This looks like pretty interesting stuff. I confess that biology is not my field, and I don't have a good understanding of your examples . In any case, it would seem that your post brings up challenges to the modern synthesis of Darwin's natural selection, and the discovery of DNA as the mechanism for inheritance that Darwin assumed. Perhaps the inheritance method is more complicated than DNA. I certainly don't know for sure. But of course, this sure doesn't seem to me like an example of (from the original post) Intelligent Design has found anomalies that just cannot be explained in terms of Darwin's random natural selection. I agree with you, though, that the study of the history of the evolution of the species is evidently a living field, which means that there must be things that biologists don't understand about it. Perhaps biology will soon have a radical rethinking of the method of inheritance from one generation to the next. I don't know enough to hazard to guess. I don't think, though, that such a rethinking could result in a shift to ID, and I certainly don't think it would be due to papers by Behe, which I've been told are not that good anyway.
Other people have addressed what I consider your misrepresentation of what Darwin's theory of natural selection has turned into. What doesn't strike me as correct is your historical analogies. As I know the history, the Catholic Church prosecuted Galileo because their political power was threatened by the Reformation. Copernicus published his papers with the Church's blessing. But this doesn't seem to be a valid analogy for why ID might represent a new paradigm. Whatever power biologists have isn't going to be threatened by ID. They would just study biology in the framework of testing ID. What's more, I don't think anybody doubted the genius of Galileo or Newton while they were alive. Let's look at what could be considered a "paradigm shift" from classical to modern physics. The really radical shift was driven by Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli. All those guys came up with discoveries that won them the Nobel prize regardless of whether this shift in thinking about the world as deterministic and mechanical to thinking about it as nondeterministic and nonlocal had taken place. Also, physics at the end of the 19th century was ripe for a change. Everyone agreed that blackbody radiation, hydrogen spectra, and the photoelectric effect would take some pretty radical new ideas. It's just that no one could imagine how radical. What nobel prize winning discoveries have taken place to make us think about the origin of the species differently? Also, I should point out that a requirement of quantum physics was that "turn into" classical physics when talking about large things. Classical physics wasn't proved "wrong", exactly- just incomplete. So using this as a model, any new theory that replaces natural selection would in some sense "connect" to natural selection in an analogous way. I don't see how ID does that.
I've appreciated your comments as well. Let me go beyond my depth one last time, and comment on what I think of evolution vs creationism as simply different lenses. If they are different lenses, then to me this paints a picture where an individual simply picks which part of glasses he wishes to put on, so to speak. But I don't think belief in God should be like choosing to put on a pair of glasses. I think it should be compelling. But for it to be compelling, it must be relevant to understanding the relationship of the person to the world, just as to be relevant it must be compelling. But it seems to me that it can't be relevant if our experience in the world doesn't somehow motivate our belief. That doesn't mean I think we should be able to prove God's existence by logic or world experience- many much smarter than I am have tried, and they all seem to have failed. But if all this fossil record doesn't say anything about Genesis, then how can Genesis say anything about the fossil record? (I won't go into it, but even if we are not to read Genesis literally, I do think it can help us to better understand the fossil record.) And if Gensis can't say anything about the fossil record, what hope does the Bible have of applying to my life? If my life cannot push on the meaning I take from the Bible, then it would seem the Bible cannot push on my life in any meaningful way. It is a dead Bible. And I don't want that.
I think it is more precise to say that it is the uniformity of the background radiation that causes problem for certain models of the Big Bang. The existence of the background radiation is predicted by Big Bang models. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem . The cosmologists claim that inflationary theory solves this, and some other problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation . But sure, there are aspects to the Big Bang that we don't understand. We don't have a good grasp on how gravity behaves when the universe is very hot, so that right there is a big problem for understanding the Big Bang, and all the rest of physics. That's why it is exciting to most scientists. Scientists live to prove existing theories wrong. But that doesn't mean we don't have the right idea with the Big Bang. A power of science (I might almost call it a miracle) is that we are somehow able to do OK with understanding only part of the story. Newton understood a gravity that is in many ways less exact than Einstein's, but in a very real sense it is just as true. What's more, the simplicity of Newton gives it more power than Einstein when you can get away with using it. So in addition to letting us understand the observation that stars seem to be moving away from us, with more distant stars moving faster, a simple model of the Big Bang can be used to calculate, for example the average energy of the cosmic background radiation, and the ratio of hydrogen to helium. (IIR, I confess, its been a while since I studied this stuff.) Both these predictions turn out to be right. So that is a lot of power right there, too much to be completely wrong in my opinion.
herefore, it is inconsistent for supporters of the big bang model to use light-travel time as an argument against biblical creation, since their own notion has an equivalent problem.
This is a little off topic from what we were dicussing, but I think this mis-states the problem. The problem is one with models of the early big bang. The speed of light is fairly well understood. In fact, the whole notion of causality in physics depends on the speed of light being constant. (I suppose it could decrease or increase slowly with the history of the universe, but I am getting out of my depth there.)
