Interesting idea. I do not know the ultimate fate of The WGARSland... Do you recall its author by any chance? (I have my own guess, but I would like yours first...) If we agree on an author, we could ask if they still have a copy should they ever return...

All quite valid. Comes from me last approaching Anthro seriously in college, my word, twenty years ago. I can keep up with the physics, astronomy and I have to keep up with the CS. My wife tries to keep up with the bio, but her free time is even less than mine. Plus, she's always been a canine specialist. She has a submariner's approach to biology: there are only two animals, canines and prey.



Actually, I am a brain in a jar. All my posts are written by banging my visual cortex into an exposed wire in specific patterns to represent ASCII. Plus, I've forgotten the code for the letter after 'y', further complicating things. And don't get me started on Unicode.

122 decimal. 7A hex. 172 octal. 01111010 binary. That's for the small 'z', of course; for the capital 'Z' merely turn off the third bit as usual.

I KNEW IT.

Someone on these boards owes me 50 bucks.

You are implying that I was demanding clarification in cases where I already knew the answer, just in order to be difficult. That is neither fair nor accurate. As far as I can tell, waffle is not a practicing professional scientist, any more than am I. Given that, I think it's legitimate for me to find out whether when he makes a statement of scientific fact is he making the same caveats that a professional scientist would.

Even now, I'm not confident that he is. As you yourself pointed out, not every statement waffle presented as "fact" is confirmed to the extent that he implied.

You might want to dismiss these as "nitpicks" but in fact, this is the very core of the topic we are discussing. Is there truly a difference in kind (note: kind, not degree, there is clearly a difference of degree) between when I say "It is a fact that God exists" and waffle says "it is a fact that Australopithecus is extinct"? If he is including the proper caveats, then he legitimately has the full weight of scientific consensus on his side. If he is not including them, then he does not.

I thought that one of the participants was a known entity on the boards - a moderator, even, and the others were sock-puppets. Am I misremembering this?

Heh, I was being silly for my own nefarious purposes. I think we both recall the thread and the author, but I do not remember any specifics about the poem itself. Still, a debate between Kahzmick and whoever would be pretty fun to watch I think. But for now, I think we should drop this topic and get out of the way of Kit's thread.

Is there anything, that would need to happen, to convince you god does not exist? And you base your conviction, that god does exist, on this still not happening.

I'd also include things not happening affirming god's existence, and their occurrence weighing against it.

Yes, of course there is a difference in kind. Waffle may not be a practicing scientist, but he also doesn't appear to be an idiot, so we can take it for granted that he is aware that all knowledge is provisional, and nothing can ever be absolute. "Australopithecus is an extinct hominid" is a statement about a scientific topic, and it is one agreed upon universally by all workers in the field*. When we say 'it is a fact that' about a subject in science, we mean that this is universally or near-universally accepted by workers in the appropriate field due to the weight of evidence in its favour, even if it could be overturned by some unforeseen discovery.

'God exists' is a fundamentally different statement. It's a deeply controversial one that sparks much disagreement, and which is often argued to be fundamentally unknowable. It's not a scientific topic, there is no body of workers judging on any preponderance of evidence. Saying 'It is a fact' in this case has a wholly different meaning. It's a declaration of strong belief.

*If you'd like me to throw in some caveats, maybe there's a radical, iconoclastic palaeontologist in Chile who thinks Australopithecus is a misidentified Cercopithecid, but I doubt it.

OK, I'm with you. God isn't falsifiable, the characteristics of Australopithecus are supported by the weight of evidence, the universe of scientific discourse is the assumed context for any statement such as Waffle's. I'm not disputing any of that. But here's the follow-up question:

1) Waffle attached this modifier to his statement: "That is a cold, hard fact and is not going to change. Ever."

Otherwise I might have taken his statements exactly as caffeine describes above. But it seems that this attached statement specifically moves the prior statements into a new category of claims of absolute knowledge. It's hard for me to see another way to interpret those words. What else can be meant by "cold hard fact" and "not going to ever change"?

Let's go to the instant replay:



The point I was trying to make is this: Observations are different from theory. There are two nearly identical terms, Evolution and the Theory of Evolution, which were being thrown around as if they were interchangeable. They are not. What I was listing were facts about the fossil record.

This is a fact:


This is a member of the genus Australopithecus. That is a fact. More to the point, it is a definition. Animals with skeletal features matching this specimen's are assigned to the genus Australopithecus. This is how we define the genus. If they share the broad features, but differ on some specifics, we assign them to a different species than the one above (A. afarensis). But all those bearing a similar overall structure to the remains of the above animal are grouped into the genus Australopithecus. Bonus points to anyone who can identify our celebrity guest (without looking at the URL).

