Re: Q!Re: Shall We All Leave At Once?

On 22 May, 01:26, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:b69845fa-ccba-482b-956a-12f22193723c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On 19 May, 04:00, "Agamemnon" <agamem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Phil Bowles" <philipbowles2...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

No. I was talking about the people defending RTD. The reference to PC
LOONIES should have given you a clue who I was referring to.

Um ... everyone other than you? That seems to be the way you usually
use the term.

No. The PC LOONIES. That is perfectly clear to anyone but a
comprehensionaly
challenged fool.

Ah, so these are the people who, like Steve Wilson, don't mention RTD
at all and you slam them for defending him, right?

POPPY***!

“Opiate-producing flower male chicken”? After all, don’t words mean
the same as the combination of their source words?

They are people like Steve Wilson who want RTD to penetrate their
back side and to suck his ***.

A back doesn’t have a side. Or do you mean backside? Punctuate, dear
boy, punctuate.



appeals to Plato and Aristotle spring to mind). And more often than
not you just try to pass opinion off as fact, such as your strange
ideas about religion.

No, that's you who tries to do that. I only cite original texts.

You miss the point - citing original texts doesn't make the argument
you're using them to support correct or factual, even presuming the
texts themselves are correct representations of events.

You don't understand subject. Citing original texts proves that you don't
know what you are talking about and are relying on other peoples personal
opinions who don't know what they are talking about either and that what I
have said is confirmed historically.


What, so if I’m citing original texts it means I don’t understand what
I’m talking about and just parroting those texts – but if you cite
them, it means you know what you’re talking about?

I’ll have to plead guilty on one count at least – when I cite original
texts I do indeed repeat what they say. Whereas when you cite them,
what you cite them to support rarely has any bearing at all on what
the text actually says.

Speculative argument (NOT fact): That name must be Zeus-Pater, and the
individual referred to must be the deity generally regarded as
fictitious.

The name on the inscription is Sa-a-si-te-pi which is identical to Ausstaeb
otherwise known as Istaveon from the Bavarian Chroniclas and other records..

Istaveon = Zeus Deon. From linguistics when know that in Minoan times the
name Zeus was pronounced Sdeus. Sa-a-si-te-pi was Zeus. Live with it. Zeus
is also referred to in Egyptian inscriptions from the same time as Sheshi.
Sheshi is identical to Saasi.

And even if all this were true, the relevant bit of the above to your
argument – “and the individual referred to must be the deity generally
regarded as fictitious” is *still* opinion, not a “FACT”.

What you post are opinions,
mostly unsubstantiated.

Depends on the topic - I note when I've giving a personal opinion and
generally provide citations when discussing facts.

Your so called citations are nothing more than personal opinions of other
peoples personal opinions of other peoples opinions who have never
actually
read the source texts

Hmm, you mean such as translations of Aristotle or the text of the
Travels of Noah?

You have never cited a single source text ever.

I’ve cited both of these, hence using them as examples.

Aristotle is a primary eye
witness.

“Eye witness”? For your babble about his claims about drama, he *is*
the source text.

The Travels of Noe into Europe is based on primary and secondary
sources including Berosus' Chaldanean history and is not a personal opinion.
It's a historical record and written as such.

So in what way have I not cited the source texts by using these, um,
sources?

As I've told you before, sophistry won't let you get away with
sloppy
thinking. If you manifestly (and repeatedly) get things wrong, and

Except I haven't got things wrong. You just think I'm wrong because
you
don't understand and have never studied the subject

You've tried mouthing off about philosophy and science before now,
both subjects I have indeed studied and demonstrably understand better

Yove not studied real science or philosophy.

Hmm, what was that you were saying about taking the experts at their
word?

You've not studied real science or philosophy. That is perfectly clear.

You’ve never understood Plato, Aristotle, religion, language, history
or science (real or otherwise). That is perfectly clear. Whether or
not you’ve “studied” them is irrelevant since you plainly haven’t
learned from any such study.

You've really got to get a handle on what "demonstrated" means (SP, is
it in the list?) You provided an example of one Platonic text I
happened not to have read (fair enough, he wrote quite a lot and in

It was a text you were refereeing to and pretending to be an expert on and
yet you had not even read it.

I read it after you posted the relevant extract from it and commented
on its content accordingly.

any case for much of my course I focused on more relevant philosophers
such as Kant). This does not in any way "demonstrate" that "I've never
read a primary text in my life". How does it demonstrate, for example,
that I've never read Leviathan, the Groundwork on the Metaphysics of
Morals, A Treatise of Human Nature, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, or for that matter On Friendship or The Republic. All
primary philosophy texts.

