Summations Only

This isn't the thread for it, but I think Chuck has unwittingly stumbled onto a good idea - it'd be fun to see Agent 509 go back and respond to some of his own earlier arguments, from a "here's why I said that; here's what I learned since" kind of perspective.

Not to join the pile-up, but I'm always surprised by people who claim that science doesn't have an explanation for something, when its obvious that the scope and boundaries of science is something they have no knowledge of.Buz, are you sure that science makes no study of the Big Bang singularity? Are you aware that the Large Hadron Collider exists to study that exact phenomenon? Are you sure that there's no scientific study of abiogenesis? Any freshman text on genetics written since 2003 should make mention of the "RNA world" model which explains how you can bootstrap evolutionary genetics with RNA, which we now know has both the self-replicating properties of DNA and the enzymatic activity of proteins. "Extension" of the dinosaurs? Did you mean "extinction"? And why do you think that science doesn't grapple with the extinction of the dinosaurs? The Alverezes (father and son) famously proposed that an asteroid impact devastated the Earth's biosphere, causing the extinction of megafaunal species. This proposal was supported by the high concentrations of extraterrestrial iridium in K-T sediments, and was ultimately confirmed by the discovery of the Chicxulub impact crater.So, again - are these things that science has no explanation for, or are these things that science has explanations for that you just hadn't heard about? What's your science background, Buz? What classes have you taken? Or are you just trying to wing it based on creationist books you've read and what we've patiently tried to explain to you over the years?

What do you mean "that's it for science"?Malcolm Gladwell's statistic is that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something. At the institutions I've attended, a bachelors degree in the sciences requires about 90 credit hours in the sciences, so, approximately 3600 one-hour lecture periods attended plus something on the order of 5 hours in the lab a week for four years. That's just for a bachelors; getting the PhD requires another 600-1200 hours in the classroom plus 30-40 hours a week in the lab for about six years. That's about 12,000 hours of study or more by the time someone leaves the educational system with a PhD in the sciences (usually about 10-11 years after they entered it.)In all that time, do you think that budding scientists study only "relativity, quantum theory, and uniformity assumptions"? How on Earth could that possibly take 12,000 hours?Here's a more personal anecdote - last year, my wife graduated with her PhD in entomology; she started college in 1999. Her focus was phylogenetics and molecular systematics, so you can consider her a fairly generic biological scientist. The only time she took any courses that covered relativity or quantum mechanics was her freshman year when she took a fruity seminar called "Concepts of Infinity." Since she doesn't do paleontology, uniformatarianism was never in her curriculum.As always, Buz, you have no idea what you're even talking about. It's kind of a pattern with you. Logic is nothing but a word-game; all logical conclusions are, by definition, tautologies. And why would "common sense" ever be right about anything except by accident? Why would the world operate in a way that is common-sensical? We can prove that we live in a quantum universe by observation and experiment; indeed, it was the enduring non-common-sense results of certain kinds of experiments - the two-slit experiment, observations of radiating blackbodies - that prompted the development of quantum theories in the first place. The only way to preserve the primacy of "common sense" as a tool for explaining the universe is purposeful ignorance, a tradition I see you're proud to carry on.