Posted on 04/04/2014 5:25:29 PM PDT by Moseley
The stakes are higher than most conservatives realize. When the fraud of man-made global warming finally dies, folks will start thinking: What else were we lied to about? How could the high priests of modern knowledge have confidently insisted something that was never remotely plausible?
A key element of progressivism is having wise philosopher-kings who make benevolent decisions for the masses. It is a core element of conservatism that you can make decisions for yourself. But for progressives, it is essential to convince the public that the designated authorities know better than you do, including what to eat, how to raise your kids, how to educate children, whom to vote for, etc.
Who will control society is up for grabs. The entire progressive religion depends upon maintaining public belief that their self-declared experts are all-knowing. Conformity is more important than truth. So desperate Warmists are intensifying their efforts even as their argument collapses in full view of everyone.
But a scientist with an opinion is not a scientist. A real scientist is cheerfully open to being proven wrong, eager for discovery more than for satisfying his ego. Many of the most important discoveries were not what a researcher was expecting. A scientist will have suspicions and a working hypothesis, but only with an open mind.
Instead, modern science has become a festival of speculation. Progressives simply speculate about what might be true and then read tea leaves for any hint consistent with their imagination.
We have special-effects television shows about dinosaurs showing the coloring of dinosaurs whose skin we have never seen and the sounds they make which we have never heard. Science shows tell us that the mother dinosaur is starting to worry that day about the storm approaching, and that the young dinosaurs are feeling playful.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Every hypothesis and every theory is an exercise in speculation.
So Science is now dead because evolution can’t be proven through the scientific method, but it will spring back to like if they toss creationism into the mix?
Science is now dead because the imagineers who call themselves scientists have abandoned science. The core disciplines of the Scientific Method are no longer taught, followed, or believed in by so-called “scientists.”
NOTE: Werner Von Braun designed the rocket, and I will use the word rocket ship as a full-blown craft rather than just a missile.
According to his designs, the rocket should have worked.
It didn’t. It blew up.
The team developing the V-2 joked that the safest place on Earth was at the target zone where the rocket was supposed to hit.
Spectacular video shows the rockets blowing up again and again — including those designed and built by different teams WITHOUT Von Braun.
They didn’t just speculate that a design will work, strap in live people, and push the button.
THEY TESTED THE DESIGN to make sure it would work.
It didn’t.
They had to keep making changes until they could be confident that it would probably work.
Is that speculation, or do you have proof?
No it didn't. Aristotle could have had no such evidence because that's not what happens.
>Your points about radioactive dating ignore the fact that in many cases, multiple techniques confirm the same age.
I ignore it, because it isn't true.
Sure it is. This table (from here) shows the dating of some meteorites by multiple methods. Note that the St. Severin metorite was dated by 4 methods that came up with ages from 4.38 to 4.55 billion years.
First, no one accepted Newton's laws without first testing them by repeated experiments on Earth.
What is an experiment on Earth that would test the proposition that gravity is proportional to a body's mass and inversely proportional to the square of its distance?
We can predict that the moon should be at a precise point in space at a precise point if our calculations about gravity are true.
The ancients were predicting the location of the moon, planets, and stars long before Newton formulated the Law of Gravity.
A scientific law is a scientific theory, which is proven to a higher level of certainty than your average theory and which has very broad over-arching application.
