According to the guys in #gaim on irc.freenode.net (the developers), Google is going through a lot of work to make a Jabber implementation that will scale well to the large volume they'll be doing as compared to other Jabber servers, which use the reference servers. I thought they were intentionally leaving out compatibility too, but that's not the case. They are actively working on it, but it's harder than it sounds. There's still a bit of cynicism in me about this, but I think the gaim devs are pretty reliable for information like this.
SIP already allows for the negotiation of the most mutually preferred codec. Problem solved.
All of these IM-based voip solutions are to SIP in the voip world what MSN and AOL IM are to Jabber in the IM world. They are fun toys, but they aren't intercompatible long-term solutions. SIP is robust, well supported, and awesome. As it progresses and society becomes more dependent on it, firewalling issues will rapidly fade, and you'll get a situation similar to how virtually all firewalls allow port 80. Granted, SIP could have been made more firewall-immune in the first place, but this is really its only significant problem. The only other one I'd mention is that very few SIP phones have a full keyboard or straightforward way of entering in full sip addresses, which look just like email addresses and can have letters. This should also hopefully fade once it becomes more ubiquitous, and people need to call other networks more often, and will need that @domain in there.
The range of SIP telephones is amazing. Check out this bad boy at voipsupply.com
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare for my job as a science teacher in Kansas.
i was born and raised in kansas, and all my science teachers at the five high schools and three middle schools i attended, were excellent. granted, the typical rural kansan thinks evolution is a crazy myth made up by "evil" scientists, but still..
no. wrong. microwave ovens use frequencies that are specifically "tuned" to the water molecule. this doesn't mean they don't still excite other molecules.
put a glass in the microwave some time, or a piece of plastic. it will get hot.
Even if you don't understand the necessity of the "spooky action at a distance" idea (I don't understand it either), do you really think that you, John Q. Random Slashdotter, with only a layman's knowledge of physics, have found the obvious truth that pretty much every quantum physicist has missed? Get over yourself.
i don't know what you mean by "missed". i never suggested that scientists have missed anything. i'm just saying that a lot of ideas in QM are completely speculative, and they damned well know it.
for instance, the idea that events can be uncaused, leaving us with a non-deterministic universe. this is completely speculative, and goes completely against logic. perhaps it works well for some of their hypotheses, but it is totally untestable.
it doesn't matter how many scientists support some idea, if they have no evidence to support it. the only way you could prove this "action at a distance" idea, would be to show that a particle had no state until you observed it. but the only way to know what state it was in would be to observe it.
what's more, the concept of "observing" a particle to collapse its wave function, just means "interact with". a lot of people have this errant notion of there being a necessity for a "sentient being" to observe it. this is, of course, totally ridiculous. since every particle in the universe interacts with every other particle, through gravity and the other forces, every wave function is always collapsed, and has assumed a state.
quantum mechanics is useful at many things. but when in comes to the more obtruse, mystical aspects, it's just a bunch of fun philosphy of lattes. i don't have to be some accomplished expert in the field to say this. the evidence speaks for itself. no scientist has yet to support any of this quackery through any experimentation. the best we've got is some work to test some of belle's conjecture, and even that doesn't say very much that is concrete.
try this ad hominem stuff on somebody less accomplished, cause it won't fly with me. i'm to smart for that.
when you look at it, the half "decides" which half it will be
this is the biggest load of baloney ever perpetuated in science. the idea that something has no state until it interacts with another particle (i.e. "is observed").
this is 100% speculative, and hypothetical, and has nothing to do with experiment or reality whatsoever. it's like string theory; it's just fun conjecture with little or no real world value at the moment. it just gives scientists this warm fuzzy feeling.
I don't know what BART the guy was riding who said you can fall asleep on them. I ride BART all the time, and it is so loud, you have to stop and wonder why something hasn't been done about it, and how it was ever released to the public in that state. I've had times where I was trying to pick up on some girl, and even after getting her to pull her little white (iPod) earpieces out, it was futile..because it's just so unbelievably loud. It's this high pitched grinding screech. Uhh..I just wince thinking about it.
This does not mean that I accept that you can even assign relative probabilities to the ideas of creationism and evolution.
well of course you can. evolution has a theory, making it certainly of greater liklihood than anything which does not. mutation and selection are observed. no gods are observed.
The point was that there is still a great deal of subjectivity when you assign your probabilities. You only have one sample to go from and you seem to feel it's safe to assume that the one sample represents the rule and not the exception.
one sample? there are millions of examples of observations supporting evolution. mutations and selection happen all the time. what do you mean by this?
When you get into matters of metaphysics things are not so clear cut because they are trying to describe the origins of the system itself.
i'm not so comfortable with the term "metaphysics". it makes me feel like i should be sipping a latte and wearing birkenstocks.
Since all available evidence comes from within the system you're stuck trying to apply the rules of the system before the system existed.
no, we don't really have to apply rules, so much as acknowledge probabilities in light of complete ignorance of the rules.
This is why I said in my first response that you cannot apply science to matters such as these and the reason I will continue to maintain that believing or disbelieving the existence of a higher power is a matter of faith
that doesn't hold air as a valid argument. it doesn't matter what the rules were at any previous point. we don't know them, so our probabilities have to be totally agnostic to them. what are the odds that a random entity's favorite integer from 1-10 is 8? the odds are 1/10, given that the entity even has a "mind". it could likely be as intelligent as a pile of manure and have no favorite anything of course.
you seem really stuck on this idea of wanting empirical data to discuss purely mathematical concepts which work because they take into account the very lack of that data. you have to remember that probability is completely about your level of knowledge.
I'm defining faith as belief in something that cannot be known
what do you mean by "known"? that's a very ambiguous term. in math we have "known". in the real world we just have confirmed to some degree of certainty. i "know" evolution happened just like i "know" the sun does fusion. is that faith if i can't prove it in the mathematical sense of absolute proof? i have always thought of faith as believing in something the odds of which are below 50%.
I'm certain you will disagree with me on the previous point. It seems we'll just have to acknowledge that neither of us is going to budge from our core beliefs over a discussion on slashdot.
and i'm still going to maintain that my argument proves you wrong. the basis of your belief is logically flawed, because you think we have to know something about a system to calculate odds. this flies in the face of the very meaning of "probability".
probability is completely relative to your level of knowledge, or lack thereof ("ignorance"), so it absolutely does.
I'll grant that you can come up with a probability in this situation, but that does not make the conclusions you draw from the probabilities correct. It's a good guess, nothing more.
you could say that about anything you claim to know. it's a good guess that earth is round. it's a good guess that the sun has fusion going on inside. it's a good guess that the moon is made of rock and not cheese. any evidence you've seen for them could have been faked by advanced technology. facts, in the real world, mean things that have been confirmed to such a de
i didn't see anything listed here that was a podcast. these are all netcasts, or "blogcasts", if you like that term better. a podcast is a specific kind of netcast, which is irrelevant to someone who doesn't have itunes/ipod.
you go play with your "mp3 player". i'm going to play with my dmp.
you're right. this thing needs an edit feature for when you go back and re-read what you wrote, and realize you made some stupid typo or mistake that mucked everything up. the slashdot forum system is extremely lacking, though it does have some interesting features. here's my second attempt, since i messed up a/blockquote myself.
Prove it, beyond any doubt. You can't, the scientific community can't (or this discussion would not take place).
it already has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. this discussion takes place because creationists make logical flaws and misunderstand the data.
