>>Ok and as I pointed out before even if some of them are cured of cancer this doesn't prove anything about the existence or not of god. People are cured of cancer everyday in hospitals - if you decide to attribute that to god that's your business but not scientificly testable.
>>WHat utter nonsense. Even if any of these prayers were granted there is no way to distinguish wether it was by the action of a god or god's or simply by chance or any other factor. If you were to run this 'trial' and some of the prayers were answered then choosing to attribute that to god would be purely an act of religious faith.
You set up a bunch of people who pray for another group, perhaps to cure them of cancer. The experimental group has no knowledge they are even in a survey, nor do the doctors or anyone working with them. You come back a year later and see if there is a difference between them and a control group.
Do you even understand how statistics work, at a basic level? I'd recommend a basic text.
>>Well, how about if a bird flu virus evolves so it can pass human-to-human, and kills a couple hundred million people? Would that work for you?
The flu virus mutates rapidly, so it's mathematically easy for it to happen. ID isn't creationism. It is evolution with the belief that something influenced the mutations of DNA.
>> They've practically created new species of fruit fly through "forced" evolution in the lab
Sure, they've done lots of experiments which resulted in new species of fly. It again has nothing to do with the issue, which is if something influenced DNA to cause beneficial mutations, especially multiple beneficial mutations. If it happens in the wild, run stats on it, and see if someone is rigging the game.
>> Statistical analysis does nothing. At exactly what probability does it magically change from natural to design?
---- "SIX SIX SIX"
What's that?
Our random number generator.
It doesn't seem very random to me.
That's the problem with randomness, you just never know. ----
Stats answered this question a long ass time ago. Read up on confidence intervals.
You can never 100% prove a casino machine has been tampered with, even if it hits a jackpot on every pull, but the math will give you a confidence number. The 95% and 99% thresholds are two traditional thresholds for claiming a fact is "true" or not.
>>Can you falsify the assertion that God causes the fall of every sparrow?
You can falsify if God answers prayers. If God massively answers prayers around the world, then statistical analysis would demonstrate this. You can falsify if someone is influencing DNA by similar means.
>>Two things: fossil record, and genetic algorithms.
Genetic algorithms are a bad example, since they essentially just cover a search space already defined by a programmer.
Which demonstrates a lack of understanding of the subject.
Consider. Suppose God answers a certain percentage of prayers. You set up a double blind trial... heck, don't even tell the subjects they are participating in a study. Statistical analysis would reveal whether or not the premise was true. It's falsifiable, and doesn't require a why to be answered from God. It's only non-scientific in that you have a black box doing actions without an understanding of how it operates. Yet math gives us the power to observe and quantify black boxes.
The dodge that nothing is 100% certain is solved neatly by stats. You set a confidence level, and leave it at that.
In a similar vein, analysis could reveal influence on DNA. If a herd of horses sprouted wings tomorrow, without any latent wing DNA, then you'd have to say (with a high degree of certainty) a designer was involved. Not necessarily God (ID doesn't presuppose God, as much as people like to believe that), since a hobbyist with a penchant for gene splicing could have been responsible for it. Or aliens, or whatever.
>>It means that the process by which genetic varition occurs is random - as you stated. However, selection (the fitness of a particular allele for any environment) is NOT random.
I didn't say the entire process was random. The creation of new mutations is random (ish). And then selection pressures are applied. If you're going to call someone ignorant you should at least bother to read what they wrote first.
>>This is one things that scares me the most about this debate. Not only are proponents changing the definition of science, they are changing the definition of evolution to make their argument more paletable to the masses.
And it scares me how people like to flame people without even a basic comprehension of what they stated in their post. Rational discourse requires rational discourse.
>> In science you adjust your theories to fit the evidence, with ID/Creationism you adjust your evidence to fit your theories. That is my core problem with it.
Sure. I have the same problem with a lot of Creationist ideas. But it doesn't mean that rational people can't believe in it.
If it makes you feel more comfortable, go with Crick's idea that DNA blew here from outer space, and see if mathematical analysis can prove or disprove it. There's no God involved in that theory. Or maybe aliens. If we find a message to the Klingons, Romulans and Cardassians that we should live in universal peace...
