And according to that link,

Looking at the referenced book itself, "Science Vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think" by Elaine Ecklund, on page 35 (viewable on Google Books), it says:

This study was explicitly limited to scientists from the following "top" universities, according to the University of Florida's annual report of the "Top American Research Universities":

• Columbia University
• Cornell University
• Duke University
• Harvard University
• Johns Hopkins University
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Princeton University
• Stanford University
• University of Pennsylvania
• University of California at Berkeley
• University of California, Los Angeles
• University of Chicago
• University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
• University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
• University of Washington, Seattle
• University of Wisconsin, Madison
• University of Southern California
• Washington University
• Yale University

In other words: according to the source you cite, no, most (64%) of the top scientists do not believe in God.

It's not about "matter" evolving into "complex organisms," it is about "simple organisms" evolving into "complex organisms." Evolution isn't concerned with how life arose, only how it changed after arising.

BTW,

No.

Why would both parents need to acquire a trait at the same time? Either parent could pass on the trait, and beneficial traits would tend to spread throughout the population. More complex traits don't need to arise all at once, so a beneficial trait could arise in a small segment of the population and then gradually spread as those possessing the trait out-competed those without it. This is really basic evolutionary theory.

I have no idea what this means. "Organize" in what sense? Ironically, the word "organize" comes from "organs," which were evolved by... nature! The primary defining characteristic of all life is organizing. The most basic function of a cell is separating the interior from the exterior; when a cell ceases to segregate internal from external, it is no longer alive. Life is, literally, the organization of simpler compounds into organs, cells, and populations.

What is a "VERY valid question?" What question are you raising?

That's why we are still researching it. We know the general mechanism (inherited genetic differences), but there are a ton of specifics left to figure out. The impressive thing about it is that a random number generator and a fitness function will give rise to amazingly complex results (either natural organisms or simulations). None of this requires any kind of mysterious, magical "intelligent designer" guiding the process. I may be overly cynical, but suggesting that evolution does have some "guiding hand" is a way to weasel ID nonsense into the conversation.

Let me start by saying that I mostly agree with your points, and am intending to further discussion rather than bash you. It's always hard to tell on the Internet.

Why? This is something I hear a lot in the gay marriage debate but have never really understood. Obviously, you can't speak for all people who hold this view, but I'd like to try to understand this sentiment better.

For the purpose of comparison, my position on this is that I care about the meaning of the word "marriage" only insofar as it is an English word which allows for unambiguous communication. I care as much about the meaning of the word "marriage" as I do about the word "house" or "fire." In other words, it would be a shame if the word "marriage" had to be substituted for a much longer explanation in order to accurately convey a particular meaning. As a specific cultural institution, I don't really care about preserving it.

So my question is, "what do you mean by 'retaining the meaning of the word marriage' and why is that important?" I genuinely don't understand this sentiment and would like to try to understand it better.

We seem to be in perfect agreement about this. I might go further and remove the words "two" and "cohabitating," but I'm still thinking about that one.

This is an issue which I doubt will ever really be "fully" resolved, since it is so subjective. Does human life begin at conception? Does it begin at the act unprotected sex? When the sperm and egg plasma membranes fuse? When the haploid egg and sperm cells fuse to create a diploid zygote? When the heart starts beating, or when a certain amount of brain function is achieved? Is it at birth, or when the baby begins to respirate, or when it can see? Are sperm and egg cells alive? (well, yes) When are they considered human? Is it wrong to allow an egg to go unfertilized?

There is no real answer to these questions, since they all depend on such subjective opinions of what constitutes a human or "potential human." Since it will always be arbitrary, we choose an arbitrary point at which to make the cutoff, birth being an unambiguous one. The problem I have with moving the cutoff earlier (and especially within the first trimester) is that it then include morning-after pills and intrauterine devices, since they act after fertilization, but prevent implantation (well, for morning-after pills, it seems like the research isn't completely settled on that point). Are we allowed to induce medical abortions through drugs like Mifepristone? It's a sticky subject.

