Actually, the one effect the study DID find statistical relevance for was that for the group that was told that they were being prayed for, they did worse than normal. Which we might suspect could be because those people concluded "geez, things must be really bad if they have to pray for me!"
Just a note. While the effect of additional people praying certainly could be thought of as a factor, the groups were randomly assigned. That means we would not expect either group to have a different balance of people who might have others praying for them or not. Random assignment helps control for those sorts of otherwise uncontrolable factors.
The problem is that it wasn't the non-believers who commissioned this study: it was the believers. All the criticisms you and others have leveled at the study were dead on, and in fact the authors of the study basically discounted their lack of results using the same rationale.
But that only begs the question: why spend 2mil on such a study in the first place if you already have a list of reasons ready to go that completely negate any results that you get?
Atheism can't sensibly be blamed for anything, because it's not an ideology in itself: it's an exclusionary category. Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest may not have been believers, but they did evil because of an ideology they held and a love of power, not because they weren't believers. By the same token, of course, Christians can't be held to blame for what someone who believes a different sort of Christianity does. Christianity has evolved a great deal over the years, and mostly all to its credit.
One of the most startling changes has been with anti-Semitism. While it would be foolish to pretend that it's gone, for the first time in millenia, it's no longer mainstream acceptable anymore in any major Christian sect and in most Western societies. Centuries ago, Martin Luther could publish a tract called "On the Jews and Their Lies" and be generally well regarded for it, despite the fact that it basically outlined and advocated everything that Hitler carried out (he cited it constantly). Nowadays, such views are anathema to almost every Christian on the planet. Blaming modern Christians for things like the Inquisition is _almost_ as silly and backwards as blaming atheists for Stalin.
I've generally found just from anecdotal experience that religious belief doesn't seem to do much of anything for making death any easier. Whether you believe in heaven or not intellectually, you still suffer the loss of a person, and it still hurts just as much. Religious people don't seem to understand this very well, but atheists pretty much do and experience EVERYTHING the same darn way as everyone else. Ones metaphysics are all well and good, but the bottom line is that we all go out the business of living like human beings, regardless of what we believe or don't believe.
I don't think most people caught this humor. 5% is generally the range of error on most studies.
Most of the prayer studies that have shown an effect turned out to be because after the study was over, the interested parties culled over the results looking for any differences between the control and experimental groups, picking out the differences and touting them, ignoring the data that pointed the other direction, and all of it within the error of the study. This sort of after the fact cherry-picking is akin to shooting the side of a barn and then drawing a target around the places where there are bullet holes.
"Actually, no, it doesn't prove that. If DNA determines what the animal will look like and how its body functions, then similar animals will have similar DNA, whether they are in any way related or not."
With DNA, there are billion ways to get the same result. There is no need for similar creatures to have similar DNA unless they recently got it from a common source, especially given that DNA, especially the non-coding sections, tends to "drift" all over the place naturally. The amount of this neutral drift implies the relative time of this common ancestry, just as we use copying errors in several copies of an ancient text to figure out which was copied from which.
"As for being able to draw family trees, you can take random strings and draw a "family tree" for them by comparing them and their differences to each other. With long enough strings, there's bound to be similar sequences, especially since DNA only has 4 possible "letters". These kind of diagrams can't be used to prove evolution, since they assume evolution as one of their prerequisites."
Unfortunately, the situation and comparisons are much more complicated than that. First of all, we're dealing with both the morphological AND the genetic trees, which can be determined indepedently of each other. The real magic comes when we compare the two... and find that they agree to an accuracy of 38 decimal places and counting. But that's not even the end of the story. The tree also has to then fit with all the fossil evidence (it does) in terms of time and space. And it has to fit with geology: Australian marsupials have to be different enough from South American ones in a way that reflects the last time they could have had any interrelation geographically frmo what we know of the movement of the continents. And they are. And THAT isn't even the end of the story... it goes on and on with this or that way of testing it against some piece of physical evidence to see if it all fits together.
