I always liked the take one of my economics professors had on the concept of rational behavior: "All behavior is rational. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is how people are measuring the costs and the benefits."
That would be a great argument if altruism was limited to one's family. But what drives people to perform selfless work for non-relatives? These same people may someday be in competition with you for resources of some sort. That is the exact opposite strategy to natural selection.
I'd be interested in seeing how this logic differs with respect to social and non-social animals. It makes sense for humans and wolves to take care of others, even when they're not members of their immediate family for the simple reason that a strong social network is good for everybody in the tribe/pack/whatever. I doubt that you'll find salamanders with the same type of drives.
Beyond that, I would guess that the extreme altruism often seen in human beings is a combination of the basic instinct to take care of other people combined with the human capacity for abstract thought. I get pleasure from helping members of my family and tribe, and I understand that a starving person halfway across the world is a very similar entity, so I get pleasure from donating to a cause that helps somebody half a world away. I've found a way to stimulate my altruism response in a less direct way courtesy of the human luxury of abstract thought.
The problem with speculative counterexamples is that they aren't scientific. A counterexample only renders the finding invalid if it actually works: it it doesn't work, it's not actually a counterexample. We only know that a counterexample is a counterexample after it's been demonstrated to work. This comes down to a battle of unfounded beliefs: Behe believes there's no way to evolve the system, and the evolutionists believe there is.
In that case, why bother with IC at all? Just about everything that ever evolved did so through a path that's unknown, so we may as well throw up our hands and say that the whole thing is nonsense. Of course, if we want to say that there are a lot of structures whose origins are unclear, that's perfectly fine. If Behe wants to sell it as a death knell for evolution, that's another matter entirely.
Of course, as soon as there's overwhelming evidence that a particular system isn't IC, all Behe and company have to do is find another one to jump on. Basically, Behe is saying that we can't rule out intelligent design until we've demonstrated, in detail, every evolutionary step that ever occurred. That's technically accurate, but totally uninteresting, especially given that even Behe acknowledges the overwhelming evidence for common descent. "This rock appears to have been smoothed by erosion" can always be answered (quite correctly) with "Or it could have been intelligent agency!" but without some reason to think it's probable, I just don't see a reason to go down that route. Basically, most of us aren't contradicting Behe's claim that we don't know the origins of blood clotting with 100% accuracy. We're saying that we're not ready to assert magic where history tells us that there's an explanation, and that his position that we should isn't going to win him any accolades as a great scientist.
To demonstrate the impossibility of producing a system by chance, Behe would have to demonstrate that every conceivable set of modifications to the system within certain probability bounds fails to perform as required. To demonstrate the possibility of producing the system by chance, evolutionists would have to demonstrate a path of modifications, ecah with acceptable probability. Both of these are big asks.
Basically, yes. Since that can't be done, it's a bit irrational to say that he he's come up with a concept that lends any credibility to the idea of a designer. We have no idea whether the probabilities associated with IC are large or small, so what he's given us is essentially a very well dressed god in the gaps argument. We've seen it before, and while it may be 100% correct, he's not likely to get very much attention from the scientific community for it. I tend to shy away from god in the gaps simply because the number of gaps appears to get monotonically smaller with time. History is not on the side of the position of assuming divine intervention.
I conclude that both camps hold to positions which have not been adequately demonstrated experimentally. Neither position should be considered to have greater scientific merit than the other. However, I think the problem of irreducible complexity should receive some attention, since it is a scientifically interesting problem, even if (or perhaps because we don't have a resolution to it yet.
Honestly, I don't think it's a very interesting problem. Perhaps from a mathematical perspective it's interesting (what's the minimum system with X properties?), but from the perspective of figuring out whether things are "designed" or not, I think it's a dead end. As I see it, there are two ways to interpret the argument of irreducible complexity. The first way is, "There's no way for this to happen other than intelligent agency." That is clearly answered by simple thought experiments, and a lot of work has been done poking holes in the examples posited for the absolutist position. The logical response to this is si
Chances are that lots of the others are at least somewhat aware of the realities of the Middle East, but they're betting that the American public doesn't want to hear about it. There's a lot of evidence to support this belief.
