Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/27/news-of-the-times-science-can.html
Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH News of the Times breaks the news: Science Cannot Explain Everything
7 Likes
Science, of course, can explain why when the helicopter goes straight up and straight down it ends up in the same place. What it can’t really yet explain on evolutionary grounds is why so many people’s response to anything new is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout “can’t hear you!”
28 Likes
there is no brick wall - the universe is like a sphere that is only true (only exists) within its own finite boundaries, much how the equation of a sphere only exists within the graph created according to its function, even though we can imagine Cartesian axes out to infinity…
4 Likes
If science has taught me anything its that whales did start out really small but just never learned to poop so they still carry everything they ever ate around with them. You may say “Preposterous, show me how that could be” and I say show me the whale poop. There should be gigantic whale poops like everywhere in the ocean. Whalebergs is what we’d call em, and they’d possibly start film and television careers after varying success in the music biz. Because Science.
22 Likes
Naah, whale poop sinks and that is the REAL reason for sea level rise…
18 Likes
I’m not sure that science exists to explain everything.
3 Likes
If evolution was true, snow would have evolved to not fall on driveways, sidewalks and roads.
15 Likes
Science exists to account for [“save” in Copernicus’s statement] phenomena.
2 Likes
I was going to link to a parable I read once about how whales are just arrogant cucumbers. In it, a cucumber in god’s garden became too big and proud, so god threw it in the ocean, and told it when it could blow out enough of it’s insides that it could shrink back down to the size of a regular cucumber again it could return. So the story goes, it never could, and that’s whales and their blowholes.
but now I can’t find it anywhere and am starting to question my sanity…
9 Likes
I’m getting the vibes that a good portion of commenter will not get Tom’s trademark sarcasm…
1 Like
Of course “Science does not explain everything” ≠ “Your particular version of God is therefore true.”
10 Likes
I know, but it will be fun (in a non-sarcastic sense) to see scientific explainations of some of the examples of “science not explaining everything” given in the comic.
3 Likes
Have you checked in the Berenstein Bears universe?
8 Likes
That was in an early 80s kids book I once read, and I remember being upset that ‘God’ stabbed a finger into the back of its head to make the blowhole before chucking it in the sea.
Seemed a bit rough to 8 year old me. And today.
5 Likes
The entire article is worth reading, but this from the article: The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness.
I’m in no position to question the research, but, although I’m not onboard 100% with the above, to me it does sort of laterally hint at an evolutionary driver: Avoidance of unknowns that could get you killed. I can imagine a group of early hominins getting by – surviving – running on inter-group learned behavior, eventually running up against change. Not being very bright (yet!) yet being evolutionarily predisposed to not deviating from what has allowed them to (so far) survive, they might automatically be wary of veering from what happened to get them as far as they have. Denial kicks in.
3 Likes
No kidding! It is a methodology, not an answer. And when you do get what seems like an answer, it is poor form to accept it instead of asking more questions.
7 Likes
Nah, the hard head gene was never bred out of snow. “I’ll fall where I damn well please”
4 Likes
It doesn’t count unless science can explain it in a way that is easy for evangelical Republicans to understand.
8 Likes
Was that Christian Science where Jesus sat down and quietly explained the slow fermentation of grapes, but it got edited for the book?
Miracles don’t have to happen quickly…
5 Likes
Mandatory:
7 Likes
