…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
…the noyau, an animal society held together by mutual animosity rather than co-operation
Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative.
I do my best trolling with the ABU Cardinal fishing reel.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Abu_Cardinal_expl.jpg
l ol
Mung,
+1
All spin, no fish.
I tried it, but all I could catch were red herrings soaked in oil of ad hominem.
That gets old.
Glen Davidson
This is a comment I’d like to respond to from another thread:
I’m teaching them how critical thinking shows the claims of evolutionists is not well supported by repeatable observations, and why I believe a Creator is a better explanation.
No, you don’t realize cumulative selection and modern evolutionary theory are not NATURAL, they are imaginary.
Modern evolutionary theory(s) don’t have experimental evidence backing them up in the major claims such as Eukaryotic evolution from a prokaryotic-like form.
Cumulative selection is not the norm in lab and field observations, extinction and reductive evolution are well observed. Evolutionary theory seems not to agree with actual repeatable experiments in the dimensions where they really count.
You doubt my claim? How about the evolutionists state what the net number of new multicellular animas arising are per year? If they have no idea what the present rates of new animal species arising each year are, if they can’t measure it, then how can they possibly assert their theory is right?
I’m sorry, for someone like you who swears by repeatability, a student of biology like myself (a new student that is) or any other student of biology capable of critical thinking ought to notice something is wrong with a theory that claims to have experimental evidence (like antibiotic resistance) that isn’t really relevant to its major claims (like emergence of novel large scale complexity such as Eukaryotic forms and new multicellular species).
You can say evolution worked in the past in a way different than today, but then, on grounds do you claim it is really natural than imaginary. Darwin said, “Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”. I could easily say, “Elimination of Species by Means of Natural Selection” or “Reductive Evolution (loss of genomic function) by Means of Natural Selection.” Which claims are closer to direct observational evidence and repeatability?
Then you’re teaching them a lie.
stcordova,
(For those following along at home, Sal describes his indoctrination of children here and I respond here.)
What evidence do you provide for the existence of your god?
Says the person who admits ignorance of biology.
Here’s what you said about your “teaching”:
Do you bother to explain to them that your example has nothing to do with evolution? Do you mock other scientists as well? How else do you encourage willful ignorance in an innocent six-year-old?
If you want more Frankies and phoodoos, indoctrinating them in willful ignorance before they are able to defend themselves is exactly how to do it. You are an abuser of children. Think about it and stop it.
The miracle of life. You claim life is the result of natural processes, but you fail to show that natural (aka typical, repeatable) actually creates life.
Has plenty to do with the origin and maintenance of homochirality, a necessary condition for OOL. The coins are an illustration of the binomial distribution that chiral amino acids would follow in a plausible OOL scenario.
The ideas can be extended to higher constructs (like DNA grammars) to drive home the point. It just takes a little more work to show.
Nick Matzke, PhD wasn’t even will to concede one micron of ground and admit I found an example relevant to biology where an exceptional chemical property (homochirality) was not based on some after-the-fact CSI calculation, but could be gleaned from straight forward statistics.
I think he knew, if I could find one such property without the cumbersomeness of CSI, I and other IDists could find more such exceptional properties.
You’ve shown that your favorite supernatural entity POOFED life into existence exactly…where?
stcordova,
No, proof by contradiction. You’re channeling Nick Matzke.
I’d reject the chance hypothesis based on proof by contradiction. That’s not an argument from incredulity. Apparently Nick needs schooling on the difference. You seem unwilling to acknowledge there is a difference.
If I said, “life does not naturally arise from non-life, it takes a special event(s)” to an 8-year old, would you have a problem with that?
If you say, “yes.” Then what would you have me say.
“Patrick says life arises naturally from non-life, even though Patrick can’t cite any experiments that actually show this, he insists that it’s child abuse if any one teaches you otherwise even though we have zero experimental or observational evidence that shows life naturally arises from non-life.”
What do you want me to say, that we actually have experiments where life naturally arises from non-life? I’d be lying to them. Would you like me to pass on such lies to the kids?
Sal is simply paying forward what was done unto him. Faith in the imaginary is like a parasite, not just deluding the host mind but ensuring that the host passes the parasite to each succeeding generation.
We see here the pavement of good intentions in action.
Sal, who do you think you are kidding? How many examples can YOU provide of your imaginary god poofing up life from non-life? You seem to be assuming your poof conviction is the default, and must be true if some other means is not demonstrated to your satisfaction. To use your own words, we have “zero experimental or observational evidence” that life was poofed up by your god.
