Here’s some personal correspondence between Liz and me. I presume that she checks posts before allowing publication, so if this is inappropriate I claim innocence.
Dear Liz,
As you know, I have great respect for you, even admiration, but I suggest the following.
You wrote:
The reason I get exercised about ID is that I do think, in simple scientific terms, that it is fallacious. Not because there couldn’t have been an ID, nor because science demonstrates that there wasn’t/isn’t one, but because the inference is, IMO, fallacious.
I respond:
The reason I get exercised about the proposed creative power of the Darwinian mechanism of random errors filtered by natural selection is that I do think, in simple scientific terms, that it is fallacious. Not because this mechanism couldn’t possibly have produced all that it is credited with, but because evidence, logic, and simple probability calculations demonstrate that this proposition is fallacious.
Thus, it seems to me, we are separated by an immense chasm over which there is no bridge.
Gil
Let’s face it, the ID versus materialism debate has profound scientific, philosophical, theological, and even ethical implications, which is why passions run so high.
Someone is wrong and someone is right. I just want to know the truth.
William J Murray,
To be honest, William, I think so. Peer-review is not a very high bar, and a lot of junk does get published. This is particularly true with cross-disciplinary papers where no one reviewer may have the expertise to understand all the concepts.
And there are an increasing number of journals, some of which have a much higher (and some have a much lower) bar than others.
One of the main benefits, I would say, of peer-review is not so much as a vetting process as an editing process. Reviewers’ comments often sharpen up a paper, or ask authors to address specific issues, or consider alternative interpretations. Most importantly, for empirical papers, they try to ensure the enough details are given of the methodology that the work can be independently replicated and/or the hypotheses re-tested. Peer-review does not grant an imprimatur.
One valuable activity most science departments conduct is “journal club”, where groups read a recent paper, and try to figure out whether the methodology is sound and the conclusions valid. And often gaping holes are found, sometimes in journals that really shouldn’t have let such bloopers through.
So it’s only the first step in the validation process. The most important part is replication, or empirical validation of a theoretical paper.
I’d be more than happy to host a journal club of Abel’s paper here. It works quite well online.
I don’t know if that’s the best one to choose, though. Any other suggestions?
I don’t know how that would work if some of the participants can’t read or understand the material in any of those papers yet want to accept them as “authoritative.”
Abel’s papers are a mess to start with because they are so long and he throws so much junk into them (we see this tactic over on UD also). It might be easier to start with some shorter papers.
From my experience, I suspect that a recent paper like Sewell’s “Second look at the second law” would be much easier to deal with because its misconceptions are more accessible and easily contrasted with the correct concepts from physics.
One of the Dembski and Marks papers permits discussion within the first couple of pages of some Dembski’s uses of information. It is not as simple as Sewell’s paper, but it is less messy than Abel’s stuff. It then goes on with more of Dembski’s ideas about how he thinks his ideas apply to things like the Dawkin’s Weasel algorithm.
That link to the Science Café apparently picked up an extra parenthesis.
Here it is again.
Weakly beneficial variants in small populations under neutral drift (stochiastic variations can lose organisms with beneficial mutations before they accumulate to significantly high level) . [evil grin]
Not that this helps the ID crowd. Instead of arguing about tautologies, they could head over to astandard textbook on evolution (Futuyama’s is nice), crack open the section on the mathematics of natural selection, and read on, then follow that up with observed and experimental natural selection.
Yes, that’s a fair comment, except that, as Joe rightly says, as we measure fitness by replicatory success, we can’t often actually tell drift effects from beneficial effects, except statistically, unless we can identify a specific gene that does a specific job, that increases fecundity.
So it remains simply true that variants that reproduce more often will be reproduced more often. That’s not tautological, unless you forget that the variant individuals doing the reproducing aren’t the same individuals as the variant offspring.
It’s just self-evidently true.
But that’s a problem that would have to be faced by the putative Designer, not by evolution. A Designer would have to know something about his materials and about the effects of design changes before making the changes.
That’s what scares ID advocates, the fact that the source of variation doesn’t know the effects in advance. They simply can’t understand how sophisticated assemblies can arise without planning.
That’s the Adam Smith insight (whether true or desirable in human economics or not). That’s the insight that Darwin asserted led him to natural selection.