We were not discussing those texts.

“You've never read a primary text in your life” was your claim.

The texts that were relevant to the
discussion were ones it was clear you had not read and I had, otherwise I
wouldn't have been making the claims I made based on them.

I read them as soon as you brought them up and I’d found the relevant
passages online, where you didn’t post the extracts themselves. The
difference is that, having done so, I understood them and it became
plain that you didn’t. Newsflash: I didn’t go into this with any
grudge against you or even, at the start, any expectation that you’d
be wrong – I just found, again and again, on pretty much every subject
you discussed, that you manifestly misunderstood the sources you were
relying on.

"ethology", a discipline which was for a long time scorned by
biologists themselves (in much the same way physicists - and many
other scientists - sneer at cosmology these days). Such developments

They do not.

in biology as evolutionary theory and ecological modelling have little
if anything to do with behavioural studies.

They are about as scientific as Anaxagoras theories of the cosmos.

The ones you were saying where scientific cosmology?

Anaxagoras didn't have a mathematical formulation and was speculating, and
neither do you.

Do you understand what “modelling” means in science? It does, indeed,
mean a mathematical formulation. Hell, even the most basic ecological
and evolutionary principles like Shannon’s diversity index or the
Hardy-Weinberg rule use mathematical formulae.

Having said all that, it is of course absurd to equate "observation of
behaviour" with "personal opinion". Observations are just that -
records of what's actually happening. "Cuttlefish change colour" isn't
a personal opinion, it's an observation. *Why* they change colour may

It's a personal opinion when you start making claims as to why they change
colour and why they were thinking when they did so, for examples all the
bull*** biologists come up with about why certain animals spray on trees or
adopt certain behaviours towards others.

You mean, such as “My cat wants me to have sex with it because it’s
presenting its rear end to me”?

I notice you manifestly ignore everything I point out about the way
behavioural hypotheses (you really have to learn this word) are
tested. And, once again, ethology is but one fairly minor branch of
biology.

be a matter to hypothesise about, and in the true scientific
tradition, to test - indeed behavioural studies are heavily based on
experiment to develop explanations for behaviours. Now, what's the
word for making observations and conducting experiments in order to
find explanations for those observations?

Speculation is the word you are looking for.

No, the word is “science”, or if you prefer “the scientific method”.


Real sciences are based on
mathematics

Mathematics doesn't predict anything. Nor do statistics. Scientists
use them to make predictions, but in order to do so they need
observations or hypotheses to feed in. Mathematics is just the

Nope. You've never heard of Theoretical Physics then. Einstein predicted
gravitational lensing decades before it was observed.

Correct – Einstein did. Maths didn’t. That was just the tool he used.

computer processing - feed in your data, get your output. Science is
"based on mathematics" in the same way journalism is based on word
processors - it's a tool that makes the process a lot quicker and
simpler, but isn't in any way fundamental to the process. Stats are

You are talking codswallop.

FOOL! Codswallop means “To hit with some big fish”. Only a
comprehensionaly challenged stupid, brainwashed ignorant would use it
to mean “rubbish”.

Without mathematics modern physics wouldn't
exist, Newtonian physics wouldn't exist either

Your point being? Without modern computer processing power, Bayesian
hierarchical analysis wouldn’t exist – nor would many advanced methods
in modern statistics. That doesn’t mean that scientific disciplines
which use these techniques didn’t exist before high-power desktop
computers came along, it just means they didn’t have these tools. Same
as maths – the science can exist without the maths to make
quantitative predictions (you’ve pointed out yourself that this is
true of cosmology).

nor would radio or television
since Maxwell predicted radio waves before they were discovered.

They could still have been discovered had they not been predicted, so
this example doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Mathematics
is fundamental to physics and always has been since the time Archimedes,
Aristarchus and Meton.

Depends how you define it – astronomy made plenty of observations
without using maths (yes, it made some use of maths, but not to
explain everything). Uranus wasn’t predicted; it was just found.
Neptune wasn’t predicted on the basis of any mathematical analysis,
just a qualitative prediction that it would be there. Vulcan, by
contrast, wasn’t there, and that was actually predicted by the maths –
specifically the fact that Newtonian mathematical formulations
couldn’t explain Mercury’s orbit. One of those hypotheses that turns
out to be false, don’t you know, not a ‘valid theory until disproved’.

