Try listening to this program. Chase down the Seton Hall studies too. They're good reading. I highly recommend "A profile of 517 Detainees through Department of Defense Data" for a high level overview.
When the guy is firing a gun at our soldiers and we take him prisoner, I am not inclined to give the guy a trial by jury.
What about when the guy is turned in by a bounty hunter (who promptly disappears) for a $5000 reward with no evidence other than his say so? Is he really a bad guy? Was he just a sap who got picked up for $5000? Did he piss of a warlord somewhere? Should we shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out?
The extent of the proof I need is they were captured hanging around with guys who had guns firing at American soldiers, and I'll just take the American soldiers word for it.
Well, that covers about 5% of them. I'm happy to give the US forces the benefit of the doubt on those cases. What about the 95% or so who were picked up by Northern Alliance, Pakistani Intelligence, and "other" who may or may not have any witnesses or evidence against them?
Trials are for criminals. These guys aren't criminals, they are soldiers in a new kind of war. I don't recall putting all the German soldiers that were captured on trial before tossing them in prisoner camps. The only difference here is that the enemy is not represented by a well defined country, but rather a more loosely defined movement.
So when does this "war" we've declared end? Do we keep all combatants, regardless of affiliation, in the hole until there's nobody anywhere in the world who might commit a terrorist act against us? If you don't have an enemy that you can define or a way of describing victory, you don't really have much of a war. You have something that more closely resembles an ongoing law enforcement issue.
...the overwhelming majority of people in Guantanamo were rounded up from the battlefield...
I don't see much evidence to suggest that this is true. According to this breakdown 11% were picked up by the US or coalition forces and 20% were picked up by Northern Alliance and Afghan authorities (bounties were involved, but very little documentation of actual offenses and captors appears to be available). Let's assume for the sake of argument that all those people were on the battlefield. Sixty six percent were picked up by Pakistani authorities. If even half of them were picked up on the battlefield, that leaves over a third of the prisoners being of questionable origin. I strongly suspect that given the sums of money involved and the lack of oversight, we're dealing with a large number of people who were definitely not rounded up from the battlefield.
Of course, your original point holds--they aren't being rounded up "concentration camp" style, but "witch hunt" style might not be much of a stretch. I certainly agree that using the word "detainee" for somebody being held for years without a trial is whitewashing a situation that our leaders might call "disappearing" if it were Hugo Chavez doing it.
The problem with that is we already have a system for dealing with captured solders. If the Gitmo detainees are "enemy combatants" they should have access to THAT system in all of its honest workings.
Yes, the CSRT is an impressive system...
MALIK: Regarding the charge that I worked at several guest houses and offices, what was the work?
JUDGE: I cannot answer that. This is the first time we've seen the evidence. I know nothing more than what is written here.
MALIK: Same with me. I don't know anything about this. Regarding the charge that I was frequently seen at Osama bin Laden's side -- who saw me?
JUDGE: I don't know.
We all know that there's nothing better for justice than being railroaded by secret evidence.
I know this because I was a soldier myself. Regardless of what you hear in the media, the military does not like to waste resources. Wasting money is bad. It will get you in trouble. Wasting some other's soldier's time is a HUGE No-No!
Having spent plenty of time trying to get things done with the military, I have to disagree with your assessment. The military differs from other branches of the government mainly in that the people on the ground take their jobs more seriously. Beyond that, it's not exactly what I'd call a bastion of efficiency. Add to that the fact that they've got a hard job and not a lot of time to do it, and you have a recipe for problems.
Wasting someone's time who is not really military that belongs to some organization with three initials like CIA or NSA.... well, you just don't do that.
No, they do a pretty good job of wasting their own time as it is. Again, a huge organization doing a hard job doesn't necessarily produce great results. If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend listening to This American Life's program on the topic. The part that mentions the head of interrogations at Guantanamo complaining about getting too many "Mickey Mouse" prisoners is especially interesting. Also recommended is the Seton Hall study it references. We're scooping up a lot of people and disappearing them on what appear to be fairly thin pretenses, and we're not doing a particularly good job of correcting our mistakes or being answerable to the public about it. This isn't a matter of malice or abuse of power or even competence. It's the natural result of a system with high stakes and insufficient safeguards.
