Puck, the key part of your answer is this:
That’s the only kind of debate I’m asking for, a debate by super-competent people in a field, that is deliberately aimed at a highly intelligent audience. Debates where the purpose is demagoguery (either of the right or the left), I’m not interested in. Much of the debate about global warming, on both sides, is, I readily concede, motivated by demagoguery. That hardly means that a debate, with two high-quality participants, could never be of value.
Nor am I suggesting, as you seem to think, that I am looking for a “winner” in the debate. Both you and Mercer seem to have a very crude and limited notion of the meaning of the word “debate” in English. I think you imagine some prep-school contest run by high school teachers, or some culture-war affair set up by a special interest group on one side of the issue, where a partisan or even non-partisan crowd, most of whom know even less about the issues than the debaters, “votes” afterward on who won the debate. You guys here all continually forget my background – very high-level education in the humanities. I’m talking about serious, high-level thought, not two people shouting at each other with off-the-shelf arguments.
For example, in political theory, you can have very high-level, serious debate between a Marxist theorist and a Platonist, with a live audience consisting mostly of people who have spent their lives reading all the major works of political philosophy for the past 2500 years. An example of such a debate relevant to the current topic might be a prepared scientific conference event where two eminently qualified climatologists, each long familiar with the work of the other, stake out opposed positions in front of an audience of climatologists (or others with scientific competence to follow the debate), and there is a lengthy period for rejoinders and rebuttals between them, followed by a lengthy period where each answers questions from the highly trained audience. If ever such a debate has been filmed, and is available on the internet, I would watch it.
But here’s an interesting question for you as a lawyer: Much of what you say would apply to courtroom trials as well. Often the law is complicated, yet a jury (of laymen who cannot be expected to know nearly as much about the law as either prosecutor or defense attorney) is asked to decide which of the two legal experts has made the better argument. Are you advocating scrapping juries (because they will be fooled by superficial elements of the lawyers’ performance and won’t understand the legal substance) and replacing juries with a panel of expert lawyers from some Law society or university? It’s a side-point here, I know, but I’m wondering if your implicitly elitist notions about communication and debate are limited to scientific matters, of whether you would extend them into law.
I agree with what you are driving at, but once again I find myself misunderstood here. I am not talking about some prep-school debate. I’m talking about two people, both acknowledged experts, standing on a stage, with all their audio-visual materials prepared, each well aware of the sort of arguments the other person has presented in the past and is likely to present again in the debate, and each agreeing to stick just to the science, with a moderator there to rule out of court any ad hominem remarks about someone funded by an oil company, etc. And plenty of time allotted for rebuttals and rejoinders and rebuttals to rejoinders, so that there is back and forth, and thus time for the careful qualifications that all serious debate requires. E.g., “I grant your point regarding X; however, it is not the only factor involved; you seem to be leaving out the effects of Y…” From such a debate, one might learn something. Where can I find a recording of such a debate?
And again, I am not looking for a crude “winner” in such debates. The point is to educate the public (or at least, the patient and thoughtful part of the public which will take time to listen to the debate) on what the alternatives are, why their adherents support them, how scientists gather data and reason from data, etc. The point of the debate would not be to settle the question once and for all, but to provide an intelligent framing of the issues – after which listeners could then go on to study more about the issues on their own, who knows, maybe even take courses from climatologists to make themselves more familiar with the details.
That is, I see debates – properly conducted, and in the right spirit – as tools of education.
I don’t think this is a serious concern. I’m well aware that a great many scientists are surprisingly inarticulate – and not just in speech but even in writing – as I am a professional copy-editor these days and have seen things written by Ph.D.s in just about every field of science that are shockingly bad in prose and even in logic. (If these guys write that badly, when they’ve spent weeks writing a paper with plenty of time to edit their work, I’d hate to have to listen to them speaking off the cuff in a debate!) But there are also at least a few scientists in each area of study who, in addition to knowing their science, know also how to communicate well. There should be some in the climate science community who can communicate well, and who could stand up against clear communicators like Christy and Curry. In biology, for example, we have people like Dawkins and Gould; in astrobiology there have been people like Sagan; there surely must be some in climatology that could do the same.
As I already said, the debate was not over evolutionary biology but over the origin of life. I’ve listened to almost all the segments. Which ones have you listened to? It sounds as if the answer is “None.” I would suggest you listen to some of them before deciding what is in them.
I’ve never heard him say that, and I doubt he ever has said that, and to the best of my knowledge, he is an “old earth” creationist, not a YEC. But in any case, he did not say that in the debate to which I’ve referred you. He didn’t talk about dinosaurs or the Bible; he talked about things like chemical bonds and chirality – if that term means anything to you. And in that debate, he crushed the arrogant young grad student (or former grad student; I think “Professor Dave” did an MSc in Chemistry sometime in his past, but isn’t working in science now). It was wonderful to see youthful insolence and braggadocio (to use your word) completely humbled by maturity and mastery of the subject-matter.
This is all I have time for on this thread – I must get back to the aforementioned editing! See you guys in a few months!
