Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
Thanks Alan and olegt, and Toronto will now back out of the room smiling with his pet photon, and then interrogate him as to why he behaves sometimes as if he has mass when he has none. 🙂
(That means I’m going to crack a few books.)
The Pound-Bebka experiment – and later the Pound-Snider experiment – is one of the more direct measurements of the effect of gravity on a photon.
One of the most important parts of this experiments was the use of the Mössbauer effect to detect the change in frequency of the photon falling or rising in a gravitational field.
There are a couple of important concepts about the photon that are involved in this experiment. One is the fact that the effect of falling or rising in a gravitational field shows up in its energy; and hence it’s frequency. Another is that when the photon interacts with an atom, it transfers momentum to that atom. This is why Pound and Rebka used the oscillating loudspeaker coil to offset the Doppler shift introduced by the recoiling iron atoms that had just absorbed a photon as well as to scan through the frequencies of the photons that had been absorbed. (note that the experiment measured the deficit of photons passing through the iron absorber.)
The resulting measurements – taken with the source of photons at the top of the tower and again at the bottom of the tower – confirmed general relativity to a precision within 10%. Later experiments have improved that precision considerably.
Other important effects that show that photons carry momentum and energy are Compton effect and the photoelectric effect. If an atom is free, it recoils when emitting or absorbing a photon. If the atom is locked into a solid lattice of atoms, the recoil shows up as phonons traveling through the solid.
So, even though the photon has no mass, it carries energy and momentum; and these show up in the interaction of photons with matter and when photons are moving through a gravitational potential well. The change in potential energy is reflected in the photon’s energy and momentum.
Besides energy and momentum, electrons have charge and spin. All of these properties can be measured to very high precision. The electron g-factor anomaly (g-2) has been measured to something like 13 significant figures. Quantum Electrodynamics deals with the interactions of photons with matter; and the measurements in this field are among the most precise in all of physics.
If I had known physics was so fascinating way back when, I would have pursued it as a career.
But what did I get involved with instead, the wonderful world of software.
I take it here they mean an “effective” mass for the purposes of explanation.
What if there was no “Creator/Intelligent Designer”?
Then life wouldn’t be a “Creation”.
Do you have a “designer” capable of creating life, Joe?
That Wikipedia article is simply using “mass of a photon” as an analogy. It is somewhat analogous to using the mechanical equivalent of heat in order to express the amount of heat in units such as joules.
A better way to do the calculation is to simply start with the equation that Oleg gave above. One finds from quantum mechanics that the energy of a photon is E = hf, where h is Planck’s constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Then one can use that formula Oleg gave to find the momentum of the photon. One doesn’t even have to talk about the “mass” of a photon.
The photon is a boson that is the mediator of the electromagnetic force. The connections of quantum mechanics with general relativity are not yet worked out despite the fact that we can calculate the effects of gravity on photons. We only know that we don’t know at this point. It apparently has something to do with the equivalence of mass and energy that concentrations of energy can also have gravitational effects. The graviton is the mediator of the gravitational force and has been detected indirectly from the gradual change in the frequency of rotation of gravitationally bound massive neutron stars; a change that can be accounted for if gravity is radiated away in the form of gravitons.
Just how the graviton “couples” to the photon has not been completely worked out; except perhaps in some of the models based on string theory. We don’t even know if string theory is a correct approach, or that it means anything to say there is a “coupling” that occurs between gravitons and photons. String theory has not been adequately tested by experiment because such experiments are currently way beyond our current technology. There is much yet to be done in physics; and it all can’t be done in a single lifetime.
That’s as gnomic as one of BA77’s own utterances (though mercifully shorter!). Which argument do you mean, and why does von Neumann hold the key?
oleg:
I suppose I should have qualified my ‘accelerating objects get heavier’ notion with reference to the inertial frame, then? If you are the accelerating object, your mass and length stay constant. But to an observer in a stationary frame, the length in the direction of travel shrinks and (I understood) the mass increases?
