…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."
In consideration of this day when Muslim Terrorists killed almost 3000 innocent people in 2001, I mention Richard Dawkins:
http://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2018/march/leading-atheist-dont-celebrate-decline-of-christianity-in-europe
Out of interest Sal who are you more likely to be attacked by? White supremacists or a muslim?
Hint: It’s not the muslims.
https://www.politifact.com/california/article/2017/aug/31/who-carries-out-more-terror-attacks-us-soil-right-/
And yet, the article you link to says nothing of the sort. Interesting.
William J. Murray,
Well, it says that the’evidence is not clear,’ suggesting there’s some plausibility to the claims. Anyhow, I’d think the studies at least suggest that Sal should be equally afraid of right wing American groups and not exclusively fearful of Muslims.
OMagain didn’t say “right wing American groups”. He said “White Supremacists”. Those two terms are not synonymous at all.
Haha. OK. Have it your way.
So many of the recent posts have been weapons-grade derp. TSZ is a giddy mix of governance angst and shite these days. Mission accomplished, IDists.
“Forget about it, Jake, it’s the Internet.”
Well, it’s open to all members to submit an OP. TSZ is the pitch. Members are the players.
You’ve posted OPs in the past, Rich. Good speech drives out bad apparently. You could help.
Oh, come now! Nobody is taking ID seriously as science. ID is sidelined. The problem is US Republicans have free rein at the moment. Get the vote out at the mid terms!
“Mission accomplished, IDists.”
Oh ID is dead, as smarter minds have noticed before me. The mission was to show UD was right in having stringent content control, by posting utter dreck here.
I don’t know what this means.
This is Alan’s true colors and the real reason behind his refusal at all costs to step away from being a moderator. He is a propagandist clear and simple.
“Get out the vote. The problem is people are still talking about ID. Its the Republicans. We must stop them.”
What the fuck do Republicans in America have to do with this site Alan? Why the fuck is it a “problem” to you that people can still talk about ID?
This is why you have been a hack moderator here from Day 1 Alan. Because this has always been your goal. You don’t like free discussion Alan. You don’t have the faintest idea what you are talking about in science, but you don’t care, you just want to shake your pom poms and be your teams best cheerleader. Be Lizzie’s little campaign manager.
That is why you couldn’t quit. That is why you have always been unable to suppress your ridiculous biased proclivities. You couldn’t fake pretending you wanted to be the opposite of UD. You are a shill Alan. Always were. Now you accidentally admit it. Guerilla Skeptic Alan.
What?
That I’m amazed at how the unholy alliance between unscrupulous, self-serving, amoral hard-right politicians and religious leaders in the US are intent on usurping church-state separation and now the independence of the judiciary (Kavanaugh).
If I’m mistaken about what I see and read, correct my mis-impression.
Those that are able to vote (despite the attempts to disenfranchise) should take the opportunity to support or oppose what’s going on.
Why shouldn’t the machinations of the US political system be open to comment? I’m sorry if such discussion embarrasses you. I can understand it would.
ID was ever only a cynical attempt to cover Creationist efforts at changing public school curricula with a fig-leaf of “sciencyness”. It doesn’t matter any more with Trump and Betsy de Vos in charge.
Whose team do you think I’m on? I’ve never in nearly seventy years set foot in the US. I’m just an outside observer.
I freely admit to SIWOTI syndrome. But there’s almost no admin work needed these days and a fairly even balance of worldview among our six admins now. It’s not just me.
I’ve never exposed my proclivities here! *googles* Certainly not! Never!
UD is a website. When Bill Dembski ran it early on, there was no tolerance for dissent. Dembski would silently ban at the drop of a hat. That was what got me interested in ID. It seemed politically motivated and shamelessly so.
*googles again* Why, thank you, Sir!
What? That I have political views? Is it prohibited here? Don’t think so. Is it prohibited for admins to express political or religious views? Don’t think so. What are you actually upset about?
Perhaps a series of remedial lessons on evolutionary theory could swing things back around. 🙂
First, there are all kinds of political views here, and all kinds of views on ID, and your ridiculous desire to pin all of the “evils” of discussing ID on some Republican Party in the US is just downright nonsense.
It gives you comfort to try and believe that it is just a few far right fringe outliers who don’t believe in Darwinism, but that is completely absent of fact. Heck, the popular (and quite liberal) podcast Radiolab just did an episode completely demolishing the standard Darwinist myths, and revealed how the newest knowledge of gene transfer from cells to other cells wipes out virtually everything Darwinist have been proposing for the past 100 years.
