> I just wanted to comment that that's an excellent.sig you've got there. Does it come from anywhere in particular?
No, just from what's been going on in the USA for the last couple of years.
I've been thinking about the.sig for a while, but what finally motivated me to put it up was the news story last week about an American colonel using criminal behavior to get a POW to talk, and a group of legislators wanting to reward him for it.
> The main proponent of Intelligent Design is the Discovery Institute, a Seattle research institute funded largely by Christian foundations.
It is also a branch of what was formerly known as the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, a neocon activist organization. Many think the leaders of the ID movement are interested in religion primarily as an opiate for the masses.
> You seem to be under the mistaken notion that the Intellegent Design movement is the same as the old bible-thumping Creationist movement. It is not. [...] See particularly the articles by William Dembsky
Is that the same Dembski whose speaking tours consist of engagements at churches and chapels instead of biology department colloquia?
> Actually "Intelligent Design" is another in the series of attempts by creationists and atheistic anti-evolutionists, to attempt to return science to schools...
Actually its an attempt to make an end run around the Establishment Clause.
Also to replace Creation Science with a "theory" that does not make any predictions that might come back to embarrass it later. (The proponents of ID go out of their way to defuse questions about who or what the Designer is and exactly what "design" entails.)
> the mantra from the evolutionists that "you propose a god and therefore cannot be scientific" has been answered...
ID hasn't answered anything except the creationist demand for an end run around the Establishment Clause and a pretense that their religious beliefs are supported by science.
As for the "mantra", it is exactly correct. When you invoke a hypothetical being that has unlimited powers and unknowable motives, you have provided a wildcard rather than an explanation. There is no conceivable observation - nor even any inconceivable one - that is not compatible with the HBthUPaUM. It makes no predictions, isn't falsifiable even in principle, and holds no explanatory value. You might as well offer "*" as a scientific answer to some question.
> The problem with ID arguments is the people researching it are not competing to come up with the better theory but are trying to come up with some standard that "believers" can pile behind and feel that their belief in a creator is still valid or more precisely it is that the theory of evolution makes them feel like their religious beliefs may now be invalid unless they come up with another theory that keeps the door open for God in this universe.
[Emphasis mine.]
Right. The best possible illustration that ID is not science is the fact that it does not suggest a research program. The proponents came up with their ideas and rushed straight off to state school board meetings demanding that they be given equal time with the theory of evolution.
> Even I can see that there are some problems that Evolutionary Theory hasn't adequately explained, the nonreducible complexity problem perhaps foremost among these. And that's a pretty fundamental problem.
No, it's utter bullshit. Behe claims that a certain step in biological history could not be the result of evolution and follows with the conclusion that some Intelligent Designer must have intervened at that step.
The problems with Behe's claim are manifold. First off he uses a strawman caricature of evolution rather than the theory that real scientists use. (I.e., he thinks that evolution can only procede along a direct path to some goal, with a fitness advantage at every step along the way.)[*] Second, scientists have since pointed out that there really are evolutionary precursors to the system he claims to be irreducibly complex. Third, his inference of an intelligent intervention is a non sequitur. (The correct conclusion - if not for his other errors - would be a simple "I don't know how we got from point A to point B.")
Intelligent Design, as it is currently being offered, is just a renaming of Ignorance Theory.
* Notice that stone masonry arches are irreducibly complex, but we build them one stone at a time all the same.
> If the universe really does have the fine tuning properties that it appears to have based on our current understanding, then inferring from that some kind of Creator makes sense as a metaphysical construct.
No, not at all. It may be that there is some underlying reason for the universe to have the properties that it does. It may be that there are or have been many universes, and for obvious reasons we can only notice the one we arose in. It may even be a simple matter of luck.
Appeals to ignorance do not motivate any Creator hypothesis. If you want to convince us that there is a Creator, give us some evidence or appeal to special revelation and hope we go along with it. Don't waste our time with bad arguments.
> I don't believe that it can be used to disprove intelligent design
ID hasn't been disproved. Nor has Last Thursdayism, for that matter.