This is key. A "good" leader can get good results by being smarter than the people he leads and tricking them into supporting smart policies with emotional appeals, jingoistic slogans, and folksy charm. A great leader elevates his people by telling them the truth and not only getting them to support good policy, but getting them to support it for the right reasons. While the results can be the same, I would say that there's a big difference between manipulating people and leading people. I don't really agree with a lot of Congressman Paul's positions and would rather not have him running the show, I do think that he's sincere, and I think that he was the only one on the stage that day who was honestly showing his intent to lead the American people. It's hard to lead, and it's even harder to become President by being a leader rather than a manipulator. I sincerely respect him for trying, even as the manipulators make mincemeat of him at the polls.
I attended a lecture by a member of the scientific community a couple years ago concerning two invalid assumptions Radio-Carbon dating makes (wow, a scientist who disagrees with Evolution! We don't hear much about those... I think more of them disagree with evolution than the average North American thinks).
I think that this is an important section to respond to because C14 dating gets a really raw deal in the general populace. There are some really important details that a lot of these debates gloss over, and people leave with the impression that C14 dating is little more than witch doctoring.
I'm scraping the dregs of my memory, but as I recall, the first assumption was that we know how much c-14 was contained in the animal when it died... there's really no way to prove that, at least not that I know of... unless someone invents time travel.
A common technique to deal with that is calibration with tree ring data. Most organisms are at equilibrium with the atmosphere when they die, so the question is, how much C14 is in the atmosphere? If you can get your hands on wood from old trees, you can trace back the years and then measure the carbon ratios for a given year. After that, you have a very good measure of what to expect to find in organisms from that year. As it turns out, C14 dating has been very successful when proper calibration is done. This field of research is called dendochronology. It should also be noted that for timeframes longer than a few tens of thousands of years, we have to go to something other than C14 dating, so C14 is really not relevant to anything but the "last mile" of evolutionary theory. Even so, I think it's important to point out that it's not the mess that most people seem to think it is.
Second, the dating method assumes that c-14 decays at a uniform rate. This is also open to question. Basing an entire dating method on these two assumptions seems a bit shaky to me.
Well, as I pointed out, the first assumption is testable for more than 10,000 years back. The second assumption is a consequence of atomic theory and has serious consequences if it's not true. Nobody has proposed an alternate atomic theory in which decay rates change in appreciable amounts. You'd be fiddling with some fundamental values in physics. That's not to say that it's not possible. It's just highly unlikely. The constancy of radioactive decay is not the house of cards so many people make it out to be.
Another fact is that the radioactive dating methods tend to agree with each other, even systems that are based on different types of decay. Changing one type of decay would not be expected to have any effect on other types of decay. Likewise, different elements would be affected differently. We don't observe anything to support this, unless all of the decay rates have been fiddled with and tuned in such a way as to completely negate any measurable effects. Having an open mind is one thing, but essentially discarding most of modern physics simply because you're not comfortable with dates that C14 dating produces takes epistemological nihilism a bit too far, IMO.
This objection irks me. It seems that the people who accuse Behe of arguing from ignorance provide refutations in the form of arguments from credulity. Behe points out complex systems and says "remove any one piece and the system breaks." His opponents respond, "so it happened some other way." Where does the onus lie?
The problem with Behe is that he wants to have his cake and eat it too. He presents IC as a death blow to evolution because it's an argument of the form "It's not possible for X structure to develop through evolution." On the other hand, when somebody posits a reasonable (although speculative) counterexample, Behe calls it a "just so" story, ignoring the fact that any counterexample at all renders the whole idea of IC useless. On top of that, it's worth noting that there's no way to prove that a system is IC except by looking really hard and saying, "It looks too complicated to me!"
Personally, I see the biggest flaw in Behe's position to be the simple fact that there's no reason for evolution to have to arrive at a result by constantly adding things. If a system has N parts and can't survive with N-1 (let's assume this assertion--while completely unproven--is true for the moment), there's nothing to say that the system didn't start as N+1 parts and lose a part to end up at N. Climbers sometimes get stuck on ledges because they've climbed down to a point where they can't climb down any further, but they can't climb back up. Behe's observation would be that they must have been put there by an outside force simply because there's no direct climbable path up to their location.
The problem for any kind of intelligent design theorist is that natural-formation theorists of any kind (such as evolutionists) already believe that the structures in question can form naturally, and that adding a designer is unnecessarily complex. It's not clear to me what sort of evidence can be presented to the naturalists in support of ID theory under these conditions.
