Arete

Again - simply find the notion unevidenced and therefore not compelling. I refer back the sweetness example. I see no reason for "sweetness" to be anything other than an the triggering of biochemical pathways by the detection of crystalline carbohydrates in my mouth, redness a certain wavelength of light being detected by my retina, etc and so on. I am simply a poster the forum like yourself. I don't make the rules or the subforums. You've repeatedly demanded that the scientific community abandon it's "positivist" approach in this thread. This is specifically what I have repeatedly disagreed with. I also, again never stated that God didn't exist - simply that it's existence is not evidenced. Like the whole "qualia" thing I find the notion not compelling. I know you take personal offense to it, but it's exactly the same reason I do not find any other mystical supernatural beings or phenomena - like ghosts, mythical creatures, bigfoot etc. compelling. No - in fact this notion is one of the fundamentals in your premise I am disagreeing with - the honest answer is "We don't know if the scientific method can answer all questions." And then we come to the divergence in our viewpoints. There's simply no compelling reason to investigate what's beyond the physically observed world, because there's no compelling evidence that anything else exists. I'm more than happy to admit that the scientific method bears improvement, and that science might not explain everything, but I see absolutely no reason to leap beyond the bounds of rationality and logic and start assuming the supernatural exists because there are some things we don't know. Channeling the eloquence of Tim Minchin once more: "Isn't this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex Wonderfully unfathomable, natural world? How does it so fail to hold our attention That we have to diminish it with the invention Of cheap, man-made Myths and Monsters? If you're so into Shakespeare Lend me your ear: "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw perfume on the violet… is just f***ing silly" And I disagree. There's no evidence for something beyond the current reality and no compelling reason to start chasing it with fanciful "non positivist" methods. What part of "intuition=/=evidence" implies I don't believe in intuition? Intuition is required to develop the test hypothesis but evidence is required to validate it. No. I don't reserve questioning for subsets of unscientific assertions - all claims should be assessed with equal merit, regardless of how many references, big words and Nobel laureate quotes are included in the proof. It's hard to follow what you're saying here but it appears to be self contradictory - you never said you weren't going to put God to the scientific test - but it's inappropriate to do so? In previous posts you state you want to test and validate the God hypothesis - here you seem to be saying that's not how faith and revelation work... which is fundamental in why religious beliefs are incompatible and thus incomparable with scientific investigation, which is kind of my point. And we come again to the crux - I never said God didn't exist - I've never seen it stated on the forum either. There's just no evidence for it.

No I'm using an analogy to try and demonstrate the difference between a conclusion drawn on the documented investigation of evidence by others and one drawn from a blind faith position.

So If I was on a jury, convicting because the prosecutor said "We believe he did it because we found his fingerprints at the scene and matched the bullets to a gun registered in his name - here's how we processed the evidence..." would be the same as convicting becuase he said "I believe it's him because I have a gut feeling he did it." unless I was an expert crime scene investigator and collected the evidence myself?

Some interesting fuel to the fire. Due to anaerobic decomposition of organic matter in flooded fields, there is reasonable evidence that rice production can potentially produce up to 24x more greenhouse gas than beef production. http://www.breiling.org/publ/lcaricejap-en.pdf http://www.bbc.co.uk/bloom/actions/rice.shtml#quickjump And mechanized crop production might actually kill more animals that meat production: https://theconversation.edu.au/ordering-the-vegetarian-meal-theres-more-animal-blood-on-your-hands-4659 The argument surrounding sustainability and food ethics is intricate, and dividing up based on the taxonomy of the end product is a somewhat naive approach, IMHO.

