Congratulations! Your video, NDT Demonstrates Why Eye Witness Testimony Is Unreliable, has reached the #1 spot in the current Top 15 New Videos listing. This is a very difficult thing to accomplish but you managed to pull it off. For your contribution you have been awarded 2 Power Points.

This achievement has earned you your "Golden One" Level 435 Badge!

Your video, Do You Have Symptoms Of A Smart Person?- NDT, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 237 Badge!

After reading the title i was surprised and excited that Corona would have NDT in a commercial.

Call me disappointed

The rebuttal from the Nephew of NDT....

Also Stephen Colbert discusses Pluto with NDT

For that we have NDT. Dawkins is for those times when an abrasive asshole is what's called for, and there are all too many of those times. He's not really a good 'spokesperson', but he's a great slobbering bulldog.

@BicycleRepairMan
i do not understand what you are arguing against.
you could have stuck with "no" and that would have sufficed,but you went off on a tirade about religion that had very little to do with what NDT was attempting to convey.

simply put:keep science and religion distinctively separate.that you could BE a scientist and still be a religious person.

he didnt get into the details because (and i am assuming here) he is full aware of the complexities of ones personal beliefs,religion being only a single facet.

to say religion has not produced a single novel or new idea,totally ignores the massive contributions in regards to:philosophy,math,astrology,physics.the list is pretty extensive.

you appear,and please correct me if i am wrong,to pigeon hole anybody who claims a religion as being a fundamentalist.this is not only staggeringly inaccurate but reveals a massive lack of understanding.

which is why NDT didnt even mention the fundamentalist,because the chances of a fundamentalist being a scientist hovers around 0%.

so why are you making an argument against fundamentalism when NDT did not even proceed from that assertion?

why do you care if a scientist also happens to hold a religious or spiritual philosophy?
are you suggesting that a scientist who DOES hold to these philosophies can no longer function properly as a scientist?

has it ever occurred to you that an intelligent person may hold a religious philosophy and keep that philosophy separate from their work?

or considered that a religious person may actually view their work as the continuing study of god/creator/universal consciousness? that by unraveling the mysteries of the known physical universe is their way of revealing god?there is a certain poetry to seeking and attempting to understand the mysteries of the universe.

i am totally with you in regards to fundamentalism,which brings a stagnation to the inquisitive mind and hampers the desire to know and seek those answers.the fundamentalist externalizes those questions in the form of scripture and in the process..stops asking the questions.

but to suggest that anybody who adheres to a religious or spiritual philosophy is somehow a fundamentalist,and therefore unworthy of consideration,is just plain inaccurate.

Another problem with NDTs words in this video, he tells us that 50% of scientists believe in god/are religious, and this is somehow proof there is no contradiction, or that science does not lead to non-belief. But this is a laughable failure of statistical analysis by NDT. I think the 50% number seems quite high, like he has been using a really bad sift on who qualifies as scientist (is it anyone with a science degree on any level?) But fine, lets make it 50% of scientists in the US. The takeaway from that is that the number of religous is MUCH LOWER than in the general population.
T
he general population is like 85% religious. That means that if 100 people go get a science degree, 85 will be religious, and 35 of them will lose their faith on the way to becoming a scientist. That means that if you study science, and you are religious, theres a 40%
chance youll lose your faith along the way. (This doesnt take into account that many of the 15% non-religious are probably already scientists, so the general population number is probably even higher.)

If you make it all the way to the National Academy of Sciences, a whooping 78 out of the 85 will have lost their faith. Thats about as damning for the no-contradiction/conflict-hypothesis as you can get.

Its like arguing that most drunk drivers never actually crash, therefore alcohol-intake does not influence your driving skills.

A simple "no" does not allow the man to drop some knowledge though. A simple "no" does not cause anyone to possibly rethink their position.

I don't think NDT thinks he is going to convince anyone that their religion is false. He probably feels his time is better spent trying to get people to stop rejecting science just because it might go against or does not support their religious beliefs and that science does not have to be the enemy of their religion.

