What's the difference between a Conspiracy Theory and The Truth?

[Fheredin]

You can actually put the genetic sequence to the SARS-CoV2 spike protein into genetic databases, and the insertion sequence is about 12 base-pairs long only shows up in the two places I listed. A 12 base-pair sequence has approximately 16.7 million possible permutations. This is not to say that we know for a fact this isn't used elsewhere; it could be somewhere we haven't found or it could have been discovered, but unpublished in public databases. But we can say with reasonable certainty that this is a pretty rare sequence.

How would you quantify that rarity? We've mapped the human genome fully, but my understanding is that only a tiny fraction of animal viruses have been sequenced. This is a paper on new virus sequencing from 2020, for example:

Although millions of distinct virus species likely exist, only approximately 9000 are catalogued in GenBank's RefSeq database.

https://elifesciences.org/articles/51971

So I think that the animal markets are teeming with unmapped animal viruses that the sequence could potentially be pulled from via viral recombination. Reviewing what I understand of viral recombination,

Viral recombination occurs when viruses of two different parent strains coinfect the same host cell and interact during replication to generate virus progeny that have some genes from both parents. Recombination generally occurs between members of the same virus type (e.g., between two influenza viruses or between two herpes simplex viruses). Two mechanisms of recombination have been observed for viruses: independent assortment and incomplete linkage. Either mechanism can produce new viral serotypes or viruses with altered virulence.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK8439/#_A2330_

It seems like it is at least a possible mechanism.

You yourself (accurately) said that we share 60% of our genome with a banana, so while we can't say for a fact exactly how rare this sequence is, we can put a "floor" on the rarity because it's only recorded once in many hundreds of thousands of genetic samples. It is certainly not one of life's MVP shared architecture structures.

Also, natural chimerism isn't a plausible mechanism when you're talking a triple species barrier. As a refresher, we're talking about a bat coronavirus, a pangolin virus, and a human clotting enzyme binding site. Which species was the host during the chimerism mutation? If you say the chimerism happened in a bat or pangolin, then the furin cleavage site would be selected against and the variant would fail to spread. If it was within a human, then you are dealing with a double-species barrier, where two viruses with spike proteins tuned for incorrect species must infect the same person. In fact, it's worse than that because they have to infect the same cell at the same time. COVID viral loads have a doubling time of 6 hours, so the cell will die within a day of being infected. The time window for this to happen is actually quite narrow. This is already rare when you're talking two viruses bred to infect the same tissues in one specific animal. Sure, it's theoretically possible, but that rings hollow.

Then there's also the matter that both of these viruses are on file. Naturally, we know about the furin cleavage site because it's a human virus structure, but what about the animal viruses? I'll be conservative and interpret that "millions of different viruses" as only one million viruses, with us knowing 9,000 of them. The odds of us knowing both viruses in a random two animal viral chimerism event like this is roughly 1 in 12,000. (1,000,000/9000= 111, 111^2= 12,321) And I was being as conservative as possible by interpreting "millions" as only one million. If you double that number to two million unknown viruses, the odds shoot up to 1 in 50,000.

Now, I can't prove that there aren't other viruses we don't know about, of course, but that doesn't seem to be relevant here because even if the chimerism did occur with unknown viruses, the actual parent viruses would have to be closely related to the ones on file, or else it would not ping. Again, being generous, let's reduce the field by 50% to include cousin viruses. That's still 1 in 6,000 odds.

You know what is restricted to known viruses? Genetic manipulation. Lab leak self-selects for known viruses because you obviously can't manipulate the genetic code of a virus you haven't discovered.

