101 thoughts on “An organized collection of irrational nonsense”
Frankie: OK so you think the first replicator was complex.
When the Intelligent Designer created the first replicator, how complex did it need to be? How do you know?
Frankie: Congratulations, you just refuted materialism and naturalism.
Your god can’t make a universe that creates it’s own complexity? What a poor quality deity you worship.
Frankie: And thanks for admittimg your position cannot be tested and isn’t science
And yet, this “position” is the accepted position and everything assumes it’s truth.
Quite a feat for a non-testable non-scientific position.
One can assume therefore that the position you hold is even less well supported. If evolution is untestable but dominant then ID must just be a joke.
Frankie: It takes faith and relies on faith. So it is a religion of sorts
Said the guy who can’t say when the designer acted, what it did, how it did it or anything else about it. Except Frankie just knows it was design. Sounds just like faith to me!
OM, attacking ID with your ignorance is not going to help your position find support. But I understand why you do it…
Shazam! In that list in the list of pseudosciences is PHRENOLOGY! YAY!
This relates to evolutionary biology because:
In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics.
Jerry Coyne
Frankie: OM, attacking ID with your ignorance is not going to help your position find support.
I understand that asking you for details regarding ID is perceived as an attack, yes.
Presumably it’s a defensive mechanism that has evolved due to the lack of empirical support for ID – when asked to support a claim you simply say that the person can’t support their own position instead, and that’s why they are asking.
As a tactic it does not really seem to be working out for you, I must say. If you look at the numbers the number of IDC’s are falling year by year. I’d suggest a different tack if I were you.
In science’s pecking order, Intelligent Design lurks somewhere near the bottom of phrenology, having a sniff, and hoping one day to be as well supported as Homeopathy.
stcordova:
Shazam! In that list in the list of pseudosciences is PHRENOLOGY!YAY!
This relates to evolutionary biology because:
[quote-mining Jerry Coyne]
This is reprehensible even by creationist standards. You are approaching the Frankie level here. Are you ashamed?
“In science’s pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history’s inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike “harder” scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture.”
So since “We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike “harder” scientists,” why don’t we evolutionary biologists say, “we don’t know”. A physicist will say, there is uncertainty — in fact a fundamental law of physics is Heisenberg uncertainty.
Pseudoscience is making up stories and insisting it is known fact. Better to say, “we believe” or “we speculate” rather than “we know”.
But if one wants the whole context, Jerry was really embarrassed by evolutionary psychologists Thornhill and Palmer’s survey of rape and their inference that the tendency to rape is selectively favored. The essay by Coyne, Of Vice and Men isn’t available anymore.
Is he a bit embarrassed for admitting the truth now?
“In the end we are looking here at a product of the storyteller’s art, not of science.”See . The Coyne quotation is from Jerry A. Coyne, “Of Vice and Men: The fairy tales of evolutionary psychology,” a review of Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s A Natural History of Rape, in The New Republic (April 3, 2000), last page. The entire review is available at:
That’s like the pot calling the kettle black. So Jerry, what does the common ancestor of tigers and butterflies look like? If you don’t know, just say, “we don’t know”. But if you don’t know, isn’t a little pre-mature to insist one’s story is fact? For all we know it could be some black swan process.
Do you even know what making a solid case means, Sal?
We’re not UD, we don’t care about your pseudoscientific misuse of authority and innuendo without any sort of real evidence in sight.
The trouble with your gambler’s view of the world is that, rather than carefully considering everything on its evidentiary merits and then making your wager, you instead misconstrue “threats” to your preferences at every level in order to protect your “wager.” It’s not reasonable in the least, because it avoids reason as the basis for your bet, which instead is made on the basis of misrepresentation of what’s involved.
Anyway, save your “case by authority and innuendo” for the dolts who are impressed by nonsense. We’re simply not gullible enough for it.
GlenDavidson: Do you even know what making a solid case means, Sal?
Evidently it relies heavily on mind-reading.
Do you even know what making a solid case means, Sal?
Experiments and observations help to make a solid case.
Do you believe plants give birth to mammals? Do you believe mammals give birth to plants? But Jerry believes something was the ancestor of mammals and plants. Even if true, it’s not a solid case, it’s speculation, it’s an imponderable.
Better to label such assertions a “belief statement” rather than experimental science. UCA (theory of universal common ancestry) is built on belief statements that would require sets of events that are so improbable they are hard to distinguish from miracles — that’s assuming UCA is true.
UCA predicts tigers and mosquitos came from the same ancestor. Do you have any actual experiments demonstrating the feasibility of this claim?
Mung: Evidently it relies heavily on mind-reading.
stcordova: Experiments and observations help to make a solid case.
Do you believe plants give birth to mammals?Do you believe mammals give birth to plants?But Jerry believes something was the ancestor of mammals and plants.
So you don’t notice the huge difference between the two different scenarios? This goes back to your lack of dealing properly with matters, but making sweeping generalizations across very different claims.
Even if true, it’s not a solid case, it’s speculation, it’s an imponderable.
What a baseless claim. It’s not speculation, it’s based on normal evidence that people accept for ancestry, similarities appearing in a highly derivative fashion. You certainly have no reasonable explanation for it, while derivation is a very reasonable explanation for derivative patterns.
Better to label such assertions a “belief statement” rather than experimental science.
Why don’t you think about these things, rather than rattle off a bunch of ID soundbites?
Of course you find it comforting to think that it’s a “belief statement,” but in fact evolutionary theory is the only origins model that actually arose from the evidence.
UCA (theory of universal common ancestry) is built on belief statements that would require sets of events that are so improbable they are hard to distinguish from miracles — that’s assuming UCA is true.
What problem should that be for you, who believes in miracles?
