> because your boss is going to be the last person that wants you telecommuting.
Of course. Forgive my cynicism, but what's the fun in strutting and ordering people around, when they're at home where they can ignore both and concentrate on their work?
> But you would think- at least I would -that for a lynchpin turn in the evolutionary progress of a species that one could dig up more than just one sample, look at it and point "missing link!". After all, it was a successful natural selection and should therefor be fairly wide spread.
No, I don't think it follows that a species that fits into some position in the family tree that we happen to find interesting would necessarily be very populous or very long-lasting.
> I guess my question is why aren't we tripping all over these damn things instead of busting our asses finding just ONE, especially given the copious amount of fossil record we do find. I find it hard to believe that preservation is THAT hostile.
How many organisms have ever lived? How many fossils have we collected?
Of the 50,000,000 people who lived in the Roman empire at any given time, how many can we find traces of? That was only a couple of thousand years ago.
> It would seem that there would have to be some sort of informational exchange in order to determine air was a candidate source for oxygen. How did this happen?
For an intuitive notion of "information exchange", evolution extracts "information" from the environment by trial and error.
Crudely put, if evolution tries A and B, and discovers that A works and B doesn't, it has extracted one bit of information from the environment. (Actually not always a whole bit due to redundancies between A and B, and redundant trials, and the fact that "works" is often a matter of degree rather than a boolean predicate. But you get the idea.)
> If evolution, as they say, takes so long, there WOULD be fossils that we COULD conclusively show are directly linked to other species - without missing links - and they would be found just as easily as dinosaur fossils are.
What makes you think that?
What is the probability that an organism will become fossilized, survive erosion and other hazards for millions of years, and then actually be found by someone? I.e., how good a sample do you think the fossil record is.
How easy would it be for you to find your own ancestors' bones going back 100 generations? Or just 10. What do you conclude from any gaps in that record?
> > > agree. It's time to stop. It's like saying that 1.5 is the missing link between 1 and 2 and then someone comes along and says "no, there's a gap between 1 and 1.5".
> > You know, the grandparent post was a little difficult to understand for me, thank you for translating it into numbers.
> Could someone please translate it into something simpler than numbers? Math hurts my brain.
> > The sooner we realize that faith in evolution is no more scientific than those damn bible thumping fools, then the sooner we can just quit arguing and realize that our way is not the way.
> Perhaps you should address the evidence and explain why a validated, tangible specific prediction is somehow equivalent to "religious faith". Supporting your claims, rather than just asserting them, would give you a great deal more credibility.
Yeah, but when you can't support your claims you have to fall back on that sort of rhetorical posturing as a substitute.
Or else abandon your claims, but that's not an option for some people.
> I can hear the naturalists clacking away at their keyboards in glee with the "smoking gun" that evolution has finally been "proven" and that the creationists will have to sit in stunned silence under the weight of the evidence finally presented.
To the extent that anything is ever "proven" in the natural sciences, evolution was "proven" well over 100 years ago.
And of course, nobody expects creationists to sit in stunned (or any other kind of) silence, regardless of what evidence is presented.
> Let's not oversimplify this discussion. Thoughtful, intelligent people on both sides of this debate have passion, and conviction.
Yes, but one side has facts and a theory, whereas the other has a well-funded propaganda machine and a lot of self-appointed spiritual advisors telling the ignorant masses that they'll be tortured for all eternity if they let the facts affect their conclusions.
> As a creationist, I welcome advances in knowledge that arise from investigation of the physical realm. I respect men (and women) of science, and applaud this new discovery - but that changes not my conviction that a creator made the planet as it is.
To paraphrase the old saying, facts won't dissuade anyone from a position that isn't built on facts to begin with.
> There are enough complexities and challenges with the idea of evolution as a means of speciation that one more discovery does not put a nail in the coffin of creationism.
Except as a religious/social/political issue, creatinism was nailed back in the nineteenth century.
