You seem unable to view the world from any point of view except your own limited one. Let me fix things again for you.
Fail again. And why do you replace the ancient egyptian? Do you have something against them?
I see no reason to assume any point of view describes reality. The fact that they may be internally self consistent is a claim all the modern ones make, thus I place them on the same level.
That's easy, you test, and look at what works. Prayer demonstrably doesn't work. Science does. That makes it quite clear which is closer to the truth.
You know that what you said has nothing in common with the idea of God and spirituality, and also nothing to do with the 'debate' that we're discussing? This is pretty much what the science dude said too, but that was not the subject matter of the discussion, and you're very, very, very offtopic.
It does have a lot to do with morality, which you mentioned in your first post ("things like morality and purpose of life"). When people stop attempting to make laws to regulate behavior according to religion, then the idea of non-conflict will be a bit more believeable.
My position is that morality is within the realm of science and that religion is unnecessary for moral matters. In fact much science has been done on morality. There's your conflict.
This is true, what is your point? I never specified which religion was correct or if I knew which one was. I have an opinion, sure but I don't claim to be able to prove it.
Precisely that, that religion is unrelated to reality.
A Christian, Buddhist and ancient Egyptian looking at a tree would agree on the number of apples hanging from it, but when they look at the universe they come up with completely different answers, which suggests that they're not really describing reality.
Religion is man's attempt to answer that question, i.e. why am I here? Science can't address it. So either you go with total ignorance and avoiding the question, or you engage in religion (or call it philosophy or whatever floats your boat, the name can change, what you are doing doesn't - it is an important question that science can't directly address as it deals with aspects of the universe and existence that exist outside the physical universe, though how interconnected the two are has a lot of room for debate).
The correct answer in that case is that while there's no evidence, the question is not answerable.
Ask three different physicists how the universe came into existence (the mechanism) and you can get three different answers. So? Somebody is more or less right, that's all it means.
Actually there's a lot of agreement on that.
If scientists disagreed as much as religious people, it wouldn't mean "somebody is more or less right", it would mean nobody knows what they're talking about.
The religious guys are the ones that created science, for heavens' sake. Look at the history of science, and you'll see WHO actually contributed to science.
So? Surgery got started by barbers. Fortunately we moved on since then, and good riddance.
There is no real contradiction between the faith/religion, as in the spiritual aspects of life (things like morality and purpose of life) and science, that works in the material aspects of life. Nobody cries that psychology has nothing scientific about it.
Of course there is. Take for instance homosexuality, it's something that falls squarely within both realms.
On the scientific side you have research that indicates it's quite common through the animal kingdom (which includes a lot of weird practices, like duck necrophilia, and male insects raping other males to fertilize females by proxy)
On the religious side, it's an "abomination" and "unnatural" (despite the above) because the bible says so.
Except religion doesn't contain an answer to that question, as it's not based on anything related to reality.
Ask about the purpose of the universe to a Christian, Buddhist and ancient Egyptian, and you'll get three different answers to that question. Heck, even within a single religion they can't agree.
Upstart makes it very challenging to block system boot.
I needed to install new machines loading the installer from BOOTP. That went on as expected, until I ran into the issue of having to run a post-install script specifically on the first reboot, which must complete before the user is allowed to login, and upstart does everything possible to prevent me from blocking system boot.
At least, if there's a way to get it done, I didn't figure it out, and ended up hacking around it in a very ugly way.
Also I hate the very idea of it on a server. On a server I want simple and predictable, without any weird magic happening, and parallelism is entirely unnecessary.
First, this makes some setups a lot more annoying. The/bin and/lib dirs might be rather obscure these days, but the separation still comes ocassionally handy with strange disk layouts.
Second, since when do normal users need to care about the distinction? All those are in $PATH anyway, so it doesn't matter whether bash is in/bin or/usr/bin for most end user purposes.
Third, what's with the weird obsession with messing with what works? Ubuntu is annoying enough already with the upstart thing. I don't need more stuff like that. Please leave the base system the hell alone.
No reason anywhere to care about what you care about, but this is an example of how you can't seem to help equivocating someone's statements to what they are not.
One might indeed say this, and you can verify this by noting someone could make that statement. If you're unable to discern that I'm using a very qualified rendering of this for a wider context, I'm not sure how you communicate, but there it is. If you're going to (rather humorously) excerpt sections and demand I literally do that, I'll at minimum note what I actually said--literally.
I have no clue what you're talking about here, but thought I'd point out you seem to be replying to yourself here.
Ah, no? Now what?
I'm still unconvinced, and you're not making any progress there.
I have no need to present to you on-demand anything. I have stated what my view is, with what I felt is appropriate qualification. Go ahead and address the proposal before you, if you like. The minimum FSM for full emulation of a given entity, and the count of states needed.
It's not that you don't "need" to present anything, it's that you don't have anything that could be presented.
Like I said, the minimum FSM is an impossible problem because you can't deduce the algorithm from the data that it generated, therefore it doesn't work for the purpose you're saying. Unless you've managed to revolutionize the field of mathematics, in which case please go collect your Nobel prize.
This does not exist with reference to anything in reality whatsoever. An easy way to avoid addressing it by stipulating impossible criteria, but it's really nothing more than silly evasion.
But it's precisely what your position requires. Therefore, either you figure it out, or rephrase your position in some terms that don't involve complexity.
That I insist we remain open to future data, requires no data to assert. The argument is self-contained and has no such contingencies. Again, my argument is what it is, not what you'd prefer to make up that it is.
Except that you keep saying something about complexity, and are pushing one specific point, (and not "we should keep an open mind in general"), which implies you did measure something and on that basis decided that your argument has merit. So please go and present whatever you measured.
Should have expected this sort of evasion. No, it's not. You are saying "complexity" doesn't exist. "Exist" includes all contexts, including engineering.
Not in reality, no. Just like species don't exist either, they're just arbitrary labels we assign to things to make things easier for ourselves. In nature, there are no platonic forms. There's a continuum we try to subdivide into kingdoms and species, but which never fit reality 100%, because reality doesn't actually work like that.
