I’m sort of already on vacation mode, so here’s a post that (a) is another damn library post and (b) has vacation planning as the intro. Also, (c) the post doesn’t really know what it wants to do and (d) is pretty short, but that’s just me being me. Sorry in advance!
I was at the library trying to find something light but interesting to take on vacation. I looked through the science section, and I came across a fair amount of intelligent design and similar nonsense mixed into the actual science and popular science books. I was rather startled, but I suppose it’s better than them not being available.
To be clear I certainly don’t want to be censorious or to tell librarians how to do their jobs. And if people want to read it, well then I guess it should be at the library. I mean, it isn’t the library’s job to say what books are good and bad science. It’s just surprising to see it.
You can get Mein Kampf at the public library, so why not books on intelligent design, too? In fact, I recommend reading them together if you’re researching psychotics’ thought patterns.
Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” has turned out to be another clusterfuck.
http://mynorthwest.com/646/222.....ss-of-2013
Roger Rabbit Commentary: How did one man get so many things so completely wrong?
Nah, Seattle’s the home for intelligent design and The Discovery Folks probably make big donations to the library.
It’s not that they have the books; it’s that they have them in the science section.
Having ‘intelligent’ design and other non-scientific books in the science section would be sort of like having Mein Kampf in the self-help section. Sure it’s OK for the library to have these books, but at least shelve them correctly.
Some books (some but not all) which might be construed as dealing with the concept of “intelligent design” might be OK but properly ought to be in the religion or philosophy sections instead of being foisted off as “science”. Almost anyone with a shred of religious faith uses the concept of some “higher power” in the universe (perhaps really the universe itself) to explain the why of things. Claiming that as a way to describe the how or even the what belongs in the realm of fairy tales.
“Darwin’s Doubt” is a good read to check out. Brand-new off the presses. Check it out–discusses the Darwinian puzzlement by the Cambrian Explosion. How did so many species just appear out of nowhere all at once in a particular point in time? Darwinism doesn’t have any explanation for it.
And as Dr. Stephen Meyer says, when you think about Intelligent Design, the thing to ask yourself about the ideas being put forth is the question “Is it true?” That is the thing to remember.
ID is actually a very interesting concept. Bill Gates says that human DNA is a far more advanced form of programming than any software program man has ever developed. ALL software has intelligence of the engineer who developed it as its origin. True? Of course—software has someone’s mind behind it. That being the case, is it REALLY so strange to ask what is the intelligence behind the extraordinary sophistication of DNA? Of course it isn’t strange at all. WHERE did this uber-intelligence behind DNA come from? Esp when randomness is not normally known to produce perfectly ordered things. Quite the opoposite, in fact.
Inquiring minds want to know. Those (and you’ll find these kinds of people here at HA) who are from the school of “we will not consider new ideas in science & are against any new information on the subject” probably won’t, however. Open your minds, people. The concept ID is presenting and questions they are asking are excellent things to consider. That is why books like “Darwin’s Doubt” are selling so well. It’s good information from people who’ve looked at it and dared to ask these kinds of questions. Like good scientists should.
Gays were created by intelligent design.
http://www.amazon.com/Hockey-S.....038;sr=8-1
Or, if you want fiction, the IPCC4 report.
@8 try playing hockey at the North Pole – you have a better chance of swimming, it’s becoming a lake.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....52373.html
Another way to look at climate change science reporting.
http://www.desmogblog.com/site.....-Chart.png
@ 9
Because of dumbfucks like you who take propaganda at face value, the University of Washington has posted an explanation of what happens each summer in the Arctic:
The formation of melt ponds has always been a key feature of the summer season on sea ice. Each summer, solar radiation melts the snow cover and 10-50 cm of the sea ice upper surface. Depending on the porosity of the sea ice, the number of cracks, and distribution of openings at the edge of individual ice floes, some of the melt water from the surface drains to the ocean and the rest forms melt ponds. These are fresh water ponds lying on top of the sea ice with their surfaces slightly above sea level.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/.....bCams.html
No, Santa isn’t drowning.
And at least one gay @ 7 clearly was created with no thought whatsoever to intelligent design.
@2. Interesting Article about the consequences of testing.
Maybe the kids are supposed to get all their knowledge of American history, world history, geography, civics and government from conservative talk radio?
To me, it’s another damning element that No Child Left Behind Testing Requirement amd standardized testing causes, that dovetails with the discussion of scoring corruption. Education needs help, but the fix the conservatives forced on it, is not working.
This was an interesting comment on the hockey stick book.
@11 Go Fuck yourself, Dumbfuck, with the wool pulled over your eyes. Give it time, eventually there will be no ice, thanks to intellectual idiots like you.
