Scordova at UD asks a question that I find interesting.
By way of contrast, intelligent agencies, particularly those intelligent agencies which we presume have free will, cannot be counted upon to behave in predictable manners in certain domains. Even presuming some intelligent agencies (say machine “intelligence”) are deterministic, they can be an unpredictable black box to outside observers. This makes it difficult to make direct experimental confirmation of certain ID inferences.
It has long been my contention that the defining behavior of science is the search for regularity.
Some regularities can be refined into mathematical equations, which we generally call laws of nature.
Other processes are complex or chaotic, making long range predictions impossible. But chaotic systems can be seen, at small scale, to be following regular rules. Weather develops. It doesn’t simply appear. We can find regularities in its past.
Evolution is a bit like weather. we cannot predict where change is going, but we can find regularities in its past. And these regularities are what distinguishes evolution from intelligent design. They are what allows us to look in a certain place for Tiktaalik. Or hominid fossils. Or predict that genomes will form a nested hierarchy.
So I would answer Scordova that science never looks for capriciousness and always looks for regularity. That is the definition of science.
The reasons are partly historical and partly practical.
Historically, it has been a successful approach. And in practical terms, the search for capriciousness cannot fail. It is the default finding.
There are so many chaotic phenomena in our midst that the world seems to be governed by mysterious forces. The notion that one could find and potentially control these forces is a very new idea. It has little support in art and fiction, and is actively opposed by most religions. So when science started being successful and began to produce practical results, it also found itself in opposition to much of human culture. I do not find it surprising that animosity has developed.
Over to you guys…
I never said that stochastic means non regular. I´m here defending that the variation of aleles in a population, a stochastic process, is predictable and regular, what I´m contending here is that the variation of life forms was a regular process, it wasn´t even stochastic. The variation of life forms is a succesion of singularities. Uniques events in the past, the last one, according to darwinism, was the appearence of hominids 2 My ago. Since then nothing. Aren`t that singularities?
Personally I don’t. But it is a fact that the vast majority of IDists are creationists in the sense that they are trying to get their religious beliefs taught as science in U.S. public schools under the guise of ID, so ID/creationist is not a misnomor for the overall group.
Nope, we are not talking about scientific creationists. You wrote (and I quoted in the message to which you replied):
Nothing there about “scientific” creationists, and obviously not referring to that particular subset.
Indeed. As I noted in the Censorship topic:
The term “creationist” to describe a proponent of creationism was first used by Charles Darwin in 1856.[28] In the 1920s, the term became particularly associated with Christian fundamentalist movements that insisted on a literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative and likewise opposed the idea of human evolution. These groups succeeded in getting teaching of evolution banned in United States public schools, then from the mid-1960s the young Earth creationists promoted the teaching of “scientific creationism” using “Flood geology” in public school science classes as support for a purely literal reading of Genesis.[29] After the legal judgment of the case Daniel v. Waters (1975) ruled that teaching creationism in public schools contravened the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the content was stripped of overt biblical references and renamed creation science. When the court case Edwards v. Aguillard (1987) ruled that creation science similarly contravened the constitution, all references to “creation” in a draft school textbook were changed to refer to intelligent design, which was presented by creationists as a new scientific theory. The Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005) ruling concluded that intelligent design is not science and contravenes the constitutional restriction on teaching religion in public school science classes.[30] In September 2012, Bill Nye (“The Science Guy”) expressed his scientific concern that creationist views threaten science education and innovations in The United States.[31][32]
– from Wikipedia
Hence the association.
Oddly, you are making a moot claim William. People such as Galileo were not, by definition, “creationists”, certainly not in terms of this discussion. So what’s your point? Assuming a very broad use of the term for the sake of argument does not then provide any evidence that “creationists are better at science than materialists or atheists” since all such supposed “creationists” restricted their pursuit of science to materialism and outright rejected the influence of any immaterial or divine causes. Indeed, Francis Collins is as conservative a Christian as one will find in science, but he freely admits to checking his theology at the door of his lab. The only people who don’t appear to do that are those aligned with ID, but then since those folk don’t actually do anything scientific, again I ask, what’s your point? Clearly it isn’t actually that, “Creationists are better at science for the simple fact that they do not preclude a potentially true set of causes – immaterial causes” because there are no scientists – creation or otherwise – who proposed or investigated immaterial causes for any scientifically studied phenomenon. “Laws” and “force” are most certainly not immaterial.
