How much science should we expect other people to understand?

Having offspring with mutations is still a thing.

OH . . . so you now think it is entirely possible for there to be transitional stages between non-avian dinosaurs and birds?

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Guys, the arrogance and intolerance you display in this thread is unbelievable.
To the OP.
If someone I chat with in Facebook “does not get it”
I would first think that I am doing something wrong since I am unable to convey what is necessary to communicate my idea.
To think that the other guy needs to change, stinks to high heavens. (Pun intended)

That’ll be a no then. Funny that.

I think you need a lesson in language comprehension. That answer had no relationship to my quip.

Richard

That is not a major problem in science, at least within the fields I know. The main reason for the birth of new science journals has been that general journals can only accept a very limited number of manuscripts from a narrow subfield. As the number of manuscripts grows, there is a need for more specialized journals focusing on a narrow field of science.

Another common reason for the birth of new journals has been the competition between publishing houses. An example is the Nature portfolio. Starting from one (Nature), it now includes several journals, like Nature Genetics and Nature Physics. With a broader set of alternatives, the publisher hopes to atract a larger proportion of top manuscripts. Top papers are influential and lift the relative impact of the journal and the publishing house, so it is good for the publishing house to have many journals in their portfolio.

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Marc,

That is exactly what I’m doing with this thread.

I asked my original question precisely because I wanted to know if I was expecting too much of other people by expecting them to understand the most elementary facts about how the scientific method works once it is pointed out to them.

This means that when you say this:

you have provided an answer to my question. Others may beg to differ, but I have noticed, and I have taken your opinion into account. Thank you for you contribution.

Unfortunately there has been a tendency in this thread for the discussion to drift way off topic. There are a lot of discussions going on about more advanced scientific topics that I would not necessarily expect everyone to understand, and that do not even attempt to address the question of whether we should expect other people to understand them or not. They are useful discussions to have, and are within the scope of this forum in general, but just not in the scope of this specific thread.

When one asks a specific question and is looking for answers on that specific subject, it is right and proper to object when the subject drifts off topic, and to ask for the off topic discussions to be moved elsewhere. To dismiss such an objection as “arrogance and intolerance” is quite uncalled for.

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Off topic is in the eye of the beholder.
And to say "There are a lot of discussions going on about more advanced scientific topics that I would not necessarily expect everyone to understand " is precisely what I object to. But if you don’t see this … I failed the same as you.

There are a lot of discussions that are not worth having. Take my attempt at education about food and metabolism. Debating a vegan is completely pointless. Unfortunately the person did not disclose in time he was.
Try debate logic with a pentecostal,or sabatism with an 7DA. :upside_down_face:

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As a disinterested party to that particular discussion (but someone who read it none-the-less), I think it should be noted…

  1. @SkovandOfMitaze first replied to you on Sept. 8.

  2. He mentioned his vegan diet later on Sept. 8.

  3. If you view vegans as not worth your time or respect, you shouldn’t have waited until a week later to disclose that. You could have saved Mi a lot of time he spent engaging with you in good faith.

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Perhaps I missed that, but you added a value judgment (not worth of respect) all from your own production.
Enough said.

Should probably let you know this now as well. Fairly quickly I realized you never had any formal training on even the basics of nutritional science or the scientific consensus on the impact agriculture has on the environment. You use arguments that are some of the weakest arguments that people toss out thinking they found an “aha”. Even the articles you shared countered what you said. Which means you did not even read them, or worse, you did and misunderstood it.

Believe me, everyone except the flat earthers of the world of nutrition understands that plants are the backbone of healthy eating and that diets high in meat are associated with diseases of affluence. But i really enjoy this subject. Normally, the discussion is a bit more technical and is built around things like creating a weight loss diet with 1600 or 2300 calories and things like fat under 10% of the diet or helping with a meal plan where someone needs the bulk of the carbohydrates from low glycemic foods and so on.

The other reason is because I’ve noticed over the year a decent amount of traffic. There are not many discussions on the vegan diet or how livestock affects the environment and so if by some chance someone is here and looks it up, I want them to have something they can work from. Key words to highlight issues within certain jargon. Like sharing studies that show this nutrient is good for this organ and so therefore this food with that nutrient must be healthy, but that kind of reductionist approach to dietetics fails short of what we see with holistic approaches to health. There is plenty here for someone to consider and into. Several books have been mentioned by well known and highly respected scientists who specialize in the biochemistry of nutrition. Including those that are not vegans, but still promotes diets that are mostly plant based.

