[Alchemy]

Apologies for the long post, but I've been gone a while and must make up for lost time. A free cookie to anyone who reads the whole thing.

Originally posted by utabintarbo
Well, how about an example of the "completely false information". Without such, your charge is baseless.

No problem. Some of these are based on posts made after yours, if you consider that fair. First, look at my first post, where I corrected a number of BigBen's hyperbolae.

Yo-DUH seems to be a bit dim on the concepts of Buddhism, Islam, and biology. Calling science "a bunch of hooey" more or less signals his unwillingness to debate.

The "small million year steps" between amphibian and mammal are at least partially reconstructable. There is a pattern of physiological and chromosomal features between any two animals chosen at random, and by building up the foundation of knowledge that is biology, it can be shown with varying degrees of certainty how random genetic mutations, encouraged by natural selection, in a process of tens of thousands of years, led one particular animal to gradually become another. Nature itself has no care for our particular word "species" - taxonomy is both a help and a hindrance to evolutionary biology - so when people claim that evolution is false because there are no creatures halfway between one species and another, I'm at a loss: All creatures people find evidence of existing are ascribed a species name. Trying to pick two species and find a transition species between them that is not itself its own species is an absurdity of the definition of species - it's like being asked to pick two rational numbers between which no numbers exist. Biology, like the number line, is a continuum.

Psychofunk is pretty much pure unfocused vitriol, the sort of speak one writes about in a screenplay where a doomsday fundamentalist Chrisitan is needed to unleash God's wrath by unleashing a super-flu of some sort.

I honestly can't read airspirt's stuff. The tone makes it too difficult to follow.

Bigben is wrong again about the law/theory thing, but I guess that's alright because half of the scientists around don't know what a law is anyway. Laws are quite rare in science.

A law is a scientific assumption made based on recurrence rather than based on a series of premises. A law is most useful in mathematics, which is entirely based on axiom. In science, laws find their best purpose by defining basic parameters of nature rather than natural events, though they can do both. The laws of thermodynamics define temperature, work, heat, entropy. Newton's laws of motion define force and momentum. They are problem solving tools based on observation, not hypotheses that could be proven or disproven. If laws could be disproven, Newton's laws of motion would have been struck down by quantum mechanics. But their function does not necessitate this - Newton's laws were, are, and will remain to be approximations of nature and work perfectly well for a certain range of scale.

Evolution, or natural selection, was regarded by Douglas Adams - who knew less science than I do, but was such a fantastic writer and public speaker as well as an astute mind that he could run laps around me in any field I claimed to be an expert in - as a very special tautology, "That which survives, survives." A is equal to A. It's such an obvious concept that the basics that come form it - that animals die, that animals better-equipped for that time and place generally survive, that mutations occur and once in a while are beneficial, and that four billion years is a long, long time.

I'm perfectly alright with people asking specific questions about details that bother them with scientific principles - we do that all the time with heat, temperature, viscosity here - but spouting cavalier rhetoric like "wish me a tree" is juvenile and unproductive. Do people doubt the existence of Sumeria because anthropology does not produce real, live Sumerians? Do people doubt the existence of dinosaurs because paleontology does not produce real, live allosauri? Isn't it simply idiocy to know nothing about a scientific principle, then mock it by requesting evidence for this principle that in fact violates this principle?

Consider how foolish people appear when such concepts of heat and temperature are argued on this board. Then consider that the mechanisms for heat transfer, especially turbulent, are a thousand times less predictable and less understood by physics than the evolutionary path of tens of thousands of creatures charted by biology.

Okay, more examples of falsifications? Winewood says evolution is filled with holes, but gives no reason or example, then follows with a number of non sequitors. Again, the common tactic of the (excuse the connotation) ignorant - "I don't believe evolution, give me an example of a cell organizing itself from nothing, even though this is not how evolution works and would in fact neither prove nor disprove evolution."

To be clear, the origin of the first cells is the focus of many, many academic papers I lack the time and understanding to read. All I can do is borrow the argument of Richard Dawkins - the fully functional cell is the Roman arch. It had a support structure - its evolutionary predecessors - on which it was built, and that structure is gone. We know the Romans used wooden supports to hold up arches on their bridges until the capstone was in place. In the case of the first cell, possibly the predecessor to the first bacteria, this support structure isn't anywhere near as obvious.

Regarding religion - it's another playground, it is as irrelevant to evolution as heat transfer is to the Bible. Only when a particular group of people, following a specific interpretation of a book that is holy to them, claim that a scientific theory is false, does any debate occur. Nothing in science makes claim for or against god - it simply takes the evidence and comes up with the most logical, consistent, comprehensive, and predictive understanding. To misrepresent this - to think of science as a group of hell-bent, radical atheists (or satan-worshipper, as I've been called once), or to ignore the review of information by peers, or to claim some massive flaw in the scientific method on a hunch rather than actually stating the flaw itself, or to deny logic in favor of insults and vitriol - does both sides a disservice.

Logic is the engine of mathematics, the most important tool in science, and it is by no means heretical for the religious to use it - if it is, I do indeed fear for the people who worship that god.

I would say that the one fact that I have brought forth is that faith is not a valid mechanism for achieving knowledge of reality ("Wishing won't make it so"). Do you wish to debate that?

I think it's important to ascribe a scale to faith - from rational assumptions based on repeated observation all the way to the blind faith of doomsday cults. There is a matter of how much evidence one needs and how credible that evidence is, as well as how likely or unlikely the truth ascribed to that evidence is, for a person to draw an opinion on the truth or untruth of an event. I take it on faith when someone tells me he was late to an appointment because he had a flat tire simply because the truth or falsity of the event has little bearing on me, for example.

That should do.

Alchemy