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Author Topic:   The Ten Laws of Creationism and Intelligent Design
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


(2)
Message 41 of 75 (803865)
04-05-2017 11:24 AM
Reply to: Message 21 by Davidjay
04-04-2017 9:51 PM


Re: Reading Genesis literally but not scientifically
Theres no mathematics to evolution, ...
Thank you for telling us up front that you don't know anything about evolution. And I am not referring to the missing apostrophe.
Let me refer you to John Maynard Smith's book, Evolutionary Genetics. It is devoted to the mathematics of working with evolution and population genetics.
We also have that infamous quotation from a Wistar Institute conference in the 1960's, to the effect that "survival of the fittest" is a tautology. I cannot place my hand on it right at this moment, but I'm sure that you're familiar with it since it's so popular among creationists. Sir Peter Edawar was involved, as I recall.
I'm sure that you have read the creationist quote-mining of what he said, but have you gone to the original document and read what he actually said? It turns out that he was complaining about neo-Darwinism because it was almost purely mathematical! He was complaining that fitness was just a number, which told you nothing other than if something was more fit then it would survive, which he said was tantamount to a tautology. The part that creationist quote-miners leave out is that what he was really interested in was why and how an particular organism's particular traits made it more fit. His complaint was that the math of neo-Darwinism abstracted away all that really interesting information that he wanted to see. Which is very different from how the quote-mining creationists want you to interpret that.
So then, "no mathematics to evolution"? Edawar complained that there was too much maths to evolution, that it was almost purely mathematics. So which is it?
Frankly, I think that Sir Peter Edawar knew a helluva lot more than you do.
And, OBTW, a tautology is always true.
Evolution is easy to understand because it is all based on luck and chance, if given enough shakes of the dice, to eventually come up with an amazing combination that just happens to fit in perfectly.
You have a helluva lot to learn about evolution!
One thought: "creation science" lies about what evolution is. As a result, creationists do not understand what evolution actually is nor how it works, but rather they think it's some really weird lie that "creation science" had taught them, AKA "the evolution model". Interesting thing about the "evolution model" is that it consists primarily of the vast majority of creation models. That is because of their Two Model Approach which postulates a "creation model" and an "evolution model" which consists of everything that's not in their "creation model". Every definition they offer of the "creation model" is narrowly sectarian young-earth creationism, so all non-YEC creation accounts go straight to their "evolution model" along with every single long-discredited idea about evolution. BTW, this description of their "evolution model" was given to me personally by Dr. Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research, what wrote the book, saying that the "evolution model" includes "most of the world's religions, ancient and modern."
So in all that creationist confusion, please explain to me exactly how you, a creationist, are supposed to know what evolution actually is. I honestly believe that you don't know.
... if given enough shakes of the dice, to eventually come up with an amazing combination that just happens to fit in perfectly.
Are you talking about single-step selection? That somehow one single random event caused a modern protein to suddenly appear, or something like that? Absolute nonsense!
Nearly three decades ago, I read Richard Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker. In the first half of Chapter Three, "Accumulating Small Changes" (from memory), he describes a program he wrote in BASIC on his Mac (as I recall). It employed what he called "cumulative selection", which I will describe below. He wrote it to create through random changes and deterministic selections within a population a target string, a line from Shakespeare's Hamlet, "Methinks it is like a weasel." He started the program running just before they went out for lunch and it had produced that output string by the time they returned.
Well! I didn't believe it! So I wrote my own version based entirely on his description (he never did post the actual BASIC code). Furthermore, I wrote it in Pascal, my working language at the time. Pascal is a compiled language whereas BASIC is an interpreted language, so Pascal would be expected to run faster than BASIC -- with Pascal, you parse and generate code in one single operation, so every time you run the program you don't have to do all that translation work, but with BASIC you may parse it once, but you have to generate code for every single line every single time you execute it, so BASIC runs much more slowly.
My program ran successfully in less than a minute. Each and every time. Never failed. BTW, I named my program MONKEY for the obvious Eddington analogy of an infinite number of monkeys, etc, etc, etc. That's posted at MONKEY. You might like my quotes: "Everybody's got something to hide, except for me and my monkey!" (Lennon and McCartney). BTW, if you feel like claiming that I had cheated (as has been tried), I also provide the source code for my programs, in both Pascal and in C. If you truly believe that I had cheated, do please point out the exact lines of code where I am supposed to have done such a thing. It's all right there.
I still could not believe the incredible success of my MONKEY, so I analyzed the probabilities. On CompuServe I provided that as an additional file in the PKARC archive file, but nowadays you can find it at http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/mprobs.html (also linked to in the MONKEY page). Only then could I finally realize how and why MONKEY worked so well. To express it simply, eventual success turns out to be far more probably than continual failure. Feel free to grind through the numbers and you will arrive at the same conclusion.
Basically, you have two possible probability models: single-step selection and cumulative-step selection (read Chapter Three of The Blind Watchmaker for a more complete explanation).
In single-step selection, you try randomly to arrive at the final outcome. When that fails, you again try all over again completely from scratch. Please read my treatment of this method in MPROBS (the bare link given above). Basically, the probability of this method succeeding is far, far beyond abysmal -- using a supercomputer capable of one million tries per second (I estimate that most PCs can only manage a few thousand), it would take thousands of times longer than the estimated 13 billion year age of the universe to arrive at one chance in a million of success. But then that has absolutely nothing to do with evolution despite all the false creationist claims.
Instead, evolution uses cumulative selection which succeeds both rapidly and inevitably. Instead of being all-or-nothing in a single attempt, it's a step-wise progression towards the target. And despite the low probability of each single step's success, with many organisms, a population, working in parallel the situation becomes one of it being far more improbable for all attempts to fail opposed to one or a few succeeding -- it only takes one successful attempt to generate the next population possessing that successful trait.
You can examine the source code and the probability analysis for yourself.

