The Official Perfection KOs Creationism Thread Part Three: The Return of the KOing!

[Erik Mesoy]

I'm too lazy/ignorant/stubborn/dumb (select any)

I select lazy, because science as a whole has proven to be self-correcting. Whatever errors creationists howl over were generally discovered by real scientists.

Now, I state that the Earth is round, not flat. This could be checked by going into orbit around the Earth and viewing it from space, However, I am too lazy to do this. Are you lazy too?

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Eran
Translation (of your words not mine):
I'm too lazy/ignorant/stubborn/dumb (select any) to check whether the scientists say at least 10% of truth.
But I will shout and call ignorant anyone who doesn't believe them.

I don't believe them blindly not because I'm better scientist then they but simply because I know what people can do to make money and get honor.
And this does not include falsifications only - false ideas are also false even when they're clothed in clever words like "theory".

Eran, what makes you think THEY are experts?
If you are not such - how can you be sure about them?

Money and honor? Do you have any idea what motivates scientists at all? Do you have the slightest idea how the scientific method works? And if you completely reject paleontology for no reason other than that you insist that they are wrong, do you do this with every field of science?

I consider someone an expert in paleontology if they have studied it for years and if their findings hold up to peer scrutiny. Peer scrutiny, unless there is some elaborate conspiracy to lie about fossils, which I can't see happening, will be a check on accuracy.

 

[Souron]

Scientists are experts because they used the scientific meathod to come to their conclutions.

While I do not verify the evidence supporting every fact I am presented with, I do know that the general meathod used by scientists is the most reasonable whay to study what every it is there studying in order to come up with meaningfull conclutions.

 

[civ2]

Souron
"Scientific method" is exactly what I meant!
It lets scientists do whatever they want and claim it's "scientific".

El_Machinae
I'm confused by your way of speech.
If it's a question - ask directly.
If not - say it in other words...

Erik
Paleonthology is different from most other types of science in that it CAN'T be checked!
You (and Magellan etc) can go round the globe to prove it's round.
Knowing gravity you mustn't even travel - just look at an apple.
Anything that IS NOT bound to time (aka relates to the past or far future) CAN be checked and if nessesary corrected.
Evolution and "Earth's age theory" CAN'T!
It's all pure theory with no ever got evidence.
Unless we invent a real time machine.

Eran
Honor is the most seeked thing in the world - maybe more than money.
And since we DO have lots of falsification cases IN SCIENCE...

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

We have a few cases of falsification, all of which were proven false by OTHER SCIENTISTS. That is why every claim that is made must be reviewed and studied by other scientists.

And paleontology is based on the same principles that govern all other fields. We can't see atoms and molecules, which I suppose means they don't exist. Either that or there are other ways of detecting them. Same with paleontology; we don't need a time machine because animals leave fossils, which even if you think otherwise are quite useful. No one alive was around for the signing of the Declaration of Independence; how do we know that really happened either?

 

[Souron]

Souron
"Scientific method" is exactly what I meant!
It lets scientists do whatever they want and claim it's "scientific".

Doesn't your school teach the scientific method?

The scientific method is a method for determining which theories are most reasonable and experimentally sound. That is it determines which theories are more likely to be true.

Anyway, I do not feel like writing an essay on it right now, So I'll explain in question and answer format. I ask a question, you answer it, and I'll explain what's wrong with your answer or ask a follow up question. I'll try to tie this in withe palentology, since that's what you seem to have the most trouble with.

So I ask you, given two explanations of some natural phenomenon, how do you determine which to believe?

 

[civ2]

Souron
No I wasn't taught THAT.
In different countries we have different school systems.
1. Earth is round.
Read on Magellan and some others and then observe an ant rounding an apple.
2. Gravity.
Jump out of the window...
And be lucky to write here the day after.
3. Electricity.
Put two wet fingers into an open TV set.
Ever tasted roasted meat?
4. etc.

Now explainations:
1. Simple similarity in actions.
2. Obvious effects of an unknown force.
3. Same as 2.

BUT!
The Jurassic Park was/is/and will be JUST a sci-fi and NOTHING more!
You can't clone a dino!
(Not enough DNA to use!)
Again - unless you make a time machine and return with a live dino - any amount of bones proves NOTHING!
The MOST they can (theoretically with a weak reliability) prove that there were (some UNKNOWN time ago) such creatures.
Nothing about who's whose daddy and mommy!
And you can't also check the C-dating (or any other that tells of millions of years).
You know why?
simple - the conditions during those ""millions of years might have changed also millions of times.
And that could make most if not all of nowadays "nature laws" either void or different.
Nobody can check what happened even a thousand years ago (if not for some written documents - still not very reliable).
But NO - you still believe that over those millions of years the Earth was as steady as a "2+2=4" rule.
So you believe in DRASTIC changes through evolution but you base them on a ABSOLUTELY steady Earth.
(Not the regional or climate conditions - the NATURE conditions themselves!)

