I’m sure we’ve all felt this way before — some smug know-nothing confronts you with a dilemma out of his own imagining, and then expects you to applaud and recognize the brilliance of his insight.
That guy in the red sweater is every creationist on the planet.
It’s amusing to imagine playing along, but even better is when a scientist replies with dumbfounded incredulity. I found an example of that, but I’m not going to address it myself, because it’s on the topic of physics and cosmology, and I have only a superficial knowledge of the subject, so I’d only be able to say “I don’t know” if queried on the details. This video, Roger Penrose confronts creationist critic Stephen Meyer, is wonderfully satisfying.
Stephen Meyer is fond of pontificating on the origins of the universe, and he often claims that physicists like Hawking and Penrose are supporting his ideas about the Big Bang, and singularities, and fine tuning — it’s annoying because he doesn’t actually understand what he’s saying, but loves to quote sciencey-sounding fragments that make you think physics is pro-intelligent design. In that 20 minute video, they show clips of Meyer chattering about physics with Christian apologists like Sean McDowell, intercut with Roger Penrose replying.
He’s usually saying “that makes no sense” or “that’s wrong” before explaining what he actually wrote or discussing the details of his theory. I’m not going to discuss any of the details of Penrose’s CCC theory, because I’m afraid he’ll then turn around and make a video titled “Roger Penrose debunks biologist critic PZ Myers”. It could happen. Watch the whole video and see what you think.
Best outcome: Stephen Meyer shuts the fuck up and stops distorting Penrose’s physics.
P.S. Angela Collier rips into billionaires who think they can use AI to solve deep problems using “vibe physics”. It’s the same problem: poseurs who think they can skip all the hard work and math and go straight to their Nobel prize.
Sloth is a virtue in these peoples’ eyes.
There’s a whole long list of scientific disciplines founded on evolutionary presuppositions: Genetics, pathology, microbiology, paleontology, systematics, anthropology, just to name some. If evolution is wrong, then all of those other disciplines are wrong too, at least in the presuppositions they’ve been based on for the past century.
Are creationists really going to claim that all of those other disciplines are wrong too? Because that’s where they ultimately end up. And if evolution is wrong, then how is it that scientific work done in all those other disciplines based on evolutionary presuppositions turns out to be right so often?
I saw (as in, saw a thumbnail of, not actually read) an article claiming something similar for Roman history – we can fill in all the lacunae and textual losses from ancient authors with AI! We can “rediscover” the missing hundred-odd books of Livy by feeding the remainder into a glorified predictive text contrivance and getting it to make up several centuries of accounts!
No. No we can’t. If we’re going to do that we could at least pay some ancient historians to make up the texts – they’d do a better job and they almost certainly need the money.
@2– All the disciplines you mention predate evolutionary theory. (Genetics is close; Mendel’s pea experiments started only a few years before Origin of Species came out). As such, they were not founded on evolutionary principles. It’s more that evolutionary principles became indispensable to those fields as evidence accumulated.
@3– That is pure magical thinking! I mean, reconstructing lost books with LLM or AI generation would be a fascinating project, but it’s obviously not “rediscovering” texts any more than Colossal is “de-extincting” species.
Idiot misrepresents highly speculative model. News at 10.
Chris, No. 4, sorry, I should have used a different word. I meant the current foundation on which those disciplines rest, not that their originators had evolution in mind at the time.
Speaking of bad actors. I got an email from Medicare a little while ago with some medical advise: “Walk your way to better health.” That’s not bad advice…I walk everyday for exercise…but it came from “Stay Healthy with Dr. Oz”. That’s THE Dr. Oz! Prominently pictured in the email. That crackpot is getting paid by Medicare, and probably a lot, to put his face on these suggestions rather than providing healthcare for more people. I’m sure this is because Oz is a Taco hanger on. I wrote them to complain.
“How come there are still monkeys?” is a total non sequitur. Are these people expecting there not still to be monkeys? And if so, why?
@robro #8
He’s the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
And from a frequent commenter to a venerable British tech-focused site yesterday on an article regarding the planned shuttering of the Mauna Loa observatory, “[…] still doesn’t explain why, if CO2 is so brilliant at ‘trapping’ heat, we’re not using it for heating or insulation.”
That has honestly just been making my brain itch ever since. Yes, refutation is uncomplicated, but life is too short to engage with someone who had already contributed at least 20 such (ahem) carefully thought-out Nobel-worthy comments to the thread. So yeah, in a sense, that guy has won. He’s flooded the zone with sincere foolishness, and my interest in learning what anyone else has to say over there is dead. For a while, anyway. Could use that guy’s disingenuousity as insulation, ffs.
I’m a physicist. Condensed matter, not GR, but I do have some familiarity with CCC, as an interested physicist…
Anyway, CCC is a model Penrose developed to help explain certain aspects of the universe that have been experimentally shown: accelerating expansion of the universe, low initial entropy, existence of dark matter and dark energy, gravitational waves etc.
Those are facts that have been discovered by experiment.
CCC is a cool idea!
Penrose and others have created models to help explain the evolution of the universe that is consistent with those facts.
None of the models have been experimentally verified enough to be called a Theory, like say General Relativity. That is why physicists are working on incorporating gravity into the current Standard Model to get a Theory of Everything. It’s a tough problem.
Heck, we don’t even know what dark matter and dark energy are, and we have not detected a graviton (if they exist…)
So all of Stephen Meyer’s “evidence” for his world view is based on pure speculation about unproven models. He does not give any experimental evidence to support his model. He cherry picks ideas from other peoples models, slops them together using physics jargon incorrectly and tires to make it sound like his misinterpretation of Penrose’s model somehow supports his worldview.
Any other physicist here have anything to add, correct or clarify?
Do comments on his comment on fb count as peer review?
(No. Obvs.)
The number of people who think their “common sense” or limited personal experience outweighs decades and even centuries of serious, careful scientific studies, research, maths and mental effort is depressingly clear on any fb thread or youtube comments page when it comes to Climatology that’s for fucking sure.
“I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.” – Charles Babbage
@7– Yes. It’s one of the most impressive feats of modern evolutionary theory, becoming essential to many scientific disciplines, some of which had existed long before Darwin or the New Synthesis.