Sorry, you're wrong. As explained here
Some scientists will tell you that the difference between them is that a law describes what nature does under certain conditions, and will predict what will happen as long as those conditions are met. A theory explains how nature works. Others delineate law and theory based on mathematics -- Laws are often times mathematically defined (once again, a description of how nature behaves) whereas theories are often non-mathematical. Looking at things this was helps to explain, in part, why physics and chemistry have lots of "laws" whereas biology has few laws (and more theories). In biology, it is very difficult to describe all the complexities of life with "simple" (relatively speaking!) mathematical terms. Regardless of which definitions one uses to distinguish between a law and a theory, scientists would agree that a theory is NOT a "transitory law, a law in waiting". There is NO hierarchy being implied by scientists who use these words. That is, a law is neither "better than" nor "above" a theory.and here
A law generalizes a body of observations. At the time it is made, no exceptions have been found to a law. Scientific laws explain things, but they do not describe them. One way to tell a law and a theory apart is to ask if the description gives you a means to explain 'why'. Example: Consider Newton's Law of Gravity. Newton could use this law to predict the behavior of a dropped object, but he couldn't explain why it happened.and here
Hypotheses cannot become theories and theories cannot become laws. Hypotheses, theories, and laws are all scientific explanations but they differ in breadth, not in level of support. Theories apply to a broader range of phenomena than do hypotheses. The term law is sometimes used to refer to an idea about how observable phenomena are related.
Second hand hearsay is not what I’d consider compelling evidence.
BTTT!
I must take issue with both these claims, dear freedom2003.
First, AGW (anthropogenic global warming) doesn't even qualify as an intelligent hypothesis. Anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the history of climate change on this planet would likely find such a proposal risible. For it simply doesn't square with the evidentiary record, available to any intelligent generalist who cares to follow the problem.
Just ask any AGW proponent to see the evidence backing up his proposal, and he will give you the results of his own purpose-built, mathematically-based climatological model as just the evidence you seek. Try that global warming alarmist/troll Michael Mann (of UPenn and "hockey stick" fame) on that question and see where it would get you. (It would probably be a lawsuit....)
Are we to believe that the legitimacy of science depends on such tactics? Does Michael Mann really expect us to believe that his consecrated model is a complete description of climate change in the natural world, that is to say in Reality? Which is to say that Reality can actually be reduced to the size of a conception of a human brain — i.e., as something further translatable into a purpose-built mathematical model.
If that is so, then all I can say is Mann's model does not address the Mediaeval Warm Period (roughly dated 800–1400 A.D.), back when Greenland was actually green. (Evidently the folks on Greenland back then were engaged in small-scale agriculture, herding and vinocultural activities. Also they were Christians, as church ruins there attest.)
I find it noteworthy that toward the end of this global warming period, Europe was horrifically savaged by the Black Plague. Estimated loss of life: 13 million souls.
Anyhoot, fairly quickly thereafter, severe cold set in globally, and persisted for centuries. In the American experience, one thinks of the first year of the Pilgrim's landing at Provincetown, MA (1620), and the enormous toll in lives it took (over a third of the population in that bitter winter). Or of the horrific experience of Valley Forge, in that terrible winter of profound misery and discontent....
But then, things started warming up again from there. A family reminiscence here that seems on-point: When my Dad was a boy, he attended boarding school at a private academy located on an island in Boston Harbor. He would tell us of how the harbor would freeze in the winter, so much so that they could bring in horse-teams to drag in fully-loaded coal barges over the ice. THAT sort of thing hasn't happened in my lifetime!
I recall that, back in the 1970s, the stories that Time and Newsweek were running were all about immanent global cooling, presaging the imminent return to the next Ice Age….
It’s to laugh.
Anyhoot, the Mediaeval Warm Period does not comport with Mann’s hockey stick. Moreover, the ideology behind global warming theory — that man is the sole culprit, thus his Industrial Revolution is entirely to blame for the catastrophe that Mann’s model purports to predict — is totally silly. Back in the Mediaeval Warm Period, there was zero industrial activity whatsoever going on involving large-scale use of hydrocarbon fuels. Beyond cooking and warming fires, there was near-zero release of hydrocarbons by man-made means into the natural environment. (And you can’t blame everything on cow flatulence.)
Finally, what really puts me off is the global-warming-alarmists’ claim that carbon dioxide emissions kill the biosphere because they introduce inadvertent, devastating effects on global climate. At least that seems to be implicit in their main argument.
