quote:Originally posted by Raventhief: malanthrop, you're comparing two completely incompatible things. Linear systems, like gravitation and astronomy, have been studied and developed for about 3000 years. Nonlinear systems (like meteorology) were considered completely unpredictable until about 100 years ago.
You're giving pre-Keplerian astronomy a bit too much credit, here. They did not study gravitation in the sense of having a mathematical model - linear or otherwise - that they could manipulate. It was basically stamp collecting.
Besides that, gravity isn't linear anyway, it's inverse-quadratic, and we do not know of analytic solutions for problems with more than two bodies, except a few special cases. Planetary movements are just as chaotic as weather, it's just that the timescale on which predictions are useless is much longer.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Planetary movements are just as chaotic as weather, it's just that the timescale on which predictions are useless is much longer.
Maybe they are similarly chaotic when you ignore timescales like that, but tracking planetary movement is done with (relatively) small objects in a big space over large timeframes, while weather is a gas made up of trillions of small objects 'stuck' to a large spinning object over short timeframes. Astrolabs and other fairly simple computers (as in, machines that compute) can accurately predict planetary motion for human lifetimes. There is nothing comparable for weather calculations.
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Fugu, I'm apparently just missing something about the nature of irrational numbers. My math topped off at number theory and linear algebra. And it's been a few years.
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quote:Originally posted by Raventhief: malanthrop, you're comparing two completely incompatible things. Linear systems, like gravitation and astronomy, have been studied and developed for about 3000 years. Nonlinear systems (like meteorology) were considered completely unpredictable until about 100 years ago.
You're giving pre-Keplerian astronomy a bit too much credit, here. They did not study gravitation in the sense of having a mathematical model - linear or otherwise - that they could manipulate. It was basically stamp collecting.
Besides that, gravity isn't linear anyway, it's inverse-quadratic, and we do not know of analytic solutions for problems with more than two bodies, except a few special cases. Planetary movements are just as chaotic as weather, it's just that the timescale on which predictions are useless is much longer.
Not mathematically linear, a linear system. Input a yields output b. Input almost a yields output almost b. Weather is not such a system. And I'm giving no credit to preKeplerian astronomy. I'm just saying that linear systems have been well understood for a long time.
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quote:Originally posted by Raventhief: Not mathematically linear, a linear system. Input a yields output b. Input almost a yields output almost b. Weather is not such a system. And I'm giving no credit to preKeplerian astronomy. I'm just saying that linear systems have been well understood for a long time.
You're forgetting (among other things) F(alpha a)=alpha F(a). KoM's point was that gravitation ~1/r^2 i.e. (as a function of r) F(alpha a)=(1/alpha ^2) F(a).
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quote:Are you suggesting people couldn't predict planetary movements prior to the acceptance of a sun centered universe?
No. I'm suggesting that they did so to the limit of accuracy of the naked eye, and that when telescopes came along, their system broke down in the face of more accurate measurements. You are just plain mistaken as to facts when you argue that heliocentrism, which incidentally was a theory of Copernicus and not Galileo, was initially less accurate, in this sentence:
quote:Galileo's theory of a sun centered universe couldn't match the theoretical models and mathematical predictions of movement of the earlier scientific models of an Earth-Centric universe.
Needless to say, Mal is wrong about virtually everything. However, in spirit he might deserve more credit than you are giving him. In particular, my recollection (and a few minutes of searching) suggests that Copernicus predates telescopes and I'm not sure that the tables he was responsible for are actually better than the tables that were replaced. Certainly Brahe and Kepler's tables were vastly better than Ptolemy's.
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Raventhief: I think the closest concept to what you're looking for (when you say linear) is continuously differentiable.
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quote:Not mathematically linear, a linear system. Input a yields output b. Input almost a yields output almost b. Weather is not such a system. And I'm giving no credit to preKeplerian astronomy. I'm just saying that linear systems have been well understood for a long time.
Well, you're mistaken then, because the movements of planets are not linear in this sense. Move the initial conditions a wee bit and, in a hundred thousand years, you have no idea where Venus ends up.
quote:Maybe they are similarly chaotic when you ignore timescales like that, but tracking planetary movement is done with (relatively) small objects in a big space over large timeframes, while weather is a gas made up of trillions of small objects 'stuck' to a large spinning object over short timeframes. Astrolabs and other fairly simple computers (as in, machines that compute) can accurately predict planetary motion for human lifetimes. There is nothing comparable for weather calculations.