I think you have to be careful with slippery-slope arguments, since they can often be used to argue for or against any position. Obviously, any legislation about whether someone is "legally a human" should be extremely specific and inflexible, so that problems such as "defining Gitmo to be a womb" are as hard as possible.

I'm against killing unborn children to harvest their stem cells as well, but I don't see a problem with harvesting the stem cells of an already-aborted fetus. The tricky part is that one could argue that allowing the use of fetal stem cells would incite abortions if it was financially beneficial to the woman considering the abortion. I sympathize with this view, but I feel like it is, by itself, unlikely to have any meaningful effect on abortion rates. In other words, I am opposed to fetal stem cell research only insofar as it encourages unnecessary abortions, or those which would not otherwise have happened.

Simply, fetal stem cell research is fine, inciting abortions to increase the supply of fetal stem cells is not.

Or a car!

Do you see the problem with these two paragraphs? The first one is arguing against government intervention in the economy, while the second is complaining about complaining about insufficient (positive) government intervention in the economy.

Now, it would be perfectly reasonable to say, "the federal government has shown itself to be ineffective at managing the economy, as evidenced by its recent mismanagement of the banking and auto industries, so I don't want them having as big of a hand in the economy." That means that they don't have as much of an ability to make positive changes to the economy, since they have less control. Obviously, things like setting interest rates and taxes are very different from purchasing ownership of a company, but I read your comment (perhaps incorrectly) as being against expanding federal government influence in the economy in general, not just specifically those cases where it achieves this through direct acquisitions.

It is inconsistent to say "I don't want the government involved in the economy, but I want them to fix it!"

Here, we are in agreement.

Ah, you're looking for Bruce Schneier's essay on the dangers of worst-case thinking. Are smart meters actually going to be able to shut off power remotely? Are power systems actually going to be that vulnerable to a wide-scale attack? Maybe, maybe not, but imagining a worst-case scenario and then creating policy based on it is still just creating policy based on something imaginary. Would you give the president the power to order all adults under 5 feet to a volcano just because I can imagine Sauron's armies attacking the Pentagon?

So in this fantasy future, all blankets, coats, and things-which-can-be-burnt-to-generate-heat have been lost to the mists of time? I'm sorry, but I don't buy that this scenario is actually realistic.

And that's not even taking into account the fact that this will be abused should it pass.

There was a really interesting talk I saw a few years back about Failure-Oblivious Computing (original paper (PDF), Google PDF viewer) which would deal with certain kinds of memory errors, like reading or writing past the end of a buffer, by ignoring them and moving on. For reads, if the program tried to read from a bad address, the system would figure out something random to return, and if you tried to write out of bounds, rather than throwing and exception (or segfaulting), it would just ignore the extra writes. This sounds horrifying and seems like it could not possibly work, but it turned out that for (certain kinds of) mostly-correct programs, they could literally ignore errors and things would mostly work.

I can't find a link for it now, but towards the end of the talk, they stress-tested the failure-oblivious compiler by manually introducing off-by-one errors into the source code and seeing what happened. They tried this with a video codec, and found that certain loop bounds were essential for things like determining branch targets, but that a significant number could be fudged and you would still end up with a recognizable video. Obviously, it was degraded from full working order, but you could still make out what was happening in the picture.

The point being that there are certain kinds of faults which a program can tolerate (slightly inaccurate pixel colors, minor graphical garbling of text or images), and there are faults which it cannot (like figuring out a branch target).

I doubt the whole world will move to highly fault-tolerant or failure-oblivious computing any time soon, but it could be an interesting niche for a coprocessor, and/or in certain domains.

Well, you're right, but "I can show you two power plants" is not a good argument. It's fairly easy to take a look at the DOE list of US electricity sources to see that we get (as of 2009) 48.2% of our energy from coal, 1.1% from petroleum liquids and "petroleum coke" (whatever that is). Another 21.4% comes from natural gas, which I guess could be considered oil, but usually is in a separate category.

It would definitely be accurate to say that most of our energy comes from fossil fuels or non-renewable resources, but we actually only get a small amount of our electricity from oil.

Spot on.

