Somehow I have trouble understanding how did you get from "evolution is wrong" to "creationism is right". If you really "studied" from scientific point of view, you would know that disproving evolution (whatever that means) gets you exactly 0 (zero) evidence in favor of creationism.
A scientific point of view would recognize that a historical question is not in answered by operational science. (The stuff you do to examine the laws of physics, the behavior of animals, etc)
What happened yesterday? What happened 10 years ago? What happened 10 million years ago? Different lengths of time are involved, but they're fundamentally the same type of question with the same method of coming to a "right answer".
Beneficial changes must happen over time, even if rare.
Prove it. Do you not realize that complete failure (extinction) is an option?
Entropy works with information much the same way as it does with matter. Entropy to a car makes it nonfunctional, and eventually reduces it to scraps. Entropy (noise) to information reduces it to junk.
Or do you think "346oihap98gya9whoaidjfpoawije" has any meaning in English... ?
Creationists do not know that stuff. They, in my experience, may have a technician level understanding of a science - even physicians are basically technicians, which is how you can have medical doctors who are Creationists - but not the kind of broad appreciation of the scientific hinterland that is needed to grasp just why evolution, the Big Bang and so are are generally accepted by scientists.
First off, technicians aren't dumb. Sometimes they're the ones who are fixing the engineer's mistakes. (And I'm speaking as an engineer) That does not indicate an inferior understanding.
Your claim of ignorance in Creationists is wrong. There are educated professionals in all fields who do not believe that evolution is the best explanation. Ignorance does not explain their existence.
Creationism and evolution are not competing scientific theories, they're competing histories. That is why physicians do not need to believe that evolution (simple to complex) happened in the past in order to practice medicine.
The practice of science and belief in evolution are pretty much unrelated. That has not stopped evolutionists from attempting to tie belief in evolution to being scientific.
Call them whatever you want; but those words are still insulting.
Truth is a defense against an accusation of libel; truth is not a defense against an accusation of condescension or disrespect.
The former is a matter of fact. The latter is a matter of how ideas and concepts are communicated. If you only want to be right, you can disregard the difference. But if you want to persuade...
Correction: the US is/was a Christian nation (people) with a secular government. Governments represent a nation, but the nation is not its government.
Despite the secular government, the influence of Christianity gives the US a different national character than a pagan people with a Christian government, or an Islamic nation with an Islamic government. The set of ideas and principles that differentiate the US from other countries have a strong Christian heritage, so it is useful to simply describe this characteristic as the US being a "Christian nation".
There is a perspective and terminology where "Christian nation" is an accurate description for the US. Would "Christian heritage" be more acceptable to for you?
No, the US was explicitly created as a secular nation founded on religious freedom. No mention of God or Jesus Christ in the Constitution nor the original "bill of rights." It has nothing to do with what percentage of the population is Christian, it is not a Christian government. If it were, that would be establishing a religion and the 1st amendment explicitly forbids that. The Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment, they saw the abuses of mixing Governance and religion and wanted no part of it.
A secular government is the only way to truly have freedom of religion. So while the US population is 80% Christian, it is not a Christian nation. There is a big difference.
Correction: the US is/was a Christian people (nation) with a secular government. Governments represent a nation, but the nation is not its government.
Despite the secular government, the influence of Christianity gives the US a different national character than say a pagan people with a Christian government, or an Islamic nation with an Islamic government. The set of ideas and principles that differentiate the US from other countries have a strong Christian heritage, so it is useful to simply describe this characteristic as the US being a "Christian nation".
There is a perspective and terminology where "Christian nation" is an accurate description for the US. Would "Christian heritage" be more acceptable to for you?
You don't need to believe in abiogenesis in order to believe in evolution. When people say that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, they're not talking about abiogenesis. They're talking about the evidence for there having been periods billions of years ago when there were only single-celled organisms, and the evolution of those organisms into the complex life we have today.
Which is horribly inadequate to prove that you can get higher order lfieforms from lower order lifeforms through random mutation.
Estimate how many steps there are between humans and bacteria. (Compare the size of the genomes). Check the amount of time we have to evolve each step, and then consider the number of chances you reasonably have, compared to the tiny chance of success.
How many steps to go from no brain, to human brain? How many steps to go from asexual reproduction, to the human sexual reproductive system? Don't forget that many of the complex systems you need to evolve are highly interdependent for development, growth, and maintenance. Either they evolve the interdependence, or they happened to evolve together, all of which requires more steps (and lower the probabilities that they could occur by random chance).
Total up the probability of all of those steps, and the combined expected value goes to zero, to the point where it will not happen, statistically. The evidence for evolution is inadequate, but we've done an excellent job of insisting that it's overwhelming.
Look for the Miller-Urey Experiment, for a classic. Bear in mind that to go from primordial soup to single-cells, we're talking about a handful of freak occurrences, each one some 40 million years apart.
That experiment doesn't mean much. No evidence to show that there was an ancient Earth atmosphere like that. An elaborate system to trap organic compounds away from the heat, so that said compounds could accumulate, rather than being destroyed by heat within the main mixture. All that, and only a dilute solution with a few amino acids.
Organic compounds don't usually accumulate and stick around for 40 million years - so how do is the right environment maintained so that freak occurences 40 millions of years apart can chain together to create life?
As to the US being a Christian nation, I don't see how anyone can believe that. It's obvious to me that the vast majority of Americans worship money (the sin God hates more than any other sin).
One can accurately claim that based on the principles underlying the US, as well as the history and tradition of the US people.
It's not necessarily about the exact % of the population that can be classified as "religiously practicing Christian" at this precise moment.
One can make a case that the US is becoming less of a Christian nation, but it could be classified such in the past, and may do more to be classified thus in the future.
