Maybe I spend too much time on dog forums. About 10 years ago the National Geographic, which I once respected as an objective authority, published a cover article on the dog stating DNA proved they all descended from the East Asian Wolf. It was presented as settled, proven science. Since then, I have seen work tracing their origin to Africa and some other dissent. Even if I had dug into the arguments, I might not be qualified to sort out fact and fiction. One more case of different scientists hyping opposing ideas as proven fact.
Perhaps part of the problem is modern egotism. In the more distant past chemists gave the now politically incorrect name noble to helium and other gases with full electron shells and said they were not known to form compounds. My chemistry text book used the term inert gases and flatly stated they didn’t form compounds. That was disproved before I got out of school. Anybody that knew much about chemistry said ‘‘Duh, yeah, hybrid orbitals.’’ and went on with things of significance. The poorly written text books gave those wanting to attack science a great opening. If science was wrong about the inert gases, then maybe they are wrong about evolution.
There are some other points I feel are too subjective to waste time correcting.
Well first of all, the term “Noble Gas” is still in use as a general descriptor for those elements. And calling them “inert” isn’t 100% correct but they are much, much, much less reactive than any other class of elements, and you aren’t going to encounter them under any normal circumstances. For all general intents and purposes, that’s what people need to know about them (Inert is also a better word to describe their properties than noble, which takes some extra explanation, which is the reason you hear it). But what you’re missing is that all science knowledge is treated as provisional. We go forward based on what we’ve been able to prove at this point and revise when new information comes up. This is a feature, not a bug.
Well, you have to realize first that National Geographic is in reality a magazine whose objective is to popularize geography and science, they are not a Scientific Journal.
AFAIK you are concentrating here on cutting edge science, that is science that has very little to no consensus or plenty of evidence to support it. Unlike the Vaccine and Climate change issues, there is plenty of evidence and papers supporting the science that tell us that mercury was not related to the Autism scare and that climate science data was not changed. So can you acknowledge that you are not correct on those?
Christianity didn’t particular care about abortion for its first 1800 years of existence, nor, obviously, did it have an opinion about stem cell research until stem cell research was first conceived of in the late twentieth century.
If opposing environmentalism becomes a Christian principle then in 50 years one will just assume it has a “religious justification” and is obviously a core part of Christianity, as happened with abortion. There’s no difference in that regard.
Well, not quite what I was getting into, yes, they did not care much then, but they sure produce a lot of biblical justifications now. Incidentally it is because of how they do get those justifications now is that I also see it as them doing a very ridiculous thing.
As the example of the evangelicals in favor of the environment tell us, it is not likely that opposing environmentalism will be a Christian principle 50 years from now.
All true, certainly, and it goes back even farther. Fundamentalist christianity in America has actually morphed into a folk religion, where social/political issues carry weight equal to or greater than spirituality. Right-wing political dogma, an absurd level of nationalism (which they consider patriotism), capitalism have all become articles of faith to these people. Their hatred for environmentalism and pacifism date back to at least the Nixon years, probably the McCarthy era, when anti-war and environmental activists were branded with the “communist” brush.
Their hatred and denial is visceral. People that want to protect the environment, who dare to promote peace, who wish to elevate various minorities to full & equal status, must certainly be anti-American. And since America is a christian nation, ordained of god, even (some say) forcast in the Book of Revelation, then environmentalists, pacifists, social liberals are enemies of God.
To me, this demonstrates their moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
I’m new to SDMB, and am impressed! Scanning through the thread, I see the comments spiraling in on the root conflict. Following a 2000-year old tradition, there are actually powerful forces employing religion as a political tool. I recall the full-page Mobil ads promoting exploitation of public resources for private gain. In the ensuing 30 years we have had the Gospel of Rupert stuffed down our throats. The poor social conservative is being led to the slaughter by the ring in his nose. It’s not going to get better until we break the fiction that a corporation has full civil rights and can break the unholy alliance between television revenues and political fund raising. Meanwhile, we will have the gruesome spectacle of politicians teaching us religion!
Methinks thelabdude is misrembering: here’s a National Geographic News article from 2004 with the headline “Dog DNA Study Yields Clues to Origins of Breeds.”
[QUOTE=National Geographic News]
The results revealed that an unexpected and geographically diverse cluster of breeds—including the Siberian husky, the Afghan hound, Africa’s basenji, China’s chow chow, Japan’s akita, and Egypt’s saluki—are most closely related to dog’s ancient wolflike ancestors. “Dogs from these breeds may be the best living representatives of the ancestral dog gene pool,” the researchers wrote.
The finding may back up claims by some experts that dogs originated in Asia and migrated with nomadic humans both south to Africa and north to the Arctic.
[/QUOTE]
Googling also brought up a few other NGN stories concerning dogs’ origins but, while the consensus seems to be that the most likely locations were in the Middle East or East Asia (or some combination of those locales) with the possibility that interbreeding with wolves occurred after the original domestication, in none them could I find a claim that those origins had been proven and settled.
