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Author | Topic: What exactly is ID? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined:
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A clear evidence for what I have just said is the Rosetta Stone. Nobody ever saw it get designed. But it is a clear case of design. And when it was found, design was infered. I don't believe I'm understanding this statement the way you intend me to. The Rosetta Stone is a human artifact, made by humans, with human writing on it, in two languages that we were familiar with, from other human artifacts, but did not understand, and one language that we did understand, at the time that it was discovered. There is no doubt that it was designed, by humans. But the purpose that it is famous for, deciphering Demotic and hieroglyphic script and understanding that the latter was phonetic rather than pictographic, as had been previously believed, was not the use for which its makers intended it in any way. Its actual reason for existence is to glorify one of the Ptolemies in any language his literate subjects might understand. This is a good example of irreducible complexity, in that if any of the three languages was missing -- Greek for the meaning, Demotic for the phonetic relationship to Coptic, hieroglyphic for the meaning of the pictorial alphabet -- then it would not have been able to perform this unintended and serendipitous function. And this irreducible complexity appeared entirely by accident, through a slow reduction in other features, ie every other potentially decipherable polylingual Egyptian text that had ever existed. Unless you mean God had the libraries of Alexandria burned and then sent Napoleon to deface the Sphinx in order to be able to later accomplish this miracle?
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
As I suspected, I wasn't following your argument properly.
I had the idea, when reading your comments about Mount Rushmore, that you were talking about some hypothetical future edifice, once the sharp edges and tool marks had eroded away and the various plaques decribing its construction and tour guides yammering on about it were gone. Someone standing off in the distance could still see several big heads, but there would probably also be people who argued that it was just an illusion formed by natural processes, the way they do when Elvis appears on a burnt pop-tart, for example. In such a case we ought to be able to go in there and do some science and settle the question as to which view was true, and I had the idea that you were saying that this was similar to the science Dembski was describing in relation to biological systems. You were making more sense to me than you ever had before. But now I see that this was all in my head. You were talking about the actual Mount Rushmore we have right now! As with the Rosetta stone, the main point of your argument is that inferring design has nothing to do with an opinion about who the designer might be, it could be Charlton Heston or Mork or whoever. This is part of the wedge strategy: religious interpretations being forbidden in public education due to the separation of church and state, the question of who the alleged designer may be must be left open.
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined:
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One might indeed wonder what the purpose of these vague, imprecise, and fataly flawed arguments can be. They seem to serve several purposes in the creationist movement. First, they give the impression that creationists are at least trying to engage in some sort of science. Why, they even got no less a luminary than David Wolpert, the discoverer of the No Free Lunch Theorem, to disagree with them about what it means! Nail on the head. Here is my favorite quote on this matter
Matt Young writes:
http://www.pcts.org/journal/young2002a.html
Many years ago, I read this advice to a young physicist desperate to get his or her work cited as frequently as possible: Publish a paper that makes a subtle misuse of the second law of thermodynamics. Then everyone will rush to correct you and in the process cite your paper. The mathematician William Dembski has taken this advice to heart and, apparently, made a career of it.
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined:
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There's a fundamental difference between evolutionary theory and creationism, which is that the theory of evolution, and the modern evolutionary synthesis of which it is a key component, are science.
To comprehend this difference properly, it is necessary to understand what science is and does, and what it is not and does not do. Science never proves anything, it never even tries to prove anything. The idea of ultimate truth is beyond its scope, it simply serves to provide the closest approximation to the observed facts that general theories are capable of being. One may see scientists and/or science teachers occasionally "prove" something in a debate, which is to say, win the debate by having better evidence and more convincing explanations. But this is just cake; while doing science, they never seek to prove their hypothesis. Quite the contrary, all their efforts are, and must be, to disprove their hypothesis. This is the only way science can advance. The hypothesis makes a prediction: if lighter and heavier objects fall at the same speed, then when I drop this feather and this anvil they should hit at the same time. *drops things* Wow, they don't! What's wrong with my hypothesis? I must change it, to something that I haven't yet disproven. (Lighter and heavier objects fall at the same speed in a vacuum, in case you missed that class.) Creationism absolutely cannot follow this method. To do so, would be to work to disprove the Bible. This sort of open honest method is forbidden by priestcraft and slave morality. Setting up a theory, say that God drowned everyone except 8 people and several pairs of critters, is fine. Proposing that if that theory were true, then the geological record would show a huge layer without stratification, with only a few thousand layers of stratification on top of it, is not fine. Looking at the record and recognizing that the theory is simply false, must be abandoned, is absolutely forbidden. So in its attempts to resemble science, creationism has no choice other than to attempt to disprove vast swathes of overwhelmingly-confirmed science. It cannot do this by experimentation though, as it does not have the intellectual capacity or resources and anyway, doing so would only make its case worse and worse. So it mimes the process by simply proposing pseudo-theories which serve to "plausibly" disprove much of the evidence science has built its theories out of, by not requiring those components for its own case and by offering intangible solutions for various "gap" issues like This-or-that Anomaly and These-or-those Bacterial Wonders. "Intelligent Design" is a perfect example of such a pseudo-theory. It makes no falsifiable predictions, proposes no experiments, explains no mechanisms, and tells us nothing about the actual world that we did not know, and many things we know to be false. Its "science" consists entirely of trying to disprove or discredit real theories, often in the most transparent way. The Discovery people love to name-drop Crick for his ideas about panspermia. What they fail to point out is, panspermia doesn't actually help their theory at all, all it does is open up range for experimentation about one tiny variable detail of the prevailing theory. To be clear about this: animate crud falling from the sky, does not support design by a designer, at all (though throwing the word "alien" around with a straight face helps them blur this distinction for the gullible.) All it does is provide an alternative to the not-particularly-critical idea of animate crud bubbling up from the ocean. It's still prebiotic complex chemicals, no matter where it forms! It isn't science, it isn't faith, it's simple idolatry, the worship of some traditional interpretation of some poetry as being "literally true" in a very limited and disrespectful way.
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
twelve intelligent design predictions! Hardly. The most alluring in a pseudo-logic sense is thusly
Steve Meyer writes: If an intelligent (and benevolent) agent designed life, then studies of putatively bad designs in life - such as the vertebrate retina and virulent bacteria - should reveal either (a) reasons for the designs that reveal a hidden functional logic or (b) evidence of decay of originally good designs. This isn't a real prediction though, it shows something that has to not happen in order to falsify ID, which, isn't happening. Do you accept that ID is thereby falsified? Of course not. Dembski has already prepared the groundwork for this one, if ever we develop even significantly more evidence that bad designs are intrinsic to this shebang we have here.
Bill Dembski writes: the intelligent in "intelligent design" simply as referring to intelligent agency (irrespective of skill or mastery) and thus separates intelligent design from optimality of design. Again, to make this clear; the prediction is a method to "prove" ID, not a method to falsify it. The prediction isn't happening. This doesn't falsify ID for believers; and if it did, they can simply cant about "intelligence" vs "optimality". Meyer even pretends to argue with Dembski about defective trucks.
Biological structures have been around for at least thousands of years, consequently, there will be no bugs in them. Dembski is referring to any intelligent design including the floor mats designed by Toyota. But there are bugs in them! Literally! We have a permanent case of spotted fever, and couldn't live without it. Species go extinct all the time. Does this falsify ID?
Not science. PS: If the Flying Spaghetti Monster theory is true, then everything will be found to be either a) more like pasta than it once was; or b) degenerated from its more original pasta-like state ... Edited by Iblis, : Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
You are a chance worshipping Hindu-Muslim, be proud of it already! I actually knew a Hindu-Muslim at one point. Really he had just added Allah to his collection, you know? Had a bit of mosque decor up against the east wall of one room, facing Mecca, in between some voudun guys on one side and Yahweh and three Jesuses on the other. Basically every once in a while, when he got the yen, he liked to kneel on his prayer-rug there and bang his head against the ground and chant some Arabic. Not 5 times a day though, closer to 5 times a year. I told him that sort of thing was just going to get him killed. He said "Yes, yes, it is so. Many times already I have been killed." A shrug and a sly half-smile, and he was off, burning incense to the Laughing Buddha and polishing his Kali again.
Genetic entropy is NOT about beneficial VS deleterious mutations! It's about accumulation of ANY mutations.Beneficial mutations still degrade genetic information and cause genetic entropy. Uhm, no, it's about the deleterious ones. Hence the name. The neutral ones don't do much of anything, again hence the name. Oh, if they pile up long enough you get an emergent property, which may be good or bad, but nature just kills it. As long as the population is big enough to where the genes involved aren't the sole representatives, the species gets right over it. Don't let me discourage you though. You are really just courting martrydom at this point anyway, right? Shame you aren't Muslim yourself. They are a lot more fun to watch when they martyr ....
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
that was my point! My recollection of the event wasn't totally correct but you have the idea now. No, your point was that ID can't be Christian because it's compatible with astrology. Her point was that it isn't science because it's compatible with astrology. It's no damn good for anyone. ... I wonder if astrologers get mad about being lumped in with such a useless idea? At least they help people feel better about their daily lives.
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
Yep, excellent documentation.
Now here's a factual basis for discussion.
traderdrew writes: I will also point out (from the top of my head), I believe it was during the Dover trial that someone asked Michael Behe if intelligent design should investigate astrology. If someone thinks ID and Creationism are the same thing then, why would someone think Creationism should investigate astrology or ask if it should do so? Do I need to tell you that astrology and Christianity are incompatible? He asserts that ID is not creationism because ID is incompatible with Christianity.
Granny Magda writes: Coyote has already put you right on this one. Behe was forced to admit on oath that his definition of science was broad enough to allow astrology alongside ID. For my part, I would like to note that Christianity is supposed to be incompatible with lying. She asserts that in fact it is science that ID is not compatible with, as demonstrated by the loose redefinition process extending the concept to obsolete and unfalsifiable concepts. This opens the question as to intentional distortion of the facts.
traderdrew writes: ....but that was my point! My recollection of the event wasn't totally correct but you have the idea now. He responds by claiming that was what he was saying all along, which is clearly false. It is difficult to understand how this could just be a mistake or lapse of memory. . . . We had a similar controversy during the course of the trial, didn't we? Message 24 Percy writes: Geez, cross examine me like that about last night's dinner and I'll be "lying", too. Buckingham may be a lot of things, but I don't think he's a liar. You gave the guy the benefit of the doubt.
pink sasquatch writes: He said that he had no idea where the books or the funds from the books came from, and had no interest in knowing, yet he himself took donations from the congregation of his church, and then wrote a check for the amount of the donations to the person who bought the books. I honestly don't see how he could have completely forgotten doing all of that... Someone else pointed to the actual facts.
Percy writes: You're right, he was lying about the source of the money for the Pandas books. I've changed my mind, he's a liar. You, being an honest scientist, adjusted your theory to fit the facts. You did not advance the claim that that was what you really meant all along.
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
I would like to know what rule says science cannot investigate astrology. Begging the question. Astrology is psychology formulated using the terms of astronomy, it relies on the mythological associations of named heavenly bodies to stimulate archetypes in our alleged collective unconscious. Science has investigated it, and these are the documented results. It is not a science, because it is an art, an unfalsifiable art that works by means other than those it uses for misdirection. There is no supernatural connection between distant planets and human nativities, the head of the person delivering the baby has more gravitational and radiational impact on the newborn child than anything in the sky. The most reliable form of astrology is the tropical horoscope, which is categorically false in the sense that the actual signs have shifted by about 27 degrees since it was established due to the precession of the equinoxes. Nevertheless, it works like a charm, because it is the astrology most clients believe in, and beliefs are more important than facts in psychological manipulation. Furthermore, your claim that astrology is incompatible with Christianity is plain nonsense. Every fundamentalist I have ever met believes in numerous concepts from astrology, they they tend to refer to it falsely as astronomy. For example, they believe that the alignment of distant planets can have a significant effect on the earth, causing mass catastrophes; and that the tides affect our personal metabolism and moods. Gravity is the weakest of the fictional "forces", the only reason it even causes tides is because of the massive volume of liquid involved in the displacement process. Do you have access to a large swimming pool? Go measure the water mark at high and low tides. And that's thousands of gallons! Why do you not know this stuff? Why do people drag things like astrology, genetics, RNA error, Josephus and the Septuagint into arguments when they have no familiarity with the material and thus vulnerable to systematic attack? Are you guys even trying to win these arguments, or is this some kind of kamikaze mission?