So it's not a delusion to claim that Eve was created from Adam's rib? Or that Mohammed ascended to the heavens on a magical horse? Or that when you drink wine in the Communion rite, it's actually the blood of Christ entering your body?
Believing the two historical claims is not delusional if they actually happened. Would you like to offer up irrefutable historical proof that said events did not happen? Eyewitness accounts? Video recording? Time machine?
Disdain is not a disproof.
(I do not believe that the wine in Communion literally becomes blood, and do not defend that belief).
The difference between an atheist and a believer is only in how many gods they don't believe in.
That's an amusing quote that is somewhat nonsensical.
1. Atheists are believers; they believe that no gods exist, rather than that a god/many gods exist. You're trying to distinguish between a subset and the set that it is part of. "The difference between an atheist and an atheist..."
2. "disbelief" is only meaningful with respect to the beliefs that drive the disbelief. "Adding one more god to disbelieve" makes it sound like an insignificant addition when totaling up all the gods one can disbelieve in, but it only happens because one has a stronger belief that excludes the disbelieved notions. So it is not the number of disbeliefs that matter, but the number of beliefs that do matter.
Here's an illustration for why the saying is really silly. There are an infinite number of wrong answers to 1 + 1 = ?. But the person who looks at the number of wrong answers to 1 + 1 and then decides that there is no right answer to the question is also wrong. The person who rejects "1 + 1 = 3" because "there is no right answer to 1 + 1" is right for the wrong reason. No matter how many wrong answers to 1 + 1 he can find, his core belief is still wrong.
What matters is not how easy it is to adopt a conclusion. ("just another god to not believe in") What matters is truth. That's something we can all believe in.
... It doesn't so much matter how those things arise.
So you can replace programmers with random number generators and get the same output?
Brilliant! It'll cut costs to practically nothing! Let's make millions undercutting everyone else!
More seriously, treating intelligent additions to complex systems as if they were from random noise sources is to completely miss the point of how evolution is "supposed to work", or how it differs from intelligent design.
If the definition of evolution honestly includes the products of intelligent design, then the word evolution is meaningless, and we need a new word to describe the different theories of how life came to be.
I don't know how you got the impression that better was objective. It's not just my personal preference, though. It happened through our complicated and flawed representative democratic system.
Who voted for a higher MPG limit? No one. The EPA, a gov't bureacracy, acted on previously delegated power to set new mileage goals. This being a democracy, we're free to disagree with the ends and the means.
Yes, and that worked brilliantly. Would you suggest the government did the same for cars?
If the gov't could do the same for cars, I'd like to see the proposal. The EPA raising the mileage standards is not even remotely similar to what the gov't did to start off the Internet boom.
We've been over and over this, Silly. We don't get something for nothing. There are tradeoffs.
You still haven't provided evidence that the mileage standards are attainable - only made vague unsubstantiated references to carmakers being "okay" with them.
To recap: a politician does not create solutions. He is not a professional in any particular field. He can't be - he's voted in as a voice of the people, not an expert on a particular thing.
Unless said politician is a leader and is able to form policies that attract followers and support. (He may take other people's solutions, but he can also make his own).
It's not a one way relationship. Politicians respond to the people who vote for them, and the people respond to the politician's ideas and actions.
Furthermore, scientists may be experts on technical subjects, but the politicians are experts on creating consensus/compromise and getting society to buy into a desired policy. (Not that every politician does this well, but the experienced politician will be better at it than a random scientist)
Competition pushes back against that force; nobody wants to be limited to 20 MPH all the time. The insurance company that doesn't let you drive 20+ MPH doesn't get the business that the others do.
But said insurance companies will charge you according to the risk you incur going 20+ MPH, or they'll pay more in damages than they get in premiums and go out of business.
Yeah, intelligent incremental design is completely like mindless incremental improvement by random mutation.
When a programmer sees that his code doesn't compile, he randomly changes something from the last working build and starts over. When he wants to add a new feature, he randomly toggles a bit and see if it breaks the code, and then randomly toggles another bit, repeating the process until he gets a working feature.
A random ASCII character generator can spit out a Tolkien novel; but that doesn't make novel-writing akin to random mutation, even though you can find incremental drafts between the idea and the final product.
Actually, I did bait and switch on you, I couldn't find the paper I wanted, so I found a similar paper. Which is still a problem for you. It's a problem because evolution created the same thing as intelligent design did, which proves that evolution, witht he same process as biological (genes are just information), is capable of optimizing and creating complexity from randomness. That's all I needed to show to prove my point. This would also create a problem for you in that if evolution can create the structure, how intelligent does "intelligent" design have to be? It certainly lowers the bar a bit doesn't it?
The paper you wanted to cite does not exist, because the optimal number of steps for a 6-sorter is 12, not 5 as you claimed. Additionally, since the sorting network has an optimal solution, it is nonsensical to claim that any optimal sorting network found is "illogical" and wouldn't have been designed by an intelligence. The intelligence looking for an optimal solution would have found it (by brute force computing if need be), proven it was optimal, and would have every logical reason to retain the solution for future reference.
As for the "problem" your genetic algorithm created for me - did you even read the paper? 6 major preparatory steps - your genetic algorithm is an intelligently designed system that does a clever search through randomized parameters, using a process optimized for the computing hardware it ran on. Evolution has to start from scratch. Not even close. "No fair, that's abiogenesis!", you might say. Then take an abacus and evolve it into a Core i7. No pathway, you say? Same problem for evolution - even if you get to cheat and start with a "simple" bacterium.
