On 8/28/2022 at 2:07 PM, AsianAtHeart said:

It wasn't the first, and won't be the last.  Remember "Nebraska Man"?  That was an even more egregious case (and at least that one is now absent from the supposed history of Homo sapiens).

The role of ‘’Nebraska Man’’ in the Creation-Evolution debate

Although Nebraska Man did not survive long enough to become widely accepted by the scientific community and was quickly forgotten when its true identity was recognized, Hesperopithecus is again being trotted out in the current recrudescence of creationist attacks on evolution. The creationists who belittle mistakes by scientists cannot admit that science advances, in part, by correcting error.  role-nebraska-man-creation-evolution-debate

Nebraska Man should not be considered an embarrassment to science. The scientists involved were mistaken, and somewhat incautious, but not dishonest. The whole episode was actually an excellent example of the scientific process working at its best. Given a problematic identification, scientists investigated further, found data which falsified their earlier ideas, and promptly abandoned them (a marked contrast to the creationist approach).   a_nebraska.html  

Evolution as a process that has always gone on in the history of the earth can only be doubted by those who are ignorant of the evidence or are resistant to evidence, owing to emotional blocks or plain bigotry —   Theodosius Dobzhansky.   

On 8/28/2022 at 2:07 PM, AsianAtHeart said:

Haeckel's embryos

On 8/28/2022 at 2:07 PM, AsianAtHeart said:

Can you tell me why "science" has not removed the fabricated and debunked notions of the peppered moth and Haeckel's embryos ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") from biology textbooks?  It would be one thing if they admitted to the actual missteps of history--but they still use these as examples of the supposed genetic process because they seem like such great supports to their pet theory of origins (naturalistic evolution--usually all the way down from abiogenesis).  The peppered moth theory is still taught as fact, despite the fact it was debunked decades ago, and known to have been a fabrication (peppered moths land, not on the tree trunks, where they were glued for the photos, but up in the foliage).  The nonsense about the tree trunks turning colors due to factory pollution having an effect on the darker versus lighter moths was a clever fraud perpetrated on the whole world.

Creationists have continued to use the peppered moth to further an antiscience agenda. I think it’s important to respond with additional layers of evidence. And so here we have in some sense the ultimate piece of evidence that’s now written in stone.” — Ilik Saccheri 

As always, a lot of research remains to pin down the precise molecular mechanism by which this genetic alteration causes the melanic morph during wing development, but this is yet another nail into the coffin of creationism, and in particular, their rabid abuse of the peppered moths example of natural selection in the wild. Will this now finally end the creationist obsession with spreading falsehoods about peppered moths? If history is any guide, the answer is a resounding no. But, like before, proponents of mainstream science will be there to counter them at every step. 

  — Debunkingdenialism.com.  Fighting pseudoscience with reason and evidence

Lemuria was a human civilization that existed about thirty-four million years ago, according to The Secret Doctrine .Early man could stand upright and had two eyes in the front of his head and a third eye in the back of back of his head. The third eye remained an organ of vision until the end of the Lemurian period. After that the third eye became an internal organ of psychic ability which continued into the Atlantian epoch. Today it is the pineal gland.The idea of Lemuria was subsequently incorporated into the proto-New Age philosophy of Theosophy and subsequently into general fringe belief.—  link >  Lemuria_(Steiner)

On 5/30/2021 at 4:56 AM, covidiot said:

some of them are deluded or charlatans, it's true ...

not sure about steiner. 

''There was once a large expanse of land [Atlantis] where today there is the Atlantic Ocean …... The human being who lived then was in his external form half man and half fish. ……. The more imperfect of these fish-men evolved to become kangaroos, those a little more advanced became deer and cattle, and the most perfect became apes or men. You see from this that man did not descend from apes; man was there, and all the mammals really descended from him, from these human forms in which man remained imperfect. ………....... Birds once consisted entirely of air. ……........ we have gone very far back into the past and found human beings who really only consisted of dense air.''    — Rudolf Steiner – From Sunspots to Strawberries. #4 The origins of the world and the human being.— 1924.    link >  books    [Darwins book was 65 years earlier]

Rudolf Steiner co-invented 'Anthroposophical medicine’ which is based on occult notions and draws on his spiritual philosophy. It assumes metaphysical relations between planets, metals, and human organs, which provide the basis for therapeutic strategies. Diseases are believed to be related to actions in previous lives; in order to redeem oneself, it may be best to live through them without conventional therapy.

