Yeah I get annoyed by this and I'm gonna call you out on it especially since we had a major former NFL star in Junior Seau die from playing Football. Rugby is a very tough sport, made for very tough men, but they're not tougher than NFL football players because they don't wear pads. Players wearing pads hit eachother with a much greater velocity than Rugby players normally hit themselves...and they hit eachother in the head which is causing deaths.

I think you can make a similar comparison to boxing and bare knuckle fighting. In over 100 years of bare knuckle fighting no one has died from it, but an average of 4 people die from boxing related injuries in the US alone. The reason is because when you fight bare knuckle you don't go for the head as much...it hurts. In boxing you basically trade blows to the head for rounds and rounds severely damaging a brain.

So no, rugby players are not tougher than NFL players...or even soccer players. We should all do well to remember that we have similar DNA and sports with differing sets of challenges. I would say the toughest athletes in the world are ultra-marathon runners. Because nothing is more suggestive than the voice in your head telling you to stop.

So skinny little runners in short shorts that run over 100 miles in 120 degree temperatures are tougher than all of you. Have a nice day.

Calling it an "Arms Race" sort of suggests that they're in a competition with eachother. Israel is a US Client State, it has the most modern military force in the region. Palestine can't even come close to competing with Israel for arms. It shows in the amount of death Israel doles out consistently.

>> ^bmacs27:

I'm just curious, are you guys happiest because a successful treatment for a serious condition has been discovered? Or is it more because medicinal uses of recreational substances you happen to enjoy have been found? I only ask because my suspicion is that if a video had come along saying "blah blah blah drug you've never heard of" has been shown to be effective at treating PTSD you all probably wouldn't care.


i'm happy because it's pretty obvious the MDMA is great for all sorts of therapy, especially in getting people to talk to eachother. On MDMA, you tend to see the positive sides of things.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

Hang on... just a minute there! Tyler Durden was a villain?
And Roy Batty?
And Vincent and Jules? Ok, they weren't good guys, but they certainly weren't the villains.
Also, if we have to have a villainous Disney cartoon cat, I see your Scar and raise you Shere Khan.


I think Tyler became a villain, it's sort of the best villain because it's where internal conflicts beat on eachother for a time and then one wins out. Very interesting to think of that movie in terms of them actually being two people instead of what it ended up being. Imagine Tyler was his friend that slowly went insane and controlling until you had to eventually push the big red button and stop the madness.

Although I have to say me personally, I was all for Tyler. His last stand was certainly not hurting anyone and it was a great idea, which is why I suppose it wasn't a thing when it happened to go down anyways, it was a fitting climax. Jack though was reacting because the situation had gotten out of control and he could predict where it would lead. He didn't trust Tyler, or himself really. Pretty cool.

I'll say a little bit about my experience here, since you brought it up @ZappaDanMan. The reason I signed up to videosift, initially, was to provide a counterpoint to the enormous amount of anti-christian videos I noticed being propelled into the top 15. There was no one here representing the other side of the argument, or posting any Christian videos, so I figured I would be that guy. However, I quickly found out that I was pretty unwelcome here, except, that is, for a few important exceptions. One is @dag. Dag has commented many times that he feels I am a valuable member of the community. Perhaps he recognizes the pitfalls of a lack of diversity in the sift economy. Quite often the comment sections, at least for anything related to religion, are echo chambers for militant anti-theists. That isn't a good thing if you want to have a broad-based appeal.

There are some individual users who have reached out to me, some openly like @enoch, most though in secret. The reason being is because from the beginning there was a concerted campaign to try to get rid of me. The first strategy was to downvote all of my videos and comments and deny my participation in the system. I am sure I am the most downvoted user of all the time. Can anyone (@lucky760) track that? There was a time when I couldn't get a video to last more than half a day. It wasn't because of the nonsense people are posting in this thread, it was because there was a group of people working against me to kill them all off. I have 18 discarded videos in my discarded posts folder. Granted not all of them were that great, but some were sincerely good. Can anyone else claim a number like that? I doubt it, because people don't generally treat eachother like that here.

