…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
[to work around page bug]
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Robin:
Yes, because as we all learned in school — and as Strunk and White never tired of reminding us — a “/snark” tag always, always applies to the entire comment in which it appears.
Robin:
keiths:
Robin:
Um… that’s what I did.
Clearly. Imagine the gall of someone disagreeing with Robin and then not copping to such an obvious mistake.
P.S. Oh dear… there’s no /snark tag in my comment. Now no one will understand what I mean.
Robin,
By the way, where did you get the idea that “Alan et al” claim I am incapable of admitting mistakes?
Alan is steering clear of that accusation. He tried it once and it backfired on him. See the exchange beginning here and continuing here.
Well that explains it – I was using WordPress Advanced HTML Coding syntax. No wonder you’re having problems.
Speaking of, where exactly are you placing the start tag for my comment? I mean, there’s a reason I left it out…
No you didn’t. You assumed I don’t know what irony is. Nowhere in my post did I even imply sarcasm or facetiousness weren’t forms of irony; you just inferred it because you assumed something not in evidence in the text.
Ooo! Double points for the compound irony! Nicely done!
Oh it’s ok. You never closed the tagging, so it’s still under your starting tag applied several pages ago…
Robin:
Oh, really?
keiths:
Robin:
You. Cannot. Be. Serious.
Yeah. I’ve read the entire exchange. I’ve also read all the commentary on it. Hence my commentary. Of note, several folks have stated they think you’re wrong and your fairly consistent reply has been (essentially), “but wait, go back and read the specific exchange!” Now you may not find that particularly ironic, but I do.
Yes, that’s exactly what I posted and I will simply note again, there’s no indication there whatsoever that sarcasm with a sprinkling of facetiousness isn’t a form of irony. Nowhere. That you think it can be inferred is solely a product of your assumptions and has nothing to do with the text as presented.
Robin, through gritted teeth:
keiths:
Robin:
I. Am. Completely. Serious.
Where did you get the idea that “Alan et al” claim I am incapable of admitting mistakes?
As I explained above, Alan already got burned by that. He’s not making that accusation anymore.
But knock yourself out. Go find us a quote, and when you fail, remember:
LOL! Now you’re just making stuff up. What in the world could I possibly admit I was mistaken about? That I was hallucinating the intent of my own post?
You’re a riot Keith!
Wow…oookaaay…
…where oh where could I have picked up such an idea…
And those are just from the last few days. I could easily find more going back weeks, months, or years.
I’ll just toss this out Keith, with a shrug in regards to whether you digest it or not: it matters not one bit whether any of those singularly or in total actually directly accuse you of never admitting a mistake or not. And…AND…I’ll also note, that if each and every one of those folk responded to this post and said point blank, “nope…sorry Robin…not what I was implying at all” (which…let’s be real…is sooooooo laughably unlikely to happen), such would still not change the validity of my response here. Those, among other similar statements, gave me the idea.
Robin,
I just approved a comment of yours that was stuck in the mod queue, probably due to the large number of links. If you didn’t want it published, my apologies.
Robin:
In other words:
“My claim has to be true. See all these links that don’t support it?”
No…no, my apologies. I clearly just got a little carried away there. All good. 🙂
Sorry Keith, but you’re having a tough time reading again. They all quite specifically support what I actually wrote. They may well not support what you assume I meant, or what you wish I’d written, or even some esoteria you infer from what I wrote, but then I’m not much concerned about that.
Robin quotes himself…
…and then writes of his umpteen links:
Robin,
You chose a rather, um, interesting place to truncate your quote. Here’s your original sentence, with the words you cut highlighted in bold:
Game, set, match.
When you’re reduced to quotemining yourself, it’s probably time to hang up your spurs. But remember:
P.S. You’re in
goodcompany. Like you, Alan got caught quotemining himself recently.William explains himself at UD (On Double Standards, comment 18):
I think it must be a mis-statement for, ‘I’m always on the lookout for gaining problems in my worldview, to add to the huge number of misapprehensions that I presently have.’
Still, who knows, with the incomprehension with which he tackles each and every issue.
Glen Davidson
‘Cuz it’s Friday:
HECK
[hek]
noun
1. The place you go if you don’t believe in Gosh.
You’ll suffer eternal darnation!
I mean, geez!
About all you’ll be able to do then is say, “Fornicate it all.”
Glen Davidson
stcordova writes:
That’s not only not noble, it’s profoundly intellectually dishonest. You aren’t following the evidence where it leads, you’re trying to cram it into your predefined beliefs.
