Sure, but that's not the same thing as millions of people still keepig their NES systems around to play it. The fact that Wii offers it as a nostalgia thing is not exactly the same deal.
Hey, it was programmed by ONE GUY in FIVE WEEKS, which was a huge rush job by the standards of those days. Compare that to most of the other Atari games, and it's really not any worse than most.
I have to disagree on the last part. I've actually by coincidence been playing through it recently, and I don't think it holds up all that well: the controls and concept were neat for its day, but compared to modern versions the controls are clunky and the world sort of shallow: way way too much of the game feels I'm playing through busywork to get to the good stuff. It also doesn't help that the game is so dark: I have the brightness turned up all the way on my tv, and I still can barely see anything at night or in some of the more annoying temples.
I agree. Obviously the tech was not as good, but the concept and execution of that Zelda was, I thought, cleaner and more fun: it holds up on replay in ways that Ocarina doesn't: far too much of Ocarina is just plain frustrating and shallow.
Your alternatives are just irrelevant. We don't have evidence of God or any other pet claim you want to make in addition to what the evidence shows. So we just stick with the evidence and leave it at that. You can believe that God is still involved behind it all in some way, but there's nothing compelling or even really all the interesting about it (it doesn't really even explain anything).
I do like you explanation that the Biblical God is such a dick because I wouldn't marry him though. I AM dead sexy.
I'm not sure how someone ELSE creating me for a purpose gives MY life meaning though. If your parents had you because they wanted a tax break, does that mean that your purpose in life is to provide them with a tax writeoff?
To be fair, there is a bit of confusion here. The "fish" we evolved from and the "fish" we know today are two very different things (and in fact, there is no real taxonomic classification that both includes all modern fish but doesn't include things like birds and mammals and so on), and modern fish as just as much "changed" and diversified from our common ancestors as we are.
I think you also underestimate how conservative evolution is: it's stuck with working with what it's got. The fact that only a few tetrapods have done away with the whole four-limb thing is not a good reason to think that it's definitely the superiority of tetrapodness: mayeb it's just really hard to find a way out of the evolutionary gravity sink that is the basic body design. Simply tossing up an extra arm or two via mutation isn't good enough: there's no guarantee that such macromutations will be functional or useful, and indeed our entire skeletal structure and all sorts of other elements are based on the expectation of 4 limbs: changing that requires some gradual path out to something else, and those paths may be very limited and few (which is why most of the major cases, snakes, some amphibians, and whales, all seem related to living in water: a world without "gravity" allows a lot of the basic design constraints a lot more freedom)
Your particular theory of ID isn't wrong or bad, but as I think you understand the main issue is that it isn't very scientific or compelling. "You can't prove that God didn't arrange my next poker hand" is a true statement, but only because it is trivial. Anyone could make the same claim about any pet theory about anything. If you believe it, great, but you probably believe it for some other reason than that it's a convincing argument for belief, because it isn't.
Come on, the original post was "fags are meant to die with never reproducing." What sense do you think "meant" was ACTUALLY being used in that case? Aren't the defenses of this statement as "essentially true" getting a little elaborately silly?
If the sense is evolution, then there isn't a coherent sense of "meant" at all, because there is no "meant" in evolution, just past advantage in past environments.
Still doesn't follow. Lots of things may be retained because they prove advantageous evolutionarily. That doesn't mean they are "meant" for anything or restricted from then on.
Uh, yes because he said fag instead of homosexual. And no, it's not essentially true. Homosexuals aren't "meant" not to reproduce. They just currently don't/can't do so directly with their partners.
You missed the part about how this was the last big hurdle for implanting a man-sequenced code into a cell. Which is what they are going to do next. So, yes, this IS a big feat in the field of creating synthetic life: according to them, it's pretty much the last piece of the puzzle prior to actually doing it.
Speigelman's monster was already pretty damn small: the smallest reproducing/evolving version had, what, like 48 base pairs TOTAL or something? True, it needed to live in an environment where it's enzyme and raw materials already existed, but still, I don't see an "organism" getting much smaller than THAT.
I agree that ID really doesn't have much to lose by this, but certainly a lot of the theological and philosophical ideas that undergird creationism in general do. For starters, it's pretty much the final death-knell to the idea of vitalism or that there's something special about "life" outside of having the right physical and chemical components.
