I understand your insecurity, it takes a lot of character to admit when you don't understand everything and probably never will. We're all in that position from time to time; I wouldn't second guess my doctor, and I'd avoid second guessing my air conditioning guy, frankly, and he's a heck of a lot less specialized than a climatologist.

Second guessing such people with little more than "I don't get it" is an error you should be expected to be called out on, unless you want to allege that they're all in league or conspiring to defraud us or something.

Evolutionary fitness of the United States is yet to be determined.

I also looked at climate science in the same way and found it to be an utter mess.

Unless you're a climatologist, I don't know if you're qualified to make that claim; I appreciate that you agree with scientific opinion on evolution, but unless you're a microbiologist or an evo-bio, I'm not sure you're qualified to make any claims on that count, either.

You're just using your Dunning-Krugerized acceptance of evolution to justify your Dunning-Krugerized denial of AGW consensus. Your acceptance of evolution may be in accord with scientific consensus (let wether it's an accurate account of nature or not), but it cannot justify the contention that you have examined the theory and exhaustively acknowledge its findings, you're simply not qualified. We have professionals for that, you need only be knowledgeable about what they say, your agreement is irrelevant, Nature proceeds without it.

The idea that the median, "reasonable person" should be able to understand and evaluate complex scientific claims is pseudo-skeptical and querulous. It's great when people do, and it is the motivation for science education, but we do receive these fact on qualified authority, they are not for argument or debate by casual observers, in the way that moral or political questions are.

The original (implicit) claim is that when 97% of scientists agree on something, it must be right.

The explicit claim of the scientific method is that if 97% of scientists agree on something, that's the best we can do. Any dissenting claims may be correct, they're just not substantiated by the available objective evidence.

My reading of those critiques was that because someone could not describe the purpose of this DNA, it was "junk," despite the fact that the DNA was getting transcribed and was having biochemical interaction in the cell. I think the "conservatives," or the ones how think there's a lot of junk, are thinking teleologically about the "purpose" of DNA and are simply excluding these other sequences because the cannot give a complete account of their purpose or whatever advantage they may confer to the phenotype.

As such I think the whole idea of "junk" DNA is teleological because it assigns arbitrary purpose (and confers subjective judgment) to the non-"junk."

Um, where do you get those numbers? At least 76% of the non-coding human genome is transcribed -- to what end we cannot be certain in all cases, but the RNA transcripts from these often are fed back into gene expression and regulation. It's estimated that well over 50% of non-coding DNA is heavily conserved by evolutionary processes and contributes significantly to fitness.

According to that chart the US has had almost 10% inflation for a decade -- it's ridiculous, or at least if it were true, it would call into question the utility of such a measure. If such a measure were accurate, that would mean that real wages have not just been stagnant, but had been declining in excess of 5% a year, and that the median wage-earner's real wealth has been declining precipitously since the 1980s. I guess you can make the numbers look that way, but it's subjectively nuts.

They substitute hamburger for steak because people don't buy enough steak for it to be an adequate model of the consumer basket -- it's a luxury good and it doesn't behave like a proper staple commodity, it's bought when it can be afforded, it's subject to regional and seasonal price changes, and purchasing decisions related to it were not correlated to inflation. From the Boskin commission report:

5. The BLS should study the behavior of the individual components of the index to ascertain which components provide most information on the future longer-term movements in the index and which items have fluctuations which are largely unrelated to the total and emphasize the former in its data collection activities.

This could result in the down-weighting or even elimination of data collection for certain cities and a revision of the commodity structure of the index which would consider some goods as having a national market, sampling a larger number of items but with less regard to geography, focusing on geographical differences only for more "local" commodities, such as fuel costs, rent, personal services, and fresh produce.Currently, the BLS collects a large number of price quotes on bananas, because they are inexpensive to collect and their prices are quite variable, even though these variations are not related systematically to the underlying trend-movements in the CPI. At the same time, less attention is paid to less variable but more likely to change (disappear or be redesigned) and harder to measure commodities, such as surgical treatments, consumer electronics, and communication services.

They changed the CPI calculations in the mid 90's because the CPI's method up to that time was completely unscientific and based on arbitrary, non-evidence based preconceptions about what people shopped for. Meanwhile they eliminated food and energy from the core CPI because they concluded these prices were far too volatile to aid in policy making, and in the end food and energy are just inputs into other processes which are eventually priced by the CPI. They also made the very wise decision of eliminating house prices from the calculation, substituting equivalent rent. The consensus among economists is that the CPI was overestimating inflation throughout the 80s.

I'm not going to say there can't be more room for improvement, but I think you're wrong on this point, and your account of how the CPI works is glib and biased.

Even though its charge is to protect the value of the US Dollar, the USD has lost 98% of its value over the past century (this year marked 100 years of Federal Reserve control of the currency).

That's sort of by design. It is not the Fed's job to erect an inviolable, electrified fence around the real wealth of bondholders. That'd be rentierism, and it isn't in the national interest -- it might be in yours, but the United States doesn't run the currency for your benefit.

The Fed's present mandate is to maintain a stable level of inflation and maximize employment, through the dread 1978 Humphrey-Hawkins Act. Employment has generally prevailed over price stability as a primary concern, and when most Americans are net debtors, inflation is not cumulatively adverse.

I am quite aware of the history and organization of the Federal Reserve System, it does not trouble me. All you have here is warmed-over anti-bank populist tropes that have been presented, in one form or another, for the last two hundred years under any number of banking regimes. The Banks are always screwing over somebody, they're all in league, and the Bad Things that are happening now are in fact part of a premeditated strategy to ruin producerist woobies, such as the Farmer, the Small Businessman, and the Pensioner.

I don't know the specifics in this case, but it's quite likely the elevator's owned by a co-op, of which he and all of his neighbors are members.

Isn't it sortof a tautology to assert that criminals don't follow laws? Really you could use that rationale to invalidate any proposed law..

Sigh. She's married now. The hot grits will just never taste the same.

All the dolphins ever did was muck about in the water having a good time...

Engineers are on the application side of things....they use the existing tools (equations) to build other things. They don't need to know exactly how the tools work as long as they can be trusted to work.

This presumption is probably what has created the Salem Effect, whereby it's been observed that a lot of engineers are creationists.

An understanding of pure science will tend to inform and contextualize such beliefs, while a focus on mere "operative" technology seems to encourage engineering types to either oversimplify or overgeneralize complex ideas, and to pontificate way above their weight class on subjects to which they cannot speak with authority.

This also seems to underly a lot of very, very smart engineers (who should no better) claiming that such-and-such a problem in neurology, evolutionary genetics, or philosophy of the mind is simply a problem of applied $ENGINEERS_DISCIPLINE. (For this, see Ray Kurzweil, an engineer who specializes in pattern recognition, and now sells books about how human consciousness is nothing more than pattern recognition.)

Not the TVTropes Red Shirt*. The other kind.

*by which we mean "Gold Jumpsuit" to those of us who hold to the TNG/DS9 Order of Things

I claim nothing is false, just that we cannot say so-and-so is objectively true given the available information without resorting to magical thinking to bridge the gaps in knowledge.