>> I would suggest that coming up suggestions that evolution is a random process is a sign of being ignorant about important aspects of the debate. This is a common and understandable ignorance (as evolution is taught so badly), but does not put someone in a position to be critical of others.
Did you even bother to read what I wrote? It's a random process with a selection pressure applied to it. You can stick your fingers in your ears and pretend I said that it's fully random, but it doesn't make you sound very intelligent.
>>It's not a strawman, it's a reductio ad absurdum. The only mechanism I can see for a creator god to come into being is by the same random chance that could more readily have created simpler life-forms. However, I may be missing something. Please explain your alternative and why a two-stage process would be favoured over a one-stage process.
It's possible to find bias in a casino game without having knowledge of who or why is messing with the deck.
>> Look up "ring species". Then go dig your "Intelligent Design" into a hole.
Yes, because Intelligent Design says that evolution doesn't happen.
Oh, wait, that's Creationism.
Go find another strawman. I'm a skeptic, not an IDer myself.
>> creation of species and increase of information (survivability) through mutations is WELL covered.
Speciation is well covered. Increased survivability is a gimme. But you demonstrate ignorance if you equate increased survivability with increased information. It's possible for information to decrease to increase survivability.
>>This is also false. The idea that the only way a "design" would appear is through intelligence because the chances of all those random mutations combined is very small is the same kind of mistake made when people claim that only intelligence could design a functional gene because the chances of certain protein sequence are 20^X (where X is the length).
You can't argue from a single example. You have to apply stats.
Consider how math can reveal if a casino slot machine is crooked or not.
>>Doesn't work. The problem is that you are assuming that proponents of intelligent design are being rational, and that your highly santized version of ID is representative for most ID believers.
I don't necessarily believe in ID. But I do think it is possible for rational people to believe in ID.
Most people go to church and think that the hymns have something to do with Chritianity too, whereas it doesn't really matter one way or another. You can't conflate irrational people with a rational problem. Irrational people belive crazy things, and you can't disprove a rational argument just because an irrational person agrees with it.
"Highly sanitized"? I guess. I didn't invent the notion of ID being the same question as a signal analysis problem. And when you pose the question in that way, you can get a yes or no answer.
>>That is the typical version of ID I've come across when talking to people who believe in it - I've not come across anyone who would change their mind "simply" by being shown evolution in action.
I went to a talk on it at my university. Half the people there were faculty, mostly all engineers, very rational people. Heck, one of them was sorta the father of hyperthreading. I think any person in there could be convinced ID is false through any one of a number of different means.
>>Proving specific sanitized instances of ID wrong is one thing, but proving the overall concepts of ID wrong doesn't work because it isn't a scientific theory, it isn't falsifiable, and it invariably changes whenever convenient.
Shrug. People believe a lot of things. It doesn't mean that it's not possible for a rational person to believe in ID.
>> So, from your point of view, the question is why evolution happens, not if and how?
I don't have a point of view on the subject, I am not an ID-er. But AFAIK, ID is not about the why, but the what and how.
>>However, I suspect that discrediting the theory of evolution is on the agenda of many people (in the US), at least it seems that way.
Fundamentalists love intelligent design. But, presumably, Neo-Nazis love McDonalds, or dictators love trips to Disneyland. People draw inference the wrong way, and assume that since fundamentalists like something, it's impossible for an intelligent person to believe the same way.
>>Also, exactly how unlikely is "mathematically unlikely"? Is there any credible calculation of this probability anywhere? The thing is, the Earth is a very large system, and it spans a very long timeframe. Just about anything can be done with enough time and resources, why not "accidental" evolution as some call it? Indeed, since I am here arguing about it, something must obviously have worked, and thus we set out to find that something.
That's what stats are for. How do you know a deck of cards is rigged? When I was beta testing Magic Online I showed their shuffler wasn't working right through stats.
You can't argue from example. You can't, for example, claim that because a single example was highly improbable that evolution was false. The earth is a big place, and operated on a geologic time scale. That's a lot of opportunities for rolling the dice. So you have to use stats to see if the deck is rigged, so to speak.
>>I would be interested if you were capable of going into more detail on this. Bear in mind you are talking to a qualified geologist. I think the above is deliberately deceptive, or very ignorant.
