In "Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD."

/me wanders in, and looks confused would someone mind, fer the love o' whatever, explain to me how and where the US went totally batshit insane? I mean, this is just getting way out of hand...

In ""

my favourite quote from a naughty lad (and one of my best mates) is "99% of all chicks are awesome, man. The rest ain't figured it out yet." Makeup or no, chicks are hot.

In "HotCaptcha"

Good eye. That's why all of MoFi is mocking the sexism. Because we're all sexist. Your attention to detail astounds.> *badaboom* that's me told...

/delurk Hedgehogs, kittens, heffalumps. Much better than what appears to be Sexism Day on MoFi.

In "Newsfilter: Judge rules Intelligent Design not acceptable in Pa. Biology Curriculum"

Mr. Knickerbocker, I think you have some confusion about what 'falsifiable' means in the scientific context. We're not talking about 'can be proved to be false' any more than we're talking about 'right' and 'wrong'. What 'falsifiable' means is 'has a hypothesis and a method that can be tested'. Just as 'theory' has a different meaning in the scientific world to the everyday world...

You of course would shackle and smother all opposition. Um. No. Read it again. Science is research. Research is published and judged by other scientists, based on empirical evidence and testable hypothesis (those words again) ID produces very little research, and what research it does produce is very quickly proved wrong, not "smothered and shackled". Once more, science is not about which hypothesis is "better", "most appealing" or "most popular": it is about which hypothesis is FALSE or NOT-FALSE. If ID produces NOT-FALSE data that can be experimentally or observationally tested then it is science. It has not done this to date. You, cynnbad, spoke for god. You also attempted to bring partisanship into it with your "when the knee-jerks on who are self-leftidentifying can debate it sensibly" comment. I called you on both of these and rejected the place of politics in the debate. Please do not reintroduce politics when it is not relevant. You have absolutely no idea of my political affiliation, or my religious, cultural and intellectual position, so don't attempt to deduce it from stereotypes.

cynnbad, that was trollish. No-one has knee-jerked you at all! At worst, I asked you for clarification and... horror of horrors! I rebutted your points by asking for your proof. And don't you dare get all 'left-vs-right' on this issue. The judge is a known conservative and appointee of George W. Bush. 'Sensible debate' doesn't mean 'when everyone agrees with cynnbad'!

I think their thinking is worth considering.. Why? It gives a bad name to science AND philosophy!

and path - a great example of the bad design principles our nominal 'designer' had is the size of a human baby's head at birth. Why design a birth mechanism to deliver an object larger than the hole it's supposed to come out of? ID, of course, likes to pretend that we don't know the designer's motivations...

sorry, that was to cynnbad

No, we don't have to "acknowledge those who disagree" at all. Science is based on FALSE and NOT-FALSE distinction. It is not a popularity contest where everyone gets their five minutes. Theory must be empirical, evidentiary and testable. ID is none of these things. Evolutionary theory is all of them. ID is FALSE, evolution is NOT-FALSE.

quoth cynnbad: You're joking, right? No. I'm really not. Where is the evidence that the singular, Judaeo-Christian God you're invoking created anything? The argument you present is exactly that of ID, that 'something that we don't understand happened at a time that we don't know and resulted in the universe, hence God' As I said earlier, science is empirical. It is based on observation, evidence, and testable hypothesis. ID is not. And it is being presented as science, not philosophy.

yes, fine sure... but where's the evidence?

sorry, that wasn't really clear... thanks for clearing that up. I don't think you're right there, but I don't have the means to unpack it (damn my lack of science! damn it!)

cynnbad - um?

f8xmulder - the archives of The Panda's Thumb explain a lot about the disjunct between ID and evolution. (The commenters can be antagonistic, though - I often don't read them as they do not reflect accurately upon the scientific world at large) They also discuss - a lot - that the ID community is not engaged in producing research of quality that "does point out some of the flaws and gaps in evolutionary theory." (as you put it) In fact you can read, weekly, articles in science journals (popular and scholarly) that ID cannot explain the 'flaws and gaps' in itself, let alone evolution. Science is based on empirical research which is published to a community of peers, challenged, and researched again. This is the quality of ID research - and it is, even to this non-scientist's eye, not good. TalkOrigins contains a lot of excellent, well-written, fact-based articles and FAQs that explain the differences in approach and philosophy of Creationism, Itelligent Design, and evolutionary theory and is a clear indication of how such faith-based (there, I said it!) disciplines are derived from faulty, incorrect or contrarian assumptions. The reason that "This typically gets short shrift in the academic and scientific community" is because ID is neither academic nor scientific. Science is not a political debate - there are not two sides that should recieve equal airtime. There are only assumptions proved false and assumptions proved not-false. In the overwhelming majority, the assumptions of ID 'research' have already been proved false, the literature has been published and the conclusions accepted as another step along the path to understanding our universe. This overview may be a better guide than I.

In "South Park Generator"

You love it. You know you do.

In "Punk photos."

but if you're nice to me i'll keep swede

i'm finding all of this very artichoke down.

In "Award-winning George"

Fuck history. I've got a willy.

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