That's what makes ID a fine thing to think about but not a particularly scientific endeavor. I'd be fascinated if somebody like Dembski could put together a rigorous way of measuring the quantity he calls "complex specified information" and actually use it for something, but as it stands, he's simply engaging in philosophical wanking with more mathematics than is really necessary. My problem with positing a designer is that it's simply not a solution to the problem "Complex things need a complex designer." Simply assuming a designer that is somehow not bound by that axiom doesn't really do anything for us that simply dropping that silly axiom would, and it's clearly just as arbitrary.
So I'm really not happy with this whole tactic of dismissing Behe as "arguing from ignorance". What are the appropriate standards of proof here? How do we decide whether naturalist explanations are actually plausible? This seems like a tremendous area of credulity among evolutionists (who take immense offence at the suggestion that they are credulous). What's a man like Behe supposed to do to demonstrate his case? The onus probandi here seems insurmountable for the ID theorist.
I'm not sure how much sympathy I feel for Behe and company. Their position appears to be that there is an unmeasurable entity somewhere that is interacting (or has interacted) with our reality somewhere along the line in an unmeasurable way that produces unmeasurable results. If that's your position, you're kind of stuck with the options of either modifying it to make it meaningful or sucking it up and dealing with the fact that it's just your intuition and you won't be able to get your foot in the door with the scientific community. They can at least look on the bright side and remember that the popular press publishing and lecture circuit are usually much more profitable endeavors than doing lab work.
Well, if Creation is so provably wrong whats the harm in setting creation and evolution side by side in a science class?
What's the harm? Creation "science" isn't science, whether not its conclusions are correct. The point of science class at the primary school age is to teach a little bit of science and a lot about how science works. Teaching something that isn't science doesn't do anything to further either one of those goals.
everything is very nice in science UNTIL you get to the details.
Not surprisingly, the people who knock radiometric dating tend not to provide those details.
Carbon dating is notoriously inaccurate for anything older than a few thousand years - I believe you will get this from both scientists and "creationist researchers" whatever these later may be...
The upper practical limit on C14 dating is about 50,000 years, but the "sweet spot" is not quite that far out. C14 has a relatively short half life, so it's essentially all gone at ages older than that. With the "few thousand year" timeframe that's verifiable, calibrated C14 dating actually has a very good record. Stories of insanely wrong values tend to be from people who either through ignorance or malice dated materials that are simply not viable subjects for C14 dating.
However, no one has ever breeded two dogs and gotten a cat.
That would be extraordinarily surprising and hardly what evolutionary theory predicts. Species are a continuum much like colored light. If I start with red light and slowly increase the frequency, I'll eventually reach violet light. The fact that red light only begets more orangy-red light doesn't change that fact. It would be silly to say "I've never seen red light turn into violet light by this method!" In fact, any too adjacent light frequencies will be very similar.
No new DNA information is created or used. Rather, existing information is scrambled around or duplicated in those cases. I don't think there is any such thing as a beneficial mutation. If you can name me an example, please do so.
Your post is long on assertions and rather short on evidence. This is a classic case. What do you mean by "information" and how would we measure it? This is important, because without a halfway decent definition of the quantity "information" your whole point falls apart. If you're looking for an example of a beneficial mutation, you might want to look into the assorted mutations that imbue resistance to antibiotics or the now famous "nylon bug" in which a mutation allows a certain bacterium to "eat" nylon. The mutations are understood (i.e. mapped to a particular piece of DNA--the researchers know what happened) and they're clearly beneficial in that environment.
We can't even know for sure how long ago it died, since modern dating methods have been proven unreliable.
No, they haven't. You're just not looking deeply enough into those specific examples and understanding why they are the way they are.
If I recall correctly, a freshly killed seal ( or some such animal ) was measured using Carbon Dating, and it was found to be thousands of years old... which was false because it had just died. That is a proof by counter-example that Carbon Dating is unreliable.
It's very important to note that it was a seal or some such animal and not something else. The effect that whoever told you about this didn't mention to you (I'll be charitable and assume that it was an honest mistake) is called the "reservoir effect." For radiocarbon dating to work, the organism should be at equilibrium with atmospheric carbon. This isn't the case when organisms get most of their carbon from "old carbon reservoirs" like the seal in question did. The classic example is mollusk shells, which can often be constructed from the carbon in limestone to which the creatures are attached. In that case, the amount of "old carbon" from the rock will dwarf the amount of "new carbon" from the atmosphere, causing old dates. The same is true for the seal example (from Wakefield's "Mummified seals of southern Victoria Land"). The seal in question lives in an area where large quantities of old carbon are known to be in the food chain.
