Yeah, Ron Paul likely would, but probably largely because of his economic stance. "Against stem cell research" and "against federally-funded stem cell research" (your link) are different statements, with different drivers for evaluation involved.
I can't really picture the most conservative of conservatives being against it on this basis. So, maybe the people choosing the issues for the grid saw it as a nonissue at this point as well.
Well, you're simply stating ID is as it isn't, a) that it either necessitates or specifies the Christian God, or b) it definitionally denies either "macroevolution" or "microevolution" occurs.
Since you're simply making up what's under discussion, I suppose I'll need to leave your conversation with yourself to you. Unfortunate, since it was an interesting discussion.
Your strategy of simply asserting a straw-man version of ID aside, eventually, regardless of how much anyone tries to freight "Intelligent Design" with other positions of theism (in contrast to the process that would be intellectually honest, looking for the best argument in a domain--instead choosing to deliberately search for the worst), science simply will need a term to refer to "maybe some or all of this was designed", and actually deal with the issue.
Which brings us full circle to the question of the scope of science opened in my first post.
I hope I didn't give the impression that I'm predisposed to there not being a "reduction" of proposed instances of "irreducible complexity", though. My personal worldview can accomodate every single proposal being sufficiently explained, thus simply moving my notion of the point of design's "when" back to the Big Bang. I think, perhaps, your concern is that it is your worldview that fails outright, with the very first example that doesn't "reduce".
Well, I hope you'll at least acknowledge "useful" is a rather-subjective evaluation.
But let me propose one scenario:
We are now at the point in history of being able to do substantial varieties of genetic engineering. What we don't have, is historical data as to the possible negative effects of producing various varieties of "artificial life". Let say, in one alternate future, -because enough people didn't reject the notion out of hand-, we "ran the numbers" on some fossilized form of life, and found that judging by the calculated probability, this form of life had no likely direct Earthly ancestor. This form of life also was apparently remarkably efficient at killing off other forms of life existing at the time, in unexpected ways--say, it secreted its own deadly virii or somesuch. No need to specify "God" or "intelligent extraterrestrials" or any further cause--we're simply left with the evidence that an apparent case of design interacted with its environment in previously-unforeseen and hazardous ways. The only distinction that caused us even to focus upon, pursue, and reach this information is the paradigm of design. Given that we're now entering a historical period of doing our own genetic design, with an ever-expanding scope, could not the outcome of an apparent historical sample of that be of very pressing "usefulness", in terms of cautionary specifics to refer to for our own genetic engineering efforts?
As for ID's falsifiability, well, that's debatable too--but a little aside the point in terms of String Theory. The criteria for excluding ID would state that String Theory should not have been "allowed" to be pursued scientifically in the first place, or that it magically "became science" the moment when the first person thought of (or proposed, or documented... what is your criteria, anyway?) something to falsify it.
Right. Simple manufacture of what the term "faith" means, to custom-fit a prepackaged argument--I believe this was pioneered by Dawkins.
There is no suggestion that, say, Christianity ever utilized this definition, or that it makes sense at all to use in the domain of discussing religion. Our basic texts simply outright state that certain people had extensive evidence--yet, they still had "faith" in the sense that "faith" actually means, confidence and trust in a process or entity with -incomplete- information. I may have "faith" that my company will do well after hiring specific quality people, lining up good investors, etc., and although I have absolutely no evidence as to our company performance next year (given it hasn't happened), characterizing my confidence as lacking any backing evidence at all is simply to lie about what "evidence" means, and what "faith" means.
And, equally, I can say ID "makes sense".
No, I don't need some "magical event", I need an instance of Design. And, again, "it goes against all evidence" is purely your personal -interpretation- of the evidence. My notion of the system at hand is additive, not either-or; I can, without any self-contradiction, assert there is a particular causal mechanism -and- that mechanism was designed at some point in the causal chain. Naturalists tend not to have that option, and so tend to have a deep problem understanding "proximate cause", or at least refuse to understand it in regards to ID, though they're fine with the notion that what caused, say, the Nagasaki explosion was a nuclear chain reaction--and that what caused the Nagasaki explosion was President Roosevelt.
And that leads to the open lunacy of the chain-of-false-dichotomies "god of the gaps" argument... but I digress.;)
Thanks for throwing in the two straw-men at the end, but I think we'd agree discussing that would serve no productive purpose, nor was intended to.
Well, in fact, it does make predictions--off the top of my head, it would predict that the probability of the specific mutations required for "irreducibly complex" structures in the aggregate, given the available particular time period and population size, would be extremely low. And no, it doesn't say "no way we can no why", that's just your mischaracterization--we're already with epigenetics seeing where teleology and biology can intersect.
