Yes, you can. Not mathematically, but you can do so for a large number of the passwords. Just use a dictionary, hash the whole dictionary, and now you have a reversable hash for most of the passwords people are likely to use. Now, with a salted hash, this is much more difficult.
Even more so, there's nothing that forces any particular OEM to include any particular package. If I'm an OEM, I can strip off and install anything I want on Ubunto, and I don't even have to pay Ubunto anything.
"I also somehow ended up with three layers of management. That's uh... great."
In a _startup_? That's insane. Perhaps you need a better-managed startup? I've left a good-paying job and worked for a startup that didn't pay well, but only because they were very employee-focused (in the early years, the employees were making more than the owners). There's a difference between a startup that is trying to be wise with money and a startup that is actively trying to screw you. Perhaps in the future you should stay away from the latter type:)
"...corporations became a sort of protection mechanism for bad behavior. Maybe it's always been this way."
It has, but it used to be that corporations were solely for projects that were for the public good, and could not be operated any other way. Personally, I think that the widespread use of the corporation as a business entity is responsible for a fair amount of our ethical problems with big business. The responsibility of the company's directors is to make money, not be ethical. The people who vote for the board aren't privy to the ethical decisions that they've had to make, only the financial statements. The stockholders can't be held responsible, because they are only allowed to see the public, financial side. The directors can't be held responsible because they are legally required to do what is in the best financial interest of the company.
The corporation form of business has created an entity that is fundamentally incapable of making moral choices, and only capable of making economic choices. Some people think that the answer is to make the economics so that the corporations do the right thing. I think that this is a bad move. The real answer is to change the system to make individuals ethically responsible for the choices they make. Make them bound to ethics first, not money.
I think the best way to do this is to (a) go back to making local legislatures approve every corporation individually, with respect to whether or not it is actually a company for the public good that cannot be operated in any other manner, and (b) force all existing corporations to either go through the process in (a) or find a new organizational model within the next 10 years.
Allowing people to hold shares in a company is a great idea. Allowing people to hold shares in a company, vote on its future, and not be responsible when it does bad things in the name of money is not.
Or disband them? The problem is that shareholders don't see a need to appoint a board that operates ethically. If we were to disband a corporation or two, I think that perhaps shareholders might start seeing things differently.
Of course, there is a lot of negative economic impact, but that is precisely the bargaining chip they've been using to extort for years.
I don't even think this is a breakthrough wrt aging. It is only about cell lifespan. Our cells die and regenerate constantly. I'm not convinced that knowing how to increase lifespans of cells will have any dramatic impact on the length of multicellular life. I think there is a fundamentally different regulatory activity occurring.
However, the DNA from neanderthals could provide some clues (some think that the features of neanderthals are based on differential maturation rates).
Of course dating techniques involve methodologies that are both conflicting and have not been proven.
For example, isotopes with longer half-lives will also give you older dates for the very same rock.
Alpha and beta decay give very different dates. In fact, every fossil ever tested has had measurable amounts of C14 in them.
Diamonds still have measurable amounts of C14 in them.
Non-radiometric age determinations give substantially different results as well. For instance, measuring Helium diffusion rates gives a substantially different results than radiometric dating.
Measuring radiometric dates of events of _known_ dates often leads to very bad dates.
Not to mention the numerous flood stories (many of them pointing to the same flood date), and the fact that many ancient non-Christian geneologies go back to some spelling of Noah.
Actually, Mendel's problem had nothing to do with the age of the earth, but rather the discreet nature of the genetics he had discovered argued against any gradual model of change. There still does not exist a gradual model that has any sort of experimental validity.
As for the age of the earth, there are only _some_ measures which give the earth a great age, most of them dealing with alpha nuclear decay. Beta nuclear decay indicates a young age of the earth, as do other metrics such as helium diffusion within crystals. See the book Thousands not Billions. If you want to look at what they were investigating, you can see their pre-research book, Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth.
Much of their work is summarized in the following posters they had available at the American Geophysical Union:
"What utter horseshit. Access is a front-end application to a database engine."
Delphi is exponentially better in this regard. Paradox managed to be good at both.
"Incidentally, JET (the database engine MS used for a long time), was a great deal faster and more fully featured than MySQL... despite the criticism heaped on it."
The fact that RNA can both carry hereditable information AND enzymatic activity suggests that those are not hard requirements to meet.
No it does not. The conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premise.