The inability to foresee either the structural effects of mutations, or their utility or counterutility seems to be a condition of existence. Chemistry doesn’t seem to all detailed foresight into complex molecules. Certainly not to the point where one could forecast the differential utility of similar folds. Much less the utility of developmental differences.
This problem is faced all the time by human designers. One does not get rich by designing products that are objectively the best. One gets rich by striving and by being lucky. The analogous selector on designed products is the marketplace, not juries of engineers.
Elizabeth,
Well, you can do direct head to head survival experiments of populations (works well with bacteria, not so well for Blue Whales), often done with antibiotic experiments.
But the point is that the whole “natural selection is a tautology” is a load of foetid dingos kidneys. We have more than adequate mathematical definitions of natural selection, and actual observations of it (even if it can be tricky, I for one do not propose to do any Blue Whale experiments).
Fisher’s Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher's_fundamental_theorem_of_natural_selection
and a test thereof:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2007.00179.x/abstract;jsessionid=1FFF56CBA4116197C87A7FD099777450.d02t02
There are other interesting phenomena, as illuminated by the study of epigenetics in living organisms, which have their analogs in nearly every other level of complex, organized systems.
Nearly all such systems of a sufficient level of complexity will involve hierarchies of increasingly more loosely bound constituents. A complex structure can be based on an underlying, robust, tightly-bound “core” upon which increasingly more loosely bound complexity is built up.
Such structures can be sorted according to those more delicately bound components without changing the underlying core.
One of the simplest examples is chemistry, in which the chemical compounds formed from the various elements can change and be sorted, but the nuclei of the atoms remain unchanged.
This phenomenon occurs at all levels of complexity.
So, basically what we have here is the choice between a peer-reviewed paper published in a prestigious scientific journal, and a guy on an internet blog claiming to be an authority and using rhetoric, personal attacks, negative characterizations and unsupported, unquoted paraphrasing to make his “case” and who, when challenged, basically waves his hands and claims those he is addressing doesn’t have the education necessary to understand his argument?
I appreciate your time.
Those textbooks are still available and are still used in the standard courses in physics and chemistry. They are what are called classics in these areas because they are complete, well-written, and have withstood the test of time.
Journal editors and reviewers are overloaded in today’s fast-paced research environment. A lot of junk gets into various journals for various reasons and then simply dies there. It takes experience and knowledge of the relevant fields to sort through the garbage.
Nobody has criticized you for not having the expertise. But that certainly doesn’t justify your picking and choosing “authorities” on the basis of the fact that you don’t like what some of them say.
So it is not clear why you would want to accept the massive clutter in journals over material that has been vetted and has withstood the test of time. You don’t have to believe me; just go check the best textbooks out there.
The probability equations in question assume that all searches must be exhaustive. However, Gregory Chaitin has demonstrated, at least in principle, that random searches can narrow the field by being cumulative — without the aid of being intelligent designed.
In fairness, his model demonstrates that even with a drastically reduced scope, the time needed to generate DNA ex nihilo would still be much greater than the age of the Universe. But by his own admission, his model is but an initial sketch in the quest to formulate a mathematically description of evolutionary processes.
The salient point for Intelligent Design, however, is that their equations are predicated on a premature assumption about the nature of searches — that is, they too are infected with the a priori bugaboo.
Holy mackerel! (Why mackerels are holy I have no idea, but that’s how the saying goes.)
When Liz invited me to post here I told her that I didn’t think I would have anything of interest to say to such an audience, but apparently I was wrong.
Thanks to all at SZone for the civil and cordial welcome. It is greatly appreciated.
In our personal correspondence I told Liz about my experience when my family discovered that I had apostatized from the family religion of atheism, developed an interest in ID, and had converted to the historical Christian faith. I was essentially disowned, especially by my mother (although that situation has improved immensely in the last four years).
Being disowned and ridiculed by one’s loved ones is very painful. It is from this experience that much fear and trepidation originated.
Without any malice I say in my experience it is more common for strict churchgoers to enforce churchgoing in the children than the other way round.
I’m agnostic, but spent ten years in a church choir because I love the music. I simply don’t see the point to faith. One believes what seems undeniable and remains open to the rest. I see nothing convincing about any religion, but I remain on good terms with many churchgoers.
William J Murray,
I’m in no position to assess the prestige of International Journal of Molecular Sciences, but you’ve informed us at least three times that it’s a prestigious journal, so I’ll take your word for it.
