It would baffle me why anyone would even attempt to equate the methodology (even the terminology) of Science to Religion as in "heresy" that you mentioned. I said "it would be" since I've witnessed not only fabrication but documented outright and knowing lies where religious organizations have attempted to elevate their status to one equal with Science such as by replacing the term "Creationism" with "Intelligent Design", to pawn off old ideas as something new, different and better because they borrow from Science. Since this was found to be completely untrue, and a knowing lie, it makes sense that if one can't pull oneself up the only alternative is t bring the other down.

Since i don't know you well, I will start by trying to take you at face value, someone who is intelligent and generally in favor off The Scientific Method. However I must caution you to take a hard look at your own methods and the tendency we all have to some degree to operate on assumptions, often unknown to us as assumptions. Certainly there are people devoted to Science who are too rigid, just as there4 are some that are way too loose. These tend to resolve over time but not always within a human lifespan.

Science must walk a fine line. It has to be open and creative but not too open and creative. It serves no purpose to "reinvent the wheel" or to rehash old concepts that were falsified before with no new overwhelming data in. Think about it. There is good reason to dismiss someone and not waste one's time discussing "Phlogiston" or "The Ether" unless some truly profound new data comes in. It is wiser to be intensely skeptical of such "pet notions". If, however, it is true it will come out since the body of knowledge as well as the technology to observe and experiment obviously grows and improves over time.

MOND is such a "pet notion". Good scientists certainly hold out final judgment being open to an upset or paradigm shift but in such cases it is much like boxing. One must decisively beat the Champ to have your hand raised as the winner. No new data adds sufficient reason to revisit MOND yet. That isn't to say that some years from now some variation of it might be found difficult to falsify and it's ability to make good predictions considerably improved, but until that time it must remain a non-issue except for those that have chosen to "go against the grain" and fully accept they won't often be taken seriously.

To see just how this is done there is a very good article from the New Yorker about a superb commencement address to Cal Tech very recently. Anyone interested in clear and thorough assessment of The Balance should read this - New Yorker on the Mistrust of Science

BTW: I've little interest in MOND. What I didn't like was that attempts were made to shut the website down. THAT is my issue. "They (people talking about things) must be silenced!" Is never an acceptable statement to me... EVER.

The minute you draw the line on what is acceptable for people to discuss, the position of that line becomes a tool for politics and subterfuge.

While I agree with you on that in principle, just like here on LQN where if one doesn't accept the standards of the Forum in practice, one risks being censured or even banned. It is my understanding that it was the blog's host server that threatened banning since they didn't want to be associated with what they consider Tin Foil Hat subjects which is their right and apparently in their EULA. They are free to find some less stringent server to continue as they please.

This is NOT a case of The Scientific Community Goliath (it isn't a singular whole, but a loose and sometimes conflicted compendium) suppressing David and crushing him underfoot. It is just a local event exercising rights of ownership that we all, likely including you, agree we should have. There are in fact plenty of sites that welcome such subjects, YouTube among them.

I read these posts with interest...

enorbet, that link from the New York times, kind of made me think a little...

Science has become another bully group, history has shown that when groups get together and start to state they have the facts, then people with an idea that contradicts there approved and supposedly proven theory on something has no idea what they are talking about and must be put in there box and close the lid, for they cannot have someone saying they are wrong..

This is the way it has been since the British science group(stuffed if I can remember there silly title but Darwin had run ins with them) was formed and started to dictate...

A couple of comments that was published in that article has to be pointed out,

One, GM crops, one thing we have a problem here in Western Australia, is Roundup Resistant Rye Grass(RRRG), now that don't sound like much of an issue, but if you are a farmer and you are planting crops, like Barley, Wheat, Canola, Lupins or Oats, then you need to be able to control rye grass. If your rye grass is RRRG, then GM cropping is a waste of money and chemicals. So GM has no benefit in your cropping program. Another problem with using GM here is roundup(Glyphosate) is taken up by cereal crops, the more you use it the more uptake. Glyphosate is no good for humans and can store in the fat cells of the body. GM crops grown here are for using Glyphosate during the growing of the crop, thus increase the uptake of Glyphosate... There are quite a few other issues, and it all points to GM not being of any benefit in the long run...

