Errr... The original unsupported claim was, "It wasn't just this administration. It's everybody." We're talking about a concrete example of "this administration" doing this, so the original criticism is valid. It was the grandparent who made the unsupported claim and the person you responded to was challenging him. Even if it was just a lame tu quoque argument attempting to make any criticism of Bush look like a partisan smear, some specific examples might have been nice.
Now, this is probably a generalization that doesn't always hold true, but my experiance is that I have yet to hear a satisfactory layman-friendly account of the sheer volume of evidence that they have.
You'll probably find that talkorigins.org does a pretty good job of accumulating the relevant evidence and breaking it down in a layman-friendly way by topic. They usually have references to the most relevant handful of papers on any given topic. They're also pretty good about giving pointers to further reading if you leave them some feedback.
But as long as there are variations, such as orientation and symmetry, to the way these molecules are bonded, you still have an exponential search space.
So in summary, we don't know the probabilities of each step or how they affect one another, we don't know the number of potentially valid targets there are in the search space, but we can confidently conclude that the probabilities are too small. You have to admit that you're making sort of a leap there. I think that we can agree on my point that any numbers that people are trying to sell you with regards to probability are essentially completely made up.
Now, I'm not sure what you mean by an "exponential" search space. The point is that the valid amino acids for a given position in a protein are not independent of position or content. The number of valid outcomes shrinks as stuff gets added to the protein. So, until somebody comes up with a model for that, applies it to a specific protein or class of proteins, and shows that there are not (or, at least, it's unlikely that there are) other valid target proteins, they're just guessing. If they're right, it's a major result. But until then, I put the mountains of evidence for evolution ahead of back of the napkin calcluations with fabricated values for input variables.
I can't see why you would dismiss intellectual design so easily.
I can give you a few reasons. First, it's not a theory in and of itself. It makes no predictions. It has no model. It just says that there is something out there other than evolution at work. All arguments in favor of intelligent design are actually just arguments against evolution with the assumption that intelligent design somehow "wins" by default if the prevailing answer turns out to be wrong.
Second, the arguments are usually mathematics without data, mathematics without a model, or hand-wavy mis-application of well understood science. The "thermodynamics" challenge is a classic.
Third, their model produces nothing interesting. Even if it is true, the idea that there is something magic out there tinkering with the universe in an unspecified and unmeasurable way contributes nothing to my understanding of the world and could be true no matter what I observe. Twin nested hierarchy? Could be evolution or could be magic. No twin nested hierarchy? Could be magic. Apples fall to the ground? Could be gravity or could be magic (or both!). I prefer that the phrase "or it could be magic" remain implicit at the end of every statement of fact. Sure, it's true, but do we even need to bother thinking about it?
ID folks will impress me when they do the following:
1) Come up with a cohesive theory that they can all somewhat agree on. Right now the ID camp is simply the creationists rebranded. And of course we have young earth creationism, old earth creationism, and anybody else who has a religious beef with evolution. They don't agree on anything, but they're banding together to fight the common enemy and being really quiet about the details in hopes that nobody notices.
2) Come up with a mechanism. How was this design accomplished? Is it still happening now? Did it stop years ago? Was it done by periodically beaming information into the genome? Go out on a limb. Make some statement of fact somewhere.
3) Define their terms. Complex specified information? Only Dembski seems to understand what that is. We have an ill-defined quantity and lots of math manipulating it. The result? GIGO.
4) Come up with a test. Right now, there is no imaginable observation that could possibly falsify the idea that something, somewhere, is designing things and making those designs reality in some unspecified way using an unspecified mechanism over an unspecified timeline. If they can do 1-3 and use those to make some sort of real prediction, they can come up with an objective test to see if their ideas hold any water.
Some computer scientists have worked on a genetic algorithm modeled after evolution theory. The objective is to see if natural selection and mutation can produce desired computer functions. For a simple function, such as taking the average of two numbers, this can be done easily, but as function gets more complicated, its syntax tree deepens and causes exponential growth of the search space that is so large to yield any sensible functions at all even when you prune the searches using "natural selection."
Your problem here is you're trying to evolve a complex function from nothing in one go. There are a few problems with that. The first is that you'd probably get better results if you target stopping points along the way. Averaging three numbers, for example, is easier to arrive at if you've already evolved a function that averages two numbers. More importantly, testing evolution in general with algorithms like this fails on assumption that there is only one viable final target in your search space. Evolution doesn't have targets that specify functionality (e.g. "must average 10 numbers" or "must climb trees"). Anything that turns out to be useful is a good thing, whether it's averaging numbers or performing FFTs.
And how do genes of any specie get into that particular alignment?
Suppose humans have 20,000 genes each carrying just one bit of information, then the number of searches to achieve that alignment is on the magnitude of 2^20,000. Try to punch that number on your calculator.
You're assuming that that specific sequence of 20,000 bits is the only valid goal and that the genes are randomly changed, one bit at a time, in uniformly distributed random trials. Neither of these is true. It's like calculating the probability of a particular poker hand (infinitesimally small) vs. having any playable hand at all (not small at all). Also, I can't really apply the idea of "20,000 1-bit genes" to anything I know of in actual biology or genetics. I have an idea of what you're thinking, but I'm not entirely sure that you're clear on the process you're trying to model. The average person has 50-100 mutations. On average, about 3 of those result in a different protein from the one that the original DNA coded for. What's the probability of producing a given sequence? Extremely small. What's the probability of creating novel proteins? Pretty high.
The reason why I quoted thermodynamics is because it has a probability cause. It is not impossible for a closed system to decrease entropy, just improbable.
