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Source: (consider it) Thread: What could DISPROVE Evolution?
ken
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quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Surely, ID is in no shape or form, a scientific theory. It seems to me to be largely parasitic upon genuine scientific disciplines, such as biology, geology, paleontology, and so on, in that it takes information from them, and uses that to argue against evolution.

Pretty much. Also its never clearly explained - there is a lot of handwaving and assertion that certain thiongs are impossible, but no real detailed description of why they think that. It looks like an attempt to pull the wool over they eyes of people who will accept it uncritically.

And it is crap theology. In some ones much crappier theology than YEC. YEC implies that the universe is a fake, a sort of stage set, a virtual reality in the mind of God. At least that is compatible with belief in an omnipotent, eternal, creator God. And also with doing science if you can persuade yourself that you are studying an idea in the mind of God rather than a real external world - which is a sort of theism, if not particularly a Christian one (and ought to cause literalists trouble when reading 1 John!)

But ID implies that God is not really the eternal omnipotent creator God, because he made made lots of little mistakes when creating the world and living things, he left lots of loose ends lying around, and if you look hard enough you can find them and unravel the story.

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Ken

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quetzalcoatl
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Yes, I have seen both YEC and ID described as failed science, and failed theism.

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deano
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quote:
Originally posted by goperryrevs:
quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief
People who are motivated by following the evidence, not by proving or supporting an a priori assumption, such as, oh, say, that God made everything.

But the theory that God (or rather an intelligence) made everything is no more an a priori assumption than the naturalistic idea that everything (especially the most complex of systems) must have self-assembled without any kind of intelligent guidance or input.
Which is why an agnostic scientist's opinion is more likely to be valuable than a theist or atheist. Anyone with an agenda has their neutrality compromised.
Which is also why scientists publish their work for scrutiny be their peers - peer review. So if a theist has written something, it can be critiqued for objectivity by an atheist. It all works out.

Which works out quite neatly as Dawkins has avoided having to produce much peer-reviewed work by writing "Popular" books which don't come under the same level of scrutiny.

Even Harvard biologist Professor Edward Wilson say's he isn't a proper scientist for these reasons...

quote:
I hesitate to do this because he's such a popular guy, but Dawkins is not a scientist. He's a writer on science and he hasn't participated in research directly or published in peer-reviewed journals for a long time. In other words, there is no Wilson-versus-Dawkins controversy: it's Wilson versus … well, I could give you a goodly list of other scientists doing peer-reviewed research.




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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
It's possible to be motivated by more than one thing at a time.

Certainly. But if you're motivated to make the evidence point to a conclusion you determined in advance, you're not doing science.

quote:
Originally posted by EtymologicalEvangelical:
But the theory that God (or rather an intelligence) made everything is no more an a priori assumption than the naturalistic idea that everything (especially the most complex of systems) must have self-assembled without any kind of intelligent guidance or input.

I don't know that anybody makes that assumption, do they? Science is the attempt to describe and explain the world around us based ultimately on verifiable, objective (or as objective as we can determine) observations. "God did it" is not a verifiable observation. God is not part of science.

quote:
Furthermore, what if a scientist looked at the evidence and concluded that abiogenesis is just not a plausible theory, and therefore, by default, some kind of design causation had to be inferred? Are you suggesting that such a scientist is bogus?
I'd suggest what he's doing isn't science. "There's no way that could have happened" is not a scientific hypothesis, and in general it's the sort of thing which, when said, tends to get disproved 10 years later.

quote:
(If you are suggesting that, then that is tantamount to saying that the naturalistic theory of origins is unfalsifiable, given that no alternative can be considered consistent with the scientific method. But an unfalsifiable theory is also unscientific.)
Naturalism isn't a theory. It's a methodology.

quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
It's like a form of "God of the gaps", but where they're trying to create the gaps so they can wedge God into them!

Well said, sir.