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 45 of 75 (803873)
04-05-2017 11:57 AM
Reply to: Message 38 by Davidjay
04-05-2017 11:08 AM


Re: Reading Genesis literally but not scientifically
As design is not anywhere in evolutionary theory, its premise is that all things evolved in time (billions and trillions of years) and just happened by chance to fit together and work together in harmony by luck and chance.
Again, please learn something about evolution so that you can avoid making such stupid statements.
In experiments where evolutionary processes were used to design something, those designs all possessed the same interesting trait: they were all very complex. Some were even irreducibly complex. Such complexity is not a trait of things that are designed intelligently -- I should know because I myself am an intelligent designer, a software engineer. When IDists claim that intelligent designs should be highly complex, all they succeed in doing is demonstrating that they know nothing about designing anything. When we see something complex in nature, then that is evidence of evolution, not "intelligent design".
I mean if there was evidence, why didn't they teach us any of it in university ...
They do. All the time. Why didn't you take any of the classes? You're acting like the idiot in the comedy sketch who's looking all around under a streetlight for something he lost. A passer-by tries to help by asking where he had it last. Half a block down the street. So why aren't you looking for it there? Because the light's better here.
If you cannot be bothered to take the classes on a subject, then do not lie and say that those classes do not exist!
Dr. Eugenie Scott told a story from when she taught anthropology. The biology department did not teach evolution, but she did. Every semester she would get biology majors, usually in their senior year, taking her class for an "easy A" to meet their graduation requirements. And for each and every one of them, she could see the moment when everything they had learned in biology finally started making sense now that they had learned evolution:
quote:
Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light, it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious, but making no meaningful picture as a whole. . . . Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. Only if symbols are construed to mean what they are not intended to mean can there arise imaginary, insoluble conflicts. As pointed out above, the blunder leads to blasphemy: the Creator is accused of systematic deceitfulness.
(Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher 35:125-129 (March 1973), p. 129)
... and why did they never allow anyone to question them.
Scientists welcome questions. They crave questions, because only through questions can we challenge what we think we know, test what we think we know, correct our mistakes, and learn something new. Two of the foremost debate opponents for creationists, William Thwaites and Frank Awbrey, described their motivation for 15 years of debating creationists:
quote:
Back in the early days, we thought there might be some small chance that a creationist would dig up a real biological paradox, one that would prove to be an interesting brain-teaser for the scientific community. We hoped that we could use the creationists to ferret out biological enigmas much as DEA agents use dogs to seek out contraband.
... While we had discovered that every creationist claim so far could easily be disproved, we still had hope that there was a genuine quandary in there somewhere. We just hadn't found it yet.
(William Thwaites and Frank Awbrey, "Our Last Debate: Our Very Last", Creation/Evolution Journal, Issue 33, Winter 1993, pp 1-4, https://ncse.com/files/pub/CEJ/pdfs/CEJ_33.pdf)
What did they discover in those 15 years? That the creationists had nothing whatsoever.
Scientists want questions and crave questions. But they have no patience with bullshit lies, which is all that creationists have to offer.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 38 by Davidjay, posted 04-05-2017 11:08 AM Davidjay has not replied

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


Message 46 of 75 (803874)
04-05-2017 12:03 PM
Reply to: Message 44 by Davidjay
04-05-2017 11:43 AM


Re: Reading Genesis literally but not scientifically
Birds becoming mammals becoming fishes, with spouts on the tops of their heads, as with mamalian whales...
Davidjay, you have already proven that you know nothing about evolution. There is no need for you to prove that you are a blithering idiot as well!
Do you really seriously want to claim that that blithering nonsense is what evolution teaches?
Please, please, please, please, please learn something!
In the meantime, thank you very much for thoroughly discrediting your false religion and for contributing to the growth and spread of atheism. Of course, if that is not your intent, then you may want to think about what you are doing.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 44 by Davidjay, posted 04-05-2017 11:43 AM Davidjay has replied

Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 53 of 75 (803900)
04-05-2017 2:49 PM
Reply to: Message 38 by Davidjay
04-05-2017 11:08 AM


Re: Reading Genesis literally but not scientifically
In Message 41 I wrote:
DWise1 writes:
Davidjay writes:
Theres no mathematics to evolution, ...
... We also have that infamous quotation from a Wistar Institute conference in the 1960's, to the effect that "survival of the fittest" is a tautology. I cannot place my hand on it right at this moment, but I'm sure that you're familiar with it since it's so popular among creationists. Sir Peter Edawar was involved, as I recall.
I'm sure that you have read the creationist quote-mining of what he said, but have you gone to the original document and read what he actually said? It turns out that he was complaining about neo-Darwinism because it was almost purely mathematical! He was complaining that fitness was just a number, which told you nothing other than if something was more fit then it would survive, which he said was tantamount to a tautology. The part that creationist quote-miners leave out is that what he was really interested in was why and how an particular organism's particular traits made it more fit. His complaint was that the math of neo-Darwinism abstracted away all that really interesting information that he wanted to see. Which is very different from how the quote-mining creationists want you to interpret that.
So then, "no mathematics to evolution"? Edawar complained that there was too much maths to evolution, that it was almost purely mathematics. So which is it?
Frankly, I think that Sir Peter Edawar knew a helluva lot more than you do.
And, OBTW, a tautology is always true.
I found that reference in a response that I wrote on this forum in 2013. It turns out that it was Waddington who had been misquoted. Here is what I had written:
quote:
Natural selection is, at best, a tautology. Anyone can state that the fittest will survive as long as you can define what "fit" means after you know who does and does not survive.
That old canard, "natural selection is a tautology", appears to date back to Luther Sunderland's Darwin's Enigma (1978) and his quote-mining of a paper. As it was quoted to me by a creationist on CompuServe on 1990 April 11:
quote:
{DARWINS'S ENIGMA Fossils and Other Problems by Luther D. Sunderland p.32-33}
Arthur Koestler wrote about the unscientific nature of Darwinism and said that the education system was not properly informing people about this:
quote:
In the meantime, the educated public continuse to believe that Darwin has provided all the relevant answers by the magic formula of random mutations plus natural selection- quite unaware of the fact that random mutations turned out to be irrelevant and natural selection a tautology. 37{Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up (New Jork: Vintage Books, 1978), p.185}
In a symposuim at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, prominent English evolutionist Dr. C.H. Waddington made some very pointed criticisms of neo-Darwinism as being a vacuous tautology. In commenting on a paper by Murray Eden entitled, "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory," Dr. Waddington said:
quote:
I am a believer that some of the basic statements of neo-Darwinism are vacuous;... So the theory of neo-Darwinism is a theory of the evolution of the changing of the population in respect to leaving offspring and not in respect to anything else. Nothing else is mentioned in the mathematical theory of neo-Darwinism. It is smuggled in and everybody has in the back of his mind that the animals that leave the largest number of offspring are going to be those best adapted also for eating peculiar vegetation, or something of this sort; but this is not explicit in the theory. All that is explicit in the theory is that they will leave more offspring.
There, you do come to what is, ineffect, a vacuous statement: Natural selection is that some things leave more offspring than others; and you ask, which leave more offspring than others; and it is those that leave more offspring; and there is nothing more to it than that.
The whole real guts of evolution-which is, how do you come to have horses and tigers, and things- is outside the mathematical theory. 38
{P.S.Moorehead, and M.M.Kaplan, Eds., Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, The Wistar Institute Symposim Monograph N. 5 (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute Press, 1967), pp.13,14}


