Couldn’t resist the tribute to Denyse?
The new open policy at Uncommon Descent appears to have stalled somewhat. In trying to post a comment this morning I find it disappears. I tried on a couple of threads to no avail. Going on past behaviour, I suspect Barry Arrington has found having an open venue even less appealing than a blog dying from lack of traffic. Of course I could be wrong and will be ready to eat my hat if it turns out to be a glitch.
In the meantime, this is what I had to say (I tried to comment immediately after R0bb’s comment)
Echoing Astroman and R0bb,
Could we have a definition of CSI (complex specified information) which enables a distinction between designed and non-designed entities? It seems core to claims being made currently by Barry and others that there is some substance to ID as an intellectual pursuit.
If it is indeed a quantifiable concept, please tell us how to measure it.
Any, absolutely any, example would do for a start.
From R0bb’s link, Ewert writes:
At her blog, The Skeptical Zone, writer [neuroscientist] Elizabeth Liddle has offered a challenge to CSI that seems worth considering. She presents a mystery image and asks for a calculation of CSI. The image is in gray-scale, and looks a bit like the grain in a plank of wood. Her intent is either to force an admission that such a calculation is impossible or to produce a false positive, detecting design where none was present.
But as long as we remain in the dark about what the image actually represents, calculating its probability is indeed impossible. Dembski never intended the design inference to work in the absence of understanding possible chance hypotheses for the event. Rather, the assumption is that we know enough about the object to make this determination.
Ewert seems to say calculating CSI is impossible unless you know whether the entity in question is designed or not. Seems to render the effort somewhat pointless! Surely someone can do better than this.
Mind you, I must have been doing something right if Barry has indeed “suspended” posting privileges”. I see Keith is still posting there.
ETA Seems some hat-eating may be in order. Commenting from another IP using my phone still works.
ETA2 I’m no longer able to post from other locations, so I guess that’s it.
ETA3 User name and email address now not in their data base so that’s definitely someone actively deleting my account details.
phoodoo,
‘You guys’? On your bike, phoodoo. You, and anyone else except Joe ‘tunie’ Gallien can post here without let or hindrance, save for a request to address the argument and not the argumenter. That is, the kind of personal stuff you (but not us) can get away with at UD tends to be frowned upon here. As for anything else, give it your best shot. Oh, you have … 🙂
“Alan Fox: Can you imagine Barry giving Gordon the key to the safe?”
Yes, I can. In the time that Barry was absent (bible camp) my IP address was blocked from four different locations. But before that, and after the “amnesty”, I was banned for being critical of Gordon and my original comment was deleted (which was tame) and a subsequent comment from Gordon was also removed; but they failed to remove Barry’s response to Gordon which stated “I sent ’em pack’n, as usual. Which I assume was not referring to a moving company.
Allan Miller,
But Allan, what makes you think ID people just want somewhere they can post? UD allows people to have scientific discussions, without all the bullshit that is allowed here.
A request to address the argument, not the argument here? As enforced by Who, Alan?
The difference between UD and here is that Barry enforces the policy, and here they don’t. Every stupid comment is allowed here (except Alan will chose which ones he doesn’t like and put in guana) , so the site is just a morass of vacuous insults, and sewage. Big deal. What’s the great privilege.
I have to believe it was KF too. I lost my ability to post just a few hours after I made a rare reply to him critical of his turning off comments in all his threads. I had no heated exchanges going on with anyone else around that time.
I also believe Barry and Denyse both know of it by now and tacitly approve.
petrushka,
I am accusing you of being unable to identify an appropriate criticism. Jerry Coyne allowed you to say that religion is not the sole reason for violence, wow. See if he will allow you to ask what evidence is there for evolution creating complex intricate networks necessary for life, and see if he will allow this (he won’t).
