Ophiolite

In fairness I concede that you actually believe that bullshit. If your perception is that you have no choice then all of your subsequent actions are the actions you would take if you actually had no choice. If in two situations your behaviour does not differ between them then there is no practical difference between them. That is the very simple and wholly accurate point being made by pavel. In my view treating slavery as a digital entity - Slave/Not Slave - is simplistic and dishonours many people on what is in reality a spectrum. Factory workers in Victorian England were not slaves, yet on practical grounds enjoyed fewer rights than slaves in ancient Greece. Correct me if I am wrong, but a Greek slave was a valuable commodity whose wellbeing was important to his owner. If may not be dignified to be thought of as a commodity, but neither is it dignified to perish as a ten year old in the bowels of a mill machine because that is more cost effective for the mill owner than having proper safety measures, working practices, training and adult workers.

Good and bad are value judgements and therefore to declare something universally good or bad lies somewhere on the spectrum between silly and really dumb. Those ethical positions that have evolved appear to address either maintenance of the power structure of the society, or fairer distribution of material and spiritual resources.

Precision and concision are closely linked. Failure to recognise this can lead to failure.

Where was the leap. Everything I posted was a factual account of the nature of science today and in the past. No supposition, no assumption, no inference, no deduction. Just statements of fact. Your second sentence does not parse. Perhaps you could try restating it. As written it makes no sense, though several contradictory interpretations are possible. And your third sentence follows with all the inevitability of badger hunting in the presence of an ocean liner.

The mantle is not molten, so the magma datum is irrelevant. You would need to take some account of the molten and solid iron nickel core. I suspect mineral phase changes could have a significant volume effect. Too much work to answer a question that seems to lack significance.

In failing to provide even a smidgen of detail as to how a field replicates you left open the implication that by replicate you meant precisely duplicate. And how is any of that mirrored in the "replication of fields"? (That may be , with the same hyperbole you employed, the 100th anniversary of that request.) If you mean this thread then you are incorrect. If you mean the one located elsewhere, no. But as has been pointed out to you, this is where the discussion on this forum should take place. If you lack the ability to explain your hypothesis clearly and concisely here don't go blaming others for your deficiencies.

So you discard the conventional notion in biology that evolution requires replication with defects?

To take your example of feet kissing, this seems no different from the many forms of submissions seen in many, most, all (?) mammals. As such I see no relationship to art.

Since my reading of biology research papers is highly selective it is entirely possible I am selecting a sub-set of biologists who favour selection at individual, or even group level. I would still like to see some review articles that confirm the perception you and tantalus have.

Do you have a reference for that article?

I realise the discussion has moved on, but I believe this needs addressing. You repeatedly make posts in which you question the wisdom of how you think the rest of the world, or subsets of the rest of the world, think. In most instances you are wholly wrong about how those subsets think. If I didn't think about feedback loops in my work, both from the technical and the social aspects, I would be barely competent. I don't believe I am exceptional.

It becomes simpler, I think, if you consider humans to be a biosphere. Recall that there are more bacterial cells in our body than their are human cells.

My impression was that the pendulum had definitely swung the other way. Do you have any citations to review articles that would confirm your thinking.

Mike, what's your point?

And always reflect on the fact that you are not the first father-son pairing to go through this. That can bring some perspective to it.

In order to become a gas giant you need two things: 1. A rocky core 2. Gas If the core forms in the inner part of the system, no gas. If the core forms in the outer part of the system, after the gas has been dissipated, then no gas.

Stop being obtuse. I have made I believe his assertions is that species have not changed in millions of years. That absolutely polarises the debate! I offered the only plausible alternative - he was making a trivial statement that "they kind of looked similar" - and noted that in that case, a case I do not believe to be true, then he had said nothing of relevance. Please pay more attention to what is written. Of course Strange's view is biased. He is in favour of logic, critical thinking, objectivity, honesty and the scientific method. He is against emotionally based arguments, woolly thinking, agenda driven thought processes, deceit and irrationality. Which of these biases do you find to be wrong?