Research punctuated equilibrium then.
>>You've lost me here (or are deliberately constructing a strawman). Evolution is not 'a collection of random processes'.
Imagine a random generator. It knocks out / substitutes base pairs in DNA. Then you apply a selective pressure to the resulting creature.
>>Interesting. How many 'vestigal processes' does evolution predict?
Roll some D20s, construct yourself a biochemical pathway. There's a variety of ways of accomplishing the same task, some with toxic side effects, some more baroque than others. The toxic ones would have a selective pressure applied to them, the baroque ones would not unless they perhaps were so ineffecient so as to give the creature a competitive disadvantage. There's no particular reason for a baroque pathway to collapse into an elegant one, and yet the pathways are generally elegant. If you are claiming that random processes will always generate the best solution, I want you rolling my dice the next time I go to Vegas.
>>Yet a designer could 'drop in' a complete new pathway at any time; the conspicuous failure of this to happen being a problem for ID, usually dealt with by sidestepping or ignoring.
Sure, it evolved when there was an oxygen free environment. You keep acting like intelligent design is creationism. It's not. Your argument is basically, "Why didn't the designer/God/Aliens/Whoever do something better?" Which isn't really compelling at all when you think about it. God, even in the Bible, never showed a strong tendency to explain the Why, of anything.
The interesting thing about vestigal processes is not that they exist, but that there are so few.
>>It's interesting that you would want to ask medical students, who are typically taught huge volumes of facts without much underlying theory
Rather the opposite, at least from what I've seen at UCSF.
>>Define your parameters. I don't accept any concept of a higher being (Intelligent or otherwise), so any evolution is "through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings". So I've just falsified ID.
Who the intelligent being is doesn't matter a whit for the theory to be true or false.
Does it matter more that golden retreviers were a genetically engineered species, or who it was that genetically engineered them? Evidence can be found through genetics to demonstrate that they were engineered without any question of who the engineer was (in this case, English nobility, IIRC).
>>OK, all you have to do is to prove it. You also have to explain who the designer is, what forces he or she allays in order to effect change, when and where these forces were used. For a bonus you could also try to explain why the designer does what he does.
I don't necessarily buy into ID. However, by putting it on the level of signal analysis, it's a more concrete debate than mystical hand waving.
>>Please bear in mind when considering the probability of random mutations that radioactivity -- which is known to be a good source of genetic mutations -- has been decreasing exponentially over time. For each radioactive isotope that exists, just one half-life ago there was twice as much of it. It is also possible that some radioisotopes which once existed, have been completely exhausted.
And yet the rate of evolution has been increasing rather than decreasing. New species have been emerging in a time span of 10,000-100,000 years, rather than the span of millions.
>>I am not surprised you get aggravated. You haven't got a clue.
I love the scientific discourse here. It's so polite.:p
Personally, I'm a skeptic, and can argue both sides. It always amuses me when people subscribing to science revert to dogmatism.
The strawman that everyone holds up is the fundie who just wants creationism back in schools, and is using ID as his super-duper-secret method to do so.
Oddly enough, my left-wing AP Bio teacher taught it as something interesting to consider and debate way before it became a controversial topic. The speaker who spoke at our class was from Scripps, and he basically arrived at agreeing with ID after empirial observations. Christianity had nothing to do with it.
>> How the hell are we supposed to be able to disprove that a supernatural being has had NO intervention in evolution?
Statistical measures.
If you ever go beyond the "mean, median, and mode" level of stats, you learn it is the Way to Truth. It's essentially the answer to epistemology: how do we know when we know something? Stats have much deeper implications than most people realize.
>> Evolution is a theory that has come about through people observing evidence. ID is based on religious zealotry.
The more correct statement is that religious zealots believe in ID.
ID is a theory that many people arrived upon from empirical observations, and from the math.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Ok and as I pointed out before even if some of them are cured of cancer this doesn't prove anything about the existence or not of god. People are cured of cancer everyday in hospitals - if you decide to attribute that to god that's your business but not scientificly testable.
>>What have statistics got to do with this?
Google "t-test" and maybe you will figure it out.
