Sandbox (1)

Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.

1,772 thoughts on “Sandbox (1)”

  1. I actually think that Lastyearon, in an ironic twist, is agreeing with you Lizzie. Maybe he doesn’t even realize it, but essentially he’s hit the nail on the head: Either way, CSI (in accordance with Dembski’s definition) was involved, which means there was an intelligent designer. And by analogy to “Artificial Intelligence” in computer games, the intelligent designer in your example was the fitness function. Thus, by modeled demonstration, Natural Selection is the Intelligent Designer of ID. Nice work! You get a Nobel!

  2. Robin:
    I actually think that Lastyearon, in an ironic twist, is agreeing with you Lizzie. Maybe he doesn’t even realize it, but essentially he’s hit the nail on the head: Either way, CSI (in accordance with Dembski’s definition) was involved, which means there was an intelligent designer. And by analogy to “Artificial Intelligence” in computer games, the intelligent designer in your example was the fitness function. Thus, by modeled demonstration, Natural Selection is the Intelligent Designer of ID. Nice work! You get a Nobel!

    Hat tip to REC @ AtBC:

    “Murray’s comment is just an echo of Dembski and Marks in their critique of ev:

    “When some offspring are correctly announced as more fit than others, external knowledge is being applied to the search and active information is introduced.”

    “Optimization by Mutation. This process discards mutations
    with low fitness and propagates those with high fitness.”

    ”

    http://evoinfo.org/papers/vivisection_of_ev.pdf

    They seem fine with the environment adding information.

  3. KirosFocus:

    “(Oh, how the folks at TSZ and elsewhere would like to change the subject or twist the matter into pretzels of confusion and polarisation, anything other than to straightforwardly answer it.”

    There’s plenty of open and polite dialogue to be had here, if you wish. We have similar “straightforward” concerns (CSI).

    “And, this is a free kick at goal that has gone un-taken for over six months now, the seventh is coming up.) ”

    We’ll have to take your word for it. Your blog is so heavily censored we’ll never know. Perhaps that’s stopping people from even bothering? I believe someone here was game. You can’t moderate all the good concerns away and then claim ‘no objections’.

  4. It would be entirely possible to devise a massive table of ‘fitness functions’, with stochastic elements within them and stochastic choice (white noise sampling, say) of which one to use in a given run. You can’t smuggle everything in!

    The only ‘cheat’ is to run the simulation of replication, mutation and differential survival on digital computer strings instead of using actual organisms and a few million years.

  5. I try to avoid the meta, as it does not overly matter what any individual might think, But this from Eric Anderson raised a chuckle, though not for the reasons I think he intended:

    Lizzie via Joe:

    I do find it extraordinary that those who think they’ve found a flaw in evolutionary theory so regularly demonstrate just how little they understand the theory they are attempting to critique.

    Eric: Actually, I for one, understand the theory quite well. When we strip away all the fancy terminology and the obfuscations, the theory is essentially this: particles bumping into each other over a long period of time can result in Mozart, Einstein and Tolstoy.

    It’s not that we don’t understand the theory. It’s just that the theory is so preposterous that it is a joke. That’s why we sometimes make fun of it and why it so often makes us laugh. 🙂

    That‘s understanding the theory ‘quite well’? 😮

  7. Someone should inform Barry Arrington that his Margaret Sanger quote is fabricated.

  9. I do find it extraordinary that at UD they make such a big fuss if you suggest that ID is about anything more than “detecting the signature of design”, and yet so many of their articles seem to be rooted in simple paranoia about the modern world in general, and nothing to do with ID as stated – what have climate change or contraception got to do with detecting Design?

  10. It’s almost as if ID was a ruse of the religious right, rather than genuine science.

  11. Lizzie,

    Neil Rickert and JWTruthInLove did so. I also asked him to back it up (only because I’ve seen that filth before, and because a considerable number of comments had flown by without any response to the two that questioned the veracity of the quote).

