What irritates me about the CFL replacements to incandescent is that the CFL tubes that they sell to "replace" a 100W bulb don't put out quite as much light as a 100W bulb. Really, energy savings are great and all, but the replacement should put out at least as much light as the original. If I I can go from 100W in a fixture down to 24W and get less light by a small but irritating margin, I'd much rather go from 100W to 33W and get the same amount of light while STILL saving 2/3 of the energy.
What I really want to do is replace my lights with the crazy PC tubes that I have in my planted aquarium. They're incredibly bright with surprisingly low draw. No visible flicker and they're available in color spectra that don't make you feel like you're in the cough syrup aisle of your local drug store.
And this is different from gold or silver backed, or even fiat currency, exactly how?
Well, given that anything that has value could be used as a medium of exchange, I suppose it's reasonable to call anything with value "money" if you want to play it that way. That does not, however, mean that inflation of a price of a single good is causing "inflation" in the broader sense.
What I'm talking about is tying up a significant portion of a culture's resources in what is essentially a con artist shell game. This is not compatible with my idea of "making money while doing no evil"- but that might be due to my rather low opinion of people who would rather suffle paper than create.
I think I see where you're going here. I agree that there's a fundamental problem with the way the stock markets have been working lately, but I think that we disagree on the cause. You seem to have reached the conclusion that there is no value in a stock market at all. The problem I see is that "investors" seem to have forgotten what drives the value of the things they're investing in. The point you made in another post regarding dividends is extremely relevant here. Google is "worth" zillions of dollars on pure speculation about future payouts as they have no history of paying out any profits to their investors. Looking at the history of stock prices relative to dividends, it's easy to see that people have gone from seeing stock purchases as investment in a business with a stream of profits to something more akin to trading baseball cards in hopes of striking it rich. When the stock market operates that way, I agree that it is nothing more than a pointless wealth redistribution machine.
At the same time, if people could go back to looking more rationally at their investments, stock markets can do their jobs remarkably well. The root of the problem lies in the fact that stock markets are markets and are only as smart as the aggregate intelligence of its demand side.
True enough- but one leads to the other. Because people are making money off of that con game, that means they have more money to spend- which means prices go up on everything from gasoline to clothing to food to houses. That is why a stock market is hyperinflationary- it invents an "industry" to make money in that contributes no real goods to the general market but sucks in value and spits out money.
I would argue that when a stock market is not operating in a bubble regime or otherwise failing to do its job properly, the industry surrounding it does add value. Its agents can do damage to the market by providing bad advice and encouraging poor investment practices (as they have been doing for some time), but there's no reason to think that if they behave properly they're not earning their money.
If you want to look at an industry that shouldn't exist, I suggest looking at the tax preparation industry. The fact that our government makes tax law complicated enough that a huge number of otherwise average people need to hire experts to explain the rules to them clearly indicates that something is wrong and we're experiencing a massive deadweight loss.
Of which I have not previously been aware. I thought hyperinflationary practices had a tendency to raise the cost of living without raising wages in concert- but this takes the cake.
Is it just me, or was this a total word salad? Hyperinflationary practices? How?
(It's worth noting that the "Flying Spaghetti Monster" parodies which many in the anti-ID crowd have latched on to do not, in any way, contradict or discredit Intelligent Design. ID is completely mute on the nature of the "Intelligent Designer.")
The whole point of the FSM is exactly that. ID is completely silent on the nature of the designer and, as a result, makes all possible designers equally viable "scientifc" answers. The FSM illustrates that once you allow that to happen, completely ridiculous ideas that nobody would even give a second thought suddenly become sound scientific thinking. ID falls on its face because it makes no claims whatsoever.
The FSM also does a great job of pointing out the hipocrisy of some of the ID supporters. On one hand they say, "ID makes no claim about the designer." Then, when FSM is proposed, half of them (the half that doesn't realize that it's politically expedient to keep up the "we don't know who the magic man is" charade) say, "Hey! That's offensive! You shouldn't mock my god!"
There's something that needs to be cleared up about this whole issue. The vast majority of these "arguments" are in fact not used at all by supporters of Intelligent Design, but are created by their opponents to make everyone think they look stupid. Sure, they may stem from some comment made by some un-educated supporter, buy why in the world is anyone taking the word of some anonymous idiot as the viewpoint of the entire group?
I'm totally with you here.
he real supporters of intelligent design have PHDs and know what they're talking about, but never get posted on slashdot because they're not "controversial" enough.
Well, a few of them do have PhDs, but they're rarely in the relevant fields. The flagship supporters like Behe and Dembski are notable exceptions (I'm granting Dembski because he's a mathematician and his argument, while bizarre, is a quasi-mathematical one).
It doesn't really matter, though; the only non-idiotic argument I've ever heard against Intelligent Design is that "It can't be disproven." (seriously) Everything else I've seen is either BS or is based on a misunderstanding of ID (like this one about bees). If you want to attack it, come back when you actually have heard the real thing, instead of laughing at idiots who claim bees can't fly.
I agree that the bee example is pathetic, but the idea that ID cannot be disproven does put it clearly outside the reach of science. That doesn't make it wrong. It just makes it an alternative to science.
As for the actual arguments in favor of ID, there don't appear to be any. All of the arguments appear to be arguments against evolution. Behe simply comes up with examples of things that are hard for evolution to explain and Dembski takes the completely unrigorous concept of "specificity" in information and applies it in a GIGO fashion to formal information theory. Then they make the leap from "evolution cannot work the way they say it does" to "therefore my alternative is correct."
