posted
Well, I had an interesting discussion with one of those fun intelligent design people.
The only piece I'll give you the grief of reading is the fact that his definition of mutation is merely a change which decreases genetic information, and his definition of evolution is, basically, an evil alternative of God, which has no proof.
When I pointed out the real definitions, particularly of evolution, he merely said that that was what the evolutionists wanted me to think, and that they had nothing to do with evolution.
The actual nearly official definition of evolution, he dismisses as having nothing to do with evolution.
Of course, he later talks about specifics, and makes numerous claims, which I ask him to cite sources for. He adamantly avoids doing so. And then goes on mixing new unrelated factual information with personal bias, (all trying to show how evolution would be possible, basically, because it's too unlikely and the changes are too complex, and all intermediate changes would be utterly useless, which I know to be blatant falsehood) to the point where I don't know if any of the facts he stated are true in the first place, instead of citing his earlier claims.
... and he claimed I was the one brought in by propaganda and falsehood. He speaks things I know for a fact are false, and furthermore could not actually give anything backing up his claims. I tried to be careful not to make any claims, so he couldn't say the same back to me.
*sigh* Talking to people who not only lie but completely misunderstand the very basis of the thing we're talking about, and dismiss the actual definitions as conspiracy-based irrelevent falsehoods, is not a fun thing to do.
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posted
If it's not fun to do then don't do it. I debate because it forces me to develop a complete understanding of my beliefs and exposes me to facts and views that I would not come to know otherwise. Don't continue a debate that you find to be equivalent to smashing your head against a brick wall.
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quote:Originally posted by 0Megabyte: ... definition of mutation is merely a change which decreases genetic information
I never understood why this particular argument is so attractive and popular given the existence of observable things such as gene/genome duplication, transposons, development of bacterial resistance and associated gene transfer.
It just seems so counter-intuitive given the number of biotechnology techniques and computer science algorithms which practically rely on these things happening in real life in order to well... get any results.
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Next time my experiments fail (which is pretty frequently), I should just explain to my boss that these things are all evil conspiracies so any expectation of success is foolish of him. ;-)
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quote:Originally posted by scholar: Next time my experiments fail (which is pretty frequently), I should just explain to my boss that these things are all evil conspiracies so any expectation of success is foolish of him. ;-)
I always thought it was impossible for an experiment to "fail." Well...unless you happened to completely botch it up and get all sorts of external interference into the works...
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Well, I am at the early steps in the experiment- trying to make the mutant. I have failed to make the mutant, so I have no data yet.
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I bet, to a person actually DOING these things, the claims that it's all a lie is even more infuriating.
Anyway, Threads:
It's fun, in a sense, to find out the other side's view. And this guy was better than the others I spoke to that day. He wasn't ENTIRELY stupid, and seemed to know some facts. (though maybe he was just copy/pasting.) It's a pity when his first question is "why do you hate God so much?"
I seriously was beginning to think this stuff was cliche. Do they really, seriously not know our answers?
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You can't have a rational discussion with some one who is irrational; it just doesn't work.
Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. How can you say evolution is too complex to work? This is GOD we are talking about, how could anything be too complex for him? Evolution simply documents God's hand on earth. Evolution and natural processes are simply the mechanisms by which God works his miracles on earth. Science simply attempts to document God's methods.
Those who dispute Evolution, nature, and natural processes actually diminish God in my eyes. They are people who were not made in God image, but who made God in their own very constrained and limited image, and as a consequence can't believe that God can do anything that they can't personally understand.
It seems they would rather believe in spontaneous magic, rather than think God had a long term and complex plan for the development of earth.
Personally, I see Intelligent Design people as very much anti-God.
quote:Originally posted by 0Megabyte: Ooh: scholar, this all sounds very cool.
I bet, to a person actually DOING these things, the claims that it's all a lie is even more infuriating.
Well, right now as I am frustrated and annoyed with my stuff not working properly, I am thinking they have the right idea. But yeah, in our journal club, we talk a lot about the crazies. We read some of the articles that behr (darwin's little black box) sites and discussed what the data actually said- which differed a bit from what he claimed. It was kinda annoying to realize that the man actually did read the papers and still somehow came up with this wacky interpretation.
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pooka: I'd not be surprised if it was a new one.
And it's true. In the same way that the Ministry of Peace and the Ministry of Truth, the "large" size coffees at Starbucks (tiny little larges, ne?), and calling Hitler "good" are true.