    Talk about erecting a strawperson – post a fabrication in order to provoke a collective outburst of self-righteousness.

  13. As far as I can see, not a single person has yet even acknowledged that the thing isn’t true.

    Isn’t there a Commandment about bearing false witness?

  14. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”.

    Who knows what construction those people put on top of the term “neighbour”. In the context of Barry’s post and the vomiticula that followed, neither Margaret Sanger, nor black women in need of contraception appear to qualify.

    I suppose it all depends on what a UDist can rationalise as “false”.

  15. The more I think about that post of Barry’s the more angry I become.

    I don’t suppose he knew that it was false when he posted it, but why let it stand now he does?

    Because he hates a movement that has lengthened the lives and transformed the health of millions of women?

  16. Me too.

    He posts it with a tagline “without commentary”, then proceeds to comment throughout the thread without addressing the questions that Neil Rickert and JWTruthInLove raised.

    What a piece of filth. He pulls up nobody among the UDists for their inhumane commentary equating contraception with murder.

    And by the way, Kantian Naturalist should learn the difference between a logical problem and social problem. Access to contraception is a social problem for women, access to Lutheranism is not.

  17. Lizzie:
    The more I think about that post of Barry’s the more angry I become.

    I don’t suppose he knew that it was false when he posted it, but why let it stand now he does?

    Because he hates a movement that has lengthened the lives and transformed the health of millions of women?

    I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.

    There is a deep-rooted and ineradicable seam of misogyny in the sort of creature that infests UD. There is evidence of it in the way you, Lizzie, were treated there. Some of the invective and false accusations to which you were subjected could stem from nothing else but dislike and fear of intelligent and feisty women.

    (I suspect that Denyse O’Leary was also a target, although her “intelligence” poses no threat to anyone)

    Women are not welcome at the top tables of the religious right (except as servitors, of course).

  19. damitall2:
    1. The word is spelled“supersedes”

    Merriam-Webster

    Supercede has occurred as a spelling variant of supersede since the 17th century, and it is common in current published writing. It continues, however, to be widely regarded as an error.

    But you are correct, it seems. Apparently it’s from the Latin super +sedere, “to sit”. I assumed it was super+cedere (“to yield”).

    Being a word nerd myself, supersede will supersede supercede henceforth in my typing 🙂 (Well, as long as my fingers are listening, which they often don’t).

  20. damitall2,

    “Supersede” pffffffffffft. Only out there among the degenerate colonies. It is spelled “supercede” wherever spelling is respected.

    (Sounds of Grumpy Old Man throwing dictionaries around the room).

  21. Well, it’s true that “sit on top” makes more sense than “yield on top”.

    I was just going on analogy with secede. And precedent. 4 centuries’ worth.

  23. Alan Fox,

    I will trade my moderation for your surname. Mine is such a common surname. My ilk is always getting six months without the option for minor infractions of the criminal code. At least we don’t go in for the more bizarre forms of misbehaviour.

  24. timothya:
    damitall2,

    “Supersede” pffffffffffft. Only out there among the degenerate colonies. It is spelled “supercede” wherever spelling is respected.

    (Sounds of Grumpy Old Man throwing dictionaries around the room).

    Excuse me!
    “Degenerate colonies”? Since when was England a colony of anybody’s? Not for a very long time, chum!

    America,now – there’s a degenerate colony, and their spelling has long since passed the pale of righteousness

    Bydand for supersede!

  25. Anyone who uses “hopefully” instead of “I hope” (or any other such mangling) will get a soggy noodle whipping (Grumpy Old Man Ruling). Beware!

    Native speakers of languages other than English are exempt from the Grumpy Rule. Except Americans, who should know better.

    And if I have to go and look up your Unexplained Capitalised Acronyms, you can expect strange things to be pushed through your letterbox.

    Humpph!

  26. timothya:
    Alan Fox,

    I will trade my moderation for your surname. Mine is such a common surname. My ilk is always getting six months without the option for minor infractions of the criminal code. At least we don’t go in for the more bizarre forms of misbehaviour.

