New Lecture on Trees of Life, Science, and Christianity

I’m not clear on where in the video he asserts this. Can you give some time stamps?

Dictionary definitions are based on common usage. They are updated to follow changes in common usage. But perhaps you think lexicographers decide what a word should mean and then insist everyone else follow their lead.

[citation needed]

Added: Note that the original article was about graduate students, not undergraduates. What Eddie and his fellow undergrads did is not definitive.

Interesting! Reminds me of “Science Fair” competitions that some high schools used to send students to. And I can certainly imagine that some keen undergrad student might want to present something at such exhibits, and I can also imagine that if they did, they would put it on their c.v.s and that some graduate schools would be impressed by the initiative. I’m not questioning that these events take place now, and they might have even taken place back in the 1970s, which is the only period I commented on. But I’m still unclear how, if the research required the use of university chemistry or biology or physics lab facilities, undergrads could get the use of them. To take physics for example, at one school I knew well, they had a particle accelerator, and profs, post docs and grad students were all competing for precious time on it, and administrators had to carefully apportion access. It’s hard to imagine that they would reduce a grad student’s or post-doc’s accelerator time so some sophomore could spent time bombarding nuclei for a glorified science fair project. I certainly never heard of it happening.

I’m puzzled. Surely you saw the diagram he gives, where he shows a whole cloud of conflicting trees derived from different genes in a particular plant species? And surely his commentary indicates that he regards this as in conflict with what theory predicts, because (according to him) theory predicts that the trees from different genes should all be the same, or close to the same? Again, he might be wrong in characterizing “what theory predicts,” and therefore the conflicting trees may not damage the theory at all. I’m passing no judgment on that. But I thought it was obvious what his line of argument was.

A petty attempt to catch me out, as usual. Context should have told you that I was not talking about the definition of “colleague” but about who uses it. Yes, the dictionary captures the current sense of “colleague”, but dictionaries don’t specify in what subcultures the word “colleague” is more or less common. My point was that it is less common in some subcultures than others. Undergrads use the word much less often than professors or grad students. Factory workers and store clerks use it less often than members of medical or law associations. Faizal was accusing me of being ignorant of the dictionary definition, but I was perfectly aware of it; it just was not relevant to my claim. But then, Faizal, like you, makes a career here of trying to catch me out on what he thinks are slips of language. You, Faizal, and Mercer should all get together for a wine and cheese party and practice catching each other out on pedantic points. I’m sure you’d all have a great time keeping score and declaring the winner of the day. You could make the losers pay for the wine and cheese.

This probably happens because most[1] ID proponents are, in your own words, “amateurs and dilettantes, writing about subjects in which they have zero academic training.”

You say you don’t trust Wikipedia for this reason, yet you seem perennially horrified that others demonstrate that ID proponents similar lack of expertise leads them to make frequent and egregious errors.

The amusing thing is that Wikipedia is fully aware that the vast majority of its editors are not experts in the fields they are writing about, and so sets policies and guidelines to compensate for this – most notably WP:NOR and WP:V. The result is, for articles that are subject to a reasonably high level of scrutiny, a reasonably good level of quality (obscure articles are often of much lower quality however).

(The alternative, an online encyclopedia written solely “by invited or approved expert authors” has already been tried – it’s called Scholarpedia – but as the relatively tiny number of articles it has (1,804) demonstrates, the model doesn’t scale nearly so well.)

ID has no such checks and balances in place, which results in the mix of lies, half-truths, and misrepresented and cherry-picked data we all know and love – or in your own words, “riddled with error all through”.


  1. Buggs himself would seem to be a potential exception to this in that he may have sufficient expertise such that he should know better. ↩︎

:rofl:

:rofl::rofl:

Eddie wants “quotations” from “phylogeneticists”. He doesn’t want citations to published papers, and he doesn’t want data. He has no interest in looking for himself. He is asking for an argument by authority.

@Eddie, this is the “Peaceful Science” board, not the Peaceful Spoonfeed-me-with-quotes board.

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Interesting fact: “Spoonfeed” is the longest English word which has its letters in reverse alphabetical order.

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Very good. Then you should have no problem finding at least one single example of the term being used in the sense that you claim it is used by the man in the street. For instance (hypothetical example): “In undergrad, my lab partners and I dreamed of the day when we would be grad students or maybe even professors, and could finally refer to each other as ‘Colleague’”.

I look forward to what you find.

That’s nice. I don’t care what entirely arbitrary and self-serving rules you want to make up to avoid admitting the gaffe you have committed here. Your implicit accusation against @John_Harshman of dishonesty and/or incompetence, however, is duly noted.

I would I like you to clarify: Are you saying only that you, personally, do not know whether the observed divergences from a tree pattern are within the range predicted by common descent? Or are you saying that this is a scientific question whose answer, at the moment, is not known to anyone?

I personally would not consider a person who uses the opportunity of an inaugural lecture to spread lies about his colleagues and his own supposed area of expertise to be one to inspire trust. But that’s just me.

So I’m not the only one who has noticed this. That is reassuring.

You actually said he asserted that most evolutionary biologists believe there should be no conflicting trees whatsoever.

Do you still claim that is what he said?

If so, do believe his claim is correct?

Yes, that is rather important, isn’t it?