Yes, a random search might find the "right answer" (optimal sorting network). But then you have to pay attention to the probabilities - what is the solution space, and what is the chance of stumbling upon correct solutions? What is the chance of stumbling upon a good solution, and from there making continuous incremental improvements to yield an optimal solution? Are the solutions continuous? Evolution claims them to be so, but has not proven it. Evolution has not really addressed any of these questions, but proponents love to mis-cite the existence of genetic algorithms as if it bypasses all of these problems.
Better is subjective. You don't think the result will be better, but I do.
I thought this was about making objectively "better" changes that would help the greater good. Now it's about personal preference? Why should your preferences override those of the car manufacturers and their customers?
Innovation doesn't all come from one place. Sometimes it's private sector and sometimes the government spurs the innovation. I've got an example in mind. I'll give you a hint - we're communicating over it.
For the Internet, gov't-paid scientists and engineers designed a decentralized communications network, whose protocols and design was copied by the private sector and deployed everywhere. Gov't created something and shared.
A little different than the gov't decreeing that every house must have an ISP hookup, or that every person needs to buy a computer with a modem. The EPA rules are just edicts - no innovation or technology is provided that will spur improvements. It's coercion - and while it may yield useful results, gov't coercion rarely pays attention to the unintended consequences of its objectives - consequences that are quite capable of outweighing any good done.
Would you like to show evidence how all the desired improvements are easily attainable without any cons?
Your sorting paper is rather disappointing compared to what you said it did. To recap:
Show me the world's fastest sorting algorithm. I'll give you a hint it sorts 6 values using 5 comparisons. This was found using genetic algorithms.
... In this case, an algorithm for sorting that does not make any logical sense. But it works. So we start at randomness and create order. Very efficient order. And there;s the thing, since it does not make "sense", no "intelligent" designer would have designed it. It appears as random swaps. Generally you only orderly swap things if they are out of order.
Key claims - 6 item sorter, genetic algorithms used to dervive it. Algorithm does not make sense, so no intelligence would have designed it.
So what does your paper say? It's talking about sorting networks, which are "more efficient for sorting small numbers of items". It's only the "world's fastest" for a subset of sorting problems.
Next, the genetic algorithm studied in the paper was for sorting 7 items, not 6 items. The paper uses references from 1997, so it must have come after 1997; the paper points out that the results "has the same number of steps as the 7-sorter that was devised by Floyd and Knuth... described in Knuth 1973". A solution derived by human intelligences 24 years prior was used to confirm the results of the genetic algorithm.
And one very key point to the genetic algorithm that confirms what I said with no knowledge of which paper you were referring to: "Before applying genetic programming to a problem, the user must perform six major prepatory steps..." (p.3) - if you look at the six steps, you'll notice keywords such as identifying, creating, choosing, determining... Heavy amounts of human intelligence must be invested in order to make a genetic algorithm applicable to the problem. This is not even close to being a proof of mindless mutation having creative power.
Tangentially, for the 6 sorter, wiki says nothing of genetic algorithms being used to find it, but does tell us that the optimal number of steps is 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_network
P.The trilobite link doesn't tell me anything useful. Some people attempt to explain away trilobites "staying the same" with an evolutionary perspective; that's not really science - no experiments can be devised to test the claims.
Given that intelligent design would fit any historical record, I'm rather disinclined to entertain it. If there is a third, I'd love to hear about it.
That's not a good reason to dismiss a valid explanation. If we were to assign probabilities - a 0.1% chance doesn't mean that it's automatically false - but can you honestly assign a low probability to intelligent design of universe + life?
Especially since evolution has the same "problem". It fits any historical record. No fossils? Hard to find and create. Fossils exist, but not in expected order? Catastrophe created a strange setup, or maybe it's time to rewrite the evolutionary timelines. Human history claiming creation? Fairy tales.
It's just the two, if you want to abstract it to that - random, or non-random. Random isn't a very good explanation at all, when we consider what is needed for life to continue its existence (let alone begin to exist!).
Further the distinction between 'information' and 'noise' in purely in the eye of the beholder.
The difference between a working system, and a non-working system is not at all subjective. For life to exist, you need the information that defines a working biological system to be maintained within a certain range. Introducing noise into the information of the design works against that.
Now, a certain part of information is arbitrary. There's no reason why "asdf" can't mean "cat". But in the context of English, asdf does not mean cat, it is noise. In the context of genetics and life (self replicating biological systems), there is plenty of noise, and not that much information. (Every genetic sequence that cannot be decoding into a viable lifeform is noise)
Your objection to evolution is more or less the statement that "information cannot be created". This is a false statement, and there is no evidence for it. There is plenty of evidence that information is created all the time, from genetic algorithms to the spontaneous appearance of complex carbohydrates in interstellar clouds.
Genetic algorithms are created by intelligences. Not a proof for random noise->information. A block of matter, such as carbohydrates, is not in of itself information. Contrast that pile of carboyhydrates to a bacterium - systems for movement, sensors, self-maintenance, replication, adaptatation. The bacterium is a system with parts. The pile of carbohydrates? It just exists, and maybe forms a neat looking crystalline structure if formed under certain conditions.
Is it not absurd to claim computers could be improved by random chance?
No, it is not absurd. If we had billions of years, and trillions of little reproducing computer components, and didn't much care what the resulting computer did, as long as it did something - then no. It's not absurd. It's just not very efficient.
Look how many "ifs" you used in that statement. Without those prerequisites, your honest answer to my question is "no".
Your point is basically this: a low probability event can happen if you throw enough chances at it.
Errr, yes, that's how probability works. But for something to be likely to happen, you must have *enough* chances relative to the probability. Evolution doesn't, because the target (life) is that difficult of a problem, requiring an extremely rare configuration amidst a vast lifeless solution space.
