These two statements flatly contradict each other: if he has "paid more than enough taxes" to cover his treatment, then he is being harmed by the system overall.
Not necessarily. Insurance, by its nature, should be (very nearly) a wash overall. The point is not that an individual should come out ahead or break even, but rather that he can live his life without worrying about ending up destitute. In fact, most people should get net negative returns in an insurance scheme. Example: If I offered you $5000 guaranteed or a 10% chance at $50,000, which would you choose? The vast majority of people (at least, people for whom there is a substantial difference between $5000 and $0) would choose the sure bet, even though their expected payouts are the same. Insurance is exactly the same situation, but negative values are allowed and there's a small (at least, it should be reasonably small) overhead lost to the carrier's operations. Let's say you had a 1/1000 chance at losing $1000, but you could avoid the risk by paying $1. Most people would probably choose the $1. Sure, 999 out of every 1000 people were "harmed" by the system, but that doesn't make the system a net negative by any stretch. Insurance isn't some sort of frequent buyer club that gets you free money because you're part of the team (at least, it's not supposed to be even though people do treat health insurance that way). It's a system for managing risk.
Shouldn't it be his choice to get insurance or not, as he sees fit?
Sure, that would be fine if our society were willing to let him die if something happens to him that leaves him unable to pony up the cash. If he's cool with that and nobody is going to cry to me when he dies because his car crashed and he didn't have the cash for an ambulance, that's fine with me. The problem is that we don't actually operate that way. We're not going to let somebody bleed to death on the floor because he's poor. Whether or not that's a good thing (I tend to think it is), it's a fact about how we operate. That being the case, we're essentially choosing how we transfer money from the healthy or wealthy to the poor or sick, not whether or not we do it at all.
This is not a pardon.. Dubya commuted Libby's sentence, which means Libby is still a felon and has to pay the $250K fine. At this point Libby has no more rights than any other felon..
What will probably happen before Dubya ends his term he will pardon Libby.
Which is pretty much what the whole thread leading up to your comment was saying.
Also, had there been a conspiracy, it would not have been criminal or treasonous because Ms. Plame was no longer undercover. According to The CIA she had not been deployed outside the US in any capacity for more than five years. The statute of limitations on her "undercover" status has run out for a while now.
No, no, no. She was no longer operating actively outside the country, but her identity as a CIA agent was still classified material for reasons outlined here. The CIA doesn't just publish the names and roles of covert agents after they come back into the country for a very good reason. I don't see how people are debating the finer points of where she happened to be working when the bottom line is that Armitage leaked material classified information that could have done serious damage to CIA operations and Libby lied about his involvement in the affair. I don't know about him, but when I signed papers for a security clearance, those papers made it pretty clear that my balls would be in a vise if I leaked any classified information. No clause saying "But it's OK if it doesn't seem too important" or "Go ahead and leak away if you think that the Russians and Cubans probably already know." I'm just irked that Armitage didn't get smacked around over this.
I'm not disputing she never has been "covert." I am disputing whether she was "covert" at the time this alleged outing occurred. And it never did occur, because she wasn't "covert" at that time. I believe that was the conclusion of Fitzgerald. But, over-zealous prosecutor he was, he needed to get a conviction to justify himself. Mr. Libby was that unfortunate individual in my opinion.
The problem is that there's often no practical difference between hiding secret things a covert agent is currently doing and continuing to hide them after they're done. If your assertion is that she's not in any danger of execution because she's here in the US and not spying anymore, I agree with you. If your assertion is that her status at the time was not secret, you're full of it. The fact that she wasn't currently active in covert operations doesn't mean that leaking her past activities wasn't potentially a huge breach of security.
Whenever a former covert agent's identity becomes public knowledge, every foreign intelligence agency worth its salt starts to tear through every record of everything that person has ever done, chasing down every possible lead and contact they can find. If, for example, they figure out that other people worked for the front company that the agent in question worked for, they know that those other people are agents. They know that any people those agents had contact with in foreign countries may have been agents or collaborators. Lather, rinse, repeat. These people don't work in isolation, and there's a lot of potentially valuable intelligence to be found once you know the identity of a former agent. That's why the CIA thinks long and hard before giving former covert agents permission to come out, and it's why wankers like Robert Novak don't generally have access to the names of even former agents. It's also why the CIA still considered her undercover and her affiliation with the organization was classified until some people who clearly weren't authorized to do so outed her.