There. I've attacked the real thing. My hat is now in the ring (as if it wasn't already).
Your religion offends me! To suggest that there is no God is absolutely infuriating, and I do not want you to shove your shit down my, and my children's throat. The very nature of public education has only served to advance the Atheist religion, and due to law my children are being FORCED to go to that public school, and be taught things that I find fundamentally offensive!
There's a difference between teaching something that doesn't explicitly support religion and explicitly promoting atheism. Economics is a flaming atheist philosophy as well, I suppose. Does everything need to explicitly affirm your faith in order for it to avoid the "atheism" label? If so, you'll find automotive repair decidedly disturbing in its naturalistic approach to things.
Actually, I have Behe's book, and read it carefully, though that was several years back. My recollection is that the challenge was not that there was no evidence for random emergence of a particular system -- a state that was assumed, but not particularly challenged. Rather the challange was that no one had even proposed a theoretical process by which such a system could emerge from a random process, or at least, that no one had made any such proposal that was sufficiently plausible to gain publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
That is my understanding of his position as well. My point was that once such a pathway is proposed, the next step in goalpoast moving is inevitably, "But there's no evidence that it DID happen that way!"
If, since that time, such proposals have been published, then Behe's original challenge (as best I can recollect) would have been met.
However, I can imagine that there might be some dispute about whether the plausibility was actually present, or whether some lightweight thinking was being given a sympathetic pass by the reviewers, given that Behe is much dispised by many of his peers.
As much as the fathers of the ID movement like to think that they're at the front of everybody's mind when papers are being published, I doubt that we can chalk up the volume of relevant papers on the topic to a conspiracy to put them in their place. It's a bit offensive to assume that the relevant works are simply the result of sloppy thinking and some sort of international good old boys' network. It's easy to assume that the reviewers of all of these journals are seeing what they want to see, but the people who say that are often reluctant to acknowledge that Behe, being in the extreme minority among experts, might be ignoring what he doesn't want to see.
But, I do wish someone could offer direct links to journal articles -- or at least to the abstracts. Given the lack of time, I'm reluctant to trudge through all the histronics I remember as characteristic of talk.origins, to search for the actual citations. I'm made even more reluctant by past experiences hunting citations which turn out, once run to ground, to be far less substantial than the disputant promised.
I'm not sure how much you'll find in the way of histrionics on the page I linked as it's mostly a series of links to PubMed papers. If you want a more trimmed version, I would recommend starting with their reference to "A temporary flagellate (mastigote) stage in the vahlkampfiid amoeba Willaertia magna and its possible evolutionary significance." There are others. Even if you assume that only a handful of these papers addresses the topic, it's obvious that the conclusion that the literature is "silent" on the topic is so much self aggrandizing nonsense.
I did run through a number of the links found at talk.origins . . . and it's clear that there has been some publication of peer-reviewed articles which address elements of the systems Behe described as "irreducibly complex". Unfortunately, the links I pursued, before I ran out of time, seemed not to meet the challenge Behe raised.
I'm sure that in Behe's eyes, that challenge will never be met.
Granted, I was reading abstacts, not full articles, and I'm not a biochemist, so to begin to fully understand those articles requires of me more time than I have right now. But . . . the 8 or 9 links I followed out seemed to dicuss bits of the systems Behe mentioned, but seemed not to offer a COMPLETE plausible hypothetical random emergence pathway the whole distance from a living organism totally lacking the system considered, to a living organism in which the system the system was both present and essential for life.
It's worth noting that these papers discuss observations and phenomena for which there is evidience. Taken individually, they propose very plausible partial pathways to Behe's challenges. This m
The problem with the whole line of reasoning (aside from the fact that the specific arguments are flawed) is that on one hand ID proponents are claiming to have come up with a new, fascinating branch of science. At the same time, it posits no mechanisms, makes no predictions, and has no positive evidence to support it. It simply boils down to "not evolution". It seems like more of a silly use of set theory ("our theory is EVERY other hypothesis that is not evolution!") than anything else. Maybe they'll hammer it into something that actually passes the scientific smell test someday, but until then, it's certainly not ready for prime time.
Transcripts are available here among other places. You might want to try to track down some of the articles mentioned in the transcript, but the talkorigins.org link I gave you in the grandparent post has more direct references that should be easier to find.
Something worth remembering is that whenever a potential explanation for an "irreducibly complex" structure is proposed, ID proponents say at least one of two things:
1) You have no evidence that it DID happen that way. Of course, that's not relevant given that the argument is that such things are impossible due to their logical construct of irreducible complexity. The examples serve as simple counterexamples showing that it's ridiculous to make the leap from "I can't explain it" to "It can't be explained."
2) OK, but what about structure X? There is an essentially infinite number of example structures one could pull from, so if they want to play the game that way, they can do so forever. The goalposts just keep moving. Behe's challenge can remain unanswered as long as he wants it to because, once again, it's just god-in-the-gaps.
And, I'd bet those "days" preceded the 'invention' of ID by years, or maybe even, decades?
No, it probably just had a different name then. What do you think they'll call creationism when "Intelligent Design" falls out of fashion?
But I have yet to encounter a SINGLE instance of an anti-ID debater engaging the 'strong' idea behind ID, which is the concept of "irreducible complexity"*. So far as I know, this idea has not even been addressed in any general discussion of ID, much less demolished! My guess is that 99% or more of those who have heard of ID via the popular media has NOT heard of "irreducible complexity".