Nu, I don't want to claim that human lifetimes are irrelevant; but the point is that both are chaotic systems, and all chaotic systems have a "horizon of predictability"; there exists some time t beyond which no amount of computer power will make accurate predictions. As you add more computers you can get arbitrarily close to t, but you cannot go beyond it. The number of elements just means the horizon is closer for weather than it is for planets.
quote:In particular, my recollection (and a few minutes of searching) suggests that Copernicus predates telescopes and I'm not sure that the tables he was responsible for are actually better than the tables that were replaced. Certainly Brahe and Kepler's tables were vastly better than Ptolemy's.
Yeah, fair enough, I overstated that slightly. Copernicus, however, could produce an equally-good prediction of, say, the position of Mars in much less time than could be done with epicycles, because the math was so much simpler; then, as observations improved, it turned out that the Copernican method was more accurate as well as faster. When your observations are, let's say, 10+-5 it doesn't matter whether your theory gives 10 or 11, it's good enough; speed of calculation does matter, though. But when your observations get so much better that you're seeing 10.8+-0.2, then the difference between 10 and 11 is important.
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quote:Originally posted by Raventhief: Not mathematically linear, a linear system. Input a yields output b. Input almost a yields output almost b. Weather is not such a system. And I'm giving no credit to preKeplerian astronomy. I'm just saying that linear systems have been well understood for a long time.
You're forgetting (among other things) F(alpha a)=alpha F(a). KoM's point was that gravitation ~1/r^2 i.e. (as a function of r) F(alpha a)=(1/alpha ^2) F(a).
No no, that's a mathematically linear system. I'm using linear system in a non mathematical sense (possibly wrongly, but I've definitely heard it used this way before). Weather is a chaotic system in which minor changes of inputs such as temperature, pressure, etc, can (but don't always) create major changes in outputs.
Edit: Fugu, continuous is probably close to what I'm thinking. I need to get back in the math game.
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Continuous is a little weaker than continuously differentiable, but yeah.
KoM's characterization of the overall systems is better, but in the short term (anything less than decades), the orbital systems are much easier to approximate than the weather.
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quote:Weather is a chaotic system in which minor changes of inputs such as temperature, pressure, etc, can (but don't always) create major changes in outputs.
Planetary movements are also such a system, it's just not obvious on a human timescale.
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quote:Weather is a chaotic system in which minor changes of inputs such as temperature, pressure, etc, can (but don't always) create major changes in outputs.
Planetary movements are also such a system, it's just not obvious on a human timescale.
But it is very obvious in the case of some of Uranus's moons. It's also the reason why we don't know if that asteroid that's supposed to come by in a couple of decades will hit us (Apopsis).
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I had the impression that last is because asteroids are so small that their orbits are quite difficult to measure accurately, rather than the perturbative effects of planetary gravities. I didn't know the Uranian moons were visibly chaotic; do you have a link, by any chance?
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The universe having consistent laws only points to an intelligent designer if you insist on assuming it was designed and are not comfortable with saying simply "It is."
Are you denying that there is apparent order in the universe? Are you claiming that order is more to be expected than chaos?
How highly ordered does anything have to be before you will automatically assume without any serious question that it was put there deliberately by someone with a mind? Like seven stones arranged as an arrow in the woods? How about billions of proteins in a DNA strand that produce an organism with definite characteristics, and that is able to reproduce itself? How about whirlpools of millions of stars that all seem to conform to the laws of gravitation, with consistent classifications of stars, where the blue stars are always hotter than the red stars, and with the spectrums we see in light from distant stars which show the same patterns as the spectrums we produce on earth which indicate specific elements?
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quote:Originally posted by The White Whale: I think it's better not to automatically assume anything.
There comes a point where common sense has to intervene. Otherwise how can we function in the real universe?
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: I had the impression that last is because asteroids are so small that their orbits are quite difficult to measure accurately, rather than the perturbative effects of planetary gravities. I didn't know the Uranian moons were visibly chaotic; do you have a link, by any chance?
