"Is ID Science?"

[Iacchus]

Originally Posted by naturalist.atheist

I could care less what you do with god. Cram it up your ass and masturbate to it for all I care. I told you what I do. If you don't like it tough shit.

Getting quite perturbed over something you don't assume, eh?

I do not divorce them. My imagination is an all natural occurrence. Just as everything else. And illusions are also all natural. An illusion is a projection. A projection is kind of like a picture. You can picture things that are real or you can picture things that are not real. When they are not real that is called an illusion. You can even picture things that might be real and go look for them. If you find them then you made a prediction of reality and it worked. But if you don't ever find it then it may be real but it could very well not be real. But the process is all natural.

What I would like to know, is why this illusion we call self, tries to make any sense out of anything? ... since it obviously doesn't persist after death. I mean what is the point in it being here in the first place? To gain assess to the knowledge of "reality" (that reality itself doesn't possess), and then not? Reality must be pretty stupid and pretty sophisticated all wrapped up into one.

[Deadlokd]

Originally Posted by yguy

wherefore the universe must be dumbed down so as to pose no threat to its illusion of hegemony.

Can you get dumber than goddidit?

Originally Posted by Iacchus

Mine is the simpler explanation. In fact it requires very little calculating at all. Not that I'm discounting QM and QED mind you. Although from what I understand, they do nothing to account for why reality is predictable, and/or where this predictability begins. If nothing else, if the whole of nature is predictable, and QM is not, then what are we to conclude, except that QM exists "outside" of nature? and, that there may very well be some other force (or entity) which guides it.

You can ask my wife, she's a member here. And really mate, up until you got your g-string in a twist because I wasn't insulting you, I was treating you with respect. If I choose to treat yguy like the dumbass he is, what the fuck does that have to do with you? Except perhaps for solidarity among the ignorant.

Now, getting back to your half-baked point. Why do you assert that reality is predictable? Your whole argument for god seems to centre around the point that "everyone" knows how reality is going to turn out. Well, sorry, but no one forwarded the email to me. Fill in the blanks for me eh? Reality is going to _________ _________ ___________ _________!

Personally, I think your "reality is predictable" argument is odd. You can't know what shape evolution is going to take simply because of the fucking enormous number of mutations happening all the time.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I reiterate that science is seeking to understand and Intelligent Design is ceasing to seek with the catch-all phrase "goddidit", and for that reason, Intelligent Design is not science.

And that is the lay down miseré.

[Count]

Originally Posted by Deadlokd

You can ask my wife, she's a member here.

It's true, you can and I am.

You mentioned "assumptions" a fair bit back there, Iacchus. I would suggest that you don't make assumptions on people's relationships lest you come off looking like a wee bit of a twat.
For the record, Deadlokd doesn't have a girlfriend (or do you?! ). He does have a wife though, moi. And I can assure you he has never treated me with anything less than the utmost respect (excluding the time I told him his cooking was burnt and unpalatable, I still maintain that his reaction was OTT ).

He is gentle, sweet and kind to those he loves. He generally reserves his scorn and derision for those worthy of it, like fucktards on the net that have somehow mastered the art of typing with their buttocks.

[Dragar]

Originally Posted by davidm

It's not clear to me why this experiment should prove Many Worlds only to the subject of the experiment. It should also prove it to those vanishingly small number of observers who witness you never being shot.

Well, it will prove something to the people who watch. I am not sure what they would conclude though. As far as they know, they have just witnessed a series of extraordinarily unlikely events. I'm not quite sure this would demonstrate Many Worlds to them, or simply show them quantum mechanics does not work when it comes to me, shooting myself in the head.

But we must be careful, because I am not sure this counts as science any more! It is sounding like philosophy!

[BDS]

Originally Posted by Count

For the record, Deadlokd doesn't have a girlfriend

That's what they all say.

He is gentle, sweet and kind to those he loves.

Even the Philistines can say the same. It's being gentle, sweet and kind to those one doesn't love that's the trick.

[Count]

Originally Posted by BDS

Even the Philistines can say the same. It's being gentle, sweet and kind to those one doesn't love that's the trick.

The difference of course is that being gentle, sweet and kind to fucktards is nowhere near as fun as being hilariously scornful.

It all boils down to respect really. IMO, there is a defaulted amount of respect people are initially entitled to. That amount can either increase or decrease depending on their degree of "fucktardation". In this instance, the level of respect appears to have decreased due to an acute case of fucktard syndrome.

Signed,

Philistine

[BDS]

Good answer. I was just joking around, and I'm no examplar of loving my enemies.

