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Author Topic:   How long does it take to evolve?
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(1)
Message 91 of 221 (770500)
10-06-2015 3:56 PM
Reply to: Message 79 by Lamden
10-02-2015 2:44 PM


Let's Get This Discussion Started!
DWise1 writes:
Lamden writes:
I was raised religious (not Christian), and I remain so.
If not Christian, then why considering and the fundamentalist perspective and even adopting some of their premises? If by "not Christian" you meant "not Fundamentalist", then bear in mind that Fundamentalists (creationists are drawn primarily from Fundamentalists and a handful of other sects) are a definite minority among Christians.
Not accusing, just confused and wondering what you meant.
Seriously. While claiming no Christian background, you nonetheless sound very much like one, specifically like someone with "conservative Christian" leanings (ie, fundamentalist/evangelical/etc). Are the concerns and the way you're expressing them and the questions you're raising in the manner you're raising them based on your own non-Christian background or on the proselytizing process that creationists are applying to you?
This is of interest for learning what non-Christians are thinking as they're being manipulated and persuaded by creationist proselytizers. And do not for one instant imagine that they're not trying to convert you. That is their primary goal. Their method is to throw you off by asking you "scientific" questions that you are unable to answer (they are designed to be unanswerable), thus leading you to question what you know and think and then offering their "creation model" as the only alternative, knowing that once you have bought into that then converting you to their form of Christianity will follow quite easily. At http://fishdontwalk.com/witnessing-dialog-real-life-story/, Bill Morgan describes having applied that technique in real life -- it might look familiar to you. That is also the progression that he himself had followed in his own conversion: first he got sucked into "creation science" and then two years later he became a fundamentalist Christian.
We can easily understand why and how "creation science" appeals to strongly to fundamentalist Christians, because it appears to support their beliefs in biblical literalism, a young earth, Noah's Flood, and other aspects of their theology. But what we find harder to understand is how it would appeal to a non-fundamentalist.
This is where you can help by discussing those questions with us. And by differentiating your ideas about the whole question now with before their conversion process had started. For example, at what point did you adopt the assumption that creationists only have to disprove evolution in order to win? And when did you adopt the Christian idea of a Creator along with the assumptions that science somehow disproves that idea?
My own reaction to "creation science" was apparently different than yours. 25 years ago I had written an essay to explain that to someone: Why I Oppose Creation Science. Do please read it, but in the meantime I will offer a short synopsis.
Half a decade before my initial exposure to creationism (at the time, "creation science" was still in the process of being invented), I had left Christianity because I could no longer believe its teachings (specifically, I had started reading the Bible and found it too unbelievable). I was already finding fundamentalist beliefs to be vastly more unbelievable, so I was skeptical about the first few claims presented to me. But then that story about the NASA computer having found Joshua's lost day was just too blatantly bogus.
That was circa 1970, in the midst of the rise of fundamentalism fueled by burned-out hippies (they called themselves "Jesus Freaks"). I didn't hear more about creationism until a decade later. Since creationists were still around, I assumed that maybe there might be something to their claims, so I started studying it in order to see what their evidence was. I mean, they said that they had evidence, so what was it? I quickly discovered that they had no evidence, but rather only distortions and misrepresentations of scientific sources, combined with outright lies.
My initial efforts had been learning the claims and checking them out, then discussing what I had learned with creationists. Of course, that never went well. At first I had navely assumed that they didn't know they had made a mistake and that, being a truth-loving Christian (that was my own Christian training), they would correct their mistake. I was not prepared for ferocity of their hostile reaction. They cared far more for defending their false beliefs than for the truth. In fact, I have come to learn that creationists can be the most pathological of liars (Bill Morgan most especially).
So basically, that has been my experience. Feel free to ask questions.
Another set of questions that we may want to explore would involve what you understand about how evolution is supposed to work. Actually, I'm more interested in a creationist's answers to that question, but so far they've refused to answer. Specifically, there are creationist claims that they accept readily but which make absolutely no sense whatsoever. I assume that those claims are based on bizarre misunderstandings of how evolution is supposed to work, in the light of which those nonsensical claims might make some kind of sense. But until we know what they are thinking, we cannot make any sense of what they are saying.
While you have not yet been converted into a creationist, it may prove worthwhile to explore creationist claims that appeal to you and that seem to make sense to you and why that would be.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 79 by Lamden, posted 10-02-2015 2:44 PM Lamden has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 92 by Lamden, posted 10-06-2015 8:40 PM dwise1 has replied

  
Lamden
Junior Member (Idle past 2395 days)
Posts: 25
From: Lakewood
Joined: 09-23-2015


(1)
Message 92 of 221 (770508)
10-06-2015 8:40 PM
Reply to: Message 91 by dwise1
10-06-2015 3:56 PM