If Dawkins had met you, he never would have qualified his summary of creationists: “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
I was an Old-Earth evolutionist once upon a time, raised in the Roman Catholic church.
My belief in evolution changed because I don’t think universal common ancestry (UCA) is a good explanation for consciousness, and even by evolutionist convention, UCA doesn’t explain the origin of life. So it’s like Haeckel said, it requires something like a miracle. Dan Graur said, “If ENCODE is right, evolution is wrong.”
So I started driving up yonder an hour away and see what the ENCODErs are actually up to. Are they the “crooks, ignoramuses generating piles of excrement with their 40 classes of epigenomic and genomic experiments” that Graur and PZ Myers and Larry Moran made them out to be? Didn’t look that way to me when I visited the NIH and attended NIH functions open to the public. It made me think ENCODE is right.
I’m preparing news reports that I will present to meetings of IDists and creationist biologists who are geographically far from the biotech capital of the world. TSZ has helped assure the accuracy of the reporting of what the NIH is actually doing regarding the 100 trillion epigenomes in the human body. I’ve referred some of them to the discussion here at TSZ to get to see criticism of what I say.
Walto bringing up the New Yorker was very helpful for increasing my understanding, and even Allan Miller’s arguments over what constitutes transgenerational epigenetic marks in things like X-inactivation. Good gravy, didn’t no know the New Yorker talking about chromatin would cause such a firestorm.
But, fwiw, thanks for taking the time to read what I said.
You could have at credited me for selecting diagrams that are better fuel for creationist memes than Kairos Korageous’s fishing reels. 🙂
Sal,
Nothing in your response changes the fact that you are trying to make the evidence fit your preconceived religious beliefs. That’s not honest.
Is there any evidence that would convince you that you’re wrong about Encode or any of the other topics you’ve been spewing about recently?
stcordova,
What you have never done is come close to explaining anything that evolution doesn’t.
Even worse, you haven’t come close to explaining that evolution explains quite well. Like the extremely derivative nature of features within clades–just as unthinking evolution would be expected to effect.
All you do, and can do, is lie about the evidence and what it indicates. Because you’ve only ever sucked up the nasty habits and blaming of others that creationists/IDists engage in almost to a person, you appear unable to think according to the evidence, preferring anything–like your idiotic Goldberg bullshit–to dealing honestly with the evidence.
You’re morally bankrupt, just like nearly all of the rest of the zealots of ID/creationism. You may be incapable of moral decency at this point. At best, there’s no indication that you have a conscience regarding the matter of evolution or with respect to those who actually do have integrity.
Glen Davidson
An experiment that showed spontaneous generation is ordinary and typical, that we just happened to be missing some small overlooked chemical in our OOL experiments.
As far as ENCODE, Graur and friends have to show their sequencing machines in all 40 experiments were instrumentally flawed. He claims they are poorly trained technicians generating lots of noise. Of course that’s about his last resort, criticize the data and experimental procedures.
Oh like birds are in the fish-type clade?
Whales supposedly descended from bacteria. Bacteria became a eukaryote, a protist, then some unspecified multicellular creature that became a fish, and the fish became an amphibian, then the amphibian became a mouse like creature, and the mouse like creature became a cow like creature, and the cow like creature started wandering near the ocean shores and then became a whale. There, that’s how I can fit whales into the bacterial clade.
This diagram of bone morphogenetic protein comparisons at the molecular level suggests to me mammals descended from mammals, and at best some vertebrate ancestor that wasn’t a fish. With all your phylogenetic reasoning one could just as well argue fish descended from mammals based purely on similarity arguments since the root ancestor is arbitrarily and circularly reasoned assumption about what is at the true ancestor.
Blatant dishonesty.
Glen Davidson
And yet, oddly, you don’t require evidence of supernatural creation ex nihilo in order to believe in the myths of bronze and iron age shepherds.
Because it’s not at all possible that “functional” as used by some of the Encode researchers means something very different than how the same term is used by the vast majority of biologists? It’s simply inconceivable that you’re basing all of your attacks on one of the most well supported scientific theories on nothing more than equivocation?
Sure I do, but your definition of what counts as evidence for you isn’t the same as what counts as evidence for me. Given that, I can see how you’d make that call, but my beliefs are mine, not yours.
Astronaut Charles Duke prayed for a blind girl, and she was healed. Duke accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and savior after he returned from walking on the moon. Some of my gambling friends who had associates farthest from the Christian faith also reported of miracles and then converted.
