Talk:Nils Heribert Nilsson

Why this page
I plan to elaborate a little bit on NHN, as his is a typical example of the creationists' way with quotes...

16:11, 11 July 2009 (UTC)


 * The Swedish Bontanical Instutute is something I'd expect to hear about in a shampoo commercial. --Kels (talk) 16:36, 11 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I love this guy. The first creationist I ever met came out with this guys quote. I had been at uni about 6 weeks when some guy stopped be in front of the physics building and asked me if I believed it had been put together by random chance, I replied only if the bricks had some way on bonding that required a certain orientation like chemical bonds. We argued for about 20 minutes. I noticed every time I would reply to one of his points he would just go to the next one on his list. I kid you not this guy just had a book he was working through. The quote from Nils Heribert Nilsson was towards back meaning it was creationist heavy fire. I really have never taken them seriously since. 01:01, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I ♥ the term "creatiosphere." Sterile 01:24, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Some musings
The formerly well-known Swedish biologist Heribert Nilsson is an elusive figure: it's hard to find his works today, and harder to find anyone who read them, though Tom McIver wrote about him in the book Anti Evolution: Annotated Bibliography, which I haven't laid hand on. This entry is quoted somehow here.

06:44, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * It is currently available at my uni library I could go get it if you would like. This does require walking on my part. 06:48, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Strange it seems to exist in some strange superposition of both being in the main collection and not available for loan. Mind you our library does seem to be an experiment in the non-Newtonian laws of physics so it might be possible that when I find its wave form my collapse to allow me to borrow it. 06:54, 13 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Okay, couldn't borrow but have material. What would you like done with it? 07:35, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Here is all the relevant pages. 08:04, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

(EC) Wow, that's great - I'd like to read the material! If it's a pdf, you could just sent it to me ;-) I could get neither Nilsson's nor McIver's at my university's library. The creation-evolution debate isn't of much interest here... 08:17, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I noticed its classification is Evolution-Controversial literature. 09:20, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Very interesting read: If he believed in the Welteislehre, it's not surprising that he published in German, and not in English!
 * Joel Hedgpeth really didn't like the book: elegantly printed two-volume, two volumes of fact and fancy, Such works also serve another useful function (in addition to keeping printers employed), ouch, I LOLed when I read it... 09:15, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
 * This is why YECers love him - no well-versed amateur scientist has ever heard of him. One more lap of Gish galloping later...  09:18, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Swedish Botanical Institute
Now that we've ascertained that the SBI is not, in fact, the SBI but in fact just some university biology department, have we any reason to believe he was Director of that august institution, or just worked there? --Kels (talk) 21:29, 21 July 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't think that the department was that big when Nilsson was professor in Lund (1934-1948) - perhaps three or four professors. Probably, the directorship rotated, so that Nilsson was director for some time... 21:39, 21 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Doesn't seem terribly fair to the others, then, seeing as they've been skipped over by history. Wouldn't it be more appropriate to put him down as "a director" or simply "a professor" at the Institute? --Kels (talk) 22:02, 21 July 2009 (UTC)


 * Anyone thought of emailing the university and asking? 15:45, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I have emailed their information and press office for details. So I'll wait and see what I get back. 21:02, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Great! But why am I reminded of A. Schlafly, Dawkins and the university of Oxford? 21:05, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Because back then, we emailed Oxford to gain assurance that Dawkins was, indeed a professor there... hehe... 00:26, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
 * And of course, all we want is the accurate truth if we can find it. Schlafly was seeking to prove a half-assed pet assertion. Glad you thought of this, GK, thanks!  00:27, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Beer goggles and botany of the institutional Swedish meatball
Do we come up first for anyone else? 01:06, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * That is what I get even without the quotation marks, for Australia too. 01:45, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * New Zealand and UK too. However on Sweden we are second after some report about the National Botanical Institute of South Africa. Really looks real now. 01:49, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

A critique of the book, and past section referring to CP
Is there a reason the italicized parts are truncated to such short line lengths? 01:09, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * It makes difficult reading, I assumed it was formatted like that in the original? 01:14, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I don't think it is necessary to preserve typesetting and page width when quoting, and it doesn't look like poetry, and as you say, it makes it hard to read, so I'm a gonna hack out the formatting and let the words flow, like a mountain stream... 01:16, 22 July 2009 (UTC)