Even if maths is fundamental to physics, so what? That doesn’t say
anything about its relevance in science as a whole. Maths is
fundamental to accountancy, but accountancy isn’t a science. Science
is the practice of applying the scientific method, not an outgrowth of
mathematics – a tool which may or may not be involved in applying the
scientific method in different cases.

just a way of organising data and summarising results and trends;
anything the maths can tell you you can work out by staring at the raw
data set long enough if you have the time or inclination.

Staring at the raw data set long enough if you have the time or inclination?
You are fucking crazy. Sarting at the raw data isn't going to tell you when
the next solar eclipse is going to occur

Put the dates of eclipses into a graph, and that will tell you if
there’s a trend (say, one every 20 years) – the only maths involved is
the ability to count. In geology, for instance, it’s recognised that
ice ages occur in a cycle with X number of years between them. In
solar physics, the sunspot cycle repeats every eleven years. No
mathematics is needed to predict the next high point in the solar
cycle, for instance. True, you can’t make quantitative predictions
without maths for the most part (that, after all, is what quantitative
means), but you can make perfectly sound if less precise scientific
predictions with no maths at all. When I carried out a study of
factors associated with species distributions in frogs, I carried out
regression analyses to allow me to predict quantitatively how strong
any associations were, but it would have been entirely possible for me
to look at my data set and say “Hmm, this frog is more common where
canopy cover’s lower – I predict that I’ll find it more often in
disturbed areas with open canopies”. The maths let me pin down the
degree to which that appears to be the case, and was quicker and more
precise than a visual estimation from the data, but I didn’t need
maths to make the basic prediction.

Um. Buzz - wrong again. With the possible exception of cosmologists,
who are arguably only regarded as scientists because they're lumped in
with 'physicists' and have scientific training, rather than because

HOGWASH!

Cosmology was the first ever science and Cosmologists were the first ever
scientists since before the time of Anaxagoras.

You're thinking of astronomers (and way back then they didn't use

No. Anaxagoras was not an astronomer, not even an astrologer. He was a
cosmologist and purely theoretical.

Your claim wasn’t that cosmology existed in ancient times, but that it
was “the first ever science”. Random speculation about the nature of
the cosmos doesn’t count (it’s arguable whether it counts these days).

mathematics, just observed the behaviour of stars and planets, so
can't have been real scientists...)

What a load of bollocks. Ptolemy's model of the solar system was based on
mathematics. It wouldn't have worked otherwise. His model was based on
earlier models all of which were mathematically based.

You’re not too familiar with parody, are you? What I said was every
bit as true as your claim that there was no maths in biology, only
observation – i.e. not at all. That was the point.

Cosmoslogy is a very recent
science, hence the fact that it's still stuck without the tools to do
anything other than theoretical work.

Nope. Cosmology has existed since Anaxagoras and earlier. It's never had a
proper mathematical footing until modern times

Science is not about “having a proper mathematical footing”. Science
is about observing and making testable predictions. Cosmology has
lacked any ability to test its predictions until maybe a decade ago –
and so far it’s still not actually managed to test them. That’s what
makes its status as a science dubious, not whether it’s based on
maths.

but Pythagoras had a go at
suggesting one in about 536 BC based on the geometry of triangles.

Pythagoras suggested a religion based on the geometry of triangles
too. Doesn’t make it science.


what they actually do is science. A sizeable number of cosmologists
are among those who complain about the lack of scientific rigour in
that field. It's *fundamental* in science that no claim is accepted
until it's been subjected to and passed tests, even if this ideal
isn't always followed to the letter in practice. Your struggle to
understand even this core concept demonstrates just how weak your
grasp of scientific principles is.

You have no idea what scientific principles are. All theories are
considered
valid unless proven otherwise. That is why they are called THEORIES not
laws!

Two more, SP - theory (scientific) and law (scientific).

A theory is called a theory because it is accepted in science that our
ways of modelling the world are approximations to make things simple
for people to understand, rather than a true description of the world,
and in the knowledge that all theories are replaced in time. And it

HOGWASH!

You’re at it again. What I said had nothing at all to do with cleaning
pigs. Learn to use English, IDIOT!

The aim of Newton's theory of gravitation was to give a true description of
the world and the entire solar system and universe.

Newton didn’t call it a theory either. I was making a point about
science as a whole and the reason it uses the particular jargon it
does, not the beliefs of individual scientists. The idea that someone
can believe something to be true while knowing intellectually that it
might be false is something you really can’t get your head around,
isn’t it? Yes, scientists very often believe their theories to be
true. Leverrier believed in Vulcan until the day he died. Einstein
refused to believe in quantum mechanics. Alan Pounds firmly believes
climate change is responsible for frog declines. There’s a
palaeontologist who stridently insists to this day that birds aren’t
descended from dinosaurs. That doesn’t mean they *are* true or that
the scientists believing them don’t recognise that, at most, what
they’re proposing are theories that might be wrong.