 

[Che Guava]

Ohhh...these post make me feel a might angry :angry:

Souron
"Scientific method" is exactly what I meant!
It lets scientists do whatever they want and claim it's "scientific".

Oy, first of all, take 10 minutes out of your day to learn what the scientific method is. Once you do that, you might realize that:

1. It is really a system of checks and balances to make sure that personal bias is kept out of scientific research.

2. Reproductability of methods/observations/experiments is essential so that anyone with the right equipment and materials can reproduce your experiment and chack the validity of your conclusions.

3. That the scientific method begat scientists, and not the other way around. What I mean to say is that the method isn;t something that scientists came up with to bolster thier theories, its a code of conduct that allowed the progress of science to occur. You can't 'hide' bethind the scientific method, its very purpose is to point out errors and problems in experimental design and interpretation.

Erik
Paleonthology is different from most other types of science in that it CAN'T be checked!
You (and Magellan etc) can go round the globe to prove it's round.
Knowing gravity you mustn't even travel - just look at an apple.
Anything that IS NOT bound to time (aka relates to the past or far future) CAN be checked and if nessesary corrected.
Evolution and "Earth's age theory" CAN'T!
It's all pure theory with no ever got evidence.
Unless we invent a real time machine.

I think that you have a problem here deciding what is 'checkable' or not.

No, you can't reproduce the excavation of dinosaur bones in another lab to decide if they did it all right, but what would be the point? Paleontologists record what they find, where they found it and use a myriad of methods to check age, composition, etc. This then goes to a larger body of research which puts the finding in context with what others have found.

Sure you can sail around the world to prove its round, but you can't use that as absolute proof that Mars is round. Based on what we know about the earth, we can reasonably assume that other planets will be round (without other methods, of course). Similarly, we know that gravity works just fine on earth, but what about in another solar system? Another galaxy? In another dimension? All we know for sure about gravity is that it works here, everything is 'theory'/

Paleontology is not all theory, the fossils are the evidence, and those can be 'checked' against the structure or genetics of present-day animals, known large scale events like meteor strikes or changes in atmospheric composition. If you choose to believe that the scientific community is vastly misinterpreting what they find or involved in some massive cover-up of the truth, that's your opinion, but it's not a basis by which to undermine paleontology and evolutionary biology.

Eran
Honor is the most seeked thing in the world - maybe more than money.
And since we DO have lots of falsification cases IN SCIENCE...

Unlike other fields, however, science has a whole system of checks and balances to make sure that falsifications are discovered. Ever hear of anonymous peer-review?

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

First of all, Carbon-dating is only used for objects about 50,000 years old or less (I think, maybe it's a bit more). Second, science is full of things that the average person cannot directly observe. Third, no one considers Jurassic Park to be real science. You have left the realm of attacking strawmen and seem to be calling airstrikes on your own position. Just saying is all.

 

[civ2]

Che
OK. I think I simply used the term as it appears to someone who didn't study it.
The idea remains.
The checkability doesn't rely on the number of people involved - it's whether you can reconstruct the vent or not.
And the EVENT is not excavation of bones!
It's the life of that dino they excavated!
That's the point!
No matter how many bones you dig and how good - you still can't recreated that LIVING being!

Moreover (as I said) the very existance of a certain animal (even nowadays) DOES NOT prove anything about its ancestors!
You can't recreate evolution in a lab.
You CAN make a dark bird into a light or a tall fly into a short - that's selection NOT evolution!
You could NEVER make a fly into a lizard - without a time machine.
And that's my point.
no matter how many different animals were dug (or imagined - that's not the most important thing) - they can't e considered as links unless you observe it.
Otherwise it's speculation.
Period.

You can continue insulting me and calling ignorant or whatever you like.
"The truth is out there."

 

[The Last Conformist]

The Jurassic Park was/is/and will be JUST a sci-fi and NOTHING more!
You can't clone a dino!
(Not enough DNA to use!)

By the same standard, the Bible is false, because Narnia is just a Fantasy tale.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Scientists can tell a lot more from bones than you realize. Like if a specimen had sharp teeth, it probably ate meat. And evolution IS selection, over time; it has been done in a lab. You can't turn a fly into a lizard because flies aren't ancestors of lizards; you can't turn a dinosaur into a bird just because the whole process takes millions and millions of years, which we don't have.