You can find the uptake levels of crops by looking up the Finnish studies done into plant uptakes of herbacides and pesticides...

Secondly, the gun ownership debate. In the US, it is a completely different culture for gun ownership than anywhere else in the world. Not many places in the world you can own a firearm for defense of your home. In Canada for example, they adopted the same laws as NZ for firearm ownership and saw a dramatic drop in violence. Another country to consider when people state things about firearm ownership is Switzerland... But Honduras is the opposite, murder is significantly higher yet has a ban on firearms.

So two points made by the author that can be debunked without too much brain cell activity... The Author states they are proven in that article, but statistics in those subjects are always manipulated in favour of the result that was stated.

I agree with you on the point of ownership of a blog/forum etc, if privately owned then the owner holds a right...

I dont agree with science or a scientist being of greater intelligence or knowledge... Most modern science has too much theory that has been accepted as fact and in this day and age, any one who disagrees with an accepted theory is ordinarily made out to be a sceptic, which I will always be...

As Luridis stated in one of the posts, "what I see is what I believe", I may not be one of those but I wont accept that my own theory must be wrong because I am not a scientist...

6 years ago I was laughed at because I built a seeding machine that was different... Hmmm, funny how my crop was twice the size of anyone else and the cattle where fatter because of it... Now there are 4 machines with the same modifications... I must be a nut case for building that hey!

I think we can both agree that my wanting to see honest presentation across scientific theory, especially those that compete, isn't a push for more Ancient Alien coverage.

Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers,
knocking at the door
This night,
and the night before

BTW: Since we're talking about real science. Does this picture, from the game No Man's Sky make you think: Ya'll better run! Get off that thing and go, before it's too late. Like it does for me?

https://goo.gl/images/dGhmSt

I like to call it, "No Man's Sky, a place in the universe were gravity doesn't work at all." lol

Greetings wraithe, nice to hear from you and get to know you some and thank you for your considered responses. I applaud your assessment skills and determination that resulted in what seems to be a worthy modification and improvement. That is an important part of Applied Science that has taken Homo Sapiens all over the globe and to the moon as well as to the top of the food chain. It will be a challenge to see how well we still adapt and stay there.

I'd like to add to the discussion begun with the New Yorker (not the NY Times, btw) that you covered above in this thread just a few posts above in #79

Proof is only a meaningful concept in Mathematics, because it takes place pared down to simplest terms, unlike what we see as "real life". In Science there is only "current preponderance of evidence" In simple terms this just means odds that point to a "safe bet".. However for the clearest meaning of what has that preponderance (or "proof" in limited terminology) one has to pay strict attention to what is stated. The author did NOT say that ALL or ANY GM Crops are always beneficial for everything or in every circumstance. He said that "in balance", overall GM is a beneficial practice. When one considers that almost no foods resemble how they were in the wild a long time ago and recognizes that GM, in effect, had been going on for thousands of years by selective planting, burning, poisoning, grafting, seed selection and conditioning, etc etc. It's just that the methods are less "close to the ground" than they used to be. Bottom Line is that if we are to even hope to feed the still growing population of the world and not fall into warfare and poverty even deeper, GM is a necessity that has served us well especially when viewed in the exact context stated in my linked article.

On the second point regarding gun ownership I think you misunderstood his point in a diametrically opposed manner. He is saying that people often feel safer when they own guns but this does NOT bear fruit statistically. The odds that people are safer (especially in cities and suburbia) when they do not have guns has been demonstrated many times. It is much like how most people who have anxiety when flying in a plane repeatedly jump into cars without a second thought, when the real odds are vastly in favor of air travel safety. Plane crashes make big news but if we were shown all the horrific deaths globally in every car accident each day, we would not have time to see even a 1 minute clip of each one even if we stayed awake for 24 hours a day, were fed intravenously and had tubes for automatic waste removal. I know... over the top, but maybe by seeing just how frequent and horrific these deaths are we would have a better feel for the relative safety of types of travel. Fortunately, we don't have to experience things like this if we are just careful with statistics.

