I don't think scientific illiterates should be allowed to sit on the Science and Technology committee. But that's just me.
I think it reflects extremely poorly on the Republicans in general that they would vote for such a twit to be on that committee. Even if you say, well, he doesn't represent all Republicans, the sad fact is that the other Republicans in Congress have enabled him to get on that committee, which is precisely where he has no business being.
It's no wonder that only 9% of scientists are Republican.
I agree wholeheartedly. I feel very much that there is no excuse what so ever for this person to be an ELECTED LEADER much less someone on the board of science and technology.
If you believe that (then .......well I shall reserve my opinion) then thats fine. If your people that you represent TRUELY believe that then its the best thing for you to be. However please......under no circumstances try to work on the science and technology committy.
Depends on what he means when he says "evolution" If he is doubting a abiogenesis then I would not call him anti scientific as the truth of that is still hotly contested. If he means common ancestry is a lie then he is going against the facts.
I'm withholding judgement until their is further clarification.
If he thinks that evolution is abiogenesis, that also doesn't speak too kindly to his scientific literacy. Could be an honest mistake, but if that were the case, I would expect a statement saying so after he was no doubt informed as to what evolution is.
he litterally means that the world was created by an all knowing being in 6 days 9000 years ago. Everyting you see right now is how it was created 9000 years ago with only a few slight differences. The evolutionary fact that we evolved alongside other primates from a common ancestor is denied. The fact that evolution is a THING is denied. Dinosaurs walked along side man and the big bang is a myth created by evil satan worshiping 'scientists' hell bent on defacing christianity which is the one true path to god.
Depends on what he means when he says "evolution" If he is doubting a abiogenesis then I would not call him anti scientific as the truth of that is still hotly contested. If he means common ancestry is a lie then he is going against the facts.
I'm withholding judgement until their is further clarification.
The existence of abiogenesis is not hotly contested. Abiogenesis is just the idea that living matter formed from non-living matter at some point through natural means. The mechanism of abiogenesis is contested, but not the fact that it happened in some way.
The existence of abiogenesis is not hotly contested. Abiogenesis is just the idea that living matter formed from non-living matter at some point through natural means. The mechanism of abiogenesis is contested, but not the fact that it happened in some way.
Putting it that way even Jews and Christians believe Adam was formed from dust and given life.
The mechanism is contested because spontaneous abiogenesis violates the rule of theoretical impossibility.
Edit: Is this in debate because it is about religion+politics?
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Out of the blackness and stench of the engulfing swamp emerged a shimmering figure. Only the splattered armor and ichor-stained sword hinted at the unfathomable evil the knight had just laid waste.
Honestly, America, I just don't get this. I don't get how, in the 21st century, a man in a wealthy nation with a good, solid education system can espouse these views in a political forum and still be taken seriously enough to hold a position as significant as congressman. I know he doesn't speak for all of you, I know intelligent design advocates lost their battle to have their "scientific ideas" taught in schools, but this is still utterly shocking and to those of us on the outside it's utterly baffling that this sort of thing comes up so often.
How is it that the same nation who gave the world NASA - something you really should be incredibly proud of - also has people like this in positions of power?
It's elected office and there are a lot of Americans that reject Evolution. Even in some American schools Evolution is challenged, see the Kansas school boards that started the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster satire with trumped up assertions passed off as scientific analysis.
It is concerning to see these people have legislative power. See the Missouri representative that thinks if he legitimately rapes a woman she will not become pregnant. That man votes on sex education and contraceptive legislation.
Honestly, America, I just don't get this. I don't get how, in the 21st century, a man in a wealthy nation with a good, solid education system can espouse these views in a political forum and still be taken seriously enough to hold a position as significant as congressman. I know he doesn't speak for all of you, I know intelligent design advocates lost their battle to have their "scientific ideas" taught in schools, but this is still utterly shocking and to those of us on the outside it's utterly baffling that this sort of thing comes up so often.
How is it that the same nation who gave the world NASA - something you really should be incredibly proud of - also has people like this in positions of power?
