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Intelligent Design Ruled "Not Science"
blane.bramble writes "The Register is reporting that the UK government has stated there is no place in the science curriculum for Intelligent Design and that it can not be taught as science. 'The Government is aware that a number of concerns have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to whether creationism and intelligent design have a place in science lessons. The Government is clear that creationism and intelligent design are not part of the science National Curriculum programs of study and should not be taught as science.'"
It's not really religion either.
God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith. If you see something that you think is proof of God's existence, you're wrong. He's ineffable. That means you can't effing figure him out.
The arrogance of the goddamn literal read types is just astounding....Anyone else would look at evolution and go, "Damn! That God guy is hella fricking smart! Look at this crap! It's a system for self-improvement built into self-replicating creatures! It's awesome!" but a literal-read weenie will look at it and say, "Don't say nuthin about that in da bible. You must be wrong."
The worst thing that can be said about the literal read types, is that they have nothing to look up to. They know all there is to know about god and everything. So very very sad.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Will someone in the US government please do the same?
I really can't wait for the end of the world, mankind doesn't deserve to live
Isn't evolution *also* pretty much just a theory at this point, like Intelligent Design?
Very pleased to hear the government come out and and state what by far the majority of the country would assume anyway, nice to have it made official.
May as well teach crystal healing in heart surgery if your going to allow RE into Science classes.
Error 001
Security Scan and Virus Detection do not work with your operating system.
I can't believe it is such an issue in the USA. People don't seem to even understand the definition of science. While I won't diminish the importance of religion or spirituality in life, science is based on reason and logic and is therefore a very practical and useful way to understand the natural world.
Personally, I don't see any conflict between the world being created by some God, even in 7 days, and its being formed over billions of years by natural processes. One is a faith based way of experiencing the world, the other is a sensory based, practical, and logical way. They are both useful.
What isn't useful is to deny children understanding of what, very practically and falsifiably, is the way our reality works.
Thank God for that!
No, wait...
So.. it has come to this
Except for the "Intelligent" and "Design" parts, you mean?
If you open for the far fetched possibility of the universe being created, there's not only intelligent design to consider, but by logic you must also open for stupid design, intelligent accident and stupid accident. Because there's nothing that points to either intelligence or design being the only possible factors of a creation, unless you beg the question.
Regards,
--
*Art
Oh Lord. Don't look at those sinners in the United Kingdom.
Enjoy looking at us in the US, please?
We love you so much we do everything in your name.
Come to church friends and lets pray for less WMD and more enforcement of DMCA.
So God will get so much love from us that he can ignore that hate from the UK.
George W Bush will tell us how much God loves our prayers and how desperate we try to look better in churches than the rest of the world with all our singing and praying.
The Ministry further clarified that teachers planning to cover climate change were not permitted to substitute "An Inconvenient Truth" with "Evan Almighty".
The Big Bang theory doesn't say what happened before. The Big Bang says things only about the progression of the universe after its beginning. The difference between the Big Bang and a literal reading of Genesis is that the Big Bang is based on natural laws that have been discovered.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Of course, the interesting part of the big bang theory is not what came "before" the big bang (which many not even be a meaningful statement.) What came after the big bang is the "answer"; it helps to provide a nexus between, for example, our understanding of galaxies and of protons. It is true, though, that the big bang doesn't provide an answer to the metaphysical question of first cause (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_cause), although it can probably motivate answers. However, science is not directly concerned with metaphysics.
Well, one is based on observation and the other is based on a book with unknown authors,
so i'll choose the one based on observation.
The difference is, Intelligent Design teaches specifically that certain structures found in biological systems are too complex to have come about through macro evolution. They point to things as varied as the eye, flagella on bacterium, and a number of other things which they call "irreducibly complex", meaning that they would have no function if broken apart, and so supposedly cannot have an evolutionary pathway leading to their creation. ID has nothing to do with explaining the origins of the universe. It's an attempt to prove the involvement of a deity in the development of life on Earth.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Could you list the sources where you got your definition of Big Bang cosmology? I'd love to know what hoakey craphouse you got it from. Big Bang cosmology neatly explains:
1. the red-shift of distant galaxies.
2. nucleosynthesis
3. the black body radiation that can be found every in the universe
ID, on the other hand, explains nothing. It's an empty statement that is designed to
a. fool judges
b. make such vague statements on the origins of the universe and life that everyone from a Young Earth Creationist to a Theistic Evolutionist are supposed to be friendly and consequently overthrow the evil secular forces of public education in America.
My recommendation to you is to
a. go read something on the Big Bang by actual cosmologists
b. go look up the Wedge Document to find out what ID *really* is.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
While this is indeed a win, the watering down of the sciences in the UK is horrifying. I've written an article about the physics exams to try and bring some attention to this topic. On the biology side, I was shocked by the most recent GCSE paper on which the last question described an experiment on lab animals and the effect exposure of a hormone had on them. The students where then asked: ''How does this experiment contradict the theory of evolution.'' Also they are asked questions like ''Who would oppose contraception'' and they get a mark for writing ''Certain religious groups.'' It's really sad.
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Account 1: "Nothing existed. Then something inconceivably complex existed. That something willfully created us, specifically."
Account 2: "Nothing existed. Then through sheer logical necessity, everything else existed. Everything. Those parts of everything which were capable of contemplating existence posted on message boards. The rest were not aware that they should be doing so."
Why do you feel there should be an explanation for what caused causality?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
...I don't see any place for Intelligent Design in public schools, either.
Then again, I don't see any place for public schools when it comes to my (eventual) kids or the kids of the families I financially support. Personally, I'm a fan of Intelligent Design combined with evolutionary and old Earth science, but I would in no way force my opinion on others -- as the public school system does. Evolution? Creationism? Who cares -- if you as a parent don't work to teach your children, don't expect the public school to do a better job, regardless of what they're teaching.
What I find disturbing about the whole issue is not the disagreement as to whether ID is science, but the rigidity with which governments and opponents of ID are trying to define science. Many of the advancements to science can be considered outside of what is considered "science" at the time. An attempt to limit scholarly inquiry by excluding it from scientific discussion will only discourage diversity in the scientific community. ID is unique (I'm not talking about young earth crap) because it really is not straight philosophy as it has too many ties to empirical data, it shouldn't be religion because (at least the reasonable arguments) don't actually argue for a "God," and yet it doesn't fit very nicely into the current definitions of "science." I don't think it is fair to any argument to preclude it being reasonable based on the fact that it doesn't really fit into current frameworks that have been set up.
The Big Bang is supported by evidence. What was there before the Big Bang is unknown. Saying "we don't know what was there before the Big Bang" is a lot different than saying "God was there."
For all we know, maybe God created the Big Bang. Maybe the Big Bang spontaneously appeared out of nothing. Maybe the Big Bang happened after a Big Crunch, and maybe the Universe has been creating and recreating itself forever. Maybe the Big Bang started when Great Green Arkleseizure sneezed. As soon as we have some solid supporting evidence for any of these possibilities, they will become Scientific Theories. Before then, they are just hypotheses. However, with no real way to test them, they are not particularly interesting hypotheses.
Us intelligent design theorists were so close to getting tenure providing untestable theories for the last 8 years.
Everyone knows that everything in the real world is already figured out anyway, it is time for my kind to provide people who can't (or chose not to) understand all those quarks and photonamajiggers something to believe in.
Besides, who doesn't like envisioning their enemies burning for all eternity in a lake of fire? Eh? Eh? Come on you know you want some of that.
The words in bold, by the way, apply to scientific reasoning but not to religion. So the big bang and religious creation myths are "the same" only if you completely throw out all the successful predictions and agreements of cosmology, and focus on one particular question that the big bang theory was never intended to answer.
In a more general sense, science never claims to give your life meaning, or to answer the "why?" questions. It merely provides predictive models, or in other words answers the "how?" questions. Science and religion are very different, and pretending they are the same is rather disingenuous.
... how do you explain the fact that your finger is exactly the right diameter for sticking up your nose?
Even worse, you enter a logic trap when you insist that things require a Prime Mover. If the universe requires a Prime Mover, then the logical extension to that is that the Prime Mover also does, and you enter an infinite regression of Prime Movers. The standard answer by those who insist on causality all the way down is that their Prime Mover is exempt. At that point, an application of Occam's Razor states that unnecessary entities should be removed, and so if the alleged Prime Mover requires no lower-level Prime Mover, then why can't the universe exist without the need of a Prime Mover.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sir Fred Hoyle had problems with the British scientific establishment also.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Fire ruled "Not cold."
That's nice but what does the Big Bang theory have to do with evolution?
The Big Bang is about how the universe started and evolution is about how life in earth started about 10 billion years later.
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I don't think I've ever heard someone say that there was nothing before the Big Bang, except you creationist nutcases. Clearly there was something there before it, and clearly there is probably no way for us ever to see what that was. That doesn't mean there was any sort of design by any sort of intelligence.
That you can go out of the house expressing views like that without being horribly embarrassed is amazing. Or maybe you just never leave your mom's basement.
Just in case you were wondering, all the matter that there is or ever will be has always existed. It floated around in space and through literally countless collisions due to the inherent physics of everything (that have also always existed) they eventually came together into stars and planets and on some of them, such as Earth, life evolved and here we are. Whether or not this explanation is true (it likely is similar to the truth) it sure as hell seems easier to believe than some desert sky daddy or whatever nonsense you believe.
The Farewell Tour II
I for one, see a bloody huge difference between Intelligent Design and the Big Bang theory. Mostly in part due to the evidence that the Big Bang theory presents in relation to what Intelligent Design tries to explain.
Just to start off with, there's some reading you should do http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_bang and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Design
Now once you've read both of these and understood the points on both sides you can see that while Intelligent Design is one of the more intellectual ways of arguing your faith it's pretty much inherently flawed. Because even though you can argue for days that a creator designed everything we know it still poses the greatest question of all: Who created the creator?
Answer me that!
The Refined Geek - Technology, Finance, Space and everything in between
There you go. How can a person, or a "God", be responsible for the creation of something as complex as the Universe? It is a total non-sense! I mean, the Big Bang is the beginning of a series of events that created the Universe and its laws. It's physics. You just cannot have someone who decided all this. And why explaining human beings and all living creatures with creationism? It is not a creation, it is an evolution. As far as you can go back, there always was an ancestor before you. Up to a point where life (organic compounds) spawed off inorganic precursors (Miller-Urey Experiment.
Anyways, there are so many obivous flaws in the creationism that it simply loses all its credibility as a possible avenue to understanding our complex world.
iTx Technologies: Open source development in Montreal
Would the conclusion that a particular teacher shouldn't present it in their own class, based on this ruling, be a plausible inference, or an empirically-verifiable fact for that classroom?
How do I get the scientific answer here? Replicable, quantifiable suggestions only, please... and preferably a little more solidly quantifiable than reliance on nebulous constructs like "government", "declarations", and "politicians".
Help me out here.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Part, the second: Physics doesn't permit a nothing to exist. There is no such thing in science as "nothing". There are no "perfect vaccuum"s, except in adverts. There is a quantum foam, which consists of pairs of virtual particles whose sum total of mass and energy is zero. This is not a cheat, it is an inevitable consequence of the inescapable laws of thermodynamics which underly ALL other laws of the Universe. Besides, there's a possibility it has been observed in experiments on the Casmir Effect.
Now we get to the third part. Relativity requires that space/time curve under gravity. If you backtrack time towards the Big Bang, time bends inwards. The closer you get, the slower time subjectively is. You can never reach time zero. It's flat. The gradient is zero. There is no point from which the Big Bang erupted. Time is parabolic that early on. If there is no origin, then there is no need to explain what happened then. (This was why Professor Hawking was nervous about talking to the late Pope John Paul II - the Pope said it was ok to explore the universe, just not talk about how it originated. Hawking's talk earlier that day had shown that there was no origin to talk about.)
Next, we get to part four. Testability. The Big Bang is a verifiable hypothesis - we can create the conditions needed to create a virtual energy density necessary to inflate a bubble universe, and that has been known for many decades now. I'm not saying anything new here. Creationism and Intelligent Design is unverifiable, short of God appearing on Larry King Live, and strangely I don't see the Creationists begging Him/Her to do so. Odd, that.
(I have nothing against faith, but many who claim to have faith have nothing of the sort and I do have a great many problems with abuse of faith.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Sky is Blue and Pie tastes good. Thank you Government of the UK even though I live in backwards America. Thank you for point out the obviousness of sections of OUR Governments stupidity. I hope all the Intelligent Design people back off here in America now. Yah right and next pigs will fly out of my ass....
The Big Bang theory is scientific because it makes falsifiable predictions about what the universe ought to look like. It is the explanation most consistent with our observations of the universe. It accurately explains the red shift of distant objects, and the observed structure of the universe, and the cosmic background radiation, among other things. Creation isn't scientific because it isn't testable. The explanation for everything is always "Wizard did it." There is no way to falsify "Wizard did it."
Although really unrelated to this argument, One can show that Creationism is actually the more complex explanation, and therefore, according to Occam's Razor, more likely to be false. Creationism presupposes god, or some equivalent entity. God is, by definitions used in philosophy and theology, greater than the whole of the universe. Therefore, Creationism, by presupposing the existence of god, an entity more complex and powerful than the universe, who then creates the less complex universe, is a more complex argument than the Scientific explanation, which merely presupposes that the universe can come into existence. In order to be intellectually honest, you have to explain god, and how god comes into existence.
Like heliocentrism, the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, and set theory, Evolution is just a theory!
As we all know, the conjunction of two sets is determined by God and depends on how God feels at the time.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster is not going to be happy to hear about this!
Both ID and evolution are theories, or they wouldn't have the words "The theory of" before them. I think it's important to remember that the best either camp (scientists and theologians) can offer are just theories, both with their own supporting evidences. It's sad, though, that kids can't be taught both (that is, taught an ID where the goal is to show the probability of some greater power, not necessarily any religion's god) and then be left alone to make up their own minds about which they will choose to believe. Because, when it all boils down to it, you have to have faith in something, be it science or religion. The fact is that some of those who vehemently flame ID have just as much (or more) faith in the current scientific paradigm (see: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn) compared to their religious counterparts.
The big bang as other have said only says that at some point the universe exploded forth from a single small immensely dense and hot thing. Thats all it claims to say essentially but it does so in excruciating methametical detail with evidence from observations and models supporting it. It is irrelevant who that small dense thing came into being, it could have been god or a drunk frat student sneezing in another universe (really weird universe where sneezing pops new universes into existence). Since we by many account cannot know how that initial point came into being it is irrelevant.
As for your second explanation? How did god create the universe? When did he do it? What state did he do it in? Had he further influenced it? If so are these influences predictable or verifiable? Well? I'm waiting.
Church leaders around the world have called for the shee^h^h^h^h Christians to shun all science. Their exact words are "Shun all science, it is of the Devil Satan. He is controlling the minds of the evil Atheists. We must fight this evel now! Kill all those who oppose us!" All people believing in such superstitions are now agreeing with their religious leaders in the call to eliminate all that believe in the so-called "evil science" They were immediately confronted by Freethinkers and the worldwide killing spree was brought to a halt before it ever began.
"Since you believe all science is evil, get rid of your weapons since they are made through science. By the way; all the food you enjoy, the beverages you drink, the water you need, the clothes you wear today, the transportation you use, and the computers you use were all created through science. Are all you religious sheep going to kill yourselves through dehydration and go without clothing as eveything is created through science?" was a phrase created by a collaberation of two Freethinkers, Bill Gates and Linus Tovalds. This phrase was repeated by all freethinkers around the world.
This caused all people from all religions to looke into it and agreed and found out their respective bibles were really created with science. Word have it quite a few people of all religions became Freethinkers that day and the rest decided to commmit suicide from all of the madness.
From the mysterious future.
This just in, the worldwide crime rate, subtance abuse, and poverty is at an all time low. It is now near zero. With no religion in the world today the world is now enjoying peace and prosperity until all life comes to an end on the Earth. A major breakthrough in the cure for cancer has revealed all diseases can and will be cured since there is nothing blocking the research. Microsoft has finally agreed to open their source code and all of their file formats since their is no need for money. Alternative energy sources such as solar and wind will be in full implementation by the end of the week.
What ID really was was an attempt to slip creation in under the door. This is because Creationists can't stand the following phrase. "I don't know."
Here are some things that do need to be understood.
1. Evolution does not disprove the existence of "God" but it may undermine the myth of Jehovah. That is to say, the creationists are afraid that if we get so much evidence to show that the religions of Abraham are false, or the world doesn't work the way they say it does, that God becomes impersonal and Alien to us. Which is a sane argument really. The creator of the Universe caring about what happens to us is like us caring about what happens to some Ant hill somewhere.
If that happens, then all our wars, and churches, and institutions we built up to serve religion will be for a "God" who is disconnected and we will have built these social institutions for the sake of ourselves. Alot of powerful people don't want that.
2. Our understanding of Evolution is incomplete. That is to say, we can see the trees, but not the entire forest. We aren't that far ahead. There are going to be errors we make in our determination in how evolution works. The creationists are going to come back and say "see! see! you screwed up! but God makes everything perfect!"
3. If you want to know the truth of whats out there, I'd imagine religious forces in this world would seek to prevent it, or cover it up. A lot of these religions created by Abraham revolve around the idea that Man is at the center of everything. If we discovered Alien life elsewhere in the Universe, at first everyone religious would panic. Gradually, Religion would change to accommodate the Aliens. But you damn well bet there would be people saying "Jebus died on the Cross for Humans/Terrans/Earthlings" whatever.
So, as an Agnostic, who isn't sure whats out there, I'd like to know, but I can't be sure until the technology exists for me to explore this universe in much greater depth. I'm very curious. But I feel comfortable saying "I don't know right now." The hard core religious people can't afford to be wrong. If their $Holy_Text is wrong, then they are going to realize the magnitude of some of the inexcusable things done in History.
I think some day it will happen. We will come out with concrete evidence that exposes the whole mythology, something so observable that religion can't adjust to it. Who knows if we will accept it and become better people, or deny it and kill each other. Again, I just don't know.
What was there before the Big Bang is unknown
The statement doesn't really make sense. There was no length before the big bang, there was no width, or depth (dimensions 1-3), and there was no time (dimension #4). To ask the question requires time to exist when it didn't.
Fortunately we don't need to invoke God for every scenario where quantum reality is non-intuitive to beings whose ancestors were being chased around by dinosaurs for snackage just a cosmic handful of years ago.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is typical Abrahamic religion thought, and not common to all religions. And to make it worse, the fact that it's a typical argument in Abrahamic religious traditions, doesn't make it an essential feature of them.
Which means that you're carrying out a strawman argument, since you're not engaging the actual claims and beliefs of any actual adversary, only those you project onto an imagined one, and which just happen to be very conveniently weak.
Are you adequate?
I would be very interested to hear their arguments. Last time I looked it wasn't trivial to distinguish science from pseudoscience... Yes, I am a scientist...
Both start with a hypothesis, but only one is based on data, observations, and analysis like readings from deep space instruments, physics calculations, etc. I guess that one would be more scientific. The other one is based on oral and written histories. The last time I checked, oral and written histories are not science.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Because, when it all boils down to it, you have to have faith in something, be it science or religion.
Bullshit. Don't water down science as something that people must have "faith" to believe in. That's is 100% false, and that is purely rhetoric to make science sound like something that is debatable. By and large, it is not. It's not always right, but it is right a hell of a lot more often than not. Religion and science do NOT intersect. In fact, they're polar opposites.
I don't respond to AC's.
Despite the contrary, all systematic views of the Whole Thing(tm) require faith (philosophically known as a "world view"). Science is no different in this regard. Science has two basic articles of faith: First, that mankind has the mental capacity to reason out the universe and can do so through independent, verifiable testing of mankind's understand of the universe. Second, that despite not understanding currently everything, eventually mankind will figure out the Whole Thing (tm).
The first article of faith has shown repeatedly that there is no need to call in anything supernatural. Time and time again, when confronted with things (i.e. miracles, magic, etc), science has shown through testing that non-supernatural answers (or no answer) has been found. There has never been a proven case that science was left with "boy, no matter what, it seems God is working that."
The second article of faith has shown that many things that were labeled as unknowable or only in the realm of the supernatural were eventually solved with non-supernatural, testable, verifiable understanding; thus, one can conclude that while we do not have an explanation of the Whole Thing (tm) now, it seems some day we will.
Remember, there was a time when most people only accepted that the world was flat. A few people did tests and realized that their tests and the laws of math for a flat earth did not jive. Many people through away the differences because "how can you explain a round Earth when I clearly see flat land and the sun and moon revolving around us?" It took a long time of gathering evidence to recognize that it was *our perspective* that was flawed.