When that didn't work there was another campaign waged to totally marginalize me by labeling me as a troll. Many people put me on ignore and advised others to do the same. I felt like I had entered into an Amish community and advised them to use zippers instead of buttons. That actually worked because at some point I decided to leave and stopped posting for awhile. I couldn't get any videos published, and every time I posted anywhere people would insult me, or ignore me. It was only because a few people reached out to me that I came back.

These days, it isn't as bad. People just generally ignore me and don't really downvote my videos that much. There has actually been somewhat of a softening towards me and I've gotten a few videos published, which surprised me. I also appreciate @ChaosEngine 's principaled stand and I wish more people thought that way. There have been some people who have consistently given me their votes (I won't name you because it will make you unpopular) even though I know they disagreed with the material. So I am not here to rail against the sift, because I appreciate the people who are being nicer to me, and I pray for all of you whether you like me or not.

The point I am making is that my experience completely affirms everything Zappa said. If you want further proof, just look at the amount of anti-religious vs. religious videos that have been sifted. There is no actual comparison. People downvote for ideological reasons (they hate religion) and that is why you don't see many videos that inform rather than denigrate religion on the sift.

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me?

Alright, Ill answer your "refutations" then:

"Why shouldn't you suspect that decay rates could change?"

If you read my post, I explained why : Because there is no evidence that suggest it is changing, and no known physical mechanisms that can produce such change. The moon could suddenly start orbiting the other direction relative to earth tomorrow, but there is no signs, no evidence, that suggests or implies that it will, and also physics dont allow it unless it is pushed or pulled by some very large force etc.
Bottom line, change in the decay rate is an assumption of something for which there is no evidence. Thats why scientists dont waste their time suspecting this.

As for the line "absense of evidence is not evidence of absense". Well thats a poetic thing and all, but its not really true when you think about it for a little bit: for the most part, this is how we exclude things from our reality, and separate what is real or not. It is perfectly consistent to say "I really dont think this thing exist" while remaining, in principle, open minded. There might be green hairy monsters hiding under my bed, I can never know for absolute certain, but I dont THINK so, the absense of evidence convinces me there are none.

The same is true in say, particle physics, there may be thousands of different "higgs-bosons" of different kinds doing all sorts of crazy shit in physics, but again, in the absense of evidence... you cant just build your ideas around fantasies.

Do you know the geologic column doesn't actually exist in reality?
Are you alking about illustrations of the geologic column? Then yeah, I'm aware that it doesnt look like that in real-life, but the term is definately real, and yes, erosion and things like that can expose old layers to fresh air, this is of course well know in biology and geology. When I say fossils are layed down in order, I dont mean that they are all physically on top of eachother, but that the dating of the layers match with the kind of animals found in that era. IE: there are no "fossil rabbits in the pre-cambrian" as one biologist replied when asked what would truly disprove evolution.


Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Hahaha, if that was said by an actual molecular biologist capable of finding his own ass, I'll eat my hat. This is so obviously Creo-speak from here on to hell. The first thing an actual biologist would do would be to question the use of the word "information" (I'm assuming he's asking about the information contained in DNA) in this context. Because we refer to DNA as a language and "it contains all the information needed to assemble a human" and so on, Creationists think of DNA as some sort of literary masterpiece, it seems. The truth is of course that its 4 acids spelling 95% repetetive gibberish intersped with some interesting bits that code for proteins and do actual useful stuff.

They also seems to think that (perhaps because they believe it themselves) humans existed from the get-go, and that DNA somehow evolved inside us or some shit like that. (Like one creationist who asked Richard Dawkins how we humans peed before our penises and vaginas evolved..) Anyway, like our penises, our DNA is of course much older than humans themselves, We are simply the latest iterations of a nearly endless line of attemps by nucleic acids to clone themselves by way of making an animal that does the reproduction.

I highly suspect that interview was faked by creationists , but even if it wasnt, it'd just mean that there's a molecular biologist out there who doesnt know fuck all about molecular biology and hold some strange beliefs, and he's wrong. Simple as that.