As I wrote earlier, evolution and paleontology are not my fields, so I can't say all that much about them. But I can say a little about physics. In practice, individual physics experiments can appear to have large amounts of circular reasoning in them. For example, to detect an electron, we have to assume that we understand how our detection machine works, even though it might also use electrons. This is because science has a strong iterative element to it. A theory can be too large to test all at once. Instead, we have to assume most of it is true, then test a small part for consistency. If our result is consistent (for example, the electron does appear to be there, within the fault tolerance of the machine), then we assume it to be true, and test the other parts of our theory (we can calibrate the machine to be more sensitive using a sure source of electrons.) This can be done so that scientific research is not tautological, but it is difficult, and sometimes subtle. It is one of the really hard parts of science. In fact, IIR, the physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne even argues that the circular nature of though in science can be analogous to the role of faith in theology, but he would argue this is evidence that theology does not need to be tautological either, that it can be based on motivated belief rather than blind.
However, in regard to things like the Big Bang or molecules-to-man evolution there is no reproducible, verifiable evidence.
I don't see how the evidence produced by the Big Bang or the evolution of the species is any different from my example of the Sun. We have no way to observe the light from the fusion that is going on now. All the light we see is from fusion ~20-50 million years ago. In fact, in the case of the Big Bang, some of the strongest evidence for the Big Bang is the cosmic background radiation, which is "light" produced back when the universe was still very hot, and is directly analogous to the light produced by the Sun.
there has never been a transitional form shown that meets the criteria.
So the question then is really just whether the fossil record supports this timeline where we had species whose descendants are radically different in form. For me this is a much easier question to understand than one about an abstract ability to add "genetic information."
You say "there is no evidence that genetic information can't be created, " I say there is no evidence that it can be created.
I was trying to say that there is evidence that genetic information can be created. The fossil record is that evidence. What is more, other areas of science don't say that this genetic information can't be created, so that the rest of science is consistent with evolution. Now, I suppose that I could in principle be wrong that the fossil record supports evolution. But belief in evolution is still motivated by observation, it is not some sort of metaphysical or tautological assumption. If it were, then we would be completely wasting our time even discussing the fossil record.
I think I understand a little better now what you mean by "information". It seems to me that you don't dispute that there is large amounts of genetic information that now exist. One who believes evolution and natural selection would claim that, eg, the fossil record is proof of the evolution of the species. This is exactly the same as saying, in your terminology, that "speciation can create genetic information." Perhaps you can't see the actual creation of this information anymore than you can directly see the fusion taking place in the Sun. In the case of evolution, you have too look at the effects of fossils that may be hundres of millions of years old. In the case of fusion in the sun, we see the effects in the form of visibile light, which takes between 17 million and 50 million years to get Earth from the time it is actually created (see the wikipedia entry on the Sun.) (Heck, we can't even directly see fusion in the lab- we have to look at the results there, too, although on a shorter time scale.) There seems to be nothing wrong with saying that genetic information was created naturally. There is no evidence that genetic information can't be created, unlike, say, mass/energy, net electrical charge, or that entropy must ultimately increase for a closed system. So I don't understand how this is an issue separate from the validity of the fossil record.
I suppose I interpreted "accidental" to mean something sort of like what is meant by "random" when talking about classical physics. But you know you're right, one way to read it is that culture is truly accidental, in that we can't say anything more about how or why it came to be:-)
If, in fact, we are simply observing what "God has set into motion," then there is no dichotomy, false or otherwise, between creation and science. To suggest that the God of the Bible, however, has brought us to where we are via molecules-to-man evolution is to blatantly contradict His Word, the Bible.
Maybe, then, I think that I consider you to be you are narrowly imagining Genesis. I can read Gensis as a story about our relationship to God, not about the physical history of our species. I'm sure for you and many others, that makes God or the Bible seem untruthful. I can sympathize with that. But I believe in a God who can be simultaneously fully human and fully God, who I trust loves us and is benevolent despite all the horror in the world, and who gave us a world with the subtleties of modern physics. I can believe in a God who did not intend me to read Genesis as a scientific paper. The Jews wanted a warlike messiah who would take back the physical Israel. This obviously isn't what they got. Sometimes, what we need from God isn't what we want.
I'm speaking of what would have to take place for molecules-to-man evolution to be true. An addition of genetic information.
I'm still not sure what you mean by information in this paragraph. My question, though, is how would you expect just information to behave? You write as if you believe its creation to be a problem. Why is this? And in what way does speciation "cause" a loss of such information. It would seem to me that such information may be lost as part of the process of speciation, but can't we just as easily say that gaining such information is part of the process of speciation?
But what about Creationist biologists?
I don't know how many biologists are creationists of the sort that believe Genesis should be interpreted in part as a scientific document. According to this website, http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm, only 5% of "scientists" (whatever that means) believe in it. My own guess is that if this were only biologists, this number would be lower (certainly, in my experience, biologists seem to be more likely to be atheists than physicists and physical chemists). If you were to talk about only those who do research on things directly related to evolution, I would think it would be lower still. If there were any sort of real movement against evolution in biologist circles, there would be a bunch of peer reviewed papers that said so. I've been told, incidentally, that most of the "Doctors" of the discovery institute are MDs, or PhDs in nonbiological sciences, although I haven't personally verified this.
It's not that I don't "trust them." It's that I disagree with their presupposition on the origins of life and how we got here.
I should have written "trust their judgement." Belief in evolution is supposed to be like any other scientific belief: motivated by empirical observation, not simply an assumption. If there is no good evidence for evolution as you describe, and it is simply an assumption then the biologists must be incompetent. But for drugs, food safety, etc, they don't seem to be competent. So I don't understand how this could be.
We all have the same evidence. The neo-Darwinist and the Creationist just interpret that evidence differently.
I think this is understating yoru differences. The creationists think that the neo-Darwinists, and I consider that to be more or less identical to saying "the biologists", are completely, terribly wrong in their interpretation of the evidence, about as wrong as can be. Again, they would seem to have to be completely incompetent for this to be the case.
You are absolutely right in that many people on slashdot quickly resort to inappropriate name calling whenever anyone challenges evolution. The comment about crawling under a rock by the GP was inappropriate and rude. However, in your post you write:
Such is the neo-Darwinian circus.
If neodarwinism is a circus, then biologists must be its performers. How can you not expect them to take offense at this? I am not a biologist, and I sort of take offense at it.
Microevolution has, obviously, been observed and validated. What speciation event has been observed or proven?
Has a microevolution event ever been observed? I don't think it has because I don't see how there is any such thing as a speciation event. Both microevolution and speciation are processes. So we shouldn't refer to speciation as some point in time. Then since it is a process, the only way to "observe" it is to observe the discrete events that are a part of it. The paleontologists and other biologists claim they have observed this. I confess that I certainly haven't. If I were to try to convince a geniune skeptic that evolution occured, I would almost surely fail. At best, I would leave it open as a possibility. However, I trust that the biologists know what they are doing. This is something I've never understood- how can you (and people like you) not trust that the biologists know what they are doing? This is the same group of people that creates your vaccines, antibiotics and other medication, verify what temperature you need to cook your food to keep from getting sick, etc. Do you not trust them on those things either? If not, aren't you being inconsistent? And if so, how do you live your life? And if even after all their successes, you still can't trust biologists to know when they know what they are talking about, how can you trust any group of people? In other words, if biologists are the circus, what is an example of serious, competent people?
Nowhere (let me restate that for emphasis......NOWHERE) is there ever found any speciation that adds information.
I'm not sure what you mean by information here, and I've never studied information theory. I assume that you mean something akin to negative entropy? The sun provides negative entropy to earth. This was necessary for speciation to occur on Earth.
In addition you create a false dichotomy between a belief in Creation and Science
I appears to me that by narrowly imagining Creation, you are creating a false dichotomy between theistic creation and the scientific theory of natural selection. You haven't really written enough for me to be sure I believe that, though.
Now, please, do us all a favor, and crawl back under your rock.
He didn't say anything about human species being designed. He also said that he believes human beings evolved. He is not spouting some crazy alternate theory with no backing in observation. He is simply saying that he is not convinced that humans and chimps sharing a common ancestor makes sense to him. That's called being a skeptic. Convincing him, or helping him to convince himself, is what science is all about. So no, he shouldn't crawl back under a rock.
Just to agree with you, and add a little bit: in general, science doesn't need to explain the entire story. In fact, science has a long history of concentrating on the things it can explain, and ignoring the things that it cannot. For example, when Newton's law of gravity came out, there was a lot of controversy as to how objects could interact with each other at a distance, about which Newton's law of gravity says nothing. But how can you argue with it? It is so powerful, and so elegant, it must be getting part of the story right, so to speak. It wasn't until 200 years later, with Einstein, that physics had anything interesting to say about how those objects interacted with each other at a distance. Similarly, there seem to be a lot of big, important questions left in the evolution of the human species. It does seem quite little strange to understand evolutionary pressures that allowed us to carry food on the savannas also allowing us to go to the moon, or paint the Mona Lisa. Maybe there is more to the story then. But that doesn't need to mean that the part of the story we do have is wrong.
Sure, the police can take pictures of me when I am outside, and use them in a court of law. But the reason for the police to take pictures of me is supposed to be to use in a court of law. Maybe it is just me, but I think part of the way we keep 1984 from happening is for the default to be the government and other people minding their own private business, and me minding mine. My neighbor may be allowed by law to set up a telescope in his window and watch me work in my lawn, and keep a log of everyone who goes into and out of my house, but for him to do that just because he finds it interesting is plain weird, IMHO. This new station seems to change that default, which is why it makes me so uncomfortable. Its not that the cameras are there recording what I do- they were there before anyway (though that makes me uncomfortable, too.)
It is not just the convicted felon. You share a lot of DNA with your siblings, and parents. When the state has your brother's DNA, to a large degree it has yours as well.
Also, you have to get fingerprinted to get a drivers license in California, and I have to assume in some other states as well. So it's not manditory, exactly, but it sure doesn't feel voluntary either.
I was curious about that too, so I did a back-of-the-envelope look at the numbers a little bit. According to wikipedia, 16000 brain tumors were diagnosed last year. So that is 112,000 over the 7 years, lets say, over roughly half the US population (since the people on the top floor were older), 140 million people, say. Then the probability of getting 7 or more people on a single floor is ~10^-14, or an average of 10^-8 per million such floors per 7 years. So this number is tiny. However, maybe these people were older, and their chances of having a brain tumer are quite a bit higher, say 10 times higher. Then it comes out to 0.15 per million such floors per 7 years, which means that if we have 10 million such floors, there is an 80% chance that we will see one of these cases. So it looks to me like it very well may be that we would statistically expect to see this sort of thing- after all, we are talking about a large fraction of the world population. On the other hand, it may very well be very statistically improbable as well, implying that there should be something linking them together. I wish the article had given this sort of number. It seems to be kind of a pain to calculate.
Can companies be said to be private in China in the same sense that they are private in the US? I am embarrased to say that I am too ignorant to know. In any case, a company, private or not, choosing to censor material based on the decisions of its individual owners, as would happen in the US, has to be different than a company being forced to censor material due to state laws, as I understand is happening here.
It's not too terribly different from the system of censorship that we use in the US, with the FCC.
Isn't that analogous to saying jumping is not too terribly different from flying because your feet are off the ground in both cases? My guess is that you know much more about the FCC than I do, but for example it doesn't keep media from criticizing the government. In general, it can't keep the media from discussing any particular idea, although I suppose it can limit the way that the media can discuss the idea (for example, by not allowing curse words in the discussion.) This seems to me quite different what what is discussed in this article.
Why do you think that names necessarily implies self awareness? It's a pretty heavy term, and I'm not exactly sure what it implies. I do think that it probably has to involve being able to name things. However, I think it also implies, in humans at least, a concept of time, and of one's self as having a duration in that time. I can imagine, at least, a creature using names without that concept of itself time. I would also think that self-awareness implies ethical self awareness as well, which use of a name also doesn't necessarily imply. I'm neither a philosopher nor a psychologist though:-)
Mickey is only susceptable to copyright time limits and violation. He has never had to worry about cancer. (Though he would probably cheerfully tell you that copyright violation is itself a cancer growing in our society...)
I think it is one thing to say that the soul transcends the physical, and another to say that it transcends a single gene. Biology seems to tell us that if we were technologically capable of doing it, in principle we could take a fertilized human egg, and change its dna enough so that it would develop into, say, a dog. Whether such a creature would have a soul or not is a matter of debate. However, I would claim that this is a different debate than whether we should be able to remove our soul, or our humanity if you like, by changing a single "gene", or even some small collection of genes. My guess is this is by no means an answered question either. It is also, I think, a different question than whether our soul has a existence that is somehow independent of our physical body.
Whether a soul exists or not is debatable, but I think we can all agree that if we have a soul, it should transcend the possesion of a single gene. Otherwise, its not much of a soul. I know you are not suggesting this, but if a soul can depend on a single gene, then can't it also depend on a single hair cut, or a particular level of intelligence, or a particular skin color. One of the compelling things about the idea of a soul is that it would can mean that human beings are similar in a way that doesn't depend on any of these things. If a Creator did endow us with a soul, then I don't think he would give us a single gene to switch it off anymore than a plane engineer would put a "press to crash now" button right next to your volume control on the airline seat:-). That being said, I agree with the idea making any changes to the human germline is of course potentially very dangerous, for many different reasons, but I don't think they were talking about doing this in this article.
Re:What makes this really interesting...
on
One Big Bang, Or Many?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This is an interesting idea. However, I don't think we know whether there are an infinite possible combinations of matter and energy. I would think the possibilities would be infinite. My intuition tells me there would be an infinite number of possibilities. But even if there is only a finite number of possibilities, we may still only live once. Probability is funny when you are dealing with the infinite. For example, if I tell you to build a decimal with an infinite number of digits between 0 and 9, you could pick 0.166666... with the 6 repeating. Then there is a possibility that you pick the number "1" exactly once, and the number "6" the rest of the time, so "1" only lives once, so to speak. (Strangely, the probability of this happening turns out to be 0, however.)
What we really need to do is beef up our local emergency response system across the entire country. Unfortunately, this costs real money. We seem tempted to think the right pill will fix all other aspects of our lives, and another flu pandemic is no different.
Slashdot Mirror
It's no lamer than curling.
:-P
Except that you at least have to get out of bed to do curling. And put clothes on.
This looks like pretty interesting stuff. I confess that biology is not my field, and I don't have a good understanding of your examples . In any case, it would seem that your post brings up challenges to the modern synthesis of Darwin's natural selection, and the discovery of DNA as the mechanism for inheritance that Darwin assumed. Perhaps the inheritance method is more complicated than DNA. I certainly don't know for sure. But of course, this sure doesn't seem to me like an example of (from the original post) Intelligent Design has found anomalies that just cannot be explained in terms of Darwin's random natural selection. I agree with you, though, that the study of the history of the evolution of the species is evidently a living field, which means that there must be things that biologists don't understand about it. Perhaps biology will soon have a radical rethinking of the method of inheritance from one generation to the next. I don't know enough to hazard to guess. I don't think, though, that such a rethinking could result in a shift to ID, and I certainly don't think it would be due to papers by Behe, which I've been told are not that good anyway.
Other people have addressed what I consider your misrepresentation of what Darwin's theory of natural selection has turned into. What doesn't strike me as correct is your historical analogies. As I know the history, the Catholic Church prosecuted Galileo because their political power was threatened by the Reformation. Copernicus published his papers with the Church's blessing. But this doesn't seem to be a valid analogy for why ID might represent a new paradigm. Whatever power biologists have isn't going to be threatened by ID. They would just study biology in the framework of testing ID. What's more, I don't think anybody doubted the genius of Galileo or Newton while they were alive. Let's look at what could be considered a "paradigm shift" from classical to modern physics. The really radical shift was driven by Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli. All those guys came up with discoveries that won them the Nobel prize regardless of whether this shift in thinking about the world as deterministic and mechanical to thinking about it as nondeterministic and nonlocal had taken place. Also, physics at the end of the 19th century was ripe for a change. Everyone agreed that blackbody radiation, hydrogen spectra, and the photoelectric effect would take some pretty radical new ideas. It's just that no one could imagine how radical. What nobel prize winning discoveries have taken place to make us think about the origin of the species differently? Also, I should point out that a requirement of quantum physics was that "turn into" classical physics when talking about large things. Classical physics wasn't proved "wrong", exactly- just incomplete. So using this as a model, any new theory that replaces natural selection would in some sense "connect" to natural selection in an analogous way. I don't see how ID does that.
I've appreciated your comments as well. Let me go beyond my depth one last time, and comment on what I think of evolution vs creationism as simply different lenses. If they are different lenses, then to me this paints a picture where an individual simply picks which part of glasses he wishes to put on, so to speak. But I don't think belief in God should be like choosing to put on a pair of glasses. I think it should be compelling. But for it to be compelling, it must be relevant to understanding the relationship of the person to the world, just as to be relevant it must be compelling. But it seems to me that it can't be relevant if our experience in the world doesn't somehow motivate our belief. That doesn't mean I think we should be able to prove God's existence by logic or world experience- many much smarter than I am have tried, and they all seem to have failed. But if all this fossil record doesn't say anything about Genesis, then how can Genesis say anything about the fossil record? (I won't go into it, but even if we are not to read Genesis literally, I do think it can help us to better understand the fossil record.) And if Gensis can't say anything about the fossil record, what hope does the Bible have of applying to my life? If my life cannot push on the meaning I take from the Bible, then it would seem the Bible cannot push on my life in any meaningful way. It is a dead Bible. And I don't want that.
I think it is more precise to say that it is the uniformity of the background radiation that causes problem for certain models of the Big Bang. The existence of the background radiation is predicted by Big Bang models. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_problem . The cosmologists claim that inflationary theory solves this, and some other problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_inflation . But sure, there are aspects to the Big Bang that we don't understand. We don't have a good grasp on how gravity behaves when the universe is very hot, so that right there is a big problem for understanding the Big Bang, and all the rest of physics. That's why it is exciting to most scientists. Scientists live to prove existing theories wrong. But that doesn't mean we don't have the right idea with the Big Bang. A power of science (I might almost call it a miracle) is that we are somehow able to do OK with understanding only part of the story. Newton understood a gravity that is in many ways less exact than Einstein's, but in a very real sense it is just as true. What's more, the simplicity of Newton gives it more power than Einstein when you can get away with using it. So in addition to letting us understand the observation that stars seem to be moving away from us, with more distant stars moving faster, a simple model of the Big Bang can be used to calculate, for example the average energy of the cosmic background radiation, and the ratio of hydrogen to helium. (IIR, I confess, its been a while since I studied this stuff.) Both these predictions turn out to be right. So that is a lot of power right there, too much to be completely wrong in my opinion.
herefore, it is inconsistent for supporters of the big bang model to use light-travel time as an argument against biblical creation, since their own notion has an equivalent problem.
This is a little off topic from what we were dicussing, but I think this mis-states the problem. The problem is one with models of the early big bang. The speed of light is fairly well understood. In fact, the whole notion of causality in physics depends on the speed of light being constant. (I suppose it could decrease or increase slowly with the history of the universe, but I am getting out of my depth there.)
As I wrote earlier, evolution and paleontology are not my fields, so I can't say all that much about them. But I can say a little about physics. In practice, individual physics experiments can appear to have large amounts of circular reasoning in them. For example, to detect an electron, we have to assume that we understand how our detection machine works, even though it might also use electrons. This is because science has a strong iterative element to it. A theory can be too large to test all at once. Instead, we have to assume most of it is true, then test a small part for consistency. If our result is consistent (for example, the electron does appear to be there, within the fault tolerance of the machine), then we assume it to be true, and test the other parts of our theory (we can calibrate the machine to be more sensitive using a sure source of electrons.) This can be done so that scientific research is not tautological, but it is difficult, and sometimes subtle. It is one of the really hard parts of science. In fact, IIR, the physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne even argues that the circular nature of though in science can be analogous to the role of faith in theology, but he would argue this is evidence that theology does not need to be tautological either, that it can be based on motivated belief rather than blind.
However, in regard to things like the Big Bang or molecules-to-man evolution there is no reproducible, verifiable evidence.
I don't see how the evidence produced by the Big Bang or the evolution of the species is any different from my example of the Sun. We have no way to observe the light from the fusion that is going on now. All the light we see is from fusion ~20-50 million years ago. In fact, in the case of the Big Bang, some of the strongest evidence for the Big Bang is the cosmic background radiation, which is "light" produced back when the universe was still very hot, and is directly analogous to the light produced by the Sun.
there has never been a transitional form shown that meets the criteria.
So the question then is really just whether the fossil record supports this timeline where we had species whose descendants are radically different in form. For me this is a much easier question to understand than one about an abstract ability to add "genetic information."
You say "there is no evidence that genetic information can't be created, " I say there is no evidence that it can be created.
I was trying to say that there is evidence that genetic information can be created. The fossil record is that evidence. What is more, other areas of science don't say that this genetic information can't be created, so that the rest of science is consistent with evolution. Now, I suppose that I could in principle be wrong that the fossil record supports evolution. But belief in evolution is still motivated by observation, it is not some sort of metaphysical or tautological assumption. If it were, then we would be completely wasting our time even discussing the fossil record.
I think I understand a little better now what you mean by "information". It seems to me that you don't dispute that there is large amounts of genetic information that now exist. One who believes evolution and natural selection would claim that, eg, the fossil record is proof of the evolution of the species. This is exactly the same as saying, in your terminology, that "speciation can create genetic information." Perhaps you can't see the actual creation of this information anymore than you can directly see the fusion taking place in the Sun. In the case of evolution, you have too look at the effects of fossils that may be hundres of millions of years old. In the case of fusion in the sun, we see the effects in the form of visibile light, which takes between 17 million and 50 million years to get Earth from the time it is actually created (see the wikipedia entry on the Sun.) (Heck, we can't even directly see fusion in the lab- we have to look at the results there, too, although on a shorter time scale.) There seems to be nothing wrong with saying that genetic information was created naturally. There is no evidence that genetic information can't be created, unlike, say, mass/energy, net electrical charge, or that entropy must ultimately increase for a closed system. So I don't understand how this is an issue separate from the validity of the fossil record.
I suppose I interpreted "accidental" to mean something sort of like what is meant by "random" when talking about classical physics. But you know you're right, one way to read it is that culture is truly accidental, in that we can't say anything more about how or why it came to be :-)
If, in fact, we are simply observing what "God has set into motion," then there is no dichotomy, false or otherwise, between creation and science. To suggest that the God of the Bible, however, has brought us to where we are via molecules-to-man evolution is to blatantly contradict His Word, the Bible.
Maybe, then, I think that I consider you to be you are narrowly imagining Genesis. I can read Gensis as a story about our relationship to God, not about the physical history of our species. I'm sure for you and many others, that makes God or the Bible seem untruthful. I can sympathize with that. But I believe in a God who can be simultaneously fully human and fully God, who I trust loves us and is benevolent despite all the horror in the world, and who gave us a world with the subtleties of modern physics. I can believe in a God who did not intend me to read Genesis as a scientific paper. The Jews wanted a warlike messiah who would take back the physical Israel. This obviously isn't what they got. Sometimes, what we need from God isn't what we want.
I'm speaking of what would have to take place for molecules-to-man evolution to be true. An addition of genetic information.
I'm still not sure what you mean by information in this paragraph. My question, though, is how would you expect just information to behave? You write as if you believe its creation to be a problem. Why is this? And in what way does speciation "cause" a loss of such information. It would seem to me that such information may be lost as part of the process of speciation, but can't we just as easily say that gaining such information is part of the process of speciation?
But what about Creationist biologists?
I don't know how many biologists are creationists of the sort that believe Genesis should be interpreted in part as a scientific document. According to this website, http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm, only 5% of "scientists" (whatever that means) believe in it. My own guess is that if this were only biologists, this number would be lower (certainly, in my experience, biologists seem to be more likely to be atheists than physicists and physical chemists). If you were to talk about only those who do research on things directly related to evolution, I would think it would be lower still. If there were any sort of real movement against evolution in biologist circles, there would be a bunch of peer reviewed papers that said so. I've been told, incidentally, that most of the "Doctors" of the discovery institute are MDs, or PhDs in nonbiological sciences, although I haven't personally verified this.
It's not that I don't "trust them." It's that I disagree with their presupposition on the origins of life and how we got here.
I should have written "trust their judgement." Belief in evolution is supposed to be like any other scientific belief: motivated by empirical observation, not simply an assumption. If there is no good evidence for evolution as you describe, and it is simply an assumption then the biologists must be incompetent. But for drugs, food safety, etc, they don't seem to be competent. So I don't understand how this could be.
We all have the same evidence. The neo-Darwinist and the Creationist just interpret that evidence differently. I think this is understating yoru differences. The creationists think that the neo-Darwinists, and I consider that to be more or less identical to saying "the biologists", are completely, terribly wrong in their interpretation of the evidence, about as wrong as can be. Again, they would seem to have to be completely incompetent for this to be the case.
You are absolutely right in that many people on slashdot quickly resort to inappropriate name calling whenever anyone challenges evolution. The comment about crawling under a rock by the GP was inappropriate and rude. However, in your post you write:
Such is the neo-Darwinian circus.
If neodarwinism is a circus, then biologists must be its performers. How can you not expect them to take offense at this? I am not a biologist, and I sort of take offense at it.
Microevolution has, obviously, been observed and validated. What speciation event has been observed or proven?
Has a microevolution event ever been observed? I don't think it has because I don't see how there is any such thing as a speciation event. Both microevolution and speciation are processes. So we shouldn't refer to speciation as some point in time. Then since it is a process, the only way to "observe" it is to observe the discrete events that are a part of it. The paleontologists and other biologists claim they have observed this. I confess that I certainly haven't. If I were to try to convince a geniune skeptic that evolution occured, I would almost surely fail. At best, I would leave it open as a possibility. However, I trust that the biologists know what they are doing. This is something I've never understood- how can you (and people like you) not trust that the biologists know what they are doing? This is the same group of people that creates your vaccines, antibiotics and other medication, verify what temperature you need to cook your food to keep from getting sick, etc. Do you not trust them on those things either? If not, aren't you being inconsistent? And if so, how do you live your life? And if even after all their successes, you still can't trust biologists to know when they know what they are talking about, how can you trust any group of people? In other words, if biologists are the circus, what is an example of serious, competent people?
Nowhere (let me restate that for emphasis......NOWHERE) is there ever found any speciation that adds information.
I'm not sure what you mean by information here, and I've never studied information theory. I assume that you mean something akin to negative entropy? The sun provides negative entropy to earth. This was necessary for speciation to occur on Earth.
In addition you create a false dichotomy between a belief in Creation and Science
I appears to me that by narrowly imagining Creation, you are creating a false dichotomy between theistic creation and the scientific theory of natural selection. You haven't really written enough for me to be sure I believe that, though.
Now, please, do us all a favor, and crawl back under your rock.
He didn't say anything about human species being designed. He also said that he believes human beings evolved. He is not spouting some crazy alternate theory with no backing in observation. He is simply saying that he is not convinced that humans and chimps sharing a common ancestor makes sense to him. That's called being a skeptic. Convincing him, or helping him to convince himself, is what science is all about. So no, he shouldn't crawl back under a rock.
Just to agree with you, and add a little bit: in general, science doesn't need to explain the entire story. In fact, science has a long history of concentrating on the things it can explain, and ignoring the things that it cannot. For example, when Newton's law of gravity came out, there was a lot of controversy as to how objects could interact with each other at a distance, about which Newton's law of gravity says nothing. But how can you argue with it? It is so powerful, and so elegant, it must be getting part of the story right, so to speak. It wasn't until 200 years later, with Einstein, that physics had anything interesting to say about how those objects interacted with each other at a distance. Similarly, there seem to be a lot of big, important questions left in the evolution of the human species. It does seem quite little strange to understand evolutionary pressures that allowed us to carry food on the savannas also allowing us to go to the moon, or paint the Mona Lisa. Maybe there is more to the story then. But that doesn't need to mean that the part of the story we do have is wrong.
Sure, the police can take pictures of me when I am outside, and use them in a court of law. But the reason for the police to take pictures of me is supposed to be to use in a court of law. Maybe it is just me, but I think part of the way we keep 1984 from happening is for the default to be the government and other people minding their own private business, and me minding mine. My neighbor may be allowed by law to set up a telescope in his window and watch me work in my lawn, and keep a log of everyone who goes into and out of my house, but for him to do that just because he finds it interesting is plain weird, IMHO. This new station seems to change that default, which is why it makes me so uncomfortable. Its not that the cameras are there recording what I do- they were there before anyway (though that makes me uncomfortable, too.)