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
I see your point but there was the other point not so obvious point that Creationism isn't ID. Your point is nonsense, ID is in fact creationism, as has been demonstrated to you over and over again. Your claim that astrology is incompatible with Christianity is easily demonstrated to be false by making reference to Daniel chapter 7, in which he uses it to produce what is very commonly believed to be Biblical prophecy. First he examines the western sky above the point where the sun set to establish omens about what is falling and declining in the world. He makes note of the appearance of Leo, Ursa Major, and Leo Minor, identifying them with the prior empires of history. Then he looks east to see what is rising and, as appropriate for the season when Leo is setting after the sun, he doesn't see anything for a while. Pisces is a fairly insubstantial member of the Zodiac. Finally what rises under Pisces is visible, which is Cetus, the whale, commonly represented in mythological planispheres from that day to this as a great beast having several heads and horns. Using this as his platform he preaches the destiny of the Greek empire, which will crush and break up all the others but eventually be defeated by God's Chosen People. St. John the Divine does something similar in Revelations 12 and 13, but because it is live material rather than an example already compromised by excessive use in instruction, if you want me to explain it to you you will have to pay cash up front. And when I'm done explaining it, you will find you have changed a lot of your opinions, without really understanding quite how that happened. But, you will be a better person ... Just to cap this one off, what did you think that business about the Star of Bethlehem was?
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
You're the doctor! What is your diagnosis? Dr. A isn't available right now, he had to leave the office unexpectedly. But I believe what he was trying to stress for you, in his own inimitable way, is that in many many well-attested cases it has been seen that a number of people who have attached themselves to the ID movement do not act in an honest manner. You are going to need to sift the wheat from the chaff very carefully when using these sites, even when they appear to be quoting real scientists.
So did science close previous "god of the gaps" arguments or did it open new ones in the cases of this code and irreducibly complex structures? Also, I remind you, there are other areas of interest where ID has based its arguments on. The fine-tuning of our terrestrial environment and in the physics of the universe and the irregular patterns in the fossil record are other places where ID has arguments. Aren't these exact places, very conveniently, the areas where such "gaps" appear? And these gaps are then systematically closed. Isn't it a little disrespectful to any real deity that might be out there to continually associate him with things that are soon to be explained away, thereby only casting further doubt on his person?
I notice you have the word in brackets (yet). This suggests you believe it is only a matter of time before science proves you right. Isn't this nothing more than "faith" in something? There are two kinds of faith, that espoused by Luther, consisting of blind belief; and that advanced by Paul, in which belief is a tool to get at the evidence for things unseen. The one is delusion, the other a concise summary of the scientific method. These gaps do close. Believe it!
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
If you can think of a more simple model for protein replication starting from something else other than DNA them I am sure science would love to hear about it. I don't see them parading the old theory on origin of life from the Russian scientist Aleksandr Oparin. I think the Stanley-Miller experiment has gone out of favor also. Nonsense. Here's the current version of "the soup"
Some refer to microspheres or protein protocells as small spherical units postulated by some scientists as a key stage in the origin of life. In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey demonstrated that many simple biomolecules could be formed spontaneously from inorganic precursor compounds under laboratory conditions designed to mimic those found on Earth before the evolution of life. Of particular interest was the substantial yield of amino acids obtained, since amino acids are the building blocks for proteins. In 1957, Sidney Fox demonstrated that dry mixtures of amino acids could be encouraged to polymerize upon exposure to moderate heat. When the resulting polypeptides, or proteinoids, were dissolved in hot water and the solution allowed to cool, they formed small spherical shells about 2 μm in diametermicrospheres. Under appropriate conditions, microspheres will bud new spheres at their surfaces. Although roughly cellular in appearance, microspheres in and of themselves are not alive. Although they do reproduce asexually by budding, they do not pass on any type of genetic material. However they may have been important in the development of life, providing a membrane-enclosed volume which is similar to that of a cell. Microspheres, like cells, can grow and contain a double membrane which undergoes diffusion of materials and osmosis. Sidney Fox postulated that as these microspheres became more complex, they would carry on more lifelike functions. They would become heterotrophs, organisms with the ability to absorb nutrients from the environment for energy and growth. As the amount of nutrients in the environment decreased, competition for those precious resources increased. Heterotrophs with more complex biochemical reactions would have an advantage in this competition. Over time, organisms would evolve that used photosynthesis to produce energy. Microparticle - Wikipedia Here's the best candidate for a PNA