Behe has certainly made other predictions. It's weird how this argument tends to go at this point--either the person simply denies, in the face of reality, the fact predictions are being made, or they shift context and start attacking the predictions, as if this weren't implicit admission predictions are made. Likewise the fact that if ID is testable, it's science, and if it isn't testable as an inference, it does not vary in this respect from other areas uncontroversially-classified as "science". Amazing how difficult it can be to get someone to acknowledge the meaning of the conjunction "or", at times...
"Science" is not, simply, solely scientific method per se. It is also, again uncontroversially except when discussing ID, inference from scientific method. Anthropology, to name just one field, would be wiped out as a science if, in fact, we admitted into it only what could be specifically tested as individual hypotheses. Fortunately, inference from what we can test often works remarkably well.
But, the wider application of such predictions are much more interesting, as it could be a paradigm shift that adds to our basic repertoire for evaluating Phenomenon X. If in fact Design is a relevant attribute of biological entities, would it not make sense to accomodate in our basic method of evaluating and discovering things, this heuristic? Certainly, if you went to your mechanic, and instead of referencing the purpose of various parts of your car toward diagnosing the problem, he started with a physically-causal elaboration on how the rubber was formed, the metal smelted, etc., you'd find him grossly inefficient and focused on irrelevancies for the given task of information analysis (e.g. the problem with the car), and go elsewhere.
In other words, science isn't devoid of heuristics, and those heuristics can be informative. Though, this is highly speculative, and who knows what benefit might "evolve" in the future--but none will in this domain on the premise of scientific censorship.
Anyway, enough for now. I've already done your stock two-line AC response too much justice.;)
No, in fact, "Darwin's Black Box" in itself contains extensive science. This is a verifiable empirical fact by looking at the biochemical causal chains specifically described, like, you know, on the pages.
It's simply a assertion of yours based on your preference to exclude the science that is there based on your disagreement with the inference. You just arbitrarily "de-scope" the science, and thus exclude it from your characterization of ID. Sorry, not impressed.
Same for String Theory, until recently. Why was that "allowed"?
I'm not even sure how the event of hypothesis-formation occurs with regard to any domain in your model--because certainly, the hypothesis precedes the testing model, and if said hypothesis "isn't science", it would then be excluded a priori.
I think, as a historical question, for the integrity of science, "philosophy of science" is particularly important now.
Now that the academic scientific orthodoxy has rallied to ensure for now that one disturbing inference, ID, is uniquely excluded, we'll need some way to deal with the aftermath--which is the bare fact that science is rife, throughout, with models which contain untestable inferential conclusions from tested empirical knowns. Given that this has always been the case (name the date -all- predictions of Einstein's model were experimentally verified--this year, was it--why'd we let him make that proposal in the interim?), is presently, and always will be--and we need only wait a half-hour for any given scientist to make such an inference without providing his testing model in any domain, the "cat is out of the bag" so to speak and well have to view "science" per se from a definitional perspective that reflects reality, without subsetting science down to a tiny shadow of its current scope. This isn't really an abstract question any more--it's the practical reality of fending off the appearance of bare hypocrisy in academia, by students who are paying attention to their educators' consistency on the matter.
A complex process, to be sure, but the risk is artificially limiting the scope of our investigation of reality at the outset, with literally untold damage to science and humanity.
Personally, I think Kuhn is a good place to start in terms of perspective, and the demarcation problem a good place to start as far as the overall issues at hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Be a Creator?
Hey, I'd be satisfied with just a passel of rib-DNA-generated gender-flipped quasi-clones.
Not sure if that'd make them my wives or daughters, but I think I can deal with the metaphysical ambiguity.
Well, you could conjecture about the subjective qualia that would persist for an individual should time stop in various, er, "states"...
Yeah, especially the formally-invalid fiction of a false dichotomy.
So, I'll call it "allegory" and...
(waits 200 years)
I win.
No compromises, just facts, remember.
Nice that Beethoven finished that Ninth before they grabbed him.
...I'm drunk? ;)
Or, we have reached a confluence of realities where "threaded" and "flat" become one...
Probably the first.
Whether that was addressed to me, and you just can't read a "Reply to this" link, or not...
I'd like to thank you for providing me with the single most defensive response to attempted humor I've ever seen.
I wasn't suggesting it wasn't "acceptable". But if we're calling it a "date of birth", mmm... July is party-time.