Even so, as Mike and Elizabeth have said, peer review can be a leaky filter. For example, in section 3.2 of this paper, Dembski and Marks use negative relative entropy to compare the average performance of two searches. Since negative relative entropy is always negative, they conclude that search A performs worse than search B. But by the same reasoning, it’s also true that search B performs worse than search A, and in fact every search performs worse than every other search.
No expertise is required to see the absurdity of this, so we have to wonder if the reviewers even read this section. I haven’t seen poorly vetted articles like this very often in technical journals, but I’ve certainly seen some.
William,
It’s not just Mike Elzinga (not exactly a nobody) who finds Abel’s paper vacuous, so does Liz and so do I. All of us are well-established scientists with enough experience in relevant fields. Perhaps we are missing something. Why don’t you explain what Abel does and why it is significant? Perhaps you could start a dedicated thread?
So far you have only appealed to the fact that his paper was published in a “prestigious” journal. What makes you think that it is prestigious, or even reputable? It publishes essentially everything that gets submitted. It has an impact factor of 2, which means that its papers receive 2 citations on average during the three years after publication. Prestigious journals, such as Nature or Cell, have impact factors upwards of 30.
It has everything to do with it, William.
Even the breeding of those horrible little yappy dogs with snuffly noses is to do with “generating the largest number of adult viable offspring”. It just so happens that the environment in which those dogs evolved was/is one in which being a horrible little yappy dog with a snuffly nose enhances your chance of mating.
That fact that that environment consists of members of another species who like horrible little yappy dogs with snuffly noses makes no difference to the principle.
Hence all those horrible little dogs.
Except Elizabeth has already said:
This is called shifting the burden. Mike Elzinga originated my involvement here by paraphrasing, negatively characterizing, and smearing Dr. Abel’s published work (and the published work of others by claiming that all ID/creationists do the same thing). I challenged him to quote the particular, relevant parts of the paper in question and then explain (not characterize, or rhetorically dismiss with personal smears) why Abel was wrong.
If one is going to claim they Abel et al is wrong, it’s not my job to prove the converse; it is Elzinga’s job – or Elizabeth’s, or yours, or whomever’s – to show why Abel – or Dembski & Marks, or Axe – are wrong. I haven’t claimed he is right; I’ve challenged those who claim he is wrong to explain why he is wrong with the common, polite internet debate procedure of quoting the relevant area of his paper, citing the page, and then explaining why it in particular is erroneous.
But what do I get from such a simple, common request? Hand-waving, negative insinuations and burden-shifting.
I’ll have go, William. I can’t make much of Abel, but I can certainly tell you where Dembski and Marks go wrong.
I can probably have a go at Abel too, but I find his prose is at best tough going, at worst obfuscatory.
William,
Why don’t you open a separate thread dedicate specifically to Abel’s paper? Hopefully someone on the ID side could summarize what is right with it and we on the opposite side will explain why we think the paper is not even wrong.
I am still hoping that in this thread Gil would provide examples of “simple probability calculations” that he mentioned in the opening post.
Being disowned and ridiculed by one’s loved ones is very painful. It is from this experience that much fear and trepidation originated.
Personally, I cannot imagine why anyone would ‘disown’ a child on a matter of faith. I am a lifelong atheist, but my children can believe what they wish (or rather, what seems sensible to them). Just as I would not disown them over matters of sexuality or politics, matters of religion are simply an issue of individual freedom. There are, of course, many who could tell the tale from the opposite standpoint. I have a friend who was raised a Jehovah’s Witness but has recently started to question, and had a tearful reunion with his sister who had been ‘disowned’ by their mother some 20 years before.
Individual atheists may appear – and may even be – angry and contemptuous, and I’m not keen on that attitude. It invites prejudice. It is interesting, for those of us who dip a toe into UD commenting, how often a mild statement, calmly typed, seems to have been read by the opponent as thumped two-fisted into a spittle-flecked keyboard. It is sometimes a genuine effort not to respond in kind to the attitude that occasionally comes the other way.
I’m also very keen to know about those simple probability calculations Gil mentioned.
Perhaps Gil doesn’t realize that his calculations may overturn 150 years of evolutionary thinking. With the benefit of hindsight brilliant ideas often look very simple – to the point of almost trivial. This kind of feeling may have prevented Gil from publishing his work so far, but I would urge him not to keep his quite possibly ground-braking work to himself.