You then have the obligatory list of quotations, and what can I say?.. I can see how you think these are somehow indicating a plot or something against creationist, but honestly this is just plain quotemining.

Back when France was good and didn't fall apart and fight with eachother all the time.

Pit two of them against eachother and watch the universe unravel!

Megatextures made Rage the most beautiful FPS I have played yet. Don't knock it! I am sure this does some form of texture streaming. The Unreal engine has been doing that since UT3.

I didn't like the way he kept calling things "accurate" when they were clearly hacked fakey versions and not at all accurate. The distributed lighting was based on a specularity effect. I noticed many surfaces right on top of the red carpet was not colored by light bouncing off the carpet instead they just colored a specular highlight on the object so it actually looked pretty bad in places where objects were close to eachother.

Really cool...I would've liked to have seen two trucks running into eachother though.

>> ^Ariane:

>> ^Yogi:
>> ^EMPIRE:
now that house is over, I would love to see Hugh Laurie back in comedy for a bit.... (of fry and laurie)...

I was hoping first for a Travel Documentary in the vein of Fry in America. Just have them traveling about for a bit and chatting about their lives and meeting new people. Wouldn't it be funny watching to giant Englishman stomp around East Asia or somewhere cool? I think so, and it would be a nice little trip for Laurie after House, which had a decent enough ending in my view.
After that I demand some comedy though.

I don't know, it seems Michael Palin has already pretty much covered the world already.


He does a good job, but I honestly like travel programs that have a gimmick like motorcycles (Long Way Round) or Cars (Top Gear specials) and have more than one person. I get bored with one person, how people interact with eachother while on the road is much better and I can imagine Fry and Laurie would be amazing at it.

Fact 7: Distance between stars so great that no stars will touch in a galaxy-galaxy collision: We can measure the distance to "nearby" stars (up to 400 light years) by triangulating using earths different position as it orbits the sun. Stars further away is measured by their brightness. We can also obviously just see how far the stars are apart from eachother. So thats how we know the density, or lack thereof, of our galaxy.

"Ok, you need to understand two different concepts........the odds of getting so much similarity by accident is exceedingly small.

So in light of this reality.....supposedly bring down evolution."

Minor disagreements? I'm having a hard time believing that you've seriously investigated this subject if you are now claiming (scaled back from your prior claim of perfect agreement between "scores" of them) that molecular and morphological phylogonies typically have a high level of agreement. They don't. Agreement is the exception, not the rule. Even worse, molecular phylogonies don't agree with eachother either:

As morphologists with high hopes of molecular systematics, we end this survey with our hopes dampened. Congruence between molecular phylogenies is as elusive as it is in morphology and as it is between molecules and morphology. . . .

Partly because of morphology’s long history, congruence between morphological phylogenies is the exception rather than the rule. With molecular phylogenies, all generated within the last couple of decades, the situation is little better. Many cases of incongruence between molecular phylogenies are documented above; and when a consensus of all trees within 1% of the shortest in a parsimony analysis is published (e.g. 132, 152, 170), structure or resolution tends to evaporate

Congruence Between Molecular and Morphological Phylogenies

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.es.24.110193.001101

"If only you were a bit better at it. Even the quotes you chose to mine serve to undermine your point. I think my point can be summarized by the following quote from your reference"

“On one side stand traditionalists who have built evolutionary trees from decades of work on species' morphological characteristics. On the other lie molecular systematists, who are convinced that comparisons of DNA and other biological molecules are the BEST way to unravel the secrets of evolutionary history.”

The relevant part here is the word “best.” These people are clearly just trying to decide what the most accurate method of phylogenetic determination is and this article represents nothing more than a discussion of one of the many battles that go on in the constant refinement of science. And this disagreement does nothing at all to disprove evolution""

Your charge of quote mining is false. Quote mining is the logical fallacy of quoting something out of context, distorting its intended meaning. The quote I provided was very much in context, and showed support for the assertion that molecular and morphological phylogenies do not have "perfect" agreement, and now I have further supported that assertion (and disproven your scaled back claim of very statistically significant agreement) that their agreement is actually very superficial. It is far more significant how little agreement there actually is.