Even if each and every line of indepedent evidence were wrong, how can you account for the fact that they all give basically the same answers? Error is not coordinated: it's random. Only truth provides coordination and convergence for evidence (from a single fact flows all sorts of different circumstances, all of which match back to that fact if they are all related to it).
None of this "assumes evolution" as a prerequisite. It concludes evolution because that's the only process that fits this extremely detailed pattern of constraints on what sort of evidence we'll find about this or that.
It isn't even DNA that can contain vast differences without any functional changes. It's the proteins themselves. Many proteins have only a few amino acid sequences which actually control their overall shape, which is what makes them "work." The rest of the animo acid seuqences can vary quite a lot without causing any change in shape. In fact, proteins can actually evolve dual roles this way: a previously unimportant part changes so that it affects the shape in some way... but without altering the part of the original shape that did something: thus allowing the protein to do something new without losing its ability to play its original role. Proteins, like DNA, can be quite flexible.
Indeed, many of the key proteins in our bodies are very obviously slightly altered versions of each other (which usually happens via duplication, with the second copy not affecting anything until it changes slightly, allowing there to be both the original protein AND a simmilar but slightly different one available to play a new function)
4. "Soft tissue" is a bit of a misnomer. As you noted, this stuff wasn't juicy, and it wasn't really even the original tissue preserved. It was fossilized impressions of tissue that allowed to learn about it's structure. It wasn't the cells themselves. It was remnants of their materials and structures. Without all the journalistic blaring of images of Jurrasic park, the "soft tissue" could be less misleadingly called "impressions and chemical components of soft tissue allowing scientists to infer what it was like"
The problem is that even the evolution of dogs took a lot longer than 6000 years (most figures put it starting at around 12,000 years). And, of course, every piece of physical evidence speaks to an old earth, no global flood, and a billion year process of evolutionary change in life on earth.
The really important thing to note is that toy poodles are morphologically much more different from wolves than humans are to chimps. If you accept that NS can account for dog evolution, then it becomes pretty hard to discount the evolution of man or anything else. The morphological changes in dogs are just too radical to imagine away, and the morphological differences between chimps and people are comparatively rather tiny when you sit down and actually look at the traits (humans differ mostly in brain size, hip balancing, and that little indent in the top of your mouth). And before you come back with "but they are still dogs," that's not really any mystery either. Large scale and recent interbreeding of dogs with wolves and other dogs has kept them genetically compatible even as their traits have varied widely. Genetic incompatibility and morphological variation are not linked: many genetically incompatible speices are so similar that a layperson could never tell the two apart (for instance, abalone's speciate at an alarming rate, but their genetical compatibility is about the only thing that's changing on that scale)
It's important to recognize exactly what went on with those forgeries though. They passed through peer review because the submitted methodologies and the basic math and so forth were all perfectly sound, and described things that science knows to be both possible and in fact to work the way described (i.e. we know cloning can be done, we're just not sure exactly how best to make it work). The problem was that the researchers lied about the results and the experiments. It's very hard to catch that sort of thing on the pre-publication review: it's the sort of lie that's caught once the article is published, read widely, and then other people try to duplicate the results or work through the experiments.
"Peer-review" is actually a much larger process than the initial review process before publication. Publication is really the beginning of a lot of the process, not the end. Pre-publication review is excellent at weeding out sloppy methodology, suggesting uncontrolled variables, making methodological critiques. But catching outright fraud often takes a wider audience to suss out.
As with all things science, the patience and cautionary skepticism is there, it just works much slower and metholdically than journalistic headlines can be cranked out.
"One can test versions of ID without any assumption of a diety."
Technically, sure. But in practice, to do the sorts of things necessary to explain life on earth, something outside the constraints of physical testible reality as we know them would be needed. Again, it isn't a problem with dieties per se. Just one of too MUCH explanatory power.