Only in minds the likes of which I can scarcely even fathom.
Anyway:
"Personally, I see Intelligent Design people as very much anti-God. "
I used to think the same thing. Back when I believed in God. I don't dislike these people any more now than I did then.
But what really upsets me is when they insinuate I dislike God for some reason. No, the god I worshipped was not dislikable at all, unlike their psychopathic one.
However... well. I can't believe without evidence. So their claims that I must hate God really bug me.
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In response to the first post, I have a cousin who is a die-hard creationist. When the dinner conversation shifts to how life came to be the way it is, it is a bit of a pain to sit through. We keep bringing up the same arguments; he says evolution has no proof and has been blown out of proportion by atheistic scientists, I say God could have easily created life by means of making little changes over periods of time. My cousin is such a likable guy everywhere else, and I admire his friendliness, his ability to settle a non-creationism argument, and his leadership role, but he's so hard-headed when it comes to creationism.
I wish some people would realize that there's more to Christianity than speaking hate to Darwin and all who consider his theories plausible. Of all the things supposedly Christian, devoting one's life to denying the idea that life has a common ancestral source is not at the top of my list for ways to impress God.
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posted
Thinking about to this converstaion... I think I was talking to someone from an alternate universe, through internet magic.
I mean... he spoke events which happened precisely opposite of how they happened. He spoke of evolution as if it was how his religion is. He spoke of Creation Scientists disproving so-called lies, when I know for a fact it was actualy scientists who did so.
Alternate universe. That has to be it.
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Seriously though, I was wondering about something, because I find that a lot of the disagreement does come from different ideas of what science actually is. So in the course of my musings, I came up with a question to which the answer might be illuminating.
What is Gravity?
I don't mean, what are its effects or how is it measured. Where does it come from? What sets its strength? Is its strength independent of everything, or is it an emergent property in relation to other physical forces? That sort of thing.
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I don't know you well, 0Megabyte, but I'm surprised by the Hitler reference. Maybe we need to bump a Godwin's law thread.
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Eh. Resh actually managed to come up with some interesting questions for a change. The answers to each one are "Not known at this time; ask again in 20 years". With the exception of the one about emergence; I think it is reasonable to say that gravity does not emerge from the other known forces, although they may all four be emerging from some underlying physics.
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"Only in minds the likes of which I can scarcely even fathom."
And that's not your fault?
What I mean by that is not that you cannot understand how people can consider Hitler to be good, but the (extremely bigoted) implication that for the same reasons you cannot understand those of us who do not believe a 19th century theory that has been updated out of desperation.
"Large, tall, whatever. The point remains valid."
No, it doesn't. Originally there were two sizes, short (8 ounces) and tall (12 ounces). Then they added the grande (16 ounces). And then, because we Americans are such pigs, Venti (20 ounces) was added on top of that. You can still get a short at Starbucks, but you have to request it specifically. It's also called a "kid's size" now.
At any rate, if you can be wrong about the Starbucks sizes, maybe you're wrong about evolution too.
That last bit was a joke, by the way.
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It was updated because we found ways in which it was an inadequate explanation of the facts, and the updated version was a better explanation of the facts. This is called science.
If anything, evolutionary theory has been updated rather less than many areas of science, in the same time period. Such as, say, physics. Or chemistry. I mean, we only got a decent grasp on the nucleus of atoms in 1911! Was rewriting atomic theory to accomodate new experiments an act of 'desperation'?
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Eh. Resh actually managed to come up with some interesting questions for a change. The answers to each one are "Not known at this time; ask again in 20 years". With the exception of the one about emergence; I think it is reasonable to say that gravity does not emerge from the other known forces, although they may all four be emerging from some underlying physics.
So was the emergence question the exception to my "interesting questions for a change" or "not known at this time"? I assume the second, and so I ask, how do you know? The other three forces are generally measured against Gravity, but of course they can all be measured against each other.
But you think if I ask again in twenty years I'll get an answer? By all appearances these are properties of nature that have their basis in some sort of metaphysical reality. It is believed that we can perhaps learn something about that reality by studying it's effects.
So my question is this: why might intelligent design be unscientific if it is the result of some supernatural creation? We know nothing of its processes itself, but if it is true, then we should be able to learn something about it by studying its effects.
My point is that I think the labeling of macroevolution as scientific and ID as not is really a matter of preference. Wouldn't you agree?
