posted
So in fact, Dembski did worse than your average scared little girl; I'm pretty sure the judge would have mentioned it in his judgement if any eye-clawing had been going on. I understand they tend to get a bit stuffy about that sort of thing in their courtrooms.
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AND NOW AN ARTFUL DODGING SESSION WITH SCIENTIFIC ILLITERATE RESHPECKOBIGGLE
quote:Q. Resh...what's being left out? Can you please give examples? I have an open mind and would like to see for myself.
quote:A. Well, I've tried pointing them out before, but apparently they are inadmissible to the argument.
TRANSLATION: I'm not going to show what's being left out by pretending that I somehow can't.
quote:Q. I'm curious, Resh: what, when you scratch a bit deeper, reveals a flaw in evolutionary theory?
quote:A. There's no one thing. I just mean that it's something I started doing a while back and now I don't believe in it.
TRANSLATION: I don't actually have anything to show to prove my last statement, but I believe my last statement and therefore it's how I manifest it must be true.
quote:Q. Please name some of these smartest people so we can see their arguments.
quote:A. I'd probably have to put Bill Dembski up there near the top.
TRANSLATION: I am a sucker for punishment.
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Hey Sam. If anyone goes back and reads past the first sentence in my responses, they can see that I actually do follow up. Why are you being dishonest? And I don't really care much about what people who already consider anyone who denies evolution to be an ignoramus think about Bill Dembski. And I'm certainly not going to lend any credence to arguments made against a "right-winger" on Wiki. All I know is that I've read his books and they are brilliant. You think I'm praising someone who has already been shown to be beneath consideration. But that's what happens to anyone who does not toe the evolutionary line. Another sign of the bankruptcy of Evolutionary theory: squelch all dissent.
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We don't have to squelch anything, really. Most of it is nonsense, so it does it for us.
Claiming that your beliefs, when talking about scientific theories regarding how things do or do not evolve, are unprovable by their nature doesn't mean they are correct. Not even close. It makes it not even worth discussing...at least in a science class.
I personally don't have any problems considering myself a person of faith who believes in science, and in evolution. I don't believe for an instant that they are mutually exclusive.
I just don't try to use my religious beliefs to change biology curriculums in public schools. Nor do I try to teach my beliefs as scientific theories, because I know BY DEFINITION scientific means measurable and independently repeatable.
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You don't repeat evolution, you independently repeat experiments that demonstrate the plausibility of evolutionary explanations.
As for measurements, there're certainly a lot of things to measure. We can count the speciations we've seen in the short time we've been on the planet, we can count mutation rates, we can look and measure similarities between fossils, all sorts of things.
Back to Dembski, I'm going to assume you aren't aware that several specific things he says in his books (such as about what evolutionary theory says) are specifically false. That, is there is no interpretation problem. He's either incredibly mistaken or lying.
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AFAIK we haven't experimentally repeated any speciation event (except maybe polyploidy? but that feels like cheating ), but that's not a bad thing, given the time scales the earth has been around.
Behavioral changes, sure, there are lots of parts of evolution we've repeated.
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Totally offtopic: I'm seeing funny little browser-doesn't-recognise-this-character thingies scattered through your post. Are you doing anything special?
Ontopic: We haven't repeated, say, the chimp/human split, sure, because we don't have the ancestor around. But I believe that we can create speciation events in fruit flies pretty much at will.
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You breed dogs, or fruit flies because of their brief generational lives, or even green beans for god's sake! You take things you CAN measure, that have a strong relationship with the things you want to examine, and apply what you find though trial and error.
Then you make a hypothesis and extrapolate.
Most of all, if you find out your explanation was wrong, you don't get pissed and defend it even though the evidence is against you. You adapt your hypothesis, and start applying it again.
You know, the very thing this thread was created to mock.
It's called the scientific method for a reason, you know. If it involves faith in the face of contrary evidence (or lack of any scientific evidence, at least), it's called religion.
quote: Hey Sam. If anyone goes back and reads past the first sentence in my responses, they can see that I actually do follow up.
Checking ..
checking ..
checking ..
checking ..
