When a Scientist Believes Data Does Not Support Theory in Climate Models, What Then?

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Re “lying”, I want to go back to exactly what I originally wrote, in post 100, unmodified by your ellipsis:

“For example, did Tour make false statements when he pointed out that on more than one occasion the reaction products Farina and his sources were boasting about required chemicals that were bought by the experimenter in a pure state that would never be found in nature?”

Now, you answered that (Post 103) by quoting a drastically trimmed version of my statement:

and then replying:

Now, your intended use of the ellipsis was not at the time clear to me. You might have been using it just to keep things brief, in which case the “lie” of Tour covered more ground, or you might have been saying that only the six words reproduced were the “lie”, and not anything else Tour said. I could not tell which. At the time, I took it that you were saying that the whole thing was a lie. And even if I had thought you meant only the six words, the “that” did not have a clear antecedent. Was the lie that chemicals were required, or that they needed to be in pure state, or both? Impossible to tell from you manner of quoting, and your terse, unhelpful explication. But I asked you to clarify, in Post 107:

“What is your evidence for this charge? Did you write to the scientists in question, and did they tell you they made no use of purified, purchased chemicals in the reactions they ran? Send us scans of the replies of the scientists, please, or withdraw the charge of lying.”

So it should have been evident to you that I was having trouble getting your exact charge straight. But you didn’t immediately clarify.

Your very next post (110), contained an uncooperative non-answer which, based on what I had written, you must have known would not be clear to me:

Huh? So “the way chemistry works” proves that Tour was lying when he said the scientists bought their chemicals? So what were you saying, that they didn’t buy them? And “the way chemistry works” proves that Tour was lying when he suggested that certain substances would not have been found in a prebiotic earth in a sufficiently pure state? What does that mean? That there is no such thing as a chemical substance that wouldn’t be found in a prebiotic earth in anything but very impure states? Or were you speaking only about the particular substances Tour was mentioning, and saying he was wrong only about the existence of those particular substances in a prebiotic state? Hard to say, since you didn’t name the substances or direct me to the video where he discusses them. And further, how would his being wrong in claiming that, prove that he was lying in claiming that? It wouldn’t be a lie if he thought it was correct, just an error.

In short, your early discussion of the alleged lie was unclear, and from a conversational point of view, inept and uninformative. That’s nothing new around here, of course; it describes more than half of the posts here.

Now, after a long gap in posts, you finally return to clarify what you meant, but your clarification has no content; it’s merely a repetition of the truncated quotation which left me guessing in the first place. And then you refer me to something you said to Rumraket in a “recent reply” (not numbered). Why didn’t you just quote yourself, to save me the trouble of hunting? In any case, let’s start fresh. Forget Rumraket, forget repeating your truncated quotations, and just answer my questions in straight-forward English:

Was Tour lying when he said the scientists in question bought the referenced chemicals off the shelf?

Was Tour lying when he said that the chemicals would not have produced the reaction reported by the experimenter unless they had at least a certain level of purity?

Was Tour lying when he said that such a level of purity would not have been found (or would not likely have been found) on a prebiotic earth?

And finally, if your answer to any of these is “Yes”, please explain why, in each case, you chose the word “lying” rather than “making an error”.

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Then you still don’t understand the nature of our disagreement. You seem to think Tour committed no more than a minor and understandable oversight, as if he had misremembered a detail of a peer reviewed paper or failed to confirm a popular press description of some recent research.

I disagree. That dinosaurs did not live alongside human beings a few thousand years ago is not some minor piece of specialized knowledge that could only be expected to be understood by experts in a field. For someone who purports to be a world class scientist, it is knowledge as basic as that the earth is not flat, regardless of what his scientific discipline. Tour should not have had to think for more than a moment before rejecting whatever YEC source he based his claim of dinosaur red blood cells on. That he not only failed to do so, but went on to publicly endorse and confirm the finding to a YEC organization, calls his basic scientific knowledge, judgement and objectivity into serious question.

That help?