This physics derail arose from a throwaway remark of mine about mass/energy equivalence, because our ID correspondent Joe talked of a ‘material’ universe with which something outside can interfere using pure ‘energy’. But I don’t see how those concepts can be divorced, or partitioned between a ‘material’ world and an ‘energetic’ one.
I tend to talk of matter as ‘frozen’ energy, which is perhaps more metaphorical than good physics … nonetheless, although clearly not exactly the same thing, the continuity of properties between ‘obvious’ material particles and ‘obvious’ forms of energy blurs the distinction. Particle masses are quoted in units of energy, and energy can impart mass, while the very ‘stuff’ of the supposed material world is held together by exchange of particles one might think of as ‘non-material’ – photons and gluons – the binding energy of which makes a significant contribution to the mass of the resulting hadrons/atoms.
And you can pass streams of electrons or even atoms as waves through Young’s slits just as readily as photons of light, yet deflect the ‘wave’ with a magnet …
Then there is the energy imparted by the four forces acting between those ‘material’ particles that are susceptible to them. Without those particles generating and responding to fields of force, no ‘energy’ can exist in that sense.
I’m not, as I say, a physicist, but I would be grateful for any comments you or Mike may care to make on the foregoing.
Any comment directed at Joe would appear to have been thrown away.
Interactions among matter, and the fields that mediate these interactions, are well-understood and quantified to the point that we can measure them out to many significant figures. We can measure energies of interaction that are extremely small, far smaller than is needed to measure the interactions of atoms and electrons within complex molecules.
There are many laboratory techniques with enough sensitivity to detect whether or not something we don’t know about is pushing atoms and molecules around. We know this even from the fact that phenomena like hypothermia and hyperthermia severely disrupt the transmission of easily measurable voltages along the nervous systems of animals. So we know that deities would have to interact with matter at these levels at the very least.
The question that ID/creationists have to answer is, “How does a non-material entity such as a deity interact with matter; what is the mechanism?”
The energies necessary to push atoms and molecules around in complex organisms are easily measurable. A deity would have to use comparable energies. Why haven’t we seen any of this?
If a deity pushes or pulls on something, how does that force vary with distance? If it is large enough to push atoms and molecules around, we should be able to measure the deity-to-atom or molecule distance and plot how the force depends on distance. Why haven’t the ID/creationists done this experiment? They have better funding for this kind of research than do many legitimate research groups doing real science.
Discussing their designer would lead to more questions than answers and so ducking the question, is their only out.
kairosfocus, their resident technical guru, should be asked to comment on this.
I’d like to see if he even makes an attempt.
And we’re left wondering, “Where is the evidence for design?”
You’re okay with “why Darwin can’t”, but you’ve yet to work up the courage to provide a “why the designer can”.
Until people see you actually “put some money in the pot”, they don’t have to take your hand seriously.
Mung – take a course! Read a book! You cannot wrap your head around science with the security blanket of ID theory wrapped around you. If you are seriously wondering what the evidence is … I can only assume there are gaps in your education. Perhaps you look at the science only deeply enough to see why it’s wrong – if you’ve no exams to pass, there’s no strong iincentive to try and see why it might be right. Still, if you confront the evidence head-on and then decide it’s not good enough, fair enough. But people who are educated in the subject tend to be far less critical of it. How so? Metaphysical blinders, perhaps? Maybe. But from what I see, you’ve joined a gang with a credo, and they will chorus ‘bullshit’ to each and every statement or argument a ‘Darwinist’ makes. And with local safety in numbers, you feel justified in snorting ‘bullshit’ too. Hee hee hee, codons ‘symbolise’ amino acids, hee hee hee anyone who argues against that point on the basis of chemistry and physics is a dolt. Hee hee hee, matter-energy relations are just silly hair-splitting by thickoes. Hee hee hee, Common Design is a much better explanation of sequence similarity than Common Descent. Hee hee hee, how can anyone be so stupid as to think you can shuffle amino acids and get functional proteins? I mean, any engineer, lawyer or programmer can tell you what nonsense the chemists and biologists spew, right? (I look forward to another Joe cut ‘n’ paste!).