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
I think there is an implicit accusation in the OP that evolution is unfalsifiable and, hence, unscientific.

Which would be a noddy-level idea of what "scientific" might mean.
Karl Popper, surely?

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Alan Cresswell

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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
quote:
Originally posted by Ricardus:
I think there is an implicit accusation in the OP that evolution is unfalsifiable and, hence, unscientific.

Which would be a noddy-level idea of what "scientific" might mean.
Karl Popper, surely?
The noddy-level version of what Popper actually wrote. Popper was reacting against the positivism prevalent in science at the time, by pointing out that no amount of accumulated data in agreement with the predictions of a hypothesis can prove it, however a relatively small body of data that a hypothesis fails to predict or explain is sufficient to make that hypothesis untenable. His proposal was that the best way to test a hypothesis was to develop tests that push the edge of the explanatory power of the hypothesis (ie: apply it to situations increasingly further from the data set used to develop the hypothesis), which is where contrary results are more likely to occur. That isn't always easy, and for practical reasons some of the tests one would like to do are impossible. You can't test evolution by running multiple identical worlds and confirming that after 4.5 billion years you get life forms that resemble each other on anything other than the smallest scales - and then you get people shouting that your experiments with bacteria in petri dishes is "micro-evolution" and doesn't say anything about "macro-evolution" (just showing that you just can't satisfy some people).

Popper quite rightly recognised that "this hypothesis is false" is itself a hypothesis, one that can't be proved ... so a hypothesis can not be falsified any more than it can be proved.

[I'd originally put "just proving that you just can't satisfy some people" but thought "prove" was too strong a word inviting people to produce contradictory evidence in good-old Popperian fashion!]

[ 17. January 2013, 06:08: Message edited by: Alan Cresswell ]

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Latchkey Kid
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quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
Even better, the recognition that science deals with the physical universe - matter, energy and fields. Questions relating to the existance (or otherwise) and nature of non-physical entities are beyond the ability of science to address.

This may be tangential, or maybe not, but how does this relate (if at all) to Feyerabend's view that science is not a special form of knowledge and is to be seen as the contemporary ideology or religion which is uncontestably reliable just as religions were in their day of (relative) indisputability?

That being 'unscientific' is the heresy (my analogy) against institutionalised science which does not, according to Feyerabend (Against Method) have an objective and intrinsically reliable scientific method, and that all attempts to characterise scientific methods have failed.

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Dafyd
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Alan Cresswell:
It's possible to be motivated by more than one thing at a time.

Certainly. But if you're motivated to make the evidence point to a conclusion you determined in advance, you're not doing science.
That's a bit idealistic. For example, Isaac Newton's response when confronted with refractory evidence was to maintain that the measurements must have been done wrong. Or else, that God was stepping in to make the necessary adjustments. I don't think Newton was the first or last 'scientist' to believe that his hypothesis must be right and any contrary evidence must be wrong. Science doesn't grant a magical dispensation from human error. It's just that the nature of the subject matter and the techniques involved mean that it's easier to clear the error out of the way.

I wouldn't say ID is not science. It's just really badly done science.

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Dafyd
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quote:
Originally posted by Latchkey Kid:
This may be tangential, or maybe not, but how does this relate (if at all) to Feyerabend's view that science is not a special form of knowledge and is to be seen as the contemporary ideology or religion which is uncontestably reliable just as religions were in their day of (relative) indisputability?

That being 'unscientific' is the heresy (my analogy) against institutionalised science which does not, according to Feyerabend (Against Method) have an objective and intrinsically reliable scientific method, and that all attempts to characterise scientific methods have failed.

I haven't read much Feyerabend. I think it's ok to say that the sciences do not form a single body of specially reliable knowledge with a single distinct methodology. But Feyerabend is often taken as saying that they do not amount to any form of knowledge about anything objective at all. And that seems wrong.

