Ringer

Any particular reason, or even better evidence, for this assertions?

Nothing in your post does anything to invalidate the fact that classification of virtually any taxa, not just species, is fairly arbitrary while some are more arbitrary than others. Since we are talking about ancestral species it is even more arbitrary because there is no strict point at which one species becomes another. Even if there were we would have no way to show that two separate ancestral species were, in actuality, separate species. Something being arbitrary doesn't mean it's not real, it just means it there is not a strict way to delineate things so it is not an absolute category.

So to find the concentration of oxygen at, say, 1 atm and 298 K use the ideal gas law, PV=nRT, and rearrange it for concentration, n/V=P/(RT). Plugging in the values for one liter using oxygen's partial pressure gives us n/1L=0.1089 atm/(.0821 * 298) = 0.00445 mol/L O2 I believe it is impossible to live for long stretches of time with less than 50% of the O2 concentration at our sea level, which Google tells me is around 5500m. Sea level O2 concentration is around 0.00934 mol/L O2, half of that is 0.00467 mol/L O2. So breathing the air would definitely be a problem for long term human stays though short stays may be possible, but keep in mind the transition between the relative concentrations would probably need to be gradual. Also, if the gravitational force is 13 times that of Earth even if your extremities were supported by an exosuit it would probably still do quite a bit of damage organs. I probably wouldn't care about something like this if I was just reading a story, but I don't know how strictly realistic to you are going to be when writing. Also, I make stupid mistakes when doing plug and chug so someone may want to check my math.

There may or may not be a constant proportion between life span and sexual maturity, but there is definitely a link , and it also tends to correlate with amount of offspring. I don't see why it wouldn't make sense from and evolutionary survival perspective. If an organism has a long life it has a longer period of time that it can be taken advantage of by competitors so it should allocate a good amount of its energy to its own survival, a sort of support structure. Since the amount of energy allocated tends to be high and the energy needed to produce offspring is also high it cannot due both due to available energy restraints. This would put selective pressures on species to do one or the other but not both. The tardigrades and other extremophiles that are dormant are completely different scenario. We have been looking at a set of populations of a species that have been breeding separately over time and comparing their descendants. When looking at the dormant extremophiles we may be directly comparing descendants to preserved ancestors instead, so it's not really a good comparison. Also, since evolution only deals with populations and not individuals the discussion must be focused at the population level.

Here is a link to what he may have meant: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/einstein-philscience/#ReaSep He wasn't trying to invalidate the statement, he is trying to make the point that saying something is real is close to meaningless because real is such an ill defined concept. He is not doubting the meaning of hypothesis, but the meaning of the word real. I don't believe so, something can be real and subjective as well. As I understood the OP we were discussing how individual biases impair objectivity in science. Say we were in a room together at with a constant set temperature. I say it is cold while you say it is just right. Though we are both experiencing a real thing, the temp, though our measurement of it is subjective. Now under the same conditions we measure the temperature and you say it is 19.25 Celsius and I say it is 19.23 Celsius. Now the measurements are mostly objective, but I may use a slightly lower point if the reading is jumping due to my bias of feeling cold. So we both keep measuring and get consistent results of the same range, mine is usually slightly lower but easily within accepted error. Then we leave and more people enter (people's presence doesn't affect temperature) and start getting measurements. These agree with our prior results though are very slightly higher, this happens multiple times. Though my subjective experience of the temperature being too cold may have biased the initial results replication should start weeding out these subjective biases. That may have went on too long. . . Anyway I'm unsure of what you mean by reality quotient. I went through the previous posts and tried to look it up and couldn't really find a good definition. I agree that nature works independently of our observations of it. We may be starting to get a bit too close on specific subject but; His opinion may have helped him develop his ideas, but they did not cause other people to get data that supports the ideas. Part of objectivity in science is knowing that how nature works may seem completely ludicrous, but that is what is subjective. One of the main points of repeated experimental observations by multiple sources is to remove subjective biases. These things aren't taken at face value and accepted, people with different ideas try to disprove each other constantly as well as change currently accepted ideas.

