The evidence for design and a designer - AS OF 10/27, SUMMARY MESSAGES ONLY

Hi Percy, Moreover, JBR's "APC" appears to be almost indistinguishable from Bill Dembski's "specified complexity". Well, let's be honest, it is Dembski's "specified complexity", just with a different name that JBR made up.Quite why JBR would wish to do this is beyond me. Is he hoping that a new name will distract us from the fact that his argument is warmed-over, previously refuted nonsense? Maybe he just wants to claim the credit and bask in the reflected glory (that's William Dembski's glory mind you, slim pickings if you ask me).I don't know, but whatever his reasons, it's not working.Mutate and Survive

Lets try it this way, since it appears to me your are skirting an issue.Lets assume for a moment that OJ actually killed these two people. Im not saying he did but lets assume he did AND YOU WITNESSED HIM ACTUALLY DOING IT. You saw him in good enough light and and witnessed the actual stabbing and kiilling of these two people.This would be proof positive ABSOLUTLEY to YOU that he actually commited the crime, there would be no need for you to conclude this on SOMEOTHER INDIRECT YET CONVINCING EVIDENCE, correct?You conclude that the nature of things is that they operate by themselves with no outside influence. So for this to be proved like witnessing a murder, you would have to have seen the initiation source of such mattersThis information is not available to you, to Prove such a conclusion, lkie witnessing the murder, is itNow percy, I find it hard to believe that person of your intellect cannot see such a simple distinctionDawn Bertot

No. Not to me, it wouldn't. If there was somebody standing beside me, the first thing I'd ask him would be, "Did you see that?"To somebody with a scientific mindset, no eyewitness is to be trusted, not even oneself. Corroboration by somebody else or even better, by physical evidence, is a far more reliable method for reaching conclusions than our own senses.As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."You've fooled yourself into thinking that your ramblings are "logical" and that everybody but you is wrong. That's the antithesis of objectivity and science.

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"It appears that many of you turn to Hebrew to escape the English...." -- Joseppi

Hi Dawn Bertot,If to you proving design means you were an eyewitness to design in the making then you have to say that is what you mean.And if to you concluding design means relying on evidence gathered after the event then you have to say that is what you mean.But what you are saying you mean is not inherent in the terms proving design and concluding design. You have to explain what you mean. To most people in this context the two terms mean relying upon evidence of any type.This advice is meant to help you have a better experience here at EvC Forum. You can continue doing things your own way, but only for so long. As I said before, this is off topic. You were either unwilling or unable to describe what this means when we were defining the topic, and so I ruled it off topic before I ever promoted this thread.Edited by Admin, : Grammar and clarification.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Not in a coherent or usable way. If I read a paper on shannon information or Kolmogorov complexity in genomic sequences it tell me how it is measured and what calculations are neccessary for that measurement. If I wished I could apply the same analysis to the data myself and, hopefully, get the same results. Your definition of genetic complexity is nothing like this.You seem to miss my point about sequence length, I'm asking what level you are looking at function for. At the single nucleotide level, the exon level, whole open reading frames, whole gene loci? Because depending on which it is the task of measuring your genetic complexity becomes either much simpler or virtually impossible. But they can't, your definition is unuseable so you are effectively saying that there is no way to measure genetic complexity, but you are nonetheless sure that it is so great as to be impossible for it to have evolved naturally. JBR is 'Just being real'. Because the whole argument from design seems rather undercut by your own example showing how simple it is to misclassify designed and undesigned. It emphasises that the type of intelligent design/divine design IDists and creationists propose is of a completely different nature to the human design we are familiar with.TTFN,WKEdited by Wounded King, : No reason given.

What was the question there? Yes experiments on Drosophila have shown beneficial mutations. Since you don't deny the existence of beneficial mutations what was your point? Good for you, it's just JBR making that particular unsupported claim then. Very few evolutionary biologists, if any, would ascribe to such a view either. The evidence for key non-genetic changes, such as endosymbiosis, having played a vital part in the modern diversity of life is pretty much universally accepted. Such alliances may have become more entrenched due to subsequent genetic changes, such as the exchange of genetic material between host and symbiont genomes, but their initial acquisition was non-genetic.TTFN,WK

Actually, if you get a chance spend some time on a dig. They very often let people volunteer (mostly for the grunt work) but I can tell you that a week or so on a dig will teach you an immense amount about identifying designed from natural.I'm not saying that you will succeed in being able to accurately tell designed from natural in just a week but maybe, just maybe by the end of the period you'll be able to get it right about half the time.An arrow head is not just a pointed rock. And if you'll do a week or three on a dig and maybe a knapping class or three you will begin to understand just how different an arrowhead is from a pointed rock.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