The idea that this was no big deal is, put simply, garbage. There are times when our government can be overly anal about keeping information secret. This was not one of them. There's no disputing the fact that significant classified information was leaked.
I think it has been established she didn't fit the criteria of "covert," notwithstanding what the CIA claims. I don't believe much that spews out from Langley btw.
You're simply wrong if you're asserting that her past actions were not covert by any reasonable definition of the word. If the CIA had not wanted to keep her operations under wraps, they wouldn't have had her "working" for a front company that didn't exist and they wouldn't have those activities treated as classified. The idea that what you're saying has "been established" by anybody other than the people who'd rather not get in trouble for leaking substantive classified information is, quite simply, nuts. The CIA doesn't expend resources on setting up fake companies for no reason, and the idea that anybody other than the CIA is a reasonable arbiter of which of the CIA's agents are working undercover makes absolutely no sense.
Someone who works at Langley is by definition not undercover
The person to ask is Victoria Toensing who wrote the law .
You might also want to ask the director of the CIA, who seemed to think that the Mrs. Wilson's position at the CIA was classified information. Those CIA guys are so uptight.
I agree with you. Half-way. I don't believe Libby did anything wrong. The base accusation concerns a non-leak that he may not even have started. Plame wasn't a covert agent. It's not illegal to point out that guys who work at Langely every day probably work for the CIA. Plame was in that category, so how was there any cover to blow?
Plame worked for years overseas as a covert agent posing as an energy analyst for a front company that didn't exist. Her relationship to the CIA and the nature of her operations (i.e. the fact that she was not in fact an energy analyst but rather a spy) were classified. People can and do get in trouble for leaking classified information. Where you and others are getting the idea that she was just some sort of CIA groupie who hung out on the front porch is beyond me. The CIA itself asked for the investigation because this was a big deal. Blowing the cover of inactive agents can cause a lot of problems.
It's OK when Clinton pardons drug dealers, murderers, and illegal alien bank robbers.
And while we're on the subject of other executives who are out of power in order to distract from the topic at hand, I seem to remember that Phalaris was a real dick too.
Yes, but Valerie Plame wasn't undercover. She had a desk job.
WTF does having a "desk job" have to do with the fact that her connection to and job with the CIA were classified and she traveled abroad as an "energy analyst" gathering information in secret? The fact that she was, working in the US at the time doesn't change the fact that she carried out real covert activities for the CIA that should have been kept secret.
Oops. Well, thanks to the runaway modding, that totally incorrect description is totally burned into the record. Suck.
Oh well. To further clarify, the pardon basically gives back any rights that were lost as a result of the conviction. It looks like courts have ruled that it carries with it an assumption of guilt and the record continues to exist, but no confession needs to be made. What's interesting about the whole situation is how many decisions on the topic were rendered relatively recently after the initial precedents were set a long time ago. It looks like Iran-Contra served to clarify a few things. Older decisions said basically that the crime magically went away, but that has gone by the wayside and now you're guilty in the eyes of the law, but just not punishable.
The next interesting question is, if you're technically guilty but not really because you were pardoned, what implications does it have in issues where your status as a criminal might not have legal implications but definitely has practical ones (e.g. getting a security clearance)? Not surprisingly, it looks like there are a lot of interesting legal opinions on this one. It looks like the prevailing wisdom is, "You got caught being bad and everybody knows it. Suck it up."
Libby outed Plame who wasn't a covert agent?? Or wait, he "obstructed" an investigation into whether someone might have committed a crime by outing non-covert agent Plame? And the guy that "outed" non-covert Plame gets off free because PLAME WASN'T A COVERT AGENT?!?
It's convenient to use the strict legal definition of "covert" versus "undercover" when you want to obscure the fact that her position, relationship with the CIA, and the nature of her work for them was classified and, as such, shouldn't have been shared. Your statement implies that her identity and job were somehow well known (totally false) or that it somehow didn't matter to the CIA if it became public knowledge (it did).
