In response...
... to the longest comment that "Same beat, different tune has ever received...
With regard to creationism, it's basically a post-hoc attempt to fit existing facts to a preconceived story (one interpretation of Genesis). That's not how science works.
So what is it that people are trying to do with Darwin's theories? When Darwin himself, the originator of his theories, strangely enough, would not have believed his own theory given the evidence now available, why do people still try to fit their thoughts in line with his? And why, when it is no more proven today then it was when it was first stated as A THEORY, is it still taught in schools as scince fact.
I didn't want to get into discussion hypotheticals, because I wasn't there that's all the following is...
The first, hydrological sorting, fails to explain why (for example) sea turtles, which sink like rocks when they die, only appear at the top of the column.
I don't know if you're aware, and forgive me for being facetious if you are... but Sea Turtle can swim... therefore should there be a flood, they would probably be able to swim for a while, and survive perhaps slightly longer then say a T-rex...(great kicking legs, but upper body strength somewhat lacking for swimming...)
The second, involving the ability of animals to temporarily escape uphill, fails to explain why mangrove trees were apparently able to run faster than velociraptor.
Again hypothetical, and only a possibility.... During major floods, landslides can create vast amounts of incredibly high speeding trees, and all it would take would for your velociraptor friend to be not on the sliding land for it to be overtaken.
It's simple, but you can't say it's wrong... even if it is unlikely, lets not even get started on the mathematical probability of life from nothing...
They fail to explain the burrows, because they never set out to... What would be the purpose of explaining it anyway...? Can you explain them?
Re: Radiological timings... Whilst we all agree that radiological data is quite reasonable to predict at a constant in the short term, i.e. a time that we have tested it in, when we start basing our proof of a theory based on something that is older then we could ever actually test... i.e. a constant rate of decay in various radiological elements, CANNOT BE PROVEN, and therefore takes an element of faith somewhat to believe it to be correct. An element of faith, that is somehow more of a leap then to believe the alternative. Anyway, I digress...
Not to mention the lack of oxygen halfway down a thousand-foot pile of dirt.
Sorry... did you expect there to be an expanse of oxygen? Is it also beyond belief that there could be pockets of oxygen, sufficient for a burrowing animal to survive for a brief time, enough for it to burrow some way, before asphixiating? Anyway...
So creationism is quite demonstrably wrong, at least when it attempts to make any positive claims at all. What about its successor, ID?
I'm sorry again... I should stop apologising, but demonstratibly wrong? You haven't demonstrated actually anything, you've cast aspersions on the flood theory, but nothing that even I, chief of skeptics, could ignore... and readily!
Onto ID we go...
Getting into philosophy of science for a moment, a claim is held to be scientifically useful if (broadly speaking) it provides us with some information as to what we'll see next. In particular, the most useful claims make concrete, testable predictions.
I'm glad you said broadly speaking, because otherwise I'd probably point out that science was IMO there to try to understand how things worked in the way they did, and what caused that first and foremost... predictions are there to make sure we got our understanding right, as if things don't behave the way we thought they were going to, we probably got our understanding wrong.
Another way to look at it is: the only way to figure out whether an unverifiable claim is right is to have lots and lots of potential ways to prove it wrong (falsifiability).
Again... erm... what? if a claim is "unverifiable" then surely it cannot be proven one way or the other...?
Does ID match up to these requirements? Not even slightly. ID proponents have made a grand total of one concrete testable hypothesis in the last decade, and it turned out to be inaccurate.
You know why there has only been one hypothesis made? Probably because those people that could be making them, are too busy teaching science to others, so they don't get blinded by poor science being propergated as fact, (see numerous threads) and arguing against the claims like you make...
I believe the technical scientific term for this record is: completely pants.
As I have discussed before, there has been a paper written, which makes many many claims, all bar one have so far been proven correct, the greatest historical document we have both in terms of content, accuracy and testability, and yet this paper is largely ignored because it makes some claims that people don't want to accept... Anyway, I digress again...