What ID sorely lacks is any motivation for anyone to believe any of it.
> or to prove that it is irrational to believe that the universe is the product of intelligent design.
It should be treated like any other unsupportable claim, such as Last Thursdayism or IPU Theory (IPU = "Invisible Pink Unicorn). I don't have any opinion on whether such views should be designated as irrational. But what is irrational is to try to justify them with bad arguments. And that's the piper's tune when it comes to ID.
I have vastly more respect for people who simply say "goddidit" than for people who invent pseudoscience to convince themselves and others that "goddidit".
> ID is a nice belief system if you're already a creationist who accepts on faith that the Universe was created by the God of Genesis (optional: 6,000 years ago in a week), but it's not science.
I wouldn't even say that much. The theological implications of Behe's claim that God let evolution happened but intervened to help parasitic microbes obtain flagellae are astonishing.
ID "theory" provides no support for biblical literalism whatsoever. If the masses of creationists ever stopped to listen what the ID "scientists" are actually saying rather than adopting them as "the enemy of my enemy", the public demand for ID would evaporate overnight, and the ID "scientists" would be looking for a new scam the next day.
> My point is that even if I did accept ID as a scientific theory, I'd still be forced on the overwhelming strength of the data to reject it in favor of the theory that best fits the data, and that theory is - until someone comes up with a hell of a lot of data saying otherwise - evolution.
I think all the leading proponents of ID actually accept evolution. They certainly accept common descent. All they really claim to be doing is showing that (Behe) "evolution got some intelligent intervention here and there", or (Dembski) "evolution wouldn't have worked if some Designer hadn't tuned it to the problem of biology". They just want to wedge some little gap that they can hide their little god in.
Everything beyond that is a case of creationists hearing what they want to hear.
> Every so often, we've got to reevaluate where we are and where we're going in science (even computer science!) It's important to keep in mind that none of this is gospel, and that we're continuing to learn and revise our pool of knowledge.
Yep, and that makes an interesting comparison to creationism, doesn't it.
> Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community that it is being taught alongside evolution in many schools and colleges, explains that to even reach the stage at which we exist there are no fewer than twenty-six variables necessary for our universe to even consider permitting life and a further sixty-six within our galaxy and Earth itself that allowed the multitude of living beings not only to come into being but to flourish (this whitepaper that was in My Favorites breaks these criteria into probabilities -- great read if you prefer to see the evidence of this hypothesis); in a nutshell, this concept is summed up in Asimov's fantastic quote "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
First, observe that although some ID advocates make that kind of appeal, it's really just a restatement of the anthropic principle, which has been around much longer than ID has.
But let's get back to this:
> Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community that it is being taught alongside evolution in many schools and colleges
ID has no status whatsoever in the scientific community. The only academics you will find pushing it are those pushing a religious agenda (or neocons pushing a political agenda disguised as a religious agenda).
> I'm glad there's another scientific viewpoint that can rationalize the concept that free will is the only variable that yet seems unaccounted for...
Free will is "unaccounted for" in the sense that no one has even made a convincing argument that it actually exists.
> One has to start somewhere to reconcile observation with history in order to get closer to the truth.
You won't get any closer to the truth by following bunkum like ID.
> whenever a modern-day scientist (or/.'er) encounters the idea that evolution is not how _we_ came to be, he will AUTOMATICALLY think the idea deserves 5 cuckoos, without looking at the evidence.
That's not correct, at least in my case. I don't give ID 5 cuckoos because I'm ideologically committed to evolution; I give it 5 cuckoos because it is a god-of-the-gaps argument with a thin veneer of pseudoscience as a fig leaf.
I'm not aware of any rival to evolution as the explanation for all the stuff evolution explains, but if you know of one you should post it and tell us what it has going for it.
> Ask anyone who ever read the Lord of the Rings as a kid and then went and read the Hobbit afterwards. Although it's a delightful children's novel, the Hobbit is inevitably a terrible disappointment after the scope and depth of the LOTR.
Not me. I read LoTR, then after many years re-read it and then read The Hobbit for the first time. And frankly, I think The Hobbit is a better story.
