Comment on I Tried To Make Something In America (The Smarter Scrubber Experiment) - Smarter Every Day 308

• Thorry84@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  He can believe what he wants in his personal time. He can even use his platform to spread his beliefs. However being all about science and then pushing some weird agenda is a whole other thing. He betrayed the trust, so I choose not to watch his stuff anymore.

  It was this video: youtu.be/VPSm9gJkPxU

  When this video went up it caused quite a fuss online as Destin seems to heavily push an old debunked intelligent design narrative around flagella.

  source

  • aidan@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    He literally says that there’s a lot of good research being done trying to find the evolutionary mechanism. Nowhere that I saw at least did he push creationism, other than mentioning that the concept exists, and that he believes in god.

    source

    • Thorry84@feddit.nl ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Well, I don’t think it’s worth repeating the debate again. You can go back and look at what was posted back when it came out.

      But he tells a very one sided story and keeps telling to keep an open mind. He presents this thing as if it’s totally unique and amazing, where there are very similar structures in nature out there. He also heavily focuses on the idea of it being a motor in the way that a human designed motor works, giving the same names to parts which are kind of similar on a surface level but really aren’t. He also repeats all of the bible thumper talking points around this subject, as if it’s a mystery nobody can explain and couldn’t have come to be without some kind of intelligent design at the helm. But the reality is, this is not representing the reality at all. This whole flagella thing was an exercise of goal post moving in the first place. The ID people kept pointing out weird things and missing links. Then when science explained exactly how that thing came to be, without ID involved, they just pointed to the next thing at one point ending up at flagella.

      There is a whole Wikipedia page talking about how flagella evolved and how it came to be. The intelligent design people have been shouting about this for 3 decades now and there is so much info out there to find about how this came to be. If Destin wanted to approach this from a scientific standpoint, he would focus on that information, instead of presenting it like some kind of mystery we are still figuring it out today. And not keep telling people to have an open mind and how he can’t figure it out. He could have even gone into why people might think it was ID and then explain the science why it is not. Something other online science communicators often do, give people the points they have been hearing from the “wrong” side and then go into those points and explain them.

      Basically the whole subject itself is very hard to present without going into the whole ID versus evolution standpoint and the way he represented it was straight out of the ID playbook. And keep in mind all of this was thoroughly debunked back 20 years ago. Him bringing this up now is inexcusable.

      source

      • aidan@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        He also repeats all of the bible thumper talking points around this subject, as if it’s a mystery nobody can explain and couldn’t have come to be without some kind of intelligent design at the helm.

        He literally does not say that though, he says there’s a lot of research into it and encourages people to read it.

        This whole flagella thing was an exercise of goal post moving in the first place. The ID people kept pointing out weird things and missing links. Then when science explained exactly how that thing came to be, without ID involved, they just pointed to the next thing at one point ending up at flagella.

        Yeah I agree, but I also think that you can’t exactly blame someone else who was uninvolved with the initial argument for arguing a different thing at a different time. If one person criticizes a politician for not providing enough social services and another separate person complains about taxes that’s not moving goal posts, those are just two different people.

        There is a whole Wikipedia page talking about how flagella evolved and how it came to be.

        Yes, but, did you read it? Its not exactly too resoundingly confident in any one theory.

        And keep in mind all of this was thoroughly debunked back 20 years ago.

        All of what? It is true that the flagella isn’t unique if that’s what you mean.

        I’m not even sure there is research still being done on this, the research was done decades before, there is no mystery.

        onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mmi.14658

        Here’s a relatively recent study that says basically what the wikipedia says:

        Homing in on the T3SS, the exact evolutionary relation between injectisomes and flagella1 is debated. Phylogenetic analyses and functional arguments led to two models: (a) The evolution of modern flagella and injectisomes from a common ancestral protein export machinery (Gophna et al., 2003; Pallen and Gophna, 2007), or (b) The evolution of injectisomes from a flagellum-like ancestor (Abby and Rocha, 2012; Denise et al., 2020; Nguyen et al., 2000).

        But it also says:

        The T3SS is one of the most complex bacterial molecular machines, incorporating one to over a hundred copies of more than 15 different proteins into a multi-MDa transmembrane complex (Table 1). The system, especially the flagellum, has, therefore often been quoted as an example for “irreducible complexity,” based on the argument that the evolution of such a complex system with no beneficial intermediates would be exceedingly unlikely. However, it is now clear that, far from having evolved as independent entities, many secretion systems share components between each other and with other cellular machineries (Egelman, 2010; Pallen and Gophna, 2007).

        I ofc am just a layman reading this, I agree it seems better understood that how I interpreted what he was saying, but it also doesn’t seem nearly as well understood as you’re saying.

        source

        • -> View More Comments
  • HiddenLychee@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I’m curious to see the creationist stuff but I’ll be honest, I don’t want to listen to him for a half hour. Is there a time stamp I can skip to?

    source
• Venator@lemmy.nz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  how is is not morally good from their perspective?

  It is, but thier perspective is immoral.

  source

  • aidan@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yeah that’s a fair perspective I have. I just don’t like when people aren’t honest about their problem with it because they want to act like they’re okay with religion.

    source

    • Venator@lemmy.nz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I think religion is ok, as long as it isn’t evangelical or spreading anti-intellectualism.

      source

      • aidan@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Well aren’t many religions inherently by their beliefs one of those things?

        source
• iii@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Believe can cross into delusion and become harmfull. I believe (hihi) creationism is part of the latter, as it also implies a hierarchy between people and other life.

  Additionally, all evidence points away from intelligent design. For this youtube channel in particular, it’s sad to see examples of belief over evidence.

  source

  • aidan@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Fundamentally isn’t any religious belief in an omnipotent/world creating god creationist? I think the evidence trying to “prove” intelligent design is pretty weak, but the thing about essentially all religious belief is that its not exactly falsifiable. The argument can basically be as simple as “yes that evolved but god created everything in the world so it would evolve that way” or “no it didn’t evolve, god created the world 5000 years ago, he just also made stuff that to any observer would appear older. he did that to intentionally obfuscate the truth so you must have faith”

    source

    • iii@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Fundamentally isn’t any religious belief in an omnipotent/world creating god creationist?

      Oh yeah. This isn’t a problem unique to Christianity.

      but the thing about essentially all religious belief is that its not exactly falsifiable

      I think the function of a belief system is to lessen fear in scary, doubtfull, uncertain, painfull situations. That’s when an unfalsifiable happy ending brings comfort.

      It’s just that many of them were invented quite a while ago, and some things that used to be unknown and scary then, are now better understood or obsolete. No point in engaging in makebelief for those.

      source

      • aidan@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yeah, but it seems like for a lot of people they either have to believe all of it or none of it

        source

        • -> View More Comments