The problem with the lab leak/ natural origin discussion is that it is the Evolution/ Intelligent Design argument couched in different language. It's obviously bad to assume that SARS-CoV2 had to have been a natural virus when there's a biohazard level 3 lab a few hundred yards from the wet market, but the evolution argument that everything we see today had to have a natural origin is the same assumption presented in a less obviously bad way. It sounds reasonable, but it is an assumption which is seldom questioned. In that sense, this incident threatens to create a fissure down to the heart of modern biology by killing the sacred cow of Evolution; humanity has an absolutely bizarre three-part Robertsonian Translocation mutation where our 2nd and 3rd chromosomes are fused which is at least as weird as COVID's viral chimerism.

So you're saying that assuming Evolution too much is harmful, specifically because we should put more effort into understanding why the human genome was apparently engineered.

Evolution is very widely assumed, but I think that we could put more effort into distinguishing between engineered and natural organisms in general - particularly because as the technology spreads, there is more potential for illicit GMO creation. This could then be applied to the case of the human genome.
[/quote]

Allow me to put my criticisms of evolution this way; you can tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience by looking for technology the theory created. Evolution has co-opted selective breeding as if it was a technology it enabled, but humanity has been doing selective breeding since before we learned to write. Evolution says that if you put creatures under selective pressure, they will either die out or evolve, but our lived experience with selective breeding is that if you go to far, inbreeding faults compound. Evolution counters this lived experience by adding zeroes to the timescale with a baseless assumption that things will change if you wait long enough. This is quite literally medieval monks drawing epicycles on geocentric models of the solar system.

Meanwhile, consider the Intelligent Design camp. CRISPR-CAS9 is the most powerful cellular therapy discovered and from a philosophical paradigm perspective, it's a traitor. It's a million percent Intelligent Design. To draw parallels to the Copernican revolution, this is Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

Evolution is taught as scientific "fact" because a lot of currently published professional scientists have a great deal of sunk costs in publishing about it. I'm not going to say there's no truth to it, but I also think that the evolutionary paradigm recklessly exaggerates what is known or testable, and often postures to make itself look more solid than it actually is. If you approach the matter from a performance perspective--seeing how scientific theories interrelate to the development of technology--Intelligent Design is eating evolution alive, and microbiology is the battlefield.

[jhkim]

Allow me to put my criticisms of evolution this way; you can tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience by looking for technology the theory created. Evolution has co-opted selective breeding as if it was a technology it enabled, but humanity has been doing selective breeding since before we learned to write. Evolution says that if you put creatures under selective pressure, they will either die out or evolve, but our lived experience with selective breeding is that if you go to far, inbreeding faults compound. Evolution counters this lived experience by adding zeroes to the timescale with a baseless assumption that things will change if you wait long enough. This is quite literally medieval monks drawing epicycles on geocentric models of the solar system.

Meanwhile, consider the Intelligent Design camp. CRISPR-CAS9 is the most powerful cellular therapy discovered and from a philosophical paradigm perspective, it's a traitor. It's a million percent Intelligent Design. To draw parallels to the Copernican revolution, this is Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

Evolution is taught as scientific "fact" because a lot of currently published professional scientists have a great deal of sunk costs in publishing about it. I'm not going to say there's no truth to it, but I also think that the evolutionary paradigm recklessly exaggerates what is known or testable, and often postures to make itself look more solid than it actually is. If you approach the matter from a performance perspective--seeing how scientific theories interrelate to the development of technology--Intelligent Design is eating evolution alive, and microbiology is the battlefield.

Your premise here is that people who believe in Intelligent Design were the ones who invented CRISPR-CAS9. However, I don't think that is the case. CRISPR-CAS9 was invented by biochemist Doudna and microbiology Charpentier, and I am certain that they both believe in Evolution. Doudna co-wrote a pop science book on gene editing that references Evolution, for example.

I've read a number of biographies of famous biologists, and all of them have believed in Evolution.

There are a few scientists who believe in Intelligent Design who have made useful contributions to science, but they are rare.

You yourself (accurately) said that we share 60% of our genome with a banana, so while we can't say for a fact exactly how rare this sequence is, we can put a "floor" on the rarity because it's only recorded once in many hundreds of thousands of genetic samples. It is certainly not one of life's MVP shared architecture structures.