Evolutionist supporters have made a long and complex history of trying to stifle debate on the topic of the evidence (lack of) for evolution. Why would a site like Wikipedia need to be so dishonest about the topic of evolution? Because their founder, Jimmy Wales wants it that way. Why do they fight so hard to not allow students in schools be told about the gaps in evolutionary theory? Because they are preachers who don’t want other opinions heard. Why does Jerry Coyne think Guillermo Gonzales doesn’t deserve to be an astronomer? Because he doesn’t believe in Coynes made up narrative about the history of life. Why won’t Richard Dawkins debate any ID supporters who have biological science degrees? Because he knows he will fail miserably, so he hides behind his rhetoric, without being called on it. Why does Eugenie Scott recommend that evolutionist supporters never debate evolution with non-believers? Because she knows they always lose.
Evolutionists are the Kings of stifling scientific inquiry. But the walls are crumbling around them, just ask Nature magazine. Monarchies eventually fall.
So Phoodoo, how many papers with positive evidence for ID have you or your UD chums submitted to any scientific journals?
It’s not honest to say ID gets unfairly rejected when they voluntarily choose to not participate.
I’m periodically reminding the UDers of the bannings.
Here, for example:
And here:
I second the request for a list of ID papers that have been rejected by journals.
Unless papers have been submitted and rejected, claims of censorship are bullshit.
I can hear them scream: but people are afraid for their jobs.
Fine, publish the papers anonymously in ID journals, of which there are no shortage.
Barry enforces the rules? How do you see this? When a critic of ID is persistent (but civil) he/she is banned. When a proponent if ID is persistent, rude and offensive (Joe and Mapou), they are defended. That is not enforcing the rules, that is manipulating the message.
Nobody is arguing that Barry (or Alan) shouldn’t be allowed to enforce rules of civil discourse, but that isn’t what is happening at UD. I have been reading UD and I am only aware of one ID proponent being banned, and that was only because he stepped over the line from offensive to batshit crazy.
Vishnu has declared himself/herself teh_winnah, and also waved some credentials around for good measure.
Keiths, if you’d like to invite our friend over, I’ll put the kettle on.
“I have never been so unimpressed in my life as I have been with those guys from the “skeptical zone.””
They must have pearl-clutching workshops or something.
There are no papers that support the theory of evolution. In fact there isn’t any ToE , so your argument is already a ruse. . Lots of people getting money, lots of people preaching their religious worldview, but no papers that demonstrate the non-existent ToE. No wonder your side works so hard to censor the discussion in our schools. You are great propagandists.
Here’s phoodoo when someone starts talking about the evidence for evolution.
This is why we call them IDiots.
What is this ‘no Theory of Evolution’ crap? It has echoes of Mung’s ‘textbook on macroevolution’. Is Google broken?
Riddle:
What is
1. no damn good;
3. based on a tautology;
3. a religion;
4. goes farther than the evidence actually indicates;
5. throws money at a lot of faux scientists; and
6. doesn’t exist?
[Answer: baseball scouting]
That bullshit is called science, and it’s quite necessary in “scientific discussions”.
You are free to stop doing it. There are also stupid attitudes allowed here. For example, you making nonsensical claims and then not answering the question we make to show the nonsense in your claims.
Because it isn’t?
I’ll show you how wrong you are.
Choose a feature that, according to you, can’t be explained by evolution, and explain it with ID.
Then I’ll choose a feature that can be explained by evolution and you try to explain it with ID.
The answer to all the stupid question you ask (because stupid comments are allowed here, as you said) is that ID is bullshit BECAUSE IT DOESN’T REALLY EXPLAIN ANYTHING.
There are lots of papers with “evidence” for ID. What they still don’t have is the scientific theory of ID (or the scientific hypothesis).
Of course not. Obviously, the distorted idea you have for the theory of evolution, which is something very different from what scientifically we call theory of evolution.
Basically, there is no scientific paper supporting the strawman you call “theory of evolution”. But we are talking about THE REAL theory of evolution.
Anyway, that’ a poor defense of the scientific value of ID. You are admitting there is no scientific literature on ID (which is also false, there is a lot of seemingly scientific literature on ID; that in fact it’s fake should be our argument).
Are old-fashioned baseball scouts the NPRists for causation and explanation of in theories of baseball talent?
People, I really don’t know how to start a post. Could someone start a post about biological structures that are actually explained by ID?