Basically, you've taken a well-understood special case and made a hasty generalization to completely discard a huge pile of evidence to the contrary. It's important to understand that knowing how to use the tools is just as important as the accuracy of the tools themselves. Organizations like AiG often exploit this in their "research" and forcibly "break" the dating methods and pretend to be surprised. I recommend reading into the topic a little bit before discarding good research and essentially calling the vast majority of scientists incompetent based on stuff you read on the Internet.
When creationists try to present creation theory in the classroom, alongside evolutionary viewpoints, they are viciously attacked. If evolutionary theory is so sound, and creationism is such a farce, why not let them stand side to side and see who wins? Let the almighty scientific method do it's work and bring forth the truth.
Because we're teaching CHILDREN. Creationism hasn't been able to make any headway in the actual scientific community--the one populated by grownups who study and analyze data for a living. They've opted to take their case to kids instead. Think about that for a minute. What kind of case does a person have when he'd rather pack a jury with children than adults?
To answer your question more completely, we don't do it for the same reason we don't offer a rebuttal on the benefits of crack in health class, the idea that f = ma^2 in physics class, and how the holocaust never happened in history class. The world is full of crackpot ideas and giving equal time to all of them is ridiculous on its face. If you want your idea to get into schools, convince the experts in the field that it has some merit. Do what the rest of modern science has done and gather the data and convince the establishment that you're right. Until then, you're just another "crack is good for you" fringe case.
However their isn't any solid evidence for 'random mutations' producing POSITIVE benefits (what you mean natural selection yes?). The examples usually given for it are moths or human 'sickel cell' mutation. The Moths example normaly states that because of polution moths changes color but it reality all that happens is a particualar color moth is more sucesful and becomes more preverlant... not an example of natural selection, as the diferencial aready existed. as for the human example it is VERY debatable if its a positive mutation.
What if I come up with a scientific theory that better fits the bill? You're going to massively change then? Or am I going to be incorrect.
If you can come up with the evidence to support it, I suspect that you'd probably win a Nobel Prize among other things. If you know something that the rest of us don't, don't hold back.
As an earlier poster mentioned, if you only consider naturalistic explanations as scientific. You are no longer searching for truth, but for the most credible naturalistic explanation. Even if it might be false.
I think that the fundamental point is that science can only handle naturalistic explanations. If the real explanation is supernatural, science is basically sunk. Some tools are only good for certain jobs. As it happens, the scientific method does an insanely good job of getting us to the core of most practical matters, so I see no reason to abandon it just yet. I also hasten to point out that the fact that something can't be investigated scientifically doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong. Conversely, the fact that an idea may be correct doesn't make it a scientifically valid hypothesis.
the big problem with Radio-X dating is that if you have a chunk of rock and then date it using [method] you will get a number pick another [method] and you will get another number. Chain this out for a bit and you may land up with X methods and X+Y numbers all from the same chunk of rock
And AiG works very hard to get samples that produce the most disparate results possible. Not surprisingly, the results tend to agree when people other than AiG select the samples. It's all about selecting sensible samples.
carbon dating has the problem that a sample drawn from a guy said he had been dead for x thousand( or was it million) years , when he was informed the man in question was surprised.
Reference, please. These stories are almost always apocryphal. I can certainly see it if they were dating something like mussel shells, but for human tissue? Not likely.
My "mention of the fact that the Federal Reserve Banks are corporations is a classic example" of "usually misleading at best and more often outright wrong" claim? You yourself admit it is factual. Please elaborate on why it is misleading.
The fact that the banks are private corporations are true. You were, however, attempting to attach some significance to that fact when really there is none. The banks don't operate like standard private for-profit corporations, so the only reason to point the fact that they're privately owned without elaborating that fact is to give people the impression that they're highly profitable entities that simply print money to enrich themselves. That's simply false.
ou said originally that "a casual glance at where the money is going simply doesn't bear that out" where do you recommend one to take this "casual glance" at where the money is going?
If you're interested in the actual budgets of the Fed banks and what it's doing with the money, you might start with its annual reports to Congress. A better question is, what exactly do you think they're using the money for? Is Ben Bernanke buying mansions somewhere?
