Ambient Irony

You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine, and you think they're probably lying to make you feel better?
Yes.
Everything's going to be fine.

Sunday, October 16

Intelligent Design In The Dock

This is funny:

MR. MUISE: We object on the basis of hearsay again for any testimony relating to this affidavit, this out of court statement issued by Mr. Kenyon.
THE COURT: Again you're going to have to do better than a basic hearsay objection, and it's also an affidavit that appears to have been part of the record papers in that case. Now, is it unreliable? Do you have any reason to doubt its voracity?
MR. MUISE: Well, Your Honor, again with regard to it's an affidavit given in a court case that's not addressing the issue of intelligent design. Again she's relying on these statements to arrive at an opinion that's not substantiated by, you know, by weaving this web of these assorted statements throughout the course of the testimony. We're going to continue to object to any of the statements that keep coming up, Your Honor, and I'll ask for a standing objection on that, but --
THE COURT: Well, I don't think a standing objection is going to work for you because you may have particular things you want to say about it. You have to do what you have to do. I'll overrule the objection.
...
Q. And Matt, could you go to the first highlighted portion of the document?
MR. MUISE: Your Honor, we object on the basis of hearsay.
THE COURT: Are you objecting to the document, reference to the document generally, or to individual parts of the document?
...
MR. MUISE: Objection to the reading of this portion of the text into the record on the basis of hearsay.
MR. ROTHSCHILD: I'm not offering it for the truth, Your Honor.
...
MR. ROTHSCHILD: Your Honor, one more thing. Mr. Muise is objecting because these are philosophical and theological statements, and I think most of what Dr. Forrest is going to testify about surely are, and it is the plaintiff's position that intelligent design is at its core a philosophical, theological, religious statement. So that, I mean, that's what she's here to testify about, so it's not going to be surprising if those kinds of statements are, you know, the core of Dr. Forrest's testimony today.
THE COURT: Well, if you said that to get Mr. Muise to stop making continued objections, you're probably going to fail. So let's move on.
...
MR. MUISE: Your Honor, we object on the basis of hearsay.
THE COURT: Overruled.

Muise is the counsel for the defendant, the Dover Area School District, which is trying to teach Intelligent Design in public schools. They don't seem to be having a good time of it in court.

One thing I've noticed about judges (in my limited experience) is that they really don't appreciate time-wasters.

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Quagmire Update

Rioting sparked by fascist thugs leads to dozens of arrests.
Explosion kills one, hundreds evacuated.
Navy plane crashes, pilot rescued.
Stretched forces, budget cuts lead to increased use of reserves.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, millions of voters turned out to have their say on the country's new referendum.

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Nylon, Yummy Nylon

Here's something I haven't seen before: The story of how a single mutation allowed a bacteria to digest nylon:

My favorite example of a mutation producing new information involves a Japanese bacterium that suffered a frame shift mutation that just happened to allow it to metabolize nylon waste. The new enzymes are very inefficient (having only 2% of the efficiency of the regular enzymes), but do afford the bacteria a whole new ecological niche. They don't work at all on the bacterium's original food - carbohydrates.

Naturally, this ability to digest nylon is "irreduceably complex": If you remove any one of the genes involved, it no longer works. Unfortunately for the IDists, we know exactly how a single genetic mutation gave rise to this ability.

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1 This may well be th end of the tracksuit as we kow it.

Posted by: tommy at Sunday, October 16 2005 09:19 PM (EhwJT)

2 It's proof that god hates nylon because of what it did to the wool, silk, and cotton industry.

Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at Sunday, October 16 2005 11:20 PM (0yYS2)

3 Maybe the big G just has a problem with static cling.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 16 2005 11:42 PM (QriEg)

4 Hmmm, didn't think of that. I do have one question regarding this new bug: All carbon based life forms must intake carbon in order to live, but if these new bugs eat nylon, do they chemically convert part of it to carbon, or do they simply become non-organic life forms? If we can make a life form that is non-organic, then the potential for new applications, such space and deep sea exploration by engineered biomechanical cyberbetic organisms, starts to sound less like sci-fi and more like possibility. Just think, no carbon means no need for oxygen, and though anaerobic carbon-based organisms have existed for a long time, they have remained very primative because if exposed to air they oxidize quickly and die. If a new organism could be built, one with a biomechanical brain and self repairing cellular structure that could ingest raw elements and survive brutal conditions, then we could literally flood the galaxy with them in order to perform basic tasks such as planetary surveys. The possibilities are endless.

Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at Monday, October 17 2005 07:44 AM (0yYS2)

5 I remind you of the X-Files episode in which folks were exposed to a silicon-based lifeform that caused their throats to explode...... I wonder what my tracksuit is thinking right now....

Posted by: David Earney at Monday, October 17 2005 08:35 AM (1douf)

6 Actually, nylon is a polymer of C₆H₁₃NO (or something similar; there are a few different types of nylon). It's a hydrocarbon, not a silicone. If there were bacteria that could digest silicones, that would be impressive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 17 2005 09:34 AM (QriEg)

7 I was simply bringing up the silicone lifeform for the purpose of making a joke. I should eschew obfuscation.

Posted by: David Earney at Monday, October 17 2005 10:54 AM (1douf)

8 Okay, but Improbulus Maximus seems to be a little confused. :)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 17 2005 11:16 AM (QriEg)

9 Not confused, just carried away. Because of the way nylon is chemically structured, it is almost impervious to things that are highly destructive to straight organics, and so I was thinking beyond the immediate application. Chemistry isn't my strong suit, but then, Einstein failed math. Do NOT take that as me drawing a parallel either, just pointing out that imagination is important.

Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at Monday, October 17 2005 03:12 PM (0yYS2)

10 Okay, but I was confused. :p

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 17 2005 10:18 PM (AIaDY)

11 What about those microbes that eat steel, check out how the Titanic is being eaten: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4352568.stm

Posted by: RobC at Friday, October 21 2005 05:33 AM (o0N0R)

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Preconditioning

Weird. I was going to cleam up my blogroll, and I started clicking on some of the links to check them, and a number of them came up with error 412:

Precondition Failed
The precondition on the request for the URL / evaluated to false.

I suspect an overzealous referrer-spam filter, but if that's the case, it's awfully common. Try clicking on any of these links:

A Small Victory
American Digest
Cold Fury
Daily Pundit

Any ideas? Anyone?

Pause.

Oh. Duh. Ambien. I've been cut off from the net. [Sobs.] If I bring up my blog as ai.mu.nu it all works.

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Saturday, October 15

Wash Your Mouth Out!

In the series Pretty Cure (which is targeted at pre-teen girls, near as I can tell), the amorphous monster thingies that get summoned by the bad guys are known as zakenna. Or at least, that's the sound they make.

In the current episode of Bleach that I'm watching (about ep. 319 or so), the main character says zakenna at one point, and the subtitle comes up Screw you!

Blink blink. It's a very plausible translation in the context (a heated argument), but is that really what the monster is saying in every episode of PreCure?

Apparently so:

[zakennayo] (exp) (X) (vulg) fuck you!/don't fuck around!/don't be a screw off!

Heh.

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What To Unmake...

And how to unmake it.

So you've read the Evil Overlord List, and got yourself comfortably established? And now you're ready to destroy the world? Only you want to do the job properly?

Here's how.

(via Chizumatic)

Update: Here's a handy button for your website to keep track of the current status of planet Earth:

Of course, I really should hotlink it to make sure it stays up-to-date, but that's considered impolite.

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Not Just For Cleaning The Bathroom

Bleach is one of the most popular anime series in fansub right now. As I type this, a double-episode has just been released (eps. 52 and 53) and there are 15,000 people downloading it.

Remember, this is subtitled. 15,000 simultaneous downloads is quite a lot.

