ericmurphy
Posts: 2460 Joined: Oct. 2005
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Quote (incorygible @ Sep. 27 2006,08:39) | To truly understand my position on evolution, or even on molecular phylogenetics, you would have to sit in on more than a few university-level courses, read hundreds of textbooks, read literally thousands of papers, attend dozens of conferences, have a few beers and "back-of-the-envelope" sessions with dozens of prestigious scientists actually doing the work, do some of the work yourself, publish peer-reviewed papers where you apply the same principles, use the principles in a very practical facet of your job (determining populations or units of fish species that qualify for protection as endangered species, for example), and so on. |
Or, Dave, you could recognize that you don't begin to have the necessary intellectual toolkit to understand this sort of highly-technical information, forget about your methodologically-dubious attempts to do end-runs around the hard parts, and accept the fact that the guys who have spent their careers studying this stuff (and the other guys who review their work to make sure it represents solid science) know it way, way, way better than you ever have a prayer of knowing it, and take their word for it.
When the entire scientific community (i.e., the relevant part of that community, not the engineers, the mathematicians, the astronomers, or the biblical scholars, for crying out loud) accepts that humans and chimps are more closely related to each other than either is to gorillas, maybe it's time for you to accept it as well. After all, guys who are way smarter than you are, e.g., Stephen Hawking, Leonard Susskind, Ed Witten, or Lisa Randall, accept the fact that they don't know nearly enough about primate evolution to critique the work of recognized experts in the field. What make you think you're qualified to do so?
If you were really interested in evidence supporting the (HC)G) phylogeny, you'd actually study that evidence (and not rely on the non-specialist critiques on AiG). You'd delve into the actual original research, and in order to do that, you'd need to have a pretty good understanding of the underlying science, which you most emphatically do not have.
Remember way back in May, on the very first day of this thread, when I admonished you about saying you would "forgive scientists if they admit their errors and fix them"? You think you're going to find "errors" in Incorygible's, or JonF's, work, to say nothing of scientists of international reputation? This is exactly the kind of arrogance that drives people crazy around here, because God, Dave, no one I have ever seen in any Internet forum discussing science has less right than you do to be arrogant when it comes to science.
You're still laboring under the misapprehension that science is easy, Dave, and reading a few websites like AiG and ICR (which are not intended for even a scientifically-literate audience, let alone an audience of scientists) is enough to get you up to speed on topics like radiometric dating, primate genetics, stratigraphy, astrophysics, etc. But science isn't easy. It's extremely hard. Just getting knowledgeable about one tiny little subspecialty (Lake Victoria cichlids, and you'll note that the first paragraph of that abstract contradicts your young-earth "hypothesis," which should once more give you an idea of what you're up against in trying to disprove and old earth) can take an entire career. But you have the monumental arrogance to think you can take in all of science in one big year-long gulp from the muddy puddle of creationist websites, and get anywhere disproving all of science.
And you still can't come up with any actual support for your own hypothesis!
-------------- 2006 MVD award for most dogged defense of scientific sanity
"Atheism is a religion the same way NOT collecting stamps is a hobby." —Scott Adams
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