We start from a neat classification of "animal" and "vegetal", and then it turns out that at some points it's unclear which is which, and new strange things like viruses and prions force us to rearrange our classification.
How is pointing this out relevant to the discussion of "complexity"? Wait... are you saying it's not complex? Speaking unrelated verbal constructions having nothing to do with the point at hand? Yes, you can go ahead and say you yourself consider this "less complex", and that is precisely why you chose it as an example, and that is why you yourself think such a statement can be validly asserted. It's transparent anyway.
I'm saying that your position requires an absolute measure of complexity, and we don't have one. Stonehenge went from complex to simple, to soon trivial. Therefore engineering difficulty is not a good example of complexity for your purpose.
And you say that while still refusing to explain what you mean by it.
You are arguing it is not too fast (for the available "modes of travel")--presciently with respect to all future cases. Intuitively, one might say that the immune system is "too complex"
On what grounds? Another assertion with nothing behind it. I don't care about your "intuitively". Where's the data?
(yes, I suggest you do give some credence to the validity of complexity as "real", because you yourself likely know this is a more appropriate example than, say, explaining having fingernails--I suspect it would be a challenge for you to discuss this for more than a few paragraphs without contradicting yourself as to recognizing that complexity "exists")
Again, on what grounds to you say that? I still have no clue what you mean by "complex".
In answer to that, one might counterargue that it isn't too complex given incremental changes--again plausible. We won't get any farther than this until genetics can provide what we actually require to resolve it--an enumeration of all the specific mutations required to produce the biological feature. Given that, we can approach the frequency of mutations anywhere in DNA as a matter of chemistry, and from there determine the expected frequency of all the required mutations for the result. Adding to this at least provisional estimates of population size and years at hand, we should be able to provide a fairly-specific probability--eventually.
So why aren't you trying to do it? Where's your attempt to do anything of the sort?
For somebody who likes to pontificate on science, you sure talk a lot with nothing backing it up. I want to see data. Tables of measurements, statistics, that kind of thing.
Then again it's obvious you don't have anything, because I'm sure you could point to something if you had it.
So, though we may at this point heuristically conclude different things, say, "too complex" on one side versus "not too complex" on the other, those are just general opinions until we have the means to quantify it.
Precisely. You have no argument until you come up with some data. Once you do, come back and try again.
What such a quantification would yield, I am not prepared to say, and I suspect no matter what the probability figure is, those predisposed against design will argue it isn't overly improbable, by such means as the Anthropic Principle. Nonetheless, such a calculation would be useful both with respect to the question of design and for science in general, and I see no legitimate reason to argue it should not be pursued based on one's own personal worldview bias.
Well, excellent! You're doing the claim here though, so it's up to you to do the work. I'll be waiting.
As for measurement of the complexity, though I am again not proposing to offer a definitive methodology for this domain (other than the Finite State Machine suggestion),
Please address some of my questions on that respect
I find it rather unreasonable to conclude there is -no- functional methodology to address "complexity" as something that exists.
Until you provide something more than empty talk, I'll continue assuming there isn't.
It simply isn't credible to say that, in fact, no engineering projects actually proceed, despite the evidence of the economy, because when the executives and investors ask "How complex will this be to do", the answer is inescapably "There's no such thing as complexity, so I can offer you no scope or cost projections to create this, invest accordingly". This notion flies in the face of basic reality.
No. Absolutely not. I'm interested in developing understanding, not complying with your irrelevant expectations. That's how science, as opposed to the various things you erroneously think science is, advances. With proposals that, at the point of proposal, lack even any tests, much less conclusive "proof". Conceptualization of a hypothesis -always- precedes a test, every single time, and often by decades, such as some attributes of Relativity, which were only testable 50 years after the theory was presened.
Oh yes, absolutely yes.
Look, if we were arguing about whether travelling from New York to Paris in 4 hours is "too fast" (substituting a "too fast" for the "too complex" argument), we'd have to agree on a whole bunch of stuff beforehand. Like, what exactly does it mean to travel from New York to Paris, what does "4 hours" mean, what is the speed of the known transport, and so on. Only with that you can begin to argue that me going from New York to Paris in 4 hours might be "too fast". We can't possibly have a meaningful argument if you only insist that it's too fast, but refuse to explain why or by what metric is it considered to be too fast.
So same here. Until you explain what complexity is, any discussion is meaningless, as without the explanation your claim has an enormous unexplained void in it which makes it effectively meaningless, and allows you to fill it with whatever you deem convenient.
That won't do. This cannot proceed until you explain precisely what complexity is, an exact observer-independent way of measuring it, and provide a good explanation of at what level complexity becomes excessive and why (perhaps by measuring the complexity of a lot of things and proving that it doesn't follow a normal distribution would be a start)
My objection, from the beginning, was and stems from your statement that you apparently know that design will not be a conclusion in the unknown future of science. I continue to maintain that you cannot, and am not claiming that I can "prove God did it".
My objection is that it still needs more evidence to make it even vaguely plausible.
There are other options you don't seem to be discussing for some reason. Like "It just happened despite the improbability", "there's a yet unknown mechanism that made it happen", "it got copied as-is from another source", and so on.
Yet you oddly concentrate specifically on design, despite design requiring a designer we have not the slightest shred of evidence of, despite having looked for other civilizations with SETI, and constantly looking at space with telescopes, for instance.
I'm not sure if I'm being unclear, or if my point is just so rock-simple on its basic level that you can't believe my point was actually what it was--but it is. I showed you a picture of fluorescent cats that were demonstrably designed, by virtue of being designed by genetic engineers.
Don't be silly. The argument is and always has been about the historic "origin of species", which covers a huge timeline that we are a tiny part of.
Sure, let's ignore say, the last 1000 years, it doesn't make a difference for the sake of argument.
I disagree with this notion, that it is merely a question of perception, or subjective evaluation, but I'm not really prepared at this point to offer an exhaustive counterargument. I believe such is quantifiable, by, for example, specifying the minimum Finite State Machine that could fully "emulate" the entity in question, and determining the number of State-Event transitions such a model requires. There are probably objections to this that could be made, though, so I'll leave it at that counterproposal without further analysis.
