is absurd. As a phylogeneticist - most of the reconstructions we carry out have an extremely large number of possible outcomes. The initial expectation for the most likely reconstruction is extremely low and experiments must be run for many millions of replications to ensure that all possibilities have been considered. The philosophy that insists on the consideration of many unlikely possible outcomes is as a direct product of the skeptical and thorough nature of the scientific method and a direct contradiction to the acceptance of positive outcomes based on faith. If we designed experiments based around the premise of an a priori belief in the outcome, there'd be no reason to use the extensive parameter spaces which we do.
  8. In a controlled manner, no. The cited article is nice, but pretty naive. 1) Modifying bacteria is a rather routine laboratory procedure. You can buy a bacterial cloning kit and insert a gene of your choosing using relatively basic benchtop techniques. Doing it at home shows significant determination, but not a whole lot of novel innovation. http://www.invitroge...Brand/topo.html 2) The author seems fairly poorly informed - luminescent tattoo ink already exists for retail sale http://www.crazycham...yartsupply.com/ http://poundedink.com/tattoos-that-actually-glow-in-the-dark/ and genetic modification is unlikely to yield a viable ink. Unlike luminescent pet fish whose whole bodies glow due to the expression of modified luminescence genes, to just make a tattoo glow using GM, you'd need the ink to be alive, or to mutate the host's cells. If it was that easy to modify a human skin cell, many medical conditions would have been trivial to cure for a long period of time. 3) A -80 is a fairly basic laboratory storage device. Even setting up Sanger sequencing will set you back a decent six figure sum (let alone next gen techniques). While it's awesome that civilian scientists are interested in biotech, it's an equipment intensive field and without industry standard equipment it's hard to innovate things industry/academia hasn't already tried. 4) GMO is seriously ethically bound. DuPont spent 2-3 billion dollars generating BT insect resistant sunflowers. When experiments showed that, at least in north America, the BT genes would cross into wild sunflower populations and negatively affect native herbivores, the project had to be dumped. Given the potential impacts of GMO's, they're not the type of thing you want unregulated parties whipping up in their garage - even if they could.
  9. To add some context - this is a spin off from a closed thread where I and others took objection to you equating the ethics of general medical practice to the ethics of conducting novel scientific research and your subsequent claim that general practitioners were equatable with research scientists - which is a fallacy. Medicine (distinct from medical research) is an applied science (along with engineering, agronomy, pharmacology, veterinary, etc etc etc). GPs apply validated scientific research to the treatment of human illness - GPs are generally restricted from conducting novel trials and drug development on their patients as they are not equipped, nor specifically trained to conduct such experiments. The ethics of applying validated scientific research to the treatment of illness is distinct from the ethics of developing new treatments and conflating the two is disingenuous, as is claiming that a GP is a research scientist, which is what you did.
  10. No - I'm saying the comparison of god and gravity is inapt, even if you state you're describing the predicted outcome of the theorized force, rather than the explanatory theory. I can measure gravity. I can weigh my pencil and measure its acceleration towards the ground when I drop it. I am unable to measure god or the forces attributed to god due to the absolute nature to the concept. I'm not trying to disagree with your theistic position, but I am disagreeing that it is equatable with belief in measurable, natural phenomena explained by falsifiable theory. Belief in a deity is not equatable with belief in gravity whether or not you're choosing to define it as the theory or the measurable effects of the force described by the theory, unless we can generate a comparable set of measurements by a force attributable to god and described by a falsifiable theistic theory.
  11. In this case, the "public" (or more correctly - you) want something that deviates from reality. Scientists will never go away into a little huddle and not come back until they've gift wrapped you a silver bullet solution to your problems. Nor should they - that's not the objective, philosophy or modus operandi of scientific research in any capacity. An additional layer of regulation won't force science to provide simplistic answers to complicated questions when they potentially don't exist, or when multiple answers share probabilistic significance or when practical solutions might simply need to be multifaceted (e.g. your energy example). Trying to blame Marie Curie for Fukishima, or Thomas Midgely for the hole in the ozone layer, or expecting a regulatory body to have predicted the negative side effects of their research due to practical applications discovered decades later is unrealistic - can you offer a method by which you would have predicted the discovery of CFC's, then predicted their usefulness in cooling applications, then predicted the impact they would have on the yet to be discovered ozone layer? Or would you have recommended that an inert, non-toxic alternative be used to replace the flammable and toxic substances that were being used at the time and thought it was a good idea too?
  12. This is a strawman. GPs are not medical scientists. Scientists are not policy makers. So you're using an assumption that some sort of global regulatory body would prevent scientific advancements from resulting in indeterminable practical outcomes which may or may not result in indeterminable negative side effects to demand scientists be curtailed to research which is in line with your own sociopolitical agenda... No thanks.
  13. I disagree that the theory of gravity "simply is". Gravity is a falsifiable theory. Experiments can and have been devised to provide repeatable observations to either support or disprove the theory. A probability value can be determined to describe the probability of the theory being correct. If proven incorrect in part or whole, it can be modified or rejected in its entirely with no ideological impediment. The god hypothesis on the other hand, is not falsifiable and does not predict observations that allow it to be supported or disproved. The absolute nature of the hypothesis only allows it to be completely accepted or rejected with no room for uncertainty. One is a falsifiable hypothesis supported by repeatable observation, the other is a faith based positive assumption made in the absence of observational evidence. Your comparison of religious belief with acceptance of a scientific theory is rendered inapt by the differences in the assumptive nature two concepts.