From what little I know about dynamics, orbit determination is most imprecise when you haven't seen an object for many orbits or even a very large portion of one orbit in the case of KBOs. KBOs have some of the worst known orbits, and many of the ones discovered by surveys are considered "lost".
Really dim objects are a general pain, astrometrically speaking, but physical size as a constraint separate from flux received doesn't really matter, because very few objects are actually resolved in telescopes to begin with. Certainly not most stars, and the exceptions have involved HST! Honestly, you just need enough light, and a very stable telescope to get a decent centroid on the asteroid image with other nearby, non-saturated stars as a reference.
Chaotic simulations are very much used to determine how the other planets (mostly Jupiter) interact with asteroids. There are places where asteroids can't survive for very long before they are ejected out of the solar system or into the sun called the Kirkwood gaps.
The universe having consistent laws only points to an intelligent designer if you insist on assuming it was designed and are not comfortable with saying simply "It is."
Are you denying that there is apparent order in the universe? Are you claiming that order is more to be expected than chaos?
How highly ordered does anything have to be before you will automatically assume without any serious question that it was put there deliberately by someone with a mind? Like seven stones arranged as an arrow in the woods? How about billions of proteins in a DNA strand that produce an organism with definite characteristics, and that is able to reproduce itself? How about whirlpools of millions of stars that all seem to conform to the laws of gravitation, with consistent classifications of stars, where the blue stars are always hotter than the red stars, and with the spectrums we see in light from distant stars which show the same patterns as the spectrums we produce on earth which indicate specific elements?
If you can come close to comprehending an observable size of 93 billion light years and an age of 14 billion years, then yeah I have no problem with higher order creation evolving over such an immense stretch of time. But, I know, you belive the universe is what? 10,000 years old?
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quote:There comes a point where common sense has to intervene. Otherwise how can we function in the real universe?
It seems that atheists function just fine in the universe without making assumptions about its design. So, given that the assumption isn't needed to function, why make it?
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The universe having consistent laws only points to an intelligent designer if you insist on assuming it was designed and are not comfortable with saying simply "It is."
Are you denying that there is apparent order in the universe? Are you claiming that order is more to be expected than chaos?
How highly ordered does anything have to be before you will automatically assume without any serious question that it was put there deliberately by someone with a mind? Like seven stones arranged as an arrow in the woods? How about billions of proteins in a DNA strand that produce an organism with definite characteristics, and that is able to reproduce itself? How about whirlpools of millions of stars that all seem to conform to the laws of gravitation, with consistent classifications of stars, where the blue stars are always hotter than the red stars, and with the spectrums we see in light from distant stars which show the same patterns as the spectrums we produce on earth which indicate specific elements?
With regard to anything Astronomical, I would see the fact that stars agree with the theories astronomers have made, regardless of the direction you look, evidence of a lack of a higher power.
Also, astronomers use the color of a star to determine its temperature, which works up until about 30000 K. The fact that blue stars are hot and red stars are cold is because we see a blue star, and we say that it must hot because Wien's law states that temperature determines color, not because someone went out there with a thermometer.
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: How about billions of proteins in a DNA strand that produce an organism with definite characteristics, and that is able to reproduce itself?
Billions?
Can you show us an organism with billions of proteins?
Ensembl's latest assembly shows that humans have only 23,000 genes, with a total of 140,000 transcripts. According to you, this is a fraction of a percent of all the proteins in an organisms. Where are the rest?
If you mean "billions of bases", well, humans only have about 3 billion bases. The vast majority of life gets on with a fraction of a percent of that.
This is not the first time I have asked you for the sources for your figures, or corrected you when you were off by magnitudes in your facts about genetics.
Honest people don't do such things after they have been repeaedlty corrected.
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quote:The most important contribution of an ethic based on ignorance*, or, more precisely, on a frank admission of ignorance, is to provide grounds for hope and a spur to action, which are vanishingly hard to find in these cynical and pessimistic times. It might seem paradoxical to suggest that embracing the permanent inadequacy of our knowledge can provide hope, but I think it can. The acknowledgment that we can never be sure about what we know or what will happen next frees us from the cost-benefit calculation that dominates so many styles of moral decision-making.