ANALYSIS: Your statement is UNTRUE. There exists no 'follow-up.' The same ambiguities exist that I point out, the same unanswered questions are at issue.
quote:And I don't really care much about what people who already consider anyone who denies evolution to be an ignoramus think about Bill Dembski.
TRANSLATION: "I am going to invent an untrue supposition of your beliefs, by saying that you think anyone who denies evolution is an 'ignoramus.' This isn't true, but I think it is, and will use that as a pretty hollow dismissal of any valid critiques you might have of my empty, fractured claims."
quote:And I'm certainly not going to lend any credence to arguments made against a "right-winger" on Wiki.
TRANSLATION: "I am intent on standing by a presupposed validity of Dembski's works, to the extent that I am going to throw out any consideration of valid critiques of a person I am intent on believing to be right where others are wrong."
quote:Another sign of the bankruptcy of Evolutionary theory: squelch all dissent.
TRANSLATION: "I totally skipped over the part where various universities talked candidly about how individuals even like Behe are freely and openly sanctioned to hold their beliefs and present academic critiques and submit new scientific postulates. I have to, because if I don't, I'm arguing from a position that I would already heavily doubt. I'm not in the business of doubting myself whenever I'm sure I'm true, to the point of purposefully huge mental dissonances. In fact, I have no mechanism for compensating for the fact that science largely has no desire to teach things that are not science, as science. The best I can do is to assume that people like me are only not given 'equal time' because we are squelched by some giant imaginary conspiracy against the academic peer-reviewed research that we never submitted in the first place, an attempt to squelch the postulates we were never able to prove. I ignore the fact that if it actually existed, it would be the world's most pointless cover-up in existence."
this has been part two of 'abuse of paraphrase theatre' -- stay tuned for edition 3
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No, those are some bizarre artifact of a relatively new (and completely basic and normal) keyboard I acquired. For some reason it occasionally inserts unicode fragments. I've experimented some, and cannot determined why. At some point I'll just get another keyboard.
We've never recreated a fruit fly speciation; there have only been a few really solid ones. We have recreated what could be the start of a speciation event, but without strong enough reproductive separation to call it speciation.
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I guess we must be talking past each other, because when you say "There have only been a few strong [speciations]", that says to me that we have successfully repeated this experiment.
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No, one just happened and was noticed, and none of them (depending on how you count, I think there were two or three total; there have been several more 'near speciations') was reproductively assortative for the same reasons (largely because they were all pretty different experiments).
Presumably we can only call something the reproduction of an experiment if the procedure is at least vaguely similar, particularly when the results are only superficially similar.
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I think that depends on what you want to show. For the purposes of this discussion, the null hypothesis is "No speciation takes place", and any speciation at all will refute it, so any two speciation events are a repeatable experiment. If your null hypothesis was "Speciation cannot be done by means X", then you'd have to do it the same way twice.
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posted
No, any two speciation events are not a repeatable experiment. Experiments are not 'stuff that happens' and a repeat experiment is not merely 'the same stuff happening twice'.
An experiment is not defined by its null hypothesis, either. Were it so, we wouldn't need all those burdensome procedures when trying to replicate experiments that have remarkably simple null hypotheses. While there is no hard and fast line, an experiment bearing little relation to another besides the presence of fruit flies and the same general goal can hardly be said to be a repeat of the other experiment.
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posted
I feel there is a difference between repeating the experiment - we made fruit flies speciate under these particular conditions and with this method - and repeating the result - we made fruit flies speciate. I'm more interested in the latter.
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posted
Resh, see what's happening there? KoM and fugu disagree on what constitutes acceptable evidence, and rather than blustering about imaginary conspiracies and scientific elitism, they're actually having a civil discussion on the validity of their respective viewpoints.
In fact, fugu is actually taking a position that would refuse to admit KoM's claim of evidence in favor of evolution, even though, as you know quite well, fugu accepts evolutionary theory. That is science properly done, in action. No ego, no ideological bias, just analysis of the data and an honest approach towards reconciliation between two interpretations of said data. That is, in fact, the exact type of exacting analysis that has lead to the widespread of evolutionary theory in the scientific community.
