06-09-2012, 02:43 PM
Ed,
Thanks for the object lesson in support of my poem, I could not have asked for a more visceral response than that. I especially like the part where you make up things I didn't say, and then attack them. :p
Myth, btw, is a story we create to explain the world to ourselves. Despite science, I have not noticed a great increase in predictability of events, only that like myth, science offers explanations after the fact. I am hopeful this will change, but then I was not attacking science, I was attacking the people who treat it like a religion.
"Scientific method allows, and expects, that its findings will be refined, perhaps even contradicted, with progress. To compare it with religion, or myth, and try to set up some kind of equivalence, has no obviously rational basis."
The way people respond to it as though it were a religion has a rational basis, people are perfectly capable of making a god of anything, in fact liberals have done very well in making a religion out of politics. Unlike you Ed, I don't believe science has yet striped reality bare and shown us what lies beneath it. We don't even have a unified field theory for christ sakes. You are going to accept as true an edifice whose two most successful theories, General Relativity and the Standard Model can not co-exists, yet both are accepted as true? The science also presupposes that to be factual, something must be proved as factual by the scientific method, and anything that cannot be does not exists. Behaviorism anyone?
"but if I see some kind of ape, the idea that that creature and I are not in some way related"
So you are going to reduce evolutionary theory to recognizing a superficial likeness. That sounds more like sympathetic magic to me. The last common ancestor between humans and apes was 6 million years ago, and you are going to base that on the eyeball test? I guess most people before Darwin were just observing idiots.
" knows v well that with a bit of care they can produce say, a black tulip, where one did not exist, or a different kind of sheep. But of course that's not species, right? So that's OK. "
Ever hear of a guy named Charles Babbage, and a problem called "a difference in scale"?
One word on natural selection "Opposable Thumbs"!
Billy,
"darwins evolotion theory" ?!? Spelling aside, if you are meaning "modern evolutionary synthesis" then you are using incorrect terminology. However the failure in your experiment was simply from not getting a large enough grant :p
Dale
Thanks for the object lesson in support of my poem, I could not have asked for a more visceral response than that. I especially like the part where you make up things I didn't say, and then attack them. :p
Myth, btw, is a story we create to explain the world to ourselves. Despite science, I have not noticed a great increase in predictability of events, only that like myth, science offers explanations after the fact. I am hopeful this will change, but then I was not attacking science, I was attacking the people who treat it like a religion.
"Scientific method allows, and expects, that its findings will be refined, perhaps even contradicted, with progress. To compare it with religion, or myth, and try to set up some kind of equivalence, has no obviously rational basis."
The way people respond to it as though it were a religion has a rational basis, people are perfectly capable of making a god of anything, in fact liberals have done very well in making a religion out of politics. Unlike you Ed, I don't believe science has yet striped reality bare and shown us what lies beneath it. We don't even have a unified field theory for christ sakes. You are going to accept as true an edifice whose two most successful theories, General Relativity and the Standard Model can not co-exists, yet both are accepted as true? The science also presupposes that to be factual, something must be proved as factual by the scientific method, and anything that cannot be does not exists. Behaviorism anyone?
"but if I see some kind of ape, the idea that that creature and I are not in some way related"
So you are going to reduce evolutionary theory to recognizing a superficial likeness. That sounds more like sympathetic magic to me. The last common ancestor between humans and apes was 6 million years ago, and you are going to base that on the eyeball test? I guess most people before Darwin were just observing idiots.
" knows v well that with a bit of care they can produce say, a black tulip, where one did not exist, or a different kind of sheep. But of course that's not species, right? So that's OK. "
Ever hear of a guy named Charles Babbage, and a problem called "a difference in scale"?
One word on natural selection "Opposable Thumbs"!
Billy,
"darwins evolotion theory" ?!? Spelling aside, if you are meaning "modern evolutionary synthesis" then you are using incorrect terminology. However the failure in your experiment was simply from not getting a large enough grant :p
Dale
How long after picking up the brush, the first masterpiece?
The goal is not to obfuscate that which is clear, but make clear that which isn't.
The goal is not to obfuscate that which is clear, but make clear that which isn't.