[Deadlokd]

Originally Posted by BDS

Even the Philistines can say the same. It's being gentle, sweet and kind to those one doesn't love that's the trick.

The Philistines were actually quite nice people. Haven't you seen the Simpsons?

And really now, why on Earth should I be nice to someone who accuses me of talking to him like trash? What social constraint says that I must be nice to hypersensitive ignoramuses?

[Crumb]

Originally Posted by Count

mastered the art of typing with their buttocks.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by davidm

Really? Do you have any support at all for this extraordinarily unhistorical assertion?

He was "kinda troubled that he had to resort to God to explain the existence of gravity"? Just the opposite: He believed that God's immanence in both space and time accounted for gravity.

I am pretty sure that he would have been very happy to do so if he could. He saw the universe as something very regular. Not subject to arbitrary interference by the deity. That god did not interfere in nature since god's creation would be perfect.

He also believed that Christ would return to the earth, and rule over it.

Newton was not an atheist, or a deist. He was a Christian, though an anti-trinitarinan.

Yes you are right. But he would have been considered an Orthodox Christian in only the loosest sense of the word. And not all that much earlier he would be called a heretic.

For those who would like to learn more, I recommend Stephen D. Snobelen: Newton Reconsidered

There is also this website that has a large number of original texts.

Welcome to the Newton Project

It supports the idea that he kept his ideas about nature and his religious ideas somewhat separate:

Originally Posted by Sir Isaac Newton

That religion & Philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into Philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.

Keynes Ms. 6 (Normalized Version)

Newton did not care for atheists:

Originally Posted by Sir Isaac Newton

Of Atheism

Opposite to the first is Atheism in profession & Idolatry in practise. Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowells) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin ....

Apparently he was very taken by the idea of god as the master designer and the design had to be perfect.

http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.u...ode=normalized

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by Iacchus

Getting quite perturbed over something you don't assume, eh?

No. It is only you.

What I would like to know, is why this illusion we call self, tries to make any sense out of anything? ... since it obviously doesn't persist after death. I mean what is the point in it being here in the first place? To gain assess to the knowledge of "reality" (that reality itself doesn't possess), and then not? Reality must be pretty stupid and pretty sophisticated all wrapped up into one.

You get to decide for yourself what the purpose of your life is going to be. Because frankly most people really don't want others to make that choice for them. It's your life, its your purpose. If you think the point is that everything was created just for you so you could have an afterlife of eternal bliss then have at it. It would be just the sort a purpose I would expect from a narcissist.

This is what Feynman had to say:

Richard Feynman - Doubt and Uncertainty

[The Lone Ranger]

Asking how a hypothetical experiment could disprove the conclusion that Homo sapiens has evolved from earlier species is rather a lot like asking how you might disprove that the Earth is a planet in orbit around a star we call the Sun.

That's because the evidence for the conclusion is so ironclad that there is no debate about the matter within the scientific community. It is a fact that Homo sapiens evolved from earlier species -- at least as well-supported as is the conclusion that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

There are plenty of experiments that could have disproved this conclusion.

For example, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, whereas chimpanzees and other non-human apes have 24 pairs. If it's true that chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor, then two chromosomes must have fused sometime after the split between the proto-chimpanzee line and the proto-human line.

Sure enough, comparison of human, chimpanzee and gorilla chromosomes revealed that one of our chromosomes formed from the fusion of two "ape" chromosomes. Our chromosome even has a non-functional telomere right in the middle, indicating where the fusion occurred and allowing us to determine which two ape chromosomes fused.

It's certainly possible that comparisons of the chromosomes of humans and non-human apes would have failed to reveal evidence of chromosomal fusion -- evidence that must be present if humans and the other ape species share common ancestry. That would have cast grave doubt on the conclusion that humans and chimpanzees share common ancestry.


Most mammals possess genes that allow them to synthesize Vitamin C. Humans can't, however, because the gene that would allow us to do so has undergone a mutation that renders it incapable of functioning. The gene is present, but non-functional.

If humans share ancestry with other ape species, then if non-human apes lack the ability to produce Vitamin C, it should be because they inherited the "broken" gene from the same ancestors we did. Sure enough, like us, non-human apes cannot manufacture Vitamin C, and must get it in their diets. And, it's because they, like us, have the same "broken" gene. (So do monkeys, by the way; they, like the apes, cannot manufacture Vitamin C.)