The Big Bang is merely our current understanding given the view of all our evidence. It is not the first proposal. An early proposal was Steady-State universe. Like any good theory, it gave predictions of other things we should observe, but they didn't hold up to testing. The Big Bang has. Does this mean that Big Band is The Answer (tm)? Of course not, because it doesn't (yet!) explain what came before it; however, that may be a meaningless question.
Paul Davies has been trying to marry Quantum Dynamics with Cosmology has the interesting suggestion that the idea that there is such a thing as time may be very misguided. I can't do justice to his work here, but the short version is that time is just another direction in QD. The QD works irrespective of time and the suggestion that perception a past and future comes from how we view things in a macroscopic view; in other words, our perspective is likely wrong.
What makes Science scientific is that scientific theories present something that is testable and is rooted that everything we need to observe exists within the universe. Intelligent Design coached in statements that sound plausible to the layman, but it is flawed because it makes claims that cannot be tested. It's faith is based on lack of proof. Science is faith based on proof.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
Science is based, even moreso, on the scientific method, which, sadly, doesn't seem to be taught in schools in the U.S. It may be mentioned once or twice in ten years of education, but it's not taught, such that kids graduate from high school actually understanding it well enough to explain it to someone else.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I'm tired of hearing about the E/ID debate, and I'm sick of seeing news about it. Can I PLEASE have a filter that explicitly excludes these kinds of discussions from my RSS feed? Preferably either one on my /. account or one that plugs into aKregator? I neither have the time nor the inclination to care even that much about this topic, and I'm quite busy evaluating for myself which side has more assholes and who is less worth listening to. At the moment, both sides are losing, in my estimation.
You're all lunatics.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
evolution is not about how life started.
once life of some kind existed (by some unknown method) then evolution applies.
I love broken car analogies so here is one.
Steering requires a moving car like evolution requires moving life.
Steering a non-moving car does nothing like evolution applied to non-living stuff does nothing.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That is how I have always argued it. The argument seems so simple, and so obvious. Yet not only do people not think of it themselves, they twist their minds into pretzels trying to figure a way to deny its validity. It is absolutely frightening what religion does to people's brains.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The universe could be caught in an infinite big bang/big crunch loop. The big bang could happen when enough of the black hole formed by the big crunch had evaporated away (hawking radiation) and could no longer sustain itself (explode, big time). As the debris flew outwards the relentless force of gravity would eventually win (assuming the correct cosmological constant) and cause the big crunch.
Hey, just a thought. I expect that there are an innumerable amount of holes in it. Even if there were not, it's not like anyone's every going to get around to proving it.
... that the only science of intelligent design ... IS the science of evolution.
The reason IMO, even as a staunch defender of intelligent design theories, that this is the correct move, is because the only real science (currently) for intelligent design, is the exact same science as that of darwin's evolution.
I.e. the only way to prove evolution is to design a repeatable experiment, whereby the experimenter designs the environment of the experiment (e.g. with fruitflys), and then evolution occurs before the naked eye, as organisms adapt, or are selected by fitness, and ultimately evolve in the controlled confines of this scientifically reproducable experiment.
Of course, the irony is that this simultaneously proves both evolution, and intelligent design. Because without an intelligent designer of the experiment intervening and subverting nature, there would be no results and no new life forms to witness.
That's nice but what does the Big Bang theory have to do with evolution?
Both theories are repugnant to those who have a deep seated need for something, anything which is in control. The idea of a chaotic, unplanned and meaningless universe scares the crap out of them. For me, that just means that nothing bad is certain either, that my plans are potentially as good as anyone else's, and I can give the universe whatever meaning I like.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Let the Kids decide
God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith.
Yet if "God" demands belief, faith, without proof in "It" to go to heaven instead of hell then "It" is sadistic.
I used to believe but after I "survived" an accident I lost the beliefs I had. And yes, I used and meant "survived". I was riding my bike when a moving van hit me. While I was in a coma the docs told my family it would be a miracle if I lived. If I were to talk to those docs now I'd say they were wrong, my life has been a living hell since.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Unless the Flying Spaghetti Monster lives in that pond
Lives under the pond? No. Lying dead under the pond, waiting and dreaming? Yes.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
Many of the advancements to science can be considered outside of what is considered "science" at the time.
You're confusing prevailing beliefs held by scientists with the scientific method itself. You're right, at any given time some portion of the best-believed scientific knowledge will be wrong, and other scientists will eventually find evidence for other theories. This will, however, be done using scientific principles. It will not be done by examining scripture.
ID is unique (I'm not talking about young earth crap) because it really is not straight philosophy as it has too many ties to empirical data, it shouldn't be religion because (at least the reasonable arguments) don't actually argue for a "God," and yet it doesn't fit very nicely into the current definitions of "science."
ID simply does not use the scientific method. To do so, it would have to generate a testable hypothesis which is disproveable. It is inherently not proveable to show that the earth was made, in some way, by a deity. As Wolfgang Pauli once put it, "That's not right. That's not even wrong!" His point was that, for a theory to come under the purview of science, it has to be disprovable. ID is not. ID takes a specific belief and carefully skirts around existing evidence in a way that it avoids making a testable hypothesis. As such, ID does not belong in science curriculum. There's also the notion of "why the Christian religion?" If they get equal billing with science, surely Mayan, Greek, Norse, Phoenician, Aztec, Zulu, Persian, Flying Spaghetti Monster, and other creation myths should be taught in science class, right?
An attempt to limit scholarly inquiry by excluding it from scientific discussion will only discourage diversity in the scientific community.
We're talking about what should be taught in high school science. Textbooks contain the best available knowledge at any given time, and that's what should be taught in PUBLIC schools. The vast majority of scientists have examined the available evidence and mechanisms and concluded that evolution is almost certainly responsible for the existing biodiversity on earth. No one, however, is preventing a group of people from conducting research into ID or anything else, or of teaching it in parochial schools not funded by taxpayers. So no one is attempting to limit scholarly inquiry.
Many (if not most) advancements to science are made by those exploring unpopular theories, but no one denies that what they're doing still qualifies as "science" (as opposed to Astrology, ID, etc.). Can you give an example of one advancement (or more) to science that can be considered outside of "science"? I'll allow outside of "science at the time" as long as you stick to time periods since the scientific method was created.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Just tell them that the schools will offer to teach ID as a fact when the churches teach evolution and Darwinism as a fact.
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Do you have insurance? Why do you need insurance, if God will protect you?
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Do you have a job? Isn't it written "Ask and you shall receive."
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Any kids? After all, there's less than a 100% chance that their kids will believe, so they have a chance of increasing the number of people condemned to hell. Shouldn't you be practicing birth control instead of making babies?
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Is incest still okay? Adam and Eve's kids must have practiced incest.
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Do you have more than one wife? King David had 300, and he was "a man after god's heart". the lech. and Solomon had 700.
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Is slavery still okay? After all, God commanded his people to enslave their enemies, and even Jesus never condemned slavery.
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Is racism and genocide still okay? After all, God commanded his people to kill off those who were not true believers.
Gee, that "Intelligent Design" doesn't look so intelligent any moreKevin Smith on Prince
You go smite those god damned literal bible types.
AAAAHHHHHMEN!
Deleted
Just to point out. In the bible it says God created the world. However it doesn't say how he did it. For all we know he created the world through evolution. Fact is, no one will ever really know for sure. Anyway just something to think about.
while i am a firm believer in evolution, i find it rather ironic that the creationists' ideas have evolved into intelligent design, but the evolutionists' ideas have not evolved into anything new.
as new evidence comes to light, the scientific argument should change over time to adapt to the information available. in other words, evolution should evolve the way that creationism has.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
"ID is unique because it really is not straight philosophy as it has too many ties to empirical data"
OH PLEEAAASE! what empirical data ID has? that the human eye is so complex that it could not evolve by itself? Please show us a site where empirical data that verify ID are posted.
"it shouldn't be religion because don't actually argue for a "God,""
Yeah right. Can you say 'hypocrisy'? "intelligent designer" means "creator of the universe" i.e. "god".
It's a well-thought out comment.
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
there is evidence that we can all see, whether it's in the Bible or in the environment around us
Where is this evidence? I haven't seen any evidence of any supreme diety. Nor for any soul or spirit.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I've only seen those sort of lessons about power plants in classes called "Earth Science" and "Environmental Science". In physics I learned physics, in biology I learned biology, and in chemistry I will learn chemistry. I also live in the United States.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
he only exists in your mind
Im assuming that such an objective, clear-headed individual such as yourself as some empirical evidence of that?
The reason I ask is because (and I speak as one of those unwashed masses I think your post was aimed at), all of the scientific theories Ive heard for the origins of the universe sound just about as implausible as the idea that a god of some sort created everything. My uneducated understanding here is that those scientific theories tend to work (sort of) mathematically, but there's not a whole lot of concrete evidence in support of any in particular.
Likewise, in my limited experience here (less than 3 decades), it has seemed to me that people will pretty much use anything to keep them in line - material or imaginary - but that a combination of guns and an economic stake in your way of existing seem to work far better for keeping people in line than religion does.
I havent seen any evidence of god that I cant explain with math or science, but I certainly havent seen any math or science that preclude the idea....but...since you're so sure of yourself...maybe you have some? It would certainly help me settle of couple of bets with my other uneducated friends.
Wish I could provide a reference, but I read about a simulation that showed that a fully working eye could evolve in a pretty short span (well, still many many generations, only much faster than most would guess).
The theory goes something like this; that it may have been advantageous to detect light or maybe from which direction light comes, specifically sunlight, maybe for navigation - don't recall what the study said. From simply feeling heat on the skin, to a part of the skin being more specifically sensitive to light, to start detect variations in light, to starting to "see" contours, to a rudimentary eye, the steps were all quite logical, although I am now extrapolating from a vague memory...
It's all about if something provides an advantage for survival and therefore reproduction - if it does, and well enough, it may yield fantastic results, like the eye. Conversely, bad designs that doesn't really affect survival to any large degree may often be left untouched forever - a good example is our shared throats for breathing and eating/drinking, which is a pretty half-assed design, causing discomfort and problems, even death at rare times. It's just that it's so rare that it actually affects someones survival that there hasn't been an evolutionary need to get rid of it. Still might happen in the future.
Not that this actually proves anything, just shows that it's quite possible to find reasonable, logic explanations for incredibly awesome things like the eye as well as incredibly stupid designs like the shared throat.
Spine World
another point is that there are only so many hours and days in the school year, and we already constantly make choices - as you point out - about what does and does not warrant precious class room minutes.
Science is essentially a process of knowing about the natural universe. Now a big part of that is that scientific theories must be falsifiable, that means that they must be stated in such a way they can be tested to be proven false. This is key, science is only about testable thing. If you can't test it, it isn't science. That's why there's objections to calling string theory a theory, it isn't. It's a nice bunch of math, but currently it doesn't make testable predictions and thus isn't a theory, it isn't in the real of science, but rather math and philosophy. If such a time should come when it does make testable predictions, then that is the domain of science.
So when you understand this, it is pretty easy to see that ID isn't science. The reason is that it invokes god, which is the ultimate untestable. It is perfectly possible that there is a god guiding evolution with an invisible hand, and there's no way to detect it, but that doesn't matter to a science class. Since you can't test it, it isn't science. If the ID people want it accepted as a scientific theory, they have to make testable predictions.
Thus this ruling is a correct one. Regardless of if you believe ID to be right or wrong, it isn't science, it can't be. You can't have an untestable supernatural component to your idea and have it be science. Doesn't mean it is wrong, but it can't be science.
Consider an old, weathered rock in the desert and a wheelbarrow in the yard. The wheelbarrow exhibits properties of intelligent design while the rock does not. There are properties of each that allow us to classify them as "intelligently" designed or not--along the lines of "I know it when I see it." I think that a cogent philosophical/scientific exploration of these properties would be useful to science. Such an exploration might help us to decide whether a certain physical phenomenon is the result of some intelligence acting or simply an unguided application of physical laws.
Imagine a scientist trying to explain how a wheelbarrow came to be via a sequence of unguided applications of physical law.
It is possibly the case that some of the astrophysical observations that we make today are of phenomena that are the result of guided application of physical laws rather than unguided. Attempts to incorporate the unrecognized "guidedness" into our scientific theories (which are biased towards unguided processes) may warp or even invalidate them.
The real problem at the heart of the whole controversy is state controlled education. In a nutshell, it is impossible to educate without instilling values of some kind. Since the state controls the curriculum, it largely controls the content of the values being instilled in children during their formative years. This is the very crux of the problem.
People disagree with each others on the subject of basic values. Essentially, there can be only two options as to the who has the right to select the values to be instilled in children: it's either the state or the parents. Since strong opinions of any kind tend to be controversial, children educated by the state are taught watered-down values, because the educational infrastructure prefers to avoid controversy at all cost. The only strong values taught are acceptance and conformity; in other words, submission to the primacy of the state.
The state should be a reflection of the values of the electorate and their values. It should not select nor be in a position to select the values being inculcated in the children of the electorate. Simply put, if you want your children to be taught real values, of whatever nature, you must have the right to do so and not subordinate that right to the powers of the state, in the form of a state controlled educational system.
Intelligent Design is so much window dressing around an irrational rejection of Evolution. That should be self-evident to anyone with any form of intellectual integrity. But the fact remains that parents who believe in the ID voodoo have the right to have their children educated with an ID curriculum, as long as the children remain minors. Conversely, parents who reject the ID fallacy have the right to keep their children's education free of such nonsense.
In short, this subject can only be controversial and command such public traction when we are debating who should control the curriculum of a state controlled education. In a sane society, there is no controversy, since parents control the values being instilled in their children.
Which is why you should reject state controlled values and support school-voucher programs.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
...presenting the most common ideas as theories and letting the student choose what they want to believe? I can understand not elaborating on something such as creationism other than defining it since there isn't much to say that isn't religion specific; just let the churches handle the specifics. Evolution is a good solid theory with a lot more proof than creationism, not that there is much proof of creationism beyond "Look around!" (that IS the meaning of faith after all.) I just don't see the point in trying to drive even the presentation of the creationist idea from schools. I believe I'll bring it to a halt here before I dig myself into too deep of a hole here. Just think about it, what's wrong with letting someone believe in a higher power? Isn't it their right as a person to choose what they want to believe? Just my 2 cents.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
"God demands faith. God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith. If you see something that you think is proof of God's existence, you're wrong. He's ineffable. That means you can't effing figure him out."
This is, of course, your belief system talking. Who really knows? If there is a God (and I hope that there is) one can not really know anything about him from reading any book or listening to any story handed down though the veil of time.
Unless God speaks to me directly I can't be sure what he thinks or wants. (And even if he does it may mean that I'm just crazy.) All we have are many, many books that other people claim are from God. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't but just because one of those books says that God demands faith doesn't make it so.
This is nonsense. There's not a drop of science of any kind in ID. ID does not argue that "God set the evolutionary process in motion", or "God guided the evolutionary process". It flat out argues that "some things (i.e., the eye, the bacterial flagellum, the bombardier beetle, the tongue of the green woodpecker) are too complex to have evolved gradually. They are 'irreducibly complex', meaning that if you take away any one part, the whole system fails (which means that they could not have evolved gradually). The existence of such objects is proof of a design and proof of a designer.
This is NOT science, and is the very OPPOSITE of science for at least four reasons:
1) Appeal to the supernatural to explain natural phenomenon. (Yes, ID *does* quite clearly argue for the existence of a God. It's just a rehashed version of the teleological argument, and if you argue that all things in nature must have had some "designer", then in the end, you need a god to break the infinite regression.)
2) Unlike science which crafts theories from evidence, ID tries to find evidence to match a theory that already exists. (Unsuccessfully. Every example of "irreducibly complexity" has been explained by evolution.
3) It is completely unfalsifiable. The theory goes that "if there is any ONE thing that is irreducibly complex, then that is proof that EVERYTHING is the work of a designer." In order to *disprove* ID, you have to *prove* the evolution of every feature of every creature that has ever lived.
4) The whole purpose of science is to tear down barriers and to *learn* things. ID encourages ignorance and says, as a famous comedy bit once said, that a "magic man done it".
As scientists know, ID has absolutely no place in the science classroom or in science itself. It's unfalsifiable pseudoscientific garbage that produces no useful predictions whatsoever. Leaving it open as a possibility within the realm of science makes no more sense and is no more useful than allowing for the possibility of Zeus's invisible hand being responsible for lightning bolts.
If philosophers are convinced by such a bankrupt "theory", they're welcome to it. Despite what you claim, there is not a SHRED of evidence to support it.
What you've done is restate the handwaving used to justify the Prime Mover being the end of the road. Perhaps if there were some evidence on hand for the Prime Mover's properties, then we could get somewhere, but there isn't. It's simply a made-up rejection of the logical consequences of insisting that causality somehow holds firm prior to the Big Bang (if the phrase even has any meaning at all).
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As a matter of probability, as a matter of history, as a matter of precidence, ID is emminantly more probably than a Darwinian Evolution.
ID is not science and therefore should not be taught in science classes. Evolution on the other hand is science and belongs there. I wouldn't mind having ID taught in public schools however as part of a philosophy curriculum. If so though then other beliefs of the origin of life need to be taught as well. Such as the Apache Creation Story, Navajo Creation Story, and the Zuni Creation Cycle.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Intelligent Design does not rule out evolution in the sense you described. Programmers use "genetic" or "evolutionary" algorithms all the time - and that is an example of intelligent design.
How the hell did this post get modded insightful? This was flamebait through and through. Not even our top scientists can agree on whether there is a God or not, so how can one /.er make those claims with absolute assurance and then get modded up?
Brusselsprouts! There goes the SETI program too - one of my favorites.
you don't know the truth or the lies but you believe in one of them!
The intelligent design "argument," by the way, is simply a new realization of the age-old argument that Richard Dawkins calls the "argument from personal incredulity." (If you haven't, go read Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker.) The argument goes like this: an ID proponent might look at a complex biological systems such as the bacterial flagellum and say, "my, that's really complex, isn't it? I can't possibly see how any of those component parts is any good on its own. I can't imagine that such a structure possibly could have evolved through gradual change and recombination of preexisting structures." In other words, ID proponents give up and assume, quite literally, a deus ex machina.
The alternate approach is to actually attempt an explanation. While it's true that biologists haven't come up with compelling evolutionary explanations for every single biological phenomenon observed, the theory of modification and selection is the best one we have to explain biological complexity in general, and I expect that its descriptive power will only grow as we learn more about the details of life. And it's certainly much better than throwing your hands in the air and saying, "that's too complex! There must be a go^H^H^Hn intelligent designer! Hallelujah!"
The fundamental basis of the scientific is repeatability.
All the evidence that underlies evolution is repeatable - without having to reproduce 3 billion years in a laboratory the size of the entire Earth.
When you understand how this can be true, you'll be a lot less stupid - and you'll understand what "repeatability" means in the scientific method.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Probably something very similar to what is after. It wasn't "god," I assure you of that.
The Farewell Tour II
Ah, stupid design!
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
45% rejected evolution for any living thing
Perhaps then these people need to contract a drug resistent strain of TB, like the one that guy had who was flying across the pond. Or perhaps E coli or avian flu.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If I shoot you in the head, some impetuous folks would jump to the conclusion that this event caused your subsequent death. However, they are just guessing, since they can't repeat the experiment.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
Would you mind answering that question without being insulting (not you, Skreems, in particular, just the other 99.9% of /.)? Seriously guys, there are plenty of people who are open-minded enough to listen to the arguments you make. When they (we) raise questions, you need to answer them instead of being insulting. If I choose to take the Bible on faith, that's my prerogative, since religion is based on faith (iow, does not require proof). A scientific explanation, otoh, is not afforded that same luxury. It sucks and its unfair (to the short-sighted), but thems the breaks.
And so you know, no, I will not argue "but every missing link discovered creates two more." I would, however, like an answer to the question you alluded to: If a part has no useful purpose in the current generation, why is it passed on?
Rather than mod you down, perhaps you could actually justify what you said by, say, citing research. That you can make up accusations off the top of your head isn't being argued, but I'll wager you don't know enough about the subject to actual make a meaningful critique. Thus you invoke works like "metaphysics" and "philosophy", hoping (possibly subconsciously) that someone will actually believe that the bullshit you just wrote had even the rudiments of a legitimate analysis.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That's a nice argument.
Where is the Undo button for my life? Not to mention the Esc key.
Could you get me a positive proof of that assertion? Please keep in mind you have a high bar to pass, the father does not hide from his children, as they say.