Yes, he was, by definition (the one I provided from Merriam Webster), and in terms of the discussion I’m having (about creationists who were scientists and what their creationism afforded them in terms of explanatory frameworks).
Can you describe the phisical properties of a “Law”?
No William,
I hope you can see the difference.
I will happily stipulate that the majority of scientific advances have been made by creationists. However, in order to support your “better” thesis, you need to demonstrate that creationists are over-represented amongst scientific innovators. As Allan has pointed out, both well-to-do gentlemen and bushy beards are over-represented; creationists, not so much, and certainly not in the last 150 years. (Curiously, the effect of beards seems to have declined in recent years.)
You also assert, without support, that materialists are inferior because they “exclude a potentially true set of causes”.
You seem to think that this is somehow self-evident, or obviously correct.
If you are interested, I will explain to you why this is, in fact, false.
Thank you. That is aimlessly sarcastic.
Blas,
No. NO. no, no, no, no. NO.
No.
Evolution 1 feeds into evolution 2 (this is a pointless distinction incidentally, for most purposes). Evolution 2 is either an accumulation of evolution 1 in one lineage, or the differential operation of evolution 1 in two lineages separated by a barrier. If you can’t know the next mutation, you can’t know which way it’s going to go in any future state beyond that. That applies to ‘evolution 1’ as much as ‘evolution 2’.
If a mutation leads to reproductive success it is only more likely to be fixed. The regularities of evolution relate to things such as the certainty that any locus pool will see one ancestor remaining after an average 4N generations. Which one is not predictable. And nor is whether this particular run will take a bit more or a bit less than 4N.
Convergent evolution. The concordance of genetic distance with other markers. The tendency of multicellular organisms to be both sexual and dioecious. The influence of population size upon the relative strengths of selection and drift. The evolutionary fragility of specialists.
There is not an infinity of different ways to make a living. But even “Evolution 1” doesn’t happen the same way every time. You still haven’t got that. Evolution is stochastic. Stochastic processes do not repeat, but can still display regularity.
Symbiosis provides mutual benefit to 2 genomes. The first symbiotic association of a particular pair of organisms has a similar status to a given mutation. It is unpredictable and contingent. Its consequences may lead to greater reproductive success for both partners (in this case, the archaeon and a-protobacterium). Its consequences have also taken it far from the original niches. In fact, into every niche occupied by a eukaryote. Evolution works on what happens, it does not cause it to happen, and not everything is a result of a point mutation.
If you could just wrap your head around what ‘evolution 2’ is, you might reconsider that. Evolution 2 is little more than evolution 1 occurring in separated gene pools, or over prolonged periods. If you separate a gene pool and monitor the changes, you will see divergence. See Lenski, and many more investigations besides. No doubt you will drop your marker at the divergence of the mustelids and the bears, or some such arbitrary point too long ago to investigate in real time. Yawn.
Bollocks. If you set off and toss a coin at every junction, do you think you’ll just end up where you started?
Reproductive success is measured against the competition. Elephants do not occupy the same niche as either prokaryotes or nematodes.
See my reference to the actual use of the term “creationist”, particularly in legal/science terms. That aside, as I noted, if you insist on using a definition of “creationist” that is so broad as to include all persons who ever had a theistic inkling, then your claim that “creationists are better at science than materialists or atheists” is either erroneous or disingenuous. So I repeat, what’s your point?
The MW defintion was for the phrase “scientific creationists”, not scientists who happen to believe special creation but still do real science.
And still no examples of a scientific advance based on a creationist framework, just one or two examples of scientists who believed in special creation and still did real science outside of those beliefs and a few red herring claims you made, of scientists who definitely were not creationists under any definition. Of course, you haven’t acknowledged your error about them. But that’s just your M.O.
Sure. Newton’s First Law of Motion: an object at rest or an object in motion moves (or remains at rest) at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force. The physical property is the object.
The thing you seem to be confusing is that the articulation of a given phenomenon is not itself the cause of the phenomenon. “Force” is not a cause; force is the measured outcome a given cause. Thus the ignition of rocket full and the subsequent escape of gas is a cause of a rocket’s movement forward. That movement is mathematically described based on the given “force” that said fuel ignition and gas movement imparts.