Don't you think you should figure that out first? How can you argue about complexity before even figuring out what it is?
And for that matter, I don't think the FSM is going to solve your problem. Say, how do you reduce fractal to a FSM? Do you have some algorihtm that can take any piece of data and somehow figure out the most efficient algorithm possible to generate it? Or do you judge by your best attempt to make a FSM to generate the image without using the formula for the Mandelbrot set, despite that the algorithm and initial data needed to make it is tiny in comparison?
What about other things, like say, pi? Is it complex because it never ends? Is then 1/3 complex? Or is it simple because it's the result of a division? Does the algorithm to calculate arbitrary digits of it change its complexity?
Finally, how are you going to apply this to genetics?
Seems plausible, but I still think we lack the development of genetics at this point to make a quantifiable analysis of which transitions are the best candidates for strong argument for specific design.
Then on what basis do you suggest ID?
Again, I am not fundamentally opposed to the notion of design occurring only at a "higher-order" of design of the process of evolution to ultimately produce specific results, or design of the properties of physics from which evolution emerges--but this is more of a philosophical stance than a specific scientific question, and it is the specific science level that I am concerned about being damaged by dismissing some viable possibilities a-priori.
I dismiss it on the basis that you've yet to provide a good reason to even propose ID as a possibility. Nothing in the record that conflicts with evolution, no coherent definition of what is this complexity you keep talking about, and now you even admit that you can't figure out what kind of characteristic would be a strong candidate for ID.
"Proof" has nothing to do with what "evidence" is, or what "science" is. I don't know to put your inappropriate expectations for the domain under discussion, and escalation of my original statement to what it was not, any more clearly.
That's not what I'm saying. I mean that you can't draw the conclusion "it must have been designed" from the observation "There's only a 0.001% chance it could have happened over the known timeline". As far as we can tell, the universe doesn't seem to be full of life, so it may well be that it's something that very rarely happens.
1. I have given evidence (that is, visual, conclusive evidence) of everything I have asserted--that all biological features existing cannot be accounted for without reference to design. This is a fact of present-day, and at base we are arguing about -when- this fact applies to, not -if-. That is the scope of my expressed position.
Er, no, you haven't. You've not even described a single thing you think is irreductibly complex. You just keep claiming that there is, but never show.
2. No, absolutely not. You are making the assumption that features cannot have design as a causal factor. That was your statement at the beginning, what I responded to, and what my position has been since. I am well aware there could be additional causal factors -beyond- that.
No, I'm not. However, it's a farfetched enough claim that I think it needs a lot more justification, and you're not providing any.
Fine. Nonetheless, it is evidence. It is not -conclusive- evidence, as I have stated. If it were not evidence at all, there would not be a few million debates on-line and throughout history debating the strength of that evidence. Again, you are equivocating disingenously.
The largest problem I have is that "complexity" isn't something that exists in reality. An atom is an atom, 1 Kg is 1 Kg, and a second is a second in the US, in China and everywhere else. They either correspond to physical things that can be measured, without depending on the judgement of the observer.
However, "complexity" is a purely human valuation. A watchmaker might comment that a design is simple an elegant, a layman would see a complicated mess of parts. People comment that Apple devices are simple when looking at the external design and user interface, ignoring the incredible internal complexity. Conway's Game of Life is simple if you look at the list of rules, and complex if you look at how they interact.
Which is why I think that a judgement based on complexity is inherently invalid, because I do not even know what you mean when you say something is complex. Come up with with a measure of complexity that's based on something universally calculable and which does not depend on anybody's judgement, and try again.
I am quoting an authority in the field. If he ultimately is incorrect, it makes no difference. The wisdom teeth still have partial utility in the case of tooth loss, giving a rationale for its presence, and even if it were not the case, it remains undemonstrated that causing their elimination by design would not create more issues than it solved, and even if -that- were demonstrated, we are using conjectural, rather than objective, standards for judgment--again, from a naturalist evolutionary perspective, what survived, survived, and it's survival is the only criteria by which we can "measure" it, which it by definition passed.
He may well be entirely correct, but like I said nothing your authority says seems to indicate design. There is a plausible evolutionary explanation for the same situation.
Given that, you should explain why the design based explanation fits the events better, but it doesn't. Design ought to be detectable in the fossil record.
"That won't work". Okay. In the absence of you demonstrating that it won't, I'll put that one down as another psychic claim. As I directly said, the population size and time available would be factored into the probability calculation--it would still resolve to a given probability.
Won't work for the simple reason that something being improbable doesn't really prove that it never happened.
There are 3 billion base pairs in human DNA, I'm made of a very specific and extremely improbable combination of them, yet I'm still here.
You throw around "proved" and "disproved" remarkably lightly for a discussion about science.
Fair enough, I'm not being very careful. And given that no evidence seems to be forthcoming from you I'm not sure it's worth bothering.
More accurately, I'm claiming, accurately, that you cannot exclude these possibilities other than by application of the supposed psychic powers you claim.
My problem with your argument is twofold:
1. Your assertions still are getting presented without evidence 2. You're making the assumption that if not evolution, then design, as if there were only two possibilities.
As for "the phylogenic tree", the reality is this is under ongoing revision, most recently with strong biological argument that we will need to add an entire new biological domain. To state that a particular "tree" is established biological fact as opposed to provisional relationships under ongoing correction is simply to misuse the concept.
All classifications are of course human made and subject to revision. However, if there was design inserted somewhere in there it ought to look very out of place. Which means you shouldn't have a problem with pointing to some evidence of that happening.
Complexity is evidence. However, complexity is not "proof", which is precisely why you asked for a criterion applicable to no actual scientific theory, so that you can decide your stance with information so compelling you have no decision to make--such "proof" would compel your conclusion.
You're still making assertions. I do not agree that complexity is evidence. Complexity as we understand it arises in nature all on its own without much trouble. Simple things can interact in ways we perceive as complex.
But anyway, complexity according to what standard? On what basis does our ability to understand something affect reality? The way I see it, reality doesn't care if I think it's complex or not.