That's a good point, but it's debatable how much of the "search space" is off limits because of this.
This is true to a point.
Keep in mind that we have other shortcuts, such as transposable elements that can move functional domains from one protein to another.
Transposable elements don't help, actually. They help once they are established, but the establishment of functional transposable elements requires an even-higher-order process to bring them about, one that is even less likely. Simply transposing random bits does not do you any help in regard to the above issue -- you would still be making random jumps. The existence of transposons means that you have another process to explain -- how tranpsosons themselves come about. Dembski showed in No Free Lunch and Searching Large Spaces that the higher-order problem (making the transposon) is _less_ likely to occur than the original problem.
Not all mutation takes place solely on the base pair level.
True. However, you should distinguish between telic and atelic mutations. The Darwinian hypothesis is that all telic mutations are simply systems which are products of atelic mutations. This is where ID and Darwinism butt heads the most.
Also, that we have 2 alleles of most genes allows many lethal alleles to stick around as a recessive gene for a long time, giving it a chance to mutate
Maybe a little, but not much. And that is only in sexual organisms, which, according to evolutionary theory, didn't happen for a while.
But from reading the abstract it looks like like a computational model, just like the ecologists I mentioned had. Only here he hasn't even done the follow up experiment to see how well the model matches reality.
He was using a computational model based on Darwinism. That's his whole point -- it doesn't work. The genomic change usually observed in the lab is fundamentally telic -- i.e. non-Darwinian. Genomes actively reorganizing themselves. Not just waiting for random things to happen and hope to not be killed by them.
This reaction is complex and ordered enough that abstractions such as "personality", "ideas", "desires", and "choice" can be used to describe its properties. This in no way affects the fact that I am governed by the laws of physics.
It _does_ affect whether or not my realization that I am governed by the laws of physics has any validity. Let's assume, to begin with, that there exist people who think stupid things. Let's say X is the stupid think that person Y believes. Why does person Y believe X? Because of forces in his brain over which he has no control. However, these are the same forces that cause you to not believe X. Neither of you have any control whether or not you believe X. So how can you say that the belief or non-belief in X is based on anything other than happenstance without the existence of choice?
"It certainly does. These are called "hypotheses", and are tested by experiments."
Okay, please show the tests that show that Darwinian mechanisms have done ANYTHING remotely interesting to a genome. On the contrary, Behe was using Darwinism's own mechanism to show the problem. If the Darwinian mechanism is active, it would use Behe's numbers. Behe was showing the problem with the mechanism -- it doesn't work! If there is _something_ that works, it must be something else than the Darwinian mechanism.
There are two possibilities -- an infinite regress of creators, or a creator that was not complex. ID does not specify. However, one of the ideas of ID is that creative causes are not reducible to material causes. What seems to be causing your confusion is that you assume that something has to be complex to be intelligent. However, in ID, intelligent causation is distinct from material causation (thought obviously intelligent causation is limitted by material causation). We are both complex machines and intelligent (not meaning IQ, but meaning more of "willful"). ID does not rule out the idea that something could be willful and not material. Your story makes the unstated assumptions that both (a) there cannot be an infinite regress of creators, and (b) there cannot be intelligent causation without complex material causation behind it. If either (a) or (b) are false, then your example is irrelevant.
"In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next."
Then there is no disagreement between creation and evolution, especially as a creationist (Mendel) came up with the idea of alleles and the way that they vary anyway.
"Yes, thankfully we have natural selection to guide the process."
(a) natural selection cannot work until there is a complete, existing replicatory process to begin with. (b) natural selection cannot guide _through_ negative changes. If to jump from A to B requires 20 negative changes before hitting a positive, natural selection can't guide you anywhere. Note that natural selection does not choose the direction of the change (or even whether one occurs), only whether a given change is positive or negative.
"How do you figure?"
Why not read Behe's article I linked to? Notice that the timeframes he specifies is for a change of only 3 or 4 individual nucleic acides.
"Science admits matter, energy, and spacetime. If you want to propose some fourth quantity, you need to come up with some data that is not explained just as well by conventional science."
I have -- choice.
"As for "choice" how do you know it isn't invalid? Or at least illusory?"