Basically, you and William are engaging in an equivocation in an attempt to try and argue for immaterial causes. There are no such things in science, by definition.
When will you be presenting those explanatory frameworks afforded them by their creationism? So far all we’ve gotten from you is that they include the immaterial “POOF, MAGIC!” in their possible explanation set. How is that scientifically helpful?
To be fair (and since I can hear William crying already about how his claims are constantly misunderstood and misrepresented…), he didn’t say or imply that immaterial causes were “POOF, MAGIC!” Clearly his complaint regarding force shows that “poof” is not what he was going for.
But, his complaint does raise the question: if he thinks that creationists are better at science than materialists and atheists because they leave open the possibility of things like force or laws, but all materialist or atheist equally embrace such concepts because they see them as quite material, how can their be any validity to William’s claim? The answer: there can’t be.
Strange. I was playing with the programs that here everybody said is how evolution works and when I put the smallest value of advantage that alelle always become fixed. There should be something wrong with the models.
I understand these as regularities for evolution 1. Ok no problem.
Convergent evolution appart, I hard see this as regularities of evolution 2. That ae biological properties or evolution 1 regularities.
Agree stochastic process display regularity. Evolution 1 displays regularity. I always said that.
unpredictable
contingent
works on what happens
Evolution 2 do not shows regularities.
everything it is not product of a point mutation
Evolution 1 is not sufficient to explain evolution 2
If there were positive evidence for evolution 2 I would wrap my head. Promise
I´ll try next time I want to get lost.
But the ancestors of elephants did, And I really do not know how they lost the reproductive contest.
Oh my God! darwinists!
Then the object is the phisical property fo the Law?!
Actually he never defined what he meant by ‘immaterial’ at all. Apparently it’s something those stupid materialist scientists have to learn about so they’ll be as good as the Creation scientists.
As we all know from experience refusing to define his terms is a WJM common tactic. That way whenever someone calls him on his BS he can use his stock hand wave “you are misrepresenting what I meant!!” He’s been running from honest discussion with that lame excuse for years.
No Blas. The “Law” is merely a human mathematical articulation of the constant phenomenon. The object is the object undergoing the phenomenon – in this case, motion.
Take any law of nature you’d like. How about Boyle’s Law? Boyle merely noted a consist relationship between the volume of gas at a given temperature and the pressure exerted by that gas. It’s mathematically consistent – hence the use of the term “law”. Yet “the law” is for our convenience; it’s our way of representing the relationship in the phenomenon. The physical nature of the phenomenon is still THE GAS however, along with the characteristics (pressure, temperature, mass, volume, and so on). There is nothing immaterial in that phenomenon, it’s arrangement, or the description.
Basically, you are confusing the map for the territory.
Funny that. It’s easy to argue points if nobody can pin you down on what you’re actually arguing.
Apparently not, if by “immaterial” William means “those things that materialists define as material”…
Quite so. Which is why I asked him several times, “what’s your point?” I mean, it’s a little odd to me to argue that creationists who accept the same things that all materialists and atheists accept are better scientists than materialists and atheists. What does that even mean?
Arrangement or description that is inmaterial.
I’ll take my hat off to anyone who, by any means, makes a genuine scientific advance. I don’t reserve my plaudits for those who reject the ‘immaterial’ – though it must, in some way, interact with us, in order to even have a phenomenon to investigate. Immaterial phenomena that don’t interact with matter or force in any way are a bugger to study.
But have at it, ID-ers. Kekule literally dreamt up the benzene ring. Fleming made two major discoveries by accident. There is no royal road to success, and nothing is out of bounds, contrary to WJM’s caricature of the closed-minded atheo-materialist-scumbag. Nonetheless, some avenues seem more promising than others. People haven’t stopped looking for function in junk, for example, they’re just not finding much.
Exactly! Science is constrained by the limitation of only being able to study phenomena that can be observed, at least indirectly. ID needs to propose an effect that might result from an “Intelligent Designer” that could be measured and it could then be considered a scientific endeavour.
Um…no. You are still confusing the map for the territory.
IDists — gpuccio, for example — have proposed that quantum phenomena could be covertly manipulated to produce desired mutations at just the right time.
