Coffee: Massimo Pigliucci, trying to get it
| October 12, 2013 | Posted by News under News, Philosophy, Science |
Here:
It is precisely in the area of medical treatments that the science-pseudoscience divide is most critical, and where the role of philosophers in clarifying things may be most relevant. Our colleague Stephen T. Asma raised the issue in a recent Stone column (“The Enigma of Chinese Medicine”), pointing out that some traditional Chinese remedies (like drinking fresh turtle blood to alleviate cold symptoms) may in fact work, and therefore should not be dismissed as pseudoscience.
Especially not by the turtle.
6 Responses to Coffee: Massimo Pigliucci, trying to get it
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You might have included the next sentence:
“This, however, risks confusing the possible effectiveness of folk remedies with the arbitrary theoretical-metaphysical baggage attached to it.”
which is the point of the article.
This sounds like a very good description of Darwinian processes. Are they just as valid as Qi? After all Qi is assumed true without any verifiable evidence. And Darwinian processes are assumed true without any verifiable evidence. Was Darwin, no more than a snake oil salesman? He certainly could write well. He would have made a good used car salesman in today’s world.
Pigliucci is one of the people who have investigated macro-evolutionary processes and found we do not have any explanation for what we see.
The following quote needed some correction:
Actually the point of the article is that there should be a more rigorous demarcation of science from pseudo-science. In fact Pigliucci tells us what he thinks the true mark of a pseudo-science actually is:
Although Pigliucci does not list Darwinian Evolution or ID in his list of what he considers the main pseudo-sciences which are prone to ‘creative fudging and finagling with empirical data’,,,,
Darwinian evolution could easily lead Pigliucci’s list of pseudo-sciences:
Or as Karl Popper may have very well put it,
Here is how neo-Darwinian evolution avoids falsification from ‘anomalous’ genetic evidence:
Here is how Darwinists avoid falsification from the protein evidence
Here is how Darwinists avoid falsification from the fossil record;
Here is how Darwinists avoid falsification from the biogeographical data of finding numerous and highly similar species in widely separated locations:
Many Darwinists tried (although they didn’t get too far) to protect Darwinism from the ENCODE findings of widespread functionality for ‘junk’ DNA by claiming that Darwinism predicted this finding all along:
And let’s not forget another means in which Darwinists avoid falsification; the fraudulent practice of literature bluffing;
The deception, (literature bluffing), from neo-Darwinists at Dover did not stop with immunology;
In fact Nick Matzke, whom I believed was involved fairly heavily in Dover, still seems to take literature bluffing rather seriously, as a form of art rather than the blatantly fraudulent practice it actually is:
Many more instances of Darwinism avoiding falsification from the empirical data, by ad hoc models (rationalizations), can be found on this following site:
A rough outline of the top problems of neo-Darwinism are here:
To reiterate, there is simply nothing within Darwinism so that one may demarcate it as truly being ‘scientific’ and potentially falsifying it:
Whereas, Intelligent Design (ID) does not suffer from such an embarrassment of a lack of mathematical rigor:
In fact Intelligent Design has a demarcation criteria that can be easily understood
In fact a single observed instance of Darwinian processes creating functional information would falsify ID:
Darwinism simply does not have anything at all like ID does so as to falsify it, and is therefore a pseudo-science
of note: for the sake of brevity I’ve left off the examples of where Darwinism has actually led to medical malpractice
Ian Juby has a video up on the assembly of the Bacterial Flagellum
According to plan! This is Genesis Week with Wazooloo/Ian Juby – video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G312mHr1URw