Jayjay4547 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:Let's take a look at this shall we?

JayJay, I really wonder at times what fantasy parallel universe you're occupying, because NONE of your assertions bears even the most tenuous connection to observational reality. The notion that Behe is some sort of intellectual gadfly stinging the rest of biology into seeing the light, is not merely fucking laughable, it's deranged, palsied, encephalitic, and bordering on the clinically insane. Behe is a failtard, he's a wank-break shill for a wank-break ideology, the pedlars of which are professional liars for doctrine without exception, and the idea that his vomitings rise above the level of chimpanzee shit flinging, is another of those deranged notions that only a totally blinkered creationist ideological stormtrooper could treat as being worthy of something other than scorn and derision.

Cali, don’t you ever consider that you might be going too far in your bad mouthing of people you disagree with?

Nope, because that doesn't happen. He's 'badmouthing' your claims and ideas. You =/= your ideas/claims.
Do get that elementary fact will you?

Jayjay4547 wrote: No governor on your tongue?

Still pathetically clinging to criticising language rather than content?

Jayjay4547 wrote: You get hoity-hoity when I dare criticise the work of establishment scientists, (never their persons) you call that traducing.

Because your critique consists of dishonest straw-manning and blind assertions, rather than rational arguments and evidence.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Yet you give yourself permission to vomit all over Michael Behe.

Because he's a lying fucktwit.

Jayjay4547 wrote: It’s unseemly and it’s uninsightful.

No-one's forcing you to read Cali's posts.
If you can't deal with the language, don't read them.
Attacking his use of words instead of his content, only demonstrates that you cannot do the latter and are desperately trying to hide this silly tone-policing.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Behe is no gadfly he is just a scientist who marveled so deeply at the functionality of what he saw through the microscope as to disbelieve that it could have happened through trial and error. And he is a stubborn cove. Institutional science can put up with a few people like him.

Nope, he's a disengenuous arse, who, instead of following where the facts lead, insists on clinging to his prefered ideological presuppositions and twist and mangle anything else to fit that conclusion.
The exact opposite of what science, institutional or otherwise, needs.

Jayjay4547 wrote:I don’t myself think that Behe is on the money, but he may be onto something that can be turned upside down into truth by reexamining what we mean by human design of things; that it is an exploration of what is creatively possible: the creativity doesn’t subsist in the designer but in what is possible within that state or level of technology.

Oh look more wordsalad.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Anyway that wasn’t the point I wanted to make

Then why waste so many words expressing mindless guff?

Jayjay4547 wrote:I wanted to point to the value of skeptical courage; the problem with the Christian evolutionist Kenneth R Miller is that he uncritically accepts what he never should have, that a human observer can see imperfections in natural design , at first glance . One way or another that is hubris; the characteristic fault of the atheist.

1. There's no such thing as an evolutionist, that's a wellpoisining term devised by creationist.
2. You're once again lying about atheism.

hackenslash wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s almost incredible that you claim as a fact that Behe is “a young earth cretinist”, when you are responding to a post where I pasted a direct quote in Wikipedia from Behe establishing that he isn’t. If there were some evidence that he actually denies the geological time scale, wouldn’t someone have edited that into the Wiki entry? How do you figure that someone could even manage to lie about that- to claim not to deny something, but to actually deny it?

Which bit of 'he's a lying cunt' is giving you problems here? You can tell when he's lying, because his lips are moving.

Much as I agree about the general loathsomeness of the pseudoscience from Behe and his ilk, not to mention the indulgence in same by some here, there's good reason to think that Behe is not specifically a young-earth creationist - now, at least. I don't know if he once was.

Put it this way, if the fundies are slagging him off, like here for instance, he's not entirely in their camp.

Dismissing Behe would be more trivial if he really was a YEC, since the Ham/Comfort/Hovind style of utter ridiculousness is much more obviously unrelated to actual science than the obfuscatory wibble emanating from the Behe/Dembski school of 'cobbling some shite together that looks like science to the ignorant, but isn't really'.

The latter is insidious, and although playing to the gallery is fun, I do think sometimes that shouting 'liar, liar' is unhelpful.

That said, I never fail to be awed by the comprehensive deconstruction efforts from Cali and Rumraket that take the shite apart one piece of crap at a time. Where do you guys find the time?