Was a good idea for the Fed to make the M3 money statistics secret?
Remember when I used the phrase "usually misleading at best and more often outright wrong" and you called me on the carpet for it? This is one of those cases. The Fed isn't collecting that data at all any more. They're not collecting it and keeping it a secret. It's expensive and difficult to collect, and there's very little use for it for monetary policy. It's no more a "secret" than the number of Wii owners who also like ballet is a "secret" because the government doesn't collect those statistics. Personally, I don't miss the M3 value, although it's certainly interesting information, and you'll never find me complaining when economic statistics are made available. A better question would be, did you have some plans for the information? I know that Ron Paul is desperate for it, but I can't quite figure out what he plans to do with it.
Do you agree with the finding by the Grace Commission that:
"100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their Government." ?
Well, I do, but I don't see the significance of a 25 year old budget report. First, you're attempting (and by that I mean they were attempting and you're buying into it) to lump federal interest payments in with transfer payments. That's ridiculous as they're two different issues. I suppose it's important to note that we are paying out a tremendous outlay in interest payments, but are you one of those people who thinks that money goes to line the pockets of Fed executive? For what it's worth, the Fed only holds about 5% of the government's debt, it refunds a good portion of the interest the treasury pays to it, and the government would be borrowing like a drunken sailor with or without the Fed's help. Your issue is with Congress and its spending habits, not the banking system that files the paperwork. I don't totally disagree with you on that front, but I have to tell you that you're pretty much out in the weeds when you bring up the Grace Commission.
The majority of the people in this country are religious, disgregarding what religion or denomination they claim. It's not unnatural for those people to want representatives they can identify with.
I can certainly see saying "I have common values with that guy, so I'm more likely to vote for him." I can't understand saying, "There's no way I could ever vote for that guy" simply because he has no religion. That's what the poll question was asking. Those people would not vote for an atheist even if he was otherwise qualified. That's a nutty way to run a secular government, IMO.
To me this poll says that about half of religious people have no particular ill-will toward atheists. Can you say that half of all atheists have no ill will toward religion?
Wait a minute! Your question doesn't match your original assertion. About half (less than half) of religious people hold no ill will toward atheists (the people). Now you're saying atheists are worse because they hold ill will toward religion (the concept). What? I don't think that atheists in general hold any ill will toward religious people. They don't agree with the concept of religion, the same way religious people don't agree with atheism. You're changing the fact that atheists are against religion to mean that they're somehow against religious people. That's a leap. I should also point out that just about every atheist who votes probably votes for a religious person in just about every election.
Every atheist I've known has been a bitter academic who seems mortally offended at the idea that people can have faith in something.
Then you're not looking very hard. I would bet that every atheist you describe is somebody who you've engaged in theological discussion with, and is somebody whose views offend you. That's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. I would also bet that the vast majority of atheists you've met haven't made you aware of their atheism. It's easier not to mention it, you know. Unfortunately, the result is hasty generalizations and unelectability. If more atheists would stand up and be counted, maybe people would realize that they're not "bitter actademics who are mortally offended at the idea that people have faith" but rather people who have no faith themselves and are mortally offended at the idea that they should be legally subject to the religious whims of others.
Yes, I'm probably more familiar than most slashdotters with international banking and fiat currency. My point is that the claims made on slashdot about how the Federal Reserve system actually works are usually misleading at best and more often outright wrong. Your mention of the fact that the Federal Reserve Banks are corporations is a classic example.
Let me suggest that if the only exposure one has had to the field is "The Money Masters" and the Internet, it might be a good time to start grabbing some textbooks on the topic that present a more balanced and complete point of view.
The Federal Reserve is a private FOR PROFIT corporation incorporated in Delaware.
Check your phone book, you wont find it in the gov section.
Technically accurate but misleading at best. The Federal Reserve banks are private corporations, but they're run by government officials, and they're not operated for profit. Stock in Federal Reserve banks is not like stock in your typical for-profit corporation. It's clearly hard for some people to understand, but nobody's getting rich off of profits from Fed services. The conspiracy theorists like to make it sound like it's some big puppet-master corporation that's siphoning all of our money into the pockets of the Board of Governors, but a casual glance at where the money is going simply doesn't bear that out.
I would say that if you have no idea where the candidate you voted for stands on any issues at all, or if you don't understand the powers and responsibilities of the office, you voted in ignorance. Rebuttal?
