And you make me sick. You still haven't answered my question by the way.

I understand it just fine. Incidentally, to answer my question you had to address every point I listed, you didn't. You instead gish galloped on a different topic, you did this because you hoped to provoke me into looking at that, we can address those points when you completely rule out all the possibilities I listed. I know all the reasons why these arguments don't work, but you cant use any of those reasons because your standard of falsifiability doesn't permit it. But you wont admit to losing this debate because you aren't trying to win this debate, this is likely about serving your paymasters. Any reasonable person reading this will realise you aren't interested in an actual discussion because you don't engage with the other persons points. You don't write refutations, when you get caught with your hand in the cookie jar you just jump on a list of canards.

Incidentally asserting I don't know the difference and linking to a wikipedia page is not a refutation.

Reality does not depend on time travel not being possible, there are several possible theories of time travel, but you cannot just provide argument for why time travel is ruled out by the contemporary rules of physics. You have to explain why. I'm not going to explain why you are wrong about Wall's paper until you refute all the other points I made though. Necessary and sufficient remember. And I'm not makeing a Baseian argument, it is a Kuhnian argument, you have read Thomas Kuhn right? And you are right that this argument is just as bad as intelligent design, you position on global climate change is just like intelligent design and I'm glad you can admit it.

Karma is slashdots reputation system, it is why you are positing in this thread, your likely sock account needs to be seen defending science and shilling in this thread you can do both by arguing against pseudoscience and peddling it. It is fortunate evolution isn't a threat to your likely paymasters. If you aren't a shill just stop positing, no one who isn't getting paid or doesn't think the planet is at stake would keep this up, and you claim the latter isn't the case. Of course you cant do that, can you. Your likely paymasters wont cut you the cheque otherwise.

I'm sorry I'm not responding to that gish gallop. You have admitted your standard of falsifiability is inadequate. You should concede defeat.

I wont stop posting this response to you though, because your paymasters likely have written in your contract that you have to have the last word on every discussion. So you and I will burn karma together yet again. How do you sleep at night?

The web of assumptions that evolution depends on includes time travel not being possible. And the second law. And a whole bunch of other things. You are right, you standard of falsifiability is absurd, which is why no philosopher or scientist uses it. The use a more refined version of falsifiability which admits that any test is contingent on multiple other assumptions, and that a test of any one is inherently a test of the other. There is no such thing as a test both necessary and sufficient in the sense you use it. All we can do is exclude every reasonable objection. As this has already been done and since you now admit that your standard of falsifiability is 'misguided' I take it you are prepared to accept the consensus on global climate change?

For the interested reader, hsthompson69 is likely deliberately karma whoring on this article to facilitate future astroturfing. His response suggests he is currently trying to make it look like I don't think evolution is a legitimate scientific theory by failing to acknowledge that my responses are applying his absurd standard for falsification to it, not any conventional standard of falsification.

That paper doesn't do what you need it to. You need show that time travel is impossible, you need to exclude the null. All Prof. Shengwang Du and colleagues did was confirm that suoerluminal propagation of light did not transfer information faster than the speed of light, something every physicists already warned was likely the case (myself included). You have to provide necessary and sufficient conditions to exclude the null. You also failed to refute all my other points. You still have not answered the question. As a reminder my question was:

"How would you know it was a legitimate fossil?"

To answer this question and meet your standard of falsifiability your next post must include:

1) A peer reviewed study showing time travel is completely impossible
2) Proof aliens do not exist or at least could not have seeded rabbits
3) Evidence that the type of convergent evolution I suggested is impossible
4) A definition of 'legitimate' to which no logically coherent objection can be mounted
5) Proof that the lineage of the modern rabbit is perfectly understood completely ruling out any and all other possible lineages.

And DON'T just do one, you have to do all of them. Necessary and sufficient remember. And when you have done that you need to deal with the next set of objections I pull out on the fly and gish gallop you with ignoring your refutations because no amount of refuted objections builds confidence in a theory, only being falsifiable by your insane standard.

Now, answer the fucking question.

I'm not trying to convince you arsehole, you are a shill, and your style of argumentation makes it clear you know your arguments are weak, making me suspect you are actually paid to do this. This suspicion is heightened by the fact you always reply to posts. I'm treating you like crap so others see me doing it and ask themselves why I have no respoect for you.