Re: Let's Get This Discussion Started!
a) Jewish, not Christian.
b) I agree with much of what you have written in your website. There is no place for "creation science", only "science". So if the creation science is all bogus, to hell with it.
c) I also believe that one ought to look at established science, and see if one can find evidence of a creator. I am not sure why that is a false dichotomy. If one could conclude that the world as we know it could not reasonably have come about any other way, that would appear to point to evidence of a creator. If one could reasonably explain how the world etc could occur "by itself", then the world would not be evidence of a creator.
This is what I am trying to get from this website, and I think we are engaging in productive conversation.
Most directly, I found on your website a program you ran to try and get the word monkey out of randomness. I understood the first part of your explanation, but lost you somewhere in the middle. I was hoping you could take the trouble to answer me in layman's terms, if possible. ( I got some exposure to probability theory when I was studying for my CFA exams, but never had to actually use it, so I am pretty weak . I do remember that it was pretty cool!)
To state simply what I don't get is: I want to hypothesize that, for all practical purposes, one can never get complex organization from randomness. The monkey program, modeled after Dawkins methinks weasel sentence, was intended to demonstrate that with NS it is not as far fetched as it seems.
What I don't get is, that the program was designed with "monkey" in mind. wouldn't it be more fitting to compare NS to trying to program some unknown word . It could be monkey, bird, or perhaps tyrannosaurus, but not programmed in advance.
Now , the most likely answer I would expect is, that each step of NS is intrinsically "programmed " to stay put, as it provides some sort of advantage to the creature. But I don't get that either, as each step towards a "good thing" is hard to believe that it really helps that much. Ie, is a little snub of liver or kidney really so useful to an animal?
I think this is a key point that reveals best to you my line of thinking.
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Add blank lines.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 91 by dwise1, posted 10-06-2015 3:56 PM dwise1 has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 93 by dwise1, posted 10-06-2015 9:45 PM Lamden has not replied
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 Message 98 by dwise1, posted 10-07-2015 2:54 PM Lamden has not replied
 Message 101 by RAZD, posted 10-07-2015 5:02 PM Lamden has replied
 Message 109 by dwise1, posted 10-07-2015 8:49 PM Lamden has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 93 of 221 (770509)
10-06-2015 9:45 PM
Reply to: Message 92 by Lamden
10-06-2015 8:40 PM


Re: Let's Get This Discussion Started!
I'll have to rush off to dance class in a short, so I'll just address a few things for now.
Most directly, I found on your website a program you ran to try and get the word monkey out of randomness.
Actually, my program would by default try to generate the alphabet in alphabetical order. It could also accept any string you give it. Richard Dawkins' original program was called WEASEL because he had it produce a line from Shakespeare's Hamlet where the characters are looking at clouds and saying what they look like: "Methinks it is like a weasel." I named my effort MONKEY because of Eddington's statement about thermodynamics that (as I recall) the probability of all the gas molecules in a container spontaneously aligning on one side would be the same as an infinite number of monkeys banging randomly on an infinite number of typewriters producing Shakespeare's Hamlet.
A favorite creationist probability argument describes how virtually impossible it is for amino acids to arrange themselves randomly into the exact order needed for a modern protein. That argument is wrong for a number of reasons (including over-specifying that sequence), a primary one being that that is not how we would have gotten that protein. It wouldn't have just fallen together by chance, but rather it would have evolved. And the big difference between it just falling together spontaneously by chance (AKA creation) and it evolving lies in the difference between single-step selection and cumulative selection, which is what WEASEL and MONKEY are all about.
The conclusion (sorry, I'm really rushed here) is that single-step selection, which is what creation is based on, is virtually impossible (which is why it requires a Creator to direct it), whereas cumulative selection is virtually inevitable since it is virtually impossible for it to fail.
The part in the middle that I just left out is MPROBS.DOC, which I HTML'ized and posted at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/mprobs.html, which I believe is what you were talking about. I used Markov chains (which I used cookbook-style from a textbook) and finite state automata with which I am very comfortable since I studied them in computer science. Basically, each state represents having a certain number of letters right and you transition from one state to the next by either advancing with another correct letter, stay put by either replacing a wrong letter with another wrong letter or a right letter with the right letter, or falling back by replacing a correct letter with a wrong one. For each of those three transitions there is a probability with I developed. And those probabilities are different for each state, such that when you start with all wrong letters then it's more likely to change one to a correct letter, and when you have mostly correct letters it's more probable to fall back. But for cumulative selection to fail you must always fail to advance, which becomes virtually impossible.
That does not model evolution -- even Dawkins explicitly wrote that, regardless of what creationists say -- but rather compares and contrasts two forms of selection.
In the meantime, find a copy of Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and read Chapter 3, which is where this is developed.
I want to hypothesize that, for all practical purposes, one can never get complex organization from randomness.
1. Evolution is not random blind chance.
2. The products of evolutionary processes are complex. Very complex. Even irreducibly complex. We have conducted design experiments based on evolutionary models and their results are functional and far too complex for any human to have done (eg, designing a device made of digital circuits, but which exploited the minute differences in those circuits' electrical properties.
Ie, is a little snub of liver or kidney really so useful to an animal?
What good is 1/10-th of a liver? Better than 1/100-th of one.
In The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins goes through that argument using the evolution of the vertebrate eye.
To quote Ian Shoales, "I gotta go."