Today practitioners of anthroposophical medicine can be found in many communities in North America, Europe, and elsewhere.  ''Consulting the stars to understand diseases is obviously fallacious — and dangerous for the patient, who needs real care, not astrological hokum''.  —The dangers of Anthroposophical Medicine.

 > steiners-quackery

 infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical schools and academic medical centres .

>anthroposophic-medicine-at-the-university

Anthroposophy, philosophy based on the premise that the human intellect has the ability to contact spiritual worlds. It was formulated by Rudolf Steiner who postulated the existence of a spiritual world comprehensible to pure thought but fully accessible only to the faculties of knowledge latent in all humans. He regarded human beings as having originally participated in the spiritual processes of the world through a dreamlike consciousness. 

However, many scientists and physicians, including Michael Shermer, Michael Ruse, Edzard Ernst, David Gorski, and Simon Singh have criticized anthroposophy's application in the areas of medicine, biology, agriculture, and education to be dangerous and pseudoscientific.

10 hours ago, Fat is a type of crazy said:

I  thought what Spinoza said was really interesting especially since he had been born in the 1600's.  

During his life he was widely attacked for his 'blasphemous' and 'heretical' opinions on God, the bible, and religion, even suffering one of the most vitriolic cherem (excommunication) ever issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese-Jewish community.    Spinoza says that God is 'immanent' in nature, not some supernatural entity beyond the world. But does this mean that we can describe him as a pantheist, as someone who believes that God is revealed in every aspect of the natural world that lies around us? This was certainly a popular interpretation……..The philosopher John Toland, in the early 18th century, insisted that the terms 'Spinozism' and 'pantheism' are synonymous.     > spinoza-the-atheist

The chief objection I have to Pantheism is that it says nothing. To call the world "God" is not to explain it; it is only to enrich our language with a superfluous synonym for the word "world." It comes to the same thing whether you say "the world is God," or "God is the world.”  –Schopenhauer.

On 4 July 2012, the discovery of a new particle with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c2 was announced; physicists suspected that it was the Higgs boson, also known by its nickname the “God particle’’ Peter Higgs and François Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in identifying and discovering the Higgs boson.

Finding a Higgs-like boson validates much of how scientists believe the universe was formed. The media calls the Higgs boson the God particle because, according to the theory laid out by Scottish physicist Peter Higgs and others in 1964, it's the physical proof of an invisible, universe-wide field that gave mass to all matter right after the Big Bang, forcing particles to coalesce into stars, planets, and everything else. If the Higgs field, and Higgs boson, didn't exist, the dominant Standard Model of particle physics would be wrong.

"There's no understating the significance" of this discovery: says Jeffrey Kluger at TIME. "No Higgs, no mass; no mass, no you, me, or anything else…..  Taking all of those costs into consideration, the total cost of finding the Higgs boson ran about $13.25 billion'’.  

HTH.  The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

8 hours ago, thaibeachlovers said:

I'd like to see science come up with an explanation of how all the matter in the universe only existed at the instant of the big bang. Sounds like "creation" to me.

The BB theory explains it. And the Higgs Boson confirms it. No need for gods. The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, no electric charge, and no colour charge. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately.

Particle colliders, detectors, and computers capable of looking for Higgs boson took more than 30 years to develop.The $5billion Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider and the largest machine in the world. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries.

 Inside the LHC, two particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. Because Higgs boson production in a particle collision is likely to be very rare (1 in 10 billion at the LHC), and many other possible collision events can have similar decay signatures, the data of hundreds of trillions of collisions needs to be analysed and must "show the same picture" before a conclusion about the existence of the Higgs boson can be reached.

On 4/19/2021 at 12:50 PM, thaibeachlovers said:

Sooooo, if one doesn't believe that God created the universe, what explanation does one have for the existence of all the matter that makes the universe exist. Where did it come from?