*Ignorance dos not mean the rejection of all knowledge. Rather, it entails an acknowledgment of how much we do not know, coupled with an awareness that anything we claim to know, perhaps especially about human and non-human nature, we know only partially and tentatively, and this is always subject to revision.
And from my experience, my common sense has never allowed me to automatically assume anything. I assume a lot, but it's always up for revision or retraction. And I function quite wonderfully in this universe, thank you very much.
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quote:How about whirlpools of millions of stars that all seem to conform to the laws of gravitation, with consistent classifications of stars, where the blue stars are always hotter than the red stars, and with the spectrums we see in light from distant stars which show the same patterns as the spectrums we produce on earth which indicate specific elements?
I think you perhaps misunderstand how these things work.
We have written the "laws" of gravitation the way we have because they appear able to explain the phenomena we observe, including celestial whirlpools of millions of stars. (For the most part. Where we cannot yet figure out what consistent "law" explains everything we see, we have a mystery -- like, say, the whole Dark Matter thing.)
We know that light at certain wavelengths has certain colors, and is produced by certain plasmas at certain temperatures. For this reason, we assume that stars which appear red are cooler than stars which appear blue. This may not in fact be true; there may well be a blue star that is blue for some other reason, but we won't know -- or even suspect -- otherwise until more data about that exception is available.
The natural "laws" you believe have been written into the universe are, in practice, really just the lowest common denominators scientists are able to come up with that are capable of semi-reliably predicting physical outcomes.
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It's funny, because the fact that we continue to find stars that conform to the "laws" of gravitation is, once again, further support for the scientific approach that Ron so deplores.
If theory A predicts outcome X, and we observe outcome X, then we have empirical support for theory A. And yet in RonWorld, that apparently proves that the methodology used to produce theory A is wrong. Posts: 1321 | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:Originally posted by Raventhief: I used to be in love with the idea of Burden of Proof, until I realized that it applies only in legal and strict scientific settings.
This is a scientific question. Either there are deities that exist or there are not. If there are, it would be possible, in theory, to prove it.
quote:The burden of proof is on whomever wants to convince their opposite. Always. You say that religious people have made assertions with no proof, well and good. But if a theist (to use your term) doesn't care if you believe or not, then he is under no obligation to prove anything. Same with your talking plant man
"Theist" isn't my term. It's the word for someone who believes in a personal, intervening god.
And the theists who don't care if I believe don't have anything to prove to me. I have theist friends, and we just hang out and discuss video games and such, and don't worry about convincing each other.
But when the discussion of "does god exist" does come up, I'm sorry, but it is those who say he does that have the burden of proof. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and theists make the most extraordinary claim of them all without even the slightest bit of evidence. The only claim I make is that since they can't give me any evidence that makes sense, I have no reason to accept their claim. If they can claim it without evidence, I can dismiss it without evidence. It's that simple. They are the ones that have the extraordinary claim, not me. So they are the ones with all their work still ahead of them.
quote:(BTW, you gave me an idea for a short story, mind if I run with it?)
quote:Originally posted by Verily the Younger: This is a scientific question. Either there are deities that exist or there are not. If there are, it would be possible, in theory, to prove it.
It's a scientific question to you. And to me, for that matter. However, there are those who claim that the question transcends science. I may (and do) disagree with them, but if they are correct, then there's no way to prove or disprove the existence of a deity within a scientific framework.
quote: But when the discussion of "does god exist" does come up, I'm sorry, but it is those who say he does that have the burden of proof. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and theists make the most extraordinary claim of them all without even the slightest bit of evidence. The only claim I make is that since they can't give me any evidence that makes sense, I have no reason to accept their claim. If they can claim it without evidence, I can dismiss it without evidence. It's that simple. They are the ones that have the extraordinary claim, not me. So they are the ones with all their work still ahead of them.
Ah, I see. I was under the impression that your claim was that god doesn't exist. If your claim is merely that you don't have to believe, then I agree, you have no burden of proof. However, if your claim is that they are mistaken and there is no god, then the burden of proof is equal upon you both. Calling the existence of god an extraordinary claim (as much as I agree with you) doesn't change anything. One could equally claim that the human animal being a natural descendant of non-living, discrete, organic molecules is similarly extraordinary.
quote: Knock yourself out.
