Posted by Dale Husband on June 2, 2008
For any conspiracy to succeed, there are several conditions that may be required:
- The participants must be as few as possible.
- The conspiracy must be of as short a duration as possible.
- The conspiracy must be extremely secretive.
Condition 3 relies on the first two, as indicated in the proverb, “Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”
Thus, the commonly held 9-11 conspiracy theory that many government officials under the Bush Administration were directly involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is far less credible than the idea that a dozen operatives of Al-Qaeda were responsible. Likewise, it is far more credible that Exxon and its operatives have been planting misleading claims about global warming in the popular press and various blogs over the past couple of decades than that thousands of scientists have been misleading people about global warming since 1896, when Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first identified the heat retaining properties of carbon dioxide (called “carbonic acid” in Arrhenius’ paper referred to below).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/1/18/Arrhenius.pdf
People make up conspiracy theories to explain what could be responsible for something they happen to dislike. The “theory” could be more properly considered a hypothesis in science. The problem comes when these people do not take the next step in the scientific method, which is to test the idea via observation or experiment. Instead, they proclaim the conspiracy theory as DOGMA and proceed to interpret all evidence according to that dogma, despite never finding any direct evidence to confirm the theory. Then they abandon all willingness to allow the claim to be disproven.
You can’t do science that way! Just because a theory explains something doesn’t mean it is true. You must ultimately rule out all other possibilities before stating something questionable to be FACT.
Posted in Conspiracies, denialism, dogma, global warming, scientific, skepticism | No Comments »
Posted by Dale Husband on May 31, 2008
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/03/lynn_margulis_blog_tour.php
Note comment #163, which I wrote in reference to some earlier commenters.
(((Interesting comments, these three.
Let’s face it, no one who is not a dissident is going to read links to an HIV dissident site, especially when some of the papers are by Duesberg. People may read papers from mainstream scientists so long as they support their own arguments. Everyone here is interested in furthering their own arguments. Period.
Posted by: wayne | March 19, 2007 7:46 PM
“Not only have I read Duesberg’s articles but I have checked his claims with the ‘orthodox’ literature. It is only after this that I concluded that duesberg is full of crap.”
And therefore everyone reading this blog should take Chris Noble’s word for it. Just like everyone takes nature’s and Science’s “word for it” when they also say Duesberg is full of crap. My guess is that (unlike Chris Noble) 99% of people who take [fill in the blank]’s “word for it” have not actually taken time to examine the “dissident literature” (or even the “orthodox literature” which dissidents allegedly “cherry-pick” and “abuse”). My guess is, 99% of people who dismiss dissidents out of hand do so simply because “everyone else thinks so…”
And then everyone wonders why it’s NOT impossible for such a blunder to have happened…
Jake
Posted by: Jake | March 24, 2007 6:51 AM
DT said: “I dismiss dissidents because I have taken the trouble to look in detail at their claims, and found them wanting”.
DT, as with most of what you have to say, that statement of yours is not true at all!
DT dismisses the HIV dissidents because DT is a HIV drug rep to doctors for a pharmaceutical company! Doooohhhh!
Posted by: lincoln | April 1, 2007 12:06 AM
This is an example of what happens when someone gets so fixated on an idea that they can’t stand to lose an argument over it.
Here’s a tip for the denialist fanatics: Just because a concept is acceptable to YOUR mind doesn’t mean it is actually true. You may be suffering from psychotic delusions.)))
Posted in biology, denialism, scientific, skepticism | No Comments »
Posted by Dale Husband on May 28, 2008
Natural selection describes the process by which variations in a population of organisms is edited out over time to enhance the ability of the individual organisms to survive and reproduce in an environment. Even if over 90% of all mutations, being random, are harmful to the next generation, natural selection can still eliminate those and keep those others that are beneficial, thus countering the destructive effects of mutations in general.
It is the same with the scientific peer review process. Because science has made so much progress over the past few centuries, most people have the impression that scientists are unusually brilliant, nearly infallible, and totally objective in their views and methods. But in fact, that is simply not the case for most of them, at least as individuals. Scientists can be just as mistaken, corrupt, dogmatic, and failing in their efforts and assumptions as the rest of humanity. A few of them can even be downright stupid!