Also, natural chimerism isn't a plausible mechanism when you're talking a triple species barrier. As a refresher, we're talking about a bat coronavirus, a pangolin virus, and a human clotting enzyme binding site. Which species was the host during the chimerism mutation? If you say the chimerism happened in a bat or pangolin, then the furin cleavage site would be selected against and the variant would fail to spread.

This is jumping between two extremes here. We both agree that there are many "MVP" sequences that are common across millions of species including humans.

However, you then assume that a sequence found in a pangolin virus must be unique to only a pangolin virus and could only be found in pangolins, and this sequence couldn't also occur in many of the millions of other unmapped animal viruses out there. It is quite possible that the short sequence found in a pangolin virus is also found in many other viruses, such as other bat viruses. More specifically,

Then there's also the matter that both of these viruses are on file. Naturally, we know about the furin cleavage site because it's a human virus structure, but what about the animal viruses? I'll be conservative and interpret that "millions of different viruses" as only one million viruses, with us knowing 9,000 of them. The odds of us knowing both viruses in a random two animal viral chimerism event like this is roughly 1 in 12,000. (1,000,000/9000= 111, 111^2= 12,321) And I was being as conservative as possible by interpreting "millions" as only one million. If you double that number to two million unknown viruses, the odds shoot up to 1 in 50,000.

Now, I can't prove that there aren't other viruses we don't know about, of course, but that doesn't seem to be relevant here because even if the chimerism did occur with unknown viruses, the actual parent viruses would have to be closely related to the ones on file, or else it would not ping.

If 60% of the DNA is the same between a human and a banana -- then a tiny 12 base-pair-long sequence does not have to be unique to only a few closely related viruses. It could be found in highly different viruses or even among some non-virus organisms that picked up the sequence during infection. Especially if that sequence helps covid-19 to be so successful in infection, then it could be successfully copied across thousands or more of viruses. There's a huge middle ground between:

(1) A gene sequence so common that we never could have missed it earlier, and
(2) A gene sequence so rare that there's almost no chance that it could be natural

[DocJones]

There's definitely something to this "fur in' cleavage" thing:

[Fheredin]

Allow me to put my criticisms of evolution this way; you can tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience by looking for technology the theory created. Evolution has co-opted selective breeding as if it was a technology it enabled, but humanity has been doing selective breeding since before we learned to write. Evolution says that if you put creatures under selective pressure, they will either die out or evolve, but our lived experience with selective breeding is that if you go to far, inbreeding faults compound. Evolution counters this lived experience by adding zeroes to the timescale with a baseless assumption that things will change if you wait long enough. This is quite literally medieval monks drawing epicycles on geocentric models of the solar system.

Meanwhile, consider the Intelligent Design camp. CRISPR-CAS9 is the most powerful cellular therapy discovered and from a philosophical paradigm perspective, it's a traitor. It's a million percent Intelligent Design. To draw parallels to the Copernican revolution, this is Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

Evolution is taught as scientific "fact" because a lot of currently published professional scientists have a great deal of sunk costs in publishing about it. I'm not going to say there's no truth to it, but I also think that the evolutionary paradigm recklessly exaggerates what is known or testable, and often postures to make itself look more solid than it actually is. If you approach the matter from a performance perspective--seeing how scientific theories interrelate to the development of technology--Intelligent Design is eating evolution alive, and microbiology is the battlefield.

Your premise here is that people who believe in Intelligent Design were the ones who invented CRISPR-CAS9. However, I don't think that is the case. CRISPR-CAS9 was invented by biochemist Doudna and microbiology Charpentier, and I am certain that they both believe in Evolution. Doudna co-wrote a pop science book on gene editing that references Evolution, for example.

I've read a number of biographies of famous biologists, and all of them have believed in Evolution.