Another thing most vegans don’t actually stick with it. Most lack the discipline and compassion. Most vegans who were vegans 5 years ago are not vegans today. Very few vegans stay vegan after 5 years, and even less goes beyond 15 years like myself. But most who actually goes a year or two following it, still keeps a mostly WFPB diet with occasional meat. Same as how most non vegan doctors, when recommending healthy diets to their patients, push more plants and less meat. Same for nutritionist. Even in sports nutrition with high protein diets still encourages significantly more plants in the diet.

But yes, if your goal was to change my mind even the slightest, you absolutely wasted your time. You don’t know anywhere near far enough to even change something within this debate that I’m unsure of. One way I like to learn is to play the devils advocate and I often enter into discussions as someone promoting hunting, eating meat and so on. But if you don’t want to waste your time you don’t have to worry about responding.

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A few other things I think worth looking at.

This is an ongoing lawsuit about runoff into ground water.

A lawsuit concerning changes Trump made concerning air pollution created by factory farming.

This is an organization focused on animal cruelty within factory farms. Would like to highlight how even in the earlier journal articles I
posted, the language used by the people for the process was “production” and “products” and not animals or highlighting the fact they are living beings.

You can find tons of recordings of animal treatment in these facilities including those that say they are free range and so on.

Another sad and interesting thing is seeing what animal behaviorist have to say. This is an article that discusses some of the pain animals go through and what can cause it. They’ve noticed lots of damage to cows showing up due to regulations not behind upheld.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8068923/

This article is from psychology today and is built off of an actual study, which it cites. It shows cows as sentient emotional beings instead of just as burgers.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201711/cows-science-shows-theyre-bright-and-emotional-individuals?amp

They also brought up the dog style questions, which by the way, was very obviously not rhetorical.

Here is some of the reasons why it’s pointless to argue with a long term vegan.

  1. Do we have to eat animals in order to survive?
    No.

  2. Do animals suffer emotionally and physically during the farm to slaughter process?
    Yes.

  3. Do animals have to die for us to eat them?
    Yes.

  4. Is there a way for me to thrive and be fit and healthy, living a potentially long life while also significantly reducing the pain and death of other innocent earthlings while also helping to positively impact the environment? Yes. It’s called veganism.

  5. Is there a way for me to significantly increase the pain and suffering of animals, resulting in their eventual death, that also causes tons of environmental damage and if often one of the leading causes of diseases of affluence in people? Yes. It’s the standard paradigm and choice of many people for the time being.

This shows a complete lack of the slightest concept of how heredity works – what you wrote has nothing to do with development and inheritance of characteristics.

Which points to another aspect of the communication problem: lots of people thinking they know something but having it wrong.

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In stage band and pep band in high school we played this a lot–

It caught on well enough that our varsity basketball team decided to drill at dribbling the ball to the dominant 7/4 beat, which won a critical game: tied with less than 20 seconds on the clock, the team captain hollered at the band, "The Stomp!’ and they went dribbling down the court to X x X x X x x, the ball hitting the floor on the small x downbeats. It so flustered the other team our guys practically breezed over halfway down the court and then went into a passing drill to the same beat, and when the other team was still scrambling the team captain took a pass and dropped a perfect “nuthin’ but net” shot with two seconds left.
After that we played it pre-game but never during the game except when the team asked for it.
(The pep squad tried to come up with a routine that went with it but they were too dependent on an even rhythm to make much with it.)

There was another one that carried stage band to semi-finals at the Reno Jazz Festival that used 3/4, 4/4, 5/4, 7/4, with some 6/8 mixed in, but one of the judges hated “uneven” time signatures and sunk us.

Oh – in marching band our brass section took a piece from Pussywiggle Stomp and worked it into our marching for between playing regular pieces. It got us a “most original” award at one parade (we heard it would have been a trophy if the whole band had marched to it).

edit: I have to say it was more fun to play than to listen to the Ellis version.

Really?

Are we now having a new definition of the word random?

If you are trying to say that the traits (DNA) already eisted then the DNA of the first ever live cell has to be astronomically long to incluce all the diverisy of Nature.

The whole principle of the Evolutional process is a random deviation that causes a new …
anything.

Abd the problem has always been to define the scope of that anythihing.

The Galapogas variatios are marked but very small. Variaion in size, of body or beak . They were still all finches…

But ToE say you can change anything and evrything from a fish to a mammal and beyond. Given enough time, and luck.