Today’s xkcd: Think logically (on the dynamics of crackpots).
The authors of threads have the ability to moderate them and move personal attacks to guano or to he sandbox, I believe.
🙂
Intellectually they pose no threat. If they manage to get hold of the handles of political power, as they keep trying to do, they could cost taxpayers and school districts a lot of money and ruin a lot of good science programs. They are also focused on the US Supreme Court appointments, as well as the electing of judges to the state supreme courts; and this is at the center of a lot of behind-the-scenes political manipulation. They are relying on the fact that many voters don’t pay much attention to the appointments and elections of judges to the courts, especially US district courts and state supreme courts.
And speaking of entertainment value; that KF character put up another of his long, scolding screeds. He doesn’t understand the scaling up of the charge-to-mass ratio calculation, what it has to do with ID/creationist “refutations” using ID/creationist dice, coins, and alphabets; and he can’t do the calculation himself. It just blew right by him. Instead, he continues to bluff and bluster about his own made-up FSCO/I without even trying to understand anything about atoms and molecules. No surprises here; but entertaining.
And we should be politically aware enough to understand that creationist political efforts would be as useless as their scientific efforts if there were no broadly supportive political constituency to be organized and mobilized. You can’t lead a parade unless you have a whole parade full of people willing to march.
And so here in Alabama, we have Judge Roy Moore, ex-chief justice of the state supreme court who was booted out for violating constitutional law and refusing legal obligations on the grounds that his personal faith trumped the very constitution he swore to uphold. BUT Moore has won nomination to run for chief justice all over again, essentially unopposed.
The Republican primary WAS the effective election for this office, and Moore won easily – by running on his very record of violating his oath for religious reasons. Creationists didn’t need to invest a penny.
Flint:
Is there anyone running against him in the general election? If so, what do you estimate the odds are of his winning in the general? What’s the general feeling about him in Alabama?
Ah; I found it.
No, fortunately, as the siren call of power would surely overcome my initial good intentions. Only options are edit, delete, ban. Copying to trash is a cumbersome option but I don’t think things are that bad yet. Being ignored is sufficient admonishment for OT comments. Works for me, anyway!
I’m responding to Toronto’s comment here since it seems to be a slightly more appropriate thread. I apologize to Lizzie in advance for my part in all the guano shoveling awaiting her.
I agree with everything except the last line. Dover was ID’s Waterloo as far as pretensions to scientific credibility go. As I’ve noted before here, ID has no observations to explain, it has no testable scientific hypothesis, it makes no predictions that could serve to falsify it — in sum it is scientifically vacuous.
As a religious movement it is also fading. The latest polls show an increase in those identifying as atheist or non-religous. Children of fundamentalists are leaving their parents’ churches in droves, albeit to more “liberal” denominations. There are still the hard-core fundamentalists to contend with, but they’re shrinking in terms of the population (although certainly not fast enough).
Further, with its lack of scientific traction, ID is less interesting to the creationists who are looking for a veneer of respectability for their myths. If ID can’t get them past those pesky Supreme Court rulings and into the schools, there’s no reason to keep quiet about Jesus.
There are a lot of battles left to fight before our children’s education is safe from the anti-science god botherers, but ID isn’t going to be a significant factor. There are a dozen, maybe two dozen at the most, hard core ID faithheads at UD making a bit of noise and effectively zero sense. It’s much more of a mutual support society for those wishing to maintain their Dunning-Kruger delusions than any kind of threat.
Most of the ID advocates over at UD appear to have no sense of their own history. And just because the UD crowd and the AiG/ICR crowd are mutually suspicious of each other doesn’t erase that history. They are directly related by memes and genes.
