Just a note: the conversation is once again, about my credentials or qualifications and personality. This is not considered as trolling since even mods and admin are doing it
Excuse me but SciForums is not an academy, a university, or even an online journal. There's no primary or secondary research going on here, only (occasionally) tertiary and (more usually) quaternary and beyond. In a place of quaternary research, professional standing in the discipline of discourse is sufficient evidence in support of a person's assertions to satisfy the Rule of Laplace. Citing an article by a professional, or being a professional, does not
prove beyond a reasonable doubt the validity of the assertion, but it places on anyone who challenges it the obligation to provide contradictory evidence, not merely to shout, for example, "You're wrong because you're a theist!"
Therefore it is important to verify the credentials of anyone who is casually accepted by the members as a professional scientist. Since we don't check them when people become members, it is entirely fair, and even vital, to ask:
- Do you have a university degree in biology?
- What level? Baccalaureate, magistral, doctoral?
- What university?
- How long ago? You're young enough (or so you say!) to waive this requirement. But if, for example, my 1967 B.A. were in computer science (it's in accounting), 90% of what I learned would be obsolete.
- Are you a career scientist using that degree as qualification for your job?
- Where and for whom? For example, you're all aware of my categorical rejection of the U.S. government as a reference for absolutely anything--the people who told us that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and that marijuana is more dangerous than alcohol and tobacco.
- Does the quality of your work keep you in good standing with your peers?
Please be a dear--and a good scientist--and answer the questions.
And the fact remains that you do a lot more trolling than most posters here.
I challenge that assertion. As a Moderator I see a lot of trolling. Hardly a day goes by that we don't have to ban a member for it--often permanently. I agree that Sam trolls but she's hardly in a class with, say, Baron Max or Brent/Tnerb.
How did Dawkins get appointed as the spokesman for atheistic scientists, much less for all atheists? I don't have the qualifications in biology to challenge his science, although privately I'm very skeptical of it and never cite it as a reference; but I absolutely do not appreciate his rhetorical style. It's one thing to antagonize theists on SciForums, where theism is specifically defined as a collection of extraordinary assertions lacking extraordinary support. It's quite another to stand up in front of the entire world and talk that way. Particularly given that he's not a good writer and uses both sloppy language and poorly researched data the moment he sets one toe outside his scientific specialty. If you regard religion, specifically Abrahamic monotheism, as a cancer, as I do, Dawkins's screeds are not going to help combat the epidemic.
Gene: working subunits of DNA
A poorly constructed definition. Subunits of what? Genes are comprised of DNA. What do the genes comprise?
survival of the fittest what? The fittest organism? The fittest group? The fittest species? The answer: the fittest genes.
I disagree with this elaboration, although I confess I'm speaking as the Linguistics Moderator and I haven't looked up the consensus of biologists. (My opinion on the haphazard way otherwise-precise scientists treat the language is also on record.) In order to make sense and to conform to the way evolution works, "survival of the fittest" must refer to individual complete organisms, and ultimately accrues up to populations, subspecies and species. It's rare for a trait that affects survivability (or anything else) to be determined by a single gene. It's usually a group of genes. The individual "bad" genes might survive in individuals in whom they don't occur together, and in fact by themselves or in combination with other genes they might even have a positive effect on survivability of the individual.
And natural selection does not work at the level of the gene. Stephen Hawkings intelligence "gene" if there is one, is pretty useless in the face of the fact that they come prepackaged with crippling disease. How many women you think wanna have his babies?
Have you checked the sperm banks? I haven't either, but I'll wager that there's a demand for it. Some people will take the chance of the intelligence being separated from the illness in the sperm.
Hawking's penis still works. . . .
A perfect illustration of reflexes at work. You're saying the reflex center in his spine responsible for the orgasmic reflex is not affected by the illness that has cut off most communication between his brain and the rest of his body.
So when a species goes extinct, its the genes that have not survived? Or the organism?
A species is not counted as "extinct" until there are no living members. Right? Obviously, depending on its place in the paradigm of lifeforms, at least 50% and as many as 98% of its genes live on in other species. Even animals and plants, two of the six kingdoms, share about half of their DNA.
The top down, creationist approach again. It's a characteristic, I think. The potential general advantages of an atheistic worldview, in avoiding one apparent path into this trap, are immediately obvious.
As the Linguistics Moderator I have to point out that the term "creationism" has been hijacked by the Evolution Denial movement. Supernaturalists who merely object to abiogenesis (which has not been proven true beyond a reasonable doubt and therefore is not a canonical scientific theory like evolution), and supernaturalists who assert that a being external to the natural universe guides the course of evolution, should not be called creationists. This includes Catholics and the vast majority of Protestants and other Abrahamists outside the benighted post-1960s United States, all of whom accept evolution unremarkably.
Even though these people indeed believe that the natural universe was created by an external being and therefore by our scientific definition the word "creationist" is technically appropriate, in general discourse it will invariably be misinterpreted as "evolution denialist" and will derail the discussion.
However, it's worth pointing out that even their least extreme disagreement with us (that a god is sitting in his celestial easy chair tweaking the laws of probability for his own amusement to favor of the evolution of the species he wants to populate his favorite planet) still flies in the face of science by suspending the law of probability that underlies the scientific model of the natural universe. We're diligently trying to figure out how something could have occurred that is not quite impossible but still astoundingly unlikely (the local reversal of entropy which allowed for the increase in organization we call "life" to arise). They tell us we'll never figure it out--and we don't have to--because God did it.
To whoever challenged my use of the words "illogical and unobservable" to summarize gods, here's an example.
