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“Once again, evolution was not observed in real time. The snail remained a snail instead of turning into a new type of animal. Evolutionists are baffled by how

“Once again, evolution was not observed in real time. The snail remained a snail instead of turning into a new type of animal. Evolutionists are baffled by how what they claim about all the species on Earth never actually happens. Instead of being disproven, the proponents now say the lack of evidence is proof it happened… on extremely-long, time scales science can’t confirm. That science can’t prove everything, like their core beliefs. They called for believers to keep having faith.” It would be a great news story. Especially if it contrasted the proof of minor adaptations within types of creatures vs lack of actual evolution of the kind we always read about. Then, explain what falsification is, evolution’s predictions, and how observations contrary to predictions should decrease belief in the theory. Meanwhile, snails are still snails, ants are still ants, and chickens are still chickens. Billions of things not turning into new animals. It’s like God had to intervene to create these categories since it’s observationally impossible by chance.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Changing into new species is just a longer time frame of more an more adaptations. Not sure why people aren't able to extrapolate that.
- jdthedisciple 2y ago
  Maybe that's how fairy tales work, but not science. Changing your chromosome numbers is an entirely different (and unproven to have ever occurred) beast compared to simply expressing some different but previously already present genes due to changing environments (something easily observable). Not sure why people aren't able to grasp that.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    What are you talking about? Of course chromosome number changes have been seen: see every Down's syndrome person ever. Had that been an advantageous change, Down's people would be successfully increasing their percentage of the population
    - jdthedisciple 2y ago
      Let's make it extremely simple for you: Can you name a single species whose speciation-by-random-mutation we have witnessed? Have I missed the Down-syndrome one (or any analogous known gene mutation) which has been continuously procreating all this time? Besides the fact that Down-syndrome is a terrible example since Down-syndrome-parents would not necessarily produce offspring with the same genetic disorder, hence no speciation-by-random-mutation. I thought people learn this stuff in HS...
      - Thiez 2y ago
        "Species" itself is a vague concept in biology. It makes sense at a HS level like "dog is a different species from elephant" but it breaks down in more complex cases, e.g. lion + tiger. Ring species are also a nice example where individuals from A breed with B so same species, B breeds with C so same species, …, but A does not breed with E so not the same species. If we exterminate the populations B, C, and D, A and E are now definitely different species, so I would argue we could observe speciation that way? But while the populations between them exist, it's more muddled. Since evolution moves slowly there are two ways to see it in action: either you experiment with a species that reproduces very rapidly, or you look at fossil records. For the first type bacteria are usually used, but since bacteria don't have sexual reproduction a naysayer could always cast doubt on whether a new species has truly been created (are any two individual bacteria really the same species? Who can tell, short of verifying base-by-base equality of their DNA), so it won't convince someone who is determined to doubt evolution. For the fossil records we have literal mountains of evidence where the development of existing and extinct species can be observed. But I imagine you won't count that as "witnessing" it happening. I feel like many people who doubt evolution use a standard of evidence that they don't use for any other scientific theory, and probably not for any other area in their life either. Other people have mentioned it already: plate tectonics, almost all of astronomy... we could extend it to history too. Did you witness the founding of the United States? If documented history count as proof of stuff like founding of the US, the civil war, and the first world war, then why don't fossils count as proof of evolution?
        2y ago
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    Yeah man, totally. Creationists have been pushing this boulder up the hill as long as I can remember. Any day now there will be some aspect of evolution that will stump biologists indefinitely and will never be answered. Meanwhile the proposed alternative seems to be: some dude just created it all and he's supernatural so we can't even conceive of a way to falsify his existence. Talk about fairy tales!
    - jdthedisciple 2y ago
      Fyi, I'm not negating evolution per se. I'm operating strictly within the realm of the empiricism-based scientific method. It should not be so sensitive to scrutiny and skepticism. So creationism or not, let me pose the simple challenge to you as well: Can you name a single species whose speciation-by-random-mutation we have actually observed? You see, the hard fact, which many of my beloved scientistic friends have yet to come to terms with, is that technically speaking, the speciation-by-random-mutation is a scientifically invalid hypothesis because it is not even falsifiable. In other words, it is a mere conjecture (and sadly nowadays even a doctrinal belief) like any other, from an honest, objective, naturalistic point of view. But I don't even need to get into that because most of my beloved atheists will already have more of an impulsive emotional reaction to that rather than facing it head-on.
      - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
        "actually observed" Maybe the problem here is you disagree with what an 'observation' is. If you are saying, I must physically see speciation or plate tectonics, myself, within my lifetime. And thus any events that occur over longer time spans, when I'll be dead, and not observing them, thus they cannot be proven? Anything with a long time scale is by your definition, invalid science?
    - nickpsecurity 2y ago
      You’re missing something that science-as-religion made people forget. Science is just one type of knowledge that isn’t even how most people learn most knowledge most of the time. We mostly learn by testimony from sources we trust mixed with experiential learning. Works fine. We also have science. So, we first need to get back to the pre-Hume period where godless, materialistic science wasn’t the answer to all questions or the only way forward. Second, we must be able to say what we’ve always known: it’s OK for science to say “I have no idea. We might never know that because we can’t scientifically observe or test it.” That’s what they should say about the origin of life. What can we know? We can indirectly observe the attributes to take guesses. If not knowing, we can work with God’s design rather than against it. Really, only revelatory knowledge… the Creator telling us… will tell us anything close to the truth. We’ve claimed both. I already posted evidence for the Bible being the Word of God in this thread. People who follow Jesus Christ treat key claims as axioms before layering reasoned statements on top of those and scientific observations. Unlike other faiths, we’ve found no contradictions. Unlike godless science with its axioms, ours lead us somewhere where every action in science should reflect godly character and love for others as commanded. Then, there’s the intelligent design evidence coming from complexity and systems theory. Universe, natural laws, and organic life make the best creations of humans look dumb and inept in comparison. Especially how the universe runs perfectly. Best I’ve seen humans claim is nine 9’s reliability on something way, way simpler. They couldn’t sustain it either.
  - shellfishgene 2y ago
    There is lots of evidence in chromosome number changes, mostly duplications. Many grasses that we use as crops, such as wheat, have multiple genome copies and thus a much higher number of chromosomes.
    - jdthedisciple 2y ago
      Same challenge to you: Can you name a single animal species whose speciation-by-random-mutation we have witnessed?
      - LegibleCrimson3 2y ago
        Depends on how pedantic you want to be about "speciation". Humans have tons of adaptation just across ethnicities that likely originate in random mutations, sickle-cell anemia being an obvious one. If you're asking for full species change in a laboratory environment (ignoring the fact that what constitutes a "species" is somewhat arbitrary), there have been many studies on that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_speciation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_sp... Claiming that the science is bad because the time scales are large is to discount any hypotheses on large time scales. That blows away nearly all of astronomy and huge potions of geology. That's ridiculous. We can clearly learn about things that have happened in the past by piecing together the mountains of evidence that are available.
        jdthedisciple 2y ago
        The problem with hypotheses on large time scales is that they are not falsifiable. The even bigger problem is to, despite that, make them into de-facto doctrinal tenants such that any critic is automatically labelled a pseudo-scientific nutcase. The additional problem with the hypothesis at hand (speciation-by-random-mutation) is that it has never been observed and thus confirmed. Now what I just stated are simple objective facts that nobody who understands reasoning from first principles AND is academically honest should have any qualms with.
        2y ago
- mbivert 2y ago
  > Changing into new species is just a longer time frame of more an more adaptations Strictly speaking, this is a theory, however reasonable. We know from history that life can be surprising, hence, from a truth point of view, it's better to be careful, avoid rushing to conclusions, especially if this implies closing all other doors.
  - LegibleCrimson3 2y ago
    Strictly speaking, plate tectonics is a theory as well. I get quite tired of people claiming something as a theory as if it casts doubt on it. Evolution is known and accepted by biologists to be an undeniable fact by all but the most fringe. Even the vast majority of Christian biologists accept this.
    - mbivert 2y ago
      The problem is, conflating theories (beliefs really) with truth is one of the things reproached to past religious people. There's no shame in saying: "we don't know for sure, but this is reasonable so far". If we don't, then we're sowing the seeds for discord for when our theories will need to be updated. And it's reasonable to think that they will, as, so far, most (all?) scientific theories has evolved. IIRC, Darwin's views on evolution require patching e.g. to take into consideration chaotic incidents affecting mortality/genes propagation (e.g. asteroids, epidemics). Maybe if that theory keeps accumulating patches, it'll end up very different from where it started!