I have no doubt that a lot of people at Guantanamo are the types of people who should be locked up for good. What I doubt is that a system that encourages turning people in for sizable rewards, when combined with what appear to be kangaroo courts, is one in which we should entrust the power to lock people up indefinitely. I strongly suspect that this is going to be one of those episodes in our history that we will have a hard time defending in hindsight.
But because there are fables and proverbs in the bible doesn't mean it is a "fairy in the clouds". And that was the point I was making. Nothing more.
I think that the point others are trying to make is analogous: The Bible contains things that appear to be generally true and things that are clearly not literally true. It doesn't follow that we should lend the highly unlikely parts of the Bible any more credibility than we lend other mythology that's grounded in historical events and places. I'm having a hard time coming up with a distinction between "fairy tale" and "fable" that isn't designed mainly to avoid being rude.
I've seen you use what you call the "ordinary" definition of speciation elsewhere:
A reproductively isolated aggregate of interbreeding organisms
and you seem to label anything else as unreasonable. You're missing something fundamental: The definition of "species" is unclear and varies from application to application because the one you're fond of doesn't apply in many cases. For example, it *completely* throws out all asexual organisms--the ones that make up the majority of species in the world. Realistically, your definition applies best to animals and decreasingly well to other kingdoms. I suspect that the main reason you haven't seen what you're looking for is the fact that you're using a definition that's relevant to the kingdom with, on average, the longest time period between generations. We've observed fewer generations of animals than we have just about anything else.
And "can no longer" is often a confused interpretation of "doesn't any more". This doesn't imply they cannot breed, it just implies that they don't. We have a set of salamanders in California that this mistake is actually being observed.
I think you're reading far too much into "reproductively isolated" than biologists do and then telling them that they're wrong. For example:
But given the right forcings and they can be made to breed.
If we start allowing this definition, the number of plant species drops precipitously. Tangerines and grapefruit become the same species. Botanists produce kooky crosses of plants all the time--often using plants that we could consider decidedly different species--and it's not uncommon for mother nature to surprise you when you find out that the offspring are fertile. Same species? Really?
They also can breed through test tubes.
If you want to go that far, I'm betting that we could surprise ourselves with the creepy hybrids we can create, even in the animal kingdom. It would not be entirely surprising if a human / chimpanzee hybrid were possible. Would you label us the same species in that case?
You're seeing not a lot of fuzzy definitions of "species" because the community of biologists is trying to trick you. You're seeing it because it's a really weird question with no truly good answer. Are all asexual organisms the same species? Do they not count as species at all? The problem gets really hairy really quickly, and falling back to a hard and fast definition or (more commonly) appealing to "common sense" and intuition just doesn't cut it.
I am more than willing to hear why you believe science is right in this matter. It doesnt change the fact that nothing can form from nothing without a creator.
I have no serious interest in cosmology (which isn't relevant to evolution) or even abiogenesis (which is really a separate area of study from evolution), so I'm not really dying to get into this, but I have to ask, how exactly does a "creator" solve the problem you're proposing? You seem to be saying that all things that exist require a creator, and to "solve" the problem, you're positing a creator that violates the rule you just asserted. Why not just do away with the rule in the first place if you're so quick to discard it when it's convenient? I'd hardly call your "fact" a fact at all. It seems more like folksy wisdom than anything that necessarily has to be true. Frankly, if you're rejecting most of modern science based on that assumption, you might want to think a little bit about how you evaluate the world around you.
Frankly, I don't know what you mean when you refer to "this matter" since you've skipped from evolution and appeals to non-biologists to what appears to be cosmology and some sort of philosophical "first cause" argument. Are you just rejecting science in general, or is there something specific you want to complain about? Like, maybe, something having to do with biology and old dinosaur bones?
Let me just ask you this, do you REALLY believe that all life came by accident? out of nothing???