You make a correct statement about entropy and thermodynamics. My point is that you're applying it incorrectly to the system you're modeling. "Entropy" has a very specific meaning, and you're not applying that meaning to the system, making any appeal to the laws of thermodynamics essentially meaningless.
You mentioned that thermodynamics law can only apply to closed systems, but one must make an assumption somewhere to define closed system.
I actually didn't mention that directly, but the gist of the point is correct. The obvious fact, though, is that life organizes itself by pulling in energy from the outside world in the form of food / sun / etc. As such, it can't possibly be described as a closed system. The same principles that allow a single celled embryo to turn into a complex, adult human being allow life to evolve. You'll have to draw a thermodynamic distinction between the two if you believe otherwise, and fortunately, there is no such distinction to be drawn.
Is the combustion engine a closed system?
Nope.
What about its exhaust?
Exhaust. And the fuel that is put into it. Exactly. The engine, like a living organism, exists by exploiting the flow of available energy from one form to another. As long as there are pockets of energy and entropy gradients, it is possibl
In my experience it is because that is the level which the anti-religious types expect of them... a step by step explanation (with proof). There's no significant evidence that opposes religion either. I will freely admit that evolution in some form exists. How many staunch evolutionists have you heard make that same statement about God?
I think that the difference is that one area of study is science and the other is not. That doesn't make religion(s) necessarily wrong. It just means that the existance of deities doesn't fall into the realm of things that science really has anything to say about. The only time they really butt heads is when religions make factual claims that science can investigate (e.g. the planet is 6000 years old, there was a global flood, etc.), or when people with religious agendas start challenging fields of science about which they know nothing (e.g. "I think that evolution has a lot of holes in it" followed by "holes" that were never a problem or were addressed years ago in the literature). You will tend to get scientists swarming out at you with the appearance of an anti-religion agenda when ideas like intelligent design come up because those ideas tear down good science unjustly rather than simply building up their own philosophy. The creationism movement has done quite a lot of undeserved harm to the public's perception of science in general and evolution specifically, and with recent attempts to get intelligent design into classrooms, it's not surprising that people who normally have no issues with religion at all are up in arms.
You have to remember that the vast majority of "evolutionists" believe in a god of some sort and there is no reason to equate evolution with atheism or evolutionary ideas with attacks on religion. The people who would have you believe that are selling something. It takes a real leap of flawed logic to say that filling one particular gap that used to be filled by gods means that no gods exist.
The two are not mutually exclusive... and the pissing match is getting real old.
I agree that the two are not mutually exclusive with one caveat: They stay out of each other's territory. Factual claims that can be investigated scientifically may well be investigated scientifically, and the results may conflict. In that respect, the pissing match will continue as long as a vocal minority of religious zealots insist on challenging science on its own turf.
You have to admit it... an animal that doesn't even have a passing resemblence to it's closest genetic family (echnidas) and hasn't for 100+ million years (according to scientists... not me), and is that genetically screwy really does stretch the theories.
No, it really doesn't. It fits neatly into the theory in the space of "things that split off a long time ago and don't have a lot of close relatives remaining." It's no more a problem for evolutionary theory than the fact that helium balloons "fall" upward is a problem for Newton's theory of gravity.
Something I've never understood about the creationist approach to this discussion: Why does the theory need a complete step by step explanation of everything? There's no significant evidence that opposes evolution. It just doesn't paint a complete picture of everything. Likewise, geologists aren't wrong about everything because they can't give you the history of every rock in a mountain formation. Their general theories haven't been contradicted, so how is it that the inability to produce detailed information on one topic weakens a theory irreparably?
You're right about the externalities associated with the overall environment not really being externalities in this case. The fact that we all pay equally (roughly speaking) for the problem means that the externality model doesn't fit. I think that what the grandparent was thinking of is the idea of "The Tragedy of the Commons." It's easy to think of the environment as a public good and individual environmentally friendly behavior as the cost associated with that public good. People who behave irresponsibly are not producing externalities as much as they are acting as free riders.
Of course, the market has no solution for the free rider problem either. Typically, when we feel the need to solve it, we impose government controls on behavior. Whether or not you believe that the problem warrants government action, it's silly to say that the market alone will solve the problem until the cost of day to day use of the commons (in this case, production of greenhouse gasses) is high enough that individuals can no longer afford to overuse them. The only way to force a solution is to regulate the use of the commons directly or to regulate prices to increase the cost of overuse.
Do you deny that electrons, atoms, stars, planets and living things ALL have some level of coherent organization, ie. structure?
I suppose, if by "structure" you mean "the way things fall together based on fundamental forces." A star has structure that appears to be subject to the nature of gravity and nuclear fusion.
Structure or coherent organization cannot be achieved without the information that determines that structure.
And my problem here is that you appear to be calling the laws of gravity and nuclear forces "information" and then attempting to apply information theory to them. I acknowledge that the laws of physics are "set up" one way or another and that matter and energy obey them. The question of where those laws come from is, for me, well outside of anything that I've been interested in thinking about. You're falling back on the idea that the fact that the universe has rules indicates an intelligent designer. I agree that an intelligent designer could cause rules. I disagree that having rules indicates an intelligent designer to the exclusion of other possibilities.
