Here is an informative little video by a guy named Steve Mould who does a lot of “science” videos on youtube. Its all (ostensibly) about how simple little processes can make “meaningful” structures from stochastic processes-and he uses magnetic shaped little parts to show this. Its a popular channeled followed by millions, and is often referenced by other famous people in the science community-and his fans love it.
And hey, it does show how meaningful structures CAN form from random processes. Right? So you can learn from this. Wink, wink. Nod, nod. And all the skeptics will know exactly what he is really saying. Cause we are all part of the clique that knows this language-the language of the skeptic propagandist. I mean, he almost hides it, the real message, it is just under the surface, and the less skeptically aware, the casualist, might even miss it. The casualist might not learn as much about Steve Mould and what he is trying to say here-but the skeptic knows. “See, atheism is true! Spread the word!” Steve has given the wink. The same wink used by DeGrasse Tyson, and Sean Carroll, Lawrence Krauss, Brian Greene, and on and on. You know the one.
And for 95% of his viewers, whether they know it or not, they got his message. I mean, look, its plain as day, right? He just showed you, that is certainly a meaningful structure that arose from random processes, isn’t it? Its defintely meaningful, its a, a, a , well, it’s shape that, we have a, a name for…that’s kind of…anyway, defintely random, I mean other than the magnets and the precut shapes, and the little ball with nothing else inside, and the shaking only until its just right then stopping kind of way…That’s random kind of right???
But there are 5% percent of his viewers that spotted his little wink and nod, and said, hold on a second. If you want us to believe that your little explanation about how simply life can form from nonsense without a plan, how blind exactly do you want us to be? 95%, they are hooked, you got them (Ryan StallardThere are so many creationist videos this obliterates. Especially 4:18.). But some likeGhryst VanGhod helpfully point out: “this is incorrect. the kinesin travels along fibres within the cell and takes the various molecules exactly where they need to be, they are not randomly “jumbling around in solution”. https://youtu.be/gbycQf1TbM0 ” and then you get to see a video that tells you just a few more of the things that are ACTUALLY happening which are even more amazing if you weren’t already skeptical (the real kind).
And if you go through some more of the comments you will notice a few more (real) skeptics, not the wink and nod kind, and you will start to notice why the wink nod propogandist skeptics everywhere you look in modern culture are a very puposefully designed cancer on knowledge and thought.
I see a forest as distinct from a group of trees. A forest is so much more than a collection of trees. A forest is a superorganism with its central nervous system concentrated below ground level and its limbs stretching skyward.
You may not be a materialist, but that would be a consistent belief a physicalist would arrive at. Would you consider yourself a physicalist?
Far as I can tell, a great many people visualize Trump as the vehicle to transport them back to a hazy golden past people manufactured in their minds, by modifying suitable memories to fit their dreams and culling out the rest. America USED to be great, back when everything was better. When one of my local (white, Southern) politicians was asked exactly when America used to be great, he thought for a minute and said it was when we still had slavery. THOSE were the days, by golly. Before the despised Lincoln started the War of Northern Agression. If only we could return to those halcyon times!
I suppose in California, the golden days were before pollution, congestion, liberals and Mexicans.
No. I’m inclined to consider myself a behaviorist. We judge things and people by how they behave more than what they are made of.
Flint,
Why do you think circular reasoning along with labeling fallacies is going to be persuasive to a professional philosopher? We all know your opinion on the subject. How do you support that opinion beyond emotionally charged assertion?
Said Mr “atoms are designed”.
OMagain,
It’s been several years and you are still incapable of a reasonable counter argument. The best explanation remains that they are designed due to the fine tuning required for their existence.
1. The Abrahamic faiths were very much shaped by the fact that the Hebrew pronunciation of the name of Hebrew god has been forgotten, as a result of which they resorted to “the Lord”, “God,” etc. (In Kabbalah, He is called “Ha-Shem,” “the Name”.) It’s a nice question if the history of monotheism would have been different if the name hadn’t been forgotten. (“Yahweh” is a scholarly conjecture.)
2. I capitalize “He” out of respect for historical usage, not out of personal piety.
3. I’m not interested in the question “is believing in the Christian god as silly as believing in the Norse gods?”, so if that’s the question for you, then we’re having different conversations.