But don’t let the facts get in the way of your evangelical propaganda needs (Admin not Admin, Moderator Not moderator) Alan. Spin away. Your worldview needs it.
The subject was a new book by David Quammen “ The Tangled Tree” .
Per the New York Times review “Quammen offers a readable and largely reliable Baedeker to a fast-moving and complex field of science that is as tangled as the tree of his title. He ultimately concludes that Darwin was not wrong, but that his tree of life was too simplistic. Yet, though Quammen shapes a truly fascinating tale, it’s clear that this story is not yet finished.”
Perhaps your interpretation is not quite agreed by all.
Perhaps its the Darwinists whose interpretations have problems. I thought it was all settled?
“Oh, just a few pesky details, like you know the peppered moth story is complete bullshit and is actually a refutation of Darwinian style evolution, and the exchange of giants swaths of DNA between different organisms is completely rampant. Other than that…We are working on it!”
The only people frozen in time are those bound to words written thousands of years ago. Those words do not change. They do not change.
Darwinists, whatever you think they are, are happy to change as the wind changes. Follow the evidence where it leads, remember?
Citation?
I’m unfamiliar with the dna of giant swaths. Does it have some special properties?
In short, phoodoo, it seems that you are afraid of change, you are looking for “an” answer and there is no single answer. The certainty you seem to be seeking can only be found in those static, unchanging texts. The rest of us must struggle on. And suffer your futile complaints as we go!
Out of interest phoodoo, how long until those non-believers outnumber the believers in Darwinism? 10 years? 20 years? 50 years? As it seems to me once that happens you’ve won by default.
Care to put a figure on it? If not, you can’t be all that confident you are on the winning side can you?
Precisely how does gene transfer wipe out ‘virtually everything’ proposed?
phoodoo,
Phoodoo. Clearly admins have views on subjects. Comments are not administration. Look back at your previous attempts at motive-mongering, you always look like an idiot.
I don’t think he looks like an idiot. But he does look as if he is angry and driven by his anger to post in an irrational way.
I don’t doubt that he thinks his anger is justified. But he needs to get over it, and get back to a more rational way of behaving.
Perhaps
“QUAMMEN: It does revise Darwinism. The canonical view of evolution – the Darwinian view is that evolution occurs as genes descend from parents to offspring and are very gradually modified and branches diverge. The tree of life is the model used because it chose branches diverging. But now we understand that innovation in genomes doesn’t always come gradually. Sometimes it comes suddenly, in an instant, by horizontal gene transfer. And that represents the convergence not the divergence of lineages.”
QUAMMEN: Well, I think it should make us feel humble. Each human is an individual still in a very, very important sense. But it should remind us of that important Darwinian truth – and I think it’s the deepest and the darkest of Darwinian truths – that we humans are not separate from nature. We’re not above nature. We’re part of nature. And now we know that not only is that true in the sense that we are animals evolved from other animals, but we also contain bacteria. We contain viruses. We are individuals, but we are individuals that are mosaics encompassing other individuals.“
Seems like he might need your help interpreting his own work.
“Oh, just a few pesky details, like you know the peppered moth story is complete bullshit and is actually a refutation of Darwinian style evolution
Not per the latest experiment
Cook LM, Grant BS, Saccheri IJ, Mallet J. Selective bird predation on the peppered moth: the last experiment of Michael Majerus. Biology Letters. 2012;8(4):609-612. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2011.1136.
The is the price one pays for proposing specific mechanisms, they are always subject to new knowledge.
Care to propose how you believe what we see came about?
newton,
You mean the part of Darwinism that IS true is that we are all a part of nature?
Wow, shocking.
For some yes. I doubt being descended from a bacteria or a virus is any better than a monkey.
How can you talk about any meaningful notion of descended when you know that Dna can be swapped from totally different species into other species?
I would say you are descended from whatever contributes to your makeup.
How does design explain it?
That reminds me of something. Something about a foot and a door and something something.
It was designed.
Yeah! It does.
You can’t convince someone of something he/she doesn’t want to even hear about… She has a selective hearing problem that is common among this species…
Anybody up for wasting his/her time? OMG’s favourite is the 2 shtick hellevolution into 3 shticks… The sticks look similar, as all sticks supposed to so they must’ve evolved…
Case closed!
If J-Mac actually engaged with the comments on his inanne posts there would be an argument for them. But he’s just trolling even on his own posts.
Enough.
You’ve convinced yourself that biologists reject intelligent design creationism because they reject god. And yet there are plenty of theistic biologists doing great science who also reject intelligent design creationism. The evidence is against you.
That is what you tell yourself to justify the ridicule your incoherent ideas recieve. The truth is far worse, for you.