There are a few scientists who believe in Intelligent Design who have made useful contributions to science, but they are rare.

I never said anything about the scientists self-ascribed beliefs; I said CRISPR-CAS9 is philosophically more attuned to Intelligent Design than Evolution. The Evolutionary idea of genetic manipulation is to irradiate fruit flies and watch as a few of them develop oddly colored eyes or four wings. This approach does not work very well. The evolutionary model requires reproduction and selection.

CRISPR-CAS9--which I would categorize as a discovery, and not an invention, because it's a repurposed immune enzyme from a bacterium and not a custom-designed protein--works by modifying the genes in a living cell. This is, in no uncertain terms, more philosophically attuned to Intelligent Design because it uses the Intelligent Design information and modification framework. Plagairizing, you could say, because none of this is getting due credit.

You yourself (accurately) said that we share 60% of our genome with a banana, so while we can't say for a fact exactly how rare this sequence is, we can put a "floor" on the rarity because it's only recorded once in many hundreds of thousands of genetic samples. It is certainly not one of life's MVP shared architecture structures.

Also, natural chimerism isn't a plausible mechanism when you're talking a triple species barrier. As a refresher, we're talking about a bat coronavirus, a pangolin virus, and a human clotting enzyme binding site. Which species was the host during the chimerism mutation? If you say the chimerism happened in a bat or pangolin, then the furin cleavage site would be selected against and the variant would fail to spread.

This is jumping between two extremes here. We both agree that there are many "MVP" sequences that are common across millions of species including humans.

However, you then assume that a sequence found in a pangolin virus must be unique to only a pangolin virus and could only be found in pangolins, and this sequence couldn't also occur in many of the millions of other unmapped animal viruses out there. It is quite possible that the short sequence found in a pangolin virus is also found in many other viruses, such as other bat viruses. More specifically,

Then there's also the matter that both of these viruses are on file. Naturally, we know about the furin cleavage site because it's a human virus structure, but what about the animal viruses? I'll be conservative and interpret that "millions of different viruses" as only one million viruses, with us knowing 9,000 of them. The odds of us knowing both viruses in a random two animal viral chimerism event like this is roughly 1 in 12,000. (1,000,000/9000= 111, 111^2= 12,321) And I was being as conservative as possible by interpreting "millions" as only one million. If you double that number to two million unknown viruses, the odds shoot up to 1 in 50,000.

Now, I can't prove that there aren't other viruses we don't know about, of course, but that doesn't seem to be relevant here because even if the chimerism did occur with unknown viruses, the actual parent viruses would have to be closely related to the ones on file, or else it would not ping.

If 60% of the DNA is the same between a human and a banana -- then a tiny 12 base-pair-long sequence does not have to be unique to only a few closely related viruses. It could be found in highly different viruses or even among some non-virus organisms that picked up the sequence during infection. Especially if that sequence helps covid-19 to be so successful in infection, then it could be successfully copied across thousands or more of viruses. There's a huge middle ground between:

(1) A gene sequence so common that we never could have missed it earlier, and
(2) A gene sequence so rare that there's almost no chance that it could be natural

No. While there is a space between those two extremes, it is a lot less than you'd think. Genes replicate themselves, so the distribution isn't linear, it's logarithmic, with the most common genes being many orders of magnitude more common than the least common ones. There's probably a bunch of genetic information out there we haven't seen (although that's an argument from silence because it's impossible to quantify what you don't know), but statistically, we can say with significant certainty that the genetic material we haven't seen is somewhere between unusual and rare because of how much we can extrapolate from known genetics.

Also, the 12 base pair sequence isn't from either RaTG13 or the pangolin virus (whose designation I don't know.) That's the Moderna patent or deep ocean bacterium coding for the furin cleavage site. This is the part interacting with human biology which we understand best. Human genetics and human viruses do have furin cleavage sites, but they don't code for one in this particular way. 