But for us, to insist that miracles are responsible for what appears by all of the evidence of derivation to have come by, wait for it, derivation, is about as absurd a notion as we have encountered.
UCA predicts tigers and mosquitos came from the same ancestor.Do you have any actual experiments demonstrating the feasibility of this claim?
Do you have any actual experiments demonstrating the feasibility of your miracle claims? Or in favor of your meaningless innuendo and fallacies of authority?
Does anyone have any actual experiments demonstrating the feasibility of two black holes merging? But am I supposed to ignore good gravitational-wave evidence that two actually did?
No, observation is perfectly good evidence, unless you’re trying to move the goalposts. You have no observations or experiments that support your claims, and in fact we have observations that go quite against those and for evolution sans miracles.
So, you appear not to know what a solid case is, which isn’t surprising after a decade of bad thinking inculcated via ID.
stcordova: Experiments and observations help to make a solid case.
Do you believe plants give birth to mammals?Do you believe mammals give birth to plants?But Jerry believes something was the ancestor of mammals and plants. Even if true, it’s not a solid case, it’s speculation, it’s an imponderable.
Do you believe you gave birth to Eleanor Roosevelt? Do you believe Eleanor Roosevelt gave birth to you? But you believe someone was the ancestor of you and Eleanor Roosevelt. Do you think there is a solid case for that? Now in fact there is a very solid case, and there’s also a comparable case for the mammal/plant ancestor. Historical science, despite your imagination, is good science, and we know that all eukaryotes have a common ancestor. You may even be familiar with some of the evidence, though you discount and ignore it.
Better to label such assertions a “belief statement” rather than experimental science.
Better to label such assertions “historical science”. It’s a common trope among creationists that only experimental science, in a lab with, presumably, a white coat and test tubes, is real science. Real scientists would disagree.
UCA (theory of universal common ancestry) is built on belief statements that would require sets of events that are so improbable they are hard to distinguish from miracles — that’s assuming UCA is true.
An odd objection from a person who believes in copious miracles. And we aren’t even talking about UCA here. Eukaryotes are very, very far from that.
UCA predicts tigers and mosquitos came from the same ancestor.Do you have any actual experiments demonstrating the feasibility of this claim?
Are you asking for a tiger to give birth to a mosquito in the laboratory, or what? Why do you completely discount phylogenetic as a source of reliable conclusions? Hey, most of it these days takes place in labs! With white coats!
John Harshman: Do you believe you gave birth to Eleanor Roosevelt? Do you believe Eleanor Roosevelt gave birth to you? But you believe someone was the ancestor of you and Eleanor Roosevelt. Do you think there is a solid case for that? Now in fact there is a very solid case, and there’s also a comparable case for the mammal/plant ancestor. Historical science, despite your imagination, is good science, and we know that all eukaryotes have a common ancestor. You may even be familiar with some of the evidence, though you discount and ignore it.
I simply refuse to believe that Ted Cruz and I had a common ancestor. Therefore we did NOT have a common ancestor. It’s too preposterous. QED.
Flint: I simply refuse to believe that Ted Cruz and I had a common ancestor. Therefore we did NOT have a common ancestor. It’s too preposterous. QED.
Yeah, many people feel the same way about themselves and monkeys. Go figure.
UCA […] is built on belief statements that would require sets of events that are so improbable they are hard to distinguish from miracles
No event more improbable than organisms having offspring (but not necessarily with every organism on earth), and merging genomes (though not necessarily daily) is required.
Last night, with insomnia allowing me a little time to think (something I’ve been doing a lot of over a periodod about 85+ years at this time), it struck me:
Would the intelligent designer be capable of the design and manufacture of a crude machine like f.i. the famous American V8-engine? I don’t think so. If he could, why didn’t he make it, just to let us know that he is there even though we may not see him?
And yet, he’s being attributed with the capability of creating all that we see around us?
Not very credible. If you read your Bible you wil find that he said “Let there be”, meaning he left it to the forces of nature to make things happen.
That’s why we had to invent the V8, he couldn’t. Since then, we’ve made a lot of fascinating inventions that he failed to make. Reality is, we don’t see the sligthest signs of His Existence. He’s absent, or indifferent. I vote for the latter.
Kurt Vonnegut in one of his books invented the “Church of God the utterly Indifferent” and I think that’s as close to the real thing as we can get.
As we all know, the concept of gods was invented by our early ancestors to explain the world they found themselves in, without knowing anything about how that had come to be.
So, in order to make sense of their world, they invented lesser gods to account for rains, winds and other phenomena. And a major God above them all, the ultimate creator that just poofed the universe and everything else it into existence.
Yes, it’s interesting how much more complex life is than are our inventions.
And yet, nothing like what we make appears without our efforts (unlike in Douglas Adams’ worlds), and the only complex functional things that arose without known designers contain copious evidence of non-magic evolution.
It’s just a coincidence that complex functional things not designed by known designers have the evidence of derivation that is entailed by known evolutionary processes?
It’s amazing, isn’t it? Unless, just maybe, life did evolve sans designers.
Robin: I think I would qualify the difference this way:
I’m inclined to agree with you at first blush, but I think that it is more complex than that. That view is probably heavily influenced by our Western experience of Christian religions and all of the missionary work involved in “spreading the good news”. Many sincerely-held beliefs still (IMHO) classify as bat-shit crazy even if they are held by religions with less Dominionist tendencies that Evangelical Protestants.
Followers of Nuwaubianism believe that they must bury their placenta after childbirth so that Satan doesn’t clone their children. However, I’m not aware of any major push to legislate that into Georgia law.
Atheists belong in the irrational camp for the very reason that they deny their own intelligence.
They insist on a dichotomy between nature and humanity – that what humans have achieved, nature has not.
its cognitive dissonance, that tortucan mentality, compartmentalization of concepts, so they can feel good about being mavericks against the spiritual majority.
in essense, they are always a day late and a dollar short.