This particular specimen has been reliably dated to 3.2 million years ago by argon-argon radiometric dating. The dating was done on volcanic ash found 1 meter and 18 meters beneath the remains. Dating was done by the Institute of Human Origins, which has published the details of how the dating was accomplished. Performing checks on both layers gives an important cross check on the reliability of the dating techniques. But that is just for our celebrity guest.

Several other members of the genus Australopithecus have been discovered. Dating on these remains give us the range of the genus. That range is between four and two million years ago. The dates have been checked and cross checked, with the results verified by scrutiny of the techniques, using multiple laboratories for the dating and using multiple techniques (argon-argon, potassium-argon, etc). The dates agree within this broad range. The most impressive dating are footprints matching the genus Australopithecus tracked across the fresh fallen ash of a volcanic eruption, just before the ash turned to concrete due to rainfall. In this case, the fossil footprints can be dated directly, 3.6 million years ago.

The dates for these fossils are unlikely to change outside the error bars on the date estimates. More fossils might eventually be discovered and classified into the genus Australopithecus. This might push the date range for the genus out further. We may redefine the genus more narrowly, excluding some creatures and tightening up the date range a bit. What is not going to change is the scale of dates involved. These creatures lived and died two to four million years ago. This is an observation about the remains. There may be some wiggle room in the dates by a few thousand years, but that's about it.

In other words, Australopithecus as a genus lived between two and four million years ago. That is a fact.

Finally, Australopithecus and humanity share a common ancestor. Do this. Go back up to our celebrity guest. Cover that jaw bone with your thumb and look at the skeleton. Look at the ribs. Look at the hips. Look at that arm. Look at that knee. I'm not going to get into the details of the skeletal features, if anyone is interested, there's plenty of reading online. Here are the conclusions. This creature had the knees, thighs, hips and lumbar vertebrae of an upright walking ape. Let me say that again: this creature walked upright.

How far distant from humanity this creature is on the evolutionary tree is a matter of debate. But that this creature and humanity share a common ancestor is a direct conclusion from the morphology of the fossil and an understanding of the morphology of the living members of the hominid family: gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans and humans. And of the four, this creature shares the most similarities with humanity. This is not an ancestor of humanity, that's too strong a statement. But this creature and humanity share an ancestor. And that is as close to one can get to a fact in paleobiology.

My original point was this. These points above are facts. They are observations. Any grand unified theory of biology, be that the Theory of Evolution or some subsequent theory will have to conform to these facts. In science, theories can change. But the reason they change is because the new theory more closely conforms to the observations made. A new theory must match all the observations made, plus whatever new observations led to the abandonment of the original theory. At this point, the weight of observation is so high that any replacement to the Theory of Evolution will look pretty much identical to the Theory of Evolution when discussing observations we already know.

In other words, we are not free to speculate that scientific theories represent some sort of faith because they may be arbitrarily replaced at any time. Replacement theories are sharply confined by the observations made. One of the tests of any new theory is how well it accommodates existing observations. This means that in regions where we know the old theory to be accurate, we expect, even demand, that any replacement theory yield identical results to the old theory.

kitoba, I think you're really, really, really reaching here.

In any case, I think it is time to reveal our guest celebrity. Come on out and say hi to the crowd, Lucy:

I think the kinds of assumptions you are making, and the language you are using would be fine in 99% of the discussions you might get into. But this is the 1% of conversations where it isn't, because you're using science to make philosophical points. It doesn't matter how much evidence there is, or how convincing it is, science doesn't yield absolutes. It is specifically designed not to make absolute claims.

I'm not sure why this is considered a provocative or controversial statement.



I think maybe the communication gap here is that you have a lot of negative connotations to the word "faith" that I don't share. Calling something a matter of "faith" to me neither implies that it is based on no evidence, nor that it contradicts the available evidence, nor that it can be arbitrarily replaced. If that's how you define faith, I can see why we've had so little luck in seeing each other's point of view.

I don't think it is. I think the controversial statement is that when someone calls something a cold hard fact that is not going to change, it means that they're 100% certain in a philosophical sense, rather than 99.999% certain in a practical sense. This is certainly not the common use. And more: while you said "all men are mortal" was a premise and not a fact, I picked it because a quick search found lots of discussions where it was called a "fact" anyway, so I'm not sure yours is even the universal use in philosophy.

At any rate, whatever the semantics of the word, I'm not sure how you could miss that waffle is not actually making what you are calling absolute claims; it seems really obvious from his explanations. Science would not become a faith simply because people aren't using the word in the sense you think they should.

Wasn't this the origin of this discussion in the previous thread? How did we base another discussion on the assumption that this had been resolved when it clearly hadn't?