However, we DO have a very large body of experimental and observational evidence of what is possible with ordinary physical and chemical processes, and life IS a physical and chemical process. We have “zero experimental or observational evidence” that ANY gods exist or have EVER done ANYTHING. Not something relevant, not something kinda sorta related, but ANYTHING AT ALL.
It’s entirely likely that the (very gradual) development of life from non-life DOES require some finite set of conditions. Life already existing is NOT one of those conditions, but I don’t imagine you mention this, right?
The claim that because nobody has created life in a lab, THEREFORE your god poofed it up by magic, is the lie. And bald-faced at that.
That analogy is hilarious. So your analogy to reject chance is one where no tossing is allowed? Begging the question much?
Zero direct, but not zero indirect.
You may not have seen miracle or the miracle maker, but that does not mean life is not the result of a miracle, and if life does not naturally arise from non-life, then life is a miracle, and miracle require a Miracle Maker.
How does Crick define “almost a miracle” — as in requiring intelligent beings from outer space. God seems a better explanation because the ETs would also need a creator.
The word was “involved” not “allowed”! The context started here:
Barry re-worded it a little later, but Nick knew what we were talking about, and that was the original question:
.
What’s the difference Sal? I mean, seriously
We avoided saying “the coins on the table were randomly tossed into that configuration”. That would be just plain stupid, unless one were playing loose with what was meant.
We used the word “no tossing involved” to emphasize that Nick didn’t see the coins being tossed or whatever, all he saw was the coins on the table. The reason we used the word “no tossing involved” was people at TSZ kept using the phrase “tossed”, and I wanted to emphasize we weren’t looking at a hypothetical example of tossing, but an observed configuration.
The argument over “tossed” began here:
I went on to show this was 22+ sigma deviation.
I have put sets of coins in front of kids on a table, and asked them if they think they were the result of chance. I sent a 6-year old out of the room while I made all the coins on the table heads. When he came back, he said, “you touched them!” Earlier I had just been shaking the coins and pouring them on the table in front of him. He understood intuitively the law of large numbers and binomial distribution even though formalisms are way beyond him right now.
Such statistical ideas are quite relevant to OOL, namely the notion of expected outcomes.
Sorry, zero indirect as well.
But notice that little word “if” in there! If life arose naturally even once from non-life, your “if” has failed. You are assuming magic as the default.
Ordinarily you seem like a smart guy, but when it comes to your indoctrinated faith, you assume your conclusions, and you demand levels of evidence for any other conclusion impossible to produce, while requiring not even the suggestion of a hint in support of your assumptions.
Sal, you live in a world where the creativity of biology beggars the imagination, while the next verified miracle will be the first ever. What need is being satisfied by this posture?
Do you think your children would grasp the concept of flipping each coin until it came up heads, and then not flipping it again? Do you think selection is that impossible for them to understand? Do you think they’d regard the final all-heads configuration as random because every coin was fairly flipped?
There’s something about selection, how it works and what it does and how very common it is, that seems to bounce right off a certain mindset.
There is some point something is exceptional enough to look like a miracle. Events more remote than 1 out of the number of atoms in the universe are good enough for me to be a miracle. If I’m wrong, it’s an honest mistake.
A good number of researchers (like Koonin) estimate odds as remote as I do. I’m not exactly fringe in that regard.
If you think no phenomenon can in principle be so exceptional that it can constitute a miracle, I respect that, but if that is the case, then there would be no miracle even in principle that would count as evidence for you even if it did happen. At some point, an element of faith rather than formal deduction will have to settle it for each person.
As I mentioned, Dawkins at this point in his life, even if he witnesses God giving him miracles and visual appearances would assume he was having a hallucination (a naturalistic explanation). There is some aspect in this debate where each side is faced with a practically if not formally undecidable proposition: “is origin of life a miracle or not”.
I also point out, if miracles are repeatable at our will and call, they aren’t miracles, they are laws of physics and chemistry.
Well thanks for the kind words along with your objections.
But we do at least have hints. Here is one physicist at my graduate alma mater who says what we know of Physics hints there is a God:
and
So there is at least some hint to suppose there is a MIND that can work the magic. Since I view life as a miracle, I believe in a Miracle Maker.
Sorry, but this is bad teaching.
As is probably apparent from my posts here, I disagree with the consensus view about AI, and I disagree with the consensus philosophy that relates to AI. So what do I teach my computer science students in an AI class?