"According to the British Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial surgery, in a article titled, Management of Asymptomatic Impacted Wisdom Teeth, Vol. 34 October 1996, the author notes that in Neolithic man the average, highly abrasive diet caused attrition of the teeth resulting in a reduction in the size of the molars from front to back. This decrease in size from the abrasive nature of the food ingested allowed for the forward migration of the teeth and adequate space for the eruption of the wisdom teeth. With the arrival of processed foods and a reduction in the amount of chewing necessary to reduce the food for swallowing, less wear occurs. This coupled with a decrease in the loss of teeth as a result of a decrease in cavities, requires modern generations to address impacted and partially impacted wisdom teeth."
That's still unconvincing, given that human ancestors have large enough jaws to have room for the wisdom teeth without problems, and regardless of diet.
Also, it doesn't add up. There's no evidence to my knowledge of extra teeth suddenly appearing in the neolithic. There is however evidence that our jaw size shrunk, which provides an explanation that makes a lot more sense: jaw shrunk, teeth had a hard time fitting but for a while due to the diet it wasn't too bad, and now that diet changed the problem is no longer so effectively hidden.
So, either our number of teeth is from before the jaw shrinkage, in which case wisdom teeth are an evolutionary problem, or you have to find some evidence for extra teeth appearing at around neolithic time.
For a "test", that will definitively fall out in a quantifiable sense when we are able to specify the specific set of mutations required for a particular biological feature, apply it across the population size that could have a pre-existing state of, or lack of, that feature, and specify the probability of this occurring as a question of what is ultimately chemistry, across the range of biological features that are proposably "Irreducibly Complex". Not by general conjecture as to how it might have formed, but by calculation of what happened and what could have happened with reasonable probability over the population and timeframe. That is, by hard, quantifiable brute-force calculation of the probability necessary changes on the level of chemistry.
That still won't work. First, millions of years multiplied by millions of organisms makes even quite unlikely events a lot more likely to happen.
Second, that an event is very unlikely is not a guarantee that it never has or that it never will. Winning the lottery is unlikely, yet people do, and getting struck by lighting is very unlikely as well, but there's a guy who got hit 7 times.
Third, "irreducibly complex" is a big thing to claim, and I've yet to see any instance that hasn't been disproved. So please provide some.
Although, of course, asking for "proof" in a scientific context is almost never appropriate, I feel confident this actually suffices as that for our purposes:
Of course it is appropiate. If you claim you saw a polka dot patterned penguin, I'm going to ask for proof of it. And Darwin didn't just go and say "stuff evolves", he produced several books with evidence.
Still waiting for your.
Fluorescent cats.
Heh. I'm talking about history here. Unless you're going to claim somebody travelled back in time to run genetic experiments, or that aliens dabbled in genetic experimentation for some reason. But the record we have just doesn't match that. Traits don't suddenly appear out of nowhere outside their place in the phylogenic tree.
Yes, genetic engineering and such exist and are possible, problem is that there's no evidence of it in the historic record. Like I said, still waiting for your evidence.
Okay, well since you're bringing it up again, with respect to this and the appendix, current scientific consensus is these absolutely did had a purpose, on the basis of our earlier diet, chewing and digestion of it, with the fact dentists were not always available to replace the teeth before migration of the wisdom teeth in the jaw would handle it.
Our permanent teeth are that, permanent. Wisdom teeth only make sense with a larger jaw, which we don't have. If permanent teeth were supposed to get replaced, then that'd be all of them, and not just a couple in an oddly inconvenient location.
Also, yes, diet was different, but the jaw was larger, and the brain was smaller. At that time wisdom teeth weren't a problem, because there was room for them.
Frankly, your analysis seems to entirely ignore even an attempt to specify for consideration any secondary consequences to modifying what you insist is "lousy", and just assert it is, in direct contradiction to any determination (that is, other than your subjective value-judgment) you can make according to evolution.
Ok, what would be the negative consequences if we could produce vitamin C?
That seems pretty obvious. I mean, the sea level rise alone is going to be unpleasant at the very least. Is it really cheaper to rebuild cities and work on defenses of enormous scale than to spew less crap into the air?
3. Humans are the primary cause
Why is it so important? Since when do we sit there and take it just because "nature did it"?
4. Reducing C02 emmisions is better than adapting
Well, "adapting" in nature is a rather unpleasant thing that involves the ones that fail to adapt dying. I don't know about you, but I'd rather part with some money instead. And cleaning up CO2 sounds a lot cheaper than everybody on the coast having to get a new house on higher ground.
Also, the track record in New Orleans shows two things:
1. That such defensive architecture is hard to get right, and is an excellent target for budget cuts -- which seems to nearly guarantee that it's not going to work very well due to lack of funding and maintenance.
2. That when it fails, it results in a huge and very expensive mess.
Then we've discovered a very interesting fact of science. Though it wouldn't make a difference from a philosophical viewpoint (as "evolution designed up-front" or "specific design occurring in-process" are both viable positions), it would be very interesting scientifically, such as developing methods of discerning cases of each,
That's all too vague, and not what I asked for. I asked for predictions, of the future. Like, what does that predict about epidemiology?
For instance, Newton's laws allow us to predict the future position and speed of objects, and Darwin predicted that human ancestors originated in Africa, which matches the fossil record that was found later.
likely expanding our abilities at design by reference to pre-existing designed structures
Why would it? The process by which something evolved may be interesting, but it isn't particularly necessary to copy something. We could duplicate whole organisms by cloning without having a clue how to make one from scratch.
I think you are confused by my statement. Design per se is a fact. That all biological features cannot be accounted for outside of design is fact. If you want to soften your position to "evolution as a causal explanation is sufficient up to a certain point in time", then do so. That the general (universal) statement is false is a matter of the reality of 20'th century genetic engineering.
That's an assertion with absolutely no proof behind it. Please provide some. So far you haven't.
No. Apart from arguing this point with the reality that our design, if we were designed, is astonishingly brilliant to a degree we cannot remotely replicate (such as self-aware intelligence)
That we can replicate is given -- if we didn't, then we wouldn't be here to talk about it. There'd just be a lifeless rock floating in space. And no, it's not brilliant in any measure, it's messy and often inefficient. For instance, why would a designer create multiple incompatible blood types?