I'm beginning to wonder why, though. I picked up a few episodes and started watching it, and it seemed like quite a good series. A bit of action, a bit of humour, a bit of supernatural horror (the show features shinigami, Japanese death spirits, and "hollows", which are ghosts that have lost their ties to the world and seek to fill themselves by devouring other souls).

And then around episode 12, it started slowing down. A fight that might previously have taken half an episode took two. Humour and character development fell by the wayside in place of more fights - which got slower still. And then one of the characters got abducted, and the other characters set off to rescue her, and the whole series just ground to a halt.

I'm watching it now - sort of. I have it playing in one window while I read Chizumatic in another. Some bad guy was mortally wounded three episodes back, and he's just about to die now. I hope.

Honestly. I've said before that Fushigi Yuugi would have been better if they'd cut four episodes from it, but this is ridiculous. You're lucky to get two minutes of actual plot per episode. Given a couple of hours, I could splice each pair of episodes into one (except for episode 33, which is a stand-alone sort of thing) and it would be twice as good. At least. You can just sit there and watch it and see tick... tick... tick... 30 seconds of reaction shots and dialog that add nothing to the story. Snip! Heroes running along the same tunnel they were in five episodes back. Snip!

Meh.

Who wrote this thing, Robert Jordan?

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Stupid Science Tricks

Do not look directly at Sun with remaining grape.

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Thursday, October 13

146 Years Of Smacking Idiots

Charles Darwin published his great work, The Origin Of Species, in 1859, and still people are writing posts like this one:

Finally, a skeptic has come to terms with reality. Douglas Kern at Tech Central Station has just posted an article on why Intelligent Design will replace neo-Darwinism as the dominant worldview on biological origins.
Most people don't understand the ID debate, because atheist fundamentalist fruitbat critics are too busy trying to shout down any debate with vitriol - attacking the messenger instead of the message.
You've seen it in the blogosphere - the endless rants about how ID is just a 'front' for Creationism (as if Darwinism wasn't a convenient front for secular humanism) without any reasoned attempt to actually meet ID's scientific challenges head on.

The debate from the science side can get a bit strident at times, it is true, but that is largely because the side of nonsense has been putting forth the same arguments since (and indeed before) Darwin's day. One can understand the irritation of the practicing biologists and geologists that 80 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Creationists can put the same arguments out yet again under a new name, and try to force their nonsense back into schools.

And I'll ignore for now the irony of

[A]theist fundamentalist fruitbat critics ... trying to shout down any debate with vitriol - attacking the messenger instead of the message.

As I wrote in comment to the above post:

A scientific theory must be predictive - you must be able to use it to make predictions (whether these are positive or negative). It must be explicative - it must explain some natural phenomenon. It must be falsifiable - there must be some experiment or observation (and one that is actually possible to perform) that can prove that it is incorrect.

Evolutionary Theory fulfils all of these requirements. That doesn't necessarily mean that it is right. (It is right, of course, but it is the never-ending avalanche of confirming evidence that tells us this.) What it means is that it is a valid scientific theory.

Intelligent Design doesn't even begin to fulfil any of these requirements. That means it is not science. It's as simple as that; it's not science. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily wrong, just that it's a load of supernatural claptrap. It could in fact be correct, and it would still be a load of supernatural claptrap.

ID is not science, by the very definition of what science is. So teaching ID in the science classroom is fraud.

And it's nonsense. It says nothing, does nothing, makes no claims, except that "Evolution is wrong". Evolution can be shown to be wrong, but the IDists (and their predecessors the Creation Scientists and their predecessors the Creationists) can't do this because there is no evidence whatsoever that Evolution is wrong. And absolute mountains of evidence that Evolution is correct.

You might as well teach homeopathy in medical school, phlogiston in chemistry and the flat-earth theory in geography. In fact, all of these are more worthwhile than ID because they can - and have - been proven false.