I am very curious about how IDsts (is it offensive if I say IDiots, I prefer that term) deal with trying to elaborate a real explanation to anything.
Design is a mechanism. X was designed. ID explains X as “design is a mechanism” and it was designed by the mechanism of design.
That’s basically about it.
OMagain,
I mean ID in biology.
Besides, “design” is not a mechanism. It’s an action that can be performed in many ways. So, to consider “design” a mechanism to explain a biological feature, you have to describe the process of design.
That’s what I mean by explaining any biological feature: explaining what happened exactly that produced that feature.
This is noteworthy
Claim:
Evidence:
When a real (or fictional) detective solves a murder, the detective is supposed to ask about Motive, Means, and Opportunity. Did the butler do it? If so, what was the butler’s motive for doing so? What means was used? (For example, did he stab Lord Fotheringay with an icicle?). And was there an opportunity? (How long was he alone in the greenhouse with Lord Fotheringay just before the murder?)
Generally advocates of ID do not specifically ask these questions. If pressed, they acknowledge that their Designer is everywhere and at all times, and is omnipotent. This is certainly convenient. The issue of motive is addressed by declaring that we, being mere mortals, cannot speculate about the motives of the Designer.
That is also the response they have to any assertion that there has been Bad Design. However they are inconsistent about that: when it comes to junk DNA, they are insistent that there is basically none, because that would be Bad Design.
They even get to the point of saying that these questions are of no interest to them. That the main point of ID is detectign design and that’s all.
But you can’t detect design without knowledge of the mechanism of design, which in turn gives you information about the designer. Without this knowledge, all you can do is detecting complexity. So, ID would be a redundant theory that says that life is very complex (something we already know, of course).
I was actually talking about ID in biology, at least from what I can discern from reading UD 🙂
Joe “tunie” Gallien started that meme a few weeks ago. Other IDiots then picked up on it – Andre, Vishnu, Phoodoo, Mapou.
Joe in particular has been riding the “it doesn’t exist!” train pretty hard. He’s used it on everything from “mass extinctions don’t exist”, “the Chicxulub asteroid impact doesn’t exist”, “the fossil nested hierarchy doesn’t exist”, you name it.
It really does tell you everything you need to know about their understanding of basic science facts and their maturity level.
Guys,
It’s fine to criticise ID, assertions and claims. “That is an idiotic statement because…” but can we refrain from calling people names, please.
Could be. Is the idea that “talent” is non-physical property that necessarily accompanies various actual physical properties?
phoodoo,
So … there is no moderation here, but there is moderation. Is that the problem?
Can you point to anything that was put in Guano which could not be considered personal? I can certainly point to people (you can’t see me, but I’m jerking a thumb in my own direction as I type) who have been banned from UD without giving so much of a whiff of offence, despite provocation from (inter alia) Joe, BAzzer, Upright Biped, Bjorn Again 77, nullasallus, Axel, KF …
Enkidu,
Then if you would just say what it is, that should pretty well take care of it right. Heck Steve Schafner promised to do so weeks ago, but then ran away from it.
Here, let me help you. The theory says that things change somehow, we have no idea how but there are lots of ways. After that things die and everything works like magic.
Some theory.
Barry has posted this:
”
Barry ArringtonNovember 6, 2014 at 8:50 am
Nice summary News.
It never ceases to amaze me when I watch a bunch of dissenters comment about how dissenters are not allowed to comment.”
Which means he’s aware of the bannings but wont comment on why bannings now happen, who banned and why. That’s a major shortfall of character in my estimation.
Out of interest, what is it you imagine get’s taught at Universities in evolutionary biology courses?
I’m sure you’ve heard of Yale:
http://eeb.yale.edu/
When people pay their money to go there are they sitting round doing nothing in those classes?
Obviously the butler is innocent. Where would he find an icicle in a greenhouse?
OMagain,
…or just answer and and put an end to the dodging Omagin.
You sound like a typical skeptic, totally void of any skepticism whatsoever.
Ladies and gentlemen, The Strawman, again:
No, not “things”; populations of living organisms. And not “somehow”. The mechanisms of change have been described and we are still discovering new mechanisms.