[Grognard GM]

There's definitely something to this "fur in' cleavage" thing:

Where's the one where she shows the fur?

[jhkim]

Allow me to put my criticisms of evolution this way; you can tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience by looking for technology the theory created. Evolution has co-opted selective breeding as if it was a technology it enabled, but humanity has been doing selective breeding since before we learned to write.
(...)
Meanwhile, consider the Intelligent Design camp. CRISPR-CAS9 is the most powerful cellular therapy discovered and from a philosophical paradigm perspective, it's a traitor. It's a million percent Intelligent Design. To draw parallels to the Copernican revolution, this is Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

Your premise here is that people who believe in Intelligent Design were the ones who invented CRISPR-CAS9. However, I don't think that is the case. CRISPR-CAS9 was invented by biochemist Doudna and microbiology Charpentier, and I am certain that they both believe in Evolution. Doudna co-wrote a pop science book on gene editing that references Evolution, for example.

I never said anything about the scientists self-ascribed beliefs; I said CRISPR-CAS9 is philosophically more attuned to Intelligent Design than Evolution. The Evolutionary idea of genetic manipulation is to irradiate fruit flies and watch as a few of them develop oddly colored eyes or four wings. This approach does not work very well. The evolutionary model requires reproduction and selection.

I don't think that distinguishing science and pseudo-science is a philosophical question, though. It comes down to the brass tacks of what works and what doesn't. Can the science make verifiable predictions and/or produce useful technologies?

Given a philosopher who assures me of a philosophical similarity, and a scientist who actually discovers useful techniques -- I'm going to pay more attention to what the scientist says. And mainstream biologists who believe in Evolution have been very successful through the present day - with lots of successful predictions and useful discoveries.

I don't think individual scientists are infallible or superior, but the general process of science and field of modern biology has a lot to its credit. That's very different than, say, government-appointed science leaders - who often declare public policy that isn't supported by the published data.

[Trond]

Meanwhile, consider the Intelligent Design camp. CRISPR-CAS9 is the most powerful cellular therapy discovered and from a philosophical paradigm perspective, it's a traitor. It's a million percent Intelligent Design. To draw parallels to the Copernican revolution, this is Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

I wouldn't call it cellular therapy, but it could conceivably be used for that. It's used for gene editing. But how is it "a million percent intelligent design"? It's basically an immune system (sort of) of a bacterial cell, to help it fight off bacteriophage viruses. It presumably evolved just like our own immune system has evolved, and keeps evolving (something that is well documented).

CRISPR-CAS9 is philosophically more attuned to Intelligent Design than Evolution

What does "attuned" mean here?

[Fheredin]

Allow me to put my criticisms of evolution this way; you can tell the difference between real science and pseudoscience by looking for technology the theory created. Evolution has co-opted selective breeding as if it was a technology it enabled, but humanity has been doing selective breeding since before we learned to write.
(...)
Meanwhile, consider the Intelligent Design camp. CRISPR-CAS9 is the most powerful cellular therapy discovered and from a philosophical paradigm perspective, it's a traitor. It's a million percent Intelligent Design. To draw parallels to the Copernican revolution, this is Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

Your premise here is that people who believe in Intelligent Design were the ones who invented CRISPR-CAS9. However, I don't think that is the case. CRISPR-CAS9 was invented by biochemist Doudna and microbiology Charpentier, and I am certain that they both believe in Evolution. Doudna co-wrote a pop science book on gene editing that references Evolution, for example.

I never said anything about the scientists self-ascribed beliefs; I said CRISPR-CAS9 is philosophically more attuned to Intelligent Design than Evolution. The Evolutionary idea of genetic manipulation is to irradiate fruit flies and watch as a few of them develop oddly colored eyes or four wings. This approach does not work very well. The evolutionary model requires reproduction and selection.

I don't think that distinguishing science and pseudo-science is a philosophical question, though. It comes down to the brass tacks of what works and what doesn't. Can the science make verifiable predictions and/or produce useful technologies?