 * That whole section seems like it was copied strangely from somewhere else (well, yeah, I know it's a quote). And the last section, the one on the CP article is a fricking formatting mess.  What's with all the itals and bolding, it makes what is quoted and what isn't hard to track down.  Anyone else want to tackle cleaning it up?  01:21, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Is the whacky emphasis just trying to show a copy/paste effect? If so, why not just say so?  04:38, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I think I tried to clean it up a bit, but I probably failed. 08:17, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * No failing there :-) Thanks for cleaning up the mess which I produced by a sloppy copy&paste job from the pdf-document in the first place (sorry...) 08:30, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Bravo
Well done guys, this is an excellent rebuttal of a Creationist quote mine. 08:08, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, this was really great work people - ironically, putting us at #1 on the search engine beginning with "G" when oogling. 08:18, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * I think so, too. It was a pity that conservapedia had a monopoly on Nilsson and his wacky concept of emication.  08:33, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Although now Wikipedia has an article they will probably go top. I also found this at Skepticfiles. 15:44, 22 July 2009 (UTC)

Emication
I think a sister article on Emication would reinforce our search ranking position. Any volunteers? 17:05, 10 August 2009 (UTC)


 * I wrote the wp:Emication section of wp's article, so I'm afraid I'm the natural volunteer. Shouldn't we just make a redirect - and a section at our own article, too? 17:15, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
 * I hate to sound Kennish but a separate article would reinforce our standing at an internet search-engine beginning with 'G'. Also Nilsson's theory needs debunking on its own account. 17:20, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
 * O-kay 17:26, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Bronze
I just added the tag: Though the article mentions conservapedia (it was written at first as an direct answer to 🇰🇪's articles), it is IMO worthy :-) 13:46, 6 May 2010 (UTC)


 * This is the sort of thing that RW excels at: covering the factual background of the claimed backing for woomeisters and antiscientists - David Gerard (talk) 14:06, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

The ideas are crankery, but the use of German isn't
I've deleted the highly speculative sentence linking Nilsson's support for Hans Hörbiger's Welteislehre with Nilsson's book being published in German and added the citation needed template as we currently have not documented this particular bit of nuttery. German was and is one of the "great academic languages" especially within certain fields (ditto French, btw) and Sweden has traditionally been tightly linked with German academia, so causally linking Nilsson's support for one particular crank idea with his book being published in German is neither a good or a strong argument. ScepticWombat (talk) 09:43, 5 January 2017 (UTC)


 * I thought that Heribert Nilsson was fluent in English and German, as his "Synthetische Artlehre" includes an English summary which makes up 10% of the text. But this summary was written a friend and private lecturer, O. Tedin. The use of German just implies that he was educated in the world of German academia. So, you are right there. BTW, I don't think that German still is one of the "great academic languages" - the only one left is badly written English ;-)
 * In Ch. VIII "Die Auflösung der paläobiologischen Konfliktpunkte", he describes his reasoning about the history of Earth, and pays tribute to Hörbiger: NHN does not support Hörbiger's general cosmology, but likes some aspects, especially about the Moon.

HNH invents a nice little Socratic dialogue:



Here my attempt of a translation: ''Could the fossils have been built on the barren mountain top? &mdash; No. &mdash; So, they have to been built in Water? &mdash; Yes. &mdash; You have water only in lakes and the seas. &mdash; That is right. &mdash; But the fossils are lying on the mountains. &mdash; That cannot be denied. &mdash; So, socratically we have to conclude that that, what earlier was in the sea, now lies on the mountain. &mdash; That is for certain. &mdash; Ergo, the bottom of the sea has risen to become a mountain. &mdash;

''No, how do you no this? Have you see such a thing appearing? &mdash; Do you think this likely? &mdash; No, thinking about it, it is rather unlikely. The sea cannot rise its own bottom above itself and make it to a mountain. &mdash; ''Well, how will we expalin the fact, that fossils, which have been in the sear, no lie on the highest ranges of a mountain? &mdash; That is impossible to tell. I only think it is undeniable that they got there another way. &mdash; Can you state such a way? &mdash; No,but for me, it seems, that they have been carried up to there. &mdash; Do you think that men carried the snails and animals carried the fish onto the mountain? &mdash; No, but waves could have hurled the animlas high into the mountains. That must have been much more mightier waves than those of our seas. Sky-high flood-waves could throw maritime animals upon sky-high mountains. &mdash; This possibility cannot be denied. Where to get these floods? Here, HNH uses Hörbiger's ideas on the Moon... --larron (talk) 21:08, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Dear Sceptic Wombat, perhaps you could improve my translation & we integrate the dialogue into the article? Thanks! --larron (talk) 21:13, 17 January 2017 (UTC)