LoTR scores high on conception, but has its problems. IMO the author is too heavy handed, recycles too many of his own ideas, tries too hard to jerk the reader's chain, too transparently manipulates the characters like chess pieces to set up "special" scenes, etc.
> Speaking of sun exposure, my favorite university memory of walking across the medical school campus was the cluster of smokers puffing away and sunbathers roasting right next to the Cancer Research and Treatment Center sign. One of these days I have got to take a picture of that.
We'll only be interested in the pictures of the sunbathers, thank you.
> Heh. I tried to read the Foundation series, but unfortunately I'd already read enough about Lorenz and Mandelbrot to know that little errors don't just go away if you pick a bigger sample, and subsequently couldn't ignore the major flaw that is "psychohistory" and enjoy the books*.
Heh, my calculations showed you were going to post that.
> This incident reminds us of the importance of password security. It is sad to see one weak password responsible for such a breach.
I'm apologize - I never imagined that they would guess 'mydebian'.
Re: Lets get this out of the way
on
20 Years of Virii
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> Actually, no, viri is an acceptable plural of virus. The word virus is used in Vergil's Georgics; if you look it up in Lewis and Short (and I assume in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which I don't have immediate access to), the plural in Latin is indeed viri.
The Oxford Latin Dictionary says that it always appears in the nom. sing. or acc. sing., with only two exceptions: once in the gen. sing. and once in the abl. sing., both in Lucretius. It also cites the use in Vergil's "Georgics" as malum ~us, "bad poison", i.e. not a plural. The Oxford Classical Text of the "Georgics" also shows malum uirus (line I.129).
Possibly L&S were right and the OLD & OCT are wrong, but I doubt it.
Slashdot Mirror
> I just wanted to comment that that's an excellent
No, just from what's been going on in the USA for the last couple of years.
I've been thinking about the
> A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
And a dog is a machine for turning dogfood into...
> The main proponent of Intelligent Design is the Discovery Institute, a Seattle research institute funded largely by Christian foundations.
It is also a branch of what was formerly known as the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, a neocon activist organization. Many think the leaders of the ID movement are interested in religion primarily as an opiate for the masses.
> You seem to be under the mistaken notion that the Intellegent Design movement is the same as the old bible-thumping Creationist movement. It is not. [...] See particularly the articles by William Dembsky
Is that the same Dembski whose speaking tours consist of engagements at churches and chapels instead of biology department colloquia?
> Actually "Intelligent Design" is another in the series of attempts by creationists and atheistic anti-evolutionists, to attempt to return science to schools...
Actually its an attempt to make an end run around the Establishment Clause.
Also to replace Creation Science with a "theory" that does not make any predictions that might come back to embarrass it later. (The proponents of ID go out of their way to defuse questions about who or what the Designer is and exactly what "design" entails.)
> the mantra from the evolutionists that "you propose a god and therefore cannot be scientific" has been answered...
ID hasn't answered anything except the creationist demand for an end run around the Establishment Clause and a pretense that their religious beliefs are supported by science.
As for the "mantra", it is exactly correct. When you invoke a hypothetical being that has unlimited powers and unknowable motives, you have provided a wildcard rather than an explanation. There is no conceivable observation - nor even any inconceivable one - that is not compatible with the HBthUPaUM. It makes no predictions, isn't falsifiable even in principle, and holds no explanatory value. You might as well offer "*" as a scientific answer to some question.
> The problem with ID arguments is the people researching it are not competing to come up with the better theory but are trying to come up with some standard that "believers" can pile behind and feel that their belief in a creator is still valid or more precisely it is that the theory of evolution makes them feel like their religious beliefs may now be invalid unless they come up with another theory that keeps the door open for God in this universe.
[Emphasis mine.]
Right. The best possible illustration that ID is not science is the fact that it does not suggest a research program. The proponents came up with their ideas and rushed straight off to state school board meetings demanding that they be given equal time with the theory of evolution.