*thunk* OW! I'm not good at rendering myself unconscious. Help me out?
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quote:Originally posted by Raventhief: I used to be in love with the idea of Burden of Proof, until I realized that it applies only in legal and strict scientific settings.
This is a scientific question. Either there are deities that exist or there are not. If there are, it would be possible, in theory, to prove it.
In theory, yes. But it might depend upon suitable techniques being available. For example, if you had no microscopes, how would you go about settling the question of whether germs exist?
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quote:One could equally claim that the human animal being a natural descendant of non-living, discrete, organic molecules is similarly extraordinary.
Do you believe there is an equal amount of empirical evidence for these two hypotheses?
No no, I believe firmly in evolution, but I was talking strictly about the idea of burden of proof. You can frame evidence and restate theories in different ways so that it seems that one idea or the other is "extraordinary." Except for legal issues, burden of proof is either equal to both sides of an argument, or solely on the shoulders of the one who wants to convince the other.
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I really find it a little difficult to buy the notion that an intelligent species that has the ability to fly between the stars, stop all disease and aging, etc. would bother putting much energy into religion. (and yes, I do think we or our descendants will be doing those things eventually, given some luck re: terrorists, pandemics, and natural disasters like meteors/volcanoes) I'm not saying such a species wouldn't believe in God (although I'd guess they wouldn't if I had to guess at all). I'm saying they wouldn't spend much time/energy on worshipping, going to church, etc., maybe.
I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's religious practices here, merely pointing out what's obvious, or at least obvious to me. Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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The universe having consistent laws only points to an intelligent designer if you insist on assuming it was designed and are not comfortable with saying simply "It is."
Are you denying that there is apparent order in the universe? Are you claiming that order is more to be expected than chaos?
How highly ordered does anything have to be before you will automatically assume without any serious question that it was put there deliberately by someone with a mind? Like seven stones arranged as an arrow in the woods? How about billions of proteins in a DNA strand that produce an organism with definite characteristics, and that is able to reproduce itself? How about whirlpools of millions of stars that all seem to conform to the laws of gravitation, with consistent classifications of stars, where the blue stars are always hotter than the red stars, and with the spectrums we see in light from distant stars which show the same patterns as the spectrums we produce on earth which indicate specific elements?
Ron, if I came across an arrow point in the woods, I may guess it had been put there by someone with a mind but I wouldn't assume it had. The two are different. I've encountered many natural phenomena that suggest they were made by human hands, but were decidedly not. Beautiful statues that appear to be figures carved by nothing more than wind and rain. Organizations of sticks and leaves that suggest they had been put there intentionally, but merely fell that way or were blown that way. Sometimes while I watched. The human mind loves to find patterns. It's part of what makes us so successful. And we will find patterns where ever we may.
It is entirely possible for order to simply be and not have an intelligent creator.
Only the physical laws that the universe operates by and the matter that makes it up were there at the beginning. Everything else evolved from those two things over billions of years following nothing more than those laws. And we don't really know enough about the beginning to say much about it either way with regard to an intelligent creator. It is entirely possible that that matter and those laws simply are. They are just the way things work. And it's no more complicated than that. It is also possible that there was some sort of intelligent design that went into their creation. But given the complexity that has evolved given nothing more than billions of years to play and that set of rules, I consider it entirely possible that there was some other set of rules that governed the creation of the universe. And perhaps some other set that governed those. It is entirely possible that all these rules simply are.
And by the way. Those rules aren't ordered. Not on the most basic level. On the most basic level, the quantum level, they appear to be chaotic. Ordered chaos, but chaos none the less. The universe does not appear to be deterministic. And if it was, there would be no free will.
quote:Originally posted by Raventhief: Ah, I see. I was under the impression that your claim was that god doesn't exist.
I think I was more than adequately careful not to make such a claim. I defer to the judgment of the other posters; if anyone can find any statement I've made that said that it is my assertion that god definitively does not exist, then it means I have not expressed myself clearly enough and will be happy to re-state.
quote:One could equally claim that the human animal being a natural descendant of non-living, discrete, organic molecules is similarly extraordinary.
For which there is extraordinary evidence. A great deal of work has already been done by our team toward demonstrating that our claims are accurate. It is the people who claim that our claims are false that still have all their work still ahead of them.