>>WHat utter nonsense. Even if any of these prayers were granted there is no way to distinguish wether it was by the action of a god or god's or simply by chance or any other factor. If you were to run this 'trial' and some of the prayers were answered then choosing to attribute that to god would be purely an act of religious faith.
You set up a bunch of people who pray for another group, perhaps to cure them of cancer. The experimental group has no knowledge they are even in a survey, nor do the doctors or anyone working with them. You come back a year later and see if there is a difference between them and a control group.
Do you even understand how statistics work, at a basic level? I'd recommend a basic text.
Sigh... read the damn page and stop wasting my time.
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB901.html
>>Well, how about if a bird flu virus evolves so it can pass human-to-human, and kills a couple hundred million people? Would that work for you?
The flu virus mutates rapidly, so it's mathematically easy for it to happen. ID isn't creationism. It is evolution with the belief that something influenced the mutations of DNA.
>> They've practically created new species of fruit fly through "forced" evolution in the lab
Sure, they've done lots of experiments which resulted in new species of fly. It again has nothing to do with the issue, which is if something influenced DNA to cause beneficial mutations, especially multiple beneficial mutations. If it happens in the wild, run stats on it, and see if someone is rigging the game.
Talk.Origins: No one has observed macroevolution in the wild.
If you're going to quote someone, you should at least bother to read if it doesn't completely say the opposite of what you think it says.
>> Statistical analysis does nothing. At exactly what probability does it magically change from natural to design?
----
"SIX SIX SIX"
What's that?
Our random number generator.
It doesn't seem very random to me.
That's the problem with randomness, you just never know.
----
Stats answered this question a long ass time ago. Read up on confidence intervals.
You can never 100% prove a casino machine has been tampered with, even if it hits a jackpot on every pull, but the math will give you a confidence number. The 95% and 99% thresholds are two traditional thresholds for claiming a fact is "true" or not.
>>Can you falsify the assertion that God causes the fall of every sparrow?
You can falsify if God answers prayers. If God massively answers prayers around the world, then statistical analysis would demonstrate this. You can falsify if someone is influencing DNA by similar means.
>>Two things: fossil record, and genetic algorithms.
Genetic algorithms are a bad example, since they essentially just cover a search space already defined by a programmer.
>>Which is *why* ID isn't science.
Which demonstrates a lack of understanding of the subject.
Consider. Suppose God answers a certain percentage of prayers. You set up a double blind trial... heck, don't even tell the subjects they are participating in a study. Statistical analysis would reveal whether or not the premise was true. It's falsifiable, and doesn't require a why to be answered from God. It's only non-scientific in that you have a black box doing actions without an understanding of how it operates. Yet math gives us the power to observe and quantify black boxes.
The dodge that nothing is 100% certain is solved neatly by stats. You set a confidence level, and leave it at that.
In a similar vein, analysis could reveal influence on DNA. If a herd of horses sprouted wings tomorrow, without any latent wing DNA, then you'd have to say (with a high degree of certainty) a designer was involved. Not necessarily God (ID doesn't presuppose God, as much as people like to believe that), since a hobbyist with a penchant for gene splicing could have been responsible for it. Or aliens, or whatever.
>>It means that the process by which genetic varition occurs is random - as you stated. However, selection (the fitness of a particular allele for any environment) is NOT random.
I didn't say the entire process was random. The creation of new mutations is random (ish). And then selection pressures are applied. If you're going to call someone ignorant you should at least bother to read what they wrote first.
>>This is one things that scares me the most about this debate. Not only are proponents changing the definition of science, they are changing the definition of evolution to make their argument more paletable to the masses.
And it scares me how people like to flame people without even a basic comprehension of what they stated in their post. Rational discourse requires rational discourse.
>> You posit life is impossible without a creator.
No, I claim that mathematical analysis might be able to show if a creator was involved or not. You can't assume your conclusion.
>> In science you adjust your theories to fit the evidence, with ID/Creationism you adjust your evidence to fit your theories. That is my core problem with it.
Sure. I have the same problem with a lot of Creationist ideas. But it doesn't mean that rational people can't believe in it.
If it makes you feel more comfortable, go with Crick's idea that DNA blew here from outer space, and see if mathematical analysis can prove or disprove it. There's no God involved in that theory. Or maybe aliens. If we find a message to the Klingons, Romulans and Cardassians that we should live in universal peace...
