There Doesn't Have to Be a Podium for There to Be a Debate

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

Continuing the discussion from Some Comments from YouTube Watchers of the Tour-Farina Debate:

@Mercer

Your gross misrepresentations of science and scientists are the issue here.

I’d suggest that it is more likely that your conception of “science” and “scientists” is shaped wholly by your experience of your own little corner of science. If one moves to other areas of science, one can see that debate happens quite often. For example:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-debate-hawkings-idea-that-the-universe-had-no-beginning-20190606/

No one who read that article with comprehension could doubt that it depicts ongoing “debates” among physicists and cosmologists, in the normal, everyday, unforced sense of that word. Not formal staged debates, but debates nonetheless.

For more debates among cosmologists, see:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-bang-vs-steady-state/

For the existence of debates in chemistry:

“An understanding and appreciation of current issues and debates in chemistry”

https://su.edu.et/chemistry/

For the existence of debates in origin of life research:

“Among the many lively ongoing debates in origin-of-life
research is the conundrum of which came first, metabolism
or genetics?”

https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/sites/default/files/186-ElementsIntro.pdf

And regarding evolutionary theory:

"One of the great and unresolved debates in evolutionary theory is the relationship between micro- and macro-evolution. Micro-evolution is commonly defined as evolution within and among populations (Hendry and Kinnison, 2001; Hautmann, 2020). In practice, this usually means the patterns and processes that are described by the modern and powerful theory of population genetics (Templeton, 2021). Macro-evolution, on the other hand, is the pattern and processes that happen in taxa higher than that of species, over geologic time (Hautmann, 2020).

“On the one hand, some authors provide excellent arguments for why macro-evolution should be an extension of micro-evolution (Dietrich, 2009), and on the other hand, other authors have articulated why macro-evolution is a separate process that cannot be distilled to micro-evolution (Erwin, 2000). Among the best arguments of the second school of thought are the many macro-evolutionary phenomena that resist micro-evolutionary explanation.”

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.1048752/full

I could go on and on with examples…

Apparently many scientists in many fields have not yet received the memo from Mercer at The Global Head Office for Science that they are not supposed to engage in debates, or ever to describe their controversies as “debates.”

@mercer

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Eddie

@Mercer

Your gross misrepresentations of science and scientists are the issue here.

I’d suggest that it is more likely that your conception of “science” and “scientists” …

I’d suggest that you are moving the goalposts in a most mendacious way.

Here’s the claim you are trying to defend with irrelevant quotes:

@Eddie

Your concession that “arguments about interpretation” do occur at conferences is all that I have ever been trying to say.

The context is conferences. None of your quotes are relevant to them. So I take it that you are tacitly conceding that you have no idea what happens at them, starting with our use of the term “meetings.”

@Eddie

…is shaped wholly by your experience of your own little corner of science.

You couldn’t be more wrong. I would bet that my publication record is the broadest of all who post here:

My Bibliography - NCBI

I’ve presented this to you before, so you have no excuse for making that false claim. You can click on that from anywhere, now that your fake excuse of lacking PubMed access has been deflated.

I’ll close with what I wrote and you predictably ignored in favor of constructing yet another straw man:

@Mercer

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.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Mercer

I’d suggest that you are moving the goalposts in a most mendacious way.

No. I’ve made clear in this current discussion that I’m not talking merely about formal debates like Farina vs. Tour nor even about disagreements at conferences. Those are merely examples. I’m addressing your longstanding claim, which has always been a broad one, that scientists never “debate” about scientific matters. You’ve repeatedly said they don’t debate, but instead present evidence. But the two activities are not mutually exclusive, despite your attempt to present them as such.

You continue to maintain that now, when you say they debate over faculty hirings and over grant approvals, suggesting that they don’t debate over other things, like the contents of their subject. But lots of scientists debate over conclusions, hypotheses, and theories in their subject-areas.