ID can never be proven false, and that is why it is totally worthless. You can never know if it is true or false. The whole point of science is about exactly that, of winnowing the seeds of truth from the chaff of nonsense. With ID, you simply cannot do that:

By contrast, Darwinism cannot accept even the slightest possibility that it has failed to explain any significant dimension of evolution.

That's exactly the point. Evolutionary Theory must explain (or at the least, be compatible with) every significant dimension of evolution, or it is wrong. There's no point of having a theory if it doesn't explain its subject matter, and there's no point in having a theory if you can't know whether it is right or not.

Go ahead and teach ID as religion or philosophy, but it is not science, nor can it ever be.

(Cross-posted to The University of Woolloomooloo)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:16 AM | Comments (23) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 I'm a fruitbat? And here all this time I was thinking I'm a hominid! And no wonder I have back problems, I'm supposed to sleep hanging by my feet! Honestly, the main reason that evolution will never catch on among religious fanatics is because the Bible is written on about a second grade level, (not counting all the polysyllabic names, though hyphenated for ease, and leaving out the blood, gore, incest, etc.), while reading Origin is like trying to plow granite. One holy work speaks to ignorance, superstition, and fear, which means that it appeals to about 95% of humanity, while the other speaks to reason, logic, and understanding, which is why 95% of humanity reject it as the work of the Devil.

Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at Thursday, October 13 2005 11:15 AM (0yYS2)

2 I think that's overstating the case a bit. A lot, in fact. The basics of evolution are straightforward enough - once you accept the concept of deep time. And we know that the world is billions of years old. It's only the Young Earth Creationists who are truly hopeless. They really do belong with the Flat Earthers and other nuts.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 13 2005 01:38 PM (QriEg)

3 It's kinda like those people who still believe we never landed on the moon. Despite all the evidence in the world, they just retreat to the same old tired arguments. I like how the articles begins with "Finally, a skeptic has come to terms with reality...". That's a kicker.

Posted by: andyuts at Friday, October 14 2005 12:03 AM (FVdKE)

4 Wait... when did we land on the moon?

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, October 14 2005 01:15 AM (mAAjO)

5 What moon?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 03:04 AM (QriEg)

6 It's quite true that ID is not predictive, explanatory, or falsifiable, as it stands. This is because ID, as it stands, is not a theory or hypothesis -- it's an objection, an attempt to refute a theory. It resembles, that is, Einstein's thought experiments, which he constructed to refute quantum mechanics. Popper's criterion for valid scientific theories does not apply to objections; Einstein's thought experiments were "unfalsifiable", but that wasn't a reason to dismiss them.

ID arguments, in fact, all have the form of a thought experiment: a biological system is exhibited, then the expected time required for that system to be reached by random mutations is calculated, and it proves to be longer than the known lifetime of the Earth -- from which, if the calculations are right, it follows that the mutations leading to that system weren't random. The trouble is that the calculations aren't right; but as with Einstein's thought experiments, the errors in ID arguments are not simple, or scientifically uninteresting. Michael Behe's argument, for example, would be very much worth teaching, and refuting, in a high school science class.

I strongly suspect, however, that you, Pixy, aren't thinking of the arguments when you call ID "unscientific". You mean, rather, the conclusion: if ID is correct the material world cannot be wholly and correctly understood as an independent thing, yet "science" must so understand it. Therefore ID cannot be "science", even if it happens to be true; and this is your chief reason why it is almost certainly not true. The only possible remark to this is, that it is not by any stretch a refutation of ID. It is nothing more than a restatement of your personal faith in materialism.