 

[Che Guava]

Che
OK. I think I simply used the term as it appears to someone who didn't study it.
The idea remains.
The checkability doesn't rely on the number of people involved - it's whether you can reconstruct the vent or not.
And the EVENT is not excavation of bones!
It's the life of that dino they excavated!
That's the point!
No matter how many bones you dig and how good - you still can't recreated that LIVING being!

Good lord, do deny that, oh say, George Washington was never alive just because all we have left are paintings and bones?

Moreover (as I said) the very existance of a certain animal (even nowadays) DOES NOT prove anything about its ancestors!
You can't recreate evolution in a lab.
You CAN make a dark bird into a light or a tall fly into a short - that's selection NOT evolution!
You could NEVER make a fly into a lizard - without a time machine.
And that's my point.
no matter how many different animals were dug (or imagined - that's not the most important thing) - they can't e considered as links unless you observe it.
Otherwise it's speculation.
Period.

Evolution is a product of two opposing forces: mutation (which can be shown in a laboratory) and selection (which can be shown in a laboratory). If you need proof, just visit a toxic waste dump: bacteria there have 'magically' gained the ability to metabolize compounds that don't exist in nature, all through mutation and selection of genotypes. What more 'lab proof' of evolution do you need?

And no, we can't say for sure that this certain evolutionary process did occur as we imagine it for large vetebrates (how many things in the world can we know for sure anyways?) but if you can come up with a better scientific explanation for the series of fossils that we've uncovered, I'll be all ears...

You can continue insulting me and calling ignorant or whatever you like.
"The truth is out there."

Sure, we're all against you ....

 

[civ2]

Eran
"Which we don't have" - is EXACTLY what I'm trying to tell already many times.
Bones might tell something about their bodies but they can't prove they evolved from/into ANYTHING.
Morphological and genetical changes are VERY different.

An example with plants:
We take a high tree and plant it in a desert.
Its offspring (both from seeds and from roots) will be low and sickly.
But if we take them back to the original location - they will grow high as their ancestor would.
But their "missing link" will be low and may even be of another color or leave-shape.
All - due to the desert's poor climate - not genes.
The "med-generation" can take even several actual generations - this won't change the gentics of the tree enough to make it into another species.
But scientists could easily misinterpretate this as a new species.
Etc.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

Morphology is determined in large part by genetic change. And since we assume that the rules for genetics are the same now as in the past - just like we assume for everything, which makes more sense than assuming they somehow changed - we can study the relationship between morphology and genetics now, and relationships between species in terms of genetics and morphology, we can thus make real, evidence based determinations of the relationship between living and extinct species.

 

[civ2]

Che
Washington's painting is exactly one of the things dinos lack - their actual look.
you can hardly reconstruct the look using only bones - and without that you don't know what color they were and if they (maybe?!?) had fur!
This feature is beyond fossils of that "age".
Oh, we DO have some dinos with feathers.. all over their body!
(In China?)
And about "dino" - I often get a funny argument that "those were not dinos".
I (and 99.9999999999% of people) refer to all pre-historic reptiles as dinos regardless whether it is accurate or not.

And bacteria eating new materials doesn't prove it EVOLVED - it proves they can get used to new materials as btw can rats.
Do you call a plastic-eating rat a mutant?
I'd rather call it a starving poor animal.

 

[civ2]

The only some 70% (I'm semi-joking about the numbers) reliable proof would be DNA of those fossils.
But we can't extract it AND/OR we haven't yet decipher the very DNA to know what causes what.
Otherwise there would be no more illnesses since 99% of them are related with genetics.

 

[Eran of Arcadia]

First off, not everyone refers to all prehistoric reptiles as dinosaurs - they are not, and that doesn't excuse your ignorance.

Second, just because we can't get everything (such as DNA) from fossils doesn't mean they are worthless. If one knows what they are doing it is possible to tell a lot about an organism from its bones. Heck, forensic anthropologists do it now to reconstruct a person's face from their skull.

Third, these bacteria aren't like rats eating plastic bags because there is nothing else. You seem to know little about what is actually happening, but they are developing the ability to synthesize materials that don't normally exist in nature.

 

[Che Guava]

civ2: well you got your wish: you're ignorant. I don't mean it as an insult, just a fact.

Having a conversation with someone like you about the scientific method and evolution is like having a talk with a toddler about your stock portfolio. If you want to have a serious (read: informed) debate over this sometime, send me a PM. Otherwise, I have my own science to conduct

 

[ironduck]

Anymore takers for my quiz back in post 539? Maybe some creationists wanna join in?

Remember, just pm me your guesses and I'll post the right answers here later.