@ #12 Bluesheep,

The supermarket clerk who looks at you may also remember your face. But the reason we don't worry about this as an invasion of privacy and do worry about the recording of computerized image data, however crude, is that it is possible to combine such data into huge computer databases--even if this is not done initially it can be done later.

And what is the problem with computerized databases? Myself not being so well-informed as Cory, I know of at least two such problems.

One is the ease with which such data can be superficially searched looking for abstract criteria that supposedly predispose a person to "bad behavior". This can easily lead to lots of innocents being harassed (remember innocents being kicked off airplanes or searched every last time because their name is similar to the name of a terrorist), or people guilty of something minor (e.g. dog pooping) being persecuted by overzealous authorities just because it computers make it easier to do this than to pursue greater crimes.

The other is much, much worse: such data is easily *manipulated*. Take the American presidential election in 2000 in Florida. According to research of Greg Palast, tens of thousands of citizens, many of them black and probably democratic, were systematically prevented from voting in the following way: 1) convicted felons are prohibited from voting by law; 2) the voter rolls were computer-searched and people whose names remotely resembled those of convicted felons were identified; 3) these names were automatically purged from the rolls. Fact 1 is unethical in itself, but 2 and 3 would not be possible without the digitization and dehumanization of the entire process of dealing with large lists of personal information.

I think it is good to bring out this particular aspect of the subject more clearly: computerization makes certain types of abuse, previously unthinkable in the days of paper and typewriters due to sheer impracticality, as easy as the touch of a button. And since things are changing so fast, it is going to be harder and harder to predict new kinds of abuse that have become possible just due to computerization of personal data.

I tend to agree that Einstein fulfilled a need for heroes in America during WW2, in opposition to the disturbingly powerful personality of Hitler and perhaps other personalities and social forces. The opinions which Einstein offered on many topics of then-current interest, though sometimes cleverly expressed, often seem to me as well to have been trite in hindsight.

One particular conversation between Einstein and Niels Bohr is quite revealing in any case as to their respective philosophical positions concerning the nature of the scientific search for truth. It seemed to me when I read that conversation (which admittedly was some time ago) that Einstein was something of a transitional figure between two major strains of thought. The first is the Cartesian or German Enlightenment reliance on axiomatic systems as the basis of truth--as also exemplified by David Hilbert insofar as Hilbert wanted to reduce quantum mechanics to formal mathematics and mathematics to formal logic. The other is modern mathematical physics with its abstract formal theories in search of supporting experimental data. Einstein seems not to have read Nietzsche or Kierkegaard and so he missed the development of existential thought in the late 19th century as embodied in those two philopher's works. In this vein he directly and indirectly supports the view that truth can be learned through pure intellectual effort--and he is in this respect close to the religious notion that truth can be learned through divine revelation, which is a rather deep-seated feeling that I believe still underlies much scientific thinking even today and especially the scientific method itself.

Niels Bohr on the other hand sounds completely modern, defending the idea that we should be willing to overturn our assumptions as new information comes along. He puts it even more strongly: we should not begin with any assumptions whatsoever.

@ Xopher, 488

Sweet! Come to think of it, I wonder what the ID explanation for wet dreams is.

@JakeTheSnake

Yes, explanations from a doctor can be a good sign. We once visited four doctors about a certain important question--the first three all said the same thing with very little added information, while the fourth gave a convincing explanation as to why we should not follow the advice of the first three. We trusted him and he turned out to be right. And no surprise, since his explanation made quite a lot of sense. Caveat emptor as usual.

I too heard from one doctor (whom I do trust) that a man should have approximately one orgasm every day to maintain prostate health. Maybe that explains wet dreams: involuntary bodily functions kick in to save us when we don't use our bodies as nature (god?) intended--including masturbation!

Also @ JakeTheSnake

Sorry, I forgot to respond to this question of yours:

What about the choice between praying for your health and modern medicine?

I was just making a statement about my trust in science. If a doctor says "here take this" then most people just do as he says. Why? Faith in science.

As an aside, prayer has been scientifically demonstrated to be good for your health:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2002/01/05/mantra-rosary.aspx

(To be fair, I don't think they demonstrated that having someone else pray for you is good for your health--but if you find it relaxing it probably would be. But I wonder whether the contributors to this board would find that terribly relaxing!)

@ JakeTheSnake

Thanks for your direct question. My original point was that the language used in the discussion here by those defending science and the theory of evolution shows many telltale signs of idealisation and dogmatisation. I find this dangerous because the high esteem in which science is held today is being used to justify a lot of very unscientific and unscrupulous research, the effect of which is to increase profits at the expense of the public's wealth and health. I would very much like these noble defenders of science to take a closer look at what they are defending.