Things like that are hard to distinguish causation. Just because a child grew up in a music rich environment and develops musical abilities doesn't mean the environment helped, it could be just as likely that the parents were musically oriented and the abilities were passed down genetically. Or perhaps the parents pushed the child to pursue music as well as giving them a musical environment, instead of the music rich environment being the cause it may be the parents pushing their child towards music that caused this. Also, listening to music =/= having musical ability. You may be able to passively listen to music very well, but that does not mean that you can create music just as well. [edit] Also, here is a link to different sources for you http://voices.yahoo.com/research-supporting-selective-rearing-resulting-in-4784788.html [/edit]

The quote by Einstein is taken a bit out of context: He goes on to say So even if he though the concept of reality was arbitrary he accepted that the scientific process must use the concept. Not that his personal opinion mattered because I highly doubt that every scientist that does novel work has the same opinions as those who support their finding or the opposite opinions of those who reject their findings. That is why science thrives, because even if we are extremely biased to find certain results there will be at least, if not more, someone trying to show that we are wrong.

If you say something, the universe, couldn't exist without being created why would the same argument not work for the 'mind' that created it. Would something not have to create that as well? Any argument saying that a creator does not need to be created then invalidates the first assumption that the something must be created before it can exist. The sandbox analogy doesn't work because it is just a structure put together using already existing parts. Nothing was created, things were only organized.

Also, bringing plants into this will further confuse the issue because they can do all sorts odd things when they hybridize or undergo polyploidy events. Even so, if the population is that long lived the time it takes to become sexually mature will probably be much longer than would allow for the populations to be able to evolve at the rate you are suggesting.

Dogs and wolves, although considered different species normally, can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. So even though they are different species in some aspect, they do not interbreed under 'natural conditions', they are not different enough to say they are completely distinct genetically. The same thing happens with ring species. So to say that current wolves are their ancestral species wouldn't necessarily be correct, but at the same time it wouldn't be wrong to say that a type of wolf was the ancestor of them both. As to identifying an exact ancestral species for two related species is near impossible because there isn't an exact point to say that speciation happened here. I think Arete's post did a good job explaining that though.

Asking what something is no longer becomes relevant after it is explained well enough to be understood. I was being general, but for your example somethings path curves without direct interactions with other objects. Since it doesn't make itself curve, the dimension it was using for travel must curve if no other interaction can explain the curvature. Expecting more than is useful is not objective at all because it uses subjective expectations to decide what something should be able to explain. These models make predictions without the use of subjective expectations, and the predictions match observation. It doesn't matter to the model or to nature if we enjoy or agree with them.

Richard Feynman had two quotes that I believe relate to the point about theoretical physics. One was along the lines of experimental physicists make observations and theoretical physicists explain those observations. The second is that no matter how beautiful an idea is if it disagrees with experiment it's wrong. Theoretical frameworks aren't just mathematical models pulled from nothing, the model is built to explain observed experiment. The explanation in physics boils down to mathematics, but the observations and experiments do not. I think the point ajb was trying to make is that to explain things in physics it boils down to mathematics because you can't fully explain the idea without the math, no matter how wonderful one may be at explaining things. On the same token the math does have to agree with observation. This same idea applies to what it is. Even if I could talk all day about what spacetime is (I can't but let's pretend) it wouldn't really tell you what it is because we can't really imagine four dimensional structures. So the math is necessary to show how a fourth dimension can explain the observations made in the field. It's not really something that one can get across without math because there is no common way to make a fourth dimension analogous to experiences and knowledge people probably have that don't involve math.

Since you enjoy trying to be condescending please explain how a cranial nerve is pinched between two vertebrae because as I recall cranial nerves don't pass through the spine. As to the rest I'm tired of you just avoiding addressing any point I've made so I'm done with this whole thing.