And who would you be to decide this? Who are you to call other people ignorant? Have you explored every universe, every dimension and every plane of existance, and found no God? I think not. You sound like one of these people who condemn Creationists and such when they try to force their opinion on others, yet you feel authorized to offend the ones who think differently from you. I'd like to know who the hell thought this comment was insightful.
..... thank Christ for that !
Over in the UK they don't bother teaching things like that even in those classes. They spend the extra effort saved on actually putting up wind farms.
For your next one, you should believe in neither! You might want to warm up before you try those mental gymnastics, though. You might sprain something otherwise. But it'd totally be worth it for the look on people's faces when you tell them "Oh yeah. I'm an atheist but I don't believe in evolution."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Good point. Happy to refute it.
This is not an example of actual evolution - there was no change to the gene pool. This is, however, like the industrial era moths, an excellent example of natural selection.
As mentioned in the article, the existence of silent moths was not new - but the circumstances that allowed the to dominant is.
Those questions cannot be answered. You would have to know the mind of God.
In the Bible, there are few details about creation. The main point is God is the creator. The Bible states that the universe was created in 6 days, but man is responsible for defining the passage of time. Therefore, the actual amount of time for creation is unknown. The point is to have faith that the writings of the Bible are true.
Should creationism be taught as science? No. Creationism is a leap of faith. Should the theories of evolution be taught as fact? No. Over time, these theories will change as new evidence is uncovered and our understanding of the universe expands.
How do you combine creationism and evolutionary theory? Good question...
Here's the original paper.
I was recently watching The Ascent of Man (BBC, 1973). When discussing evolution, Dr. Bronowski says something to the effect of, "Of course, today, almost nobody denies evolution." All I could think was, "How far backwards have we gone that in 1973 the issue was pretty much considered a fact by the general population and now..." It's scary, really.
This is not an example of actual evolution - there was no change to the gene pool. This is, however, like the industrial era moths, an excellent example of natural selection.
Evolution is any change in the relative frequencies of alleles in the gene pool. Natural selection is the process which drives that change.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The problem I find, however, is that when we try to extrapolate what many would claim to be absolute truth based only on what we know how to observe so far, we can easily come to the wrong conclusion. The answers may be good enough or close enough to what actually happend to give us what for our purposes is respectable predictive power, but it's still just guesswork until we've repeated the whole thing for ourselves and verified the results.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Bush-appointed official government scientists have declared Intelligent Design as science and designated Evolution theory as a belief often held by terrorists. Just kidding. I think.
Hmm, interesting take on the theory - I'd like to get it clarified, if you'd be so kind. My understanding of 'survival of the fittest' is that it's essentially a self-fulfilling chain of logic which goes like this:
Replace longer neck with whatever is applicable - a 2-colour-seeing mutation in a colour-blind species, or legs that bend a slightly different way which prove to be an advantage when living in hilly areas, etc.
So, what am I missing? Where is the metaphysics and/or religion needed?
What GP is pointing out, in a roundabout way, is that if you assert "X cannot exist without Y", then by definition X is not a Prime Mover. If you also assert "a Prime Mover exists", then you have to stop traversing this chain at some point and say that "Z is the Prime Mover". But perhaps Z is nothing more than the singularity that existed before (and I use that preposition loosely) the Big Bang. Where's the evidence that "Z cannot exist without Z'"?
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
I need mod points! This deserves an informative at least!
Oops, how did this get here?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
"...has their 'science' cured cancer yet?"
No, and neither has library science.
"Religion is for people who want to believe in fairy tales, live in trees, eat berries and die of the first trivial infection, anything else is hypocritical."
Buddhism is not a religion. It's a philosophy based on reason and experience. Which is why most Buddhists, most notably the Dalai Lama, embrace the findings of science. EVEN if they have to revise long-held thinking on something. I don't have the exact quote but I remember reading about the DL visiting some research laboratory and making a comment to that effect.
"Meanwhile, those of us in the real world will use science to improve our lives."
Which is what most, if not all given the chance, philosophical Buddhists do every day. Those practicing folk-Buddhism intertwined with local religions, superstitious traditions, ancestor worship, etc, such as in Laos and Cambodia, maybe not so much. They've got bigger problems though. Like getting clean water and food.
Bloody hell it's hard to know where to start you are so ill-informed.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
The last item in quotes is hard to read because of the single quote followed by double quotes; read it as "Z cannot exist without Z-prime".
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Creationism isn't science because you can't replicate it in a laboratory.
God spoke to me.
...has their 'science' cured cancer yet?
... and science should not be used to answer religious ones.
Has yours? No? What does that tell us then? That yours is no better than theirs.
Next time you might want to choose examples that *your* science actually has some real victories in... you know like has their 'science' built an iPhone? or something like that.
But that's all beside the point. Religion is for the questions relating to the purpose of the universe and things in it. Science is for determining how the universe works. The two questions are fundamentally different.
Religion should not be used to answer science questions
I think it must really piss off ID people that between the four choices -- intelligent design, stupid design, intelligent accident and stupid accident -- science has found the most evidence for life being created by "stupid accident".
Additionally there's a trap in a assuming "Nothing Existed" as Step 1, previous to Step 2.
Our understanding of space-time suggest that not only space came into existence at the big bang, but also time itself. Which is why it doesn't necessarily make sense to talk about "before" the Big Bang; if time only exists inside the universe, it's a meaningless concept.
Unfortunately we live in a middle world where relativity and quantum physics aren't part of our daily experience, so this makes about as much sense as Schrodinger's cat does to the layperson.
We already live in a universe where, in empty space, particle antiparticle pairs come into existence out of nothing, attract, collide, explode and generate energy (as a photon) that travels backward in time to provide the energy for the original pair to come out of nothing (as long as everything is done within a unit of Planck time so the universe can get away with this kind of "cheating"). This happens all the time, everywhere, in empty space, and yet we can't conceive of the universe itself coming out of nothing?
Yes, I have taken just enough quantum physics and cosmology to screw me up for the rest of my life.
In your mentioning of the UK, it occurs to me that perhaps there is a project being undertaken by the government here to create God by means of it's omnipresent CCTV network with loudspeakers attached on high, which are used to occasionally talk down to people in a loud booming voice to chastise miscreants for their misdeeds (litter dropping, loutish behavior etc) in a very old-testament style manner.
...
...
"Oi, you! I command thee, pick up that Mars bar wrapper thou hast dropped on the pavement, or face my wrath (of a 20 GBP fixed penalty fine)."
Maybe the government are just worried about the threat of competition and want to nip it in the bud when they they young.
Cue 1984: s/Big Brother/God; s/The Party/Christianity
>> "Does God exist?"
> "Of course he exists. Christianity exists. God is the embodiment of Christianity."
I thought the intelligent design theory was based on the idea of throwing all the parts of a bicycle out a plane, and then seeing a well formed gleaming bike on the ground - taking into account the time taken for gravity to work its magic.
The chance of getting a bike from doing this would be astronomically small, but of course we do live in an astronomically large universe.
I think intelligent design should be taught - but taught as an exercise for debate. Missing out religion from the curriculum also leaves a huge gap in history.
When I was young not only did I have to walk to school, they taught Religious Education in it, but you could go play with computers instead if you so wished - now where are the virgin memory chips I need to sacrifice to the great god of logic.
While I am always encouraged to read news of the mystics once again being driven from the science classrooms, I still find it depressing that the need to do so continues to exist.
but does it run Linux!
The point is that ID isn't a theory at all. It is an idea. ID proposes not one mechanism. As far as as the idea of intelligent design is concerned, new organisms just kind of *poofed* into existence at semi-regular intervals throughout Earth's history. Wake me up with ID proponents are willing to suggests a specific mechanism by which the supposed "designs" came into this world.
So you think organisms just *poofing* into existence at semi-regular intervals over the course of Earth's history is more proabably than them developing naturally over time?
You're looking for evidence in the wrong places. Or rather, you're missing the forest for the trees. You're not going to find evidence for evolution in individual fossils or individual samples of DNA. You look at how they all fit together (the "forest.)
Lookup "ring species." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Piltdown man
A tooth of a pig drawn into an apeman!
A lie and a fake 5 years by 1927.
Nebraska man
A lie and a fake for 40 years.
By then everyone in the world thought they were from apes.
How did it take 40 years for the scientific community to find it was a clumsy fake?
Javaman (homo erectus)
Discovered by Dr Dubois and he himself declared in 1938 that it was just a monkey (gibbon).
He had found human skulls in the same stratum did not tell anyone for 30 years!
A lie and a fake. He eventually renounced the javaman as a fraud himself.
Peking man
Dr. black discovered it, a tooth and some ashes.
Soon after human remains were found mixed with animal remains. The animal remains were the food of the humans.
Hey but they wanted an apeman! so they grabbed bits of both and made Peking Man!
1972
Richard Leaky
Found a skull that supposedly blew evolution out of the water by 2.5 million years. The only thing left was
Ramapithecus. Just some fragments of jaw bones and some teeth. The same size and shape as a babboon in Ethiopia.
It never has been found and it never will be found a creature that is more than brute and less than human.
Also there is such little evidence for apemen that the amount would not be accepted in any other field of science.
And there's plenty more scientific evidence for the non-existenance of evolution!
(I know this is not what you like to hear, so just score me nothing as usual. Thanks)
I return the favor to other religions. ;)
Inelegant Design
Intolerable Design
Incomprehensible Design
Inebriated Design
Indefensible Design
Indeterminate Design
Make up your own!
And remember you have to be gleeful to mock my religion
otherwise you're just hurting yourself.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
It's a false argument. It presumes the ID crowd's mechanism of evolution, which says a complex system can only evolve by the slow accumulation of all it's parts, none of which had any useful function until the last part evolved into existence. But this simply ignores the possibility that might be other pathways to an irreducibly complex system. For example, what if some of the parts had a different function prior to becoming part of the irreducibly complex set? What if the set wasn't irreducibly complex in the past, but lost some proteins until the set that remained was irreducibly complex?
Or how about this conundrum. What if there was an "irreducibly complex" set of proteins performing a vital function, then some unrelated protein randomly evolved in a way that caused it to be better than one of the existing proteins. This made one of the proteins redundant, which then disappeared ('evolved away') leaving no trace. The remaining set is again "irreducibly complex". By observing the second set, can we now conclude that it was "intelligently designed"?
Gee, this is fun.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Isn't it sufficient enough for these science types to believe in god because it is a "safe bet?"
Seriously though, pascal's wager almost always leads to some interesting conversation with Christians and atheists alike. Try supporting it around these types of people if you haven't yet.
what many would claim to be absolute truth based only on
There are no absolutes in science. What we have is the best model so far, based on observable evidence. The model will continue to change, and parts of it will be modified, thrown out, and refined. That is how the scientific method works.
"Creationism" or any religion-based "theory," and I use that word very loosely, are not built upon observable evidence over time. Creationism is not based in fact, and it is not continuously refined and retested. There is a reason why people refer to religion as "faith."
Please try not to view those of us who accept evolution as doing so upon faith. It is simply the best model that we have at the moment. If the model changes, based on new, factual evidence, and it can be retested with the same results, then our understanding of evolution will change right along with it.
I don't know about you, but I like my explanations of the things around me to be based on fact, not largely fictitious prose written two-thousand years ago.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Where I get tripped over ID is that when *I* am Intelligently Designing something, such as a software module, there is a process of evolution going on in my head. I start out with the basic idea, do a first try, step back and look at it, make adaptations and enhancements, evaluate it in a test environment, refine it some more, plug it into a larger module and test that out, fix some stuff I forgot to deal with, rewrite the whole thing from scratch a couple times, try out the alternatives, pick one and go with that, do some performance tuning, roll it out to QA and customers, make staged changes based on feedback, roll those out, then maybe go work on another software module with the same process.
So even if ID is true, it's still evolution, it's just moving the venue from "stuff happening on earth" to "stuff happening in supreme space alien's brain".
This is (currently) an impossible step. Just going from amino acid sequence to protein shape is a very hard task. (see folding@home) We don't have any real way of proving whether or not the resulting protein 'works'. Is it structural? an enzyme? is it merely a building block for something else? (protein clumps on ribosomes for example?) The problem is akin too taking random shapes and proving which are parts for working machines - without any real way of knowing just what those machines do or how they work. That and not all mutations are single base-pair mutations. This experiment is far too simple.
T
Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.
Do you believe anyone should create educational standards, or do you believe it should be total educational anarchy?
The experts in the fields involved should be the ones to set standards, for instance scientists shoud set science standards, not politicans.
Do you believe that education should be required by law for children? If so, how would you determine what qualifies as "education"?
Yes, Education should be required up to a certain age, say 16, but the way a child is taught should not be mandated so long as they meet the requirement set by experts.
FalconShould there be a Law?
From the hypothetical G being as done in Futurerama: "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
:D
The reality is if there was a proven observable god; you wouldn't need faith you would simple just know and take it for granted. "Oh there goes god again doing stuff..." God turns into a very mundane and run of the mill entity. So I don't think there will ever be an end to the "does god exist?" arguement.
Here's another point I love to make on this topic. Considering that the easiest explanation is most likely... isn't it more plausible with intelligent design that Aliens and not God are responsible for creation? I have to admit, I think it would.
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day ruled "Not Night"
Science finds an atom and looks at it harder, it finds sub-atomic particles and looks at them harder and thus our knowledge continues to expand.
You seem to be trying to conflate science with scientists. Scientists are human beings and belief/opinion/ego etc that diverts from a pure scientific method. This has downsides (retarding scientific progression by clinging on to accepted notions) but also has upsides (insightful leaps, often with scant initial evidence). The strength of the scientific method is not that it renders scientists infallible, the strength is that by sticking with it as much as we can it allows us to progress despite our human failures.
Scientists will readily concede that we don't know everything, that models are being refined, that wholly new explanations are being sought, that generally accepted theories are still being tested (at some expense).
That is sciences strength. Science seeks and then seeks some more. It does not say "I dunno, god must have done it". And any 'beliefs' that scientists may have does not undermine the fact that science itself is not about belief.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Please tell me that God at least greased up said Yoda doll before inserting it into your rectum! And yes, it was too intelligently designed. Just not for shoving up your ass. Lastly, are you sure it was God? Because sometimes people like to play with their own asses, but are too embarrassed to admit it, so they make up stories, like how they just slipped and fell onto that cucumber, or they heard that peanut butter was a good hemorrhoid cream, and they don't know HOW that dog got there. It's okay if you did it, really it is. Just ask Bob Goatse, ass-play can be fun! Not for me though, not with my hemorrhoids.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
why do people assume God is male?
:-)
...
Have they seen his penis?
If "he" is omniscient, and the universe is very large,
then he must have a whopper!!
Insert "Big Bang Joke here
Not trolling, just illustrating the absurdities of those
who say "God is Male"
Whether bhuddism is religion or philosophy could be a very long discussion.
However, for the philosophical aspects of bhuddism, Tao, or any "mystic" system I have come up with a very simple way of thinking about it for myself. 2000 years ago, a Tai Chi practioner would not have the physics or anatomical knowledge we have now. Still, through careful observation and direct experience, they developed a system of movements, breathing, and a philosophy of mind that successfully increases a practitioner's health, power, and well-being. Really, they have. Practice it for awhile with any seriousness and I am quite confident that anyone would agree who is at all open to the experience and who has a decent teacher, at least.
So for 2000 years, who was ahead of the game, the ones tied to the limits of their scientific knowledge, or the practitioner?
I have gotten to a point where I'm not willing to let the limits of scientific surety define the entirety of my universe. It is, by its very method, limited in its understanding and always will be even as the limits grow infinitely. However, when I delve into the realm outside of current scientific understanding, I do it knowing that it's all "unknown", and I'm very careful with labels and assumptions. If something seems useful, great... that doesn't mean it's truth, but it may be useful nonetheless. But I must remain able to revise and edit.
Of course, you could say that the same fluidity is needed in scientific knowledge. Newtonian physics is still quite useful, even though it's not "true".
Can you use something without calcifying, without undue attachment? Can you let a belief die, no matter the investment or time you have in it? I think that is the key question, really.
"Absolute truth" isn't what science is about, and "extrapolation" isn't as important as you would make it; inasmuch as it is relevant at all, it is just in coming up with hypotheses. Once you have a proper scientific hypothesis you then, by definition, have empirically falsifiable predictions you can test to validate the hypothesis. If those predictions fail, your hypothesis is wrong. If they do not, your hypothesis is a viable theory. That doesn't mean it is right: a more parsimonious or powerful theory may displace it because of the greater utility it provides, or additional predictions may be later derived from your hypothesis enabling new tests that may fail. No proper scientific theory (though some things popularly labelled theories are untested hypotheses) rests on extrapolation alone: if it is properly called a theory (as evolution is) it has testable predictions with have withstood testing.
Science isn't about giving answers that are some kind of Ultimate Absolute Truth. It is about refining models that have explanatory and, more importantly, predictive power.
The factual evidence that supports creationism is that anything exists at all. That there happen to be other models that are perceived as more acceptable to the scientific community does not alter this fact. Not that I offer such evidence as any alleged proof for the existence of God... how can something that is merely imagined prove within the imaginary scope the actual existence of one who imagined it to be? That's the level that the universe would be at compared to a deity that created the universe... just a figment of his imagination. That we might imagine ourselves to have intelligence and sentience, and even the ability to question our origins and our nature does not necessarily mean we are anything more than this.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
for some it was religious faith that gave them strength of spirit to overcome adversity or to become greater than they already are.
I don't think faith is a bad thing. Blind faith against all proof is a bad thing. Scientologists going off their meds being an example that easily comes to mind; now that's bad. But that's organized religion for you, it's dumb. When we get together and just discuss our philosophies and the nature of humanity that at it's core is good regardless of where you come from. That takes down barriers and brings human nature back into focus. But faith in something that flies against what we know factually is bad.
I'm not a religous guy anymore (but deep down I believe), but that doesn't mean I feel the need to bash on religion in general. That's a bit unfair to those who need religion and aren't in this camp of "My faith vs your science". They aren't all like that. So I'm all on the side against the fundies that try to discredit science with theories like ID but when you trash on religion in general that's a step to far.
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And it was SCIENTISTS not creationists that discovered and exposed the hoaxes.
The belief in a creator god cracks me up:
Who created HIM?
No one, he always existed.
Then why can't we say that the universe always existed?
'Cause I'm not smart enough.
sure god exists.. here's the proof:
do you believe in words ? (yes)
is god a word (in the dictionary) ? (yes)
ergo god exists...
its just the definition that trips people up!
All I have to do is stimulate the right part of your brain with the right electromagnetic field. It was an interesting experiment, as everyone knew that something was being done to their brain, yet most people still felt that the experience indicated the actual presence of the divine.
One argument I love to refute from personal experience is the "If you ask with an open heart He will show you the way," argument. Well, I have and I got nothing. I'm still an agnostic, but I can only believe based on my experience that any God that might exist must not give a damn whether I believe in Him or not.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Evolution has nothing to do with religion. It's extremely logical. Short version:
1. Assume two different animals.
2. Assume one of them is more likely to get food / have children.
3. The one that is likely to get food / have children is also likely to pass on its genes.
There. Evolution in 1-2-3. Notice, no leaps of faith.
I lost my sig.
e.g. Then God said, ''Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.'' And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning--the third day.
...apples ruled "Not Oranges."
"Strangers have the best candy" -Me
I never heard any mainstream religion explain the cruelties of life on Earth. Wars, natural disasters, disease, genocides and whatnot. What kind of good and benevolent God sits around and does nothing while people suffer every second on this planet? That's why I personally find the existence of a good and benevolent God so difficult, in fact I don't believe God, as described in mainstream religions exists.
The Problem of Evil (PoE) is trivially false. If that's the reason why you're an atheist, well, you should probably rethink your position. While is has a strong emotional grip (which is why it is so popular), it's a *logically* untenable one. There are other reasons to be atheists, but if you consider yourself a rational person at all, you should discard the PoE as the reason. I'll give you a brief argument showing why (and no, I think "God has his mysterious ways" is not an answer).
The PoE argument is this, in a nutshell:
1) God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. (I.e., all knowing, all powerful, and all good.)
2) If there is suffering in the world, and God does not stop it, then God cannot be (one of) omniscient, omnipotent, or omnibenevolent.
3) Suffering exists in the world
4) Therefore, God does not exist. QED.
While it looks on the surface like a completely reasonable and rational argument, it is not. There are, in fact, several fatal mistakes in the argument.
