There is no "evidence" for any race of people existing "800,000 years ago," there is only speculation. I suggest you read "Guns, Germs, and Steel" to see the folly of this kind of thinking.
That book is full of speculation on where certain races come from, and how they got from one part of the world to another. None of it is provable, but the author has a good time anyway. It's a perfect example of the kind of speculation we are discussing. The author also maintains that the inhabitants of New Guinea are the smartest people in the world, which further illustrates the flaw in his methodology.
And similarly, bad science fiction proves that physics is wrong. Seriously? That's your argument? Science should be rejected out of hand because someone once wrote a book that contains speculation? barfo
No. Try to follow along. What passes for "science" is often just speculation, or educated guesses. That's the point. In fact, Jared Diamond demonstrates this quite well in "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by advocating for a multiregional theory on the birth of mankind, when most "scientists" argue that the human race originated in Africa. Who's right, who's wrong? Well, they're all just speculating.
So, you reject all science because you think it's all just guesswork and speculation. I think that's guesswork and speculation on your part. barfo
As for guessing, science makes a small-step hypothesis, but that is not called the truth until it is verified with experiments on the physical world. Also, all the truths must fit together in a system of logic. Have you taken any courses (check the college philosophy or math departments) in logic? It's tighter than speculation. For starters, why don't you try defining the difference between speculation and logic (also called the philosophy of rationalism, which means reasoning things out). One difference is that reasoning takes small steps from premise A to conclusion B, while religion makes large leaps of faith, often with emotion the guiding principle. If A and B are far apart, reasoning requires intermediate steps, like A to X to Y to B.
There are no experiments that can verify many of the claims put forward by science, but they are put forward anyway. For many years, science said that birds were descendants of dinosaurs, and then one day (oops!) science changed its mind and said that birds were NOT descendants of dinosaurs. Who's talking about religion? I'm talking about the speculation that passes for "reasoning" in the scientific world. And those "small steps" are often leaps into the unknown . . .
Uh, no. Where do you come up with this stuff? Science is wonderful, but it has limits. Science has given us modern medicine, and computers, and all kinds of great things, but when we enter the realm of the distant past, and trying to discover what happened hundreds of thousands of years ago, science is inadequate.
No. Not correct. Birds are still believed to have descended from dinosaurs because that's what the fossil record that God placed in the ground for us to discover indicates. There are those who believe otherwise, but that's not the mainstream belief. That said, if your argument that science is bunk because beliefs change, it simply shows you don't understand the concept of science. Science, unlike religion, doesn't pretend to be a set of universal truths. It's the best predictive model of the world, that fits the known evidence, that humans have at any given point. If a superior model (superior based on predictive value and how well supported it is by verifiable evidence) comes along, science adopts that instead. "Science" (there's no monolithic institution known as "science" as you seem to believe, but...) believed that physics followed a Newtonian model for many years because it was a model with great predictive power and explained the observations we could make. Then Einstein came up with a new model that fit better observations that were possible at that point and predicted the behavior of the universe better (though in most normal human situations, Newtonian physics still does a good job, so it suffices for people who aren't graduate physicists). If you think "science changing its mind" based on better evidence-based models is a mark against it, I think you're looking for something other than the best current knowledge. And your needs are probably well-served by religion.
You got a better tool? We could use that instead, if you do. Far as I can tell, science is the best thing we have for investigating things that happened hundreds of thousands of years ago. Science gave us those great things you list because some people didn't dismiss scientific investigation the way you do. The history of science is full of people saying that it's all poppycock and a waste of time. You are the follower of a grand, if misguided, tradition. barfo
Science is the union of rationalism (reasoning things out in your chair, using your imagination to think of the several forks in the road something can go logically) and empiricism (getting outside your mind and experimenting upon the physical world to verify which fork in the road, which mental construct of the many imaginable in the dimensions of the multiverse, represents this world, the one in which we randomly find ourselves). The above definition was formulated in the middle of the millenium which just ended, when there were many revolutions, and many lives burned at the stake and tortured in Galileo's shackles, to overcome the religious Inquisitions which opposed science. The structure of the last thousand years, the structure which eliminated from leadership all but the conquerors and warriors, was the continuing, nation to nation religious Inquisition. Revolutions made the information-gathering, torturous Inquisitions go underground and become the secret institutions they are today.
In today's science news, I just finished watching the shuttle's last landing, and find that Hubble discovered a new moon of Pluto! Denny, you'll like this. I haven't read it yet. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/20jul_p4/ Okay, now I'll try a second time to post it. How can I not be logged in if I'm typing into the Quick Reply window? Here goes. I'll log out and then in and then repost. Okay, I did that. Better click fast or it'll say I'm logged out.
Quack science! They concluded by factoring in assumptions. Bad science. This, from live science, states how rare those breeding hotties really were. http://www.livescience.com/5570-neanderthals-poised-extinction.html This "science" article states neanderthals NEVER bread outside http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=dbe_1218160816
Wrong. The fossil record indicates no such thing. That's why the theory was debunked years ago. Science is constantly making these kinds of claims, which have no basis in fact. You apparently don't understand the English language. I just said in a post above that science has accomplished all kinds of marvelous things, and made the world a better place. Who in his right mind would say science is "bunk"? It's these kinds of wild accusations that make you look stupid. Thank you for making my point. A great many of the assumptions that science makes about the way the universe operates, or what happened in the distant past, are later proven to be wrong. Instead of admitting that we don't know certain things, science comes up with theories, passes them off as accepted truth, and later revises them when it becomes clear they were wrong. Science used to believe that tomatoes were poisonous, that leeches were therapeutic, and that the world was flat. Time eventually proved them all wrong, of course. And your needs are probably well-served by the occasional enema.
Interesting. Perhaps you should read the book instead of repeating what you've heard about it in a faux-academic way. The book is criticized pretty extensively in the academic world, as should any book attempting to explain differences in culture, but not for Diamond's presumption of the course of human evolution, which is an accepted pretext to his analysis. It's also criticized pretty extensively by creationists (which is where I'm guessing you got your "analysis") because it is a controversial piece of literature having to do with some aspects of human evolution, which they can parade around as proof that science is wrong on evolution.
The missing link between dinosaurs and birds, Archaeopteryx, was found in the 1800s: Birds being descended from dinosaurs is still the mainstream belief, from everything I've seen. In fact, even someone who disputes the notion that birds descended from dinosaurs said (in 2010) that it's the mainstream belief: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100209183335.htm How mean! If I couldn't understand the English language, how could we be talking right now, engaging in this frank exchange of ideas? I made the common sense point that your "black mark" against science is actually what makes science the most widely accepted and respected search for knowledge: the fact that the scientific community works from the best theories possible from current evidence and will replace old models with proven better ones. I know you prefer religious fervor, where admitting wrong is a sign of weakness, but science is happy to "be wrong" if it means a better model came along that advances human knowledge. Again, so mean.