This message is a reply to:
 Message 92 by Lamden, posted 10-06-2015 8:40 PM Lamden has not replied

  
Coyote
Member (Idle past 2105 days)
Posts: 6117
Joined: 01-12-2008


Message 94 of 221 (770512)
10-07-2015 12:28 AM


Unintelligent Non-design Suffices
Making Genetic Networks Operate Robustly: Unintelligent Non-design Suffices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsbKzFdW2bM
Mathematical computer models of two ancient and famous genetic networks act early in embryos of many different species to determine the body plan. Models revealed these networks to be astonishingly robust, despite their 'unintelligent design.' This examines the use of mathematical models to shed light on how biological, pattern-forming gene networks operate and how thoughtless, haphazard, non-design produces networks whose robustness seems inspired, begging the question what else unintelligent non-design might be capable of.

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
Belief gets in the way of learning--Robert A. Heinlein
How can I possibly put a new idea into your heads, if I do not first remove your delusions?--Robert A. Heinlein
It's not what we don't know that hurts, it's what we know that ain't so--Will Rogers
If I am entitled to something, someone else is obliged to pay--Jerry Pournelle
If a religion's teachings are true, then it should have nothing to fear from science...--dwise1
"Multiculturalism" demands that the US be tolerant of everything except its own past, culture, traditions, and identity.

  
AZPaul3
Member
Posts: 8513
From: Phoenix
Joined: 11-06-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 95 of 221 (770513)
10-07-2015 4:11 AM
Reply to: Message 92 by Lamden
10-06-2015 8:40 PM


Re: Let's Get This Discussion Started!
Now , the most likely answer I would expect is, that each step of NS is intrinsically "programmed " to stay put, as it provides some sort of advantage to the creature.
This is one of the reasons these simulator programs are not all that useful as analogies to natural selection. They concentrate on the individual steps instead of the whole.
Natural selection works on the phenotype. The whole individual. Any new mutation may well be passed on to the babies be it good, bad or indifferent. The key in natural selection is the combined phenome, the whole of the individual, with respect to their ability to make healthy babies (fecundity). There may be dozens of novel differences in an individual. If the combined effect makes the individual less fecund than another then that individual is less fit (in evolutionary terms) than the other (though, officially, "fitness" in not just how many babies you make but how many babies you make that go on the make even more babies). Over time, as pieces parts of the population-wide genome are mixed around, some individuals arise with much more benefits than others, make many more healthy babies that make even more healthy babies, and these benefits, these mutations, then become the norm in the population as all the while more mutations are working their way into or out of the population gene pool sparking an endless string of these cycles.
But I don't get that either, as each step towards a "good thing" is hard to believe that it really helps that much. Ie, is a little snub of liver or kidney really so useful to an animal?
As dwise1 pointed out, a small one with limited filtering capabilities would be more beneficial than an even smaller one less efficient, or not having one at all. And if it adds in any way, no matter how small, to the health, and thus the fecundity, of the whole individual then that entire suite of genes may be passed on in greater numbers then without that small filtering capability. Keep in mind that these organs were in development even prior to our fishy days. Even the smallest waste filtering organ would have had a significant health benefit to the small mass of the pre-fishy polyp that, 800 million years later, would become us.
What I don't get is, that the program was designed with "monkey" in mind. wouldn't it be more fitting to compare NS to trying to program some unknown word .
Yes, very much so. In this case, however, whatever word the program produced would have to be accepted as a viable result of the process whether or not it falls into an English lexicon. There is no goal. There is nothing to consider an acceptable end result.
Take 7 places. Randomly put a letter in each. DIBLMWX. That is your animal. Now randomly change one letter in one position. DIBHMWX. That is a different, related, animal. If after 3.8 billion years you come up with something like SAPIENS then good for you. If not, then, whatever you did come up with is the animal you now have. There is no targeted result. What you get from the process is what you get.
Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.
Edited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 92 by Lamden, posted 10-06-2015 8:40 PM Lamden has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 96 by Pressie, posted 10-07-2015 8:15 AM AZPaul3 has seen this message but not replied

  
Pressie
Member
Posts: 2103
From: Pretoria, SA
Joined: 06-18-2010


Message 96 of 221 (770517)
10-07-2015 8:15 AM
Reply to: Message 95 by AZPaul3
10-07-2015 4:11 AM


Re: Let's Get This Discussion Started!
AZPaul writes:
The whole individual. Any new mutation may well be passed on to the babies be it good, bad or indifferent. The key in natural selection is the combined phenome, the whole of the individual, with respect to their ability to make healthy babies (fecundity).
That's how I understand it, too. There's no ordered steps. It doesn't happen in the order of mutation one and then mutation two and then mutation three and then mutation four and then mutation five and then mutation six and then and then and then.... The order of mutations don't matter. In the end, the combined effects of all the mutations (no order of mutations happening) do things.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 95 by AZPaul3, posted 10-07-2015 4:11 AM AZPaul3 has seen this message but not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 97 of 221 (770537)
10-07-2015 2:43 PM
Reply to: Message 79 by Lamden
10-02-2015 2:44 PM


Re: Creationist "Unanswerable Questions"
Since I had already written so much of this before your reply (Message 92):
... I share with you that, being a person of reason , I , like many others, was taught that the world testified about the Creator, etc. etc..
Yes, that is a widely held belief and attitude. And a valid idea for an actual creationist to hold. However, it is one that "creation science" creationists (the kind that we are discussing, so let's just call them "creationists" in order to keep the discussion simple) do not hold. Rather, those creationists teach that only the Bible testifies about the Creator and that the real-world evidence must be subverted in favor of the Bible. I feel that that idea is just plain wrong.
When AOL was still in the web hosting business, one of the sites was created by George H. Birkett, a grandfather and devout Christian (he has not recreated his site and I think I found his obituary). He had little patience for creationists and fundamentalists whom he considered quite correctly to be bibliolaters (bible-worshippers). He devoted one page to what he called "The First Testament", which is the world and universe and everything that is in it. God wrote The First Testament and we can learn much by reading it. Men then wrote the Bible to tell us about the Author of The First Testament. Similarly, the filk song, The Word of God says: "Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world."
The universe is The Word of God. Creationists' beliefs about the Bible are Man-made (which is the nature of all theologies), hence the Word of Man. Their theology claims things about the universe that are contrary to fact and insist on giving their Word of Man precedence over The Word of God. Seems kind of blasphemous, don't you think?
, Yet was told by virtually unanimous representation of the scientific community, at least as represented in Wikipedia, that the world can be explained without one.
Yes, that is correct. And your point is ... ?
You see, regardless of whether there is/was or is/was not a creator, the world can still be explained without one. So you're seeing a problem where there isn't one.
As I pointed out earlier, science is the study of how the universe works and how it has worked. Regardless of how the universe came into being, whether by purely natural means or by supernatural means or by natural means directed by the supernatural, since the universe has come into existence it has worked the way that it does, which is what science studies. The findings and endeavors of science would be exactly the same whether the universe had been supernaturally created or not.
Therefore, science can and does explain the world without referring to a supernatural Creator. For that matter, science cannot make any use of supernaturalistic explanations. The scientific method involves observation, forming hypotheses to try to explain observations, and testing those hypotheses to eliminate or to correct hypotheses. That works exceedingly well with naturalistic explanations, but it cannot work at all with supernaturalistic explanations. It is impossible to observe or measure the supernatural, or to detect it in any manner, or to determine whether it even exists. Science does not attempt to make any use of supernaturalistic explanations because it cannot. Science restricts itself to naturalistic explanations because that's all that it can work with, not because it wishes to deny the existence of the supernatural.
Besides, what scientific purpose could it possibly serve to add God to the equation of how something works? It offers nothing. It would be like adding to a description of the four-cycle gasoline engine that the sky is blue. The color of the sky makes no difference and hence has no effect of how a gasoline engine operates; if you were to have added that the sky is green, then the engine would still operate exactly the same.
Forcing God into the equation can have a detrimental effect. There are many gaps in our scientific knowledge, gaps which we are working to close but gaps do still remain. By adding supernaturalistic explanations to science (which is what you're doing by adding God to the equation), you open the door to using God to explain away those gaps. We hit a gap in our knowledge and say "Goddidit" in order to explain that gap away. That does several things, none of which is desirable. It gives us a false sense of accomplishment, such that we stop trying to seek the answers for closing that gap properly; ie, scientific research in that matter stops. We come to define God as a means to fill those gaps -- this is "God of the Gaps"; also read the two short essays, What Does "God of the Gaps" Mean?Science and Christian Apologetics. Through "God of the Gaps" thinking, we come to define God as that which fills the gaps in our knowledge, which itself has several effects such as edifying our ignorance and motivating us to actively block scientific research since trying to solve a mystery that justifies the existence of God would be seen as a directly attack on God (very much the attitude of creationists towards science). By consigning God to the dark gaps of our ignorance, we diminish Him greatly, turning him into an impotent sad excuse for a deity who must forever hide in the darkness mortal terror of the bright light of knowledge as his hiding places shrink away. And by turning God into the God of Ignorance, then believers and non-believers alike will view new knowledge as disproving God.
It should be noted that both "creation science" and "intelligent design" make extensive use of "God of the Gaps" reasoning as both will point to some gap in our knowledge, whether real or imagined, and pronounce it as evidence or proof of "Goddidit". While "creation science" uses it more as a rhetorical device, "God of the Gaps" is an integral part of ID and a fundamental basis for all their reasoning. It should also be noted that forcing God into science is a fundamental goal in their Wedge Strategy.
The only place where it makes any kind of sense to add God to the equation is in philosophical and theological settings, which include one's own personal beliefs. And the way that that should relate to science is that we may personally believe that the world and universe are as God had made them and that they work as God had created them to work, while science investigates how the universe works.
More on ID:
Science restricts itself to naturalistic explanations out of practical necessity. This is called "methodological materialism", which basically says, "We will restrict ourselves to materialistic explanations which dealing with how the universe works because those that's the only kind of explanation that we can deal with." Science does not bother itself with the question of whether the supernatural exists, but rather conducts its business without including the supernatural for practical purposes.
In contrast, "Intelligent Design" (ID) proponents accuse science of engaging in philosophical materialism, which is a philosophical position that the supernatural does not exist and the material universe is all that there is. Because IDists confuse methological materialism with philosophical materialism, they have launched a crusade to force science to change, to force science to incorporate supernaturalistic explanations. We have already seen what that can lead to.
Several years ago I started a topic here, So Just How is ID's Supernatural-based Science Supposed to Work? (SUM. MESSAGES ONLY). Only a few people tried to respond to the question, but nobody could offer an acceptable answer. If that link doesn't work, go to http://www.evcforum.net/dm.php?control=msg&t=12852.
Some religious people believe in God-guided evolution- I have no interest in discussing that, as I don't really care that much how God did it.
But that is all that science does. If you are not interested in that, then you are not interested in science.
Rather, you should think about the roles and capabilities of science. I would suggest that some things to consider would be 1) that science does not and cannot deal with the supernatural, which makes it incapable of proving or disproving God, let alone give direct testimony as to the nature any gods (you would need to infer that yourself independent of science), and 2) the natural universe works the way that it does regardless of the existence of non-existence of any gods.
My only interest is in random, "natural", unguided ev, which I believe to be impossible due to ID and IC.
By "IC" I assume you mean something like "intelligent creation". I have never seen those initials used.
Evolution is natural. It does contain some randomness. But it is hardly unguided, since it gets its guidance primarily from natural selection. True, there's no conscious deciding of what changes are needed, nor are there any long-term goals, just response to immediate pressures of the environment.
In the conclusion of MONKEY Probabilities (MPROBS), I try to offer an analogy which may not have made much sense. In orbital mechanics, we can describe entire orbits and use our knowledge of those entire orbits to predict where a planet or asteroid will appear at any given time or to plot the course of spacecraft. But how does an orbiting body follow its orbit? Does it need to have knowledge of that entire orbit and foresight and foreknowledge for where it needs to go to stay in that orbit? No, of course not! All that that orbiting body does, all that it could possibly do, is respond to the immediate forces that are exerted upon it from one moment to the next. It is the cumulative effects of all those instananeous responses to immediate forces that result in the complete orbit.
Similarly, evolution is the cumulative effects of life doing what life does. Although we describe evolution in terms of special forces and processes, those terms are only to enable us to think and talk about what's happening; those forces and processes don't actually exist in nature even though their effects do. All that's happening is that some organisms in a population survive long enough and with varying success to reproduce with varying success and some of their offspring survive long enough with varying success to themselves reproduce with varying success. Those varying degrees of success are determined primarily by the organisms' characteristics (the physical expression of their genes; ie, their phenotypes which are the physical express of their genotypes) and how well those characteristics work in their environment.
There is an adage: individuals do not evolve; populations evolve. In evolution, what happens to the individual is relatively unimportant. Creationists like to throw in the effects of fatal accidents that would kill of the most fit individual before he can reproduce. But what's important is what's happening in the entire population -- you should have received some schooling in statistical methods, which likewise deals with population samples instead of the individual units under test; the mathematical analysis of evolution is population genetics which employs statistical analysis of entire populations.
Furthermore, individuals do not evolve. They were both with one genotype which does not change in their lifetime. Their offspring will be born with genotypes that are very similar to that of their parents, so that is where change in the genotype starts. It should also be noted that the same holds true for the entire population in any given generation: the gene pool of a given population, the cumulative genotypes of all individuals in that population, of any given generation does not change; it is only with the next generation that any differences can arise. Therefore, the cumulative effects that constitute evolution is what happens to a population's gene pool over many generations.
I packed a lot into those last four paragraphs, the last three especially. You may want to chew on them quite a bit more to make them more digestible.