The first thing that we must do is dispose of the concept of intervention as being relevant to the discussion. What the argument is actually about is about a flawed creation, in which suffering happens. If God had built a perfect creation, then no intervention would be necessary. Conversely, a creation which needs constant interventions to require it to run correctly (cars having accidents without anyone being ever hurt), is likewise a flawed creation (because it needs fixing on a constant basis). So, interestingly enough, we can completely ignore the question of why God doesn't intervene, and instead simply examine the question of a flawed creation, in which suffering occurs. In other words, the PoE, restated, is "Why couldn't God have made the world a perfect place?"
This exposes the critical problem with the PoE. It is actually, logically, impossible to create a perfect material world.
Any world God could create with people in it has the following constraints:
1) Certain laws of physics
2) Matter, objects, etc.
3) Multiple agents possessing free will.
Actually, take a second here to imagine how you would create a world, you know, if you were God, using the above three constraints. It's a very interesting thought experiment. Build a world.
The logical inconsistencies can be shown from the above, that it is impossible to create a perfect world with all three of those constraints in place.
1) Laws of physics means that certain physical processes will always behave the same. A tooth biting into food to eat (to power our energy needs) can also be used to bite and wound another. Could God create an invincible human? One whose molecules could not be altered by an arbitrarily high level of energy? Only if the laws of physics were not to hold.
2) As long as there is matter, there will be scarcity. It's one of those unavoidable consequences that Star Trek always seems to gloss over. Star Trek claimed that the advent of the replicator made money obsolete (supposedly since there would no longer be scarcity). But Captain Kirk also had one of the only houses within Yosemite. How could he buy or sell that house? How come he could get a super cool house within a national park, but other people can't? While it might be possible to give a person a perfect, worry free life inside something like The Matrix, in a material world it is impossible.
3) While it would be possible to create a paradise for a single individual, it is impossible to create a perfect world for multiple free agents. Many people have risen through the years to become kings and tyrants, and thought th
Where did the useful skepticism go?
That useful skepticism was primarily produced by the left hippocampus, whereas his emotional attachments to his religious beliefs are primarily produced by the right hippocampus. Unfortunately, in most brains, the two are mutually-exclusive; when one is dominant in a thought process the other one is barely expressive (hence the heartless logician stereotype).
Or at least, that is one theory. I think I read most of my evidence for it right here on slashdot. We can perhaps apply that skepticism to this theory as well and just reflect on the issue from a higher-level perspective...
Like, for example, the observation that the mind will seek to preserve the integrity of the core set of beliefs which provide it with a sense of security. Anything that might disrupt that sense is percieved as an attack against the self-structure, and all kinds of interesting psychological self-defense mechanisms will kick in (including, but not limited to, outright irrationality). It takes courage to remain open to the possibility of new learning, and it is far, far easier to just assume that one already knows all the important things. From my perspective, this amounts to little more than intellectual cowardice. But don't say that to a Christian's face...in my experience some of them are not at all hesitant to use their fists as a means of demonstrating just how well they can turn the other cheek.
I used to try to cultivate a high level of respect for the sorts of value-systems that motivate other people. After all, don't I demand similar respect? But in truth all I demand is that I be treated with basic human decency regardless of my beliefs, and so that is all I will give in return. I reserve the right to think a person who can't distinguish between mythology and science, nor between fact and opinion, is injuriously unintelligent and/or a coward.
(disclaimer: believing in fairy-tales about talking animals, magical fruits, and super-powerful beings who threaten to torture you for all eternity is ENTIRELY different from believing that their is more to the universe than science understands. Mysticism is not necessarily the same thing as mythology...it is just common (and unfortunate) that the two are generally associated).
actually i think everyone here is surprised that you didnt get modded flamebait, i would have if i still had mod points. go back and re-read what you said and explain how that is somehow bringing reasonable discussion to this. the fact of the matter is that ID is people trying to say that god created everything without an ounce of proof and forcing this to be taught in schools. thats great if you believe in it but its not a science and it should not be taught in schools, at least not outside of a philosophy class under the guise of "science"
Like all religions, philosophies and belief systems, Buddhism is only meaningful to its practitioners in so far as it explains something about the real world. Claims that religion is about answering 'unanswerable' questions that science and rational thought cannot be applied to are nonsense. We are by definition only capable of asking questions from within the context of reality. Any meaningful answers about life, the universe and everything are going to give us information about reality. If they didn't, they would not - could not, by definition - be meaningful.
Reality is a jigsaw puzzle, and facts are the pieces. The puzzle only fits together one, single way. Anything inconsistent with the puzzle that is reality - ie the supernatural, or religious beliefs not based on evidence - is, by definition, unreal, and therefore untrue, false, wrong.
The beautiful thing about reality is that the pieces of the puzzle do fit together. To say that the real world must be understood using logic and rational thought is redundant: reality is logic. Logic is consistency, nothing more. And reality is not only itself perfectly consistent and therefore perfectly logical, but it defines consistency and logic.
Religion is illogical and based on the supernatural, and therefore doesn't fit together with the rest of the puzzle that is reality. It is therefore either wrong, or doesn't tell us anything useful about reality. Either way, it's meaningless. This line of reasoning is inescapable. Anyone of normal intelligence who looks at the facts - the pieces of the puzzle - cannot avoid concluding that atheism is true, any more than one can avoid concluding that physics or biology or chemistry or mathematics is true. The facts about our world only fit together one way, which is why there is no Muslim biology or Christian physics or Buddhist chemistry. Something can only be true if it is consistent with reality, and by corollary anything that is not consistent with reality cannot be true. Truth transcends religion because religion is wrong. End of story.
A-Bomb
I don't know where anyone gets the idea that the Big Bang says anything about there being "nothing" at any point. It doesn't really even describe the beginning of existence as everyone seems to think, just he beginning of the universe as we know it.
Scientific method: a body of techniques for investigating phenomena and acquiring new knowledge, as well as for correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning, the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.
You might say that a real scientist is always a practitioner. What you think you know based on what you heard from someone else (even someone with a reputation as a "scientist") is in some part based on faith. As you put it, "tied to the limits of their scientific knowledge." Faith in science, yes, but still faith, until you have verified it yourself.
The proper scientific attitude is "I don't know, let's check this out for ourselves, what happens when we do this?" which is, coincidentally (?) also the proper attitude recommended by Buddhist teachers. In the Kalama sutra, the Buddha said:
I always thought it was really interesting to see a 2600 year old tradition which teaches, "don't accept something just because it's in the scriptures -- check it out for yourself!"
include $sig;
1;
"The factual evidence that supports creationism is that anything exists at all"
There's an invisible dragon that lives behind my toilet and causes inclement weather. It rains, and thus factual evidence supports my claim. Just because meteorologists prefer some other theory of weather doesn't mean anything - after all, I don't see them being able to reproduce any hurricanes.
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
We don't know the properties of the early universe past a certain point, nor any other purely naturalistic state of existence prior or causal to it. Nor do we actually KNOW that everything must have a cause: in fact, this is simply something we assume given that everything IN the universe appears to (though perhaps not: QM raises some interesting issues here). Applying that logic TO the universe itself is a category error.
In short, you can either declare that all things need causes, or you can admit that there are exceptions (for your pet Prime Mover theory). But once you admit that there can be exceptions, you lose all ability to deny the same exception to some naturalistic uncaused cause: which is always going to be a simpler brute fact sufficient than a brute fact intelligent designer.
for the USA to advance out of the 19th century on this.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
What else can you say, but "I don't know", to The Big Question "Why?" (the meaning of life, etc.)
FWIW, am also OK with "I don't know", but many people immediately jump to "oh no, what if the answer is; No reason". Lots of people can't handle that and need to fill the void with some explanation.
Ironically, science may provide the ultimate answer to matters of faith, and it may be "some things are not knowable."
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Next time you might want to choose examples that *your* science actually has some real victories in... you know like has their 'science' built an iPhone?
No, but their science has taught some to transcend the desire for an iPhone. Everyone knows that the Enlightened One prefers the Helio Ocean's dual slider design.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Evolution happened, see the post next to this. What didn't happen was speciation. But that has been observed in the laboratory as well, in fruit fly populations. Also, before the invention of nylon, there were no bacteria capable of eating it. Years after its invention, a species evolved that could.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Why aren't people satisfied with their surroundings as their own personal God? I think this is the basis of deism, and I've read its the belief Albert Einstein held.
What bugs me is how someone can look at something they don't understand, and blame it on something they can't understand. If something complex is a product of something else complex, why not form a recursion? Why blame it on God? It may be easier to do, but it takes curiosity out of life.
Support SETI@home
Probably not. Has yours?
Give this a looksee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRsWAjvQSg
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I love how everyone who has a crackpot theory thinks they're Galileo. The truth of it is, if there had been a real scientific community around Galileo, they'd have agreed with him. His evidence was sound.
There is zero evidence for ID. None. The only arguments I've ever heard in favor of it were arguments against "DE" as you call it, or Evolution as the rest of the world refers to it. Darwin wouldn't recognize much more than the shell of it, these days. He laid the groundwork, but there has been a lot of building since then.
Basically all ID arguments come down to the following: "Evolution doesn't explain X. X is either irreducible or too complex to have come about 'by accident'. Therefore ID is correct, and God exists."
This is not proof. This is not science...It's actually a fallacy: the argument from ignorance. In many cases, the ID objection isn't even rational. ID has no falsifiable hypothesis, it has no positive evidence supporting it. It's not science, by any definition of science I have ever heard.
I always ask, "Do you have any rational, positive evidence to support ID?" And the answer is always no. I have never heard a single thing that wasn't either negative, or trivial. Maybe this will be the first time.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I disagree. These two worldviews are constantly battling with each other, and have been for a very long time (note the historical persecution of breakthrough scientific minds for religious reasons). They suggest very different ways of living your life, one way based on evidence and reasoning, the other based on dogmatism and saying, "This much knowledge is enough for me." Which one of these two views is going to provide our next medical breakthrough? Which one has historically driven humanity forwards? I'm not so sure they're both useful.
In the Church of Trinary.
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
That's *not* the FSM lying dead under the pond, waiting and dreaming! Count the tentacles carefully.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I think you a Kuhn have made the mistake of not seeing the difference between a belief and an idea.
Proper sciencetific theory envolves no faith. Certainly a scientific mind can have faith, and some scientists have made the mistake of believing in the expected results of an experiment to a point. Usually this is the result of poorly planned thought experiments.
A scientific theory must be dropped or modified when it has been proven false through repeatable experiments. You cannot simply believe in a theory on a matter of faith alone when evidence shows it not to be true. It has been shown that the creation story of the Old Testament while great alegory, is certainly not a true "historical fact" as often toted by those of the many Jewish and Christian faiths.
Basically, science doesn't "plug holes", it attempts figure out what actually is the correct answer when a theory is shown to be in error. Science contiues to experiment in attempt to learn the truth. It does not, if performed properly, does not make excuses for a disproven theory, it should include the new evidence in its ever changing theory(ies).
Just because you can, does not mean you should.
Oooh, someone needs to lay of the serious pills. That was a joke, Falcon. ;-)
I went through something dealing with this with a friend. While in college a friend met some guy and quit college to move with him across the country. A couple of years later she returned with his baby and as a "Born Again" Christian after he dumped her. Almost every tyme I talked with her religion ended up in our conversation. Eventually I had to stop talking to her. So I get a bit sensitive at tymes.
FalconShould there be a Law?
total lack of evidence for the existence of something, despite 10,000 years of continual searching, is pretty good evidence that the thing does not exist.
Thats disingenuous. There are plenty of things humanity has recently discovered that certainly weren't possible to observe until today. Your argument precludes any future discoveries of anything that people have been looking for for awhile. While a good indicator, it's far from a sure indicator.
A theory that includes a creator needs to explain both the existence and formation of the universe AND the existence and formation of a creator prior to the formation of the universe.
So it's an extra layer of "no evidence"...is that completelackofevidence++? If you've hit zero, you've hit zero....there are layers that have to be explained with all the other "scientific" origins speculation that goes on...not just with the idea of god.
Religion: Youre not incompatible with science, stop bitching and moaning
Science: You literally have nothing to say on the subject of god...you have no evidence for or against and you can work in either scenario with zero changes. Stop being (ironically) holier than thou
I thought The Register had been ruled "Not News"...
Isn't anyone here the least bit concerned about the whole government-declaring-what-is-or-isn't-science thing? I thought there were more libertarians here. But I guess most everyone supports giving the government more authority as long as it is pushing through their preferred policy positions.
(I see the core insight of libertarianism as: even if the current crop of politicians are making the "right" decisions, what happens when the next crop of politicians has all the same authority but the "wrong" policy positions? Better off to not expand the authority of government in the first place.)
Teeth. How much intelligence could possibly go into the design of teeth? They suck!
The Spine. I can think of several better ways to go about that one.
Foot arches. If these were designed by God, then God hates pedestrians.
Appendix. 'Nuff said.
Sinuses. WTF! What kind of a MORON bores holes in a skull that do nothing but attract infection?
Nipples on men. Makes perfect sense as a leftover byproduct of an evolved system, but as a purpose-designed feature? Get real!
The list goes on longer than I am willing to type, (did I mention carpal-tunnel syndrome? There's some brilliant engineering) but I think I've pretty well debunked Intelligent Design by a Benevalent Deity.
Either God intelligently designed the world to fxxx us over hard, or he couldn't design his way out of a paper bag, or HE DOESN'T EXIST!
Computer simulations have already done just that. It hasn't been done in a lab because we haven't had functional laboratories for three billion years yet.
Incidentally, repeatability in the sense you're implying isn't a fundamental basis of science. If it were, cosmology wouldn't exist as a field, for one. Falsifiability, on the other hand, is, and evolution hasn't been falsified so far.
Ted Rall in the Slate: http://cartoonbox.slate.com/tedrall/2007/06/21/
Of course, the interesting part of the big bang theory is not what came "before" the big bang
That's when the Matrix booted up. Obviously there was nutn we'd be aware of before it booted; kind of like we're not currently aware of the Matrix.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Someone who actually understood what empirical evidence was would understand that.
Is 10,000 years of searching for something and failing to find it compelling? Sure. Personally, I'm not persuaded that there is a God or Gods, and I'd say that the lack of evidence is certainly a component of that. However I still am intellectually honest enough to admit that it isn't 100% positive proof.
How do I deal with this uncertainty? By pretty much ignoring the question of God/Gods except when it has a direct impact on my life. One such way that it impacts my life is in our educational system - I'm opposed to pseudo-science being taught in schools. Pseudo-science that includes ID and nonsense like that, but also that includes concepts like "And despite what some people will tell you, total lack of evidence for the existence of something, despite 10,000 years of continual searching, is pretty good evidence that the thing does not exist." It's not good evidence that the thing does not exist - it's good evidence that whatever means we have been using to look for it, if it does exist, are not sufficient to detect it. There's a difference there, and it's not a terribly subtle one.
Also, I should note that I find your comment ironic, considering your username.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Religion: You ARE incompatible with science. You are incompatible with reality. You've caused far more problems than you've solved. The solace you offer the suffering is more than offset by the suffering of the wars you cause. We don't need you any more and we probably never did. You are the disease. Knowledge is the cure and the thing you fear most. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
Support SETI@home
...the Prime Mover, by definition, is the Mover that doesn't need a Mover. That's why he's Prime, and not just A Mover.
Then, you have no infinite regression. You have finite regression to the Prime Mover.
And you've brilliantly mis-applied Occam's Razor by removing the one entity that's actually required, rather than any of the non-require intermediate Sub-Prime Movers.
There's a joke here about a crash in the Subprime market, but I don't know what it is.
That problem's easy enough to get around by slightly reformulating the premise:
If you can coax them this far along, this is what most religious people (including myself) believe.
(Note that I believe that [whatever] consists of the earliest moment of the Big Bang, and that it's been a dozen or so billion years since [whatever].)
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
My first post clearified the difference. NS does not count as Darwinian Evolution. Besides, no one actually disagrees that NS occurs in nature - not even the Biblican Literalists.
The answers may be good enough or close enough to what actually happend to give us what for our purposes is respectable predictive power, but it's still just guesswork until we've repeated the whole thing for ourselves and verified the results.
So you're saying, unless we know everything, we don't know anything? How do you survive in our society hating science as much as you do?
Look, what would you have us do? The scientific method comes to tentative conclusions from evidence. The conclusions are tentative because they represent the best explanation for what we currently know, but we're learning new things all the time, and sometimes, we learn things that show us we were wrong. Being wrong isn't the worst thing in the world.
Religion, on the other hand, offers the following - just make-up whatever you want and pretend like it's true. (Or we'll make something up for you if you're not feeling creative.) How is that better? Surely no reasonable person could mistake make-believe for a path that's liable to be fruitful in finding out what is true?
Nobody holds the claims of science to be absolute. Absolute certainty is the province of religion, not science. Personally, I'd rather be mostly right and getting righter (as our knowledge expands and is refined) than, like religion, fixedly and eternally wrong.
Truth or certainty. I guess you can pick which is more important.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Maybe you wrote quickly but Monte Verde isn't in Peru it's in Chile.
A professor in one of my archeology classes talked about the controversy. A lot of archaeologists were skeptical of the stone tool evidence that were just river rocks, until they were shown similar rocks with twine wrapped around them, some with handles attached.
Pro Clovis archeologists right?
FalconShould there be a Law?
4. Random mutations occur.
That last one's critical. To add to your point, evolution has even been reproduced with simulated "organisms" on computers rather than with living organisms with remarkable results. It not only makes sense, it works when we try it ourselves. It's the furthest thing from faith I can think of.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
and that it can not be taught as science.
I disagree. While it may be a very very weak theory, it can qualify as science. It is testable as much as SETI is testable (example: Images or math in DNA). Nobody has ever proven that design cannot be identified by works. It may be difficult, but not necessarily impossible. And "proper" ID does NOT assume a super-natural designer. The seeders/fiddlers of life on earth may just be the SETI aliens. Remote chance, yes, but remoteness by itself does NOT make something non-science.
Those who try to rule out ID from "science" via boolean rules of science will fail. It is simply a very weak theory, and THAT is why it should be excluded from school. (Perhaps SETI should also.)
Table-ized A.I.
I should clarify that I am looking at a version of ID that excludes "irreducible complexity". IC *has* failed multiple tests. Perhaps I should call this "id" (lower-case).
Table-ized A.I.
Of course. It's not even possible to be 100% positive that the universe exists. Or that it did 15 minutes ago. Or that it will 25 nanoseconds from now. But the probability that it doesn't or didn't or won't is so small that it can safely be ignored. Much like the probability that gods exist could be safely be ignored. That is, if there weren't people out there willing to kill you because you ignore that unlikely possibility. The damage that is done by these mistaken beliefs exists with nearly 100% probability and therefore it cannot be safely ignored.
Also, I should note that I find your comment ironic, considering your username.
I have never said I believe extraterrestrial intelligence exists. I only believe that it's worth looking. And there, too, I will consider continued absence of evidence to be evidence of absence. And that in and of itself is a result worth pursuing. Assuming that only one answer to a question has scientific value is somewhat unscientific, isn't it? Some might even consider the answer "Yes, we are alone" to be more profound than the converse.
Since we've searched about .00005% if the Galaxy in about 0.002% of the usable EM spectrum (both numbers are overestimates), I'll reserve judgement for the time being.
Support SETI@home
teach kids how to make chemicals that are fun to make?
Yea, and the next thing you know the Gestapo, er Homeland Security, will be busting down your doors accusing you of being a terrorist.
FalconShould there be a Law?
-DE is also not disprovable.
-I gave an observable, predictable example of ID occuring and an extremely likely prediction of it continuing to occur.
Why are you AGAIN smearing this argument by bringing up the 'God' thing - it's a red herring. Can you please stop? I'm trying to have a rational discussion with you.
Evolution is non-disprovable because the only alternative you see to it is a 'God' and you can't get around believing in that so you are stuck with DE. The DE community is constantly developing new fantastic theories to explain what has happened here on this earth in a 10 billion year lifespan (actually, a lot shorter than that due to habitability issues.)
And I can give you 'rational, positive evidence' to support ID. An advanced races has created a brand new imperfect, inferior one right here on earth. Look at Monsanto. There is your evidence of ID occuring.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/0 7/1925250
;)
In about 100 million years, intelligent design _will_ be considered science.
It's only utter bullshit for the _first_ generation.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
God is integral to ID as it is postulated in this country; talk to an average ID proponent about little green men, and he'll think you're out of your mind. In Kitzmiller v Dover, the judge decided based on the evidence that ID was an obvious attempt to get religion taught in the public schools. But lets assume you're serious.