The simple fact of the matter is that, no matter what we throw at it (and believe me, scientists do experiments that could potentially falsify evolution all the time), evolution just works. All of the data sticks, and all of the criticisms miss the target. That is why evolution is as strong a theory as any in science, and that is why scientists so vociferously support it. Your continual insistence that there is some sort of concerted effort by EEEEVILutionists to suppress data is complete and utter delusion.
Incidentally, you still haven't answered our request for some of that conflicting data, despite virtually every participant in this thread having personally asked you for it. So: are you gonna put your money where your mouth is?
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posted
Let me put it another way, with an example from my own field: Suppose I wanted to measure the mass of the D0. This can only be done by measuring the momenta of its decay products, and it can decay in a lot of different ways; generally speaking, you're going to have to choose just one or two of the possible decay paths, because your detector will be best suited to those products, or there's a background that confuses your measurement in some but not all channels, or you just plain don't have the time and studentpower to check all the channels for systematics. So let's say I measure the D0 mass using the decay Kspipi, and you (maybe with a different detector) are using pipipi0. Our experimental approach is going to be fairly different, because you've got the pi0 in there which needs to be reconstructed from its two-photon decay, and that smears out your measurement, but on the other hand you've got more statistics because your decay is more common, so you can demand better quality of your tracks... and so on and so forth. Nevertheless, we are measuring the same thing, and if we get the same result, then I'll call that a repeated experiment.
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posted
That's not a repeated experiment. It's actually better than a repeated experiment in some ways -- it's two different but related experiments providing evidence of the same thing.
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Well, ok, but that's just what I'm saying with the speciation. I think we're just disagreeing on nomenclature.
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fugu said that they weren't the same experiment, and he is correct. In some ways what you are discribing would be better, because it provides TWO angles of observation of the same event/data set, but in no way would that be the same experiment, by definition.
And if it is not the same experiment, then it has not been repeated, by definition.
I worked on 13 medical studies for USAMRIID while I was in the Army, and what you are discribing would not have been accepted as a confirming study, although they would have been happy for the extra confirming data. If someone had submitted a similar idea as confirmation of a study's result, it would not have passed peer review, as it had not been repeated.
So while I understand where you are coming from, it is more than disagreeing on nomenclature.
posted
Yeah, I think it is a nomenclature thing (edit: mostly). I agree that speciation is repeated, I just don't think we've (edit: scientifically) repeated speciation (in the sense of having done the same thing twice; we've gotten similar results in dissimilar experiments).
Once "scientifically" gets tacked on there, there's a new burden before something can be called repeated.
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You can't get, necessarily, the same mutation each time, as it's based on mistakes in DNA, right?
What you'd really need is to create a specific, closed ecosystem, with several "challenges", and put in certain species of animals, the same species, say, in each of the different places. Give a number of them the same challenge, a different equal number a different challenge, etc, and observe over a good million years.
Then you'd see some interesting things, at least.
Heck, with rapidly reproducing species, you probably wouldn't need that long, and only thousands of years.
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posted
Even more than that......there are an tremendous amount of of sets spread out over the whole earth at any given time....so not only do you have to account for the unfathomable amount of time it takes, but the billions and trillons of sets at each time as well.
If you were trying to prove it on any real accurate scope, that is. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Tarrsk: Resh, see what's happening there? KoM and fugu disagree on what constitutes acceptable evidence, and rather than blustering about imaginary conspiracies and scientific elitism, they're actually having a civil discussion on the validity of their respective viewpoints.
In fact, fugu is actually taking a position that would refuse to admit KoM's claim of evidence in favor of evolution, even though, as you know quite well, fugu accepts evolutionary theory. That is science properly done, in action. No ego, no ideological bias, just analysis of the data and an honest approach towards reconciliation between two interpretations of said data. That is, in fact, the exact type of exacting analysis that has lead to the widespread of evolutionary theory in the scientific community.