Yeah, Ron Paul likely would, but probably largely because of his economic stance. "Against stem cell research" and "against federally-funded stem cell research" (your link) are different statements, with different drivers for evaluation involved.
Good point, though.
...to 4,568 million years ago, within a range of about 2,080,000 years.
Similarly, I've discovered my birthday to be defined as subsequent to July.
...but not stem cell research?
Because recent advances have eliminated the necessity of an ethically-controversial method of acquiring them?
Pretty widely-carried news recently.
I can't really picture the most conservative of conservatives being against it on this basis. So, maybe the people choosing the issues for the grid saw it as a nonissue at this point as well.
Ad-hominems to the point of absurdity. I expect you didn't really expect a response to that, and I'll accomodate you.
Well, you're simply stating ID is as it isn't, a) that it either necessitates or specifies the Christian God, or b) it definitionally denies either "macroevolution" or "microevolution" occurs.
Since you're simply making up what's under discussion, I suppose I'll need to leave your conversation with yourself to you. Unfortunate, since it was an interesting discussion.
Your strategy of simply asserting a straw-man version of ID aside, eventually, regardless of how much anyone tries to freight "Intelligent Design" with other positions of theism (in contrast to the process that would be intellectually honest, looking for the best argument in a domain--instead choosing to deliberately search for the worst), science simply will need a term to refer to "maybe some or all of this was designed", and actually deal with the issue.
Which brings us full circle to the question of the scope of science opened in my first post.
I hope I didn't give the impression that I'm predisposed to there not being a "reduction" of proposed instances of "irreducible complexity", though. My personal worldview can accomodate every single proposal being sufficiently explained, thus simply moving my notion of the point of design's "when" back to the Big Bang. I think, perhaps, your concern is that it is your worldview that fails outright, with the very first example that doesn't "reduce".
Well, I hope you'll at least acknowledge "useful" is a rather-subjective evaluation.
But let me propose one scenario:
We are now at the point in history of being able to do substantial varieties of genetic engineering. What we don't have, is historical data as to the possible negative effects of producing various varieties of "artificial life". Let say, in one alternate future, -because enough people didn't reject the notion out of hand-, we "ran the numbers" on some fossilized form of life, and found that judging by the calculated probability, this form of life had no likely direct Earthly ancestor. This form of life also was apparently remarkably efficient at killing off other forms of life existing at the time, in unexpected ways--say, it secreted its own deadly virii or somesuch. No need to specify "God" or "intelligent extraterrestrials" or any further cause--we're simply left with the evidence that an apparent case of design interacted with its environment in previously-unforeseen and hazardous ways. The only distinction that caused us even to focus upon, pursue, and reach this information is the paradigm of design. Given that we're now entering a historical period of doing our own genetic design, with an ever-expanding scope, could not the outcome of an apparent historical sample of that be of very pressing "usefulness", in terms of cautionary specifics to refer to for our own genetic engineering efforts?
As for ID's falsifiability, well, that's debatable too--but a little aside the point in terms of String Theory. The criteria for excluding ID would state that String Theory should not have been "allowed" to be pursued scientifically in the first place, or that it magically "became science" the moment when the first person thought of (or proposed, or documented... what is your criteria, anyway?) something to falsify it.
Horribly semantic, but okay. Remove the term entirely.
The specific mutations required PERIOD.
Right. Simple manufacture of what the term "faith" means, to custom-fit a prepackaged argument--I believe this was pioneered by Dawkins.
There is no suggestion that, say, Christianity ever utilized this definition, or that it makes sense at all to use in the domain of discussing religion. Our basic texts simply outright state that certain people had extensive evidence--yet, they still had "faith" in the sense that "faith" actually means, confidence and trust in a process or entity with -incomplete- information. I may have "faith" that my company will do well after hiring specific quality people, lining up good investors, etc., and although I have absolutely no evidence as to our company performance next year (given it hasn't happened), characterizing my confidence as lacking any backing evidence at all is simply to lie about what "evidence" means, and what "faith" means.
And, equally, I can say ID "makes sense". No, I don't need some "magical event", I need an instance of Design. And, again, "it goes against all evidence" is purely your personal -interpretation- of the evidence. My notion of the system at hand is additive, not either-or; I can, without any self-contradiction, assert there is a particular causal mechanism -and- that mechanism was designed at some point in the causal chain. Naturalists tend not to have that option, and so tend to have a deep problem understanding "proximate cause", or at least refuse to understand it in regards to ID, though they're fine with the notion that what caused, say, the Nagasaki explosion was a nuclear chain reaction--and that what caused the Nagasaki explosion was President Roosevelt. And that leads to the open lunacy of the chain-of-false-dichotomies "god of the gaps" argument... but I digress. ;)
Thanks for throwing in the two straw-men at the end, but I think we'd agree discussing that would serve no productive purpose, nor was intended to.