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Did the reactions ‘require’ reagents in a pure state? No. So what he said was false. Given his obvious experience and position of authority, I find it difficult to imagine he didn’t realize this, and I’m not prone to allow much leeway on untruths when presented with that much authority.

To say that a statement is false, does every part of it need to be false? If I saw robbers in purple masks rob a store, and falsely claim you were one of them, does it matter if I got the color of the masks right?

The antecedent of a comment immediately following a quote is almost always the quote.

I’ll here note that you did not ask me to explain what the charge was in the first place. One might assume from that you had it right. In which case my response was accurate. So no, I don’t think it was evident at all.

You may have noticed that I had not been tagged in the posts in question. I had not noticed them until I saw my name quoted in @Mercer’s reply.

The lie was in saying that a pure state was required for the reactions in question. There is nothing wrong with purchasing chemicals, nor with using pure chemicals, and Tour’s farcical objection to their use is completely unhinged. But the suggestion that they were required is a statement of fact that requires support. Support that he could not possibly have. And when you say something like that, necessarily wrong as it is, in a forum like that, designed as it was to convince gullible rubes like you of baseless untruths… yeah, it’s a lie.

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That doesn’t help, as both the words I specified were inside the quote. But never mind, since you finally answered the question clearly at the bottom.

I understand now your reasoning for the “lying” charge. It’s exactly what I expected; indeed, it’s a standard line of reasoning on anti-ID and anti-creationist blog sites. Yawn.

I find it interesting that you are willing to say that Tour is not only wrong but lying, when by your own admission you, like me, cannot remember which video, cannot remember the specific chemicals Tour was talking about, cannot remember the particular scientific article he was criticizing, etc. It’s as if the particular chemistry involved in the particular claim makes no difference at all to how you would respond to Tour. If that’s the level of precision and objectivity they teach in grad school in evolutionary biology, then evolutionary biology is even more scientifically pretentious and vacuous than I thought.

OK, adjust my statement to:

“All the atheists most of the TE/ECs here are rabidly partisan and it’s just automatic for them that anyone identified as an ID person must be shown to be completely wrong on everything.”

Now it’s correct.

And by the way, specify the two Christians, since the term “Christian” is used so vacuously around here that for some people a self-identification as “Christian” guarantees nothing.

This a very dangerous and doctrinaire conception of science. You are saying that because there is a scientific consensus on a subject, scientists should not “have to think for more than a moment” before rejecting what might be an empirical fact, because that empirical fact, if true, would upset the scientific consensus, so that fact must be bogus. I disagree. There is a legend that some theologian or Scholastic scientist wouldn’t look through Galileo’s telescope because whatever it showed, if it showed anything different from the reigning Ptolemaic-Copernican cosmology, it had to be false. That’s a very bad attitude for a scientist to take, to dismiss a potential fact after thinking for just a moment. Sometimes a new fact can, and should, shatter a scientific consensus.

The proper course for Tour to take would not have been to reject the blood claim on the grounds that it couldn’t be harmonized with the consensus, but to try to verify that claim, by tracing it to its ultimate source. Not “think for a moment”, and try to reason out whether that fact cold possibly be true, given its clash with other things, but do research to find out if the alleged fact was a fact. That is what I would have done in his shoes.

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My emphasis:

Re “lying”, that is not a request for clarification. It is a request for evidence, which is not the same thing at all. Nor does it contain even a hint at uncertainty.

I’m choosing the word "lying"because @Eddie is sufficiently adept at nit-picking precise meanings that he must not only know that he wasn’t asking for clarification, but also know that his question could not be interpreted that way.

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No, I’m saying a world-class scientist should know that something like an episode of Ancient Aliens, some psychotic person screaming on a street corner, or a Youtube video from a Young Earth Creationist is not a “scientific” source reliable enough to overturn a fact as well-established as that dinosaurs did not co-exist with humans.

But thanks for the further demonstration that you completely lack the reading comprehension skills one would expect of someone of your alleged academic accomplishments, as pedestrian as even those are.