I would find design a lot more believeable if humans were without misfeatures and vestigial organs. No things like wisdom teeth, transplants of organs between any two individuals of the same species without complications with the immune system, no autoimmune diseases, eyes done the right way and not inside out, no defects like myopia and baldness, and no random cancer. There's also a big problem in that things like that make perfect sense in the light of our ancestry. There's absolutely no reason for them to be there otherwise.
you are wandering into teleological claims that you have no basis to make within a worldview of naturalism. From the perspective of naturalism, whatever survived, survived, and its survival is fully sufficient to meet the only criteria there is--survival.
Well, of course. But the environment favours particular kinds of survival. Here we have an example of that -- a poison resulted in the individuals that can best deal with it surviving better, and the ones that couldn't dying.
Understood. I'll give a little thought to the question of testing that biology was designed, rather than knowing it was designed as -fact-, as we currently know, and propose a test which would test for it, as if we had the absence of the -facts- the test would ostensibly resolve.
But, if biology is designed, then what?
As it stands, generally, "the fact we saw it designed" seems to define the testability criteria, for which it now passes admirably.
Don't see how. First there's a lot of evidence of descent. Parts get reused over and over, species can be organized as a tree, and change is seen gradually through it. A designer wouldn't need to do incremental improvement. They could suddenly go and plug an entirely new part somewhere, but there's no evidence of that. (if you have any please provide it).
And as a design, ours is incredibly lousy. Why would a designer leave in various junk like a the remains of a tail (humans can be born with one), wisdom teeth, appendix (which does more harm than good these days), goose bumps (which would raise our fur if we still had any) and the ability some people have to move their ears (which makes perfect sense for monkeys with large ones)?
Then there's plain bad construction. The spine is curved, leading to no end of medical issues (which isn't a big deal for animals that don't walk erect). The eye is made wrong, with obstructive blood vessels. Squids have better vision than we do. Our large head makes childbirth painful and problematic.
Then, I don't understand how you'd see evidence of design, specifically. The way I see it, the best one can find is that "the current theory doesn't explain adequately how feature X appeared". But there more potential answers to that than design. For instance DNA transfer by virus, or a yet unknown mutation mechanism.
I'm confused by this statement. How do you possibly know this, other than by assertion you're psychic as to the future determinations of science? You wouldn't consider a biological structure that -could not- come int o existence apart from design, due to the probability of the aggregate mutations required while retaining survivability, to be a "concession"?
Because as formulated, that's not scientific. It's not enough to just make a statement "X was designed", there must be some testable consequence of that, and you're not offering any.
So for instance, Netwon disagreed with Aristotle and said that everything falls at the same speed in a vacuum, regardless of weight. You can go and test that.
So if something had to be designed the result is... what exactly? What could somebody go and test in a lab?
It's purely a human concept that we use to make sense of things. Even Darwin already noted that the number of species drastically varies depending on who and how does the counting.
Say, does it count as species if they can interbreed if genetic material is exchanged, but:
A. Live separately? Eg, lions and tigers B. Have incompatible courtship rituals? C. Are interested in mating at incompatible times? D. Consider each other too alien looking to try breeding in normal circumstances? E. Offspring are rarely viable?
New species don't really pop into existence, we create them by deciding "this animal looks different enough that we should give it a new name".
If one were to look at how a wolf got turned into a domestic dog, there wouldn't be a fixed moment where a wolf suddenly became a dog. Rather, there'd be a population of more and more sociable wolves (some of which would be nice, and some less), until most people would agree that this wolf adopted by the more radical parts of the village is starting to look rather different from the kind we find in the wild, so we might as well name it something else.
Modern science is built around the idea that you can never actually prove a theory, only disprove it and build a better theory. When you stop trying to disprove your models and accept them as truth, you stop being a scientist and step into the realm of faith.
There's just two problems with that one:
1. There's enough evidence for evolution that it must be mostly correct 2. If evolution is flawed, it won't result in concessions towards the creationist stance
For instance, take Newton. Yes, he wasn't entirely correct. But what he figured out, in the conditions he tested it in, worked. That Newton wasn't 100% correct didn't suddenly mean that the reality was any more aligned with the view of Aristotle.
The same way, the argument isn't about whether evolution exists. That got figured out long ago, even before scientists figured out how genetics work. The current arguments are all about the details of it. That the current understanding isn't 100% correct isn't going to suddenly mean that the creationist stance is right, it's just going to mean that some of the details weren't entirely correct, like exactly how some features evolved, how important different mechanisms are, and so on.
Fire the management, and advertise their new positions at 5% of their current wage.
After all, it's the employees who do the actual work. Most of the people on the top probably can't even competently sweep the floors, let alone fly an airplane.
ARM isn't a microcontroller. A microcontroller is something with 1K RAM and 16K flash, and a set of pins useful for talking to external devices, like a serial port, digital outputs with PWM and integrated AD converters.
ARM is a low power CPU and if they're smart they'll do like x86 and require the unused bits to be all set to 1 or 0 so that they can't be repurposed.
If Geothermal doesn't have any technical barriers remaining, and Google's recent map shows us where to drill, and everyone says it puts out way more than enough energy for our needs far into the future...
Why the hell are we bothering with anything else? Why aren't we just pulling the plug on all other alternative energy and putting all those people and all that money into the task of massive geothermal plant deployment?
Because it's expensive to set up. With PVs there is almost certainly a way of producing them cheaply that we haven't figured out yet. That can be researched. So you find some bright team with an idea that sounds good, and give them some money hoping that they might have figured it out.
With geothermal though, what you do is bring a lot of heavy, expensive and complicated machinery and dig a very deep hole. The oil industry already mastered that art. Maybe it can be done 5% cheaper, but it's extremely unlikely that there's anything that can be done to make it much cheaper. If there was, the oil industry would have researched it already.
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Fail again. And why do you replace the ancient egyptian? Do you have something against them?