An interesting aside that falls out of this is that the claim "order can't arise from disorder without the application of intelligence" becomes tautological if you assume that everything in the universe is "pre-programmed" by intelligence. Any example that I give of order spontaneously arising to indicate that intelligence is not necessary, you refute with the idea that the intelligent designer has preprogrammed some unquantifiable "information" into the physical laws that caused it to happen. That's why ID is a completely uninteresting premise to me. Any observation and test you could possibly make is simply explained by "the intelligent designer pre-programmed the universe to work that way." So now we have salt crystals forming not because thermodynamics allows localized decreases in entropy (it does... and that's why arguments against evolution based on thermodynamics are still silly), but rather because the intelligent designer pre-programmed NaCl with "information."
As yet another aside on the entropy and thermodynamics topic, it is worth noting that normal heat flow causes localized decreases in entropy all the time. A variation on your very own experiment demonstrates this fact. Take a hot block of steel and put it up against a cold block of steel. Heat will flow from one block to the other. The net entropy remains the same. The entropy in the block that was originally cold increases. What does that say about the entropy in the hot block? That's right--a localized decrease. No intelligence required, unless we go back to the assumption that some intelligence pre-programmed the steel with the "information" necessary to cause that heat flow. I don't see how the data supports that idea, though.
Unfortunately mutations never ADD information but lose or garble it every time. Information is stored in physical systems and because these are subject to decay, (entropy) the information stored therein is never increased, but always lost or corrupted in some way.
This statement is flatly false, as has been observed in any number of experiments. All of the following mutations have been observed occurring randomly:
* Substitution of base pairs
* Deletion of base pairs
* Addition of base pairs
I challenge you to find any definition of "information" that cannot be increased by these operations being performed randomly. Any change in DNA sequence (even those that "increase information") at all is simply an additive combination of the above. All it takes is one base pair to change in such a way that a different but passably useful protein is created, and we have another step in the stochastic hill climbing process. We have observed mutations that add novel proteins and structures. To say otherwise is simply to ignore the data.
Interestingly, for all of the arguments about "inform
Anything that has a specific structure, such as molecules and atoms also contains information inherent in the structure. Sodium chloride molecules are included in this. When they form crystals they arrange themselves according to the structure information inherent in their nature. The level or amount of information in atoms and molecules is sufficient to allow them to form regular, repeating structures under the right conditions. Living structures contain orders of magnitude more information. We see this in manmade things also. An automobile contains much more information than a wheelbarrow.
So the shape of NaCl molecules is information, and that "information" is what allows us to separate them from water with heat. You're abusing the word information in ways I can't even begin to describe, but I'm just going to roll with it at this point. Let's assume that it's OK to shift the definitions of information and entropy around and assume that information in one context equals information in another, and that all of these terms are perfectly substitutable.
Your overall thesis seems to be that anything that allows even a localized reduction in entropy contains information, and anything that contains information is intelligently designed. It follows from the premise, that sodium chloride molecules and life are intelligently designed. OK. We'll go with that particular piece of circular reasoning. My gripe isn't really with the fact that ID supporters are using flawed logic and assuming their conclusion at every turn as long as they do it outside the school system. My problem comes when ID supporters use their whacko ideas of actual scientific principles to shoot down the GOOD work of real scientists.
Case in point: Your abuse of thermodynamics and rather unconventional take on the concept of information as it applies to physical systems. If equivocating terms and spinning those laws makes you feel better about your underlying belief, that's fine by me. It is, however, insulting to the people whose life's work you're smearing. We've observed and recorded genetic mutations adding information by any reasonable definition of the word. You're claiming that those observations are wrong, the entire world of biologists is out of their minds, and that your touchy feely interpretation of physical law invalidates it all. My only concern is that there are people out there who don't have the time to study information theory or thermodynamics who might believe you.
Think of it this way: I'm betting that you're a computer engineer or computer scientist. That's OK. I'm a CE myself. I think we differ in an important way, though. When my reasoning conflicts with the experts in topics outside of my field, I assume that I'm probably missing something and I should study it more deeply. I don't claim that the experts are all wrong, or that their entire field of study is a fanciful waste of time, or that there is a vast conspiracy to shut down my insight (an insight which, by the way, is only shared by other people with an equal lack of expertise). Imagine a biologist haranguing you about cache design, claiming that direct mapped cache should be far faster than fully associative cache. Reason? It's well known that a DIRECT route is always faster than any other. Computer engineers just choose to ignore the fact because of indoctrination! Teach the controversy! Stop silencing us!
My guess is that you'd try to point out that the word "direct" perhaps does not mean what they think it means. You'd probably also be a little bit miffed at a person dumping on your design decisions based on a deeply flawed understanding of basic principles. The worst part? Imagine he's going to your boss. Or trying to change the computer engineering curriculum at your local university. You can see where I'm going with this.
The hemoglobin molecule is a three dimensional structure of thousands of atoms, each of which, like a complex machine must be in the correct place, in order for the machine to fulfill its function. Making such a structure by any means other than careful attention to the intended application of such a complex machine is incredibly unlikely.
Perhaps you're not following what I mean by the "shape" of the search space. Your calculations (or, the calculations you're implying that you've done... your your guestimations) are relying on the fact that each step in assembly is equally probable and the probabilities are independent. This is almost certainly not true. As was pointed out in the document I linked you to, once you start certain chains of molecules, the order in which they bond is far from uniformly distributed. It strongly favors certain patterns, so the calculations that creationists claim to do but never actually do are usually totally nutty. It's also worth noting that hemoglobin is not the only target molecule that performs that particular function. Hemocyanin is another perfectly valid option. There may well be others. Now we have many solutions and a non-flat search space. Should we redo the calculation, or should we continue to dismiss 99.99% of all professional biologists out of hand?