By “we” you must be referring to “we the dumb people who don’t understand evolution”.
If you mean “we humans” or “we scientist” it’s false.
That’s not part of evolution. Magic is more compatible with ID.
Can you know explain ID? I assume you understand ID much better than evolution.
The difference between the theory of evolution and ID is that one is a theory that proposes a mechanism to explain what is being observed, and the other is simply a bald assertion.
The idea of evolution was known long before Darwin. Lamarck proposed one theory to explain it. Darwin proposed another. It is the mechanisms that can be examined scientifically. The fact that things can change over time is just an observation, no more scientific than observing that night follows day. It is the mechanism behind why night follows day that can be examined scientifically and led to Newton’s theories. ID, on the other, only claims that you can detect design. Until they propose a mechanism behind the design, it cannot be examined scientifically. But whenever this is mentioned, we are told that it is beyond the scope of ID.
William J Murray’s posts can be vastly improved by snipping out the middle:
“Notice again how keith’s use of negative personal characterizations towards his opponents….
…those who offer virtually nothing other than invective and sniping for a short while.”
Big Boy Pants, William.
Exactly: one explains some things but not everything, and the other explains nothing at all. And then Darwinism skeptics say, “well, you can’t explain ______!” (e.g. the origin of animal phyla, or multicellularity, or abiogenesis). And that’s mostly true — we don’t have good explanations of those things. Perhaps we never will (though I’m cautiously optimistic; human ingenuity has a pretty decent track-record so far). But the fact that we don’t have good explanations of these Big Transitions doesn’t do anything to bolster the case for intelligent design, since intelligent design doesn’t explain these Big Transitions either.
And it certainly won’t help to appeal to archeology or forensic science, because in those cases the design inference is constrained by background information that in turn allows the inference to be tested. Indeed, we can test the design inference only because we have fairly general facts about the designers that we can rely on in framing our hypotheses. Applying the design inference to biology or cosmology is useless, because it’s untestable, and it’s untestable because we can know nothing of the designer(s).
ID advocates sometimes complain about the remark that “intelligent design is creationism in a cheap tuxedo”. I think that creationism is actually in better shape, epistemologically, than intelligent design. Creationism offers hypotheses that are precise enough to be refuted. (And have been refuted, many times.) Whereas design theory is not even wrong, because it doesn’t make claims precise enough to be refuted (or confirmed) in the first place.
We can see this more starkly by noticing that ID consists primarily of calculations of probability about the likelihood of some event coming to pass. These calculations don’t count as scientific hypotheses because those calculations are based on the background assumptions of the model; they aren’t hypotheses that can be tested against empirical reality. Creationism, at least, does offer empirical hypotheses in the first place.
I have made my only offer. For every word you give explaining The Theory Of Intelligent Design I will give you an equivalent number of words explaining The Theory Of Evolution.
That you are unwilling to entertain such a trade is not my loss.
That’s what I’m going with these days too. When you get an “evolution can’t / how does evolution” I offer a narrative only if they agree to provide a corresponding ID narrative. They never agree.
Notice how phoo did not speculate on what they do in those multi-year courses at Yale either. I guess they teach nothing to nobody.
Barry makes it so easy:
phoo @ UD
Linky
Yea, I’m sure the “bystanders” will see that straight away!
I believe Barry nows the flaws in what he said. He just wants to have a soundbite about openness because the banning are an elephant in the room for them.
UD is the North Korea of the internet.
Barry makes it easy, and Denyse makes it even easier:
phoodoo,
That’s what the theory says? Do you have a reference?
The AtBC banination archive is great. Although Joe should be commended for having straightened up his act for last 5 years:
“Barry Arrington
04/27/2009
2:09 pm
Joseph, you are on the edge of being booted. Knock it off”
I guess it must at least exist then!
Exactly. If there were any injustice in the bannings, why aren’t the banned complaining at UD?
Since they’re not, they must realize that they deserved banning.
Kind of like Phoodoo’s complaint that evolutionists censor, and it’s terrible that TSZ isn’t censored like UD is.
Creationist logic.
Glen Davidson