Nearly all arguments for ID talk about "the limits of scientific inquiry"...Are you suggesting that hypothetical aliens are outside the realm of our investigation? That's highly unlikely. It's far more unlikely that they could create anything that is ultimately irreducible to our inquiries.
And I fail to see how simple genetic modification translates to the level of consistent macro evolution on this planet, as depicted by the fossil record. I also fail to see any reason to suspect that there is anything in our heritage that would necessitate a designer; this is something you will have to show before your argument can be taken seriously.
Remember, you're going to have to explain the fossil record. If there is no evolution, then your hypothetical designers were hanging around for billions of years, churning out fractionally different animal types...They're still doing it today apparently.
Additionally you're going to have to explain why, if the designer is intelligent, 99% of all species are extinct, and the ones that aren't have unused organs, a la, the spleen, and vestigal wings, in the case of a goodly number of waterfowl.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The definition of evolution that you are using is not consistent with one that is accepted in the scientific orthodoxy.
Try picturing billions of years of life in your head with millions and millions of generations and mutations and natural processes taking place and conceive the outcome of such a process. Having trouble? Me too. It is difficult for our brains to extrapolate generational natural selection into macro evolution, but that appears to be the way it works.
God does not provide proof, because proof kills faith.
ID as stated does *not* assume supernatural life makers/fiddlers. Monsanto is a life ID'er to some extent.
Yes, it is *backed* by the religious, but the truth of a statement does not change depending on the beliefs of supporters or detractors. Otherwise, evolution would turn false if a Darwin Cult formed.
Table-ized A.I.
Ahh.... five more minutes, Mom?
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
How much of the univese has been scanned for God? What techniques have been used? I daresay that SETI has been more exhaustive than the SGE, by any scientific metric. You might say that the Search for God's Existence is unimportant, but let me ask you this: You claim that people are willing to kill you over a disagreement about God; how many people are willing to kill you over a disagreement about whether or not ET exists? Surely, by your own argument that people willing to kill you makes something important should apply here?
My problem with your comments is that you're attempting to come from the angle of science, but you are absolutely wrongheaded with your statement that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, ESPECIALLY given that the search to date has been rather far from exhaustive. It would be like saying "Hey, I have a building with 500,000 rooms, and I thought about looking in one of those rooms for something, but since just thinking about it didn't find the thing, it obviously isn't in the building at all."
What's funny is that I personally could give a shit about whether or not God exists, am very much into SETI, and generally hold the view that God probably doesn't exist while ET probably does, despite there being roughly the same amount of evidence for both (none) - so in a way, I agree with you on some things. You responded to someone asking for empirical evidence with a claim that was based on very non-empirical evidence - which is exactly the same tactic the ID people use when trying to defend ID when people call it nonsense.
It's okay to just say, "In my gut I don't believe that God exists." There's no shame in not being certain. But there should be a lot of shame attached to trying to make it seem like there's real evidence when there is none, just so you can support your gut instinct. That's not science, it's sophistry.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
When it does happen, it is the beginning of existence... and you don't need Stephen Hawking to be present.
But I really haven't heard about many apes/monkeys/etc. emerging from the jungle and joining the rest of civilization.
We work for 50 years of our life so we can eventually retire and spend our declining years in a nursing home, looking forward to mushy bananas, crapping our pants and living without responsibilities. Monkeys get there without the 50 years of work.
Who's smarter?
(Real answer to the original question: what makes you think such a large and significant evolutionary step is going to sponteneously occur in your lifetime, out of the hundreds of millions of years of evolution? Besides, that particular ecological niche is taken; and how do you know they haven't tried to join human society and been rejected? It's not as though humans treat each other particularly well...)
Blank until
I must say, I agree with your statement about God requiring faith. I don't need faith to believe in God because I have "seen" evidence of God. But that is a different discussion. In the same way, I don't need a theory to prove to me that God created the universe or created human kind. If I believe that God is Omnipotent (all powerful), then I have to believe that he's capable of "creating" everything. Think of "existence" as an equation with n variables, where n=infinity Only someone who's "bigger than infinity" can solve it. There is an interesting verse in Genesis which, in some translations, states that God commanded the "Earth" to produce all kinds of animals and plants etc, but it clearly says that "God said: I will create" humans. This to me is a clear indication that (If I believe the literal Bible and God) I am created not evolved. I do not have to disprove evolution to be safe in my faith in God. I think it is a lame argument and leads absolutely no where. People who are looking for proof that God exists to believe, will never find it outside of themselves. By the same token, those who try to "defend" God will always fail because people, in the middle of "miracles" still worshipped animals. But, these discussions are always entertaining, even though at time the sheer ignorance of people on both sides of the argument (it's not a debate) is both frustrating and astounding.
Perhaps God is the programmer who defined the diverse physical constants before bootstrapping our instance of the universe? And Meta-God is the programmer who defined God's universe's metaphysical constants before metabootstrapping it? And Meta-Meta-God is...
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The problem with attacks on Darwinian science is that they are done from the perspective of someone who accepts an ancient text as flawless received wisdom. Such a person assumes that we in the scientific community also accept our received wisdom (The Origin of Species, for example) as flawless. But no, we realize that Darwin didn't have all the facts or all that many fossils, that science builds upon the shoulders of giants instead of believing that all of reality was revealed at some point in the distant past. Darwinism looks at nature and sees it performing the scientific method (experiments, paradigm abandonment, etc.) to achieve its ends, even as it itself undergoes these forces. I wrote about this at length here:
the Authoritarian Model of Information Value
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Its called faith you stupid jackass. Some people have it and others don't. Deal with it.
I'll give you the benefit of a doubt that you're not merely a troll, but legitimately upset that some people don't believe as you do, and so ask you this simple question: What is it that is "called faith"? That is, what do you mean by faith? The usual meaning I hear is "belief in something without evidence". But I'm not talking about evidence or skepticism at all. Faith of that sort is not always misplaced: for example, I have faith that the person who put together the periodic table of elements in my chemistry class did so correctly. We wouldn't get very far if we didn't have faith of that sort, because it's beyond any of us to build our entire knowledge base from the ground up.
But since that's not the kind of thing I was talking about at all, I'm at a loss as to what you mean by faith and what it has to do with verifiability. Are you saying that acceptance of unverifiable propositions (that is to say, things that don't make any descriptive claims about the world at all) is faith? Cause I don't have any problem with that either: if you say that the sky is blue and water is wet and 2+2=4 and all sleezborgs are foodlebaks, I can agree with you 100%, because I agree that the sky is blue, and that water is wet, and that 2+2=4, and since 'sleezeborg' and 'foodlebak' are meaningless words I just made up right now, you can agree or disagree with that bit and it won't make any difference to me. So if both you and Joe Blow agree that the physical (i.e. observable) world operates according to such-and-such laws and has such-and such history, but you believe that that is the case because an in-principle unverifiable mind wills it to be so, and Joe Blow ostensibly disagrees, you two actually agree on all matters of fact; your point of contention is, literally, an empty statement with no truth-value (neither true nor false), so it makes no difference whether you say that's the case or not. For a mathematical analogy: if you say the measure of something is equal to 2 plus 1 plus 0, and Joe Blow says it's equal to 2 plus 1 minus 0, you're both equally right (or wrong) because you're both saying the same thing, namely that the measure of that thing is 3 - despite your difference in words.
An important footnote here: by "in-principle unverifiable" I don't just mean that no one anywhere ever WILL have opportunity to observe it, as may be the case with events far away in space or time; rather, I mean something like, if you had absolutely perfect instruments of every variety available to you, and a magic device that could take you any place and any time, even in that fantastic case there is no observation you could make that could prove or disprove the hypothesis in question. In short: a statement is verifiable if and only if, were there someone in the right place(s) at the right time(s) with the right sensors, they would be able to tell by observation whether the statement was true or not.
Now the third thing I can think of that you might mean by faith is something of a cross between the two above: where you say "I don't know what the things he's saying mean, but I agree with him 100%". This kind of blind faith is reprehensible. As I said before, I have faith (of the first variety) in my professors, whereby when they say something and I don't know any better I generally trust that what they say is correct. However, when I hear a professor say something that I don't understand (something which has not conveyed any meaning to me, though perhaps the speaker did mean something by it), I don't think "well, I don't know that to be false, and I trust him, so I'll believe that". I think "what?". And I try to ask questions until I can understand what's being said, and then, if I can finally tease out what exactly he means, then I'll either believe it or not based first on how much I know about the matter and then on how much I trust the professor's beliefs on the matter.
As a philoso
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
What is the likelihood of humans sending life accidentally or otherwise to Mars. Compare that likelihood to the evolution of life during the same period.
"Sending life accidentally". That's not "intelligent design" at all. It's "negligent accident".
Are you kidding? Our head of state was placed in power by the grace of God Himself. George W Bush just says that he was.... wait a sec.
My bird wants to be a dog. He's jealous of our dog because the dog interacts with us more. So he makes dog sounds, tries to play with the dog, etc, as if the dog had some "in" with us, the bearers of food and treats.
Meanwhile the dog thinks its a person. This is partly pack behavior but it's pretty clear that the dog doesn't really distinguish us on a social level, even if it does at a physical one.
This is most telling when the dog attempts to enter into group conversations. She tries to talk. It's not growling or attention-grabbing barking... just moan-inflection-babble she interjects. If we're all around a table or counter, she'll paw up onto it and engage us... not because she wants something in particular, but because she feels that she be involved in the social interaction.
Weird, huh?
Animals can want to be other things too given the right stimuli. By examining the majority of society I say that what most people want is actually pretty base and it is not normal to want to be something more, other than well off.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
what the hell does striving to be something greater than yourself have anything to do with whether or not you believe in god or evolution or the happy watermellon god, answer? nothing.
this is an extremely short sighted statement, because the two things aren't mutually exclusive of one another. I can and do believe in evolution. I can still be religious and have faith. And i dont have to think that I know everything or that I am perfect. There are things that are unknowable.
in any event, the belief of the origins of man have little to nothing to neccesarily do with your belief of who you are where you are going and what you are capable of. if you cant recognize that then you just have a whole lot more room for improvement than everybody else. I can't stand how every single person who argues how we need to believe in creation rationalizes the statment by saying "but we need our christian values" "but you need to believe that you aren't perfect and the you can better yourself" "but you have to believe everything i do or you are a sinner"
its such bull. none of these things have anything to do with one another. even the devoid statement "christian values" is a piece of crap. Values such as honesty, trustworthyness, honor, compassion, and etc are common morales of human societies. They exist independantly of any religion and most of them existed long before christianity, so stop trying to tell us how important these things are in relation to one another.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Like the UK (or any) government could identify science if it bit them in the ass.
Far from it.
It is more like function Q(a,b,c....x,y,z) has a fitness with many codependancies among the pairwise, triple, quads, and so on.
Q(a',b,c...x,y,z) may be worse. Q(a',b',c...x,y,z) may be better, provided enough a' survives long enough to have descendants with b' that crowd out the a/b.
There may be many base cases. It's not so simple and linear. People who use irreducible complexity-type arguments applied to evolution are like people who do statistical analysis of a word problem that ignore correlated events and then complain when the probabilities don't add up, or don't understand why you should _always_ change your door on Let's Make a Deal.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
So until a black hole is created from scratch in a lab, you're just going to handwave them away with "meh! They don't know yet?"
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
"many which fall under metaphysics/religion (e.g. there is a god called survival of the fittest that drives evolution, science is good, good is good, you are right, this is important for humanity, all religions are false)."
Funny, I don't recall any of that in Origin or any major work on evolution since Origin. These ideas you speak of are not found in any science textbook I've ever encountered. Seems like you have a problem with making shit up. That's something you might want to have checked out.
Secondly, your reasoning here and from the dude the linked blog (I'm scared for that baby) is pretty crummy. We've heard the "if evolution is true, then we should live like animals" line plenty, thanks, and it's just plain silly, frankly. Is isn't ought, and a caricature of both what biology describes and how that relates to morality just won't do, sorry.
as when evolution is the topic. Quadruple the normal response, and halve the intelligence of the average post, and you get an evolution thread (including those supporting, those denying, and those off on their pet hobbyhorses).
Seriously, for a community that prides itself on its geek cred, the illiteracy and overall ignorance in these threads is horrifying.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
The VMWare environment doesn't even have a way of TALKING about anything outside the environment. The memory space starts at 0, goes to 0xFFFFFFFF, and wraps around. It "disappears" when you "shut off" the host, but of course the VM isn't even aware of it... this is the way we want it.
Since we create environments with inner containers, we could speculate about the existance of outer containers. But they have no predictive power, utility, or detectability, so there's little point to argue either way.
This is the position we actually hold. We don't know, we can't know, and there's no way to find out.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
one is somewhat relieved that english fries don't exist, so they can't be renamed faith fries or similar.
You would be genuinely surprised if during an interplanetary voyage you discovered a large, red magic teapot. Let alone a blue one!
I use this argument on understanding divisions theist vs. agnostic vs. atheist and how some people misrepresent them.
Suppose there was an OTB that allowed you to wager on the existance or non-existance of a major deity (or dieties). The minimum wager was $10,000, and the odds are something like 1:10 against existance of the diety.
Theists would take the long bet, because their faith was strong.
Agnostics wouldn't bet $10,000; that's irresponsible and a wasted payment on that new house.
Athiests would take the "sure bet". Hey, easy grand. On the flip side, if they lost (and here's the kicker), they'd know there was a deity.
You'd think people think athiests would just explode into a puff of smoke if something came along to change their minds! You can't just stick your fingers in your ears and shout "La la la". The OTB has your $10000!!!
They wouldn't be athiest anymore after something like that. That's what it means to be athiest.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
What does ID predict? ID is precisely not science because it begins with the conclusion and then tries to find evidence for it. That is, it starts with the assumption that there is an intelligent designer (you say it's not necessarily supernatural, but that is a strawman, since the ID designer IS the Christian God, hands down).
You are confusion something that can be tested with a scientific theory. Homeopathy can be tested and refuted too, but it doesn't make it a scientific theory.
The point that the parent was attempting to make is that other species are designed not to need all this intellectual baggage we drag around with us. They can still accomplish the three prime objectives of life (eat, breed, die), and never waste a moment sitting and agonizing over the wording of their slashdot posts.
/sig
Wow, you really are out of touch with science, aren't you? Earth is estimated at about 4.5 billion years old.
Evidence that intelligent design has happened is not evidence that it is the source of all speciation on Earth. You sound like a Creationist who thinks he's proved that all of the world's geology was formed in 6,000 years because he was able to find ONE bit of geology that was formed in 6,000 yrs.
Man, I'm glad you're not a scientist.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Actually the Big Bang theory says that it's not reasonable to ask the question "What happened before?", because as far as we know there was no time to make the word "before" meaningful.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
We are superior because, if we froze all external environmental pressures (a big if, I know), in a hundred years from now, the human race would be completely different. Could we say the same about any other animal in the same example, without human intervention?
Space Shuttle was a program that strapped humans to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
This is quite interesting topic. Most of the present day science is based on some assumptions and hypothesis which are essentially based on some observationed. How to use these sciences for the human cause or advatage is the Intelligent Design(ID), unfortunately this is also based on assuptions and theories. If some body says that there is no science in ID it shows only their Intellectual level or their ingnorance. Of course it is understood that there no science in spirituality but spirituality has science, that human science. Spirituality is for the commonness of the people who are humans. Science for those who want to do some thing else. Similarly every design has some creativity it is left to individuals how intelligent it is are how natural it is. Since our level of science has made us to live far away from nature we may not be able to appreciate or understand the natural designs. To my knowledge Life it self is science, It is an ART - OF - LIVING, everybody needs a loaf of bread, a shelter to live and to be peaceful. This is quite natural. Human has not developed to the level of understanding the INTELLIGENT NATURAL DESIGNS.
The funny part is that last time I discussed with a creationist, his argument was hinged on the claim that genetic mutation could never, ever introduce a beneficial mutation. Guess that's another good example of pseudoscience: Depending on the person, they disagree with different aspects of the scientific approach, but somehow, they always end up with the same competing theory in the end...
I lost my sig.
If you really believed your religion was the truth, wouldn't you consider "The observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena," (definition of science from the american heritage dictionary) in the context of your religious beliefs science?
If you are a Christian, and you don't take the whole bible as truth, where do you draw the line? If the Bible's depiction of creation is a lie, is Jesus's promise of salvation a lie as well? I realize this analogy is a little extreme, and proponents of theistic evolution would argue that evolution does fit into the Genesis depiction of creation, but I think it is easy to see why a creationist would hold their beliefs as true, and consider the study of intelligent design science. Assume intelligent design is real (just for the moment). If that is the case, shouldn't the study of natural phenomena (science) take that into account? That is the viewpoint of the creationists.
It is clear that the UK Government does not share this viewpoint.
I think when it comes down to it, most creationists aren't as interested in science as they are theology, and they would rather have their idea of creation err on the side of God rather than the side of atheism. After all, when we are all dead, what does it matter if we evolved into our modern forms or God created us? If we assume God created us, but the truth is evolution was the case, why would he hold it against us? If biblical creation is truth, however, and we denounce it, God would probably not be happy that we convinced others of a story of creation in which God is non-existant.
For creationists, their belief is a win-win situation.
And yet so many people assert exactly that about the theory of evolution as applied to humanity.
No, they don't. The theory of evolution is supported by abundant evidence from multiple, independent lines of investigation; as a result it's accepted by consensus science. It's probably the best-tested theory in science and its met every evidentiary challenge put forth.
We still only accept it tentatively, of course. And it's been a remarkably effective (and interesting) model for the biological sciences. Essentially evolution is the reason biology is a science and not just stamp-collecting. People are, as a result, enthusiastic about evolution.
That enthusiasm isn't an assertion that the theory is Absolutely True.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
How does that differ from SETI?
Table-ized A.I.
That's because, in the US, there is a large population (and lots of them too), of people who don't need to learn no science, because science done never did nothing for them. Besides, it doesn't take any science to have 8 kids and live in a single wide trailer.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
It's nice to see it's alive and well somewhere. -Joe
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Evolution is something that works within the confines of the Laws of Physics. Without the laws of physics evolution would be impossible. The universe is governed by these immutable laws; therefore evolution is a property of this Universe. So what makes the Laws of Physics work exactly like they do??? So far we don't have answer to that one.
What about "Randomness", how can you have randomness within a mathematical universe? Do decimal rounding errors introduce randomness or is the universe a perfect computable system? All that would be required is the Laplace Machine to see that nothing is random and freewill doesn't exists, we just appear to have a choices because we can see the alternatives, but never-the-less always choose the same option. Schopenhauer says something similar in a thought experiment. If you go into a restaurant and look at the menu you're free to choose anything you want, so long as you can afford it. Then there's certain dishes I don't like, will I choose to eat one of those? What about the wife who'll kill me if she finds out I've eaten stake, as I have a heart condition. Before long freewill looks like more like coerce will. We still can't disprove that this isn't a predetermined universe.
So evolution doesn't disproved God, only that Genesis isn't a literal telling of creation. If you ask me they should rewrite part of Genesis and sick in a nice lump of the Selfish Gene give it a generator or two and nobody will know that it wasn't there all-a-long... Sure all they need to do if find some more of those Dead Sea thingies.
How is Bill Gates like a diety?
Microsoft's software is full of complexity.
Were all those bugs created by coding errors or were they created by design?
Does complexity and variation require intelligent design in computer software?
Does complexity and variation require intelligent design in organisms?
Newsflash: Reason still survives in the modern world - Government officials have not fallen into the dark ages (yet) - Hopes for sustainance of science in the coming decades!
Future archaeologists and historians will undoubtedly regard the presence of such news stories before the next dark ages as a clear indication of the pathetic condition of science in our civilisation. When confronted with a stupid theory the best course of action is to blatantly ignore it without remorse. Even by taking your time to attack the stupid theory, you are giving it some value (your time).
Such a model would not be enough to disprove the existence of God. For the universe inside Super Mario Brothers, there exists a scientifically-complete model; it happens to be 40960 octets long. However, when I hex edit a saved state, I am the god of that universe. I can modify the state of the game at will, without modifying the rules. Despite a self-consistent and fully-accurate model of the universe, God exists and can perform miracles.
Similarly, a god of our universe would be able to create objects without regard to the standard rules, and discovering those rules would not disprove her existence.
Note that I'm an atheist. I just want to make sure the logic on all sides is valid.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
I was really talking about the standard of science education in Britain. The subject has been gradually changing in this country for various political reasons. Sadly, the nation that produced Fleming, Newton and Darwin seems to have decided to rest on its laurels.