Also, I'm interested in why you're responding consistently to everything except the thermodynamics thread. You're not going to jump into another discussion with the same incorrect thermodynamics claims you made before without thinking a bit about it, are you? You've gone through a couple of Slashdot topics with the same platitudes about disorder without addressing those basic challenges.
However, since the time of this discovery, Archaeopteryx has become more and more reptile-like until it is now fashionable to declare that Archaeopteryx was hardly more than a feathered reptile. In 90 years, Archaeopteryx has thus evolved from a creature so emphatically bird-like its reptilian ancestry was barely hinted at into a creature some evolutionists declare to be nothing more than a reptile with feathers!
I think you're getting this from the fact that archaeopteryx has more dinosaur features than bird features. I suppose, then, if you apply the idea that a transitional must be EXACTLY between the two points, then archaeopteryx is not a transitional. The fact remains, though, that it has some features that are exclusively reptilian and some features that are exclusively avian. Here's a more interesting question that evolution addresses, though: Where did birds come from? Why don't we find fossils of birds that are the same age as fossils of the oldest dinosaurs and other early life? Evolutionary theory, with archaeopteryx as an example, provides a clean answer.
The sudden appearance, in the fossil record, fully formed, of all the complex invertebrates (snails, clams, jellyfish, sponges, worms, sea urchins, brachiopods, trilobites, etc.) without a trace of ancestors, and the sudden appearance, fully formed, of every major kind of fish (supposedly the first vertebrates) without a trace of ancestors, is strong evidence that evolution as commonly taught has not occurred.
I'm assuming you're going after the "cambrian explosion" here. So, you're saying that "all complex invertibrates" formed "without ancestors?" What about sponges and cnidarians? Both existed before the "explosion" which was hardly abrupt (5-40 million years, depending on who you ask). There are a number of other factors that could have contributed to the fast branching off of interesting phyla, including hox genes. I don't think that any of this is particularly surprising to evolutionary biologists. Also, is it really a big surprise that the period when exoskeletons and other easily fossilized hard bits become common is also a time when fossils become easier to find?
Better question: Why don't we find any rabbit fossils in the pre-cambrian layers? Do rabbits just not sink as deeply into the mud, or did they arrive later via some as yet unexplained path?
It's not that they missed it, but that they have deliberately ignored it.
Aaaah, the appeal to the elite conspiracy. That's always a good one. All of the experts have simultaneously decided to get wrong answers for their entire careers. They're sacrificing their entire field of study to cover for the evolutionary biologists. The same is true for the physicists and geologists who say that the earth is old. The only way to *really* understand is not to have any atheist baggage (i.e. believe in a literal Biblical creation) and avoid "indoctrination" (read: higher education in the subject you plan to pontificate about). Don't you think that at least some people with the relevant backgrounds would decide to claim fame and fortune by doing the calculations that you suggest are so obvious? The only one I can think of with the relevant background is Michael Behe, and he doesn't get involved in the physical chemistry calculations either. Those seem reserved entirely for non-chemists.
In the random shuffling of cards, as per the article "bad math" you are looking for one and only one particular sequence, not any outcome. Substitute atoms for cards and there is only ONE combination that will make a properly functioning hemoglobin molecule.
What about the shape of the search space, as described in "Bad Math"? Can you describe the shape of the search space? Is it totally flat? Your suggested calculations imply that you believe it is. Is that just a guess, or do you have some physical chemistry results that back up the claim?
So what's your take on archaeopteryx? In fact, given that the existence of something like an archaeopteryx (not just the general form, but the time period when it would be expected to have existed) was predicted before the fossil was found, what's your take on the prediction that evolutoinary made? Just good luck?
Indeed you did. You just whacked my entire post and all of the arguments in it. Touché.
[the same wikipedia quote we see over and over again...]
A quote from the WIKI article: "Unlike most other laws of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is statistical in nature, and its reliability arises from the huge number of particles present in macroscopic systems. It is not impossible, in principle, for all 10^23 atoms in a gas to spontaneously migrate to one half of container; it is only fantastically unlikely -- so unlikely that no macroscopic violation of the Second Law has ever been observed."
And that's all very true. That's NOT where your argument falls flat on its face.
Evolution of simple life forms into complex ones has also never been observed, and although not impossible, it is just as unlikely as the atoms all migrating to only one part of a container. If you have two such containers connected with a pipe, the pressure in both of them will be equal. If you replace the pipe with an intelligently designed power-driven pump, you can get all or most of the atoms into one container only. If you supply energy only, such as heating the pipe, there will be be an equal increase of pressure in both containers. Only the designed pump, supplying energy does the job.
This is where you're failing. You CAN create localized decreases in entropy by applying energy. The entropy merely moves elsewhere. That's how life stays alive. That's how you end up with salt crystals and steam when you boil salt water. Your particular experiment demonstrates the second law, but it doesn't demonstrate the concept I'm trying to point out to you. You have yet to explain how life holds itself together by taking in energy without violating your understanding of the second law. You have yet to explain how we ended up with crystals and steam without violating the second law. The bottom line is, you have only a peripheral understanding of the second law and you're using it the wrong way.
All present experience shows the opposite of the evolution dogma, namely that complex things fall apart into simpler pieces.
This sentence is an oversimplification, so any experiment I do to demonstrate that it's wrong has no bearing on thermodynamics. The salt water experiment I linked to in my post does, though. You've been ignoring it consistently. Why?
Do an experiment TODAY that shows the opposite. There is no mechanisms you can show today of what evolution conjectures by faith happened by whatever processes you care to name in the past. You don't have to use the "expensive" processes evolution supposedly employs. Just come up with a plausible experimental simulation. Write a computer program that shows how an eye might "evolve".
