Believers (Christians, Jews, Muslims) think their lives are a gift of God, and that it's not just up to them to decide that their life isn't worth living any more. Sure, there are believers who fear death when you come right down to facing the real thing; but the flip idea that this study "proves" that believers are all really hypocrites doesn't actually explain why they would fight against death harder than unbelievers. If you really do think that the explanation is that believers are afraid to die and face judgement, then you just haven't met many. I don't think many of the comments are intended to be taken as more than on opportunity for abuse.

CMUCL
Yes, really.
Stop looking at me like that.

I don't thinks it's quite so simple. What would count as "falsification" in this case?
How could any experiment with the fruit fly farm demonstrate "survival of the fittest", without circularity?

At the end of your experiment, you presumably have a population of fruit flies differing in some systematic way from the start population.
How do you assess whether this is a population of "fitter" individuals without simply appealing to the fact that they have obviously survived, so they *must* be fitter?
You need an independent criterion of "fitness" which you decide on before you start the experiment.

You can demonstrate "survival of the fittest" with breeding antibiotic resistance into bacteria for example [even then, a creationist could say that you haven't produced a new species.]

I agree that creationists seem very prone to miss the whole point of the scientific project, but their objections cannot be adequately met by ridicule. It just isn't the case that creationists are *all* either stupid or lying or both.

There actually *is* an issue with falsifiability and Evolution. Popper himself was not at all happy at his criterion for science vs non-science being hijacked by creationists in attempt to claim that the theory of Evolution was invalid; however he describes the theory of Evolution as a "metaphysical research programme", i.e. a (highly fruitful) source of scientific hypotheses, rather than in itself a scientific hypothesis; he certainly did not regard it as unscientific.

It's worth saying too that Popper's philosophical approach is far from being unquestioned in this area; many working scientists have noticed (for example) that the actual process of scientific research doesn't really go on as he suggests; his famous example of the bending of light predicted by relativity vs classical physics is actually quite exceptional. It's *not* typical for a productive theory to make a specific, falsifiable prediction which can be invalidated so conclusively that the theory must be obviously be abandoned.

Even in the Einstein/Newton case, it's an important fact that Newtonian physics is within its domain incredibly accurate and successful (Moon Landing!), so that any better theory needs to also explain the success of Newtonian physics (as it does, by reducing to it under most everyday circumstances)

You're far from being alone.

Many people (about 10%) lack *stereopsis*, the ability to fuse to slightly different images from the two eyes so that the brain perceives depth.

But stereopsis is really just the icing on the cake of depth perception, and just as you say, people use all kinds of other visual cues to perceive depth, with the brain doing the processing subconsciously to a great extent.

Lack of stereopsis is so little a handicap that most people lacking it are unaware of the fact; orthoptists (the paramedical professionals who measure squints and treat amblyopia) have special tests to pick it up.

My favourite is the Wirt Fly:
http://www.sussexvision.co.uk/wirtfly.htm

I've known perfectly capable eye surgeons who lacked stereopsis.

Everyone without a personal axe to grind is agreed that standards have declined - hell, university textbooks have had to be rewritten to match the lower standard of modern beginning students.

But the truly sinister aspect of this is not so much the decline in standards as the Government's bare-faced blank denials that there is a problem at all.

It's difficult to treat a patient who won't even admit that he's ill.

I want a refund on my copy of "A New Kind of Science" before thinking about paying more money to the Wolfram organisation.
Much handwaving, little meat, astonishing arrogance.

One of the most overhyped books I've ever actually been suckered into buying.

I found particularly offputting W's treatment of important parts of his own thesis (computational completeness of some automata) as commercial secrets