If that is true, how can science be trusted to produce reliable facts and theories? Because the scientists use peer review as their means to test any new ideas put on the table by one of their number. No scientist’s word need be taken at face value. In order for his idea to be accepted as anything beyond a speculation, he must show observational or experimental data, clearly defined, that supports it. Thus, it should always be possible for other scientists to duplicate the results of the first scientist making the claim. If attempts to duplicate the observations or experiments do not produce the same result, the idea is rejected.
Sometimes the peer review process goes too far in its skepticism, and a valid idea, such as continental drift, is rejected and even ridiculed by scientists even though it explains all the data collected and is contradicted by none of it. But that’s why repeated testing of that idea is required, as long as it is not outright falsified. Continental drift WAS accepted in the 1960s once an overwhelming amount of evidence was found to support it and those geologists who had been bigoted against it in the 1920s had died or retired, and a new generation had arisen that was more open-minded. Those who supported the continental drift theory were able to come up with a mechanism, plate tectonics, that explained it, and once they did opposition to it faded away rapidly.
Individual scientists may fall so deeply in love with their own ideas that they refuse to accept the peer review process when it rejects their ideas. Then they become cranks who no longer do science, but instead put out propaganda to appeal to the scientifically illiterate. This is especially true of Creationists and global warming denialists who happen to have science degrees. They even go so far as to attack the peer review process itself! But it must be noted that they can never produce anything that would produce superior results in terms of seeking objective data in the universe and explaining it.
Scientists who refuse to recognize that an idea of theirs is wrong are like a population of organisms that are too specialized in their lifestyle to adapt to any sudden change in their environment, resulting in their extinction. Fortunately, the progress of science continues even in spite of such incidents, just as life on Earth has continued despite the mass extinctions that have wiped out most species that evolved on Earth before.
Posted in Peer review, bigotry, denialism, evolution, geology, global warming, scientific | No Comments »
Posted by Dale Husband on May 26, 2008
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of increased warmth that is recorded in the history of the North Atlantic region from about 800 AD to 1300 AD. During this period, the extent of the Arctic ice cap was considerably less than today. The purpose of this blog is not to deny the reality of the MWP nor to reject the historical facts associated with it. However, global warming denialists have claimed that because the ice sheets of the Arctic were less extensive than today, the MWP must have been warmer than today and thus there is no reason to think that the current warming period, thought to be caused by man-made greenhouse gases, is in any way unusual. Indeed, they even claim that the readings from scientists indicating that the temperatures of the MWP were lower than today were faked in an effort to deny or cover up the MWP. Thus, I feel it necessary to demonstrate the absurdity of such assumptions.
Let us do an experiment. We take two identical bowls filled with pure water and place them in a freezer. After the water is completely frozen in both bowls, they are removed from the freezer and one, labled “A”, is placed in a refrigerator, while the other, labled “B” is placed on the kitchen table. After about an hour, bowl B has ice that is PARTLY melted. We take a picture of the bowl and then discard it.
A week later, we remove bowl A from the refrigerator. By then, the ice of this bowl is COMPLETELY melted. We take a picture of this bowl and discard it also.
Finally, we present both pictures to someone who knows nothing about the experiment and ask him, “Which bowl would you say looks warmer to you?” He will certainly say, “A”, but he will be wrong, because bowl A was in near freezing temperature for a week before its picture was taken, while bowl B was in room temperature for an hour before its picture was taken.
The point of the experiment is that it is not merely temperature that is the factor in melting water, but TIME as well. The Medieval Warm Period was indeed a natural event, and thus its arrival was gradual and so was its ending. The ice sheets in the Medieval Warm Period were less extensive because it lasted for several centuries, unlike the current warming period, which has lasted for only a few decades. Thus, the picture of bowl A could represent the Arctic ice cap at the height of the MWP, while the pic of bowl B could represent the Arctic ice cap today. Higher temperatures, but less time to melt the ice cap.
Thus, there is absolutely NO basis for the slanderous claims made against the scientists who have studied the progress of global warming in this present time. Indeed, if the MWP had been only three or four degrees F warmer than today’s average temperatures, we should have expected to see an almost total meltdown of both the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, resulting in a massive rise in sea levels around the world. And history records NO such thing!