Yet it seems to me that the natural world quite handily deals with the well-being of the total Biota: We humans discern that the Biota consists of two fundamental realms, the biological and the botanical. Botanical entities’ respiration consists of inhaling carbon dioxide — without which photosynthesis would be impossible [and thus no food for humans] — and exhaling oxygen.
And it’s a really good thing that the plant world does this: because human respiration consists of inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.
What an amazing complementarity in living and breathing Nature!
All Thanks and Praise be unto the Lord!!!
Michael Mann: Does your “model” take such considerations into effect?
Or are these considerations negligible, because they do not presuppose or fit your model?
Dear freedom2003, I was about to get into my Second point, re: whether or not Darwin’s theory qualifies as accepted science. Then I realized how long I’ve gone on already.
Time for a break. But I’ll be back.
Thank for agreeing with me that AGW theory is total tripe.
IF global warming is occurring, it is a very good bet that the same thing which has caused global warming during the last billion years is doing it again, namely something Solar. But then if that is acknowledged, how can scam thieves like Al Gore and the democrips masters, the globalist banking masters, make billions off of humans doing business and just living on the planet?
As a scientist, I deem the article to have encapsulated this entire pseudo / politicized-"science" thing in single sentence:
"A real scientist is cheerfully open to being proven wrong, eager for discovery more than for satisfying his ego."
~~~~~~~~~~~
...and, might add, "or stuffing his pocketbook."
Plus, I should append, "To conservatives, TRUTH is vital."
To continue RE: My quibble with your Second point, freedumb2003, that Darwin’s theory is accepted science — so accepted, in fact, that it cannot be questioned by any sensible person now living.
But if that is the case, then it seems to me we have entirely left the precinct of science, and are venturing into wholly ideological territory, a territory unhinged, untroubled by, any connection with the actually Reality in which you and I and everybody else actually lives.
For openers, science itself is an intergenerational, communal and social effort that has a noble mission and tradition to maintain. Science can’t tell us everything we’d like to know, but we have confidence that, in what they do tell us, that is reliable.
To evaluate this issue, it seems best to mention at the outset the gist of two different points of view of what constitutes Reality, and what constitutes Science. Historically, culturally in the West, the latter has ever been thought of as the devoted student and explicator of the former. That is to say, science per se is not the principle creative activity in Nature. The purview of science is a very restricted one, based as it is on the method that distinguishes it as a valid intellectual activity: That is, a method based on direct observation (as technologically made more keen over time), and on successful and replicable experiments designed to “falsify” (or by default, “justify”) whatever outcome the experiment is seeking to achieve.
But what science never does, nor can do, is to PROVE anything. “Proof” is a term that belongs to mathematics alone. Science is about making descriptions of Nature, to as high a probabilistic determination as possible. Which ALWAYS falls short of 100% accuracy.
I am probably not alone in thinking of physics as the preeminent discipline in the natural sciences. Its propositions are rigorous and widely testable. As a discipline, it has shown itself adept in assimilating new evidence. Which is how human knowledge of Reality progresses from Ptolemy to Einstein.
Which means that physical science is ineluctably subject to change, subject to subsequent modification as new evidence comes into play.
David Bohm sums this up quite nicely:
…Newtonian mechanics, thought originally to be of completely universal validity, was eventually found to be valid in a limited domain (velocity small compared with light) and only to a limited degree of approximation. Newtonian mechanics had to give way to the theory of relativity which utilized basic conceptions concerning space and time which were in many ways not consistent with those of Newtonian mechanics. The new theory was, therefore, in certain essential features qualitatively and fundamentally different from the old one. Nevertheless, within the domain of low velocities, the new theory approached the old one as a limited case. In a similar way, classical mechanics eventually gave way to the quantum theory, which is very different in its basic structure, but which still contains classical theory as a limited case, valid approximately in the domain of large quantum numbers. Agreement with experiments in a limited domain and to a limited degree of approximation is evidently no proof, therefore, that the basic concepts of a given theory have a completely universal validity. — Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980, p. 105How come the biological sciences don’t work this way? NOTHING has changed with Darwin’s theory for the past 160 years. Every new discovery becomes new “proof” that Darwin’s theory is correct. And God help the brave person who suggests otherwise!!!