    Perhaps we could move any discussion that might develop about the merits and demerits of various surnames vis-a-vis moderation to a thread of its own?

  27. Americans? Don’t get me started. We’ll be boarding the plane momentarily? What’s the point of that? You could care less? So could people who care a lot! 😀

  28. One of the posters over at UD, franklin, is asking the UD crowd questions that not one of them can answer.

    William J Murray challenges franklin with the question, “Can chance and necessity build a battleship, franklin?”

    Franklin fires back, “To make your tortured analogy fit the biological/chemistry realm, what would be the mass to charge ratios of the various components of the battleship?”

    What follows is very revealing. Eric Anderson asks, “Why do you think mass and charge have anything to do with it?”

    Reading the rest of Eric Anderson’s reply demonstrates the deep problem that almost all ID/creationist followers have. Not one of those UD characters has a clue about high school level chemistry and physics.

    As I have mentioned before; not one of them can do a simple high school physics/chemistry calculation that scales up the charge-to-mass ratios of protons and electrons to kilogram-sized masses separated by a meter and calculate the energies of interaction in joules and in megatons of TNT.

    It would be interesting to see franklin ask them to do that calculation. The response should be very predictable; total incomprehension.

  29. An amusing thread. wjm, higher up, on measuring CSI:

    You don’t use a metric. You use the nodes employed by the medium for the function in question. In text, that means letters. In proteins, that means ATGC binding sites required for the functionality of the protein. In chemistry, that means chemical bindings necessary for the construction of a von-neumann self-replicating machine.

    Something of a confusion of half-grasped notions. Protein function ~ ‘ATGC binding sites’? He goes on to quote Axe while completely ignoring (more likely, unaware of) the extensive literature on the functional richness of protein space. And commits Hoyle’s Fallacy on page after page after page. 10^77! 10^164! Take a long enough sequence of a sufficient variety of monomer subunits and you get numbers that are rilly rilly big if you were to draw ’em from a bag! Especially if they all have to be left-handed!

    Joe:

    I thought I have been quite clear. It doesn’t matter how many needles are in the haystack as blind and undirected processes cannot produce any of them.

    Not much point calculating CSI then, is there?

    EA:

    Finally, just based on common-sense everyday experience, a moment’s reflection is sufficient to remind us that the number of functional configurations of matter is a tiny droplet in the vast sea of non-functional configurations.

    Why do science when a moment’s reflection will suffice?

    Joe saddles up his tired ‘how can you prove any mutation is random’ pony, and the thread crashes, the way they all do.

  30. @ CLAVDIVS and franklin

    I’m hoping you might participate in a little experiment. Little time or effort is involved. If you register here, I can give more details via email.

    Cheers
    Alan

  32. A second attempt to reply. The first disappeared down the moderation hole.

    PM me, if possible.

  34. Alan Fox,

    You, Alan.

    But I’m not sure I want to participate on this site.

    Is there a way to PM on this site?

    Email me at jagdtiger1966 |at| gmail.com.

  35. The forum message board is not currently usable. I don’t know if Lizzie has plans for the future on that score. I emailed you as requested.

  36. I am pleased to extend an opportunity to members of this forum to participate in an international research program of some importance.

    Owing to the indulgence of an anonymous philanthropist, we have been able to embark on a program to locate The World’s Worst Joke.

    Naturally, the early phase of this research program has involved a great deal of work to establish a reliable set of bad-joke selection criteria. We have evolved the following:

    Existential Criteria:
    1. The joke must be expressible in a language that can be processed by the audience without causing illness (please do not submit jokes written in BornAgain)
    2. The joke must be openly transmissible (that is, not subject to copyright, patent or trademark restrictions, other than those applying to fair use and attribution)

    Constitutional Criteria:
    1. The joke must be gluten-free and must not contain traces of leather, nuts or abused animals. Plant and other lifeform inclusions are permitted so long as they are declared in advance.
    2. If the joke includes traces of logic, that logic must be of the standard predicate type, unless declared in advance. Fuzziness will be judged against the Lotfi Zadeh Index.