Posted in denialism, global warming, scientific, skepticism | 3 Comments »
Posted by Dale Husband on March 5, 2008
While there are ways to experimentally test the process of evolution, known as natural selection, by mimicking it artificially, ways to test the historical issue of evolution, known as common descent, must rely on making observations and making predictions of the outcome of those observations.Inside the cells of all Eukaryota (plants, animals, fungi, and protists) are organelles called mitochondria. Likewise, inside the cells of plants are organelles called chloroplasts. Both mitochondria and chloroplasts have their own DNA and are thought to be descended from bacteria that took up residence inside the larger cells. In any case, the DNA in those organelles are completely different from the DNA in the nuclei of those same cells.
We can take the DNA of cell nuclei and check them to see if the differences between those of various organisms can enable us for build a family tree of those organisms. The more similar their nuclear DNA is, the more closely related they are. But since mitochondria and chloroplasts also have DNA, we could also take them and check to see if we could build up a family tree that is the same as the one we would build up with the nuclear DNA.
Indeed, there is no reason, if all life was produced by a single recent act of creation, for the DNA of the mitochondria of all animals to be significantly different from each other. So if I was a Creationist, especially of the young Earth kind, I would predict that it would be impossible to make a family tree from mitochondria DNA, or if I did, it would be completely different from the nuclear DNA. But if I was testing the theory of common decent, I would predict that the readings in animals of both their nuclear and mitochondrial DNA would produce the SAME FAMILY TREE in all cases! This would make perfect sense if the mitochondria and the rest of the cells have been evolving together ever since they first came together over a billion years ago.
Mitochondrial DNA is already used in forensics to determine who the mother of a child is, while nuclear DNA must be used to determine the father of that same child. This would only be an extension of that function, since the parents of the child must be of the same species, or at least very closely related, to even produce offspring at all.
Posted in biology, evolution, scientific | No Comments »
Posted by Dale Husband on March 4, 2008
A skeptic is defined as someone who reserves judgement on an issue until enough evidence is found to support a claim beyond a reasonable doubt and also clearly defines what would make him disbelieve a claim. This is scientific thinking.
By contrast, a denialist has no such defined limits, either of belief or disbelief. The denialist starts from a position of dogma, asserting opposition to an idea by presenting a contrary idea as absolute truth and interpreting all evidence according to that unalterable dogma, rather than draw conclusions based only on the evidence. This is the opposite of scientific thinking, although denialists often use scientific terminology to make their positions seem legitimate to fool the ignorant.
Denialism vs geuine skepticism is found in debates over evolution vs. Creationism, global warming, religion, and politics. If there were no denialists, most of those debates would have either ended long ago, or would be a lot more cordial than they tend to be.
Posted in Intelligent Design, bigotry, debate, dishonesty, dogma, evolution, global warming, scientific, skepticism | No Comments »
Posted by Dale Husband on January 25, 2008
The term “species” has a clear definition in biology: a group of organisms that breed only among themselves and do not breed with members of any other group. Thus, as far as we can tell, humans are all members of the same species, Homo sapiens.
The lesser black backed gull and the herring gull of Britain, however, act like separate species, yet are connected to each other by a ring of subspecies that extend all around the Northern Hemisphere and can interbreed with their neighbors. So in the sense I stated above, the definition of species breaks down.
The issue of species also fails when asexual life forms are considered, including bacteria, most protists, a few populations of beetles, a population of lizards, and an entire class of rotifers called Bdelloidea. The lizards, beetles and rotifers in question are all females, while among the single celled organisms the issue of gender identity is meaningless.
Suppose we have a population of 400 asexually reproducing lizards which are genetically and physically almost identical. One at a glance would assume they are members of the same species. But because the lizards do not swap genes via sexual reproduction, they would just as well be considered 400 separate species.
The issue of “species” becomes meaningless when one considers extinct organisms that are dug up as fossils. Fossils cannot breed among themselves and so the designation of certain fossils as Homo hablis, Homo egaster, and Homo sapiens is entirely arbitrary, based on the structure of the fossils and nothing more. The same is true of all other organisms in the fossil record, including dinosaurs.
I would therefore argue that the term “species” is really useless and should be abolished completely, because it is a source of unnecessary confusion.
Posted in biology, evolution, scientific | No Comments »