So it is very odd that you not only seem uninterested in taking the steps that would allow you to answer it yourself, but that you have dismissed or ignored the answers given to you right here in this very discussion by qualified experts in the field.

Why ever would that be?

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Pretty much all of the research presented comes out of the student’s position with a lab and is done at the initiative and under the direction of senior leadership. In Canadian research universities, there are an array of scholarship and agency programs to make this happen.

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It should be noted that in this lecture Buggs is doing nothing more than regurgitating an old ID trope that was debunked as long as 14 years ago:

Do Different Genes Mean Different Phylogenetic Trees? | National Center for Science Education (ncse.ngo)

As I said, I have had the pleasure of attending a number of these lectures over the years. I cannot recall a single one in which the speaker spent 40 minutes speaking, not about his own research, but promoting an erroneous claim that had been made in a 15 year old high school textbook.

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I couldn’t find anywhere where he says what the theory predicts, nor how what he observes is in conflict with that. No. What he actually says is something along the lines that Richard Dawkins says the gene trees should be “the same”, which he interprets to mean Dawkins says they should be identical, and then goes on at length about how gene trees in various plant clades aren’t identical in the sense he took Dawkins to imply.

It’s just very odd because as a scientist one would think Richard Buggs would be aware of things like uncertainty and statistics, and if he’d read Penny and Hendy 1982 which he himself refers to, he should also be aware that trees that have numerous incongruent branchescan still have a degree of similarity that is highly statistically significant. Particularly considering how the different trees they evaluate in that paper have incongruencies and yet are still found to be highly similar.

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No, just highlighting that you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Really?

Here’s the context:

You were talking about the definition of ‘colleague’, and contrasting the dictionary definition with common usage. You were not, at that point, talking about who uses the word.

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Doesn’t matter. “Eddie” was wrong either way. Not a single person in the history of the English language has correctly used the term “colleague” in the way he claims the common man on the street does. Just wait and see if he is able to come up with even one example.

And we might as well keep talking about this, because there is no way he is going to acknowledge the total refutation of Buggs’s claims regarding phylogenetic trees that has been made in this discussion

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I believe that is a picture of the Jonestown mass suicide. Otherwise, point well taken.

It is also noteworthy are that these instances in which large groups of people start to believe things that are patently absurd, with a fervor that it takes over their entire lives, tend to occur in groups of people who have been indoctrinated into a cult under the sway of a charismatic leader. Which is a pretty good description of early Christianity.

But don’t be distracted by this, @Eddie. We want to hear your thoughts on Buggs’s claims regarding phylogenetic trees. Have you determined whether the scientific data backs him up?

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They do, you just don’t have a framework that allows you to understand them.

That’s because most of your statements regarding this have been false.

Why would I do that for someone who has always despised me? As Roy wrote:

Yes, you are. Your authoritarian, hierarchical mindset is what is keeping you in the dark. I’ll address the false assumptions that illustrate that.

I’ve never called any of the professors I’ve worked for “Professor” or “Dr.” to their faces. No American (or Russian) I’ve supervised has called me “Professor” or “Dr.” either. Indians start by doing that, but I correct them.

On campus. Where did that come from?

All of the above. Except for the PI, they are all colleagues. Your harping on that term reveals your total inability to understand the collaborative environments in which science is done.

Are you kidding? Grants pay. If I’m a professor on life support on departmental funds, I’m not taking on undergrads.

You really have no clue.

Nope.

His colleagues. It’s a collaborative thing that authoritarians like you have trouble understanding.

All of your questions assume an authoritarian, hierarchical environment that does not exist.

Let’s review. I told you:

Do you not understand what that means?

I’m certain that everyone reading my comments understands them except you, because they aren’t rabid authoritarians. If I’m wrong, anyone who doesn’t is welcome to PM me.

No. Not this thread, Eddie.

That’s because there isn’t a range. Another thing you don’t understand is how the forum is constructed.

Maybe if you started by admitting you don’t have the slightest clue about how science gets done, instead of pretending to be some sort of lofty authority on academia, you’d learn more.

And the same thing happened with Meyer’s false claim that peptidyl transferase (the enzymatic core of the ribosome) is a protein. Meyer cited the Wally Gilbert N&V paper in Nature that described the prediction clearly. So we’re supposed to think that his misrepresenting the fulfillment of that prediction is a mere error?

That’s strong evidence for deception.

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What claims? From what I can see he doesn’t actually make any, except that different genes don’t always give you the same tree. He may imply other claims, but it’s not entirely clear what he’s implying.

Ahh yes I see I got my cults mixed up.

Yes, my mistake. So we are back to the earlier question: Exactly what is supposed to be interesting about this lecture, in terms of the topic of phylogenetics? If it was true that most evolutionary biologists believe that the existence of even a single gene tree that diverges from an associated species tree is inconsistent with common descent, then I highly doubt we would hearing about the existence of such divergences for the first time in Buggs’s lecture. And, in any event, that claim is clearly not true. It is based on nothing more than a very trivial misstatement that Richard Dawkins made in a single Youtube video.

Any interest in this video, as far as I can see, is related to it being an example of ID propaganda techniques, with @Eddie and @colewd demonstrating the sort of mentality that allows one to be taken in by such propaganda.

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