Think about it, with their doubting thomas ways, could an atheist make a revolutionary discovery?
Just look at Joe, Larry, and company – nope, nope, its all junk. nope, nope dembski didn’t put that last nail in the mathematical coffin. nope. nope. doesn’t count.
So when you’ve got atheists doing science, there is no incentive for new discovery. Warming administrative armchairs? Sure.
But actually finding something awesome and revolutionary?
Fawgeddaboutit!
That’s not why they chose science.
Steve:
Atheists belong in the irrational camp for the very reason that they deny their own intelligence.
[omit more of the same]
I’m always amazed how completely mystified True Believers are when confronted by the sane. Every single claim here is so far off base it’s not even in the right time zone. True Believers have crawled into a hole they can’t see out of, and pulled the hole in after themselves. When you see a mind on religion, you really don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
On the contrary Flint, this is not about religion or areligion.
Its about rationality. There is nothing rational about refusing to contemplate the fact that nature designs precisely like humanity designs.
Only someone with an attitude would refuse to consider such a blatant observation.
Leave religion out of it. Speak to the issue. Where is the dichotomy between nature’s supposed inability to design and humanity ability to design?
In the context of this OP, your insistence on a dichotomy would be ‘naturally’ considered reason enough to put you in the irrational nonsense collection.
Prove you are not a member of the iNC.
Flint: I’m always amazed how completely mystified True Believers are when confronted by the sane. Every single claim here is so far off base it’s not even in the right time zone. True Believers have crawled into a hole they can’t see out of, and pulled the hole in after themselves. When you see a mind on religion, you really don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Steve: On the contrary Flint, this is not about religion or areligion.
Its about rationality. There is nothing rational about refusing to contemplate the fact that nature designs precisely like humanity designs.
Only someone with an attitude would refuse to consider such a blatant observation.
Leave religion out of it.
Says Steve-o who decided to insult atheists first and foremost.
Okay, dude, I’ll “leave religion out of it” if you’ll just plain leave.
Steve:
Atheists belong in the irrational camp for the very reason that they deny their own intelligence.
[omit more of the same]
I’m always amazed how completely mystified True Believers are when confronted by the sane. Every single claim here is so far off base it’s not even in the right time zone.
Just idle curiosity, I looked up Nobel prize winning scientists who profess no religion (self-identified as atheist, agnostic, freethinker).
As a group, we’re definitely keeping up our prize percentage compared to our percentage of the general population.
Watson. Crick. Chandrasekhar. Bohr. All the Curies. Arrhenius. Sanger. Schrödinger.
And Nobel himself identified as an atheist later in life. But what did he know! Obviously neither intelligent nor moral whatsoever!
Why does anyone who professes religion think that it would please their god to insult and belittle other humans just because they don’t happen to believe in that same god (or any god)? Do they genuinely think they are brave warriors for the one true god — over the internet ?
Is their god so petty-minded and jealous ?
That last one is a rhetorical question. 🙂
Steve: They insist on a dichotomy between nature and humanity – that what humans have achieved, nature has not.
Perhaps I am confused about the intention of this statement. Materialists believe that nature (sans Supernatural guidance) has created all life including humans.
It is the Theists that see humans as a Special Creation with (to quote John C. Lennox) nearly “infinite value” being completely separate from and above all other life.
RoyLT: Perhaps I am confused about the intention of this statement.Materialists believe that nature (sans Supernatural guidance) has created all life including humans.
It is the Theists that see humans as a Special Creation with (to quote John C. Lennox) nearly “infinite value” being completely separate from and above all other life.
It didn’t seem to come from anywhere except for Steve’s imagination. People discussed the difference between what intelligence does vs. what non-intelligence does, but that’s generally accepted by IDists and by those who don’t deny science.
It was really just a bizarre attack on the evil atheists, for all I could tell. A strange melange of wildly incorrect statements satisfying some kind of emotional need in the poster, with no pretense of rational argumentation.
Flint: True Believers have crawled into a hole they can’t see out of, and pulled the hole in after themselves.
So I’m not a True Believer?
GlenDavidson: A strange melange of wildly incorrect statements satisfying some kind of emotional need in the poster, with no pretense of rational argumentation.
I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes a troll is just a troll. After re-reading his full comments, I’m amused at how many statements he attempted to apply to Atheists that come directly from arguments against ID and Creationism. Tortucan-traps, armchair research, cognitive dissonance, etc…
This is one of those laugh or cry moments.
Here we have the Hot_Shoe and Flint insisting I have insulted them by claiming they are irrational for their atheist positions.
Yet, it seems this site among many other are dedicated to insisting that any people that harbor any type of believe in unseen entities are…. wait for it…….irrational.
So by their standards they have repeatedly insulted a huge number of people.
This seems an appropriate time to make the proper introductions….kettle, meet pot.
No matter, the interesting quesiton is will Flint put his toes in those icy dichotomous waters? Will he explain how humans have an extraordinary ability to design but nature does not?
Here we have the Hot_Shoe and Flint insisting I have insulted them by claiming they are irrational for their atheist positions.
Since this accusation is false, why should we not be offended. You are lying.
Yet, it seems this site among many other are dedicated to insisting that any people that harbor any type of believe in unseen entities are…. wait for it…….irrational.
Of course, it’s more than “unseen”, it’s unevidenced in any way whatsoever. Complete unsupported fiction. Reifying figments of your imagination is indeed irrational. Drawing tentative conclusions from a body of evidence is rational.
So by their standards they have repeatedly insulted a huge number of people.
And deservedly so. If the shoe fits, and all that. But maybe you can be the very first to provide evidence beyond sincere assertion or some sort of statistical fallacy. Care to try? Most of us would just LOVE to examine your evidence.