Ahh yes, and overnight put thousands of small businesses out of business. Again, like it or not, illegal immigrants do the work americans refuse to do.
Without coming out for or against the issue, I'd like to add something to that statement. "Illegal immigrants do the work Americans refuse to do at the current market price."
What's funny about the whole "series of tubes" thing is exactly what you point out. The tube analogy is probably the single most accurate thing he said. The whole rant was largely a nonsense pile of misused terms and misattributions of technical problems, and the thing that people decided to laugh at was probably the one thing that made some semblance of sense.
The electoral college tends to make presidents try to be president of ALL the regions of the country, not just of a few big states.
I generally understand what you're saying, but this is simply nonsense. The way the electoral college system works, presidential candidates only care about pandering to the states they can actually win. If a particular state isn't worth the effort, it's off the list. There's no reason to even bother. For example, if a Democratic candidate can win a few votes in swing states by offering to nuke the major cities in solidly red states, there's no reason for him not to. He has no chance at any of their electoral votes, so why even worry about what they think?
If candidates actually had an incentive to minimize the margins for their losses in states that they don't carry, that would certainly work, but as it stands, there's no incentive to bother. Just let the states you lose be a blowout and spend your effort on the few states that actually matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I always liked the take one of my economics professors had on the concept of rational behavior: "All behavior is rational. That's not the interesting question. The interesting question is how people are measuring the costs and the benefits."
Beyond that, I would guess that the extreme altruism often seen in human beings is a combination of the basic instinct to take care of other people combined with the human capacity for abstract thought. I get pleasure from helping members of my family and tribe, and I understand that a starving person halfway across the world is a very similar entity, so I get pleasure from donating to a cause that helps somebody half a world away. I've found a way to stimulate my altruism response in a less direct way courtesy of the human luxury of abstract thought.
In that case, why bother with IC at all? Just about everything that ever evolved did so through a path that's unknown, so we may as well throw up our hands and say that the whole thing is nonsense. Of course, if we want to say that there are a lot of structures whose origins are unclear, that's perfectly fine. If Behe wants to sell it as a death knell for evolution, that's another matter entirely.
Of course, as soon as there's overwhelming evidence that a particular system isn't IC, all Behe and company have to do is find another one to jump on. Basically, Behe is saying that we can't rule out intelligent design until we've demonstrated, in detail, every evolutionary step that ever occurred. That's technically accurate, but totally uninteresting, especially given that even Behe acknowledges the overwhelming evidence for common descent. "This rock appears to have been smoothed by erosion" can always be answered (quite correctly) with "Or it could have been intelligent agency!" but without some reason to think it's probable, I just don't see a reason to go down that route. Basically, most of us aren't contradicting Behe's claim that we don't know the origins of blood clotting with 100% accuracy. We're saying that we're not ready to assert magic where history tells us that there's an explanation, and that his position that we should isn't going to win him any accolades as a great scientist.
Basically, yes. Since that can't be done, it's a bit irrational to say that he he's come up with a concept that lends any credibility to the idea of a designer. We have no idea whether the probabilities associated with IC are large or small, so what he's given us is essentially a very well dressed god in the gaps argument. We've seen it before, and while it may be 100% correct, he's not likely to get very much attention from the scientific community for it. I tend to shy away from god in the gaps simply because the number of gaps appears to get monotonically smaller with time. History is not on the side of the position of assuming divine intervention.
Honestly, I don't think it's a very interesting problem. Perhaps from a mathematical perspective it's interesting (what's the minimum system with X properties?), but from the perspective of figuring out whether things are "designed" or not, I think it's a dead end. As I see it, there are two ways to interpret the argument of irreducible complexity. The first way is, "There's no way for this to happen other than intelligent agency." That is clearly answered by simple thought experiments, and a lot of work has been done poking holes in the examples posited for the absolutist position. The logical response to this is si
Sooo... the short version of that is "magic"?
A common technique to deal with that is calibration with tree ring data. Most organisms are at equilibrium with the atmosphere when they die, so the question is, how much C14 is in the atmosphere? If you can get your hands on wood from old trees, you can trace back the years and then measure the carbon ratios for a given year. After that, you have a very good measure of what to expect to find in organisms from that year. As it turns out, C14 dating has been very successful when proper calibration is done. This field of research is called dendochronology. It should also be noted that for timeframes longer than a few tens of thousands of years, we have to go to something other than C14 dating, so C14 is really not relevant to anything but the "last mile" of evolutionary theory. Even so, I think it's important to point out that it's not the mess that most people seem to think it is.