I don’t. I refuse to teach that class. The students are not there to learn my beliefs about what is true. They are there to learn the consensus. There future employment depends on them learning the consensus. I would be doing them harm to teach something that will harm their futures.
No matter how strongly you belief you are correct, you are still harming your students. They need to learn the consensus. It’s okay to mention that there are people who disagree with the consensus. But, as a teacher, you need to avoid letting your personal biases affect what you teach — even if it eventually turns out that you are right.
Selection, even according to the mainstream, is not viewed as applicable to OOL, which is my first focus for the young kids. The issue of selection is more advanced and I teach it to higher level, older students.
Additionally, “Natural Selection” is a claim by Dawkins (after Darwin) that nature naturally selects for improbable configurations (climbing mount improbable) and thus circumvents the law of large numbers and associated statistics.
That is a far more sophisticated discussion than one could teach to kids age 6. Once they get to around college level biology, I then pose more sophisticated arguments, like the Chicken-and-egg paradox especially to biology students.
I frame the question in term that they are familiar: How can non-existent traits be selected for: spiceosomal introns spiceosomes, histones, insulin regulated metabolisms that do not have insulin nor appropriate tyrosine kinase receptors, alternative start codons, histone acetyl trnasferases and deacetylases, etc. etc.
Regarding cumulative selection, there is the issue of maintainability of large genomes. If the mutation rate in human genomes is 150 per individual per generation, and if the majority are function breaking, then according to well-accepted population genetics, the human genome is deteriorating, and selection cannot arrest it as a matter of principle. Cumulative selection cannot work if there is high specificity in the architecture of the molecular machines (little tolerance for mutation without breaking something).
The NIH is quietly doing research that is not politically correct according to evolutionists like Dan Graur and Larry Moran. If the creationists are right, selection as a matter of principle, cannot be sustaining the human genome for millions of years, and the human race is one its way to extinction or greatly reduced ability over the next few millennia. I dealt with the Poisson distributions and population genetic issues here, which agrees with the mainstream:
Larry Moran, said I was being stupid, but didn’t actually dispute my final conclusions:
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-creationist-tries-to-understand.html
Note the figure Moran uses:
This also tracks a concern that Joe Felsenstein expressed in page 155 of his Theretical Evolutionary Genetics book, in the section “Why We Aren’t All Dead”. I had a side discussion about his book here:
There are many NIH staffers and researchers in the churches in my geographical area. I’ve decided to enroll this year in the NIH FAES grad school and attend NIH conferences to confirm for myself if there is genetic deterioration going on. So I guess I’m now a student of biology. 🙂
There are projects now in place that may give us a large enough databases (say hundreds of millions of medical records and small DNA samples) that can settle the issue about genetic deterioration. I’ve been personally monitoring what is getting published and talked about at the NIH.
I’ve been told, I’m the only IDist looking into the ID relevant developments at the NIH in addition to ENCODE (RNA transcriptome) such as the Roadmap (DNA Epigenome) and E4 (Enabling Exploration of Eukaryotic (RNA) Epitranscriptome), the glycome, the epi-proteome, etc.
I’ve reported at TSZ some of what I’ve learned. It wasn’t well received, but here is some of it:
The “-omics” pose a problem for selection because it shows that selection cannot cope with the mutation rates relative to the size of the functional information in the human genome as evidenced by the transcriptome, proteome, epigenome, epitranscriptome, epi proteome, glycome.
I also think, DNA is not the sole repository of information that must be mutated. The glycome or something in the cytoplasm has information that the DNA doesn’t have, such as protein post-translational data. For example, the Lysyl Oxidase protein has a piece of copper inserted into it. That information of where to locate the piece of copper is nowhere to be found in the DNA!
If there is more than DNA that needs to be mutated, such as the glyco protein compexes, this makes it even harder for selection to work.
Well, consider that we have ONE known case where conditions were suitable, and in 100% of those cases life developed. Because our sample size is so small, estimates range everywhere from “highly unlikely” to “almost inevitable.” You are selecting something almost off the end of the spectrum for theological reasons unrelated to the chemistry and physics.
Again you have stacked the deck. Since there are no known miracles (and nearly every event is in some respects almost infinitely unlikely), I should think a reasonable default would be to look for some non-magical explanation. So far, every alleged miracle that can be investigated, turns out not to meet your requirements.
Yes, but you leap to “faith” FIRST, without ever considering anything else.