None of us were there. We have no factual proof that anything took place over billions of years. Evolution is NOT a fact, it is a theory, and statements to the contrary are almost always born out of the misrepresentations given by professors and scientists when "educating" others about the theory of Evolution.
first of all, i will have to repeat, "theory" and "fact" are different things entirely, not "rungs on a hierarchy of increasing certainty". something can be a fact but not a theory, or a theory but not a fact, or both, or neither. a theory is an explanatory model. evolutionary theory explains the fossils we find, various observations in genetics, etc. because it is supported beyond a reasonable doubt, it is also a fact.
it doesn't matter that we can't go back and see all the generations of our ancestors evolving. we also can't enter the sun, but we say it is a "fact" that it is powered by fusion. we can't go back in time and talk to hitler, but the holocaust is still a fact. it is supported beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence. "fact", in the real world, does not mean "absolute proof". there's no such thing in science. absolute proofs exist in math only.
evolution is a fact, the same way it's a fact that george bush is president. there is a very small chance that it could be hoax, perpetuated by advanced aliens or even an omnipotent being. there's a chance george bush isn't really the president, and it's all being staged. but it's extremely unlikely, so i'm correct to call it a "fact" that george bush is president of the us. your problem here is that you misunderstand the definitions of the terms.
The same evidence that supports the theory of Evolution supports the theory of intelligent design.
data can only be evidence for a particular theory, if that theory accounts for it and fits with it. in the case of mutation and natural selection, the central pillars of neo-darwinian theory, it does just that. it explains why we have perfect hierarchical nesting in life. it explains why blind organisms often have eye parts, like eye lids. it explains millions of things.
intelligent design theory doesn't explain anything, because there is no theory of intelligent design. no intelligent designers or intelligent creators have been observed. i will remind you of this every time you forget, and use the term "intelligent design theory". it is not a theory. when you have a theory of intelligent design to offer, let me and the scientific community know.
just to be thorough, another good way to show it's not a theory is show how it has no predictive or explanatory value, which is the very basis of what a theory is. for instance, if we want to know why life is arranged in a hierarchy as opposed to any other way, evolutionary theory explains that. life is one big family tree because all life descended from common ancestors. intelligent design doesn't explain this. it just says, because god did it that way. that's a generic answer that could be said no matter how life was arranged. it doesn't give us any reason to specifically expect us to see this particular arrangement of life. look up "falsifiable" in a scientific glossary.
now every time you try use the term "intelligent design theory", i'm
you're right. this thing needs an edit feature for when you go back and re-read what you wrote, and realize you made some stupid typo or mistake that mucked everything up. the slashdot forum system is extremely lacking, though it does have some interesting features.
Prove it, beyond any doubt. You can't, the scientific community can't (or this discussion would not take place).
it already has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. this discussion takes place because creationists make logical flaws and misunderstand the data.
None of us were there. We have no factual proof that anything took place over billions of years. Evolution is NOT a fact, it is a theory, and statements to the contrary are almost always born out of the misrepresentations given by professors and scientists when "educating" others about the theory of Evolution.
first of all, i will have to repeat, "theory" and "fact" are different things entirely, not "rungs on a hierarchy of increasing certainty". something can be a fact but not a theory, or a theory but not a fact, or both, or neither. a theory is an explanatory model. evolutionary theory explains the fossils we find, various observations in genetics. because it is supported beyond a reasonable doubt, it is also a fact.
it doesn't matter that we can't go back and see all the generations of our ancestors evolving. we also can't enter the sun, but we say it is a "fact" that it is powered by fusion. we can't go back in time and talk to hitler, but the holocaust is still a fact. it is supported beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence. "fact", in the real world, does not mean "absolute proof". there's no such thing in science. absolute proofs exist in math only.
evolution is a fact, the same way it's a fact that george bush is president. there is a very small chance that it could be hoax, perpetuated by advanced aliens or even an omnipotent being. there's a chance george bush isn't really the president, and it's all being staged. but it's extremely unlikely, so i'm correct to call it a "fact" that george bush is president of the us. your problem here is that you misunderstand the definitions of the terms.
The same evidence that supports the theory of Evolution supports the theory of intelligent design.
data can only be evidence for a particular theory, if that theory accounts for it and fits with it. in the case of mutation and natural selection, the central pillars of neo-darwinian theory, it does just that. it explains why we have perfect hierarchical nesting in life. it explains why blind organisms often have eye parts, like eye lids. it explains millions of things.
intelligent design theory doesn't explain anything, because there is no theory of intelligent design. no intelligent designers or intelligent creators have been observed. i will remind you of this every time you forget, and use the term "intelligent design theory". it is not a theory. when you have a theory of intelligent design to offer, let me and the scientific community know.
just to be thorough, another good way to show it's not a theory is show how it has no predictive or explanatory value, which is the very basis of what a theory is. for instance, if we want to know why life is arranged in a hierarchy as opposed to any other way, evolutionary theory explains that. life is one big family tree because all life descended from common ancestors. intelligent design doesn't explain this. it just says, because god did it that way. that's a generic answer that could be said no matter how life was arranged. it doesn't give us any reason to specifically expect us to see this particular arrangement of life. look up "falsifiable" in a scientific glossary.
now every time you try use the term "intelligent design theory", i'm going to remind you, intelligent design has no theory; no intelligent designers are observ
Saying that only one number in every 141192748112501580725300871 is divisible by 141192748112501580725300871 is not the same as saying, "unintelligence is less probable than intelligence."
you are confusing two different points i was making. the numerical example just goes to show that you can have probabilities, even with an infinite set. that intelligence is exceedingly rare, goes without saying.
uh, no beavis. you're pulling this out of the air.
Now now let's not resort to personal attacks.
i'm not resorting to anything. i demolished your argument, then called you beavis. i never rested my case on the assertion that you were beavis. no logically fallacy.
If the "whole number of all cases" is infintiy, the ratio is zero.
wrong. you apparently missed some class in high school geometry. allow me to take you back to school. this session's a freebie, cause i'm nice.
the number of positive integers is infinite. so what fraction of positive integers are divisible by 1000? according to you it would be zero, when in fact it's 1/1000. this is because there are 1000 times as many positive integers as there are positive integers that are divisible by 1000. your infinity argument don't add up son. you bes' hit them thar books again.
You're the one pulling probabilities out of thin air.
nope, i justified my statements. you wanna say i'm pulling things out of thin air, you've got to prove it son.
If you want to claim victory by an infinitely small percent you still have the problem that your strongest argument comes down to, "I say probability A is greater than probability B therefore I'm right, and you're wrong."
bam. you got it. if you are weighing the odds that cause-x was the culprit, you would divide the probability that cause-x would cause the given result, by the total probability of all causes. if, for instance, i had two dogs left alone in a room, say alpha and beta, and i knew beta barked twice as frequently as alpha, and i heard a bark come out of the room, the odds that it was beta would be 2/3.
now in the case with natural selection, we don't have a closed room. there could be "other dogs" out there that we haven't seen yet. but until we see them, their probability of "barking" (creating life on earth) has to be less than the probability of any known causes (the only one being neo-darwinian synthesis).
the great thing for the evolution camp is that even if talk about some intelligent designer making life, you have to then explain where that intelligence came from. natural selection is the only process we know of that is even in theory capable of explaining intelligence. the term intelligence doesn't even make sense without being applied in the context of evolutionary situations; conflict for limited resources.
do you think you have shown that the probability of a universe existing in which matter is subject to set physical laws and evolution produces intelligence without outside intervention is greater than 50%?
i'll leave out the set physical laws part, because it's irrelevant. no changes in the physical laws are observed, thus there's no competing theory to set physical laws. so if you phrase it without that part, then yes. i've shown it far beyond.5 fraction. more like.99999999999999999999999999999999 fraction.
Without knowledge of what else exists or could exist how can we know how likely it is?
i've more than fully explained this. whatever caused life to come about, the odds that it would have been intelligent are exceedingly low. intelligence is inherently unlikely. see
No, sorry you're not the only one who can argue and debate.
and muhammed ali wasn't the only one who could box. he was just damn good at it.
You have quite a condescending tone though
absolutely. i put my opponents in their place, partly because that's part of the beauty of the sport of possionate debate, and partly to punish them for supporting irrational beliefs, which is their own fault.
no small wonder that "debating" is your forte.
it's also largely due to my intellect.