That's easy, you test, and look at what works. Prayer demonstrably doesn't work. Science does. That makes it quite clear which is closer to the truth.
It does have a lot to do with morality, which you mentioned in your first post ("things like morality and purpose of life"). When people stop attempting to make laws to regulate behavior according to religion, then the idea of non-conflict will be a bit more believeable.
My position is that morality is within the realm of science and that religion is unnecessary for moral matters. In fact much science has been done on morality. There's your conflict.
No, you didn't.
Precisely that, that religion is unrelated to reality.
A Christian, Buddhist and ancient Egyptian looking at a tree would agree on the number of apples hanging from it, but when they look at the universe they come up with completely different answers, which suggests that they're not really describing reality.
The correct answer in that case is that while there's no evidence, the question is not answerable.
Actually there's a lot of agreement on that.
If scientists disagreed as much as religious people, it wouldn't mean "somebody is more or less right", it would mean nobody knows what they're talking about.
So? Surgery got started by barbers. Fortunately we moved on since then, and good riddance.
Of course there is. Take for instance homosexuality, it's something that falls squarely within both realms.
On the scientific side you have research that indicates it's quite common through the animal kingdom (which includes a lot of weird practices, like duck necrophilia, and male insects raping other males to fertilize females by proxy)
On the religious side, it's an "abomination" and "unnatural" (despite the above) because the bible says so.
Except religion doesn't contain an answer to that question, as it's not based on anything related to reality.
Ask about the purpose of the universe to a Christian, Buddhist and ancient Egyptian, and you'll get three different answers to that question. Heck, even within a single religion they can't agree.
This decade. Tiny root downloaded from BOOTP, /usr mounted over the network is a perfectly sensible setup for a cluster.
Upstart makes it very challenging to block system boot.
I needed to install new machines loading the installer from BOOTP. That went on as expected, until I ran into the issue of having to run a post-install script specifically on the first reboot, which must complete before the user is allowed to login, and upstart does everything possible to prevent me from blocking system boot.
At least, if there's a way to get it done, I didn't figure it out, and ended up hacking around it in a very ugly way.
Also I hate the very idea of it on a server. On a server I want simple and predictable, without any weird magic happening, and parallelism is entirely unnecessary.
First, this makes some setups a lot more annoying. The /bin and /lib dirs might be rather obscure these days, but the separation still comes ocassionally handy with strange disk layouts.
Second, since when do normal users need to care about the distinction? All those are in $PATH anyway, so it doesn't matter whether bash is in /bin or /usr/bin for most end user purposes.
Third, what's with the weird obsession with messing with what works? Ubuntu is annoying enough already with the upstart thing. I don't need more stuff like that. Please leave the base system the hell alone.
I have no clue what you're talking about here, but thought I'd point out you seem to be replying to yourself here.
I'm still unconvinced, and you're not making any progress there.
It's not that you don't "need" to present anything, it's that you don't have anything that could be presented.
Like I said, the minimum FSM is an impossible problem because you can't deduce the algorithm from the data that it generated, therefore it doesn't work for the purpose you're saying. Unless you've managed to revolutionize the field of mathematics, in which case please go collect your Nobel prize.
But it's precisely what your position requires. Therefore, either you figure it out, or rephrase your position in some terms that don't involve complexity.
Except that you keep saying something about complexity, and are pushing one specific point, (and not "we should keep an open mind in general"), which implies you did measure something and on that basis decided that your argument has merit. So please go and present whatever you measured.
Not in reality, no. Just like species don't exist either, they're just arbitrary labels we assign to things to make things easier for ourselves. In nature, there are no platonic forms. There's a continuum we try to subdivide into kingdoms and species, but which never fit reality 100%, because reality doesn't actually work like that.
We start from a neat classification of "animal" and "vegetal", and then it turns out that at some points it's unclear which is which, and new strange things like viruses and prions force us to rearrange our classification.
I'm saying that your position requires an absolute measure of complexity, and we don't have one. Stonehenge went from complex to simple, to soon trivial. Therefore engineering difficulty is not a good example of complexity for your purpose.
And you say that while still refusing to explain what you mean by it.
On what grounds? Another assertion with nothing behind it. I don't care about your "intuitively". Where's the data?
Again, on what grounds to you say that? I still have no clue what you mean by "complex".
So why aren't you trying to do it? Where's your attempt to do anything of the sort?
For somebody who likes to pontificate on science, you sure talk a lot with nothing backing it up. I want to see data. Tables of measurements, statistics, that kind of thing.
Then again it's obvious you don't have anything, because I'm sure you could point to something if you had it.
Precisely. You have no argument until you come up with some data. Once you do, come back and try again.
Well, excellent! You're doing the claim here though, so it's up to you to do the work. I'll be waiting.
Please address some of my questions on that respect
Until you provide something more than empty talk, I'll continue assuming there isn't.
You're mixing meanings here. One thing is thi
Oh yes, absolutely yes.
Look, if we were arguing about whether travelling from New York to Paris in 4 hours is "too fast" (substituting a "too fast" for the "too complex" argument), we'd have to agree on a whole bunch of stuff beforehand. Like, what exactly does it mean to travel from New York to Paris, what does "4 hours" mean, what is the speed of the known transport, and so on. Only with that you can begin to argue that me going from New York to Paris in 4 hours might be "too fast". We can't possibly have a meaningful argument if you only insist that it's too fast, but refuse to explain why or by what metric is it considered to be too fast.
So same here. Until you explain what complexity is, any discussion is meaningless, as without the explanation your claim has an enormous unexplained void in it which makes it effectively meaningless, and allows you to fill it with whatever you deem convenient.
That won't do. This cannot proceed until you explain precisely what complexity is, an exact observer-independent way of measuring it, and provide a good explanation of at what level complexity becomes excessive and why (perhaps by measuring the complexity of a lot of things and proving that it doesn't follow a normal distribution would be a start)
My objection is that it still needs more evidence to make it even vaguely plausible.
There are other options you don't seem to be discussing for some reason. Like "It just happened despite the improbability", "there's a yet unknown mechanism that made it happen", "it got copied as-is from another source", and so on.