It seems trying to debate with you is an exercise in futility. I have directly spoken to points which seem disagreeable and it seems your main point is that you're not surprised that I don't agree. Can't you actually make points to try to persuade me instead of A.) repeating the same thing that has been talked about before B.) just saying you don't expect me to be persuaded or C.) misrepresenting me? Evolution having a specific direction is wrong, why would I keep reading when some of the basic premises are incorrect? Also, as to it being falsifiable, Bohm himself stated, "there's a truth, an actuality, a being beyond what can be grasped in thought, and this is intelligence, the sacred, the holy," in regards, if the website is to believed, to consciousness. As to intelligence, "intelligence cannot be grounded in "structures such as cells, molecules, atoms, and elementary particles."" I never once said implicate order was just plain wrong. As I have said before I am not a physicist and wouldn't be able to give you an answer either way, but I do know a bit about evolution and cognition so that's what I stick to. In science you are wrong far more often than you are right, if they were always right future scientists would no longer have any hopes for a job. I am completely open to being proved wrong, but I have to see good evidence to accept that something is true. I am fine with being wrong, and have been many times, but you have to show something substantial. I'm not saying it is all wrong, but at the same time the ideas presented for non-local consciousness don't do anything for telepathy at the moment. It relies on neuron clusters being membrane bound so they can always be in contact. So I still don't see how it would help explain psi. So it was #3 then? If you did enough damage with that fall to really damage your neck enough to compress a nerve you would probably need surgery for a herniated disk or something similar. Cranking your neck would probably cause more damage than it would help. Your balance comes from your inner ear, not your neck. The nerve is called the Vestibulocochlear nerve and is a cranial nerve that doesn't even enter the spinal column. Your balance was probably due to cervical vertigo due to whiplash or a similar neck injury. You used it as an example of proof for psi. You mother was with your father to put him in his trance and she had the pictures. You have no way of knowing if she showed him the pictures because you were shut in your room. Again, this was 100% not controlled.

Yes it is, because it relies on one thing that isn't falsifiable (universal consciousness) and one thing that is plain wrong (directional evolution). There might be more but I stopped reading the link after the directional evolution part. No, but how space itself is conscious is because it assumes a definition of consciousness that is not scientific. A pinched nerve in the spine could be caused by a few things, one could be a muscle strain or other injury. In this case it heals on its own, albeit slowly. Since they heal slowly people tend to go to chiropractors when things are taking too long. If this was your situation then I'm sure you did feel better, but it's because you were healing anyway and you just associated it with the chiropractor because you went there while you healed naturally. Hence my regression to the mean comment because it is the most common thing to happen. Other ways pinched nerves happen are more serious and usually take surgery to heal completely, but other things can relieve strain on the nerve. Chiropractic ways, though, have not been shown to fix this at all. If this was the case a chiropractor won't be able to do anything to heal you. Another situation that happens all the time is that you were diagnosed by the chiropractor as having a pinched nerve, their most common diagnosis. Then they "cranked your neck" and said they fixed it. You then felt better via a placebo effect. As to your "In what universe is that not evidence?" I would have to say that in this one it is an anecdote and, therefore, not evidence. All that being said, chiropractic has seen some usefulness, but it seems to be almost exclusively in the lower back and not any different than what they do in physical therapy. Since physical therapy is not chiropractic that doesn't do anything as evidence for it. Your family's experiment was 100% non-controlled. The two people being tested for telepathy had the exact pages that were supposed to read telepathically. I mean do you really expect to persuade anyone by telling them this and saying, as a random person on the internet, "believe me, my parents wouldn't try to trick me,"?

The memory distortions and lapses as well as all the other things discussed previously. No I didn't contradict myself, but perhaps I could have worded it better. Positive studies can be evidence that something may be happening though not necessarily what is being tested. Say if we had a group of people use a placebo and a homeopathy pill, really also a placebo, and the the homeopathic medicine had a statistically significant difference in its working ability. Now although that is a positive result it isn't necessarily good evidence because fluctuation will happen. So if many other studies show that the difference seen before was just an outlier we cannot really say that the previous study was evidence that homeopathy worked. Now when that happens usually we look at the evidence for the underlying idea behind the practice. The idea behind chiropractic medicine has no evidence to support it. Since there isn't evidence to support the underlying idea, and it doesn't tend to do better than a placebo, even though there are positive result studies there is no good evidence to support its practice. Regression to the mean You can't falsify an unfalsifiable position. It is like when creationists ask evolutionists to disprove god.