I don't. However, the whole validity of the operation of science depends on choice being a valid concept. If choice is not a valid concept, that means that we do not agree or confirm data and concepts based on whether or not they are correct, but instead we simply have no choice. "reasonable" and "unreasonable" would likewise disappear as valid concepts, because all would fall into the same category of "no control". Meaning, if we are debating idea X, and you said "I believe it is foolish" and I said "I believe it is intelligent", there is no difference. Why? Because it was only happenstance, not choice, that decided our views to begin with.
So, in order to throw out choice, you must throw out the validity of science as an enterprise.
"Do you see what I'm getting at here? Are you sure that in your calculations of expected rate of evolutionary change you're not making the same mistake these ecologists did?"
No I'm not. But you seem to be mistakenly under the impression that science has presupposed answers. It does not. It goes where the evidence leads. As you pointed out, where it leads today may not be where it leads tomorrow, based on new evidence we get tomorrow. The question is, what does the evidence look like _today_? If these mathematical models are incorrect, then show where and how they are incorrect. If we don't know when and how they are incorrect, then of course they could be wrong. I find it ironic that you are debating against ID, but using the hopefulness of what future numbers might say as evidence of your claim. It is ID that is using what we know today to make inferences, while others are calling foul from the sideline based on what they hope to be found in the future.
"If the parent tells a child that math is "wrong" because it is not divinely ordained, that is "crap", and should be clearly labeled as such."
You are confusing ideas with personal attacks.
Let's say that I come into class, and say something like "there is no such thing as DNA, my parents told me so."
While their parents are probably stupid, the correct response IS NOT "your parents are stupid." In fact, there is absolutely no reason that the teacher needs to make reference to the parents at all. The case against the _idea_ is completely separate from whether or not the person's parents are stupid. And, again, there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER for a teacher to be badmouthing a child's parents in front of the child.
Better responses to the above situation:
"Here is the evidence we have for DNA..."
"That has been shown to be incorrect"
"This is not the appropriate place to discuss this"
"Such an idea is not present in scientific literature, so is out of place for this class".
"there is no evidence to support such a claim"
Notice that none of those responses were derogatory toward the parents themselves in any way, but all accomplished the same goal.
I apologize if I was unclear. That is generally where they put the demarcation. It is not strict. YECs do not believe that ape and man are the same created kind. As far as I'm aware, the usual breakup is:
Homo Erectus -> man Homo Flores -> man Australapithecus -> not man
I don't remember if Homo Habilus is thought to be man or not. I don't keep track of paleontology much.
The gold standard for an inclusionary relationship between two species is if they can interbreed, or if they can each interbreed with a common third party. So far, there is no Orang->human hybrids.
But yes, generally, for vertebrates, the demarcation line is often at the family level of taxa. For example, the whole of Canidae, Felidae, and Camelidae are thought to be the same created kind. However, such a demarcation is not absolute, given that the demarcations were not made with modern creationary theory in mind.
If you want to learn more about creation theory, in addition to the book I referenced, you might also check out this blog.
"Huh? Creationists deny that there has been change!"
That's incorrect. Even Linnaeus didn't think that. Perhaps the problem is that you've been fighting straw men. The difference between evolution and creation (in general) are whether there is a monophyletic tree (evolution) or a polyphyletic tree (creation). YEC has the additional belief that the age of the geologic column is about 6,000 years, and that most of the paleozoic and mesozoic were deposited by a single flood.
Young Earth Creationists believe that the created "kind" is roughly at the family level of taxonomy.
If you're going to berate creationists, you should find out what they actually believe. For that, I recommend Understanding the Pattern of Life. The authors are both scientists. Todd Wood was one of the geneticists who sequenced the rice genome, and Kurt Wise earned his PhD under Stephen Jay Gould.
"ID doesn't have to be an alternative to evolution, since it could merely be a philosophical (or religious - not scientific) position that the/a Creator uses evolution to accomplish "creation"."
It depends on what you mean by evolution. ID is incompatible with Darwinism as a primary causitive factor, but not other forms of evolution.
"The human body is riddled with bad design decisions and vestigal remains, that confer no benefits whatsoever."
It's really amusing because the list of vestigal organs has decreased dramatically with research. I would say, as reasearch increases, the number of vestigal organs approaches zero. Now, there are faults in organs. This is a prediction of the creation model (remember the curse?) and is irrelevant either was to ID (which only says that some specific parts can be shown to be designed).
"Unfortunately, it's suspiciously close to the ID/Creationist "I don't know how it happened, so it must be miraculous""
Neither creationists nor ID'ers use that argument. Nice straw man. ID does not say that something must be improbable, but it must be improbable AND match characteristics that are known to be normal among designed things. BOTH have to apply to make the design inference. Dembski is working on making it empirically calculable.