(Note: some ID publications could be considered to have some value to the fields of philosophy or theology, where it's harder to definitively state what constitutes good research. However, when it comes to maths and science, they're rubbish)
I like you. That's why I'm gonna take the above as humour, and not as an actual argumentative point... because otherwise I'd need to point out the crossover between science and theology and philosophy being extremely close, and the distinct lack of mathemtical models of probability for the origins of life being by co-inky-dink and the sheer unfathomable heights of faith required to subscribe to such a model.
As I have suggested before to someone else, you might want to read this as I think it would show some very good examples of the lack of "probable" arguments... or at least the difficulties they experience in holding up... have an excerpt
Next...
phew... hand hurting from typing...
This has two major problems. Firstly, it assumes that evolution always increases complexity
yes... otherwise it's defined as D-evolution... but anyway, I'm not here to pick holes in words...
given half a chance, evolution will ditch any unnecessary complexity. So it's possible for an irreducibly-complex system to evolve as parts are removed from a larger reducibly-complex system.
example... please...
My understanding, for example, the eye... without the tear duct, the eye would dry up and cease to function. But if we're talking about the probability of both a full eye, all cells, inluding nerve tissue, eye lid, eye lash, retina, iris, muscle fibres, goop inside, and tear duct, seemingly unrelated part, all "evolving at once". You see, without any of these elements the eye would not work, and therefore would serve no purpose. The eye would therefore not evolve, logically speaking, as all these parts COULD NOT, mathematically speaking happen at once to form a fully functioning unit...Not to mention that the mutant that had all these elements would then require a similar mutant with a good eye to reproduce to propergate the institution of sight in a species... we're talking worse odds then 1 in 1 to the raised 42 or something I think I read... eep...
Secondly, it doesn't cconsider whether any subsystems of the IC system have a different function.
oh ok... so what's the second function of the eye? even in it's development stages?
frankly the work of Dembski (the originator of CSI) is a mess.
times have changed... other people have taken the "jello-mould" of Dembski and progressed the work themselves... Though I have noticed that most people arguing against such theories will not quote other research other then Dembski. It's bizarre. It's almost as though someone has found a weak link in defence and concentrates their entire attack on it... CSI is above me, but not above my brother, who I hope will also post on this to state a few points.
re: the ID theists and such of the last 2 paragraphs... I've been staring at the same screen for too long... my head hurts and I still have a full days work ahead of me...
So I'm gonna leave this as it stand and await the tyrade of abuse that comes back...
In closing, I'd like to confirm that I'm not an expert on any of this.
I await your comments world!
With regard to creationism, it's basically a post-hoc attempt to fit existing facts to a preconceived story (one interpretation of Genesis). That's not how science works.
So what is it that people are trying to do with Darwin's theories? When Darwin himself, the originator of his theories, strangely enough, would not have believed his own theory given the evidence now available, why do people still try to fit their thoughts in line with his? And why, when it is no more proven today then it was when it was first stated as A THEORY, is it still taught in schools as scince fact.
I didn't want to get into discussion hypotheticals, because I wasn't there that's all the following is...
The first, hydrological sorting, fails to explain why (for example) sea turtles, which sink like rocks when they die, only appear at the top of the column.
I don't know if you're aware, and forgive me for being facetious if you are... but Sea Turtle can swim... therefore should there be a flood, they would probably be able to swim for a while, and survive perhaps slightly longer then say a T-rex...(great kicking legs, but upper body strength somewhat lacking for swimming...)
The second, involving the ability of animals to temporarily escape uphill, fails to explain why mangrove trees were apparently able to run faster than velociraptor.
Again hypothetical, and only a possibility.... During major floods, landslides can create vast amounts of incredibly high speeding trees, and all it would take would for your velociraptor friend to be not on the sliding land for it to be overtaken.
It's simple, but you can't say it's wrong... even if it is unlikely, lets not even get started on the mathematical probability of life from nothing...
They fail to explain the burrows, because they never set out to... What would be the purpose of explaining it anyway...? Can you explain them?
Re: Radiological timings... Whilst we all agree that radiological data is quite reasonable to predict at a constant in the short term, i.e. a time that we have tested it in, when we start basing our proof of a theory based on something that is older then we could ever actually test... i.e. a constant rate of decay in various radiological elements, CANNOT BE PROVEN, and therefore takes an element of faith somewhat to believe it to be correct. An element of faith, that is somehow more of a leap then to believe the alternative. Anyway, I digress...