> Even I can see that there are some problems that Evolutionary Theory hasn't adequately explained, the nonreducible complexity problem perhaps foremost among these. And that's a pretty fundamental problem.
No, it's utter bullshit. Behe claims that a certain step in biological history could not be the result of evolution and follows with the conclusion that some Intelligent Designer must have intervened at that step.
The problems with Behe's claim are manifold. First off he uses a strawman caricature of evolution rather than the theory that real scientists use. (I.e., he thinks that evolution can only procede along a direct path to some goal, with a fitness advantage at every step along the way.)[*] Second, scientists have since pointed out that there really are evolutionary precursors to the system he claims to be irreducibly complex. Third, his inference of an intelligent intervention is a non sequitur. (The correct conclusion - if not for his other errors - would be a simple "I don't know how we got from point A to point B.")
Intelligent Design, as it is currently being offered, is just a renaming of Ignorance Theory.
* Notice that stone masonry arches are irreducibly complex, but we build them one stone at a time all the same.
> If the universe really does have the fine tuning properties that it appears to have based on our current understanding, then inferring from that some kind of Creator makes sense as a metaphysical construct.
No, not at all. It may be that there is some underlying reason for the universe to have the properties that it does. It may be that there are or have been many universes, and for obvious reasons we can only notice the one we arose in. It may even be a simple matter of luck.
Appeals to ignorance do not motivate any Creator hypothesis. If you want to convince us that there is a Creator, give us some evidence or appeal to special revelation and hope we go along with it. Don't waste our time with bad arguments.
> I don't believe that it can be used to disprove intelligent design
ID hasn't been disproved. Nor has Last Thursdayism, for that matter.
What ID sorely lacks is any motivation for anyone to believe any of it.
> or to prove that it is irrational to believe that the universe is the product of intelligent design.
It should be treated like any other unsupportable claim, such as Last Thursdayism or IPU Theory (IPU = "Invisible Pink Unicorn). I don't have any opinion on whether such views should be designated as irrational. But what is irrational is to try to justify them with bad arguments. And that's the piper's tune when it comes to ID.
I have vastly more respect for people who simply say "goddidit" than for people who invent pseudoscience to convince themselves and others that "goddidit".
> ID is a nice belief system if you're already a creationist who accepts on faith that the Universe was created by the God of Genesis (optional: 6,000 years ago in a week), but it's not science.
I wouldn't even say that much. The theological implications of Behe's claim that God let evolution happened but intervened to help parasitic microbes obtain flagellae are astonishing.
ID "theory" provides no support for biblical literalism whatsoever. If the masses of creationists ever stopped to listen what the ID "scientists" are actually saying rather than adopting them as "the enemy of my enemy", the public demand for ID would evaporate overnight, and the ID "scientists" would be looking for a new scam the next day.
> My point is that even if I did accept ID as a scientific theory, I'd still be forced on the overwhelming strength of the data to reject it in favor of the theory that best fits the data, and that theory is - until someone comes up with a hell of a lot of data saying otherwise - evolution.
I think all the leading proponents of ID actually accept evolution. They certainly accept common descent. All they really claim to be doing is showing that (Behe) "evolution got some intelligent intervention here and there", or (Dembski) "evolution wouldn't have worked if some Designer hadn't tuned it to the problem of biology". They just want to wedge some little gap that they can hide their little god in.
Everything beyond that is a case of creationists hearing what they want to hear.
> Every so often, we've got to reevaluate where we are and where we're going in science (even computer science!) It's important to keep in mind that none of this is gospel, and that we're continuing to learn and revise our pool of knowledge.
Yep, and that makes an interesting comparison to creationism, doesn't it.
> Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community that it is being taught alongside evolution in many schools and colleges, explains that to even reach the stage at which we exist there are no fewer than twenty-six variables necessary for our universe to even consider permitting life and a further sixty-six within our galaxy and Earth itself that allowed the multitude of living beings not only to come into being but to flourish (this whitepaper that was in My Favorites breaks these criteria into probabilities -- great read if you prefer to see the evidence of this hypothesis); in a nutshell, this concept is summed up in Asimov's fantastic quote "In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
First, observe that although some ID advocates make that kind of appeal, it's really just a restatement of the anthropic principle, which has been around much longer than ID has.