This seems an appropriate time to make the proper introductions….kettle, meet pot.
Only if evidence does not matter. But in the Real World, evidenced is qualitatively different from unevidenced. Only the kettle is black. You seem incapable of grasping that Making Shit Up is NOT the same thing as providing evidence.
No matter, the interesting quesiton is will Flint put his toes in those icy dichotomous waters?Will he explain how humans have an extraordinary ability to design but nature does not?
Huh? Of course nature has the ability to design. Nature and humans use different design methodologies, but they are both designers. Just as the wind and an opera singer can both sing. The distinction you are probably trying to draw here is whether a design is planned in advance.
If you can’t spell my ‘nym right, you could have just copied and pasted it from my comment.
Since you can’t do that one simple thing right, why should anyone trust you to know what you’re doing when you talk about anything else ??
Steve: Yet, it seems this site among many other are dedicated to insisting that any people that harbor any type of believe in unseen entities are…. wait for it…….irrational.
Do you have a list of unseen entities it’s rational to believe in?
Presumably you don’t believe in Santa? Or Thor?
Do you believe, as many other IDists do, in ghosts? If so, what are ghosts? The dead come back or something else? If you don’t believe in ghosts are you irrational?
Ah, taking a page from Liddle’s playbook I see.
Co-opt the opposition’s POV up until a point to take the wind out of their sails. But draw a distinction to satisfy your own camp that you haven’t been converted.
Like Hillary becoming Sanders (*with a wink, wink) when its obvious you are in a tight spot.
I get it.
But unfortunately for you, nature doesn’t design like the wind sings.
You’ve got it backwards. Man is a design apprentice, not a journeyman.
Man has only discovered the design principles nature has been using for billions of years. Not only that, there are predictably numerous new design principles to be discovered in the genome. It’s just that we have not been able to wrap our brain around these higher level abstract principles yet.
Just ask Larry Moran. All he sees is junk, well, because it just, you know..lookslike junk to him.
And thats how it stands today in this debate. One man’s junk is another man’s gold.
Smart money is on the gold.
Huh? Of course nature has the ability to design. Nature and humans use different design methodologies, but they are both designers. Just as the wind and an opera singer can both sing. The distinction you are probably trying to draw here is whether a design is planned in advance.
Pardon the underscore hotshoe.
My apologies.
hotshoe_: If you can’t spell my ‘nym right, you could have just copied and pasted it from my comment.
Since you can’t do that one simple thing right, why should anyone trust you to know what you’re doing when you talk about anything else ??
Rolf, you need to drink a hot cup of chamomile tea. Your insomnia is not helping you think clearly.
So god is not good enough to make a V-8 engine?! But he is obviously good enough to design a human body.
So by this logic, Man must of course be able to design and run a prototype organism similar to or more advanced than humans. I mean with Man’s V-8 prowess, God is severely handicapped, right?
So Rolf, when do we get to see an initial strike-off?
Last night, with insomnia allowing me a little time to think (something I’ve been doing a lot of over a periodod about 85+ years at this time), it struck me:
Would the intelligent designer be capable of the design and manufacture of a crude machine like f.i. the famous American V8-engine? I don’t think so. If he could, why didn’t he make it, just to let us know that he is there even though we may not see him?
Only here at “the skeptical zone” is it safe to believe in the uniqueness of humanity vis a vis the creation of artifacts. A simple cell could not possibly be an artifact-making entity, because as we all know, artifact-making requires intelligence.
Steve:
But unfortunately for you, nature doesn’t design like the wind sings.
As I said, they use different methodologies.
You’ve got it backwards. Man is a design apprentice, not a journeyman.
I didn’t put these in any order, but nonetheless I agree with you. Many if not most human designs are copied from, based on, or derived from natural designs.
Man has only discovered the design principles nature has been using for billions of years. Not only that, there are predictably numerous new design principles to be discovered in the genome.It’s just that we have not been able to wrap our brain around these higher level abstract principles yet.
This is a confident prediction, but confidence and accuracy do not necessarily correlate. Maybe more design will be found – I’d be amazed if it were not.
Just ask Larry Moran.All he sees is junk, well, because it just, you know..lookslike junk to him.
This statement of faith is easily refuted, just by reading anything Larry Moran has said. He uses metrics which he carefully spells out for you – whether there are homologous sequences in related species, whether some sequence is preserved or mutates freely, the degree to which any resulting RNA is produced, the sheer number of copies of identical short sequences scattered through the genome, and others. The accusation that he’s just making it up to suit himself is pure projection on your part.
And thats how it stands today in this debate.One man’s junk is another man’s gold.
Well, except for the evidence. If some multiply-copied short sequence is free to mutate randomly and doesn’t seem to do anything, that MIGHT be a clue – unless you see gold ust because, you know, it LOOKS like gold to you.
Smart money is on the gold.
Even smarter money is on the evidence. I have no idea why you are so impervious to evidence. Do you maybe not know what it is?
Mung:
Only here at “the skeptical zone” is it safe to believe in the uniqueness of humanity vis a vis the creation of artifacts. A simple cell could not possibly be an artifact-making entity, because as we all know, artifact-making requires intelligence.
Who besides you has represented anything this way? Many species create artifacts, and nobody says, for example, “birds are too stupid, so the Designer must be making their nests.” However, our definition of intelligence entails abstraction of ideas, and making plans. Making artifacts does NOT necessarily entail these things.
All intelligences are artificers, but not all artificers are intelligent.
John:
Why do you completely discount phylogenetic as a source of reliable conclusions?
To the extent it says Tiger’s and mosquitos came from the same ancestors like supposedly giraffes and venus fly traps — no!