Not to mention the lack of oxygen halfway down a thousand-foot pile of dirt.
Sorry... did you expect there to be an expanse of oxygen? Is it also beyond belief that there could be pockets of oxygen, sufficient for a burrowing animal to survive for a brief time, enough for it to burrow some way, before asphixiating? Anyway...
So creationism is quite demonstrably wrong, at least when it attempts to make any positive claims at all. What about its successor, ID?
I'm sorry again... I should stop apologising, but demonstratibly wrong? You haven't demonstrated actually anything, you've cast aspersions on the flood theory, but nothing that even I, chief of skeptics, could ignore... and readily!
Onto ID we go...
Getting into philosophy of science for a moment, a claim is held to be scientifically useful if (broadly speaking) it provides us with some information as to what we'll see next. In particular, the most useful claims make concrete, testable predictions.
I'm glad you said broadly speaking, because otherwise I'd probably point out that science was IMO there to try to understand how things worked in the way they did, and what caused that first and foremost... predictions are there to make sure we got our understanding right, as if things don't behave the way we thought they were going to, we probably got our understanding wrong.
Another way to look at it is: the only way to figure out whether an unverifiable claim is right is to have lots and lots of potential ways to prove it wrong (falsifiability).
Again... erm... what? if a claim is "unverifiable" then surely it cannot be proven one way or the other...?
Does ID match up to these requirements? Not even slightly. ID proponents have made a grand total of one concrete testable hypothesis in the last decade, and it turned out to be inaccurate.
You know why there has only been one hypothesis made? Probably because those people that could be making them, are too busy teaching science to others, so they don't get blinded by poor science being propergated as fact, (see numerous threads) and arguing against the claims like you make...
I believe the technical scientific term for this record is: completely pants.
As I have discussed before, there has been a paper written, which makes many many claims, all bar one have so far been proven correct, the greatest historical document we have both in terms of content, accuracy and testability, and yet this paper is largely ignored because it makes some claims that people don't want to accept... Anyway, I digress again...
(Note: some ID publications could be considered to have some value to the fields of philosophy or theology, where it's harder to definitively state what constitutes good research. However, when it comes to maths and science, they're rubbish)
I like you. That's why I'm gonna take the above as humour, and not as an actual argumentative point... because otherwise I'd need to point out the crossover between science and theology and philosophy being extremely close, and the distinct lack of mathemtical models of probability for the origins of life being by co-inky-dink and the sheer unfathomable heights of faith required to subscribe to such a model.
As I have suggested before to someone else, you might want to read this as I think it would show some very good examples of the lack of "probable" arguments... or at least the difficulties they experience in holding up... have an excerpt
Next...
phew... hand hurting from typing...
This has two major problems. Firstly, it assumes that evolution always increases complexity
yes... otherwise it's defined as D-evolution... but anyway, I'm not here to pick holes in words...
given half a chance, evolution will ditch any unnecessary complexity. So it's possible for an irreducibly-complex system to evolve as parts are removed from a larger reducibly-complex system.
example... please...
My understanding, for example, the eye... without the tear duct, the eye would dry up and cease to function. But if we're talking about the probability of both a full eye, all cells, inluding nerve tissue, eye lid, eye lash, retina, iris, muscle fibres, goop inside, and tear duct, seemingly unrelated part, all "evolving at once". You see, without any of these elements the eye would not work, and therefore would serve no purpose. The eye would therefore not evolve, logically speaking, as all these parts COULD NOT, mathematically speaking happen at once to form a fully functioning unit...Not to mention that the mutant that had all these elements would then require a similar mutant with a good eye to reproduce to propergate the institution of sight in a species... we're talking worse odds then 1 in 1 to the raised 42 or something I think I read... eep...