> I'm not looking to start a debate on this issue, but I am hoping to raise the level of discussion by respectfully asking those who would use this occasion to ridicule people with whom they disagree to please refrain. This is a complex issue and cheap shots are not productive. I will refrain from ridicule as well. Deal?
For my money, people who express ridiculous views are entitled to all the ridicule they reap. (Unless they're insane, in which case we should show a little sympathy for their plight.)
If you would care to identify any of the creationism evangelists who are insane, it would help things alone.
> "As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power."
> This certainly goes against creationism but afaik the only difference between evolution and intelligent design is that intelligent design claims [...]
The proponents of ID are all over the spectrum with respect to their views on evolution. Some are YECs of the most narrow sort; others think biologists basically have things right except for an occasional event of intelligent intervention.
> wouldn't this missing link be required for either model as both need to go from water to land?
No, intelligent design is such a handwave that it fits any model and any observation, so long as you preserve the claim that "somebody" had a hand in things somewhere along the way. Since it doesn't put any constraints on what that "somebody" can or would do, you can't make any predictions. For example, the YEC subset of IDers wouldn't accept that anything went "from water to land" -- they think all species were created pretty much as is.
> This was a predicted, sought find. This wasn't just like, some people found a fossil and was like "wow! this fills the gap in a missing link between reptiles and fish!". They set out to find something like this, targeted the most likely places in which to find it, and actually found what they were looking for.
A similar thing can be seen on a NOVA episode that they air now and then, where a palentologist used existing fossils in the sequence of whale ancestry to estimate the date of an intermediate form, consulted geologists re where to find exposed land that was the bottom of a shallow sea at that date, visited the site (now a desert) recommended by the geologists, and found vertebrae for the predicted species lying exposed in the sand. Excavations uncovered more complete specimins showing the predicted features of "nose" and legs.
The fossil record is (and always will be) full of holes for the simple reason that not everything gets preserved (and some environments make preservation extremely unlikely), and there's no "magic fossil" that's needed in order to make the big puzzle fall together.
For the most part, the big puzzle is already together. Yeah, there are lots of areas where we'd like to have more detail, but "missing link" implies that we're looking for some sort of Holy Grail, and are in a jam without it.
> Of course, if praying really works, doesn't it cast doubt on all medical research?
Or any other kind of research.
Maybe that's why they have so much trouble predicting the weather. The meteorological model doesn't account for all the prayers pulling things one way or the other.
> > But with prayer you don't have the faintest idea what's in the environment
> Sure you do; or could at least. Do some surveys to find out how often people pray for others, etc. You can ceratinly get some understanding of the "noise". Not that I entirely disagree with you; designing an experiment to test an effect based on an illogical theoretical model is silly.
Yeah, part of the measurement problem is the vagueness of the model they want you to think they're testing. If it's merely "prayer helps", the control group is defective. If it's "more prayer is better", they need to subject several groups to different dosages. But to do that, they need to spell out what it is they are trying to measure.
What helps? The number of people praying for you? The number of prayers uttered? The number of prayer-seconds on your behalf? If someone prays for multiple subjects, is the contribution split among them, or do they all get full credit? Does it matter who prays? Does the specific content or manner of delivery of the prayer matter? Do all the pray-ers have detailed instructions, and are you following up to see whether they followed the instructions?
As phrased, none of that appears to matter. But how can they say that one group got "more", when they're so vague about what "more" means?
> Um, since when is pray quantinized. God does what he wants with or without a pray.
Yeah, the study makes at least two odd assumptions:
1) The probability of divine intervention improves as the number of people praying for you increases.
2) Miracles occur by degree: you might get out of the hospital a few days sooner, but don't expect to suddenly become completely well.
Re #2, why don't they ever study the effect of prayer on the regrowth of amputated limbs or failed organs? Or dead people coming back to life? Or congenital birth defects going away?
Somehow people "know" not to pray for that kind of thing, despite their professed belief in the power of prayer.