"Again, the whole thing may be very improbable, but that alone does not make it non-science. Exploration makes no guarentees of finds."
Nope, not if the ID has no constraints to speak of. A theory which could predict ANYTHING, predicts nothing.
That's the whole problem with the ID movement: they want to compete as a theory, but they don't want to get specific enough so that any given suggestion could be disproven. And this is something that they learned through experience too. Not just in the failure of Creationist explanations to stand up, but even in Behe's work. Behe, for instance, has to explain how the IC structures got where they are, and why there is no genetic evidence of their insertion. One of his suggestions was a protocell that contained ALL the IC structures that would ever be needed, unexpressed. Unfortunately, not only is there no evidence of that ever existing i nany genome, the very idea of unexpressed information being preserved, let alone for billions of years, is contrary to everything we know about how genes change over time due to mutation. So now Behe avoids that sort of attempt to describe anything in a positive, testible sense, and presents tests of evolutionary mechanisms as if they were tests of ID.
It's hard to come up with a theory that is both highly constrained AND proves to be correct and holds up over time. You can't make one happen just because you desire it. It's a very rare thing, and if it's not there, it's not there.
"As the pulsar experience has taught us, that is not good enough. It can be difficult to conceive up-front of possible ways nature can make artificial-looking signals."
Unfortunately, there isn't any other way to do it than the artificiality way, and the price we pay IS things like pulsars giving us false leads. Contrary to what Dembski et al claim, streams of information carried on radio signals have no gaurantee of being highly detectable: even stuff in binary still looks like a bunch of ones and zeros unless you know what to do with it. That's why SETI first searches for things unlike normal radio noise: for instance, signals that cross too much of the radio spectrum all at once. Only once we figure out that something is artificial against the background of normal radio signals can we try to see if there is a code to be cracked.
I'm not sure what the link was supposed to be about.
With aliens, we at least have the context of fairly bounded idea of what they could be like and how they would be, like us, bound by physical laws. Again, the "ID" is always coyly admitted to having to be supernatural in nature, again giving us nothing to work with.
"I am not sure what you mean by "context of the signals". Do you mean from outer space? I don't really see how that makes a difference. There are things you normally don't expect from outer space, but the same goes for DNA."
With SETI, we have are background of various radio signals that are known to be produced via natural processes. What SETI actually looks for (as opposed to "complex information" is artificiality: signals that appear outside of the normal background noises, frequency ranges and so on.
But with the claim of ID, the idea of a "background" breaks down, particularly in the case of anything biological. Suddenly everything is potentially ID, so what are we supposed to be distinguishing from what, exactly?
"This is assuming that we can both visit the space source and actually find something. We don't know this yet. The signal may be too far away to do anything other than identify the star. Or we could get something like the "WOW" signal that went away before further investigation could be done."
Again, the problem is that the idea of looking for aliens sending a radio signal is a particular assumption, at the very least, of particular capabilities and motivations of the senders. With ID, we have none of that: the ID could do or be like ANYTHING AT ALL.
"Exactly. This is why the content of the signal is at least as important as the carrier characteristics."
No, this is why there is no generalizeable test for complex information. That's why SETI searches for artificiality, not signals directly. It's only until we can put a context on something that we can even begin characterizing content.
And of course, there's the issue that messages that communicate things are rather different as signs of intelligence than are merely things that are complex.
The difference in the way in which the BB uses facts and which ID uses facts is important. The BB leverages tangible evidence to show specifics: it is WEDDED to a particular set of facts that are required for the BB to be true. The ID "explanation," on the other hand, doesn't actually describe or predict anything, it just comes up with ad hoc way to fit the data that it has no necessary connection to or allegiance to. No matter what the evidence is, ID is just as happy, and an ad hoc explanation just as easy. That's not the hallmark of good science.
Ha! Now this is awesome. These poor kids are going to be perfect demonstration of how ID just doesn't work as science. Because ID itself is consistent with any evidence, how are they going to design a test to isolate it? Any answer to any given problem will simply be ad hoc.