Leaking important classified information like that isn't kosher. There was a very legitimate reason for an investigation, and if you get caught obstructing such an investigation, I don't have a heck of a lot of pity for you.
Considering a judge recently said that Libby could not delay starting to serve his sentence (~30 months), if Bush waited until a couple of says before he left office, Libby's sentence would be just about complete. It would be a waste of a pardon.
Not really. Presidents pardon people who have served their time pretty regularly. A pardon also expunges the record of the conviction, making it as though you were not convicted in the first place. That can have some very practical side effects for some people.
Of course, this was clearly a scummy "Just cover for me and I'll make sure that you don't serve any time" quid pro quo as many presidents have engaged in. Just wait: He'll issue a pardon (for the reasons described above) just before leaving office. The commutation was just to make sure that Libby didn't set foot in jail while he was waiting for the pardon.
I would say that that is unlikely to be the whole, or even a signifcant, reason for most people who actually believe in God.
I agree to some extent, but in the context of "Intelligent Design is science" that's pretty much the whole reason. Philosophical arguments aside (and we must leave them aside because, you remember, ID is science, not religion!), the only real argument the ID camp has in favor of the existence of a designer is that one is necessary to explain creation. I'm just pointing out that either this problem is a non-problem or ID has exactly the same problem to deal with.
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.
I think that there's a crucial distinction being lost here, though. SETI is unlikely to succeed because, while it can actually test any given piece of data that it has in a meaningful way, it probably won't be able to collect enough data to produce useful results. ID, while it has all the data it will ever need in the form of DNA, will never actually fail to reject the null hypothesis because they don't have meaningful tests that can do that. Your proposed test could reject the null hypothesis by finding Bart Simpson's head encoded in human DNA, but if it didn't find it there, you wouldn't reasonably be able to say that the DNA wasn't ID. Given a signal, SETI can say with very high probability that a signal was not the result of intelligent design (at least, not of the type they're searching for). Except in very narrow scopes (like, "I'm only testing for designers who encode Bart Simpson in their DNA strands"), ID is still pretty much an "I'll know it when I see it" discipline.
Nylon Bacteria was taken up by the ID community here: http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/ why-scientists-should-not-dismiss-intelligent-desi gn/ I have to point out something important here: Neither you nor Dembski have yet managed to give a computable definition for "information" so the point is moot. The claim that "mutations can't create information" is about as meaningful as "mutations can't create marklar" without a definition of information that is measurable. Perhaps the funniest part of Dembski's post is this:
The problem with this argument is that Miller fails to show that the construction/evolution of nylonase from its precursor actually requires CSI at all. As I develop the concept, CSI requires a certain threshold of complexity to be achieved (500 bits, as I argue in my book No Free Lunch). It's not at all clear that this threshold is achieved here (certainly Miller doesn't compute the relevant numbers).
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Of course he doesn't compute the relevant numbers! "Complex Specified Information" is about as computable as "how much does my dog love me in love units" or "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" in angels per pin. CSI is not a quantity that can be measured it because Dembski doesn't define it in such a way. In fact, he's been studiously avoiding any sample computations for years now. To turn that around and call it a failing of the nylonase observation has to be one of the most ridiculously dishonest things I've ever seen him do.
Dembski then goes on and puts on his "Isaac Newton of information theory" hat and discards any pretense of mathematics and probability altogether and basically says that the protein "looks designed" to him. When it's convenient (that is, when he's not being challenged to do any real math and he's performing for people who don't understand the theorems he's referring to), he loves to pump out the equations and talk like a mathematician. As soon as he has the opportunity to actually do something (e.g. "Here's how much CSI is in the nylonase. I've computed it because it's a secret quantity that only I know how to compute. Here's the value and here's why Miller is wrong"), he jumps back into fuzzy philosophical land.
Maybe you can step in where Dembski and everybody else has failed: How do we define and measure this form of information? I think it's time to put your money where your mouth is. If the quantity can be measured, your claim of "no new information" may be valid. Until then, it's innacurate at best and dishonest posturing at worst.
You just produced random genetic code. You didn't increase any information in your hypothetical example. I think you know that DNA carries genetic information.
Challenge: Define "genetic information" in a quantifiable way and explain how my example does not produce it.