@ 14
Pull your head out and breathe, Gman. Put down the Al Gore tome. Then look around you:
… the overall extent of Antarctic ice has grown by about one percent per decade, on average, since satellite records began a little over 30 years ago.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....06554.html
I think satellite data only goes back to 1979. While it’s true that Arctic ice is receding, Antarctic ice is growing.
BTW wool over one’s face smells better than rectal mucosa over one’s face, I would guess.
Back to topic:
http://www.amazon.com/Parting-.....0671687425
This guy did Clinton’s official White House bio, which is how I heard of him. He’s the guy they snuck in to interview Clinton while he was president so nobody would know there were private written notes that could be subpoenaed.
It’s a long book. Interesting but I’m trying to keep all the names straight and I can’t, anymore, like I used to be able to memorize in my 20s, so it’s slow going. I wouldn’t call it light reading but it’s far from a waste of time.
@8, 11
One would have thought that cheapshotBob, AKA Carlos Dumbfuck, would have learned his lesson after the repeated humiliations he’s sustained on these threads when he tries to rebut science.
No, there’s just something he can’t resist, a siren song he hears when there’s an opportunity to trot out some bullshit like the Amazon link above, or that idiot Watt, or some other low-information-dependent attack meant for the dim-bulbs of the right wing, like the puddybigot, for example.
He’s trotted out UW links before, as well, only to be shown that his grasp of their content is, um, tenuous at best.
He’s a transparent shill, and not a very bright one at that, with a a particularly repellent propensity for the smarmy cheapshot.
@15.
Same article, in the comments:
It’s hard to go the source article and see the data.
Link says
And there is this
Tell, me do you bother to research anything that fits the agenda you wish to push, or do you just post as fast a possible?
I would imagine that the misnamed “thoughtful” @6 is a reflection of Discovery Institute efforts to monitor and respond to posts flagged as having discussion like this one.
Gawd these idiots are relentless.
(BTW, the “Dr. Stephen Meyer” that is referred to is a leading light at the Discovery Institute. ’nuff said.)
I feel I need to bleach my computer now – we’ve been spammed.
@18
The formation of lakes at the North Pole being a normal occurrence DOES NOT refute the FACT that either Global Warming is really happening, nor that total Arctic ice cover is shrinking relative to prior years – ie, it’s melting due to warming.
CheapshotBob is trying to muddy the waters again – like the false equivalence, it’s one of his preferred forms of dishonesty.
The latter.
@ 18
You mentioned winds around the antarctic, which apparently is intended to explain why ice there is growing.
Are you aware that winds and shifting currents are one explanation for losses of ice in the arctic? The ice is sent southward by those winds, to warmer waters, where it melts.
The whole sea-ice thing is looked at by your ilk as if this is the first time in history that ice is being lost in the Arctic. We have about a 33-34 year old method of measuring via satellite. In the 70s there were fears of a coming ice age.
You might fairly accuse me of cherry-picking but I certainly can suggest the same in reply.
We know that there are long-term oscillations – over 30, 60, sometimes a hundred years – in some aspects of our world, like currents (PDO a notable example). To just look at the last 30 years of ice data and expect that what you have with that data can be applied over millenia is asinine. You have 30 years. That’s it.
Oh, and the cherry-pickers on my side can claim no net warming over half of it, and even those on your side are having to respond to that, not without some difficulty.
Some of this Science Is not yet Settled, it seems.
@18
Whether he does it as part of a paid job, or as an avocation, either organized and coordinated or all on his own, the fact is that cheapshotBob’s whole reason for being here is to push propaganda of the most dishonest sort – climate denial, ‘union thug’ bullshit, blame-the-victim storylines – whether about Detroit or Benton Harbor or the safetynet in general.
He’s a shill (not a very good or effective one) for the plutocracy that he imagines himself a member of.
Oh. My. God.
“Teach the Controversy”
CheapshotBob is taking a page from our Discovery Institute friends!! What is this, Dimwit Day – or just our trolls really taking their jobs to heart?
@ 23
You’re right, Lib Sci, how shameful of me to bring up Atlanta in response to your Indiana charter schools post of a couple of days ago. It was off-point and racist, isn’t that what I’m supposed to believe?
After all, argument, opinion, and dissent isn’t what HA is intended to promote. It’s a forum for one-sided promotion of the liberal agenda, isn’t that what they want? Dissent is no longer patriotic, it’s treasonous, at least around here. Since right about 1/21/09. Right, Lib Sci?
Three years, more or less, I’ve been around here, and you still think I’m paid to do it? Really, Lib Sci? Those black helicopters must be more real that you imagine, then. Sleep with one eye open is my advice. They’re coming.
