Also, I'm curious. Do you really not care about all the mass graves and rape rooms found all over Iraq? Why does a true tyrant who really did fill mass graves and gas women and children not bother nearly half as much you as much as Bush?
I certainly care about those. I care even more about the ones they've been replaced with that are entirely our fault. Let me know when they stop filling mass graves, when the torture chambers stop operating, and when people stop living in fear. As far as I can tell, those operations haven't ceased. They've just changed management.
For instance, they are quick to come to muslim's defense for any perceived slight, but should a christian suffer the same thing (which happens a lot more often) they are silent.
Where do people get this shit? Seriously? I suppose it's part of the bizarre persecution complex that Christians seem to have in this country, but a quick look at the ACLU's web site shows that your statement is nonsense. That was the second result in a Google search for "ACLU support Christian" right after somebody's rant about how the ACLU doesn't support Christians. Those examples are easy to come by. Hell, the ACLU filed a friend of the court brief supporting Rush Limbaugh at one point.
I'll grant that they come to the defense of Christians less frequently than other groups, but might that be because Christians essentially run the entire country and aren't usually in need of a lot of defending?
At the time, the intend was to prevent Congress from setting up an Established Church of the United States. It forbid the states from having Established Churches, and several did for some time.
And the important question here is, what constitutes an established church? Does it need to be called that officially, or could the feds legally tax the crap out of you and give it all to the Catholic Church without being in violation as long as they don't explicitly say that Catholicism is the official state religion?
Republican voters are very turned off by the 'borrow-and-spend' policies of this administration -- note that Bush's approval rating is below the percentage of presumed Republican voters.
And the rest of us are all very impressed by how quickly these savvy Republican voters figured this out, based on the history of his approval ratings.
Basic emergency care is something everyone should get, and everyone *does* get no matter what - emergency rooms won't turn you away if you have a broken leg and can't pay.
Well, the president is actually the president of the losing states too, it really is a winner take all. But the winner take all system which most states use for their electoral votes is controlled by each state. The citizens of those states can take it up with their own state and move it to a more of a district or county level if they feel it is that important. Chances are, the majority of the people within that state don't see it as something they would want to do.
No, they absolutely wouldn't because as I pointed out, it's not in their best interests as a state to do so unilaterally. They'd simply be making themselves irrelevant to the politician who used to care about them. The only reason you'd do that is if you're always on the losing end of things. The point of a winner take all system from a state's perspective is that you maximize the chances of your state throwing the election, minimizing a candidate's ability to ignore you. The problem with it is that rather than solving the "big states take all the attention" problem, it simply moves it to "states that fit into the electoral strategy of the winning candidate take all of the attention." You're still stratifying the system by state, perhaps worse than you were before because you formalize the state-by-state strategy.
As for the rest of your post, I have no idea what it has to do with the electoral college at all. It seems to be a rant about the federal government being too important. My fundamental point is that the electoral college solves the "X states get all the attention" by substituting some other value for X in place of "big" because it increases the granularity of vote apportionment. It's not a solution. It simply moves the problem.
The president id the president of the united states not of the people living in large cities. If that is a problem for you, I would suggest moving to a country more in line with your political ideals. This one has been the way it is since the beginning specifically for those reasons.
You have a very valid point, but the whole idea becomes self defeating when states give out electoral votes based on a winner take all system. Instead of the president being the president of the populous states as he would in a direct vote, he's simply the president of the subset of states that get him a majority of the electoral votes. What we have now is, in effect, exactly the same thing. It's just split by factors other than population. Regional interests still dominate over individual issues.
If states went to a proportional system for electoral votes, it would probably bring at least some sanity back to that situation. Unfortunately, any state that does that unilaterally is largely throwing away its power in the presidential race, and it's not up to the federal government to standardize it, so I doubt it will ever happen.
What is it that determines the value of c in space? Why is it what we measure it to be? What is it that determines the value of c in water or glass? My whole point is that c varies according to the medium. That is a FACT. c is NOT an absolute constant. If the properties of the medium change, so will c.
The *definition* of c is the speed of light in a vacuum. You are confused. My guess is that you're arguing with an actual physicist based on a rather informal introduction to relativity. I note that you've snipped out basically everything he wrote that makes his case pretty definitively and replied to it by loudly gainsaying whatever small snippet you selected based on a cursory understanding of the material involved. That's not cool. I'm not surprised that you got the result that you did. I strongly suspect that this is a case of fractal wrongness that really can't be corrected unless you're ready to learn about the topic in some depth.
ALL of Einstein's equations work EXACTLY the same, no matter WHAT value you put for the speed of light. He may have reflected the common thought that c was invariant, but none of his math REQUIRES this constancy.