Quite simply, we've been doing this for so long, we can almost do it in our sleep. In fact, there have been occasions when I've been multi-tasking, switching between dealing with creationist canards and code development, and even though I've been in software development for most of my adult life, it still takes more effort than demolishing the sort of crap we see from posters such as JayJay. in fact, sometimes, the latter is so easy, it's virtually a for of relaxation to take my mind off difficult coding problems.

indeed, the most difficult part of dealing with the shite we see from creationists, is learning not to let the rampant discoursive malfeasance contained within their posts become too much of an irritant. As for the substance, such as it is, all too frequently, several of us come away from the exercise with the feeling that it's like hunting dairy cows with an Apache helicopter gunship. All too often the apologetic fabrications peddled here, are literally sitting ducks for the laser rangefinder. It's a case of "canard detected, target locked, missile away" and "boom". Quite often because many creationists simply regurgitate the contents of previously examined and destroyed creationist websites, thinking that they've somehow alighted upon some startlingly original wisdom with which they're going to "stick it to the stupid atheistsTM", only to discover that we lined their regurgitated crap up for a session with the Katies years ago. Frequently, I don't even need to break out any of the three and a half thousand scientific papers in my collection to do the demolition job, because the crap they're peddling is asinine drivel we've seen and destroyed so many times before. Even on the rare occasion (and it IS rare) that one of them brings something original here, it's usually so utterly brain dead, that the major effort exerted consists of trying not to piss ourselves laughing at what they've presented to us. If you want to see some truly spectacular examples of this, then the output of a certain Robert Byers will provide you with endless hours of pants-wetting hilarity, though he's not been back for some time, and perhaps it's a little unfair to offer him up to you as an Aunt Sally as a result, but if you haven't savoured the particular brand of creationist tard that his posts provide, trust me, you're in for a treat. The words "comedy goldmine" were practically coined for his posts.

Bear in mind also that prior to the Great Forum Implosion that struck the Richard Dawkins Forums, a good number of the veterans here were also long term campaigners over there. It's where I began my career as a bomb aimer for anti-fundie JDAMs, and frankly, some of the shite we saw over there really did deserve to be preserved for posterity, so that future rational minds could ponder the question of how the authors thereof could function as normal human beings whilst posting the requisite drivel. Some of the droolingly encephalitic and miasmatically gangrenous verbal neurotoxins we encountered there, were of such a level of complete and utter fail, we were left asking ourselves if the authors were capable of remembering their own names and the functions of each of their limbs. We're talking here about the sort of polydactylous products of recursive genealogy, whose cortical functioning invited unfavourable comparisons with single celled life forms, and a relatively astute and programming-savvy teenager could probably write an Elizabot to mimic them, though why one would bother other than for the shits and giggles is another open question.

Whilst the cautious may be wary of underestimating their opponents, creationists routinely demonstrate that underestimating them is actually a non-trivial and difficult exercise, possibly in the realm of NP-hard problems. The genuinely dangerous ones are people like Jonathan Wells, who have explicitly stated they're studying evolutionary biology in order to try and destroy it from the inside, and who have actually acquired some genuine knowledge of the topic along the way. These are the people who require some effort to demolish, though usually, it isn't long before canards from the usual classes are found lurking in their apologetics.

Calilasseia wrote:droolingly encephalitic and miasmatically gangrenous verbal neurotoxins

I'm totally loving the language too. I plan to plagiarise it shamelessly, where I can take the credit. Not here, obviously, I'll do my best to be at least slightly original....

deleted, 'pols

Darwinsbulldog wrote:
The term first appeared in Europe in 1877,[12] and around this time it was used by sociologists opposed to the concept.[13] The term was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter who used it in the ideological war effort against fascism to denote a reactionary creed which promoted competitive strife, racism and chauvinism.
You talk of skeptical courage? Skeptical courage also takes intellectual honesty to be of use to anyone. Let me give you an example of REAL character, real intellectual courage. Tutors at Murdoch university have to do an induction course. Among other things, there were lectures by Indigenous people on Indigenous matters.

I was sitting there listing to one of these lecturers and he started gobbing off about Social "darwinism". I could not believe such ignorance! I politely interrupted the speaker and said, first of all, that social darwinism [invented by Herbert Spencer] had nothing to do with Charles Darwin's biological theory. Second, I claimed, Darwin published on Natural Selection in 1858 [in a paper with Wallace] and in his 1859 book "Origins". How could Darwin therefore be responsible for the Pinjarra massacre and other pogroms.
You know what this MAN did, this excellent human being? He accepted the facts, and admitted his opinion was wrong. Later, during the tea break, he told me he had a "young creationist" educational background. His "fault" was in assuming his religious missionary teachers were being honest and giving him the facts. I also pointed out that the science backs up aboriginal claims on the land, whereas creationism does not. Because creationists only give an age to the earth in thousands of years [6 to 10K years], whereas scientific evidence clearly indicates that aboriginals were present in Australia at least 50,000 years ago, or even 60,000 years ago.

The gentleman now knows the facts, and was intellectually honest enough to accept them. He realizes that science is not his enemy, ignorance is. That is intellectual courage. To admit that he was wrong. This is a guy who has had his ancestors murdered by whites, has experienced prejudice and hardship from racism, he had every reason not to believe me. But he did. Why? Because facts are facts.