It may be true that physics is not utterly reliable. There may not be a sharp cut off with physics, chemistry and biology on one side of a line and, say, economics and cultural anthropology on the other. But it might still be true that physics is more reliable than economics.

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I wouldn't say ID is not science. It's just really badly done science.

What research do they do, besides comb science journals for "mistakes" to expose?

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Adeodatus
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Feyerabend's brilliant. He is to Karl Popper what the Sex Pistols were to the Carpenters.

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Feyerabend's brilliant. He is to Karl Popper what the Sex Pistols were to the Carpenters.

Loud, angry, and out of tune?

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Adeodatus
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Feyerabend's brilliant. He is to Karl Popper what the Sex Pistols were to the Carpenters.

Loud, angry, and out of tune?
More or less, yes. Definitely out of tune. His approach to scientific method was "anything goes". Which, taken to extremes, might have scientists saying "Tell you what, let's see what happens if I dip this neutron in some jam". But which also has a certain appeal to it.

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quetzalcoatl
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I wouldn't say ID is not science. It's just really badly done science.

What research do they do, besides comb science journals for "mistakes" to expose?
It's sometimes said that science makes guesses, but tests the guess empirically. As far as I can see, ID just makes guesses, and as you say, looks for mistakes that scientists have made, so they can crow.

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Dafyd
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I wouldn't say ID is not science. It's just really badly done science.

What research do they do, besides comb science journals for "mistakes" to expose?
(Short answer: I don't know. I read about Behe's black box and decided it wasn't a serious intellectual enterprise.)
Someone doesn't have to be doing empirical research to do science. (The scientific community as a whole has to be doing empirical research somewhere, but not any given individual.) Up until the Large Hadron Collider was built, nobody doing fundamental particle physics could do any empirical research into it.

I would think it's easier just to show the intellectual flaws in ID, than to construct a non-ad hoc definition of proper science and show that all the right things qualify and ID doesn't.

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Latchkey Kid
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quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Feyerabend's brilliant. He is to Karl Popper what the Sex Pistols were to the Carpenters.

Loud, angry, and out of tune?
Is it that his criticisms are invalid; or just that his work does not help the process of science; or something else?

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quetzalcoatl
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quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I wouldn't say ID is not science. It's just really badly done science.

What research do they do, besides comb science journals for "mistakes" to expose?
(Short answer: I don't know. I read about Behe's black box and decided it wasn't a serious intellectual enterprise.)
Someone doesn't have to be doing empirical research to do science. (The scientific community as a whole has to be doing empirical research somewhere, but not any given individual.) Up until the Large Hadron Collider was built, nobody doing fundamental particle physics could do any empirical research into it.

I would think it's easier just to show the intellectual flaws in ID, than to construct a non-ad hoc definition of proper science and show that all the right things qualify and ID doesn't.

Surely in the end, science does test its hypotheses. This may take a long time, and there may be periods of purely abstract mathematical or theoretical work, but in the end, science rests on observations and hypotheses, with consequent predictions (of further observations) and testing.

If ID does this, please show me where.

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lilBuddha
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quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I would think it's easier just to show the intellectual flaws in ID, than to construct a non-ad hoc definition of proper science and show that all the right things qualify and ID doesn't.

ID is nothing but flaws. ID does nothing besides point to things its target audience either does not understand or care about and then misrepresent them; or point to a an error and say "AHA! One person was wrong, therefore the rest is bollocks."
ID is ignorant in its best intentions, dishonest in its worst.

[ 18. January 2013, 02:00: Message edited by: lilBuddha ]

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The Great Gumby

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quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
I would think it's easier just to show the intellectual flaws in ID, than to construct a non-ad hoc definition of proper science and show that all the right things qualify and ID doesn't.

ID is nothing but flaws. ID does nothing besides point to things its target audience either does not understand or care about and then misrepresent them; or point to a an error and say "AHA! One person was wrong, therefore the rest is bollocks."
ID is ignorant in its best intentions, dishonest in its worst.