Let me form a rebuttal: to me, you seem to be an armchair philosopher who just wants to show off some mad skillz.
nice try, but no. i debate because i am naturally argumentative. i can't stand when creationists, or anyone else, make statements that are patently false, and they go unrebutted. i stayed up last night very late getting very little sleept (like 3 hours) before work today, because i couldn't pull myself away from the computer. i spent about 6 of my 8 hours at work today debating online. call it ocd if you will. maybe it is. but it certainly isn't to impress anybody. i like to show off while i'm doing it, but that's not the reason i do it. not that i owe you any explanation, but i just thought i'd bring that up.
The picture is completed by your last lines, showing that you don't actually have any debating skills.
well, i refuted numerous fallacious arguments, in a very concise yet descriptive way, citing very strong evidence. if you say that's not debating, i say you need to get a dictionary and look up debating.
i don't really deal with words like "flamebating" and "troll". these words are always used for people who like to debate, as if that was a bad thing. the only useful way i've ever heard "troll" used, is for people who don't even care about the argument, but just say things to get a reaction out of people. i debate because i genuinely care about debate the way ali cared about boxing. it's a sweet science baby, and don't you fuckin put your clueless two cents in like you know me.
But if this god is omnipotent, why does it follow evolutionary theory?
it wouldn't. that's one of my primary points. you're really showing me how much attention you paid to my post.
Notice that omnipotence can also mean transcending logic itself.
this is one of the most absolutely ridiculous arguments i've ever heard. but you're not the first to say it. we're talking about the logic used to calculate some idea of probability about god's being intelligent. probability is essentially an assessment of how much you know (or don't know) about the state of something. it's not like god can be so powerful that the probability god is intelligent goes up, or is no longer calculable. the only thing that can change the calculation of the odds is a change in how much information we have about god. in this case, we have only the intelligence and omnipotence, which are by definition. no matter how omnipotent or powerful god might be (if god even exists), god can't change concepts that we have defined ourselves. god can't make 2 + 2 = 5. (that's obrien's job).
statements like this show misunderstanding of what probability even is. say someone comes and knocks on my door every day, and.1 of the time it's my sister, and.9 of the time it's my brother. i hear a knock and walk to the door. even if you are in the room with me and look out and see that it's my sister, i still know that it's most likely not her, because i don't have as much information as you do. you couldn't say something to me like, "you're sister is such a powerful magician that the odds it's her at the door are now.99. that wouldn't make any sense. unless i h
That's called instincts. A cheetah is born with those hunting skills.
that's quite debateable, since animals that have not been properly raised will often be much poorer at such things. i don't have to tell you that there are a lot of stories of wild animals raised by humans who could not really fend for themselves in the wild.
but in any case, that's irrelevant. whether the cheetah's hunting skills are put into place by genes or by experience, they still get there. that's intelligence. i would go so far as to say that it is a mistake to treat even the brain as the "point" of intelligence, since the entire body interacts as one whole, leading it to perpetuate itself.
Give the gazelles a new sense, or a new way to detect approaching cheetahs, and the cheetahs, not being intelligent enough to figure out what's going on, will starve.
absolutely. it's an arms race. however, predators tend to become intelligent a lot faster than prey. this is because of the disparity in what they have to do. prey, like gazelle, often eat plants, which don't require much intelligence to "capture". when they flee from danger, they often have a good head start. they also often stick in packs where their survival is aided by statistics that make them less likely to be the one who gets singled out. even when running from a cheetah, a gazelle has the upper hand because it can choose to dart left or right, and the cheetah has to react to this. this is another particularly good example of how evolutionary theory explains biology as well. why would a creator make two organisms insanely fast when the difference between their speeds is so small? why not make one go 5kmp and the other go 3kph? with competative forces pushing evolution, organisms are always driven to be faster, smarter, stronger, or whatever it is that gives them a competative advantage in their environment
And anyways, your theory about "gods" being randomly created, we live in a huge, perhaps infinite universe. Do you seriously think that there are no room for more than one omnipotent being?
stop and think about what you just said. more than one..omnipotent being. if a being is all-powerful, it cannot be opposed. if an all-powerful being chooses to push a planet one way, and another being pushes it the opposite way, they can't both have their will left unopposed. omnipotence implies a maximum of one.
And if the omnipotents are randomly created, a few may even be intelligent. Like even intelligent enough to create a world filled with humans.
.
i would agree with that argument were it not for the omnipotence factor.
A-haa! I just figured out why we appear to be alone in the universe! Everyplace else has a retarded god, who is unable to create life.
Rule number one about gods: Do not discuss gods, because you are inevitably wrong no matter what you say.
if you've got an argument to support that, lay it down.
So you can show me an obeserved instance of non living material evolving to life? If you haven't seen random collections of raw matreials spontaneously becoming alive then you don't know of either dog ever barking.
chemicals exist, and chemical reactions happen. this we know. so we know that it is possible for them to react to form a self-replicating system, we just don't know how probable it is. however, there are no rival theories since no other observed phenomena could even theoretically have formed self-replicating systems. have you observed any creators lately? ahh..i thought not.
if there are possible answers to a question, and answer a is 51% likely to be correct, and answer b is 49% likely to be correct, and a person chooses to "believe" that answer b is correct, then i would condemn him
Your argument would work if it was actually possible to assign numerical values to the answers we are considering.
i don't have to know the exact numerical value that i won't quantum tunnel through the floor to know that it's extremely unlikely.
In questions dealing with the whole of our universe it's not possible to do that. We have no way of creating bounds for the domain of possible answers.
it doesn't matter how many possible answers there are, just what fraction of them meet the criteria, in this case "being intelligent". as an example say the nsa has used their computer resources to generate an enormous positive integer, and i have to bet my life savings on whether it is divisible by 141192748112501580725300871. i have no idea what the bounds are on how big this number they'll generate will be. there are an infinite set of numbers from which they could choose. but i can still be overwhealmingly certain that the number they pick will not be divisible by 141192748112501580725300871.
Can we consider previous universes where we know they happened by chance? Do we know there are no other universes with different laws of physics? Creating an actual probability becomes impossible because the set of possible answers is infinite.
again, the size of the set of answers is irrelevant. what matters is what fraction of the answers are within the specified parameters. i have refuted this point in my previous response anyway.
All probabilities then approach zero.
uh, no beavis. you're pulling this out of the air.
You can show no evidence that makes random chance more likely than anything else.
i most certainly can, because i'm using "random" to indicate "unintelligent" (not in some sort of "even statistical spread"). so my point is simply that non-intelligence is vastly more probable than intelligence, which is obvious. this is inherent to the very concept of what intelligence is. if you want an excellent example of this, cut open your dog's head and rearrange the atoms in his brain at random, and check the odds that he will be intelligent when you're done. there are an infinite number of ways you could arrange the atoms (well..finite if you take the quantum physics approach but incomprehensibly large nonetheless), yet a probability can still be established. it doesn't have to be a specific probability. it's lower than 50% (incomprehensibly lower). you could also go write a computer program to play chess against deep blue, choosing the bits to enter one at a time by flipping a fair coin. we'll just see how likely that program is to intelligently play chess, or do anything else intelligent at all. remember, intelligence by its very nature is the property of enacting algorithms which effect certain outcomes inspite of a large number of contingencies. my dog for instance, will make it to his bowl to eat, even if i put a chair in the way of a different possible path he could take, every day. he'll always navigate
one thing i'm going to teach you right now, is that if you debate me you'd better do your research first, cause i'll clean up the floor with you. debate is my forte, and i don't start debates before i know i can back up what i say. i've been debating this god thing my whole life, rookie. you're way out of your league. now sit down, read, and learn.
why give their irrational beliefs consideration?
Because if you don't, you're inconsiderate.
how cruel of me to be inconsiderate to superstitions. i should be arrested.