The YEC science fairs are even sillier, because they've already been parodied so expertly, and yet now the paraody is coming true. 10-year old Billie compared his uncle to a monkey and found that they are totally, like, different!
"Intelligent Design does not dictate a specific creator, year of creation, nor does it dismiss evolution."
Well, yes: at it's inception, creationists decided that aruging about those topics divided their forces, and so they'd lay them to side for the time being so that they could present a unified front against evolution. It's not like this was a secret or anything. Or, actually, it was, but it was one of the worst kept secrets ever.
And the fact that ID doesn't predict any specifics is its core WEAKNESS, not its strength. It doesn't say ANYTHING about ANYTHING other than suggesting that there was a mind somehow involved. Well, that's just not enough to make any sort of useful science, and so far whenever anyone has tried to use this rule of thumb, it's turned out that our instincts are terrible.
"Reasonable folks on the evolutionary side of this debate are coming out publicly and noting that their peers are the ones responding in a manner that undermines their credibility."
Actually, that's not exactly what the film argues. Olson basically thinks that scientists aren't very media savvy or charismatic. Which yeah, is true, but I'm not sure what the solution is. Real science just can only be dumbed down and Hollywoodized up a tiny bit before you've relaly abandoned some key foundations and requirements for understanding.
"From most of the responses here, I see an outright dismissal of the possibility of ID, because of "overwhelming proof"."
Actually, that's the not the major problem with ID. The major problem with ID is that it purports to be able to explain ANYTHING. In science, that's tantamount to not explaining anything.
"All I am suggesting is that the facts are and should remain open to reinterpretation. What about the concept of entropy and the Laws of Thermodynamics? Without outside influence (in their natural states), systems move from order to disorder."
See, this is the problem. You want us to be "opneminded" but then you go and state that we should consider a possibility that's based on an misunderstanding of what the 2nd Law actually says.
"Under Big Bang theory, we have a cosmic explosion that has gradually become more and more ordered while eons and eons have passed."
No, the opposite actually. If you mean thermodynamically, of course. The 2nd law isn't really against order per se: it's against perfect efficiency.
"Am I somehow "unscientific" for questioning Big Bang theory on this basis?"
Well, given that you are using a basic misunderstanding of a fundamental law, yes?
"My biggest problem is this: each side is quick to criticize the other with only their own camps' experts and literature in tow."
I think this is a case of once burned, twice shy. I can't tell you how many times Id "literature" has pointed me at a quote about some evidence or claim that, when I looked up the reference, turned out to say the EXACT OPPOSITE. Here's a recent example just from TWO DAYS AGO:
Wow, seems like the authors of the paper are saying they have evidence to support the idea that these basic bodyplans could never have evolved, right?!
"That is not really true. One can search for "intelligent" patterns in DNA/RNA similar to SETI looking for intelligent signals."
Not really. There are a number of things that make the SETI project work: a context of natural signals, a sense of what characteristics they are looking for, that simply don't have an analogy in DNA. The claims of ID go too far: they remove the idea of a natural context for comparison, and they remove all the possible characteristics that would allow us to pinpoint the work of a particular designer.
If you converted DNA into quaternary code and then broadcast the genome of a snail, I very much doubt that anyone would recognize it as intelligent unless they recognized exactly what it was.
Actually, all is not quite lost in tracing back our origins. Part of the new toolkit we have now is in using the genes of modern creaturs to triangulate back in time to see what a really early lifeform would have been like. Interestingly, there is a real question as to where viruses fit it. Some seem like recent developments, and others seems like they could be the remnants of the hypothesized "RNA world."
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the one effect the study DID find statistical relevance for was that for the group that was told that they were being prayed for, they did worse than normal. Which we might suspect could be because those people concluded "geez, things must be really bad if they have to pray for me!"
As someone observed upon seeing all the crutches cast away by people supposedly healed at Lourdes: "What, no wooden legs?"