Homology is similarity and the term was coined by creationist Richard Owen. Similarity proves similarity, not phylogeny.
As far as Glen’s complaint of lack of experiments demonstrating miracles, the issue is if a phenomenon is repeatable at our whim, it is not a miraculous mechanism but a law of physics and chemistry by definition. Hence Glen’s epistemology is totally flawed if he expect experiments will directly detect miracles and if indeed miracles happen.
UCA requires such statistically improbable sets of events to happen that it is hard to distinguish it from miracles of special creation.
We share some DNA with bacteria, but how do you explain TRGs (taxonomically restricted genes) that are unique to Eukaryotes like the genes that code for histones and spliceosome parts? There is no ancestor of these parts in the phylogenetic record, they sort of just poofed on the scene!
You all claim it is natural, but no one has been able to make a case that such transitions from prokaryote to eukaryote are as mechanically reasonable as a shark giving birth to other sharks for N-generations. You can’t say the common ancestor of plants and animals is as typical as a shark giving birth to a shark. No way!
Plants give birth to plants. Animals give birth to animals. If we don’t really know how they supposedly have a common ancestor, the scientifically responsible thing is to say, “we don’t know!” Why is that so hard? You can say you believe it had a common ancestor, but that’s quite a different thing than having experimental facts.
Even Jerry Coyne had to concede evolutionary ideas are at the bottom of science’s pecking order because of the lack of experimental verification.
And for all of Glen’s complaining of solid cases, note Coyne contrasts evolutionary biology against the “harder sciences” which implies evolutionary biology is a “soft science.”
Ok Glen, soft means deformable, therefore not solid. So don’t you find it ironic Glen you’re complaining about me not knowing about a solid case when you yourself swear by something that isn’t solid? 🙂
Ah, the “I can’t imagine how this could happen, therefore it can’t have happened” defense of creationism. The entire biosphere is limited by Sal’s failure of imagination.
Flint’s imagination though is legendary.
The entire biosphere is limited by Sal’s failure of imagination.
So you can imagine the common ancestor of elephants, butterflies, starfish and tulips? What would the creature look like?
I think one needs some LSD to imagine that.
No wonder one needs to resort to molecular phylogeny because mechanically reasonable common ancestors seem not only absent in the fossil record, they seem absent in principle.
stcordova: So you can imagine the common ancestor of elephants, butterflies, starfish and tulips? What would the creature look like?
Reductio ad absurdum. You are relying on the micro vs. macro argument against common descent. Can you imagine a common ancestor between giraffes and horses? How about between giraffes and elephants? Do they require LSD (or maybe just a few hits of weed) to imagine?
stcordova: So you can imagine the common ancestor of elephants, butterflies, starfish and tulips?What would the creature look like?
It’s a single-celled eukaryote, lacking chloroplasts, probably diploid with a haploid gamete phase, one of which is motile. Not as difficult to imagine as you imagine. And supported by extensive evidence of the sort you refuse to look at and dismiss with “similarity is similarity”. All that you’re learning in your biochemistry class will be useless to you if you don’t understand the least little thing about phylogenetics.
I want to translate this diagram. Can someone please provide its source code?
When the Intelligent Designer created the first replicator, how complex did it need to be? How do you know?
Your god can’t make a universe that creates it’s own complexity? What a poor quality deity you worship.
And yet, this “position” is the accepted position and everything assumes it’s truth.
Quite a feat for a non-testable non-scientific position.
One can assume therefore that the position you hold is even less well supported. If evolution is untestable but dominant then ID must just be a joke.
Said the guy who can’t say when the designer acted, what it did, how it did it or anything else about it. Except Frankie just knows it was design. Sounds just like faith to me!
OM, attacking ID with your ignorance is not going to help your position find support. But I understand why you do it…
Shazam! In that list in the list of pseudosciences is PHRENOLOGY! YAY!
This relates to evolutionary biology because:
I understand that asking you for details regarding ID is perceived as an attack, yes.
Presumably it’s a defensive mechanism that has evolved due to the lack of empirical support for ID – when asked to support a claim you simply say that the person can’t support their own position instead, and that’s why they are asking.
As a tactic it does not really seem to be working out for you, I must say. If you look at the numbers the number of IDC’s are falling year by year. I’d suggest a different tack if I were you.
In science’s pecking order, Intelligent Design lurks somewhere near the bottom of phrenology, having a sniff, and hoping one day to be as well supported as Homeopathy.
This is reprehensible even by creationist standards. You are approaching the Frankie level here. Are you ashamed?
Ashamed?
I think I’ll die laughing.
I guess you’ve not interacted much with Sal? He has no shame!
https://udoj.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/salvador-cordova-asshole-of-the-year/
Yep, Coyne thinks evolutionary biology is pseudoscience. No irony in his remarks. I’ve been over them with the Mark lll and it barely even trembled.
Here is the larger context:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/344056-in-science-s-pecking-order-evolutionary-biology-lurks-somewhere-near-the
So since “We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike “harder” scientists,” why don’t we evolutionary biologists say, “we don’t know”. A physicist will say, there is uncertainty — in fact a fundamental law of physics is Heisenberg uncertainty.
Pseudoscience is making up stories and insisting it is known fact. Better to say, “we believe” or “we speculate” rather than “we know”.
But if one wants the whole context, Jerry was really embarrassed by evolutionary psychologists Thornhill and Palmer’s survey of rape and their inference that the tendency to rape is selectively favored. The essay by Coyne, Of Vice and Men isn’t available anymore.
Is he a bit embarrassed for admitting the truth now?
Here is one blurb I picked up talking about Coyne’s infamous essay:
http://www.reviewevolution.com/viewersGuide/Evolution_05.php#40546
That’s like the pot calling the kettle black. So Jerry, what does the common ancestor of tigers and butterflies look like? If you don’t know, just say, “we don’t know”. But if you don’t know, isn’t a little pre-mature to insist one’s story is fact? For all we know it could be some black swan process.