... You may have run into 'proponents', amongst whom I presume you would count me, who argue for the theory. But proponents are not scientists.
Which makes every accusation of "anti-science" from an evolutionary proponent all the more absurd. It's not about beliefs (conclusions), it's about process (repeatable proofs).
Anyways, since we seem to be wrapping up the discussion, thanks for the dialogue.
You do know that we can still read your comment that started this, calling the standards "unattainable", don't you?
Sorry. Didn't read back far enough into the discussion to refresh the memory.
Tradeoffs. Duh. We've been over that before. You could still buy your gas guzzler. You might pay more to subsidize sales of the gas sipping cars, though.
You can't buy a car that doesn't get designed and sold, because selling it to meet market demand would trigger heavy penalties.
Beyond reason? Again you think you know more about this than the carmakers themselves. You're not convincing.
You're not convincing me that it takes a gov't demand in order to make carmakers design better cars. Is that where you think innovation comes from? Decrees from kings or bureaucrats to make it so?
The car companies have millions and billions riding on this stuff, yet you claim to know their business better than they do. I think you simply made a silly comment (standards are unattainable) and don't want to admit it.
No, it's because the carmakers would not achieve those gains without the rule. In a single comment you suggest the standards are unattainable and also that they'd meet the standards even without the rule.
I didn't say the standards were unattainable (impossible). I claim if they were so easily attainable, they'd be accomplished - but instead the gov't needs to coerce car-makers into adopting the standards. (As far as car-makers make positive noise about the standards, that's PR/marketing; engineering realities are another thing)
In order to meet the standards, the carmakers have to make tradeoffs - price, safety, style - things which customers can legitimately want, but are now denied due to "unintended consequences" of gov'ts decrees.
Gas efficiency is a feature. Carmakers already have a strong incentive to improve it within reason. What gov't standards just did is to push improvements *beyond* reason. There is no free lunch.
I don't think that there's any evidence for this statement. And it would be dangerous to extrapolate from it to any theories about how much change is required from a DNA point of view to effect change from an organism point of view.
There are 4 possible discrete values for each position in a "string" of DNA. DNA is decoded by proteins as 3-digit "words". It's digital because there are discrete values. It's a code because it's decoded as a sequence to create proteins and whatever else DNA is responsible for. (I suspect as we study it more, we'll discover that parts of DNA act as control code - showing that it is a programming language)
It's a digital code by definition. It is not dangerous to recognize comparable points between different systems. It's highly valuable to use the simple system to gain understanding of the more complex system - this is the entire basis of modeling and simulation!
For my examples, I have used the "simple" computers to provide a lower limit of the complexity of the lifeforms that exist and which we are one of. We know where computers come from and how much work is needed to iterate improvements - is it not absurd to claim computers could be improved by random chance? Yet we are to accept that the more difficult task (life) did so!
You don't have to look far into, say, the fossil record, to observe that life has increased in complexity over time. Darwin's theory was that this was driven by creatures attempting to out-compete each other, and this led him to the theory of natural selection.
If you wish to shift to this line of argument, then we are no longer discussing (operational) science, but history. The rules of evidence to apply are different. If you rely on historical evidence to "prove" evolution, then you are conceding the mechanical evidence for evolution isn't airtight enough to stand on its own.
I would also like to note that there are competing historical claims that also fit the same evidence. Evolution is not the only possible theory that accounts for the fossil record.
Genetics showed us how this is possible, from a biochemical standpoint. So that how an organism's characteristics might be passed on from one generation to the next is no longer complete mystery.
My analysis disputes this on the basis of information theory. That's my entire argument - it's not possible, even though proponents of evolution continuously assert it is.
An enormous amount of evidence clearly points to life evolving over billions of years from single-celled organisms to the diversity we see today. Is your point then that what little we understand about genetics is insufficient to support the notion that this development came about through natural means? Do you concede that this development took place?
My understanding of the current set of evidence for evolution, and my experience from working with information systems (computer programming and designing systems) is that the great body of evidence you cite is flimsy.
I'd be perfectly astonished if your objects weren't very well known. What I understand about the theory of evolution has completely satisfied me, in the sense that it seems believable and rational and plausible. You obviously feel differently, and I'd encourage you to ask these questions somewhere other than slashdot - which is mostly frequented by IT professionals - perhaps you could even take an undergrad course in developmental biology (if such a thing exists - the course that is, not the subject).
They may be well known, but I have yet to find an answer. You yourself do not have any - perhaps you will have some the next time you run into these objections.
I am unsatisfied with evolution as an explanation, and those who are, are more likely to insult my intelligence than attempt to address my points.
I'll read up on the trilobites if you'd like to provide a link.
If you don't believe in evolution, then just look at how a fetus evolves in the womb. Why would we get a tail then lose it during development. If we were intelligently designed, we'd forgo the tail in the womb. Some people are still born having tails because the genes to undo it were not active during development.
Note that for things ike "gills" on a fetus - those are not actually functional gills - they are structures that look like gills. For an alternative explanation why those structures exist - perhaps that is an efficient way to build up the body structure from an undifferentiated clump of cells.
To disprove this alternative, you'd have to show that the existing process is wasteful and unnecessary, such that there is no logical reason to do it that way. This is a very difficult claim to disprove. If we look at human created processes, there are many that may seem quite wasteful - but that is the only way to do it with our current technology and available resources - wastefulness in of itself does not prove lack of intelligent design.
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Somehow I have trouble understanding how did you get from "evolution is wrong" to "creationism is right". If you really "studied" from scientific point of view, you would know that disproving evolution (whatever that means) gets you exactly 0 (zero) evidence in favor of creationism.
