should creationists be allowed in science?

I don't see how predicting something after it happened is a prediction, unless the CIA is making the prediction.

The first penicillin resistant bacteria appeared in 1947. If I'm not mistaken, it was Staphylococcus aureus, which isn't even harmful to humans. That was followed by Streptococcus pneumoniae (1967), gonorrhea (1976) and Enterococcus faecium (1983).

If they want to impress me, they can predict which bacteria specifically will become resistant. I would consider that a prediction, instead of an obtuse generalization in the style of Nostradamus.

I've been saying that for years, so it's a lot more than twice.

I'm totally lost there. I've never even been to Portugal and don't really care, unless it's Whirled Cup qualification time.

That's most unfortunate, since they rely on it to their own detriment.

When I was a TA, I used to fail students for citing Pukipedia. It was department policy (and the university frowned on its use but didn't ban it outright).

Here's a very typical Pukipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_Force_74

Tthe article contains numerous fallacies and blatantly false facts.

False. It was deployed to the Indian Ocean. See ship's logs and original documents declassified more than 15 years ago.

Totally false.

The Task Force never withdrew from the Bay of Bengal, because it never entered the Bay of Bengal, nor had it been ordered to so.

No Soviet submarines were “dispatched to shadow the fleet.” There were two Soviet surface squadrons and a submarine squadron (6 submarines including two guided missile subs) already in the Indian Ocean Region prior to the departure of Task Force 74. One of the Soviet surface squadrons was in the Bay of Bengal. One might possibly conclude that the Task Force did not enter the Bay of Bengal in order to avoid a direct confrontation with Soviet vessels, but that’s a bit of a stretch.

According to the ship's logs, the Task Force moved into the West Andaman Sea between the Andaman Islands and Nicobar Islands before changing course and moving southwest toward Ceylon (Sri Lanka). In fact, on the day that Pakistan surrendered, the Task Force was just east of Ceylon before moving to Point Charlie on the southern coast of India, then it sailed into the Arabian Sea to the Gulf of Kutch which lies to the south of Karachi, Pakistan.

The Task Force then came about and headed south where it laid off Mumbai (Bombay) for a few days. After spending about 3 weeks sailing up and down the coast of Pakistan/India (um, being shadowed by Soviet submarines and two Soviet surface squadrons), the Task Force left sometime during the latter part of the 1st week of January and headed back to Yankee Station in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Very obviously, the Task Force did not feel threatened by the presence of two Soviet surface groups and a submarine squadron if they spent three weeks or more cruising around the area.

The names of the Soviet ships are available through any number of resource.

Wrong. The USS Anderson was decommissioned and struck in 1946, and the naval registry shows it was sold as scrap in 1962.

A ship that was decommissioned in 1946 could not possibly be cruising the Indian Ocean in 1971.

Also the USS Bausell was not part of the task force, but the USS Waddell was (and ship's company have organized associations and publish things like the ship's log and discuss various cruises and other activities, so there's no excuse to be stupid).

Why rely on false and erroneous information when you can go to the source?

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-usn/usnsh-a/dd411.htm

If anyone is interested, the nuclear attack submarine was the USS Gurnard.

There's also an error by omission, since three other ships were omitted.

That's also patently false.

The ship's logs state quite clearly that they had no navigational maps of the area; that the entire region had very heavy commercial shipping traffic; that marker lights (identifying points, shoals, reefs, sand bars and other underwater hazards) were not functioning in many areas; and that several people had to transfer to the Enterprise from other ships to assist in navigation and on-the-fly map making.

The destroyers accompanying the Enterprise had re-fueled at Malacca or re-fueled en route. The range is 4,500 miles cruising at 18-24 knots. I dare say they were in no danger of running out of fuel.

If the bozo who wrote the article had done any research, he'd know they were traveling with an oiler, which could refuel all ships twice, so the real range is over 12,000 miles.