Finally, it is also true, as you pointed out, that humans are flawed and will sometimes cave into agenda and "sacred cows" and this plagues all areas of human thinking and endeavors including Science. However Science is one of the few disciplines that actively works to "separate the wheat from the chaff" over time and has formal methods to do exactly that. While not all people are, Science IS self correcting in the long run.

Note: For those who didn't do the math regarding auto accidents.....
24 hours per day x 60 minutes per hour = 1440 minutes per day
Hmmm so lets up the ante and make it one accident clip per second
1440 minutes per day x 60 seconds per minute = 86,440 seconds (or 1 second duration accident clips viewed per day)
Now lets make that yearly
86,440 per day x 365 days per year = 31,536,000
THERE ! Maybe that will do it

Well, it is close. Globally an average of 35,000,000 (between 20 million and 50 million) people are injured, disabled, or killed in traffic accidents each year. To get it back into terms we can almost feel, there are almost 30,000 auto accidents every DAY but we feel safer than in planes because we think we have more control in a car and are powerless in a plane. Fear and Mistrust are not a part of Reason, nor apparently commonly mitigated.

Damn, good point on auto accidents, sadly I been preaching that to deaf ears for a long time... Look up trucks accidents and percentage of deaths, just in Australia.. The US has high numbers too but India I think gets close to the highest rate of any country...

By profession, I am a truck driver, started when I left the Army, but did have a bit of exposure beforehand, as both my parents drove trucks...

Its absolute madness when a car drive out in front of a truck, but the worst bit is the size of the trucks here that we drive... When going into the city, I would weigh upto 100 tonnes(220,000 lbs) and on the highway or freeway that I had to use, I could be travelling at 100 kmh(60 mph)..

So auto accidents have been in the forefront of my thinking and you bought the point up first, so well done and well said...

On the subject of GM, you point out plant breeding, selective breeding, grafting etc etc...

Not quite the same as what Genetically Modified plants are. GM Canola for instance, is bombarded with Rye Grass genes to give it resistance to Glyphosate.. This is not the same as selective breeding or grafting. These are natural methods adopted over a long time, but to combine the 2 is common practise done by advocates of GM... Basicly your saying a Horse is a horse, which is not so..

Another point is the belief that GM is proven to be better and produce better... What you dont hear or see, is the fact that if your crop is not up to standard, you are rwquired to destroy it.. So a failed crop is not allowed to grow and a damaged crop from things like frost has to be ploughed in... That is not proof the crop is better, in fact it is more proof that the crops are not capable of competing on an even playing field...

GM is more of a money making exercise than a benefit to mankind..

In the US you are not allowed to save seed for next years crop, so all the seed cleaners that used clean the seed from last season are now closed down...Because of contamination from GM crops...

In Australia, we still have areas that arn't contaminated by GM and crops that haven't been cross pollinated, but once that happens, all seed will have to be bought from over seas or from seed suppliers or worse yet, from GM seed suppliers...

GM patent owners have forced governments to legislate laws in there favour too..

If you think GM is safe and won't cause contamination, believe me, I carted the crap and you have no way of ensuring no seed will drop on the side of the road, most of our country roads are showing sign of contamination by GM...

Oh by the way, GM Canola smells like rotten socks when flowering where non-GM smells sweet when flowering... Thats all you need when driving past crops, one wiff of GM and you close the windows quickly...