The way you tell this story someone appointed to conscientise tutors is persuaded by an interruption from the audience that he was mistaken about part of his presentation and after a conversation with you, feels he needs to explain himself as having been misled by his own background. I don’t see the courage there’ it’s a tale of such a ludicrous climbdown that I can hardly trust your account.

A courageous position would have been for the speaker to have said he would look into what you said. And that his creationist educators had at least supported him as far as that lecture room to tell the audience some things they needed to know.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:
The term first appeared in Europe in 1877,[12] and around this time it was used by sociologists opposed to the concept.[13] The term was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter who used it in the ideological war effort against fascism to denote a reactionary creed which promoted competitive strife, racism and chauvinism.
You talk of skeptical courage? Skeptical courage also takes intellectual honesty to be of use to anyone. Let me give you an example of REAL character, real intellectual courage. Tutors at Murdoch university have to do an induction course. Among other things, there were lectures by Indigenous people on Indigenous matters.

I was sitting there listing to one of these lecturers and he started gobbing off about Social "darwinism". I could not believe such ignorance! I politely interrupted the speaker and said, first of all, that social darwinism [invented by Herbert Spencer] had nothing to do with Charles Darwin's biological theory. Second, I claimed, Darwin published on Natural Selection in 1858 [in a paper with Wallace] and in his 1859 book "Origins". How could Darwin therefore be responsible for the Pinjarra massacre and other pogroms.
You know what this MAN did, this excellent human being? He accepted the facts, and admitted his opinion was wrong. Later, during the tea break, he told me he had a "young creationist" educational background. His "fault" was in assuming his religious missionary teachers were being honest and giving him the facts. I also pointed out that the science backs up aboriginal claims on the land, whereas creationism does not. Because creationists only give an age to the earth in thousands of years [6 to 10K years], whereas scientific evidence clearly indicates that aboriginals were present in Australia at least 50,000 years ago, or even 60,000 years ago.

The gentleman now knows the facts, and was intellectually honest enough to accept them. He realizes that science is not his enemy, ignorance is. That is intellectual courage. To admit that he was wrong. This is a guy who has had his ancestors murdered by whites, has experienced prejudice and hardship from racism, he had every reason not to believe me. But he did. Why? Because facts are facts.

The way you tell this story someone appointed to conscientise tutors is persuaded by an interruption from the audience that he was mistaken about part of his presentation and after a conversation with you, feels he needs to explain himself as having been misled by his own background. I don’t see the courage there’ it’s a tale of such a ludicrous climbdown that I can hardly trust your account.

A courageous position would have been for the speaker to have said he would look into what you said. And that his creationist educators had at least supported him as far as that lecture room to tell the audience some things they needed to know.

The basic facts were easy enough to check. There were some 25-30 academics in the room. had I been deliberately lying I would have been caught out and that would have cost me a job. All tutors have smart phones, so the dates were easy for anyone to check. There were NO objections to my dates and basic facts.

These were WORKSHOPS, ie interactive lectures where the group leaders not only allowed interruptions, but EXPECTED them. it is clear to me you have never attended an academic meeting or workshop involving educators at any university.

I feel sorry for you jayjay, for it seems evident you have never attended a community of scholars where intellectual honesty was expected and normal.

TopCat wrote:Much as I agree about the general loathsomeness of the pseudoscience from Behe and his ilk, not to mention the indulgence in same by some here, there's good reason to think that Behe is not specifically a young-earth creationist - now, at least. I don't know if he once was.

Put it this way, if the fundies are slagging him off, like here for instance, he's not entirely in their camp.

You and I differ here, in that I don't see the reactions of idiots as constituting god reason to think anything, other than that a group of people who will be offended at the drop of a hat got offended. Behe's entire façade is precisely that, one designed to make creationism look like it isn't a religious position.

Dismissing Behe would be more trivial if he really was a YEC, since the Ham/Comfort/Hovind style of utter ridiculousness is much more obviously unrelated to actual science than the obfuscatory wibble emanating from the Behe/Dembski school of 'cobbling some shite together that looks like science to the ignorant, but isn't really'.

The latter is insidious, and although playing to the gallery is fun, I do think sometimes that shouting 'liar, liar' is unhelpful.

I've done the actual debunking at some length in the past, and have no reached the stage that cobbing peanuts is all I can be bothered with. The same is true of weaselly shits like Kalamity Kraig. I can still sometimes muster a good debunking, but it's mostly just the peanuts these days. I more often take Kraig seriously, because he's taken seriously by people who aren't as obviously stupid/

That said, I never fail to be awed by the comprehensive deconstruction efforts from Cali and Rumraket that take the shite apart one piece of crap at a time. Where do you guys find the time?