OK, ignoring the rest of your arbitrary restrictions the examples I referenced showed exactly that. My query was because 'overall' suggested that you were wanting something that improved fitness in multiple environments. Well it doesn't look like a simple clear unambiguous signal of artificiality like Drake and Sagan described. And without some usable way to identify particularised information I'm not sure how you measured the amount in amy particular strand of DNA.TTFN,WK

Why is this off topic in a Free for All area? Both of these would be a logical deduction of any position dealing with such questions, depending on who was requiring evidence, why they were requiring it and what they believe to be valid as far as the information will allow.After an examination of said evidence, one would have to decide whether that information was enough to establish it as acceptable to believe it as a valid conclusion, depending on the method one uses for themself Here I gave an illustration in the example of a murder, to which only Ringo replied with a response that made little or no sense, or at best unbelievableSince Ringo attempted a response it should be obvious that people understand what I mean, only that they have no valid responseOne would need all information concerning such conclusions for it to be absolute proofWhat is so hard about that to understand from a logical propositonDawn Bertot

My response was essentially that your example was invalid and I explained why it was invalid. If you think my response was invalid, explain why.

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"It appears that many of you turn to Hebrew to escape the English...." -- Joseppi

If you click on the Forums link at the top of the page and scroll down to the Free For All forum you'll see this description: You don't seem to be getting the point, so let me be as clear as I can. At this board the moderators run the show, not the rank and file. I'm telling you how I see things, and the way I see it is that discussions in which you take part tend to consist of you making statements no one understands followed by extended fruitless attempts to get you to explain what you mean. EvC Forum's goal is constructive discussions that actually get somewhere. If you're unable to participate constructively in discussions then your participation here will eventually come to an end.In other words, start making it clear what you mean or you won't be here much longer. Hopefully that is clear.About things that "operate in and of themselves," that is off-topic in this thread.Please, no replies to this message.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

Because the answer was moronic. it assumes that even an eyewitness examination of a specific thing is not proof of a thing, atleast to that person . How do i respond to such a clownish rebutal, which is no rebutal at all.It is simply an evasion to avoid the clear distinction between what we know presently and what we cannot know about some events and facts, no longer available to us Why dont you present this comment in the context it was written and lets see if fits the bill to being an eyewitness, with no visual or mental problemsBUTI suppose I this is all we can say in this conxtext since it would risk, off topic discussionDawn BertotEdited by Dawn Bertot, : No reason given.Edited by Dawn Bertot, : No reason given.Edited by Dawn Bertot, : No reason given.Edited by Dawn Bertot, : No reason given.Edited by Dawn Bertot, : No reason given.

It isn't an assumption. It's a conclusion. We know that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. That's why science requires repeatability and consensus. That's why a personal "feeling" that something is designed is not evidence of design.That's why everybody has been asking you to show evidence of design that everybody can see. That's why experiments are necessary, so that others can repeat the observation. If you think I'm using the quote out of context, go ahead and show it.

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"It appears that many of you turn to Hebrew to escape the English...." -- Joseppi

The quote comes from Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman: He makes the same point in a similar way elsewhere in the address: If it's just one person, seeing is not believing. The existence of an eyewitness is not proof. There are studies of the unreliability of eyewitnesses. Many of the people freed from prison on the basis of DNA evidence were convicted by eyewitness testimony.Because of the tentative nature of science you really want to avoid use of words like prove and proof. The more evidence we gather, the more scientists who have managed to obtain the same result, the more confident we become in our knowledge, but that knowledge remains always tentative and is never considered proven.--Percy

Its an assumption of the worst form, since I am not talking about a second hand witness not having witnessing the eventWe are not talking about evidence in a situation that is second hand for someone else. We are talking about evidence that is visible and demonstratable to an individual in any given situation. That is proof positive to the individual, when an event occurs in front of that personYour trying to take a simple principle and make it complicated, to assit your argumentIf Iam standing in front of an individual and I watch him kick a football ball, in person, I dont need to conduct tests to see if that is what happened. It is proof positve that it did happen, if it happened only to myselfWitnessing and event first hand, does not need someone elses coroboration or more test for it to be proof a an event or thing immediately, to that personWhen speaking about proof and what is knowable in a given situation, you comments above are simply silly, its a feable attempt to avoid the obvious point that the scientific method is not required, where absolute proof is obvious in a given situation You provided the quote, provide it in contextual scriptRank and File Bertot