It’s okay. He does good science, so we can ignore his misogyny. /s
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Yeah, not really, but we’ve interacted enough on this forum that I’m pretty confident you were being sarcastic. He’s a creep. I don’t care if he does science videos too, or if he cites “sources” for his misogyny. Just because someone is wrong about one thing doesn’t mean they aren’t right about other things, sure, but sometimes the thing they’re wrong about is indicative of the sort of deep character flaws that nullify whatever positive influence the person might have.
In this case specifically, the fact that this guy does science videos as well as hates women, justifies the hatred of women to a whole huge swath of people. Including, it would appear, some people here.
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The human eye only looks like a bad design when you ignore a lot of the use case. It’s astoundingly resilient! You could have your eye reduced to an empty sack hanging on your cheek and (if you are lucky) end up seeing fine out of it less than a year later. If you’re very lucky, and don’t get any opportunistic infections, your eye can recover from a major puncture event without any treatment at all.
Human eyes don’t just have to transmit video signal, they have to be self-repairing, functional in widely varying conditions of light, pressure and medium (your eyes still work in salt water and in smoky rooms), heritable, resistant to airborne mold and bacteria, it’s a long list of requirements, but optimal vision is defintely not the primary requirement.
It was more a question then sarcasm, actually.
I see it as giving someone who attacks women a larger voice and credibility. YMMV.
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I would agree with that. People come for the science videos, and end up staying through the paranoid, breathless rants about how having a vagina makes a person reliably inferior to anyone with a penis. If anything, the fact that the guy makes “good science videos” in addition to his inane rants about hating women and “social justice warriors” actually makes him worse. He’s a Trojan horse of misogyny. Science videos on YouTube have a really broad audience, but one of the core demographics is school-aged children, including tween/teen boys who are especially susceptible to this kind of brain-vomit.
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On top of that, because he is a scientist, he gets a larger measure of credibility on his BS misogyny. He has more gravitas because of that fact.
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Yep. Just plain terrible.
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I’ve got myself a shiny new idiom to gross people out with!
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It’s perhaps ironic that the scientific method enshrines skepticism, conditional belief, and first-person data collection, yet much of the populace treats scientists as a priesthood dispensing dogma, and many scientists believe themselves entitled to this very treatment.
(apologies for the poor construction of the preceding sentence.)
I understood your meaning, which is the primary purpose of the written word, so you’re fine.
But yeah. I think science is important and should obviously be respected. it shouldn’t be fetishized and scientists be elevated to inerrant geniuses whose views should be held up as superior in every form of knowledge production.
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Except that the actual design of the mechanics of the eye - the bit being lauded by creationists - are totally insane: photoreceptors are behind blood vessels, degrading visual acuity, which then have to go through a hole in the photoreceptors, creating a blindspot (plus, only a small portion of the eye can really see at all, all of which means, in order for the process of vision to work, human brains have to be completely delusional about what they think they can see). Since these flaws don’t exist in other types of eyes, human vision is actually pretty terrible for absolutely no reason at all - if this was a de novo design, which is what creationists think it is. But it isn’t, it’s the result of a long evolutionary process, and as such it is pretty amazing.
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Well, yes, I see your point entire. The creationists (and Darwin, incidentally) are talking about it as though clear vision was a primary design goal, and that makes no sense.
I have a friend who suffered a stroke long ago, and lost some important neurons. He has a “hole” in his vision on one side that is pretty large.
He says that if he moves his head enough, the neural processes of his brain, evolved to deal with the blind spot, will actually fill in the missing area. He can see fine, because of the computational mechanisms necessitated by the human blind spot.
However, he says if he is still for too long, his brain synthesizes visual fantasies (some quite disturbing, apparently) and fills in the hole with that. So he might see alien creatures reaching for him from a fissure in spacetime, or worse. Which makes him want to move his head.
I believe that kind of wacky-but-useful stuff more strongly supports the idea of natural selection of semirandom variation than it does creationism or intelligent design.
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