I am quite confident Gil’s model is not of the tornado-in-a-junkyard variety, like the probability of a specific 200 amino acid protein randomly assembling having a probability of 1 in 20^200, because the relevance of such calculations for evolution has long been known to be nil. No, it has to be something far more deep and elegant.
.I want to know!
In my comment above is a specific example of an error on the part of Dembski and Marks, showing exactly where and how they’re wrong. If you want to see it laid out even more explicitly, see here. I don’t know how a critique could be any more clear-cut. I can offer many more such examples if you’r’e willing to read them and either refute or acknowledge them.
Pinning down Abel’s issues, on the other hand, is a bit like trying to show exactly where Alan Sokal is wrong in his famous article. I personally see no way to interpret Abel’s work such that it’s valid, but I’m not willing to waste time arguing over how it should be interpreted. So maybe you could pick what you consider to be Abel’s best argument, give us an unambiguous interpretation, and we can discuss it on that basis.
P.S. I too am interested in seeing Gil’s probability calculations.
William J. Murray as admitted he has no expertise in this area; and there is no point in pressing him to explain a paper he can’t read and articulate.
But this is simply the point I was mentioning earlier. In the 40+ years I have been watching the followers of ID/creationism, I have never encountered one that can sit down and articulate and justify the concepts of the “theorists” from whom they draw their quotes.
I have gone through Abel’s paper paragraph-by-paragraph and I see things like “spontaneous molecular chaos,” Shannon entropy, “cybernetic gap,” and dozens of other made up words and acronyms that have no correlates in the real world of chemistry, physics, and biology. The entire paper mischaracterizes the way matter and energy behaves.
But these words resonate with the followers of ID/creationism who can’t even define these words let alone explain to anyone why they should replace the concepts in chemistry, physics and biology that are drawn from study of the real world.
Abel is typical of those in the pseudo-scientific world who dumps loads of trash on his readers in an extremely long and muddled paper and leaves the reader to bask in flowery language that says nothing about reality.
Granville Sewell on the other hand takes on the second law directly in a relatively short paper and gets it completely and demonstrably wrong. He has no idea what entropy is; and that can be illustrated by a simple concept test.
In taking on such a fundamental concept in physics, one would think that he would have submitted the paper to Physical Review Letters; but he didn’t. He submitted it to Elsevier.
The more interesting thing about this paper is that it was rejected, and Sewell sued and got $10,000 in a nuisance settlement with Elsevier.
But that isn’t the point. The paper is dead wrong, yet the people over at UD were taking umbrage at the fact that it was rejected. Not one of the UD comments over there showed any evidence that any of them understood what was wrong with Sewell’s paper.
And so it goes; paper after paper from the “theorists” of the ID/creationist movement, yet not one follower who can read or justify those papers and is willing to compare the misconceptions of their leaders with the concepts in science. And this has been going on for over 40 years.
If William J. Murray cannot get his head around Abel’s long, multi-concept papers, perhaps he would be willing to take on a short, single concept paper like Sewell’s.
I have to leave on a trip in about an hour, but I will be back late Sunday. I don’t know if I can get to a computer before I get back.
In a way the whole debate on ID vs. Darwinism is premature. A fundamental problem, pointed out many times of course by many people smarter than me, is that ‘Intelligent’ is not defined in any formal sense. It can reasonably be argued that the process of variation + selection itself is an Intelligent process – as in, it can find solutions to problems faster and at less cost than brute searches. The moment we accept this, the entire controversy collapses from one about Intelligent versus non-Intelligent into one about the nature of the Intelligence. I suspect that it will then become clear that the dividing line is not presence or lack of intelligence, but the presence or lack of purpose. Where purpose, of course, implies consciousness and a mind. In other words, is biological evolution a mindless process or not?
Before we go all nail and tooth in this debate, we really, really need to agree on what is meant by this word Intelligence, and be very clear about what is included in the class of intelligent entities and what is not. If we are unwilling or unable to do this there is no hope to ever narrow the chasm.
fG
By the way, why do I look like an angry toaster?
fG
Here is a thread at Pharyngula on Abel’s review paper “Is Life Unique?”. PZ seems less than impressed.