I don’t even think that questions of evidence are relevant to talking about the reasonableness of faith (or lack thereof). We need evidence when it comes to choosing between two (or more) competing scientific theories, and even then evidence is decisive only so far as the underlying paradigm has not been called into question.
But I don’t think that stories about the gods or about God are in the explanation business, they aren’t proto-science, and evidence really has quite little to do with it.
Also, not that it matters, but I’m more of a Spinozist than anything else.
I did not know that. Apparently the original word for bear was also lost because people were too afraid to say it in case it summoned it.
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/04/04/word-bear/
Ok, here goes: No, they are not. Your move. And this is the problem, there is no further step that can be taken. You have taken a position that cannot be refuted. I don’t deny that ‘atoms’ may be Intelligently Designed. I just don’t think they are as there is no evidence to support that they have been so designed.
What fine tuning is that then? Care to be more specific?
In actual fact there is a surprising amount of laxity in the “fine tuning” where atoms can still exist more or less as they do now. The laws of physics can be changed quite a bit until your fine tuned atoms cannot exist any longer. It’s not the single point in configuration space you might imagine.
But, hey, whatever. It’s not like we’ll ever engage on a specific detail in a specific way that can decide some specific point one way or the other. You are immune to change it appears, after some date in the past your appear to have frozen into place, immovable and immobile.
So your evidence that atoms are designed is based on the very specific fine tuning required for atoms to exist. And yet I’m saying that that fine tuning is not so fine after all, if atoms are what you are after. So your ‘evidence’? Not all that, as it turns out. Not to me, anyway.
I would provide references but if you are interested you’ll find them, it’s a fairly niche subject, right.
I dunno. How can you claim something like a name is “forgotten” when there is nothing to show it existed previously? And assuming for the moment, some transcendent concept did exist and has been renamed, how does that impinge on it remaining human invention?
No need for a counterargument there. Your argument has not been made. It looks a lot more like a bare claim than an argument. What do you even mean? Did you mean that atoms had to be fine tuned in order to exist? If so, how do you know? What exactly was finely tuned in those atoms? How do you know it was finely tuned? If not something in the atoms, then what was finely tuned for atoms to exist? how do you know it was finely tuned at all? If you cannot establish that something is finely tuned about atoms, then why would we need a counterargument? Isn’t it enough to say that we don’t even agree with your assumptions and, therefore, your argument has no foundations?
What say you?
Nothing to see here because its all true?
Something I was wondering about. While it is true that some viruses hijack dynein motor proteins to reach the nucleus, I never heard of newly synthesized viral capsid proteins being transported by kinesin or dynein motor proteins. Did you check whether this actually happens? For the record, I have a hard time believing viral capsids are being actively assembled by motor proteins. This is definitely accomplished by spontaneous self assembly of the type demonstrated in the video.
Still not seeing any theological implications of any of the above being false or true.
Not sure that is what upset phoodoo.The other ID creationist in the room claimed that self assembly of viral capsids supported Intelligent Design. That is usual fare: complex biomolecular processes are simply claimed as evidence for Design.
My working hypothesis is that Steve Mould accidently blew some dog whistles when he used words like “random” and “meaningful” in the wrong context. That would explain why only the IDers were capable of spotting the “hidden atheist message”. This is just me idly speculating of course.
You and truth are not friends.
Mould claims, “The ribosome is basically like a robot, I mean it is a robot.” He has got that the wrong way round. Human designed robots in some ways show similarity in an extremely basic way to cellular organelles. But to claim that ribosomes are robots is even more inaccurate than telling us that the Large Hadron Collider is a Scalextric track.
According to him, the ribosome “grabs” the carrier which grabs the TRNA molecules which are just “jumbling around in solution”. Once the ribosome spits out the protein it is just floating about in solution, “moving around aimlessly”. He builds up a picture of proteins “sloshing around in solution”. He is forced to use this sort of language in order to fit in with his idea of low level stochasticity resulting in the intricate, organized, deliberate structure of the whole creature. But we all know that there is much more to intracellular processes than stochasticity and molecules floating around and coming together by accident. A quick look at the findings of researchers in this area gives a very different picture of the one he is trying to paint.
Here they describe tRNA in its journey through the ribosome:
Mould emphasizes the stochasticity at the molecular level, but there is no mention of any deliberate, directed activity.
In this article on ribosomes, they say:
Stochastic processes are easy to demonstrate if the conditions are set up in isolation, but how much deliberate action within the cell is necessary to facilitate any stochastic process?