  14. You made the positive assertion. The burden of proof is on you. By dismissing the burden of proof, you've turned your mountain explanation into a logically fallacious and thus dismissible argument. Classify the following people according to good and evil: Zakir Naik, Adolf Hitler, Fred Phelps, Mahatma Gandhi, David Koresh, Thomas Jefferson, Anders Behring Breivik. Then reclassify according to whether they identify as Christian. Compare your lists.
  15. The absurdity, idiocy and hypocrisy defining the "goodness" or badness" of people based upon whether they share your personal system of religious belief is almost beyond comprehension. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If this excuse is valid, it justifies dismissing the text in its entirety. Well there's certainly not one now - http://possiblywrong.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/is-the-earth-like-a-billiard-ball-or-not/ So, where was it? Where did it go? What removed it? Given the difficulties humanity faced getting to the top of Everest, how did biblical era men climb it? How did they see so far in an atmosphere containing water vapor?
  16. Actually - If we're adhering to strict logic, it's considerably worse. It relies on the positive assertion that God was "just here" despite no direct observation to support the existence of God. Axiomatically, if a God can create matter/physics, God itself is more complex than matter/physics are (and most monotheistic religions explicitly state this assumption by describing God as an omnipotent, sentient being) . Therefore, you are making the assumption that an unobserved entity, more complex than matter itself existed to create the matter. As such, the conclusion that matter and physics were created by a God relies on more unsupported assumptions than concluding that matter and physics were not created by a God. It therefore fails the principle of Occam's Razor and is thus not a conclusion reached by pure deductive reasoning. I am certainly not trying to disenfranchise or belittle your faith based position, but let's call a spade a spade - it is a faith based conclusion and not one reached via deductive reasoning. The God answer might be philosophically and personally satisfying it is however, scientifically unsatisfying.
  17. Plenty of insects feed on detritus - e.g. dung beetles, springtails, snails, various flies, etc. The positive association between increased diversity and abundance of pathogens and a detritic diet/habitat is at least to my knowledge, unsupported. Poisoning via an emvenomating bite is wholly and completely unrelated to disease caused by a pathogen. I elaborated on host specificity in post. #12. Please read it. Yes.
  18. Arete

    Your diet

    The wife and I tend to make a lot of our food ourselves - as both a health and environmental decision. She bakes our bread, usually rye sourdough made once a week. We tend to not buy meat and only eat meat I've hunted. This means I shoot a couple of deer per year, field dress them and send them to the abattoir for processing. We have a couple of chest freezers full of Bambi. Venison and jalapeno salami is amazing. We both make our own beer - usually partial mash brews and have a few on the go at any given time. I'm also partial to a nice single malt scotch or small batch rye whiskey. We try to grow some of our own herbs and veges but mostly buy those.
  19. Many believe that extremely dilute remedies are powerful cures. Or that magnets have healing powers. Or holograms improve your balance... it doesn't stop them from being incorrect. The scientific method is, rather by definition, a method, which also, by definition, contains inherent fallibility - hence the term scientific theory. Do such critics visit medical practitioners? Do they use the practical outcomes of scientific research such as the internet/computers to convey their displeasure with the "religion" of science? Is the ironing delicious when they do? Do you acknowledge the metaphorical nature of observationally supported conclusions when deciding to exit the fifth floor of a building via the window or the elevator? The observationally supported proof of concept is publicly available to anyone who cares to learn about any scientific theory ever put forward. In the event that the current explanation for electricity or radiation, the scientific explanations can, without ideological impediment, be changed. When there's a null hypothesis and a p-value for God then the the two are equatable - until then, any attempt to do so is logically fallacious. 97% of Royal society members and 93% of National academy of sciences members answer "No" to the question "Do you believe in a personal god?" http://www.humanreli...telligence.html www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html You post with a hidden agenda and then pull the moral persecution card when rule violations are potentially enforced? Really? There's even a sub-forum dedicated to religion.
  20. The ancestral simian was likely a lemur-like animal - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090519104643.htm but the ancestral hominid (ancestor of modern apes and humans) was unequivocally \ rather more ape than squirrel like - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardipithecus_kadabba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahelanthropus_tchadensis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrorin_tugenensis In the interests of logical honesty - the burden of proof lies with the party making the positive assertion. There might be a teapot orbiting the sun between earth and mars etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot. Since your positive assertion is supported only by a single anecdotal event, it's speculative at best.
  21. OP - Humans did not come from monkeys. Human and monkeys share a common ancestor. As an analogy - you and your cousins share the same grandparents. You are related, but you did not come from your cousin nor would you expect your cousin's children to gradually start looking more like you. No it isn't. Given the process is not universal, it is impossible to characterize rates of evolution across all biota. Also, I'd say there is extremely strong evidence that anthropogenic impacts on the evolution of most other organisms has a destabilizing rather than stabilizing effect - there's evidence of rapid directional selective sweeps (e.g. peppered moths http://en.wikipedia....i/Peppered_moth, cane toads http://www.canetoads...devolution.html), population expansions (e.g. rats http://onlinelibrary...09.02228.x/full) adaptive radiations (e.g. dogs http://www.sciencedi...16895259390122X) and extinction events (do I really need an example?). Personally I find it difficult to think of an organism undergoing stabilizing selection due to anthropogenic circumstances - and would have to conclude that if there is an overall trend in overall evolutionary rates as a result of humans, it's an acceleration of the process. Anecdote =/= proof. It's quite plausible that the situation you describe was due to coincidence than the assumptive cause/anthropomorphism you ascribe
  22. http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201112020036 No straight out lies - but it's intellectually absurd, then they bring on an opponent and out-argue her by shouting over her rather than actually engaging her or listening to a word she says.
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