So interesting that it was made into a movie. Unfortunately, I find the skeptics far more credible on this one.
Just a note. While the effect of additional people praying certainly could be thought of as a factor, the groups were randomly assigned. That means we would not expect either group to have a different balance of people who might have others praying for them or not. Random assignment helps control for those sorts of otherwise uncontrolable factors.
The problem is that it wasn't the non-believers who commissioned this study: it was the believers. All the criticisms you and others have leveled at the study were dead on, and in fact the authors of the study basically discounted their lack of results using the same rationale.
But that only begs the question: why spend 2mil on such a study in the first place if you already have a list of reasons ready to go that completely negate any results that you get?
Atheism can't sensibly be blamed for anything, because it's not an ideology in itself: it's an exclusionary category. Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest may not have been believers, but they did evil because of an ideology they held and a love of power, not because they weren't believers. By the same token, of course, Christians can't be held to blame for what someone who believes a different sort of Christianity does. Christianity has evolved a great deal over the years, and mostly all to its credit.
One of the most startling changes has been with anti-Semitism. While it would be foolish to pretend that it's gone, for the first time in millenia, it's no longer mainstream acceptable anymore in any major Christian sect and in most Western societies. Centuries ago, Martin Luther could publish a tract called "On the Jews and Their Lies" and be generally well regarded for it, despite the fact that it basically outlined and advocated everything that Hitler carried out (he cited it constantly). Nowadays, such views are anathema to almost every Christian on the planet. Blaming modern Christians for things like the Inquisition is _almost_ as silly and backwards as blaming atheists for Stalin.
I've generally found just from anecdotal experience that religious belief doesn't seem to do much of anything for making death any easier. Whether you believe in heaven or not intellectually, you still suffer the loss of a person, and it still hurts just as much. Religious people don't seem to understand this very well, but atheists pretty much do and experience EVERYTHING the same darn way as everyone else. Ones metaphysics are all well and good, but the bottom line is that we all go out the business of living like human beings, regardless of what we believe or don't believe.
I don't think most people caught this humor. 5% is generally the range of error on most studies.
Most of the prayer studies that have shown an effect turned out to be because after the study was over, the interested parties culled over the results looking for any differences between the control and experimental groups, picking out the differences and touting them, ignoring the data that pointed the other direction, and all of it within the error of the study. This sort of after the fact cherry-picking is akin to shooting the side of a barn and then drawing a target around the places where there are bullet holes.
"Actually, no, it doesn't prove that. If DNA determines what the animal will look like and how its body functions, then similar animals will have similar DNA, whether they are in any way related or not."
With DNA, there are billion ways to get the same result. There is no need for similar creatures to have similar DNA unless they recently got it from a common source, especially given that DNA, especially the non-coding sections, tends to "drift" all over the place naturally. The amount of this neutral drift implies the relative time of this common ancestry, just as we use copying errors in several copies of an ancient text to figure out which was copied from which.
"As for being able to draw family trees, you can take random strings and draw a "family tree" for them by comparing them and their differences to each other. With long enough strings, there's bound to be similar sequences, especially since DNA only has 4 possible "letters". These kind of diagrams can't be used to prove evolution, since they assume evolution as one of their prerequisites."
Unfortunately, the situation and comparisons are much more complicated than that. First of all, we're dealing with both the morphological AND the genetic trees, which can be determined indepedently of each other. The real magic comes when we compare the two... and find that they agree to an accuracy of 38 decimal places and counting. But that's not even the end of the story. The tree also has to then fit with all the fossil evidence (it does) in terms of time and space. And it has to fit with geology: Australian marsupials have to be different enough from South American ones in a way that reflects the last time they could have had any interrelation geographically frmo what we know of the movement of the continents. And they are. And THAT isn't even the end of the story... it goes on and on with this or that way of testing it against some piece of physical evidence to see if it all fits together.