Go back to the salt water experiment and explain how it fails. We start with a pot of salt water. We apply heat (and heat alone!). The water boils off and we get high entropy steam and low entropy crystals. The net entropy has not decreased, but localized entropy has. Does this violate the second law? Now, think about a living being growing: It's bringing about all sorts of order and complexity by taking in energy from the sun and producing entropy. Its body remains a localized area of steady or decreasing entropy until it dies and stops converting energy. The same thing happens for evolution.
Or, to take another approach: A strand of DNA can be viewed as a bit stream (although small changes in DNA can result in HUGE changes in protein functionality, we'll ignore this fact for the moment). We have observed that natural mutations can substitute, duplicate, insert, and delete base pairs. Those things can and do increase the entropy of the string. You can calculate it. In fact, why not start there? Define what you mean by complexity (Shannon entropy, Kolmogorov complexity, e
Anybody who has ever done any probability calculations for the formation of even only the basic molecular structures in life forms quickly learns to write double and even triple digit exponents. Study the chlorophyll, hemoglobin or DNA data storage molecules and calculate the chances of any one of such functioning structures evolving by probability mechanisms. Measuring the age of the universe in nanoseconds will still yield numbers many orders of magnitude smaller than these calculations.
Please show your work. You might want to refer to the bad math blog to avoid some of the more common pitfalls.
Here's a worthwhile question to consider, though: Why have you noticed this calculation but hordes of biochemists appear to have missed it? Do they just hate religion, or could it be something in their years of study that the average armchair physical chemist is missing?
A crystal is nothing more than a repeating structure of atoms arranged by the "shape" of the atoms. Comparing a crystal to a living cell is like having a 800 page book filled with pages of "aaaaaaaaaaaaa" or "ababababababab" as compared to "The Lord of the Rings" or a similar work.
Are you still going on about this nonsense? Have you gotten around to explaining the thermodynamic distinction between descent with modification and the growth of a zygote into a complex, multicellular life form yet? All that's going on is energy being added to the system to create a localized state of lower entropy... like I described here. If everything you learned about thermodynamics came from Answers in Genesis augmented by a little bit of cherry picking from Wikipedia, you're not starting in the right place.
You can't just go around applying physical law by analogy or equivocation. I can't say that a person's attraction to sweet food is "like gravity" and start applying relativistic calculations to strawberry shortcake. Likewise, I can't say that the government forces me to pay taxes, so we can apply force = mass*acceleration and figure out my income based on how long it takes the check to get to the Treasury department. Somehow, tortured analogies and equivocation become fair game with thermodnyamics. I just don't get it.
There has been a lot of disagreement about the definition of species and other biological groupings. The point is that there are distinct groupings, whatever they may be called, that cannot cross from one to the other. All the fruit flies in the article (drosophila) always were and remained fruit flies, even though their behavior and other characteristics were different. None of them ever became some entirely new creature.
So, you seem to have a pretty good idea of what constitutes speciation. Could you please be the first person to draw the line for us and explain why the biologists are wrong? Right now, it seems like the scientists of the world are kicking balls at invisible goalposts. Thanks to the likes of AiG, we have lots of datapoints about what they say isn't speciation, but they've never given us a good idea of what is.
You don't actually know there isn't a Santa Claus or a god. What you have is a theory, not proof.
But of course, if you listen to the "atheism == religion" crowd, it follows pretty clearly that "not beliving in Santa Claus == religion" as well. Likewise, likewise, not beliving in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. How many variations on religion can you get? Is my belief in OJ Simpson's guilt in his murder trial also a religion?
[CB102 [talkorigins.org]] I have a short debunk of this debunk. The structure of living things are highly ordered (low entropy). By second law of thermodynamics, entropy in any system can only increase or stay the same over time. Mutation is a random process that corresponds to raise in entropy, and leads to destruction of living organisms.
Aaaagh! If you've actually taken a physics class that covers thermodynamics, I weep for the future of physics. Can you actually state the law and apply it rigorously to evolution?
Here's a better question: What is it that evolution does that violates the second law that an embryo growing into an adult human being doesn't do? What's the thermodynamic distiction? Please show your work.
It drives me NUTS when somebody takes rigorous concepts like thermodynamics and information theory and applies them in a wishy-washy hand-waving way and then claims to have rigorously refuted over a century of good science. What is it that you know that all of the physicists in the world seem to have missed?
8. I still don't see how a copy error is new information. Your use of the phrase 'gets changed to' suggests that there was something to begin with, not _new_ information being _added_. But, maybe we're just splitting hairs of the use of terms. Most creationists will readily agree that micro-evolution occurs, because there is obvious evidence to support it. The problem is that macro-evolution is a big assumption that this process occuring over millions/billions of years (depending on who you talk to) produces different animals. This hypothesis has yet to be backed up by any evidence that doesn't involve a serious number of assumptions.
There are a number of important points that creationists miss when they make the "information" based arguments. Generally, they start by not defining "information" and the way they measure it. Second, they ignore the fact that there's really no good way to relate the amount of change in "information" in DNA to a resulting change in protein functionality. Remember, proteins are complex, 3D structures that are created by linking chains of molecules together. A small change in the DNA sequence may result in no change in the protein, or a drastic change in its overall structure and functionality. The hand waving information theory arguments don't hold water.
The nice thing about evolutionary theory is that it explains the following observation: At one point, there was life, but there were no rabbits. Now there are rabbits. Where did the rabbits come from? Is the entire geological column nonsense, or did the rabbits just poof in from nowhere?