When “scientific” creationism was in its heyday back in the 1970s and 80s, there was no end to the chutzpa and bullying that came out of that movement. Duane Gish would show up unannounced in the biology classrooms in Kalamazoo, MI and harass the biology teachers (he couldn’t do that today). They got free multi-page spreads of their pseudoscience in local newspapers around the country. They had free national publicity. It all went to their heads as they proceeded to bully school boards, teachers, state boards of education, and state legislatures into accepting their pseudoscience.
After Edwards v. Aguillard, it all started to go downhill for them; and they tried to morph clumsily into “Intelligent Design Theory.” Dover was one of the more devastating stakes through the heart of this political movement. But as we can see, the movement isn’t completely dead; and this is partly because of the current generation’s chutzpa that comes from its complete ignorance of its own history combined with its ignorance of basic science. But it is a weaker chutzpa now.
Most of their current “intellectual” activity seems to be centered on “information” as though there are no such things as physics and chemistry to consider. Calling the logarithm of probability “information” does not suddenly negate all of chemistry, physics, and biology. Yet Dembski, Abel, and the most recent generation of ID advocates over there at UD seem to think taking logarithms gives some kind of new insight into complex systems that cannot be explained by science. All one has to do is take a logarithm of a probability. If it were that easy, why didn’t ID proponents predict the Higgs boson? Why didn’t they discover DNA? They know nothing of the thinking and the processes that went into those discoveries; and they know nothing about the thinking and processes that are going into future discoveries.
I think we can be cautiously optimistic about the ultimate demise of ID/creationism as long as we maintain clear public records of its history, its smarmy socio/political tactics, and its misconceptions and misrepresentations of science. But politics is politics; and sometimes nuttiness prevails.
Gpuccio seems about to depart from the debate, but it’s worth remembering his fallback position. It is not sufficient to demonstrate that variations can accumulate to produce new functionality. One must account for every detail, every gene, every regulatory sequence. As long as there’s a gap, there’s a god to fill it. Or perhaps just a non-physical designer.
It hadn’t occurred to me in quite this form before but, in mathematical terms, they apparently think of evolution as continuous and infinitely differentiable. No matter how closely one looks, there must never be a gap or a kink. If they can imagine such a gap or kink, evolution is wrong and intelligent design is true by default (i.e., what other choice is there?).
Their feigning that ID is not a default position rings pretty hollow. Given what they think they know about science – and what they think they know is all wrong – they can only fill the “gaps” with a designer; they simply have no other alternative that they can imagine. It’s their misconceptions about basic science that burn them. There is no such thing as research in ID theory, only agonizing medieval scholasticism and the infinite regress of nitpicking over the meanings of the meanings of the meanings of meanings. Demonizing Alan Fox doesn’t change any of that.
Mung:
This is incorrect. ‘Darwinism’ has nothing to say on the fundamental implementation necessary for ‘Darwinism’ to occur. Awareness of transcription/translation came 100 years post-Origin. Evolution requires variation and inheritance and (for the NS component) differential reproduction. It doesn’t require as an absolute that the inherited element map onto a particular other form of chemistry (even if you insist it is a symbolic conversion, with lookup tables an’ everything) in order to persist.
You (ie: the purveyors of probabilistic computations on the ‘impossibility of Life’) need to know what the minimum functional protein string was, given the number of acids available at the time, and the frequency of functionally equivalent strings in the protein space dictated by strings of various lengths formed of those acids, before you can start to make some declaration on evolvability, either of proteins themselves or their ‘library’ of subunits. Evolution moves from functional point to functional point.
But, with the naivete typical of ID, the whole modern system is bundled into some minimal package without which Life is declared impossible, right down to its roots. The modern case of 20 acids, in ‘strings’ of length n (that have been through several billion rounds of Mutation, Selection and Drift, and have co-evolved with an entire system of like elements) … why, that’s so much dFSCI that a haystack full of universes laid end to end would not have enough quarks to represent the …. how a designer is supposed to pick the ‘needles’ from such a functionally sparse space, let alone ‘randomness’, Heaven alone knows. There is, in fact, good evidence that protein space is rich in ‘function’. The space of 72 ASCII characters … probably not. So what?
This is something of a caricature of biochemistry. Each reaction in the causal chain from codon to addition of acid to peptide chain follows gradients of chemical potential, ‘downhill’. The fact that codon does not become amino acid by one or even several exothermic chemical reactions does not negate the chemical principles involved. Some of the reactions in the translation chain do not ‘naturally’ proceed in that direction, but there is coupling of energetic carriers (one of which is aminoacylated tRNA, another of which is the binding energy of mRNA docking) which enable the reaction as a whole to proceed ‘downhill’. The coupling of codon to acid is not direct, but it is entirely by stepwise descent of gradients of chemical potential – and the fundamental peptide-forming reaction does not even require a codon.
This kind of coupling chain is found throughout biochemistry – the protein synthesis pathway is not some kind of exception to the cell-wide mechanistic way in which reaction pathways proceed. Things don’t have to become other things, chemically, in order to be governed by physical law. But protein synthesis is singled out for special mention, because of its persuasive modern resemblance to our codes. Yet you haven’t discovered a biochemical pathway that is any kind of an exception to the general mode of biochemical pathways … it simply possesses a modern multiplicity of substrates, each with an optimum binding affinity for (at one end) one of the several aaRS enzymes in the modern system, and (at the other), strongest binding (hence, greatest likelihood of peptidyl transferase catalysis) for a limited number of the codons in the 64-codon triplet set. The codon-acid link is not strictly determined by physical law, but then neither are distal parts of any biochemical pathway. Because it is a system that follows chemical gradients but does not derive from chemical necessity, specificity can evolve from generality.
The full ASCII table had a job to do on day 1. No evidence has been adduced other than the absence of an older system, or the fact that such systems do not self-organise before our very eyes, to support the thesis that protein ‘coding’ has been eternally constrained in an equivalent manner.
Are you Creationists so desperate that you incorporate “prophecy” into an analogy about “designers and engineering” ?!! 🙂
Your grasp of the role of feedback in systems is as bad as William J Murray’s.
After watching Joe G’s behavior here on Elizabeth’s blog, and watching his and that Mung character’s behaviors over at UD, I have been wondering what role they play over there. Why are they kept around?
It is easy to picture them as a couple of scruffy-feathered blackguards squatting on a big tree branch overhanging a sidewalk, urinating and defecating on people below, and laughing like a couple of kookaburras whenever they think they have scored a hit.
Evidently they are being kept on as professional hecklers over there. ID is in big trouble when it uses that kind of razzing to gain attention.
Petrushka,
Not wishing to pursue a ‘tone derail’ too far, but it is hugely ironic that the thread from which this spins is even entitled by a KF-scold of Alan Fox for – how dare he! – suggesting that the ‘explanatory filter’ puts design as a ‘default’ position.
Meantime, people here are called dolts and full of shit, GAs are worthless, biology, chemistry and physics are routinely misrepresented and here’s Felsenstein or Elzinga spewing this, that and the other … even the ‘polite’ gpuccio manages to get a couple of posts’ worth of somewhat less contentiously-worded swipes!
If there is umbrage to be located in any given search space, UD will find it double-quick. But the best way to stop distractive red herrings leading away from the path of truth is to ignore them … hang on! A red herring! See how distractive it is! I’m going to pursue it specifically in order to highlight its distractive nature …
Gpuccio at UD
To Petrushka (at TSZ):
I don’t feel hobbled by the necessity of being overly polite.
