Nimcha said:
Therumancer said:
Alright, thanks for the explanation. My reason for asking is quite simple, most of your ramblings seemed to border on the intelligent design dogma. Mostly because of your wording, perhaps. It seemed like you were postulating evolution has a purpose, or meaning.
As an aside, 'fringe science' does not exist. Something is either scientific or it isn't. I'm sorry to tell you that most of your post is unscientific, but then again so is most of this thread.
Also, the thing about the 'missing link'? It's not needed. Human evolution has been pretty much mapped out without it. No real doubt anymore there.
Well, I tend to cover all bases when I post, hence why my posts get so long and rambling. Something I haven't been able to get around when conveying a lot of information.
I disagree with you about "The Missing Link", simply put because without such remains any "mapping" of human evolution is just a theory. We have been able to prove evolution in general by finding remains of a lot of differant animals and showing how they evolved step by step over a period of millions of years. Humans are however conspicuously absent from this however. Just because I point this out doesn't mean that I don't think one will never be found, I'm just saying that neither side of the arguement can actually prove anything to anyone who isn't already pre-disposed to agree with them.
As I said, I ultimatly take neither side of the debate, as I feel the whole thing is stupid.
"Fringe Science" is areas of science that can be proven, but for various reasons have not been commonly accepted by the mainstream. Every once in a while a network like "Discovery" does a show on Fringe scientists who will perform some rather shocking demonstrations of something, but wind up being on the outskirts of the academic community due to politics. Understand that "facts" mean less in the science community than getting published and there are massive "wars" fought not so much over whether or not something is right or wrong, but having it accepted as such because of whose career it can influance. "Fringe science" being called that because it's there, it's part of science, it's within the community, it hasn't been cast out, but it's not something that you are going to find presented to the mainstream or given heavy representation. A lot of things we take for granted now started out as fringe science, and only came into the public consciousness where they are now after long, hard battles. Psychology and Psychiatry, as well as things like Sociology are examples of this. There were times when the main scientific establishment embraced things like Phrenology (the study of bumps in the head), and the people with a vested stake in that had to be overcome for other sciences to replace them.
Very little of what I said isn't science. We understand pheremones, there are practical demonstrations of it when people and animals are castrated and how it destroys their sex drive. The way sex drive and the associated chemicals affects behavior can also be tracked by showing exactly how someone's personality changes when those drives are removed. Indeed one of the big reasons why people will spay or neuter house pets is not so much to prevent breeding, but to lower aggression and wandering-type behavior.
Hypnosis has been proven time and again, and there are people who do it for entertainment as part of magic shows.
Brainwashing is also well documented, as are deprogramming methods and the like. If you read much about real cults and their brainwashing techniques, and what is nessicary to re-assimilate a lot of those people to society it's pretty interesting... and it goes well beyond that.
The point is that what I've said about how the brain works and how it influances personality, and how people can be radically changed and controlled by chemicals, that's just plain science. It's part of psychiatry. People mess around with that stuff every day, and show tangible results. It's just most people don't think about it in a "big picture" kind of way because it's kind of disturbing for people who believe in some kind of inherant individualism to find out exactly how predictable, hardwired, and controllable we actually are. Sociology is even more disturbing on a lot of levels when you get down to it, and we also see practical demonstrations of that nearly every day through things like advertising.
Nothing directly to do with my earlier statement, I'm just saying that I think your being a bit too quick to dismiss what I had to say. I'm guessing because it freaked out out on a certain level. A lot of people react that way to be honest. A lot of what I said tends to elicit the same reactions that you get from people who are offended by the very idea of psychiatry and the fact that people and their personalities/thought processes can be approached successfully as a science.