Its actually extremely simple. We have a vast difference in intelligence between people. You have some people who are for some reason able to break through from this overly religious bonds and actually muster some intellectual thought.
However you have some hicks in the middle of georgia (no offense to Georgia. I lived there for a few years myself) that are putting more stock into what they read (often misread) in the roughly translated English version of an ancient Jewish Text and actually taking it literally. Several of these people are taught since childhood that anything not Christianity is of the Devil and trying to sway you from heaven. Its like a really really really really bad brainwashing.
Religion itself isn't bad (its debatable in this forum but my stance is that its not innately damaging) but its definitely a danger in the hands of idiots being led by a persuasive idiot.
If you've ever read the book 1984 a lot of Americans practice doublethink. Its where they can learn science and such without actually believing the theory behind it. I honestly don't know how they do it but .....some people do it.
I agree that we are actually the ONLY country that has a disproportionate wealth to people who reject creationism. There is actually a chart (i'll try to find it) showing a direct correlation between acceptance of Evolution and average income of people in different countries. The ONLY country that doesn't fit in the near perfect curve is America...... and It kinda sickens me.
The rate of people who disbelieve the facts of evolution is frankly embarrassing, but there's not much to be done about it. We believe in freedom more strongly than we believe in getting things right, so we can't just go and forcibly educate folks in some of those totally backwards states.
I agree that we are actually the ONLY country that has a disproportionate wealth to people who reject creationism. There is actually a chart (i'll try to find it) showing a direct correlation between acceptance of Evolution and average income of people in different countries. The ONLY country that doesn't fit in the near perfect curve is America...... and It kinda sickens me.
USA isn't a counterexample to that, it's just a country which is much too large to lump into one single heading. Chart it state by state and you'll see that there's a strong (but probably not perfect) correlation between belief in evolution and wealth. States like New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California have relatively high levels of wealth and high levels of belief in evolution; states like Arkansas, Missouri, and Mississippi have relatively low wealth and low belief in evolution.
This is of course indirectly causal; states with high wealth have better educational systems, states with better educational systems have higher belief in evolution, and having a strong educational system contributes to sustaining or building on high levels of wealth into the future.
Honestly, America, I just don't get this. I don't get how, in the 21st century, a man in a wealthy nation with a good, solid education system can espouse these views in a political forum and still be taken seriously enough to hold a position as significant as congressman. I know he doesn't speak for all of you, I know intelligent design advocates lost their battle to have their "scientific ideas" taught in schools, but this is still utterly shocking and to those of us on the outside it's utterly baffling that this sort of thing comes up so often.
How is it that the same nation who gave the world NASA - something you really should be incredibly proud of - also has people like this in positions of power?
The basic explanation is that we've got bad primary schools but good universities. So our best and brightest can excel, but - notwithstanding Bush-era education programs - a lot of children get left behind.
Don't know if it's the one you're thinking of but I recently saw this doing the rounds on facebook. Was pretty interesting to say the least.
Okay, a few things -
First: the rejection of this scientific fact in the US is sad and embarrassing. That's true regardless of anything else.
Second: The proposed best-fit curve is pretty loose. Of particular note, the further you go to the right the more data points you find below the curve.
Third: The data points seem selective. bLatch's comment made me look for some Middle Eastern nations, but for "Western Asia" there was only Turkey and Cyprus, the most heavily Europeanized. And for other non-European countries there was no India, no China, no Mexico, no Brazil, not even Canada - just Japan. To be clear, I'm not accusing this Piro fellow of cherry-picking intentionally; I suspect the data simply weren't available. But we're not getting the whole picture. We're seeing a trend line for Europe.
Thus stuff just comes with the territory of having publicly elected officials. The best way to counter the anti-science thought(/movement?) is to vote him and others like him out of office.
Well the only reason that the Middle Eastern countries have such a high average income is because of a very select few ultra wealthy men who make money from oil. The rest are dirt poor. So They are a very very very bad example of even having a "mean household income".
I assume that is why they were not in the chart.