Whilst I agree up to a point, I am unconvinced that an adversarial appoach is effective at establishing facts (did the glove fit?). Shared experience reinforced by experiment and repeatable observation works. Respect is certainly easier to lose than earn but the ability to acquire new knowledge should be open to all. Those who would wish to restrict the free exchange of ideas don’t have my respect.
Mung can’t be real. And if he is real, it’s great illustration of Poe’s law. Consider this dialogue:
Priceless. These people won’t learn anything, and probably can’t.
I guess nothing has changed with ID/creationists in 50 years. When knowledgeable people back them into a corner and highlight ID/creationist misconceptions and misrepresentations, ID/creationists just start babbling incoherently and playing the persecution card.
They try to sound erudite and knowledgeable, but they string together technical words and sentences that make absolutely no sense. They seem to imagine that by babbling big words in pseudo-scientific language they are “staying in the game” and debating advanced scientific ideas on a par with experts. They just end up looking even stupider.
This is a well-known tactic that is taught within the ID/creationist community – starting with Henry Morris and Duane Gish – and it takes practice. And practicing is what they are doing over at UD.
Yes, quibble with someone who teaches and publishes on population genetics, and quote Wikipedia at them! Because he uses the term ‘wins out’ to denote the surviving alllele, when he could have said “becomes fixed”?
And apparently Natural Selection is really differential reproduction, no actual ‘selection-as-choice’ is going on, and no-one in biology knew that until Mung pointed it out just now.
And …
Really? You’re following along and everything, and laughing your ass off at the stupidity of the TSZ-ers … and the lack of actual reproduction and actual alleles and an actual population (but with digital representations of all these things) means this can’t be a model of actual Natural Selection (differential reproduction)? Is it because it’s not really natural?
GP
I understand that GP is frustrated with the form that this debate has taken. A handful of ‘ID critics’ here, a handful of enthusiasts there, much noise and confusion. Ten people talking at once in two different venues. I really don’t know why he didn’t take the opportunity to post directly. Then a conversation could develop. I don’t think we’re outrageously uncivil. If we became so, he could depart at a moment’s notice.
I think Lizzie was hoping for more dialogue here. But most pro-ID people have departed. That may be the quality of the debate – and not necessarily in a good way! 😀
I don’t think most people here would have any qualms about posting at UD, despite the certainty of a frosty and even hostile reception from some quarters. Most have, but are now unable, for a whole variety of reasons – but not, to my knowledge, for incivility. It has evolved into a quite peculiar situation.
The only thing you have a right to expect in a debate is the right to make the best argument you can. Unfortunately that’s the one right that UD denies.
Disagree with them and you either get banned or your posts disappear in a cloud of noise from the loudspeaker in the ceiling.
I don’t normally bother with Joe much, but this is worth a look. I won’t comment, just absorb the wisdom:
Joe. try this in demo mode. Just click the Start button. Try to figure out whether there is one goal, or a multi-dimensional array of fitness values.
Then change the language while the demo is running and tell me if the GA can follow a change in the fitness universe.
Bear in mind it’s just a toy.
http://itatsi.com
Back a couple of years ago, folks on Panda’s Thumb were discussing the Weasel algorithm. Apparently the UD crowd were stumbling all over themselves trying to make the program work and couldn’t do it. They were all hung up on “latching;” which doesn’t occur in Dawkins’ program. Meanwhile, the various people commenting over on Panda’s Thumb were writing many versions of the program in different languages.
Just for fun (and to rub it in), I wrote a version of the algorithm on an entirely different platform; the HP50G handheld graphing calculator. The program has lots of bells and whistles, including the ability to put in any desired amount of “latching” in order to see its effect.
It also has an outer loop that can randomly change the environment; and when it does, the process simply tracks along from where it was headed and proceeds to go in the new direction; just like real evolution. It then plots the results on a graph. It runs great even though it is a bit hard on the batteries.