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quote:Originally posted by Verily the Younger: The certainty with which I claim there isn't a god cannot be absolute, but it is high enough that there's no point in pretending that I assign much of a probability to his/her/its/their existence.
This line was the source of my confusion. I just misunderstood. Your most recent post seems to indicate that both sides have the burden of proof, but the atheist side has found its proof while the theists have not. Does that accurately sum up your thoughts?
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quote:Originally posted by Verily the Younger: This is a scientific question. Either there are deities that exist or there are not. If there are, it would be possible, in theory, to prove it.
Why? I don't agree with this assumption.
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quote:This line was the source of my confusion. I just misunderstood. Your most recent post seems to indicate that both sides have the burden of proof, but the atheist side has found its proof while the theists have not. Does that accurately sum up your thoughts?
Atheist does not equal "evolutionist." An evolutionist has to deal with burden of proof (but fortunately there's plenty of evidence). Prior to existence of evolutionary theory, a reasonable atheist position would have been "I have no idea how the world got to be the way it is, and neither do creationists." If said "Strong" atheist wanted to go around proving to theists that their God couldn't exist then I think it falls on the atheist to find evidence that is logically incompatible with the theist in question's definition of God.
But a position of "there is no evidence for this, so I won't believe in it" doesn't require any burden of proof. Lack of understanding of a phenomena does not obligate us to make up solutions.
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(2) There you go again, accusing me of being dishonest without any valid cause.
(3) Each DNA step is formed of adenine, cytosine, thyamine, and guanine. (And uracil in RNA.) Those are what I was counting. Sorry if you feel it is somehow "dishonest" and "dishonorable" for me to call them proteins.
(4) Your complaint about me being off by orders of magnitude is untrue by your own calculation, and saying this has been true in the past is only your opinion--I have disputed logically and with cited evidence the common assumptions behind the "magnitudes" commonly assumed for the age of the universe. You cannot correct me on this, because I am not wrong. You only wish to claim that I am. Thus your argument is not a logical argument at all, it is only propaganda--based on personal attack.
[ January 08, 2010, 12:50 PM: Message edited by: Ron Lambert ]
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Alcon, thank you for attempting to put together logical arguments, instead of resorting to the personal attacks so many here seem to depend upon as their only way to express themselves.
If you find seven stones in the woods arranged in a perfect arrow, there may be one chance in a million that it "just happened." But if you are trying to follow the trail of someone who told you he would mark it for you, is it reasonable for you to dismiss it as something that "just is"? Is it sensible to use such reasoning to deny the obviously heavy weight of evidence that the universe was designed, and that such high level of design does demand an Intelligent Designer?
God has not removed every possible hook upon which you may choose to hang your doubts, if that is what you want to do. That is how much He respects your free will. But it is sensible, as most people would surely agree, to go with what the vast preponderance of the evidence indicates.
Evolutionists know that the idea of actually increasing the order of genetic code through the random operation of natural processes is highly improbable--that is why in order to make their theory seem credible to anyone, they need to invoke like a magic incantation the prospect of billions of years for it all to take place. They seem to suppose that if our brains are suffiently numbed by appeals to an incomprehensible billions of years, we will be willing to agree that anything is possible. The problem is that actual attempts to computer model the likelihood of evolution have always failed, even when all the parameters are increased by orders of magnitude over what evolutionists try to invoke. Evolutionists tend to avoid mathematicians, because the latter blow their cover.
Yes, maybe there is one chance in a quintillian that the universe just created itself, with no Intelligent Designer involved. That it "just is." But what kind of a gambler would bet on such odds? Let me clue you, the odds are in favor of "the House."
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: Atheist does not equal "evolutionist."
Nor does theist equal non-evolutionist.
This!
Ron, try thinking of your "arrow in the wood" scenario like this: Instead of finding an arrow, we find various piles of stones in various configurations and we, being who we are, assign meanings and names (like "arrow") to describe what we observe.
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quote:Evolutionists know that the idea of actually increasing the order of genetic code through the random operation of natural processes is highly improbable
Strangely, this has been observed in the wild over and over again. We have numerous colonies of bacteria that we've verified have had beneficial mutations.