"Accident" and "nothing" really aren't meaningful in this context. Are we talking about evolution or cosmology here? As far as I can see, your objections to evolution are probably twofold: 1) My guess is that you have a strong religious predisposition against it. 2) You seem to reject a huge pile of scientific results based on a combination of your intuition and what you want to be true.
You've been assiduously avoiding actually talking about the data in favor of vague platitudes and appeals to misplaced authority. For want of a kinder way of putting it, that's exactly why over the past thousand years, science and reason have made the place for mysticism and fear as small as it is now. One side wants to discuss the actual evidence and the other side wants to talk about emotions, intuition, and philosophical consequences. I don't know about anybody else, but I know which horse I would rather tether my intellectual cart to.
Actually, a cursory search on the flagellum or blood clotting or the immune system will give you piles of results. Quite a bit of work has been done on the potential evolutionary pathways of so-called "irreducibly complex" systems. The problem is that when you point that out to an ID creationist, their position changes from "There's no way this could possibly have evolved" to "But you can't prove that it *did* evolve that way!" You may have missed it, but I highly recommend that you read Michael Behe's testimony during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. It's a classic example of how far you can go by claiming something cannot be explained and then ignoring any plausible explanations that people offer you.
molecular biology, organismal biology, environmental biology, and human biology.
Are you actually reading this shit before posting it? Googling around shows two L J Gibsons who might have written the paper, and neither of them is a biologist--certainly not one whose background would include a significant understanding of the fossil record or genetics. That's really beside the point, though. If you dig hard enough, you'll probably be able to find one or two crank biologists who will support your position. You'll probably succeed in quote mining a good biologist before you succeed in that.
The bottom line, though, is that you'll probably only succeed in trotting out more long-refuted creationist talking points. No new information? No transitional fossils? Seriously? Try this: What's the single most compelling piece of evidence that you have in favor of your position that you are able to argue without resorting to appeals to scientists who died before Darwin or people who have no real knowledge of evolutionary biology?
Christian scholars will often claim the list of 'banned substances' in the bible is only applicable to 'The chosen people' i.e. the Jews.
By that reasoning a Christian can for example eat pork and a Jew can not.
Interestingly, I've heard many of the same people who say that decry "moral relativity" when they see it elsewhere.
It's hard to trust any debunking source that is okay with personal bashing while they are countering a scientific argument.
What about a debunking source that points out a litany of mathematical and logical errors in the scientific argument? You'll find those among the snorts and hoots of laughter as well. We're referring to the same Setterfield who claimed an r-squared of 1 with data that lay everywhere except on his regression curve, right? It's hard to be polite to a guy who appears to be blatantly lying to you about his results.
It's worth noting that unless something has changed in the past few years, Setterfield is a crank by any reasonable definition. My favorite part of Setterfield's classic work is when he claimed an r-squared value of 1 (to "nine significant figures") when none of the points in his data set actually lay on his curve. Maybe Setterfield has spent some time in statistics class over the past 25 years, but he has historically been good for a laugh.
Well, you make a good point. Still doesn't invalidate the splitting possibility though. So we have two valid ways of humans and other primates splitting apart on the chromosome count. Double the chance, double the fun?
Probably not. If it were the other way around, you'd expect to see branches of the ape family tree with the same number of chromosomes as humans. To my knowledge, this is not the case. Anything that branched off before the fusion would have the "old" number of chromosomes, and anything that branched off after the fusion would have the "new" number. If it was a split, it would have had to coincidentally occur in any branch that split off before humans did. That seems very improbable.
Interbreeding in of itself or lack thereof isn't enough to create a new species. We have genetically modified some bees so they cannot produce offspring, that doesn't make them "not Bees". it just makes them sterile bees.
So, if you have a branch of the family tree that can no longer breed with other branches of the tree and produce viable offspring, but it is capable of reproducing within its branch, what other criteria need to be met before you call it an independent species?
And it isn't for lack of trying, we have been attempting to do this in one way or another for centuries. It may come as a surprise but we have been purposely manipulating breeds long before the concept of speciation has been around. Changing a definition doesn't "fix" this.