As for your capitalization, the first letter of every sentece is capitalized for the same reason that an ethernet packet has a preamble: to be sure where it starts.
wrong. punctuation delimits sentences. you apparently didn't know that alphabets were originally written entirely in capital letters. obviously you didn't bother to do your research. you should pay me tuition. but i'm nice so i'll let you audit my course for free.
if you don't capitalize at least the first letter of a sentence, you make your texts inefficient and inconvenient to read.
hopefully you should give up this silly idea knowing that case didn't used to exist. it's all about what your neural patterns have conformed to. there are languages that still have no concept of upper or lower case.
It's essentially an arbitratry choice against an established standard.
wrong. case is unecessarily superfluous and therefore illogical. this goes beyond my mere dislike for the concept.
Since your texts are a horror to read, I won't even bother to check if you've answered this point already, so I'll just put it shortly here
give me a break with this moronic rant. we're talking about a small fraction of the letters i typed being lowercase instead of uppercase. you can't seriously came that makes anything less readable. i hope you don't ever visit irc with this limited computational ability you've got; you'll get hopelessly confused for sure.
Believing (having faith) or not believing in God(s)/a god is an arbitrary choice, since it's existence cannot be proven. Neither choice can be better or worse.
nothing outside of mathematics can have absolute proof, thus it is ignorant to use the term "proof" in science anyway, unless you specifically qualify it with something like "proof beyond a reasonable doubt".
in the case of the existence of god, there are obvious logical reasons why it is extremely unlikely. we can be far more certain there is no god than we can be that earth is round. any evidence you can think of, such as views from space, could be faked with the right technology. but the argument against god rests upon pure math. namely, that a the minimal set of properties that god would have to have to be god, would be "intelligence" and omnipotence. even if we take out the probability that an all-powerful (omnipotent) being exists by assuming one does, the odds of its being "intelligent" out of all possible algorithmic properties it could exhibit, would be extremely low. this is because the very nature of intelligence refers to patterns of behavior involved in picking out the very limited "correct" options in a myriad of incorrect ones.
in fact, the very basis for what we call intelligence stems from animal behaviors which evolved as a consequence of existing in a world of limited resources and a large ratio of fatal choices. were our ancestors in the ocean to have faced no lack of food, and no predatory opportunists, there would never have been the selective "push" to select genes for making them act in very specific ways as brought about by their increasingly sophisticated brains.
as a cheetah stalks a gazelle, there are a huge number of possible actions it can take
I don't know if you caught the latest Slashdot article, but the evolutionist organizations are the ones legislating ID curriculum out of the classroom, using sneaky copyright issues.
the creationist movement has tried to bypass the scientific process by getting their material brought in through the side door of legislation. this puts the rational people in a tough situation where they have to fight back using equally nasty methods. i think that's a shame, but i understand they have to do what they have to do.
They're afraid and it shows. The question is: why? Why are they so afraid to let parents decide their kids should see a few different theories?
for the same reasons they don't want their kids taught that earth is flat, or that the holocaust never happened. because school is supposed to be about education, not making your kids "stupider".
and there aren't different theories. the only theory is neo-darwinian synthesis. creationism has no theories to offer. creationist ideas could scarcely be called hypotheses, because there's not the slightest bit of data supporting them.
Red flags pop up when the arena of ideas shuts a contender out.
the place for contending science, is within the field of science. creationists have every opportunity to find some other explanation besides darwinism for biology. but they can't do that. they are being shut out, because they are trying to enter through the back door instead of paying with evidence.
I know you think it's down for the count, but a lot of people don't, so by definition it isn't.
allow me to clue you in on how science works. it isn't a matter of what people think. it's a matter of what they can support with facts. so far, there are no alternative theories to neo-darwinian synthesis. i know that's really tough for you to deal with, but..deal with it. part of being an adult means dealing with things that can be frustrating to accept. i know it's hard when you're a kid and you find out there's no santa. same thing applies here. you just have to be strong brother.
I don't want to start throwing more accusations around, but seriously ask yourself what motivation I have to believe something I think is a lie.
it's more comforting to believe you were created for a purpose, and you'll go somewhere when you die. although i'm not saying everyone just believes because there's some kind of incentive. a lot of people genuinely don't understand the case for evolution. i admit, a lot of it can be very difficult to understand.
I've heard plenty of arguments for evolution, it's not like I've been denied the opportunity to try that interpretive framework out.
if you still don't believe it, then you misunderstood something. explain why you don't believe in it, even though it's utterly obvious, and i'll be happy to clear up your confusion.
I've also seen many different types of creationism.
there are no arguments for creationism. not one. no creators have been observed.
Why would I believe evolutionists when they tell me to just give them some more time to find the strong intermediate life forms their theory so badly needs?
1) every life form is an intermediate.
2) many obvious lines of evolution, where the gradual changes can be clearly seen, are known. see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.h tml
3) evolutionary theory does not need any obvious transitional forms. even if we couldn't find any, darwinian theory would still be the best explanation for life, because it's the only explanation for life that we know of. if there were no obviously transitional fossils (bear in mind that every fossil is in fact transitional) we would just have to assu
(my apologies..i accidentally hit submit before cleaning this all up nicely)
you seem to forget, rookie, that i've been doing this my whole life. now watch as i slice and dice your absurd arguments to shreds.
"...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transition in my book..." -- Dr. Colin Patterson
you're going to regret posting this first quote, because colin patterson himself has explained that the quote was taken out of context, and misunderstood by creationists. here's his letter in response to an inquiry about the quote. read this well my creationist friend, because this is a great example of how creationists lie and distort the facts to make their arguments seem plausible.
Dear Mr Theunissen,
Sorry to have taken so long to answer your letter of July 9th. I was away for a while, and then infernally busy. I seem fated continually to make a fool of myself with creationists. The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues "... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."
I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists' is false.
That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.
I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still maintain that scepticism is the scientist's duty, however much the stance may expose us to ridicule.
what he's explaining here is that any transitional fossil could be either a direct ancestor of modern day species, or it could be the descendant of one of those ancestors, and there's rarely any way to be completely sure. this in no way invalidates the fossils, because obviously they had to have ancestors. and if you don't believe in evolution, those ancestors would have been the same species, meaning that his entire point is invalid to a creationist anyway. sorry, i'm probably talking over your head.
further, every fossil is a transitional fossil. every single organism that has ever lived was a transitional state between it's ancestors and descendants. there is documentation of a huge number of "obvious" transitional fossils here, in which the gradual evolution over eons is well documented. the evolution of cetaceans is an especially clear example, where we see an aquatic animal evolving to live on land, and then evolving to live in water again.
You've apparently made the same argument too many times to notice that I was talking about something different. I didn't say positive or negative, I said dead end. If a mutation appears in an environment where it's detrimental to the survival of the creature and the creature dies without reproducing, that was a dead end, whether it would be beneficial in another environment or not.
you said "most mutations" are dead ends. some are detrimental to survival and are dead ends. most are neutral. are you denying your own statements?
no you don't. stop lying. nothing worse than a liar.
Your refutations are much more complex and rest upon weird, highly improbable assumptions.
no matter how improbable anything i've brought up is, it's still more probable than the god hypothesis.
I wish somebody would invest some money into biology research that starts with Biblical assumptions, the tables would turn quickly when clear, unified results begin to appear.
bwah hah hah! are you kidding me?! creationists are paid big money to come lecture, write creationist books that little fundie kids will gobble up, and help out the think tanks trying to legislate their crackpot ideas into classrooms, since they can't get in the front door where your ideas have to have scientific merit.
here you are, presented with total refutations of your theistic anti-science baloney, and instead of facing the facts and accepting it, you're dogmatically keeping your brain closed, and hoping that someone will fund some research that will show your case to be right. you prove my point so wonderfully. creationists ultimately don't even care about whether the evidence supports them; they just want to believe their fantasy. the whole debate is just a big sham to give their case an air of respectability, like it might almost be a valid option to consider. gimme a break. you can be a crackpot. but just admit it. that's all i ask. don't go trying to get your hogwash inserted into school science books like it actually has some place there. as long as your side continues to do that, you are just a pack of lying thieving cheats, and you should be ashamed of yourselves.
you seem to forget, rookie, that i've been doing this my whole life. now watch as i slice and dice your absurd arguments to shreds.