But anyone looking at the chart can see that America is the only country that doesn't fit the curve. Yes there is room for error but America is the only country that completely ignores it.
But anyone looking at the chart can see that America is the only country that doesn't fit the curve. Yes there is room for error but America is the only country that completely ignores it.
America and Japan are also the only two countries that aren't on or adjacent to the continent of Europe. Japan is not a suitable stand-in for "every non-European and non-American country on the planet".
And the curve has to bend quite sharply for Turkey to be on it.
Seriously, how can anybody looking at this chart not see that it is "statistics" in the full Mark Twain sense of the term? Hell, it doesn't even pass the very first test I use to check for a misleading graph: the axes are truncated so the origin isn't at (0, 0).
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
America and Japan are also the only two countries that aren't on or adjacent to the continent of Europe. Japan is not a suitable stand-in for "every non-European and non-American country on the planet".
And the curve has to bend quite sharply for Turkey to be on it.
Seriously, how can anybody looking at this chart not see that it is "statistics" in the full Mark Twain sense of the term? Hell, it doesn't even pass the very first test I use to check for a misleading graph: the axes are truncated so the origin isn't at (0, 0).
Indeed. It doesn't look like a totally accurate chart that would stand up in a Harvard presentation.
However the facts behind it are real. There is a real correlation between acceptance of real scientific fact and national average income.
It isn't just this guy that's on the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
There's also Rep. Tod Akin (Missouri) who up until recently believed he could not get a woman pregnant through legitimate rape. Roscoe Bartlett. Randy Neugebauer. Dana Rohrabacher. Sandy Adams. Ralph Hall.
Pres. Obama just recently lifted a ban on stem-cell research in the United States in 2009. If it had not been for the stem-cell research ban, it might have been a US scientist receiving the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Instead of Nobel Prizes, our MD's with Chemistry degrees are renouncing their studies as conspiracies.
Earlier this year scientists at the LHC had a breakthrough on the Higgs particle and how matter is composed. The US could have made that breakthrough ten years earlier if we hadn't cut off funding for the SSC halfway through construction.
NASA has seen drastic cuts. The US now has to team with Russia to send astronauts into space. The lone consolations being the Curiosity Mars Rover and increased attention by private US citizens to fund space travel.
It's not too late. A US scientist shared the Nobel Prize for Physics this year. He's made a tremendous stride for Atomic clocks and maybe Quantum Computing, but we need to come together as a country to embrace science, encourage scientific study, and dismiss members on the House Science Committee that fight science as conspiracy.
People like this are still in the congress at this day and age.
Yeah, the thing is, the crazy turn their craziness into a cause. This is why fad dieting is always a cause. And vitamin pills. And bottled water. And oh so much more.
And once you do that, other people will gravitate to your craziness.
Broun reminds me of Dr. Oz in some ways. Both commit medical fraud for a particular population (fundamentalists for Broun, talk show hosts for Oz) in order to get a cult of personality.
But they're both really just a 21st-century medicine show in the end.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
All I wonder is when has science started to teach atheism. Atheism is the only world view brasen enough to think it can be a spokesperson for science.
Science has not taught atheism, certain strains of atheists have touted science to disprove religion. Religion, as I know it through the Catholic, Methodist, and Episcopalian Christian faiths, has not taught against science. Certain strains of religion have fostered anti-science, as this man clearly believes scientific theories are conspiracies against accepting a spiritual savior.
All I wonder is when has science started to teach atheism. Atheism is the only world view brasen enough to think it can be a spokesperson for science.
Mr. Broun is definitely not an atheist, and he has taken it upon himself to be a spokesperson for science.
And science does not teach atheism. What it teaches is that people should examine claims carefully and seek evidence for them. Doing so may undermine the faith-based authority of certain religions, but that's the religions' problem, not science's. As for when this started - Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei codified the scientific method in its modern experimental form, but the roots of observation-based reasoning as a system can be traced all the way back to Aristotle, and of course humans have been doing it intuitively since the dawn of the species.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Mr. Broun is definitely not an atheist, and he has taken it upon himself to be a spokesperson for science.