    Performance Criteria:
    1. The joke must not send its audience to sleep (unless restoratives are provided)
    2. The joke must reach its punchline within the projected residual life of the universe, and preferably within the attention span of the notional “average reasoning person”. An alternative formulation of this rule is that the expression of the joke must be compressible to the standard average length of a water-cooler conversation.
    6. The agreed performance measure is the standard SI unit of appallingness. This (I need not remind you) is an index known as the Generalised Eructation Measure, which is in the form:

    GEM = F + ((groan length X groan volume) X (log of spittle volume) X (pi X eye-roll angle in radians)

    Where F is the Fundamental Constant

    Even allowing for this necessary, preliminary theoretical work, we at the WWJ Research Centre of Excellence have not ignored the need for field studies. We have already conducted discovery surveys in areas as far-flung as post-modernism, Father Ted, the films of Ingmar Bergman, and the famous nose-hair jokes of the Fegyu. But we do not wish to blow our own violas da gamba just yet.

    We do believe, however, that as a result of an ingenious piece of fieldwork by a certain teacher librarian, we have located a viable Benchmark Joke. Think of it as the nadir against which all candidates can be measured:

    There once was a famous anthropologist, who was an expert in tribal dance rituals. He attended a international colloquium to present his integrated, comprehensive theory of the emergence, praxis and significance of tribal dancing around the world.

    Amid the echoing applause of his peers, one of his colleagues grasped him by the elbow and said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you – can you tell me about the Butcher Dance Tribe?”

    The famous anthropologist thinks to himself, “This is dreadful! I’ve never heard of the Butcher Dance Tribe! I must mount an expedition.”

    After months of preparation, he travels across the wide ocean, over the high mountains, down the raging river, across the arid plains, and through the steaming jungles until he locates the Butcher Dance Tribe. He then settles down with them to observe their habits.

    Eventually the great day arrives. The Butcher Dance Tribe gathers in the jungle clearing. They light a bonfire and a great feast is prepared and consumed.

    Then the tribal chief steps out into the dancing ground. The tribe gathers and forms a chorus line.

    The chief raises his staff of office high in the air. The entire tribe places their hand on their hips and begin to sing . . .

    “You butcher left foot in . . .”

  38. I’m constantly amazed at the chutzpah of KF at UD.

    The cell is chock full of FSCO/I

    Yes, that well recognized quantity of “chock”.

    So, let us see a sound Darwinist/evo mat account of OOL, grounded on observations that break the general inductive conclusion that FSCO/I is a reliable sign of design as cause. The cell is chock full of FSCO/I and so far, no observationally anchored evo mat account and no Nobel Prize consequently.

    So, to be clear, KF want’s to see a Darwinist exposition of OOL that explains FSCO/I yet he would be unable to measure the FSCO/I in any such demonstration in any way other then it having the quantity of “chock” or “not chock”.

    Tell you what KF. Tell me specifically how much FSCO/I there is in three different types of cell. I would expect three different numbers there. Then for bonus points explain how you calculated those numbers.

    If you can refine “chock full” any further then I’d be very interested to see that.

    It turns out that the world of the living cell is replete with such, and so we are inductively warranted in inferring design as best causal explanation.

    Is “replete” another notch on the rule for measuring FSCO/I?

    The point is if you can’t put a figure on FSCO/I how can you tell if it increases? If it decreases? If it stays the same?

    If you can do none of those things, how is it useful?

    If all you can say is “cells are “chock full” of it” then haven’t you already got all the use out of the concept that you are ever going to get? I.E. A talking point used to beat a strawman with.