"...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transition in my book..." -- Dr. Colin Patterson
you're going to regret posting this first quote, because colin patterson himself has explained that the quote was taken out of context, and misunderstood by creationists. here's his letter in response to an inquiry about the quote. read this well my creationist friend, because this is a great example of how creationists lie and distort the facts to make their arguments seem plausible.
Dear Mr Theunissen,
Sorry to have taken so long to answer your letter of July 9th. I was away for a while, and then infernally busy. I seem fated continually to make a fool of myself with creationists. The specific quote you mention, from a letter to Sunderland dated 10th April 1979, is accurate as far as it goes. The passage quoted continues "... a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way to put them to the test."
I think the continuation of the passage shows clearly that your interpretation (at the end of your letter) is correct, and the creationists' is false.
That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification). Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and concerned systematics, nothing else.
I hope that by now I have learned to be more circumspect in dealing with creationists, cryptic or overt. But I still maintain that scepticism is the scientist's duty, however much the stance may expose us to ridicule.
what he's explaining here is that any transitional fossile could be either a direct ancestor of modern day species, or it could be the descendent of one of those ancestors, and there's rarely any way to be completely sure. this in no way invalidates the fossils, because obviously they had to have ancestors. and if you don't believe in evolution, those ancestors would have been the same species, meaning that his entire point is invalid to a creationist anyway. sorry, i'm probably talking over your head.
further, every fossil is a transitional fossil. every single organism that has ever lived was a transitional state betweeen it's ancestors and descendents. there is documentation of a huge number of "obvious" transitional fossils here, in which the gradual evolution over eons is well documented. the evolution of cetaceans is an especially clear example, where we see an aquatic animal evolving to live on land, and then evolving to live in water again.
we also see many examples of vestigial features in life, which show their ancestry.
Evolution, in regards to change within species, is a fact. Beyond that, it's a religion because it takes faith to believe in something that can't be proved.
it is a fact that all life on earth came to be via natural evolutionary processes over billions of years on earth. to quote stephen jay gould:
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.
- Stephen J. Gould, " Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981
]]]] They're shifting the burden of proof. Proof by absence of counterexample is not proof.
i'm sorry, but you'll have to be more specific here. mutations are proven to occur. antievolutionists often erroneously argue this contrived case of "micro" vs. "macro" evolution, and the point is that there's not any meaningful distinction between the two.
Here's
a straightforward statement: Any random change in a complex, specific,
functioning system wrecks that system.
1) there's no such thing as "complex".
2) "specific" means referring to a small, rather than a broad, set of things. if i say, "the guy who mugged me was tall and fat", that doesn't help the police much because it refers to so many people. if i say, "the guy was 193 cm, asian, 110kg, and about 30 years old", that refers to a much smaller group of people. so explain how you think the term "specific" applies to a system, biological or otherwise?
3) "functioning" is entirely relative to the function you're talking about. a rock makes a great paperweight, but a bad baseball. a baseball is great for playing a game of baseball, but will roll off your desk, and isn't "functional" as a paperweight. if it were to be crushed in an accident, that might "wreck" it for use as a baseball, but make it more functional as a paperweight.
4) you're just dead wrong. engineers at car companies, for instance, are constantly trying to find ways to make cars more powerful, or more fuel efficient. this means that there are changes that could be made that would make the vehicles better. this means that if you randomly changed a given car's design, there's a chance you would improve it. there is also a chance you could make it worse, or have a neutral effect. a recent slashdot article, in fact, talked about an advancement in artificial lighting that was discovered by accident. vulcanization of rubber was discovered by accident (and improved it vastly). stainless steel was discovered by accident. tons of random alloys were made, and thrown into a pile. it was noticed that one of them wasn't rusting. in fact many companies have used the evolutionary "trial and error" approach to inventing new things, where you just try lots of random ideas and keep the ones that work and discard the ones that don't. this is a lot like biology, where the random mutations that are beneficial to survival remain, while the ones that aren't don't.
living things are the most
complex functioning systems in the universe.
wrong. there's no such thing as "complex".
Science has now
quantitated that a genetic mutation of as little as 1 billionth
(0.0000001%) of an animal's genome is relentlessly fatal. The genetic
difference between human and his nearest relative, the chimpanzee, is
at least 1.6% Calculated out that is a gap of at least 48 million
nucleotide differences that must be bridged by random changes. And a
random change of only 3 nucleotides is fatal to an animal. (Geneticist
Barney Maddox, 1992)
this is completely untrue. koalas, for instance, have millions upon millions of genetic differences with us, yet they survive and so do we. if a fertilized human egg underwent the right series of mutations, it would become a koala zygote, and could be removed and put into a koala mother to grow into a cute little koala baby. in the case of humans and chimps, our closest relative, we diverged from a common ancestor with them about 5 million years ago. this has been determined both by genetic analysis, and the fossil record. we even share the same broken vitamin c gene.
Another problem is that the universe
appears to be too young to accommodate the millions and billio
Slashdot Mirror
According to the guys in #gaim on irc.freenode.net (the developers), Google is going through a lot of work to make a Jabber implementation that will scale well to the large volume they'll be doing as compared to other Jabber servers, which use the reference servers. I thought they were intentionally leaving out compatibility too, but that's not the case. They are actively working on it, but it's harder than it sounds. There's still a bit of cynicism in me about this, but I think the gaim devs are pretty reliable for information like this.
SIP already allows for the negotiation of the most mutually preferred codec. Problem solved.
All of these IM-based voip solutions are to SIP in the voip world what MSN and AOL IM are to Jabber in the IM world. They are fun toys, but they aren't intercompatible long-term solutions. SIP is robust, well supported, and awesome. As it progresses and society becomes more dependent on it, firewalling issues will rapidly fade, and you'll get a situation similar to how virtually all firewalls allow port 80. Granted, SIP could have been made more firewall-immune in the first place, but this is really its only significant problem. The only other one I'd mention is that very few SIP phones have a full keyboard or straightforward way of entering in full sip addresses, which look just like email addresses and can have letters. This should also hopefully fade once it becomes more ubiquitous, and people need to call other networks more often, and will need that @domain in there.
The range of SIP telephones is amazing. Check out this bad boy at voipsupply.com
i was born and raised in kansas, and all my science teachers at the five high schools and three middle schools i attended, were excellent. granted, the typical rural kansan thinks evolution is a crazy myth made up by "evil" scientists, but still..
no. wrong. microwave ovens use frequencies that are specifically "tuned" to the water molecule. this doesn't mean they don't still excite other molecules.
put a glass in the microwave some time, or a piece of plastic. it will get hot.
i don't know what you mean by "missed". i never suggested that scientists have missed anything. i'm just saying that a lot of ideas in QM are completely speculative, and they damned well know it.
for instance, the idea that events can be uncaused, leaving us with a non-deterministic universe. this is completely speculative, and goes completely against logic. perhaps it works well for some of their hypotheses, but it is totally untestable.
it doesn't matter how many scientists support some idea, if they have no evidence to support it. the only way you could prove this "action at a distance" idea, would be to show that a particle had no state until you observed it. but the only way to know what state it was in would be to observe it.
what's more, the concept of "observing" a particle to collapse its wave function, just means "interact with". a lot of people have this errant notion of there being a necessity for a "sentient being" to observe it. this is, of course, totally ridiculous. since every particle in the universe interacts with every other particle, through gravity and the other forces, every wave function is always collapsed, and has assumed a state.
quantum mechanics is useful at many things. but when in comes to the more obtruse, mystical aspects, it's just a bunch of fun philosphy of lattes. i don't have to be some accomplished expert in the field to say this. the evidence speaks for itself. no scientist has yet to support any of this quackery through any experimentation. the best we've got is some work to test some of belle's conjecture, and even that doesn't say very much that is concrete.
try this ad hominem stuff on somebody less accomplished, cause it won't fly with me. i'm to smart for that.
this is the biggest load of baloney ever perpetuated in science. the idea that something has no state until it interacts with another particle (i.e. "is observed").
this is 100% speculative, and hypothetical, and has nothing to do with experiment or reality whatsoever. it's like string theory; it's just fun conjecture with little or no real world value at the moment. it just gives scientists this warm fuzzy feeling.
