Moderation at TSZ, part 2

The first post in this series can be found here:

Moderation at TSZ, part 1

In part 2, I had planned to discuss why I think the rules aren’t having the desired effects. I still plan to do that. However, in gathering my thoughts, it occurred to me that no one (to my knowledge) has ever made explicit the rationale behind the Guanoing of comments. I think the topic is worthy of an OP of its own.

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Accidents that Breed.

This is all Darwinian evolution really says in the end.

In the topic of morality, Allan, Neil, Lizzie and others use the same old con of claiming that morality is not accidents, its….and then they just trail off into a non-answer.  I find this a very frustrating and telling habit of the materialist.

There is no “other” thing there.  Unless you want to include an intelligence, or a destiny into the theory (which destroys the theory of materialism) you aren’t left with another aspect to why things are.  You have accidents, that somehow formed a durable combination.  Its such a dishonest aspect of materialism that when its not convenient they don’t want to admit this part.  But in not admitting it, they struggle with saying anything to counter it.  They can use words like emergence, or nature did it, but that’s meaningless.  The materialist theory is that it is simply accidents that breed well.

Every time a materialist tries to claim there is more to it than that, when they need to have a stronger arguing basis, don’t be fooled by the dodge.  That is all they have.  Accidents.  Sorry, to force them to accept their own reality.

Rule edits

I made some minor edits to the rule page. The “Address the post not the poster” rule now reads:

Address the content of the post, not the perceived failings of the poster. [purple text added 28th November 2015]

  • This means that accusing others of ignorance or stupidity is off topic
  • As is implying that other posters are mentally ill or demented.

And for guidance I also added text from an excellent post by Reciprocating Bill:

Participation at this site entails obligations similar to those that attend playing a game. While there is no objective moral obligation to answer questions, the site has aims, rules and informal stakeholders, just as football has same. When violations of those aims and rules are perceived and/or the enforcement of same is seen as arbitrary or inconsistent, differences and conflicts arise. No resort to objective morality, yet perfectly comprehensible and appropriate opprobrium.

 

How to calculate amino acid sequence space

[latexpage]I see long-time commenter at Uncommon Descent, Mung, in a thread entitled Backwards eye wiring? Lee Spetner comments, asks:

How do you calculate the size of amino acid sequence space?

As this seems somewhat off-topic there, I thought I’d attempt to answer Mung’s question. I’ll try and be brief. Continue reading

Doubt comes for the Archbishop

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, raised eyebrows several days ago by admitting that the Paris attacks had caused him to doubt God’s presence:

Interviewer:

Do you ever doubt?

Welby:

Oh, gosh, yes. Yes!

Interviewer:

Does something like this happening ever put a chink in your armour?

Welby:

Saturday morning I was out, and as I was walking I was praying and saying “God, why is this happening? Where are you in all this?” and then engaging and talking to God. Yes, I doubt.

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Unyielding Despair

Gregory has made the connection more than once between atheism and despair. But he wasn’t the first.

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

– Bertrand Russell. A Free Man’s Worship

I’m thankful that my foundation is not one of unyielding despair.

The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with with a problem of pure metaphysics; he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves.

– Aldous Huxley. Ends and Means

I am also thankful that I do not believe that there is no valid reason why I personally should not do as I want to do, and that my friends have no desire to seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all

And for those who don’t celebrate this particular holiday, happy November 26th, happy-almost December, happy almost-solstice, and/or happy whatever makes you happy — which I trust is something humane both for theists and non-theists among us).

 

Catch ya on the flip side.

Answer to Barry Part 1 (and, inadvertently, 2)

Barry seems to have noticed TSZ again, and so I will take this opportunity of inviting him over here, where he can post freely, and will not be banned unless he posts porn or malware or outs someone, which I expect he can manage not to do.

And he responds to my post, Lawyers and Scientists.  He does so in two parts, so I will devote two posts to them.  Here is my response to his first part.  Barry writes:

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Is Barry Arrington The Least Competent ID Advocate Ever?

Barry Sez:

Having studied Darwinism for over 20 years, I can tell you what it posits. Therefore, when I attack it, I am attacking the actual thing, not some distortion of the thing that exists nowhere but my own mind.

Source

And

Good grief Zach do you have no shame? Do you seriously believe you can get away with saying that Darwin believed stasis is more typical than change and not his own words when he wrote infinitely many fine gradations between past and present species [are] required on the theory.

Source

Darwin sez:

It is a more important consideration, clearly leading to the same result, as lately insisted on by Dr. Falconer, namely, that the periods during which species have been undergoing modification, though very long as measured by years, have probably been short in comparison with the periods during which these same species remained without undergoing any change. We may infer that this has been the case, from there being no inherent tendency in organic beings to become modified or to progress in structure, and from all modifications depending, firstly on long-continued variability, and secondly on changes in the physical conditions of life, or on changes in the habits and structure of competing species, or on the immigration of new forms; and such contingencies will supervene in most cases only after long intervals of time and at a slow rate. These changes, moreover, in the organic and inorganic conditions of life will affect only a limited number of the inhabitants of any one area or country.

Darwin, Origin of Species, 1866. p. 359
Source

20 years of study, and nothing learned. Pathetic.

Barry finally gets it?

Barry Arrington was astonished to find that Larry Moran agreed with him that it would be possible for some future biologist to detect design in a Venter-designed genome.