 It's been explained before. Quick recap. All the matter in the universe erupted from a singularity –which isn’t nothing. When the universe was just 10^-34 of a second or so old  it experienced an incredible burst of expansion known as inflation, in which space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. During this period, the universe doubled in size at least 90 times, going from subatomic-sized to golf-ball-sized almost instantaneously.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe was extremely hot and dense. As the universe cooled, conditions became just right to give rise to the building blocks of matter – the quarks and electrons of which we are all made. A few millionths of a second after the BB, quarks aggregated to produce protons and neutrons. Within about 3 minutes, these protons and neutrons combined into hydrogen nuclei.  It took 380,000 years for electrons to be trapped in orbits around nuclei, forming the first atoms. The first stars formed from clouds of gas around 150–200 million years after the BB. Heavier atoms such as carbon, oxygen and iron, have since been continuously produced in the hearts of stars and catapulted throughout the universe in spectacular stellar explosions called supernovae.

Any evils humans experience outside the Garden before God breathes into them the breath of life would be experienced as natural evils in the same way that other animals experience them. The pain would be real, but it would not be experienced as divine justice in response to willful rebellion. Moreover, once God breathes the breath of life into them, we may assume that the first humans experienced an amnesia of their former animal life: Operating on a higher plane of consciousness once infused with the breath of life, they would transcend the lower plane of animal consciousness on which they had previously operated—though, after the Fall, they might be tempted to resort to that lower consciousness.       – The End of Christianity – William Dembski

Specified complexity is a creationist argument introduced by William Dembski, used by advocates to promote intelligent design The concept of specified complexity is widely regarded as mathematically unsound and has not been the basis for further independent work in information theory, in the theory of complex systems, or in biology.       "Dembski's work is riddled with inconsistencies, equivocation, flawed use of mathematics, poor scholarship, and misrepresentation of others' results.” – Elsberry and Shallit

12 hours ago, Fat is a type of crazy said:

On the second point intelligent design seemed to be based on the idea that things like eyes could not evolve bit by bit over time ..it had to be designed. 

Irreducible complexity is one of two main arguments used by intelligent-design proponents, alongside specified complexity. Creationist Jonathan Sarfati has described the eye as evolutionary biologists' "greatest challenge as an example of superb 'irreducible complexity' in God's creation”, The eye and bacterial flagellum as examples of IC have been fully debunked. The flagellum has been presented so often as a counter-example to evolution that it might well be considered the "poster child" of the modern anti-evolution movement. 

''In short, the ‘Bacterial Flagellum Trial’ (as one of the defence lawyers called it) established that the teaching of ID in American state schools was unconstitutional. The court found that "Professor Behe's claim for irreducible complexity has been refuted in peer-reviewed research papers and has been rejected by the scientific community at large.” > pallen.pdf

No true examples of IC have ever been found. IC can’t touch science, because IC is almost all philosophy and no demonstration, nothing observed, nothing tested, nothing real. IC is a thought experiment and nothing more. It has only one empirical part, the very first step that takes an observed object to analyse.  From there, it goes off on a fairy tale, making claims with absolutely no evidence. 

In summary, peer-reviewed research provides little evidence that biodynamic preparations improve soils, enhance microbes, increase crop quality or yields, or control pests or pathogens. There has been observed a general lack of efficacy over the benefits provided by organic methods. The review also establishes that the additional costs associated with formulating and applying the preparations represent an economic loss when compared to organic farming.  — The problem with  biodynamics:  myths, quacks and pseudoscience.  

  In it, Dunning lays out his case for why Rudolph Steiner lacks a lot of credibility on many subjects, and as a whole seems to have been more of a charlatan than a visionary.  > biodynamic-viticulture-pseudoscience 

On 3/18/2021 at 9:59 AM, Fat is a type of crazy said:

Having said that it seems the basis of his beliefs were often pretty out there and in part strange and often non scientific.

 Indeed they were.   Biodynamics; organic farming with astrology, homeopathy and magic. 