Take out the luck and you change the whole process. Take out the luck and you find God.

But the two expremes need not be the only answers, which is what I argue and science cannot accomodate.

Richard

I would hope that people would have learned about inheritance of traits while they were in biology class. If memory serves, I was learning about Mendelian inheritance in 6th grade. I would think that it is fair to expect people to understand the basic of inheritance in discussions like these.

At the same time, I don’t think it is fair to expect regular people to understand the science behind mutations and why scientists think they are random. Most people I have talked to are unaware that each human is born with about 50 mutations. They are also usually unaware of the classic experiments that established the randomness of mutations with respect to fitness.

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/the-lederberg-experiment/

I can understand why a regular person would be skeptical of random mutations because they probably aren’t aware of the data behind that conclusion.

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snicker

The irony.

I have not been keeping up with the discussion in this thread, so I don’t know where the conversation has been going. i am still focused on on @jammycakes 's OP. I read this post by @Wesley_Coleman just now:

and thought it was a really good example to use for discussion here. How would “the average American Josephine” work through this?

Most people simply would not, I’m afraid. “Above my pay grade” or would find it intimidating. “So many words.” “Guy seems to know what he’s talking about.” “I don’t want to have to go back and read the post he is replying to, which will be just as much work…” etc.

I read @rsewell 's post to which Wesley_Coleman’s post is responding. Ron’s was clear, I think. But I don’t have the time to investigate his statements to make sure they are right. Although they are consistent -I think-with what I have seen at, say, the Indiana State Museum (awesome!!!). But maybe the museum displays have been fudged to fit the claims they want me to believe. (For what purpose?)

The Wesley_Coleman brings things from Ron’s post into question. Going through it all will take me a good deal of time as it probably did the respondant. Evaluating what questions he brings but does not answer himself will be something I would need to do. But then what? Ask AIG? Or DI?

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I think the main thing I expect people to understand is that their compulsory education doesn’t really prepare them to “evaluate the science” for themselves when it comes to specialized fields. Just because you can read a journal article written by doctors or scientists with advanced degrees and years of specialized experience doesn’t mean you can evaluate whether it’s good or not. At some point you have to trust consensus to work. I think most people go off on stupid tangents because they trust the wrong “experts” on the complicated stuff, not because they failed to master more basic stuff. But admitedly, we do draw some strange birds around these parts who seem especially dense and impervious to basic facts.

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A corollary to the O.P. might be: How much ‘astute vetting of sources’ can be reasonably expected by an average high-school grad?

Because the reality a couple of you are hitting on above is that at some point all of us need to have information curated to us by ‘tour guides’ we’ve decided to trust - or trust enough that we give them our regular earnest attention. These are the voices we are choosing to be discipled by.

I’d like to think I do and have chosen well in that regard. But so says everyone and their uncle in every various deep silo no matter how extreme or cultish.

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I like the way you put this.

Yes. How does one account for these differences or encourage change, particularly when the trust is in “tour guides” who are not only untrustworthy, but in positions to guide or make policy that effects large groups of people?!

I have two very close relations, who have much stronger science backgrounds than I do, who follow plenty of pseudoscience – “alternative medicine”, “all natural,” minimal vaccinations, etc. They seem in step with they contemporary movements that have accompanied Evangelicalism in the last 20-30 years. Am I just cantankerous? Or am I the cultish one?

I don’t think it’s the later two.

I’m really not comfortable with the term “discipled” here. But maybe because I reject in relation to me and not in relation to someone else. But I don’t see myself as “discipled by” anyone related to science or medicine. Maybe that discipleship is done. I’m sure there are plenty of folks who would just see me as thoroughly indoctrinated. Saturated in the kool-aid, whether I know what’s in it or not.

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I think you have a good point here. It may even be really relevant to the OP–no matter how many book smarts we have, we can have huge blind sides. So, even though we should know better, it always behooves us to anticipate the blind side with both ourselves and others, and correct the erring, as Paul told Timothy and Titus (1 Tim 5; 2 Tim 2:25; Titus 2), with gentleness and humility.

I have a general surgeon colleague who everyone likes–even the primary providers–because he explains everything from the ground up with patience and respect. As I tell my patients, he doesn’t make me feel like a “dumb family practice doc.” There may be some things I can teach him, too–but that means I should approach things in the same way.

Thanks.

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