> The problem is that there is no way to ever test the effect of prayer. Let's take the sample people who "were not receiving prayer", the problem exists that they always are. Every day, I say the Shmoneh Esreh, a prayer three times a day. This particular prayer has a paragraph beseeching G-D to intervene for all sick, worldwide, period. Ergo, even though scientists assume that individuals were not being prayed to, this is in fact not true.
So the unspoken assumption is that the number of people praying affects the divine response.
I'm wondering whose theology accepts the idea that having n + m people praying for you increases the chances of divine intervention in comparison to only having n people pray for you.
Or maybe they're testing whether prayers for the anonymous sick are as effective as prayers for the named sick...
In addition to all the other problems with these experiments, they need to start by spelling out their hypothesis more precisely. But that's likely to step on some theological toes among the target audience.
> So, enlighten us. How would you handle the other posters example of a toxicology study where the toxin in question is free in the environment in variable amounts?
If you know there's a toxin in the envionment it's because you've measured it. Yeah, it appears in variable amounts, but you have a model for the distribution of the amounts.
But with prayer you don't have the faintest idea what's in the environment. You can't do a randomized test because you don't have the faintest idea how your test factor relates to the background noise. How big a sample do you need when you don't have the first clue about the amount and variability of the environmental exposure? How are you going to convince critical readers that your sample was large enough to ensure that random fluctuations didn't swamp the signal you are trying to detect?
Can you detect a signal among noise, with little knowledge of the characteristics of the signal an no knowledge whatsoever of the characteristics of the noise?
If these people want to argue that "if all else is equal, we expect our test group to get some amount more prayer than the control group, albeit by a completely unknown amount", then they should emulate a pharmacology experiment and test for various dosages (one prayer group, two prayer groups,...) and show that the effect increases monotonically with the dosage.
Of course, nobody believes that that's how prayer works. What, precisely, is the model of prayer that they think they're testing? More is better? How come no one ever does a variable dosage test?
Prayer as understood by monotheists is absurd anyway. Supposedly prayers are appeals to a God who already knows what you want, and is going to do what He thinks best regardless of what everyone prays. Even if experimental rigor were possible, there wouldn't be any reason to expect the test group to do better than the control group. If you believe the background assumptions necessary for a prayer test, what you're really testing is whether God had unfathomable reasons to help heal more people in one group than in the other.
And of course, there's the issue of whether the God wants to be bothered by all that praying. Without knowing what He wants, you can get "significant" results and still have it entirely backward!
These experiments are fluff; like ID, they're religious apologetics in a lab coat, with no serious attempt to address the issues they pretend to be assessing.
> No, you don't. That's what randomization is for. The Prayer group is getting a defined amount of more prayer than the Control group.
No, they don't have the faintest idea how much prayer the control group got.
This is like doing a drug evaluation experiment, where they ask some people to take the drug, but the drug is available over the counter and they don't actually control either group's access to it, so they end up without the faintest idea what either group actually got.
> You simply cannot control for everything when doing research. So you just have to make sure you have a sufficiently large sample so that confounding variables don't have any significant impact.
But you've got to control the dosage of the independent variable you're studying, or you haven't got an experiment.
(Notice that the same problem applies to the study that found no effect, too.)
Slashdot Mirror
> Does that make me a Software Engineer? Or just a two-bit coder?
Consider an analogy between a civil engineer and a construction worker, and let that answer your question.
Kinda makes you think how immature our profession is, too.
> because your boss is going to be the last person that wants you telecommuting.
Of course. Forgive my cynicism, but what's the fun in strutting and ordering people around, when they're at home where they can ignore both and concentrate on their work?
> But you would think- at least I would -that for a lynchpin turn in the evolutionary progress of a species that one could dig up more than just one sample, look at it and point "missing link!". After all, it was a successful natural selection and should therefor be fairly wide spread.
No, I don't think it follows that a species that fits into some position in the family tree that we happen to find interesting would necessarily be very populous or very long-lasting.