    You know, it’d be great to do something like this:

    A) Sequence some bacteria
    B) Measure FSCO/I
    C) Breed mutated bacteria.
    D) Measure FSCO/I.
    E) Compare B FSCO/I to D FSCO/I.

    It seems many questions that are relevant to ID (genetic entropy, the fall) are amenable to similar investigations. I suppose that’s what I find most frustrating about ID – the unwillingness of it’s supporters to actually further ID themselves.

    Of course, if KF was serious about FSCO/I as a scientific tool rather then a talking point used to provide a science sheen over his religious claims then he could have joined any number of recent threads here discussing it.

    Complex Specified Information: breaking the mould of Darwinistic evolution or bogus concept.

    But he prefers to remain aloof, instead of defending and refining his arguments against all comers he prefers to trust Joe as an honest reporter of goings on here and respond to his selected snippets.

    Yet FSCO/I could prove many of their existing claims to any scientists standard if it could actually be measured (and therefore give even the beginnings of validity to their claims of it showing cells are designed) in a reproducible way, which is kind of the definition really.

    I have tried the experiment of opening up the background file for an empty basic Word document then noticing the many seemingly meaningless repetitive elements. So, I pick one effectively at random, and clip it out, saving the result. Then, I try opening the file from Word again. It reliably breaks. Seeming “junk digits” are plainly functionally required and specific.

    It’s perhaps not that surprising that you have chosen not to spend much time understanding what you believe to be a failed concept, so your misrepresentations are somewhat understandable.

    the solar system threshold adopted based on exhausting the capacity of the solar system’s 10^57 atoms and 10^17 s or so, is highly significant. At the {500-bit} threshold, we are in effect only able to take a sample in the ratio of one straw’s size to a cubical haystack as thick as our galaxy, 1,000 light years.

    Tell me KF, what biological process is going on when you are taking that sample? You are fond of analogies, what is the analogical biological situation here?

    Of course, it’s because there is no analog in biology that you can point to. Rather it’s just the final tug on the magicians curtain, producing the rabbit of impossibility to a credulous audience. For all your claims of “following the evidence where it leads” you are remarkably reluctant to do so. You have some striking evidence (if you claims are taken on face value) and could conceivably trigger a global revolution in our understanding of our place in the universe (seemingly subservient to a remarkably dull, unimaginative and inconsistent designer) yet you don’t do this.

    Why? Don’t you get bored of year after year FSCO/I having the same impact outside UD that it had the year before? I.E. None at all – honestly, if you search for that string “FSCO/I” there are no results outside of UD and people talking about the people at UD. It’s a remarkably barren concept for all the value to see to wring from it day after day. Never stop and wonder why? Not even when somebody writes a function outline and asks you to write the actual code that determines FSCO/I? Never wonder why that’s even asked when it’s so “clearly” calculable just using the information in the UD faq?

    I know why.

  40. A trumpet sounds

    TSZ Denizens: I have yet to see any good reason to try to invest time & effort and put up with the sort of attitude and behaviour that are evident in situations like that. Not interested, save maybe in speaking for record — and UD is at least as good for that. If your case cannot be made under forum rules that enforce a modicum of civility, the case is not worth the effort to deal with it. The fact is, in a bit over a week, it will be eight months of silence — apart from some snipping, strawmannising and fallacy-laced sniping — on a free kick at goal. That failure to take up a good faith offer to make the case speaks volumes. And this very thread lays out a simple version of the design inference on a pivotal case (at significantly shorter length than 6,000 words, 3600+ I think). The reactions from objectors I am seeing do not impress me for cogency or substance. KF

    There! That’s you told! 🙂

  41. Allan Miller:
    A trumpet sounds

    If your case cannot be made under forum rules that enforce a modicum of civility, the case is not worth the effort to deal with it.

    There! That’s you told!

    kairosfocus,

    UD has Joe. TSZ does not. Which forum has a modicum of civility, again?

    Come discuss your position here. I guarantee that you will be treated with more respect and courtesy than are ID opponents at UD.

