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Domain: mattox.com
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Comments · 8
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Read up on Periannan Senapathy before making...
...sweeping claims like that. (-:
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No, seriously!
I think Pastafarianism is great! It's a high-humour way to get people thinking about origins for real.
Another one I like to point out is Periannan Senapathy's warm little pond, which is mathematically far more reasonable than Gradualism. It approaches the abundant inconsistencies in both Atheist and Theist viewpoints from the serious end, and can make people really stop and think. My goodness, how that must hurt some of them. (-:
Perhaps next year's funny randomness cult can revolve around a Holy Hamburger Patty engraved with the powerful sigil IHS ("In Hot Sauce") and served with spinach as a testimony to Pope I? -
Here, try the hair of the cat...
...that is, pretty much the opposite of what you asked for. Before you write the guy off as an idiot, run the calculations. (-:
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That's only the DNA sequencesYou've forgotten to account for the DNA itself, and the composition of the supporting proteins, to say nothing of the gazillion or so chunks of supporting machinery and other stuff which is imported wholesale along with the DNA.
And then he presumed that the whole thing had to just appear randomly at once.
That's actually more reasonable in statistical terms. Meet Dr Periannan Senepathy, respected biologist with many important papers to his name.
Your Pentium IV analogy is hilarious!
Who took parts of the primordial cell and "rearranged them and added new stuff"? Time and chance? Or researchers aided i their planning by powerful computers and reams of physics?
Who dictated the x86 lineage (I favour MIPS myself)? Breeding? Or policy decisions by managers?
Who sets policy for a cell?humans wouldn't have been intelligently created with an appendix or tonsils
Well, I must say that you walked right into this one! (-:
Go and read any modern medical text on the subect to discover why doctors are becoming increasingly reluctant to excise such organs at a whim. What you'll find is that the scorn heaped on them was a product of our collective ignorance, coupled with the evolutionary assumption that such features would exist. Now we as a race know better, but evidently you've got some catching up to do. (-:
Damn, I replied to an AC again. -
Sorry, forgot to address one point......which is:
If you can satisfactorily explain where the intelligent designer comes from then I might buy the Occam's Razor argument.
Just to make sure that both sides of the argument start off on the same page...
Underpinning every theory are axioms. The key axiom of materialism is that matter exists (either always, temporarily, or in a recurring fashion) in a form which allows it to randomly recombine over the course of a few billion years to produce space and hydrogen, which coalesces to produce stars and planets. These in turn must possess the properties which allow them, over the course of a billion or so years, to produce protozoa, petunias, puppies and philosophers. These properties must exist from the start, in either actual or latent form. Are we agreed on that?
The key axiom of Intelligent Design is that either this assemblage which became matter and finally life arrived with a designer, or a designer built it from scratch, which in turn implies that the designer either always existed or was supplied from an external source. Still OK?
At first it might appear that the matter plus designer postulate fails Ockham's Razor because it looks like the materialist axiom plus a designer. This simplistic surface view of the comparison ignores the ability to displace uncannily precise universal requirements (mathematically, the term is "impossibly precise") for material properties into the designer, allowing a much broader range of properties for any starting material.
The designer-makes-matter postulate simply displaces all of the required specificity into the designer, and any specificity in the universe at large simply derives from said designer. Mathematically, this would make the requirements much more manageable, but it is intellectually disturbing because it smacks too much of a magic wand, like the carefully-unexplained antigravity or warpdrives trotted out by sci-fi authors to make their stories workable.
However, at the end of this dissection, an embarrassing observation remains: by themselves, none of these postulates is on an overview scale any better than another. They all require axiomatic starting conditions which we cannot directly measure, only infer, and they all end up with a complex and very specific end condition. This is the precise fate which awaits the "panspermia" theories.
The devil, as they say, is in the details. <digression>Wherever someone says this, I think of Maxwell's Demon. Cute concept, and a great pity that it cannot work.</digression>
Adopting one PoV to the exclusion of the others can handicap your science quite a bit. I'm sure your aware of the classic examples of this, like J Harlan Bretz, but fewer people are aware of what can happen if you decouple your theology from your earth-history at a different point. No, I'm not seriously proposing Senapathy's theory as workable, but it does have the mathematical advantage over either uniformitarianism or punk-eek, and seriously exploring the ramifications of it or scenarios tangential to it might be scientifically fruitful.
The point I'm orbiting with that little example is: considering the available menu of alternatives to be completely explored is as much blind dogma as the countless volumes of papal Canon Law. If you can accept that, then you're well on your way to understanding why it is so counter-productive to dismiss ID principally because it is heresy according to your own canon. Or to put it more bluntly, because it worries you.