Yet you oddly concentrate specifically on design, despite design requiring a designer we have not the slightest shred of evidence of, despite having looked for other civilizations with SETI, and constantly looking at space with telescopes, for instance.
Don't be silly. The argument is and always has been about the historic "origin of species", which covers a huge timeline that we are a tiny part of.
Sure, let's ignore say, the last 1000 years, it doesn't make a difference for the sake of argument.
Don't you think you should figure that out first? How can you argue about complexity before even figuring out what it is?
And for that matter, I don't think the FSM is going to solve your problem. Say, how do you reduce fractal to a FSM? Do you have some algorihtm that can take any piece of data and somehow figure out the most efficient algorithm possible to generate it? Or do you judge by your best attempt to make a FSM to generate the image without using the formula for the Mandelbrot set, despite that the algorithm and initial data needed to make it is tiny in comparison?
What about other things, like say, pi? Is it complex because it never ends? Is then 1/3 complex? Or is it simple because it's the result of a division? Does the algorithm to calculate arbitrary digits of it change its complexity?
Finally, how are you going to apply this to genetics?
Then on what basis do you suggest ID?
I dismiss it on the basis that you've yet to provide a good reason to even propose ID as a possibility. Nothing in the record that conflicts with evolution, no coherent definition of what is this complexity you keep talking about, and now you even admit that you can't figure out what kind of characteristic would be a strong candidate for ID.
You're talking out of your ass, basically.
That's not what I'm saying. I mean that you can't draw the conclusion "it must have been designed" from the observation "There's only a 0.001% chance it could have happened over the known timeline". As far as we can tell, the universe doesn't seem to be full of life, so it may well be that it's something that very rarely happens.
Er, no, you haven't. You've not even described a single thing you think is irreductibly complex. You just keep claiming that there is, but never show.
No, I'm not. However, it's a farfetched enough claim that I think it needs a lot more justification, and you're not providing any.
The largest problem I have is that "complexity" isn't something that exists in reality. An atom is an atom, 1 Kg is 1 Kg, and a second is a second in the US, in China and everywhere else. They either correspond to physical things that can be measured, without depending on the judgement of the observer.
However, "complexity" is a purely human valuation. A watchmaker might comment that a design is simple an elegant, a layman would see a complicated mess of parts. People comment that Apple devices are simple when looking at the external design and user interface, ignoring the incredible internal complexity. Conway's Game of Life is simple if you look at the list of rules, and complex if you look at how they interact.
Which is why I think that a judgement based on complexity is inherently invalid, because I do not even know what you mean when you say something is complex. Come up with with a measure of complexity that's based on something universally calculable and which does not depend on anybody's judgement, and try again.
He may well be entirely correct, but like I said nothing your authority says seems to indicate design. There is a plausible evolutionary explanation for the same situation.
Given that, you should explain why the design based explanation fits the events better, but it doesn't. Design ought to be detectable in the fossil record.
Won't work for the simple reason that something being improbable doesn't really prove that it never happened.
There are 3 billion base pairs in human DNA, I'm made of a very specific and extremely improbable combination of them, yet I'm still here.
Fair enough, I'm not being very careful. And given that no evidence seems to be forthcoming from you I'm not sure it's worth bothering.
My problem with your argument is twofold:
1. Your assertions still are getting presented without evidence
2. You're making the assumption that if not evolution, then design, as if there were only two possibilities.
All classifications are of course human made and subject to revision. However, if there was design inserted somewhere in there it ought to look very out of place. Which means you shouldn't have a problem with pointing to some evidence of that happening.
You're still making assertions. I do not agree that complexity is evidence. Complexity as we understand it arises in nature all on its own without much trouble. Simple things can interact in ways we perceive as complex.
But anyway, complexity according to what standard? On what basis does our ability to understand something affect reality? The way I see it, reality doesn't care if I think it's complex or not.
That's still unconvincing, given that human ancestors have large enough jaws to have room for the wisdom teeth without problems, and regardless of diet.
Also, it doesn't add up. There's no evidence to my knowledge of extra teeth suddenly appearing in the neolithic. There is however evidence that our jaw size shrunk, which provides an explanation that makes a lot more sense: jaw shrunk, teeth had a hard time fitting but for a while due to the diet it wasn't too bad, and now that diet changed the problem is no longer so effectively hidden.
So, either our number of teeth is from before the jaw shrinkage, in which case wisdom teeth are an evolutionary problem, or you have to find some evidence for extra teeth appearing at around neolithic time.
That still won't work. First, millions of years multiplied by millions of organisms makes even quite unlikely events a lot more likely to happen.
Second, that an event is very unlikely is not a guarantee that it never has or that it never will. Winning the lottery is unlikely, yet people do, and getting struck by lighting is very unlikely as well, but there's a guy who got hit 7 times.
Third, "irreducibly complex" is a big thing to claim, and I've yet to see any instance that hasn't been disproved. So please provide some.
Of course it is appropiate. If you claim you saw a polka dot patterned penguin, I'm going to ask for proof of it. And Darwin didn't just go and say "stuff evolves", he produced several books with evidence.
Still waiting for your.
Heh. I'm talking about history here. Unless you're going to claim somebody travelled back in time to run genetic experiments, or that aliens dabbled in genetic experimentation for some reason. But the record we have just doesn't match that. Traits don't suddenly appear out of nowhere outside their place in the phylogenic tree.
Yes, genetic engineering and such exist and are possible, problem is that there's no evidence of it in the historic record. Like I said, still waiting for your evidence.
Our permanent teeth are that, permanent. Wisdom teeth only make sense with a larger jaw, which we don't have. If permanent teeth were supposed to get replaced, then that'd be all of them, and not just a couple in an oddly inconvenient location.
Also, yes, diet was different, but the jaw was larger, and the brain was smaller. At that time wisdom teeth weren't a problem, because there was room for them.
Ok, what would be the negative consequences if we could produce vitamin C?
Ok
That seems pretty obvious. I mean, the sea level rise alone is going to be unpleasant at the very least. Is it really cheaper to rebuild cities and work on defenses of enormous scale than to spew less crap into the air?