Bfut the manipulation of stochastic phenomena can be detected by statistical studies. Such studies can detect loaded dice or loaded lotto balls.
Lenski’s experiment indicates that evolution can throw every possible dice combination in a reasonable time (say the duration of his experiment), so the IDist needs to explain why intervention — covert or otherwise — adds any value.
Hear hear! And this is the fundamental issue with William’s and Blas’ argument/complaint. That we use a language to describe a given phenomena – say calculus to describe the motion of celestial bodies in the universe – does not then mean that the people who used said language were open to “immaterial explanations”. At best one could say that they were open to immaterial representations, but even that would be questionable.
The real question for me is, what does “the immaterial” theoretically add to science or our understanding of this world and universe?
Well, my question to such folk would be: if the manipulation is covert, how could you ever detect it and how could it ever be studied as science? Why posit “intelligent design”, argue that it needs to taught as science, and then add the caveat “oh… but we can’t actually detect it because we think it can’t be detected…”
As I noted to another creationist some time ago who insisted I can’t know that I’m not living in an illusion: given an illusion that in no way appears to be anything but “reality”, why would I assume it wasn’t reality?
Indeed. But assuming that such could not be detected by any means, why would such a concept then be a valid basis for science? If you’re proposing that something cannot be detected in any way, doesn’t that then render it rather moot in terms of study?
Quite so!
Gpuccio obviously accepts the isolated islands argument. He does not believe it is possible to walk from an ancestral protein coding sequence to two modern descendants that no longer have any similarity.
The question I ask in the OP is, what is the work of science, given an unknown history?
For the benefit of Blas, let us define regularity in the case of protein evolution, the descent of protein codes without outside intervention, changing gradually by known and observed mechanisms of point mutation, recombination, duplication, shift, and so forth.
Regularity does not predict the direction of a drunkard’s walk, but it does predict that over time, the walk will increase its distance from the starting point.
If trait was useful then creationists would out compete non-creationists and all scientists eventually would be creationists.
Yet the opposite seems to have happened.
So, William, is the larger explanatory set actually useful in practice? Can you give an example?
I would ask Gregory the same question. What values is added by the union of secular science and theology?
It seems to be the key ID argument; that evolutionary processes cannot account for the observed pattern of extant and extinct life. (And the default ot ID, of course – a leap to another island if ever I saw one!)
Reminded me of Kirk Durston’s last guest appearance on UD.
ETA “a” to “the”
Blas,
You were playing with deterministic models and they behaved deterministically. Why should I care? How did the stochastic ones behave?
You find the same things happening in different microevolutionary scenarios, such as dioecy, you know that this is quite likely to indicate an underlying commonality. Lots of independent instances of evolution 1 ending up the same way – you don’t think that is a regularity? Please yourself.
Hermaphrodity and isogamy are less stable than dioecy under most conditions. Either that or there is no regularity, just one hell of a massive coincidence. It is actually a form of convergent evolution.
Evolution 2 is just evolution 1 in separated lineages or over long time periods. And there are regularities at that level too.
.
Try sentences. Helps argument. How are those words, applied to either symbiosis or a more ‘conventional’ genetic change, problematic in the context of a stochastic process?
What makes you think that point mutation is the only permissible variational process in ‘evolution 1’?
That you continue to write sentences like that shows that your head will remain perpetually unwrapped. Macroevolution is not something separate from microevolution. It is the summing of multiple instances of micro or the separate operation of micro on either side of a reproductive boundary. Macro cannot happen without micro, and micro cannot help but be macro if you split 2 populations or allow one to evolve for an extended period of time. Of course, you’ll now demand a detailed genetic account, otherwise …. what? Poof? Sometime someplace someone said “Beavers!”. This asymmetry of explanation is laughable.
Probably by occupying a different niche. For example, eukaryotic cells are about 10,000 times bigger than prokaryotic cells, they can eat instead of diffusing, they have a much greater surface area for energy generation. Not all at once, probably, but this is the kind of thing that can favour leisure over fecundity.
Blas,
Why do you think an iterated process of allele fixation cannot turn something that you would not call a giraffe into something that you would?
Petrushka,
Errrrr, tinkering is an intelligent process.
Why would you think tinkering is somehow supporting evidence for ‘no-intelligence involved’ evolution?!
Omagain,
Information as an independent, immaterial entity exhibiting cognizant attributes.