So, if by "highly improbable" you mean "virtually certain to happen over and over again, as shown by observing it happen over and over again", I suppose your statement would be correct.
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: Each DNA step is formed of adenine, cytosine, thyamine, and guanine. (And uracil in RNA.) Those are what I was counting. Sorry if you feel it is somehow "dishonest" and "dishonorable" for me to call them proteins.
I don't know about that, but it's just plain WRONG.
The bases you just named definitely are components of DNA (not the only ones, but let's leave that aside for the moment), but what they're not is proteins.
Note the differences between the first two (composition and shape), and note the large size difference between a single amino acid (or DNA base) and the average protein, which is made up of several HUNDRED amino acids.
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quote:The universe does not appear to be deterministic. And if it was, there would be no free will.
Alcon, lets say I agree with you that if the universe was deterministic, there would be no free will. The universe not being deterministic does NOT then necessitate the existence of free will. A chaotic universe, particularly at the quantum level, tells us nothing about the existence, or lack there of, of free will. Or, more accurately, I don't think any definitive statements can be made about free will solely due to quantum indeterminacy.
And anyway, is that the kind of free will you'd want? What about the unpredictability of quantum measurements makes you free?
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: If you find seven stones in the woods arranged in a perfect arrow, there may be one chance in a million that it "just happened."
Yes, but Ron, walk by enough stones over enough time and the odds of seeing that perfect arrow aren't so staggeringly small. Added to what kmbboots just said about how it's only significant to us because of the meaning we assign to it, and I don't really see a need for assigning any mystical significance to finding a group of stones in the woods that I perceive as an arrow.
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kmboots, the problem is that in the scenario you describe, it would be unreasonable for an arrow to be used to indicate the path.
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What is "the path" supposed to be in your analogy? I was taking the arrow to be natural phenomena that we observe (DNA< stars and so forth) but I don't know what such phenomena "leads to".
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rivka, OK, I stand corrected. The bases I named should not properly be called proteins. How about "structured molecules"?
fugu13, what constitutes a "beneficial mutation" is a relative and therefore slippery term. If a cosmic ray smashes an atom in a molecule and causes a mutation in the normal operating mechanism of the bacteria, and that happens to make the bacteria no longer susceptible to the way a certain common antibiotic acts, is that really evolution? Or just a kind of damage to the bacteria that accidently seems to benefit it in one kind of environment? Remove the antibiotic, and how long would the mutation persist, without eventually compromising the ability of the bacteria to prevail over its undamaged competition?
Computer models have been done of bacteria, and the changes needed to change one kind of bacteria into another are prohibitively great, mathematically.
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quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: rivka, OK, I stand corrected. The bases I named should not properly be called proteins. How about "structured molecules"?
Each DNA strand is actually a single (very large) molecule. While the bases, when found individually, are molecules, once they join together they really don't have distinct separate-molecule status.
And all molecules are "structured". So I have no idea what that's supposed to mean.
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Since this thread is evolving into an evolution thread (haha), I will link this interesting article (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/an-evolve-by-date/) on evolution. Were I to give a one-line synopsis I would say it is concerned with the limits of evolution as a survival mechanism; however I won't as it is a short read. The following paragraph is interesting with regard to the time-scale (measured in generations) it can take for an advantageous trait to evolve:
quote: Moreover and this also has a bearing on the matter where no previous capacity exists, evolving a brand new trait can be a slow and haphazard affair. Suppose you put bacteria into test tubes where their usual sugar source is in short supply, but an alternative one which they cant consume at all is abundant. (If you put them with just this alternative source, they would all die of starvation at once.) Then, you can watch how long it takes for the bacteria to evolve so they can digest the alternative. The answer, in one famous case, was more than 31,000 generations! Which just goes to show: just because a particular trait would be useful does not mean that it will soon evolve.
quote:Originally posted by Ron Lambert: ... Evolutionists tend to avoid mathematicians, because the latter blow their cover.
Ummmmm, no. Mathematical models of evolution and algorithms analyzing genomic and proteomic data have produced the most convincing proof of evolution yet. There's a whole field of bioinformatics which is closely linked with mathematics.
For example at the University of Waterloo, the Bioinformatics Research Group is based out of the School of Computer Science which is IN the Faculty of Mathematics.
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