Further to “Debate!: Tree of life? Forest of life? What about matchwood?,” legacy mainstream media are offering their usual sock puppet theatre beside the actual issues* in the Nelson Velasco debate on the supposed Tree of Life.
That said, the local paper reports an interesting comment from a local U prof:
But Dr. Martin Rice of Pitt-Johnstown says ideas on intelligent design and creationism are worth hearing.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is a Nazi, he adds.
“I believe in free discourse and inquiry,” says Rice, who teaches philosophy, philosophy of science, logic and philosophy of mathematics.
“Even though I don’t agree with him, I think his views should be aired. People should have the chance to question him, and he should have the chance to explore and question his competition. Anything else is fascism.”
That may sound a little extreme but if you read the Our Town story, it quickly becomes clear that many don’t think Nelson’s perspective should be heard in scholarly circles at all.
Playing to a crowd educated by the likes of Our Town, his opponent Velasco explains,
“I would like to say that in principle, any topic can have a place in scholarly debate,” he says. “But this does not mean that all questions are or should be actively debated by scholars. It is impossible to separate the scholarly activity within science from the political and social ramifications of the practice and interpretation of science. The common ancestry of living things is extremely well-supported by the evidence and explains a number of different kinds of facts about the diversity and distribution of life on this planet.”
The critical difference in this case, Velasco says, is that the debate is not technically “scholarly.”
So if Nelson presents the kind of evidence you can read for yourself in the journals and is covered here at UD, about why the Tree of Life is matchwood, and undermines Velasco’s position, it doesn’t really count. And Velasco will help see to it that the debate never takes place in a venue where it did count.
It’s hilarious listening to rants in legacy media about how supposed creationism in voucher schools contributes to low science rankings. What contributes to low science rankings is precisely the stupidification on display here.
The first step toward reality is to realize that almost anything we hear from Our Town will be aimed at defending a deteriorating status quo, on which it itself depends. The Tree of Life (which Our Town didn’t even want to tell its readers is the real topic of discussion – even though the image it ran (above left) makes that clear – is indeed now matchwood. Shouting otherwise impresses the low information readers — increasingly the ones they are left with.
The topic of the debate should have been: Where do we go from here? Not “Is the thing dead?”
– O’Leary for News
Note: Here’s the link for the live stream of the debate.
*For these reasons, they cannot afford to examine real issues seriously any more.
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OT: Record quantum entanglement of multiple dimensions – March 27, 2014
Excerpt: An international team directed by researchers from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, with participation from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has managed to create an entanglement of 103 dimensions with only two photons. The record had been established at 11 dimensions.,,,
Until now, in order to increase the “[quantum] computing” capacity of these particle systems, scientists have mainly turned to increasing the number of entangled particles, each of them in a two-dimensional state of superposition: a qubit (the quantum equivalent to an information bit, but with values which can be 1, 0 or an overlap of both values). Using this method, scientists managed to entangle up to 14 particles, an authentic multitude given its experimental difficulty.
The research team was directed by Anton Zeilinger and Mario Krenn from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.,,,
scientists described how they managed to achieve a quantum entanglement with a minimum of 103 dimensions with only two particles. “We have two Schrödinger cats which could be alive, dead, or in 101 other states simultaneously”, Huber jokes, “plus, they are entangled in such a way that what happens to one immediately affects the other”.,,,
Instead of entangling many particles with a qubit of information each, scientists generated one single pair of entangled photons in which each could be in more than one hundred states, or in any of the superpositions of theses states; something much easier than entangling many particles. These highly complex states correspond to different modes in which photons may find themselves in, with a distribution of their characteristic phase, angular momentum and intensity for each mode.
“This high dimension quantum entanglement offers great potential for quantum information applications.
http://phys.org/news/2014-03-q.....sions.html
as to this comment:
It might be to Velasko’s embarrassing dismay if he underestimates Dr. Nelson’s grasp of the details of the subject.
As I pointed out yesterday, my respect from Dr. Nelson has steadily grown over the years as I have seen him break down extremely complex subjects in biology for the lay audience and has shown Darwinian explanations to be grossly inadequate.
But as to his hidden presupposition that a debate with a Theist cannot truly be ‘scholarly’, I would like to point out, once again, that it is the atheistic materialist who has extreme difficultly explaining how it is possible to ‘know’ anything is ‘true’ in the first place if naturalism were actually true.
Verse and Music: