Many of us don't have a problem with closed-source drivers. Closed source drivers help keep intellectual property so companies can stay in business and keep the market competitive. Besides, they are free, just not open.
Re:Damned if they do, Damned if they don't
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No Anti-Virus in Vista
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· Score: 1, Insightful
For Windows to have a lack of virii like Unix systems they would have to shrink their market share to a small, Unix-like niche, so nobody would write virii for them.
The debate on these systems is not so much whether or not they're irreducibly complex, but whether or not an irreducibly complex system can evolve gradually, which most likely they can't.
If you read Darwin's Black Box you'll see that in many cases studies were done in which each part was individually removed and in every case the entire system ceased to function.
You "expect" these other examples will go away, but you can't be sure of that, so you should at least hold ID as a plausable conclusion with an open mind. To do otherwise is just more naturalistic zealotry.
IC's most fatal flaw is that it ignores the possibility that while a given intermediate feature may not be useful in its current function, it may have some intermediate value other than what its "final" value may be. There are volumes of papers on the topic that have been written since Behe introduced the concept, but none of them are "good enough" to satisfy Dr. Behe.
This is an old and falsified argument. If a part of a system does not have a useful function, then natural selection has no way to favor it. This is no better than to say that the part just happened to be favored and put into the system by chance without the guidance of natural selection. Behe explains this also in terms of his mousetrap analogy:
In order to catch a mouse, a mousetrap needs a platform, spring, hammer, holding bar, and catch. Now, suppose you wanted to make a mousetrap. In your garage you might have a piece of wood from an old Popsicle stick (for the platform), a spring from an old wind-up clock, a piece of metal (for the hammer) in the form of a crowbar, a darning needle for the holding bar, and a bottle cap that you fancy to use as a catch. But these pieces, even though they have some vague similarity to the pieces of a working mousetrap, in fact are not matched to each other and couldn't form a functioning mousetrap without extensive modification. All the while the modification was going on, they would be unable to work as a mousetrap. The fact that they were used in other roles (as a crowbar, in a clock, etc.) does not help them to be part of a mousetrap. As a matter of fact, their previous functions make them ill-suited for virtually any new role as part of a complex system.
The entire concept of "irreducibly complex" is logically flawed.
Um... Can you be more specific than that? Just asserting something as true doesn't make it so, and is hardly convincing. Irreducible complexity poses a huge problem to naturalistic evolution... I use the term naturalistic, because many IDers are evolutionists, like Dr. Michael Behe for example.
Also, your list of discoveries that would supposedly falsify naturalism are very vague and are generally compatible with ID anyway:
Find evidence that fossils are faked and are not really the remains of very old animals and plants.
IDers would say they're not faked, but are really the remains of very old animals/plants.
Find evidence that those fossils could not have been the descendants of current animals for any reason.
Same thing... IDers have no problem with this...
Find evidence of any biological feature that could not have evolved from some other biological feature for some reason.
Irreducible complexity.
Demonstrate that living creatures subjected to a challenge do not adapt over generations to deal with the challenge.
Most IDers believe this to some extent, but even when they do, they're only able to adapt because of already designed, irreducibly complex systems. The problem that many darwinian evolutionists have, is that they're assuming an overly simple system, and deal with evolution at the macroscopic level, but have not answered the biochemical challenge of irreducible complexity.
Find genetic evidence that genes do not carry information about how/what we grow into.
Of course they do, both IDers and naturalistic evolutionists believe this. This is no criteria for proving evolution!
Find evidence to explain why animals, when subjected to environmental conditions, eventually changed in ways that made them better suited to those conditions that differs in some way from evolutionary theory, and demonstrate evidence.
Again, many IDers grant evolution, but evolution is only able to answer cumulative complexity, not irreducible complexity. So while evolution seemed true in the past, because of our lack of understanding and technology, it seems to be falling apart with greater understanding of biological, irreducibly complex nanomachines.
Actually I think the parent is right, ID is falsifiable... more so than *naturalistic* evolution.
How do you falsify evolution? William Dembski writes:
If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do. In that case Occam's razor finishes off intelligent design quite nicely.
But, as for naturalistic evolution being falsifiable he writes:
On the other hand, falsifying Darwinism seems effectively impossible. To do so one must show that no conceivable Darwinian pathway could have led to a given biological structure...The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstructing its history in Darwinian terms. Is Darwinian theory therefore falsified? Hardly. I have yet to witness one committed Darwinist concede that any feature of nature might even in principle provide countervailing evidence to Darwinism. In place of such a concession one is instead always treated to an admission of ignorance. Thus it's not that Darwinism has been falsified or disconfirmed, but that we simply don't know enough about the biological system in question and its historical context to determine how the Darwinian mechanism might have produced it."
So, no matter how complex, even if the system if irreducibily complex, the evolutionist could just say "we haven't figured it out yet"... this excuse could be used on and on with no chance for falsification. For more on ID being falsifiable, read the whole paper here:
The catch-22 of ID is that it can't really be disproved with logic or science.
This is an old and defeated point. ID is just as testable as darwinian evolution, probably even more so. What falsifies an ID claim? A natural explanation... Occam's razor will favor a natural cause in most cases. Problem is, natural explanations are yet to be discovered for irredicubily complex systems at the biomolecular level, and it seems implausible that they will. Can they? Sure it's possible, just not plausible. What falsifies darwinian evolution? Pretty much nothing... they will just stick to their guns and say "just wait, we'll figure it out" no matter how difficult the problem gets.
A chip very similiar to the Yonah is going to replace the Pentium 4 line on desktops... The P4s are just to hot and not fast enough. Intel is going back to a higher performance/clock cycle design, like the one AMD has been using successfully.
What's interesting is how the P6 architecture has survived in one form or another. From the Pentium Pro, to the P2, to the P3, and various versions of Pentium M, which is a modified version of the P6 architecture (longer stage pipeline, more instructions, more saving features, etc.).
1. Different APIs - Lots of rewriting and adjusting to get it to work.
2. Huge time setback for future OS and browser release (like Vista).
3. IE is a good browser - Since XP SP2 much (naturally not all) of its security weaknesses have been dealth with, and its fast. And IE7 stands a good chance of being much more secure than IE6.
4. Antitrust lawsuits - Opera is someone MS can point at and say "See! We have competition! So don't sue us!"
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Many of us don't have a problem with closed-source drivers. Closed source drivers help keep intellectual property so companies can stay in business and keep the market competitive. Besides, they are free, just not open.
For Windows to have a lack of virii like Unix systems they would have to shrink their market share to a small, Unix-like niche, so nobody would write virii for them.
If you read Darwin's Black Box you'll see that in many cases studies were done in which each part was individually removed and in every case the entire system ceased to function.
You "expect" these other examples will go away, but you can't be sure of that, so you should at least hold ID as a plausable conclusion with an open mind. To do otherwise is just more naturalistic zealotry.
This is an old and falsified argument. If a part of a system does not have a useful function, then natural selection has no way to favor it. This is no better than to say that the part just happened to be favored and put into the system by chance without the guidance of natural selection. Behe explains this also in terms of his mousetrap analogy:
In order to catch a mouse, a mousetrap needs a platform, spring, hammer, holding bar, and catch. Now, suppose you wanted to make a mousetrap. In your garage you might have a piece of wood from an old Popsicle stick (for the platform), a spring from an old wind-up clock, a piece of metal (for the hammer) in the form of a crowbar, a darning needle for the holding bar, and a bottle cap that you fancy to use as a catch. But these pieces, even though they have some vague similarity to the pieces of a working mousetrap, in fact are not matched to each other and couldn't form a functioning mousetrap without extensive modification. All the while the modification was going on, they would be unable to work as a mousetrap. The fact that they were used in other roles (as a crowbar, in a clock, etc.) does not help them to be part of a mousetrap. As a matter of fact, their previous functions make them ill-suited for virtually any new role as part of a complex system.
Um... Can you be more specific than that? Just asserting something as true doesn't make it so, and is hardly convincing. Irreducible complexity poses a huge problem to naturalistic evolution... I use the term naturalistic, because many IDers are evolutionists, like Dr. Michael Behe for example.
Also, your list of discoveries that would supposedly falsify naturalism are very vague and are generally compatible with ID anyway:
Find evidence that fossils are faked and are not really the remains of very old animals and plants.
IDers would say they're not faked, but are really the remains of very old animals/plants.
Find evidence that those fossils could not have been the descendants of current animals for any reason.
Same thing... IDers have no problem with this...
Find evidence of any biological feature that could not have evolved from some other biological feature for some reason.
Irreducible complexity.
Demonstrate that living creatures subjected to a challenge do not adapt over generations to deal with the challenge.
Most IDers believe this to some extent, but even when they do, they're only able to adapt because of already designed, irreducibly complex systems. The problem that many darwinian evolutionists have, is that they're assuming an overly simple system, and deal with evolution at the macroscopic level, but have not answered the biochemical challenge of irreducible complexity.
Find genetic evidence that genes do not carry information about how/what we grow into.
Of course they do, both IDers and naturalistic evolutionists believe this. This is no criteria for proving evolution!
Find evidence to explain why animals, when subjected to environmental conditions, eventually changed in ways that made them better suited to those conditions that differs in some way from evolutionary theory, and demonstrate evidence.
Again, many IDers grant evolution, but evolution is only able to answer cumulative complexity, not irreducible complexity. So while evolution seemed true in the past, because of our lack of understanding and technology, it seems to be falling apart with greater understanding of biological, irreducibly complex nanomachines.
How do you falsify evolution? William Dembski writes:
If it could be shown that biological systems like the bacterial flagellum that are wonderfully complex, elegant, and integrated could have been formed by a gradual Darwinian process (which by definition is non-telic), then intelligent design would be falsified on the general grounds that one doesn't invoke intelligent causes when purely natural causes will do. In that case Occam's razor finishes off intelligent design quite nicely.
But, as for naturalistic evolution being falsifiable he writes:
On the other hand, falsifying Darwinism seems effectively impossible. To do so one must show that no conceivable Darwinian pathway could have led to a given biological structure...The fact is that for complex systems like the bacterial flagellum no biologist has or is anywhere close to reconstructing its history in Darwinian terms. Is Darwinian theory therefore falsified? Hardly. I have yet to witness one committed Darwinist concede that any feature of nature might even in principle provide countervailing evidence to Darwinism. In place of such a concession one is instead always treated to an admission of ignorance. Thus it's not that Darwinism has been falsified or disconfirmed, but that we simply don't know enough about the biological system in question and its historical context to determine how the Darwinian mechanism might have produced it."
So, no matter how complex, even if the system if irreducibily complex, the evolutionist could just say "we haven't figured it out yet"... this excuse could be used on and on with no chance for falsification. For more on ID being falsifiable, read the whole paper here:
http://www.leaderu.com/offices/dembski/docs/bd-tes table.html
This is an old and defeated point. ID is just as testable as darwinian evolution, probably even more so. What falsifies an ID claim? A natural explanation... Occam's razor will favor a natural cause in most cases. Problem is, natural explanations are yet to be discovered for irredicubily complex systems at the biomolecular level, and it seems implausible that they will. Can they? Sure it's possible, just not plausible. What falsifies darwinian evolution? Pretty much nothing... they will just stick to their guns and say "just wait, we'll figure it out" no matter how difficult the problem gets.
For information about how ID is falsifiable and confirmable, see Dembski's paper "Is Intelligent Design Testable? A Response to Eugenie Scott" here: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/dembski/docs/bd-tes table.html
In the 20th century man spilled more blood than the previous 10 centuries combined in the name of atheism and naturalism, not God.
A chip very similiar to the Yonah is going to replace the Pentium 4 line on desktops... The P4s are just to hot and not fast enough. Intel is going back to a higher performance/clock cycle design, like the one AMD has been using successfully. What's interesting is how the P6 architecture has survived in one form or another. From the Pentium Pro, to the P2, to the P3, and various versions of Pentium M, which is a modified version of the P6 architecture (longer stage pipeline, more instructions, more saving features, etc.).
1. Different APIs - Lots of rewriting and adjusting to get it to work. 2. Huge time setback for future OS and browser release (like Vista). 3. IE is a good browser - Since XP SP2 much (naturally not all) of its security weaknesses have been dealth with, and its fast. And IE7 stands a good chance of being much more secure than IE6. 4. Antitrust lawsuits - Opera is someone MS can point at and say "See! We have competition! So don't sue us!"