The simple fact of the matter is that, no matter what we throw at it (and believe me, scientists do experiments that could potentially falsify evolution all the time), evolution just works. All of the data sticks, and all of the criticisms miss the target. That is why evolution is as strong a theory as any in science, and that is why scientists so vociferously support it. Your continual insistence that there is some sort of concerted effort by EEEEVILutionists to suppress data is complete and utter delusion.
Incidentally, you still haven't answered our request for some of that conflicting data, despite virtually every participant in this thread having personally asked you for it. So: are you gonna put your money where your mouth is?
Well, that civil discourse only happens when you have two people who fundamentally agree that evolution is a fact, and that particular matter is not up for debate.
But regardless of how much lip-service is paid to the open exchange of ideas within the scientific community, I think the fact that Behe and Dembski are pariahs in the scientific community has less to do with their methodology and more to do with their ability to dismantle the arguments of evolutionists in a way that is intelligible to people like me.
Speaking of, having a bunch of jargon thrown at you and then being told that you are too ignorant to understand is not a winning method for convincing people of something that is sooooooo obviously true, but still sooooooo hard to explain convincingly to a true skeptic. I may not have the years of indoctrination--- I mean, schooling--- that most scientists have, but my b.s. detector is just as good as the next guy's. Now maybe evolution isn't an empty template which has never proven a thing about existence, despite its proponents constantly insisting that it has. But obsfucation requires a lot of words, and my denial of evolution requires only one.
Entropy.
But oh, different levels of energy, in a closed system, and there's millions of years, so information hasn't really been increasing, et cetera, et cetera. Sorry. Anyone can see with his plain sight that things don't get built up, they break down. It is only through the efforts of our intelligence that we can ward of this most fundamental of natural influences. And this most definitely goes for information. DNA code does not just get longer and more detailed. It breaks down, it loses information. Show where the reverse has happened, a single time, and you might have something.
It is because I am willing to entertain the notion that we were not brought about by accident that this is so obviously apparent to me. If you refuse this possibility, then you have no choice but to cling to this mythology. So open your mind a little. Maybe we aren't an insignificant accident with no reason to exist.
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You think mathematics journals won't publish people because of their thoughts about biology? I've heard of several mathematicians who've been creationists, so I rather doubt that.
He has published a tiny percentage of the articles expected of someone that far out of grad school (far less than would be expected in one year of a moderately productive person), and none of them are on the field he claims he is making expert judgements of evolution using.
Allow me to cite some examples of local entropy decreasing that we see all the time: plants, humans, salt crystals.
Or are you saying that plants have more entropy than dirt, humans have more entropy than plants (and the other things we're made of), and salt crystals have more entropy than salt water?
Your argument is so much nonsense it isn't even funny. Even several creationist sites tell advocates to stop using the entropy argument, its so obviously bad.
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quote:I think the fact that Behe and Dembski are pariahs in the scientific community has less to do with their methodology and more to do with their ability to dismantle the arguments of evolutionists in a way that is intelligible to people like me.
Have you considered the possibility that said dismantlement is tailor-made to sound plausible to those who lack the scientific background to recognize the technical and logical flaws?
I'm familiar with most of Behe's and Dembski's "work" (there's rather very little of it) and I'd be happy to point out why their ideas don't fly. Why don't you pick your favorite evolution dismantling argument and we'll discuss it. We can do Behe's blood clotting cascade irreducible complexity or Dembski's No Free Lunch or whatever you'd like to talk about.
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What creation sites say that? I don't believe you.
The argument is that things that are designed are able to ward off entropy. Salt crystals; that is at about the level that entropy has an appearance of reduction as a result of an imbalance of energy levels within a system. Trying to extrapolate this principle to the entire biosphere as a result of the difference in energy between the sun and the earth, or however the argument goes, now that is nonsense.
Besides, you still aren't taking into account the concept of information. Is information not subject to the concept of entropy , either? Regardless of the material processes that DNA takes part in, that has no bearing on the incredible expansion of the information contained therein. Evolution has not, and I daresay will not explain the massive amounts of data our DNA has encoded within.
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posted
Resh, you should get that BS detector checked, because both Behe and Dembski are obscurantists, who needlessly complicate arguments to obscure facts.