Known examples of random mutation cause loss of functionality and sometimes that loss of functionality causes something beneficial for survival to happen.
Could you point me to any known experiment or observation which shows some new functionality which isn't simply a degradation of previous information?
The most popular example is the "nylon eating bacteria" example. A frame shift (IIRC) mutation added the ability to metabolize nylon to bacteria that didn't previously have it. Of course, when pressed, most creationists would probably refer to a mutation that produces wings as "the loss of the inability to fly" so I'm sure that the example in question is nowhere near good enough.
You call BS. I call for examples based on observation.
Aside from abusing the word "information" creationists have essentially asserted a physical law (no new "information" can be created by mutation) out of thin air. It can be shown that given the basic types of mutations (insertions, deletions, duplications, etc.), it's possible to start with any arbitrary sequence of DNA and transform it into any other arbitrary sequence of DNA. Given that that's the case, what is the phenomenon that would prevent this quantity you call "information" from being inserted into the genome?
The first point I made was not an attempt to prove ID to you - it was to answer your question that ID doesn't start with a creationist/Biblical/young earth viewpoint - and you asserted that it did and asked for evidence that it did not. I provided that.
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.
Common non-coding DNA. Have you considered the possibility that it isn't actually just along for the ride?
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
Because random mutations can't produce new information. Evolution is downhill in regards to information.
You made that up. Seriously. There's absolutely no reason to believe that what you just wrote is true. In fact, for every useful, quantifiable measure of "information" mutations can and do produce new information. Let's try supporting your statement for a moment. Here's a string of DNA:
ATTGCCAGGT
Let's mutate it by copying some of it:
ATTGCCAGGTGCCA
How much information was in the original and how much information is there now? Please show your work. The problem with creationism's appeals to information is that they never quantify it in a measurable way. They claim that there's some undefined version of information that mutation, for some reason, can't produce. They never explain how to measure it, but they claim that somehow its obvious abundance (Don't ask me how they know that it's abundant) somehow kills evolutionary theory. I call BS.
Er...the chromosomal fusion we're talking about? The whole subject?
And why aren't the chimps continuing to spit out a human every once in a while that we can observe when this coincidental fusion occurs?
Well, because the fusion doesn't change phenotype. At all. It just puts the DNA in a different place.
I didn't read the WHOLE thing in explicit detail because that's not how a discussion happens - someone else here tried to get me to watch a 90 minute video. I'm not going to send you on a scavenger hunt, either. I'm sure you can explain it to me here as you would if we were sitting at a table at IHOP.
For starters, the damn thing was 5 pages long and it addresses every single one of your questions (please note that it's a blog entry and has comments at the end, making it look a lot longer than it really is). Let me get something straight, though: You're dumping on 150 years of research and tens of thousands of expert biologists when you don't have the first clue about the subject and can't be bothered to read 5 pages of background information (information that's basically introductory genetics stuff) that completely refutes your position? I suppose it's par for the course, but what's up with that?
In a nutshell: The fusion doesn't kill you. It doesn't even change how genes are expressed. It simply changes where the DNA is, which has implications for reproduction. Let me snip out the crucial part of Dr. Myers' article:
Assume we have a set of genes (a) found on one chromosome, and a set of genes (b) found on another. Everyone has two copies of each set, so in a normal diploid cell, we have (a) (a) (b) (b). In meiosis, the cellular mechanisms segregate the chromosomes in an orderly way, so each gamete gets one set (a) and one set (b), each gamete looks like this: (a) (b).
In an individual with a Robertsonian fusion, though, each diploid cell looks like this: (a) (b) (a:b). They have three chromosomes instead of four, even if they do have the proper doses of (a) and (b). Now when meiosis occurs, the cell has to sort 3 chromosomes into two cells, and there are multiple ways this can happen:
(a) (b) a normal gamete : normal
(a:b) a gamete carrying the fusion, but with the normal complement of genes: normal
(a) (a:b) a gamete with an extra (a)--lethal
(a) a gamete with an no (b)--lethal
(b) (a:b) a gamete with an extra (b)--lethal
(b) a gamete with a no (a)--lethal
As you can see, several of the combinations produce viable gametes, and this individual can have healthy children with no detectable problems, although half of them will carry the Robertsonian fusion. The other gametes have serious problems, and will typically lead to very early miscarriages, especially if they involve a large chromosome, like chromosome 2. They will have more problems conceiving, but their children will be normal.