You seem to have a very specific, objective definition of "species" in mind (or you're simply hell bent on rejecting a number of common interpretations used in biology for some reason). Could you share it with us?
Second, the bible isn't a collection of fairy tales. There is quite a bit in it that has been historically documented and we have archaeological evidence to show they happened.
So, do you regard the story of a man who is swallowed by a giant fish / whale and lives 3 days inside its belly as particularly plausible? Certainly, the Bible references real places and events, but it doesn't follow that none of it is fantasy. A lot of mythology references real places and events and mingles those things in with what one might uncharitably refer to as fairy tales.
Like all companies, they suck when they have a monopoly. Put two of them together in the same neighborhood and make them compete with each other for customers for a couple of years and see how it goes, though. I was excited about FiOS not because I thought that Verizon was going to save the day. I was excited because I sincerely hoped that Comcast and Verizon would beat the crap out of each other fighting for market share.
Can you point me to statements by "most" design theorists which state that homo sapiens and dinosaurs lived at the same period? I doubt you can. This misrepresentation of Intelligent Design is starting to get old.
So true. Creationists and cdesign proponentsists have nothing to do with each other. Nothing to see here. Move along.
I'd like to point out that I am against both antibiotics and the refrigeration of meat and dairy products, as Newton did not come out in favor of either one. Relativity blows too.
Hey Copid, Objective evidence and you have numbers? Not sure what you mean by the numbers thing, but the concept is simple.
Well, information is usually a very quantifiable thing, and creationists love to bandy it about and even invoke information theory, but they never seem to be able to explain how it's actually measured in the context they're using. Even the amazing Bill Dembski, for all of his mathematical bluster, can't seem to calculate the amount of "information" as he sees it in a couple of DNA strings. All we get are hand waving analogies like the one you provided. I strongly suggest that you stop referring to "information" because you're not referring to information in the sense that any information theorist would use.
When you look at the DNA for a single-celled organism compared to that of a fish, you will find a fish has a lot more DNA information not present in the single-celled organism.
Yes, that's quite true. And mutations can create significant chunks of DNA, which by any reasonable measure, increases information in the genome.
So if the only letters you have to write a book with are A through D, you can only have that much variation to work with. A fish by analogy, has the letters A through M and there are no observable methods or transistional forms to indicate where the extra letters could come from - in fact observable microevolutionary changes to DNA have always show a deletion of letters or duplication at best and never the addition of more letters. I don't know how to make it any simpler.
The problem is that you've made it so simple that you've made it wrong. Information-wise both the fish and the unicellular have 4 possible symbols (or "letters"). One just has more than the other. The fish genome almost certainly has more information than the simple organism does, but that says nothing about whether mutations create information or not. Simply adding a random nucleotide to the unicellular creature's genome will increase its information content and cause it to creep closer to the fish's genome in information quantity. Do something drastic like copy a long chunk of DNA and you've created even more information by any meaningful measurement. That's why I'm asking for a quantifiable definition of information--without it, creationists tend to say, "Well, that's not what I mean by information." By all appearances, they want "information" to mean "A quantity which increases that mutations cannot cause to increase."
What numbers are you referring to?
Well, in theory, when you say information "decreases" there's almost certainly a quantity associated with that, yes? It's not like love where I can say, "I love you more than I love ice cream" but be completely unable to quantify it. For example, if I give you two DNA strands:
AGCTTAGGT
CCCTAATGC
Which one has more information in it, by your calculations?
As to your reference, it looks like Spetner wants to use thermodynamic entropy and Shannon information. That's fine, and it's a perfectly good measure of information. What is clear from a basic examination of mutations and entropy is that mutations can and do (often) increase information by that measure. And of course, there's the article asserting (from nowhere, as far as I can tell):
However, a mutation does not necessarily reduce specified complexity--just that it is so likely to do so that it cannot be the mechanism for generating the huge amount of specified complexity that we see in living things.