Well, in fact, it does make predictions--off the top of my head, it would predict that the probability of the specific mutations required for "irreducibly complex" structures in the aggregate, given the available particular time period and population size, would be extremely low. And no, it doesn't say "no way we can no why", that's just your mischaracterization--we're already with epigenetics seeing where teleology and biology can intersect.
;)
Behe has certainly made other predictions. It's weird how this argument tends to go at this point--either the person simply denies, in the face of reality, the fact predictions are being made, or they shift context and start attacking the predictions, as if this weren't implicit admission predictions are made. Likewise the fact that if ID is testable, it's science, and if it isn't testable as an inference, it does not vary in this respect from other areas uncontroversially-classified as "science". Amazing how difficult it can be to get someone to acknowledge the meaning of the conjunction "or", at times...
"Science" is not, simply, solely scientific method per se. It is also, again uncontroversially except when discussing ID, inference from scientific method. Anthropology, to name just one field, would be wiped out as a science if, in fact, we admitted into it only what could be specifically tested as individual hypotheses. Fortunately, inference from what we can test often works remarkably well.
But, the wider application of such predictions are much more interesting, as it could be a paradigm shift that adds to our basic repertoire for evaluating Phenomenon X. If in fact Design is a relevant attribute of biological entities, would it not make sense to accomodate in our basic method of evaluating and discovering things, this heuristic? Certainly, if you went to your mechanic, and instead of referencing the purpose of various parts of your car toward diagnosing the problem, he started with a physically-causal elaboration on how the rubber was formed, the metal smelted, etc., you'd find him grossly inefficient and focused on irrelevancies for the given task of information analysis (e.g. the problem with the car), and go elsewhere.
In other words, science isn't devoid of heuristics, and those heuristics can be informative. Though, this is highly speculative, and who knows what benefit might "evolve" in the future--but none will in this domain on the premise of scientific censorship.
Anyway, enough for now. I've already done your stock two-line AC response too much justice.
No, in fact, "Darwin's Black Box" in itself contains extensive science. This is a verifiable empirical fact by looking at the biochemical causal chains specifically described, like, you know, on the pages.
It's simply a assertion of yours based on your preference to exclude the science that is there based on your disagreement with the inference. You just arbitrarily "de-scope" the science, and thus exclude it from your characterization of ID. Sorry, not impressed.
Same for String Theory, until recently. Why was that "allowed"?
I'm not even sure how the event of hypothesis-formation occurs with regard to any domain in your model--because certainly, the hypothesis precedes the testing model, and if said hypothesis "isn't science", it would then be excluded a priori.
I think, as a historical question, for the integrity of science, "philosophy of science" is particularly important now.
Now that the academic scientific orthodoxy has rallied to ensure for now that one disturbing inference, ID, is uniquely excluded, we'll need some way to deal with the aftermath--which is the bare fact that science is rife, throughout, with models which contain untestable inferential conclusions from tested empirical knowns. Given that this has always been the case (name the date -all- predictions of Einstein's model were experimentally verified--this year, was it--why'd we let him make that proposal in the interim?), is presently, and always will be--and we need only wait a half-hour for any given scientist to make such an inference without providing his testing model in any domain, the "cat is out of the bag" so to speak and well have to view "science" per se from a definitional perspective that reflects reality, without subsetting science down to a tiny shadow of its current scope. This isn't really an abstract question any more--it's the practical reality of fending off the appearance of bare hypocrisy in academia, by students who are paying attention to their educators' consistency on the matter.
A complex process, to be sure, but the risk is artificially limiting the scope of our investigation of reality at the outset, with literally untold damage to science and humanity.
Personally, I think Kuhn is a good place to start in terms of perspective, and the demarcation problem a good place to start as far as the overall issues at hand.
Either question can be ignored and you'll still live, honestly.
...temporarily.
Tell that to Dawkins... though, he has a problem with metaphysics in general unless he's talking about his memes...
So, we're talking about teleological choices, made by teleological beings, driving a non-teleological process?
Sir, your question, though completely plausible and directly connected to empirical knowns by simple logical inference, is unscientific!
(Disclaimer: Post not representative of science as it historically and presently actually is)
I think we're okay as long as it's just sending scientific data that doesn't reveal much about our cultural predispositions.
"You couldn't possibly have had anything to do with Designing us" should work.