A scientific point of view would recognize that a historical question is not in answered by operational science. (The stuff you do to examine the laws of physics, the behavior of animals, etc)
What happened yesterday? What happened 10 years ago? What happened 10 million years ago? Different lengths of time are involved, but they're fundamentally the same type of question with the same method of coming to a "right answer".
Beneficial changes must happen over time, even if rare.
Prove it. Do you not realize that complete failure (extinction) is an option?
Entropy works with information much the same way as it does with matter. Entropy to a car makes it nonfunctional, and eventually reduces it to scraps. Entropy (noise) to information reduces it to junk.
Or do you think "346oihap98gya9whoaidjfpoawije" has any meaning in English ... ?
Creationists do not know that stuff. They, in my experience, may have a technician level understanding of a science - even physicians are basically technicians, which is how you can have medical doctors who are Creationists - but not the kind of broad appreciation of the scientific hinterland that is needed to grasp just why evolution, the Big Bang and so are are generally accepted by scientists.
First off, technicians aren't dumb. Sometimes they're the ones who are fixing the engineer's mistakes. (And I'm speaking as an engineer) That does not indicate an inferior understanding.
Your claim of ignorance in Creationists is wrong. There are educated professionals in all fields who do not believe that evolution is the best explanation. Ignorance does not explain their existence.
Creationism and evolution are not competing scientific theories, they're competing histories. That is why physicians do not need to believe that evolution (simple to complex) happened in the past in order to practice medicine.
The practice of science and belief in evolution are pretty much unrelated. That has not stopped evolutionists from attempting to tie belief in evolution to being scientific.
Call them whatever you want; but those words are still insulting.
Truth is a defense against an accusation of libel; truth is not a defense against an accusation of condescension or disrespect.
The former is a matter of fact. The latter is a matter of how ideas and concepts are communicated. If you only want to be right, you can disregard the difference. But if you want to persuade ...
Sorry. Second try without borking the tags.
Correction: the US is/was a Christian nation (people) with a secular government. Governments represent a nation, but the nation is not its government.
Despite the secular government, the influence of Christianity gives the US a different national character than a pagan people with a Christian government, or an Islamic nation with an Islamic government. The set of ideas and principles that differentiate the US from other countries have a strong Christian heritage, so it is useful to simply describe this characteristic as the US being a "Christian nation".
There is a perspective and terminology where "Christian nation" is an accurate description for the US. Would "Christian heritage" be more acceptable to for you?
No, the US was explicitly created as a secular nation founded on religious freedom. No mention of God or Jesus Christ in the Constitution nor the original "bill of rights." It has nothing to do with what percentage of the population is Christian, it is not a Christian government. If it were, that would be establishing a religion and the 1st amendment explicitly forbids that. The Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment, they saw the abuses of mixing Governance and religion and wanted no part of it. A secular government is the only way to truly have freedom of religion. So while the US population is 80% Christian, it is not a Christian nation. There is a big difference.
Correction: the US is/was a Christian people (nation) with a secular government. Governments represent a nation, but the nation is not its government.
Despite the secular government, the influence of Christianity gives the US a different national character than say a pagan people with a Christian government, or an Islamic nation with an Islamic government. The set of ideas and principles that differentiate the US from other countries have a strong Christian heritage, so it is useful to simply describe this characteristic as the US being a "Christian nation".
There is a perspective and terminology where "Christian nation" is an accurate description for the US. Would "Christian heritage" be more acceptable to for you?
Depends. Are the 'stupid' a direct threat to your life? ...
In the context of this thread, the "stupid" are the "fellow citizens ... voting for idiots ..."
So ... uh, the "bullet to the back of the head" is to "fix" people with different opinions (thoughts, aka speech).
You don't need to believe in abiogenesis in order to believe in evolution. When people say that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, they're not talking about abiogenesis. They're talking about the evidence for there having been periods billions of years ago when there were only single-celled organisms, and the evolution of those organisms into the complex life we have today.
Which is horribly inadequate to prove that you can get higher order lfieforms from lower order lifeforms through random mutation.
Estimate how many steps there are between humans and bacteria. (Compare the size of the genomes). Check the amount of time we have to evolve each step, and then consider the number of chances you reasonably have, compared to the tiny chance of success.
How many steps to go from no brain, to human brain? How many steps to go from asexual reproduction, to the human sexual reproductive system? Don't forget that many of the complex systems you need to evolve are highly interdependent for development, growth, and maintenance. Either they evolve the interdependence, or they happened to evolve together, all of which requires more steps (and lower the probabilities that they could occur by random chance).
Total up the probability of all of those steps, and the combined expected value goes to zero, to the point where it will not happen, statistically. The evidence for evolution is inadequate, but we've done an excellent job of insisting that it's overwhelming.
Look for the Miller-Urey Experiment, for a classic. Bear in mind that to go from primordial soup to single-cells, we're talking about a handful of freak occurrences, each one some 40 million years apart.
That experiment doesn't mean much. No evidence to show that there was an ancient Earth atmosphere like that. An elaborate system to trap organic compounds away from the heat, so that said compounds could accumulate, rather than being destroyed by heat within the main mixture. All that, and only a dilute solution with a few amino acids.
Organic compounds don't usually accumulate and stick around for 40 million years - so how do is the right environment maintained so that freak occurences 40 millions of years apart can chain together to create life?
As to the US being a Christian nation, I don't see how anyone can believe that. It's obvious to me that the vast majority of Americans worship money (the sin God hates more than any other sin).
One can accurately claim that based on the principles underlying the US, as well as the history and tradition of the US people.
It's not necessarily about the exact % of the population that can be classified as "religiously practicing Christian" at this precise moment.