The quantity "specified complexity" is, for want of a more polite term, complete crap. Nobody has ever calculated the amount of "specified complexity" in any string, much less proved the probability of mutations increasing or decreasing it. It's a quantity that, as far as I can tell, exists only in the minds of creationists. This assertion is not
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Try listening to this program. Chase down the Seton Hall studies too. They're good reading. I highly recommend "A profile of 517 Detainees through Department of Defense Data" for a high level overview.
Well, that covers about 5% of them. I'm happy to give the US forces the benefit of the doubt on those cases. What about the 95% or so who were picked up by Northern Alliance, Pakistani Intelligence, and "other" who may or may not have any witnesses or evidence against them?
Of course, your original point holds--they aren't being rounded up "concentration camp" style, but "witch hunt" style might not be much of a stretch. I certainly agree that using the word "detainee" for somebody being held for years without a trial is whitewashing a situation that our leaders might call "disappearing" if it were Hugo Chavez doing it.
Pardon me. The proper study link is here.
MALIK: Regarding the charge that I worked at several guest houses and offices, what was the work?
JUDGE: I cannot answer that. This is the first time we've seen the evidence. I know nothing more than what is written here.
MALIK: Same with me. I don't know anything about this. Regarding the charge that I was frequently seen at Osama bin Laden's side -- who saw me?
JUDGE: I don't know.
We all know that there's nothing better for justice than being railroaded by secret evidence.
No, they do a pretty good job of wasting their own time as it is. Again, a huge organization doing a hard job doesn't necessarily produce great results. If you haven't done so already, I highly recommend listening to This American Life's program on the topic. The part that mentions the head of interrogations at Guantanamo complaining about getting too many "Mickey Mouse" prisoners is especially interesting. Also recommended is the Seton Hall study it references. We're scooping up a lot of people and disappearing them on what appear to be fairly thin pretenses, and we're not doing a particularly good job of correcting our mistakes or being answerable to the public about it. This isn't a matter of malice or abuse of power or even competence. It's the natural result of a system with high stakes and insufficient safeguards.
I have no doubt that a lot of people at Guantanamo are the types of people who should be locked up for good. What I doubt is that a system that encourages turning people in for sizable rewards, when combined with what appear to be kangaroo courts, is one in which we should entrust the power to lock people up indefinitely. I strongly suspect that this is going to be one of those episodes in our history that we will have a hard time defending in hindsight.
and you seem to label anything else as unreasonable. You're missing something fundamental: The definition of "species" is unclear and varies from application to application because the one you're fond of doesn't apply in many cases. For example, it *completely* throws out all asexual organisms--the ones that make up the majority of species in the world. Realistically, your definition applies best to animals and decreasingly well to other kingdoms. I suspect that the main reason you haven't seen what you're looking for is the fact that you're using a definition that's relevant to the kingdom with, on average, the longest time period between generations. We've observed fewer generations of animals than we have just about anything else.
I think you're reading far too much into "reproductively isolated" than biologists do and then telling them that they're wrong. For example:
If we start allowing this definition, the number of plant species drops precipitously. Tangerines and grapefruit become the same species. Botanists produce kooky crosses of plants all the time--often using plants that we could consider decidedly different species--and it's not uncommon for mother nature to surprise you when you find out that the offspring are fertile. Same species? Really?
If you want to go that far, I'm betting that we could surprise ourselves with the creepy hybrids we can create, even in the animal kingdom. It would not be entirely surprising if a human / chimpanzee hybrid were possible. Would you label us the same species in that case?
You're seeing not a lot of fuzzy definitions of "species" because the community of biologists is trying to trick you. You're seeing it because it's a really weird question with no truly good answer. Are all asexual organisms the same species? Do they not count as species at all? The problem gets really hairy really quickly, and falling back to a hard and fast definition or (more commonly) appealing to "common sense" and intuition just doesn't cut it.
Frankly, I don't know what you mean when you refer to "this matter" since you've skipped from evolution and appeals to non-biologists to what appears to be cosmology and some sort of philosophical "first cause" argument. Are you just rejecting science in general, or is there something specific you want to complain about? Like, maybe, something having to do with biology and old dinosaur bones?