> I guess my question is why aren't we tripping all over these damn things instead of busting our asses finding just ONE, especially given the copious amount of fossil record we do find. I find it hard to believe that preservation is THAT hostile.
How many organisms have ever lived? How many fossils have we collected?
Of the 50,000,000 people who lived in the Roman empire at any given time, how many can we find traces of? That was only a couple of thousand years ago.
> I have a question that I've never really understood the answer to: why is creationism as a belief incompatible with science (including evolution)?
Because its adherents want it to be.
> It would seem that there would have to be some sort of informational exchange in order to determine air was a candidate source for oxygen. How did this happen?
For an intuitive notion of "information exchange", evolution extracts "information" from the environment by trial and error.
Crudely put, if evolution tries A and B, and discovers that A works and B doesn't, it has extracted one bit of information from the environment. (Actually not always a whole bit due to redundancies between A and B, and redundant trials, and the fact that "works" is often a matter of degree rather than a boolean predicate. But you get the idea.)
> If evolution, as they say, takes so long, there WOULD be fossils that we COULD conclusively show are directly linked to other species - without missing links - and they would be found just as easily as dinosaur fossils are.
What makes you think that?
What is the probability that an organism will become fossilized, survive erosion and other hazards for millions of years, and then actually be found by someone? I.e., how good a sample do you think the fossil record is.
How easy would it be for you to find your own ancestors' bones going back 100 generations? Or just 10. What do you conclude from any gaps in that record?
> > > agree. It's time to stop. It's like saying that 1.5 is the missing link between 1 and 2 and then someone comes along and says "no, there's a gap between 1 and 1.5".
> > You know, the grandparent post was a little difficult to understand for me, thank you for translating it into numbers.
> Could someone please translate it into something simpler than numbers? Math hurts my brain.
Ok, try "no, there's a gap between l and l.S".
> > The sooner we realize that faith in evolution is no more scientific than those damn bible thumping fools, then the sooner we can just quit arguing and realize that our way is not the way.
> Perhaps you should address the evidence and explain why a validated, tangible specific prediction is somehow equivalent to "religious faith". Supporting your claims, rather than just asserting them, would give you a great deal more credibility.
Yeah, but when you can't support your claims you have to fall back on that sort of rhetorical posturing as a substitute.
Or else abandon your claims, but that's not an option for some people.
> Flame away diephobic moderators...flame away.
You're a fookin returd.
Oh, and your post was really stupid too.
> I can hear the naturalists clacking away at their keyboards in glee with the "smoking gun" that evolution has finally been "proven" and that the creationists will have to sit in stunned silence under the weight of the evidence finally presented.
To the extent that anything is ever "proven" in the natural sciences, evolution was "proven" well over 100 years ago.
And of course, nobody expects creationists to sit in stunned (or any other kind of) silence, regardless of what evidence is presented.
> Let's not oversimplify this discussion. Thoughtful, intelligent people on both sides of this debate have passion, and conviction.
Yes, but one side has facts and a theory, whereas the other has a well-funded propaganda machine and a lot of self-appointed spiritual advisors telling the ignorant masses that they'll be tortured for all eternity if they let the facts affect their conclusions.
> As a creationist, I welcome advances in knowledge that arise from investigation of the physical realm. I respect men (and women) of science, and applaud this new discovery - but that changes not my conviction that a creator made the planet as it is.
To paraphrase the old saying, facts won't dissuade anyone from a position that isn't built on facts to begin with.
> There are enough complexities and challenges with the idea of evolution as a means of speciation that one more discovery does not put a nail in the coffin of creationism.
Except as a religious/social/political issue, creatinism was nailed back in the nineteenth century.
> I'm not looking to start a debate on this issue, but I am hoping to raise the level of discussion by respectfully asking those who would use this occasion to ridicule people with whom they disagree to please refrain. This is a complex issue and cheap shots are not productive. I will refrain from ridicule as well. Deal?