Any uninformed person watching this video would think of the intracellular environment as a chaotic mess.
I’m not entirely sure what your point is here.
Maybe this will help, a bit. There’s a nice distinction between “sense” and ‘reference”: the sense of a word is what it means, and reference is what it refers to. Classical example: “the evening star” and “the morning star” refer to the same object — the planet Venus — but they don’t mean the same thing, because “morning” is not a synonym for “evening”.
In talking about the Abrahamic conception of God, as influenced by a few hundred years of Platonic and Aristotelian theology, I’m only pointing out that “God” (in that context) does not have the same sense as does the word “god” when used as a genus term for the Norse, Greek, Aztec etc gods.
The rest of you seem to be interested in the question whether God is “imaginary” or “real”. To be honest, that’s not an interesting question to me, so I’ll bow out of this conversation for the time being.
ding ding ding. We have a winner.
Welcome to reality.
Haha, yea right, more just random accidents!
I wonder if Jock will complain that Harvard is purposely trying to make the process seem more complicated than it really is.
The atheist response, “yea, but so…..”
The end product of millions of years of molecular evolution is going to, well, look like something.
You do realize that that video is not an actual video of what is happening, rite?
Sure, they look like machines. Sure, the banner at UncommonDescent looks like it has a machine on it. But do they actually look like that, have you ever wondered?
Entropy,
Computers work well. Biological organisms work well. Their common smallest irreducibly system is atoms. Without precise tuning of the smallest components these larger systems would not be possible. Is this an accident?
What say you?
Yeah, but if protons were 0.000042 percent lighter, slood would have been more stable. This totally undermines the fine tuning argument, I feel.
ROFL.
Heavens, no! “Harvard” is purposely trying to make the process seem simpler than it really is, in order to explain it to a lay audience. All sorts of stuff they glossed over. The two I expected to be glossed over were in fact: how the Q cycle works, and the importance of the fact that ATP is actively pumped out of the matrix thanks to its greater negative charge: ATP synthesis wouldn’t run otherwise.
The insides of cells are more complicated than any of these videos make out, but they are also a hell of a lot messier.
Charlie’s conviction that tRNAs don’t just bump into ribosomes (and that the intracellular environment is not a chaotic mess) is a case in point.
I say you’re not very clear. You seem to be saying that if atoms didn’t work the way they work, nothing else would work. That still doesn’t lead to “therefore atoms are fine tuned.” How can atoms be tuned? Do they have dials? If they have dials, how is it possible for the dials to work unless they’re made of things that work? How is it possible to fine tune atoms unless they can be tuned? How could atoms be tuned unless their “components” “worked well” enough for atoms to be tunable? How is it possible for anybody to tune atoms unless they themselves can do the job. Is that ability to tune atoms an accident?
I think you’re putting the cart before the horse, as usual. Unless things “worked well” not even tuning would be possible. Therefore things have to “work well”, at least to some extent, for anything else made from them to “work well.” Not even fine tuning would be possible without this prerequisite.
Clear enough?
Ah, I think I understand. Making Shit Up has nothing to do with evidence, and Abrahamic shit has a much different flavor than Greek or Norse or Hindu or Shinto shit, so even though there is NO connection between any of these gods and reality, that’s irrelevant because reality is irrelevant. What IS relevant is the shit that Christian theologists have made up. It’s better shit.
What’s critical here is that we are talking about pure reason, which need only rest on itself, since it’s reason all the way down. Questions of reality (aka evidence) don’t apply, and just confuse things.
Again, a courtier’s response. NONE of this makes any sense in the sense I use the word sense. I simply cannot understand how “a few hundred years of Platonic and Aristotelian theology” makes the imaginary god they are writing about functionally any different from the imaginary gods believed by people in India (who have also written at length about their gods).
Other than who you’re aware of who has written about their god, what IS this difference in “sense” you rattle on about? What makes Plato’s imagination qualitatively different from, say, Adi Shankara’s or Ahmed Raza Khan Barelvi’s?
I am willing to concede that Mould intentionally blew some dog whistles.
You and I recognize that
1) Intelligent Design is presented as Science, but it is so horrendously bad science that it’s vacuous, or pseudoscience.
2) Intelligent Design is religiously motivated.