{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)
Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)
Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)
It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.
Steven Colbert on NPR

This message is a reply to:
 Message 79 by Lamden, posted 10-02-2015 2:44 PM Lamden has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 99 by kjsimons, posted 10-07-2015 2:55 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 98 of 221 (770538)
10-07-2015 2:54 PM
Reply to: Message 92 by Lamden
10-06-2015 8:40 PM


Re: Let's Get This Discussion Started!
a) Jewish, not Christian.
I never thought that I would ever channel my basic training TI, Sgt Denmark, an almost archetypal red-neck. One of the jobs assigned to recruits would be to march other recruits to divine services (everywhere a group would go, they had to be marched there and somebody had to be in command of the formation), a Catholic to march the Catholics to Catholic services and a Protestant to march Protestants to Protestant services. After he had made those two assignments, he asked simply because he had been trained to, "Anyone else?", and a single hand raised up. Surprised, he asked, "What else is there?" "I'm Jewish."
Actually, one of the basic training details I was on was as "Shabbas goy" for the Jewish chaplain. It was light duty and I got to hear a little Beethovan (on the TV in the break room), which did do my soul much good.
But seriously, thanks for finally clearing that up. The same basic Creator tradition as the fundamentalists claim to follow, though they have added layers of additional twists and turns to it. I know that there are forms of strict creationism (including denial of evolution) in Judaism and in Islam, though I don't know the particulars, being much more familiar with the most prevalent form, that of fundamentalist Christianity.
b) I agree with much of what you have written in your website. There is no place for "creation science", only "science". So if the creation science is all bogus, to hell with it.
Glad someone finally read what's there instead of what they want to see. As I mention, I've received a lot of very vicious hate emails accusing me of saying things that I simply have not said, and almost every time I ask for specifics so I could find what they are talking about they never reply. Similarly, I have explained my position repeatedly to local creationist activist Bill Morgan, which I'm sure he has always ignored; ironically, he boasts repeatedly of opposing my position and having disproven it, so since my position is that truth, truthfulness, and honesty matter greatly that means he opposed truth, truthfulness, and honesty -- that's doubly ironic, since he is a pathological liar and the most dishonest person I have ever encountered (all of which, he says, is because he loves Jesus), so for once he's telling the truth.
Basically, the story with "creation science" is that fundamentalists' literalist theology has them believing many things about the physical world which is contrary to fact, as well as believing that those contrary-to-fact things must be true in order for God to exist or at least be worth worshipping (As the Jewish protagonist of a movie remarked, "Christians do not know how to read the Bible." 1). They have invested an enormous part of themselves in a theology that is at odds with reality, so a large part of the function of "creation science" is to lie to themselves for reassurance about their beliefs. And then it gets weird.
I also believe that one ought to look at established science, and see if one can find evidence of a creator. I am not sure why that is a false dichotomy. If one could conclude that the world as we know it could not reasonably have come about any other way, that would appear to point to evidence of a creator. If one could reasonably explain how the world etc could occur "by itself", then the world would not be evidence of a creator.
So you want to search the beach for the footprints of the unseen Hand of God? (no, I didn't make up that mixed metaphor)
I do not think that science will help you there. Remember, all that science does is figure out how the universe works. The results of science would be the same whether any of the gods exist or not. Rather, it is only your interpretation of what you find that will serve your purpose, but that interpretation is admittedly very biased.
You know what topiaries are, shrubbery that's been trimmed to specific shapes, including animals. And there are also bonzai trees whose shapes are created by artful and careful trimming. I see those as representing two different analogies for two kinds of Creator, God as Gardener. One kind just goes in and uses brute force to hack and cut the creation into shape, while the other applies subtle influences on the plant at key times in its growth to influence it into the desired shape. Which one displays the greater skill and artistry? Which one is more worthy of respect and awe?
Or we could use an designer analogy. One type of designer throws a quick-and-dirty design together. It works, but he has to constantly adjust it in response to changing conditions, even to the point of having to basically rebuild it every time a parameter changes. An electrical example would be a voltage regulator which must adjust for changes in the load (amount of current drawn from the power supply) in order to maintain a constant output voltage. A voltage regulator design that required a human operator to manually adjust it every time the load changes would be a very poor design. Basically, that describes my mprobs program, which calculates and prints out the tables of probabilities for cumulative selection. I wrote it quick-and-dirty with the parameters (eg, population size, string being created) hard-coded into the program. Every time I need to run it with different parameters, I need to change them in the program and recompile it.
Then there's the type of designer whose designs need no outside intervention to run. Such superior designs can react to and adjust themselves automatically to changes in the environment. Every practical voltage regulator is designed to automatically adjust to changes in the load and maintain a constant output voltage with need for a human operator to do that. Every self-respecting computer program allows the user to enter values and options and even tests those values for validity and can handle bad values.
So which designer is the superior one, the one more worthy of praise? The schlockmeister who has to continually poke his pudgy fingers into the works to keep it going? Or the one who can simply start his design running and then leave it to do its thing?
And example of that argument is in my response to one of Bill Morgan's recent "unanswerable questions" (his "question" is in the angle quote marks) -- emphasis added:
quote:
>> So you think your kidneys have the ability to regulate the water content
in your blood because matter arranged itself into the kidneys...but wait...oh
wait....matter can't analyze blood counts....... <<
No, kidneys evolved. ...
Though actually, my own kidneys did not evolve, but rather the human kidney evolved. Which is not the same thing as matter just coincidentally arranging itself. I'm sure that you are aware of the difference, but as usual you choose to use the lie instead of the truth even when you do know better. And actually my own kidneys did result in matter arranging itself during the process of embryonic/fetal development. Or does your position go to the ridiculous extreme of having your god micromanage the placement of every single atom during the entire process of embryonic and fetal development as well as throughout the entire lifetime of every single individual organism, not just the human population but also every single animal of every single species on the planet? Do you really believe that your "Creator" is so grossly incompetent that he couldn't have designed a world in which everything ran by itself without the need for him to keep poking his pudgy fingers into everything constantly? What a pathetic theology you have!
And, yes, my kidneys do have the ability to function as kidneys. Duh? And as for matter analyzing blood counts, I don't know what you mean. Do kidneys have to perform blood counts in order to work? Is that really the way that kidneys work? That would be the same as saying that in order for the moon to orbit the earth, it must be able to calculate the solution to Kepler's Equation. Sheer idiocy! The moon doesn't have to calculate anything, just as I'm sure that kidneys do not need to analyze blood counts. In the case of the moon, gravity does the work based on immediate forces. In the case of the kidneys, they just do their thing in response to immediate conditions.
And we build machines and other equipment to analyze blood counts. Machines and equipment consist of matter. So then, yes, matter can indeed analyze blood counts.
So, do you believe God to be a Schlockmeister designer? Or a competent one? For a Schlockmeister, we should be able to observe a constant stream of miracles as He has to constantly poke His Pudgy Fingers into his Creation in order to It running. But for a competent Designer, we should be able to observe the Creation humming along running all by itself. Even though I've been an atheist for half a century, I would opt for the competent Designer and cannot imagine any believer wanting to opt for the Schlockmeister.
Or to follow the Gardener analogy, I can find more praiseworthy a Designer who grew the universe into what it is instead of One who just hacked everything together by brute force.
I tend to see support for my position in Genesis 1:20 and 24, which I think depicts the Creator working indirectly through Nature as He commands the waters and the earth to bring forth life.
I also believe that one ought to look at established science, and see if one can find evidence of a creator. I am not sure why that is a false dichotomy.
No, that is not a false dichotomy. What is a false dichotomy is where you use a contrived set of options and try to prove the one simply by disproving the other. Which is what you are arguing for in saying that creation wins solely by discrediting its contrived and false ideas about evolution.