It's because they are usually throwing that out there after a less than exhaustive search, hell, even after a less than cursory search.
The amount of actual searching for God has been even less, relative to the size and lifespan of the universe, than a search for shipwrecks in a 1x1 centimeter square of the Pacific. Even more, most of it has been limited to thought experiments and not even any kind of actual search with any kind of rigor (however that would actually work). So saying that because there's no evidence for God is a strong sign that God doesn't exist is really pretty premature, and arrogantly assumes that we've done a much deeper search than we actually have. And this applies to anything - not just God. "Oh, we haven't figured out how to cure cancer yet, therefore we never will." "All attempts at cloning humans have had problems, therefore it'll never happen." "Nobody has ever lived past 150 years of age, therefore no one ever will." The amount of solution space searched in these particular cases may *seem* large to an individual, but that isn't the scale that matters.
Now, don't get me wrong - I'm NOT saying that we should look for God. I don't care, and I don't think God is necessary. The only time I'd advocate actually looking for God is if there were some theory in which it seemed like God was a requirement for that theory to be true and if we had some way that seemed reasonable to think would actually turn up evidence. As of yet, this hasn't happened - despite the best efforts of the ID people to claim bananas and peanut butter are proof of God. All I am saying is that if we're going to use an absence of evidence to say God doesn't exist, then it should at least be after an exhaustive search, whatever that entails. Me, I just cut out the need for that search by using other reasons to not need to worry about this whole God thing.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
According to the Prophets of WBC, we UKians are nothing more than a "raunchy little group of pagans".
Raunchy pagan? Moi?!
Ker-ching!
Adding some sugar on top of that, we can not only create favourable conditions for procreating, we can create new meaning in life, where none (presumably) existed before. Life has meaning because we made it that way.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
The problem with ID is that, above and beyond the mental exercise you're illustrating, nearly all of their poster child examples for irreducibly complex systems can be contradicted with specific evidence. For flagella, the structure is a couple molecules different from that of a structure which sits in the cell wall and controls the passage of lipids or some such molecule. With the eye, as someone posted earlier, there's an evolutionary advantage to every step in the development of the structure from the presence of light-sensitive cells in the brain through to the final product -- that, along with the fact that the eye has evolved independently 2 or 3 times would tend to prove that it's not irreducible.
And, as someone else also posted earlier, it's an appeal to incredulity. I find that people who disbelieve the possibility of evolution tend not to have a grasp of the truly staggering number of organisms that are involved in the process over its total time span.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
That, and the eye has evolved independently several different times on Earth. Offhand, I know the octopus eye is from a completely different evolutionary origin than that of mammals and all who share that branch, and I'm pretty sure there was a 3rd unique origin too.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
How about because observation clearly shows that it had a beginning ?
It always amazes me how people who claim the universe doesn't have a beginning in order to deny God "believe" (because that's what it is) in the big bang theory that states that the universe DID have a beginning.
Am I the only one seeing a problem with this attitude ? Probably
The point is that "the UK government has stated there is no place in the science curriculum for Intelligent Design and that it can not be taught as science." Finally, this government has pulled its head out of its own politically correct asshole, spoken the thoughts of the vast majority of the people that democraticslly elected them to power and stopped pandering to the small-minded lobby groups. Still, it's all too little, too late. I can't wait until they loose the next election...
I'm looking over the wall; and the're looking at me!
Newsflash: Reason still survives in the modern world - Government officials have not fallen into the dark ages (yet) - Hopes for sustainance of science in the coming decades!
Yep, unfortunately, that *is* news.
Or rather, the news is that the UK isn't run by religious crackpots like the US is.
PS: "sustenance".
Time-serving members of the civil magistracy have ruled only atheism constitutes true knowledge while religion is declared to be mythology and superstition.
self-reflection.
Fair points. Buddhism does seem to be a bit more realistic in its acceptance of science. I still don't understand how wasting energy in the pursuit of superstitions, imaginary people, etc is constructive though.
;-)
"Bloody hell it's hard to know where to start you are so ill-informed."
I wouldn't go so far as to say that I'm informed at all. At least I've grown out of having an imaginary friend
If it were only "nearly immune" to *all* antibiotics, it would have been wiped out by now.
It's trying, and making progress. Thanks for asking. Modern science would never claim to have all the answers, it's simply trying to fill the gaps.
It seems to me that working logically on a problem is better than desperately asking your imaginary friend to sort it out. When I was young and got into trouble I'd desperately rely on my parents for help. Now I'm a big boy I have to sort out my own problems.
For it to even be possible without some kind of outside aid would require many more years than this planet has existed. True, though, DE is mutations + NS but the dispute is about the mutations, not the NS.
The Big Bang did not create the Universe. Matter already had to exist at that point for it to be concentrated intio the singularity which ex/imploded. The Big Bang began the Universe's expansion. Nothing more.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Engineer: 2 + 2 = probably 4 but we'll call it 10 to be on the safe side.
-- "Hey kids, try this at home!"
"My bird wants to be a dog. He's jealous of our dog because the dog interacts with us more."
So, the bird doesn't want to be a dog, but simply wants what the dog has. Not the same thing.
"She tries to talk. It's not growling or attention-grabbing barking."
I hate to be the one to ruin your well crafted anthropomorphic fantasy, but that's exactly what it is and you know it. She did something, you reinforced it, behavior continued. It's not nearly as weird as you seem to think.
This is why I rarely get involved in these types of discussions. As a professional in the field, analysis like yours is all too common, and is wrong every time. It's nice to pretend that your dog "thinks it's people" but that's all it is, you pretending.
I do love the assertion you made that it's not attention seeking, especially since there's no way in hell you could know that, and more importantly, because it's clearly not true.
It is with math that you can define pattern recognition, therefor efficiency which uses pattern recognition to come to an easier smarter more productive end would classify this as a Math problem.
If we tought more efficiency instead of letting people come up with it on their own....we would have a lot more ikeas around the world.
- There are athiests who are both skeptics of DE and advocates of ID. Do you enjoy seeing your favorite causes or theories always being straw-manned by crackpots? If you are, say, a Republican, do want me to refer to you as belonging to 'the party of Mark Foley?'
- Don't care what some judge says. I don't suspend my judgement or my reason based on what some jackass in a black robe thinks and neither should you. Besides, under the robe is a lawyer.
- Aliens are not outside the realm of investigation.
- 'Still doing it today' - where? I can understand how a habital planet would be used for seeding or for experimentation. Or that humans did infact evolve over a much longer period of time somewhere else and then moved here.
- Speaking of the fossil record, it is incredibly incomplete, making DE a VERY tough sell.
- Unused organs can be evidence of a primitive designer or that they have functions that we are not aware of yet or that may have been used in utero. The bellybutton LOOKS vestigal on me - but was necessary in utero. Same for the spleen, it seems.
Absolutely; a scientist, at least a good one, needs that fluidity of thought and that detachment to one idea being "the right one". Needs to be able to investigate an idea... possibly for a long time, with a lot of effort, and a lot of risk of attachment... and not calcify around it.
But most people are not scientists. And for those of us that are not, the question is, do you allow yourself to explore the universe outside the boundaries of the body of scientific knowledge we currently hold? If so, you are exploring areas called "magic", "faith", "spiritualism"... pretty much by definition, as they are NOT inside the body of scientific knowledge we currently hold.
I'm not sure if you thought I was, but just to be clear I wasn't trying to insinuate that science itself is calcified or unwilling to look at what is outside of its boundaries. Just that there are an awful lot of people who call themselves "rational"... myself included, at one time... who think that any exploration of those things that have not really been explored by science or that are not understood by science is somehow weak minded. Personally, I think taking the line of current scientific knowledge... or even one step beyond, if you're a scientist... as the boundary of your possible understanding is weak minded.
I'm with you though that it always facinates me for how long we've had some basic truths figured out, and it troubles me that we have "known" them for so long, and yet they still seem in such short supply in day to day life.
Neither was Darwin. But many who not too long ago advocated that the earths age was in the 1000s or 10s of 1000s of years old were scientists. As were those who advocated that one race was genetically superior to another. Or that smoking is healthy. AND there are actual scientists who disagree with DE and do have a favorable view of ID.
And you can't help but try to smear my argument with the 'young earth' people, can you?
At least with ID I can show that it has happened and continues to happen. Can you do that with DE?
BTW - I'm not an 'accredited' scientist, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to assert my understanding or continue to investigate. Your mindset is similar to what you attribute to hard core Biblical types: instead of 'God is too complex for you to understand and need not explain itself' your like is 'Science is too complex to understand and need not explain itself.'
The scientific ommunity no longer searches for truth. If the logical conclusion of data leads to an intelligent designer or other being greater than ourselves, that should be the accepted answer. Rather the philosophical basis of the scientific mindset has presupposed that no such being can exist, therefore any conclusion that posits such cannot be true. Shame on scientists for abandoning what they purport to seek--truth.
Mutation is required for us to introduce new alleles into the gene pool, but not necessary for evolution. Remember evolution is any shift in the frequency of alleles in the gene pool. If that frequency change occurs due to natural selection, it is still evolution by definition.
Maybe you need to be using another term. Speciation maybe?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Quickly:
--You're judged by the majority. What you're asking me to do is judge by the minority, which is the exact thing you're accusing me of doing in the same breath.
--Read the trial transcripts, and try not to let your prejudices overwhelm your judgment, as the conservative christian judge didn't when he ruled against ID.
--Neither are fairies.
--I find the picking and choosing of parts of evolution to be absurd. Either you believe micro and macro, or you're deluding yourself.
--I think you should actually learn something about the fossil record before you call it "incredibly incomplete". We have a vast amount of data about a vast number of species. So far man isn't one of them. Religious types make a big deal out of this.
--Primitive designers aren't exactly intelligent. Calling the bellybutton vestigial is calling the umbilical cord vestigial, and it's not. Find an actual purpose to the spleen, then tell me about how it's useful.
--Finally, you've got no positive evidence. None. Zero. You talk about the fossil record being spotty? At least it exists. What do you have? Not one thing in the world suggests that we were created by aliens (or god) except for the fact that you don't like evolution. As long as that is the whole foundation of your argument, it's worthless. Find an alien bio-lab orbiting the moon, or, you know, god and call me. Until then you're just spouting fantasies.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
But I was SO RELIEVED when I saw the tag "duh" on this article. Really, it gave me a sliver of hope for humanity.
Internet: Serious Business
You're forgetting that there are many means for selection within the evolutionary process. Darwin wrote an entire book on sexual selection, for example.
How many years do you think this planet has existed, by the way, and on what evidence do you base your claim that we would need many more than this number to achieve evolution on the scale we can see in the fossil record?
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
As soon as you provide three repeatable, observable facts that provide incontrovertible proof that you graduated high-school, we will comply. Or that prove anything else in such a manner, for that matter.
In other words, you should probably familiarize yourself with the concept of the scientific method and the definitions of words such as "theory" before you say anything further on the subject.
If Intelligent Design is to be accepted as science, that opens the nature of God to public discussion subject to scientific rigor. Honestly, do any of you seriously propose putting the definition of God in the hands of the scientific community? Think about that before you lend your support to Intelligent Design.
-- The entire concept letting a government mobocracy determine how to educate a child in a mass production, one-size-fits-all environment is hideous, unnatural, and so are all of the consequences of it, like lawyers deciding what gets taught in a class and what doesn't. Besides, you labeling someone a 'conservative Christian' presumes he is opposed to DE. Given rediculous odds involved in DE having occured, it seems only someone with a lot of faith could buy into it.
-- You brought up aliens. And fairies. I'm not sure why.
-- Doesn't 'man not being one of them' disprove it. Or is that still within the realm of investigation - like fairies? (And is there much else -all species seem to come into existence and then disappear with no 'successor' - can you point to something in the fossil record for me? And I'm pretty skeptical of fossil records minus DNA for analysis.)
-- Find you a function of the spleen? It's a great place to store extra blood that the body may need, particularly when you are working out. In horses you can relate spleen size to race success. People without one are more succeptable to septicaemia. Ok - now you tell me where the missing link is?
-- So can I call it 'Not So Intelligent But Getting There Designers'? Clearly they've shown progress - going from troglodites to humans, no? I imagine a lot of the early life could have been seeding (creating fossil fuels, etc) in anticipation of putting humans on the rock.
-- I do have positive evidence. I don't have to find a bio-lab orbiting the moon because there are many right here on earth. The AI lab at MIT, for example. Or corn with boosted protein yields. Or golden rice.
You say that you believe the Bible to be wholly true. What about the contradictory parts? The parts where one or another part can be true, but both cannot?
For instance Genesis I, 24-27:
So in Genesis I God makes Man and Woman at the same time, after making the plants and animals
Then in Genesis II, God takes a little rest on the seventh day and is bothered by something:
There was not a man to till the ground? What happened to the Man and Woman God created back on Day 6? Did God roll over in his sleep and crush them or something? I'm not sure, but the Bible says they were not around. Well it says there was 'not a man to till the ground', I guess we guys still do that kind of thing. You know we become real scarce when there's work to be done. Of course that would mean that God is not omniscient if it were so easy to skip out an him.
Oh, also notice that God in Genesis II is creating Man before there were any plants? In Genesis I God creates all of the plants on Day 3 and Man (and Woman) on Day 6. In Genesis II God creates Man (just man no Woman yet) first and then creates plants.
It cannot have happened both ways. One way or the other, but both cannot be true. The Bible cannot be wholly true. Which came first Man or plants? Only one order of events can be true, yet the Bible contains both versions. There is the possibility that neither accounts are true, but it is impossible for the Bible to be, as you say, 'wholly true'. The Bible is self contradictory. You must decide which part is true. If one of these accounts is true, then the other is false.
So, continuing with genesis II, we get to the part where God gets around to creating Man...
(Plants after Man)...
The God I believe in the same in Christianity and Islam. The total adherents of those two faiths accounts for more than 50% of the world population.
That may be true.
However.
Christians can't even agree on which God they worship. Is it the angry God of modern American fundamentalism? Or the Jehovah's Witness' God who makes Gods of his followers? Or the polygamy-loving God of the LDS?
So many people call themselves "Christians," and yet obviously do not believe in the same God. I'm not saying they can't all call themselves "Christians." I'm just saying, they can't all be right.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"I once attended a symposium where this lead astronomer from Harvard (I think it was) spoke. It's been so many years ago. Anyhow, he lectured on some molocule discovered and how if not for this single thing there would never have been life on earth. He went on to discuss the near impossibility of it existing by chance, and then went on to admit it had moved him, for the first time ever, toward a theistic belief."
But for some reason, this Harvard scientist has never bothered to write a paper and submit it for peer review to detail the particulars of this miraculous molecule. A solid piece of science that The Discovery Institute and other pseudo-science myth shops could publish and trumpet as real science.
But he failed to do so. Probably because, as an astronomer, he doesn't really know squat about miraculous molecules. Just another meaningless anecdote.
I personally believe in an existing or potential higher power, and The Tao. I do not, however, make the claim that my belief is in any way scientific. It isn't. Science is based on fact and human understanding of what those facts mean. I believe the ways of a higher power are greater than human understanding, and don't believe we will find their plain writ in the physical world.
Maybe one day, if we don't wipe ourselves out, we'll evolve to the point where we are more in tune with the higher power and can actually understand it. I don't claim to know.
Until then, my motto is to live according to the desires of my heart, using the tool of my mind. And not delude myself that I have all the answers of Creation, or that those answers are in a book scribbled by barbaric goat-herders or modern navel-gazers. What I believe (heart) and what I know (brain) are two different arenas. I prefer not to confuse them.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
I have no problem with what you say and I think I even agree (albeit, a bit harsh). As for the scientist (astronomer) or whatever. I'm not going to pretend to understand all about publishing scientitific stuff. It was for extra credit or something when I was in college (like, 20 years ago), and that's about the best I can remember. What stuck was how he suddenly went off on a theistic tangent. I'm sure whatever molecule he was discussing was published simply because I know he was referencing materials. I think he said someone else discovered it....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Intelligent design is nothing more than a philosophy...
I believe this is untrue. Intelligent design is an assertion derived from a metaphysical/ethical text (the Bible), but is itself not a philosophy.
Science, however, *is* a philosophy, specifically an epistemology. That's why you get a PhD after attending Evil Doctor school for 8 years.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I doubt many scientist would see any competition between the two, it's like comparing mathematics with dance.
Oh, like this?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"and that koko has been reading picture books to herself at bedtime just like a school kid would do, it's only imitation."
It is. I'm glad we agree.
"that she has the wish to express herself via paintings and drawings, that's no sign for intelligence."
You're right, it's not a sign of intelligence, it's a sign of YOU anthropomorphizing an animal. SO this point speaks dircetly to your failings.
"and that she invents new words is a sign for... what?"
Nothing.
"you, as many others, suffer from delusions of grandeur regarding human capabilities..."
And YOU as SOOOO many others, suffer from delusions that animals who engage in behavior similar to humans do so for REASONS similar to humans. Again, this says far more about your inability to reason than it does about koko.
None of which means koko doesn't use language. It only means that the reasons YOU think are definitive are meaningless and trivial, and that you don't have the mental processes necessary to realize it.
Sure he was. He was a biologist. Though the field wasn't nearly as well defined back then as it is now. But that is part of what makes Darwin famous. He made such signifigant finds even before his scientific field was well defined. He was a pioneer.
Where do you get this little bit of info from? If they thought that, they were most likely basing it on the Bible. In other words, they just assumed... But AFAIK, just about anyone (including monks) who actually went out to study geology quickly realized that the Earth was MUCH older than thousands of years.
Irrelevent. Plenty of people thought this, scientists and non-scientists alike. Practically the whole South of the US though it. And it is no coincidence that they were arguably the most religious too. In science, there is no such thing as "genetic superiority." Because that is a value judgment.
Nearly all scientists who disagree with evolution do so on religious grounds first, and evidence second. They only favor ID because it sounds so much like Creationism.
You can show that *humans* intelligently design. But can you show new species coming into existence without human design? Nope. At best you can claim that humans created all the species in the world. Is that your theory? Because woudl certainly be interesting.
What in the world are you talking about? The science is right there for you to understand. All the books and papers are out there. Most major universities teach it. Go ahead. Learn science if you like. Maybe once you do learn some science you'll learn why ID is not part it.
Watch that video I linked to!
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Some people may. Most people, even people who understand science and properly pragmatically apply it, have beliefs that extend beyond the scientific. That some people may have a quasi-religious belief in some of the things that are contained in evolutionary theory does not change the fact that those are scientific propositions that have withstood empirical scrutiny, while many other things (like creationism) that people may have religious or quasi-religious faith in are not.
The people may have a faith in the Invisible Hand of the Market that goes far beyond what is justifiable through the valid scientific results in economics does not make the real science done in economics any less real, even if the fervent proclamations often obscure the real science of economics. Similarly, if there are people that have an extra-rational faith in elements of evolutionary theory that goes beyond the science, that doesn't invalidate the science of evolution, nor does it make it make alternative religious explanations that are not empirically testable into scientific alternatives.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I hate to drag this discussion through the mud, but this viewpoint comes from the same place that strong nationalism, racial supremacy, and religious zealotry comes from: The characteristics that are unique to my group are those that are possessed by the superior group, because they are the characteristics that are possessed by my group.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
And for the record, Siddhartha Gautama's existence is probably one of the best historically supported of all the "religious" figures out there. It's almost a certainty he existed, though I'm sure rumours about him have been greatly exaggerated. :)
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Quite a huge obvious one: Even if the universe is caught in a big loop of time, why bother with all that instead of not existing at all? State A may be caused by State B and state B by state A, but that doesn't explain why /both/ state A and state B exist. Your idea is simply a restating of the Necessary Being argument: "God must exist in order for Absolute Good to exist!" -> presupposes absolute good exists. "The big crunch must exist in order for the universe to exist!" -> presupposes that the universe exists.
The universe, as a whole, fundamentally, exists because nobody told it not to. Through strict (and liberally asshole-ish) reading of the first bits of Genesis, this is consistent with Jewish/Christian tradition.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
I normally avoid these types of conversations but I'm going to step in this once and offer that you may be misunderstanding the term "irreducibly complex" in this sense.
Irreducibly complex means that an evolved system is interdependent on its coexisting parts. Simply put, a system could not have evolved in small steps if more than one part of the system is codependent on other parts for proper functioning. A circular dependency is created.
Evolution is the key to this point, not the system in its current form. Removing your head is not the point - your system will cease to function, and your head can be "reduced" more or stand alone as a separate part, but it speaks nothing about evolution (for this point).
If you want to study more about this, "Darwin's Black Box" is a well known and interesting read.