Do you even know what making a solid case means, Sal?
We’re not UD, we don’t care about your pseudoscientific misuse of authority and innuendo without any sort of real evidence in sight.
The trouble with your gambler’s view of the world is that, rather than carefully considering everything on its evidentiary merits and then making your wager, you instead misconstrue “threats” to your preferences at every level in order to protect your “wager.” It’s not reasonable in the least, because it avoids reason as the basis for your bet, which instead is made on the basis of misrepresentation of what’s involved.
Anyway, save your “case by authority and innuendo” for the dolts who are impressed by nonsense. We’re simply not gullible enough for it.
Glen Davidson
Evidently it relies heavily on mind-reading.
Experiments and observations help to make a solid case.
Do you believe plants give birth to mammals? Do you believe mammals give birth to plants? But Jerry believes something was the ancestor of mammals and plants. Even if true, it’s not a solid case, it’s speculation, it’s an imponderable.
Better to label such assertions a “belief statement” rather than experimental science. UCA (theory of universal common ancestry) is built on belief statements that would require sets of events that are so improbable they are hard to distinguish from miracles — that’s assuming UCA is true.
UCA predicts tigers and mosquitos came from the same ancestor. Do you have any actual experiments demonstrating the feasibility of this claim?
Or so a “mind reader” states.
Well, so long as Mung is content to ignore truth.
Glen Davidson
So you don’t notice the huge difference between the two different scenarios? This goes back to your lack of dealing properly with matters, but making sweeping generalizations across very different claims.
What a baseless claim. It’s not speculation, it’s based on normal evidence that people accept for ancestry, similarities appearing in a highly derivative fashion. You certainly have no reasonable explanation for it, while derivation is a very reasonable explanation for derivative patterns.
Why don’t you think about these things, rather than rattle off a bunch of ID soundbites?
Of course you find it comforting to think that it’s a “belief statement,” but in fact evolutionary theory is the only origins model that actually arose from the evidence.
What problem should that be for you, who believes in miracles?
But for us, to insist that miracles are responsible for what appears by all of the evidence of derivation to have come by, wait for it, derivation, is about as absurd a notion as we have encountered.
Do you have any actual experiments demonstrating the feasibility of your miracle claims? Or in favor of your meaningless innuendo and fallacies of authority?
Does anyone have any actual experiments demonstrating the feasibility of two black holes merging? But am I supposed to ignore good gravitational-wave evidence that two actually did?
No, observation is perfectly good evidence, unless you’re trying to move the goalposts. You have no observations or experiments that support your claims, and in fact we have observations that go quite against those and for evolution sans miracles.
So, you appear not to know what a solid case is, which isn’t surprising after a decade of bad thinking inculcated via ID.
Glen Davidson
Do you believe you gave birth to Eleanor Roosevelt? Do you believe Eleanor Roosevelt gave birth to you? But you believe someone was the ancestor of you and Eleanor Roosevelt. Do you think there is a solid case for that? Now in fact there is a very solid case, and there’s also a comparable case for the mammal/plant ancestor. Historical science, despite your imagination, is good science, and we know that all eukaryotes have a common ancestor. You may even be familiar with some of the evidence, though you discount and ignore it.
Better to label such assertions “historical science”. It’s a common trope among creationists that only experimental science, in a lab with, presumably, a white coat and test tubes, is real science. Real scientists would disagree.
An odd objection from a person who believes in copious miracles. And we aren’t even talking about UCA here. Eukaryotes are very, very far from that.
Are you asking for a tiger to give birth to a mosquito in the laboratory, or what? Why do you completely discount phylogenetic as a source of reliable conclusions? Hey, most of it these days takes place in labs! With white coats!
At least I’m credentialed.
I simply refuse to believe that Ted Cruz and I had a common ancestor. Therefore we did NOT have a common ancestor. It’s too preposterous. QED.
Yeah, many people feel the same way about themselves and monkeys. Go figure.
stcordova,
No event more improbable than organisms having offspring (but not necessarily with every organism on earth), and merging genomes (though not necessarily daily) is required.
Last night, with insomnia allowing me a little time to think (something I’ve been doing a lot of over a periodod about 85+ years at this time), it struck me:
Would the intelligent designer be capable of the design and manufacture of a crude machine like f.i. the famous American V8-engine? I don’t think so. If he could, why didn’t he make it, just to let us know that he is there even though we may not see him?
And yet, he’s being attributed with the capability of creating all that we see around us?
Not very credible. If you read your Bible you wil find that he said “Let there be”, meaning he left it to the forces of nature to make things happen.
That’s why we had to invent the V8, he couldn’t. Since then, we’ve made a lot of fascinating inventions that he failed to make. Reality is, we don’t see the sligthest signs of His Existence. He’s absent, or indifferent. I vote for the latter.
Kurt Vonnegut in one of his books invented the “Church of God the utterly Indifferent” and I think that’s as close to the real thing as we can get.
As we all know, the concept of gods was invented by our early ancestors to explain the world they found themselves in, without knowing anything about how that had come to be.
So, in order to make sense of their world, they invented lesser gods to account for rains, winds and other phenomena. And a major God above them all, the ultimate creator that just poofed the universe and everything else it into existence.
Rolf,
Thanks, Rolf. And welcome to TSZ.
Rolf,
Yes, it’s interesting how much more complex life is than are our inventions.
And yet, nothing like what we make appears without our efforts (unlike in Douglas Adams’ worlds), and the only complex functional things that arose without known designers contain copious evidence of non-magic evolution.
It’s just a coincidence that complex functional things not designed by known designers have the evidence of derivation that is entailed by known evolutionary processes?