That is what will drive 21st century biology. How?. By figuring out how to measure its effects; figuring out how information is imprinted on matter.
There is a grab bag of stuff we can do. And we will make inroads. Just a question of time, baby. Time.
Now, if that ” diligient” band of non-believers, who denies ill-will to believers in that magical mystery stuff called information would be so kind as to stop ‘thuggin’ around, we might just get there that much faster.
But then, that’s the problem. Right?
Thorton,
Regarding the immaterial, lets take gravity for example. You(pl) assume it is material. Yet we only actually observe its material effects. We have NEVER observed gravity itself.
Therefore, logically we must assume it is immaterial since it cannot be observed. It is not something sensory mechanisms can detect. Otherwise, we would you know, observe them. With our sensory mechanisms.
So it is the same with information. We can observe its effects. We cannot observe information itself….because….wait for it……it is immaterial.
Force is immaterial. Information is immaterial. We do not know them directly. With neither first-hand mechanisms (nose, mouth, fingers, eyes), nor second-hand mechanisms (telescopes, microscope, hadron-colliders).
The immaterial. That which is real but cannot be detected by sensory mechanisms.
And you will inevitably retort that what is real is what is material because that is all our senses grasp. Yet, how have we come to grasp the concept of opposites where one of the opposites is something outside of our sense experience?
The space shuttle existed before it was realized. It was fantasy. Until it wasnt.
God is only a fantasy to those in whom God has not yet been realised.
OK, let the philosophers KN, et al have at it!!!
Talkin’ about a grab bag of stuff, here’s a doozy of an evolutionary meme.
Organisms find strategies??? I thought it took intelligence to do that.
I know, I know. Just a figure of speech. They don’t actually find anything. They just appear to do it.
Question is?! Why do organisms appear to be doing a wholotta stuff???
Rumraket:
Density is den cities??!!
Thorton, do you perhaps live in a den….with other seemingly cunning types of material entities???
Seriously, show me force. Show me information. Show me love. Show me hope.
Thorton:
That’s why some of us think that evolution itself is intelligent.
ID proponents deny that evolution is intelligent. If we adopt their view of “intelligent”, so that we can talk to them, then we have to say that tinkering does not require intelligence.
That’s an example of why I am not a materialist. I’m not at all sure what counts as material.
I disagree with that. Yes, information is immaterial. But we can experience it, which is a kind of observing. Otherwise we could never be informed.
I wonder what you men by “material,” Steve. Is sound material? As you say, we never observe sound itself, only its effects on people’s ears. 🙂
Sound is not a substance, clearly. It is a state of matter moving back and forth at a frequency between 20 Hz and 20 kHz.
Come to think of it, we have never observed electrons directly, either. Only their effect on other bodies. Are electrons immaterial?
I’m not sure what you think your getting at here Steve, but gravity is indeed material. We have seen…at least mathematically. Einstein even came up with a really good illustration of it explanation for how it works. Here you go:
http://einstein.stanford.edu/MISSION/mission1.html
If your statement is simply that anything we can’t see is immaterial, then congratulations – you’ve just defeated germ theory, metabolism, cellular communication, and electromagnetism all in one fell swoop. That is, clearly all those things are just magical immaterial phenomenon, right?
Poor clueless IDer Steve. So much ignorance, so little time.
Let’s start with your misunderstanding of information. Information isn’t this magic immaterial “stuff” that floats around in space waiting to be discovered. Information is merely the name humans give to our knowledge of the physical configuration of material things. With no physical substrate there is no information.
The science of information theory is a method of applying mathematical rigor to the concept of information. Shannon information has to do with the fidelity of transmission and reception of a message between a sender and receiver with no regard for any meaning a message may have. Kolmogorov–Chaitin information has to do with the compressibility of a message. Neither have anything to do with biology.
So what is biological information? In science biological information is defined as merely the sequence of nucleic acid bases that produce an amino acid. Every time we have a biological organism reproduce and provide new genetics sequences either through imperfect replication or sexual recombination we get new information by definition. Whether or not this information is retained in the gene pool depend on feedback provided by environmental selection pressures. Over time the genetic sequences that work the best (i.e ‘information’) tend to accumulate.
