Some Comments from YouTube Watchers of the Tour-Farina Debate

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Eddie

Your concession that “arguments about interpretation” do occur at conferences is all that I have ever been trying to say. I’m using the term “debate” to mean “argument about interpretation [of data, results, etc.]”.

No, you aren’t; you’re now making it so broad as to be useless. Look at your OP, the context here. Eddie, you are constantly trying to avoid scientific evidence and the scientific method so that you can pretend that ID is science.

@Eddie

And I never said or suggested that debate could not be constructive.

I didn’t claim you did. I have pointed out your complete lack of understanding of the scientific process. Nowhere is your ignorance more evident than in your claims that people “read papers” at scientific meetings or that they host debates.

@Eddie

You are using a very narrow meaning of “debate” – the notion of two people with inflexible opposite positions standing on a stage, with each trying to deny every point the other makes.

No. That is the context of the OP, though.

@Eddie

They might start out in apparent disagreement, but in the course of making their case (from evidence), discover that they have more in common than they thought, and might end up in a large measure of agreement. And all the more is this the case in the context of an academic scientific context, where an initial disagreement that might seem gauntlet-throwing might, with back and forth between two open-minded professionals, produce near-agreement or agreement.

I’ve never witnessed any gauntlet-throwing except in the context of priority, which escapes you since you need to pretend that all interpretation is retrospective, because ID does zero prospective hypothesis testing.

@Eddie

I’ve been at many academic conferences where scholars, in question periods after presentations, argue over the interpretation of evidence – literary evidence, historical evidence, etc., and the term “debate” is perfectly appropriate for the sort of point-counterpoint dialogue that often ensues.

I haven’t, and we’re talking about my field, not yours.

Here’s a typical Q-and-A:

1. “Nice talk. Did you do control X?”
2. “No, but that’s a great suggestion.”

Note that this can be a brutal question delivered politely, when control X has the potential to invalidate the whole point of the talk.

@Eddie

No, it’s not a debate in the staged sense, but it’s debate in a perfectly normal English sense of that word.

What I described above cannot be accurately described as debate.

@Eddie

Your continued attempt to misrepresent my point – my point being that it is healthy when experts (scientists or others) who disagree confront each other and exchange arguments for their respective interpretations of evidence – does not appear to have any good motive.

Your gross misrepresentations of science and scientists are the issue here. Again, someone’s giving a talk (instead of a poster) at a meeting because she has produced new, interesting data, so there’s no basis for your silly pretension that people are debating retrospective interpretations of a static pile of data.

You repeatedly and deliberately invoke this misrepresentation to support the IDcreationist pseudoscientific scam, which steadfastly avoids formulating hypotheses and tests thereof.

We debate grant application scores at NIH study sections. We debate whom to hire as new faculty at department meetings. Those are real debates. No one is standing behind a podium in either case. What you refuse to acknowledge is that when we do science, we have the obligation to test our hypotheses, so at meetings we are almost always presenting the results of debates we have already had with ourselves. That being said, there have been obvious failures to do so, the ENCODE fiasco being a familiar one to people here.

That’s the essence of the scientific method, and the failure to engage in it, emphasized by your misrepresentations, is the best marker for identifying pseudoscience.