Well, maybe that further explains your failure as an academic: You waste all your time “researching” every foolish claim that some pseudoscientist or conspiracy freak spews out. I would not bother “researching” a claim that the Mayan pyramids were built by Martians because I know that if such a shocking and radical claim had been confirmed as true it would be international news and one of the most celebrated scientific discoveries in human history. It wouldn’t be something only known to a bunch of untrained laypeople living in their parents’ basement. The same goes for a claim that we had found dinosaur blood cells.

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This reminds me of a (particularly naive) news report in some local US newspaper I saw a few years back of some creationist who had made a presentation in which (among other things) he claimed that trilobites still existed.

Such fringe claims are two a penny. :roll_eyes:

And as you say, if you spent time “researching” every one of such claims, you’d never have time for anything more serious.

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Indeed, it’s a slightly modernized version of a standard creationist lie: that science isn’t about testing hypotheses step-by-step, it is only about replicating an entire complex process.

You did precisely that above:

Why? Did any of those papers that you haven’t read say anything about purity of anything existing on the prebiotic earth? Wouldn’t you need to, you know, read them first before making such a false attribution?

Since a blog by definition is a web site, what exactly is the point of adding “sites” to it? Pretentiousness?

Standard falsehoods deserve standard responses.

As if? No, Eddie, Tour’s lie is a conceptual one; it applies to all such experiments. Besides, you never bothered to read a single one of the papers Tour was criticizing before claiming that he “destroyed” his opponent, did you?

No one matches your level of pretension here.

No, Faizal didn’t provide any “because.” You just made that up to go with your other serial fabrications.

Riiiiiight. We have a nearly perfectly analogous situation in which you never bothered to find out what about Meyer’s lie was false before trying to defend it as inconsequential. You had more than one person telling you point-blank what the falsehood was, but you ignored them and mindlessly regurgitated the lie. You did zero research.

The brilliant Roy Wood, Jr. on Eddie’s diploma fetish and refusal to learn:

Golly, Eddie did the exactly same thing with Meyer, who hid the strongest evidence for the RNA World hypothesis from his readers with a blatant lile in a chapter devoted to that very hypothesis! Although I would argue that the Meyer defense was slightly sillier than this one.

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You missed out vacuousness.

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Neither of the words you specified could have been the antecedent to what I said. Because neither could, individually, be a lie. Do I need to explain how the English language works as well as chemistry?

The antecedent was the entire quote. That should have been obvious. You might be confused as to what made the quoted passage a lie, but that is not confusion about the antecedent. I hope this ends the English lesson.

Oh, so you already knew and understood why he was lying? Then why did you need it explained? Unless you’re yawn is suggesting you find that obviously true argument unconvincing, in which case… that’s just a demonstration you don’t understand chemistry very well at all.

He made the same claim about multiple chemicals. Nucleotides, lipids, amino acids, and more. Same claim, false for the same reason each time he made it. The repetition was part of why I called it a lie, hard to make the same trivial mistake multiple times in the same prepared remarks.

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On the contrary, in the video series, Tour goes straight to the actual papers Farina is citing, and shows the relevant content on the screen, highlighting key words, key parts of the equations, etc., and showing exactly where the unwarranted assumptions are. You’d know that if you had watched the videos – but of course, you haven’t.

Whom I’ve never even heard of, but apparently he is cultural figure of some importance to you.

There’s nothing you or any of your colleagues in science have to teach me about English. I constantly edit papers by people with PhDs in the sciences, and many of them are embarrassingly bad in prose style, grammar, economy, and logical reasoning. So even if there was a rule (which there isn’t) that an antecedent has to be a whole quotation (it’s more commonly a single word), there is no guarantee that a science-trained individual would know that rule or consistently follow it. You could easily have been talking about a lie pertaining to one or the other of the words in question. With science-trained writers, one can never be sure, especially when they’re writing angrily and off the cuff, as is usually the case on this blog. People tend to be sloppier when writing in indignation.