The very reason there is a contention about which is the "best" method is precisely because there is so little agreement. In any case, molecular homology appears to be winning the battle, perhaps because the evolutionists are getting tired of never finding any evolution in the fossil record.

Which brings us to the many issues with molecular homologies, specifically, their lack of falsifiability:

"We believe that it is possible to draw up a list of basic rules that underlie existing molecular evolutionary models:

All theories are monophyletic, meaning that they all start with the Urgene and the Urzelle which have given rise to all proteins and all species, respectively.

Complexity evolves mainly through duplications and mutations in structural and control genes.

Genes can mutate or remain stable, migrate laterally from species to species, spread through a population by mechanisms whose operation is not fully understood, evolve coordinately, splice, stay silent, and exist as pseudogenes.

Ad hoc arguments can be invented (such as insect vectors or viruses) that can transport a gene into places where no monophyletic logic could otherwise explain its presence.

This liberal spread of rules, each of which can be observed in use by scientists, does not just sound facetious but also, in our opinion, robs monophyletic evolution of its vulnerability to disproof, and thereby its entitlement to the status of a scientific theory.

The absolute, explicit and implicit, adherence to all the monophyletic principle and consequently the decision to interpret all observations in the light of this principle is the major cause of incongruities as well as for the invention of all the genetic sidestepping rules cited above."

A Polyphyletic View of Evolution

Schwabe and Warr

This is why Schwabe, a biochemist, wrote:

Molecular evolution is about to be accepted as a method superior to paleontology for the discovery of evolutionary relationships. As a molecular evolutionist I should be elated. Instead it seems disconcerting that many exceptions exist to the orderly progression of species as determined by molecular homologies; so many, in fact, that I think the exception, the quirks, may carry the more important message

It's a shell game where virtually any kind of data can be accomodated, and at no point is the theory questioned. Ad hoc explanations can be invented for any kind of discrepency.

""There are analogous debates going on in nearly all branches of academic study. Taking an example with fewer existential implications for religion, look towards the Holocaust. There is an ongoing effort by Yad Va Shem, a jewish organization, to catalogue all those who died under the Nazi regime as well as those who aided jews in various ways (http://www1.yadvashem.org/yv/en/remembrance/hall_of_names.asp). Now at the moment they have verified only three million names and something like 24000 people who helped, and details on each vary. But wait, oh no! We all know that there were roughly six million victims! And we don’t even have complete information about the paltry three million we’ve catalogued. Does this mean that the Holocaust did not happen? Of course it doesn’t. You need to take the internal debate in context and realize that the total sum of evidence is overwhelming. Creationists, however, can not be so objective with such a threatening theory as evolution.""

A mountain of weak, circumstantial evidence (much of which contradicts itself) does not prove macro evolution. "We're working on it" does not somehow validate that evidence. We know the holocaust happened; there is no proof for macro evolution.

""As for your junk DNA article, you similarly blow the relevance way out of proportion. Here’s the last sentence from the text that summarizes the relevance of the article:

“The present study suggests that some selfish DNA transposons can instead confer an important role to their hosts, thereby establishing themselves as long-term residents of the genome.”

Here it states simply that some of the junk DNA, not all of it, can become useful to the cell. This sentence proves you wrong in two ways. First, it admits that they have only found a few instances of utility for this junk DNA, which is a far cry from the evidence that would be necessary for the slow death you speak of. Second, the acknowledges that this as an instance of Junk DNA incorporating itself into the genome and taking on novel and useful roles. In other words, evolution!

The genome is huge and nowhere in biology does it say that all of the DNA we have designated as junk is most certainly junk. Again, this is just another example of incrementally refining our understanding about how things work, but it is not revolutionary and it still demonstrates a clear framework.