Experiments such as the Miller experiment and others allow the simple construction of primitive organic molecules including amino acids. The RNA world hypothesis shows how RNA can become its own catalyst (a ribozyme), and so become the basis for evolution of life. In between there are some missing steps such as how the first RNA molecules could be formed. The PAH world hypothesis was proposed by Simon Nicholas Platts in 2004. It is known that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are a likely constituent of the primordial sea. PAH's are not normally very soluble in sea water, but when subject to ionizing radiation such as solar UV light, the outer hydrogen atoms can be stripped off and replaced with a hydroxyl group, rendering the PAH's far more soluble in water. These modified PAHs are amphiphilic, which means that they have parts that are both hydrophilic and hydrophobic. Thus when in solution, like lipids, they tend to self organise themselves in stacks, with the hydrophobic parts protected. In this self ordering stack, the separation between rings is 0.34 nm. This is the same separation found in RNA and DNA. Smaller molecules will naturally attach themselves to the PAH rings. However PAH rings, while forming, tend to swivel around on one another, which will tend to dislodge attached compounds that would collide with those attached to those above and below. Therefore it encourages preferential attachment of flat molecules such as pyrimidine and purine bases. These bases are similarly amphiphilic and so also tend to line up in similar stacks. This ends up making an effective scaffold for a nucleic acid backbone to form along the bases. A small change in acidity would then allow the bases to break off from the original stack of PAHs and so form molecules like RNA. PAH world hypothesis - Wikipedia Edited by Iblis, : thanks Percy
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
I can't help but wonder if science is really best served by majority rules? Of course not, it's academic acceptance that is quantified by majority. Every working scientist is out there trying to investigate something that the majority doesn't follow yet and/or disprove something believed to be true. This is how the scientific method works. But if you want to do it, you have to do it with hypotheses, predictions, experiments, and replicable results. Rhetoric won't cut it. Sure, this or that looks wonky, so? Someone is hammering away at those rough edges as hard as they can, hoping for the Nobel prize or at least some good publication. If evolution is so wrong, there must be a million parts of it that are wrong. Pick out any one of them, form a new hypothesis, make a prediction based on the hypothesis, do some experiments until you are confident in your results, publish and wait while others replicate them, rinse and repeat. The ID people aren't doing that. They, like you, are whining about naturalism and materialism and the morale of society like this was a pep rally instead of the science club. Weren't you saying somewhere that you could quantify genetic information? If so, please do it here, we need it bad in this thread. All our IDists are flat-earthers and Jedi disciples and such thus far, someone who could do real information theory would be an excellent addition to the topic.
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
Are you going to talk about your information argument which belongs in another thread Mmm, I specifically asked him to argue that one in this thread. My bad, where did I go wrong? Have we not been begging both of the other live proponentsists to quantify genetic information for us? And this guy is trying to do it using actual scientific terms, too. Sorry, I didn't realize this thread was exclusively for Jew/Wizard baiting.
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Iblis Member (Idle past 4151 days) Posts: 663 Joined: |
I'm terribly sorry Iblis, if you thought I was wining. No worries, I wine a lot myself. And whine. And keen, and wail, and moan. Mostly though I howl and gnash my teeth
I was just trying to answer the question raised about 99% of scientists accepting evolution(universal common decent). I was pointing out that when you exclude one possibility from the start (without good cause), you are left with only trying to find answers that work with what is left. But what if the exclusion turned out to be the answer Iblis? Aren't you shooting yourself in the foot? I think so. Yep yep, I don't recommend that you exclude any possibility you can imagine a way to test for in your hypothesis. But do note that "supernatural" phenomena are horrifically dicey when it comes time to take a picture or repeat your experiment.
BTW, ID people actually are doing "that" Are they? Link me to some hypotheses with predictions, experiments, and peer-reviewed replicable results.
Therefore in DNA, information refers specifically to the measurable algorithmic patterns in which the nucleotides are arranged, and specifically the number of bits of the shortest program that computes that sequence. Good good, but allow me to stress for you that the information itself isn't binary, that is bits. Though you can feel free to count it that way, in comparison with other information that can be digitized. But it's actually a variation of quaternary, with the variant being a way to distinguish coding in RNA from DNA. Ask me, anyone, if you need more of this.
It is also important to note that it is not necessary for information (in this case) to be mentally received and appreciated by a receiver in order to be classified as information. Another example of information might be when scientists study the signals sent by a honey bee to others in the hive (by way of his dance), or those sent by a dolphin (with its movements and high pitches), they determine the complexity of the information in much the same way. SETI researchers likewise conclude that if a single string of prime numbers were to be detected being transmitted from deep space this would also be a much higher algorithmic measurement then regular space noise. So much so that they would deem such a transmission as being intelligent in origin. You do understand, however, that the sun and other stars are sending us complex information about where the heavy elements of which we are constructed come from? And that back in 2003 we managed to finally notice messages from the Red Rectangle nebula explaining where our original pre-nucleic acid scaffolding could be found? These don't appear to be coming from intelligent beings, but rather from the hot gas itself, in a perfectly natural manner. But they are very complex, and quite specified, and, of course, information.
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