It does not work that way, the evidence points clearly who is the side that even lied on who was lying. But perhaps you have the impression that there was a good number of scientists that supported the view of mercury+vaccines=Autism and that a good number of scientists supported the deniers of global warming, the truth was that it was a false equivalence. A super majority of scientists supported then the view that there was no connection of mercury with autism and that there was no fraud from the climate scientists, there were a few scientists that support the contrarian view on those subjects, but they are being disgraced by their own work as time goes by.
Science knowledge changes. It is not static. It is entirely unsurprising that your textbook was not correct years later.
I think you’ve just proven **Martin Hyde’**s statement:
[QUOTE=Martin Hyde]
On a fundamental level the common man doesn’t understand science or how it works…
So these people literally believe they can read a few articles on the internet and just conclude whatever “logically makes sense to them” and that is just as valid as science that took a multinational team of researchers 15 years to come up with, and that itself was built on a foundation laid by over 200 years of scientific endeavor from the Enlightenment to the present, most of which the ignorant masses know nothing about.
[/QUOTE]
So… Can the marketers use the ignorance of folks like thelabdude to sow doubt about scientific study that they find “inconvenient” (= hurts their profits?) Certainly.
I would caution everyone to also be on guard for these same corporate marketers to start linking science and atheism, in order to sow the seeds of distrust.
What part of ‘‘somebody lied’’ don’t you understand?
The vaccine case is a great example of my point. A researcher took money to publish false results. So how do I know the next study isn’t a pack of lies? Lie and you lose the confidence of the people.
But you seem to be missing why science works. A researcher in Britain lies for a profit and what happens? Hundreds of other researchers review his work, duplicate his experiment, and see what happens. What happens is that his results are shown to be wrong. If he had been a good scientist, he would have worked to find out what had gone wrong and either revised his experiment, or admitted that it was fatally flawed. Instead, since he was a fraud, he took his results to the media and claimed he was being suppressed. He stopped being a scientist and became a money making advocate of psuedo science.
You make it sound like this is the normal way things happen. It isn’t. This is actually pretty rare. The last big scientific fraud along these lines that I can recall was two cold fusion guys who over stated their results to drive up the price of a commodity they invested in. And that was in the 80s. And just like the autism-mercury link, the rest of the scientific world caught on pretty quick.
I’m not sure what you’re expecting. Scientists are human beings, not saints. Inevitably sometimes a scientist will succumb to greed and do bad science for personal gain. The question is – does science have a good mechanism for identifying these bad apples and correcting their errors? The vaccine case is an excellent example of how the “truth will eventually out” in science. Wakefield’s falsified study was debunked and his career was ruined, sending a strong message to future researchers not to try similar schemes.
A ‘pack of lies’?? Is THAT the origin of dogs that has been hidden from us??? :eek:
As to the OP:
No, I don’t think that the skepticism about climate change has to do with a supposed view of the scientific community as atheists. If that were the case then it would go for just about everything in science, not just climate studies. I THINK the reason the general public (in the US) distrusts the whole Global Warming thingy is due to several factors. One, let’s be honest here…it’s hard to understand for most people (myself included), and the proofs are not all that intuitive. A lot of it relies on climate models, something again that aren’t well understood by the public at large. I think most proponents as well as detractors come to their positions more from faith than through a really solid grasp of how it all works. The main reason I’ve converted to the ‘it’s happening, humans are causing it’ is, frankly, because I’ve been convinced by 'dopers on this board who DO seem to understand it…and I’m just going with that to fill in the gaps.
Another reason is that in the US we are constantly bombarded with Global Warming scare shows…and I think skepticism stems in part from the Crying Wolf Syndrome(aar)…especially when you couple the fact that we’ve been bombarded for literally decades with dire gloom and doomy scenarios from the environmental community on everything from acid rain to nuclear power, and after a while there is going to be a natural reaction against what some see as just another attempt by the environmentalists to get us to go back to living in caves and gathering for our snacks (note: not HUNTING, which would be BAD). I think it’s just an instances of an actual, real crisis hitting us at a time when a large percentage of the public was just saturated with disasters, and was in the mood to be skeptical about anything like this. Couple that with the fact that to ‘fix’ this crisis we’d all have to make real sacrifices, that there are no quick and easy fixes (so it’s painful to admit to it when fixing it would be painful…VERY painful) and that certain groups have latched onto this for political gains (and, again, it’s easier for the public to grasp the denial positions if they are already somewhat in denial about the whole subject, and in no mood for more gloom and doom) and you have a perfect storm, in the US at least, for the general public being split over climate science and global climate change. No atheism needed.
JMHO, but I think that’s really all there is too it. Assuming we have the time, this will all eventually balance out as more and more information and data come to light and the general public starts to lose it’s knee jerk skepticism and the information becomes more widely soaked into our collective consciousness. It doesn’t help when there are still so many scary Global Warming Will Be Our DOOM!! type shows from obviously biased environmental groups out there, but eventually I think that even in the US the facts will win out over the hype. No idea if there will be anything we can do about it except hunker down and gut through whatever nasty stuff DOES happen, but at least I think the general public will be on-board, especially if the weather keeps getting more and more extreme, as already seems to be happening if the last few years are any indication.