Quite aside from the problems of spelling and so on, which you must realize casts your argument in a weaker light, you have errors of logic or reasoning in almost every paragraph.
You confuse the notions of probability and possibility, a child's error. The fact that something might be of very low probability does not mean it is impossible.
You make unsubstantiated assertions about the probability of an event about which you have no evidence. Or do you have a time machine (to visit the ancient past of Earth) and a starship (to observe other planets evolving or not evolving life, so that you can make a count and measure its probability?)
You apparently have a poor knowledge of prehistory, archaeology and palaeontology, for you blithely state that there is no fossil record of evolution, whereas in fact it is plentiful.
You state that because humans exert selective breeding, this is therefore evidence of selective breeding of us and life on Earth, though you have no evidence of any "breeder" doing the selection.
You claim that "intelligent design" is a scientific theory, when it is nothing of the kind. It is a *hypothesis*, which is to say, an idea unsupported by evidence; and what is more, it is *not* a hypothesis supported by science, it is one supported by religious faith. It is not a "valid scientific theory", because it is not valid, not scientific and not a theory.
In other words, you are a fine example of the classic "ID" proponent: a religious proselytizer selling a religious idea but trying to sneak it in by attempting - poorly - to disguise it as science.
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
Bacteria have been trained to eat nylon.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
If you stumbled over a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica while hiking through a forest, would you say "look at this naturally occuring book" or would you say "I wonder who left this here for me to stub my toe?"
According to the scientific community, a DNA molecule contains the equivalent instructions, in terms of volume, as a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Do you say "look at this naturally occuring, random chance molecular structure" or do you say "Wow, the Grand Creator created this and my toe?"
Consider this, DNA requires protein, and protein requires DNA. Energy spontaneously tends to flow only from being concentrated in one place to becoming diffused and spread out (The second law of thermodynamics). In a universe of chaotic forces, why would random atoms coalesce instead of diverge? This question applies to the initiation of a lineage as well as the initiation of the universe.
We homosapiens share our biosphere with other species. Does it make sense that commonality exists?
Ah, asking the elusive `missing link'. Great way to retort!
It usually comes right after the `evolution is just a theory' part...
It's hard to explain to /others/ what is meant by "nothing existed, then everything existed". What is really meant is: "everything existed", which sounds like "oh, nothing caused the universe because it always existed", which is not only not what /I/ mean, but is fallaciously causal, and pretty fucking stupid.
/I/ exist, there are plenty of things which, even with the option of existence available, still are in the realm (at least from our perspective) of not-existing. Therefor, they also exist.
The problem is thinking of time as a unifying all-encompassing axis through which all possible states exist. There's a separate two-point axis of "existing" and "not existing" which presumably is one that exists purely as a logical construct. They could be thought of as disconnected states with no axis between them, but in summary:
State 1: Non-existence. Rules do not exist here. This would be chaos, except that doesn't exist here either.
State 2: Everything.
Existence springs forth spontaneously from non-existence. The interesting part, to me anyway, is that while at least
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
They also don't alite onto couches and watch the boob tube in a stupor. It's not just my dog that does this, many indoor dogs will do some of these things.
Whether you believe the dog thinks it can be a person (or be like a person), or whether it is reinforcement learning is a dubious distinction.
To return to the original example, as a human I should believe that if I try really hard to do something I can make my dreams come true (which is what the grandparent is essentially claiming makes us different than animals). This reinforcement learning is delivered to me by Disney, elementary school, my parents, etc. They show me a story of an exceptional person who overcomes adversity and is happy. I should be like that. I get praise when I overcome adversity.
So why is what the dog does any different? Just trying to fit in and do things it believes are good and to her future benefit?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Uh, people tend to look at athiests as Athiests where they strongly believe in the non-existance of god. To a point where even if they'd lose that bet, they'd still refuse to believe, and just move the goalposts back, saying that whatever it is that the OTB considered to be a God is infact a natural phenomenon and therefore nothing special.
But presumably the Athiest wouldn't take the bet unless they believed that the discriminator would actually have a chance of proving the faithful wrong in a decisive way (otherwise they'd be just throwing away $1000). So if it swung the other way, if they actually were rational then they'd have to accept that counter evidence and presumably they could no longer be "Athiest".
Essentially, what I'm saying is that Athiesm is still a conditional belief. It can have varying levels of certainty but that's dependant on how much philosophical soul searching you've done, or how much exposure you had to alternate belief systems at a young age. Agnostics tend to feel that only they hold a conditional belief, and that somehow makes it a "safe" position. But in fact what they really feel is that they are on the fence; just as someone stuck between Buddhism and Christianity or Islam or whatever.
If you ask an Agnostic whether they think there really is a God, and the answer comes back "probably not". Then you're not Agnostic, you're actually athiest.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
The issue with ID is that we don't have any reasonable basis to work from. If they were to suggest some mechanisms and properties of the designer, maybe they'd have something to work with (or at least look for). Until then, they're stuck. The best they've managed to do is the following gross generalization: 1) Life looks like a machine (I think that this is idiotic, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument). 2) People make machines. 3) People are intelligent. 4) All machines we've seen are made by intelligent people, so life must be made by something intelligent.
The problem here is that if you grant life the position of being "like a machine" life still makes up the vast majority of "machines" on this planet. Intelligent agency would be known to produce only a small fraction of the complexity around here, so how on Earth can you come up with a rule like "all complex outputs require an intelligent creator"?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Consider Xen on a paravirtualizing processor.
Each container can contain a container with a hypervisor. Turtles... all the way down. Does that construct speak to a higher intelligence, even if each layer is a complete cast and abstraction of the next, in both directions?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Santa Claus does exist though. Go learn up on Saint Nicholas of Myra.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
It doesn't matter. The point is that an induction argument with steps (where each step is only dependant on the last) is not a good example.
So let's say N is a vector of "current time" arguments. So N_1 is parameter one, N_2 parameter two, and so forth, and X(N) is the fitness function of this generation.
Y(N) is a fitness function of a different, symbiotic species under similar conditions.
X(N) could be dependant on X(N-1), X(N-3), and Y(N-10), but only if Y(N-4)+X(N_1) is greater than Y(N-1_2)... mathematical induction is to simple an analytic argument to apply here.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Our dog has specific attention-seeking behaviors.
* When she wants to play, she finds a toy or personal item and tries to lure us away from whatever we may be doing
* When she wants food, water, or to go outside, she barks noisily and with increasing alarm until someone attends to her. If we're not otherwise occupied, she will sit by the door or her food bowl without barking.
* When she wants someone to just keep her company, she will insert herself in front of that person (pushing a book away if you're reading), snout-push them in the legs, lick them, etc.
The growl-talking is a behavior we only see if we're having an animated conversation. She finds a visible but unobtrusive position (i.e., not trying to be the center of attention), and then tries to join the discussion.
OTH, if she actually wants attention because the conversation is growing very long she will paw-up onto someone and pull them away from it for 1 on 1 time.
I really don't see any reason for her to do this other than to try to fit in. Dogs are social animals and you should expect to see behavior like that, but it's not far off from what _people_ do in similar situations and that's where I have the problem with people making such vast distinctions.
There are other things that she does that seem abnormal, and she does them even if no one is around:
* Watch TV on the couch.
* Catch fireflies (specifically)
* Is cogniscant of her collar, bandana, and leash. I.E. she won't leave them if you forget them if req.d
* Closes doors behind herself. Here I'm sure she's just copying us, but it's bizarre.
We didn't train her to do this stuff. She just took it upon herself. I'm not about to speculate as to "why" she does these things but take that for what it's worth.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Hello all:
This discussion reminds me of a joke about a sculptor pointing at a block of marble and said, "There is a human head inside." Then, he proceeded to sculpt a human head from the marble. Is there a human head in the block of marble? Certainly. Is it necessary that there is a human head in the block of marble? Certainly not.
It is my humble opinion that both evolution and the various versions of creationism try to fit what's readily observable in nature into an imaginary framework. Creationism is based on an imaginary framework that an Entity started everything. Evolution, though more supported, still has an imaginary element to it, in that it is based on interpretations of what're observed. The supporting evidence for evolution, once again IMHO, does not necessarily exclude every interpretations but the right one, the truthful one, and the real one. In short, both of these point to a block of marble, which is nature, and make claims. Then, they proceed to interpret what's observed in nature conforming to the claim.
I would dare say that all scientific theories are creations of someones' minds. Therefore, we should approach all theories, including evolution, with a dose of skepticism. Though many in here would treat evolution as an objective FACT. I would regard it as a well-defended theory at best.
As for creationism I only have one question: is this a search for the truth, or a movement for public indoctrination of the creationists' ideals? If it's the former I think creationists have a lot to learn from scientists about methodologies. If it's the latter, then, it is sad. I understand that the creationists' ideals are really the Christians' ideals. I understand that Christians are commanded to spread the word of God, and that Christians honestly promote Christ out of sincerity. However, arguing the creationists' case under veil of science do nothing but encourages discord; it won't change any lives for the better and that is, supposedly, motivation behind it all...
Cheers.
B. Pascal
Despite the fact that you believe what you're saying, that doesn't matter.
The process of determining "motivation" in an animal is extremely complex. It usually involves long stretches of observation in specific settings, followed by more long hours of testing to elicit responses to stimuli. It is the kind of process, which when undertaken by a professional who is talented, observant, and qualified, can give great insight.
It IS NOT ever done by an amateur with any accuracy, unless that amateur has very specific training and instructions. You do not.
Asking you to accurately describe why your dog does what she does is similar to asking me about particle physics. It is not my bailiwick, and any answers I have will be of suspect nature.
When I said what I said before, I think you missed my point. You, unless you have some education that you're not sharing, CAN NOT have the toolset to accurately assess your dogs behavior. You can't. It is not possible. The main, and simplest, reason is because of exactly what you have already displayed, a tendency to assign human motivation to a non-human. This should NEVER be done without extreme caution. Simply watching what your dog does and assuming is not good enough.
I know, for a fact, 100% certainty, that given a sufficient amount of time, I could give you a reason for every single one of your dog's behaviors. And none of your assumptions would be correct.
I suggest you look into types of conditioning. You will gain a great insight into why everyone (humans, animals, and everything else) behaves the way they do.
Sadly though, your illusions about your dog having "conversations" will be shattered.
I consider myself lucky that religion has not harmed me directly in my life. No bad childhood experiences: parents were agnostic, and encouraged me to make up my own mind.
Growing up the only problem as related to religion I recall having was experiencing and seeing rulers applied forcefully to children's hand for not saying the pledge of alegiance with "under god". Though my mom was Catholic she was pretty much non practicing and encouraged me to study other religions as well. After reading about Buddhism I considered myself Buddhist, which is why I didn't want to say "under god". Through childhood and early adulthood my beliefs kept evolving. Several years ago I came to the realization I was agnostic, without a belief in the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being. And now I don't even believe in a soul or spirit, I am agnostic in this as well as I don't believe in the nonexistence of them either. But I really want to know.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Why?
I like my sig, and I am a Troll... Oh, and I like breasts... You should see my wifes breasts! Yummie!
You're the first one in *years* to complain. My alter ego (the real me) had way more reactions with the signature "Remember Christine Watkins".
Oh, and for the record: I know a girl that is very desirable that is as flat as a ironing board. Of course, I didn't know she was interested in me until I got married ;-)
How about because observation clearly shows that it had a beginning?
"... clearly shows..." that's news to me. Besides, I neither denied nor confirmed a beginning, I merely stated that the postulate that there was a creator in order to explain the observable universe is unnecessary.
Repeat after me, "Everything is a theory."
I'm not saying it's not conditioning.
But who's to say that what _we_ do that makes us think we're special isn't conditioning either?
That was my point. You might have noticed my flippant and sarcastic tone describing the behavior.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
SHOW YOUR WORK. Like so many others, you're making easily demonstrable mathematical claims into vague statements that can't be defended against. I could very well stay that the odds of ID being correct are ridiculous, so I win, but you might sensibly point out that I'm just blowing smoke.
You may be interested in the field of molecular phylogeny. There's a lot of relevant work there that covers how far back the most recent common ancestor of a pair of organisms go. Not surprisingly, the results strongly support the nested hierarchy assembled from the fossil record.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Great point! I have no proof, and never will. We need to allow people to believe different things (By the way, I can and do share beliefs that science can't and will never be able to explain... by acting accordingly and looking at the results. I cannot prove I am right. I cannot force other to believe what I believe. I cannot accept being imposed a belief, except for scientifically proven stuff.)
unfinished: (adj.)
Sam Harris has an amusing definition of Faith: (paraphrased) "Faith is the permission religious people give each other to deny evidence."
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
This ID stuff is nothing more than another attempt at injecting religion into government by persons who cannot correctly interpret the true meaning of the Bible. One stand-out memory I have of faulty interpretations over the years is several religious coworkers claiming the earth and the universe are only 6,000 years old. In response to my rebuttals, they found some passage in the Bible they interpreted to support their contention. When asked to explain fossils millions of years old and carbon dating, they called it the work of the devil. I gave up with a chuckle...
They're especially biased toward things that look like signals that we produce. Essentially, they're looking for life forms whose behaviors mimic (at least, very loosely) our own. The world of intelligent design is populated by a designer whose properties and mechanisms are completely unknown,
But one could look for paterns familiar to humans also in life, such as math in DNA. You are not saying that SETI aliens *must* use human-like technology/patterns, but merely that SETI is searching for only those patterns (as if they had a choice). One could filter for low-hanging-fruit (stuff humans recognize) either way.
4) All machines we've seen are made by intelligent people, so life must be made by something intelligent.
No, that is not necessarily part of the assumptions. Perhaps some brands of ID have that as a base assumption, but it is not necessary to test for intelligent *intervention* (regardless of original) in Earth life.
Table-ized A.I.
You keep using words like "test" when describing ID. Can you describe what such a test might be?
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
I didn't mean it was unimportant in terms of survival value and passing on your genes. What I meant was that it is completely unimportant in terms of "Are we better than animals?" and other such intelligent questions that direly need to be answered to satisfy the people who have an ego problem. In reality, I've come to the conclusion that warm fuzzies are the only meaning to life. Everything else is moot. After all, why attempt to find a girlfriend? Warm fuzzies. Why help other people at all if it isn't to your direct benefit? Again warm fuzzies. Why do we want to believe that we are better in some way than animals? Once again (and finally) warm fuzzies.
Of course you can think of rational reasons to justify the warm fuzzies, but you also have to remember that the things that trigger the warm fuzzies are triggers for a reason. They probably help with survival value (and thus passing on your genes*). Anyway, you organized religious folk keep enjoying your fairy tales, just don't kill any more people or waste more of my time. Those two activities really play havoc with my warm fuzzies.
*or the genes of the community as the community might select for some of its members to be self sacrificing to better the rest.
We can make inferences 99% of other animals can't.
We can make moral judgements, I wonder if chimps, elephants or dolphins can.
We can transmit culture and knowledge, modify it and improve it. Chimps can't, or at least not at the same pace, most other animals, please, don't make me laugh.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your plants example is flawed. The plant doe not chose to release chemicals, they are just programmed to do it.
A moral being in a dangerous situation would make reasoned value judgments and sometimes may decide not to warn fellow beings.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sorry, but to compare Picasso's oeuvre to that of a monkey can be done only by somebody mentally deficient or deeply ignorant.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Why do children all over the world, sometimes speak of previous lifetimes or in other languages than they have been subjected to?
Why have I myself seen the electrical-fluid like field that is surrounding my own body, on several accounts?
Just because the physical world is very familiar, doesnt mean that it explains the whole of reality. Especially when you start to tune in to more subtle phenomena, sometimes bordering with the physical plane. As kids, we do this all the time, but are scolded / taught to stop fantasizing. But sometimes, kids DO NOT fantasize, they SEE ghosts / other beings / light, etc. But we also want the love and affection of our parents, and they make us forget how to tune in, and how to function in the physical world.
Maybe this sounds like nonsense to you, and youd like to start critizising me for saying something that doesnt bring any meaning to you. But ask any of my friends, I have a Very rational mind and do not believe something just to escape reality. I am interested in reality and investigate it, and what I have found is that there is much more to it than meets the eye, and I am only beginning!
I challenge you to practice yoga, meditation and breathing techniques for a month, and investigate for yourself! You will definately not regret it, and if you do, you have direct experience with it to speak from.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
We have trebled our population in less than 80 years.
If the bugs are winning, your definition of winning is a very strange one.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Chimps have been stuck with twigs as the height of technological advancement for 6 million years at the very least, and they are the closest to us.
Clearly our intelligence is unique in the animal kingdom, no matter which way you want to spin it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"so then you might elucidate us as to what the reasons are that humans use language, and which of those reasons are so human-spcific that they cannot be found in animals?"
No actually I won't. It's not my field.
"koko has the vocabulary of a roughly five-year-old and is using it to the same extent"
Inaccurate.
"she understands spoken language and can even read a few written words."
Inaccurate.
"she names things by herself by combining words intelligently"
No, she most certainly does not. This is the most inaccurate statement so far.
"she never saw another kid reading a book to itself"
She HAS, however, seen adults do it.
"she might not be smart enough to follow this discussion or understand the subtle insults (thank you for not using the same rude language you are using in other recent posts) you are directing against me but neither are 99% of the american population."
This makes no sense.
"i'm not anthropomorphizing,"
That is a patent falsehood. You are assigning human traits to a non-human. Regardless of whether it is appropriate or not, it is the VERY DEFINITION of anthropomorphism. How can we discuss this when your base claim is false, and you refuse to admit your irrefutable anthropomorphism of koko.
You illustrate my point nicely. Rather than examine my criticisms, you respond by reasserting that you are not doing something that you are, in fact, doing the textbook definition of. You are so attached to your pre conceived notions that you flatly reuse to even admit you're doing something that is clear in black and white.
THIS and people like YOU are why I generally avoid these topics. It is simply futile to argue with a zealot who denies their actions in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Like you have done in this post.
We can continue this if you choose, but you'll have to examine your opinions more carefully. I have no desire to waste my time trying to educate any more zealots.
"So you are just rambling about something you admit you don't have knowledge about. Fine."
No, my background is behavioral psychology, not language acquisition. This is the kind of logic that got you in trouble in the first place, and made you think you were right when in reality you're just too stupid to know how wrong you are.
"No, I'm not. I'm assigning CAPABILITIES that are present in humans to a non-human."
Which is exactly the definition of anthropomorphism. I'm glad you admit it.
"Please, oh please, I want to learn, badly. Tell me more about my mistakes..."
Speaking, breathing, I pray I'm wrong, but breeding. Sharing your opinion, and commenting on a subject you're clearly not qualified for.
You're wrong, and you're (now) deliberately misrepresenting data to support a point that has been discredited for years.
You want to learn? STOP BEING A FUCKING TWAT AND ASSUMING THE ARTICLE YOU READ IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IS TRUE.
It just makes you look even more like an ignorant slut.
Mutations may occur in one generation and only be expressed in another, or depend on activation by many later, "innocent" mutations. Or they may only have minor effects on fitness but in aggregate cause a later drastic change in fitness.
Sometimes the stability and success of a population in a changing ecosystem (where other independant variables are evolving) cause delayed external effects. The extinction of a prey species, for example, may not initially put pressure on a predator until many generations later when an unrelated shift in resource competetion causes a second, competeting predator to follow a herd of an unrelated prey into the area now vacated.
Nothing is linear and independant. The variables in the system are many, sometimes correlated, other times not, sometimes visible and evident, other times not. The complexity is only "irreducible" if you choose to use a naive, inapplicable model for the system.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Assumption: A human can be more than a human.
Fallacy. All humans are human, no matter what they do. Being "more than human" is more an expression of a want to deviate from a norm.
Counterpoint: The attributes of trying to be something outside an expected 000norm is not unique to humans.
Assertion: An animal in social situation 'A' exhibits deviant behavior not characteristic to all dogs (in a similar situation it might not exhibit this behavior). Whether or not this is an accident or conditioning or whatever is not argued and is irrelevant.
Conclusion: The animal is no different than an exceptional human. This is not a human trait.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
No, my background is behavioral psychology, not language acquisition. This is the kind of logic that got you in trouble in the first place, and made you think you were right when in reality you're just too stupid to know how wrong you are. Thanks for calling me a "cunt". A behaviour really fitting of a psychologist, isn't it. But let me guess: you only started to study psychology but never finished, otherwise you would be calling yourself a "behavioural psychologist", no?
So I'm now thinking you are acting out your inferiority complex by insisting that animals must be sub-human in each and every regard. Hmm, given your way with assigning animal names to people I should remove the word "complex"... "No, I'm not. I'm assigning CAPABILITIES that are present in humans to a non-human."