If you are to dismiss it at all, it should be dismissed on far less emotive grounds, and you should take care that the baby stays when the bathwater goes. In particular, when you can satisfactorily explain the existence of universal conditions so singularly appropriate to life as we know it (no, the anthropic principle cuts no ice here, it's a statistical abomination), you'll be in a position to demand satisfac -
Let's get serious
By the way, if there was a SERIOUS challenge to the theory of evolution, it could make a scientists career.
Or more likely, break it.
Stephen J Gould, for one example, found that evolution didn't work for him, so he completely rebuilt the theory of the mechanism for it. Now we have the pleasure of sitting back and reading from both his pen, and the pens of his opponents, why neither strand of evolutionary reasoning can work.
A chap named Senapathy tried a different tack, and hasn't ben as lucky in locating supporters.
Note a statement from supporter Mattox: `I realized that he was a scientist and definitely not a creationist, so I ordered the book'. Hmmm. That speaks volumes. -
You left off a letter
No[t] withstood is the correct way of putting it.
Or you could close your eyes and shout 'tis! (-:
[Darwin's theory has] survived these attacks it has risen to become one of sciences greatest achievements,
That must be why Stephen J Gould gets so much mileage out opf catastrophism, and why `benchmark' fossils proving Darwinism are repeatedly being proclaimed, and later silently (or at best very quietly) withdrawn.
Eohippus is no longer part of a series, Archaeopteryx is a variant on the theme `Hoatzin' and Lucy was resting several layers above a modern human skull. Sorry, where was that evidence again?
Behe's `irreducible complexity' and Dembski's `specified complexity' are merely fighting over the carcass. It's time for a completely new theory.
much to the concern of creationists and flat-earthers alike.
I don't see that evolution counts one way or the other to someone with a flat-earth POV.
Does this guy count as a creationist in your eyes? His `wild' theory of specie development is a mathematical certainty when compared with Darwinism.
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replication, abiogenesis,
I wasn't trying to say that that particular molecule was a precursor to modern life. It is more of a proof of the concept that tiny self-replicating molecules do exist.
Who needs a proof-of-concept? Every living thing contains proofs-of-concept! Lots of proofs-of-concept. Actually, truth be told, too many proofs-of-concept for the time available under the most optimistic evolutionary assumptions.
No biologist in the world believes that the first cell appeared, fully formed, out of nothingness.
What can I say? Ah, yes, the word on the time-saving cap I got for Christmas. WRONG (-:
The first cell was built out of smaller things that were not cells. My personal guess is that self-replicating molecules gave rise to virus-like entities that gave rise to proto-cells that gave rise to cells. Can I prove any of this right now? Nope.
One of the more obvious big gaps in this sequence is that viruses require a host organism to be anything like viable. For example, they can't reproduce themselves at all without one.
But it is an explaination that doesn't require anything supernatural.
It's not scientific to exclude the supernatural, it's merely materialistic. And materialism is a belief, even one which cannot be formally proven.
First off, Evolution isn't random
If it isn't random, then it has a purpose. If it has a purpose (teleology) then it isn't evolution. People can assert that selection is non-random until they're blue in the face (or meet Stephen J Gould) but firstly it's wrong (the success or otherwise of selection is essentially random as well, and kept so by factors such as changing circumstances), and secondly it cannot compensate for the proposed randomness in mutation.
It is a system that builds on the successes of the past.
It is a system without foundations (there is no reasonable path through abiogenesis, and all that we know of mathematics says that there never can be), and presumes upon a nett positive effect (successes, an increase in functionality) in an environment observed to be heavily dominated by destructive effects (decay, disasters).
Once a mechanism has evolved, it doesn't have to evolve again.
Error after error! If this had been the bad old days, Torquemada would be having words with you in person! (-:
A mechanism not only has to evolve, it has to establish itself in significant numbers in a viable population of organisms, and out-compete other similar mechanisms. This happens very infrequently, so the vast majority of mechanisms would have to re-evolve countless times.
The number of base pairs in a DNA molecule isn't really all that impressive when you consider that a single mutation can double the length of the molecule.
You wind up with a double molecule, one which almost always kills the organism, not a single molecule with twice the complexity.
You seem to think something magical is going on, when all there is is chemistry.
This applies more to your claims than to mine. Chemistry as we know it does not magically produce life, or any significant step toward life, when left to itself - or even when given some very directed nudges, as in Stanley Miller's experiments - it destroys and breaks down life and components of life.