For my money, people who express ridiculous views are entitled to all the ridicule they reap. (Unless they're insane, in which case we should show a little sympathy for their plight.)
If you would care to identify any of the creationism evangelists who are insane, it would help things alone.
> "As such, it will be a blow to proponents of intelligent design, who claim that the many gaps in the fossil record show evidence of some higher power."
> This certainly goes against creationism but afaik the only difference between evolution and intelligent design is that intelligent design claims [...]
The proponents of ID are all over the spectrum with respect to their views on evolution. Some are YECs of the most narrow sort; others think biologists basically have things right except for an occasional event of intelligent intervention.
> wouldn't this missing link be required for either model as both need to go from water to land?
No, intelligent design is such a handwave that it fits any model and any observation, so long as you preserve the claim that "somebody" had a hand in things somewhere along the way. Since it doesn't put any constraints on what that "somebody" can or would do, you can't make any predictions. For example, the YEC subset of IDers wouldn't accept that anything went "from water to land" -- they think all species were created pretty much as is.
> This was a predicted, sought find. This wasn't just like, some people found a fossil and was like "wow! this fills the gap in a missing link between reptiles and fish!". They set out to find something like this, targeted the most likely places in which to find it, and actually found what they were looking for.
A similar thing can be seen on a NOVA episode that they air now and then, where a palentologist used existing fossils in the sequence of whale ancestry to estimate the date of an intermediate form, consulted geologists re where to find exposed land that was the bottom of a shallow sea at that date, visited the site (now a desert) recommended by the geologists, and found vertebrae for the predicted species lying exposed in the sand. Excavations uncovered more complete specimins showing the predicted features of "nose" and legs.
> I think that's just neat.
Way neat.
The fossil record is (and always will be) full of holes for the simple reason that not everything gets preserved (and some environments make preservation extremely unlikely), and there's no "magic fossil" that's needed in order to make the big puzzle fall together.
For the most part, the big puzzle is already together. Yeah, there are lots of areas where we'd like to have more detail, but "missing link" implies that we're looking for some sort of Holy Grail, and are in a jam without it.
That simply ain't the way it is.
> First Post!
Not a slow starter, are you.
> Of course, if praying really works, doesn't it cast doubt on all medical research?
Or any other kind of research.
Maybe that's why they have so much trouble predicting the weather. The meteorological model doesn't account for all the prayers pulling things one way or the other.
> > But with prayer you don't have the faintest idea what's in the environment
> Sure you do; or could at least. Do some surveys to find out how often people pray for others, etc. You can ceratinly get some understanding of the "noise". Not that I entirely disagree with you; designing an experiment to test an effect based on an illogical theoretical model is silly.
Yeah, part of the measurement problem is the vagueness of the model they want you to think they're testing. If it's merely "prayer helps", the control group is defective. If it's "more prayer is better", they need to subject several groups to different dosages. But to do that, they need to spell out what it is they are trying to measure.
What helps? The number of people praying for you? The number of prayers uttered? The number of prayer-seconds on your behalf? If someone prays for multiple subjects, is the contribution split among them, or do they all get full credit? Does it matter who prays? Does the specific content or manner of delivery of the prayer matter? Do all the pray-ers have detailed instructions, and are you following up to see whether they followed the instructions?
As phrased, none of that appears to matter. But how can they say that one group got "more", when they're so vague about what "more" means?
> Prayer had a measureable effect if you had RTFA. Go explain that one.
The plethora of prayer studies give results all over the map.
Which is probably what we should expect, since it boils down to looking for an ill-defined signal amid a stream of noise.
> Um, since when is pray quantinized. God does what he wants with or without a pray.
Yeah, the study makes at least two odd assumptions:
1) The probability of divine intervention improves as the number of people praying for you increases.
2) Miracles occur by degree: you might get out of the hospital a few days sooner, but don't expect to suddenly become completely well.
