Do You Accept Evolution as a Fact?

[fatslob-:O]

Nem said:

That isnt what i said at all. Science is about evidence. If theres evidence and theres great support of the results of the theory, experiment and evidence, that is the consensus. Not literally everyone. Consensus in science just means it's widely accepted as the truth after peer review because it's uncontested. The reason it's uncontested is because theres no good alternative.

So, empathy is cognitive dissonance. Very well... i'm ok with that dissonance. Theres is ethics in science. Unsafe Human experimentation is unethical. If you don't think so, as i said, feel free to volunteer your life and risk the consequences as i'm sure theres any crazy company out there willing to do that. I'm sure you can understand why that isn't ethical and that is why Eugenics is something that is unethical.

Ideology can get in the way of peer review much like how there's scientists out there who denies any results related between race and IQ not out of logical reason or contrary empirical evidence most of the time even though there are other independent studies that reveals the unpleasant observation but rather it's out of personal princples! That raises some huge objections as to how trustworthy the scientific community really is as quite a few scientists are guilty of this ... 

You only choose to believe that science is inclusive of ethics but it's not so when nazi scientists were doing human experimentation on it's prisoners. We're the nazi scientist's any less of a scientist for collecting valid data through inhumane procedures ? Are you telling me that they aren't contributors to science when they too paved way for medical science ? 

Shadow1980 said:

I don't think you quite understand what is meant by "scientific consensus." They don't congregate together and have a vote. They didn't do a show of hands or have a secret ballot. That's not how consensus works in science, regardless of the field. A consensus happens when the vast majority of scientists do independent research and the evidence leads them to come to the same conclusion about a given theory. "Alternative" theories eventually fail because fewer and fewer researchers can make a convincing case that the now-standard theory doesn't work or find any evidence supporting the alternative. That's why virtually all papers on cosmology agree that the Big Bang is a valid cosmological model. That's why 97% of all scientific papers claim that global warming is primarily anthropogenic. And, most pertinent to this discussion, you don't see any biology papers in any journal questioning the validity of evolution.

And that's why "dissenters" usually just end up being cranks after a time. There are always a handful of dissenters at some point. Fred Hoyle, Halton Arp, and Hannes Alfven were all actual scientists who questioned the Big Bang theory and proposed their own alternatives, but those alternatives were found lacking as more and more evidence piled up to support the BBT, and that small group of renegades continued to dwindle. Over time, the "dissenters" just sounded more and more like cranks, claiming that there was a "conspiracy" in mainstream science to suppress their work, and as those older dissenters have died, it has increasingly left non-scientists being the only people left that believe them. The near-unanimous support for the BBT happened because the BBT was the best fit for the evidence. Nowadays about the only people who reject the BBT are creationists and Velikovsky supporters, few if any of which are actual practicing scientists with relevant credentials.

And that's the case with evolution. The idea that all species share a common ancestry and that populations of organisms change and evolve over time is simply the best fit for the evidence. Biology, including evolutionary biology, operates on the same basic principles as any other sciences. And over a century of research by many thousands of scientists has repeatedly confirmed the validity of evolution. While the particulars have been modified, no evidence has come forth that would disprove the theory in its entirety. Evolution is so well-confirmed that there are essentially zero biologists who question it. There is no controversy within science over the issue. The only "controversy" is the social controversy, which only exists because the science threatens certain people's worldviews, most notably Protestant fundamentalists who insist on taking the Book of Genesis absolutely literally and treating it not just as a spiritual text, but also as a scientific text.

I think I do understand by what they mean of "scientific consensus" but I wonder if you understand what science is ? You're already wrong if you think there's any sort of consensus, science is about practice and it's not about the community or the thoughts of other people ... 

Consensus = Straight up voting, there's no other way around it ... 

You will have already lost if you need an "agreement" to validate a theory ... 

Funny that you mention about cosmology. All of the cosmologists at the time didn't believe in Einstein's theory of general relativity but once Einstein with the help of Arthur Eddington proved all of his doubters and skeptics wrong in just a day over the course of the solar eclipse ... 

It wasn't after the rest of the community had caught up that general relativity became the new standard, it was specifically after Einstein's obsverations were validated right on the spot that the rest of the community had submitted to his brilliance ... 

Mainstream science does try to suppress the work of scientists. It's why they try to censor any sort of results regarding tons of human experimentation whether humane or not ... (It's why we haven't came to an agreement yet about the studies between race and IQ in spite of the fact that there are many independent studies out there showing reproducible results and that there are scientists that we let them do the work who are shitty enough with their morals to straight up deny data from unethical experimentation. Ugh, don't even get me started about environmental scientists spreading so much FUD about fracking, GMO's, and the hype about renewable energy but I still have no idea why they aren't shamed for these things much like the creationists are ... ) 

You're absolutely right that there's no controversy about evolution in science, the only controversey is whether or not these progressive scientists are going to acknowledge whether or not different subpopulations in a species have different abilities as validated by the theory of evolution ...