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Out of desperation: If Darwin had any clue as to the incredible complexity of Life at its most basic level, do you think he would have developed his theory? If he had any clue as to how the fossil record would look 150 years later, do you think he would have developed his theory?
The "improvements" to his theory are the result of a refusal to abandon a naturalistic explanation for existence. This is the driving force behind the creative efforts to keep Darwin's theory valid.
Let me ask you this: Are unprovable scenarios that show how Evolution might possibly have happened evidence that it did happen?
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quote:The other three forces are generally measured against Gravity
What are you talking about? The other three forces are not 'generally measured against gravity', they're part of a unified theory that has not yet been successfully reconciled with gravity.
As far as 'macroevolution' and 'ID' being equally backed, I wouldn't agree, and I rather doubt KoM would. We have abundant evidence for the subset of evolution you call 'macroevolution' having happened in the past, and we have observed some of that subset (speciation, f'instance) in the present. Strangely, we have yet to find any evidence for ID.
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Yeah, I think he would have. He specifically talked about seeing complex things he was not yet able to explain, but felt greater understanding of the processes involved would lead to rational explanations for.
Unprovable scenarios? You'll have to be more specific what you're referring to, but no, they're not evidence that it happened, they're evidence that it could have happened.
Building up support for a theory happens in two parts:
One, evidence it is a feasible explanation for things we do not yet have direct evidence to explain.
Two, direct evidence for specific explanations.
Generally, the better a theory is, the more rapidly the first category is reduced and the second category is increased (though the first category never goes away, since new stuff is always being added as our understanding grows, and some things are just inaccessible, such as specific details about how certain early evolutionary steps occurred).
Discoveries are constantly moving things from the second category to the first, for evolutionary theory.
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0Meg, I don't get the point of this thread. Is it just to poke fun at/complain about someone you were having a conversation that we are not privy to with? That doesn't seem, to me, like a worthy cause for a thread.
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Resh, Couldn't you just revive one of the - is it two or three now - threads on evolution that you've run away from?
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quote:Originally posted by Reshpeckobiggle: The "improvements" to his theory are the result of a refusal to abandon a naturalistic explanation for existence. This is the driving force behind the creative efforts to keep Darwin's theory valid.
*raises hand* For those of us actually using Darwin's theory to work in fields such as biotechnology and doing things such as developing new drugs or discovering causes of diseases using computer models that are based on evolution: May our refinements to Darwin's theories based on actual use and observation be exempted from the your categorization as "creative efforts"
It would at least cut down a lot on our disorientation when we find out that our applied work is purely "creative." Perhaps we could save money and trade in our lab hardware and computers for a pen and paper Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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William Dembski has, but I guess his evidence is inadmissible since he doesn't believe in Evolution. Actually, all of nature is evidence for ID. Evolution is a theory that tries to show how all of that "apparent design" ---a term I'm sure you have heard before and implies that things have the "appearance" of "design"--- is only skin deep, so to speak.
What I mean about the other forces being measured against gravity is that if gravity is given a value of 1, then the others are given a value of say, 10 to the 25th power, 36th power, and 38th power (according to Wiki). I'm sorry; maybe I wasn't clear. Let's not get off topic here.
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Mucus: Newtonian Physics were useful, and in fact still are.
Mr Squicky: I suppose I could. Let me look into it. But I don't like your implication. Do you think I ran away because I thought I had lost the debate? Or could it be that I have other things in my life that take up my attention?
Fugu: Thank you for answering honestly. Now can you tell me something that is actual evidence that evolution happened?
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William Dembski has what? Given evidence for Intelligent Design?
His arguments are mathematically laughable. Anyone with a couple undergraduate courses in biology and math can tear them to shreds. Is there a particular piece of 'evidence' you feel he has for ID that you would like me to find a complete refutation of?
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Sure. When we breed lots of fruit flies together, doing nothing beyond selecting for certain attributes, we occasionally get new species of fruit flies.
We've seen new species appear in nature (observed polyploid speciations are practically normal).
We find ring species, where at one point of the (geographic) ring, going all the way around in one direction, individuals in the same general vicinity all breed together, but where it reaches back to the 'starting point' on the ring, the individuals do not breed together.
When we make predictions about the characteristics of genes that we haven't yet found in one species, based on genes in another species, based on how we've established they're evolutionarily related, our predictions are almost always right (that's really a lot of evidence, as we do that a lot).