Well, as I pointed out, the first assumption is testable for more than 10,000 years back. The second assumption is a consequence of atomic theory and has serious consequences if it's not true. Nobody has proposed an alternate atomic theory in which decay rates change in appreciable amounts. You'd be fiddling with some fundamental values in physics. That's not to say that it's not possible. It's just highly unlikely. The constancy of radioactive decay is not the house of cards so many people make it out to be.
Another fact is that the radioactive dating methods tend to agree with each other, even systems that are based on different types of decay. Changing one type of decay would not be expected to have any effect on other types of decay. Likewise, different elements would be affected differently. We don't observe anything to support this, unless all of the decay rates have been fiddled with and tuned in such a way as to completely negate any measurable effects. Having an open mind is one thing, but essentially discarding most of modern physics simply because you're not comfortable with dates that C14 dating produces takes epistemological nihilism a bit too far, IMO.
Personally, I see the biggest flaw in Behe's position to be the simple fact that there's no reason for evolution to have to arrive at a result by constantly adding things. If a system has N parts and can't survive with N-1 (let's assume this assertion--while completely unproven--is true for the moment), there's nothing to say that the system didn't start as N+1 parts and lose a part to end up at N. Climbers sometimes get stuck on ledges because they've climbed down to a point where they can't climb down any further, but they can't climb back up. Behe's observation would be that they must have been put there by an outside force simply because there's no direct climbable path up to their location.
That's what makes ID a fine thing to think about but not a particularly scientific endeavor. I'd be fascinated if somebody like Dembski could put together a rigorous way of measuring the quantity he calls "complex specified information" and actually use it for something, but as it stands, he's simply engaging in philosophical wanking with more mathematics than is really necessary. My problem with positing a designer is that it's simply not a solution to the problem "Complex things need a complex designer." Simply assuming a designer that is somehow not bound by that axiom doesn't really do anything for us that simply dropping that silly axiom would, and it's clearly just as arbitrary.
I'm not sure how much sympathy I feel for Behe and company. Their position appears to be that there is an unmeasurable entity somewhere that is interacting (or has interacted) with our reality somewhere along the line in an unmeasurable way that produces unmeasurable results. If that's your position, you're kind of stuck with the options of either modifying it to make it meaningful or sucking it up and dealing with the fact that it's just your intuition and you won't be able to get your foot in the door with the scientific community. They can at least look on the bright side and remember that the popular press publishing and lecture circuit are usually much more profitable endeavors than doing lab work.
The upper practical limit on C14 dating is about 50,000 years, but the "sweet spot" is not quite that far out. C14 has a relatively short half life, so it's essentially all gone at ages older than that. With the "few thousand year" timeframe that's verifiable, calibrated C14 dating actually has a very good record. Stories of insanely wrong values tend to be from people who either through ignorance or malice dated materials that are simply not viable subjects for C14 dating.
Your post is long on assertions and rather short on evidence. This is a classic case. What do you mean by "information" and how would we measure it? This is important, because without a halfway decent definition of the quantity "information" your whole point falls apart. If you're looking for an example of a beneficial mutation, you might want to look into the assorted mutations that imbue resistance to antibiotics or the now famous "nylon bug" in which a mutation allows a certain bacterium to "eat" nylon. The mutations are understood (i.e. mapped to a particular piece of DNA--the researchers know what happened) and they're clearly beneficial in that environment.
No, they haven't. You're just not looking deeply enough into those specific examples and understanding why they are the way they are.
It's very important to note that it was a seal or some such animal and not something else. The effect that whoever told you about this didn't mention to you (I'll be charitable and assume that it was an honest mistake) is called the "reservoir effect." For radiocarbon dating to work, the organism should be at equilibrium with atmospheric carbon. This isn't the case when organisms get most of their carbon from "old carbon reservoirs" like the seal in question did. The classic example is mollusk shells, which can often be constructed from the carbon in limestone to which the creatures are attached. In that case, the amount of "old carbon" from the rock will dwarf the amount of "new carbon" from the atmosphere, causing old dates. The same is true for the seal example (from Wakefield's "Mummified seals of southern Victoria Land"). The seal in question lives in an area where large quantities of old carbon are known to be in the food chain.