I don't have difficulty grasping the "insight". I reject it as not evidenced and thus not compelling. Why the arbitrary use of caps on the word "brain" and others? Is it meant to imply some sort of special meaning? I didn't equate your ideas to those of Deepak Chopra, I equated your scientific rigor to his. In more plain language - if you want to test your claims and have them lauded as scientific and scientifically validated, apply the scientific method to them, rather than demanding the method be altered to suit you. Rather than spewing moral outrage, show us your hypotheses, predictions and experimental designs. Better yet, publish them and link us to the papers. Your demands we bin all measurements of reality based on your interpretations of quantum evidence, along with the assertions of an Abrahamic God being the only explanation of certain phenomena indicate a distinct divergence of your ideas from the model proposed by science. You do a rather thorough job of rejecting science, as a whole, outright: e.g. "Modern science has shown that the assumption that scientific reality exists in the external physical world is false." "scientific method is inefficient at addressing the workings of mother nature." "scientific reality is only a state of mind" etc. and you do pose the acceptance of concepts without credible evidence: "Those conclusions were not drawn by observation or putting an instrument to measure those entities, those conclusions are drawn by accessing new qualia through intuition." [intuition=/=evidence] "the Abrahamic version of God is necessary to account for Real altruistic behaviours" etc. I never said anything like that. I do and will oppose the equation of scientific theories with faith based assertions, and the rejection of scientific theories using faith based agendas. If people want to equate science, [as you have with the whole "scientism" "positivist" thing] with belief in a deity, put your faith to the scientific test - or accept that the aren't equivalent. If you find the assertion that belief in a deity is not equivalent to acceptance of a scientific theory offensive - scientific endeavor will be a school of hard knocks for you. Good luck with your research.

I disagree rather vehemently that rejection of all measurements of reality, based on the apparent disagreement with current models of some measurements at the quantum level is valid and no compelling reason to start accepting supernatural explanations. Science is driven forward just as much by rejection of the test hypotheses as the acceptance of them and some of the most exciting days I have are where what I previously thought about a system turns out to be completely wrong. The suggestion that upon finding a piece of evidence that refutes my previous findings means I should bin the whole lot and accept the boogeyman as a valid alternative explanation is uncompelling, unscientific and flies in the face of scientific advancement. Suggesting as such reveals a rather apparent lack of understanding of scientific methodology and how scientific concepts come to be. I maintain the position that your suggestion should never be considered a part of scientific approach and reject the notion that we should abandon current research in favor of sitting round and philosophising about metaphysics, and strongly disagree with the notion that "the next breakthrough" has to come from meta-physicians. This is descending towards incoherent rambling. GPS works because our state of mind makes appear so? Then how come I can quite literally hand one to an African tribesman in Uganda, teach him how to work it and he can effectively navigate using it? or a child... or any of the countless people who use GPS and don't understand how it functions? Fine: come up with some hypotheses and some predictions and test your ideas. Otherwise this has all the rigor of watching Deepak Chopra being interviewed by Oprah. Again - It seems your fundamental premise is that science refuses to accept faith based assertions as equal to evidence based acceptance of theories, and neither should it.

I'm going to channel Tim Minchin. "Every mystery, ever solved, has turned out to be, not magic." It is simply not compelling to search for supernatural answers to unexplained phenomena because supernatural explanations have NEVER provided an answer. The fundamental complaint it seems you have is that you have an assertion, based on faith which you wish to be considered as valid in the field of science as empirically supported scientific explanations: I'm sorry but it's simply not as valid, it's not scientific and we should not and hopefully will never devalue the scientific method just to include supernatural explanations to appease the devout. The application of the scientific method - which describes objectively measured reality despite your assertions, has - in the matter of two human generations doubled human life expectancy. This speaks rather strongly to its efficacy. Millennia of mysticism, witch doctors, prayer, goodwill and poultices did not have the same effect. I - and science will vehemently defend mainstream medical models of say, the respiratory/circulatory system and current treatments for pulmono-circulatory disorder against a suggestion that such complaints are caused by imbalances of chi and can be cured with reiki and crystals - an attitude which I am unapologetic for. Putting it in capitals and suggesting that anthropocentric altruism is in some way unique is simply not compelling and false - there is no basis for asserting that humans are capable of altruistic behavior that no other organism is, and in fact many examples where other organisms are capable of greater - cross kin line and species boundaries "altruistic" behavior than humans are. You defined a set of altruistic behavior as distinct, unexplainable by natural phenomena and only attributable to the Christian version of God. It is a logical fallacy. Yeah you did. I could personally interpret the potholes in my road as evidence of a visit by Godzilla. Most people would have a different interpretation of the evidence and given the differential additional evidence and plausibility of alternative explanations, the likelihood of my theory being correct is lower than the alternatives generally accepted. If I wanted to validate my Godzilla speculation, I would need to contrive a prediction only explainable by the presence of Godzilla, measure evidence of that prediction, and test its statistical validity. I could then make a probabilistic valuation of how well the Godzilla hypothesis explained my data, and at that point, the Godzilla hypothesis would become scientific. Until then, the "Godzilla theory" remains unscientific. Bending the rules by which science is conducted simply to pander to my Godzilla speculation and allow me to equate it with validated theories when it's not would devalue science and shouldn't be tolerated. The issue with "Observations support and contradict both theorems. Further study and experimentation is required to refine and reconcile theories and observations." is? This is why your position doesn't lend itself to science. You demand your viewpoint be accepted "unless proven wrong" - science demands it not be accepted unless proven right. It doesn't - and has done a more effective job of describing nature than any other method ever used. The whole notion of taking a biochemical signal and extrapolating it to a mystical notion you call "qualia" is uncompelling and unnecessary. My brain registers the detection of a molecule. There's a word I use to describe the sensation. The end. No they aren't. "I am the walrus" is a falsifiable statement. You could conceivably come to where I am and verify whether or not I am indeed, a walrus. It's also rather uncontroversially, not a scientific statement. Philosophical approaches need to abide by the method of science if they wish to describe themselves as such. If they don't, they aren't science and there's no value in considering them as such or equatable to such methods.