You've been assiduously avoiding actually talking about the data in favor of vague platitudes and appeals to misplaced authority. For want of a kinder way of putting it, that's exactly why over the past thousand years, science and reason have made the place for mysticism and fear as small as it is now. One side wants to discuss the actual evidence and the other side wants to talk about emotions, intuition, and philosophical consequences. I don't know about anybody else, but I know which horse I would rather tether my intellectual cart to.
Actually, a cursory search on the flagellum or blood clotting or the immune system will give you piles of results. Quite a bit of work has been done on the potential evolutionary pathways of so-called "irreducibly complex" systems. The problem is that when you point that out to an ID creationist, their position changes from "There's no way this could possibly have evolved" to "But you can't prove that it *did* evolve that way!" You may have missed it, but I highly recommend that you read Michael Behe's testimony during the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. It's a classic example of how far you can go by claiming something cannot be explained and then ignoring any plausible explanations that people offer you.
The bottom line, though, is that you'll probably only succeed in trotting out more long-refuted creationist talking points. No new information? No transitional fossils? Seriously? Try this: What's the single most compelling piece of evidence that you have in favor of your position that you are able to argue without resorting to appeals to scientists who died before Darwin or people who have no real knowledge of evolutionary biology?
It's worth noting that unless something has changed in the past few years, Setterfield is a crank by any reasonable definition. My favorite part of Setterfield's classic work is when he claimed an r-squared value of 1 (to "nine significant figures") when none of the points in his data set actually lay on his curve. Maybe Setterfield has spent some time in statistics class over the past 25 years, but he has historically been good for a laugh.
Like all companies, they suck when they have a monopoly. Put two of them together in the same neighborhood and make them compete with each other for customers for a couple of years and see how it goes, though. I was excited about FiOS not because I thought that Verizon was going to save the day. I was excited because I sincerely hoped that Comcast and Verizon would beat the crap out of each other fighting for market share.
Well, information is usually a very quantifiable thing, and creationists love to bandy it about and even invoke information theory, but they never seem to be able to explain how it's actually measured in the context they're using. Even the amazing Bill Dembski, for all of his mathematical bluster, can't seem to calculate the amount of "information" as he sees it in a couple of DNA strings. All we get are hand waving analogies like the one you provided. I strongly suggest that you stop referring to "information" because you're not referring to information in the sense that any information theorist would use.
Yes, that's quite true. And mutations can create significant chunks of DNA, which by any reasonable measure, increases information in the genome.
The problem is that you've made it so simple that you've made it wrong. Information-wise both the fish and the unicellular have 4 possible symbols (or "letters"). One just has more than the other. The fish genome almost certainly has more information than the simple organism does, but that says nothing about whether mutations create information or not. Simply adding a random nucleotide to the unicellular creature's genome will increase its information content and cause it to creep closer to the fish's genome in information quantity. Do something drastic like copy a long chunk of DNA and you've created even more information by any meaningful measurement. That's why I'm asking for a quantifiable definition of information--without it, creationists tend to say, "Well, that's not what I mean by information." By all appearances, they want "information" to mean "A quantity which increases that mutations cannot cause to increase."
Well, in theory, when you say information "decreases" there's almost certainly a quantity associated with that, yes? It's not like love where I can say, "I love you more than I love ice cream" but be completely unable to quantify it. For example, if I give you two DNA strands:
AGCTTAGGT
CCCTAATGC
Which one has more information in it, by your calculations?
As to your reference, it looks like Spetner wants to use thermodynamic entropy and Shannon information. That's fine, and it's a perfectly good measure of information. What is clear from a basic examination of mutations and entropy is that mutations can and do (often) increase information by that measure. And of course, there's the article asserting (from nowhere, as far as I can tell):
The quantity "specified complexity" is, for want of a more polite term, complete crap. Nobody has ever calculated the amount of "specified complexity" in any string, much less proved the probability of mutations increasing or decreasing it. It's a quantity that, as far as I can tell, exists only in the minds of creationists. This assertion is not