In fact that latter idea is pretty critical to a lot of the less nuanced creationist arguments against a natural origin of life: there have been plenty of claims that "scientists can't even create a cell, how could it have happened in nature." Well, says science, shrug, okay, I guess we'll get on that.
"No, neither TFA or "everyone else" (whatever that is supposed to mean) limited the scope of discussion to Behe et al. None of your notion of the "specific players" are even -mentioned- in the article. That was your personal, intentional misstatement and misdirection of the discussion."
Good grief. The article is about not having ID in schools. What the heck do you think they are talking about? Intelligent Design is the name of a particular movement in vogue right now that encompasses all the players I and everyone else in this thread but yourself is talking about. You are being deliberately obtuse just so you can play the misunderstood martyr. But it isn't fooling anyone.
I and everyone here specified who we were talking about a criticizing upfront, and indeed it is the topic of the thread (did you forget that???). Intelligent Design is a very specific movement with very specific players. Ideas about design in general are a far broader topic: no one here except you has pretended that anyone was speaking of Aristotle when saying that ID shouldn't be taught as science in schools.
You don't have a field of study: refining ideas about biological complexity is not even close to the same thing as specifying the means, intentions, or distinctive elements of a hypothetical designer, which is precisely what leaves ID as a form of magic rather than a form of explanation. Other studies of design, like anthropology, are careful and clear about figuring out and nailing down the sorts of beings doing the design, what's distinctive about their designs, what sort of methods they used and what sort of distinctive marks and results those methods left, and so on. Point me at an ID proponent who does ANYTHING even approaching that and maybe you'd have a point.
"No, "outside operation of known natural law" is not synonymous with "magic". It's called "events which must be accounted for by a model subject to refinement", like -all of the history of science-."
It's synonymous to magic because ID proponents have not offered any model at all or provided any reason to think that they wish to refine anything. Any inquiry as to what the designers distinctive characteristics are are ridiculed as "theology" (another giveaway).
"And, of course, Behe doesn't represent all of ID."
Who does, exactly? What I am saying accurately characterizes the Discovery Institute and virtually all of its fellows, Dembski, Johnson, etc. I would say that pretty much is everyone that is well known that has any connection to the current movement, which suggests that I am intellectual honest, and you are confused.
Laws are often components of theories. For instance "Dolo's Law" is a part of evolutionary theory, just like Newtown's Laws of gravity are part of his Theory of gravity. Laws are statements of, generally, observed regularities or statistical observations that appear to be generalized. Theories are generally bodies of explanation that take things like facts and laws in order to explain some phenomenon more comprehensively.
Most of the major ID proponents have basically admitted (and Behe under oath) that the sorts of things that their theory would require are pretty much in the realm of magic: i.e. outside any operation of known natural law. Of course, it doesn't help that ID as a movement continually frames everything in terms of a _religious_ culture war and sets itself against "materialism."
So your case is pretty darn thin. Yes, you personally can go the Raelian route with ID if you wish, but that just opens up further cans of worms, and it has jackall to do with the actual historical push of ID and the sorts of claims it makes (most of which are the exact same claims made by creationists with the word "God" removed).
Another example to add to yours: we call "Number Theory" a "theory" even though it is deductively proven from its axioms, which is about as certain and proven as anything CAN be. And still we call it a "theory."
It's ok, you can be both and atheist and an agnostic.:) In fact MOST declared atheists are also agnostics in my experience (while agnostics are either theists or atheists without such a pattern... though many of them seem to labor under the delusion that they can be "just" agnostics, as if there were some third option between believing or not believing in god).
"many which fall under metaphysics/religion (e.g. there is a god called survival of the fittest that drives evolution, science is good, good is good, you are right, this is important for humanity, all religions are false)."
Funny, I don't recall any of that in Origin or any major work on evolution since Origin. These ideas you speak of are not found in any science textbook I've ever encountered. Seems like you have a problem with making shit up. That's something you might want to have checked out.
Secondly, your reasoning here and from the dude the linked blog (I'm scared for that baby) is pretty crummy. We've heard the "if evolution is true, then we should live like animals" line plenty, thanks, and it's just plain silly, frankly. Is isn't ought, and a caricature of both what biology describes and how that relates to morality just won't do, sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but that's not the same thing as millions of people still keepig their NES systems around to play it. The fact that Wii offers it as a nostalgia thing is not exactly the same deal.