Below are some examples selected from the above thread of what I consider to be either unthinking repetition of scientific dogma, gratuitous scientific zealotry, or in one case a baseless ad hoc argument. If we are going to hold the creos to a higher standard, we should do the same with everyone, including ourselves.

You see, the main difference between you ID folks and scientists is that scientists don't make assumptions. At all. There is not faith involved. ... Thats where the burden of proof comes in. Scientists don't "have faith" in the scientific theory of evolution, and so if you can come up with some kind of proof that god made man, scientists will believe you. The scientists don't have to prove their point, they already have. You have to disprove them.

...even when you are looking at big changes, they ultimately come from the microscopic level. Each outward change is reflected genetically, so when looking for evidence, persons of science look to the genetic code.

...professional scientists are real scientists, men who have spent years earning their doctorates, men who make their living looking for clues and trying to figure out how things work, men who when they make a mistake admit error and modify their thesis ...

...science is defined more correctly as "a system of acquiring knowledge based on scientific method."

...the reputations of scientists who are infinitely more reasonable than you. Hundreds of years of earnest investigation down the toilet, if you had your way.

Nothing in Darwinian texts deals with the origins of the universe or of the Earth. Other scientists are responsible for those areas of study. ... The thing about science that makes it notably different from creation or ID is that it is rigorously tested. No scientist can say, "I have a theory, now teach it." ALL scientific theories are tested by many other researchers and if they don't hold up to independent testing, they are thrown out.

Ultimately if I look at everything science has produced, versus everything religion has produced, science wins by a landslide.

Before Darwin, Lamarck came up with a similar theory of evolution, except he believed that acquired traits were heritable. ... Lamarck was proven false by experiments like the one where they cut the tails off mice and bred them, to see if their offspring would be tailless. .... The genes will, however, differ from parent to offspring if there is a mistake in the DNA transcription, and that is how mutations and variations happen.

...matters of faith and matters of science do not mix.

A lot of the people who, "took ill and died suddenly" were victims of heart disease. Those doctors who, "never saw a heart patient", probably did, but they lacked the mindset to see it for what it was. ... When a child was, "sickly" and died at eight, was it malaria, sickle cell or leukemia? We don't know. Some of the "younger" illnesses might have been hidden by the earlier causes of death.... Now, if you want to propose a testable hyposthesis to show the invalidity of the mechanisms presently thought to be the causes of these things, there are lots of peope (public and private) willing to pay for the research.

And blaming the "scientists" for the destruction of nature is so backward as to be laughable...

...various things cause genes to change randomly. ... there are the mutations that are actually beneficial in the particular environment in which the species finds itself. They confer a survival and/or breeding advantage, and the individuals who have it outbreed or outsurvive those who don't...eventually. Those genes tend to spread through a population. Slowly.

--------

And finally here is a remark which was aimed at the creos but which applies equally to the evos:

The problem is you have one standard of evidence for the thing you disbelieve (absolute proof) and you are willing to make great leaps of faith (and I'll wager, no small amount of apologia) to explain away the failings in the things you do believe.

@ JakeTheSnake

What's your point? Creationists would never have made the mistake of the oncogene theory?

I would not have characterized my point that way. However, if I must choose between a creationist who wants to pray for my health and a doctor who wants me to accept a harmful "treatment", I will indeed choose the creationist.

Also, your example of the house and the lightening is false - lightening doesn't hit church steeples because they were built in the wrong place, but because they were there.

I do not understand your response. Note I did not say "built in the wrong place". With a little imagination, I think my actual phrase "wrong place at the wrong time" is quite reasonable--say the location of the house is a mountaintop in one geologic age and a valley in another.

Let's take this to a logical extreme - if you're totally illiterate, you're unlikely to misspell words, that doesn't make you a better speller however.

While correct, your example convinces me that you have missed my point. Perhaps a somewhat better example would be that, in the driver's seat of a car, a 3-year-old is less dangerous than a drunken teenager, yet the teenager is arguably the better driver since the 3yo. will not be able to drive at all.

Also @465:

As for science in general, you seem to have a misunderstanding about what is and is not science. What you read in science journals/magazines are not accepted science [aka scientific facts]. The journals are there to spread new concepts, so that others can repeat and/or refute findings. Medical science is generally even worse, as it is largely a statistical-science, dealing with data sets that have large outliers.

I agree that medical science is quite problematic for precisely the reason you state--the way it is carried out today involves purely cookbook statistical experimentation, and its goal is not health but drug sales.

However I disagree that one can dismiss science journal articles so easily. One must certainly take any single experimental result with a grain of salt, but when they all begin to point the same way, well, that is what science is--there isn't any other acceptable definition of "science" beyond what is published in scientific journals.