I would like to add that the other thing that people tend to forget is that subsidies don't just magically appear out of thin air, that money comes from somewhere. If the government spends $1 trillion per year (which is about how much the oil subsidy is) less on oil and gas, that's $1 trillion which can be spent on other things (or deducted from taxes, though I can't imagine the government just giving that money back).

Yeah, I know this whole thing is wildly off-topic, but I'm bored, so whatever ;)

I'll agree with dishonest and selfish, but it takes some brainpower to keep a job like that when you're not actually doing your job. I'm no bigger fan of the current congress than you seem to be, but if you had a job where you could gather crowds of (literally) thousands of cheering people, be paid well (both legit and through bribes), and wield that much power, wouldn't you want to keep it? We have a system which rewards dishonesty and selfishness, and lo and behold, a bunch of dishonest, selfish people end up at the top.

There's nothing so special about the particular people we have in congress now; if we threw them all out, (barring any structural reform) we would just end up with 535 interchangeable scumbags. If you create a job which attracts scumbags, don't be surprised when the only people in the job are scumbags. Just look at Wall Street.

No, they invented drugs for flies. If you really want to smell light, head down to your local acid dealer.

Well, that's one way to combat the obesity pandemic...

Well, I for one would rather pay more for gas, but the same amount for everything else. How would I do this? By eliminating all of the massive subsidies for gas. According to this 1998 report, if you combine the annual tax breaks ($9.1 to $17.8 billion), program subsidies excluding spending on roads ($1.9 to $2.6 billion), and protection of oil-rich nations and the national reserve ($60 to $102 billion), we (as in taxpayers) are subsidizing the oil industry to the tune of $71 to $122.4 billion per year (and this was in 1998). This is not including the amount spent annually on roads ($36 to $112 billion); negative environmental, health, and social externalities ($231 to $942 billion); and other costs, such as travel delays due to road congestion, subsidized parking, and damages due to accidents (totaling $191 to $474 billion). Overall, including the less direct subsidies (environmental, insurance costs, etc), the total local, state and federal subsidies to the oil industry is $558.7 billion to $1.69 trillion per year in 1998 dollars, which is $746 billion $2.26 trillion in 2010 dollars.

According to the report, were these external costs of gasoline internalized into the cost per gallon at the pump, the price would be $5.60 to $15.14 per gallon (in 1998 dollars). Given that the cost of gas in 1998 stayed pretty much exactly at $1 per gallon ($1.34 in 2010 dollars), that's a 5- to 15-fold increase in prices. Although it is not directly comparable, a 5- to 15-fold increase in prices today (from a current price of $2.786 per gallon, according to the DOE) would result in $13.93 to $41.79 per gallon.

The thing about subsidies is, we are already paying this much per gallon, just in the form of taxes rather than at the pump. If we were to eliminate subsidies to gas and lower taxes by the amount saved (which would be difficult in practice), an average consumer would spend the same amount of money for the same set of products, just with more money spent on gas and less on taxes. This would also remove the market distortions that a lower apparent gas price causes.

So we are paying about an order of magnitude too little for gasoline, and part of that cost is in failing to correctly account for the risk of something like the gulf spill happening. Where is the money to mitigate this disaster going to come from? I would bet money that the full cost of cleaning up the spill is not going to get factored into the pump price of gasoline, meaning that the money to clean it up is coming out of our tax dollars, further hiding the real cost of oil.

Goldman's doing just fine with whatever balance of historians they have. You assume that just because the market bubble was bad for essentially everyone else in the world, that it was bad for Goldman. They're having some of their most profitable quarters ever in the past few years. A bubble is only bad for you if

1. You don't see the bubble coming or work to create it.
2. You have no regard for your fellow man.

Goldman Sachs clearly passes both of those tests, so they essentially only stood to benefit from the collapse. They could just short the world and make a fortune off of the suffering of others. Since they clearly don't care about that (as is required to work in finance these days), it would be pretty hard to sell them on changing their clearly winning (for them) strategy.

Damn kids and your blatant disregards for standards. Embrace, extend, extinguish, roll over, and you expect a treat EVERY TIME!