The TOE for a Marine battalion in 1971 was 979 marines, not 200.

This telex...

...contradicts this:

Very obviously the Task Force was already underway before December 8.

There are 1,000s of articles just like that, and that's why we don't use Pukipedia. I won't even mention the atrocious spelling and grammatical errors. Nothing more nauseating than someone with 8th Grade reading comprehension trying to sound like they're at Level 16 on the Slosson Scale. Many of the articles are very slanted and heavily biased, engaging in academic dishonesty.

Natural Selection occurs after Evolution has already taken place. It is nothing more than a sort of Quality Control/Assurance process. It either rejects evolutionary "mistakes" or it rubber-stamps them.

Yes, they are mutually exclusive. Natural Selection does not cause Evolution. Evolution does not require Natural Selection. Evolution would occur even if Natural Selection never took place.

Natural Selection did not cause an early primate to lose its tail. Evolution caused the primate to lose its tail. Natural Selection merely said, "Okay, I like it. Drive on."

You might want to study the mechanics of Evolution again. Evolution does happen to individuals. The whole process of Evolution begins with the individual. It is the individual that initiates Evolution.

What are you suggesting? Natural Selection caused a group of hominids to drink from the John F Kennedy Memorial Lake teeming with FOXP2 genes and they walked away talking, "Ask not what your clan can do for you....?"

Surely you're not suggesting gene mutations are retroactive? How exactly does that work? Did a hominid mutate with the FOXP2 gene and then magical ether floated around and retroactively caused all living hominids to have the FOXP2 gene or did the sky god come down and wave his trident about in a special ceremony?

Evolution starts with the individual. It is not a group process. There aren't any mass mutations. It isn't everyone standing around wishing they could talk and then their wish is granted.

One individual organism mutates. That mutation will spread through the population after many generations. How many generations? That depends on when the organism reaches reproductive maturity, how often it reproduces and how many offspring it produces with each cycle.

Natural Selection may or may not play a role. It depends on the nature of the mutation, since Natural Selection is geared more toward the population as a whole, and not to specific organisms within the population.

Morality, like Truth, is Absolute. It doesn't matter what other people think, although I sure Richard Nixon and televangelist Jim Bakker would disagree.

 

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I find this statement frightening. It implies you never question yourself, doubt the rightness of your actions, or would ever later decide you were wrong and go about making amends, or apologizing.

I agree with James and don't think that's correct terminology either. I believe this is:

You have mutation and selection. You get the meiotic lottery that produces the individuals with traits of various sorts...natural selection then reduces the passing-on of those qualities that less benefit reproduction until they are pretty much edited out of the population. Over time the population is thus changed to reflect the most successful reproducers. This is what leads to speciation in cases where one population of animals or plants spreads across very different environments-like the Galapagos finches that all evolved specialized beaks.

The entire process is called evolution.

Agreed-Wikipedia is not a credible site for genuine research papers...on real serious research papers, though, Wikipedia can still be a starting point-you take the page references and go refer to those, and then you can go to the references there if you need more, and so on...on more general topics it can be a good place to get an overview, and so forth...

 

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Regarding Wiki.
This is a subject which has been discussed on here many times.
A recent thread is at http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=106135&highlight=wikipedia
It is nearly empty, so a fresh discussion could be started.
I will duplicate this post there, so the discussion can be continued if anyone wishes.

Personally, I don't have a University Library at hand, so "Pukipedia" is my best option. I agree that it doesn't replace professionally written books, eye witmess statements, and archives of original material.
But if you see something in wikipedia which is wrong, you could make an effort to repair it.

 

That is a very strange way to side-line arguably the most critical process of evolution. By evolution, I must assume you mean changes in gene frequency with accompanying changes in phenotype? In what possible way would natural selection not result in evolution? It certainly changes gene frequencies. It certainly results in changes in phenotype. I'm not sure why you're taking this tack.

Your definition is a little derived, above.

It certainly does.