I don't know what BART the guy was riding who said you can fall asleep on them. I ride BART all the time, and it is so loud, you have to stop and wonder why something hasn't been done about it, and how it was ever released to the public in that state. I've had times where I was trying to pick up on some girl, and even after getting her to pull her little white (iPod) earpieces out, it was futile..because it's just so unbelievably loud. It's this high pitched grinding screech. Uhh..I just wince thinking about it.
Yes! He knows it's a multipass!
well of course you can. evolution has a theory, making it certainly of greater liklihood than anything which does not. mutation and selection are observed. no gods are observed.
one sample? there are millions of examples of observations supporting evolution. mutations and selection happen all the time. what do you mean by this?
i'm not so comfortable with the term "metaphysics". it makes me feel like i should be sipping a latte and wearing birkenstocks.
no, we don't really have to apply rules, so much as acknowledge probabilities in light of complete ignorance of the rules.
that doesn't hold air as a valid argument. it doesn't matter what the rules were at any previous point. we don't know them, so our probabilities have to be totally agnostic to them. what are the odds that a random entity's favorite integer from 1-10 is 8? the odds are 1/10, given that the entity even has a "mind". it could likely be as intelligent as a pile of manure and have no favorite anything of course.
you seem really stuck on this idea of wanting empirical data to discuss purely mathematical concepts which work because they take into account the very lack of that data. you have to remember that probability is completely about your level of knowledge.
i didn't see anything listed here that was a podcast. these are all netcasts, or "blogcasts", if you like that term better. a podcast is a specific kind of netcast, which is irrelevant to someone who doesn't have itunes/ipod.
you go play with your "mp3 player". i'm going to play with my dmp.
it already has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. this discussion takes place because creationists make logical flaws and misunderstand the data.
first of all, i will have to repeat, "theory" and "fact" are different things entirely, not "rungs on a hierarchy of increasing certainty". something can be a fact but not a theory, or a theory but not a fact, or both, or neither. a theory is an explanatory model. evolutionary theory explains the fossils we find, various observations in genetics, etc. because it is supported beyond a reasonable doubt, it is also a fact.
it doesn't matter that we can't go back and see all the generations of our ancestors evolving. we also can't enter the sun, but we say it is a "fact" that it is powered by fusion. we can't go back in time and talk to hitler, but the holocaust is still a fact. it is supported beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence. "fact", in the real world, does not mean "absolute proof". there's no such thing in science. absolute proofs exist in math only.
evolution is a fact, the same way it's a fact that george bush is president. there is a very small chance that it could be hoax, perpetuated by advanced aliens or even an omnipotent being. there's a chance george bush isn't really the president, and it's all being staged. but it's extremely unlikely, so i'm correct to call it a "fact" that george bush is president of the us. your problem here is that you misunderstand the definitions of the terms.
data can only be evidence for a particular theory, if that theory accounts for it and fits with it. in the case of mutation and natural selection, the central pillars of neo-darwinian theory, it does just that. it explains why we have perfect hierarchical nesting in life. it explains why blind organisms often have eye parts, like eye lids. it explains millions of things.
intelligent design theory doesn't explain anything, because there is no theory of intelligent design. no intelligent designers or intelligent creators have been observed. i will remind you of this every time you forget, and use the term "intelligent design theory". it is not a theory. when you have a theory of intelligent design to offer, let me and the scientific community know.
just to be thorough, another good way to show it's not a theory is show how it has no predictive or explanatory value, which is the very basis of what a theory is. for instance, if we want to know why life is arranged in a hierarchy as opposed to any other way, evolutionary theory explains that. life is one big family tree because all life descended from common ancestors. intelligent design doesn't explain this. it just says, because god did it that way. that's a generic answer that could be said no matter how life was arranged. it doesn't give us any reason to specifically expect us to see this particular arrangement of life. look up "falsifiable" in a scientific glossary.
now every time you try use the term "intelligent design theory", i'm
it already has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. this discussion takes place because creationists make logical flaws and misunderstand the data.
first of all, i will have to repeat, "theory" and "fact" are different things entirely, not "rungs on a hierarchy of increasing certainty". something can be a fact but not a theory, or a theory but not a fact, or both, or neither. a theory is an explanatory model. evolutionary theory explains the fossils we find, various observations in genetics. because it is supported beyond a reasonable doubt, it is also a fact.
it doesn't matter that we can't go back and see all the generations of our ancestors evolving. we also can't enter the sun, but we say it is a "fact" that it is powered by fusion. we can't go back in time and talk to hitler, but the holocaust is still a fact. it is supported beyond a reasonable doubt by the evidence. "fact", in the real world, does not mean "absolute proof". there's no such thing in science. absolute proofs exist in math only.
evolution is a fact, the same way it's a fact that george bush is president. there is a very small chance that it could be hoax, perpetuated by advanced aliens or even an omnipotent being. there's a chance george bush isn't really the president, and it's all being staged. but it's extremely unlikely, so i'm correct to call it a "fact" that george bush is president of the us. your problem here is that you misunderstand the definitions of the terms.
data can only be evidence for a particular theory, if that theory accounts for it and fits with it. in the case of mutation and natural selection, the central pillars of neo-darwinian theory, it does just that. it explains why we have perfect hierarchical nesting in life. it explains why blind organisms often have eye parts, like eye lids. it explains millions of things.
intelligent design theory doesn't explain anything, because there is no theory of intelligent design. no intelligent designers or intelligent creators have been observed. i will remind you of this every time you forget, and use the term "intelligent design theory". it is not a theory. when you have a theory of intelligent design to offer, let me and the scientific community know.
just to be thorough, another good way to show it's not a theory is show how it has no predictive or explanatory value, which is the very basis of what a theory is. for instance, if we want to know why life is arranged in a hierarchy as opposed to any other way, evolutionary theory explains that. life is one big family tree because all life descended from common ancestors. intelligent design doesn't explain this. it just says, because god did it that way. that's a generic answer that could be said no matter how life was arranged. it doesn't give us any reason to specifically expect us to see this particular arrangement of life. look up "falsifiable" in a scientific glossary.
now every time you try use the term "intelligent design theory", i'm going to remind you, intelligent design has no theory; no intelligent designers are observ
you are confusing two different points i was making. the numerical example just goes to show that you can have probabilities, even with an infinite set. that intelligence is exceedingly rare, goes without saying.
uh, no beavis. you're pulling this out of the air.
i'm not resorting to anything. i demolished your argument, then called you beavis. i never rested my case on the assertion that you were beavis. no logically fallacy.
wrong. you apparently missed some class in high school geometry. allow me to take you back to school. this session's a freebie, cause i'm nice.
the number of positive integers is infinite. so what fraction of positive integers are divisible by 1000? according to you it would be zero, when in fact it's 1/1000. this is because there are 1000 times as many positive integers as there are positive integers that are divisible by 1000. your infinity argument don't add up son. you bes' hit them thar books again.
nope, i justified my statements. you wanna say i'm pulling things out of thin air, you've got to prove it son.
bam. you got it. if you are weighing the odds that cause-x was the culprit, you would divide the probability that cause-x would cause the given result, by the total probability of all causes. if, for instance, i had two dogs left alone in a room, say alpha and beta, and i knew beta barked twice as frequently as alpha, and i heard a bark come out of the room, the odds that it was beta would be 2/3.
now in the case with natural selection, we don't have a closed room. there could be "other dogs" out there that we haven't seen yet. but until we see them, their probability of "barking" (creating life on earth) has to be less than the probability of any known causes (the only one being neo-darwinian synthesis).
