The Science of Biological Evolution (no politics or religion)

In the modern world, you have a perfect right to create a company whose aim is to achieve your dream, seek investors who see it is a good enough idea and if you do, achieve it. You also have the right to write to your favourite space agency or politician and explain why it is a great idea.

And those investors, scientists and politicians have the right to poo-poo the idea (see what I did there?) and get on with real work.

I see a common theme running through some of these posts. To paraphrase bits:

- Science gets things wrong
- You're only fitting observations to your beliefs
- The scientists you admire so much . . .
- You have to convince people in order to establish proof

I find this fixation on social elements like faith, charisma, and cult of personality completely out of place in a topic about logic and knoweldge. Science is not a book of final answers. It is not an appeal from charisma for the purpose of convincing a mass of people. It is a logical process used to discover truth.

To reiterate an older post of mine that mentioned epistemology, it seems some people really don't believe that the human mind can, under its own powers of reason, discover truth. It's no wonder debate is strained (at best) and often useless with people who have such a fundamentally different view of what true information is, how it's discovered, how it's demonstrated to be true, and even whether people can actually have it in the first place.

I'm imagining the reply:
"So you believe scientists and textbooks are completely correct? Isn't that the opposite of critical thinking? You don't seem open to alternatives."

Of course I don't believe any scientist or textbook is completely correct. I'm always skeptical. What annoys me is that this question once again emphasizes BELIEF. The faith I may or may not have in people or information is completely irrelevant. If you want to challenge an idea, then challenge it in the realm of logic and reason. It doesn't matter who believes it, or what their personal reasons are for believing it.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying truth requires no testing, it simply is. Therefore science is not truth.

Of course. Like I said, science is a process. It seems you're criticizing it for something it doesn't claim to be.

We have knew this world is not a free world,so not everything is clear.It will be easier if it was said that this world inherited philosophical difficulties.

s23bog wrote:

I might start with the "air gun" method.  Make large BB's of shit, and try to propel these BB's and see how far you can get them to go.

I'm very surprised The OP has not blocked you. Most of your posts are political, blatant attempts at inciting conflicts, besides the fact they have absolutely nothing of revelence to the topic. (For that matter, not relevent to anything really but some personal agenda that has become quite boring)

Good, so you either agree with me or are trolling... maybe both?

I agree with MD.

This is a science thread yet it's quite plain you have no interest whatsoever in discussing the topic in a reasonable and adult manner. You appear to have set up permanent camp here now and you're clearly intent on being profoundly dishonest, argumentative, inflammatory, provocative, wilfully obtuse, disruptive, evasive, antagonistic and if I was the OP you'd have been blocked ages ago.

Tellingly, you also have a nasty tendency to elevate passive-aggressive to the level of an art form. You just did it again (above). I only know of one other person who used to do this routinely on CC and he was called Frenchbasher (RIP).

weuf weuf

Me and Ghostliner agree on something!

Bravo :)

I think you are proberbly right most scientists do not say "This looks a bit younger than we imagined" and that very thing leaves me a little purplexed. I don't think anyone is claiming that they saw a dinasour on the way to the shops this morning.  If you read the blurb carefully the oldest they could possibly be without iorn or those pesky bronze aged idiots is around one million years not the hundreds of millions of years that are so often claimed.

Dinosaurs lived 1 million years ago?

Can you get the money back for your education?

We're discussing the existence of soft tissue samples in dinosaur remains and the implications it might have with regard to how old they might be.

Right,I understand. fossilized tissue with high concentrations of iron can have the iron chemically removed leaving a scoffolding of the tissue's structure that can be examined microscopically.

I feel I should also contribute to the current arguments with regard to s23bog and whether or not he should be banished.  To be honest I don't find him that inflammatory, people have said far nastier things to me on this forum.  I think a particular highlight was the notion that a belief in an Intelligent Designer was a result of some kind of mental illness.  Some might say this is akin to me making the claim that a belief in evolutionary theory is due to the childhood contraction of chicken pox.

I concede the overall thread of his argument are a little hard to follow and you could argue that they do not belong on a forum concerning evolutionary theory, however let me put in my input on what he might be trying to say.

If mankind does not lift its horizons from concentrating its attention on this planet alone then our time as a species could come to an abrupt end.  It's not illogical to postulate that we should pool our planetary resauces rather than war mongering and make a collective bid to establish colonies on other habitable planets, the sooner the better.  It is true we do not have the technology to do this at present, but establishing a colony on the moon might be an important first step, one might say a test bed for the type of problems we might encounter in the future.

Perhaps he's making the subtle point that the scientific community should not concentrate so much about our past but should rather look to the future in the interest of our self preservation as a spices.

Yes preserve our spices. Turmeric is especially good. Don't ban anyone,but of course my vote doesn't mean much.

meh I can't spell, but your an american so you haven't got a leg to stand on where spelling is concerned.

There is no single cause, single effect rule in the real world. Rather, you can compare two hypothetical situations, one with easily available guns and one without, and any sensible analysis finds extra deaths of different types associated with the single difference. This is the meaningfui effect of a single factor, holding everything else constant. Of course in the real world one cannot just create two copies of the world with one difference between them, but informative conclusions can be made about such things by the sets of examples that are available, and reasonable models extrapolating that knowledge.

But hang on, this is the evolution forum.

No more posts on gun control, thanks - that's most definitely a political topic and should be discussed somewhere other than the public forums. Thanks.

David - moderator