He was further astonished to find that REC, a commenter at UD, agreed with Larry Moran.

Barry expresses his epiphany in a UD post REC Becomes a Design Proponent.

Has Barry finally realised that those of us who oppose the ideas of Intelligent Design proponents do not dispute that it is possible, in principle, to make a reasonable inference of design?  That rather our opposition is based on the evidence and argument advanced, not on some principled (or unprincipled!) objection to the entire project?

Sadly, it seems not.  Because Barry then gives some examples of his continued lack of appreciation of this point.  Here they are:

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More statistical confusion…

At UD I noticed, while I was checking the Moran-Arrington score, I couldn’t help noticing a news item entitled, provocatively (for me) Psychology does not speak the language of statistics very well.

So being a psychologist who teaches statistical methods to psychology students, I had to click, and found that it was a report of a blog piece here called Statistics Shows Psychology Is Not Science

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Lawyers and Scientists

There’s been a skirmish between Larry Moran and Barry Arrington about whether Barry understands the Theory of Evolution, and the latest salvo is a piece at UD, entitled, Can a Lowly Lawyer Make a Useful Contribution? Maybe.

Well, in a sense, Barry makes a useful contribution in that post, as he gives a very nice illustration of a common misunderstanding about the process of hypothesis testing, in this case, basic model-fitting and null hypothesis testing, the workhorse (with all its faults) of scientific research.  Barry writes:

[Philip]Johnson is saying that attorneys are trained to detect baloney.  And that training is very helpful in the evolution debate, because that debate is chock-full of faulty logic (especially circular reasoning), abuse of language (especially equivocations), assumptions masquerading as facts, unexamined premises, etc. etc.

Consider, to take one example of many, cladistics.  It does not take a genius to know that cladistic techniques do not establish common descent; rather they assume it.  But I bet if one asked, 9 out of 10 materialist evolutionists, even the trained scientists among them, would tell you that cladistics is powerful evidence for common descent.  As Johnson argues, a lawyer’s training may help him understand when faulty arguments are being made, sometimes even better than those with a far superior grasp of the technical aspects of the field.  This is not to say that common descent is necessarily false; only cladistics does not establish the matter one way or the other.

In summary, I am trained to evaluate arguments by stripping them down to examine the meaning of the terms used, exposing the underlying assumptions, and following the logic (or, as is often the case, exposing the lack of logic).  And I think I do a pretty fair job of that, both in my legal practice and here at UD.

Barry has made two common errors here.  First he has confused the assumption of common descent with the conclusion of common descent, and thus detected circular reasoning where there is none.  Secondly he has confused the process of fitting a model with the broader concept of a hypothesised model.

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The Law of Conservation of Information is defunct

[latexpage]

About a year ago, Joe Felsenstein critiqued a seminar presentation by William Dembski, “Conservation of Information in Evolutionary Search.” He subsequently discussed Dembski’s primary source with me, and devised a brilliant response, unlike any that I had considered. This led to an article, due mostly to Felsenstein, though I contributed, at The Panda’s Thumb. Nine days after it appeared, Dembski was asked in a radio interview whether anyone was paying attention to his technical work. Surely a recipient of

qualifies as a someone. But Dembski changed the topic. And when the question came around again, he again changed the topic. Mind you, this isn’t how I know that Felsenstein blasted conservation of “information,” which is not information, in evolutionary “search,” which does not search. It’s how I know that Dembski knows.

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The Enigma of Lamarckism

Lamarckism (or Lamarckian inheritance) is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring (also known as heritability of acquired characteristics or soft inheritance).

– Wikipedia

Many of us have probably been taught that Lamarkian inheritance is anathema. Heresy. But why would that be the case? Is it for theoretical reasons or simply because of a lack of empirical evidence?

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Jonathan McLatchie fails to define Specified Complexity

At Uncommon Descent, a News posting by Denyse O’Leary shows us a video by Jonathan McLatchie. News then expects “Darwin faithful” to “create a distraction below”.

McLatchie defines Specified Complexity as information that matches a predefined pattern, such as specific protein folds needed to have a particular function. His video is in a series entitled “One Minute Apologist” (he takes 2 minutes).

He never says anything to clarify whether natural selection can put this information into the genome. We’ve discussed these points many times before, but let me briefly mention the dilemma that he doesn’t resolve for us:

1, Complex Specified Information was defined by William Dembski in No Free Lunch in this way. The high level of improbability that he required was supposed to show that random mutation could not produce CSI. And a Law of Conservation of Complex Specified Information was supposed to show that natural selection could not achieve CSI. Unfortunately the LCCSI is not formulated so as to be able to do that, because it changes the specification in the before and after states.

2. So in 2005-2006 Dembski instead defined Specified Complexity. Now it is a measure of how improbably far out we are on the scale of specification, with the improbability defined this time as computed taking not only mutation into account, but also natural selection. Dembski does not say how to compute that probability. Now SC really does rule out natural selection — simply by being defined so as to do so. It thereby becomes a useless add-on quantity, computable only once one has already found some other way to show that the information cannot be put into the genome by natural selection.

McLatchie presumably wants to clear us all up on this, but he seems to be using the definition of 1 with the name of 2. So we end up confused as to whether his quantity can be put into the genome by natural selection, or whether it is a useless after-the-fact add-on to some other argument which establishes that it can’t. And he’s had a whole extra minute.