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Eugine_Nier comments on Publication: the "anti-science" trope is culturally polarizing and makes people distrust scientists - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: ancientcampus 07 February 2014 05:09PM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 February 2014 02:29:21AM *  0 points [-]

I meant to say that if you believe a scientific claim to be legitimate, there should/are going to be implications of that on other parts of your worldview. When we misjudge what the implications of a belief are, we can believe it while simultaneously rejecting something it implies. (That's what reductio ad absurdum's are for.)

We also tend to overestimate how much parts of our worldview support each other, or as this quote says:

If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves.

I was under the impression that GPS was such a technology.

GPS requires corrections for general relativity, it's somewhat of a stretch to say that implies the big bang.

I also don't see much room for reasonably believing in evolutionary medicine without accepting macro-evolution

Well, according to the wikipedia entry for evolutionary medicine the key concepts are:

  • Trade-offs: changes that could make an organism less vulnerable to disease can lead to a decrease in fitness due to effects on other traits.
  • Pathogens evolve rapidly and respond quickly to human intervention.
  • Some symptoms are useful defenses.
  • Because cultural and demographic changes are more rapid than biological evolution, humans are often mismatched to modern environments.
  • Human phylogenetic history leaves a legacy of biological constraint.
  • Cancer is the result of somatic evolution.
  • Humans have not stopped evolving.
  • All phenotypes are products of gene-environment interaction and are often shaped by developmental calibration.

These all involve at most micro-evolution and the observation that humans are well designed for an ancestral environment, neither of which YEC's reject to my knowledge.

Comment author: JQuinton 10 February 2014 07:29:11PM *  6 points [-]

In a geology course I took in undergrad, I was under the impression that successfully locating fossil fuels that can be used for production purposes requires understanding the mechanics of how fossils form and how long the organic material has to be fossilized, which explicitly requires deep time. Young Earth Creationism cannot be used as a model for providing the world's oil, and our professor made sure that we understood those implications.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 February 2014 11:49:05PM 2 points [-]

http://youtu.be/MWAbr-SoMAs

Pat Robertson (who considers young earth to be an embarrassment to his sort of Christian) uses that very example.