As Ambitwistor has been trying to point out to you, you're missing the distinction between "The equation still says the same thing" and "The equation still properly reflects reality." Yes, Einstein's equations work no matter what value you plug in for c. However, if c changes over time, the assumptions that the equations are based on no longer hold, meaning there's no reason to believe that those equations are meaningful. The fact that you can still compute them doesn't make the slightest bit of difference.
The constancy of c is listed as a postulate rather than a consequence of the work. That means, "If c is a constant, then the following is true..." rather than, "Because of all this math, c is a constant." If you invalidate the postulate, the whole thing goes down the toilet.
There is NOTHING in any physics that requires the speed of light to be constant.
Except for the correctness of relativity and anything that relies on relativity being true. Watching this exchange between the two of you says to me that you may be arguing a bit outside your field on this one.
The point is that the key evolutionary mechanism of natural selection cannot account for this complex motor drive.
And the point of the response is that's really just an assertion based on the author's personal incredulity.
However the design theory can elegantly explain the existence of the basic motor.
I'm not sure how a design theory as vague as ID is could possibly explain anything elegantly. If you consider, "At some point in history, an undescribed force changed something in an unknown way, thus leading to the flagellum" an elegant explanation, I suppose it's spot on, but I fail to see how anything that's vague enough to apply to all possible observations warrants the term.
So far I have not heard of an evolutionary mechanism that could account for the existence of the basic motor itself.
How much of the literature have you been keeping up with? I hear stuff like this a lot from people who seem to expect the answer to show up in the mail somewhere. Is that, "I've been reading the latest journals on the topic and none of them are satisfactory" or, "Nobody has posted a mutation-by-mutation list on slashdot"?
You can remove certain parts and it may still function. If you remove the crank or camshaft however it no longer works. If it no longer works it no longer is visible to natural selection and would in time be eliminated.
That's why I added "in that sense" to my response. I didn't want to quibble about the particulars of the motor. The idea was that motors are not irreducibly complex with respect to cylinders, but pointing that out doesn't validate the idea for common descent of motors.
The more fundamental point is that no irreducibly complex biological system has been posited for which potential pathways cannot be suggested. In that sense, IC works out to nothing more than Behe's personal incredulity. Further, I suspect that there's no way of actually showing that a system is irreducibly complex.
The key is that natural selection can ONLY work for a completed, working variation that confers a survival advantage. That is the very definition of natural selection, the driver of evolution. A partial change or mutation, like an inoperable flagellum, confers a DISadvantage and will be eliminated by this fundamental process.
There are two fundamental flaws with IC in this case. First, it makes a rather sweeping assumption that all intermediate forms must be used for the same thing the final form is used for or that they're useless. This simply isn't the case. Second, it assumes that we're always going from N-1 parts to N parts (hence the emphasis on "reduction"). There's no reason to suggest that. There's no reason perfectly functional non-IC system of N+1 parts can't lose a part and become a functional IC system of N parts. Imagine seeing a climber on a cliff face who has climbed himself down into a trap. You see no way for him to have climbed up, but do you then assume that he can't possibly be standing there?
The question then arises: How can such a complex motor come into existence by natural selection, a piecemeal fashion? It must be fully functional in ONE reproductively capable organism.
Quite a bit of work has been done on potential origins of the flagellum. It doesn't appear to be nearly the logical impossibility that Behe suggests. Of course, when somebody points this out to him, he immediately moves the goalposts from, "There's no logical way that it could have happened" to "Sure, it could have happened that way, but you didn't prove that it did!"
By that reasoning, if someone removes two cylinders from an 8 cylinder engine, the engine evolved from a 4 cylinder model, since it still runs on only 6 cylinders.
No, by that reasoning, an 8-cylinder engine is not irreducibly complex in that sense. The point of the examples is not that they "prove" evolution but rather that they show irreducible complexity to be misapplied in those cases and, in all likelihood, a vacuous concept.
However, for flooding to occur locally it meant that the land surface itself must rise and fall below ocean level.
Seriously? Is this person's understanding of where floods come from that bad?
When this problem is faced at all, the hot earth is explained away by arguing that the earth's heat is sustained by decaying radioactive elements deep within the core.
I like that. "Explained away." Are they seriously appealing to Lord Kelvin as the last word on the temperature of the earth?
The population of the earth today is about six billion. Using the formula employed by demographers it can readily be shown that it would take just about 5,000 years to reach this figure beginning with Noah's family and assuming only 2.4 children per family.
Simple question for people who use this model: How many people built the pyramids? It's usually good to toss a sanity check in when you build a model. Consider this to be it.