It’s amazing, isn’t it? Unless, just maybe, life did evolve sans designers.
Glen Davidson
I’m inclined to agree with you at first blush, but I think that it is more complex than that. That view is probably heavily influenced by our Western experience of Christian religions and all of the missionary work involved in “spreading the good news”. Many sincerely-held beliefs still (IMHO) classify as bat-shit crazy even if they are held by religions with less Dominionist tendencies that Evangelical Protestants.
Followers of Nuwaubianism believe that they must bury their placenta after childbirth so that Satan doesn’t clone their children. However, I’m not aware of any major push to legislate that into Georgia law.
Atheists belong in the irrational camp for the very reason that they deny their own intelligence.
They insist on a dichotomy between nature and humanity – that what humans have achieved, nature has not.
its cognitive dissonance, that tortucan mentality, compartmentalization of concepts, so they can feel good about being mavericks against the spiritual majority.
in essense, they are always a day late and a dollar short.
Think about it, with their doubting thomas ways, could an atheist make a revolutionary discovery?
Just look at Joe, Larry, and company – nope, nope, its all junk. nope, nope dembski didn’t put that last nail in the mathematical coffin. nope. nope. doesn’t count.
So when you’ve got atheists doing science, there is no incentive for new discovery. Warming administrative armchairs? Sure.
But actually finding something awesome and revolutionary?
Fawgeddaboutit!
That’s not why they chose science.
I’m always amazed how completely mystified True Believers are when confronted by the sane. Every single claim here is so far off base it’s not even in the right time zone. True Believers have crawled into a hole they can’t see out of, and pulled the hole in after themselves. When you see a mind on religion, you really don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
On the contrary Flint, this is not about religion or areligion.
Its about rationality. There is nothing rational about refusing to contemplate the fact that nature designs precisely like humanity designs.
Only someone with an attitude would refuse to consider such a blatant observation.
Leave religion out of it. Speak to the issue. Where is the dichotomy between nature’s supposed inability to design and humanity ability to design?
In the context of this OP, your insistence on a dichotomy would be ‘naturally’ considered reason enough to put you in the irrational nonsense collection.
Prove you are not a member of the iNC.
Says Steve-o who decided to insult atheists first and foremost.
Okay, dude, I’ll “leave religion out of it” if you’ll just plain leave.
Just idle curiosity, I looked up Nobel prize winning scientists who profess no religion (self-identified as atheist, agnostic, freethinker).
As a group, we’re definitely keeping up our prize percentage compared to our percentage of the general population.
Watson. Crick. Chandrasekhar. Bohr. All the Curies. Arrhenius. Sanger. Schrödinger.
And Nobel himself identified as an atheist later in life. But what did he know! Obviously neither intelligent nor moral whatsoever!
Why does anyone who professes religion think that it would please their god to insult and belittle other humans just because they don’t happen to believe in that same god (or any god)? Do they genuinely think they are brave warriors for the one true god — over the internet ?
Is their god so petty-minded and jealous ?
That last one is a rhetorical question. 🙂
Perhaps I am confused about the intention of this statement. Materialists believe that nature (sans Supernatural guidance) has created all life including humans.
It is the Theists that see humans as a Special Creation with (to quote John C. Lennox) nearly “infinite value” being completely separate from and above all other life.
It didn’t seem to come from anywhere except for Steve’s imagination. People discussed the difference between what intelligence does vs. what non-intelligence does, but that’s generally accepted by IDists and by those who don’t deny science.
It was really just a bizarre attack on the evil atheists, for all I could tell. A strange melange of wildly incorrect statements satisfying some kind of emotional need in the poster, with no pretense of rational argumentation.
Glen Davidson
So I’m not a True Believer?
I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but sometimes a troll is just a troll. After re-reading his full comments, I’m amused at how many statements he attempted to apply to Atheists that come directly from arguments against ID and Creationism. Tortucan-traps, armchair research, cognitive dissonance, etc…
This is one of those laugh or cry moments.
Here we have the Hot_Shoe and Flint insisting I have insulted them by claiming they are irrational for their atheist positions.
Yet, it seems this site among many other are dedicated to insisting that any people that harbor any type of believe in unseen entities are…. wait for it…….irrational.
So by their standards they have repeatedly insulted a huge number of people.
This seems an appropriate time to make the proper introductions….kettle, meet pot.
No matter, the interesting quesiton is will Flint put his toes in those icy dichotomous waters? Will he explain how humans have an extraordinary ability to design but nature does not?
Since this accusation is false, why should we not be offended. You are lying.
Of course, it’s more than “unseen”, it’s unevidenced in any way whatsoever. Complete unsupported fiction. Reifying figments of your imagination is indeed irrational. Drawing tentative conclusions from a body of evidence is rational.
And deservedly so. If the shoe fits, and all that. But maybe you can be the very first to provide evidence beyond sincere assertion or some sort of statistical fallacy. Care to try? Most of us would just LOVE to examine your evidence.
Only if evidence does not matter. But in the Real World, evidenced is qualitatively different from unevidenced. Only the kettle is black. You seem incapable of grasping that Making Shit Up is NOT the same thing as providing evidence.
Huh? Of course nature has the ability to design. Nature and humans use different design methodologies, but they are both designers. Just as the wind and an opera singer can both sing. The distinction you are probably trying to draw here is whether a design is planned in advance.
If you can’t spell my ‘nym right, you could have just copied and pasted it from my comment.
Since you can’t do that one simple thing right, why should anyone trust you to know what you’re doing when you talk about anything else ??
Do you have a list of unseen entities it’s rational to believe in?
Presumably you don’t believe in Santa? Or Thor?
Do you believe, as many other IDists do, in ghosts? If so, what are ghosts? The dead come back or something else? If you don’t believe in ghosts are you irrational?