And I can always link you to a few hundred thousand pages (maybe more, I don't know if anyone has counted) of scholarly work, finding particular predi
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Reshpeckobiggle: You're missing the point. What I'm asking is when we make refinements to the theory based on what we discover in the course of developing drugs or computer models of proteins, may we get an exemption for our efforts as not being "creative" or "desperate"?
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quote:Originally posted by Reshpeckobiggle: I assume the second, and so I ask, how do you know? The other three forces are generally measured against Gravity, but of course they can all be measured against each other.
I do not see what that has to do with emergence; to answer your question, we know that graivty does not emerge from the other forces because, if it did, you could then manipulate matter using the other forces and see a gravitational effect. Such an effect has been looked for and not found, down to some ridiculously small limit. In addition to this experimental effect, which admittedly only applies to electromagnetism, there are strong theoretical reasons from field theory; plus of course the much more intuitively appealing argument that forces with a range of 10^-15 meters would have a hard time giving rise to a force with an infinitely long range.
quote:But you think if I ask again in twenty years I'll get an answer?
No - quite the opposite: I am convinced that there will certainly not be an answer at any time in the next twenty years. Twenty years is a lower bound.
quote:So my question is this: why might intelligent design be unscientific if it is the result of some supernatural creation? We know nothing of its processes itself, but if it is true, then we should be able to learn something about it by studying its effects.
Fine; make a prediction for your 'supernatural creation', then. One which differs, if you please, from the ones we get from ordinary naturalistic theories. If you are able to do so, then you will have managed what neither Behe nor Dembski could do: To wit, put ID on a reasonably scientific basis. Perhaps it is useful to distinguish two cases: One is the Platonic ideal of ID that I've alluded to above, which makes predictions. This is science. The other is ID as we've actually observed it these past ten years or so, which is just creationism dressed up in big words.
quote:My point is that I think the labeling of macroevolution as scientific and ID as not is really a matter of preference. Wouldn't you agree?
When intelligent design makes a testable prediction or has a useful (scientifically or practically) application, then yes. Until that time, I most certainly do not agree.
Since you now seem to be posting again, answer this: If complex system X requires a designer Y by virtue of its complexity, how is it that designer Y, presumably still more complex than X, needs no designer? And by the way, you ran away from the previous thread on these issues.
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Sure, Mucus, at that level I agree the developments are based on scientific rigor.
Fugu, those pieces of evidence do not prove Evolution happened. They prove that if you apply a lot of (intelligently directed) effort at fruit flies, you can get a broadly defined "new" species. Is it no longer a fruit fly, though? Is it now a dragonfly, or a bumblebee, perhaps? When a Larus Gull is no longer capable of interbreeding, is it no longer a gull? Is it an eagle now?
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Well, KoM, here's the problem: I'm not positing a theory. I think ID is what happened, but not based upon any scientific beliefs I have. I think we were created and I don't need to prove anything. However, if you want to scientifically disprove creation, you need a valid scientific theory, and I don't think Evolution does the trick.
No, it is not up to me to prove anything, and I think some of you keep forgetting that. Less than 10 percent of the American population believes you, and it's not because they are stupid (though that may be what you think.) It is because your theory is less than convincing.
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Moved from the other thread, because it belongs here and because I'm really interested in the response:
quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Go read a definition of a counterexample. A counterexample is an example of something you have said can't happen, actually happening. I can't provide one, though, until you have given a sufficiently specific definition of what can't happen -- which means a definition of complexity.
I do not intend to provide a way in which they 'could' have increased complexity, I intend to provide a way in which they did improve complexity, which I can't do until I know what you think complexity is. If your definition is sufficiently silly, I might instead prove that no increase in complexity (by your definition) would be required to change something from one species to another.
quote:Less than 10 percent of the American population believes you, and it's not because they are stupid (though that may be what you think.) It is because your theory is less than convincing.
Actually it's a combination of the excessive religiosity of this country combined with our sub-standard science education. Of course there may be a causal relationship between both of those as well.
EDIT: And 10% sounds pretty low. The Catholic church officially accepts evolution and there are something like 70,000,000 Catholics in the US. That's over 20% of the population right there.
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According to a poll which I can't remember where I read it, but don't worry, it wasn't a poll conducted by Focus on the Family, only 9% of Americans believe that Evolution occurred as a result of blind forces and without any direction by a supernatural creator.