By the way: many journal articles summarize their results in a manner that misrepresents or even outright contradicts the data given in the paper. In this way, scientists whose findings contradict the paradigm can avoid rocking the boat. Yet the data is there for those who read carefully, which most often does not include medical doctors who don't have the time for it. At best hey just read the concluding section which just supports what they already believe, or more often they relying on drug reps for their scientific info, which info is of course totally biased towards drug sales.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOW8LNU2hFE

@ 465, Agent 86

You have confused me--I suspect we are largely in agreement. Please explain what you think my "straw man" was intended to prove and what you think it does not prove.

Here is a quote from my comment #364:

"It is well known that random mutation followed by natural selection plays at best a small role in the evolution of bacteria on small time scales, because bacteria exchange or excrete DNA much faster than random mutations occur."

Correct me if I am wrong but this is exactly what you are saying.

@ Xopher 375

I said: "heart-disease and cancer cannot be genetically inherited diseases because their rates of increase have been far greater than the speed of genetic evolution. Both heart disease and cancer were virtually unknown before the 20th century."

You said: "Now you're being silly. By that argument an allergy to potatoes can't be genetic in Europe, because no one got symptoms of a potato allergy there before 1492 (when potatoes were introduced). New environmental hazards are introduced all the time, and some people are more susceptible to them than others. Things just aren't single-cause deterministic.

I feel that you are correct in pointing to a logomachical difficulty here. Let me give some examples to make my argument more precise.

If lightning strikes a house and it burns down, what was the "cause" of the destruction? Was it A) the lightning or B) that the house was in the wrong place at the wrong time? Well obviously both things are "causal" here. Why are we inclined to choose A? Because it is easier and more effective to do something about the lightning (install a lightning rod) than to do something about the location of the house.

So when I talk about "causes" or "root causes" I generally mean those causes that are easiest or most effective to address.

To take your example of the introduction of potatoes from the New World, to my way of thinking the problem can be framed like this: how shall we address the problem of potato allergy? Shall we A) look for a "causal" gene, design a drug to block it--and who cares what the gene was for--and then sell the drug to everyone with potato allergies? Or B) recommend that people with potato allergies not eat potatoes? In other words, what shall we decide is the "cause" of potato allergies: A) genetic predisposition or B) eating potatoes?

If you have an oncogene, you need to watch out for the type of cancer it codes for; that doesn't mean you'll get it, and of course taking your antioxidants and whatever might help prevent it."

The theory that there are "oncogenes"--genes that cause cancer--has led nowhere as far as treating or curing cancer is concerned (thus per my above argument we should not think of genes as "causal" in cancer). Read this fascinating repudiation by one of the codiscoverers of the first "oncogene":

http://mcb.berkeley.edu/labs/duesberg/pdfs/2007,_Duesberg0507,_SciAm.pdf

@ JakeTheSnake 372

I think this is not quite the right way to ask the question, since the field of Epidemiology was born in the early 20th century. However there are plenty of good historical references documenting diseases at that time. Sorry I don't have time to get such things for you (you can google around--I believe history is always worth researching), but here is a respectable website that makes the same assertions I am making.

http://www.fi.edu/learn/heart/history/history.html

@ Ill Lich 370

"science has become the new religion?" You are treading dangerously close to IVA BIGGRUDGE territory here.

Science is self regulating; it makes mistakes, and corrects those mistakes.

But this is exactly what I mean: you believe that it is enough to say that science corrects its mistakes-- that the sense in which this is true is enough to acquit science of being counterproductive or harmful in the same sense as religion. But we now have numerous examples of scientifically justified "medicines" that have caused and continue to cause huge numbers of deaths. These "mistakes" cannot ever be "corrected". But perhaps more to the point, it is now business as usual for science to heap more false justifications on theories that have already been disproved, rather than turn around and throw out the old theories.

Scientists don't burn other scientists at the stake for "scientific heresy."

This is quite untrue. There are many stories of scientists who were witch-hunted for their contrarian ideas, and some of them turned out to be right in the end. Some committed suicide. Today such people are marginalized and put out of business through lack of funding.

They may have economic self-interest in mind, and denigrate another theory, but in the end if their research doesn't pan out then they get no more money for research and their "propaganda" was for naught-- investment goes where it is profitable, the money doesn't care about egos or ideas, only making more money.

But there is money in deception. Pharmaceutical companies now pay professional scientists to put their names on papers the companies have written for them! The longer a large group of people continue to take a certain drug, the more money is made--regardless of whether the drug works or is deadly. If the public eventually figures it out, well, just move on to the next drug.

Have you seen all the recent news stories about how all the cholesterol lowering drugs actually increase the risk of death from heart disease? Yet they all lower cholesterol quite effectively. And the "evidence" continues to pile up that cholesterol causes heart disease. (What about contradictory evidence? Is there any? Does anyone ask? http://www.westonaprice.org/moderndiseases/benefits_cholest.html
)

Those kinds of arguments between scientific schools are just bumps in the road, and eventually the bumps get smoothed out.