Ah, taking a page from Liddle’s playbook I see.
Co-opt the opposition’s POV up until a point to take the wind out of their sails. But draw a distinction to satisfy your own camp that you haven’t been converted.
Like Hillary becoming Sanders (*with a wink, wink) when its obvious you are in a tight spot.
I get it.
But unfortunately for you, nature doesn’t design like the wind sings.
You’ve got it backwards. Man is a design apprentice, not a journeyman.
Man has only discovered the design principles nature has been using for billions of years. Not only that, there are predictably numerous new design principles to be discovered in the genome. It’s just that we have not been able to wrap our brain around these higher level abstract principles yet.
Just ask Larry Moran. All he sees is junk, well, because it just, you know..looks like junk to him.
And thats how it stands today in this debate. One man’s junk is another man’s gold.
Smart money is on the gold.
Pardon the underscore hotshoe.
My apologies.
Rolf, you need to drink a hot cup of chamomile tea. Your insomnia is not helping you think clearly.
So god is not good enough to make a V-8 engine?! But he is obviously good enough to design a human body.
So by this logic, Man must of course be able to design and run a prototype organism similar to or more advanced than humans. I mean with Man’s V-8 prowess, God is severely handicapped, right?
So Rolf, when do we get to see an initial strike-off?
Only here at “the skeptical zone” is it safe to believe in the uniqueness of humanity vis a vis the creation of artifacts. A simple cell could not possibly be an artifact-making entity, because as we all know, artifact-making requires intelligence.
As I said, they use different methodologies.
I didn’t put these in any order, but nonetheless I agree with you. Many if not most human designs are copied from, based on, or derived from natural designs.
This is a confident prediction, but confidence and accuracy do not necessarily correlate. Maybe more design will be found – I’d be amazed if it were not.
This statement of faith is easily refuted, just by reading anything Larry Moran has said. He uses metrics which he carefully spells out for you – whether there are homologous sequences in related species, whether some sequence is preserved or mutates freely, the degree to which any resulting RNA is produced, the sheer number of copies of identical short sequences scattered through the genome, and others. The accusation that he’s just making it up to suit himself is pure projection on your part.
Well, except for the evidence. If some multiply-copied short sequence is free to mutate randomly and doesn’t seem to do anything, that MIGHT be a clue – unless you see gold ust because, you know, it LOOKS like gold to you.
Even smarter money is on the evidence. I have no idea why you are so impervious to evidence. Do you maybe not know what it is?
Who besides you has represented anything this way? Many species create artifacts, and nobody says, for example, “birds are too stupid, so the Designer must be making their nests.” However, our definition of intelligence entails abstraction of ideas, and making plans. Making artifacts does NOT necessarily entail these things.
All intelligences are artificers, but not all artificers are intelligent.
To the extent it says Tiger’s and mosquitos came from the same ancestors like supposedly giraffes and venus fly traps — no!
Homology is similarity and the term was coined by creationist Richard Owen. Similarity proves similarity, not phylogeny.
As far as Glen’s complaint of lack of experiments demonstrating miracles, the issue is if a phenomenon is repeatable at our whim, it is not a miraculous mechanism but a law of physics and chemistry by definition. Hence Glen’s epistemology is totally flawed if he expect experiments will directly detect miracles and if indeed miracles happen.
UCA requires such statistically improbable sets of events to happen that it is hard to distinguish it from miracles of special creation.
We share some DNA with bacteria, but how do you explain TRGs (taxonomically restricted genes) that are unique to Eukaryotes like the genes that code for histones and spliceosome parts? There is no ancestor of these parts in the phylogenetic record, they sort of just poofed on the scene!
You all claim it is natural, but no one has been able to make a case that such transitions from prokaryote to eukaryote are as mechanically reasonable as a shark giving birth to other sharks for N-generations. You can’t say the common ancestor of plants and animals is as typical as a shark giving birth to a shark. No way!
Plants give birth to plants. Animals give birth to animals. If we don’t really know how they supposedly have a common ancestor, the scientifically responsible thing is to say, “we don’t know!” Why is that so hard? You can say you believe it had a common ancestor, but that’s quite a different thing than having experimental facts.
Even Jerry Coyne had to concede evolutionary ideas are at the bottom of science’s pecking order because of the lack of experimental verification.
And for all of Glen’s complaining of solid cases, note Coyne contrasts evolutionary biology against the “harder sciences” which implies evolutionary biology is a “soft science.”
Ok Glen, soft means deformable, therefore not solid. So don’t you find it ironic Glen you’re complaining about me not knowing about a solid case when you yourself swear by something that isn’t solid? 🙂
Ah, the “I can’t imagine how this could happen, therefore it can’t have happened” defense of creationism. The entire biosphere is limited by Sal’s failure of imagination.
Flint’s imagination though is legendary.
So you can imagine the common ancestor of elephants, butterflies, starfish and tulips? What would the creature look like?
I think one needs some LSD to imagine that.
No wonder one needs to resort to molecular phylogeny because mechanically reasonable common ancestors seem not only absent in the fossil record, they seem absent in principle.
Reductio ad absurdum. You are relying on the micro vs. macro argument against common descent. Can you imagine a common ancestor between giraffes and horses? How about between giraffes and elephants? Do they require LSD (or maybe just a few hits of weed) to imagine?
It’s a single-celled eukaryote, lacking chloroplasts, probably diploid with a haploid gamete phase, one of which is motile. Not as difficult to imagine as you imagine. And supported by extensive evidence of the sort you refuse to look at and dismiss with “similarity is similarity”. All that you’re learning in your biochemistry class will be useless to you if you don’t understand the least little thing about phylogenetics.
I want to translate this diagram. Can someone please provide its source code?