Incoherent nonsense.
More unintelligible nonsense. J-Mac is free to start his own blog and spew his BS there.
I vote for one OP a year from J-Mac.
Do brain farts smell?
Good one dazz!
Indeed. But since our absentee dictator has imposed on us a set of rules that make it impossible to restrict or sanction J-Mac’s behavior in any way, our only option is to ignore him. Of course it’s also fun to mock him but that will only encourage his antics.
Agreed, but there is also the issue of bandwidth being devoted to pointing that bandwidth is being wasted in responding to such posters.
Of course, this applies to this message as well, so kick that ladder away after use.
Continuing to lurk at PS for now, it is my current view that the dictator part is fine; it’s the absentee part that has harmed TSZ the most.
Dr S is a very active participant at his form, to the extent of scolding posters who go beyond their expertise and of liberally creating new threads to accommodate side or off-topic posts. I wonder how well the forum would do without someone like him taking this active and intrusive role.
Agreed.
I guess a site needs its personality. It’s nearly November! *crosses fingers*
I’d frankly also fault Dr. Liddle (OK, “Liz”) for not clearly empowering moderators to take this role. Although I don’t think she was ever as intrusive as Dr S is (but in a good way).
I see that you have now de-lurked, at least partially.
And yes, I agree with you about the absentee part.
Yes, I will post more there.
One thing I’d really like to understand in more detail is where biological assumptions affect Eric’s purely mathematical argument. The math is fine as far as I understand it.
I know you have noted this lacuna* from the beginning but even with Dr S’s posts I don’t think it has been ever addressed in enough detail to assess the math as applied to biological evolution.
I know that there are references to Durston’s work and CSI and ASC, but why and where do they fit in exactly.
I’ll post something on that tomorrow in one of the active threads.
———————-
* Note: Using “lacuna” instead of “gap” is a mandatory if one is to claim to have read philosophy seriously.
Yes, that’s an issue with all of the ID and creationist arguments about information. They fail to connect their models to reality.
Whatever happened to the idea of “ordinary language philosophy”?
Well-played.
Your reference to OLP gives me an excuse to post this query on Wittgenstein (who some say was the inspiration for OLP, though not an adherent of it). It’s a quote from a Ray Monk review of a recent Nietzsche biography:
This was a surprise to me since as late as 2009, a Leiter survey puts Wittgenstein at the top of 20th century philosophers. Ray Monk is a Wittgenstein scholar, so one would think any bias would be for Wittgenstein’s pre-eminence.
Does anyone know why Monk would say that? KN?
I don’t.
I’m looking at this from the sidelines. It has seemed to me that much of the support for Wittgenstein has been for the Tractatus (which I always saw as misguided). But I am seeing a trend toward a better appreciation of the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations.
Yes, as soon as you say gap or gaps you’ll be labelled a Creationist. 🙂
FWIW,
1. I don’t think of Ray Monk as a Wittgenstein scholar. He’s a biographer. And if you’d followed him on twitter you’d know that all he writes about is being a vegan.
2. Of course Wittgenstein’s reputation is “in sharp decline.” It has had to have been since at the time of his death he was considered nothing less than a God. When I took a course from one of his followers at Cornell in the 1970s, he was grouped with Buddha and Jesus.
Walto’s right — a “sharp decline” from uncritical adulation leaves plenty of room for respect!
There are still top-notch Wittgenstein scholars and superb dissertations on Wittgenstein being written, so he’s not going away. But I think that the big problem by the late 1970s was “ok, so suppose Wittgenstein’s right? Now what do we do?” It’s not really clear how we’re supposed to move on past Wittgenstein. Rorty tried and ended up leaving analytic philosophy altogether. (A warning for us all!)
Plus it seemed quite evident by the late 1970s, thanks to Jerry Fodor, that Wittgenstein just had to be completely wrong about the nature of mind. The people I know who work in philosophy of cognitive science have very little respect or use for Wittgenstein: to them it’s all armchair speculation without any empirical knowledge. Wittgenstein’s arguments against the possibility of a private language look neat, but it turns out that in fact there’s a lot more categorical and syntactical structure at work in infant minds that Wittgenstein could ever have imagined.
(That’s not to say that I myself think Fodor is right and Wittgenstein is wrong; on the contrary. Fodor is hopelessly trapped in armchair, a priori speculation of his own. But I think that we need really good empirical reasons for thinking that Wittgenstein is right.)
Kantian Naturalist,
KN, Walto: Thanks for the replies.
Good to see you are still around.
Yep, I’m still around. Glad to see you two are as well.
A lesson for us all perhaps! 😉