Hey, it was programmed by ONE GUY in FIVE WEEKS, which was a huge rush job by the standards of those days. Compare that to most of the other Atari games, and it's really not any worse than most.
I have to disagree on the last part. I've actually by coincidence been playing through it recently, and I don't think it holds up all that well: the controls and concept were neat for its day, but compared to modern versions the controls are clunky and the world sort of shallow: way way too much of the game feels I'm playing through busywork to get to the good stuff. It also doesn't help that the game is so dark: I have the brightness turned up all the way on my tv, and I still can barely see anything at night or in some of the more annoying temples.
I agree. Obviously the tech was not as good, but the concept and execution of that Zelda was, I thought, cleaner and more fun: it holds up on replay in ways that Ocarina doesn't: far too much of Ocarina is just plain frustrating and shallow.
Ok, so that's one then. 999,999 people to go just to get to even a million. :)
Your alternatives are just irrelevant. We don't have evidence of God or any other pet claim you want to make in addition to what the evidence shows. So we just stick with the evidence and leave it at that. You can believe that God is still involved behind it all in some way, but there's nothing compelling or even really all the interesting about it (it doesn't really even explain anything).
I do like you explanation that the Biblical God is such a dick because I wouldn't marry him though. I AM dead sexy.
I'm not sure how someone ELSE creating me for a purpose gives MY life meaning though. If your parents had you because they wanted a tax break, does that mean that your purpose in life is to provide them with a tax writeoff?
omg, retcon.
To be fair, there is a bit of confusion here. The "fish" we evolved from and the "fish" we know today are two very different things (and in fact, there is no real taxonomic classification that both includes all modern fish but doesn't include things like birds and mammals and so on), and modern fish as just as much "changed" and diversified from our common ancestors as we are.
I think you also underestimate how conservative evolution is: it's stuck with working with what it's got. The fact that only a few tetrapods have done away with the whole four-limb thing is not a good reason to think that it's definitely the superiority of tetrapodness: mayeb it's just really hard to find a way out of the evolutionary gravity sink that is the basic body design. Simply tossing up an extra arm or two via mutation isn't good enough: there's no guarantee that such macromutations will be functional or useful, and indeed our entire skeletal structure and all sorts of other elements are based on the expectation of 4 limbs: changing that requires some gradual path out to something else, and those paths may be very limited and few (which is why most of the major cases, snakes, some amphibians, and whales, all seem related to living in water: a world without "gravity" allows a lot of the basic design constraints a lot more freedom)
Your particular theory of ID isn't wrong or bad, but as I think you understand the main issue is that it isn't very scientific or compelling. "You can't prove that God didn't arrange my next poker hand" is a true statement, but only because it is trivial. Anyone could make the same claim about any pet theory about anything. If you believe it, great, but you probably believe it for some other reason than that it's a convincing argument for belief, because it isn't.
Windmills do not work that way!!!!!
-Morbo
Come on, the original post was "fags are meant to die with never reproducing." What sense do you think "meant" was ACTUALLY being used in that case? Aren't the defenses of this statement as "essentially true" getting a little elaborately silly?
If the sense is evolution, then there isn't a coherent sense of "meant" at all, because there is no "meant" in evolution, just past advantage in past environments.
Still doesn't follow. Lots of things may be retained because they prove advantageous evolutionarily. That doesn't mean they are "meant" for anything or restricted from then on.
Uh, yes because he said fag instead of homosexual. And no, it's not essentially true. Homosexuals aren't "meant" not to reproduce. They just currently don't/can't do so directly with their partners.
You missed the part about how this was the last big hurdle for implanting a man-sequenced code into a cell. Which is what they are going to do next. So, yes, this IS a big feat in the field of creating synthetic life: according to them, it's pretty much the last piece of the puzzle prior to actually doing it.
Speigelman's monster was already pretty damn small: the smallest reproducing/evolving version had, what, like 48 base pairs TOTAL or something? True, it needed to live in an environment where it's enzyme and raw materials already existed, but still, I don't see an "organism" getting much smaller than THAT.
I agree that ID really doesn't have much to lose by this, but certainly a lot of the theological and philosophical ideas that undergird creationism in general do. For starters, it's pretty much the final death-knell to the idea of vitalism or that there's something special about "life" outside of having the right physical and chemical components.