Even if each and every line of indepedent evidence were wrong, how can you account for the fact that they all give basically the same answers? Error is not coordinated: it's random. Only truth provides coordination and convergence for evidence (from a single fact flows all sorts of different circumstances, all of which match back to that fact if they are all related to it).
None of this "assumes evolution" as a prerequisite. It concludes evolution because that's the only process that fits this extremely detailed pattern of constraints on what sort of evidence we'll find about this or that.
It isn't even DNA that can contain vast differences without any functional changes. It's the proteins themselves. Many proteins have only a few amino acid sequences which actually control their overall shape, which is what makes them "work." The rest of the animo acid seuqences can vary quite a lot without causing any change in shape. In fact, proteins can actually evolve dual roles this way: a previously unimportant part changes so that it affects the shape in some way... but without altering the part of the original shape that did something: thus allowing the protein to do something new without losing its ability to play its original role. Proteins, like DNA, can be quite flexible.
Indeed, many of the key proteins in our bodies are very obviously slightly altered versions of each other (which usually happens via duplication, with the second copy not affecting anything until it changes slightly, allowing there to be both the original protein AND a simmilar but slightly different one available to play a new function)
You missed an option:
4. "Soft tissue" is a bit of a misnomer. As you noted, this stuff wasn't juicy, and it wasn't really even the original tissue preserved. It was fossilized impressions of tissue that allowed to learn about it's structure. It wasn't the cells themselves. It was remnants of their materials and structures. Without all the journalistic blaring of images of Jurrasic park, the "soft tissue" could be less misleadingly called "impressions and chemical components of soft tissue allowing scientists to infer what it was like"
The problem is that even the evolution of dogs took a lot longer than 6000 years (most figures put it starting at around 12,000 years). And, of course, every piece of physical evidence speaks to an old earth, no global flood, and a billion year process of evolutionary change in life on earth.
The really important thing to note is that toy poodles are morphologically much more different from wolves than humans are to chimps. If you accept that NS can account for dog evolution, then it becomes pretty hard to discount the evolution of man or anything else. The morphological changes in dogs are just too radical to imagine away, and the morphological differences between chimps and people are comparatively rather tiny when you sit down and actually look at the traits (humans differ mostly in brain size, hip balancing, and that little indent in the top of your mouth). And before you come back with "but they are still dogs," that's not really any mystery either. Large scale and recent interbreeding of dogs with wolves and other dogs has kept them genetically compatible even as their traits have varied widely. Genetic incompatibility and morphological variation are not linked: many genetically incompatible speices are so similar that a layperson could never tell the two apart (for instance, abalone's speciate at an alarming rate, but their genetical compatibility is about the only thing that's changing on that scale)
It's important to recognize exactly what went on with those forgeries though. They passed through peer review because the submitted methodologies and the basic math and so forth were all perfectly sound, and described things that science knows to be both possible and in fact to work the way described (i.e. we know cloning can be done, we're just not sure exactly how best to make it work). The problem was that the researchers lied about the results and the experiments. It's very hard to catch that sort of thing on the pre-publication review: it's the sort of lie that's caught once the article is published, read widely, and then other people try to duplicate the results or work through the experiments.
"Peer-review" is actually a much larger process than the initial review process before publication. Publication is really the beginning of a lot of the process, not the end. Pre-publication review is excellent at weeding out sloppy methodology, suggesting uncontrolled variables, making methodological critiques. But catching outright fraud often takes a wider audience to suss out.
As with all things science, the patience and cautionary skepticism is there, it just works much slower and metholdically than journalistic headlines can be cranked out.
"One can test versions of ID without any assumption of a diety."
Technically, sure. But in practice, to do the sorts of things necessary to explain life on earth, something outside the constraints of physical testible reality as we know them would be needed. Again, it isn't a problem with dieties per se. Just one of too MUCH explanatory power.
"Again, the whole thing may be very improbable, but that alone does not make it non-science. Exploration makes no guarentees of finds."