So.... normally at some point along the lines the person who wasn't able to make his point in an intelligible and unambiguous way clarifies his statement. Unless he's having more fun being abusive about the fact that nobody in the world is smart enough understand his clever, subtle, read-between-the-lines meaning. I'm just pointing that out, since you never did clarify your meaning. I'm guessing you're trying to draw a distinction between being "elected" as in "legally elected" and "elected" as in "won the popular vote" but I wouldn't want to infer anything from an ambiguous sentence. Others have already been taken to task for that sort of branch prediction.
Seriously, I was as disappointed as anybody (well... that's probably not true since there are a lot of total nutters out there, but I was pretty disappointed) in the past couple of elections, but I suppose that's just the way things go. Maybe we'll all learn a lesson from it. Eventually.
So why the random punctuation around "elected?" Most people put punctuation into a sentence for a reason, so it seemed reasonable to infer that you did as well. Since there was no indication of a direct quotation, the only punctuation construction your use of quotes resembled was scare quotes which are typically an indicator that you're distancing yourself from the idea contained in them. So was that why you used them, or was it just a malfunctioning keyboard? Perhaps your deity is angered by the use of the word "elected" when not in quotes? Since we can't make any inferences based on what appears to be standard punctuation, I think we're all at a loss to divine your meaning.
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Errr... The original unsupported claim was, "It wasn't just this administration. It's everybody." We're talking about a concrete example of "this administration" doing this, so the original criticism is valid. It was the grandparent who made the unsupported claim and the person you responded to was challenging him. Even if it was just a lame tu quoque argument attempting to make any criticism of Bush look like a partisan smear, some specific examples might have been nice.
So in summary, we don't know the probabilities of each step or how they affect one another, we don't know the number of potentially valid targets there are in the search space, but we can confidently conclude that the probabilities are too small. You have to admit that you're making sort of a leap there. I think that we can agree on my point that any numbers that people are trying to sell you with regards to probability are essentially completely made up.
Now, I'm not sure what you mean by an "exponential" search space. The point is that the valid amino acids for a given position in a protein are not independent of position or content. The number of valid outcomes shrinks as stuff gets added to the protein. So, until somebody comes up with a model for that, applies it to a specific protein or class of proteins, and shows that there are not (or, at least, it's unlikely that there are) other valid target proteins, they're just guessing. If they're right, it's a major result. But until then, I put the mountains of evidence for evolution ahead of back of the napkin calcluations with fabricated values for input variables.
I can give you a few reasons. First, it's not a theory in and of itself. It makes no predictions. It has no model. It just says that there is something out there other than evolution at work. All arguments in favor of intelligent design are actually just arguments against evolution with the assumption that intelligent design somehow "wins" by default if the prevailing answer turns out to be wrong.
Second, the arguments are usually mathematics without data, mathematics without a model, or hand-wavy mis-application of well understood science. The "thermodynamics" challenge is a classic.
Third, their model produces nothing interesting. Even if it is true, the idea that there is something magic out there tinkering with the universe in an unspecified and unmeasurable way contributes nothing to my understanding of the world and could be true no matter what I observe. Twin nested hierarchy? Could be evolution or could be magic. No twin nested hierarchy? Could be magic. Apples fall to the ground? Could be gravity or could be magic (or both!). I prefer that the phrase "or it could be magic" remain implicit at the end of every statement of fact. Sure, it's true, but do we even need to bother thinking about it?
ID folks will impress me when they do the following:
1) Come up with a cohesive theory that they can all somewhat agree on. Right now the ID camp is simply the creationists rebranded. And of course we have young earth creationism, old earth creationism, and anybody else who has a religious beef with evolution. They don't agree on anything, but they're banding together to fight the common enemy and being really quiet about the details in hopes that nobody notices.
2) Come up with a mechanism. How was this design accomplished? Is it still happening now? Did it stop years ago? Was it done by periodically beaming information into the genome? Go out on a limb. Make some statement of fact somewhere.
3) Define their terms. Complex specified information? Only Dembski seems to understand what that is. We have an ill-defined quantity and lots of math manipulating it. The result? GIGO.
4) Come up with a test. Right now, there is no imaginable observation that could possibly falsify the idea that something, somewhere, is designing things and making those designs reality in some unspecified way using an unspecified mechanism over an unspecified timeline. If they can do 1-3 and use those to make some sort of real prediction, they can come up with an objective test to see if their ideas hold any water.
The simple fact is t
Your problem here is you're trying to evolve a complex function from nothing in one go. There are a few problems with that. The first is that you'd probably get better results if you target stopping points along the way. Averaging three numbers, for example, is easier to arrive at if you've already evolved a function that averages two numbers. More importantly, testing evolution in general with algorithms like this fails on assumption that there is only one viable final target in your search space. Evolution doesn't have targets that specify functionality (e.g. "must average 10 numbers" or "must climb trees"). Anything that turns out to be useful is a good thing, whether it's averaging numbers or performing FFTs.
You're assuming that that specific sequence of 20,000 bits is the only valid goal and that the genes are randomly changed, one bit at a time, in uniformly distributed random trials. Neither of these is true. It's like calculating the probability of a particular poker hand (infinitesimally small) vs. having any playable hand at all (not small at all). Also, I can't really apply the idea of "20,000 1-bit genes" to anything I know of in actual biology or genetics. I have an idea of what you're thinking, but I'm not entirely sure that you're clear on the process you're trying to model. The average person has 50-100 mutations. On average, about 3 of those result in a different protein from the one that the original DNA coded for. What's the probability of producing a given sequence? Extremely small. What's the probability of creating novel proteins? Pretty high.