I believe that to be truly scientifically minded one must be more critical than this, even of science itself.

I am curious: the bacteria experiments you speak of-- are these findings being suppressed/ignored, or are the findings just not reproducible?

They were published in prestigious peer-reviewed journals like all the other research, received some striking negative commentary which failed to invalidate them, and the scientific community moved on maintaining its prejudices as if nothing happened. There are many examples of forgotten experiments which invalidate current scientific beliefs.

@JakeTheSnake

By "virtually unknown" I do not mean that they were unknown to doctors. However most doctors never saw a heart patient before say 1910. By 1940 they were not rare. Today we have an epidemic.

The expected mortality rate due to [cancer or heart disease] will also have to do with the expected lifespan of given population (you have to live long enough for either to show up).

This common argument is incorrect. If it were true, you would expect the increase to occur only in older populations. However the recent high rate of increase in cancer occurred in all age groups, and the onset of heart disease is occurring earlier and earlier--now doctors are seeing heart patients in their 30s. You would also expect that our present rates of disease could be seen in the past for older people. Yet older people were generally free of heart disease and cancer in the 19th century.

There is definitely a relationship between lifestyle and expected outcome, but among a population with an identical lifestyle, genetics play a role in determining expected outcomes.

I agree with you. But consider taking this argument to its logical conclusion. Place me naked in the sun with my feet buried and leave me there for a few days--I will die of thirst, starvation and exposure. Do the same with a plant and it will thrive. Does this mean I have a genetic predisposition to some kind of diseases under certain circumstances? Well yes of course it does. --the plant's genes "protect" it from "disease" under those circumstances while mine "predispose" me to "disease". Plenty of research shows that heart disease and cancer are diseases of the same variety--if your diet is nutrient-poor you will get sick, and the obverse.

This is the problem with the genetic explanation--it applies equally to everything without addressing the root causes of disease. Beware the new wave of pharmaceutical research: they are doing massive statistical analyses of thousands of genes simultaneously to find that this one contributes a 10% risk, these three a 5% risk, etc. and they will go on to develop drugs to attack all these genes in people supposedly to improve their health. But this kind of research is totally bogus because when you do thousands of statistical analyses simultaneously a few are likely (law of large numbers) to produce false positive correlations. But the profiteers know that this is enough to convince people to buy their drugs.

Sorry to come in a bit late but I couldn't resist commenting on the "evos" vs. "creos".

What strikes me about the discussion are the ominous signs of idealism and dogmatisation on the part of the evos. This has far-reaching consequences for all of us.

Genetics and evolution as they are currently widely understood form the basis for the coming generation of lucrative medical research (gene-based therapies) as well as genetic engineering of foods. Yet there is a great deal about evolution that is uncertain, and some aspects of it have already been cast into doubt by scientific research--and not the fake kind put forth by ID "scientists":

That the lizards have surprised us is just one recent example but there are other much better ones. It is well known that random mutation followed by natural selection plays at best a small role in the evolution of bacteria on small time scales, because bacteria exchange or excrete DNA much faster than random mutations occur. Or to point out a different aspect, gene expression (genes switching on and off in response to environmental cues) can hugely change the traits of bacteria--this may be erroneously attributed to evolution, whereas the genes are not changing at all. Perhaps those lizards are giving us the first demonstration of this phenomenon occurring in animals--an exciting prospect. To give one final and rather amazing example, there are experiments showing that bacteria can change their own genes without reproducing--gene change without evolution. This has been known for at least 20 years but nobody is talking about it because it is considered heresy by the scientific establishment. (Yes, scientists use words like "dogma" and "heresy"--in print no less--to describe scientific ideas. Warning to those who deride the "creos": watch your backs!)

But the theory of evolution has already been incorporated into our biological understanding of ourselves. How often do you hear the word "genetic" used to explain so many aspects of our lives?

Such new discoveries threaten the basis of profitability of genetic techniques and therefore receive tremendous opposition in the form of funding of scientific propaganda. The propaganda appears in science journals as well as news stories that go hammering on about the by-now-obsolete ideas that your genes permanently determine your susceptibility to heart disease, cancer and so on. We have forgotten so much (or it has been suppressed): heart-disease and cancer cannot be genetically inherited diseases because their rates of increase have been far greater than the speed of genetic evolution. Both heart disease and cancer were virtually unknown before the 20th century.

I fear that science has become the new religion and that the vehemence with which the evos fight the creos is misdirected. Each can learn from the other. In particular, the evos might learn that the god of nature still knows better than our scientists what we should eat--and that our scientists are out to destroy the nature on which our health depends, out of a predisposition for atheism and profit.