"However, ID is presented by its adherents as a scientific theory, and in direct conflict with evolution."
ID is never represented by ID'ers as being in direct conflict with evolution. Both Dembski and Behe both agree with Universal Common Ancestry. It is in conflict with Darwinian evolution.
Another point about ID that is rarely talked about is whether or not scientists are looking at the whole picture, or if there is more that is amenable to science than what falls under "methodological naturalism". ID'ers generally believe that intelligent causation is independent of other types of causation (but also limitted by them). ID is the study of intelligent action in many forms. In fact, Dembski's book, The Design Inference, only touches slightly on biology. Basically, ID states that (a) intelligent causation is a _different_ force than material causation, and (b) intelligent causation can be analyzed scientifically, but needs slightly different tools and approaches. Biology is actually a secondary issue.
Interestingly, though, biology is actually much more dependent on intelligent design concepts than many let on. When looking at a biochemical pathway, the primary question researchers ask is "what is it _for_?" This is a wildly different question than the materialist question "how did it get here". It implies purpose, and asks questions of purpose. This is the spirit of intelligent design. How did it get here is also an interesting question, but in biochemical pathways, very few are amenable to Darwinistic interpretations, or any other interpretations which require happenstance changes.
Slashdot Mirror
"You can't reverse a hash."
Yes, you can. Not mathematically, but you can do so for a large number of the passwords. Just use a dictionary, hash the whole dictionary, and now you have a reversable hash for most of the passwords people are likely to use. Now, with a salted hash, this is much more difficult.
Even more so, there's nothing that forces any particular OEM to include any particular package. If I'm an OEM, I can strip off and install anything I want on Ubunto, and I don't even have to pay Ubunto anything.
If OSX were a monopoly, it would be a big deal. Since they are not, it's not. In addition, there are no OEM resellers of OSX.
"I also somehow ended up with three layers of management. That's uh... great."
:)
In a _startup_? That's insane. Perhaps you need a better-managed startup? I've left a good-paying job and worked for a startup that didn't pay well, but only because they were very employee-focused (in the early years, the employees were making more than the owners). There's a difference between a startup that is trying to be wise with money and a startup that is actively trying to screw you. Perhaps in the future you should stay away from the latter type
"...corporations became a sort of protection mechanism for bad behavior. Maybe it's always been this way."
It has, but it used to be that corporations were solely for projects that were for the public good, and could not be operated any other way. Personally, I think that the widespread use of the corporation as a business entity is responsible for a fair amount of our ethical problems with big business. The responsibility of the company's directors is to make money, not be ethical. The people who vote for the board aren't privy to the ethical decisions that they've had to make, only the financial statements. The stockholders can't be held responsible, because they are only allowed to see the public, financial side. The directors can't be held responsible because they are legally required to do what is in the best financial interest of the company.
The corporation form of business has created an entity that is fundamentally incapable of making moral choices, and only capable of making economic choices. Some people think that the answer is to make the economics so that the corporations do the right thing. I think that this is a bad move. The real answer is to change the system to make individuals ethically responsible for the choices they make. Make them bound to ethics first, not money.
I think the best way to do this is to (a) go back to making local legislatures approve every corporation individually, with respect to whether or not it is actually a company for the public good that cannot be operated in any other manner, and (b) force all existing corporations to either go through the process in (a) or find a new organizational model within the next 10 years.
Allowing people to hold shares in a company is a great idea. Allowing people to hold shares in a company, vote on its future, and not be responsible when it does bad things in the name of money is not.
Or disband them? The problem is that shareholders don't see a need to appoint a board that operates ethically. If we were to disband a corporation or two, I think that perhaps shareholders might start seeing things differently.
Of course, there is a lot of negative economic impact, but that is precisely the bargaining chip they've been using to extort for years.
So now will the Anti-ID'ers will now disown Abel and Galois for using arguments from incredulity?
I don't even think this is a breakthrough wrt aging. It is only about cell lifespan. Our cells die and regenerate constantly. I'm not convinced that knowing how to increase lifespans of cells will have any dramatic impact on the length of multicellular life. I think there is a fundamentally different regulatory activity occurring.
However, the DNA from neanderthals could provide some clues (some think that the features of neanderthals are based on differential maturation rates).