the great thing for the evolution camp is that even if talk about some intelligent designer making life, you have to then explain where that intelligence came from. natural selection is the only process we know of that is even in theory capable of explaining intelligence. the term intelligence doesn't even make sense without being applied in the context of evolutionary situations; conflict for limited resources.
i'll leave out the set physical laws part, because it's irrelevant. no changes in the physical laws are observed, thus there's no competing theory to set physical laws. so if you phrase it without that part, then yes. i've shown it far beyond .5 fraction. more like .99999999999999999999999999999999 fraction.
i've more than fully explained this. whatever caused life to come about, the odds that it would have been intelligent are exceedingly low. intelligence is inherently unlikely. see
and muhammed ali wasn't the only one who could box. he was just damn good at it.
absolutely. i put my opponents in their place, partly because that's part of the beauty of the sport of possionate debate, and partly to punish them for supporting irrational beliefs, which is their own fault.
it's also largely due to my intellect.
nice try, but no. i debate because i am naturally argumentative. i can't stand when creationists, or anyone else, make statements that are patently false, and they go unrebutted. i stayed up last night very late getting very little sleept (like 3 hours) before work today, because i couldn't pull myself away from the computer. i spent about 6 of my 8 hours at work today debating online. call it ocd if you will. maybe it is. but it certainly isn't to impress anybody. i like to show off while i'm doing it, but that's not the reason i do it. not that i owe you any explanation, but i just thought i'd bring that up.
well, i refuted numerous fallacious arguments, in a very concise yet descriptive way, citing very strong evidence. if you say that's not debating, i say you need to get a dictionary and look up debating.
i don't really deal with words like "flamebating" and "troll". these words are always used for people who like to debate, as if that was a bad thing. the only useful way i've ever heard "troll" used, is for people who don't even care about the argument, but just say things to get a reaction out of people. i debate because i genuinely care about debate the way ali cared about boxing. it's a sweet science baby, and don't you fuckin put your clueless two cents in like you know me.
it wouldn't. that's one of my primary points. you're really showing me how much attention you paid to my post.
this is one of the most absolutely ridiculous arguments i've ever heard. but you're not the first to say it. we're talking about the logic used to calculate some idea of probability about god's being intelligent. probability is essentially an assessment of how much you know (or don't know) about the state of something. it's not like god can be so powerful that the probability god is intelligent goes up, or is no longer calculable. the only thing that can change the calculation of the odds is a change in how much information we have about god. in this case, we have only the intelligence and omnipotence, which are by definition. no matter how omnipotent or powerful god might be (if god even exists), god can't change concepts that we have defined ourselves. god can't make 2 + 2 = 5. (that's obrien's job).
.1 of the time it's my sister, and .9 of the time it's my brother. i hear a knock and walk to the door. even if you are in the room with me and look out and see that it's my sister, i still know that it's most likely not her, because i don't have as much information as you do. you couldn't say something to me like, "you're sister is such a powerful magician that the odds it's her at the door are now .99. that wouldn't make any sense. unless i h
statements like this show misunderstanding of what probability even is. say someone comes and knocks on my door every day, and
that's quite debateable, since animals that have not been properly raised will often be much poorer at such things. i don't have to tell you that there are a lot of stories of wild animals raised by humans who could not really fend for themselves in the wild.
but in any case, that's irrelevant. whether the cheetah's hunting skills are put into place by genes or by experience, they still get there. that's intelligence. i would go so far as to say that it is a mistake to treat even the brain as the "point" of intelligence, since the entire body interacts as one whole, leading it to perpetuate itself.
absolutely. it's an arms race. however, predators tend to become intelligent a lot faster than
prey. this is because of the disparity in what they have to do. prey, like gazelle, often eat plants, which don't require much intelligence to "capture". when they flee from danger, they often have a good head start. they also often stick in packs where their survival is aided by statistics that make them less likely to be the one who gets singled out. even when running from a cheetah, a gazelle has the upper hand because it can choose to dart left or right, and the cheetah has to react to this. this is another particularly good example of how evolutionary theory explains biology as well. why would a creator make two organisms insanely fast when the difference between their speeds is so small? why not make one go 5kmp and the other go 3kph? with competative forces pushing evolution, organisms are always driven to be faster, smarter, stronger, or whatever it is that gives them a competative advantage in their environment
stop and think about what you just said. more than one..omnipotent being. if a being is all-powerful, it cannot be opposed. if an all-powerful being chooses to push a planet one way, and another being pushes it the opposite way, they can't both have their will left unopposed. omnipotence implies a maximum of one.
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i would agree with that argument were it not for the omnipotence factor.
if you've got an argument to support that, lay it down.
chemicals exist, and chemical reactions happen. this we know. so we know that it is possible for them to react to form a self-replicating system, we just don't know how probable it is. however, there are no rival theories since no other observed phenomena could even theoretically have formed self-replicating systems. have you observed any creators lately? ahh..i thought not.
if there are possible answers to a question, and answer a is 51% likely to be correct, and answer b is 49% likely to be correct, and a person chooses to "believe" that answer b is correct, then i would condemn him
i don't have to know the exact numerical value that i won't quantum tunnel through the floor to know that it's extremely unlikely.
it doesn't matter how many possible answers there are, just what fraction of them meet the criteria, in this case "being intelligent". as an example say the nsa has used their computer resources to generate an enormous positive integer, and i have to bet my life savings on whether it is divisible by 141192748112501580725300871. i have no idea what the bounds are on how big this number they'll generate will be. there are an infinite set of numbers from which they could choose. but i can still be overwhealmingly certain that the number they pick will not be divisible by 141192748112501580725300871.
again, the size of the set of answers is irrelevant. what matters is what fraction of the answers are within the specified parameters. i have refuted this point in my previous response anyway.
uh, no beavis. you're pulling this out of the air.
i most certainly can, because i'm using "random" to indicate "unintelligent" (not in some sort of "even statistical spread"). so my point is simply that non-intelligence is vastly more probable than intelligence, which is obvious. this is inherent to the very concept of what intelligence is. if you want an excellent example of this, cut open your dog's head and rearrange the atoms in his brain at random, and check the odds that he will be intelligent when you're done. there are an infinite number of ways you could arrange the atoms (well..finite if you take the quantum physics approach but incomprehensibly large nonetheless), yet a probability can still be established. it doesn't have to be a specific probability. it's lower than 50% (incomprehensibly lower). you could also go write a computer program to play chess against deep blue, choosing the bits to enter one at a time by flipping a fair coin. we'll just see how likely that program is to intelligently play chess, or do anything else intelligent at all. remember, intelligence by its very nature is the property of enacting algorithms which effect certain outcomes inspite of a large number of contingencies. my dog for instance, will make it to his bowl to eat, even if i put a chair in the way of a different possible path he could take, every day. he'll always navigate
how cruel of me to be inconsiderate to superstitions. i should be arrested.
wrong. punctuation delimits sentences. you apparently didn't know that alphabets were originally written entirely in capital letters. obviously you didn't bother to do your research. you should pay me tuition. but i'm nice so i'll let you audit my course for free.
hopefully you should give up this silly idea knowing that case didn't used to exist. it's all about what your neural patterns have conformed to. there are languages that still have no concept of upper or lower case.
wrong. case is unecessarily superfluous and therefore illogical. this goes beyond my mere dislike for the concept.
give me a break with this moronic rant. we're talking about a small fraction of the letters i typed being lowercase instead of uppercase. you can't seriously came that makes anything less readable. i hope you don't ever visit irc with this limited computational ability you've got; you'll get hopelessly confused for sure.
nothing outside of mathematics can have absolute proof, thus it is ignorant to use the term "proof" in science anyway, unless you specifically qualify it with something like "proof beyond a reasonable doubt".