I'm saying chiropractic medicine doesn't have evidence to support its practice, yet they have had positive study results. http://www.skepdic.com/chiro.html The wiki article doesn't have much on how the theory could be used with psi, but the bizcharts has some quotes to where I could see how it could be taken that way. The quotes he has are meaningless though. It states that the entire universe has his version of consciousness, yet gives no reasoning behind his statement that only humans can use this 'inner energy'. Even the fact that a physicist would use energy in the way they are is odd. There are other parts that make me believe he took the road, like so many other greats before him, into a realm of quackery. This quote is a good example If the quote holds this same meaning in context, I don't see what he would mean to 'change reality' other than some sort of metaphysical mysticism. And I would have to say I'm with others when saying the whole theory on conscious 'wholeness', as in universe wide consciousness, is on most points unfalsifiable. It wouldn't because, as I said, it relies on the neurons being interconnected by membranes. So even if that is completely true, every person is not membrane bound to each other. When did we say all of these experiments were done with people with no 'gifts'? The point is to find out if there is such thing, so good studies would have groups with both those who say they do have the gifts and those who don't. Why would only people who don't have these 'gifts' be used? That would make no sense. Your lapses were in the essence of the controls used as well. Such as not being able to see what page you were using (if the page was ripped out it would be easy to see the page you were using in another copy), how they pages were stored, etc. That makes it even more likely that there was trickery involved because it makes the trick much easier to pull off. You have repeatedly stated the experiment could not be faked. Let's review And all of those were about this exact experiment. I can verify I know of a similar 'magic trick' that does the exact same thing with either pictures or words, depending on what they want to do, that doesn't need psi. Since that sort of thing has been demonstrated you need to introduce another factor that could not be easily explained like this. Do you disagree that extraordinary evidence is needed? That's not extraordinary evidence. It's not even ordinary evidence, it wouldn't hold as evidence for anything in a scientific field. Trivial to you perhaps, but some where lapses about controls used which is a pretty big deal. If you were to put that forth as evidence and it was demonstrated you had misreported the controls your data would be seen as fraudulent. Not that you were purposefully lying, but in a journal setting that's where it would stand. Not to mention if those were the lapses that could be shown between that writing and now, what about all the lapses that occurred between the experiment and the previous writing?\ And the same problems as the above still hold just as well.

So say the practitioners of homeopathy and chiropractors. . . I still don't see the difference. So it seems I couldn't find anything about Bohm's work outside the individuals brain other than a side mention of species wide memory and I don't remember reading it in the links offered. Is there a certain source linked or could you link one. As I said, I don't see what Penrose's work does for psi since it involves only an individuals brain. Since its quantum computer models only seem to work for interconnected neurons within a sheath of membrane it couldn't function outside the individual. It would indeed damage the validity of your data of the previous experiment. If there are huge outliers when comparing data sets, especially if there is only a single set with outliers, that data set was probably incorrectly gathered or the data was erroneous. This was a private, family investigation of telepathy with no deception involved. We did not need "Psi Cops" present to insure that there was no deception. You are welcome to cling to your opinion that my family are liars, cheaters, tricksters, fakers, frauds... pick your own derision. I'm done explaining it to you. I could come up with a ton of ways this method could be used for tricks. If you want me to I could give a few examples of how this could easily be done without psychic ability. Or it could have been something fun to do to entertain a 12 year old child? I'm not even a physicist, what does the physics departments opinion of other sciences have to do with ANYTHING I've been saying? I have read it and I didn't see anyone else say that social sciences are not science, though it has been said on other threads but I don't believe any who say that have been strongly involved in this. Since your other memory wasn't exactly correct do you not think you could also be mistaken in your other memory? I don't think saying, "well I think this should be evidence," (even though it would not be accepted as evidence for any hypothesis) is a valid form of argument. I apologize that I'm getting lazy in my replies, I'm very busy for the next couple weeks.