You make a correct statement about entropy and thermodynamics. My point is that you're applying it incorrectly to the system you're modeling. "Entropy" has a very specific meaning, and you're not applying that meaning to the system, making any appeal to the laws of thermodynamics essentially meaningless.
I actually didn't mention that directly, but the gist of the point is correct. The obvious fact, though, is that life organizes itself by pulling in energy from the outside world in the form of food / sun / etc. As such, it can't possibly be described as a closed system. The same principles that allow a single celled embryo to turn into a complex, adult human being allow life to evolve. You'll have to draw a thermodynamic distinction between the two if you believe otherwise, and fortunately, there is no such distinction to be drawn.
Nope.
Exhaust. And the fuel that is put into it. Exactly. The engine, like a living organism, exists by exploiting the flow of available energy from one form to another. As long as there are pockets of energy and entropy gradients, it is possibl
You have to remember that the vast majority of "evolutionists" believe in a god of some sort and there is no reason to equate evolution with atheism or evolutionary ideas with attacks on religion. The people who would have you believe that are selling something. It takes a real leap of flawed logic to say that filling one particular gap that used to be filled by gods means that no gods exist.
I agree that the two are not mutually exclusive with one caveat: They stay out of each other's territory. Factual claims that can be investigated scientifically may well be investigated scientifically, and the results may conflict. In that respect, the pissing match will continue as long as a vocal minority of religious zealots insist on challenging science on its own turf.Something I've never understood about the creationist approach to this discussion: Why does the theory need a complete step by step explanation of everything? There's no significant evidence that opposes evolution. It just doesn't paint a complete picture of everything. Likewise, geologists aren't wrong about everything because they can't give you the history of every rock in a mountain formation. Their general theories haven't been contradicted, so how is it that the inability to produce detailed information on one topic weakens a theory irreparably?
Of course, the market has no solution for the free rider problem either. Typically, when we feel the need to solve it, we impose government controls on behavior. Whether or not you believe that the problem warrants government action, it's silly to say that the market alone will solve the problem until the cost of day to day use of the commons (in this case, production of greenhouse gasses) is high enough that individuals can no longer afford to overuse them. The only way to force a solution is to regulate the use of the commons directly or to regulate prices to increase the cost of overuse.
I suppose, if by "structure" you mean "the way things fall together based on fundamental forces." A star has structure that appears to be subject to the nature of gravity and nuclear fusion.
And my problem here is that you appear to be calling the laws of gravity and nuclear forces "information" and then attempting to apply information theory to them. I acknowledge that the laws of physics are "set up" one way or another and that matter and energy obey them. The question of where those laws come from is, for me, well outside of anything that I've been interested in thinking about. You're falling back on the idea that the fact that the universe has rules indicates an intelligent designer. I agree that an intelligent designer could cause rules. I disagree that having rules indicates an intelligent designer to the exclusion of other possibilities.
An interesting aside that falls out of this is that the claim "order can't arise from disorder without the application of intelligence" becomes tautological if you assume that everything in the universe is "pre-programmed" by intelligence. Any example that I give of order spontaneously arising to indicate that intelligence is not necessary, you refute with the idea that the intelligent designer has preprogrammed some unquantifiable "information" into the physical laws that caused it to happen. That's why ID is a completely uninteresting premise to me. Any observation and test you could possibly make is simply explained by "the intelligent designer pre-programmed the universe to work that way." So now we have salt crystals forming not because thermodynamics allows localized decreases in entropy (it does... and that's why arguments against evolution based on thermodynamics are still silly), but rather because the intelligent designer pre-programmed NaCl with "information."
As yet another aside on the entropy and thermodynamics topic, it is worth noting that normal heat flow causes localized decreases in entropy all the time. A variation on your very own experiment demonstrates this fact. Take a hot block of steel and put it up against a cold block of steel. Heat will flow from one block to the other. The net entropy remains the same. The entropy in the block that was originally cold increases. What does that say about the entropy in the hot block? That's right--a localized decrease. No intelligence required, unless we go back to the assumption that some intelligence pre-programmed the steel with the "information" necessary to cause that heat flow. I don't see how the data supports that idea, though.
This statement is flatly false, as has been observed in any number of experiments. All of the following mutations have been observed occurring randomly:
* Substitution of base pairs
* Deletion of base pairs
* Addition of base pairs
I challenge you to find any definition of "information" that cannot be increased by these operations being performed randomly. Any change in DNA sequence (even those that "increase information") at all is simply an additive combination of the above. All it takes is one base pair to change in such a way that a different but passably useful protein is created, and we have another step in the stochastic hill climbing process. We have observed mutations that add novel proteins and structures. To say otherwise is simply to ignore the data.
Interestingly, for all of the arguments about "inform
Your overall thesis seems to be that anything that allows even a localized reduction in entropy contains information, and anything that contains information is intelligently designed. It follows from the premise, that sodium chloride molecules and life are intelligently designed. OK. We'll go with that particular piece of circular reasoning. My gripe isn't really with the fact that ID supporters are using flawed logic and assuming their conclusion at every turn as long as they do it outside the school system. My problem comes when ID supporters use their whacko ideas of actual scientific principles to shoot down the GOOD work of real scientists.
Case in point: Your abuse of thermodynamics and rather unconventional take on the concept of information as it applies to physical systems. If equivocating terms and spinning those laws makes you feel better about your underlying belief, that's fine by me. It is, however, insulting to the people whose life's work you're smearing. We've observed and recorded genetic mutations adding information by any reasonable definition of the word. You're claiming that those observations are wrong, the entire world of biologists is out of their minds, and that your touchy feely interpretation of physical law invalidates it all. My only concern is that there are people out there who don't have the time to study information theory or thermodynamics who might believe you.