Nope, not if the ID has no constraints to speak of. A theory which could predict ANYTHING, predicts nothing.
That's the whole problem with the ID movement: they want to compete as a theory, but they don't want to get specific enough so that any given suggestion could be disproven. And this is something that they learned through experience too. Not just in the failure of Creationist explanations to stand up, but even in Behe's work. Behe, for instance, has to explain how the IC structures got where they are, and why there is no genetic evidence of their insertion. One of his suggestions was a protocell that contained ALL the IC structures that would ever be needed, unexpressed. Unfortunately, not only is there no evidence of that ever existing i nany genome, the very idea of unexpressed information being preserved, let alone for billions of years, is contrary to everything we know about how genes change over time due to mutation. So now Behe avoids that sort of attempt to describe anything in a positive, testible sense, and presents tests of evolutionary mechanisms as if they were tests of ID.
It's hard to come up with a theory that is both highly constrained AND proves to be correct and holds up over time. You can't make one happen just because you desire it. It's a very rare thing, and if it's not there, it's not there.
That depends: are you HOT?
"As the pulsar experience has taught us, that is not good enough. It can be difficult to conceive up-front of possible ways nature can make artificial-looking signals."
Unfortunately, there isn't any other way to do it than the artificiality way, and the price we pay IS things like pulsars giving us false leads. Contrary to what Dembski et al claim, streams of information carried on radio signals have no gaurantee of being highly detectable: even stuff in binary still looks like a bunch of ones and zeros unless you know what to do with it. That's why SETI first searches for things unlike normal radio noise: for instance, signals that cross too much of the radio spectrum all at once. Only once we figure out that something is artificial against the background of normal radio signals can we try to see if there is a code to be cracked.
I'm not sure what the link was supposed to be about.
With aliens, we at least have the context of fairly bounded idea of what they could be like and how they would be, like us, bound by physical laws. Again, the "ID" is always coyly admitted to having to be supernatural in nature, again giving us nothing to work with.
"I am not sure what you mean by "context of the signals". Do you mean from outer space? I don't really see how that makes a difference. There are things you normally don't expect from outer space, but the same goes for DNA."
With SETI, we have are background of various radio signals that are known to be produced via natural processes. What SETI actually looks for (as opposed to "complex information" is artificiality: signals that appear outside of the normal background noises, frequency ranges and so on.
But with the claim of ID, the idea of a "background" breaks down, particularly in the case of anything biological. Suddenly everything is potentially ID, so what are we supposed to be distinguishing from what, exactly?
"This is assuming that we can both visit the space source and actually find something. We don't know this yet. The signal may be too far away to do anything other than identify the star. Or we could get something like the "WOW" signal that went away before further investigation could be done."
Again, the problem is that the idea of looking for aliens sending a radio signal is a particular assumption, at the very least, of particular capabilities and motivations of the senders. With ID, we have none of that: the ID could do or be like ANYTHING AT ALL.
"Exactly. This is why the content of the signal is at least as important as the carrier characteristics."
No, this is why there is no generalizeable test for complex information. That's why SETI searches for artificiality, not signals directly. It's only until we can put a context on something that we can even begin characterizing content.
And of course, there's the issue that messages that communicate things are rather different as signs of intelligence than are merely things that are complex.
You forgot:
"5. Pray your exhibit will witness to non-Christian visitors. "
http://www.tccsa.tc/adventure/fair.html
The difference in the way in which the BB uses facts and which ID uses facts is important. The BB leverages tangible evidence to show specifics: it is WEDDED to a particular set of facts that are required for the BB to be true. The ID "explanation," on the other hand, doesn't actually describe or predict anything, it just comes up with ad hoc way to fit the data that it has no necessary connection to or allegiance to. No matter what the evidence is, ID is just as happy, and an ad hoc explanation just as easy. That's not the hallmark of good science.