If evolution is false how about you explain why species diversity isn't virtually nil due to previous mass extinctions.

I thought I did, what about my reply didn't address that my post wasn't a misrepresentation? You seemed irritated in those post, if I was mistaken in that I apologize. But I couldn't care less if I had any emotional effect on you. As to you calling what I mention unverified crap; Chiropractic practitioners have positive result studies as well, and I said I would use that example instead of leaches, so why is it so far off. Why can't I use that analogy instead? I used alien abduction as an example of having a huge amount of anecdotal evidence while still being false. I didn't say they were exactly the same, only that they were comparable if anecdotes were taken into account. Not to make the entirety of psi look ridiculous by comparison, only to address your claim that using anecdotes was legitimate. If it makes you feel better I will use alien sightings instead (including UFO, crop circles, etc). I don't see why you keep addressing my analogies and calling them ridiculous instead of actually making points as to why they are ridiculous. I do hear it, it is just extremely unsatisfactory. You have said repeatedly anthropology was better suited to explore the phenomena than physics, sorry if my wording came off as a distortion, but when you are using QM to explain something you can't go on to say that the people who study QM are not as suited to explore it as people who have probably never taken a QM course in their entire life. These people theories only speak of an individuals consciousness, so again I say that even if both of them are entirely correct it does nothing to explain psi. No, evidence did not support the null hypothesis. What if further evidence in later experiments supported the null hypothesis, if it was already discarded how will the evidence be explained? Just because I don't accept an anecdote doesn't mean I won't accept any evidence. . . . I suppose that I needed a sarcasm sign. Did you just completely ignore the rest of what I said. You have been the one using an appeal to popularity as a factor as to way we do not believe psi. Yet you keep saying that statistic analysis is useless and we are using it to specifically attack the studies you have been using. We don't need to actually detect consciousness or its content, only that a psi phenomena occurs consistently under controlled conditions. What did you control for? There was nothing and nobody there to make sure your parents didn't cheat. You really expect me to apologize for saying that psi phenomena isn't real, and by extension your parents weren't psychic? If your entire family was in front of me demanding an apology for saying what they did was a trick I would respond the same way I am now: I will apologize as soon as you show that it wasn't a trick. Plenty of mentalists and magicians do the same type of trick without using any sort of psychic ability, so it's a much safer assumption that it was a trick instead of psychic ability. I have not once attacked you or your parents. I said your parents tricked you, and I believe it. It's no more of an attack than if you were to say my parents tricked me when they told me Santa brought me presents on Christmas.