Of course dating techniques involve methodologies that are both conflicting and have not been proven.
For example, isotopes with longer half-lives will also give you older dates for the very same rock.
Alpha and beta decay give very different dates. In fact, every fossil ever tested has had measurable amounts of C14 in them.
Diamonds still have measurable amounts of C14 in them.
Non-radiometric age determinations give substantially different results as well. For instance, measuring Helium diffusion rates gives a substantially different results than radiometric dating.
Measuring radiometric dates of events of _known_ dates often leads to very bad dates.
Not to mention the numerous flood stories (many of them pointing to the same flood date), and the fact that many ancient non-Christian geneologies go back to some spelling of Noah.
Actually, Mendel's problem had nothing to do with the age of the earth, but rather the discreet nature of the genetics he had discovered argued against any gradual model of change. There still does not exist a gradual model that has any sort of experimental validity.
As for the age of the earth, there are only _some_ measures which give the earth a great age, most of them dealing with alpha nuclear decay. Beta nuclear decay indicates a young age of the earth, as do other metrics such as helium diffusion within crystals. See the book Thousands not Billions. If you want to look at what they were investigating, you can see their pre-research book, Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth.
Much of their work is summarized in the following posters they had available at the American Geophysical Union:
Precambrian Zircons Yield a Helium Diffusion Age of 6,000 years.
The Enigma of the Ubiquity of 14C in Organic Samples Older than 100 ka.
Abundant Po Radiohalos in Phanerozoic Granites and Timescale Implications for their Formation.
"So, in short, evolution is comparable to saying Egyptians built the pyramids"
What is the grounds for that statement? Evolution has never been shown to do anything of the kind.
"What utter horseshit. Access is a front-end application to a database engine."
Delphi is exponentially better in this regard. Paradox managed to be good at both.
"Incidentally, JET (the database engine MS used for a long time), was a great deal faster and more fully featured than MySQL... despite the criticism heaped on it."
I never liked MySQL, either.
"I would even suggest the idea to be absurd, since the defining characteristic of intelligence is complex behavior, intelligence must be complex."
I don't think that complex behavior requires a complex makeup.
"Do you have any examples of such a creature?"
I have faith in God, whom I believe to be at least somewhat along these lines, but I do not have an example that would satisfy skeptics.
The fact that RNA can both carry hereditable information AND enzymatic activity suggests that those are not hard requirements to meet.
No it does not. The conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premise.
That's a good point, but it's debatable how much of the "search space" is off limits because of this.
This is true to a point.
Keep in mind that we have other shortcuts, such as transposable elements that can move functional domains from one protein to another.
Transposable elements don't help, actually. They help once they are established, but the establishment of functional transposable elements requires an even-higher-order process to bring them about, one that is even less likely. Simply transposing random bits does not do you any help in regard to the above issue -- you would still be making random jumps. The existence of transposons means that you have another process to explain -- how tranpsosons themselves come about. Dembski showed in No Free Lunch and Searching Large Spaces that the higher-order problem (making the transposon) is _less_ likely to occur than the original problem.
Not all mutation takes place solely on the base pair level.
True. However, you should distinguish between telic and atelic mutations. The Darwinian hypothesis is that all telic mutations are simply systems which are products of atelic mutations. This is where ID and Darwinism butt heads the most.
Also, that we have 2 alleles of most genes allows many lethal alleles to stick around as a recessive gene for a long time, giving it a chance to mutate
Maybe a little, but not much. And that is only in sexual organisms, which, according to evolutionary theory, didn't happen for a while.
But from reading the abstract it looks like like a computational model, just like the ecologists I mentioned had. Only here he hasn't even done the follow up experiment to see how well the model matches reality.
He was using a computational model based on Darwinism. That's his whole point -- it doesn't work. The genomic change usually observed in the lab is fundamentally telic -- i.e. non-Darwinian. Genomes actively reorganizing themselves. Not just waiting for random things to happen and hope to not be killed by them.
This reaction is complex and ordered enough that abstractions such as "personality", "ideas", "desires", and "choice" can be used to describe its properties. This in no way affects the fact that I am governed by the laws of physics.
It _does_ affect whether or not my realization that I am governed by the laws of physics has any validity. Let's assume, to begin with, that there exist people who think stupid things. Let's say X is the stupid think that person Y believes. Why does person Y believe X? Because of forces in his brain over which he has no control. However, these are the same forces that cause you to not believe X. Neither of you have any control whether or not you believe X. So how can you say that the belief or non-belief in X is based on anything other than happenstance without the existence of choice?