      - LegibleCrimson3 2y ago
        The details, yes, but denying the fact that all life as we know it has evolved into what it is now from something markedly different is not at all reasonable. I'm not claiming that the entire body of accepted mechanisms and details about evolution are 100% accurate. I'm claiming that something being a theory is not reasonable grounds to disbelieve it entirely. There is no reasonable disbelief in evolution.
        2y ago
- Pikamander2 2y ago
  The blame for that mostly lies on religion and human ego; the idea that humans gradually evolved like everything else and are no more biologically special than rats or monkeys is too much for some people to handle, so they cling to what they want to hear rather than what they can see with their own eyes.
- nickpsecurity 2y ago
  Science doesn’t work that way. Many phenomenon that happen in small ways don’t happen in large ways. A person hits a golf ball a long distance, a basketball is round, and therefore it should do that, too. A person observing golf, but not physics, might extrapolate that. It’s not until they experiment with the other claims that they learn the two behave differently. They’ll eventually learn principles of nature that say what’s possible for that small, dense ball is impossible for that larger, hollow ball. Likewise, many mechanisms found in science, esp biology, work only in local ways with limited or no use outside that. They might require their environment to exist to even work at all with no increments allowed. They might also work with other components in a precise way where neither separate nor incomplete combinations will work. For this reason, we can’t extrapolate much in biology without experiments to verify that. Then, I question why you’d be extrapolating that. Observations of the fossil record show no stream of intermediate forms in most species. Instead, we see extinctions followed by fully-grown animals appearing out of nowhere. Today, we observe zero… zero!… animals changing from one type into another. Everything tastes like chicken because the chickens are still chickens. :) So, your default positions should be these things: much evidence from adaptation within existing forms, billion plus examples against macro-evolution happening in a 2,000 year window, large-scale changes causing organism’ deaths, and changes being so hard to humans’ knowledge can’t create novel creature from existing ones. This combination of observed, replicated data should lead you to default on an intelligent designer, God or something else, being needed to create ultra-high-complexity changes to creatures along with it not happening often. Second, you should treat macro-evolution as falsified since it failed all its predictions. It doesn’t bother me as a scientist at all to say God created and sustains the universe by His will. And made man and the animals. And then drives the universe’s machinery to work in the ways we observe, which includes adaptation (micro-evolution). This fits all observations from complexity theory to universe fine-tuning to how all the laws are elegantly connected to the miracle of self-reproducing/maintaining life forms. Then, the Word of God (Bible) separately explains Jesus Christ did it to redeem us from evil to live with our Creator enjoying Him and His creations forever. That’s revelatory, not empirical, knowledge. Studying the creation is great but knowing the Creator is better. Especially seeing Him modify the laws of the universe to makes specific things happen in response to our needs or prayers. If anything, science deepened my knowlege of how powerful and good God must be.
mdp2021 2y ago
It does not work that way. Put (pseudo-)Popper aside and read Lakatos. They should first identify an experiment and - and then, if it fails, refine the experiment as reasonable assessment requires. Edit: what? It is part of the sophisticated successor of falsification, it reflects the history of Science, and it just makes sense. I cannot give a course in a post. Find material Lakatos: it is more than absolutely worth it.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  Reading part way through an article on Lakatos makes it seem that he is the saint of modern non-replicable "science" (I put that word in quotes cuz I'm not sure what it means anymore) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/#LakaBigIdea https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/#LakaBigIdea
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    I would not put it that way - of course we want «replicable» Science, as we (and in particular Lakatos) want it to provide predictions, and we value Science primarily for that capacity. Nonetheless, disappointing experiments must be treated reasonably (still Lakatos). We do not throw away theories - complex beasts that are best considered as "programmes" also to underline that they involve components - because an outcome was problematic: we investigate till we frame the problem in a sub-theory of "what could have gone wrong". Going towards the case of OP's statements which I countered, to corroborate some theory you conceive experiments to see if it is fact-resistant (Popper - but also fact compliant, which remains the main basic thing), but then you would also refine it according to the complications given by facts. Maybe you need more sophisticated ways to assess your results. > I put that word in quotes cuz I'm not sure what [science] means anymore Well, since we are on Lakatos, let us rephrase him: Science would be something that allows predictions.
