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Author Topic:   Critique of Ann Coulter's The Church of Liberalism: Godless
kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 191 of 298 (338623)
08-08-2006 6:03 PM
Reply to: Message 182 by Hyroglyphx
07-20-2006 9:44 PM


Re: Is ignorance bliss?
Yeah, but hon, like I said, that would require effort on my part.
wow. just wow. absolutely dumbfounding. i can't get over that statement.
oh, have you ever seen, heard about, or read . . .crap. forgot the name. it's a book by wells, and it's the one with the liliputians, the giants, the whinneys (the smart horses, at any rate). total satire of england, but it's been a while since I've seen/read it. you've probably heard about this . . .it was a tv miniseries in the 90s. someone hre oughtta know the name, though.

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
 Message 192 by jar, posted 08-08-2006 6:11 PM kuresu has replied
 Message 193 by Iname, posted 08-08-2006 6:15 PM kuresu has replied

kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 194 of 298 (338628)
08-08-2006 6:42 PM
Reply to: Message 192 by jar
08-08-2006 6:11 PM


Re: Is ignorance bliss?
doh!

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This message is a reply to:
 Message 192 by jar, posted 08-08-2006 6:11 PM jar has not replied

kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 195 of 298 (338629)
08-08-2006 6:42 PM
Reply to: Message 193 by Iname
08-08-2006 6:15 PM


Re: Is ignorance bliss?
doh!

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This message is a reply to:
 Message 193 by Iname, posted 08-08-2006 6:15 PM Iname has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 196 by Omnivorous, posted 08-08-2006 8:46 PM kuresu has replied

kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 197 of 298 (338654)
08-08-2006 11:10 PM
Reply to: Message 196 by Omnivorous
08-08-2006 8:46 PM


Re: Is ignorance bliss?
if you mean to ask if i search the net, um, not generally for things like that. I like to rely on my mind, you know, challenge it to rembmer those oddball facts. Like on my vacation just recently, we saw ducks sitting on a dock, but they weren't called ducks in the language of the area. their name translates into mallards. I spent the next five hours fuming over it, 'cause I couldn't remember what it was, and then on the way to a cousin's house, I went "A MALLARD. THAT"S WHAT THEY"RE CALLED" kinda scared everyone with that shout too. totally random. but man, once you figure it out, feels good.
search engines are great, but it makes a mind lasier (not that I've any hard evidnece for this, just general suspiscion).
and yeah, I know this is off-topic, so I won't continue in this vein.

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This message is a reply to:
 Message 196 by Omnivorous, posted 08-08-2006 8:46 PM Omnivorous has replied

Replies to this message:
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kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 199 of 298 (338705)
08-09-2006 10:09 AM
Reply to: Message 198 by Omnivorous
08-08-2006 11:46 PM


Re: Is ignorance bliss?
so I'm obsessed with diamonds. so what

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This message is a reply to:
 Message 198 by Omnivorous, posted 08-08-2006 11:46 PM Omnivorous has not replied

kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 238 of 298 (340957)
08-17-2006 10:46 PM
Reply to: Message 237 by MangyTiger
08-17-2006 10:27 PM


Re: Critique by Jerry Coyne
yeah, and notice how the IRC is accredited because of a state exemption
In 1995 the Council confirmed that ICR/GS met the terms of California Education Code 94303(B)(2) for exemption from state approval. This exemption was retroactive back to 1992 and extended to the end of calendar year 1996. Since that time, a new education law was enacted in 1997. The exemption continues under the new organization, Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education under the Department of Consumer Affairs through 2007.
since '95 it's been accredited, but by exemption from state approval for accreditation. go figure

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

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kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 243 of 298 (341097)
08-18-2006 2:21 PM
Reply to: Message 242 by Hyroglyphx
08-18-2006 2:06 PM


Re: Critique by Jerry Coyne
as to biology being the ToE
before darwin's theory, birds were colorful so that we could enjoy God's masterpiece known as creation.
after darwin's theory, birds are coloful so that they can attract mates to have offspring.
now then, which is the crackpot answer?
oh, and ToE does not provide the answer to any philosophical questions, and has practicality. Ever heard of vaccines? What about antibiotics. If we didn't know how evolution worked, we wouldn't be able to predict that if we use one antibiotic long enough the bacteria will be resistant to it. We might notice that, but have no clue why that was so.
and as to vaccines, if we didn't know that viruses change, then we wouldn't be trying to find new vaccines until it was too late (as in making a new one in the middle of a epidemic because, oh no, the first one no longer works).
with ToE, we can predict what might happen to populations. Like, if we put a predator that eats big prey A, A will decrease in size.
can ID do that?
can pre evolution biology do that?
NO!

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This message is a reply to:
 Message 242 by Hyroglyphx, posted 08-18-2006 2:06 PM Hyroglyphx has replied

Replies to this message:
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kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 270 of 298 (341276)
08-19-2006 2:22 AM
Reply to: Message 265 by Hyroglyphx
08-19-2006 1:34 AM