It is not just the convicted felon. You share a lot of DNA with your siblings, and parents. When the state has your brother's DNA, to a large degree it has yours as well.
Also, you have to get fingerprinted to get a drivers license in California, and I have to assume in some other states as well. So it's not manditory, exactly, but it sure doesn't feel voluntary either.
I was curious about that too, so I did a back-of-the-envelope look at the numbers a little bit. According to wikipedia, 16000 brain tumors were diagnosed last year. So that is 112,000 over the 7 years, lets say, over roughly half the US population (since the people on the top floor were older), 140 million people, say. Then the probability of getting 7 or more people on a single floor is ~10^-14, or an average of 10^-8 per million such floors per 7 years. So this number is tiny. However, maybe these people were older, and their chances of having a brain tumer are quite a bit higher, say 10 times higher. Then it comes out to 0.15 per million such floors per 7 years, which means that if we have 10 million such floors, there is an 80% chance that we will see one of these cases. So it looks to me like it very well may be that we would statistically expect to see this sort of thing- after all, we are talking about a large fraction of the world population. On the other hand, it may very well be very statistically improbable as well, implying that there should be something linking them together. I wish the article had given this sort of number. It seems to be kind of a pain to calculate.
Can companies be said to be private in China in the same sense that they are private in the US? I am embarrased to say that I am too ignorant to know. In any case, a company, private or not, choosing to censor material based on the decisions of its individual owners, as would happen in the US, has to be different than a company being forced to censor material due to state laws, as I understand is happening here.
It's not too terribly different from the system of censorship that we use in the US, with the FCC.
Isn't that analogous to saying jumping is not too terribly different from flying because your feet are off the ground in both cases? My guess is that you know much more about the FCC than I do, but for example it doesn't keep media from criticizing the government. In general, it can't keep the media from discussing any particular idea, although I suppose it can limit the way that the media can discuss the idea (for example, by not allowing curse words in the discussion.) This seems to me quite different what what is discussed in this article.
Why do you think that names necessarily implies self awareness? It's a pretty heavy term, and I'm not exactly sure what it implies. I do think that it probably has to involve being able to name things. However, I think it also implies, in humans at least, a concept of time, and of one's self as having a duration in that time. I can imagine, at least, a creature using names without that concept of itself time. I would also think that self-awareness implies ethical self awareness as well, which use of a name also doesn't necessarily imply. I'm neither a philosopher nor a psychologist though :-)
Mickey is only susceptable to copyright time limits and violation. He has never had to worry about cancer. (Though he would probably cheerfully tell you that copyright violation is itself a cancer growing in our society...)
I think it is one thing to say that the soul transcends the physical, and another to say that it transcends a single gene. Biology seems to tell us that if we were technologically capable of doing it, in principle we could take a fertilized human egg, and change its dna enough so that it would develop into, say, a dog. Whether such a creature would have a soul or not is a matter of debate. However, I would claim that this is a different debate than whether we should be able to remove our soul, or our humanity if you like, by changing a single "gene", or even some small collection of genes. My guess is this is by no means an answered question either. It is also, I think, a different question than whether our soul has a existence that is somehow independent of our physical body.
Whether a soul exists or not is debatable, but I think we can all agree that if we have a soul, it should transcend the possesion of a single gene. Otherwise, its not much of a soul. I know you are not suggesting this, but if a soul can depend on a single gene, then can't it also depend on a single hair cut, or a particular level of intelligence, or a particular skin color. One of the compelling things about the idea of a soul is that it would can mean that human beings are similar in a way that doesn't depend on any of these things. If a Creator did endow us with a soul, then I don't think he would give us a single gene to switch it off anymore than a plane engineer would put a "press to crash now" button right next to your volume control on the airline seat :-). That being said, I agree with the idea making any changes to the human germline is of course potentially very dangerous, for many different reasons, but I don't think they were talking about doing this in this article.
This is an interesting idea. However, I don't think we know whether there are an infinite possible combinations of matter and energy. I would think the possibilities would be infinite. My intuition tells me there would be an infinite number of possibilities. But even if there is only a finite number of possibilities, we may still only live once. Probability is funny when you are dealing with the infinite. For example, if I tell you to build a decimal with an infinite number of digits between 0 and 9, you could pick 0.166666... with the 6 repeating. Then there is a possibility that you pick the number "1" exactly once, and the number "6" the rest of the time, so "1" only lives once, so to speak. (Strangely, the probability of this happening turns out to be 0, however.)
What we really need to do is beef up our local emergency response system across the entire country. Unfortunately, this costs real money. We seem tempted to think the right pill will fix all other aspects of our lives, and another flu pandemic is no different.