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    Now look at that: I am academically qualified, I have _degrees_ on these topics, and I get sniped; an interlocutor takes the time to find and check and propose some material, finds enough life within to inquire, and gets sniped. Moderators, we need to tackle all of this absurd incivility.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Changing into new species is just a longer time frame of more an more adaptations. Not sure why people aren't able to extrapolate that.

jdthedisciple 2y ago
Maybe that's how fairy tales work, but not science. Changing your chromosome numbers is an entirely different (and unproven to have ever occurred) beast compared to simply expressing some different but previously already present genes due to changing environments (something easily observable). Not sure why people aren't able to grasp that.
- sethammons 2y ago
  What are you talking about? Of course chromosome number changes have been seen: see every Down's syndrome person ever. Had that been an advantageous change, Down's people would be successfully increasing their percentage of the population
  - jdthedisciple 2y ago
    Let's make it extremely simple for you: Can you name a single species whose speciation-by-random-mutation we have witnessed? Have I missed the Down-syndrome one (or any analogous known gene mutation) which has been continuously procreating all this time? Besides the fact that Down-syndrome is a terrible example since Down-syndrome-parents would not necessarily produce offspring with the same genetic disorder, hence no speciation-by-random-mutation. I thought people learn this stuff in HS...
    - Thiez 2y ago
      "Species" itself is a vague concept in biology. It makes sense at a HS level like "dog is a different species from elephant" but it breaks down in more complex cases, e.g. lion + tiger. Ring species are also a nice example where individuals from A breed with B so same species, B breeds with C so same species, …, but A does not breed with E so not the same species. If we exterminate the populations B, C, and D, A and E are now definitely different species, so I would argue we could observe speciation that way? But while the populations between them exist, it's more muddled. Since evolution moves slowly there are two ways to see it in action: either you experiment with a species that reproduces very rapidly, or you look at fossil records. For the first type bacteria are usually used, but since bacteria don't have sexual reproduction a naysayer could always cast doubt on whether a new species has truly been created (are any two individual bacteria really the same species? Who can tell, short of verifying base-by-base equality of their DNA), so it won't convince someone who is determined to doubt evolution. For the fossil records we have literal mountains of evidence where the development of existing and extinct species can be observed. But I imagine you won't count that as "witnessing" it happening. I feel like many people who doubt evolution use a standard of evidence that they don't use for any other scientific theory, and probably not for any other area in their life either. Other people have mentioned it already: plate tectonics, almost all of astronomy... we could extend it to history too. Did you witness the founding of the United States? If documented history count as proof of stuff like founding of the US, the civil war, and the first world war, then why don't fossils count as proof of evolution?
      - 2y ago
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  Yeah man, totally. Creationists have been pushing this boulder up the hill as long as I can remember. Any day now there will be some aspect of evolution that will stump biologists indefinitely and will never be answered. Meanwhile the proposed alternative seems to be: some dude just created it all and he's supernatural so we can't even conceive of a way to falsify his existence. Talk about fairy tales!
  - jdthedisciple 2y ago
    Fyi, I'm not negating evolution per se. I'm operating strictly within the realm of the empiricism-based scientific method. It should not be so sensitive to scrutiny and skepticism. So creationism or not, let me pose the simple challenge to you as well: Can you name a single species whose speciation-by-random-mutation we have actually observed? You see, the hard fact, which many of my beloved scientistic friends have yet to come to terms with, is that technically speaking, the speciation-by-random-mutation is a scientifically invalid hypothesis because it is not even falsifiable. In other words, it is a mere conjecture (and sadly nowadays even a doctrinal belief) like any other, from an honest, objective, naturalistic point of view. But I don't even need to get into that because most of my beloved atheists will already have more of an impulsive emotional reaction to that rather than facing it head-on.
    - FrustratedMonky 2y ago
      "actually observed" Maybe the problem here is you disagree with what an 'observation' is. If you are saying, I must physically see speciation or plate tectonics, myself, within my lifetime. And thus any events that occur over longer time spans, when I'll be dead, and not observing them, thus they cannot be proven? Anything with a long time scale is by your definition, invalid science?
