Salty Discussion Post-mortem

quote:

---

Oh, I forgot. I've been banned at Terry's forum. I am simply crushed!! salty

---

Are you? But it's what you wanted it, isn't it? How many times have you asked to be banned there? It seems to happen pretty regularly.People who don't follow that board probably don't realise that. They should read through your past posts over the last year or so. Every now and then you start insulting others and then ask to be banned or suggest that you should be banned. Terry comes back, regular as clockwork, and tells you how important you are, how you are the "Darwinists' worst nightmare" and so on. Hey presto! You feel wanted again. For the next couple of weeks you regularly refer to his supporting words in your posts. After a while this wears off an it's time for you to start again with the insults and asking to be banned, and so the cycle continues.Maybe this time it actually happened and Ilion took you at your word and banned you? I notice it was lifted pretty damn quickly. And guess wwhat - you continued to post there, just as you have done on every occasion you have asked to be banned, or claimed to be on the verge of giving up posting.Of course the whole thing is a complete pose. You don't need to be banned from Terry's forum - just don't visit it again! All this asking to be banned or suggesting you should be banned is nothing more than manipulative attention seeking. If they ban you, you can feel victimised and justified in your chosen self-image as a curmudgeonly outsider - if they do not ban you, but ask you to stay or even reinforce how important it is that you do stay, it feeds your ego even more. Your constant juggling of these contradictions is pretty transparent in your posts on that forum and on quite a few in this one.This kind of attention-seking would be frowned upon in kindergarten. From a soi-disant scientist it is, frankly, a bit disturbing.The need to always represent your position as contrary to others; the self-deprecation often quite strongly put; the suggestions and requests (even demands) to be rejected; the occasional episodes of fairly detailed discussion which quickly lapse into defensive insults and arguments from authority (you're not disagreeing with me but with these great scientists ...); and above all the cyclical nature of these habits suggest there is something not quite comfortable going on here.Does anyone on the board know the circumstances of salty's retirement from the university? He jumped before he was pushed, I know, but beyond that have only read his own account.There is another point that may have passed people's attention. Salty claims his semi-meiotic hypothesis is eminently testable. He also explains that he cannot test it because he no longer has a laboratory. However, he first published the hypothesis in 1984 while still in post at the university. Yet none of his papers include any indication that he did the slightest experimental work, or made any attempt to systematically test his "eminently testable" hypothesis. As a recent post on Terry's board suggested, even funding for such work would not have been a problem. salty suggests the parthenogenesis of some turkeys is semi-meiotic in origin - yet he never thought of approaching the poultry industry for funding to research the origin of this highly sought after trait?Salty will no doubt see all this as a personal attack, but rather it is an attack on his methods of discussion which are intentionally intensely personal. Salty has an interesting but as yet unsupported hypothesis. The quality of the hypothesis is quite independent of his means of promulgating it. It is primarily salty who intensely personalizes the discussion of his hypothesis. I am seeking to set that personalization in context.[This message has been edited by Mister Pamboli, 03-27-2003]

quote:

---

Now if the rest of the members would divulge their identities, we might have a decent exchange of ideas.

---

What on earth does one's identity have to do with it? Surely an exchange of ideas is possible without an exchange of biographies?Is it, as I suspect, because the argument from authority is the only tool in your toolbox?

quote:

---

I'm still waiting for someone to question any of the EVIDENCE that I have presented.

---

The point is that you have not produced any evidence, despite constant requests. You refer people to your papers, but they find none there either. You have not brought one shred of evidence to this board - only outdated soundbites.The conclusion has been reached by others on this board that you do not have any evidence to present. Myself, I conclude that you have never sought any. Semi-meiosis is not just an untested hypothesis, but a hypothesis that you appear never to have bothered testing.salty could well paraphrase John Cage: I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is science.(Cage's remark was about poetry.)

quote:

---

I'll stick with a student of mine who said "He made me want to learn".

---

Wonderful! It's like those job references which say "If you get Miss X to work for you, you will be lucky." You can just imagine a student coming out of salty's lectures, shaking his head and saying "After an hour of that drivel, he made me want to learn."

quote:

---

The only difference between me and Mike Behe is that Lehigh tolerates dissent.

---

Well at least he's not comparing himself to Einstein any more. Of couorse he overlooks that Behe, whatever one may think of his work, is a tireless teacher, lecturer and author, who keeps up with current research, who does not brush off criticism with outdated appeals to authority, does not pad out his papers with an irrelevant mish-mash of snippets from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and who responds in detail to his critics. These differences alone would explain why he is actively in his post and salty is left in the corner, muttering into his glass about Darwinists.

quote:

---

You say Dawkins supports some of his transparent foolishness. So have I. It is called publication.

---

Actually, the point is that your publications do not support your conclusions, nor have you provided any expansion or clarification that might support them. You have indeed made your position clear - and you have also made clear that you have little or no objective evidence to support it.

quote:

---

Why do you insist on a double standard for me and Richard Dawkins.

---

Dawkins is not a participant on this board: there is no double standard. I for one would love to see him here. I'm sure I have said here in the past that I am not impressed by his work.

I have read Berg and Grasse and Broom. I still don't get where he is coming from - except that he has perhaps cobbnled together a mish-mash of soundbites from their work without actually reading it it thoroughly. In addition I have read several whom salty, perhaps deliberately, ignores. Despite his attempts to align himself with better scientists, he comes across as little more than a cut-and-past quotemonger who doesn't bother to experimentally explore his own ideas or to keep up with developments in his field.For an example of this, read his recent "paper" about "metaphysics." in it he spouts his own hypothesis about xx males, but does not include more recent references by the same authors whom he quotes. Why? Perhaps he is too lazy to go the library to look them up, or he has read them and suppressed them because they do not fit his hypothesis.However, as he sees fear of contradiction and exposure as a motivation in others we can perhaps suspect that this is based on self-reflection - this is the sort of thing he does himself, so he expects the same weaknesses from others. On this basis, it's quite possible that he does not keep up with new work - even by those he quotes - for fear of finding his own hypothesis is just another failed idea on the scrapheap.