One can make a case that the US is becoming less of a Christian nation, but it could be classified such in the past, and may do more to be classified thus in the future.
You can't fix stupid. Or so they say. Honestly, a bullet to the head will fix anyone's belief.
Wow. Do you think you can still have a civil society or enjoy life in peace after you've purged the "stupid" with that method?
So it's not a delusion to claim that Eve was created from Adam's rib? Or that Mohammed ascended to the heavens on a magical horse? Or that when you drink wine in the Communion rite, it's actually the blood of Christ entering your body?
Believing the two historical claims is not delusional if they actually happened. Would you like to offer up irrefutable historical proof that said events did not happen? Eyewitness accounts? Video recording? Time machine?
Disdain is not a disproof.
(I do not believe that the wine in Communion literally becomes blood, and do not defend that belief).
The difference between an atheist and a believer is only in how many gods they don't believe in.
That's an amusing quote that is somewhat nonsensical.
1. Atheists are believers; they believe that no gods exist, rather than that a god/many gods exist. You're trying to distinguish between a subset and the set that it is part of. "The difference between an atheist and an atheist ..."
2. "disbelief" is only meaningful with respect to the beliefs that drive the disbelief. "Adding one more god to disbelieve" makes it sound like an insignificant addition when totaling up all the gods one can disbelieve in, but it only happens because one has a stronger belief that excludes the disbelieved notions. So it is not the number of disbeliefs that matter, but the number of beliefs that do matter.
Here's an illustration for why the saying is really silly. There are an infinite number of wrong answers to 1 + 1 = ?. But the person who looks at the number of wrong answers to 1 + 1 and then decides that there is no right answer to the question is also wrong. The person who rejects "1 + 1 = 3" because "there is no right answer to 1 + 1" is right for the wrong reason. No matter how many wrong answers to 1 + 1 he can find, his core belief is still wrong.
What matters is not how easy it is to adopt a conclusion. ("just another god to not believe in") What matters is truth. That's something we can all believe in.
So you can replace programmers with random number generators and get the same output?
Brilliant! It'll cut costs to practically nothing! Let's make millions undercutting everyone else!
More seriously, treating intelligent additions to complex systems as if they were from random noise sources is to completely miss the point of how evolution is "supposed to work", or how it differs from intelligent design.
If the definition of evolution honestly includes the products of intelligent design, then the word evolution is meaningless, and we need a new word to describe the different theories of how life came to be.
I don't know how you got the impression that better was objective. It's not just my personal preference, though. It happened through our complicated and flawed representative democratic system.
Who voted for a higher MPG limit? No one. The EPA, a gov't bureacracy, acted on previously delegated power to set new mileage goals. This being a democracy, we're free to disagree with the ends and the means.
Yes, and that worked brilliantly. Would you suggest the government did the same for cars?
If the gov't could do the same for cars, I'd like to see the proposal. The EPA raising the mileage standards is not even remotely similar to what the gov't did to start off the Internet boom.
We've been over and over this, Silly. We don't get something for nothing. There are tradeoffs.
You still haven't provided evidence that the mileage standards are attainable - only made vague unsubstantiated references to carmakers being "okay" with them.
To recap: a politician does not create solutions. He is not a professional in any particular field. He can't be - he's voted in as a voice of the people, not an expert on a particular thing.
Unless said politician is a leader and is able to form policies that attract followers and support. (He may take other people's solutions, but he can also make his own).
It's not a one way relationship. Politicians respond to the people who vote for them, and the people respond to the politician's ideas and actions.
Furthermore, scientists may be experts on technical subjects, but the politicians are experts on creating consensus/compromise and getting society to buy into a desired policy. (Not that every politician does this well, but the experienced politician will be better at it than a random scientist)
Competition pushes back against that force; nobody wants to be limited to 20 MPH all the time. The insurance company that doesn't let you drive 20+ MPH doesn't get the business that the others do.
But said insurance companies will charge you according to the risk you incur going 20+ MPH, or they'll pay more in damages than they get in premiums and go out of business.
Yeah, intelligent incremental design is completely like mindless incremental improvement by random mutation.
When a programmer sees that his code doesn't compile, he randomly changes something from the last working build and starts over. When he wants to add a new feature, he randomly toggles a bit and see if it breaks the code, and then randomly toggles another bit, repeating the process until he gets a working feature.
A random ASCII character generator can spit out a Tolkien novel; but that doesn't make novel-writing akin to random mutation, even though you can find incremental drafts between the idea and the final product.
Actually, I did bait and switch on you, I couldn't find the paper I wanted, so I found a similar paper. Which is still a problem for you. It's a problem because evolution created the same thing as intelligent design did, which proves that evolution, witht he same process as biological (genes are just information), is capable of optimizing and creating complexity from randomness. That's all I needed to show to prove my point. This would also create a problem for you in that if evolution can create the structure, how intelligent does "intelligent" design have to be? It certainly lowers the bar a bit doesn't it?
The paper you wanted to cite does not exist, because the optimal number of steps for a 6-sorter is 12, not 5 as you claimed. Additionally, since the sorting network has an optimal solution, it is nonsensical to claim that any optimal sorting network found is "illogical" and wouldn't have been designed by an intelligence. The intelligence looking for an optimal solution would have found it (by brute force computing if need be), proven it was optimal, and would have every logical reason to retain the solution for future reference.
As for the "problem" your genetic algorithm created for me - did you even read the paper? 6 major preparatory steps - your genetic algorithm is an intelligently designed system that does a clever search through randomized parameters, using a process optimized for the computing hardware it ran on. Evolution has to start from scratch. Not even close. "No fair, that's abiogenesis!", you might say. Then take an abacus and evolve it into a Core i7. No pathway, you say? Same problem for evolution - even if you get to cheat and start with a "simple" bacterium.