You have nailed the reason why ID advocates avoid talking about the designer. The moment you try to look at the designer or the design process, the whole thing disappears in a puff of vapor.
The designer can only be seen when you aren’t looking.
My avatar seems to be linked to my WordPress account. I guess if you don’t set up your own you get a random image.
You can set your own avatar, but I set the default to something called MonsterID which makes a unique monster based on your email address. Any site you go to with the same ID system will make the same toaster.
I had an idle minute…..
I’m chugging through the linked Abel paper now.
Will post something when I’m done.
I may be some time.
faded_Glory,
Because you have no toast, and therefore, no purpose. 🙂
In the meantime, it would great to see WJM address the above comment by R0b:
…where R0b does exactly what WJM asks: quoting the relevant area of a paper, citing the page, and then explaining why it in particular is erroneous.
The accusations of word salad for this paper are semi-justified. Abel certainly deluges the reader in a rambling way with an avalanche of (often correct) information from a disparate variety of fields. He then aggravates the matter by liberally throwing around his own homemade terms and definitions as if they weren’t. Altogether, it’s enough to exceed the bandwidth of anyone’s brain. (In a perverse way, this probably accounts for why the article got published even though it shouldn’t have.)
That said, I think it is fairly easy to isolate the fatal flaw, which is really pretty basic and which renders everything else in the article superfluous. Despite the massive amounts of information, and all the sciency-sounding jargon he throws at the reader, his entire argument turns on a critical assumption he makes that is, at worst, demonstrably false, and at best, highly contested.
Abel constantly uses words like “purposeful,” “meaning,” “utility,” and “function.” All throughout, his arguments are intended to support one key conclusion: that whenever we find matter organized in a purposeful manner that exhibits utility or achieves a function, the “programming” of that organization cannot have arisen naturally (i.e., randomly, blindly). But the validity of this conclusion is wholly dependent upon the validity of his big, underlying assumption. His assumption is that certain arrangements of matter have purpose, utility, meaning, and function independent of our human mental characterizations of them. So in order to accept his conclusions, you must first accept his teleological premise. But he provides absolutely no justification for why we should accept his teleological premise. It’s not even clear to me that he understands that his argument relies on that premise. But if you reject his teleological premise, which the methodology of science typically does, then his 45 pages of blather are totally irrelevant.
I’m happy to accept his teleological premise in Monod’s “teleonomic” sense.
I’m half way through, and I’m not checking all the references (there are 325!) but I’ve checked quite a few and some are totally irrelevant. Extraordinarily irrelevant. This is one:
Edge of chaos
It looks as though he typed his favorite phrases into google and stuffed all his hits into his reference list.
“if you reject his teleological premise, which the methodology of science typically does”
Once again, this outdated notion that there is a single, monolithic thing called ‘THE’ methodology of (natural) science? Do people notice a pattern in the language here?
There are in fact some ‘sciences’ that face ‘teleology’ directly. Sciences that study ‘extra-natural’ and ‘non-natural’ things are a fine example.
That some scholars and lay persons are not up-to-date with what PoS has amply demonstrated regarding *multiple* ‘scientific’ *methods* in the past 30+ years does not invalidate its truth. Will you ‘adapt’ your language, folks, or stick your heads back in the sand?
On the MN thread [1st after her being dismissed from UD, after announcing the dismissal], we are still waiting for Elizabeth to redress her claim that ‘scientific methodology’ means ‘MN’. What will come of her willingness or unwillingness to adapt her language in the face of a better alternative? Does she respect PoS and recognize the WAP in her position?
What’s an extra-natural thing? Or non-natural?
I’m entirely with Petrushka here in wondering what those alleged sciences that study “extra-natural” and “non-natural” things may be studying?
But I need to take it a step further (given that this entire post made me scratch my head): can you enlighten us what *multiple* ‘scientific’ *methods* you speak of, what the significance of the stars and quotation marks is, and why it should matter to scientists what philosophers think about their methods?
It seems I get two different monsters, depending on which computer I log in on. Makes me feel schizophrenic…
😉
“What’s an extra-natural thing? Or non-natural?”