 Field-mice control: ''Thus you obtain your burned mouse-skin at the time when Venus is in Scorpio. And there remain, in what is thus destroyed by the fire, the corresponding negative force as against the reproductive power of the field-mouse. Take the pepper you get in this way, and sprinkle it over your fields. In some districts it may be difficult to carry out; then you can afford to do it even more homoeopathically; you do not need a whole plateful. Provided it has been led through the fire at the high conjunction of Venus and Scorpio, you will find this an excellent remedy. Henceforth, your mice will avoid the field.’’  — R.Steiner.

 More interesting theories on insect and weed control  here  >  ash

In New Zealand, experiments on the potency of biodynamic tinctures for possum pest control were conducted without any apparent success. > pestash

 The Canaanites created Yahweh. He originated in southern Canaan as a lesser god in the Canaanite pantheon. The Ugarit predates the Bible and reveals Yahweh was one of the seventy children of El, each of whom was the patron deity of one of the seventy nations. This is illustrated by the Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint texts of Deuteronomy 32:8–9, in which El, as the head of the divine assembly, gives each member of the divine family a nation of his own, "according to the number of the divine sons”.  Israel is the portion of YHWH. 

Yahwism existed parallel to Canaanite polytheism, and in turn was the monolatristic, primitive predecessor stage of modern Judaism, in its evolution into a monotheistic religion. From the 9th to the 6th centuries BCE the Yahwistic religion separated itself from its Canaanite heritage as Yahweh became the main god of the Kingdom of Israel and Judea and over time the royal court and temple in Jerusalem promoted Yahweh as the god of the entire cosmos possessing all the positive qualities previously attributed to the other gods and goddesses.  By the end of the Babylonian captivity  (6th century BCE), the very existence of foreign gods was denied, and Yahweh was proclaimed as the creator of the cosmos and the one true God of all the world.

On 3/17/2021 at 10:22 AM, Sunmaster said:

Hey, well done...another copy/paste effort from you. A superficial article from an unnamed "European Scientist" on top of that. ????

Thanks. The author was Jean-Charles Estoppey.  A link was provided. > biodynamics-a-very-strange-concept.  TES doesn't do superficial.

The European Scientist gives the floor to researchers and experts who wish to explain to our fellow citizens the ins and outs of the scientific debates taking place in Europe.  TES seeks to rise above the level of political speeches that are all too often biased or reductionist. Instead, we seek to bring hard science, research, and data to the fore in Europe's most heated debates over energy, environmental protection, agriculture, data, and public health.

.

These days biodynamic agriculture is often assumed to be a standard of excellence in agriculture or viticulture, although it widely misunderstood by the general public, who presume it to be a category of organic farming.

There are eight of these herbal preparations (six to add to spread compost, two to spray on the crops, the latter two prepared in a cow’s horn, one of which has to be buried over the winter – and which is supposed to improve the “vital force” – the other buried over the summer, which is supposed to add “light”) Their base ingredients have to be derived from fermentation in animal organs (intestines, bladder, skull) They are diluted in a similar way to homeopathy, up to 1 mg / 10 kg (= 1 / 0.0000001), another theory which has failed to produce proof of efficacy.

Naturally these preparations have been and continue to be controversial, due to their lack of scientific rigour, which can clearly be illustrated by this quote from R. Steiner “The deer’s bladder is connected to cosmic forces. Even better than that, it’s almost a replica of the cosmos. So, we can significantly enhance the inherent ability of yarrow (one of the substances -ed.) to combine sulphur with other substances”  Furthermore, according to Steiner, these preparations can be imbued with “feelings” and “cosmic forces”                                     — European Scientist    biodynamics-a-very-strange-concept

On 2/25/2021 at 10:03 AM, Sunmaster said:

I never heard of the majority of them, but putting acupuncture (a form of alternative medicine, nowadays practiced by conventional doctors) or biodynamic agriculture (holistic, ecological, and ethical approach to farming)

Biodynamics, derived from anthroposophy, is a kind of occultism.

  Ernst Haeckel coined the word “biodynamics” in 1866 as a synonym for “general physiology.” In contrast, Rudolf Steiner's “biodynamic agriculture,” which originated in 1924, and was promoted via Ehrenfried Pfeiffer's book of 1938 with the same title, is an occult pseudoscience still popular today. The misuse of Haeckel's term to legitimize disproven homeopathic principles and esoteric rules within the context of applied plant research is unacceptable   .PMC4991331 

The founder of this theory, known as biodynamics since the 1930s, was Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian occult philosopher, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant who, in 1924, shortly before his death, invented it out of thin air in his study, without ever having contact with the business of agriculture and with no training in the field.