Yes, a random search might find the "right answer" (optimal sorting network). But then you have to pay attention to the probabilities - what is the solution space, and what is the chance of stumbling upon correct solutions? What is the chance of stumbling upon a good solution, and from there making continuous incremental improvements to yield an optimal solution? Are the solutions continuous? Evolution claims them to be so, but has not proven it. Evolution has not really addressed any of these questions, but proponents love to mis-cite the existence of genetic algorithms as if it bypasses all of these problems.
Better is subjective. You don't think the result will be better, but I do.
I thought this was about making objectively "better" changes that would help the greater good. Now it's about personal preference? Why should your preferences override those of the car manufacturers and their customers?
Innovation doesn't all come from one place. Sometimes it's private sector and sometimes the government spurs the innovation. I've got an example in mind. I'll give you a hint - we're communicating over it.
For the Internet, gov't-paid scientists and engineers designed a decentralized communications network, whose protocols and design was copied by the private sector and deployed everywhere. Gov't created something and shared.
A little different than the gov't decreeing that every house must have an ISP hookup, or that every person needs to buy a computer with a modem. The EPA rules are just edicts - no innovation or technology is provided that will spur improvements. It's coercion - and while it may yield useful results, gov't coercion rarely pays attention to the unintended consequences of its objectives - consequences that are quite capable of outweighing any good done.
Would you like to show evidence how all the desired improvements are easily attainable without any cons?
Your sorting paper is rather disappointing compared to what you said it did. To recap:
Show me the world's fastest sorting algorithm. I'll give you a hint it sorts 6 values using 5 comparisons. This was found using genetic algorithms.
... In this case, an algorithm for sorting that does not make any logical sense. But it works. So we start at randomness and create order. Very efficient order. And there;s the thing, since it does not make "sense", no "intelligent" designer would have designed it. It appears as random swaps. Generally you only orderly swap things if they are out of order.
Key claims - 6 item sorter, genetic algorithms used to dervive it. Algorithm does not make sense, so no intelligence would have designed it.
So what does your paper say? It's talking about sorting networks, which are "more efficient for sorting small numbers of items". It's only the "world's fastest" for a subset of sorting problems.
Next, the genetic algorithm studied in the paper was for sorting 7 items, not 6 items. The paper uses references from 1997, so it must have come after 1997; the paper points out that the results "has the same number of steps as the 7-sorter that was devised by Floyd and Knuth ... described in Knuth 1973". A solution derived by human intelligences 24 years prior was used to confirm the results of the genetic algorithm.
And one very key point to the genetic algorithm that confirms what I said with no knowledge of which paper you were referring to: "Before applying genetic programming to a problem, the user must perform six major prepatory steps ..." (p.3) - if you look at the six steps, you'll notice keywords such as identifying, creating, choosing, determining ... Heavy amounts of human intelligence must be invested in order to make a genetic algorithm applicable to the problem. This is not even close to being a proof of mindless mutation having creative power.
Tangentially, for the 6 sorter, wiki says nothing of genetic algorithms being used to find it, but does tell us that the optimal number of steps is 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorting_network P.The trilobite link doesn't tell me anything useful. Some people attempt to explain away trilobites "staying the same" with an evolutionary perspective; that's not really science - no experiments can be devised to test the claims.
Given that intelligent design would fit any historical record, I'm rather disinclined to entertain it. If there is a third, I'd love to hear about it.
That's not a good reason to dismiss a valid explanation. If we were to assign probabilities - a 0.1% chance doesn't mean that it's automatically false - but can you honestly assign a low probability to intelligent design of universe + life?
Especially since evolution has the same "problem". It fits any historical record. No fossils? Hard to find and create. Fossils exist, but not in expected order? Catastrophe created a strange setup, or maybe it's time to rewrite the evolutionary timelines. Human history claiming creation? Fairy tales.
It's just the two, if you want to abstract it to that - random, or non-random. Random isn't a very good explanation at all, when we consider what is needed for life to continue its existence (let alone begin to exist!).
Further the distinction between 'information' and 'noise' in purely in the eye of the beholder.
The difference between a working system, and a non-working system is not at all subjective. For life to exist, you need the information that defines a working biological system to be maintained within a certain range. Introducing noise into the information of the design works against that.
Now, a certain part of information is arbitrary. There's no reason why "asdf" can't mean "cat". But in the context of English, asdf does not mean cat, it is noise. In the context of genetics and life (self replicating biological systems), there is plenty of noise, and not that much information. (Every genetic sequence that cannot be decoding into a viable lifeform is noise)
Your objection to evolution is more or less the statement that "information cannot be created". This is a false statement, and there is no evidence for it. There is plenty of evidence that information is created all the time, from genetic algorithms to the spontaneous appearance of complex carbohydrates in interstellar clouds.
Genetic algorithms are created by intelligences. Not a proof for random noise->information. A block of matter, such as carbohydrates, is not in of itself information. Contrast that pile of carboyhydrates to a bacterium - systems for movement, sensors, self-maintenance, replication, adaptatation. The bacterium is a system with parts. The pile of carbohydrates? It just exists, and maybe forms a neat looking crystalline structure if formed under certain conditions.
Is it not absurd to claim computers could be improved by random chance?
No, it is not absurd. If we had billions of years, and trillions of little reproducing computer components, and didn't much care what the resulting computer did, as long as it did something - then no. It's not absurd. It's just not very efficient.
Look how many "ifs" you used in that statement. Without those prerequisites, your honest answer to my question is "no".
Your point is basically this: a low probability event can happen if you throw enough chances at it.