What you seem to be ignoring is the scientific method largely avoids these issues by having processes that impose rational objectivity upon findings. Individual scientists may indulge in self deception, but the method has proven remarkably efficient at neutralising their ill founded views.

It is possible to talk extensively without saying anything. Your own posts are generally testament to that. John Cuthber has eloquently nailed it with his question to you "Do you understand, if he didn't say that, he didn't say anything?" Implicit in his assertions that today's species look like fossil species is that they are the same. If he all he is saying is that they look alike, but are not alike, then he is saying nothing of relevance to evolution or creation. Is that not apparent to you?

That is because you lack the background to properly evaluate the style and content of his presentation. No. His claim was that they not only looked the same, but that they were the same. That is a completely different claim and one that is completely wrong. Yes, we knew that creationists had been misinterpreting and manipulating facts for many decades. There was nothing new in this latest deceitful attempt. So you thought that because a biased organisation with an agenda wholly opposed to the science of evolution said CW was a wonderful guy that this would somehow bring creationists and evolutionists closer together. That is astounding. Not a great deal, as it turns out.

Nonsense. There have always been Old World creationists who have no difficulty with the billions of years that life has been on the planet. And the default position of many conventional Christians is simply that God may have nudged evolution along here and there. In short his position simply sits on the pre-existing spectrum of views and adds absolutely nothing new to the "debate". From a different tack, how can you claim that the gap between creationist and evolutionist views has been shortened by the application of lies, misinterpretations, unfounded denials, withheld facts and manipulative rhetoric. He simply reinforces the notion that his brand of creationist is a deceitful, ill informed charlatan preying on the gullible.

David, Any chance you will get around to answering my questions in post #48 any time?

The Americans were well aware that the Russians had a space program. What caught them out was how advanced it was.

True, but so am I. I see only two possibilities. 1.He genuinely thinks a bug like this pretty much is a trilobite. If that is the case then the man is an uneducated fool and anything he says should be disregarded. 2. He knows these are only very4 distantly related and not trilobites, but lies because it helps support his argument. In that case he is an educated liar and anything he says should be disregarded. There seems to be a pattern emerging here. I think I see why you, lancebussel, encountered so many ad hominems -his arguments have nothing of substance in them. Having read the various responses are there any parts of his presentation that still seem unrefuted to you?

At the outset he employs the intellectually dishonest technique of critiquing the origin of matter. This really has no bearing on the theory of evolution. If we learned tomorrow that Big Bang Theory was wholly flawed it would not impact at all on the validity of evolutionary theory. This raises doubts in my mind as to his objectivity - a necessary attribute for a scientist. But more than that his critique of the theory is based on a falsehood. He asserts that scientists do not know how matter could come from nothing. However, this is not a requirement of the theory. Variants propose the Big Bang arising from a pre-existing universe. Other variants have provided an explanation of how the universe could arise from nothing. In short, his attack on this point is wrong and irrelevant. He next claims that scientists cannot explain the origin of life. He implies strongly that they have no idea. Bollocks. There are a host of evolving hypotheses and some very plausible general solutions. True, the details are lacking, but this has only been a valid research field for barely half a century. And, yet again, abiogenesis is independent of evolution. If we learned tomorrow that the first life had been placed there by a creator it would not alter evolutionary theory at all. He asserts that scientists have not come up with ancestors for most, or all of the major groups. He seems to mean phyla, by major groups. The origin of several phyla is indeed unclear, but he omits to mention the substantial advances made in recent years through genetic studies. Nor does he mention that the chain of ancestry is much clearer, as we would expect, at lower levels - Families, Orders, Species and the like. I may continue later, but I got stopped in my tracks when he said - in passing - "Most people know trilobites, they are very interesting and you find them around your home." What?!