That does not apply to individuals, like, ever. Individuals do not evolve. They live, do what they do, then die. If a clade (or grouping of your choice) does not have a means of reproduction, assuming they are not immortal, they are a dead end. In the examples you gave, the non- or post-reproductive society members remain a key part of the survival of the clade. I doubt that we will get to “alive” virtual creatures in my lifetime, but it is not beyond possibility. As I said, there is no line. There is no universally applicable standard. And trying to draw a line if futile. I choose to put viruses on the “life” side of the line, but I have no seriously defensible reason for that. It “intuitively makes sense” to me. Maybe because I have personified them by spending most of my life fighting them? Not sure, but I have no beef with folks who draw a different line, because they are all arbitrary.
Which she does not do. 
I am unsure where people got the notion that saying “other ways of understanding the world can bring valuable understandings, insights, and truths” got to be “science bad.”
But we have this problem with the attitude towards the humanities, with (some) people in scientific fields spending years AGREEING that we should spend less on history, literature, and the arts at colleges and university (as they are fuzzy fields of knowledge production that aren’t “scientific” and hence not worth spending time and effort on), and then having the fucking gall to act surprised when actual pseudoscience advocates demand we gut all those scientific institutions that have very much improved the world. But if you have a good grasp of history, for one, you know how messy the actual history of science is and the very real awful roads gone down (thinking of things like experiment on enslaved women to work out the basics of gynecology or how testing atom bombs wrecked the ecology of entire islands, etc), we can understand some scientists are complicity in many crimes and atrocities through out modern history and that there are many dead ends in science, as much as victories that benefit us all. We have a real problem with understanding how science actually works, in part because we have a real problem understanding how history actually unfolds (which is, not an inevitable march towards progress, but a stop/start process full of developments that saved lives, and those that took them).
And to go back to the original post objecting to this video…
After first rejecting them. And also, I think I object to them being called pseudoscience. Her examples are based on older, pre-science fields of knowledge. Pseudoscience are from the modern era of science, which use a scientific language to support non-scientific claims. Indigenous agriculture wasn’t trying to be what science is, instead it was a set of practices that were worked out over hundreds, possibly thousands of years. The goal was not to prove a scientific thesis, it was to produce the necessary items for daily life for people. I think calling it “pseudoscience” when it existed prior to our modern scientific method is pretty inaccurate. After all, many of these practices were rejected out of hand by modern science and industry for a very long time, until people who grew up with these forms of knowledge joined the ranks of science fields and brought that knowledge with them in order for them to be tested in a scientifically rigorous manner.
Right, but so does the egg yolk or beaver dam, which to me are still fundamentally different from non-reproductive individuals. If you want another example though I can offer plasmids or even individual genes. It absolutely makes sense to talk about them evolving, but I don’t think it makes sense to treat them as living entities rather than pieces of living things. If you do you’ll end up with a definition very much at odds with how the word is used. English usually applies “alive” to individuals not clades.
It’s the only endeavor that is self-correcting – but it may take years to millennia to do so.
Some things are so ludicrous to be correctly ignored by science – homeopathy for one. Why waste time on it? The argument that it is false is out there. Convincing idiots is a different thing, and alas that takes a lot of time and effort.
Honestly, examples like this mostly show that individuals are very capable of misapplying or misusing science. Lots of people either forget or purposefully ignore the fact that the real world is messy and full of continuums, and when a theory comes into contention with exceptions or outright failures, it is in no way scientific to just ignore them and act like they don’t exist. Finding and attempting to understand things that a theory is wrong about is one of the best ways science advances.
(For clarity, I’m mostly using the layman’s definition of “theory” there. A lot of those kinds of ideas don’t really rise to the level of a scientific theory, but the general point applies even for the stronger ones)
Docosc, I love you, but I gotta correct you: chocolate is the single most powerful development in human history.
Or maybe bicycles?
Carry on!
Bacteriophages utilize energy-storage compounds to inject their genetic material into host bacteria, so technically metabolism is occurring inside the phage. But it’s not consuming and synthesizing those compounds; they are pre-loaded into the phage when it’s being built by the host cell.
I stand corrected. But would put caffeine up there as well.
Conveniently, chocolate provides some of that as well!
Sure, and I would certainly agree that’s more pseudoscience (or maybe scientism) than actual science… but it’s hard to argue that the doctor who used the bodies of enslaved women for actual scientific advancement was doing that. We gained a lot from the violence committed against those women. If science is a rigorous methodology for proving or disproving claims, we have to understand that there are certainly cases where that was used in very violent and anti-human way.
And again, I’m not arguing against science, as i keep being misunderstood here. I think there is a kneejerk reaction that some have when you criticize the science establishment that we should maybe set aside and instead maybe listen to some of the very real and necessary criticisms of how people have carried out scientific experimentation in the past. It’s not a story of just straight progress, and that shouldn’t be seen as undermining the very real gains we got from science. But there is a reluctance, I think to abandon the idea of teleology and inevitable progress that that worldview confers, because it just easier to grok.
So it seems like part of the problem here is that what science means is kind of nebulous. For instance, is history a science? I’m guessing most people would say no, and Mindy even mentions it being contrasted with science. And yet many of the things that make science a useful way of knowing apply to it too – questioning what has been said, seeing what kind of evidence there is to support or deny it, and generally always trying to improve our understanding of the events in question.
It’s true that history isn’t amenable to the same kind of experimentation as say physics, meaning some things are stuck beyond its reach, but then neither are observational sciences like paleontology or astronomy. I think it’s fair to say that the best approach for understanding a subject depends on what it is. For some we call the results science, for others we don’t…but then once upon a time most sciences were called “natural history”.
For the record, if I could live at any point in human history, the development that would affect my choice more than any other is antibiotics.
Sorry; rubber boots and mosquito netting.
Yeah, although Marx was certainly keen to make history a science (ie, materialism, focusing on the economics and reality of class struggle, etc)… I don’t think he was correct about our ability to do that, since so much is left up to interpretive lens, there is so much missing in any given attempt to understand an event in the past, given what we’re depending on to do our work… even the best materialist is not going to be able to paint a coherent and entirely accurate picture of what happened back when, because your entirely dependent on who wrote what down, why they wrote it down, and what their angle is…
Yeah, I like that…
Indeed!
New South Wales’ first case of bat lyssavirus.
I’d say that history isn’t an experimental science, but it can be scientific. It does use evidence from the real world to confirm or refute hypotheses about the world. It is capable of rejecting false ideas like the medieval time skip, genocide denial, or the Jesus in America myth, by the use of evidence that contradicts these ideas. And the discovery of new evidence and/or sources does change our understanding of history.
Well, it can be, sort of
Pressure measurements? mmHg or inches of water? Did some Brit come along and change water to water closet for some reason? That is flipping bizarre!
Uhhh, maybe whomever wrote that saw W.C and guessed it meant water closet? As far as i know Water Column is a measurement used for pressure.
Yes, but that evidence is always incomplete, and is often heavily interpreted. the sources themselves always contain bias that must be accounted for, and the sources you use can change our understanding, sometimes dramatically. It’s always ends up being more an a narrative art that people debate and argue around rather than a definitive conclusion about the past. There is no getting around that. Yes, you can reject many false ideas completely, but there is always uncertainty there in what we do know.
I think experimental archaeology is very cool and it can be very insightful, but you’ll never be able to fully understand the use of an object in it’s own time, as much as you might try, at least no fully. We are in a different context, even if we work to get to as close to the original context as possible. It’s still looking at something through a lens of time that will distort things for us.