"It certainly does. These are called "hypotheses", and are tested by experiments."
Okay, please show the tests that show that Darwinian mechanisms have done ANYTHING remotely interesting to a genome. On the contrary, Behe was using Darwinism's own mechanism to show the problem. If the Darwinian mechanism is active, it would use Behe's numbers. Behe was showing the problem with the mechanism -- it doesn't work! If there is _something_ that works, it must be something else than the Darwinian mechanism.
Read the article. He _did_ make a personal attack.
There are two possibilities -- an infinite regress of creators, or a creator that was not complex. ID does not specify. However, one of the ideas of ID is that creative causes are not reducible to material causes. What seems to be causing your confusion is that you assume that something has to be complex to be intelligent. However, in ID, intelligent causation is distinct from material causation (thought obviously intelligent causation is limitted by material causation). We are both complex machines and intelligent (not meaning IQ, but meaning more of "willful"). ID does not rule out the idea that something could be willful and not material. Your story makes the unstated assumptions that both (a) there cannot be an infinite regress of creators, and (b) there cannot be intelligent causation without complex material causation behind it. If either (a) or (b) are false, then your example is irrelevant.
"In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next."
Then there is no disagreement between creation and evolution, especially as a creationist (Mendel) came up with the idea of alleles and the way that they vary anyway.
"Yes, thankfully we have natural selection to guide the process."
(a) natural selection cannot work until there is a complete, existing replicatory process to begin with.
(b) natural selection cannot guide _through_ negative changes. If to jump from A to B requires 20 negative changes before hitting a positive, natural selection can't guide you anywhere. Note that natural selection does not choose the direction of the change (or even whether one occurs), only whether a given change is positive or negative.
"How do you figure?"
Why not read Behe's article I linked to? Notice that the timeframes he specifies is for a change of only 3 or 4 individual nucleic acides.
"Science admits matter, energy, and spacetime. If you want to propose some fourth quantity, you need to come up with some data that is not explained just as well by conventional science."
I have -- choice.
"As for "choice" how do you know it isn't invalid? Or at least illusory?"
I don't. However, the whole validity of the operation of science depends on choice being a valid concept. If choice is not a valid concept, that means that we do not agree or confirm data and concepts based on whether or not they are correct, but instead we simply have no choice. "reasonable" and "unreasonable" would likewise disappear as valid concepts, because all would fall into the same category of "no control". Meaning, if we are debating idea X, and you said "I believe it is foolish" and I said "I believe it is intelligent", there is no difference. Why? Because it was only happenstance, not choice, that decided our views to begin with.
So, in order to throw out choice, you must throw out the validity of science as an enterprise.
"Do you see what I'm getting at here? Are you sure that in your calculations of expected rate of evolutionary change you're not making the same mistake these ecologists did?"
No I'm not. But you seem to be mistakenly under the impression that science has presupposed answers. It does not. It goes where the evidence leads. As you pointed out, where it leads today may not be where it leads tomorrow, based on new evidence we get tomorrow. The question is, what does the evidence look like _today_? If these mathematical models are incorrect, then show where and how they are incorrect. If we don't know when and how they are incorrect, then of course they could be wrong. I find it ironic that you are debating against ID, but using the hopefulness of what future numbers might say as evidence of your claim. It is ID that is using what we know today to make inferences, while others are calling foul from the sideline based on what they hope to be found in the future.
"If the parent tells a child that math is "wrong" because it is not divinely ordained, that is "crap", and should be clearly labeled as such."
You are confusing ideas with personal attacks.
Let's say that I come into class, and say something like "there is no such thing as DNA, my parents told me so."
While their parents are probably stupid, the correct response IS NOT "your parents are stupid." In fact, there is absolutely no reason that the teacher needs to make reference to the parents at all. The case against the _idea_ is completely separate from whether or not the person's parents are stupid. And, again, there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER for a teacher to be badmouthing a child's parents in front of the child.
Better responses to the above situation:
"Here is the evidence we have for DNA..."
"That has been shown to be incorrect"
"This is not the appropriate place to discuss this"
"Such an idea is not present in scientific literature, so is out of place for this class".
"there is no evidence to support such a claim"
Notice that none of those responses were derogatory toward the parents themselves in any way, but all accomplished the same goal.