It still remains valid
today as a sub-set of Einstein's theory of general relativity and will
always remain valid as such.

Until the problems with reconciling quantum mechanics and relativity
force people to recognise that Einstein got the rules right, but had
the basic ideas wrong (just as Newton, who believed gravity was a
force rather than an intrinsic property of space-time, did), perhaps.
There is indeed a small number of theories which have survived the
tests of time so well that they probably are a pretty accurate (if, as
in Newton’s case, very incomplete) description of the world – it’s
certain, for example, that any future theory of life will have to
incorporate an evolutionary process of some sort because the only
alternative, spontaneous generation, has been categorically ruled out.
Nonetheless, many evolutionary biologists already believe that Darwin
may have been completely wrong about the relative importance of
natural selection in that process compared with other evolutionary
mechanisms. Yet even these relatively solid cases are very rare
exceptions that have had to withstand over a century of scrutiny and
tests to reach that status.

takes a lot of work before anything in science is accepted as a theory
- nothing is accepted as a theory until it has passed rigorous tests
of all its assumptions repeatedly (again, except in cosmology, where
you can say "oh, I know, let's invent extra dimensions to make the
maths work. We'll call it 'string theory'").

BULL***!

Male cow dung to you too.

A theory is accepted as a theory from the very moment it is proposed as an
explanation for the observed facts.

This is so absurdly at odds with reality I’d be surprised if, well, if
you weren’t you.

If it did not explain they observed
facts it would never have been proposed and would not be a theory of any
sort. It is accepted as being valid unless proven otherwise.

No it isn’t. One explanation for Mercury’s orbit is that there is a
planet orbiting between Mercury and the Sun that we haven’t detected;
in fact before Einstein it was the only explanation proposed for this
phenomenon. And even then, without any competition, it wasn’t accepted
as being valid – plenty of people believed in it (poor Leverrier got
rather screwed over generally – he didn’t even get a planet named
after him, since someone else pinched his discovery), but that’s not
at all the same thing. The ones who believed in it tested it by
looking for said planet; by the time Leverrier died almost everyone
else recognised that it was not valid, even though it’s only in the
last few years that we’ve been able to make sufficiently precise
measurements to rule it out altogether.


What's been described as the law of natural
selection describes the set of circumstances in which natural
selection will inevitably occur; in fact in that case it's a logical
impossibility for those conditions to be met and for there to be no
natural selection.

It has always been that way throughout the history of science. If you
didn't think your theory was valid then you would have never devised it
to
start with.

Most of the time, the same observations can be explained by multiple
possible hypotheses - a scientist's job is to identify the


possibilities and develop tests to discriminate between them. For

Or to unite them. There are five or six different models all of which all
predict what is observed in high energy physics. They are all valid even
though they predict slightly different results. Fundamentally they are
subsets a far greater theory which has been around for over 30 years.

Valid as hypotheses – i.e. they’re plausible enough to be worth trying
to test. NOT theories – you don’t have half a dozen theories
explaining the same thing. Each of these HYPOTHESES is just a possible
scenario predicted by one standard model (and the failure of any of
these scenarios to accurately describe the universe as we see it has
led to a backlash against the standard model itself – I do wonder if
you’ve kept up to date with this stuff since your degree, and I take
it from the sorts of things you come up with that you probably
finished it about a decade ago), hardly a “valid theory”.

For example if you observed a ball falling and saw that it's
speed increased as a function of time you would devise a theory which
accounted for that and that theory would be considered perfectly valid
unless proven otherwise,

Not until it had been pretty firmly established that not only is this
a common feature of balls, but that the same principle can be applied
to other objects. And you have to go back a few centuries, before the

Nope. Your theory is concerning just that ball under the conditions you made
the observations.

*sigh* THAT IS NOT A THEORY. It’s a hypothesised explanation for one
result.

You wouldn't apply it to balls in general unless you'd
tested other balls and other conditions. Testing it on other objects would
be one of your tests to try to disprove it.

And if you do it enough and it passes enough, one day your hypothesis
might form the basis of a theory. But it is not a theory as soon as it
is proposed, let alone one accepted as valid (if it was accepted as
valid, no one would be going out of their way to try and disprove it,
would they?)

modern discipline of science had gained a foothold, to find a time
when even this simple observation would gain anything resembling
uncritical acceptance. The questions science deals in these days are
invariably more complex - all the basic observations have been made.