The proper response to ID is not dismissing it as "unscientific", but giving it the same critical hearing as its proponents give to evolution.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at Friday, October 14 2005 05:05 AM (O9L11)

7 Oh good grief. Look, ID is superstitious nonsense. There is not the slightest shred of evidence to support it. The only claims it can make against evolution is that the fossil record isn't complete, that we don't understand every step of every evolutionary pathway of every subsystem of every species. ID, in turn, offers nothing whatsoever. Which is the same as what the anti-materialists offer. Sure, materialism is an assumption. But if you make that assumption, you get to build science, and science works. No other ontological assumption can do that. They are all, in every real sense, useless. And the IDists aren't presenting ID as an objection, they're presenting it as an alternative scientific theory. It isn't, and they are aware of that, which means that it is fraud. What's more, the argument you present, which is indeed a common one from ID (and Creation Science and Creationism) shows a complete ingorance of Evolutionary Theory. Evolution is not random. Mutations are random. Natural selection isn't. So the calculations are completely meaningless. This has been pointed out any number of times, and I believe it was pointed out to you directly on a previous thread. The proper response to ID is not dismissing it as "unscientific", but giving it the same critical hearing as its proponents give to evolution. We gave ID a critical hearing. It is, as I stated, superstitious claptrap, which would be utterly useless even if it were true, and which is supported by no evidence whatsoever. Again, we can't prove that materialism is true. What has been proven is that it is useful, and that nothing else is.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 06:23 AM (QriEg)

8 And one more time: ID is presented as a scientific theory. It is not. Therefore, dismissing it as not being science is entirely to the point.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 06:25 AM (QriEg)

9 In support of ID, and inspired by the quotes in this post, I am proposing the AF theory. Yes, that's right, Atheist Fundamentalism. We need to get back to the roots of atheism, the knowledge that there is no supernatural being whether he's in charge of it all or not. Frankly this neomodern atheism which states that "there's nobody in charge of it all and if there was it wouldn't be a supernatural being because there aren't any" smacks of atheistic heresy to mine ears.

Posted by: Jim at Friday, October 14 2005 07:28 AM (oqu5j)

10 "The proper response to ID is not dismissing it as "unscientific", but giving it the same critical hearing as its proponents give to evolution." Oh you mean to shriek hysterically that it's the work of the Devil? How about we burn a few people at the stake, (metaphorically, of course), and accuse them of being Satanists? They seem to like that tactic. Religion has always been wrong on every matter when it comes to understanding nature. Always, every time. For starters the book of Genesis makes about a half-dozen mistakes in the first couple of pages, not to mention later transgressions of the Catholic Church, who almost burned Galileo for a heretic simply because he refute Ptolemy's cosmology. If it were up to religion, the earth would still be flat and the center of the universe, and we'd still be burning people as witches. The history of religion is one of murder and the repression of free thought, and nothing has changed but the names.

Posted by: Improbulus Maximus at Friday, October 14 2005 09:35 AM (0yYS2)

11 What's more, the argument you present, which is indeed a common one from ID (and Creation Science and Creationism) shows a complete ingorance of Evolutionary Theory. Evolution is not random. Mutations are random. Natural selection isn't. So the calculations are completely meaningless. This has been pointed out any number of times, and I believe it was pointed out to you directly on a previous thread.

No, I haven't discussed this with you before. If I had, you would have known what Michael Behe's argument is, since the core of his argument is a situation in which natural selection is not supposed to occur, by standard evolutionary logic.

The biological systems in question are composed of several distinct proteins (encoded in different genes) such that, if any one of them is removed, the whole system fails. Natural selection will act to preserve such systems once they exist; but natural selection cannot generate such systems. (Indeed, natural selection never generates any gene; that's what mutation is for.) So Behe's argument is, natural selection won't preserve the components of these systems independently -- each component, separated from the rest, is a neutral gene. And the odds that several neutral mutations will all occur within a single population, and be propagated into one organism, thus completing the system, are extremely low; low enough that the expected time for the happy event can easily exceed the lifetime of the Earth.

Now I've already said there's an error in this argument. But it's not failing to take natural selection into account. Standard evolutionary theory states that the incidence of neutral mutations within a population fluctuates at random, and the ages of species are estimated with the help of this rule. I leave finding the error as a exercise, for the moment ...