You're saying that people refuse to believe Naturalistic Evolution because of "excessive religiosity of this country combined with our sub-standard science education." Do you arrive at that conclusion because people don't believe in Evolution, or are you actually not employing circular reasoning here?
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quote:According to a poll which I can't remember where I read it, but don't worry, it wasn't a poll conducted by Focus on the Family, only 9% of Americans believe that Evolution occurred as a result of blind forces and without any direction by a supernatural creator.
Well that's a bit different. If you believe that God picked which mutations should occur or that God placed the first life on the earth, or if you believe that God kicked the universe into existence, then the modern theory of evolution is still consistent with your beliefs.
quote:You're saying that people refuse to believe Naturalistic Evolution because of "excessive religiosity of this country combined with our sub-standard science education." Do you arrive at that conclusion because people don't believe in Evolution, or are you actually not employing circular reasoning here?
I arrive at that conclusion because the vast majority of the people who I have spoken to who who do not believe in evolution have displayed an ignorance for what evolutionary theory actually says. Additionally, the US is consistently rated very low, compared to other nations, in science education. There was a report confirming this just in the last day or two (It was reported on NPR this morning).
Additionally, very few people who are not religious support the ID view and none support out-and-out creationism so religiosity is apparently a factor in evolution denial.
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Perhaps. But I've also spoken with plenty of people who do believe in evolution and have little to no idea what the theory actually says. And I've spoken to plenty of people on Hatrack, on this thread in fact, who do not seem to realize how unscientific Evolution is. They seem to think that proof of minuscule changes within species can be extrapolated to massive changes from non-nucleic bacteria to human beings.
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Reshpeckobiggle: Along with MattP, I too would like a definition of complexity as you would define it before we continue further.
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quote:No, it is not up to me to prove anything, and I think some of you keep forgetting that.
The Resh story so far is: I'll fail in an epic fashion to defend Intelligent Design as a science, I'll have my logical postulates on irreducible complexity torn apart, I'll have my sources like Behe left intellectually bankrupt. In fact, I'll keep vaguely referencing information and data that I say I have that disproves evolution, then run away whenever challenged to provide that argument. After about eight times, I'll take a new tact: Why not argue from a comfortable seat of incredulity? I'll say that I no longer have to prove anything and I'll say that it's up to other people to prove evolution to me. Science may not hinge whatsoever on the bias of my convictions or my frequently unreasonable and artificial burdens of proof, but it'll just basically be a series of negative arguments -- "I can't conceive that (fill in the blank), so your theory doesn't work."
According to Gallup, between 9-13% have said they believe that humans came from evolution without God's help. The dominant opinion is traditional creationism without evolution (44-47%) - but God-guided evolution is close behind (35-40%).
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Those numbers change drastically when you look at countries that don't score abysmally on tests of Math and Science ability, though.
I mean, the US isn't the world, and the numbers show that we are pretty terrible at the area under discussion. If you look at countries that greatly outperform us, per captia, in these areas, they don't tend to show this high belief in creationism.
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Thanks, Tresopax. I'm sorry I'm so lazy because I could have looked it up myself.
Sam, you're like a broken record. I went back to the other big debate we had and you were doing the exact same thing: restating my position in your own words, thereby exhibiting your inability to hear anything other than what you want to hear. But you got one thing right. I don't have to prove anything. You're the one with the outmoded concept of origins with no evidence that you expect everyone to accept despite all indications to the contrary.
Mucas, Matt: What does it matter how I personally define complexity? I already know what you are going to do because this is what you do with all the key words: speciation, information, proof, science, evolution; you change the definitions so that they fit the theory. I can do it too. Complexity is something that cannot have evolved. How does your theory explain it now?
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quote:Originally posted by MrSquicky: Those numbers change drastically when you look at countries that don't score abysmally on tests of Math and Science ability, though.
I mean, the US isn't the world, and the numbers show that we are pretty terrible at the area under discussion. If you look at countries that greatly outperform us, per captia, in these areas, they don't tend to show this high belief in creationism.
Another way of looking at it is that Americans are more likely to retain a belief in a Creator because they have a lees effective system of atheistic indoctrination.
Though higher Math scores would certainly be nicer.
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But yeah, in our journal club, we talk a lot about the crazies. We read some of the articles that behr (darwin's little black box) sites and discussed what the data actually said- which differed a bit from what he claimed. It was kinda annoying to realize that the man actually did read the papers and still somehow came up with this wacky interpretation.
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