But let's get back to this:
> Intelligent Design, a recent theory that has gained enough respect from the scientific community that it is being taught alongside evolution in many schools and colleges
ID has no status whatsoever in the scientific community. The only academics you will find pushing it are those pushing a religious agenda (or neocons pushing a political agenda disguised as a religious agenda).
> I'm glad there's another scientific viewpoint that can rationalize the concept that free will is the only variable that yet seems unaccounted for...
Free will is "unaccounted for" in the sense that no one has even made a convincing argument that it actually exists.
> One has to start somewhere to reconcile observation with history in order to get closer to the truth.
You won't get any closer to the truth by following bunkum like ID.
> whenever a modern-day scientist (or
That's not correct, at least in my case. I don't give ID 5 cuckoos because I'm ideologically committed to evolution; I give it 5 cuckoos because it is a god-of-the-gaps argument with a thin veneer of pseudoscience as a fig leaf.
I'm not aware of any rival to evolution as the explanation for all the stuff evolution explains, but if you know of one you should post it and tell us what it has going for it.
> Ask anyone who ever read the Lord of the Rings as a kid and then went and read the Hobbit afterwards. Although it's a delightful children's novel, the Hobbit is inevitably a terrible disappointment after the scope and depth of the LOTR.
Not me. I read LoTR, then after many years re-read it and then read The Hobbit for the first time. And frankly, I think The Hobbit is a better story.
LoTR scores high on conception, but has its problems. IMO the author is too heavy handed, recycles too many of his own ideas, tries too hard to jerk the reader's chain, too transparently manipulates the characters like chess pieces to set up "special" scenes, etc.
Great concepts, poor execution. IMO.
> Speaking of sun exposure, my favorite university memory of walking across the medical school campus was the cluster of smokers puffing away and sunbathers roasting right next to the Cancer Research and Treatment Center sign. One of these days I have got to take a picture of that.
We'll only be interested in the pictures of the sunbathers, thank you.
> I find that skipping the programs to get to the commercials to be more interesting than the other way around.
That's probably the best strategy for finding soft porn.
National governments will simply step in and legislate profitability - even if they have to outlaw the new technology.
...you'll get a most sincere policy about having your life ruined.
> There also exist games where the idea is to figure out the rules.
The most popular being the immersion game called "real life".
> Heh. I tried to read the Foundation series, but unfortunately I'd already read enough about Lorenz and Mandelbrot to know that little errors don't just go away if you pick a bigger sample, and subsequently couldn't ignore the major flaw that is "psychohistory" and enjoy the books*.
Heh, my calculations showed you were going to post that.
> Cards and monopoly are great. The have no noise making annoyances
Here in riverboat country, our card games often involve this kind of noise-making annoyance.
'Cause when you're playing games, you don't want squares spoiling the fun.
> Here come the comments about the word "boxen..."
Shouldn't it be "bokii"?
> Random passphrase? Repeat after me: The best password is the one that isn't stikie'd to the monitor and/or keyboard.
When it comes to internet-based attacks, my yellow stickies are the securest files on my system!
> This incident reminds us of the importance of password security. It is sad to see one weak password responsible for such a breach.
I'm apologize - I never imagined that they would guess 'mydebian'.
> Actually, no, viri is an acceptable plural of virus. The word virus is used in Vergil's Georgics; if you look it up in Lewis and Short (and I assume in the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which I don't have immediate access to), the plural in Latin is indeed viri.
The Oxford Latin Dictionary says that it always appears in the nom. sing. or acc. sing., with only two exceptions: once in the gen. sing. and once in the abl. sing., both in Lucretius. It also cites the use in Vergil's "Georgics" as malum ~us, "bad poison", i.e. not a plural. The Oxford Classical Text of the "Georgics" also shows malum uirus (line I.129).
Possibly L&S were right and the OLD & OCT are wrong, but I doubt it.