That is not a refutation. I'll be sure to let me thesis defence committee know they made a mistake when it comes to my understanding of fundamental physics and my alma mater will be fascinated to know I don't understand thermodynamics. Now do you have an actual refutation and answer to the question which isn't simply a hand waving suggestion of my ignorance. And before you respond suggesting that you can ignore my credentials remember that as you haven't made an argument for why time travel or aliens is not a plausible explanations not ruled out by the laws of physics (along with the other more plausible examples you have chosen to ignroe for shitty rhetorical reasons any moron can see through), so the suggestion I'm uninformed can just as easily be applied to your assertions. You have to provide evidence, and no, links to blogs wont cut it, I want peer reviewed research.

Answer the fucking question.

Ah and so the gish gallop continues. Is the reason you always respond on this issue because if you don't you don't get paid? Answer my fucking question arsehole.

"Good question. We treat it's legitimacy as hypothetical in this case, so we don't have to go down that rat hole and have you imagine all the ways the moon landing was faked"

No, we wont, answer the fucking question. I wont answer any of yours until you do so.

For the interested reader the arrow of time associated with the second law is a statistical result, some physicists argue that it can be used to rule out time travel, but it requires very specific interpretations of quantum mechanics to do so. Those interpretations do no necessarily rule out time travel. Watch now as hsthompson69 refuses to answer the question i set him and instead responds to this clarification. He is doing this because he is likely a shill.

That is a correct name (The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), although it is something of an anachronism as Great Britian is a geographical term for the island that makes up most of the land mass of England, Wales and Scotland. As such the name leaves out lots of islands that are part of the UK, but not part of Great Britian. It's territory in Europe, it's complicated.

So long as you use the UK when you want to refer to all the parts of the UK together and England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland when you want to refer to the specific bits in isolation then most people will be happy. Well, most of the time. Maybe. We English were sort of dicks to a lot of our friends here in the Isles and so some will insist you call them British, and some will insist you call them Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English. It's complicated.

"Yes. Assuming it's a legitimate fossil, we're left with divine intervention (aliens), or time travel (the end of causality as we know it). Now, it just so happens that the falsification of evolution pretty much falsifies reality as we know it, which lets you know just how strong of a theory we're dealing with"

How would you know it was a legitimate fossil? You are just going to use that word to get out of any fossil I bring you. Give me a comprehensive definition of 'legitimate' both necessary and sufficient to rule out all reasonable null hypotheses. Seriously, go read Quine's work, "“Epistemology Naturalized” is a good placce to start, and you should probably read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" as your approach to science is hopelessly outdated.

"But while we're on hypotheticals, are you willing to entertain the following notion:

[snip]"

Richard Linzen's hypothesis is legitimate but unlikely, that is the reason he continues to get funding for his work. Why is it unlikely, well for a start he put forward ways to test his hypothesis in a paper. This paper showed evidence for the hypothesis you list. Unfortunately this work was deeply flawed and a follow up study which Prof Linzen acknowledges addresses the flaws in his paper found that the impact of clouds on climate sensitivity did not reflect a large global impact of the mechanism he proposes. The relevant citation from Trenberth is below.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

I strongly believe Linzen should continue to be funded. Even with the studies conducted so far there may be non-linear impacts from cloud cover which could have some regulatory impact on the climate. A clear understanding of the effect cloud cover will make climate models more robust, reduce the amount of disagreement between them. So yes, I give that hypothesis more credence than the explanations for a precambrian rabbit.

But just like you made the perfectly reasonable operating assumption that time travel is impossible (even though there is nothing in the laws of physics to rule it out), you should also make the perfectly reasonable assumption that the impact on the sensitivity of changes in cloud cover can be reasonably inferred from the recent temperature record and that it is not crazily non-linear, especially given the paleoclimate record (why did this non-linear effect of cloud cover not impact previous hot periods in this non-linear way?). Doing that places an upper bound on how much the sensitivity can be impacted by the effect of clouds. Especially when we have results like Dessler's:

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfi...

It isn't comprehensive but it suggests that, at least for current levels of warming clouds may exhasperate global climate change (water vapour is a green house gas).

Much of this is covered in the IPCC 5th Assesment WG1 report, which I provide a link to below.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5...

You want section 7.

I know you wont reflect on your position though, or read any of the citations I've provided, because I've interacted with you in the past and I strongly suspect you are a paid shill for the fossil fuel industry. So this is for anyone else reading this, look at which of the two of us is supporting their position with references to the relevant literature (be it the philsophy literature when it comes to the nature of scientific investigation, or the climate science literature when it comes climate science). hsthompson69 does not cite sources for hypotheses and claims he makes, he is likely doing this deliberately because unless like me you happen to be familiar with the literature it makes it much hard to check what he is saying, makes it hard to look up standard refutations and makes it hard to consult the relevant literature. He wont address any of the points I've brought up but will instead switch to a new set of canards and gish gallop.