This part is true: drift and pre- and post-zygosis would cause evolution without NS. NS is not required for evolution to occur, but it is certainly a possible outcome.

Are you a Futuyamian or something? Simply put: ToE was founded on evolution.

Excuse me? Evolution does not happen to individuals. Evolution is a population-level process.

I had not the foggiest idea what the above is meant to convey, although I now find you - bizarrely - accusing me of the supposition of mass mutation, so that your conception of evolution as an individual process can work:

Clearly not. You are attempting to ascribe a new perspective to me - group mutation - in order to support your strange conception of evolution as a individual process, which is odd in the extreme. Let's examine your process below, however:

I think we have solved our issue: you have admitted to a possible role of natural selection as an agent of evolution, "geared toward the population". This is correct: evolution is a population-level process, and natural selection a component (or "possible component", if we must make the explicit distinction) of the process. A mutation in the individual is just that, without accompanying populational change, which you've described above. I think you had better review the definition of evolution: at most, you could make the argument that an individual mutation results in a change of f=1/2N, assuming a diploid organism and mutation in a single allele.

 

That's why the predictions of where researchers will most benefit from appliying their efforts, what the researchers will find, etc, are made before the researchers go looking. Such predictions are now routine in all biological sciences - Darwinian evolutionary theory is the fundamental theory of biology, and is used throughout for all the purposes of theory.

Staphylocuccos aureaus is an important bacterium, and specific predictions of its future resistance to specific antibiotics have been made several times over the past few decades. So far, every one has borne out. The remaining few antibiotics capable of killing it are now delivered only under rigid and careful protocols, to delay at least and prevent if possible its otherwise obviously (if you take the Darwinian predictions into account) inevitable development of resistance to them as well. The people developing these protocols and going to all this trouble in a more or less desperate attempt to preserve treatment options for the sick, are basing their procedures on Darwinian evolutionary theory applied to the specific circumstances involved.

In a wider field, the number of diseases and other organisms predicted to develop resistance to various antibacterial, antifungal, herbicidal, pesticidal, and so forth, agents,

predictions which are borne out every year in various cases, as the years go by after they are made,

number in the hundreds. Seriously - hundreds of such predictions have been made, based on Darwinian evolutionary theory, with a stellar record of accuracy and success. It's routine. The latest I have run into? Bt resistance in important pests of GM cotton, predicted by opponents of GM manipulations involved and reported from India right on schedule.

 

I've seen Ockham described in terms of sheer parsimony (or as a point in parsimony to be overrun with sheer power), but never with a temporal element.

 

pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate ("plurality should not be posited without necessity").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

Or as old Ike said: "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes."
But then he went and invented gravity, so why should we listen him?

 

I believe in creation ,I believe in evolution , I have worked in science for many years, and I know many more scientist who were in the front of science, what is your background ? sense you are making such swiping

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statement

 

Who am I?
I am a graduate in biology, including evolutionary biology, who is an inveterate reader, who never stops studying science in all its breadth and wonder.

 

Great so you are educated in different branch o science then I. so why are you attempting to exclude me from science I am in chemical field , in the field that biology can not explain well how chemical interact

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If creationism means that god made the world in 7 days, or something along those lines, then I'm totally opposed to that view. I don't agree with it. Yes, creationists should be allowed in science, but it's not even an issue anyway because there's no one in charge of science, no one has any authority to let anyone in or not.

 

The creationists could work on the stem cell line.

 

Mircea, you are clearly reasonably well read in evolutionary theory. Sufficiently well read to know that you are redefining terms to suit your own agenda. You are smart enough to know that as classifications and definitions are somewhat arbitrary that whatever the consensus view holds them to be, that is what they are until and unless there is sufficient cause to change them. You are also smart enough to know that your arguments fail utterly to be sufficient cause. The only remaining possibilities are that you are deliberately trolling or you are way dumber than I gave you credit for.

Which is it?