Given a philosopher who assures me of a philosophical similarity, and a scientist who actually discovers useful techniques -- I'm going to pay more attention to what the scientist says. And mainstream biologists who believe in Evolution have been very successful through the present day - with lots of successful predictions and useful discoveries.

I don't think individual scientists are infallible or superior, but the general process of science and field of modern biology has a lot to its credit. That's very different than, say, government-appointed science leaders - who often declare public policy that isn't supported by the published data.

Are you sure you want to stick with the argument that science is "brass tacks of what works and what doesn't?" The majority of sciences are in a study replication crisis. https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/What-is-the-Replication-Crisis.aspx

The journal Nature highlighted the scope of the issue in 2016 with a poll of 1,500 scientists. 70% of respondents reported that they had failed to reproduce the results of at least one of their peer's studies. 87% of chemists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 77% of biologists, 64% of environmental and earth scientists, 67% of medical researchers, and 62% of all other respondents reported this issue. 50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments.

As a reminder, the accepted p-value (the odds the study's results are from random chance) is 0.05, so the threshold for studies which can't be repeated should be around 5%, not over 50%. Science would consider itself to be pseudoscience by its own metrics. Clearly this is not about any definitions of what is philosophical or scientific, and what is science or pseudoscience; this is about the scientific publishing process reserving the right to be hypocritical if it conveniences them. And because of that, the difference between science and pseudoscience is a philosophical one.

[Fheredin]

Meanwhile, consider the Intelligent Design camp. CRISPR-CAS9 is the most powerful cellular therapy discovered and from a philosophical paradigm perspective, it's a traitor. It's a million percent Intelligent Design. To draw parallels to the Copernican revolution, this is Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

I wouldn't call it cellular therapy, but it could conceivably be used for that. It's used for gene editing. But how is it "a million percent intelligent design"? It's basically an immune system (sort of) of a bacterial cell, to help it fight off bacteriophage viruses. It presumably evolved just like our own immune system has evolved, and keeps evolving (something that is well documented).

CRISPR-CAS9 is philosophically more attuned to Intelligent Design than Evolution

What does "attuned" mean here?

Well, technically CRISPR is a repurposed enzyme. It's intended to disable the genetic material of an invading virus, but you can control the sequence it cuts, so if you program it to cut a DNA molecule at a specific point and provide a loose bit of DNA, the DNA repair mechanism has a good chance of incorporating it in at the break.

My point here is that the assumptions behind how and why this process works come from computer science in the form of Information Theory. In computer science, you measure data in megabytes. In microbiology, you measure data in megabase pairs. Intelligent Design is all about Information Theory; the entire premise boils down to non-trivial amounts of information don't spontaneously generate; they have to be created by an intelligence.

Evolution basically conflicts with information theory because the theory assumes that given enough time, mutation generates new information, thus downplaying the value of information in the function of a cell. In this sense, CRISPR works in concert with Intelligent Design and contradicts Evolution.

[GeekyBugle]

Meanwhile, consider the Intelligent Design camp. CRISPR-CAS9 is the most powerful cellular therapy discovered and from a philosophical paradigm perspective, it's a traitor. It's a million percent Intelligent Design. To draw parallels to the Copernican revolution, this is Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

I wouldn't call it cellular therapy, but it could conceivably be used for that. It's used for gene editing. But how is it "a million percent intelligent design"? It's basically an immune system (sort of) of a bacterial cell, to help it fight off bacteriophage viruses. It presumably evolved just like our own immune system has evolved, and keeps evolving (something that is well documented).

CRISPR-CAS9 is philosophically more attuned to Intelligent Design than Evolution

What does "attuned" mean here?

Well, technically CRISPR is a repurposed enzyme. It's intended to disable the genetic material of an invading virus, but you can control the sequence it cuts, so if you program it to cut a DNA molecule at a specific point and provide a loose bit of DNA, the DNA repair mechanism has a good chance of incorporating it in at the break.