ID reminds me most of a Conspiracy Theory. Like 9/11 "Troofers", IDers devote all their energy to finding what they perceive or can spin as flaws or gaps in the "official story", and then hammer on those repeatedly as proof that it's all a lie. But they never offer a coherent alternative explanation, just repeated assertions of their bottom line ("It was staged" v "Goddidit") in slightly different forms.

They apply different standards of proof and evidence, depending on who proposed an explanation and whether it fits with their prior assumptions. If the standards they apply to the evolutionary model were turned on the laughable areas of ID and "Creation Science" (a near-perfect oxymoron), their pet subject and hobby horse would disappear completely.

ID is the very antithesis of science, and we shouldn't be afraid to say so.

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Adeodatus
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quote:
Originally posted by Latchkey Kid:
quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
quote:
Originally posted by Adeodatus:
Feyerabend's brilliant. He is to Karl Popper what the Sex Pistols were to the Carpenters.

Loud, angry, and out of tune?
Is it that his criticisms are invalid; or just that his work does not help the process of science; or something else?
Far from invalid, in my opinion. I think Feyerabend was a far more acute observer of how science is done than Popper ever was. Popper wanted to see science as neat and tidy: scientists coolly considering evidence, nudging nearer to an unattainable "truth" by disproving theories and formulating new ones according to the available evidence. Feyerabend saw no such unity of method, and certainly didn't see the doing of science as either cool or rational. He saw scientists as passionate advocates of their own views, even in the face of the evidence. Against Method observes that there is no one thing that can be called "scientific method" before going on to suggest that there should be no one thing that can be called "scientific method". Feyerabend was a science anarchist. Scientists mostly hate him. They prefer Popper's fantasy.

Take the present discussion. About thirty years ago I remember seeing a tv documentary in which several prominent scientists derided - literally laughed at - the idea that a comet or asteroid impact might have wiped out the dinosaurs. This was despite an already large, and increasing, body of evidence that suggested that was what had happened.

Some time after that, scientific orthodoxy flipped on its head and within a year or two it had become obvious that what had done for the dinos was a comet or asteroid. More to the point, most scientists seemed abruptly to forget that they had ever believed anything different.

You could see this as a Kuhnian paradigm shift. You could see it as Feyerabend's scientific anarchy in action (people holding on to their outdated theories, partly because there were reputations at stake). But there's no way you can fit it into the Popperian view.

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quetzalcoatl
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Yes, Kuhn and Feyerabend between them showed science not to be a cool disinterested pursuit of truth, but a sociological phenomenon, which involves groups of people with their own self-interest to maintain, and using all kinds of scrambled non-methods (like guessing). There is also the interesting idea that scientists are very concerned to preserve their own mythology, but then this is probably true of all professions. But F. was also a sort of eliminative materialist - well, nobody's perfect.

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mousethief

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quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Yes, Kuhn and Feyerabend between them showed science not to be a cool disinterested pursuit of truth, but a sociological phenomenon, which involves groups of people with their own self-interest to maintain, and using all kinds of scrambled non-methods (like guessing). There is also the interesting idea that scientists are very concerned to preserve their own mythology, but then this is probably true of all professions. But F. was also a sort of eliminative materialist - well, nobody's perfect.

"Showed" is a little strong. And the great thing about science is that even when some people entrench around their pet theories, others come along with better evidence and better theories and knock the old guard off their thrones. Let's see that happen with ID.

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Latchkey Kid
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Kuhn's 'revolutions' I find valuable in understanding the progress of science and what it takes for a theory to be accepted or discarded by the relevant science community

I still do not know what do do with Feyerabend. How does it help in understanding science's role in society, or in a science community's assessment of their part in society.