Basically, you've taken a well-understood special case and made a hasty generalization to completely discard a huge pile of evidence to the contrary. It's important to understand that knowing how to use the tools is just as important as the accuracy of the tools themselves. Organizations like AiG often exploit this in their "research" and forcibly "break" the dating methods and pretend to be surprised. I recommend reading into the topic a little bit before discarding good research and essentially calling the vast majority of scientists incompetent based on stuff you read on the Internet.
To answer your question more completely, we don't do it for the same reason we don't offer a rebuttal on the benefits of crack in health class, the idea that f = ma^2 in physics class, and how the holocaust never happened in history class. The world is full of crackpot ideas and giving equal time to all of them is ridiculous on its face. If you want your idea to get into schools, convince the experts in the field that it has some merit. Do what the rest of modern science has done and gather the data and convince the establishment that you're right. Until then, you're just another "crack is good for you" fringe case.
Reference, please. These stories are almost always apocryphal. I can certainly see it if they were dating something like mussel shells, but for human tissue? Not likely.
If you're interested in the actual budgets of the Fed banks and what it's doing with the money, you might start with its annual reports to Congress. A better question is, what exactly do you think they're using the money for? Is Ben Bernanke buying mansions somewhere?
Remember when I used the phrase "usually misleading at best and more often outright wrong" and you called me on the carpet for it? This is one of those cases. The Fed isn't collecting that data at all any more. They're not collecting it and keeping it a secret. It's expensive and difficult to collect, and there's very little use for it for monetary policy. It's no more a "secret" than the number of Wii owners who also like ballet is a "secret" because the government doesn't collect those statistics. Personally, I don't miss the M3 value, although it's certainly interesting information, and you'll never find me complaining when economic statistics are made available. A better question would be, did you have some plans for the information? I know that Ron Paul is desperate for it, but I can't quite figure out what he plans to do with it.
Well, I do, but I don't see the significance of a 25 year old budget report. First, you're attempting (and by that I mean they were attempting and you're buying into it) to lump federal interest payments in with transfer payments. That's ridiculous as they're two different issues. I suppose it's important to note that we are paying out a tremendous outlay in interest payments, but are you one of those people who thinks that money goes to line the pockets of Fed executive? For what it's worth, the Fed only holds about 5% of the government's debt, it refunds a good portion of the interest the treasury pays to it, and the government would be borrowing like a drunken sailor with or without the Fed's help. Your issue is with Congress and its spending habits, not the banking system that files the paperwork. I don't totally disagree with you on that front, but I have to tell you that you're pretty much out in the weeds when you bring up the Grace Commission.
Then you're not looking very hard. I would bet that every atheist you describe is somebody who you've engaged in theological discussion with, and is somebody whose views offend you. That's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. I would also bet that the vast majority of atheists you've met haven't made you aware of their atheism. It's easier not to mention it, you know. Unfortunately, the result is hasty generalizations and unelectability. If more atheists would stand up and be counted, maybe people would realize that they're not "bitter actademics who are mortally offended at the idea that people have faith" but rather people who have no faith themselves and are mortally offended at the idea that they should be legally subject to the religious whims of others.
Yes, I'm probably more familiar than most slashdotters with international banking and fiat currency. My point is that the claims made on slashdot about how the Federal Reserve system actually works are usually misleading at best and more often outright wrong. Your mention of the fact that the Federal Reserve Banks are corporations is a classic example.
Let me suggest that if the only exposure one has had to the field is "The Money Masters" and the Internet, it might be a good time to start grabbing some textbooks on the topic that present a more balanced and complete point of view.
I would say that if you have no idea where the candidate you voted for stands on any issues at all, or if you don't understand the powers and responsibilities of the office, you voted in ignorance. Rebuttal?
What's funny about the whole "series of tubes" thing is exactly what you point out. The tube analogy is probably the single most accurate thing he said. The whole rant was largely a nonsense pile of misused terms and misattributions of technical problems, and the thing that people decided to laugh at was probably the one thing that made some semblance of sense.
If candidates actually had an incentive to minimize the margins for their losses in states that they don't carry, that would certainly work, but as it stands, there's no incentive to bother. Just let the states you lose be a blowout and spend your effort on the few states that actually matter.