Re #2, why don't they ever study the effect of prayer on the regrowth of amputated limbs or failed organs? Or dead people coming back to life? Or congenital birth defects going away?
Somehow people "know" not to pray for that kind of thing, despite their professed belief in the power of prayer.
> The problem is that there is no way to ever test the effect of prayer. Let's take the sample people who "were not receiving prayer", the problem exists that they always are. Every day, I say the Shmoneh Esreh, a prayer three times a day. This particular prayer has a paragraph beseeching G-D to intervene for all sick, worldwide, period. Ergo, even though scientists assume that individuals were not being prayed to, this is in fact not true.
So the unspoken assumption is that the number of people praying affects the divine response.
I'm wondering whose theology accepts the idea that having n + m people praying for you increases the chances of divine intervention in comparison to only having n people pray for you.
Or maybe they're testing whether prayers for the anonymous sick are as effective as prayers for the named sick...
In addition to all the other problems with these experiments, they need to start by spelling out their hypothesis more precisely. But that's likely to step on some theological toes among the target audience.
> So, enlighten us. How would you handle the other posters example of a toxicology study where the toxin in question is free in the environment in variable amounts?
...) and show that the effect increases monotonically with the dosage.
If you know there's a toxin in the envionment it's because you've measured it. Yeah, it appears in variable amounts, but you have a model for the distribution of the amounts.
But with prayer you don't have the faintest idea what's in the environment. You can't do a randomized test because you don't have the faintest idea how your test factor relates to the background noise. How big a sample do you need when you don't have the first clue about the amount and variability of the environmental exposure? How are you going to convince critical readers that your sample was large enough to ensure that random fluctuations didn't swamp the signal you are trying to detect?
Can you detect a signal among noise, with little knowledge of the characteristics of the signal an no knowledge whatsoever of the characteristics of the noise?
If these people want to argue that "if all else is equal, we expect our test group to get some amount more prayer than the control group, albeit by a completely unknown amount", then they should emulate a pharmacology experiment and test for various dosages (one prayer group, two prayer groups,
Of course, nobody believes that that's how prayer works. What, precisely, is the model of prayer that they think they're testing? More is better? How come no one ever does a variable dosage test?
Prayer as understood by monotheists is absurd anyway. Supposedly prayers are appeals to a God who already knows what you want, and is going to do what He thinks best regardless of what everyone prays. Even if experimental rigor were possible, there wouldn't be any reason to expect the test group to do better than the control group. If you believe the background assumptions necessary for a prayer test, what you're really testing is whether God had unfathomable reasons to help heal more people in one group than in the other.
And of course, there's the issue of whether the God wants to be bothered by all that praying. Without knowing what He wants, you can get "significant" results and still have it entirely backward!
These experiments are fluff; like ID, they're religious apologetics in a lab coat, with no serious attempt to address the issues they pretend to be assessing.
> > No, they don't have the faintest idea how much prayer the control group got.
> Like I said, they do know how much more prayer the experimental group got.
There isn't the slightest guarantee that the test group actually got a stronger dosage.
> Sheesh, you smug bastards should really go over some elementary statistics before piping up.
Actually, experimental design and statistical evaluation are big parts of my job.
I would expect to get laughed at if I applied statistics to uncontrolled measures, and rightly would.
> No, you don't. That's what randomization is for. The Prayer group is getting a defined amount of more prayer than the Control group.
No, they don't have the faintest idea how much prayer the control group got.
This is like doing a drug evaluation experiment, where they ask some people to take the drug, but the drug is available over the counter and they don't actually control either group's access to it, so they end up without the faintest idea what either group actually got.
> You simply cannot control for everything when doing research. So you just have to make sure you have a sufficiently large sample so that confounding variables don't have any significant impact.
But you've got to control the dosage of the independent variable you're studying, or you haven't got an experiment.
(Notice that the same problem applies to the study that found no effect, too.)
> They put the control group inside a Faraday cage.
And the test group in a Prayer-a-day cage?