In fact that latter idea is pretty critical to a lot of the less nuanced creationist arguments against a natural origin of life: there have been plenty of claims that "scientists can't even create a cell, how could it have happened in nature." Well, says science, shrug, okay, I guess we'll get on that.
"No, neither TFA or "everyone else" (whatever that is supposed to mean) limited the scope of discussion to Behe et al. None of your notion of the "specific players" are even -mentioned- in the article. That was your personal, intentional misstatement and misdirection of the discussion."
Good grief. The article is about not having ID in schools. What the heck do you think they are talking about? Intelligent Design is the name of a particular movement in vogue right now that encompasses all the players I and everyone else in this thread but yourself is talking about. You are being deliberately obtuse just so you can play the misunderstood martyr. But it isn't fooling anyone.
I and everyone here specified who we were talking about a criticizing upfront, and indeed it is the topic of the thread (did you forget that???). Intelligent Design is a very specific movement with very specific players. Ideas about design in general are a far broader topic: no one here except you has pretended that anyone was speaking of Aristotle when saying that ID shouldn't be taught as science in schools.
You don't have a field of study: refining ideas about biological complexity is not even close to the same thing as specifying the means, intentions, or distinctive elements of a hypothetical designer, which is precisely what leaves ID as a form of magic rather than a form of explanation. Other studies of design, like anthropology, are careful and clear about figuring out and nailing down the sorts of beings doing the design, what's distinctive about their designs, what sort of methods they used and what sort of distinctive marks and results those methods left, and so on. Point me at an ID proponent who does ANYTHING even approaching that and maybe you'd have a point.
"No, "outside operation of known natural law" is not synonymous with "magic". It's called "events which must be accounted for by a model subject to refinement", like -all of the history of science-."
It's synonymous to magic because ID proponents have not offered any model at all or provided any reason to think that they wish to refine anything. Any inquiry as to what the designers distinctive characteristics are are ridiculed as "theology" (another giveaway).
"And, of course, Behe doesn't represent all of ID."
Who does, exactly? What I am saying accurately characterizes the Discovery Institute and virtually all of its fellows, Dembski, Johnson, etc. I would say that pretty much is everyone that is well known that has any connection to the current movement, which suggests that I am intellectual honest, and you are confused.
"fun to bring up around people who have never heard it just to get their reaction"
i.e., the definition of trolling.
Laws are often components of theories. For instance "Dolo's Law" is a part of evolutionary theory, just like Newtown's Laws of gravity are part of his Theory of gravity. Laws are statements of, generally, observed regularities or statistical observations that appear to be generalized. Theories are generally bodies of explanation that take things like facts and laws in order to explain some phenomenon more comprehensively.
Most of the major ID proponents have basically admitted (and Behe under oath) that the sorts of things that their theory would require are pretty much in the realm of magic: i.e. outside any operation of known natural law. Of course, it doesn't help that ID as a movement continually frames everything in terms of a _religious_ culture war and sets itself against "materialism."
So your case is pretty darn thin. Yes, you personally can go the Raelian route with ID if you wish, but that just opens up further cans of worms, and it has jackall to do with the actual historical push of ID and the sorts of claims it makes (most of which are the exact same claims made by creationists with the word "God" removed).
Another example to add to yours: we call "Number Theory" a "theory" even though it is deductively proven from its axioms, which is about as certain and proven as anything CAN be. And still we call it a "theory."
It's ok, you can be both and atheist and an agnostic. :) In fact MOST declared atheists are also agnostics in my experience (while agnostics are either theists or atheists without such a pattern... though many of them seem to labor under the delusion that they can be "just" agnostics, as if there were some third option between believing or not believing in god).
"many which fall under metaphysics/religion (e.g. there is a god called survival of the fittest that drives evolution, science is good, good is good, you are right, this is important for humanity, all religions are false)."
Funny, I don't recall any of that in Origin or any major work on evolution since Origin. These ideas you speak of are not found in any science textbook I've ever encountered. Seems like you have a problem with making shit up. That's something you might want to have checked out.
Secondly, your reasoning here and from the dude the linked blog (I'm scared for that baby) is pretty crummy. We've heard the "if evolution is true, then we should live like animals" line plenty, thanks, and it's just plain silly, frankly. Is isn't ought, and a caricature of both what biology describes and how that relates to morality just won't do, sorry.