I disagree entirely. Take homeopathy for example - its proponents pose a disease treatment method which has no sensible mode of efficacy and no proof of efficacy. Same as chakras, meridians of chi and unicorn tears. Demanding science somehow accepts these models as legitimate, or that unsubstantiated claims of unicorns, fairies and batman be evaluated and taken seriously in scientific context is unhelpful, and a total derailment of the effectiveness of science as a whole. If you can't provide evidence it works/exists and provide a framework as to how it works/exists it simply doesn't fall into the realm of science - I think that science as a field should quite rightfully be unapologetic about not redefining itself simply so that such ideas can be validated. We go back to my first post in this thread. "In the thread in question, you took an observed phenomenon (altruism) , rejected all posed naturalistic explanations of it and asserted that the God explanation was the only plausible one. Regardless of whether or not you subscribe to the scientific method, the assertion that the phenomenon could not be plausibly explained by anything other than a benevolent God is logically fallacious." You didn't pose God as a potential explanation - you posed it as the ONLY explanation. Without actually presenting any evidence disproving naturalistic explanation of the phenomenon in question, you rejected it, and then went on - again with no evidence proving the supernatural explanation, asserted it as the only one. That's not "positivism", it's outing an illogical proof. Further, you now seem to be demanding that the scientific method be somehow fundamentally altered to legitimize such a proof. Again, I disagree entirely and think that such an alteration would render the scientific method effectively useless. So some observations invalidate the predictions of some theories (point in case, the discrepancy between quantum mechanics and classical physics). That's fine, I don't think any scientist is going to state that any theory is perfect, all encompassing and beyond further refinement. However - If you reject basic observation, I wonder why you're on a science forum at all. I really don't see the need to hand wave and project a concept like "sweetness" into some sort of "unmeasurable" concept. A crystalline carbohydrate comes in contact with a receptor, triggering a cellular reaction which closes a potassium ion channel, causing an opening of a calcium ion channel, causing a neurotransmission relaying the detection of said carbohydrate the brain. The number of bound receptors indicates concentration to the brain, the sensation of this is described in the English language as "sweetness". I see no sense in suddenly projecting it as some "umeasurable" concept eternally beyond the reach of objective investigation. Stating a philosophical approach is unscientific is not a devaluation of it.

Seems you're a bit confused: http://dictionary.reference.com/ Scientist - an expert in science, especially one of the physical or natural sciences. Prophet - A) a person who speaks for God or a deity, or by divine inspiration. B) a person chosen to speak for God and to guide the people of Israel: Moses was the greatest of Old Testament prophets. C) one of a band of ecstatic visionaries claiming divine inspiration and, according to popular belief, possessing magical powers D) a person who practices divination. E) one of a class of persons in the early church, next in order after the apostles, recognized as inspired to utter special revelations and predictions. 1 Cor. 12:28. F) the Prophet, Muhammad, the founder of Islam. G) a person regarded as, or claiming to be, an inspired teacher or leader. Anyone who would describe Darwin as a "prophet" has very clearly, never read anything he wrote. Darwin never claims to be divinely inspired, or even actually correct in any of his writings.

Edit - Phi beat me to it with the US figures. http://news.bbc.co.u...fic/3259891.stm "Cambodia's estimated 40,000 chon pika - or amputees. With a population of around 11.5 million, Cambodia has one amputee for every 290 people - one of the highest ratios in the world."