As Cali says, we've been at it for a long time.

hackenslash wrote:Behe's entire façade is precisely that, one designed to make creationism look like it isn't a religious position.

Yes, absolutely. I'm taking issue only with the young-earth qualifier. There's no point slagging Behe as a young-earther if he isn't, not least because there's plenty else to slag, and someone whose mind might have been open just a chink will slam it tightly shut if they see blatant straw-manning going on.

There's no doubt that ID is a religious position, no doubt whatsoever, nor any doubt that it's been intentionally sanitised to give it an undeserved legitimacy.

Indeed the cat was let out of the bag during the Dover trial (and probably many other times too, though I only know about this one) when earlier versions of Of Pandas and People (the notorious creationist textbook) were subpoenaed and found to have had a global search/replace done on the word creation, replacing it with intelligent design. I found Ken Miller's lecture on it all fascinating.

But this is the thing: it's the insidiousness that makes it all the more important to attack it* with light rather than heat.

As an aside, I find the Old-Earth creationist position even more batty than Young-Earth in some ways. At least the Young Earth position is testable - it's been roundly tested and found to be bollocks. But Old-Earthism with its ID twist is much less so (how the hell would you tell when God lobbed a bit of cellular machinery into the cells to give evolution a bit of direction? ). It's just God-of-the-gaps from beginning to end. How anyone with any knowledge of science - either its method or its history - doesn't get that is beyond me.

hackenslash wrote:I've done the actual debunking at some length in the past, and have no reached the stage that cobbing peanuts is all I can be bothered with.

*Mostly. Don't get me wrong, I love the peanuts.

Edit: sorry, I read that as 'lobbing' peanuts. What's cobbing peanuts?

hackenslash wrote:

colubridae wrote:Not interested in any links. Definitely interested in your view of power.

Then you should have followed the link, which was me explaining it.

Is there a name for unusable energy?

Yes, entropy.

This is laughable in the extreme. It is a staggering lack of fundamental physics understanding.
We now have:-

“entropy is unusable energy; power is usable energy”

It is wrong on so many levels.
Out of interest, hackenslash, is it your belief that this :-
“entropy is unusable energy; power is usable energy”
is correct physics, and that unless someone can demonstrate its 'wrongness' in terms which you are able to understand it stands as correct physics?


I strongly urge anyone reading his physics pronouncements to disregard them. They will almost certainly, not only, be wildly incorrect but also wildly misleading. It is crystalline dunning-krueger. It is the worst form of copy-paste-wiki amateur physics. That he is correct occasionally is simply the broken watch effect.



and for platinum-standard irony

in hachenslash's physics “entropy is unusable energy; power is usable energy”

hackenslash wrote:Hahahahaha! The irony of you accusing anybody anywhere of intellectual failure is quite delicious.

Phil Plait: There is more room for a god in science than there is for no god in religious faith.

Bert

Calilasseia wrote:-

Whilst the cautious may be wary of underestimating their opponents, creationists routinely demonstrate that underestimating them is actually a non-trivial and difficult exercise, possibly in the realm of NP-hard problems. The genuinely dangerous ones are people like Jonathan Wells, who have explicitly stated they're studying evolutionary biology in order to try and destroy it from the inside, and who have actually acquired some genuine knowledge of the topic along the way. These are the people who require some effort to demolish, though usually, it isn't long before canards from the usual classes are found lurking in their apologetics.

I would not worry too much about it. Evolutionary biology can't be destroyed. One could destroy fossils I suppose, pressure governments and corporations to starve the science of funds, bring up a generation of kids based on lies and myths instead of teaching them logic and reason.
The thing is, if the opponents of of EB do "destroy" EB, then they will destroy science as well.

colubridae wrote:

hackenslash wrote:

colubridae wrote:Not interested in any links. Definitely interested in your view of power.

Then you should have followed the link, which was me explaining it.

Is there a name for unusable energy?

Yes, entropy.

This is laughable in the extreme. It is a staggering lack of fundamental physics understanding.
We now have:-

“entropy is unusable energy; power is usable energy”

It is wrong on so many levels.
Out of interest, hackenslash, is it your belief that this :-
“entropy is unusable energy; power is usable energy”
is correct physics, and that unless someone can demonstrate its 'wrongness' in terms which you are able to understand it stands as correct physics?


I strongly urge anyone reading his physics pronouncements to disregard them. They will almost certainly, not only, be wildly incorrect but also wildly misleading. It is crystalline dunning-krueger. It is the worst form of copy-paste-wiki amateur physics. That he is correct occasionally is simply the broken watch effect.



and for platinum-standard irony

in hachenslash's physics “entropy is unusable energy; power is usable energy”

hackenslash wrote:Hahahahaha! The irony of you accusing anybody anywhere of intellectual failure is quite delicious.