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Irreducible complexity. How about it? How do the separate parts develop separately, and then come together, Matt? And I don't want conceivable postulations. How did it happen, with the bacterial flagellum, the blood clotting cascade, the mammalian eye, or any other system of your choosing? And not only must you explain this in a mechanical sense, but in a genetic sense. How did the DNA code restructure itself in such a precise way that all the coding for these separate parts with completely different functions changed so that we now have a new, perfectly working system that 1) replaces a system that presumably was working just fine earlier or 2) performs a completely novel new function?
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quote:Originally posted by Morbo: Resh, you should get that BS detector checked, because both Behe and Dembski are obscurantists, who needlessly complicate arguments to obscure facts.
Sorry, its going off right now. Because I have read their stuff, and its all pretty clear to me. Their arguments are much more straightforward than anything I have read by Dawkins or my High School textbooks. You might want to get that b.s stealth function upgraded.
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quote:Originally posted by Reshpeckobiggle: Irreducible complexity. How about it? How do the separate parts develop separately, and then come together, Matt? And I don't want conceivable postulations. How did it happen, with the bacterial flagellum, the blood clotting cascade, the mammalian eye, or any other system of your choosing? And not only must you explain this in a mechanical sense, but in a genetic sense. How did the DNA code restructure itself in such a precise way that all the coding for these separate parts with completely different functions changed so that we now have a new, perfectly working system that 1) replaces a system that presumably was working just fine earlier or 2) performs a completely novel new function?
posted
Resh, please provide the definition of information that you are working with. Most anti-evolution arguments which deal with information fail to actually provide a definition and therefore are rather meaningless since they are obviously wrong if conventional definitions of information are used.
quote:And I don't what conceivable postulations.
Why not? When "I can't conceive of how this could have happened." is the extent of your argument, it's easily countered by "But I can."
You can't have it both ways - requiring step-by-step, mutation-by-mutation reconstruction of a complex process which is postulated to take hundreds of thousands of years while at the same time stating that it's not important how something came to be designed or what mechanisms and methods were used in the design process.
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Evolution doesn't have a "purpose" in mind, it isn't purposeful, although you can often find purpose in it, as a plant or animal species changes to fit a niche in nature. To speak of something replacing something else "that was working just fine" presumes that the thing was "replaced" because there was an intention towards "doing it better" -- which is, of course, not the case. Even if something was working "just fine" -- and obviously it was working fine, or it wouldn't be working at all! -- that doesn't mean it couldn't change. If the random change was for the better, then gradual selection took place towards that "better" change. If not, then not. And to say that something performs a "novel, new function" presumes so many things I don't even know where to begin!
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posted
Yikes. 117 minutes. No I didn't watch it, but I participated in the thread because I didn't argue with the video, I'm arguing with the posts in the thread. And also, I'm generally not making my own arguments, I'm only explaining why I personally find the arguments of others more or less convincing. I will try to watch the video when I have time, though.
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posted
So I take it you're not willing to invest the time to watch the video? (BTW, the last 20-30 minutes is Q&A. The actual meat of Dr. Miller's talk is about 90 minutes. He's also quite amusing.) Even to listen to it while doing other things online?
Then don't be surprised when people are unwilling to invest the time to respond to your posts.
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quote:Originally posted by Reshpeckobiggle: Yikes. 117 minutes. No I didn't watch it, but I participated in the thread because I didn't argue with the video, I'm arguing with the posts in the thread. And also, I'm generally not making my own arguments, I'm only explaining why I personally find the arguments of others more or less convincing. I will try to watch the video when I have time, though.
Just watch it. Or do what I did the first time; I listened to it while doing data entry at work.
If nothing else, Miller is a great lecturer.
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posted
I said in the last sentence that I will when I have time. Is that what you mean by not investing the time to read my posts?
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quote:Originally posted by rivka: Nice try. Editing in a comment and then claiming I missed it hardly shows good faith.
I didn't do that.
[edit] Or maybe I did. If I did, it was right after. I'm doing about ten different things right now and am easily distracted.
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quote:But obsfucation requires a lot of words, and my denial of evolution requires only one.
Entropy.