I think you are mischaracterizing the nature of skepticism. We have countless thousands of cases of imagination, hallucination, mirages, wishful thinking, misinterpretation, faulty memory, and so on. So Dawkins assuming a hallucination would not be unreasonable provided this assumption could be tested. As a skeptic, I admit I would expect some pretty damn rigorous testing of this god and its miracles. And if it passed enough tests, I’d regard “supernatural poofing” as the most likely working hypothesis.
So you are carefully restricting miracles to those events that can’t be examined? Doesn’t that strike you as suspiciously convenient? Miracles are those events immune to the need for “pathetic levels of detail.”
I’ll have to read that. I’m suspicious of physicists pontificating on the nature of consciousness, because when you scratch the surface, you ALWAYS find a religious believer underneath.
Sigh. This is not a hint that there is a MIND that can work magic. This is a hint that someone who KNOWS there is such a mind will FIND such a mind. No such mind need exist for this to happen. And of course, pay not attention to the fact that we are aware of minds by the billions, NONE of which can do any such thing. Only imaginary minds can do it.
I suggest that you are looking at a natural process, perhaps a nearly inevitable process under the circumstances, and FORCING your imaginary god to have performed it, a priori. The NEED to believe in some miracle-izer, leading to the NEED to find something “miraculous” to ratify it, baffles me. Why this need? What does it gain you, except poor thinking?
This is not my reading. While there is no definition of “life” I’ve ever seen that either (1) includes something we don’t consider alive; or (2) disallows something we regard as alive, efforts to determine processes that had the potential to develop into life presume feedback.
In other words (and it shouldn’t be necessary to go through this), there is no special bright line with unambiguous life on one side and unambiguous non-life on the other. The usual model is that some molecules, perhaps in the presence of some catalysts, could replicate. And as soon as you have replication, you have the potential for selection. This selective process can precede what (let’s say) 50% of modern biologists would consider “life” by tens of millions of years – during which selection never stops.
It’s entirely likely that evolution led to life, and not the other way around.
Let me say briefly, regarding the idea of genetic deterioration and some of my personal investigation into the question, for once, at some level I hope the creationists are dead wrong, the prospects of human genomic deterioration aren’t a happy one.
I need to, for my own sense of curiosity, find out if the hypothesis of genetic deterioration is correct or not. If we find out that that we’re not deteriorating but rather mutations are non-random, that would be still creationist friendly, but not so gloomy.
We’re are barely at the point we can start looking into the question now that sequencing technology are getting far cheaper. I foresaw the development in 2007:
We already know the creationists are wrong about “deterioration” — obviously, if they were right, we wouldn’t have any short-lived fast-generation animals left. No bacteria — they would have “deteriorated” out of existence. Not even any observable little critters like mice, with approximately 300 mouse generations for every human generation. Unless the creationist liars say humans are specifically affected (because the Fall, or whatever crap they’re currently trying to scare the kids with) in which case their genetics is pretty goddamned cherry-picked to pretend humans are “deteriorating” and everything else isn’t, even though they admit we share the same basic DNA biochemistry.
It’s a typical creationist denial of reality for blind religious reasons. It’s nothing to be afraid of, except to be afraid of it sucking in yet more generations of innocent kids to be afraid.
Truly religion poisons everything.
Apparently, Jesus himself was a victim of that poison.
If anyone thinks himself to be religious, and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s religion is worthless. Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
– James
They have a higher excess reproduction rate. But now that you mention it, mice would be a good thing to look at! 🙂
Deterioration doesn’t mean extinction, tape worms have deteriorated (lost lots of their organs), but they are still alive. There is this mathematical renormalization toward the best of the worst, and hence deterioration can happen without affecting absolute fitness — imbeciles might be able to make as many if not more babies than geniuses, for example.
Thanks for your skepticism. There’s a lot of our tax dollars being spend on MOUSE ENCODE, not just human ENCODE. You gave me a good idea to look into — mouse ENCODE.
I should mention, there is evidence codon bias is deteriorating in some micro organisms. Muller’s ratchet (a phrase coined by our very own Joe Felsenstein) can also be researched for microbes.
And from the closet creationists at the NIH, we have this:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23801028
“punctuated by episodes of complexification.” as in POOF?
Again we have a language barrier. Today, more organisms are losing organs than gaining them, because there are more kinds of parasites than hosts. And parasites do not need organs to do what the host does for them. But if an organism adopts a more successful lifestyle, and that lifestyle dispenses with superfluous organs, why say that organism has “deteriorated”? When fish in caves lose their eyes because the eyes are a useless burden, are they “deteriorating” by adapting? Really?