Irreducible complexity has been discussed in some depth. It essentially amounts to, "I can't think of a pathway for this, so it's impossible." A number of Behe's examples have been shown to have theoretical pathways, and the whole idea fails on one simple problem: an intermediate form of an "irreducibly complex" system that performs function X need not perform function X at all. If it performs function Y, that is sufficient.
Specifically, there's a goodly list of publications that address some of his examples here. Of course, with those examples taken care of, it's always possible to posit more irreducibly complex looking structures. You can do it forever, but it's still nothing more than god-in-the-gaps.
AFAIK, both this concept, and the half dozen or so specific cases, were originally proposed by the biochemist, Michael Behe. His challenge, offered some 15 or so years ago, was that no biochemist or evolutionary biologist has offered even a plausible theoretical process by which such "irreducibly complex" biological systems could develop. I know that, in the interim, some claims have been made that such proposals have been made, but the references I can find all appear in 'popular' scientific media, and not in the peer-reviewed journals referred to in Behe's origial challenge. It's my understanding that Behe still considers his original challenge unanswered.
You should read the transcript for the Dover Intelligent Design case. When 50+ journal articles describing theoretical pathways for one of his examples of irreducible complexity were listed to him, he didn't have a whole lot to say. He either hadn't read them or he dismissed them in their entirety. I'm sure he still does consider his challenge unmet, but the biolgical community at large certainly doesn't. In fact, Behe was taken to task for it rather sternly in the judge's decision.
As one of my wisest college professors said when students were grubmling about having to learn formal definitions for a mathematics class, "I don't know where people get the idea that learning is supposed to be fun. Learning can be fun, but it can also be really tough--even downright miserable. Knowing is fun."
I'm all for making learning fun when it can be, but we often sacrifice too much in order to achieve those ends. Sometimes you just have to sit down and memorize your multiplication tables, read your textbooks, and do your problem sets. Sadly, no amount of fun will get you there faster than that.
Well even Wal-mart was selling XBox 360s, so I guess you could check there first. Or maybe Best Buy, they also were stocking them.
If you want to allow closed systems that have the operating system pre-loaded, I can think of a lot of weird hardware that comes running Linux.
Who was talking about XP, we were talking about NT. Besides the fact that these architectures are not even supported by the hardware makers anymore, do you really think MS should do a full XP port to them? Brilliant...
Hence the term "legacy support."
Yes currently available... So show me where I can buy RedHat or SuSE for RISC or ALPHA then, or show me where I can Buy the embedded version of SuSE to put into a router I'm developing?
Try debian. You get x86, m68k, Sparc, Alpha, PPC, ARM, two flavors of MIPS, PA-RISC, and others both released and in development. I'm afraid that Red Hat and SuSE don't support all of those, but they're easy enough to find in a fully bundled distribution.
What about fraud? Aren't there a lot of examples of fraud that are essentially just misleading speech designed to cheat people? Are you against those laws as well?
And I guess it just kind of sucks for you if you are married and your partner cheats, huh? Or that you're the unlucky child of a mother whose husband slept around while he was out of town? In a lot of these countries, the most dangerous thing the average woman does (in terms of risk of infection) is getting married. This isn't The Hand of God coming down to punish those with poor impulse control. There are plenty of victims here.
http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&act io n=view&ID=242. The Cambrian Explosions is called an explosion exactly because there was very little life below it, then boom mega population explosion of various life forms. An explosion of life! The exact oposite of what darwinists expected. They expected many more prior slow transitions through the sediment layers below to more simple lifeforms, leading right back to the common ancestors.
I am not the only "darwinist" who is still more than a little conused as to why a proliferation of new life forms occurring over tens of millions of years is somehow opposed to evolutionary theory. I might ask what "creation theory" or "ID theory" or "sudden emergence theory" or whatever they're calling it this year has to say about a small variety of species proliferating into a larger variety of species over millions of years.
Not exactly a scientific journal, but interesting reading all the same. Many other dating methods shown to be flakey also. How do we really know how old the earth is?
I'm actually amazed that you didn't post the old chestnut about carbon dating of the shells of recently dead snails, although I'm pretty sure that the last link of search results brings it up at least once. It's a favorite. =P
Your first clause, "Not exactly a scientific journal" is an understatement. One of the links appears to be from ICR's Grand Canyon Project, which is critiqued extensively here. Pay special attention to Figure 2. I would be particularly interested in how isochron critics explain the remarkable colinearity of the samples. They're easily explained by nuclear physics and all of the observations supporting it, but I'm sure that a number of creationists have figured out ways of tweaking cosmic constants to explain it. Whether those tweaks result in the laws of physics fundamentally changing is another matter.
Not to continue too deeply with "dueling links" but there is a good discussion of the K/Ar and Ar/Ar dating here. If you're really interested in the dating end of things (which I see as the most telling evidence for evolution and an old earth), I recommend poking through the talk.origins usenet archives or posting a question there. You should note that the newsgroup is full of physicists and geologists who can talk about this stuff in detail. The discussions about biology all seem to boil down to somebody saying "well, I've decided to interpret the evidence differently, and even though I haven't looked at nearly as much of it as you have, my opinion is as good as yours." The debates on the physics and geology of the dating process usually come to a much more clear resolution as the data and physics behind it are extremely difficult to dispute.