Posted by: Michael Brazier at Friday, October 14 2005 09:35 PM (8LTnv)

12 Sure, materialism is an assumption. But if you make that assumption, you get to build science, and science works. No other ontological assumption can do that.

Wrong. The Christian assumption, that the cosmos is the creation of a rational God, entails that the cosmos is intelligible, that study of the cosmos by rational beings is not futile. Materialism doesn't entail this: for a materialist, there is no reason to expect the cosmos to be intelligible. A materialist who knew nothing of scientific enquiry would, I believe, never invent it. (And the historical record supports this: the founders of science were theists, not materialists.)

Have you ever read Eugene Wigner's essay "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"? There, Wigner makes it clear just how surprising it is that the cosmos is intelligible.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at Friday, October 14 2005 10:09 PM (8LTnv)

13 The biological systems in question are composed of several distinct proteins (encoded in different genes) such that, if any one of them is removed, the whole system fails. Which is completely irrelevant, because evolution isn't supposed to work backwards. So the entire argument is nonsense.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 11:25 PM (QriEg)

14 The Christian assumption, that the cosmos is the creation of a rational God, entails that the cosmos is intelligible, that study of the cosmos by rational beings is not futile. That doesn't actually mean anything. Materialism doesn't entail this: for a materialist, there is no reason to expect the cosmos to be intelligible. Which is irrelevant. All that materialism tells us is that all material events have material causes. And that is both necessary and sufficient to build science. Your "Christian assumption" is neither.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 11:29 PM (QriEg)

15 I'm starting to wonder if you have any idea what evolution is, or science, for that matter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 14 2005 11:30 PM (QriEg)

16 ... evolution isn't supposed to work backwards. So the entire argument is nonsense.

Behe's argument makes no use of the idea that "evolution is supposed to work backwards". Try again, please.

All that materialism tells us is that all material events have material causes. And that is both necessary and sufficient to build science.

Would you agree that David Hume was a materialist? Because he is famous for denying the validity of science: "when we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality; which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other ..."

Posted by: Michael Brazier at Saturday, October 15 2005 01:11 AM (8LTnv)

17 Behe's argument makes no use of the idea that "evolution is supposed to work backwards". Okay, my comment was a bit oblique. To make it clearer to you: Evolution can reduce the complexity of systems as well as increase it. So you have a system that breaks if you take away one protein? So what? It could just as easily have evolved by reducing the number of proteins involved to the current state. Behe is trying to push evolution backwards up the wrong path, finds it doesn't work, and complains that evolution is wrong, when the fault lies in his own understanding. Would you agree that David Hume was a materialist? I give no thought to David Hume whatsoever. And having read that quote, I can only point out that it is entirely irrelevant to science. In fact, I'm not at all convinced that it is actually meaningful. The only way you can connect a cause to an effect is via an intermediate cause. What does Hume expect to find? Magic fairies?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 15 2005 01:32 AM (QriEg)

18 So you have a system that breaks if you take away one protein? So what? It could just as easily have evolved by reducing the number of proteins involved to the current state. Behe is trying to push evolution backwards up the wrong path ...

No. Behe did not say that, nor did I. I'll repeat: Behe's argument is, natural selection won't preserve the components of these systems independently -- each component, separated from the rest, is a neutral gene. And the odds that several neutral mutations will all occur within a single population, and be propagated into one organism, thus completing the system, are extremely low; low enough that the expected time for the happy event can easily exceed the lifetime of the Earth.

More concretely, suppose a system of 4 enzymes ABCD, for which any subset does nothing -- ABC, ABD, ACD, and BCD are all useless. Once any organism has ABCD, natural selection favors that organism over other members of its population, and the system becomes common. But (according to Behe) A, B, C, and D, separately, give no advantage to an organism; therefore natural selection does not affect their frequency in a population. So the probability that any one organism will end up with ABCD, all at once, is extremely low.