If the fusion chromosome spreads through the population, something interesting will happen, and some people will have diploid cells like this: (a:b) (a:b). All of their gametes will be (a:b), and all will be normal. Fusions like this put up measurable but not at all insurmountable barriers to reproduction and can make it easier for carriers to reproduce with each other, so they can be mechanisms for reproductive isolation and speciation.
So basically, what you have is a harmless mutation that skews the probability that you'll be able to successfully breed with a non-mutant but doesn't make it impossible. Thus, the mutation will propagate out into the population. It may die out and it may spread based essentially on random chance. Basic population genetics has observed that such a mutation will generally be snuffed out by random luck, but occasionally neutral mutations become fixed in the population. If that happens, we can end up in the situation descri
I'm not sure what happened to the reply I posted earlier, so this may be a dupe.
Well, okay, let's make a distinction between "isn't science" and "can't be science". Specific forms of ID *are* potentially testable.
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:
Testing to see if Mansanto geneticly altered products polluted a farmer's corn is a form of ID test even.
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.
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.
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.
Have you never heard of the idea that God is eternal? Something outside time would not need to come into being, in fact it could not come into being, there being no time in which the event of it coming into being could occur.
That misses the point entirely. The whole reason for positing a god is that it's a solution to the "Everything that exists needs to have been created by something else at some point along the line" problem. Suggesting an entity that breaks that rule doesn't solve the problem. Why not just throw that rule away, since it's clear that there's no reason to take it as axiomatic?
Most people who argue the statistics route place the odds against Earth occurring as it is significantly higher than the number of subatomic particles (just e-, p+, n0, usually) in the known universe.
And all of those people are essentially pulling values and equations out of their asses. What's you point?
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Sure, that would be fine if our society were willing to let him die if something happens to him that leaves him unable to pony up the cash. If he's cool with that and nobody is going to cry to me when he dies because his car crashed and he didn't have the cash for an ambulance, that's fine with me. The problem is that we don't actually operate that way. We're not going to let somebody bleed to death on the floor because he's poor. Whether or not that's a good thing (I tend to think it is), it's a fact about how we operate. That being the case, we're essentially choosing how we transfer money from the healthy or wealthy to the poor or sick, not whether or not we do it at all.
Whenever a former covert agent's identity becomes public knowledge, every foreign intelligence agency worth its salt starts to tear through every record of everything that person has ever done, chasing down every possible lead and contact they can find. If, for example, they figure out that other people worked for the front company that the agent in question worked for, they know that those other people are agents. They know that any people those agents had contact with in foreign countries may have been agents or collaborators. Lather, rinse, repeat. These people don't work in isolation, and there's a lot of potentially valuable intelligence to be found once you know the identity of a former agent. That's why the CIA thinks long and hard before giving former covert agents permission to come out, and it's why wankers like Robert Novak don't generally have access to the names of even former agents. It's also why the CIA still considered her undercover and her affiliation with the organization was classified until some people who clearly weren't authorized to do so outed her.
The idea that this was no big deal is, put simply, garbage. There are times when our government can be overly anal about keeping information secret. This was not one of them. There's no disputing the fact that significant classified information was leaked.
Oops. Well, thanks to the runaway modding, that totally incorrect description is totally burned into the record. Suck.
Oh well. To further clarify, the pardon basically gives back any rights that were lost as a result of the conviction. It looks like courts have ruled that it carries with it an assumption of guilt and the record continues to exist, but no confession needs to be made. What's interesting about the whole situation is how many decisions on the topic were rendered relatively recently after the initial precedents were set a long time ago. It looks like Iran-Contra served to clarify a few things. Older decisions said basically that the crime magically went away, but that has gone by the wayside and now you're guilty in the eyes of the law, but just not punishable.
The next interesting question is, if you're technically guilty but not really because you were pardoned, what implications does it have in issues where your status as a criminal might not have legal implications but definitely has practical ones (e.g. getting a security clearance)? Not surprisingly, it looks like there are a lot of interesting legal opinions on this one. It looks like the prevailing wisdom is, "You got caught being bad and everybody knows it. Suck it up."