@15 – you are rectal mucus
@25
You never fail to disappoint, cheapshot.
You do have that right-wing victim thing down, really really well.
As many have said here all along, the community would love an intelligent, honest, civil proponent of right-wing thought – we’ve never seen such a creature, though.
Certainly not you. I’m not sure on which count you fail more completely – honesty, or intelligence – or civility, for that matter. You’re sort of a three-fer in terms of failure.
I personally find your relentless dishonesty most disturbing, but like all encounters with right-wingers, I run into the eternal question with you once again – “Stupid, or lying?”
@25
You should have stopped there.
@25 Dissent is no longer patriotic, it’s treasonous…..oh and the hippies against the Vietnam War or those that voiced concern over the Iraq War, or those speaking out against equality isn’t patriotic, it is treasonous. You intellectual dipshit asshole, rectal mucus.
@25 why don’t you go join the Republican Brotherhood along with your close ally Putin and treat Gay people like leopards or worse. You speak of Patriotism, but you are a fake.
@9 No, it’s becoming an open ocean. Also, it won’t be sufficient to just be able to tread water. You’d better be prepared to dodge all the tanker and container ship traffic.
@30
“your close ally Putin and treat Gay people like leopards”
They treat gay people like large cats in Russia?
National Geographic says red-heads set for extinction
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/220229
Quick! start a program! What is the Red Head’s natural breeding grounds! Protect it!
@6 “That being the case, is it REALLY so strange to ask what is the intelligence behind the extraordinary sophistication of DNA? Of course it isn’t strange at all. WHERE did this uber-intelligence behind DNA come from?”
Asking is what science and rational thought are all about. OTOH, saying the science is wrong because science doesn’t know the answer to something is the product of an irrational mind.
There doesn’t have to be an uber-intelligent (or even mildly intelligent) rational mind behind DNA. It could be a product of random natural selection. To explain this, let’s divided natural phenomena into two categories: Things That Work and Things That Don’t Work.
Things That Don’t Work don’t propagate, they die out. Things That Work in many case will die, too, but after many repetitions over a great span of time, Things That Work get established and continuing evolving into higher orders and greater complexities of Things That Work. Through a continual process of selecting out Things That Don’t Work, over a great span of time, Things That Work can progress evolutionarily into very complex “designs.” Yet no one, no mind, no intelligence, no thought process, created these “designs.”
For the physical universe to evolve to its present state, three things were necessary: Primeval matter, physical forces, and instability. Let’s say primitive building blocks of matter came into being and were scattered through some volume of space. If gravitational and other forces were perfectly balanced, that matter would exist in a state of stasis forever. But the slightest rugosity in the forces holding the matter in place would, over a great span of time, lead to matter clumping or concentrating in areas of space holding slightly more matter and therefore exerting slightly more gravitational pull, until eventually enough matter is concentrated to generate compression and heat leading to the creation of new forms of matter. Thus, objects such as stars and galaxies were born, and these inherently unstable objects manufactured new forms of matter and spewed them into space. All of this could have happened without thought, intelligence, or design.
So, thanks for asking. Science doesn’t have a definitive, certainteed answer. Science’s tentative answer is that, given what is known about physical matter and physical forces, logic argues the universe as we know it didn’t need an intelligent designer to come into existence, and neither did DNA. The far more interesting and baffling question is where did forces like gravity and magnetism come from in the first place? Who or what created time, and does time have a beginning or end? There are questions science may never be able to answer, and the easiest way to rationalize these mysteries is to assume that some entity with the type of intelligence we can comprehend design and made it all. But that’s an assumption, not a demonstrated fact, and is a product of human thought process and not necessarily a divine force beyond our rational ken. On the other hand, science doesn’t disprove the existence of a God, either.
The real problem occurs when science does come up with an explanation for something that heretofore has been explained by faith-based beliefs. For example, let’s say children are dying in a village, and the villagers believe the deaths are caused by Satan, who has been summoned from Hell to the village by witches; and the villagers conclude the best way to protect their children is to identify, hunt down, and hang (or burn) the witches. Then science comes along with an alternative explanation that says the children are dying from E.Coli caused by contamination of the village well from which everyone draws their drinking water and the solution is to relocate the village latrine. More often than not, the scientist will be the next “witch” dangling from the village oak tree, because you humans are a stubborn species. The intellectual conflict rational people have with Intelligent Design proponents, climate change deniers, and assorted other anti-science idealogues is somewhat analogous.
It would be so much better if God would just do something flatly miraculous, like make everyone change genders for 2 weeks, (and shift the pregnant women’s babies to the baby daddy). This “god moves in mysterious ways” is too easily mistaken for natural processes.