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ken
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# 2460

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quote:
Originally posted by Latchkey Kid:
Kuhn's 'revolutions' I find valuable in understanding the progress of science and what it takes for a theory to be accepted or discarded by the relevant science community

It is a pretty good description of the development of physics and related studies up to Kuhn's time. But the history of biology worked very differently.

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L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

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quetzalcoatl
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quote:
Originally posted by Latchkey Kid:
Kuhn's 'revolutions' I find valuable in understanding the progress of science and what it takes for a theory to be accepted or discarded by the relevant science community

I still do not know what do do with Feyerabend. How does it help in understanding science's role in society, or in a science community's assessment of their part in society.

I didn't think that F. was so concerned with the sociological nature of science, as with the idealization of scientific method, which, he argued, concealed a kind of dog's breakfast of intuition, guessing, and various tricks and cheats. He also seemed to debunk various concepts such as falsification, and claimed that new ideas in science often don't fit the 'facts' at all. I don't really know if he was intent on being a sort of trickster figure, i.e. getting up people's noses, but probably some of his points are both provocative and insightful. I suppose he is really saying that there are no rules for doing science, but scientists pretend that there are.

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quetzalcoatl
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Damn, the guillotine got me. I have a vague memory that F. also defended things like astrology, as he thought that science was given far too exalted and privileged a position in society, and therefore, we should defend stuff like astrology, which is considered unscientific and naff.

On a purely personal note, I think this is also good for irritating atheists! On another forum, I recommended that schools should teach astrology, rain-dancing and witchcraft, and the replies were suitably apoplectic. Moi, a troll? Non.

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Ender's Shadow
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quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
On another forum, I recommended that schools should teach astrology, rain-dancing and witchcraft, and the replies were suitably apoplectic. Moi, a troll? Non.

[Killing me]
Thanks for a good laugh; I'll definitely remember that idea when I want to wind certain people up!

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Test everything. Hold on to the good.

Please don't refer to me as 'Ender' - the whole point of Ender's Shadow is that he isn't Ender.

Posts: 5018 | From: Manchester, England | Registered: Feb 2002  |  IP: Logged
lilBuddha
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# 14333

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quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
On a purely personal note, I think this is also good for irritating atheists! On another forum, I recommended that schools should teach astrology, rain-dancing and witchcraft, and the replies were suitably apoplectic. Moi, a troll? Non.

Funny, I use the same recommendation to irritate theists, especially Christians, when they suggest teaching creationism/ID. Same reaction.

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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou

Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008  |  IP: Logged
Justinian
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quote:
Originally posted by Marvin the Martian:
quote:
Originally posted by Ender's Shadow:
I'm wondering whether there is anything that could disprove Evolution.

Why would you want to?
Because there would be no better way for a scientist to go down in the history books and win fame and fortune than by disproving evolution. Almost any biologist, paleontologist, botanist, or other student of the biological sciences who thought they could disprove evolution would do so.

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My real name consists of just four letters, but in billions of combinations.

Eudaimonaic Laughter - my blog.

Posts: 3926 | From: The Sea Coast of Bohemia | Registered: Dec 2003  |  IP: Logged
Alan Cresswell

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Although in reality, a scientist who manages to 'disprove' evolution (or, rather, identify some serious inconsistencies within the theory of evolution and postulate an alternative theory that better explains the data) would find themselves ridiculed by the scientific community as a crackpot, unable to get a position in a university, trying to make ends meet from sales of books popularising his ideas (mostly bought by those with a religious reason to see evolution disproved) and appearances on Jerry Springer ... and, 50 years or more after his death in poverty and disgrace grudgingly accepted as a genius.

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Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

Posts: 32413 | From: East Kilbride (Scotland) or 福島 | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
lilBuddha
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There is the difference between creationism and science. Science self corrects at a much faster rate. 50 years is a blink compared to 2000.

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I put on my rockin' shoes in the morning
Hallellou, hallellou

Posts: 17627 | From: the round earth's imagined corners | Registered: Dec 2008  |  IP: Logged



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