User talk:NCartmell

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Argh, it makes me furious the unrelenting, blatant POV when talking about evolution and creationism. There is great debate in the scientific community regarding both of these theories. Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box is just now starting to make a huge splash, as scientists are, more and more, having to accept his postulates. And listing creationism and ID in a list of "theories", the criteria being

• • Asserting claims without supporting experimental evidence;
  • Asserting claims which contradict experimentally established results;
  • Failing to provide an experimental possibility of reproducible results; or
  • Violating Occam's Razor (the principle of choosing the simplest explanation when multiple viable explanations are possible)

is really just unnecessarily inflammatory. There needs to be a much more neutral POV when talking about such delicate subjects that are so incediary and divisionary.

You're just plain wrong, there is no great debate among scientists, which is why I removed your addition of macroevolution to the list of disputed theories. And by the way, ID does three of the four above. It does not, however, assert "claims which contradict experimentally established results", since it doesn't make any testable predictions at all. --RE 18:37, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm answering here (I moved your discussion post to my talk page instead of my user page...). As regards the small probability, please read [1]. (By the way, mathematicians do not round very small numbers to 0, they are perfectly comfortable with working with small numbers.) As regards my being a physicist, that doesn't make me any more qualified than you to comment on evolution -- that is not the point. I have never studied biology at the university level, but I have read about it as a layman, and I can tell you that there is no scientific controversy over whether evolution is a fact or not. But it is a fact that ID and creationism are very disputed. The link I posted here leads to a very good website where you can read scientific refutations of all creationist claims I have ever seen. --RE 22:52, 26 June 2006 (UTC)