To those folks looking for “certainty in Nature” I have only one observation: The only certainty in Nature is that Nature is uncertain. BUT — Nature is not random.
On such grounds, I object to the idea that Darwinism is somehow the sine qua non of Biology, let alone a valid scientific theory.
Biology is purportedly the “scientific” study of living beings.
In what follows, I’m taking my page from physics, physics being a relentlessly rigorous scientific discipline that is able to propound its thinking in terms of universal mathematical language. Also it is remarkable for its ability to assimilate new evidence that confounds old theories. If that were not so, then we’d all still be stuck in Ptolemy’s Geocentric Model of the universe, and Einstein would be completely, totally unintelligible to the human species, not to mention Niels Bohr.
I do not notice a similar enthusiasm for embracing change as a matter of scientific principle in devotees of Darwin’s theory.
The reasons I think Darwin’s Evolutionary Theory is NOT a valid scientific theory:
(1) Scientific theories must, in principle, be testable. And not only testable, but replicable by other observers, using the same basic test apparatus as adjusted to local conditions as need be. Somebody please tell me how the central premise of Darwin’s theory — that one species can convert itself, via its progeny, into a kind different than itself — that is, into a “new species — can possibly be true, since no human observer, after all this historical time, has been able to report such a finding? And since no feasible experiment seems forthcoming to test such an hypothesis?
Not all of the Reality we humans live in is directly observable in all its aspects. Yet the answer to some questions that affect us most deeply must be inferred from what can be “seen,” not just by what we feel. We are profoundly affected by the effects of “non-observables” at many levels. Thus frequent “reality checks” seem to be in order. :>)
But in any case, science cannot reach to the problem of non-observables, or justly to have anything to say about them. That doesn’t mean that the problem of non-observables just “goes away,” because Science thinks it’s unprofitable and/or bunk, methodologically speaking, to track them down. Rather, that study legitimately falls to theology and philosophy.
Finally, science cannot define Nature. However, as "formal observer," it can attempt to describe (to the maximum possible accuracy it has at hand) what Nature is — as seen from the standpoint of a particular, given point in time.
There is a "problem" that we humans actually L IVE in — and live OUT of — the very “problem” that science per se CANNOT address, given the self-imposed limit of its method.
Thus in conclusion, my objection to Darwinism is that it never changes. It’s been around since 1859, and there is nothing going on with its “creed” that has been modified by more recent experience of any description whatsoever. If anything, Darwinist theory is being used as a screening tool to prohibit free speech contradicting its (alarmingly partial) account of biological organisms — in the natural sciences, in the academy, in the elite journals, in public opinion.
The thought struck me today that Darwin’s theory is, in itself, a “fossil.” Of course, there’s irony there, in that Darwin himself worried that his theory depended on the by-then-known fossil record of his own day, which was very spotty to say the least. Yet he said that his theory would either rise or fall on the paleontological/fossil record yet to be established over time.
That Darwinism purports to be THE principal science of biology just gives me the fits. The theory says nothing about the origin of life, or its subsequent biological organization necessary to the maintenance of a living state. Darwin does not deal with such problems. All he wants to show you is how one “species” turns into another “species.” [And of course, we can always quibble about the meaning of “species” if we have nothing better to do….]
In conclusion, I just think that Darwin’s Evolution theory is the greatest Myth of our Time. It has absolutely no merit as a scientific theory, because it does not speak the language of science (mathematical formulation); it cannot design an experiment to prove its main holding — that is, to demonstrate it is possible for one species to become another species under laboratory conditions.
Finally, Darwinism proposes an (untested) directive by which further discourse regarding Nature is to prescribe to its theory that evolution is wholly undirected in its operation without deviation; that is, everything in Nature happens by chance.
If one is in the business of rent-seeking from federal taxpayers and/or other third parties, in support of such groundless “research,” I have only one thing to say to you: Please get another living, please get a LIFE. Speaking as a federal taxpayer, I’m sick and tired of paying for this kind of garbage.
In the end, your message is: Winners win; Losers lose. That’s just the way it is…. Whatta concept!!! Thank you Charlie Darwin!
Bye-bye for now, dear freedom2003. We obviously disagree on the Second point. Still, thank you so much for writing!
AGW is little more than ideology seeking authentication as "science." Fortunately people seem to be waking up to the scam.
And of course I very strongly agree with on all your other points as well.
I don't know how you can say that. Darwin knew nothing of DNA and little of genetics (much less epigenetics). He was mistaken in his idea of how traits get passed on. He would have been unable to explain recessive genes, or why differences persisted rather than being bred out, or why one child might have blue eyes while the rest have brown. Plus, he was a gradualist, while current thinking includes at least some instances of more rapid change. The only way what you say is accurate is if you mean Darwin himself hasn't updated his theory. That I'll give you. Otherwise, let me quote this guy:
We have learned much since Darwin's time and it is no longer appropriate to claim that evolutionary biologists believe that Darwin's theory of Natural Selection is the best theory of the mechanism of evolution.... the Modern Synthesis is a theory about how evolution works at the level of genes, phenotypes, and populations whereas Darwinism was concerned mainly with organisms, speciation and individuals. This is a major paradigm shift...Every new discovery becomes new “proof” that Darwin’s theory is correct.
Kinda like the germ theory of disease in that respect, I guess.
I do not notice a similar enthusiasm for embracing change as a matter of scientific principle in devotees of Darwin’s theory.
Oh come on. We grew up with slow, dumb gray-green dinosaurs, and now we have quick colorfully feathered ones. We used to portray transistional species like Archaeopteryx as stops on the direct line from dinosaurs to birds, but now we speak of clades and the idea of branching more than linear evolution. We're now investigating the influence of epigenetics, a field undreamed of 25 years ago.
One last thought: everything you say about the theory of evolution--well, the accurate parts, anyway--could be true, and it could still be right.
This may be a major paradigm shift to a Darwinist. But like Darwin's original theory, the Modern Synthesis evidently continues to presuppose that fundamentally natural processes that operate randomly are the drivers of biological evolution. Darwin's theory says that speciation occurs as the result of random mutation plus Natural Selection — where one must regard the "nature" doing the "selecting" as itself a random process that is co-evolving with the organisms it selectively modifies. (Wait, if selectivity is involved, then how can we say the process is "random?" If Nature is an exclusively material system, then how did Nature get "smart enuf" to make a selection? Selection involves making a choice.)
My question for the Modern Synthesist/Neo-Darwinist is: How does the interaction of two random systems evolve into highly organized and stable DNA, which is the antithesis of "random?"
Your article states that the Modern Synthesist/Neo-Darwinist postulates that "speciation is (usually) due to the gradual accumulation of small genetic changes. This is equivalent to saying that macroevolution is simply a lot of microevolution."
Genetics has been smuggled in through the back door here without a word being said about how it could arise in a random process.
I don't have much of a problem with microevolution. We can observe examples of this in Nature. But macroevolution is a completely different story. To say that macroevolution is effectively the simple sum of all the microevolutions going on is, to me, completely senseless. Plus, as ever, neither Darwinist nor Neo-Darwinist theory can give any account of how the first, common ancestor came to be a living being in the first place.
So as biological science, how complete. how exhaustive is Neo-Darwinist theory?
FWIW, I continue to believe the "common ancestor" is a pipe dream....
Thanks so much for writing, Ha Ha Thats Very Logical!
you left out time...... lots and lots of incomprehensable time
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