Well, if people losing their limbs is part of God's plan as you suggested, God wanted them to get amputated. And if everything that happens on earth is part of God's plan, he also wanted those abortions.

I'm relatively new here - it certainly hasn't felt like it's me vs the residents and I've had some fruitful discussions with the resident experts - particularly charonY as our fields of study appear to have some overlap. It seems, at least to me, most of the new posters who have problems come in to the forum with an agenda and not to participate in a back and forth discussion which might actually result in some sort of meaningful discussion, and while I personally wouldn't consider an anonymous internet forum an appropriate venue to discuss ideas I was potentially thinking of exploring in future publications or even ideas I am currently working on in depth, I think this place is a good venue for honing my underdeveloped science communication skills I'm not sure about everyone else here but it becomes apparent from posting style who's a professional scientist, educated layperson, student etc. When someone claims to be among other things - an expert psychologist and a successful investment analyst, you expect the poster to use certain language and posting style based on education, age, etc. and this poster just didn't add up. Even the overuse of caps in the sig line was a red flag regarding the likely generation of the poster and implied that they were younger than anyone other than Doogie Howser MD would need to be to have achieved their claimed accolades.

Geneious - http://www.geneious.com/ allows you to change the color scheme of alignments. My PhD supervisor is red-green colorblind and found it was the only software which allowed him to edit sequence data.

http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/gods-plan.htm Gotta pull out the why does god hate amputees again: "If the concept of "God's plan" is true, you can first of all see that God wants us to be aborting children. Every single abortion is planned by God, so God must be doing it for a reason. Second, you can see that both the mother who requests the abortion and the doctor who performs it are blameless. Since it is God who planned the abortion of the child, the mother and doctor are simply puppets who are fulfilling God's plan. You can also see that all the Christians who are fighting against abortion are missing the point. They are actually fighting against God's plan, and their fight is completely futile. God is the all-powerful ruler of the universe, and his plan is for more than a million children a year to die in the United States through abortion. [ref] Each one of those abortions was meticulously planned by God, so fighting against abortion is a totally wasted effort."

Have any evidence of these human/animal hybrids? Given the challenges in creating one, it's a rather extraordinary claim and at least to my knowledge, restricted to science fiction.

THis argument is eleganlty, extensively and rather convincingly torn to utter shreds by the good folks at "Why won't God heal Amputees" http://whywontgodhealamputees.com/ "No matter how many people pray. No matter how sincere those people are. No matter how much they believe. No matter how devout and deserving the recipient. Nothing will happen. The legs will not regenerate. Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees. You can electronically search through all the medical journals ever written -- there is no documented case of an amputated leg being restored spontaneously...What are we seeing here? It is not that God sometimes answers the prayers of amputees, and sometimes does not. Instead, in this situation there is a very clear line. God never answers the prayers of amputees. It would appear, to an unbiased observer, that God is singling out amputees and purposefully ignoring them.... If God is imaginary, then he does not answer any prayers. Therefore, the prayers of amputees would go unanswered too. The thing that is so appealing about this explanation is that there is no hand waving. There are no contradictions. It is completely fair. There is no paradox. This explanation makes sense in light of the evidence we see in our world. "

It's not harmless: http://jiv.sagepub.c...t/7/2/189.short http://www.thelancet...6771-8/fulltext http://www.tandfonli...0/J287v02n02_08 http://psycnet.apa.o...ls/bul/99/1/66/ http://journals.lww....l_abuse.12.aspx etc ad infinitum Clancy's book does not suggest that child sexual abuse is harmless, simply that the trauma manifests later in life. http://en.wikipedia....ki/Susan_Clancy

Sure, we can start with an incomplete or incorrect understanding of how a human body works and through trial and error, develop treatments that still work. I still don't see how that is in any way an argument for accepting such models as somehow scientific. Also, the teaching of a course at university does not make it science - universities by and large decide on what courses to offer based on expected attendance rates - The university I did my undergraduate at had a chiropractic department. Even if they start teaching chiro at Harvard and Oxford, the fact that strictly speaking, chiropractic theory doesn't accept that microorganisms cause diseases (http://dimartinochir...ke_us_sick.html) means that it is neither evidence based medicine nor science. At the same time, chiropractic treatment has been shown to be effective at treating back pain. http://www.bmj.com/c...7/1431.abstract The "reality could be wrong/not exist approach so everything is a belief" argument is a little droll isn't it? I mean I could be wrong and I'm not actually on the 5th floor of a building but at ground level - I'm still not leaving via the window Don't get me wrong - there's room in the world for unscientific philosophies/thoughts/practices/etc. and could see your point regarding positive evidence and "scientism" if we were discussing philosophers rejecting anything not evidence based, but I don't see the value in accepting conclusions that are not drawn from observation as scientifically valid - in fact I strongly think science would be devalued by doing so.

