randman responds to me:
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the physicists are discussing the fundamentals of matter, not biology.
That's my point. The fundamentals of quantum mechanics have nothing to do with biology beyond the most trivial concept that without the existence of matter, there wouldn't be biology as we understand it.
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Now, it is true that if matter comes into being only by the force of an Intelligent Mind, then that also related to the field of evolution
Incorrect.
My computer requires me to turn it on. That little switch ain't gonna flip itself. But once I've turned it on, it doesn't need me anymore. I could vanish from the universe right then and there and the computer will continue to run. I am not the one moving the electrons through the wires. I am not the one moving the heads across the drive platters. I am not the one maintaining the magnetic fields in the memory chips. While it is true that none of that will happen unless I turn the computer on, it is also true that I have no effect upon their functioning once I turn the computer on. The extent of my effect is limited and finite.
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But you seem to be suggesting that these physicists were speaking "outside their field"
No, I was suggesting that you were taking their comments out of context. They were talking about the mysticism they experienced while studying physics and then claiming that said mysticism has some relationship to the field of biology.
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and that moreover, evolutionary biologists would understand better what someone like Max Planck was studying that they would.
Incorrect.
If anything, I was saying that evolutionary biologists would understand evolutionary biology better than Planck. After all, Planck wasn't a biologist. He was a physicist. It is extremely dangerous for anybody to speak outside his area of expertise. You don't ask your tax attorney to do your heart transplant. Even though he's a smart guy.
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That is totally laughable.
I know...but they're not laughing
with you, randman....
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Are you claiming the field of physics has no bearing at all on the field of biology?
Beyond the trivial aspect by which physics allows chemistry to happen? Yes.
I'm reminded of a thought experiment from my freshman physics class. It is said that in Harvard, there is a very elegant room. And in this very elegant room, there is a very elegant chair. And in this very elegant chair sits...a grad student. The grad student in the very elegant chair in the very elegant room is watching a very elegant table and on this very elegant table sits...a brick.
When that brick jumps up one foot, the grad student will make a note of the time.
Silly, you say? Well, suppose we had but a single brick molecule sitting on that table (ignoring the absurdity of "a brick molecule"...this is a thought experiment.) How likely is it do you think that the brick molecule will stay where we had put it? Not very likely. There's a good probability that that brick molecule is going to jump a foot quite easily.
Now, suppose there were two brick molecules. How likely? Well, a little less, but not much.
Keep up this process until you have an entire brick. Now how likely is it? Oh, it's still possible, but everybody knows that nobody is every going to see it happen in their lifetime.
It's because the scale of the effects on the very small do not accumulate to the very large. They get dampened. When you put together a bunch of random processes, they cancel each other out.
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If that were the case, we would have to think biological systems did not consist of matter.
Incorrect. We merely need to think that biological systems don't behave as if they were made up of individual quarks and can have huge physical changes in their system by the application of a single photon.
Have you read any Stephen J. Gould? I can't remember if it's in
Ever Since Darwin or
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes, but he talks about the differences in physics between the world of large biological entities and the world of small biological entities and how that has affected morphology. He uses as an example the various B-movies where the hero is shrunk to the size of a fly or smaller and it shows him turning the pages of a human-sized book. This would be physically impossible for a human to do at that size. You wouldn't be able to get past the air resistance that is keeping two leaves of a book together. This is the world that tiny insects live in. It's what allows them to be able to stick to walls and ceilings...even on glass. The effects of air pressure at that scale are enormous compared to human scale. It's the same thing that allows water skippers to dance on top of the surface of water without breaking the surface tension.
By your logic, the effects of something that directly manipulates individual photons scales all the way up to produce frequent, clearly observable effects on the macrostructure scale. That simply isn't the way things work.
There's a reason that Newton decided that F = dp/dt could be reduced to F = ma: None of his equipment was sensitive enough to detect the discrepancy. Even today, it takes extremely expensive equipment to be able to do so for everyday actions. While you'd want to use Einsteinian physics if you were trying to send a rocket to Jupiter, you can get away with Newtonian physics when designing a car. The error term introduced by using Newtonian physics as opposed to Einsteinian is so small that you'd never detect it.
As I'm writing this,
Mythbusters is on and they're dealing with the claim that in a gravity race, a toy car could beat a real car over a quarter mile. So they set up a quarter mile of toy car track, got a Viper to compare it against, and let it go...only to find that the real car beats the toy car. But if you look closely, you can see why this is the case:
In their preliminary tests, they had a hell of a time keeping the toy car on the track. It kept on wanting to bounce out. In their shots of the car, you could see it rattling around...every little imperfection in the road was wreaking havoc on that poor little car. Even though at the very beginning of the race, the toy car was ahead (think about the friction required to get the car moving in the first place), the real car eventually caught up and beat the toy car.
But was that really a fair race? From the big car's perspective, that asphalt road was pretty smooth. A quarter inch crack means nothing to a car that size. But to a toy car, even on plastic track, a quarter inch crack is a huge gap to overcome. With no shocks to help absorb the impact, every little bump gets transferred throughout the entire body.
Do you not see the point? Do you not understand how the effect of something that happens on extremely small scales gets overwhelmed by factors that are in play at very large ones?
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if matter indeed comes into being through the force of an Intelligent Mind, then we can conclusively state that what makes up biology is dependent on an Intelligent Mind
Incorrect. We can only conclude that if we insist that there is nothing that happens without the direct, conscious, deliberate, and purposeful action of said "intelligent mind."
Are you saying that everything requires god? There is absolutely nothing that happens on its own?
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If this Intelligent Mind acts on the fundamentals of all of physical reality, the formation of matter, it is mere presumption to consider that same Intelligent Mind off-limits to evolutionary biology.
Indeed.
Are you saying that everything requires god? There is absolutely nothing that happens on its own?
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Now, you can claim Max was wrong
No, I'm claiming Planck is irrelevant. We're talking about biology, not physics.
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Not saying it is proven, but it certainly deserves to be on the table and considered as such, as real science.
But the point of science is to study things that happen outside of the actions of an "intelligent mind." Science studies things that happen all on their own without any outside consciousness making it happen. Not only does science ignore the effect of god, science ignores the effect of
you. Now, does that mean you don't exist? Of course not. Does that mean you have no effect upon the physical world? Of course not.
What it does mean is that the things that you do are not the things that science studies. If you are the one who is pushing the individual electrons through the wires, then you are not electricity. Science studies how the electrons move through the wire all on their own.
Are you saying that everything requires god? There is absolutely nothing that happens on its own?
Rrhain
Thank you for your submission to
Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.
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