Why is it so important? Since when do we sit there and take it just because "nature did it"?
Well, "adapting" in nature is a rather unpleasant thing that involves the ones that fail to adapt dying. I don't know about you, but I'd rather part with some money instead. And cleaning up CO2 sounds a lot cheaper than everybody on the coast having to get a new house on higher ground.
Also, the track record in New Orleans shows two things:
1. That such defensive architecture is hard to get right, and is an excellent target for budget cuts -- which seems to nearly guarantee that it's not going to work very well due to lack of funding and maintenance.
2. That when it fails, it results in a huge and very expensive mess.
That's all too vague, and not what I asked for. I asked for predictions, of the future. Like, what does that predict about epidemiology?
For instance, Newton's laws allow us to predict the future position and speed of objects, and Darwin predicted that human ancestors originated in Africa, which matches the fossil record that was found later.
Why would it? The process by which something evolved may be interesting, but it isn't particularly necessary to copy something. We could duplicate whole organisms by cloning without having a clue how to make one from scratch.
That's an assertion with absolutely no proof behind it. Please provide some. So far you haven't.
That we can replicate is given -- if we didn't, then we wouldn't be here to talk about it. There'd just be a lifeless rock floating in space. And no, it's not brilliant in any measure, it's messy and often inefficient. For instance, why would a designer create multiple incompatible blood types?
I would find design a lot more believeable if humans were without misfeatures and vestigial organs. No things like wisdom teeth, transplants of organs between any two individuals of the same species without complications with the immune system, no autoimmune diseases, eyes done the right way and not inside out, no defects like myopia and baldness, and no random cancer. There's also a big problem in that things like that make perfect sense in the light of our ancestry. There's absolutely no reason for them to be there otherwise.
And yes, we're getting ever closer to replicating it. Intelligence will come eventually.
Well, of course. But the environment favours particular kinds of survival. Here we have an example of that -- a poison resulted in the individuals that can best deal with it surviving better, and the ones that couldn't dying.
But, if biology is designed, then what?
Don't see how. First there's a lot of evidence of descent. Parts get reused over and over, species can be organized as a tree, and change is seen gradually through it. A designer wouldn't need to do incremental improvement. They could suddenly go and plug an entirely new part somewhere, but there's no evidence of that. (if you have any please provide it).
And as a design, ours is incredibly lousy. Why would a designer leave in various junk like a the remains of a tail (humans can be born with one), wisdom teeth, appendix (which does more harm than good these days), goose bumps (which would raise our fur if we still had any) and the ability some people have to move their ears (which makes perfect sense for monkeys with large ones)?
Then there's plain bad construction. The spine is curved, leading to no end of medical issues (which isn't a big deal for animals that don't walk erect). The eye is made wrong, with obstructive blood vessels. Squids have better vision than we do. Our large head makes childbirth painful and problematic.
Then, I don't understand how you'd see evidence of design, specifically. The way I see it, the best one can find is that "the current theory doesn't explain adequately how feature X appeared". But there more potential answers to that than design. For instance DNA transfer by virus, or a yet unknown mutation mechanism.
Because as formulated, that's not scientific. It's not enough to just make a statement "X was designed", there must be some testable consequence of that, and you're not offering any.
So for instance, Netwon disagreed with Aristotle and said that everything falls at the same speed in a vacuum, regardless of weight. You can go and test that.
So if something had to be designed the result is... what exactly? What could somebody go and test in a lab?
In reality, there's no such thing as a "species".
It's purely a human concept that we use to make sense of things. Even Darwin already noted that the number of species drastically varies depending on who and how does the counting.
Say, does it count as species if they can interbreed if genetic material is exchanged, but:
A. Live separately? Eg, lions and tigers
B. Have incompatible courtship rituals?
C. Are interested in mating at incompatible times?
D. Consider each other too alien looking to try breeding in normal circumstances?
E. Offspring are rarely viable?
New species don't really pop into existence, we create them by deciding "this animal looks different enough that we should give it a new name".
If one were to look at how a wolf got turned into a domestic dog, there wouldn't be a fixed moment where a wolf suddenly became a dog. Rather, there'd be a population of more and more sociable wolves (some of which would be nice, and some less), until most people would agree that this wolf adopted by the more radical parts of the village is starting to look rather different from the kind we find in the wild, so we might as well name it something else.
There's just two problems with that one:
1. There's enough evidence for evolution that it must be mostly correct
2. If evolution is flawed, it won't result in concessions towards the creationist stance
For instance, take Newton. Yes, he wasn't entirely correct. But what he figured out, in the conditions he tested it in, worked. That Newton wasn't 100% correct didn't suddenly mean that the reality was any more aligned with the view of Aristotle.
The same way, the argument isn't about whether evolution exists. That got figured out long ago, even before scientists figured out how genetics work. The current arguments are all about the details of it. That the current understanding isn't 100% correct isn't going to suddenly mean that the creationist stance is right, it's just going to mean that some of the details weren't entirely correct, like exactly how some features evolved, how important different mechanisms are, and so on.
I propose an alternative:
Fire the management, and advertise their new positions at 5% of their current wage.
After all, it's the employees who do the actual work. Most of the people on the top probably can't even competently sweep the floors, let alone fly an airplane.
ARM isn't a microcontroller. A microcontroller is something with 1K RAM and 16K flash, and a set of pins useful for talking to external devices, like a serial port, digital outputs with PWM and integrated AD converters.
ARM is a low power CPU and if they're smart they'll do like x86 and require the unused bits to be all set to 1 or 0 so that they can't be repurposed.
Because it's expensive to set up. With PVs there is almost certainly a way of producing them cheaply that we haven't figured out yet. That can be researched. So you find some bright team with an idea that sounds good, and give them some money hoping that they might have figured it out.
With geothermal though, what you do is bring a lot of heavy, expensive and complicated machinery and dig a very deep hole. The oil industry already mastered that art. Maybe it can be done 5% cheaper, but it's extremely unlikely that there's anything that can be done to make it much cheaper. If there was, the oil industry would have researched it already.