I apologize if I was unclear. That is generally where they put the demarcation. It is not strict. YECs do not believe that ape and man are the same created kind. As far as I'm aware, the usual breakup is:
Homo Erectus -> man
Homo Flores -> man
Australapithecus -> not man
I don't remember if Homo Habilus is thought to be man or not. I don't keep track of paleontology much.
The gold standard for an inclusionary relationship between two species is if they can interbreed, or if they can each interbreed with a common third party. So far, there is no Orang->human hybrids.
But yes, generally, for vertebrates, the demarcation line is often at the family level of taxa. For example, the whole of Canidae, Felidae, and Camelidae are thought to be the same created kind. However, such a demarcation is not absolute, given that the demarcations were not made with modern creationary theory in mind.
If you want to learn more about creation theory, in addition to the book I referenced, you might also check out this blog.
For one, Pennock himself lists it directly as a refutation of Behe's claims:
k VsIDC.html
o rithms.html (see especially the links at the end of the page to more research-oriented material)
http://www.msu.edu/~pennock5/research/DICE_Pennoc
Of course, Avida itself has been analyzed and found wanting:
http://crevobits.blogspot.com/2005/08/genetic-alg
I had read an article that more specifically talks about Avida with reference to Behe, but cannot locate it at the moment.
Yes. There is absolutely no reason to make fun of a child's parents in front of the child.
"Huh? Creationists deny that there has been change!"
That's incorrect. Even Linnaeus didn't think that. Perhaps the problem is that you've been fighting straw men. The difference between evolution and creation (in general) are whether there is a monophyletic tree (evolution) or a polyphyletic tree (creation). YEC has the additional belief that the age of the geologic column is about 6,000 years, and that most of the paleozoic and mesozoic were deposited by a single flood.
Young Earth Creationists believe that the created "kind" is roughly at the family level of taxonomy.
If you're going to berate creationists, you should find out what they actually believe. For that, I recommend Understanding the Pattern of Life. The authors are both scientists. Todd Wood was one of the geneticists who sequenced the rice genome, and Kurt Wise earned his PhD under Stephen Jay Gould.
"ID doesn't have to be an alternative to evolution, since it could merely be a philosophical (or religious - not scientific) position that the/a Creator uses evolution to accomplish "creation"."
It depends on what you mean by evolution. ID is incompatible with Darwinism as a primary causitive factor, but not other forms of evolution.
"The human body is riddled with bad design decisions and vestigal remains, that confer no benefits whatsoever."
It's really amusing because the list of vestigal organs has decreased dramatically with research. I would say, as reasearch increases, the number of vestigal organs approaches zero. Now, there are faults in organs. This is a prediction of the creation model (remember the curse?) and is irrelevant either was to ID (which only says that some specific parts can be shown to be designed).
"Unfortunately, it's suspiciously close to the ID/Creationist "I don't know how it happened, so it must be miraculous""
Neither creationists nor ID'ers use that argument. Nice straw man. ID does not say that something must be improbable, but it must be improbable AND match characteristics that are known to be normal among designed things. BOTH have to apply to make the design inference. Dembski is working on making it empirically calculable.
"However, ID is presented by its adherents as a scientific theory, and in direct conflict with evolution."
ID is never represented by ID'ers as being in direct conflict with evolution. Both Dembski and Behe both agree with Universal Common Ancestry. It is in conflict with Darwinian evolution.
Another point about ID that is rarely talked about is whether or not scientists are looking at the whole picture, or if there is more that is amenable to science than what falls under "methodological naturalism". ID'ers generally believe that intelligent causation is independent of other types of causation (but also limitted by them). ID is the study of intelligent action in many forms. In fact, Dembski's book, The Design Inference, only touches slightly on biology. Basically, ID states that (a) intelligent causation is a _different_ force than material causation, and (b) intelligent causation can be analyzed scientifically, but needs slightly different tools and approaches. Biology is actually a secondary issue.
Interestingly, though, biology is actually much more dependent on intelligent design concepts than many let on. When looking at a biochemical pathway, the primary question researchers ask is "what is it _for_?" This is a wildly different question than the materialist question "how did it get here". It implies purpose, and asks questions of purpose. This is the spirit of intelligent design. How did it get here is also an interesting question, but in biochemical pathways, very few are amenable to Darwinistic interpretations, or any other interpretations which require happenstance changes.