The interesting thing about Dawkins’ Weasel algorithm is that, with a shift in perspective, it also represents radioactive decay in the presence of reactivation (without the latching), or it can represent the condensation of a bunch of atoms into a potential well. It’s a pretty generic algorithm; but one with sufficient simplicity that anyone (well, maybe not everyone) can write it and understand the lessons it teaches. It’s a very nice educational tool.
Though I said I wouldn’t comment, the alleles in Elizabeth’s model actually change selection coefficients continually. I shall leave Joe to work out why.
And ‘more than one selection coefficient’, assuming that means there is more than one gene in a ‘real’ genome – it is not generally meaningful to detach the selection of one segment of the genome from that of another in a nonrecombining species – meaning that the model is not unrealistic simply because some species – unlike these strings – perform crossover, and hence have multiple elements taking part in multiple competitions. It’s not a model of a sexual species.
In any case, selection coefficients are simply not relevant to the model. The program doesn’t bother evaluating them – it doesn’t need to. Just like NS.
The closeness of fit to the ‘real world’ depends on whether there is anything in the ‘real world’ that shares such characteristics with the model. As far as units and metrics of selection are concerned, yes there is: bacteria.
Mung:
At least he can laugh at his ignorance.
These misconceptions of the UD bunch are so varied that it is probably a waste of time trying to track them and figure them out. Given all the snark and razzing over there, they don’t seem to care anyway.
(1) Elizabeth’s program doesn’t ask for members of each generation to have the maximum possible product, it simply allows the largest product in any given generation to be the parent of the next generation. The algorithm is nothing more than “the current biggest gets to reproduce.” “Current biggest” could even be smaller than in a previous generation; but as the strings evolve, bigger becomes more prevalent.
(2) The program doesn’t tell each generation how to produce a larger product, it simply selects the ones that do. The only reason for including that maximum threshold is that the program has to stop somewhere. The threshold could just as well have been lower. For the size of the string given, the program would never stop if the threshold was larger than the maximum possible product for that size string. If the strings were larger, that maximum would have been larger also.
(3) Furthermore, the program doesn’t tell the strings anything about the order of the heads or tails that produce large products. That is an emergent property not even considered in the selection process.
There are similar things that fall out of nearly any genetic algorithm. Setting up a genetic algorithm to bleed energy out of a flopping flexible rope hanging between two suspension points in a uniform gravitational field, until no more energy could be bled out, would produce a stationary rope hanging in the form of a catenary curve. The emergent feature of all this is a curve that is described by a hyperbolic cosine function. It would also have the feature that the potential energy of the rope is at its minimum. There is nothing in such an algorithm that says anything about shape or about a mathematical function describing that final state.
Making a genetic algorithm that maximizes the power in the radiated electromagnetic field of an antenna for a fixed power input produces an unpredictable shape that nobody would have thought of. There is nothing in such a program that says anything about what shape the antenna should be.
In nature, logarithmic spirals are an emergent property of some kinds of growth in the presence of space constraints. Genetic algorithms that produce these kinds of features in analogous systems do not have anything in them about logarithmic spirals.
For every genetic algorithm that is used in exploring the complex features that arise out of the collective action of constituents that interact among themselves and with a larger environment; not one of these programs has anything in them about those complex features that emerge as the systems evolve. Usually the algorithm is just a simple rule found in nature or a rule invented to find out what some alternate kind of universe would produce. Even the simplest rules can produce extremely complex and intricate patterns that nobody could have predicted or calculated.
Judging from the Keystone Cops response of the UD crowd in their attempts to get Dawkins’ Weasel program to work a couple of years ago, I doubt that any of them are very good programmers. They certainly don’t seem to have a clue about how physical phenomena are modeled on computers.
Over at UD there seems to be some trouble understanding ascii. It would make a bit more sense to take 5 bits at a time and map them to alphabetic characters. The English alphabet has roughly the same number of characters as the genetic code has amino acids.
I guarantee that if you take a random string of English characters and subject it to variation and selection, scoring fitness for combinations that appear in words, that words will appear in child generations.