 The idea of herbal preparations that could influence terrestrial and cosmic “forces” were born out of R. Steiner’s pure intuition, without any factual justification ever being claimed or produced by him or anyone else. They are supposed to be activated by “dynamisation”, which means rotating them in a certain direction once they are diluted in water to convey on them the powers attributed to them. This so-called methodology is reminiscent of Benveniste’s famous “Memory of Water” which caused a sensation in scientific circles many years ago, before its pseudo-scientific trickery was exposed.

Asimov was president of the American Humanist Association.  ‘’Good without a god’’ a non-profit organisation that advances secular humanism , a philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms the ability and responsibility of human beings to lead personal lives of ethical fulfilment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.

 Thanks to the inspiration of our friends in Britain, we've started our own atheist bus ad campaign in Washington DC     religion-advertising-atheism-bus    

On 2/25/2021 at 8:49 AM, mauGR1 said:

It's kind of funny that to promote some scientific righteousness, you are quoting a science-fiction novelist. 

Yet i wonder if you can get the irony ????

Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. He penned myriad stories, articles and essays. They spanned the rich microscopic worlds of cytoplasm, cells and subatomic particles, and ventured into the boundless wilds of space. In 1958, he switched to mainly writing science books. 

35 books on general science. 7  on mathematics. 74 on astronomy. 12 on earth science. 16  on chemistry and biochemistry . 22 on physics. 24 on biology.  39 science essay collections. 21 on history.  7 books on the bible. 10  on literature..  8  on humour and satire. 4 autobiographies.  Et al .    asimov_catalogue.html

Asimov worked as a scientist for the US Navy during the Second World War; completed a doctorate in chemistry at Columbia; and, in 1949, took a post teaching biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine in Massachusetts. 

Asimov was an atheist, a humanist, and a rationalist.  He did not oppose religious conviction in others, but he frequently railed against superstitious and pseudoscientific beliefs that tried to pass themselves off as genuine science. He spent a good part of his final years championing secular reason in an age when, he believed, the candle of critical thinking had dimmed.  d41586-020-00176-4

''Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time’

Rupert Sheldrake is a pseudoscientist who has made his name promoting various kinds of woo, including telepathy (including in dogs!), immaterial minds, and his crazy idea of “morphic resonance,” a Jung-ian theory in which all of nature participates in some giant collective memory. (He was once a real scientist, trained in biochemistry and cell biology at Cambridge, but somewhere went off the rails.)

I’ve crossed swords with Sheldrake before when I campaigned against his TEDx talk, which was filled with his crazy ideas. I and several others pointed out that what he said violated the mission of TEDx to present innovative but sound science. This resulted in TEDx taking Sheldrake’s talk off of their website and putting it in a special “time out” room for misbehaving woomeisters.

Let’s face it: we’ll never be free of people who lap up the woo of people like Chopra and Sheldrake. There’s something about human psychology that is susceptible to this kind of stuff. All we can do is decry it as often as we can, and hope that those on the fence will listen to us.

— Jerry A.Coyne.

https://newrepublic.com/article/115533/rupert-sheldrake-fools-bbc-deepak-chopra

On 2/23/2021 at 9:50 AM, Fat is a type of crazy said:

4 Surely if the example you give above is true it could have been reproduced in the last 20 years  to satisfy the scientists. I cannot believe there would not be many scientists and Sheldrake himself happy to set up a test both to promote his theories and become famous by proving such a theory correct.

Exactly. A scientific hypothesis needs to be testable, falsifiable, peer reviewed . . ESP itself is neither scientific nor unscientific — but it can be studied scientifically or unscientifically, and scientific studies find no support for the hypothesis that ESP exists. Those who ignore the evidence and insist that ESP is a real, natural phenomenon fail to meet one of the key aspects of scientific behaviour: assimilating the evidence.

''I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be''.

--  Isaac Asimov,  Professor of biochemistry, , known for his works of popular science and science fiction . A prolific writer who wrote or edited more than 500 books.