Another simple question: How does the young earth model explain the collinearity of the points in the first graph in this document? It seems like a striking coincidence.
The evolution theory zealots in this whole thread act like religious kooks claiming exactly that "science" (whatever they believe it is) excludes divine causality. And that idea of "divine causality" would be pretty darn close to "Intelligent Design," would it not?
Science doesn't exclude divine causality in the sense that it shows divine causality to be false. Science excludes divine causality in the sense that claims of arbitrary magic are not scientifically testable (at least, the fundamental explanation of "magic" isn't). I don't see why people get so upset over that simple fact. It's like complaining that mathematics has a bias against love because calculus makes no provision for it.
That being said, if your theology happens to make objectively testable claims about material reality, don't be surprised when people test those claims, and try not to be offended if they don't match up with the evidence.
The greatest sponsors of the evolution theory in history: Mao, Hitler, and Stalin failed, so what makes you hope for success?
What, no Marx? How could you possibly write such drivel and not include the Marx on the list for the nonsense jackpot?
So far Bush has attack around 4, 2 where weeksor years of negotiating was done, the other 2 have been at the request of the legal government.
You might want to go further than just comparing raw numbers and take into account that of all of the conflicts run by the two presidents, one of them stands out as a complete fucking disaster.
How do you come to that conclusion? Have you seen the same ads I have? "I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper" - "Healthcare for everyone". This can only translate into more of my labor going towards strangers.
Your labor goes toward strangers every day. We have police, fire departments, roads, military protection, a judicial system, and more. I know it makes neat rhetoric, but your complaint is nonsense.
The first is not a problem unless coercion is involed (monopolies that don't represent a win for the customers don't stay monopolies).
How do you define a "win" in this case? More consumer surplus than the competitive alternative, or just better service than if the industry didn't exist at all?
Gould is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. Most middle-of-the-road evolutionists look to Gould as one of the key players in evolutionary science. However, another key player, Richard Dawkins frequently criticized Gould for his theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. Not because it lacked any scientific merit, but simply because it sounded contradictory to Darwin. In other words, it wasn't good for the cause.
I strongly suspect that you won't be able to produce any real evidence for this claim. Dawkins has generally held the position not that PE is wrong, but rather that it isn't really a particularly surprising statement. You may have been reading one of his many discussions of the common understanding of what punctuated equilibrium is and how it differs (or doesn't, really) from neo-Darwinian synthesis. To say that it is "contradictory to Darwin" is overstating the case.
My incredulity is indeed legitimate criticism, no different than my incredulity at someone claiming he swam to Mars in scuba gear riding the solar winds on a space surfboard. And I am not completely ignorant of evolution (I do admit I am not a biologist though). I have studied the Theory of Evolution enough to know it is not true, that the evidence is no evidence at all only assumption and the shaving of square pegs to fit into round holes.
You seem to be projecting your limited knowledge of the field onto the entire field. "I've studied this in a limited fashion and because I haven't come across the answer to X question, I know that nobody knows the answer" is not exactly an impressive critique of an entire field of science. This statement, specifically, shows that you probably haven't read deeply enough into the topic to dismiss it:
I have to conclude this does not prove anything other than that similar creatures such as mammals share similar genetic traits, such as the ability to produce milk to nurse its young. When I see tits on a fish, yeah, maybe I'll take nested-hierarchies as proof of evolution more seriously.
Among other things, the interesting analysis is done on non-coding regions of DNA rather than the regions that code for specific features. You might find that reading about the molecular clock hypothesis clears up that misunderstanding, assuming that you haven't already resolved it to your satisfaction.
Common sense is not a euphamism for cultural prejudices, it is a form of wisdom, which is sound judgment upon a matter based upon honest observation and experience.
Anybody who thinks that way is unlikely to survive a modern physics education. Sometimes the universe doesn't work the way our intuition tells us it does. The only way to really figure it out is to sit down and look at the data.
Another term for those people is, "People who actually spend their time studying the subject." I don't consider Brett Favre an out-of-touch ivory tower football theorist or scorn him because my common-sense folksy understanding of the football I watch on TV tells me that he doesn't know what he's talking about. I have no idea why biologists don't get the same courtesy.
2. How can you argue (successfully) with the very simple logic supporting ID? Non sequiturs do not count. And telling your opponents that they are all stupid does not count.
You mean the grandparent's logic that can be rephrased, My beverage cup is RED and my beverage cup is a THING, therefore all THINGS are RED? The more important question is, why would one want to argue with it?
Let's not forget that Evolution, especially with respect to the origin of species, also fails this test. As hard as one might try, postulates about things which happened in the past can't ever be proven false.