Course it might really bother a lot people when God appears as a black lesbian with dreadlocks.
The one climatologist I know moved to the Puget Sound from the Southwest because she saw no hope in science winning out over the Koch brothers denialist money, at least before disaster makes climate change undeniable. The funny thing, if you are perverse enough to call it funny, is that the “Red” states for the most part are the states thet warming is going to seriously screw.
All intelligent design books should never be in the science section of any self respecting library. Surely there is a section for religious works where they can find a cozy home.
Carl,
Carl,
You do not know much about libraries, book printers and etc send them books for free. They but them out. Check the bio section and see how books about movie stars and sports stars you fine. If they only had books that they had money to pay for they would be very few books.
Also if we were created by intelligent design, why are we so fucking stupid at times?
I’m late to this party…
@6
The problem with ID devotees is that they insist on looking at Darwin only and ignoring any evolutionary science done since the 1860s.
Gould has a lot to say about this. And the giant flaw in I.D. from the Cambrian is the obvious question. If it can only be explained by thoughtful, ordered design, why are there so many species that are exclusive to the Cambrian in the fossil record that didn’t survive? Was the designer tossing things at the wall to see what would stick? Is that intelligent?
But the bulk of the I.D. defense is, “The Cambrian period proves Darwinism isn’t real.”
Sadly, no. Darwin is the spark that got a lot right. No one looks at Mathematics and says, “Pythagoras couldn’t explain Bertrand’s Postulate so teach the controversy that Pythagoras was wrong.” That would be stupid.
How many people here are interested in riding into space in a next-generation shuttle designed by engineers who were home-schooled by Intelligent Design-believing parents? Raise your hands.
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums.....tid=943347
@41 And given how our schools are “teaching to the tests” just to keep their jobs and or get bonuses, and employers want to outsource everything but the bosses, I don’t hold out much hope for any next generation anything built by Americans.
Indeed true.
This was the gist of my argument with the puddybigot a few weeks ago – his insistence that since Charles Darwin in the mid-1800 didn’t lay out everything perfectly, then he and his ideas are fatally flawed.
As you point out it is nonsensical – as in your Pythagoras example. I think I used Michael Faraday and his failure not to invent an integrated circuit. Same thing.
What this reveals, besides their inability to form a cogent argument, is a devotion to authority and received wisdom. The demand for perfection in a theoretical system from its conception, as opposed to the messy and gradual process that characterizes actual science, is very much akin to their devotion to “the inerrant Word of God.”
They completely fail to grasp that the thing talked about is not the thing itself – that human theories are approximations for the real world – often exceedingly good ones – but still always works in progress which are subject to falsifiability and further improvement. Their demand for a static and unchanging model of the world reveals, I think, a number of things – among them an extreme fear of the unknown, and related to that, a demand for and devotion to authority.
It’s from these traits that these people are so easily exploited by charlatans and despots, and the basis of their tendency to be good little goosesteppers, like the puddybigot.
#19:
lol, I just saw your post and no—I am not now nor have I ever been part of the Discovery Institute ( not that that would be a bad thing). What I AM is simply someone who dared to look into ID and find out what exactly this is about, and listen to what ID experts are saying (and it’s worth noting that some ID proponents are of some religious faith, and other proponents of it are atheist). And it’s def interesting & meritorious stuff, and worth a second, 3rd and 4th look.
What I do see are a lot of people on the left, who are so threatened by new information that doesn’t fit their agenda. Even when it is true and thoughtful information.What’s to be feared, anyway? I’m not invested in some point of view about the origin of species; I’m simply invested in learning truth. No one shd be ever threatened by the truth, but it’s clear that a lot of people here are. Don’t be. You’ll enjoy life a lot more. And it’s funny when Darwinists show their anti-science bent by saying some questions should not even be asked, nor should some things worth questioning should EVER be questioned. That’s not very scientific, people. Open your minds and dare to read Meyer’s books and see the things he’s pointing out. There’s nothing to fear, certainly.
What about the reverse?
The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.
If you want scientists to start considering Intelligent Design in the lab, why not have preachers started teaching the Theory of Evolution from the pulpit. It’s only fair.
@44
Oh, thoughtful, you’re just precious.
As someone who “has dared to look into ID” (snicker), could you, in your inimitable breathless style, give us some examples of experiments in which evidence for the intelligent designer was demonstrated, thereby avoiding having the Theory of Intelligent Design found to be identical with the null hypothesis?
Your two posts are full of fluff and pander – could you give us some meat, some falsifiable assertions, backed by evidence, that would support your Theory of Intelligent Design?
Until then, you’re just another shill, and not an especially good one at that.