>> I would suggest that coming up suggestions that evolution is a random process is a sign of being ignorant about important aspects of the debate. This is a common and understandable ignorance (as evolution is taught so badly), but does not put someone in a position to be critical of others.
Did you even bother to read what I wrote? It's a random process with a selection pressure applied to it. You can stick your fingers in your ears and pretend I said that it's fully random, but it doesn't make you sound very intelligent.
I answered the question. It doesn't matter. You can tell that a casino game is rigged without knowing the who or why of it.
>>It's not a strawman, it's a reductio ad absurdum. The only mechanism I can see for a creator god to come into being is by the same random chance that could more readily have created simpler life-forms. However, I may be missing something. Please explain your alternative and why a two-stage process would be favoured over a one-stage process.
It's possible to find bias in a casino game without having knowledge of who or why is messing with the deck.
>> Look up "ring species". Then go dig your "Intelligent Design" into a hole.
Yes, because Intelligent Design says that evolution doesn't happen.
Oh, wait, that's Creationism.
Go find another strawman. I'm a skeptic, not an IDer myself.
>> creation of species and increase of information (survivability) through mutations is WELL covered.
Speciation is well covered. Increased survivability is a gimme. But you demonstrate ignorance if you equate increased survivability with increased information. It's possible for information to decrease to increase survivability.
>>This is also false. The idea that the only way a "design" would appear is through intelligence because the chances of all those random mutations combined is very small is the same kind of mistake made when people claim that only intelligence could design a functional gene because the chances of certain protein sequence are 20^X (where X is the length).
You can't argue from a single example. You have to apply stats.
Consider how math can reveal if a casino slot machine is crooked or not.
>>Doesn't work. The problem is that you are assuming that proponents of intelligent design are being rational, and that your highly santized version of ID is representative for most ID believers.
I don't necessarily believe in ID. But I do think it is possible for rational people to believe in ID.
Most people go to church and think that the hymns have something to do with Chritianity too, whereas it doesn't really matter one way or another. You can't conflate irrational people with a rational problem. Irrational people belive crazy things, and you can't disprove a rational argument just because an irrational person agrees with it.
"Highly sanitized"? I guess. I didn't invent the notion of ID being the same question as a signal analysis problem. And when you pose the question in that way, you can get a yes or no answer.
>>That is the typical version of ID I've come across when talking to people who believe in it - I've not come across anyone who would change their mind "simply" by being shown evolution in action.
I went to a talk on it at my university. Half the people there were faculty, mostly all engineers, very rational people. Heck, one of them was sorta the father of hyperthreading. I think any person in there could be convinced ID is false through any one of a number of different means.
>>Proving specific sanitized instances of ID wrong is one thing, but proving the overall concepts of ID wrong doesn't work because it isn't a scientific theory, it isn't falsifiable, and it invariably changes whenever convenient.
Shrug. People believe a lot of things. It doesn't mean that it's not possible for a rational person to believe in ID.
>> So, from your point of view, the question is why evolution happens, not if and how?
I don't have a point of view on the subject, I am not an ID-er. But AFAIK, ID is not about the why, but the what and how.
>>However, I suspect that discrediting the theory of evolution is on the agenda of many people (in the US), at least it seems that way.
Fundamentalists love intelligent design. But, presumably, Neo-Nazis love McDonalds, or dictators love trips to Disneyland. People draw inference the wrong way, and assume that since fundamentalists like something, it's impossible for an intelligent person to believe the same way.
>>Also, exactly how unlikely is "mathematically unlikely"? Is there any credible calculation of this probability anywhere? The thing is, the Earth is a very large system, and it spans a very long timeframe. Just about anything can be done with enough time and resources, why not "accidental" evolution as some call it? Indeed, since I am here arguing about it, something must obviously have worked, and thus we set out to find that something.
That's what stats are for. How do you know a deck of cards is rigged? When I was beta testing Magic Online I showed their shuffler wasn't working right through stats.
You can't argue from example. You can't, for example, claim that because a single example was highly improbable that evolution was false. The earth is a big place, and operated on a geologic time scale. That's a lot of opportunities for rolling the dice. So you have to use stats to see if the deck is rigged, so to speak.