I have no idea why people say this. A kid tells his parents he cleaned his room. His parents, seeking to verify the claim, look at his room. Noting that the room is not clean and that nobody has intervened to make the room dirty again, reject the hypothesis that the child has cleaned his room. Likewise, any number of observations would turn evolutionary theory on its head. Show that the earth can't possibly be more than a few thousand years old. Alternately, stumble across the proverbial rabbit in the Cambrian.
Of course, I'm assuming that when you say "proven false" you mean "shown to be so vanishingly implausible that you'd be unreasonable to believe it." If you want to go too much further than that, I think it's hard to justify the belief that any claim at all can be proven false.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll grant that they come to the defense of Christians less frequently than other groups, but might that be because Christians essentially run the entire country and aren't usually in need of a lot of defending?
As for the rest of your post, I have no idea what it has to do with the electoral college at all. It seems to be a rant about the federal government being too important. My fundamental point is that the electoral college solves the "X states get all the attention" by substituting some other value for X in place of "big" because it increases the granularity of vote apportionment. It's not a solution. It simply moves the problem.
If states went to a proportional system for electoral votes, it would probably bring at least some sanity back to that situation. Unfortunately, any state that does that unilaterally is largely throwing away its power in the presidential race, and it's not up to the federal government to standardize it, so I doubt it will ever happen.
The constancy of c is listed as a postulate rather than a consequence of the work. That means, "If c is a constant, then the following is true..." rather than, "Because of all this math, c is a constant." If you invalidate the postulate, the whole thing goes down the toilet.
Except for the correctness of relativity and anything that relies on relativity being true. Watching this exchange between the two of you says to me that you may be arguing a bit outside your field on this one.
I'm not sure how a design theory as vague as ID is could possibly explain anything elegantly. If you consider, "At some point in history, an undescribed force changed something in an unknown way, thus leading to the flagellum" an elegant explanation, I suppose it's spot on, but I fail to see how anything that's vague enough to apply to all possible observations warrants the term.
How much of the literature have you been keeping up with? I hear stuff like this a lot from people who seem to expect the answer to show up in the mail somewhere. Is that, "I've been reading the latest journals on the topic and none of them are satisfactory" or, "Nobody has posted a mutation-by-mutation list on slashdot"?
The more fundamental point is that no irreducibly complex biological system has been posited for which potential pathways cannot be suggested. In that sense, IC works out to nothing more than Behe's personal incredulity. Further, I suspect that there's no way of actually showing that a system is irreducibly complex.
There are two fundamental flaws with IC in this case. First, it makes a rather sweeping assumption that all intermediate forms must be used for the same thing the final form is used for or that they're useless. This simply isn't the case. Second, it assumes that we're always going from N-1 parts to N parts (hence the emphasis on "reduction"). There's no reason to suggest that. There's no reason perfectly functional non-IC system of N+1 parts can't lose a part and become a functional IC system of N parts. Imagine seeing a climber on a cliff face who has climbed himself down into a trap. You see no way for him to have climbed up, but do you then assume that he can't possibly be standing there?
Quite a bit of work has been done on potential origins of the flagellum. It doesn't appear to be nearly the logical impossibility that Behe suggests. Of course, when somebody points this out to him, he immediately moves the goalposts from, "There's no logical way that it could have happened" to "Sure, it could have happened that way, but you didn't prove that it did!"
Seriously? Is this person's understanding of where floods come from that bad?
I like that. "Explained away." Are they seriously appealing to Lord Kelvin as the last word on the temperature of the earth?
Simple question for people who use this model: How many people built the pyramids? It's usually good to toss a sanity check in when you build a model. Consider this to be it.
Another simple question: How does the young earth model explain the collinearity of the points in the first graph in this document? It seems like a striking coincidence.
That being said, if your theology happens to make objectively testable claims about material reality, don't be surprised when people test those claims, and try not to be offended if they don't match up with the evidence.
What, no Marx? How could you possibly write such drivel and not include the Marx on the list for the nonsense jackpot?
Among other things, the interesting analysis is done on non-coding regions of DNA rather than the regions that code for specific features. You might find that reading about the molecular clock hypothesis clears up that misunderstanding, assuming that you haven't already resolved it to your satisfaction.
Anybody who thinks that way is unlikely to survive a modern physics education. Sometimes the universe doesn't work the way our intuition tells us it does. The only way to really figure it out is to sit down and look at the data.
Simple question: How does one quantify specified complexity? Until they can answer that one, they're blowing smoke.
Of course, I'm assuming that when you say "proven false" you mean "shown to be so vanishingly implausible that you'd be unreasonable to believe it." If you want to go too much further than that, I think it's hard to justify the belief that any claim at all can be proven false.