Dr. Brouh actually. That's part of what makes this so appalling, the man both studied science as an undergrad AND graduated medical school, and still has this little understanding of the subject.
People like this are still in the congress at this day and age. Whats worse is that he ran unapposed and will be sitting on the science and technology commity of congress.
Thoughts?
I think it reflects extremely poorly on the Republicans in general that they would vote for such a twit to be on that committee. Even if you say, well, he doesn't represent all Republicans, the sad fact is that the other Republicans in Congress have enabled him to get on that committee, which is precisely where he has no business being.
It's no wonder that only 9% of scientists are Republican.
If you believe that (then .......well I shall reserve my opinion) then thats fine. If your people that you represent TRUELY believe that then its the best thing for you to be. However please......under no circumstances try to work on the science and technology committy.
I'm withholding judgement until their is further clarification.
That is what he is saying.
There's not much else to say; it's not like we'll get any debate for this, since we all know the guy is wrong and we can't do anything about it.
The existence of abiogenesis is not hotly contested. Abiogenesis is just the idea that living matter formed from non-living matter at some point through natural means. The mechanism of abiogenesis is contested, but not the fact that it happened in some way.
Thanks to Rivenor of Miraculous Recovery Signatures!
Putting it that way even Jews and Christians believe Adam was formed from dust and given life.
The mechanism is contested because spontaneous abiogenesis violates the rule of theoretical impossibility.
Edit: Is this in debate because it is about religion+politics?
It's elected office and there are a lot of Americans that reject Evolution. Even in some American schools Evolution is challenged, see the Kansas school boards that started the whole Flying Spaghetti Monster satire with trumped up assertions passed off as scientific analysis.
It is concerning to see these people have legislative power. See the Missouri representative that thinks if he legitimately rapes a woman she will not become pregnant. That man votes on sex education and contraceptive legislation.
Yes, technically, that would be abiogenesis. That's what the word means.
In interest to avoid clogging up this thread: Do we have an abiogenesis debate thread? I searched and I couldn't find one.
Thanks to Rivenor of Miraculous Recovery Signatures!
Its actually extremely simple. We have a vast difference in intelligence between people. You have some people who are for some reason able to break through from this overly religious bonds and actually muster some intellectual thought.
However you have some hicks in the middle of georgia (no offense to Georgia. I lived there for a few years myself) that are putting more stock into what they read (often misread) in the roughly translated English version of an ancient Jewish Text and actually taking it literally. Several of these people are taught since childhood that anything not Christianity is of the Devil and trying to sway you from heaven. Its like a really really really really bad brainwashing.
Religion itself isn't bad (its debatable in this forum but my stance is that its not innately damaging) but its definitely a danger in the hands of idiots being led by a persuasive idiot.
If you've ever read the book 1984 a lot of Americans practice doublethink. Its where they can learn science and such without actually believing the theory behind it. I honestly don't know how they do it but .....some people do it.
I agree that we are actually the ONLY country that has a disproportionate wealth to people who reject creationism. There is actually a chart (i'll try to find it) showing a direct correlation between acceptance of Evolution and average income of people in different countries. The ONLY country that doesn't fit in the near perfect curve is America...... and It kinda sickens me.
I would wager thats actually not true -- the average income in several of the small Arab states is ridiculous large (See UAE).
USA isn't a counterexample to that, it's just a country which is much too large to lump into one single heading. Chart it state by state and you'll see that there's a strong (but probably not perfect) correlation between belief in evolution and wealth. States like New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California have relatively high levels of wealth and high levels of belief in evolution; states like Arkansas, Missouri, and Mississippi have relatively low wealth and low belief in evolution.
This is of course indirectly causal; states with high wealth have better educational systems, states with better educational systems have higher belief in evolution, and having a strong educational system contributes to sustaining or building on high levels of wealth into the future.
The basic explanation is that we've got bad primary schools but good universities. So our best and brightest can excel, but - notwithstanding Bush-era education programs - a lot of children get left behind.
Okay, a few things -
First: the rejection of this scientific fact in the US is sad and embarrassing. That's true regardless of anything else.