Anyway, I'm still not surprised to see that essentially 100% of the criticisms of radiometric dating and other old earth evidence all go straight back to ICR (including the Wikipedia entry). It should not be surprising to the outside observer that the only noise that is being made is being made by an organization with specific religious objections to the implications of the prevailing theory. You never hear anybody say, "I really have no interest in the theological implications of this, but the data really shows a young earth." That is probbly one of the data points that made it so easy for Judge Jones to reach his conclusion.
ID does not mention God, it simply says that there is intellegence inherit in the mechanic of the universe that guides the development of existence.
That's sort of the crux of the matter. ID is a conclusion (or a philosophical position). Nothing interesting springs from it aside from the satisfaction it gives certain religious groups. That's why it gets smacked down whenever it tries to present itself as some sort of scientific model. To paraphrase a great post I saw elsewhere, "ID is not a scientific alternative to evolution. It's a philosophical alternative to science."
The reason it brings nothing to the table is that it can't without 500 lawers coming to the table as well. There is come interesting stuff in Christianity that could even prove evolution wrong, but even just one religious comment would be killed by the lawers.
No, it doesn't bring anything to the table for several reasons:
- It has no underlying model (What is the nature of the intelligence? How does it "design" and interact with reality?)
- It produces no interesting tests (No possible observation could ever contradict a theory with no underlying model)
- Anybody who looks into the mathematical ramblings of Dembski and the touchy feely definition of "complexity" (irreducible, specified, or any other meaningless adjective can be attached here) will note that it's clearly a piece of theater masquerading as something serious.
There are no lawyers blocking the way to general scientific research and publication. They're only there to keep the religious nutjobs out of science education. Seriously. You can do scientific research without teaching it to children. The only reason you'd want to teach it to children before publishing any meaningful results yourself is to create a future audience of journal referees who are sympathetic to your cause. It's abundantly clear that Dover and Kansas are just an end run around doing the research and review that real scientists have to do.
When two species are sufficiently similar then there may be reason to believe they are transitional. But currently the so-called single transition is still a massive leap. One would expect fossils showing minor variations of the inbetween developmental stages.
The problem I've seen when transitionsals between X and Y are shown is that the response is always either "they're too far apart" or "it's obviously an X" or "it's obviously a Y." Creatonists seem to want it both ways. On one hand archaeopteryx is a "huge leap" and on the other hand it's "obviously a bird." The thing is, there are a lot of these transitions, and "huge leap" or not, they start to add up. The fact that evolutionary theory predicts that we will find them before we find them lends huge creedence to the theory. It certainly puts it a large step above ID which makes no serious predictions.
As I understand it, aren't we looking for a lot of precambrian things, as in most things? The cambrian explosion was the complete opposite of what Darwin himself expected the fossil record to yield.
Interesting that you should mention that. We see transitionals within the cambrian period. Google lobopods (between worms and arthropods). I'm not sure how you think that the "cambrian explosion" somehow works against evolutionary theory. All we see is a proliferation of new phyla over the course of 5-40 million years. There are a lot of good ideas as to why this was a major branching point (appearance of mobile predators, the development of "hox genes", etc.) and no reason to think that it's odd. Lots of life forms evolved after the cambrian as well (e.g. plants). What's interesting to me is that creationists bring up the Cambrian explosion when, at the same time, their beliefs are often incompatible with there being a Cambrian explosion at all. We see simple life forms before it and more complex life forms after it. How is this a problem for evolution? It seems like a more serious problem for ex nihilo creationism.
As far as your other comments, while one may say they may point towards a view of evolution, they certainly do not conclusively prove it. It's more of a Who Dunnit mystery where people examine a crime scene and try to guess what happened. However, the crime occurs long long ago and has since been ransacked by time and nature.
But of course, those unanswered questions keep piling up. We're talking about thousands upon thousands of observations, all of which support common descent to some varying degree. The fact that no group of two or three impresses you enough to consider the matter settled is not important in the face of volumes of observations so large that no single person can sift through them any more.
Interesting point. We may never know the answer to that. Just like the Theory of Common Decent, any such theories will still be mere conjectures / speculation.
I'm always more than a little agitated when an entire field of study with thousands of devoted experts is dismissed as "conjecture" and "speculation" by people who have clearly not sifted through even a small sample of the supporting work. Yes, technically speaking, we can never "know" what happened. At some point, though, the evidence piles so high, the explanations fit so well, and the dearth of alternate explanations is so lacking that one has to think that mabye the scientists are on to something. A person trained in the field can look at a fossil and tell you how old it will turn out to be when it is dated. A properly trained scientist can look at an animal and tell you what certain non-coding regions of its DNA will look like. Those things are remarkable and wouldn't be possible if all of this work were mere speculation.
We have to face the fact that those of us who are not doing the resarch on the front lines of science will have to be satisfied with only knowing a subset of the data and relying o
Even at a stretch that someone might claim it's transitional, but it's still a massive jump. Where are the in-between transitions?
This illustrates the problem with the "transitional fossil challenge." If we have two species and a fossil is found that fills the gap between them, rather than seeing it as evidence, creationists see *two* gaps now!
It could just be another species that is kinda like a bird and kind is like a dinosaur. But could be neither.
Sure, that's possible. But the question that your hypothesis still fails to answer is, where the heck did the birds come from? Unless you present some serious challenge to the evidence that shows that birds and dinosaurs never coexisted, the idea that this obvious transitional is just another animal wandering what must have been an obviously overpopulated earth falls flat. We're still searching for the precambrian rabbit.
Whale vs fish, is a closer example.