in the case of the existence of god, there are obvious logical reasons why it is extremely unlikely. we can be far more certain there is no god than we can be that earth is round. any evidence you can think of, such as views from space, could be faked with the right technology. but the argument against god rests upon pure math. namely, that a the minimal set of properties that god would have to have to be god, would be "intelligence" and omnipotence. even if we take out the probability that an all-powerful (omnipotent) being exists by assuming one does, the odds of its being "intelligent" out of all possible algorithmic properties it could exhibit, would be extremely low. this is because the very nature of intelligence refers to patterns of behavior involved in picking out the very limited "correct" options in a myriad of incorrect ones.
in fact, the very basis for what we call intelligence stems from animal behaviors which evolved as a consequence of existing in a world of limited resources and a large ratio of fatal choices. were our ancestors in the ocean to have faced no lack of food, and no predatory opportunists, there would never have been the selective "push" to select genes for making them act in very specific ways as brought about by their increasingly sophisticated brains.
as a cheetah stalks a gazelle, there are a huge number of possible actions it can take
the creationist movement has tried to bypass the scientific process by getting their material brought in through the side door of legislation. this puts the rational people in a tough situation where they have to fight back using equally nasty methods. i think that's a shame, but i understand they have to do what they have to do.
for the same reasons they don't want their kids taught that earth is flat, or that the holocaust never happened. because school is supposed to be about education, not making your kids "stupider".
and there aren't different theories. the only theory is neo-darwinian synthesis. creationism has no theories to offer. creationist ideas could scarcely be called hypotheses, because there's not the slightest bit of data supporting them.
the place for contending science, is within the field of science. creationists have every opportunity to find some other explanation besides darwinism for biology. but they can't do that. they are being shut out, because they are trying to enter through the back door instead of paying with evidence.
allow me to clue you in on how science works. it isn't a matter of what people think. it's a matter of what they can support with facts. so far, there are no alternative theories to neo-darwinian synthesis. i know that's really tough for you to deal with, but..deal with it. part of being an adult means dealing with things that can be frustrating to accept. i know it's hard when you're a kid and you find out there's no santa. same thing applies here. you just have to be strong brother.
it's more comforting to believe you were created for a purpose, and you'll go somewhere when you die. although i'm not saying everyone just believes because there's some kind of incentive. a lot of people genuinely don't understand the case for evolution. i admit, a lot of it can be very difficult to understand.
if you still don't believe it, then you misunderstood something. explain why you don't believe in it, even though it's utterly obvious, and i'll be happy to clear up your confusion.
there are no arguments for creationism. not one. no creators have been observed.
1) every life form is an intermediate. 2) many obvious lines of evolution, where the gradual changes can be clearly seen, are known. see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.h tml 3) evolutionary theory does not need any obvious transitional forms. even if we couldn't find any, darwinian theory would still be the best explanation for life, because it's the only explanation for life that we know of. if there were no obviously transitional fossils (bear in mind that every fossil is in fact transitional) we would just have to assu
you seem to forget, rookie, that i've been doing this my whole life. now watch as i slice and dice your absurd arguments to shreds.
you're going to regret posting this first quote, because colin patterson himself has explained that the quote was taken out of context, and misunderstood by creationists. here's his letter in response to an inquiry about the quote. read this well my creationist friend, because this is a great example of how creationists lie and distort the facts to make their arguments seem plausible.
what he's explaining here is that any transitional fossil could be either a direct ancestor of modern day species, or it could be the descendant of one of those ancestors, and there's rarely any way to be completely sure. this in no way invalidates the fossils, because obviously they had to have ancestors. and if you don't believe in evolution, those ancestors would have been the same species, meaning that his entire point is invalid to a creationist anyway. sorry, i'm probably talking over your head. further, every fossil is a transitional fossil. every single organism that has ever lived was a transitional state between it's ancestors and descendants. there is documentation of a huge number of "obvious" transitional fossils here, in which the gradual evolution over eons is well documented. the evolution of cetaceans is an especially clear example, where we see an aquatic animal evolving to live on land, and then evolving to live in water again.
we also see many examples of vestigial featur
here you are, presented with total refutations of your theistic anti-science baloney, and instead of facing the facts and accepting it, you're dogmatically keeping your brain closed, and hoping that someone will fund some research that will show your case to be right. you prove my point so wonderfully. creationists ultimately don't even care about whether the evidence supports them; they just want to believe their fantasy. the whole debate is just a big sham to give their case an air of respectability, like it might almost be a valid option to consider. gimme a break. you can be a crackpot. but just admit it. that's all i ask. don't go trying to get your hogwash inserted into school science books like it actually has some place there. as long as your side continues to do that, you are just a pack of lying thieving cheats, and you should be ashamed of yourselves.
you're going to regret posting this first quote, because colin patterson himself has explained that the quote was taken out of context, and misunderstood by creationists. here's his letter in response to an inquiry about the quote. read this well my creationist friend, because this is a great example of how creationists lie and distort the facts to make their arguments seem plausible.
what he's explaining here is that any transitional fossile could be either a direct ancestor of modern day species, or it could be the descendent of one of those ancestors, and there's rarely any way to be completely sure. this in no way invalidates the fossils, because obviously they had to have ancestors. and if you don't believe in evolution, those ancestors would have been the same species, meaning that his entire point is invalid to a creationist anyway. sorry, i'm probably talking over your head. further, every fossil is a transitional fossil. every single organism that has ever lived was a transitional state betweeen it's ancestors and descendents. there is documentation of a huge number of "obvious" transitional fossils here, in which the gradual evolution over eons is well documented. the evolution of cetaceans is an especially clear example, where we see an aquatic animal evolving to live on land, and then evolving to live in water again.
we also see many examples of vestigial features in life, which show their ancestry.
Cockroaches and other insects may
i'm sorry, but you'll have to be more specific here. mutations are proven to occur. antievolutionists often erroneously argue this contrived case of "micro" vs. "macro" evolution, and the point is that there's not any meaningful distinction between the two.
1) there's no such thing as "complex".
2) "specific" means referring to a small, rather than a broad, set of things. if i say, "the guy who mugged me was tall and fat", that doesn't help the police much because it refers to so many people. if i say, "the guy was 193 cm, asian, 110kg, and about 30 years old", that refers to a much smaller group of people. so explain how you think the term "specific" applies to a system, biological or otherwise?
3) "functioning" is entirely relative to the function you're talking about. a rock makes a great paperweight, but a bad baseball. a baseball is great for playing a game of baseball, but will roll off your desk, and isn't "functional" as a paperweight. if it were to be crushed in an accident, that might "wreck" it for use as a baseball, but make it more functional as a paperweight.
4) you're just dead wrong. engineers at car companies, for instance, are constantly trying to find ways to make cars more powerful, or more fuel efficient. this means that there are changes that could be made that would make the vehicles better. this means that if you randomly changed a given car's design, there's a chance you would improve it. there is also a chance you could make it worse, or have a neutral effect. a recent slashdot article, in fact, talked about an advancement in artificial lighting that was discovered by accident. vulcanization of rubber was discovered by accident (and improved it vastly). stainless steel was discovered by accident. tons of random alloys were made, and thrown into a pile. it was noticed that one of them wasn't rusting. in fact many companies have used the evolutionary "trial and error" approach to inventing new things, where you just try lots of random ideas and keep the ones that work and discard the ones that don't. this is a lot like biology, where the random mutations that are beneficial to survival remain, while the ones that aren't don't.
wrong. there's no such thing as "complex".
this is completely untrue. koalas, for instance, have millions upon millions of genetic differences with us, yet they survive and so do we. if a fertilized human egg underwent the right series of mutations, it would become a koala zygote, and could be removed and put into a koala mother to grow into a cute little koala baby. in the case of humans and chimps, our closest relative, we diverged from a common ancestor with them about 5 million years ago. this has been determined both by genetic analysis, and the fossil record. we even share the same broken vitamin c gene.
what is pedantic is that you are being so literal, when what i figuratively expressed was so obvious.