Secondly, it doesn't cconsider whether any subsystems of the IC system have a different function.
oh ok... so what's the second function of the eye? even in it's development stages?
frankly the work of Dembski (the originator of CSI) is a mess.
times have changed... other people have taken the "jello-mould" of Dembski and progressed the work themselves... Though I have noticed that most people arguing against such theories will not quote other research other then Dembski. It's bizarre. It's almost as though someone has found a weak link in defence and concentrates their entire attack on it... CSI is above me, but not above my brother, who I hope will also post on this to state a few points.
re: the ID theists and such of the last 2 paragraphs... I've been staring at the same screen for too long... my head hurts and I still have a full days work ahead of me...
So I'm gonna leave this as it stand and await the tyrade of abuse that comes back...
In closing, I'd like to confirm that I'm not an expert on any of this.
I await your comments world!
posted by mrjohnfernandez at 8:53 am
4 Comments:
Sorry about the length, it really is hard to cover this stuff briefly.
So what is it that people are trying to do with Darwin's theories?
Find holes in them, mostly. When they find a hole (for example, Darwin had no good explanation of sexual dimorphism) they propose possible modifications and extensions to the theory. They then go out and rigorously test those modifications. If they hold up to testing, they're provisionally accepted as accurate; if they don't, it's back to the drawing board.
The reason why Darwin's theories are accepted as a basis for modern evolutionary biology is that, after 150 years, there are very few holes that we haven't found an appropriate "patch" for yet. At present, there is no expectation that even the few remaining holes will cause any fundamental problems.
The primary difference between this approach and creationism lies in the "rigorous testing" step. Creationists don't do that. At all. They occasionally modify their position when directly confronted with evidence that completely contradicts it, but there's no active attempt to ensure that their hypotheses are accurate with respect to anything but the Bible.
When Darwin himself, the originator of his theories, strangely enough, would not have believed his own theory given the evidence now available, why do people still try to fit their thoughts in line with his?
I strongly disagree with your premise. Darwin produced an hypothesis that correlated uniquely well with the available evidence, but in his time it wasn't particularly predictive. Since then, evolutionary theory has been refined to the point where it makes concrete, testable, accurate predictions. Simulated evolution is used in industry to produce everything from better circuits to next-generation drugs.
Evolutionary biology these days is a frickin' crystal ball. Darwin would be delighted.
And why, when it is no more proven today then it was when it was first stated as A THEORY, is it still taught in schools as scince fact.
That's a matter of confused terminology. In strict Popperian terms, evolution is, and always will be, a theory. As normal people use the terms, evolution is as hard a fact as you're likely to find. It's right up there with the theory of gravity.
I don't know if you're aware, and forgive me for being facetious if you are... but Sea Turtle can swim
So can ichthyosaurs. In the case of ichthyosaurs, the standard explanation is that they died from the turbulence and sank. Obviously, if that were the case, sea turtles would have gone bottomwards even faster.
Again hypothetical, and only a possibility.... During major floods, landslides can create vast amounts of incredibly high speeding trees, and all it would take would for your velociraptor friend to be not on the sliding land for it to be overtaken.
In case you hadn't noticed, landslides generally go downhill :) The point is that velociraptors ended up further down the geological column than mangrove trees, despite the facts that mangrove trees are low-lying and velociraptors are speedy.
They fail to explain the burrows, because they never set out to... What would be the purpose of explaining it anyway...? Can you explain them?
Yes - the geological column was laid down to a certain depth, its top ended up as dry land, animals lived on the land, animals dug burrows in the land, the land was covered up with water again, more layers of geological column were laid down.
To fit this in with the Flood model would appear to require two Floods. And that's a bare minimum - these burrows are distributed fairly evenly through the column, so presumably one Flood would be required between each two levels at which burrows appear...?
a constant rate of decay in various radiological elements, CANNOT BE PROVEN
OK, let's assume for a moment that ratios of radioactive elements bear absolutely no relation to age. So why in tarnation would these ratios change in exact accordance with a sample's depth down the geological column?
To the best of my knowledge, no explanation has even been proposed for this. Remember that it is extremely difficult to separate different isotopes by chemical or mechanical processes.
Is it also beyond belief that there could be pockets of oxygen, sufficient for a burrowing animal to survive for a brief time, enough for it to burrow some way, before asphixiating?