My point here is that the assumptions behind how and why this process works come from computer science in the form of Information Theory. In computer science, you measure data in megabytes. In microbiology, you measure data in megabase pairs. Intelligent Design is all about Information Theory; the entire premise boils down to non-trivial amounts of information don't spontaneously generate; they have to be created by an intelligence.

Evolution basically conflicts with information theory because the theory assumes that given enough time, mutation generates new information, thus downplaying the value of information in the function of a cell. In this sense, CRISPR works in concert with Intelligent Design and contradicts Evolution.

As a Christian and someone who kinda knows something about evolution (out of curiosity):

Evolution doesn't depend on generating new "information" loosing it or it becoming non coding works as well.

[jhkim]

I don't think that distinguishing science and pseudo-science is a philosophical question, though. It comes down to the brass tacks of what works and what doesn't. Can the science make verifiable predictions and/or produce useful technologies?

Given a philosopher who assures me of a philosophical similarity, and a scientist who actually discovers useful techniques -- I'm going to pay more attention to what the scientist says. And mainstream biologists who believe in Evolution have been very successful through the present day - with lots of successful predictions and useful discoveries.

I don't think individual scientists are infallible or superior, but the general process of science and field of modern biology has a lot to its credit. That's very different than, say, government-appointed science leaders - who often declare public policy that isn't supported by the published data.

Are you sure you want to stick with the argument that science is "brass tacks of what works and what doesn't?" The majority of sciences are in a study replication crisis. https://www.news-medical.net/life-sciences/What-is-the-Replication-Crisis.aspx

The journal Nature highlighted the scope of the issue in 2016 with a poll of 1,500 scientists. 70% of respondents reported that they had failed to reproduce the results of at least one of their peer's studies. 87% of chemists, 69% of physicists and engineers, 77% of biologists, 64% of environmental and earth scientists, 67% of medical researchers, and 62% of all other respondents reported this issue. 50% had failed to reproduce one of their own experiments.

As a reminder, the accepted p-value (the odds the study's results are from random chance) is 0.05, so the threshold for studies which can't be repeated should be around 5%, not over 50%. Science would consider itself to be pseudoscience by its own metrics. Clearly this is not about any definitions of what is philosophical or scientific, and what is science or pseudoscience; this is about the scientific publishing process reserving the right to be hypocritical if it conveniences them. And because of that, the difference between science and pseudoscience is a philosophical one.

As I said, science is imperfect -- but pseudoscience is far more imperfect. When it comes down to brass tacks, there is a real difference between going to a psychic to treat someone's cancer vs going to a oncologist. Mainstream science has produced some pretty amazing results like CRISPR, lithium batteries, GPS, and so forth. I think it's track record is much better than the alternatives.


Regarding the statistics you quote, the poll reports that 50% of scientists had at least one experiment that they failed to reproduce. But an individual scientist has performed more than one experiment. The number varies widely depending on field, but a completing publication/experiment every 1-2 years is common. A scientist who has performed 20 experiments, then, might have 1 of those experiments not be reproducible. That would be 5%.

This doesn't debunk science. It's how science has always worked - by not assuming that any individual scientist is infallible. A single, not-yet-reproduced paper is at best suggestive, not the final word. Also, the reproducibility rate varies hugely depending on field. It is very low for fields like psychology and sociology - because those fields are extremely difficult to get controlled experimental conditions in. Physical sciences are better, but individual papers are still liable to have flaws.

[Exploderwizard]

COVID was simply a psyop used to drum up pandemic hysteria around flu season and oh boy did people fall for it. So many arguments over the origin of something that has yet to be isolated as a pure sample from a supposedly infected patient. Nothing needed to be cooked up in any lab. Why bother when you have the flu and hordes of gullible people. These were the same people who knew, just months earlier that paper face diapers were useless against viral transmission suddenly wore them because the CDC said THIS virus was different. Gullibility combined with a misplaced trust in authority is all that was required.