Errr, yes, that's how probability works. But for something to be likely to happen, you must have *enough* chances relative to the probability. Evolution doesn't, because the target (life) is that difficult of a problem, requiring an extremely rare configuration amidst a vast lifeless solution space.
Which makes every accusation of "anti-science" from an evolutionary proponent all the more absurd. It's not about beliefs (conclusions), it's about process (repeatable proofs).
Anyways, since we seem to be wrapping up the discussion, thanks for the dialogue.
You do know that we can still read your comment that started this, calling the standards "unattainable", don't you?
Sorry. Didn't read back far enough into the discussion to refresh the memory.
Tradeoffs. Duh. We've been over that before. You could still buy your gas guzzler. You might pay more to subsidize sales of the gas sipping cars, though.
You can't buy a car that doesn't get designed and sold, because selling it to meet market demand would trigger heavy penalties.
Beyond reason? Again you think you know more about this than the carmakers themselves. You're not convincing.
You're not convincing me that it takes a gov't demand in order to make carmakers design better cars. Is that where you think innovation comes from? Decrees from kings or bureaucrats to make it so?
The car companies have millions and billions riding on this stuff, yet you claim to know their business better than they do. I think you simply made a silly comment (standards are unattainable) and don't want to admit it.
No, it's because the carmakers would not achieve those gains without the rule. In a single comment you suggest the standards are unattainable and also that they'd meet the standards even without the rule.
I didn't say the standards were unattainable (impossible). I claim if they were so easily attainable, they'd be accomplished - but instead the gov't needs to coerce car-makers into adopting the standards. (As far as car-makers make positive noise about the standards, that's PR/marketing; engineering realities are another thing)
In order to meet the standards, the carmakers have to make tradeoffs - price, safety, style - things which customers can legitimately want, but are now denied due to "unintended consequences" of gov'ts decrees.
Gas efficiency is a feature. Carmakers already have a strong incentive to improve it within reason. What gov't standards just did is to push improvements *beyond* reason. There is no free lunch.
I don't think that there's any evidence for this statement. And it would be dangerous to extrapolate from it to any theories about how much change is required from a DNA point of view to effect change from an organism point of view.
There are 4 possible discrete values for each position in a "string" of DNA. DNA is decoded by proteins as 3-digit "words". It's digital because there are discrete values. It's a code because it's decoded as a sequence to create proteins and whatever else DNA is responsible for. (I suspect as we study it more, we'll discover that parts of DNA act as control code - showing that it is a programming language)
It's a digital code by definition. It is not dangerous to recognize comparable points between different systems. It's highly valuable to use the simple system to gain understanding of the more complex system - this is the entire basis of modeling and simulation!
For my examples, I have used the "simple" computers to provide a lower limit of the complexity of the lifeforms that exist and which we are one of. We know where computers come from and how much work is needed to iterate improvements - is it not absurd to claim computers could be improved by random chance? Yet we are to accept that the more difficult task (life) did so!
You don't have to look far into, say, the fossil record, to observe that life has increased in complexity over time. Darwin's theory was that this was driven by creatures attempting to out-compete each other, and this led him to the theory of natural selection.
If you wish to shift to this line of argument, then we are no longer discussing (operational) science, but history. The rules of evidence to apply are different. If you rely on historical evidence to "prove" evolution, then you are conceding the mechanical evidence for evolution isn't airtight enough to stand on its own.
I would also like to note that there are competing historical claims that also fit the same evidence. Evolution is not the only possible theory that accounts for the fossil record.
Genetics showed us how this is possible, from a biochemical standpoint. So that how an organism's characteristics might be passed on from one generation to the next is no longer complete mystery.
My analysis disputes this on the basis of information theory. That's my entire argument - it's not possible, even though proponents of evolution continuously assert it is.
An enormous amount of evidence clearly points to life evolving over billions of years from single-celled organisms to the diversity we see today. Is your point then that what little we understand about genetics is insufficient to support the notion that this development came about through natural means? Do you concede that this development took place?
My understanding of the current set of evidence for evolution, and my experience from working with information systems (computer programming and designing systems) is that the great body of evidence you cite is flimsy.
I'd be perfectly astonished if your objects weren't very well known. What I understand about the theory of evolution has completely satisfied me, in the sense that it seems believable and rational and plausible. You obviously feel differently, and I'd encourage you to ask these questions somewhere other than slashdot - which is mostly frequented by IT professionals - perhaps you could even take an undergrad course in developmental biology (if such a thing exists - the course that is, not the subject).
They may be well known, but I have yet to find an answer. You yourself do not have any - perhaps you will have some the next time you run into these objections.
I am unsatisfied with evolution as an explanation, and those who are, are more likely to insult my intelligence than attempt to address my points.
I wonder too
I'll read up on the trilobites if you'd like to provide a link.
If you don't believe in evolution, then just look at how a fetus evolves in the womb. Why would we get a tail then lose it during development. If we were intelligently designed, we'd forgo the tail in the womb. Some people are still born having tails because the genes to undo it were not active during development.
You're talking about recapituation theory (baby organism "replays" evolutionary history). By Wiki, that's "defunct". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory#Modern_status
Note that for things ike "gills" on a fetus - those are not actually functional gills - they are structures that look like gills. For an alternative explanation why those structures exist - perhaps that is an efficient way to build up the body structure from an undifferentiated clump of cells.
To disprove this alternative, you'd have to show that the existing process is wasteful and unnecessary, such that there is no logical reason to do it that way. This is a very difficult claim to disprove. If we look at human created processes, there are many that may seem quite wasteful - but that is the only way to do it with our current technology and available resources - wastefulness in of itself does not prove lack of intelligent design.