Now enter the IDiots. IDiots love to blather about “evolution can produce no new information” but they never define what they mean by information. It certainly isn’t one of the standard definitions above. Another common IDiot game is to equivocate between information and meaning. As we have seen information is defined as the determination of the configuration of matter. Meaning only applies when the sender and receiver of the information agree on a protocol to use certain configurations of matter as abstract symbols to carry additional knowledge. For example, English speakers have agreed that the symbols CAT represent a small furry feline mammal. To someone with zero knowledge of English the symbols CAT have the identical information content but none of the meaning. Yet another common IDiot ploy is to claim that DNA sequences are actually abstract symbols like CAT that carry the meaning “produce a certain amino acid”. This is demonstrably false. There is no abstraction involved in the DNA to RNA to amino acid process. DNA sequences don’t “mean” an amino acid; they are part of a complicated chemical reaction that produces an amino acid. DNA doesn’t “mean” an amino acid any more that Na and Cl “means” table salt.
So Steve, you ready to give us your definition of information as it applies to biological life? Ready to explain how empirically observed genetic variations like gene duplication events with subsequent mutations that produce new functions don’t count as new information?
Neil Rickert,
It would be a perverse materialist that considered ‘matter’ to be the only thing that exists, and not include the interactions between them. What those fields ‘really are’ is no more or less mysterious than what the matter itself ‘really is’, except that one you can kick and one you can’t.
The influence of a lump of ‘matter’ does not just stop at its obvious boundary. It is surrounded by fields, and the fields of separated matter interact to generate force. Gravity may or may not be a field in the same sense as the electromagnetic field for example, but it’ll do as a model. No ‘materialist’ believes in electrons but not charge, planets but not gravity, substance but not energy.
Steve,
Apparently immaterial means something different to you than to me. Where is this information stored?
Will it? Then why are you wasting time posting messages on a blog instead working that out?
You seem confident. Perhaps you’d like to make a wager? Bottle of whiskey perhaps?
All you have to do is state: What will happen and when it will happen by.
You appear to have misunderstood your role in this. The “non-believers will never be convinced by mere words.
Your role is to show then there is a better, more productive way. As all scientists want results, producing those results is in fact the best way to attact converts to your cause.
So if you are pinning your hopes on people “stopping thuggin’ around” you will be disappoint.
Of course, you no doubt use this as a rationalization (excuse rather) as to the failure of your viewpoint to catch on – it’s not catching on because of those pesky thugs. It’s not that your ideas about information are wrong, it’s that those thugs are stopping you from promoting it!
What cowardly rot!
No, actually the problem is people like you who think they can bypass the normal route that ideas have to pass through to become more then a mere idea.
Information is not recognized as an independent, immaterial entity exhibiting cognizant attributes? So your solution to that is to blame “thugs” instead of working on your idea, supporting it, performing experiments designed to highlight the superiority of your idea over competing ideas?
You are not even wrong Steve.
Some examples from this grab bag? Then perhaps you can take one example and go to UD and try to drum up some support for some actual *work* to *do* something about it?
And how much time do you need? If it’s not happening now, why will it happen in the future? You do realize that ID is basically dead, right? There is, literally, nothing happening in the ID world. So why will “time” solve anything? If anything, time is against you, not on your side!
It is interesting that this argument also overlaps with one some creationists use against natural selection — that it doesn’t exist, and that evolutionary biologists are showing their bankruptcy by using the concept. After all, all it is, is differential survival and reproduction of genotypes. It’s not a thing itself. Therefore we are wrong to use the concept. Similarly, we can argue that
1. Brownian motion does not exist (just molecules banging into each other)
2. Temperature does not exist (same, plus radiation)
3. Wind does not exist (just air moving)
4. Landslides do not exist (just rocks falling down hills)
5. Hills do not exist …
… and so on. The upshot of all this is that nothing exists except maybe quarks. Maybe. For now. Last I heard.
But creationists won’t be consistent.
Amazing that after all this time Creationists are still using a variation of Ken Ham’s basic argument from ignorance:
“Where you there??? Did you see it???”
Well, no we have here no ID but yes IE!
I do not if creationists think this, but materialist Lizzie thinks that all what we have are models. Then
1. Brownian motion does not exist is just a model
2. Temperature does not exist is just a model
3. Wind does not exist is just a model
4. Landslides do not exist is just a model
5. Hills do not exist …