No, I already expected what your reason would be for saying he was lying. Which is what I said. Do you have trouble in reading comprehension as well as in writing?

You haven’t proved there was any mistake, and couldn’t possibly do so without the actual passages of video in front of you. Let me know when you find them.

So, have you made much progress on your PhD research this week? Or have your onerous duties here, and your several-hours-per week obligation to read climate change papers, got in the way again? By all means, do let us know when you finish your dissertation, and tell us where we can read it. We might well profit from the thoughts, in his own special field, of a man who is so brilliant that he, as a side-interest, has acquired an understanding of climatology and synthetic chemistry better than that of some world-class scientists in those areas.

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“Eddie” is very good at reading English words and making relevant responses. Like he did right there.

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It is impossible that Tour could have done the necessary experimentation to back up the claim that a pure state is required. So… yeah. It was a lie.

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I suppose species names are technically Latin, even though they’re used when writing science in English.

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Why do you assume people here are writing angrily?

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Because he does.

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So you didn’t read the papers, making your use of “On the contrary,…” incorrect.

He does have your attitude pegged, right at the point of the video to which I linked.

But not the papers. Odd.

I predict that @CrisprCAS9, unlike you, will progress beyond a PhD in his academic career. Would you like to bet on that?

And why do you call this a blog? Are you really so clueless that you are unable to distinguish between a forum and a blog?

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Sometimes Latin, and sometimes Greek (with the Greek roots Latinized in spelling). But what’s your point? Latin and Greek are both languages I studied, and Greek I taught for 8 years, and I doubt Crispr has anything to teach me about those, either. As for the earlier purely pedantic complaint from someone else that I didn’t format “T. rex” correctly, it’s pretty sad when someone treats lazy typing in a discussion forum as if it’s a sign of lack of knowledge, given that I usually italicize and capitalize precisely, and given that the typography wasn’t relevant to the point I was making.

I read the relevant portions of the papers, the parts that Tour put up in his video in large print for everyone to see. It was in those portions where the dubious steps in the hypothetical pathways were presented. And to date, to my knowledge, neither Dave nor the scientists who wrote the papers have responded to Tour’s objections. But if they ever do respond, and respond adequately, I will gladly admit that they have met his objection.

It is a forum, but some of the title posts that introduce the discussions are blog-like in character. But leave it to you to make yet another pedantic objection when the point is clear.

By the way, you didn’t name the two Christians I asked you about above. You said two people responding to me were Christian, as if that was public knowledge that I should already know, but I didn’t know which people you were referring to, so asked you to name them. Did you just overlook the question, or did you see it but decide not to answer it? Or did you perhaps answer it in the post that you put up last night and then quickly took down, before I was able to read it? The question is still on the floor…

Look forward to the upcoming debate. I hope Tour avoids all polemics, and just sticks to the chemistry. (I doubt that Dave will be able to restrain himself from polemics, but we’ll see.) It seems to me that somewhere in the video exchange, or perhaps in another video interview with Tour, Tour graciously offered Dave a place to stay in his home, if Dave ever wanted to visit him to discuss the issues, and had no accommodation. A very Christian gesture toward someone who has repeatedly and gleefully insulted Tour, both professionally and personally. I wonder if Dave took him up on the offer for the upcoming event.

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How do you know those are the relevant portions?

How do you know they were dubious?

Did Tour present the actual hypotheses from the papers?

Why should they respond to a cranky old man who makes fallacious objections?

By the way, you didn’t explain why synthetic chemistry is more relevant than biochemistry to Tour’s whining.

By the way, you haven’t presented a speck of chemistry in anything you’ve written here. You know, that subject you claim to understand well enough to declare that Tour “demolished” someone?

By the way, you didn’t respond when I offered to bet that @CrisprCAS9’s career would progress beyond yours, which obviously went nowhere after the PhD.

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I’m reading that as an admission that you did not read papers.

I’m not sure who @Mercer had in mind. However, I would count both @Mercer and @misterme987 as Christians, and I do see that as public knowledge.

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