More interesting, however is the fascinating set of whale transitionals taking it from land to sea. Of course, if you decide to throw out the extensive dating evidence and assume that everything lived at one time, you could assume that Ambulocetus lived right alongside the killer whale and that there were just a whole bunch of creatures that looked like close relatives. I'm not sure why (aside from the obvious fact that it seems to support the creationist position) one would arbitrarily throw out the dating information, though.
We've got plenty of examples such as a platypus which is kinda like a duck and kinda like an otter. Left over parts perhaps.;-)
Interesting that you should bring up that point. It's worth noting that a number of these organisms that look like "half X half Y" have fossils that show a strong indication of common ancestry with both X and Y. Sadly, not a lot is known about platypus ancestry as Australia is not a particularly productive place to find fossils.
A very interesting question that is worth exploring is why Australia has no native placental mammals. Evolutionary theory explains this observation. ID explains this observation the same way it explains all other observations: by attributing it to the whim of an indescribable omnipotent being.
To start, I didn't mean to imply that I recognize AiG as a particularly good source. I'm generally not impressed with scientific organizations that have statements of faith that include, among other things, the fundamental statement that no amount of observational evidence can ever be interpeted to conflict with a literalist reading of the Bible. Even so, thanks for the link.
The link you posted appears to be acknowledging that archaeopteryx is a legitimate fossil. Lots of creationists fought tooth and nail to paint it as a hoax, but for all of its flaws, AiG is usually the first creationist organization to admit that certain arguments are wrong (that is, if it is ever acknowledged, it's usually acknowledged first by AiG).
More directly to my point: There is ample physical evidence that birds did not coexist with dinosaurs. To argue otherwise is to argue against mainstream geology and nuclear physics. Archaeopteryx appears at just about the right time in the timeline to be a transitional organism. Archaeopteryx looks like a transitional organism. The extistance of an organism like archaeopteryx was predicted by evolutionary theory before the first specimen was discovered. All that adds up to pretty strong support for the idea.
Meanwhile, on the other side, people cling to one of two claims. 1) Archaeopteryx is a bird. OK. That's fine. Call it a bird. It's still a bird that looks like it's part dinosaur. Semantic argumens aside, you still have to reconcile your worldview with the fact that the skeleton looks like a transitional. The other claim is 2) all of these animals lived together. If you seriously want to assert that, you'll have to come up with the so-called pre-cambrian rabbit. Find a credible fossil in the wrong geological stratum. If geologists are unable to explain what happened, that's strong support for the assertion that our model is wrong. However, multiple dating methods (which agree with each other) place birds and mammals after the dinosaurs on our planet's timeline by a wide margin. A credible counterexample has yet to be found.
If it were presented as this, then fine. But schools are teaching the material as absolute, established fact - they went to court over a sticker that simply read "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered." The judge ruled that calling evolution a theory was to the satisfaction of creationist parents and for no other reason was a violation of church/state separation.
Read the ruling. It's very well thought out and carefully discusses this topic. The fundamental reason for the ruling is that the sticker did not serve a purpose other than to placate the religious activists. Everything that is taught is a theory and should be studied critically and approached with an open mind. They singled out evolution because they think it upsets their diety. The whole point of the sticker was to imply that evolutionary theory was somehow different from the host of other theories that children are taught, and that it deserves some sort of special skeptecisim. Please feel free to describe a purpose for that sticker other than to cast special doubt upon evolution that also somehow serves a purpose to improve science education.
The decision is over 100 pages long. It's terribly dishonest to imply that the reasoning was so simple and somehow dismissed that point. If you want to attack the actual ruling, I recommend quoting from it and talking about why the decision is wrong rather than handwaving at it in the abstract.
And yes, the biology/geology classes come out and say "this is how the world was formed. This is how man evolved from apes." The words this is how make the clear declaration that said concept is absolute fact beyond question. This is .
I can see how this might happen sometimes. It's unfortunate if it does. The solution to the problem is to spend a couple of weeks on the philosophy of science at the beginning of the year so that students better understand where the ideas come from and what they mean. Even if it was done that way, though, I doubt that it would satisfy most of the ID crowd. You would still have a large contingent of people who want nothing more than to deflate evolution. And you would still have a large contingent of people who think that it's somehow possible to reconcile the unobservalbe and unmeasurable with the scientific method.
Consider the people who trolled me down -2 for no reason other than disagreeing with my stance: do you think for a moment that they would ever accept a teacher being instructed to preface the course material with "most biologists believe" or "it appears that it happened like this"?
I submit to you that teachers do say just that without any consequences. That's what I saw when I went to high school, and I went to school in the Godless Christian Hating Land of California.
The solution to your complaint is simple. We need science education to push more heavily on the philosophy of science. Science education should include methodological naturalism, testability, and the rest of the foundations of the scientific method. It should also point out (but not belabor the point) that these methods are tools and not the arbiter of absolute truth. That would improve science education and it would make the problem you're complaining about go away. Point out what science is and what science isn't. Don't try to redefine science in such away that astrology is suddenly on equal footing with nuclear physics.
What the ID proponents are saying is that science classes are claiming to be the sole arbiters of truth and that the solution to that is to introduce material that flies in the face of the scientific method. That's nonsense, and nobody should be surprised when a judge calls shennanigans after hearing complete arguments from both sides.
Here is an article from one of us "maybe they're not ancestors" camp. Something else you might find interesting. There has been evidence of man co-existing with dinosaurs. So my explanation is that birds and dinosaurs can easily have co-existed. I cannot point to evidence right now, so will not state it to you as proven fact.