I think I’ve seen prayers answered in the name of Jesus. They are rare, but enough to give me pause. Maybe I was mistaken, but if so, what do I have to lose by being wrong? But if I’m not mistaken, I have a lot to gain.
But, bottom line, and no personal slight intended, if you’re atheistic viewpoint had some good Expected Value (EV) payoff for me, I’d buy into it, but on infinite timelines my estimate is EV(atheism) = 0. In my gambling book, even a 0.00001% chance Jesus is who he says he is good enough to bet on relative to your atheism. You’d probably assess the odds differently for your life, and that’s OK, it’s your life after all. I just don’t find adopting your viewpoint adding value to my life.
As far as comparing ENCODE to Dan Graur? 442 researchers from MIT to Stanford to Yale to Harvard to the NIH to Cold Spring Harbor to Howard Hughes Medical Institute? With that sort of intellectual power, they can change the view of the majority of biologist if they are right. So your argumentum ad populum arguments appealing to the vast majority rather than empirical facts is a logical fallacy.
Once I saw how chromatin can be used like RAM, it is like the virtual buttons on touch screens, it can be reconfigured for different purposes on the fly to recruit and grab and attach different molecular machines to service genes topologically far away. This would explain the use of repetitive sequences since the histones themselves can act as binding (parking) sites on chromatin in addition to DNA. The fact the research into DNA repair showed histones can serve as binding locations strengthens this as a compelling possibility.
One of the ENCODE class of experiments are the 5C experiments. But this is part of a whole class of experiments like 2C,3C,4C,5C, 6C and High C. It shows one stretch of DNA can act as a parking lot for molecular machines to service other stretches of DNA. This boggles the mind, and here is a diagram of such things which the NIH, ENCODE and other research interests helps elucidate.
The picture depicts DNA acting as a parking lot for molecular machines to perform tasks related to regulation. The “beads on a string” is the chromatin which contains DNA. In this viewpoint, it is evident the DNA is more than just a genome, but part of an epigenome and even part of a mechanical scaffold and parking lot for molecular machines. DNA isn’t solely about providing coding of proteins.
The bottom line is I just don’t find Graur’s characterization believable, and if you believe (deducing from Gruar’s numbers), something as complex and intricate as humans can be coded by 82 megabytes, then that’s up to you, but I don’t buy it. It sound absurd to me.
Looks like we need an entry level post on Pascal’s Wager, false dichotomies, Bayesian
reasoning and a few other things..
In other words, you apply different standards to the “evidence” for your religious beliefs than you do to the evidence contradicting them. That’s dishonest.
Where’s the evidence for this anecdote?
I saw a guy make a 747 vanish. The difference is that I’m not gullible enough to think it actually disappeared.
Your ridiculous version of Pascal’s Wager has been dealt with repeatedly here. What do you think that vicious, genocidal, jealous, irrational bastard of a god described in your bible will do to someone who “believes” as a bet? Heck, even I get the urge to curb stomp you on those occasions when you so smugly write about abusing children and I’m nowhere near as mean as that SOB. Imagine what it come up with. Forever.
It all boils down to an argument from incredulity for you, like many creationists. You’ve already admitted that you believe in a global flood despite the evidence. You’d save a lot of time, and behave far more honestly, if you simply admitted that your position is based solely on faith without evidence.
You know this I think, because it’s exactly what YOU do with the “principles” your libertarian creed. That smaller government is better, that there are natural rights to property, speech, assembly. That regulation by governments is suspect but regulation by corporations is OK. That, all things considered, Trump is a better choice than Clinton. All those are religious principles of yours that maybe you take to be “self-evident” because of some “revelation” of your own.
Moderator, heal thyself.
The hidden God of giving will reward you with an eternity in REAL heaven which is infinitely better then the one described in the bible, if you send me $1000.
What’s the EV of that? When will you be switching? If not, why not?
P(Richard’s Offer True) = 0 by my estimate
W(Richards Asserted Reward) = infinity by his estimate
P(Richard’s Offer True) x W(Richard’s Postulated Reward) = 0 x infinity = indeterminate form
indeterminate forms are occasionally solvable by L’Hopital/Bernoulli’s rule, it’s a little tricky using products of the form “0 x infinity”, but suffice to say if P(Richard’s Offer True) decreases faster than the rate which W(Richard’s Asserted Reward) increases, then
lim P(Richard’s Offer True) -> 0 EV(Richard’s Offer) = 0 by my estimate
Another way of saying it is that if I think the credibility of Richard’s claim is inversely proportional to the level of rewards he offers, the EV(Richard’s Offer) = 0 by my estimate. My estimate could be wrong of course, but I’m betting I’m right.