{ FOOTNOTE 1:
Mein Bester Feind ("My Best Enemy"), 2011. IMDG page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1822255/
The Wikipedia page is in German and the only alternative languages offered are Russian, Japonese, and Ltzebuergesch?.
The scene involved a principal plot device, an unknown Michelangelo sketch of either Moses or Abraham. The sketch depicted him with horns, a common Christian misconception of the time due to a mistranslation from the Hebrew. That prompted Bleibtreu's character to remark that Christians do not know how to read the Bible.
I saw it on Netflix. I don't know whether it is still there (the organization of their site, including search results, can be very frustrating).
}

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kjsimons
Member
Posts: 821
From: Orlando,FL
Joined: 06-17-2003
Member Rating: 6.7


Message 99 of 221 (770540)
10-07-2015 2:55 PM
Reply to: Message 97 by dwise1
10-07-2015 2:43 PM


Re: Creationist "Unanswerable Questions"
dwise1 writes:
By "IC" I assume you mean something like "intelligent creation". I have never seen those initials used.
I think Lamden is referring to "Irreducible Complexity" when he uses IC. Another common creationist objection to evolution.

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 100 of 221 (770541)
10-07-2015 3:09 PM
Reply to: Message 99 by kjsimons
10-07-2015 2:55 PM


Re: Creationist "Unanswerable Questions"
OK, that makes sense.
Though of course complexity -- and especially "irreducible complexity" -- is characteristic of the products of evolutionary processes. And anathema for good designs.

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RAZD
Member (Idle past 1404 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 101 of 221 (770546)
10-07-2015 5:02 PM
Reply to: Message 92 by Lamden
10-06-2015 8:40 PM