If you'd followed the link in the first place, you wouldn't look such a stupid cunt now, because every word of that was qualified therein.

colubridae wrote:I strongly urge anyone reading his physics pronouncements to disregard them. They will almost certainly, not only, be wildly incorrect but also wildly misleading.

Or, put another way, you strongly urge anyone reading anything I say about physics to make a total cunt of themselves by invoking the fucking genetic fallacy, because you'd love it if everybody were as fucking stupid as you, is that it?

Try thinking instead.

You know what, people? I think I may be done here,. I've been thinking for a while that there must be better ways of spending my time, and then stupid cunts like this come along, refuse to follow simple links to ME delivering this material in robust fashion, and choose to be a complete cunt and erect fucking pronouncements rooted on a loose vernacular treatment.

What a stupid cunt you truly are. When the alleged rationalists are as stupid as, or employ the same tactics as the cretinists, there's nothing left.

I'll take the suspension that this fuckwit has driven me to, albeit 6 months long, during which time I will evaluate my tenure here. I strongly suspect that I won't be coming back.

Cali has my contact details.

Jayjay, you wanted to know whether Dembski lies:

In this video Dembski utters the following lies:
That atheists need a creation story. They don't, they only need to lack a belief in gods. An atheist can just say I don't know.
That atheism needs evolution. It doesn't. You can believe in alien progenitors for example.
That atheism = evolution = materialism. Which is nonsense for reasons explained above.
That there is an atheist agenda. There's no such thing anymore than that there's a non-stamp-collecting agenda.
He claims the Cambrian explosion is a mystery for biologists and paleontologists, which is a lie.
He also claims it's evidence for creationism, which is false.
He lies that ID is a scientific theory, when it proposes no coherent theory with explanatory, let alone predictive power.
He dishonestly asserts there is a conspiracy by biologist to keep people like him from getting jobs because of his beliefs, rather than his lack of scientific rigour.
He repeatedly misrepresents and quote-mines various atheists and/or scientists, including Hitchens himself.

More-over he's a mathematican who apparently doesn't know what a proof is, because that term only applies to mathematics and doesn't refer to the arguments presented by Hitchens.

This guy is lying fraud, nothing more.

Darwinsbulldog wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:
The term first appeared in Europe in 1877,[12] and around this time it was used by sociologists opposed to the concept.[13] The term was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter who used it in the ideological war effort against fascism to denote a reactionary creed which promoted competitive strife, racism and chauvinism.
You talk of skeptical courage? Skeptical courage also takes intellectual honesty to be of use to anyone. Let me give you an example of REAL character, real intellectual courage. Tutors at Murdoch university have to do an induction course. Among other things, there were lectures by Indigenous people on Indigenous matters.

I was sitting there listing to one of these lecturers and he started gobbing off about Social "darwinism". I could not believe such ignorance! I politely interrupted the speaker and said, first of all, that social darwinism [invented by Herbert Spencer] had nothing to do with Charles Darwin's biological theory. Second, I claimed, Darwin published on Natural Selection in 1858 [in a paper with Wallace] and in his 1859 book "Origins". How could Darwin therefore be responsible for the Pinjarra massacre and other pogroms.
You know what this MAN did, this excellent human being? He accepted the facts, and admitted his opinion was wrong. Later, during the tea break, he told me he had a "young creationist" educational background. His "fault" was in assuming his religious missionary teachers were being honest and giving him the facts. I also pointed out that the science backs up aboriginal claims on the land, whereas creationism does not. Because creationists only give an age to the earth in thousands of years [6 to 10K years], whereas scientific evidence clearly indicates that aboriginals were present in Australia at least 50,000 years ago, or even 60,000 years ago.

The gentleman now knows the facts, and was intellectually honest enough to accept them. He realizes that science is not his enemy, ignorance is. That is intellectual courage. To admit that he was wrong. This is a guy who has had his ancestors murdered by whites, has experienced prejudice and hardship from racism, he had every reason not to believe me. But he did. Why? Because facts are facts.

The way you tell this story someone appointed to conscientise tutors is persuaded by an interruption from the audience that he was mistaken about part of his presentation and after a conversation with you, feels he needs to explain himself as having been misled by his own background. I don’t see the courage there’ it’s a tale of such a ludicrous climbdown that I can hardly trust your account.

A courageous position would have been for the speaker to have said he would look into what you said. And that his creationist educators had at least supported him as far as that lecture room to tell the audience some things they needed to know.

The basic facts were easy enough to check. There were some 25-30 academics in the room. had I been deliberately lying I would have been caught out and that would have cost me a job. All tutors have smart phones, so the dates were easy for anyone to check. There were NO objections to my dates and basic facts.