Darn, and here I was hoping beyond hope that I could acquire your approval. Indeed they can, and see every one was you being angry about everyone telling you that anecdotal evidence means nothing. Because everything you said about anthropology being better equipped works for alien abductions as well, mainly because neither of them is better investigated by anthropology. Anthropology studies people and societies, not any sort of cognition, QM, or anything discussed in this thread other than people believing in supernatural phenomena. You clearly believe QM may be able to explain psi, yet you keep saying physics shouldn't be used to investigate it. Don't you see the inconsistency? No, null hypothesis can either be supported by evidence or unsupported but never completely disproved. Since it can't be utterly disproved it can never, technically, be thrown out. Yes, it's about popularity. That's why so many scientists agree on so many things, it's because all of them only accept what is already accepted. All these acts about further studies are complete rubbish because we all know what will be published. Do you seriously believe the people on this forum are telling you you're wrong because you're unpopular? Isn't it more likely that people here, who, for the most part, have no connection other than being members, are from various different specialties and fields, and have little to no interaction outside this forum, are telling you you're wrong because you are unpopular? Wouldn't it be more likely if we were just trying to team up on you to be hateful the amount of people posting would increase as time went on? Personally I would assume if the amount of people who posted dwindled down during the discussion before being even close to resolved is because the person arguing refuses to listen and is just being stubborn. Seriously, isn't it more probable that we are saying the things we are because you are mistaken about something. Even if you began with good points they have been lost in your inability to actually even take a second to think you could be mistaken in any part of your argument. As soon as someone points something out you immediately either misrepresent the argument to make them sound ridiculous or assume it's a personal attack. Even when you accepted that Cap's statement on statistical significance you continue to misrepresent what the meaning of it was. At this point I really don't know if you're purposefully misrepresenting this or you honestly can't, or won't, understand what statistical analysis of a phenomena includes and needs in order to be established as having good supporting evidence. If what you say about your IQ and academic career are true I am honestly flabbergasted as to how you still misunderstand this sort of thing. On a side note, I never thought I would have used flabbergasted. .. I have no problems with superstitions and actually have a few that I still follow. Nor am I dedicated to any sort of eradication. I didn't go out of my way to search for this thread or its subject matter. You posted it to talk about it which is what we have all done. To get angry at people for an honest discussion of a topic you asked for an honest discussion on is beyond asinine. I would be pretty confident that Bohm, a fairly famous physicist, uses the same physics definition as Swansont, another physicist. I'm sorry if their ideas are too much for me, perhaps you could simplify it for me? As I see it Penrose believed consciousness didn't necessarily need to be simplified in an algorithmic fashion, but it still followed deterministic laws. The ideas of which use certain QM phenomena inside the neurons, or groups of neurons, to explain the seeming holistic experience of consciousness. Bohm's ideas of a multidimensional holograph inside the brain that stores memories and experiences has no experimental evidence that I am aware of. Neither does his ideas of the brain relying through different muscular contractions of sets of target contractions on prior 'memory' through this dimensional holograph. Although memory is helped by something similar it does not 'rely' on it. I don't see how this was a well controlled experiment. If it was well controlled, what was the control group? I never said you were a liar, I specifically said you believed the trick. I am saying your parents tricked you, maybe not in a way that was harmful but a trick none the less. How have I harassed you? I am merely doing what people do on a discussion forum, discuss.

So do you admit that the thousands of years of anecdotal evidence is worthless in regards to alien abduction? If so what happened to this? And all the other arguing you did over not being able to discount huge bodies of anecdotes. You can never really 'throw out' a null hypothesis, but a few positive results, that have problems with sample size and such, within a fairly large body of negative results, not to mention the huge body of non-published negative results, show nothing but regular variation expected when taking tests. Consistent positive results would be a good way to help support psi, but as you have admitted psi doesn't work consistently. And this still doesn't negate the fact you have been consistently misrepresenting Cap's argument. Else, why would he be consistently repeating the same thing over and over. So you use your own definition of non-local. . . That sounds like dancing around the issue to me. Even if everything these people said is true it does nothing to support your conclusions of psi. So you want us to accept an anecdote of a trick from when you were twelve as a well controlled scientific experiment? So where did I misrepresent you again?

Also, taking into account thing like confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance play a huge role in superstitions. There are a few books on this sort of thing in sports psychology, Choke was a good one IIRC. [edit] Here's a link. . . http://www.amazon.com/Choke-Secrets-Brain-Reveal-Getting/dp/1416596186/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1331608076&sr=8-2 [/edit]

Think of a book being passed down from generation to generation. The things contained in that book are now being passed down without genetic modification. There is a certain aptitude to be able to do, or not, the things in that book but the skills in the book are still being passed down. I believe that is the sort of thing Charony was talking about.

So, to summarize, you refuse to answer me although I gave, what I believe to be, very good reasons my analogies were suitable and you refuse to acknowledge them, you misrepresent the statistics argument, you dance around the non-locality issue, you seem to add more to your stories every time you post something new, you use QM terminology without acknowledging what the terms actually mean, and, here's the kicker, you want us to believe in telepathy because of a trick you believed when you were 12? Yeah, I think I'm done with this.