Re: Let's Get This Discussion Started!
What I don't get is, that the program was designed with "monkey" in mind. wouldn't it be more fitting to compare NS to trying to program some unknown word . It could be monkey, bird, or perhaps tyrannosaurus, but not programmed in advance.
Actually if we are going to model evolutionary biology and the rise of more complex species from simple species via mutation and selection, what we should look for is any word.
Wouldn't you agree that the probability of getting any word is considerably higher than getting a specific specified word?
Consider a lottery: the probability of a single ticket being the winning ticket is very low, but the probability that *a* ticket will win the lottery is very high. Evolution doesn't have a goal so any winning ticket is good.
Also see the old improbable probability problem for some information on probability calculations on putting together a specific string.
You'll have to wade through some non-topic information to find the good stuff. Sorry bout that.
Now , the most likely answer I would expect is, that each step of NS is intrinsically "programmed " to stay put, as it provides some sort of advantage to the creature. But I don't get that either, as each step towards a "good thing" is hard to believe that it really helps that much. Ie, is a little snub of liver or kidney really so useful to an animal?
Consider an eye spot that just sees light and dark -- is there an advantage over organisms without it?
Think of your skin and feeling sunshine with it -- can you find the direction of the sun with just this feeling?
Then being able to discern objects would be an improvement, yes? Once predator and prey have that, then the "arms race" begins, the predator to see (and catch) the prey, the prey to see (and avoid) the predator.
Enjoy

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAmerican☆Zen☯Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.


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This message is a reply to:
 Message 92 by Lamden, posted 10-06-2015 8:40 PM Lamden has replied

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RAZD
Member (Idle past 1404 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 102 of 221 (770547)
10-07-2015 5:05 PM
Reply to: Message 100 by dwise1
10-07-2015 3:09 PM


Re: Creationist "Unanswerable Questions"
... And anathema for good designs.
Remove any stone in a roman arch and the arch falls -- irreducible complexity. As far as I know these are pretty good designs, having withstood several thousand years ...
Enjoy

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAmerican☆Zen☯Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.


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This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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 Message 104 by Percy, posted 10-07-2015 5:47 PM RAZD has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 103 of 221 (770548)
10-07-2015 5:47 PM
Reply to: Message 102 by RAZD
10-07-2015 5:05 PM


Re: Creationist "Unanswerable Questions"
DWise1 writes:
... And anathema for good designs.
Remove any stone in a roman arch and the arch falls -- irreducible complexity. As far as I know these are pretty good designs, having withstood several thousand years ...
Think Rube Goldberg types of complexity. Think computer programming projects that have been allowed to "evolve" and have become so complex and filled with interdependencies and special cases that the slightest change you make will break it in very unexpected places, thus rendering it a nightmare to maintain -- and most of the work in programming is maintaining existing software.
Those kinds of complexity.

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 Message 102 by RAZD, posted 10-07-2015 5:05 PM RAZD has replied

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 Message 105 by RAZD, posted 10-07-2015 6:25 PM dwise1 has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 104 of 221 (770549)
10-07-2015 5:47 PM
Reply to: Message 102 by RAZD
10-07-2015 5:05 PM


Re: Creationist "Unanswerable Questions"
The arch provides an excellent example of why irreducible complexity in nature is not proof of God or a designer. All arches were originally more complex, possessing support frameworks during construction. Once all the stones were in place and the arch could support itself, the support frameworks were removed, reducing complexity.
But the big problem with irreducible complexity is that almost all examples creationists identify in nature are not really examples of irreducible complexity. For example, a creationist will argue that the eye is irreducibly complex because if you remove just one part, such as the lens, it will no longer function. There are at least a couple significant problems with this argument:
  • The "remove one part" scenario completely misunderstands how evolution works, because there was never a time when evolution "added one part." Evolution doesn't produce sudden jumps that produce a complete and novel part in a single generation. Evolution doesn't contend that creatures with no lenses could have offspring with lenses.
  • Even if you do remove one part, the organ still does something. An eye without a lens can still detect light and dark, and can sense the shape of large objects. What this means for evolution is that an incipient and rather poor lens is better than no lens at all and can produce a survival advantage. Incremental change and selection over generations does the rest.
The most amazing thing about irreducible complexity is that a genuine scientist, Michael Behe, thought of it. Shows what evangelical Christianity can do to your mind. Behe is still a professor at Lehigh and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. By the way, what happened to DI? Seems we never hear from them anymore.
--Percy

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RAZD
Member (Idle past 1404 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 105 of 221 (770550)
10-07-2015 6:25 PM
Reply to: Message 103 by dwise1
10-07-2015 5:47 PM


Re: Creationist "Unanswerable Questions"
Those kinds of complexity.
Irrelevant -- the definition of "irreducible complexity" is that the removal of any one piece renders the (process/organ/etc) unable to preform.
The idea being that it can't occur naturally. See Mutation, Message 101
quote:
What has acted on the stone arch to make it assemble? Natural selection can not account for it, as natural selection can only take away thing.
you tell me eh?
The Bridge of Ross is situated in County Clare in the west of Ireland. Photo by Ray Millar.
Notice the appearance of a bridge assembled from smaller stones ... the appearance of an intelligent
Enjoy

we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand
RebelAmerican☆Zen☯Deist
... to learn ... to think ... to live ... to laugh ...
to share.


Join the effort to solve medical problems, AIDS/HIV, Cancer and more with Team EvC! (click)

This message is a reply to:
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