You’ve got a fetish about the word “debate.” You’ve repeatedly (under pseudonyms on other websites) said that science isn’t about “high school debate,” and every time I use the word “debate,” you pedantically pounce on it, trying to insinuate that in English the word has only one narrow meaning, and that meaning doesn’t apply to what scientists do. But in English the word has a broad semantic field, and I’m using it entirely correctly when I say that scientists debate about things.

You may have noticed that in all the hundreds of times you’ve raised this claim, i.e., that scientists never debate about their subject-matter, no scientist in the discussion has seconded your view. That’s because they’ve all been involved in debates within their own scientific areas, or at least have observed such debates. They’ll agree with you that scientific debate generally doesn’t take place in popular settings with speakers at podiums, but they won’t agree with you that there is never any debate among scientists or that science is only about “presenting evidence.” It’s also about responding to contrary evidence presented by others, and about big picture disagreements (e.g., over string theory or the nature or amount of dark matter).

The word “debate” is a big hang-up for you, but I have no intention of changing my use of the word. As I use the word (which is the way almost all English-speakers use it), scientists, like other academics, debate things in their fields. If you want to insist on your own idiosyncratic limitation of the term, go ahead, but you’ll be a minority of one. In the meantime, I’ll continue to speak about scientific debates whenever it’s appropriate, and if that bothers you, that’s your problem, not mine.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@Eddie

@Mercer

I’d suggest that you are moving the goalposts in a most mendacious way.

No. I’ve made clear in this current discussion that I’m not talking merely about formal debates like Farina vs. Tour nor even about disagreements at conferences. Those are merely examples.

So you’re only tacitly conceding that your claims about debates at conferences were fabrications. Got it.

@Eddie

I’m addressing your longstanding claim, which has always been a broad one, that scientists never “debate” about scientific matters. You’ve repeatedly said they don’t debate, but instead present evidence.

You have a habit of deliberately misrepresenting what I write.

@Eddie

But the two activities are not mutually exclusive, despite your attempt to present them as such.

I’ve never done so.

@Eddie

You’ve got a fetish about the word “debate.”

Because science isn’t about debate. It’s about testing hypotheses. No ID proponent has ever tested an ID hypothesis.

@Eddie

The word “debate” is a big hang-up for you, but I have no intention of changing my use of the word.

Of course you don’t! It’s a central part of your attempt to portray the rhetorical ID scam as scientific. It goes right along with your use of “ID theory,” when not a single ID proponent has advanced and tested even a single hypothesis to date.

You clearly see a polemic need to pretend that real science is as rhetorical as the ID scam.

[Eddie (Edward Robinson)]

@Mercer

So you’re only tacitly conceding that your claims about debates at conferences were fabrications.

No, I concede no such thing. I never said that all exchanges at conferences amounted to “debate”; however, some exchanges at conferences do. At the Wistar conference, for example, there was clearly debate about the validity of the neo-Darwinian interpretation of evolution. In fact, the whole conference was organized for the purpose of having that debate. I’m also told by a seasoned physicist/space scientist that even where debate is refrained from during actual presentation times, debate often takes place in the hallways after the session.

@Mercer

You have a habit of deliberately misrepresenting what I write.

No, I simply respond to your overclaims and your pedantry about words.

@Mercer

Because science isn’t about debate. It’s about testing hypotheses.

I never denied that. But on several occasions you have said that scientists don’t “debate” things. That’s what I’m opposing. They do often debate things, as well as test hypotheses.

I’m waiting to hear from your scientific colleagues here on this thread. What is their view? Do scientists ever debate things with other scientists? I think you will find that most of your colleagues here will say that they do. Not formal staged debate of the Tour-Farina type, but debate in the more general sense of the word.

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Eddie Please don’t be a pest.

[Dan_Eastwood]

@Mercer

I would bet that my publication record is the broadest of all who post here:

I concede. Technically I’ve got you on H and I indexes, but then I’m not first author on any on those, so I don’t think it counts.