And if you ask any professional paleontologist or geologist about those examples, they'll try not to laugh while they point out what's wrong with them. I'm very interested in hearing a (valid) refutation for the extensive radiometric dating data that shows that humans and dinosaurs existed during nowhere near the same timeframe. After that, a refutation of the geological data that shows layer after layer of strata between them.
I also would like to point out that drdino.com is probably not such a great place to be getting your data. At least point to answersingenesis.com if you want "analysis" that ignores refutations from the scientific mainstream. "Dr." Kent Hovind is sort of a laughingstock--so much so that even most other creationist organizations distance themselves from him.
Sure, birds and dinosaurs "could" have coexisted. But there's no real evidence that they did. The majority of the physical evidence points strongly toward them not existing in remotely the same time period. And of course, for the people who bemoan the lack of "transitionals" there's the archaeopteryx.
Not without evidence that it *could* have happened. Genetic inheritence and what ID folks like to call "microevolution" imply that it is possible. The fact that rabbits and birds appear after dinosaurs in the geological column is a strong implication that they arose from some previous ancestor. The argument I put forth doesn't exist in isolation. It exists along with a huge mountain of other biological research. What I was pointing out is that aside from special creation over the course of a long period of time, creationists have no proposal for where those animals come from. Evolution does.
Fossils can be observed. Whether or not they are fossils of early ancestors, or completely different but now extinct species is yet to be conclusively proven.
Well, here's a question that never seems to be answered by the "maybe they're not ancestors" camp: There appears to have been a time when there were dinosaurs but no birds. Now there are birds but no dinosaurs. The reason for there being no dinosaurs is that they died. That's easy enough. How is it, though, that we have birds now? Where did they come from? Did they pop into existence from nothing? Given that we watch evolution to varying degrees on a daily basis, and given that there is no known mechanism that prevents small changes from accumulating, one reasonable explanation is common ancestry. What's your explanation for the appearance of birds?
This is the same science that dates the lava from the last Mount Saint Helens eruption as being 1 million years old. Science is not perfect.
Yes, but this isn't a good example of it. Read up on the background of this particular example and you'll find that it is a completely unsurprising result that has been painted to make it look like the dating method used somehow gave a definitively wrong date and imply that all data acquired from this method is suspect. This is false, and it's an awful example of the type of dishonesty used by the ID team to make evolution smell untrustworthy.
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What I really want to do is replace my lights with the crazy PC tubes that I have in my planted aquarium. They're incredibly bright with surprisingly low draw. No visible flicker and they're available in color spectra that don't make you feel like you're in the cough syrup aisle of your local drug store.
At the same time, if people could go back to looking more rationally at their investments, stock markets can do their jobs remarkably well. The root of the problem lies in the fact that stock markets are markets and are only as smart as the aggregate intelligence of its demand side.
I would argue that when a stock market is not operating in a bubble regime or otherwise failing to do its job properly, the industry surrounding it does add value. Its agents can do damage to the market by providing bad advice and encouraging poor investment practices (as they have been doing for some time), but there's no reason to think that if they behave properly they're not earning their money.If you want to look at an industry that shouldn't exist, I suggest looking at the tax preparation industry. The fact that our government makes tax law complicated enough that a huge number of otherwise average people need to hire experts to explain the rules to them clearly indicates that something is wrong and we're experiencing a massive deadweight loss.
The FSM also does a great job of pointing out the hipocrisy of some of the ID supporters. On one hand they say, "ID makes no claim about the designer." Then, when FSM is proposed, half of them (the half that doesn't realize that it's politically expedient to keep up the "we don't know who the magic man is" charade) say, "Hey! That's offensive! You shouldn't mock my god!"
As for the actual arguments in favor of ID, there don't appear to be any. All of the arguments appear to be arguments against evolution. Behe simply comes up with examples of things that are hard for evolution to explain and Dembski takes the completely unrigorous concept of "specificity" in information and applies it in a GIGO fashion to formal information theory. Then they make the leap from "evolution cannot work the way they say it does" to "therefore my alternative is correct."
There. I've attacked the real thing. My hat is now in the ring (as if it wasn't already).
That is my understanding of his position as well. My point was that once such a pathway is proposed, the next step in goalpoast moving is inevitably, "But there's no evidence that it DID happen that way!"
As much as the fathers of the ID movement like to think that they're at the front of everybody's mind when papers are being published, I doubt that we can chalk up the volume of relevant papers on the topic to a conspiracy to put them in their place. It's a bit offensive to assume that the relevant works are simply the result of sloppy thinking and some sort of international good old boys' network. It's easy to assume that the reviewers of all of these journals are seeing what they want to see, but the people who say that are often reluctant to acknowledge that Behe, being in the extreme minority among experts, might be ignoring what he doesn't want to see.
I'm not sure how much you'll find in the way of histrionics on the page I linked as it's mostly a series of links to PubMed papers. If you want a more trimmed version, I would recommend starting with their reference to "A temporary flagellate (mastigote) stage in the vahlkampfiid amoeba Willaertia magna and its possible evolutionary significance." There are others. Even if you assume that only a handful of these papers addresses the topic, it's obvious that the conclusion that the literature is "silent" on the topic is so much self aggrandizing nonsense.
I'm sure that in Behe's eyes, that challenge will never be met.
