the KBW is coming

I gave myself some wiggle room on how many scientists don’t believe in evolution by saying it’s hard to define who a scientist is. I guess I would mean academics, and to a lesser extent people who work in research. People who are looking to discover things we didn’t know before, not people who are using stuff we already know to build better bridges and computers, no engineers.

There is this thing where in order to keep your scientific cred you have to publish papers in these academic magazines, and then other scientists read the papers and decide if they are true or make sense, and your standing in the community kind of depends on this. This is the self-policing function of science. If your experiment proves something that most scientists don’t believe, you will have a hard time of it, but you will get your day in court. Every now and then some group says they have discovered how to do cold fusion, and they get a bit of a buzz over that, mostly from the lame stream media because scientists are skeptics. One of the things you have to include in your paper is how you got the results you say you did. If you say you invented cold fusion you know plenty of scientists are going to run the same experiment the same way and see if they get the same results. So far none of these follow ups on cold fusion have been able to replicate the results of the guy who claimed it.

Anyway I’ll give you that if you define scientists broadly enough you can get to somewhere where ten percent of them do not believe in evolution.

I wonder about this Noah documentary. There are some stations like the history and science channels that used to actually, and sometimes still do, show historical and scientific shows, but they never got a big audience for them and now they specialize in space aliens. I think I dismiss this documentary and its ‘professors’ out of hand.

I’ll go out on a limb a bit here because I have no stats, but I believe the vast majority of those who don’t believe in evolution are religious fundamentalists. It’s not that they disagree logically with the facts and the chain of reasoning that underpins the theory of evolution, I doubt that they have ever even investigated any of them, because they don’t have to, they already believe in something else, the inerrancy of the bible.

Why should they bother listening to a bunch of pointy headed guys with pockets full of pens when they have God right there telling them the truth? There’s no reasoning with these guys. You can show them fossils and rock strata and gene charts and it won’t mean a thing. I expect that they don’t believe that the earth goes around the sun either so I don’t guess they would be much in the line of rocket scientists either. I suppose they could do well at some technical problem, they might be engineers, but they could never be anybody that discovered any new facts because for them any fact outside the bible is suspect.

I have to admit that I didn’t believe you when you said there were Seventh Day Adventist colleges, so I looked it up, and there they were, but I never heard of any of them and my guess would be that they are like Jim Jones University and that college that Jimmy Swaggart set up.

I do have a general idea how they select people for polls. They try to adjust for demographics like if the general population is ten percent Jewish they need ten percent Jews in their sample, and so on, and you have to be careful about things like you can’t do a random phone poll because people who have phones are a little different than people who don’t, so if you just used people with phones your sample would be unrepresentative of the public at large, and if you are doing an opinion poll you have to be very careful about how you word the question. Politicians and interest groups and companies do polls all the time but they have axes to grind and I think you can safely dismiss them out of hand.

There are a number of independent polling firms, and they have reputations to protect, and also they are all competing with each other so if one polling place made up numbers they would be wrong more often than the other pollsters and would soon be out of business. I picked the Pew poll because it was the first one on the screen that I googled. I’m sure other polls would show similar numbers.

But you are right, I am taking it on faith. For all I know space aliens have taken over Pew Research and are now cranking out phony numbers as part of their plot to take over the earth. Still I estimate that chances of this are slim, and I will accept their results before I accept some poll Jake, my beer drinking buddy, tells me that he heard about someplace, sometime.

I dismissed your Noah show out of hand. But if you could come back and say something like it aired on PBS 4/12/10 and gave me the name of the producer, why I would have to admit it right back in hand. Because I know PBS and I think they are reputable, and if I have any doubts I can look up the show and check it out.

See this whole thing where some people believe something and others believe the other thing and neither one can prove their case, then you are free to choose which one you want like you are in a cafeteria line and choosing between the jello and the cupcake, is just wrong, wrong, wrong. And worse than that, diametrically opposed to KBW.

We seem to be having some problem getting this running the world thing in order so it may be sometime before KBW agents invade Beaglesonia and arrest you for wrong thinking and take you to reeducation camp and make you sit in front of that crucible, but we will get around to it.

I just made up that nickel a burger number, just to give an example, and I thought it sounded a little poetic.