While I agree that "a Horse is not a horse" considering humans bred Clydesdale's to carry men wearing 100 kilos of armor that would break a Shetland pony's back, there is no fundamental difference from introducing a male horse of a specific breed to a female horse of a breed than there is in donning the plastic glove and going shoulder deep with a pipette to introduce the just that male's sperm to the female's egg. while the methodology is different (and some fillies complain not NEARLY as enjoyable) th results are the same if a bit more controllable.

Like you I am both horrified and angered by the way companies like Monsanto have strong-armed competing seeds away and in my view stepping all over the rights of people to make free choices with no intent of harm to anyone. However that is not technically a part of GM, but rather a part of business practices that should be covered under monopoly laws (just to name one category) and muddies the issue as was described, albeit briefly, by the article. Simply put, the practice of altering plants, even at the level of seeds, is not inherently bad and in fact, so far, has served mankind well.

FWIW in my vocabulary, "unnatural" is the equivalent of "impossible". If it can happen, it's natural and has no bearing on whether or not the results are good or bad and for whom. These are separate issues.

Most importantly those concepts were leveled to demonstrate "cognitive dissonance" and how we all commonly can fall prey to what seems right but lacks supporting evidence. It's generally smartest to bet with the odds and certainly not against them.

On the natural, "not necessarily so".. We have seen synthetic production of products that would not happen naturally... I can't think at the moment, headache peeving me off..(Plutonium for example)

As for going with the odds, that seems to be a common concept by a lot of people that won't disagree with the mob... I will generally go against the flow if I think the stream is heading for a fall...

Just a comment on horses, as you pointed out breeding, and that falls into genetics, it is still hit and miss... To breed a horse with color is very hit and miss, even thos you know if a stallion generally throws colored foals and he is bay and white, you put him over a grey, you may succeed, but put him over a chestnut, and your odds drop... But the odds are never in your favour when you can put the same dam and sire together and get 3 colored foals in a row, but then get a dunn followed by a chestnut...

But most people dont realise the horse was only 30cm high, a million or so years ago...

From your comment on nags, I'd say your are around them or own a few, I have been around them since I was a thought in dads mind, and my parents bred them for over 50 yrs, I have the last of the stud to mow paddocks and annoy me... :-)

Minor point to the thread but just because Nature doesn't commonly produce an environment in which Plutonium forms doesn't mean Plutonium is "unnatural". We, as part of Nature, can only work with things and conditions that exist or can exist in situ. Yes we can take mud and make bricks, but we need the mud first. Even fanciful devices like Star Trek's Replicator can only re-arrange what already exists or Scotty would never run out of DiLithium Crystals

...and yes, I have participated in a few wild horse races and wondered if I'd experienced time travel since last I recalled I was on that horses back

Back to the thread, using strict denotation, what the article states is accurate and the fact remains that Science as a body of work and a process cannot be owned and manipulated by any one person or even group of people. Although it may take some time, "Truth will Out".

How Time Becomes Space Inside a Black Hole | Space Time

"but we need the mud first":
Finally, Man has found the secrets to life and comes proudly before God to show him. Man says, "Hey God look at me, now I can create Life." He picks up some Earth and begins to form it into a small figure. And then God says, "Hey Man, get your own dirt!"

Exactly how does one come proudly or otherwise "before God"? I'm considering filing a missing persons report since he seems King of Absentee Fathers. AFAIK nobody has ever seen Him/Her/It. However he/she/it is defined as "outside this Universe" and we humans (and mud) are apparently firmly (and temporarily) embedded in only this one. No matter how we might wish it, we must stick to what is in this one when accuracy and relevency is important.

It's just a joke which reflects on humanity's position -as perceived by some people. Even if you are dispassionate about gods, it points to the next logical question after creating life, namely creating matter. Of course, the question of whether the life created is really 'live' or has an intangible essence, soul, etc, brings to mind the story of Job, who laments his plight to the almighty. The almighty then berates and taunts the man to test his wisdom. One of his questions is: "Have you found the path of the soul into the body?" Again, even of you believe in no such 'soul', it points to the questions of who we are and what does it all mean?