Which is exactly the definition of anthropomorphism. I'm glad you admit it. Let me spell it out for you: "Anthropomorphism is the attribution of UNIQUELY human characteristics and qualities to nonhuman beings, inanimate objects, or natural or supernatural phenomena." As we have seen, speech and rational thought is not unique (or common) in humans. Thus, no anthropomorphism. "Please, oh please, I want to learn, badly. Tell me more about my mistakes..."
Speaking, breathing, I pray I'm wrong, but breeding. Sharing your opinion, and commenting on a subject you're clearly not qualified for. No, you're right, my PhD in physics doesn't make me qualified to comment on the subject. But your excellent handling of foul words makes you the top-notch specialist on the matter, whose words should be taken without proof or doubt. You're wrong, and you're (now) deliberately misrepresenting data to support a point that has been discredited for years. Discredited? Well, as long as it hasn't been disproven... Being discredited doesn't mean it's wrong. It means that somebody wants to get rid of it but hasn't any rational reasoning or legal means... You want to learn? STOP BEING A FUCKING TWAT AND ASSUMING THE ARTICLE YOU READ IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC IS TRUE.
It just makes you look even more like an ignorant slut. Let me make another educated guess: you didn't have good sex in a looooong while. Otherwise I cannot explain your abundant abuse of words describing female genitalia. Maybe you could share some light on that matter for all of us?
So does this mean that there's no chance of Pastafarianism being taught in UK either?
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, because you had already proven you're not worth wasting time on.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
"The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories", Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington
True, this is the only one out there that was able to slip by that is not in a ID-favorable publication. It will take time for the science to spread. It's in for a tough fight and unfortunately a political one - but grant money is on the line.
2) I'm not capable of GENERATING actual probabilities myself but can cite a few that others have developed and are readily available to you - though I think you would only be interested in ones that are peer-reviewed themselves. Try Yockey's "Calculation of the Probability of Spontaneous Biogenesis by Information Theory," Journal of Theoretical Biology.
3) It also looks a lot like someone learning how to design lifeforms using common templates and revising them.
Sure he was. He was a biologist.
- Darwin was an observer of the world around him. Who isn't. Biologist? Maybe on the level of a 5th grader today. The point is, the 'scientist' label is not an intimidating one.
Where do you get this little bit of info from? If they thought that, they were most likely basing it on the Bible. - Comte du Buffon was a 'naturalist' (same as Darwin!) who estimated the age of the earth at 75k using a model showing estimates based on the earth cooling. John Phillips looked at the fossil record and strata and determined 100million. No Bible here.
And it is no coincidence that they were arguably the most religious too. In science, there is no such thing as "genetic superiority." Because that is a value judgment.
- What do you mean most religious? Was the Third Reich religious in advocating genetic superiority? Were blacks who sold each other into slavery in the first place religious? Or were both, essentially, triablists.
Nearly all scientists who disagree with evolution do so on religious grounds first, and evidence second. They only favor ID because it sounds so much like Creationism.
- Actually, ID is the only alternative to DE because DE is so flexible. It's randomness versus intent. So if you do not buy DE's arguments, you are kind of forced into ID. No scientists book I have read on ID (I have three) starts with a religious basis. It just starts by picking apart DE OR by making assertions about irreducible complexity. You are completely ignorant of ID.
You can show that *humans* intelligently design. But can you show new species coming into existence without human design? Nope. At best you can claim that humans created all the species in the world. Is that your theory? Because would certainly be interesting.
- In our lifetime, humans will be capable of that. They are already working on it now in other species. Why is it so far fetched? I think it's the DE advocates - who are all athiests - who have a religious stake in the outcome of the science.
They really _need_ the answer to be DE for a psychological reason. Everything about how they live their lives and the decisions they make are driven by the need for this to all be some random outcome.
Am I? Watch that video and read the Dover, PA ID ruling/summary.
I've read more than one biography of Darwin that described him as a biologist. MY point is that I'm not making this stuff up.
And the estimates got more refined and improved over time. So what?
I meant most religious in the US at the time.
Although now that you mention it, Hitler did claim Christianity as his moral basis. Hitler didn't mention Darwin or evolution even once in "Mein Kampf." Though he did make plenty of mention of the Almighty Creator.
I don't know, but what does that have to do with genetic superiority?
Randomness vs. intent is a religious problem. Not a scientific problem. You shouldn't be forced into ID because you don't like the idea of "randomness." If you are, you aren't being scientific.
Evolution isn't random, BTW, but that is a different discussion.
Do you have an early revision (before 1987) of "Of Pandas and People?" Because that book made many explicit references to Creationism. What the ID crowd did around 1987 was a word substitution for "creator" to "designer" and "creationism" to "intelligent design." It was all part of the Dover, PA trial. You should read the judges ruling and summary on that one. There's another reference. Go read/watch if you dare.
So you are claiming that humans are the designers of all species on Earth? Probably not, but that is about all you could possibly muster with that little bit of "evidence."
I realize that it is possible to manipulate DNA and "design" certain apects of life and perhaps even new species. But simply showing that humans can do it has nothing to do with what happened before humans or what happens without human intervention.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
The first goal before "spreading" the science and getting published should be to produce some sort of results that aren't simply a critique of evolutionary theory (which is essentially what the paper in question does). If they produced some results (tests, calculations, etc.), it would be hard to deny them publication. If all they're doing is rehashing creationist anti-evolution talking points, it should be no surprise that they're not making any inroads.
You might not be surprised to know that you're not the first person to cite Yockey's papers without reading them. The paper in question does not address common descent or evolutionary theory in general (note that evolutionary theory takes as axiomatic that life started somewhere and then uses that fact to explain the diversity of life now). It does address a common abiogenesis theory of its day. You might want to ask Dr. Yockey what he thinks intelligent design as science.
Are you sure? A key technique in all of this is not to look at commonalities in coding DNA but rather in non-coding DNA. Obviously, coding DNA should be similar for organisms with closely related physiologies whether or not they have common ancestry (and as far as I can tell, a huge number of creationists think that this is all that's used in these phylogeny calculations). There's no reason for non-coding DNA to be similar, though. The technique goes something like this:
1) At t=0, two descendants of an organism are born. They share some regions of DNA that are 100% identical (not surprisingly). This includes the DNA that codes for proteins and the DNA in between those regions.
2) Every generation, more and more mutations happen to the non-coding DNA. Since it's non-coding, this is generally not a big deal, so the stuff goes along for a ride.
3) Generations down the line, the coding regions are very similar, but the non-coding regions have decayed somewhat. By looking at homologous non-coding regions, it's possible to estimate how far back their common ancestor went.
As it turns out, we share a lot of DNA markers like that with other primates. We share fewer with dogs and cats and fewer still with worms. This observation is 100% in sync with common descent (and extensive computer modeling bears this out). How does ID explain it? Does the designer copy over non-coding DNA from design to design and then mutate it according to a fixed pattern that just happens to correlate with our taxonomic and phylogenetic trees? If so, why? Aesthetics? Errors in methodology? DNA rotting on the shelf? Without putting out some sort of concrete description of how the designer operates, those questions will never be answered.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
DNA is a totally different thing that doesn't look at all like something humans designed except in that it stores data digitally. Much noise has been made about doing math on DNA to figure out if it is intelligently designed, but nobody has managed to pull it off.
Nobody has managed to find anything with SETI either (so far). Does that make it "non-scientific"?
It's not hard to figure out why that is. We don't have anything to compare it to.
We could look for bitmaps, statistical anomalies (lots of one of the four bases), encodings of Pi, etc. True, we don't currently do this, but we don't broadcast lasers into space nor build Dyson Spheres, yet SETI or SETI-like programs have considered looking for those also. Thus, the "we do it now" criteria is excessive, or else we flunk those also.
More on this:
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/dnaid.htm
Table-ized A.I.
Then jump on it. What, specifically, do you suggest we look for? I'll grant that pi would be a very interesting result. How about X adenine molecules in a row? How do we know what value for X wouldn't be produced naturally but might be produced by a designer? The answer is, we really don't (or at least none of the ID camp has bothered to figure it out and make the proposal) because nobody has proposed anything about who the designer is. What were/are its mechanisms? Its goals? Its methods? If you want to propose a designer who tailor made DNA and had a fondness for pi, you have yourself a hypothesis to test. You've done more in one slashdot post than all of the "giants" of the ID movement have managed to pull off since they renamed creationism so many years ago.
The SETI people are looking for life like us. They ask themselves, "What do we do now and what might we do if we had the technology?" Those simple tests will find ET intelligence that thinks like we do and has similar communications methods. The key in all of this is that they've proposed properties for the ET life. That's what I was getting at with my "we do it now" criterion. They've characterized the system and they know what to look for. They have a description of the nature and the methods of what they're testing for. If the ID camp can simply do that, they'll be on the map in my opinion. Until then, they're just creationists under a different name who do no meaningful work beyond regurgitating old creationist canards and trying to get them into schools so they can dupe the next generation.
I do biometrics for a living. All of biometrics simply boils down to one thing: classification. We know what the genuine looks like and we know what the impostor looks like, and our goal is to build an algorithm that can classify an unknown as one or the other. SETI does a similar task. They know what naturally produced signals generally look like, and they know what signals that we might produce generally look like. They've build a classifier and they're running it. The ID crowd needs to define what they're looking for and look for it rather than expounding on how it's theoretically possible to build a classifier if you can simply calculate some nonsense quantity like "complex specified information" and not actually doing it. The key though, is to define what "designed" looks like and what "not designed" looks like and build a system for classification. That's what the rest of us have been doing for years, and that's why I'm not going to pat them on the back for pointing out that classification algorithms exist and might somehow be applied to the design of molecules.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
They don't have any proposals as to what to do with it, though. If they come up with a testable proposal, I'll call it science.
Well, okay, let's make a distinction between "isn't science" and "can't be science". Specific forms of ID *are* potentially testable. Testing to see if Mansanto geneticly altered products polluted a farmer's corn is a form of ID test even.
How do we know what value for X wouldn't be produced naturally but might be produced by a designer? The answer is, we really don't
The histogram suggestion in the link proposes a technique. I am sure statistical experts could offer better suggestions that don't rely as much on the visual inspection of histograms. But first it may be better to find good candidates before paying statisticians. Similarly, SETI would probably put more scrutiny into a good candidate if and when they find one.
Table-ized A.I.
Nearly "immune to all antibiotics" -- There's still a couple in reserve which still tend to work.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
Actually ... it kinda does imply that time does not go back further than a certain moment. I'll grant you it's not entirely proven, but it does imply very strongly that there was no moment in time 14 billion years ago. It just doesn't exist according to the big bang. Like the easter bunny.
Once you get your head around that simple, basic fact, all falls in place and you can lead a happy, positive life.
Or don't, it does not really matter at the end.
Just think about this: if tomorrow planet Earth was obliterated Jesus, Hitler, Beethoven, Julius Cesar, Picasso and Alexander the Great would be completely forgotten (actually they all eventually will be forgotten anyway. in 10 million years time very few of us, if anybody, will be remembered).
We are nothing, we matter nothing, there is no reason for anything.
Simple but true, but the enormity of the truth scares most people, specially because our genes makes us see this as counterintuitive (we are always trying to preserve and reproduce ourselves, no wonder the emphasis about sexual conduct in most religions).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_inductio n
Note how induction can be used to probe stuff for n != 0
But in any case, biological phenomena are not probable by mathematical induction, so although your comparison is interesting it holds no water.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
We have transitional forms. Plenty of them. Any person with a subscription to National Geographic would know that (and why they are so, most importantly).
The origin of life itself is not part of evolutionary theory, I don't know why you bring this topic here (nevertheless educated guesses can be made: we know how Earth's atmosphere was back then, the composition of the early seas and what may work as a catalyst for organic compounds to become more complex).
There is plenty of evidence about how simpler life has branched out as you call it. Specialized organs in our bodies have cells that behave like unicellular organisms with similar characteristics, but with the added cooperation characteristics that make them function as fully functioning organs.
Your analysis can't be objective if you lack such vast track of knowledge regarding the topic you are trying to discuss.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
To be ignorant about something, as you clearly are, does not mean you are asked to perform huge leaps of faith to accept a scientific sound theory.
The information is out there to anyone willing to go and get ti, the only leap of faith is top expect somebody like you, with such vast ignorance of the topic, to take the time and effort to read about the evidence debunking the nonsense you are ejaculating.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I did the ad-hominem attacks: you are an ignorant.
The other guy beat you nonsense with well reasoned logic until you weaseled out.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sure, that's reasonable. The key failing right now is that no ID advocates are proposing any mechanisms or properties for the designer, so all possible observations that "fit" the idea of a designer. Which is where Monsanto comes in:
I would call that a serious stretch, but one not unlikely to be tried by the main ID advocacy groups (if they haven't already). The issue at hand is that when testing for Monsanto genes, you know what you're looking for. You know what it looks like and you know what it looks like when the genes aren't present. It's about as much ID as is recognizing the offspring of a wolf and a poodle as having poodle genes simply because you recognize "intelligently designed" poodle features. You didn't recognize intelligent design via some sort of overarching theory of design. You recognized something you've seen before: a poodle.
I have to say that based on the contents of that web site, you're probably one of the world's top ID researchers. Seriously. You've come closer to proposing something worth testing than just about any other ID advocate I've seen. I think that those tests are highly unlikely to pan out, but they're definitely something.
The real issue here, though, is that the tests you propose are still "shots in the dark" rather than testing of something that follows naturally from your theory. For example, here's no reason to think that the designer would put a Fibonacci sequence into DNA. If such a sequence were found, it would certainly be evidence of something strange going on, but not finding the sequence doesn't really do any damage to the hypothesis, unless your hypothesis somehow requires a designer who is fond of Fibonacci sequences. I suppose that's where your classification of "weak science" comes in. It's more data gathering than meaningful hypothesis testing.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it. I'm reading it, over and over again! But still, please, I'm begging you, I desperately need your help! Can you please read it to me aloud? Maybe then I will understand why your use of words describing female genitalia is so abundant.
By the way, what does behavioral psychology say about a situation like this? I feel like slipping into a stockholm syndrom situation here...
Common non-coding DNA. Have you considered the possibility that it isn't actually just along for the ride?
Dr. Yuckay's opinion of ID is irrelevant. DE might be more plausible if it wasn't tied to the assertion that all of it happened here, on this planet, in that short an amount of time. It must be hard to back out of that though given the assertion of the development of species and the existance of fossils that reflect that alleged development.
You assert that DE has something that is axiomatic - I think that part of that axiom is also that it is a purely randomly driven because there is no evidence of any other kind of interference (alien biolab in orbit stuff). But there is also no evidence to suggest that the probably threshold could have been met for it to occur. It would be a far more plausible theory if it recognized that probability indicates that guidance of some kind must have occured - they could probably even point to when it occured (where they think the punctuated equalibrium occurs now maybe.)
And 'evolution has nothing to do with randomness?' I have no issue with randomness and see how it works in conjunction with NS.
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
How is it possible that someone so sophisticated in the usage of words describing female genitalia is making himself dependend upon answering again and again and thus continuing a relationship that may best be described as stockholm-syndrom situation?
Ah, your psychological background comes from being a patient, not a student, right?
This coming from the guy who claims that all evolution advocates are atheists. Whatever you say.
Why don't you just watch that video I linked to!? Here it is again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRsWAjvQSg
Seriously, just forget everything I've said and don't waste any more time replying to anyone on this thread. Just watch that video. If it helps, the lecture starts of with a prayer.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
And my point wasn't really that the ID camp can't produce vague, handwaving papers that don't mention God. My point was towofld:
1) Keep you from puffing up the publication record of ID as you seemed to be attempting ("The peer reviewed journal articles on it do not discuss dieties." Please. One article in a journal whose ID-friendly editor published the article directly rather than sending it out for peer review does not constitute "peer reviewed journal articles" by any stretch).
2) To point out that contrary to your implication, nobody has actually produced a testable theory that doesn't invoke the supernatural somewhere along the way. The interesting part of all of this is that any working paper written by an ID supporter necessarily has to be extremely vague (like the one you referenced), making no positive claims or testable predictions of any sort. ID has a choice between being religious apologetics or completely neutered "science" that makes no predictions and explains nothing. I know that the common escape route the ID advocates use when cornered on the god question is "aliens" but aliens really just move the problem of complexity to another planet rather than solving it. Clearly, at some point along the line, if the claims ID advocates make really are true, there's some sort of deity-like being that can somehow transcend their fabricated laws of complexity and touchy feely fake information theory. If that's the case, you're either dealing with a supernatural entity or all of the claims the ID group is making are simply wrong.
Seriously, though. If you've been following creationism long enough, you'll note that the players in the ID world are largely made up of the same people who were trying to get creationism into schools a generation ago. The idea that ID is somehow completely divorced from religion is nonsense. Its major proponents are religious apologetics organizations whose admitted goal is to remove "materialism" from science. Exactly what does that mean? The courts smacked them down and they rebranded their cause and made it intentionally vague so as to sneak back in. The courts have smacked them down again, but they're still trying. Take a look at the Dover trial transcripts, especially the examination of the "Of Pandas and People" ID textbook. They essentially took a creationist tract and changed references to God to "the designer" (Wooooo! The Designer! Who could that possibly be?) and tried to sneak it past the constitution.
Look, I'm sure that there's a small minority of players in the ID game that aren't just creationists in disguise, but they're not getting any results and they're not the ones doing the talking. They're just a fringe minority that buys into the Discovery Institute's glossy pamphlets and Bill Dembski's mathematical handwaving. Make no mistake that this is a political movement driven by people with a religious agenda. Any science that might be done is, right now, purely incidental.
Let me answer that question with a question. Do you think that if you brought that up at a genetics conference, everybody there would freak out because they hadn't considered the possibility and the whole idea of molecular clocks in DNA would come crashing down? The less flippant answer is, yes, this has been considered and tested. There are changes you can make to non-coding DNA to make it do stuff, but the key issue is that mutating non-coding DNA generally has no effect on the organism. As a result, it doesn't particularly matter why the DNA is there as the principle of mutations slowly introducing
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
The real issue here, though, is that the tests you propose are still "shots in the dark" rather than testing of something that follows naturally from your theory. For example, here's no reason to think that the designer would put a Fibonacci sequence into DNA.
In computer chips one can often find graffity, logos, etc. Assuming the designers are somewhat like us, then we would expect the same in designed DNA. True, they might not be, but if SETI's aliens don't use radio like we do, then we will also miss them. The Fibonacci example was chosen because it easier to define in an example, not necessarily because it is the best test. Proposed was a battery of tests. I will agree that it is highly unlikely, but some feel the same about SETI (or at least their assumptions). The thing is, DNA-ID is less expensive to test than SETI because it uses existing data (from other research) rather than build new equipment, such as antenna's. Thus, it may be low-probability, but it is also low cost. This is why I feel it is competative with SETI.
but one not unlikely to be tried by the main ID advocacy groups
True. They are looking down the wrong ID road in my opinion. My point is that ID *can* be science.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, you MUST be much smarter than me. Or are you simply not able to explain it to me? That would be a pity...
Yes. That is it exactly. When I wrote the comment, I put tags around the "he". At least, I thought I did. For some reason, it didn't work.
Although, I've been thinking about it. When a human man jizzes into a woman, it is said that he is "laying" the woman. When frogs have sex, the male frog jizzes onto the eggs as they evacuate. So, it could be said that the male frog is laying the eggs.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
So good to see that you still have time to answer my posts... :-)
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Well, at least you had the time to add some bold formatting to your reply. I think we're making progress here...
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
I didn't say all evolution advocates are athiests - but I would wager you $1 (US) that 80% of the authors on DE that have had anything published on the subject in the last 10 years are athiests.
And IHOP is a phenominal place to discuss weighty things at 2 AM.
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it to you and explain it.
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it and explain it.
Well... That is correct to say Intelligent Design is not a science; as it does not describe a discipline of science per say. It is an idea or concept that can be described by science. Evolution is the same thing. What people seem to forget is that the reasoning that bolsters one or the other would either be scientific or not. Evolution and Intelligent Design are nothing but theories! In any society that values independant analysis and critical discussion, the actions of the UK Government would be deemed Draconian, Authoritarian and just plain wrong.
"Sorry cunt, but I have no time for idiots like you"
I didn't read any of your post, again.
Read that until you get it, or better yet, have someone smarter than you read it and explain it.
Thanks for your continuous share of infinite wisdom. I'm learning from you with every reply you make...