Second: The proposed best-fit curve is pretty loose. Of particular note, the further you go to the right the more data points you find below the curve.
Third: The data points seem selective. bLatch's comment made me look for some Middle Eastern nations, but for "Western Asia" there was only Turkey and Cyprus, the most heavily Europeanized. And for other non-European countries there was no India, no China, no Mexico, no Brazil, not even Canada - just Japan. To be clear, I'm not accusing this Piro fellow of cherry-picking intentionally; I suspect the data simply weren't available. But we're not getting the whole picture. We're seeing a trend line for Europe.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Thus stuff just comes with the territory of having publicly elected officials. The best way to counter the anti-science thought(/movement?) is to vote him and others like him out of office.
I assume that is why they were not in the chart.
But anyone looking at the chart can see that America is the only country that doesn't fit the curve. Yes there is room for error but America is the only country that completely ignores it.
America and Japan are also the only two countries that aren't on or adjacent to the continent of Europe. Japan is not a suitable stand-in for "every non-European and non-American country on the planet".
And the curve has to bend quite sharply for Turkey to be on it.
Seriously, how can anybody looking at this chart not see that it is "statistics" in the full Mark Twain sense of the term? Hell, it doesn't even pass the very first test I use to check for a misleading graph: the axes are truncated so the origin isn't at (0, 0).
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Indeed. It doesn't look like a totally accurate chart that would stand up in a Harvard presentation.
However the facts behind it are real. There is a real correlation between acceptance of real scientific fact and national average income.
There's also Rep. Tod Akin (Missouri) who up until recently believed he could not get a woman pregnant through legitimate rape. Roscoe Bartlett. Randy Neugebauer. Dana Rohrabacher. Sandy Adams. Ralph Hall.
Pres. Obama just recently lifted a ban on stem-cell research in the United States in 2009. If it had not been for the stem-cell research ban, it might have been a US scientist receiving the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Instead of Nobel Prizes, our MD's with Chemistry degrees are renouncing their studies as conspiracies.
Earlier this year scientists at the LHC had a breakthrough on the Higgs particle and how matter is composed. The US could have made that breakthrough ten years earlier if we hadn't cut off funding for the SSC halfway through construction.
NASA has seen drastic cuts. The US now has to team with Russia to send astronauts into space. The lone consolations being the Curiosity Mars Rover and increased attention by private US citizens to fund space travel.
It's not too late. A US scientist shared the Nobel Prize for Physics this year. He's made a tremendous stride for Atomic clocks and maybe Quantum Computing, but we need to come together as a country to embrace science, encourage scientific study, and dismiss members on the House Science Committee that fight science as conspiracy.
Yeah, the thing is, the crazy turn their craziness into a cause. This is why fad dieting is always a cause. And vitamin pills. And bottled water. And oh so much more.
And once you do that, other people will gravitate to your craziness.
Broun reminds me of Dr. Oz in some ways. Both commit medical fraud for a particular population (fundamentalists for Broun, talk show hosts for Oz) in order to get a cult of personality.
But they're both really just a 21st-century medicine show in the end.
On phasing:
Science has not taught atheism, certain strains of atheists have touted science to disprove religion. Religion, as I know it through the Catholic, Methodist, and Episcopalian Christian faiths, has not taught against science. Certain strains of religion have fostered anti-science, as this man clearly believes scientific theories are conspiracies against accepting a spiritual savior.
Mr. Broun is definitely not an atheist, and he has taken it upon himself to be a spokesperson for science.
And science does not teach atheism. What it teaches is that people should examine claims carefully and seek evidence for them. Doing so may undermine the faith-based authority of certain religions, but that's the religions' problem, not science's. As for when this started - Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei codified the scientific method in its modern experimental form, but the roots of observation-based reasoning as a system can be traced all the way back to Aristotle, and of course humans have been doing it intuitively since the dawn of the species.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Dr. Brouh actually. That's part of what makes this so appalling, the man both studied science as an undergrad AND graduated medical school, and still has this little understanding of the subject.