  43. Link to Dembski reinstating the explanatory filter. Though I don’t recall any further developments.

    Anyone?

  44. I know that I should ignore Joe G. But this is too much fun.

    In a post “Of Sets and EvoTARDS” he explains why two sets are not of the same size.

    That’s great, Joe. You have mathematicians around the world laughing at you (but only if they have seen your post). Those two sets are the same size. That you think otherwise only shows that you are out of your depth.

    Not satisfied with that, JoeG goes on to post “Subsets and Supersets, Revisted” where he compounds the problem.

    So if two sets are not equal, then they cannot have the same cardinality.

    I give you two sets. The first is a knife and fork. The second is a cup and saucer. Those two sets are not equal. Yet both have cardinality two.

    Really, JoeG, give it up. You are way out of your depth.

    And if we look at Cardinality, we read that:

    Some infinite cardinalities are greater than others.

    You clearly did not understand that Wikipedia page at all.

  45. Neil Rickert,

    Joe demands to “see the proof that {0,1,2,3,…} is the same size as {1,2,3,4,…}.” 😀 . He has seen the proof several times and still does not understand it.

    Proof.

  46. While we are on hilarious misunderstandings, there is a “news” post at UD, that is presumably by O’Leary (I thought she wasn’t the newsdesk any more?) about how “Atheists want to banish the Big Bang because it promotes theism”, and links to a The Best Schools (what a weird name for a blog – and what’s King’s College, Cambridge doing there?) post by O’Leary, in which she claims:

    In his 2010 book with Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, Hawking embraced the idea of the multiverse or M-theory (in an infinite or arbitrarily large number of universes, ours just happens to work). Technically, M-theory combines a number of versions of much-disputed string theory, involving ten dimensions, with an eleventh added in the 1990s. [4]

    Perimeter Institute cosmologist Neil Turok has admitted that he does not know how the M-brane physical system (needed for Hawking’s proposed M-theory to be an accurate model) came into existence.[5] No one seems to. So Hawking appeals to M-theory to explain why we do not need God to account for the universe, but we must then somehow account for the M-branes’ existence.

    That may be part of why Hawking’s physicist colleague Roger Penrose said in 2010, “What is referred to as M-Theory isn’t even a theory, it’s a collection of ideas, hopes, aspirations.”

    Well, I’m no cosmologist (heh), but as far as I know “M-theory” doesn’t stand for “multiverse theory” but for Witten’s 11 dimensional version of string theory, where the M stands for membranes, possibly (or W for Witten, upside down), and Turok’s theory is a non-inflation theory called the Ekpyrotic Universe, while Hawking’s theory is that the Big Bang didn’t start at a point but as a kind of bowl, and “multiverse” theory takes various forms including the idea that inflation happens at different rates, and the theory that there are lots of “bubble” universes, as well as the simply logical deduction that the observable universe must only a be tiny fraction of the whole – to deny this, which is possible, would be to argue that Earth is at the dead (or Live?) centre of the universe, which, though theologically appealing, no doubt, isn’t actually an implication of Big Bang.

    Also isn’t Hoyle, coiner of the pejorative “Big Bang”, the guy they like because of the tornado in a junkyard thing, and panspermia? And maybe The Black Cloud?

  47. Can anybody explain the latest KF rant to me?

    I’m not quite sure, but I think I am one of the targets of that rant. But I cannot find a link there to what the rant is about. There is a link to discussions in another UD thread, but it is a thread where I have not participated.

  48. It seems to be a general rant (“EL” (probably our Lizzie), is mentioned, but not you, Neil, AFAIK) about how we have to recognise the real existence of his Big Red Balls.

    Apart from that, he seems to want everything to be rooted in tangible reality; which is an odd standpoint for someone who believes in a god.

    Oh, and if it’s “modern”, it’s just fashionable rubbish. Hence, I suppose, his attachment to ancient philosophers and ancient Middle Eastern tribal writings and beliefs

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