Indeed. I don't really know what the game is and it's speculation on my behalf. I can't see any other reason to give reviewers nothing between "minor revisions" and "reject - resubmit" aside from the fact it will artificially increase the rejection rate and decrease the time a paper is in review.

Writing an article is one thing - simply pick a journal appropriate for your study, open up the author guidelines and write your article accrodingly. Agreed. Getting accepted is totally different. Most journals (at least in evolutionary biology - my field) get far more submissions than they are able to print. Your work will have to be of an appropriate topic and standard not to be summarily rejected by the editor. If the editor feels the content is potentially acceptable for the journal it'll go to review. If you aren't conducting a broadly interesting study in a topical area with current best practice methods, chances of getting past the editor in a high impact journal are low. Review can be a crapshoot or it can substantially improve your study, regardless of acceptance/rejection. One thing I've learned is to reduce the amount of arm waving and speculation in my papers - people don't want half the discussion to be about things you could or want to do in the future - focus on what you study HAS found. I got reviews back yesterday for a paper. Reviewer 1 said: "This is a well crafted, easy to follow study." Reviewer 2 said : "The paper is poorly written, difficult to follow and full of spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. It will need substantial rewriting to become acceptable for publication." Their analytical advice varies to the same extent, but in the end it is up to the editor to decide if you answered their comments well enough. In this case the article is up for major revisions, so will likely go back to the same reviewers for a second round of revision, so I need to adequately address their concerns rather than dismissing them. Finally, for the last year or so, some of the journals have been "gaming" the system to reduce their published acceptance rates and the time papers are in review. I review for a journal which recently removed the "major revisions" option for reviewers in favor of "reject, encourage resubmission". That way they can state a shorter time for papers in review, state a lower acceptance rate and look more efficient and elite. It's supremely annoying for both reviewers and authors however.

When the dominant allele is not additive, the relative quotients of hets and dominant homs rises at the same rate. When the advantage is additive, the relative quotient of dominant het and homs both rise, but the relative quotient of dominant homs rises faster - progressing towards fixation at an elevated rate - as your graph suggests. Dominant alleles can mask deleterious recessive alleles, but progression towards fixation by selection against recessive homozyogotes means that notwithstanding linkage and selection on associated traits - will occur.

There's three tests you can use with Genepop - one's a 'U test', one an 'exact' test and the third an MCMC based test: http://genepop.curtin.edu.au/Option1.html There's more in Arlequin, DNAsp and I'm sure other software. I have to admit I've always been more interested in the interpretation that the underlying algorithm Once deviation is detected, further analysis can tell you in which direction your population/s are headed and what's likely to be the cause: In my above hypothetical, if you tested a pooled sample from all time periods, it would likely be out of HWE. If you tested again with the samples separated temporally and found them not significantly out of HWE you'd instantly be able to infer that there was genetic structure/turnover over time Totally. A test for HWE can only tell you if the allele frequencies are significantly different from what would be expected under a HWE model, and in reality no natural population is actually in perfect HWE. Any empirical study is rather by definition, relative.

Too late then! but anyway for anyone reading along: a) Selection can only act on expressed traits. For an advantageous recessive allele, only homozygotes for the allele can be selected for. For a dominant allele, both homozygotes and heterozygotes are at a selective advantage. As such, a big slab of additional gene carriers are experiencing elevated reproductive success and the gene sweeps through a population faster when the allele is dominant. b) When the gene is both dominant and the selective effects are additive, the situation is the same as above: hets are out-competing recessive homozygotes. But in addition dominant hets are out-competing both hets and recessive homs, so the sweep is more rapid again.

The scenario I am evisioning would be as follows: I sample the same locus, from the same population at three different time points. At each time point, allele frequencies are found to be in HWE proportions. However, when I examine haplotypic diversity, I find that the observed haplotypes differ across temporal sampling. The reason I would be able to infer that genetic change over time was likely to be due to stochastic drift rather than selection is due to the fact that haplotypic change occurred without the population deviating from HWE.