No offense intended, I have no axe to grind with Rich, but this fact has bearing on my beliefs why I accept Christ’s offer:
and there was an unwitting prophecy in the New Testament
This could be interpreted in two ways, humanity is horribly gullible, in such case not much hope for humanity in the long run, so nothing to lose anyway by believing or not believing in Jesus, when the solar system burns out this debate will be forgotten.
The other way to interpret it is that Jesus did rise from the dead, and that was such a powerful witness to people who saw it first hand that they went around the world to proclaim the good news. I quoted the Acts of the Apostles, that book looks too well crafted, too accurate in historical details (some names not discovered till almost two thousand of years later in archaeological record) to be a work of fiction.
The quote at the top of the blog is from a guy who had a rule about probabilities. Also, infinite heaven has a higher cardinality than the one you’re backing. Cash or check is fine.
VJT @ UD:
“Don’t take my word for it: ask Professor James M. Tour, a synthetic organic chemist, specializing in nanotechnology, who is also is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, and Professor of Computer Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas.”
That fella:
http://tinyurl.com/3s8bhcw
“What a comfort it must be to be pleasantly settled in one camp or the other, but I can not be so settled, and hence I have few tent-fellows. Based upon my faith in the Scriptures, I do believe (yes, faith and belief go beyond scientific evidence for this scientist) that God created the heavens and the earth and all that dwell therein, including a man named Adam and a woman named Eve. As for many of the details and the time-spans, I personally become less clear. Some may ask, What’s “less clear” about the text that reads, “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth”? That is a fair question, and I wish I had an answer that would satisfy them. But I do not because I remain less clear.”
You’re an arsehole, Keiths.
FWIW, I myself was formerly a chemically altered synth/organist, specializing in naheimtechnology.
https://myspace.com/waltosworld/music/song/sushi-lounge-14545597-14346781
Mung at UD:
“57
Mung
July 7, 2016 at 6:36 pm
>>>kf: WJM, lack of proper education in first things;
So true. Which is at least one reason a site like UD continues to have value. Someone brave enough to post an OP arguing that Barry is wrong about the law of identity would quickly be shown the door.
Which is why people who post such things can now be found at “The Skeptical Zone.” They can piss and moan that they no longer have posting privileges here at UD, but taht just supports the laws of logic.
They can’t both have the ability to post here and not have the ability to post here at the same time and in the same respect. Score one for Barry.”
Score 2 for Barry’s purse.
hmmm
With God, all things are possible.
“Do you hear what these children are saying?” they asked him. “Yes,” replied Jesus, “have you never read, “‘From the lips of children and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise’?”
Byers, at UD:
Just looking back on some old threads relating to dualism, certainty and solipsism and I see this comment from Mike Elzinga, someone whose contributions I have greatly appreciated in the past. I wondered why he stopped posting here.
Gregory (I think).
There was some unhappy disagreement between Elzinga and someone else. I have no recollection of who or what, other than that Elzinga took off after it, and made at least one disparaging comment about TSZ at PandasThumb (not that it matters, other than that it’s a sign that he apparently was rather displeased by the encounter). He posts at the latter yet.
Glen Davidson
Alan,
If you read that exchange, it’s obvious why Mike got upset. He made a mistake (in physics, his own area of expertise) and I pointed it out, providing a reference from Nature Physics, no less, to back up my position. Mike is used to criticizing the views of others, but not so used to having his own claims criticized.
You seem to think that we should be less skeptical here, lest we upset people like Mike. I disagree. I think Lizzie had the right idea, and that TSZ should be a place where everyone, including experts in various fields, should expect to have their ideas and positions challenged. Ideas are fair game here, and that’s how it should be. TSZ should not be a “safe space” for those with fragile egos.
TSZ isn’t for everyone, because some people feel very uncomfortable when their ideas are challenged. Mike is one of them.
One has to put up with arrogant know-tt-alls like you who can’t admit mistakes, certainly, as well as with crappy moderators like Patrick. Otherwise it would be a very nice place. A lot of smart people here.
Ironically (heh), I absolutely agree with this. You should have it tattooed on your forehead.
Would that fit too? It must be a very large forehead.
Do you enjoy exposing wrong ideas or fragile egos? Which is it? Just wondering.
walto,
You would clearly enjoy TSZ more if I stopped pointing out your mistakes.
Sorry, but that ain’t gonna happen.
I think we are evolving immunity!
keiths:
Alan:
If so, that’s unfortunate. Far better to learn from your mistakes than to become hidebound.