If you were trapped underground, would you burrow upwards or downwards? To the best of my knowledge, every single one of these burrows appears to point downwards (where a direction is determinable). There is no trace of the air pockets that you suggest. The weight of that much mud would in any case crush the life out of the majority of surface organisms.
I'm sorry again... I should stop apologising, but demonstratibly wrong? You haven't demonstrated actually anything, you've cast aspersions on the flood theory, but nothing that even I, chief of skeptics, could ignore... and readily!
I've listed a couple of cases in which Flood geology would appear to be quite clearly lacking in accurate models. I'm more than happy to go on discussing them. This discussion already happened over 100 years ago within the scientific community, and the creationists lost due to their failure to produce any actual testable models that weren't prone to these sorts of problems.
If you feel that the scientific community was biased in its choice, there's a simple test you can perform. Just ask: where are the creationist oil companies? If creationist geology is in fact superior to mainstream geology, then creationists would be better able to locate oil than companies that used techniques like sequence stratigraphy. All the mainstream oil companies would quickly go out of business or switch to the more productive methods.
I'm currently not aware of any creationist oil companies. Please let me know if you find one.
I'm glad you said broadly speaking, because otherwise I'd probably point out that science was IMO there to try to understand how things worked in the way they did, and what caused that first and foremost... predictions are there to make sure we got our understanding right, as if things don't behave the way we thought they were going to, we probably got our understanding wrong.
Potayto, potahto :) Both philosophical stances result in exactly the same scientific method - I just think that the version I described is more obviously justifiable.
Again... erm... what? if a claim is "unverifiable" then surely it cannot be proven one way or the other...?
No, a verifiable claim is one that can be verified - for example, "unicorns exist". You could verify this by finding a unicorn.
A falsifiable claim is one that can be falsified. The unicorn claim is not falsifiable - you'd have to search the entire universe to confirm that there were no unicorns anywhere. Even then, you'd never know if you'd missed a spot.
In general, hypotheses and theories are falsifiable and predictions are both falsifiable and verifiable.
The theory of gravity is falsifiable but not verifiable - you'll never know if the next object you drop will decide to fall upwards. The theory of evolution is a slightly fuzzier concept - there are in fact several different theories of evolution. All of them are falsifiable, and all of them have been independently put through the scientific mangle of repeated attempted falsification.
You know why there has only been one hypothesis made? Probably because those people that could be making them, are too busy teaching science to others, so they don't get blinded by poor science being propergated as fact, (see numerous threads) and arguing against the claims like you make...
Strangely enough, every other scientific field gets its arguments, models and predictions sorted out before it starts teaching them to little children. Anything else is seen as being completely unethical by most scientists. Evolution managed it, why can't they?
Anyway, it's not the fact that they don't have time to do experiments that really bugs scientists; it's the fact that no-one can even say what an ID research program would look like. No-one is able to give the slightest suggestion as to how one would go about researching the ID conjecture.
This was illustrated particularly powerfully when the Templeton Foundation, a Christian group which promotes research aimed at addressing theological questions, offered to give the Discovery Institute grants to research ID. They didn't get a single grant proposal back. That's pretty pathetic by any standard.
and yet this paper is largely ignored because it makes some claims that people don't want to accept
This paper is ignored in scientific circles because it doesn't make claims which are scientifically testable at present. In this sense, it is not scientifically useful. Many scientists accept it anyway on other grounds.
example [of evolution ditching complexity] please...
Whales. As we trace the fossil ancestry of whales, we see that their hind limbs gradually get smaller and smaller until they vanish altogether.
On a more recent note, it's fairly common for bacteria, such as the one I mentioned when talking about the PCP pathway, to lose the ability to digest certain foods when those foods are not available. In the case of the PCP bacterium, it has lost the ability to survive in the absence of PCP as a result.
You see, without any of these elements the eye would not work, and therefore would serve no purpose.
The eye is a bad example to pick - even people who for one reason or another have lost their eyes' lenses are still able to see well enough to avoid obstacles. So the eye is not, strictly speaking, IC.