I trust you see now why the suggestion that ABCD is simplified from a larger system, say ABCDE, doesn't help matters. A system of 5 components is even less likely than one of 4. Even supposing that E is a substitute for D leaves the system's likelihood at the same order of magnitude; ABCE is no more probable than ABCD.

I give no thought to David Hume whatsoever. And having read that quote, I can only point out that it is entirely irrelevant to science. In fact, I'm not at all convinced that it is actually meaningful. The only way you can connect a cause to an effect is via an intermediate cause. What does Hume expect to find? Magic fairies?

Actually, Hume was saying that the ordinary concept of causation is an appeal to magic fairies, and that there is no real connection from a cause to its effect. Scientific theories, on Hume's account, are merely summaries of patterns we find in history. We ascribe predictive power to them only because we assume, prior to all observation, a "law of uniformity". This assumption cannot be rationally justified, but everyone believes it because it works well in practice.

You see, I hope, that denying the reality of causal links is going to affect scientific enquiry if the enquirers can be induced to believe it?

Posted by: Michael Brazier at Saturday, October 15 2005 05:16 AM (NoQkX)

19 Scientific theories, on Hume's account, are merely summaries of patterns we find in history. Not summaries of patterns, but mathematical models of patterns, which is an entirely different thing. We ascribe predictive power to them only because we assume, prior to all observation, a "law of uniformity". Okey dokey. The "law of uniformity" is a worthwhile point to raise. This assumption cannot be rationally justified Doesn't need to be. If it could be rationally justified, it wouldn't be an assumption. but everyone believes it because it works well in practice. Yes. Because it does. In fact, it works unfailingly. You see, I hope, that denying the reality of causal links is going to affect scientific enquiry if the enquirers can be induced to believe it? Nope. Doesn't matter. What matters is what works.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 15 2005 05:23 AM (QriEg)

20 You see, here is, once again, where materialism and science have it all over idealsim, dualism, Intelligent Design and other miscellaneous bullshit. Science works.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 15 2005 05:26 AM (QriEg)

21 Oh, and as for Behe - BEF might be useful. As might ABEF. And ABDEF. And ABCDEF. And then you lose the E, and then the F. Single mutations, each neutral or beneficial, and you end up with a system that looks astronomically unlikely - if you know absolutely nothing about genetics.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 15 2005 05:35 AM (QriEg)

22 "ID arguments, in fact, all have the form of a thought experiment: a biological system is exhibited, then the expected time required for that system to be reached by random mutations is calculated, and it proves to be longer than the known lifetime of the Earth -- from which, if the calculations are right, it follows that the mutations leading to that system weren't random." Someone needs to look up the definition of "random" again... The whole point of it being random, is that just because statistics say that an occurance is likely to happen at a certain point, doesn't mean that it HAS to have happened then. Pixy - thanks for posting your original article, I am getting so tired of the "evangelical" person at work rambling on and on about how evolution is flawed... Articles like this help me keep my sanity. Now to figure out an anonymous way to give this article to him...

Posted by: John Ballentine at Saturday, October 15 2005 09:19 AM (lQRkC)

23 Oh pixy, isn't this just the hugest waste of time? ID is not science, because it doesn't have all the accessories of a science. It needs technical journals, textbooks, core classes, department chairs, graduate students and research assistants. There needs to be an institute of ID at a major secular university. Who could teach it in high schools? Where is the ID 101 for prospective high school educators? Attacking evolution does nothing for ID as science. The Discovery Institute should endow a few university chairs instead of ginning up propaganda for school boards and funding lawsuits. Take a page from the quantum theorists. We just had thought experiments in the science of the very small, because we didn't know to measure the tiny. Yet now quantum mechanics is taught in (at least, our local) college curriculum for prospective highschool educators. If ID is a science, it should be able to stand or fall on its own merits within academe. What GW did was wrong. GW (the state) suggested that ID (pseudo-science) should be taught in schools. That makes it into a Lysenkoism.

Posted by: matoko kusanagi at Thursday, October 20 2005 01:22 PM (d1AM5)

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