  - nickpsecurity 2y ago
    You’re missing something that science-as-religion made people forget. Science is just one type of knowledge that isn’t even how most people learn most knowledge most of the time. We mostly learn by testimony from sources we trust mixed with experiential learning. Works fine. We also have science. So, we first need to get back to the pre-Hume period where godless, materialistic science wasn’t the answer to all questions or the only way forward. Second, we must be able to say what we’ve always known: it’s OK for science to say “I have no idea. We might never know that because we can’t scientifically observe or test it.” That’s what they should say about the origin of life. What can we know? We can indirectly observe the attributes to take guesses. If not knowing, we can work with God’s design rather than against it. Really, only revelatory knowledge… the Creator telling us… will tell us anything close to the truth. We’ve claimed both. I already posted evidence for the Bible being the Word of God in this thread. People who follow Jesus Christ treat key claims as axioms before layering reasoned statements on top of those and scientific observations. Unlike other faiths, we’ve found no contradictions. Unlike godless science with its axioms, ours lead us somewhere where every action in science should reflect godly character and love for others as commanded. Then, there’s the intelligent design evidence coming from complexity and systems theory. Universe, natural laws, and organic life make the best creations of humans look dumb and inept in comparison. Especially how the universe runs perfectly. Best I’ve seen humans claim is nine 9’s reliability on something way, way simpler. They couldn’t sustain it either.
- shellfishgene 2y ago
  There is lots of evidence in chromosome number changes, mostly duplications. Many grasses that we use as crops, such as wheat, have multiple genome copies and thus a much higher number of chromosomes.
  - jdthedisciple 2y ago
    Same challenge to you: Can you name a single animal species whose speciation-by-random-mutation we have witnessed?
    - LegibleCrimson3 2y ago
      Depends on how pedantic you want to be about "speciation". Humans have tons of adaptation just across ethnicities that likely originate in random mutations, sickle-cell anemia being an obvious one. If you're asking for full species change in a laboratory environment (ignoring the fact that what constitutes a "species" is somewhat arbitrary), there have been many studies on that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_speciation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_experiments_of_sp... Claiming that the science is bad because the time scales are large is to discount any hypotheses on large time scales. That blows away nearly all of astronomy and huge potions of geology. That's ridiculous. We can clearly learn about things that have happened in the past by piecing together the mountains of evidence that are available.
      - jdthedisciple 2y ago
        The problem with hypotheses on large time scales is that they are not falsifiable. The even bigger problem is to, despite that, make them into de-facto doctrinal tenants such that any critic is automatically labelled a pseudo-scientific nutcase. The additional problem with the hypothesis at hand (speciation-by-random-mutation) is that it has never been observed and thus confirmed. Now what I just stated are simple objective facts that nobody who understands reasoning from first principles AND is academically honest should have any qualms with.
        2y ago
mbivert 2y ago
> Changing into new species is just a longer time frame of more an more adaptations Strictly speaking, this is a theory, however reasonable. We know from history that life can be surprising, hence, from a truth point of view, it's better to be careful, avoid rushing to conclusions, especially if this implies closing all other doors.
- LegibleCrimson3 2y ago
  Strictly speaking, plate tectonics is a theory as well. I get quite tired of people claiming something as a theory as if it casts doubt on it. Evolution is known and accepted by biologists to be an undeniable fact by all but the most fringe. Even the vast majority of Christian biologists accept this.
  - mbivert 2y ago
    The problem is, conflating theories (beliefs really) with truth is one of the things reproached to past religious people. There's no shame in saying: "we don't know for sure, but this is reasonable so far". If we don't, then we're sowing the seeds for discord for when our theories will need to be updated. And it's reasonable to think that they will, as, so far, most (all?) scientific theories has evolved. IIRC, Darwin's views on evolution require patching e.g. to take into consideration chaotic incidents affecting mortality/genes propagation (e.g. asteroids, epidemics). Maybe if that theory keeps accumulating patches, it'll end up very different from where it started!
    - LegibleCrimson3 2y ago
      The details, yes, but denying the fact that all life as we know it has evolved into what it is now from something markedly different is not at all reasonable. I'm not claiming that the entire body of accepted mechanisms and details about evolution are 100% accurate. I'm claiming that something being a theory is not reasonable grounds to disbelieve it entirely. There is no reasonable disbelief in evolution.
