Blog Comments

I couldn't quite keep it under 10,000 characters. This is what remained:

Generally, off-patent drugs sell for far, far less (often as much as 1/5 to 1/10th the cost) of on-patent drugs, even without a competitive supplier.

Good posts. It's nice to know that intelligent design pseudo science no longer plagues Volconvo.

Rather than make yet another full post for a brief summary, I'll post it here as a comment.

Summation
In brief, the arguments for intelligent design are wholly unscientific – they offer either an unfalsifiable alternative hypothesis which constitutes an argument from ignorance, or an already falsified hypothesis which must be abandoned.

It seems a simple thing to accept each person’s belief as equally valid to another’s – and it is. Yet scientific inquiry is not about belief – it is not a pursuit of spiritual or personal truth. Knowledge is not a matter of conviction or feeling; it is a matter of observation and learning – and above all, of accepting that one’s ideas, no matter how strongly held, can be wrong.

That intelligent design – and, indeed, creationism – are still widely accepted as “alternatives,” to scientific inquiry in the modern developed world is nothing short of a massive failure. It is a failure of the scientific community to publically display the flaws in these “theories.” It is a failure of educational institutions to take into account not what people believe, but what is evidenced and factual, when it comes to teaching young people about the universe around them. It is a failure of individuals to not properly educate themselves, or give credence to the dedication and professionalism of those with the required knowledge to educate them. And it is a failure of our culture – a culture in which ignorance and irrationality are deemed to be as acceptable, if not more desirable, than knowledge and reason.

** I apologize if making several posts on the same topic is a bit heavy-handed or problematic. The document ended up being much longer than I originally intended it to be. Nevertheless, even if no one bothers to read the whole thing, I think it's important to have a reference and counter-argument for other discussions on this topic, if for no one else than myself.

It is falsifiable. It has never been falsified. Falsifiability means that you can come up with a hypothesis and experiment that serves as a test of the theory - it doesn't mean that the hypothesis has to be proven wrong (if it was, then what would be the point of scientific inquiry?)

I thought falsifiability was important for a hypothesis to be considered a theory. How can natural selection be a theory if it is not falsifiable?

It's generally accepted that that's the case within the scientific community - or rather, that all modern life evolved from a universal common ancestor.

It's entirely possible that the primordial Earth was full of simple, self-replicating systems - but what seems clear is that ultimately one of those systems won out over the others, and developed into modern life.

However, I submit that there is absolutely no reasonable doubt that all life evolved from a universal common ancestor.

I submit this is laughably absurd, as it presumes there to have been only one instance where non-life turned into life.

Glad to see my ideas have been understood. or maybe this harry jack and sally also thought it out first! lol.