For the record, I put in italics above some text you seem to have inadvertently carried forward from what I had inadvertently attributed to you, but came from my looking up the interesting history of the term “Social Darwinism”.

My problem with your account wasn’t about what you regard as the “basic facts”. According to Wikipedia massacres of Australian aborigines occurred from long before 1858 to long after. Darwin didn’t cause those massacres rather 19th century Imperial-colonial British society produced both Darwin and those massacres in complex and partial association.

What astonished me about your account was the abject climb-down by this aborigine speaker, that you recall as an example of courage. Such an incident would be very unlikely in my country. Firstly a member of an equivalent audience wouldn’t report that “he couldn’t believe such ignorance” about something the speaker had been “gobbing off” about. He wouldn’t report that he had interrupted the speaker to correct him. And during the tea break the speaker wouldn’t have explained himself in such abject terms. More likely there would have been a serious row. The lecturer would have been disinclined to accept that this interrupter represented some group that was somehow on his side, especially on such flimsy grounds as that this group believed the speaker’s ancestors had occupied the land even longer. That contrast between your and my country could be because an equivalent speaker in mine would be encouraged by his political power and moral authority to hold his opinions with some grip. So your account of someone displaying intellectual courage quite clearly showed the opposite.

Darwinsbulldog wrote: These were WORKSHOPS, ie interactive lectures where the group leaders not only allowed interruptions, but EXPECTED them.

If interruptions were expected then why did you need to say above that you had “politely” interrupted the lecturer? Why did you now recall “WORKSHOPS” when earlier recalled the context as “LECTURES by Indigenous people on Indigenous matters"? If it was so interactive, why did the “lecturer” do this big climb down during a tea break not in the interactive workshop discussion? You are subtly changing your account of what happened to suit yourself.

Darwinsbulldog wrote: it is clear to me you have never attended an academic meeting or workshop involving educators at any university.

I feel sorry for you jayjay, for it seems evident you have never attended a community of scholars where intellectual honesty was expected and normal.

You would be quite wrong; I have had 31 years as full time student and lecturer at four universities. It’s interesting how quickly and snobbishly you pull this university education card. A major aspect of the evo-creo divide is that between the University Educated and the Great Unwashed. The children of parents who didn’t themselves go to university often come as creationists and get licked into shape pretty smartly; in my experience, in sociology and history classes that have nothing to do with biology. Then graduates wear their evolutionary belief as a badge of their superiority. That’s behind the vituperation thrown here at professor Michael Behe, he is called a cunt basically because he doesn’t fit the miserable mold.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote:
The term first appeared in Europe in 1877,[12] and around this time it was used by sociologists opposed to the concept.[13] The term was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter who used it in the ideological war effort against fascism to denote a reactionary creed which promoted competitive strife, racism and chauvinism.
You talk of skeptical courage? Skeptical courage also takes intellectual honesty to be of use to anyone. Let me give you an example of REAL character, real intellectual courage. Tutors at Murdoch university have to do an induction course. Among other things, there were lectures by Indigenous people on Indigenous matters.

I was sitting there listing to one of these lecturers and he started gobbing off about Social "darwinism". I could not believe such ignorance! I politely interrupted the speaker and said, first of all, that social darwinism [invented by Herbert Spencer] had nothing to do with Charles Darwin's biological theory. Second, I claimed, Darwin published on Natural Selection in 1858 [in a paper with Wallace] and in his 1859 book "Origins". How could Darwin therefore be responsible for the Pinjarra massacre and other pogroms.
You know what this MAN did, this excellent human being? He accepted the facts, and admitted his opinion was wrong. Later, during the tea break, he told me he had a "young creationist" educational background. His "fault" was in assuming his religious missionary teachers were being honest and giving him the facts. I also pointed out that the science backs up aboriginal claims on the land, whereas creationism does not. Because creationists only give an age to the earth in thousands of years [6 to 10K years], whereas scientific evidence clearly indicates that aboriginals were present in Australia at least 50,000 years ago, or even 60,000 years ago.

The gentleman now knows the facts, and was intellectually honest enough to accept them. He realizes that science is not his enemy, ignorance is. That is intellectual courage. To admit that he was wrong. This is a guy who has had his ancestors murdered by whites, has experienced prejudice and hardship from racism, he had every reason not to believe me. But he did. Why? Because facts are facts.

The way you tell this story someone appointed to conscientise tutors is persuaded by an interruption from the audience that he was mistaken about part of his presentation and after a conversation with you, feels he needs to explain himself as having been misled by his own background. I don’t see the courage there’ it’s a tale of such a ludicrous climbdown that I can hardly trust your account.