Re: Evolution = natural selection/mutation?
why does shuffling only happen in diploid cells? Here's why. Or two possibilities of why (I wish I could remember more of my biology classes)
Diploid (two of every chromosome )cells undergo meiosis. Meiosis is the basic cause of shuffling. why?
In order to get from 46 to 23 in gametes, you have to split twice--two meiosis events. I and II, they're called.
Now then, either the shuffling occurs during one of these two meiosis events, or it happens when the sperm chromosomes meet the egg chromosomses.
haploid cells do not undergo meiosis. They undergo mitosis only (diploid somatic cells undergo mitosis--it's how we grow, basically).
these cells will not combine under normal conditions. A bacteria with 20 chromosomes will produce two copies with 20 each, and only divide once. And since they don't have any cells that normally combine to get back to the functional number of chromosomes (for their species), there ain't gonna be shuffling.
yeah, I made that a touch confusing.
Just like CAT, TAC, ACT, CTA, are similar in some ways, but shuffled enough to make it different
methinks you don't know what shuffling is. shuffling is where you have the ends of chromosomes crossing over each other, and bits of one will change places with bits of another. I wish I had my bio book to show what I mean--it had some cool graphics to explain this.
(I wrote this after the bit above, even though this should have been first, but I do this i the order I caught what you say)
mutation isn't harmful, beneficial, or neutral by itself. It all depends on the environment. which is why sickle cell is an advantage in places with high rates of malaria, but over here in the west, you're screwed as far as athletic ability is concerned. It's why cystic fibrosis is (or was) beneficial in europe--greater resistance to (pnuemonia, I think?). Go where there isn't a high rate of pneumonia, it's bad for you.
i'm not sure where yuo get the idea that we keep on changing the definition of ToE. It's really simple: change in the genetic compostion of a population during succesive generations, as a result of natural selection acting on the genetic variation among individuals, and resulting in the development of new species (american heritage dictionary). It's one that every biologist agrees on (unless they think it's too wordy, or not wordy enough). It's the most basic foundation of the theory.
What speciation means is a new species arising from another. That still has never been witnessed or manipulated in a lab.
so you mean that this didn't happen:
Several speciation events in plants have been observed that did not involve hybridization or polyploidization (such as maize and S. malheurensis).
Many Drosophila speciation events have been extensively documented since the seventies. Speciation in Drosophila has occurred by spatial separation, by habitat specialization in the same location, by change in courtship behavior, by disruptive natural selection, and by bottlenecking populations (founder-flush experiments), among other mechanisms.
and here's a link with a lot more, including the hybridization and polyploidy events :Observed Instances of Speciation
sexual production isn't suboptimal to asexual production. At least, not in a neutral environment. You want to know why we think sexual production developed--better able to adapt to resist changes.
In terms of novel alleles and mutations, yuo've a greater chance of those happening in sexual reproduction than you do asexual reproduction.
asexual kicks but when there are no new challenges--it far outstrips sexual reproduction in capabilities. but introduce a disease it isn't prepared for, and sexual reproduction will kick but.
to the puncuated equilibrium--it explains why we don't find al the individual species between, say, a fish to a reptile. we have the changes in the larger orders, like genus, family, order, but not ever species. punk eq explain why we don't find every single damn species of the transtition--the taxon group under-represented in the fossil evidence.
as to your nested heirarchy criticism. Linneus came up with it, unwitingly. His classification of animals, with a few important changes (like making dolphins mammals, not fish (which was how he originally had them) and putting chimps into their own genus), follows the same classification we get if we use just DNA for classification. And he didn't have DNA. There are very, very few organisms which are difficult to classify. And that's at the genus/species level. Not enouh to discount the heirarchy.

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This message is a reply to:
 Message 265 by Hyroglyphx, posted 08-19-2006 1:34 AM Hyroglyphx has not replied

kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 285 of 298 (341493)
08-19-2006 7:28 PM
Reply to: Message 281 by Hyroglyphx
08-19-2006 4:30 PM


Re: Evolution = natural selection/mutation?
have you heard of the endosymiosis theory by (marguillis?).
It goes along these lines:
we have a world full of prokaryotes
we have a world full of eukaryotes
the structures in eukaryotes, particularly mitochondria and chloroplasts, look really, really similar to specific prokaryotes, right down to having thier own plasmids, and the similar prokaryotes do similar things.
why?
well, try this one on for size--eukaryotes came from fused prokaryotes. Or rather, one, maybe like a prokaryotic ameoba (ameoba are eukaryotes, hence the pro part), absorbed another prokaryote. and gee golly whiz, it gave him an advantage. consider this--what happens if you abosorb an organism that's really efficient at producing energy, and none of your fellow specie members have it, that means you're better off. You take the field with your advantage.
so when crash says we're made of prokaryotes, he's right. ohh.

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This message is a reply to:
 Message 281 by Hyroglyphx, posted 08-19-2006 4:30 PM Hyroglyphx has not replied

kuresu
Member (Idle past 2513 days)
Posts: 2544
From: boulder, colorado
Joined: 03-24-2006


Message 293 of 298 (341592)
08-19-2006 11:01 PM
Reply to: Message 289 by Hyroglyphx
08-19-2006 9:39 PM


Re: Evolution = natural selection/mutation?
does sexual reproduction need all the glands, the male/female parts we've got, and all that other stuff that you say is perfectly coordinated? no.
all sexual reproduction is where you have a haploid cell fuse with another haploid cell (both haploids coming from diploid cells). and then those two haploid cells become one diploid cell.
there are plants (or perhaps they're fungi) that go through one stage of life hapoid and then diploid. they don't have any of the stuff we've got for sexual reproduction.
and it's not limited to two sexes either. that's the way its setup in all animals and plants, because that's the direction the evolutionary path ended up going, but all you need is to different sexes. and if I recall correctly, fungi have a lot more than just two.
what about the organisms that lay their eggs, and then sperm gets laid on top of the eggs--no physical contact required.
point is, if you're trying to make sexual reproduction into an IC thing, it isn't.
now then, as to the whole non-random meaning it has intent (indicative of purpose, as you put), that's bull, like crash said.
here's why.
is the future a random event? we know that the future will happen. but does this non-random event display any direction of purpose? no. can you predict the future?
is a mutation a random event? no. in the sense that a mutation will occur. no matter what, a mutation will occur. but can you predict what the mutation will be? what effect it will have? where they will occur? no.
perhaps someone out there has a much better anology to explain it.

All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

This message is a reply to:
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