And regardless or whether or not your article shows that a lot of Junk DNA has function (which is common knowledge, by the way), it does not at all disprove the fact that junk DNA shows typically exhibits much higher rates of mutation because its specific sequence is less rigidly constrained than coding DNA (http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v12/n11/full/nrg3098.html?WT.ec_id=NRG-201111). It is not a complete lack of function that demonstrates evolution, but simply a higher rate of mutation that results in sequences that will be more varied the more distantly related two species are.""

There are numerous sources showing that junk dna is not junk:

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/04/28/1103894108.full.pdf+html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071025112059.htm

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/transposons-or-jumping-genes-not-junk-dna-1211

Based on your earlier argument, "we're working on it", you should realize that what some scientists consider to be junk dna stems entirely from ignorance. The idea that it got in there by "viral dna insertions" and the like is simply another ad hoc explanation among many.

""And finally, read these articles if you want a more complete understanding about how the comparisons between phylogenetic trees are indeed imperfect, but well supported and constantly refined:

http://cmgm.stanford.edu/phylip/consense.html
http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/cplite/ch4.pdf
http://www.mathnet.or.kr/mathnet/paper_file/McGill/Bryant/03ConsensusAMS.pdf
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/423
http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/content/23/12/1556.full

There are literally hundreds of thousands of these articles detailing what is essentially a whole, distinct area of study. Just search the term “consensus trees” and you’ll see what I mean.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=consensus+trees&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=onhttp://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=consensus+trees&hl=en
&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=on""

I have already demonstrated that the consensus is very weak. What you need to provide is data backing up your claims regarding cytochrome c. I am awaiting the "scores" of phylogonies that will match that data.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Craig did extremely well in that debate, especially in the segment where they asked eachother questions. You can see that at the 1:19:00 mark, and I think any objective observer would have to admit that Christopher just completely folded..he was stammering and unsure of himself, a rare thing for him, but there it is on video.
Could you give an example of an argument that Craig used from that debate which you feel is inadequate?
>> ^A10anis:
>> ^shinyblurry:
&
gt;> ^A10anis:
I watched every religious debate Hitch had. And I waited, in anticipation, for someone to provide an argument which he could not refute. It never happened. Using logic, free thought, intellect, rationale and common sense - not to mention his acerbic wit - he demolished all the religious apologists who were unwise enough to take him on.

You must have missed this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8

Actually, no, I didn't. And, if you seriously think that Craig bested Hitch, you should watch it again. Craig, in every debate, simply uses pseudo babble with a liberal sprinkling of gospel. Never has Craig been able to back up his "argument" with anything but faith, and faith cannot be used as an argument. Hitch, on the other hand.... well, if you can't see it, sadly, you never will.



You say; "Could you give an example of an argument that Craig used from that debate which you feel is inadequate?"
Yes, all of them.
As for your assertion that Hitch "folded," and was "unsure of himself." What are you talking about? He was perfectly concise and logical. He, quite understandably, becomes terse in the face of "white noise" being presented as fact. As you say; "there it is on video."

Craig did extremely well in that debate, especially in the segment where they asked eachother questions. You can see that at the 1:19:00 mark, and I think any objective observer would have to admit that Christopher just completely folded..he was stammering and unsure of himself, a rare thing for him, but there it is on video.

Could you give an example of an argument that Craig used from that debate which you feel is inadequate?

>> ^A10anis:
>> ^shinyblurry:
>> ^A10anis:
I watched every religious debate Hitch had. And I waited, in anticipation, for someone to provide an argument which he could not refute. It never happened. Using logic, free thought, intellect, rationale and common sense - not to mention his acerbic wit - he demolished all the religious apologists who were unwise enough to take him on.

You must have missed this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8

Actually, no, I didn't. And, if you seriously think that Craig bested Hitch, you should watch it again. Craig, in every debate, simply uses pseudo babble with a liberal sprinkling of gospel. Never has Craig been able to back up his "argument" with anything but faith, and faith cannot be used as an argument. Hitch, on the other hand.... well, if you can't see it, sadly, you never will.