Because phoodoo recognizes 2, but fails to understand 1, anytime he sees someone making fun of ID, he assumes they are religiously motivated. Sometimes, this is true. Plenty of times it isn’t; scientists of all religious persuasions enjoy poking fun at ID, because it is so hilariously bad. The only people promoting ID have a religious agenda (or a quite cynical financial motivation… I’m looking at you, Berlinski…), so the asymmetry is telling.
Perhaps my example of phoodoo railing against a 1750 naturalistic explanation for lightning was too obscure — here’s a more recent one: anyone critiquing Flood Geology would be, per phoodoo, promoting their atheist agenda.
Remember, he does not even understand that infinite harmonic series have infinite sums.
I doubt there’s anything to defeat. Fine tuning is but imagining that something about the universe being different would results in things being different. No kidding! But, could those things be different or are we just engaged in imagining what would happen if they were different?
Fine tuning often summarizes as a reification fallacy. Mistaking the concepts (the equations, for example), for their referents (what the equations are trying to describe/model). They tell you, the universe would collapse if this constant was changed! So, I write the equation, then change the constant, et voilà, nothing happens. Then again, of course, if I changed the constant, then the equation would no longer represent what it used to represent. How surprising.
Flint,
I’m having trouble understanding where KN is trying to get. I still feel no need for justifying my disbelief in any of the Abrahamic gods, beyond their mythological raisons d’être, just because KN feels like the sophistications around them are very sophisticated.
I’m puzzled too. Human invention can be very sophisticated but that doesn’t contribute to whether some stories might have some element of truth. Maybe KN will elaborate.
As I understand it, KN is making the point that
Personally, I suspect that almost all the theists we see at TSZ harbor a VERY mythological view of God. KN is more interested in the metaphysical end of the deity spectrum. This leads to a disconnect.
I do think the distribution along this spectrum is something I would be interested in learning more about, but beware of self-selecting samples.
I also think that KN’s final notation for a “first mover” type God — “except that He gives a shit about us” — carries an awful lot of problematic baggage…
What an honour! Do I get a prize? 🙂
Bioexplorer:
Organelles are so named for a reason.
Eukaryotic cells are dynamically ordered or critical but not chaotic
A Newfound Source of Cellular Order in the Chemistry of Life
From cell.com
As stated in cell.com, prokaryote cells lack the membrane bound organization of eukaryote cells, but “spatial organization arises in the absence of membrane boundaries”.
Cells don’t just tolerate a measure of chaos, they use it to their advantage to achieve the dynamic organization within the plasma membrane.
Whose reality are you talking about?
Where molecular machines are understood to be nothing like “machines” as we know them. Where intracellular environment are a chaotic mess.
And it all got that way by evolution. Just small little accidents that were beneficial. Each little step just so happen to fall in place. You know, like the cells that didn’t get these accidents didn’t add up…The billion of years argument. At first the cells sucked, but they got better…Hilarious.
The stupidest theory ever.
Well, no, only the tiniest tiniest percent of all these little accidents needed to be beneficial. The rest, the vastly overwhelming majority, didn’t make it. As always, you have completely ignored selection. You even mock even the most idiot-resistent examples of selection. Probaby because selection works? Could it be that if you understood selection, your resolute determination to ignore it might suffer?
But once again, of course only an extremely few little steps happened to fall in place. Selection is powerful. You should look it up, maybe grasp the basic concept even if not some fine details (like the retention of selected little steps).
I personally wonder how much selection occurred before the first examples of what might be regarded as cells today. I don’t have a lot of difficulty imagining the development of “cell-ness”, precursors to cells, because something about these made them more stable or more efficient. And all by tiny tiny steps, nearly all of which didn’t work out.
What does the word “no” mean in your sentence? No what? No they are not accidents? Do you even know what you meant when you wrote no? Because its obvious what you should have wrote was “yes”, that’s exactly what we mean, only, don’t forget about all the little accidents that were bad, which of course I haven’t forgotten!
Somehow, you think that there being many, many more bad or detrimental accidents that also happened, which slowed down the process even more makes the theory more believable to anyone who actually thought about it. But no, trust me, that makes it even more laughable. All the trillions of mitochondrial cells that couldn’t, and the bio-mechanical motors that sank. THIS is the savior of your theory-trillions and trillions and trillions of failures. Totally useless cell membranes, kinesins that did belly flops instead of walking. Now it all makes sense! Accidents for the genetic code, accidents for the development of cells, accidents for DNA, accidents for sexual reproduction, each step along the way, just more Darwin.