In general, there is no evolutionary drive toward greater complexity – evolution moves lineages in both directions, neither of which is a poof.
Yes, and it is a concern, and I’ve concluded then the Designer enjoys playing a game of hide and seek along with making malicious intelligent designs to plague those who don’t seek and find.
At some level I hope I’m wrong because if I’m right, it’s not good news for most of humanity — i.e. diseases and wars and pestilence and famine and suffering — all by design in a game of hide and seek by the Designer.
There are days I’d rather believe what you believe rather than think there is Designer who creates a world so full of beauty and wonder but mixes in horrific pain to boot.
Of late, I think I’d almost be happier not thinking there is a Designer, because if there is a Designer and Miracle Maker, He’s going out of his way to inflict misery, and that’s scary.
It would be far more merciful to the majority of humanity if all this were an accident, because at least when they die, that’s it. We can then just try to enjoy ourselves as best as we can until we check out of this life.
Regretfully, I don’t think life and the misery of this world is an accident, it looks to me like a designed world that is also intelligently cursed by God deliberately toward futility and suffering by putting it in the hands mostly of the Devil.
Even Darwin could sense this:
Neil Rickert,
If you’re ever so inclined, I’d be very interested in reading an OP from you on your views on AI and how they differ from the consensus (even if you ruin some of my favorite science fiction stories).
stcordova,
And that, after all, is the only goal of YECs and IDCists. Everything is another battle in the culture war, collateral damage be damned.
Sal, it’s clear that you’ve been broken. Your pathetic need to worship an evil deity is clearly a result of the abuse you’ve suffered and your own lack of self-esteem. That damage explains, but it does not excuse, the damage you are inflicting on others.
Stop it. Get some therapy, work through your mommy and daddy issues, and stop abusing children. What you are doing is reprehensible.
There are some posts on my blog. Clicking my name on this comment probably takes you to my blog. Actually, I have posted an OP here on the topic. See AI Skepticism.
I can still enjoy science fiction.
The “digital tone discriminator circuit demonstrates how even logic circuits can evolve to exapt the analog properties of their underlying structure. I use this as a metaphor in my own thinking about how brains work.
It seems a lot more sensible and better supported than mysterious quantum effects.
quoted for truth (… minus some psychoanalyzing).
There isn’t any mechanism in a civil democratic society for stopping people from continuing the kind of religious child abuse which Sal admits to committing. Except just flat out telling them to stop it, and hoping that there’s a decent human in there somewhere who might get the message.
Hope springs eternal.
Thank you for admitting evolution does not predict a branching tree pattern
How is that even relevant? Did you understand me to say that parasites have no ancestors? Where did I say that?
LoL! It doesn’t have any direction, well other than one generation gives rise to the next. And because of that no branching tree. And I had no such understanding but I do understand your need for a distraction
Patrick,
Patrick, we all know that you are a sore loser and a mamma’s boy. Like the little pawn you are you gladly say that GAs demonstrate Darwinian evolution even though Darwinian evolution is blind and mindless whereas GAs are the opposite.
Epic fail understanding branching / direction by Frankenstein Joe.
This one is a circle !!
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tree_of_life_SVG.svg
Check mate evilutionists!!
Frankie,
GAs can see and have a mind? Tell us more!
phoodoo wrote in Moderation Issues:
I’ll be happy to compare the quality and value of my last hundred comments here to your last hundred.
Sal said:
There are more options available than “no god” and “scary god I’m afraid to cross”.
Yeah, it’s true, mom and dad could have been in trouble with the police when at a party at our house (my brother-in-law brought some of the Daquri he mixed at the Navy Officers club) they turned the other way when I grabbed a Daquiri at age 8 and crawled into school the next day with the worst hangover of my life.
I remember telling mommy the next morning, “I feel really sick.” Mom realizing that I had drunk the Daquiri, said, “you have a hangover.”
When at school, obviously feeling bad, my friends said, “Salvador, what’s wrong.”
I replied, “I have a hangover.”
The kids started telling the teacher, “Ms. Dupree, Salvador has a hangover!”.
You are correct, at some level, I hope you moreso than the atheists here, are right. That’s the God I used to believe in, one that was more benevolent than the one I believe in now.
Sal,
There are reasons why you feel compelled to worship an abusive deity, and they have nothing to do with evidence or reason. You owe it to yourself and the children you are abusing to stop and figure out what those reasons are.
Patrick,
Evolutionism has more to do with child abuse than worshipping God