A courageous position would have been for the speaker to have said he would look into what you said. And that his creationist educators had at least supported him as far as that lecture room to tell the audience some things they needed to know.

The basic facts were easy enough to check. There were some 25-30 academics in the room. had I been deliberately lying I would have been caught out and that would have cost me a job. All tutors have smart phones, so the dates were easy for anyone to check. There were NO objections to my dates and basic facts.

For the record, I put in italics above some text you seem to have inadvertently carried forward from what I had inadvertently attributed to you, but came from my looking up the interesting history of the term “Social Darwinism”.

My problem with your account wasn’t about what you regard as the “basic facts”. According to Wikipedia massacres of Australian aborigines occurred from long before 1858 to long after. Darwin didn’t cause those massacres rather 19th century Imperial-colonial British society produced both Darwin and those massacres in complex and partial association.

It seems I need to remind you again Jayjay, making things up on the spot is not rational.

Jayjay4547 wrote:What astonished me about your account was the abject climb-down by this aborigine speaker, that you recall as an example of courage.

Because it is.
Making shit up is arrogant, admitting you're wrong takes courage.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Such an incident would be very unlikely in my country.

Then your country, whichever strange country that is, is acting rather irrational.

Jayjay4547 wrote: Firstly a member of an equivalent audience wouldn’t report that “he couldn’t believe such ignorance” about something the speaker had been “gobbing off” about.

Care to cite where Darwinsbulldog said he used those words to adress the speaker?

Jayjay4547 wrote: He wouldn’t report that he had interrupted the speaker to correct him.

And? How is that relevant?

Jayjay4547 wrote: And during the tea break the speaker wouldn’t have explained himself in such abject terms.

Which fantastical post are you responding to Jayjay? Nowhere has Darwinsbulldog expressed this.
And again, admitting you were wrong is the rational and brave thing to do.

Jayjay4547 wrote: More likely there would have been a serious row. The lecturer would have been disinclined to accept that this interrupter represented some group that was somehow on his side, especially on such flimsy grounds as that this group believed the speaker’s ancestors had occupied the land even longer.

You really managed to mangle what Darwinsbulldog actually posted haven't you.

Jayjay4547 wrote: That contrast between your and my country could be because an equivalent speaker in mine would be encouraged by his political power and moral authority to hold his opinions with some grip. So your account of someone displaying intellectual courage quite clearly showed the opposite.

It shows that your country is operated by dogmatist instead of rational skeptics, I fail to see how that's better than the academic environment Darwinsbulldog describes, which by the way is how most academics operate and how it should work.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote: These were WORKSHOPS, ie interactive lectures where the group leaders not only allowed interruptions, but EXPECTED them.

If interruptions were expected then why did you need to say above that you had “politely” interrupted the lecturer?

Because otherwise you would fabricate on the spot that he had done so unpolitely. But alas you did that even after he excplicitely stated he hadn't done so.

Jayjay4547 wrote:Why did you now recall “WORKSHOPS” when earlier recalled the context as “LECTURES by Indigenous people on Indigenous matters"?

Hello false dichotomy. A workshop is a form of lecture. See the sentence you quoted above ffs.

Jayjay4547 wrote: If it was so interactive, why did the “lecturer” do this big climb down during a tea break not in the interactive workshop discussion?

He didn't. Why do you struggle so much with reading what people actually post Jayjay?
Why do you continually persist in intejecting words if not outright events that are not present in the original post?
He explained his background during the break. He admitted his mistake during the workshop.
Explaining his background would be irrelevant and take away valuable time from the actual workshop.

Jayjay4547 wrote: You are subtly changing your account of what happened to suit yourself.

Seriously Jayjay? Could you act any more dishonest and pathetic.
It is you who has completely raped and twisterd Darwinsbulldogs account to argue against straw-man and present asinine irrelevancies.

Jayjay4547 wrote:

Darwinsbulldog wrote: it is clear to me you have never attended an academic meeting or workshop involving educators at any university.

I feel sorry for you jayjay, for it seems evident you have never attended a community of scholars where intellectual honesty was expected and normal.

You would be quite wrong;

I don't believe you.
You entire posting history, but espeically what you just posted about 'your country', makes me doubt any claim of yours that you have ever attended a credible university course.

Jayjay4547 wrote: I have had 31 years as full time student and lecturer at four universities.

Which universities? Under which names?

Jayjay4547 wrote:It’s interesting how quickly and snobbishly you pull this university education card.

I has nothing to do with being a snob and everything with your repeated statements that demonstrate you haven't a fucking clue what you're talking about, neither on biology or the academic world in general.

Jayjay4547 wrote: A major aspect of the evo-creo divide is that between the University Educated and the Great Unwashed.