THIS you can believe in. THIS you have no trouble swallowing as possible, but no, no, a creator, that is just too far outrageous for you. One wonders at the amount of time the average atheist spends pondering this. Astonishing.
Hmm, I hadn’t considered the possibility that Steve Mould was poking the bear. Maybe I am being naive, but I don’t think he was using creationist code words on purpose.
phoodoo assumes a lot if things. He would do well to make his train of thought more explicit. If I wasn’t a regular visitor to this site I’d still be wondering how he got from self assembly to atheism and why he posted this OP in the “Evolution” category, even though evolution isn’t mentioned anywhere in the video or the OP. wink wink nod nod indeed.
Corneel,
To be fair to phoodoo, he didn’t choose the category, evolution is set as a default. If no-one selects a category or more, it appears. The default used to be “uncategorised”. Maybe I should reinstate it.
Corneel,
If you don’t know how I got from self-assembly to atheism, then what is your explanation for how I knew Mould was an atheist/skeptic before I even looked anything up about him online? It was just coincedence?
Or maybe you can ask Richard Dawkins how he draws the link, or Robert Sapolsky, or Michael Shermer, or just about any other skeptic you can think of and ask them to explain to you how they have made the link between the two ideas- if it actually baffles you. If you didn’t post here often I might think you are pulling my leg.
phoodoo,
Neither impressed nor convinced, phoodoo. What bothers you about other people being atheists? Is it simple prejudice? You’ve presented no argument, reasoning or logic.
Your creator is a cunt. Your creator designs molecular machines that blind children, that worm into their brain and leave them paralyzed or worse. Generation after generation.
But then again you defend literal concentration camps, so it’s no surprise you worship a shit who thinks just like you.
Most scientists are atheists. It kind of comes with the territory.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023116664353
When I see a mouth breather video making unsupported assertions and lying about science then I know it’s a theist doing that even if they don’t mention god. See, this game is not hard at all!
So self assembly of viral capsids proves atheism because Steve Mould talks about it in a popular science video and he is an atheist? It certainly stands to reason; Self-assembling viral capsids cannot possibly coexist with an omnipotent omniscient creator God.
I haven’t checked whether Mould is actually an atheist, but if he is: yeah, I think you just made a lucky guess.
Perhaps you should come to terms with the fact that Intelligent Design creationism is not synonymous with Christianity.
LOL. “Evolution” is the default setting? I thoroughly approve of course, but that is a bit of a weird quirk.
@phoodoo: Apologies. I thought you selected that category.
I see a whole lot of bothered atheists, worried that their theory is nonsense, so trying desparetly to make is sound convincing. Why do you think they are so bothered? Intelligent design seems to scare the wits out of them. You haven’t noticed?
You know how scared they are of teaching flaws in evolution theory in schools?
For instance? Can you name one? And after that provide evidence for that desperation claim?
What is this Intelligent Design you speak of? Care to define it?
Can you name such a flaw and note the age group you think it appropriate that that flaw is taught to?
If we’re talking flaws, it seems to me that you have a flaw in your theism.
You are on record as being a supporter of concentration camps. That your theism is compatible with this seems to me to be something of a flaw.
Why are you scared of addressing this issue? Use your theism to justify the concentration camps in China why don’t ya?
I am sure atheists everywhere appreciate your concern for their well being . I think you can relax , an hypothesis that something happened sometime by something , somehow only scares the wits out of those who worry about scientific literacy in schools.But presently at least in the US , the focus of is that the real victims of institution of slavery is white folks , so creationism has taken a backseat.
So it is not ID ,that both theistic and atheistic scientists are concerned with , it is how all science, not only biology, is taught .
Since you seem to be an authority on the value of ID, can we determine whether Covid -19 was designed by humans or by a deity ? If a deity which one? I know secular scientists have been unable determine it, now would be a good time for ID to step up.
They do have similarities to machines. But that only describes a tiny fraction of what they are. The machine like quality of your arm movements as you type text into your device can tell us about the mechanics but we both know that description misses out the most important aspect of your activity.
One person’s “chaotic mess” is another person’s coordinated, directed activity. Even apoptosis may look like a chaotic mess, but in reality it is finely programmed.
Yeah, it’s quite amusing that phoodoo things atheists are scared of something that phoodoo can’t even define!
Flint, take notice.