Eye lids, eyelashes and irises are all inessential for fish. In the standard evolutionary model, the eye evolved before we moved to dry land. Hence, in this slightly different context, other parts of the modern eye can be thrown out.
(That's actually another possible explanation of IC systems which I missed. For example, the blood clotting system, which is IC in humans, turns out to have many components that are completely unnecessary underwater)
we're talking worse odds then 1 in 1 to the raised 42 or something I think I read... eep...
Speaking as a maths graduate, probabilities of that sort are complete bull. They rely on straw man models of evolutionary processes that no scientist in the field promotes.
For example, in the ever-popular abiogenesis example, creationists tend to say that a modern cell absolutely needs certain attributes, that the probability of those attributes forming by random assemblage of molecules is ridiculously small, and hence that the original cell couldn't have evolved. This is really really idiotic because no-one anywhere believes that the original cell came about by random assemblage of molecules.
It's like saying that a perfect snowflake couldn't possibly form because if you freeze water all the molecules are higgledy-piggledy.
oh ok... so what's the second function of the eye? even in it's development stages?
The eye isn't, as far as I know, a case of evolution by co-option. It's a case of evolution by gradual steps in slightly changing contexts. I can go into more detail if you like, or this page gives a decent overview.
other people have taken the "jello-mould" of Dembski and progressed the work themselves
Could you provide links? I'm only aware of Dembski's work, and I do keep track of the ID community.
Has any of that work been published in a reputable scientific journal?
So I'm gonna leave this as it stand and await the tyrade of abuse that comes back
I don't do abuse. I consider lengthy, thorough, informative responses to be more effective and at least as painful on the reader >:)
In closing, I'd like to confirm that I'm not an expert on any of this.
I have some qualifications in the mathematical areas (BA Hons Cantab in Mathematics, with some coverage of both bioinformatics and information theory). Apart from that, I too am a complete layman.
A suggestion: these comments are hopelessly long, so why not break the argument up into its functional components?
I'd suggest:
1) traditional creationism
2) ID and other mathematically-inspired complaints
3) the nature of science (inc. its relationship to religion)
why don't people ever comment niceties on my photos...
What in your opinion is wrong about the Biblical account of creation... just out of curiosity?
I don't mean the Creationist view, traditional or otherwise, I mean, the biblical account.
What in your opinion is wrong about the Biblical account of creation... just out of curiosity?
Firstly, and most dramatically, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 appear to contradict each other. Determine, if you will, which came first: shrubs or humans? Genesis 1 suggests the former; Genesis 2 the latter. (Note: I'm referring to the NIV because I'm having serious trouble parsing the relevant passages in the KJV)
Secondly, light exists long before the Sun and stars are created. Now, that in itself is actually accurate - as far as we can tell, the early universe was pretty much pure energy - but at those temperatures the Earth would pretty much dissolve away like a snowflake in a blast furnace.
Thirdly, and relatedly, morning and night are also created before the Sun makes an appearance. That's just... weird.
Fourthly, verses 6 and 7 don't really make sense outside the original context of a firmament-based cosmology, which was widely held to in Biblical times but is obviously now considered to be ludicrously wrong.
Fifthly - well, I could go on all day listing problems based on the current scientific consensus, but I'll limit myself to pointing out that, as best we can tell, the Earth was around for over 4 billion years before homo sapiens arrived on the scene.
All these examples I've given would, as far as I can tell, require major divine intervention to justify, if they're justifiable at all. However, with every divine patch-job we give this hypothesis, its usefulness as an explanation drops even further. And, since no such modifications are mentioned in the text, it becomes increasingly clear that we're just attempting to come up with ad hoc workarounds rather than producing a model with any real explanatory power.
As such, even if I were to become a theist, I think I'd probably hold to the view that Genesis is a lie-to-children - a version of the truth so dumbed down and abbreviated that even primitive tribesmen can understand the key points of the narrative.
On that front it's fairly well-done - I'm currently reading Paradise Lost and I'm continually amazed as to how much raw plot can be squeezed out of a couple of books of the Bible. Plus it's a lot less icky than many of the alternatives :)
Post a Comment
<< Home