The proof of the pudding is that there is another mammal species that cannot manufacture Vitamin C -- the Guinea Pig. Since there are plenty of mammalian groups that, according to evolutionary theory, are much more closely-related to humans (and non-human apes and monkeys) than are guinea pigs -- mammals that can manufacture Vitamin C, a straightforward prediction is that humans/apes/monkeys cannot have the same "broken" gene that guinea pigs do. It would be wildly improbable that the same mutation should happen to arise and persist in two unrelated groups.

So, there are two obvious ways that an examination of the genes of humans, non-human apes, monkeys and Guinea Pigs could easily prove that humans are not descended from common ancestors with apes (and monkeys).

First of all, if it turned out that while humans, apes and monkeys all lacked the ability to manufacture Vitamin C, it was because they had different "broken" genes (and especially if there was no evident pattern to which "broken" genes were present in the different groups), that would be telling evidence against the conclusion that humans are descended from common ancestors with non-human apes and monkeys.

But, of course, that did not turn out to be the case.

Secondly, it could have turned out that humans shared the "broken" gene with Guinea Pigs, but not primates. Given the ludicrousness of the notion that humans and Guinea Pigs share a recent common ancestor -- what with all their anatomical, physiological and genetic differences -- this would have been a crippling blow to the notion that humans and apes share common ancestry.


We could on and on and on and on ... There are, of course, any number of experiments and discoveries that could have proved that humans do not share common ancestry with other ape species. The important fact is that they didn't.

***

Anyone who thinks that individuals evolve in any way has demonstrated that he or she is ignorant of literally the most basic principles of evolutionary theory (and developmental biology). Individuals do not evolve by definition.


Cheers,

Michael

[Deadlokd]

Ha! I didn't have to google any of that! That must mean I am learning stuff. I usually have to check a few things in your posts TLR.

But Michael, if a human develops a mutation and passes it on, hasn't that human evolved? If you can pinpoint one place where the mutation occurred, then that's still evolution. Or am I wrong? Unlike some, I'm open to that possibility.

I raised a point with my Zoology lecturer. Behe, his irreducible complexity and proteins in flagella. What if there had once been more proteins and through conservation of energy the cells had worked out how to use less proteins. Then the flagellum with 13 proteins wouldn't be an ancestor, it'd be the next evolutionary step. Makes sense right? Except they haven't found flagella with more that twenty proteins, so there goes that theory. Anyway. It was an insomnia 1am thought.

[1Samuel8]

Originally Posted by Deadlokd

But Michael, if a human develops a mutation and passes it on, hasn't that human evolved? If you can pinpoint one place where the mutation occurred, then that's still evolution. Or am I wrong? Unlike some, I'm open to that possibility.

By definition, no. The term evolution applies to the entire species.
In your example, that mutation would have to propagate beyond the one individual and his direct descendants. It would have to spread throughout the entire human race and eventually become the norm, so to speak.
What qualifies as the "norm" is not loosely defined either.

Originally Posted by Deadlokd

Anyway. It was an insomnia 1am thought.

At least you are human.

[The Lone Ranger]

Originally Posted by 1Samuel8

By definition, no. The term evolution applies to the entire species.

Changes in an individual's genetic makeup are, indeed, merely mutations. Individuals don't evolve by definition.

That's because evolution is defined as changes in the genetic makeup of populations over time.

In your example, that mutation would have to propagate beyond the one individual and his direct descendants. It would have to spread throughout the entire human race and eventually become the norm, so to speak.

Actually, any change in gene frequencies within a population is evolution. (That's the definition of evolution.) The mutation in question needn't spread through an entire species, and it certainly needn't become the "norm" for evolution to have occured.

Cheers,

Michael

[JamesBannon]

When even a relative ignoramous like me can understand basically what evolution is, I sometimes wonder what IDers & creationists have for brains.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by The Lone Ranger

Actually, any change in gene frequencies within a population is evolution. (That's the definition of evolution.) The mutation in question needn't spread through an entire species, and it certainly needn't become the "norm" for evolution to have occured.

The word evolution is a confusing term. There is the change in gene frequencies in a given population over time. And that is an observable phenomenon. And then there is the explanation of how that comes about and which sets of genes will be more likely to occur over other sets.

However both variation and selection occur on an individual basis. Populations only change over time because there were changes in specific individual animals that resulted in traits that favored the ability of those animals to pass those traits on to the next generation. And genes that go away didn't make the cut.

Throw in the interaction of individual animals with the environment and you have the main elements needed to explain how animal populations change over time.

One of those observed changes is speciation. A species occurs when two populations of a given species for some reason are not able to reproduce with one another (migration separation, continental drift, geological changes, and other changes). If this situation continues for enough time the genome frequencies in each population will change so much that at some point members in each group either can't or won't mate with members in the other group if they come into contact again. Over time the two groups will split again, and then split again. There will be what appears to be a zoo of different animals. Even though members in either group no longer mate with each other they still have common ancestors. They are all cousins.