      - 2y ago
Pikamander2 2y ago
The blame for that mostly lies on religion and human ego; the idea that humans gradually evolved like everything else and are no more biologically special than rats or monkeys is too much for some people to handle, so they cling to what they want to hear rather than what they can see with their own eyes.
nickpsecurity 2y ago
Science doesn’t work that way. Many phenomenon that happen in small ways don’t happen in large ways. A person hits a golf ball a long distance, a basketball is round, and therefore it should do that, too. A person observing golf, but not physics, might extrapolate that. It’s not until they experiment with the other claims that they learn the two behave differently. They’ll eventually learn principles of nature that say what’s possible for that small, dense ball is impossible for that larger, hollow ball. Likewise, many mechanisms found in science, esp biology, work only in local ways with limited or no use outside that. They might require their environment to exist to even work at all with no increments allowed. They might also work with other components in a precise way where neither separate nor incomplete combinations will work. For this reason, we can’t extrapolate much in biology without experiments to verify that. Then, I question why you’d be extrapolating that. Observations of the fossil record show no stream of intermediate forms in most species. Instead, we see extinctions followed by fully-grown animals appearing out of nowhere. Today, we observe zero… zero!… animals changing from one type into another. Everything tastes like chicken because the chickens are still chickens. :) So, your default positions should be these things: much evidence from adaptation within existing forms, billion plus examples against macro-evolution happening in a 2,000 year window, large-scale changes causing organism’ deaths, and changes being so hard to humans’ knowledge can’t create novel creature from existing ones. This combination of observed, replicated data should lead you to default on an intelligent designer, God or something else, being needed to create ultra-high-complexity changes to creatures along with it not happening often. Second, you should treat macro-evolution as falsified since it failed all its predictions. It doesn’t bother me as a scientist at all to say God created and sustains the universe by His will. And made man and the animals. And then drives the universe’s machinery to work in the ways we observe, which includes adaptation (micro-evolution). This fits all observations from complexity theory to universe fine-tuning to how all the laws are elegantly connected to the miracle of self-reproducing/maintaining life forms. Then, the Word of God (Bible) separately explains Jesus Christ did it to redeem us from evil to live with our Creator enjoying Him and His creations forever. That’s revelatory, not empirical, knowledge. Studying the creation is great but knowing the Creator is better. Especially seeing Him modify the laws of the universe to makes specific things happen in response to our needs or prayers. If anything, science deepened my knowlege of how powerful and good God must be.

mdp2021 2y ago

It does not work that way. Put (pseudo-)Popper aside and read Lakatos. They should first identify an experiment and - and then, if it fails, refine the experiment as reasonable assessment requires. Edit: what? It is part of the sophisticated successor of falsification, it reflects the history of Science, and it just makes sense. I cannot give a course in a post. Find material Lakatos: it is more than absolutely worth it.

readthenotes1 2y ago
Reading part way through an article on Lakatos makes it seem that he is the saint of modern non-replicable "science" (I put that word in quotes cuz I'm not sure what it means anymore) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/#LakaBigIdea https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/#LakaBigIdea
- mdp2021 2y ago
  I would not put it that way - of course we want «replicable» Science, as we (and in particular Lakatos) want it to provide predictions, and we value Science primarily for that capacity. Nonetheless, disappointing experiments must be treated reasonably (still Lakatos). We do not throw away theories - complex beasts that are best considered as "programmes" also to underline that they involve components - because an outcome was problematic: we investigate till we frame the problem in a sub-theory of "what could have gone wrong". Going towards the case of OP's statements which I countered, to corroborate some theory you conceive experiments to see if it is fact-resistant (Popper - but also fact compliant, which remains the main basic thing), but then you would also refine it according to the complications given by facts. Maybe you need more sophisticated ways to assess your results. > I put that word in quotes cuz I'm not sure what [science] means anymore Well, since we are on Lakatos, let us rephrase him: Science would be something that allows predictions.
- mdp2021 2y ago
  Now look at that: I am academically qualified, I have _degrees_ on these topics, and I get sniped; an interlocutor takes the time to find and check and propose some material, finds enough life within to inquire, and gets sniped. Moderators, we need to tackle all of this absurd incivility.