Think of it this way: I'm betting that you're a computer engineer or computer scientist. That's OK. I'm a CE myself. I think we differ in an important way, though. When my reasoning conflicts with the experts in topics outside of my field, I assume that I'm probably missing something and I should study it more deeply. I don't claim that the experts are all wrong, or that their entire field of study is a fanciful waste of time, or that there is a vast conspiracy to shut down my insight (an insight which, by the way, is only shared by other people with an equal lack of expertise). Imagine a biologist haranguing you about cache design, claiming that direct mapped cache should be far faster than fully associative cache. Reason? It's well known that a DIRECT route is always faster than any other. Computer engineers just choose to ignore the fact because of indoctrination! Teach the controversy! Stop silencing us!
My guess is that you'd try to point out that the word "direct" perhaps does not mean what they think it means. You'd probably also be a little bit miffed at a person dumping on your design decisions based on a deeply flawed understanding of basic principles. The worst part? Imagine he's going to your boss. Or trying to change the computer engineering curriculum at your local university. You can see where I'm going with this.
Also, I'm interested in why you're responding consistently to everything except the thermodynamics thread. You're not going to jump into another discussion with the same incorrect thermodynamics claims you made before without thinking a bit about it, are you? You've gone through a couple of Slashdot topics with the same platitudes about disorder without addressing those basic challenges.
Better question: Why don't we find any rabbit fossils in the pre-cambrian layers? Do rabbits just not sink as deeply into the mud, or did they arrive later via some as yet unexplained path?
So what's your take on archaeopteryx? In fact, given that the existence of something like an archaeopteryx (not just the general form, but the time period when it would be expected to have existed) was predicted before the fossil was found, what's your take on the prediction that evolutoinary made? Just good luck?
Indeed you did. You just whacked my entire post and all of the arguments in it. Touché.
And that's all very true. That's NOT where your argument falls flat on its face.
This is where you're failing. You CAN create localized decreases in entropy by applying energy. The entropy merely moves elsewhere. That's how life stays alive. That's how you end up with salt crystals and steam when you boil salt water. Your particular experiment demonstrates the second law, but it doesn't demonstrate the concept I'm trying to point out to you. You have yet to explain how life holds itself together by taking in energy without violating your understanding of the second law. You have yet to explain how we ended up with crystals and steam without violating the second law. The bottom line is, you have only a peripheral understanding of the second law and you're using it the wrong way.
This sentence is an oversimplification, so any experiment I do to demonstrate that it's wrong has no bearing on thermodynamics. The salt water experiment I linked to in my post does, though. You've been ignoring it consistently. Why?
Go back to the salt water experiment and explain how it fails. We start with a pot of salt water. We apply heat (and heat alone!). The water boils off and we get high entropy steam and low entropy crystals. The net entropy has not decreased, but localized entropy has. Does this violate the second law? Now, think about a living being growing: It's bringing about all sorts of order and complexity by taking in energy from the sun and producing entropy. Its body remains a localized area of steady or decreasing entropy until it dies and stops converting energy. The same thing happens for evolution.
Or, to take another approach: A strand of DNA can be viewed as a bit stream (although small changes in DNA can result in HUGE changes in protein functionality, we'll ignore this fact for the moment). We have observed that natural mutations can substitute, duplicate, insert, and delete base pairs. Those things can and do increase the entropy of the string. You can calculate it. In fact, why not start there? Define what you mean by complexity (Shannon entropy, Kolmogorov complexity, e
Here's a worthwhile question to consider, though: Why have you noticed this calculation but hordes of biochemists appear to have missed it? Do they just hate religion, or could it be something in their years of study that the average armchair physical chemist is missing?
You can't just go around applying physical law by analogy or equivocation. I can't say that a person's attraction to sweet food is "like gravity" and start applying relativistic calculations to strawberry shortcake. Likewise, I can't say that the government forces me to pay taxes, so we can apply force = mass*acceleration and figure out my income based on how long it takes the check to get to the Treasury department. Somehow, tortured analogies and equivocation become fair game with thermodnyamics. I just don't get it.
Here's a better question: What is it that evolution does that violates the second law that an embryo growing into an adult human being doesn't do? What's the thermodynamic distiction? Please show your work.
It drives me NUTS when somebody takes rigorous concepts like thermodynamics and information theory and applies them in a wishy-washy hand-waving way and then claims to have rigorously refuted over a century of good science. What is it that you know that all of the physicists in the world seem to have missed?
The nice thing about evolutionary theory is that it explains the following observation: At one point, there was life, but there were no rabbits. Now there are rabbits. Where did the rabbits come from? Is the entire geological column nonsense, or did the rabbits just poof in from nowhere?
Seriously, I was as disappointed as anybody (well... that's probably not true since there are a lot of total nutters out there, but I was pretty disappointed) in the past couple of elections, but I suppose that's just the way things go. Maybe we'll all learn a lesson from it. Eventually.
So why the random punctuation around "elected?" Most people put punctuation into a sentence for a reason, so it seemed reasonable to infer that you did as well. Since there was no indication of a direct quotation, the only punctuation construction your use of quotes resembled was scare quotes which are typically an indicator that you're distancing yourself from the idea contained in them. So was that why you used them, or was it just a malfunctioning keyboard? Perhaps your deity is angered by the use of the word "elected" when not in quotes? Since we can't make any inferences based on what appears to be standard punctuation, I think we're all at a loss to divine your meaning.