It's worth noting that these papers discuss observations and phenomena for which there is evidience. Taken individually, they propose very plausible partial pathways to Behe's challenges. This m
The problem with the whole line of reasoning (aside from the fact that the specific arguments are flawed) is that on one hand ID proponents are claiming to have come up with a new, fascinating branch of science. At the same time, it posits no mechanisms, makes no predictions, and has no positive evidence to support it. It simply boils down to "not evolution". It seems like more of a silly use of set theory ("our theory is EVERY other hypothesis that is not evolution!") than anything else. Maybe they'll hammer it into something that actually passes the scientific smell test someday, but until then, it's certainly not ready for prime time.
Something worth remembering is that whenever a potential explanation for an "irreducibly complex" structure is proposed, ID proponents say at least one of two things:
1) You have no evidence that it DID happen that way. Of course, that's not relevant given that the argument is that such things are impossible due to their logical construct of irreducible complexity. The examples serve as simple counterexamples showing that it's ridiculous to make the leap from "I can't explain it" to "It can't be explained."
2) OK, but what about structure X? There is an essentially infinite number of example structures one could pull from, so if they want to play the game that way, they can do so forever. The goalposts just keep moving. Behe's challenge can remain unanswered as long as he wants it to because, once again, it's just god-in-the-gaps.
Specifically, there's a goodly list of publications that address some of his examples here. Of course, with those examples taken care of, it's always possible to posit more irreducibly complex looking structures. You can do it forever, but it's still nothing more than god-in-the-gaps.
You should read the transcript for the Dover Intelligent Design case. When 50+ journal articles describing theoretical pathways for one of his examples of irreducible complexity were listed to him, he didn't have a whole lot to say. He either hadn't read them or he dismissed them in their entirety. I'm sure he still does consider his challenge unmet, but the biolgical community at large certainly doesn't. In fact, Behe was taken to task for it rather sternly in the judge's decision.I'm all for making learning fun when it can be, but we often sacrifice too much in order to achieve those ends. Sometimes you just have to sit down and memorize your multiplication tables, read your textbooks, and do your problem sets. Sadly, no amount of fun will get you there faster than that.
What about fraud? Aren't there a lot of examples of fraud that are essentially just misleading speech designed to cheat people? Are you against those laws as well?
And I guess it just kind of sucks for you if you are married and your partner cheats, huh? Or that you're the unlucky child of a mother whose husband slept around while he was out of town? In a lot of these countries, the most dangerous thing the average woman does (in terms of risk of infection) is getting married. This isn't The Hand of God coming down to punish those with poor impulse control. There are plenty of victims here.
Your first clause, "Not exactly a scientific journal" is an understatement. One of the links appears to be from ICR's Grand Canyon Project, which is critiqued extensively here. Pay special attention to Figure 2. I would be particularly interested in how isochron critics explain the remarkable colinearity of the samples. They're easily explained by nuclear physics and all of the observations supporting it, but I'm sure that a number of creationists have figured out ways of tweaking cosmic constants to explain it. Whether those tweaks result in the laws of physics fundamentally changing is another matter.
Not to continue too deeply with "dueling links" but there is a good discussion of the K/Ar and Ar/Ar dating here. If you're really interested in the dating end of things (which I see as the most telling evidence for evolution and an old earth), I recommend poking through the talk.origins usenet archives or posting a question there. You should note that the newsgroup is full of physicists and geologists who can talk about this stuff in detail. The discussions about biology all seem to boil down to somebody saying "well, I've decided to interpret the evidence differently, and even though I haven't looked at nearly as much of it as you have, my opinion is as good as yours." The debates on the physics and geology of the dating process usually come to a much more clear resolution as the data and physics behind it are extremely difficult to dispute.
Anyway, I'm still not surprised to see that essentially 100% of the criticisms of radiometric dating and other old earth evidence all go straight back to ICR (including the Wikipedia entry). It should not be surprising to the outside observer that the only noise that is being made is being made by an organization with specific religious objections to the implications of the prevailing theory. You never hear anybody say, "I really have no interest in the theological implications of this, but the data really shows a young earth." That is probbly one of the data points that made it so easy for Judge Jones to reach his conclusion.
- It has no underlying model (What is the nature of the intelligence? How does it "design" and interact with reality?)
- It produces no interesting tests (No possible observation could ever contradict a theory with no underlying model)
- Anybody who looks into the mathematical ramblings of Dembski and the touchy feely definition of "complexity" (irreducible, specified, or any other meaningless adjective can be attached here) will note that it's clearly a piece of theater masquerading as something serious.
There are no lawyers blocking the way to general scientific research and publication. They're only there to keep the religious nutjobs out of science education. Seriously. You can do scientific research without teaching it to children. The only reason you'd want to teach it to children before publishing any meaningful results yourself is to create a future audience of journal referees who are sympathetic to your cause. It's abundantly clear that Dover and Kansas are just an end run around doing the research and review that real scientists have to do.
The problem I've seen when transitionsals between X and Y are shown is that the response is always either "they're too far apart" or "it's obviously an X" or "it's obviously a Y." Creatonists seem to want it both ways. On one hand archaeopteryx is a "huge leap" and on the other hand it's "obviously a bird." The thing is, there are a lot of these transitions, and "huge leap" or not, they start to add up. The fact that evolutionary theory predicts that we will find them before we find them lends huge creedence to the theory. It certainly puts it a large step above ID which makes no serious predictions.