[Farren]

I've never been clear on the exact criteria for calling two populations distinct species. My naive reading is "can't produce viable offspring together", but at least one friend contends that it can be fuzzier, such as when two populations stop feeling a biological compulsion to, and hence don't, produce offspring together any more. An example would be fish in the African great lakes who's sexual behaviour is influenced by colour and won't produce offspring with fish they could produce viable offspring with, but are the wrong colour.

[BDS]

My (totally amateur) understanding is that different species can't produce FERTILE (as opposed to viable) offspring. Horse and donkeys can produce mules and jennys, but they are infertile.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by Farren

I've never been clear on the exact criteria for calling two populations distinct species. My naive reading is "can't produce viable offspring together", but at least one friend contends that it can be fuzzier, such as when two populations stop feeling a biological compulsion to, and hence don't, produce offspring together any more. An example would be fish in the African great lakes who's sexual behaviour is influenced by colour and won't produce offspring with fish they could produce viable offspring with, but are the wrong colour.

Yes the concept of species is fuzzy. Lions and tigers in certain circumstances can produce viable offspring yet they are considered two species because they do not normally mate with each other. And the concept of species is also fuzzy because the term was coined before we knew of the underlying mechanism of genetics. Genetics makes it clear that even though species may not mate with one another we are all related. The old classifications of life are being revised constantly as new information comes to light about the genome of biota of the planet. And now with our increasing knowledge of genetics it would be relatively easy for us to make new species at will. And if they survived and we became extinct might give future intelligent species some reason to "believe" in Intelligent Design.

I suspect that sometime soon there will be a project to map the genome of every species on the planet. That will be a huge database only exceeded by the astronomical databases that are currently being created and will give an insight into what is actually related to what in a way that looking at gross biological physical characteristics never could.

[JamesBannon]

Originally Posted by Farren

I've never been clear on the exact criteria for calling two populations distinct species. My naive reading is "can't produce viable offspring together", but at least one friend contends that it can be fuzzier, such as when two populations stop feeling a biological compulsion to, and hence don't, produce offspring together any more. An example would be fish in the African great lakes who's sexual behaviour is influenced by colour and won't produce offspring with fish they could produce viable offspring with, but are the wrong colour.

Boy, the forum is slow today.

Or same species but distinct populations, as in Fish-eating and Mammalian-eating Orcas. On the other hand, it is well known that Brown Trout can fertilise Atlantic Salmon eggs and vice versa, and that they produce viable offspring in the sense of being able to breed.

[Adam]

Originally Posted by Farren

I've never been clear on the exact criteria for calling two populations distinct species. My naive reading is "can't produce viable offspring together", but at least one friend contends that it can be fuzzier, such as when two populations stop feeling a biological compulsion to, and hence don't, produce offspring together any more. An example would be fish in the African great lakes who's sexual behaviour is influenced by colour and won't produce offspring with fish they could produce viable offspring with, but are the wrong colour.

My naive understanding is that a species is inherently difficult to define because a species is simply a semi-arbitrary boundary drawn around a section of a continuous tree of descent.

[naturalist.atheist]

Originally Posted by Adam

My naive understanding is that a species is inherently difficult to define because a species is simply a semi-arbitrary boundary drawn around a section of a continuous tree of descent.

That is a good way to put it.

[Ermintrude]

Species seems to be nearly as vague in concept as race. Technically, race does not exist but we all know how it is used. Genes don't necessarily help either because in most cases they do not show up in the next generation or even in the next thousand generations. At some time for some reason, another mutation will render genes active that may date back long before the species evolved. The difference from a related species may be that in one it is active and in the other not.

If the ID or Creationists knew their science better, they could claim that God put all these genes in place at Creation and turns them on when appropriate to the Divine Plan.


It is even vaguer when looking at plants - probably the reason Creationists always talk about animals. Plant species regularly interbreed and some hybrids are fertile, either as hybrids or back to their ancestors. In some ways, genus in plants comes closer to species in animals. Even just by looking at them it is easy to see the similarity between species and genera and to arrange them as if frames that could show a movie of transformation from one end to utterly different plants at the other. Evolution hits like a smack in the face once you look at plants.

Originally Posted by JamesBannon

When even a relative ignoramous like me can understand basically what evolution is, I sometimes wonder what IDers & creationists have for brains.

After that big cheeseburger I had for lunch this past Saturday, I produced a lot of brains.