He never said "religion tells you how to get to heaven". He used Galileo as an example of how one can keep religion and science separate....how what they believe or are taught "how to go to heaven" vs "how the heavens go".

Yes....it is superstitious bullshit from A to Z. But if the man answers the question with "NO, because its all superstitious bullshit"...the only people listening at that point are the people that already agree with that statement.

Very little in science is black and white. Big upvote for NDT's follow up though. Here is an extremely thorough rundown of many of the issues at hand written by an unbiased reporter: http://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/

In article #2 he writes about FDA safety testing of GMO's, which, while "voluntary" are always performed. According to an FDA policy analyst he interviews, "(I) frankly cannot really envision any circumstances under which anybody placing a ‘bioengineered’ food on the market would have the temerity NOT to consult with (the FDA).”

In the next article, he writes about the perception that GMO's are the product of for-profit corporations and meets with plant scientists at UC Davis; a nonprofit, publicly funded university.

If you don't have time to read the entire series, then at the very least read his final article. His conclusions are well-tempered and thoughful.

What Neil deGrasse Tyson and some of the other scientists/doctors (myself include) have are saying is that the IDEA of GMO's is a great one. The fact that we can engineer our foods to get the traits we want or add additional beneficial traits is an incredibly useful tool. We've already engineered rice that is able to produce vitamin A, which has been a huge help for places with vitamin A deficiencies and we can engineer potatoes to absorb less fats and oils when we fry them, there is also a professor at SUNY-ESF who is using GMO's to try and save the American Chestnut tree from extinction.

GMing is simply another tool in humanity's struggle to survive. First it was finding which foods were safe to eat, then it was breeding organisms within species to make inbred organisms that had the traits we wanted (think cattle, dogs, cats, corn, banana's; some of these things are more inbred than the Hapsburgs), then we starting creating our own hybrids across different species, and now we have GMO's.

However, what I object to is the current corporate use of GMO's to exploit farmers over patents, and breed for traits that people do necessarily need. NdT I'm sure is not advocating for that, but is advocating for the use of transgenic organisms/GMO's to solve some of the world's most pressing issues.

GMO's are probably the most powerful tool we have to curb world hunger, and mal-nutrition, and it could also be the thing that allows humans to venture beyond the solar system. What the Sift seems to be objecting to, and the rest of the "developed" world is the use of GMO's by greedy corporations who care more about turning a profit than solving world problems (there isn't very much money in feeding the needy and hungry). They are the one's making what appear to me more or less useless and potentially dangerous GMO's. Turn your anger away from GMO's specifically and narrow it to the ill use of GMO's by greedy corporations.

Lastly, the argument that "we don't know what they'll do" is for the most part unfounded, there are a decent amount of studies (find them yourself sorry) which show that GMO's in general won't cause harm (though it really depends on what you're trying to make). The same argument was made about the LHC "We don't know what will happen when we turn it on!" but everyone was fine.

What sudden disbelief? I don't remember being a NdT fanboy.

As with everybody, just because someone is correct most of the time doesn't mean, he's always correct (or, in this case, relevant).

I think NdT is fully qualified to discuss this subject. I never impugned his credentials. You may want to direct this comment @dingens

@nock

If we accept that he is a very proficient physicist, then he is certainly able to understanding the scientific method - the attention to detail, the terms, the maths, the statistics.

A proficient physicist can spend weeks analysing a research paper written about their own particular field, needing hundreds of re-readings to understand everything.

I would say, on balance, NdT is very likely to be very capable of understanding of the biology with access to scientific research resources and reference materials. As for the chemistry - a lot of physics (especially the astro) IS chemistry; big bang nucleosynthesis, star nucleosynthesis, nuclear reactions, radioactive decay... Physicists joke that chemistry is just a subset of physics. And biology comes down to chemistry!

I think you're not giving him anywhere near the respect he deserves on this matter. He is not just a physicist - he's a scientist.

(Sorry if i'm a bit like a dog with a bone, i often think that real, well rounded scientific understanding isn't given the respect it deserves - no bias honest! But i would say that NdT could very easily conduct biological research if he found a subject that interested him in that area. Many of the tools are probably the same.)