If only Dembski hadn’t decided to duck and and run at Dover you would have shown us Joe.
As for kairosfocus’s essay, it sounds suspiciously what we have been asking of ID, i.e., “Where are your mechanisms”.
We present ours which you claim aren’t valid but yours don’t even exist to be criticized.
I’d take a shot at an essay if KF would present one that doesn’t depend on the existence and work of “Darwinists”.
ID should stand as a theory without the need of using a competing theory as a crutch.
If “Darwinism” never existed, ID would have no talking points at all.
So here’s a challenge for KF: Do the same thing you’re asking of us, present a “stand-alone” theory of ID, complete with “how-tos”.
What on earth is this ‘6000-word essay’ scam? ID critics have posted extensively at UD, and there is no sign that they have made even one point that has caused an ID regular to change an opinion. Which could be a sign of the general shitness of anti-ID argumentation, or it could say something about the ID mindset.
I think one could predict that the essay would be received with the same concept-mangling determination to find some way not to accept evolution (it is not, indeed, compulsory!), that we see throughout the evolution-bashing portion of cyberspace. Some very good books have been written on the subject, and if they weren’t persuasive, the words of blog-jockeys like ourselves are unlikely to do better.
Meantime, evolution manages to be taught to generation upon generation of students, who even get some of the concepts right, since they have a vested interest in getting a grade. In such a ‘wrong’ subject, already! There must be a room somewhere with whirly specs and white noise, where we all got brainwashed. Damned if I can remember …
Joe on the stand at Dover ll, with BarryA running the case? For that, I would fly in ‘specially.
I can see a major Hollywood movie taking shape! 🙂
Joe, on the stand, in a “value-conscious tuxedo”, but at heart, still a “creationist”.
It would take far more than 6000 words just to list all of the ID/creationist misconceptions and misrepresentations of science; many of which are already loaded into that pretentious taunt over a UD.
Then it would take hundreds of thousands of times more words just to teach ID/creationists all the science that they don’t know and don’t want to know; and it would have to start with middle school science.
It’s good to see the desperation of ID/creationism for staged debates with someone in science. Ever since scientists stopped being lured by these kinds of socio/political tactics, these ID/creationist characters no longer enjoy getting free rides on the backs of legitimate scientists. ID/creationist “arguments have been getting more ridiculous even as they get more desperate.
After Bill Nye said that children shouldn’t be taught creationism, Ken ham has been going crazy trying to get Bill Nye to debate him or one of his minions at AiG.
Taunting for debates is all they have. They have nothing to publish in any scientific journal; and they can’t seem to figure out why that is the case. They don’t even get it when someone tells them; they just want to debate.
I usually ignore Joe’s spew, including any quotations of it — he actually wrote that? After Dover going so well for intelligent design creationism?
I suppose that explains a lot of the intellectual cowardice on display at UD. Their glorious leader cut and ran when he found out that Jeff Shallit was going to be rebutting his “expert” testimony. The regulars there are brawny culture warriors in comparison.
I have an idea. Let KF compose the essay defending Evolution. If he can make the case as devil’s advocate without glaring misresentations, he wins. I don’t think he could do it if his life depended on it.
At least he isn’t banned, so it will show up. Unlike some attempts.
Dover isn’t even the worst or most recent defeat. Behe was cited by a judge for contributing to the defeat of his side.
http://ncse.com/news/interim-victory-in-california-creationism-case
If it were even taunting for debates! Here’s Joe (sorry, Patrick!) summing up opposition to the UB argument:
With argumentation of that quality, I don’t know why ID is not mainstream yet. And that’s what your carefully-thought-out, referenced 6,000-word essay will get you, with perhaps a little more padding from the more articulate. I think they honestly believe that evolutionary scientists over the last 150 years have spent entire careers doing nothing in support of a paradigm for which there is not a scrap of evidence.