You know why? Because the very religions that promote creationism promote ignorance in general.
They promote the idea that you shouldn't investigate things you don't understand and just trust in gods mysterious ways or ask a preacher.

Jayjay4547 wrote: The children of parents who didn’t themselves go to university often come as creationists and get licked into shape pretty smartly; in my experience, in sociology and history classes that have nothing to do with biology. Then graduates wear their evolutionary belief as a badge of their superiority.

Or so you blindly assert.

Jayjay4547 wrote: That’s behind the vituperation thrown here at professor Michael Behe, he is called a cunt basically because he doesn’t fit the miserable mold.

Care to adress my post exposing the lies of Dembski one of Behe's collaborators on creationism?

Lies from Behe:

In order to say that some function is understood, every relevant step in the process must be elucidated.

Absolute bollocks.

It is a shock to us in the twentieth century to discover, from observations science has made, that the fundamental mechanisms of life cannot be ascribed to natural selection, and therefore were designed. But we must deal with our shock as best we can and go on.

First of all, no scientist claims every fundamental mechanism of nature can be ascribed to natural selection so that's a dishonest straw-man.
Secondly, evolution itself isn't ascribed exclusively to natural selection, so that's another dishonest straw-man.

Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

More lies. All that is required is the gradual acquiring of ever more effective and 'complex' mutations.

Behe also falsely claims that a single mutation would always be "strongly deleterious" so would be quickly eliminated from the gene pool, so any accumulative effects of natural selection can be disregarded.

But Behe was dead wrong about it being "strongly deleterious." In fact, it seems to have no effect on transport activity at all. A neutral mutation like this can easily propagate through a population, and field studies of the parasite confirm that is exactly what has happened. In fact, a 2003 study recommended against using the K76T mutation to test for chloroquine resistance since that same mutation was also found in 96% of patients who responded well to chloroquine. Clearly, K76T wouldn't have become so widespread if it were indeed "strongly deleterious," as Behe states it must be. This is a critical point, since Behe’s probability arguments depend on this incorrect claim.

Kenneth R, Miller - Parasites and Drugs.

- See more at: http://rosarubicondior.blogspot.nl/2014 ... cZi7Q.dpuf

Some scientists, however, think the Darwinists' confidence is unjustified. They note that although natural selection can explain some aspects of biology, there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell.

Another lie.

He also peddles the 'Darwinism' canard as if evolution hasn't progressed beyond the initial theory by Darwin and keeps clinging solely to the Origin of Species.

For the record, I put in italics above some text you seem to have inadvertently carried forward from what I had inadvertently attributed to you, but came from my looking up the interesting history of the term “Social Darwinism”.

My problem with your account wasn’t about what you regard as the “basic facts”. According to Wikipedia massacres of Australian aborigines occurred from long before 1858 to long after. Darwin didn’t cause those massacres rather 19th century Imperial-colonial British society produced both Darwin and those massacres in complex and partial association.

What astonished me about your account was the abject climb-down by this aborigine speaker, that you recall as an example of courage. Such an incident would be very unlikely in my country. Firstly a member of an equivalent audience wouldn’t report that “he couldn’t believe such ignorance” about something the speaker had been “gobbing off” about. He wouldn’t report that he had interrupted the speaker to correct him. And during the tea break the speaker wouldn’t have explained himself in such abject terms. More likely there would have been a serious row. The lecturer would have been disinclined to accept that this interrupter represented some group that was somehow on his side, especially on such flimsy grounds as that this group believed the speaker’s ancestors had occupied the land even longer. That contrast between your and my country could be because an equivalent speaker in mine would be encouraged by his political power and moral authority to hold his opinions with some grip. So your account of someone displaying intellectual courage quite clearly showed the opposite.

I summarized the conversation.

The workshops ran for some days. You are right that they were not formal lectures. Apparently, the universities you frequent don't put much value in intellectual honesty. What matters is the facts, and while sometimes people do get upset or heated this was not one of those times.

It is true I could not believe such ignorance. Ignorance can be a pejorative term. We are all ignorant to some extent, it is what we do about it that matters. The gentleman in question did what any academic worth his salt would have done-looked at the evidence.
You do not understand anything about Australian indigenous peoples. I have never met a people so committed spiritually to their land. What I demonstrated was that science was not the enemy. Yet certain sections of the Australian community are bad-mouthing science and using it as a scape-goat for real injustices committed by others. These include some religious organisations, which are as we speak being investigated for other types of abuse [including sexual] by the Royal commission.

You see Jayjay, there are folks who can look past the fact that someone is a Wadjela and see just a person. You can't even recognize that Darwin was anti-racist because you are so obsessed with fevered imaginings of how science, and in particular, evolutionary biology, is the enemy.

I should have known better than to share a personal story in my life with you, you despicable human being.