Ha! Now this is awesome. These poor kids are going to be perfect demonstration of how ID just doesn't work as science. Because ID itself is consistent with any evidence, how are they going to design a test to isolate it? Any answer to any given problem will simply be ad hoc.
The YEC science fairs are even sillier, because they've already been parodied so expertly, and yet now the paraody is coming true. 10-year old Billie compared his uncle to a monkey and found that they are totally, like, different!
"Intelligent Design does not dictate a specific creator, year of creation, nor does it dismiss evolution."
Well, yes: at it's inception, creationists decided that aruging about those topics divided their forces, and so they'd lay them to side for the time being so that they could present a unified front against evolution. It's not like this was a secret or anything. Or, actually, it was, but it was one of the worst kept secrets ever.
And the fact that ID doesn't predict any specifics is its core WEAKNESS, not its strength. It doesn't say ANYTHING about ANYTHING other than suggesting that there was a mind somehow involved. Well, that's just not enough to make any sort of useful science, and so far whenever anyone has tried to use this rule of thumb, it's turned out that our instincts are terrible.
"Reasonable folks on the evolutionary side of this debate are coming out publicly and noting that their peers are the ones responding in a manner that undermines their credibility."
Actually, that's not exactly what the film argues. Olson basically thinks that scientists aren't very media savvy or charismatic. Which yeah, is true, but I'm not sure what the solution is. Real science just can only be dumbed down and Hollywoodized up a tiny bit before you've relaly abandoned some key foundations and requirements for understanding.
"From most of the responses here, I see an outright dismissal of the possibility of ID, because of "overwhelming proof"."
Actually, that's the not the major problem with ID. The major problem with ID is that it purports to be able to explain ANYTHING. In science, that's tantamount to not explaining anything.
"All I am suggesting is that the facts are and should remain open to reinterpretation. What about the concept of entropy and the Laws of Thermodynamics? Without outside influence (in their natural states), systems move from order to disorder."
See, this is the problem. You want us to be "opneminded" but then you go and state that we should consider a possibility that's based on an misunderstanding of what the 2nd Law actually says.
"Under Big Bang theory, we have a cosmic explosion that has gradually become more and more ordered while eons and eons have passed."
No, the opposite actually. If you mean thermodynamically, of course. The 2nd law isn't really against order per se: it's against perfect efficiency.
"Am I somehow "unscientific" for questioning Big Bang theory on this basis?"
Well, given that you are using a basic misunderstanding of a fundamental law, yes?
"My biggest problem is this: each side is quick to criticize the other with only their own camps' experts and literature in tow."
_ classic_neodarw.html
t ionism/002445.html
I think this is a case of once burned, twice shy. I can't tell you how many times Id "literature" has pointed me at a quote about some evidence or claim that, when I looked up the reference, turned out to say the EXACT OPPOSITE. Here's a recent example just from TWO DAYS AGO:
http://www.idthefuture.com/2006/02/davidson_erwin
Wow, seems like the authors of the paper are saying they have evidence to support the idea that these basic bodyplans could never have evolved, right?!
Well, actually, no:
http://www.steveverdon.com/archives/evolutioncrea
"That is not really true. One can search for "intelligent" patterns in DNA/RNA similar to SETI looking for intelligent signals."
Not really. There are a number of things that make the SETI project work: a context of natural signals, a sense of what characteristics they are looking for, that simply don't have an analogy in DNA. The claims of ID go too far: they remove the idea of a natural context for comparison, and they remove all the possible characteristics that would allow us to pinpoint the work of a particular designer.
If you converted DNA into quaternary code and then broadcast the genome of a snail, I very much doubt that anyone would recognize it as intelligent unless they recognized exactly what it was.
Actually, all is not quite lost in tracing back our origins. Part of the new toolkit we have now is in using the genes of modern creaturs to triangulate back in time to see what a really early lifeform would have been like. Interestingly, there is a real question as to where viruses fit it. Some seem like recent developments, and others seems like they could be the remnants of the hypothesized "RNA world."