I draw your attention to the ellipsis (ie, the "..."), since the quote-miner had hidden so very much there. In response, I looked up that Wistar Institute Symposium monograph and read what had actually been written. This is from my reply two days later:
quote:
Here is what your source (I assume Sunderland) left out in that ellipsis:
quote:
I am a believer that some of the basic statements of neo-Darwinism are vacuous; { start of omitted text } and I think there is a confusion here, possibly, about whether we are talking about Darwinism or neo-Darwinism. Dr. Medawar mentioned this phrase, 'the survival of the fittest,' and it is a very elementary, old-fashioned, long outdated concept; but, of course, this is what Darwin was talking about. By 'fittest,' he meant best able to carry out the functions of life, best adapted to some environmental situation and some way of life. By a fit horse, he meant a horse that could gallop fastest and escape best from wolves, or whatever it might be. That is a real theory which is perfectly capable of refutation.
What has happened to it since, in the process of turning this into a lot of mathematics, is that 'fitness' has been redefined, leaving out anything to do with way of life, simply in terms of leaving offspring. { end of omitted text } So the theory of neo-Darwinism is a theory ...
{and at the end of the comment}
quote:
The whole real guts of evolution -- which is, how do you come to have horses and tigers, and things -- is outside the mathematical theory. { start of omitted text }So when people say that a thing is vacuous, I think they may be thinking of this part of it, this type of statement. The sheer mathematical statement is largely vacuous. The actual way this is applied, not by the mathematical theorists but by the biologists working with the subject, is not vacuous at all."{ end of omitted text }
{P.S.Moorehead and M.M.Kaplan, Eds., Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, The Wistar Institute Symposim Monograph N. 5 (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute Press, 1967), pp.13,14}
So Dr. Waddington was criticizing neo-Darwinism and not Darwinism or evolution itself; the omitted text shows him making a clear distinction between Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. Furthermore, his criticism of neo-Darwinism was specifically because certain ideas of Darwinism, which makes it non-"vacuous," had been redefined out of neo_Darwinism in order to "turn this into a lot of mathematics." It is the "sheer mathematical statement" that is "largely vacuous," not Darwinism or evolutionary thought as it is practiced.
This redefinition occurred when population genetics was applied to evolutionary thought. The original Darwinian concept of 'fitness' did deal with how an organism might be considered more or less 'fit,' whereas the neo-Darwinian view from population genetics tends to view fitness more in terms of propagating those genes throughout the population into the next generation.
Of course, we have "in the back of {our} mind{s} that the animals that leave the largest number of offspring are going to be those best adapted also for" those things classically associated with "fitness." The criticism we are seeing is that neo-Darwinism does not EXPLICITLY include the necessary properties of "fitness," but leaves them IMPLICIT. It only explicitly includes the results of "fitness," namely differential reproduction. If we only view neo-Darwinism in terms of what it says explicitly, then we find that it actually tends to explain too much and so is harder to try to refute and test. This is the most frequent criticism of neo-Darwinism.
According to Dr. Waddington, it is the attempt to render evolutionary theory into mathematics that becomes vacuous. This is ironic, since the entire symposium was intended as an inter-disciplinary meeting to examine the applicability of mathematics to neo-Darwinism; for example, Dr. Eden, whose presentation Dr. Waddington was commenting on, was Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT.

Dr. Waddington's complaint about neo-Darwinism was that it was too heavily mathematical. The exact opposite of your vacuous claim.
QED

This message is a reply to:
 Message 38 by Davidjay, posted 04-05-2017 11:08 AM Davidjay has not replied

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


(1)
Message 67 of 75 (804067)
04-06-2017 11:14 PM
Reply to: Message 55 by Davidjay
04-05-2017 5:34 PM


Re: Reading Genesis literally but not scientifically
Dwise, please reframe from calling me a blithering idiot.
Uh, excuse me, but I never did any such thing. Why do you feel motivated to lie like that?
From Message 46:
DWise1 writes:
Davidjay writes:
Birds becoming mammals becoming fishes, with spouts on the tops of their heads, as with mamalian whales...
Davidjay, you have already proven that you know nothing about evolution. There is no need for you to prove that you are a blithering idiot as well!
Did I ever call you a "blithering idiot"? No frakking way! Stop lying about what others say! Because when you have to resort to such lying, you have conceded that you have absolutely no position at all.
Look at what you had said: "Birds becoming mammals becoming fishes, with spouts on the tops of their heads, as with mamalian whales..."
Do you actually believe that that is what evolution says? Whoever says such absolute nonsense? Except for you?
That is blitheringly idiotic nonsense. And anyone who believes that is a blithering idiot. So by indicating that you believe in such blithering nonsense, you are yourself calling yourself a blithering idiot.
I'm just pointing out that that is what you are doing to yourself.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 55 by Davidjay, posted 04-05-2017 5:34 PM Davidjay has replied

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


Message 68 of 75 (804068)
04-06-2017 11:25 PM
Reply to: Message 65 by caffeine
04-06-2017 1:17 PM


Re: Reading Genesis literally but not scientifically
Whilst I'm normally one to criticise those who question other posters' motives, I'll indulge myself since we're in the 'Free For All' forum.
It's tough to take seriously someone who declares their agreement with a parody mocking their position.
I especially like this one:
2. The Law of Conservation of Arguments: Discredited arguments are never discarded, they can always be recycled.
I have seen it used far too many times as those lying hypocritical creationists keep using the same old false claims over and over again, even when they had personally acknowledged those claims to be false. Lies serving their god, the Prince of Lies. Oh yeah, Christian doctrine identifies the Prince of Lies as being Satan. And those creationists carry on happily and zealously serving their god, the Prince of Lies, to their dying day.
Edited by dwise1, : very first qs block

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