>>I would be interested if you were capable of going into more detail on this. Bear in mind you are talking to a qualified geologist. I think the above is deliberately deceptive, or very ignorant.
Research punctuated equilibrium then.
>>You've lost me here (or are deliberately constructing a strawman). Evolution is not 'a collection of random processes'.
Imagine a random generator. It knocks out / substitutes base pairs in DNA. Then you apply a selective pressure to the resulting creature.
>>Interesting. How many 'vestigal processes' does evolution predict?
Roll some D20s, construct yourself a biochemical pathway. There's a variety of ways of accomplishing the same task, some with toxic side effects, some more baroque than others. The toxic ones would have a selective pressure applied to them, the baroque ones would not unless they perhaps were so ineffecient so as to give the creature a competitive disadvantage. There's no particular reason for a baroque pathway to collapse into an elegant one, and yet the pathways are generally elegant. If you are claiming that random processes will always generate the best solution, I want you rolling my dice the next time I go to Vegas.
>>Yet a designer could 'drop in' a complete new pathway at any time; the conspicuous failure of this to happen being a problem for ID, usually dealt with by sidestepping or ignoring.
Sure, it evolved when there was an oxygen free environment. You keep acting like intelligent design is creationism. It's not. Your argument is basically, "Why didn't the designer/God/Aliens/Whoever do something better?" Which isn't really compelling at all when you think about it. God, even in the Bible, never showed a strong tendency to explain the Why, of anything.
The interesting thing about vestigal processes is not that they exist, but that there are so few.
>>It's interesting that you would want to ask medical students, who are typically taught huge volumes of facts without much underlying theory
Rather the opposite, at least from what I've seen at UCSF.
>>Define your parameters. I don't accept any concept of a higher being (Intelligent or otherwise), so any evolution is "through chance with no intervention from intelligent beings". So I've just falsified ID.
Who the intelligent being is doesn't matter a whit for the theory to be true or false.
Does it matter more that golden retreviers were a genetically engineered species, or who it was that genetically engineered them? Evidence can be found through genetics to demonstrate that they were engineered without any question of who the engineer was (in this case, English nobility, IIRC).
>>OK, all you have to do is to prove it. You also have to explain who the designer is, what forces he or she allays in order to effect change, when and where these forces were used. For a bonus you could also try to explain why the designer does what he does.
I don't necessarily buy into ID. However, by putting it on the level of signal analysis, it's a more concrete debate than mystical hand waving.
>>No, it isn't. Unless you're postulating that the designer is visible.
No, but the results are. How do you know when you know something? That's what statistical analysis is for.
>> Which of these two is more likely:
Yay, strawman.
>>Please bear in mind when considering the probability of random mutations that radioactivity -- which is known to be a good source of genetic mutations -- has been decreasing exponentially over time. For each radioactive isotope that exists, just one half-life ago there was twice as much of it. It is also possible that some radioisotopes which once existed, have been completely exhausted.
And yet the rate of evolution has been increasing rather than decreasing. New species have been emerging in a time span of 10,000-100,000 years, rather than the span of millions.
>>I am not surprised you get aggravated. You haven't got a clue.
:p
I love the scientific discourse here. It's so polite.
Personally, I'm a skeptic, and can argue both sides. It always amuses me when people subscribing to science revert to dogmatism.
The strawman that everyone holds up is the fundie who just wants creationism back in schools, and is using ID as his super-duper-secret method to do so.
Oddly enough, my left-wing AP Bio teacher taught it as something interesting to consider and debate way before it became a controversial topic. The speaker who spoke at our class was from Scripps, and he basically arrived at agreeing with ID after empirial observations. Christianity had nothing to do with it.
>> How the hell are we supposed to be able to disprove that a supernatural being has had NO intervention in evolution?
Statistical measures.
If you ever go beyond the "mean, median, and mode" level of stats, you learn it is the Way to Truth. It's essentially the answer to epistemology: how do we know when we know something? Stats have much deeper implications than most people realize.
>> Evolution is a theory that has come about through people observing evidence. ID is based on religious zealotry.
The more correct statement is that religious zealots believe in ID.
ID is a theory that many people arrived upon from empirical observations, and from the math.