These are languages that ‘naturalists’ don’t understand, while others do. He or she who has ears…
If you folks would take a 1st-yr (is it called ‘freshman’ in USA jargon?) university course in ‘science (and technology) studies (STS),’ ‘philosophy of science’ (PoS) or ‘sociology of science’ (SoS), it would become quite clear for you what ‘multiple scientific methods’ means. Speaking of a ‘single scientific method’ is outdated, or suitable for grade school student level of knowledge.
Being ‘with Petruska’ in ignorance is worth no credit. Likewise, unwillingness to do the work of reading or asking professionals about these fields and their insights scores no monster points.
Gregory, you crack me up. I don’t need a sociologist to tell me what scientists do. I am a scientist.
GilDodgen, I’m kinda sensitive to the phrase “the religion of atheism”. Always strikes me as the sort of category error caused by a religious mindset, that sees everything as religious. But atheism is a religion in the same sense that NOT collecting stamps is a hobby. “The religion of not having a religion”, absurd-looking at first, becomes meaningful only when one realizes that if everything MUST be a religion, non-religion must be one too. The paradox of the religious view, I suppose.
I found a link to extra-natural.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/sro/rrm/rrm39.htm
and another.
http://biologos.org/blog/signature-in-the-cell-a-follow-up
A pattern emerges.
So, you speak a language that unspecified others understand, but people that are naturalists in quotation-marks don’t. That’s about as meaningful a statement as the earlier one.
And I must assume that you can’t tell us what an extra-natural or non-natural thing might be. Too bad.
Well, that refers right back to my question why it should matter to scientists what philosophers think about their methods. That question too still remains open.
And you are right: I never took any STS, PoS, or SoS classes. I took actual science classes. And now I am an scientist. The kind that practices science. The kind where we are using actual scientific methods. And I am not American, so I can’t help you with USA jargon.
So, I am still curious which ‘multiple scientific methods’ you speak of (and what the significance of the scare-quotes is), as in: would you be so kind and please give an illustrative example of what you speak of? Preferably of actual scientific methods used by scientists?
olegt,
I am also a scientist (well, a mathematician, but I work on problems in theoretical physics), but I don’t agree that the philosophy and sociology of science has nothing to teach me. That would be like saying, “I don’t need a psychologist to tell me how humans think. I am a human.”
Being an individual scientist does not grant one expertise on the large-scale social structure of science, or on historical variations in the manner in which science has been practiced, or even on the way individual scientists work on problems (just as being human doesn’t make me an expert on how individual humans — including I myself — think). There is definitely room for sociological, psychological, historical and philosophical investigation of scientific practice.
Gregory,
I’m afraid you’ve imputed a narrower meaning than I intended. I agree there is not a single monolithic procedure that is THE methodology of science. Science proceeds by virtue of an array of variant methodologies. So if you’d prefer, I’d be happy to modify my statement to, “The teleological premise is rejected by the methodologIES of science.”
I’d certainly be interested in examples of “sciences” which study ‘non-natural’ or ‘extra-natural’ things.
Sotto Voce,
Sorry, Sotto Voce, but we’ll have to disagree on this one. My own practice of science and my observation of other scientists give me a much better picture of science than a freshman seminar in sociology of science prescribed by Gregory.
That’s a neat argument. From now on, when someone asks me to explain myself I’m just going to say, “I’m speaking a language people like you don’t understand.”
By the way, knowing a thing or two, as I do, about STS, PoS, SoS, and plain old S, doesn’t help me understand what “sciences” you think study “non-natural” and “extra-natural” things.
I actually disagree with Elizabeth (quelle horreur!) and Dembski when they allow evolutionary processes to be “intelligent”, by avowing that a choice-making system can be considered intelligent even when there is no predetermined goal being pursued – or as I find helpful, when there is no possibility of an irrational choice
We of the common, philosophically-illiterate, herd simply do not recognise selection-without-purpose as intelligence.
Mind you, we might just be thick!
Once again, I am moved to enter a plea for the lightly-educated.
What, please, are those sciences that can or should study the “non-natural” and “extra-natural”; and how may they be used in this endeavour?
You ignore me at your peril – I am but the tiny tip of a gigantic iceberg composed of reasonably intelligent people, impatient of semantics games, and eager for accessible explanations of those concepts that some would force upon us.
Be told!
damitall,
I once tried to suggest using “real” and “imaginary” for natural and whatever-else natural but it didn’t catch on. The problem for imaginary things is, once you find evidence for one, it can no longer be imaginary.