Leaking important classified information like that isn't kosher. There was a very legitimate reason for an investigation, and if you get caught obstructing such an investigation, I don't have a heck of a lot of pity for you.
Of course, this was clearly a scummy "Just cover for me and I'll make sure that you don't serve any time" quid pro quo as many presidents have engaged in. Just wait: He'll issue a pardon (for the reasons described above) just before leaving office. The commutation was just to make sure that Libby didn't set foot in jail while he was waiting for the pardon.
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Of course he doesn't compute the relevant numbers! "Complex Specified Information" is about as computable as "how much does my dog love me in love units" or "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" in angels per pin. CSI is not a quantity that can be measured it because Dembski doesn't define it in such a way. In fact, he's been studiously avoiding any sample computations for years now. To turn that around and call it a failing of the nylonase observation has to be one of the most ridiculously dishonest things I've ever seen him do.
Dembski then goes on and puts on his "Isaac Newton of information theory" hat and discards any pretense of mathematics and probability altogether and basically says that the protein "looks designed" to him. When it's convenient (that is, when he's not being challenged to do any real math and he's performing for people who don't understand the theorems he's referring to), he loves to pump out the equations and talk like a mathematician. As soon as he has the opportunity to actually do something (e.g. "Here's how much CSI is in the nylonase. I've computed it because it's a secret quantity that only I know how to compute. Here's the value and here's why Miller is wrong"), he jumps back into fuzzy philosophical land.
Maybe you can step in where Dembski and everybody else has failed: How do we define and measure this form of information? I think it's time to put your money where your mouth is. If the quantity can be measured, your claim of "no new information" may be valid. Until then, it's innacurate at best and dishonest posturing at worst.
The most popular example is the "nylon eating bacteria" example. A frame shift (IIRC) mutation added the ability to metabolize nylon to bacteria that didn't previously have it. Of course, when pressed, most creationists would probably refer to a mutation that produces wings as "the loss of the inability to fly" so I'm sure that the example in question is nowhere near good enough.
Aside from abusing the word "information" creationists have essentially asserted a physical law (no new "information" can be created by mutation) out of thin air. It can be shown that given the basic types of mutations (insertions, deletions, duplications, etc.), it's possible to start with any arbitrary sequence of DNA and transform it into any other arbitrary sequence of DNA. Given that that's the case, what is the phenomenon that would prevent this quantity you call "information" from being inserted into the genome?
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
ATTGCCAGGT
Let's mutate it by copying some of it:
ATTGCCAGGTGCCA
How much information was in the original and how much information is there now? Please show your work. The problem with creationism's appeals to information is that they never quantify it in a measurable way. They claim that there's some undefined version of information that mutation, for some reason, can't produce. They never explain how to measure it, but they claim that somehow its obvious abundance (Don't ask me how they know that it's abundant) somehow kills evolutionary theory. I call BS.
Er...the chromosomal fusion we're talking about? The whole subject?
Well, because the fusion doesn't change phenotype. At all. It just puts the DNA in a different place.
For starters, the damn thing was 5 pages long and it addresses every single one of your questions (please note that it's a blog entry and has comments at the end, making it look a lot longer than it really is). Let me get something straight, though: You're dumping on 150 years of research and tens of thousands of expert biologists when you don't have the first clue about the subject and can't be bothered to read 5 pages of background information (information that's basically introductory genetics stuff) that completely refutes your position? I suppose it's par for the course, but what's up with that?
In a nutshell: The fusion doesn't kill you. It doesn't even change how genes are expressed. It simply changes where the DNA is, which has implications for reproduction. Let me snip out the crucial part of Dr. Myers' article:
So basically, what you have is a harmless mutation that skews the probability that you'll be able to successfully breed with a non-mutant but doesn't make it impossible. Thus, the mutation will propagate out into the population. It may die out and it may spread based essentially on random chance. Basic population genetics has observed that such a mutation will generally be snuffed out by random luck, but occasionally neutral mutations become fixed in the population. If that happens, we can end up in the situation descri
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.