Twaddle. The modern discipline has been around for over 2 millennia.
Ptolemy's theory of the motions of the starts and planets was devised to
explain the observed data and it took of 1,000 years of tests and
observation before it could be show to be deficient, though not invalid.

such as someone noticing that the balls velocity
was also affected by wind resistance and that unless it was dropped
inside a
vacuum, it would reach a terminal velocity which could be observed if it
were dropped from a sufficient height. Claims are subjected to tests in
order to test the theory and if the claim passes the test the theory
holds,
if not the theory is modified to give the same result as the experiment..

I wish you'd stop phrasing it like this. It makes it sound as though
scientists are in the business of fiddling the figures to make the
world fit.

That's what happens.

It’s still not a very flattering way to phrase it.

If
a claim always gives the same results within the confines of the theory
and
the experiment then it is called a law. But you wouldn't understand that
because there are no laws of Biology

See the above example. The truth is, biology is a lot more complex
than chemistry, maths - probably even than advanced physics, since
although it contains systems that are difficult to conceptualise, they
tend to be governed by a fairly small set of simple laws. "Laws of
biology" are often difficult to isolate, the mechanisms aren't
intuitive, and they are often hard to test - why does species richness
increase towards the tropics, for instance? It's been about three
hundred years since this question was first asked, and we still don't
know. But it does qualify as a law, or very nearly so.

It's a load of subjective speculations and which can be rendered totally
invalid by climate change.

On the contrary, climate change is a golden opportunity for ecologists
precisely because they can test how well their theoretical predictions
hold up under novel environmental conditions.

It's as scientific in the grand scheme of things
as Anaxagoras cosmological theory and Pythagoras triangles.

These are the ones which you gave as examples of cosmology as an
ancient science, right?

Has anyone ever managed to categorically prove classical physics? It
can't
be done.

This is why science isn't about categorical proof. Who ever said it
was? As I've said before, proof is the preserve of mathematicians and
philosophers, not scientists.

Philosophy can't prove anything. That's why its Philosophy.

Ever heard of logic? Probably not since you’re unable to apply it.
Rationalism? Same applies. Major branches of philosophy are devoted
entirely to working out what can and can’t be proved, what is
necessarily true from given first principles and so on and so forth.

Classical physics is chaotic and you can never construct an
isolated system to test it out on. So what scientists do is state that
within such and such limits and margins of error Newton's laws are valid
and
within such and such limits and margins of error Einstein's laws are
valid
and so on. If you claim they are not, then you must prove otherwise.

Once again you miss the point - you're talking about theories that
have been subjected to and passed numerous tests. Yet your claim was
that any claim a scientist makes is treated as a valid theory until
disproven, which is simply false.

Wrong. It is a fact.

Wrong. It is simply false.

nothing to do with it, as I explained. You can't describe the concept
of a car by reference to the concepts "wheel", "axle", "engine" etc.

Twaddle.

You think a car can be described by these concepts? Ever heard the
expression "The whole is more than the sum of its parts"?

words, and in a world which has had dictionaries for about three
centuries, ultimately people learn how to use the words from the
dictionary in the first place. Now, *every* dictionary in the English

The *** they do. They didn't need dictionaries 2,000 years ago or even
when
Shakespeare was alive.

You really never have got the hang of the idea that society changes,
have you? Journalists didn't need computers three hundred years ago
either, but you try finding any today who don't rely on computers to
do their job.

Oh, so the computers write their articles for them now do they, all by
themselves?

You’d be surprised. But I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make
– a dictionary doesn’t teach you what words mean all by itself,
either, you have to be using it. Same with a journalist’s computer.

language defines "homosexual" as "sexual attraction towards one's own
sex". This is what the word *means* - i.e. the concept this particular

That's what you have been deceived into thinking it means.

It's what it means in the English language.

No it doesn't.

Oh yes it does.



explaining in detail to you that the logic you were using to define
the word - that it was defined as the meanings of each of the
individual words it was derived from - is flawed. Someone even gave
an

And you never managed to convincingly do that. All that you did was to
express a personal opinion.

Not so; it was substantiated through reference to the way the word is

No it was not. You can't substantiate anything through ignorant usage.

The usage was entirely gnorant. See? I can make up words too!

That's like believing that the world is flat because everyone else who is
ignorant of science says it looks flat.

Ah, but the difference is that here the people saying what homosexual
means are not ignorant of the English language - to the contrary
they're experts, so by your own logic shouldn't their word be taken as
gospel truth?

They are completely ignorant because they don't know what it really means.

They do know what it really means; maybe you’re the completely
ignorant one. Ever thought of that?

Phil
.