Yes it is a good thing that the earth is not an essentially closed system with energy being locally increased by anything resembling a giant ball of fire.
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quote:How did it happen, with the bacterial flagellum, the blood clotting cascade, the mammalian eye....
Ironically, we have pretty good mechanisms for all three of those processes. I'll tell you what I tell all the non-scientists who try to defend Behe: if you're going to criticize gaps in evolution based on irreducible mechanisms, stick to asking about winged flight. Because we're pretty certain how the eye, blood-clotting, and flagella evolved, actually.
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posted
Starting with information, information in the sense you are using it has nothing to do with entropy in the sense of the laws of entropy (particularly, that which always increases over time).
Information theoretic entropy is a separate concept that is metaphorically related (though there are philosophical arguments for a deeper connection).
If you are talking about the entropy which is talked about in the second law of thermodynamics, you are talking nonsense.
As for 'warding off entropy', nothing does that. That's why they are called laws. We would rather notice if anything didn't follow them (there are exceptions to their absolute formulation, but nothing we would notice macroscopically). In every one of the examples I cited, local entropy decreases at the cost of entropy elsewhere. That happens constantly, all over the place, including on the scale of entire galaxies. That constantly observed behavior is all that is required for evolution to be possible by the laws of thermodynamics (and only the scale of the earth, even).
As for creationist sites warning people off entropy, you may be right, I was thinking in particular of one letter that had been posted on the front page of AiG. It might be that the recent interest in Dembski has led people to start hauling out the old canard.
I offer as something else to look at, a statement from an evangelical christian about how the use of thermodynamics by his creationist friends is often incorrect:
It is particularly handy in listing things creationists have said about the definition of entropy that the people who formulated it didn't (thus making the laws inapplicable to the imagined form of 'entropy').
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posted
"How did the DNA code restructure itself in such a precise way that all the coding for these separate parts with completely different functions changed so that we now have a new, perfectly working system that 1) replaces a system that presumably was working just fine earlier or 2) performs a completely novel new function? "
Easily, actually.
DNA coding is imperfect. Sometimes, the process of replicating DNA makes mistakes, and there are a variety of different mistakes it can make.
Since the cell follows the functions within the DNA, it will create the proteins and other things based on its reading of the DNA.
When the DNA code changes, it will act differently, create different proteins and so forth.
Most of the time, those changes are harmful. Most of the time, they can even kill you.
At the basic level, everything the body does is a simple (or not so simple) chemical reaction. The eye sees because photons from light of a specific wavelength hit the specific molecules produced by the cones of the eyes, which then change shape, triggering a signal which is sent to the brain. When a bunch of molecules from one kind of cone, for there are multiple kinds, are hit and change, the brain interprets that the light is of, say, the color green, or some variation. Or blue, or whatever.
The DNA instructs the cones on which particular molecule to create. Different molecules are affected by different wavelengths of light, if I remember correctyl. A change in the DNA would cause the cells to create a different molecule, a different kind.
If, say, when you have a kid, a mistake occurs on the gene that controls the kind of molecule created by a certain number of the cones of the eye, the eye may make molecules that don't work. Or, by chance, it might make, in that new subset of cones, a molecule that detects a different wavelength of light, that is straightened by a slightly different set of wavelengths.
That child's vision will change. They may see more kinds of colors, be better able to differentiate between colors... or, if the change makes the molecule useless, or the same as another kind (more likely) the kid's color vision is inferior to one whose DNA didn't mess up.
That's one, single thing. At that basic level, everything is simple. Everything is based on molecules, and the chemical reactions between them.
It's just that there are many, many, many, many, many kinds of chemical reactions, all doing idfferent things.
It takes a looooooooooong time for such diferentiation to occur. But it does. Everything's simple, at a molecular level. But the cumulative effect is massive, and awe-inspiring. It takes many, many, many changes to bring enough cumulative changes to go from a single celled organism to a human being.
But it can happen, if you look at things at a simple, chemical level, one change, one kind of molecule, and the effect of that kind of molecule, at a time.
(Am I wrong anywhere, guys who are more knowledgable than me?)
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