Interesting that you should mention that. We see transitionals within the cambrian period. Google lobopods (between worms and arthropods). I'm not sure how you think that the "cambrian explosion" somehow works against evolutionary theory. All we see is a proliferation of new phyla over the course of 5-40 million years. There are a lot of good ideas as to why this was a major branching point (appearance of mobile predators, the development of "hox genes", etc.) and no reason to think that it's odd. Lots of life forms evolved after the cambrian as well (e.g. plants). What's interesting to me is that creationists bring up the Cambrian explosion when, at the same time, their beliefs are often incompatible with there being a Cambrian explosion at all. We see simple life forms before it and more complex life forms after it. How is this a problem for evolution? It seems like a more serious problem for ex nihilo creationism.
But of course, those unanswered questions keep piling up. We're talking about thousands upon thousands of observations, all of which support common descent to some varying degree. The fact that no group of two or three impresses you enough to consider the matter settled is not important in the face of volumes of observations so large that no single person can sift through them any more.
I'm always more than a little agitated when an entire field of study with thousands of devoted experts is dismissed as "conjecture" and "speculation" by people who have clearly not sifted through even a small sample of the supporting work. Yes, technically speaking, we can never "know" what happened. At some point, though, the evidence piles so high, the explanations fit so well, and the dearth of alternate explanations is so lacking that one has to think that mabye the scientists are on to something. A person trained in the field can look at a fossil and tell you how old it will turn out to be when it is dated. A properly trained scientist can look at an animal and tell you what certain non-coding regions of its DNA will look like. Those things are remarkable and wouldn't be possible if all of this work were mere speculation.
We have to face the fact that those of us who are not doing the resarch on the front lines of science will have to be satisfied with only knowing a subset of the data and relying o
A very interesting question that is worth exploring is why Australia has no native placental mammals. Evolutionary theory explains this observation. ID explains this observation the same way it explains all other observations: by attributing it to the whim of an indescribable omnipotent being.
The link you posted appears to be acknowledging that archaeopteryx is a legitimate fossil. Lots of creationists fought tooth and nail to paint it as a hoax, but for all of its flaws, AiG is usually the first creationist organization to admit that certain arguments are wrong (that is, if it is ever acknowledged, it's usually acknowledged first by AiG).
More directly to my point: There is ample physical evidence that birds did not coexist with dinosaurs. To argue otherwise is to argue against mainstream geology and nuclear physics. Archaeopteryx appears at just about the right time in the timeline to be a transitional organism. Archaeopteryx looks like a transitional organism. The extistance of an organism like archaeopteryx was predicted by evolutionary theory before the first specimen was discovered. All that adds up to pretty strong support for the idea.
Meanwhile, on the other side, people cling to one of two claims. 1) Archaeopteryx is a bird. OK. That's fine. Call it a bird. It's still a bird that looks like it's part dinosaur. Semantic argumens aside, you still have to reconcile your worldview with the fact that the skeleton looks like a transitional. The other claim is 2) all of these animals lived together. If you seriously want to assert that, you'll have to come up with the so-called pre-cambrian rabbit. Find a credible fossil in the wrong geological stratum. If geologists are unable to explain what happened, that's strong support for the assertion that our model is wrong. However, multiple dating methods (which agree with each other) place birds and mammals after the dinosaurs on our planet's timeline by a wide margin. A credible counterexample has yet to be found.
The decision is over 100 pages long. It's terribly dishonest to imply that the reasoning was so simple and somehow dismissed that point. If you want to attack the actual ruling, I recommend quoting from it and talking about why the decision is wrong rather than handwaving at it in the abstract.
I can see how this might happen sometimes. It's unfortunate if it does. The solution to the problem is to spend a couple of weeks on the philosophy of science at the beginning of the year so that students better understand where the ideas come from and what they mean. Even if it was done that way, though, I doubt that it would satisfy most of the ID crowd. You would still have a large contingent of people who want nothing more than to deflate evolution. And you would still have a large contingent of people who think that it's somehow possible to reconcile the unobservalbe and unmeasurable with the scientific method. I submit to you that teachers do say just that without any consequences. That's what I saw when I went to high school, and I went to school in the Godless Christian Hating Land of California.The solution to your complaint is simple. We need science education to push more heavily on the philosophy of science. Science education should include methodological naturalism, testability, and the rest of the foundations of the scientific method. It should also point out (but not belabor the point) that these methods are tools and not the arbiter of absolute truth. That would improve science education and it would make the problem you're complaining about go away. Point out what science is and what science isn't. Don't try to redefine science in such away that astrology is suddenly on equal footing with nuclear physics.
What the ID proponents are saying is that science classes are claiming to be the sole arbiters of truth and that the solution to that is to introduce material that flies in the face of the scientific method. That's nonsense, and nobody should be surprised when a judge calls shennanigans after hearing complete arguments from both sides.
I also would like to point out that drdino.com is probably not such a great place to be getting your data. At least point to answersingenesis.com if you want "analysis" that ignores refutations from the scientific mainstream. "Dr." Kent Hovind is sort of a laughingstock--so much so that even most other creationist organizations distance themselves from him.
Sure, birds and dinosaurs "could" have coexisted. But there's no real evidence that they did. The majority of the physical evidence points strongly toward them not existing in remotely the same time period. And of course, for the people who bemoan the lack of "transitionals" there's the archaeopteryx.
Not without evidence that it *could* have happened. Genetic inheritence and what ID folks like to call "microevolution" imply that it is possible. The fact that rabbits and birds appear after dinosaurs in the geological column is a strong implication that they arose from some previous ancestor. The argument I put forth doesn't exist in isolation. It exists along with a huge mountain of other biological research. What I was pointing out is that aside from special creation over the course of a long period of time, creationists have no proposal for where those animals come from. Evolution does.