"If life on earth was seeded by aliens in the precambrian, then you pretty much have to open the door to life being seeded on earth by aliens throughout the entire history of the planet.

Voila, you've got creationism."

How is this point relevant? Address the point I raised, and stay on point. Stop your gish galloping bullshit.

"As for finding fossils in odd places, evolution clearly doesn't exclude that - and certainly our interpretation of the fossil record is subject to modification at times. That being said, clearly, a modern rabbit in the precambrian is excluded. It's not just "odd", it forces you to resort to time travel explanations"

I wasn't forced to resort to time travel explanations. I gave an example of one explanation I found more plausible than evolution being incorrect. I would abandon the idea that time travel has not occurred before I would abandon evolution, because the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and time travel is not excluded by the known laws of physics. That said the explanation I would find most likely initially is some weird convergent evolution.

"Oh don't be silly. The existence of CO2 doesn't logically lead to global warming the lack of modern, recent era creatures in ancient fossils does logically lead us to conclude that modern variants are in fact the result of selective pressures."

No, no it doesn't. Their lack could be due to some physical distortion of the fossilisation process. Or perhaps due to chemical properties unique to so-called 'modern' adnimals which prevented them from showing up in the fossil record. Or any number of other explanations. You can never do what you are trying to do, outline a test of a theory which does not rest of assumptions about some other aspect of a theory. No scientific theory rests on one observation or fact, or even isolated collection of facts.

And the properties of CO2 implies the greenhouse effect, it is trivial physics to see this. I would be willing to reconsider the consensus on global warming if you could show physicists were wrong about the chemical properties of CO2. In this sense it is clear that the theory of global climate change is more falsifiable than evolution as I am hard pressed to come up with a set of experiments which I would accept as meeting any falsification criterion. The reason for this is simple, evolution is basically the observation that there is life, that it reproduces with variation, and that the laws of thermodynamics hold. To falsify it you really need to find some experiment which shows one of those is false. This is way harder than just showing every physicist ever has been wrong about the properties of CO2.

Let's say we found a single fossil which appeared to be a modern rabbit in the precambrian. Are you now willing to assert that the theory of evolution is falsified? You wont entertain any of the possibilities I put forward or some other explanation in which evolution is correct, but some other theory in science is incorrect?

Incidentally I expect you to answer that last pair of questions. Failure to do so will just result in me posting the same question over and over again in reply to you until you do.

"If we found a modern rabbit fossil in the precambrian tomorrow, and it wasn't obviously faked, then you're looking at a refutation of natural selection and evolution. That observation is completely excluded by the hypothesis."

No it wouldn't. It could indicate that just the rabbit population was seeded by aliens, or that the lineage of the modern rabbit is incorrect, or that some unknown physical process caused rapid fossilisation, or be a really fluky example of convergent evolution, or it could be the result of time travel. I'm more inclined to believe any of those than that the theory of evolution is wrong. And we have found a fair few fossils in odd places. This paper for instance:

http://www.nature.com/nature/j...

Did that finding falsify evolution? It was a fossil we weren't expecting to find where we did. What's your excuse for why that does not falsify evolution? Keep in mind that you must make your falsifiability criterion both necessary and sufficient to your own absurd standard. (Note: I'm a biologist, I'm point out how the parents logic is identical to that used by creationists)

The theory of global warming can (to the same extent that evolution is falsified by pre-cambrian rabbits) be falsified by showing that CO2 does not have the properties it is currently believed to have in regards to interacting with light. But no one observation would falsify either.

Fortunately military hardware floats between bases and battlefields rapidly on magic pixie dust, so a functioning modern armed service does not require things like the interstate highway system. We've known a functioning modern road system was necessary for national defence since the battle of the taxi cabs, so you are only a century out of date on your understanding of logistics.

If we found a modern rabit fossil in the precambrian tomorrow you know damn well it has likely been faked, or represents some other fluke event. I'm not abandoning the theory of evolution based on a single observation. Science does not work that way and you are using the falsifiability criterion to engage in special pleading. Have you not read Quine?

YEC is falsifiable (at least the young earth portion), you can tell it is falsifiable because it is widely held to be false. Many institutions which used to endorse it, no longer do. Do you have a peer reviewed statistical analysis showing that the consensus position on climate change has been falsified? Don't like to a blog. Don't link to a newspaper. Peer reviewed journal article.

If you cant do that don't gish gallop again, give me a peer reviewed paper or I will just keep replying to you like I did last time and we both get to lose a heap of karma again. I'm happy to to stop you spreading your propaganda.