[Wrath of God]

Evolution is taught as scientific "fact" because a lot of currently published professional scientists have a great deal of sunk costs in publishing about it. I'm not going to say there's no truth to it, but I also think that the evolutionary paradigm recklessly exaggerates what is known or testable, and often postures to make itself look more solid than it actually is. If you approach the matter from a performance perspective--seeing how scientific theories interrelate to the development of technology--Intelligent Design is eating evolution alive, and microbiology is the battlefield.

What do you mean by Intelligent Design in technology? Because if you mean intelligently planned biotechnological constructs used by biotech then wow who would expect they would be better than waiting for bacteria or virus to just evolve in "natural" timescale for our purposes.
Problem is - it has literally ZERO to do with dispute between Evolution and IP as bio-historical theorems. Like the whole schtick is - was technology used to move life to level we got when mankind enter the scene or not - and not whether it's possible to purposefuly modify living organisms.

Unless by IP in technology you mean God or Ancient Aliens literally helping scientists get better results. Which I doubt.
This is unlawful mixing of two different aspects - one from biohistorical sciences and one from practical tech.

It's like saying that since purposeful melting of metal give better tech than waiting for metal to spontaneously melt itself in earth core - that means natural geology needs to be replaced by ID-Earth or something.

[oggsmash]

  Sociology and psychology are not sciences.  They are social programming bullshit.   They change their "science" based on social pressure and the people's politics in the "sciences". 

[Fheredin]

Meanwhile, consider the Intelligent Design camp. CRISPR-CAS9 is the most powerful cellular therapy discovered and from a philosophical paradigm perspective, it's a traitor. It's a million percent Intelligent Design. To draw parallels to the Copernican revolution, this is Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

I wouldn't call it cellular therapy, but it could conceivably be used for that. It's used for gene editing. But how is it "a million percent intelligent design"? It's basically an immune system (sort of) of a bacterial cell, to help it fight off bacteriophage viruses. It presumably evolved just like our own immune system has evolved, and keeps evolving (something that is well documented).

CRISPR-CAS9 is philosophically more attuned to Intelligent Design than Evolution

What does "attuned" mean here?

Well, technically CRISPR is a repurposed enzyme. It's intended to disable the genetic material of an invading virus, but you can control the sequence it cuts, so if you program it to cut a DNA molecule at a specific point and provide a loose bit of DNA, the DNA repair mechanism has a good chance of incorporating it in at the break.

My point here is that the assumptions behind how and why this process works come from computer science in the form of Information Theory. In computer science, you measure data in megabytes. In microbiology, you measure data in megabase pairs. Intelligent Design is all about Information Theory; the entire premise boils down to non-trivial amounts of information don't spontaneously generate; they have to be created by an intelligence.

Evolution basically conflicts with information theory because the theory assumes that given enough time, mutation generates new information, thus downplaying the value of information in the function of a cell. In this sense, CRISPR works in concert with Intelligent Design and contradicts Evolution.

As a Christian and someone who kinda knows something about evolution (out of curiosity):

Evolution doesn't depend on generating new "information" loosing it or it becoming non coding works as well.

Only if you limit yourself to the small scales. No one really argues that there's a significant amount of space you can customize a creature via selective breeding. The problem is that evolution on larger scales (the kind that isn't actually testable) does require infusion of new information. You can't go from a bacterium to a eukaryote without adding genetic information.

This is a classic example of the informal fallacy of equivocation, where one word is being used to describe two quite different phenomena. Intelligent Design usually describes this as "microevolution" and "macroevolution," to emphasize that selective breeding and universal common ancestry are radically different propositions. Being generous, this is the result of evolutionary biologists having a poor understanding of their own source material and what is and isn't a testable hypothesis. More realistically, this is intentional obfuscation.