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To: Question_Assumptions
"The idea of irreducible complexity hasn't been proven wrong."

The idea of irreducible complexity IC is just nonsense.
I think now you want a reason why IC is nonsense. Just look at how IC is defined. - Which definition do you have? The IC definition is changing so quickly to adapt to the gaps each earlier definition left. Give me your explicit definition and I show you the nonsense.


"No, there hasn't been one candidate of irreducible complexity that's panned out to the satisfaction of evolutionary biologists."

No wonder by these definitions.

"But there also hasn't been on candidate of signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence that's panned out, either, and there sure have been negatives."

Wrong! Your limitation to extraterrestrial signals is not valid. How loud would the ID crowd cry out if some kind of IC found in bacterias but the scientist will say you still got no prove of IC in more complex organism. The boys and girls at SETI know very well how their "IC" signals look like.

The concept of SETI is:
We got one example. Let's look for others.

The concept of IC is:
We got no example. Therefor our idea is still correct.
194 posted on 12/05/2005 2:47:27 AM PST by MHalblaub (Tell me in four more years (No, I did not vote for Kerry))
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To: MHalblaub
The idea of irreducible complexity IC is just nonsense.

The idea is to distinguish the natural from the created, the exact same objective SETI has when looking at electromagnetic signals.

I think now you want a reason why IC is nonsense. Just look at how IC is defined. - Which definition do you have? The IC definition is changing so quickly to adapt to the gaps each earlier definition left.

And if you look at the early stages of SETI, they were jumping on all sorts of things as signals from extra-terrestrial intelligences. Heck, the SETI scientists who fired off a message in 1974 failed to M13 will miss its intended target because the scientists didn't acount for the movement of the galaxy. Again, I repeat, that IC advocacy includes loons and mistakes has no more bearing on the scientific merit of IC than the loons and mistakes made by SETI advocates has on SETI. Or does real Science® demand 100% perfection these days?

Give me your explicit definition and I show you the nonsense.

A candidate for irreducable complexity will be a biological system made up of components produced by different genes that work together in such a way that the individual parts (and their hypothetical evolutionary precursors) either offer no advantage or a detriment to survival until the entire system is functioning in its entirety.

In simpler terms, find a biological system that can't be explained by natural selection.

No wonder by these definitions.

The early SETI advocates cast a very wide net that caught all sorts of natural phenomena, too. And let's not forget that popular advocacy for the possiblity extra-terrestrial intelligence includes people who hand out at Area 51, believe that little gray men abduct people with their flying saucers, and believe that there are faces and pyramids on Mars (belief in which is widespread enough to make it into mainstream movies). One of the games being played here is to widen the category ID advocacy to include as many loons as possible while narrowing SETI advocacy to a handful of respectable scientists using radio telescopes to look for a single type of evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

This is the same game that the mainstream media plays when they cover protest marches, taking effort to show liberal protesters as normal people (despite the fact that their protesters are full of freaks and loons) while showing conservative protesters as loons (despite the fact that most of their protesters are average people). Compare apples and apples, please.

Wrong! Your limitation to extraterrestrial signals is not valid.

And what limit is that?

How loud would the ID crowd cry out if some kind of IC found in bacterias but the scientist will say you still got no prove of IC in more complex organism. The boys and girls at SETI know very well how their "IC" signals look like.

So are you claiming that SETI has already found proof of extraterrestial intelligence? The SETI people know what humans might do if they were sending electromagnetic signals that might be detected by another species of intelligent life. But they really have no clue what any ET intelligent beings are up to because they've never seen one. They are guessing that aliens might solve problems the same way we would.

The concept of SETI is:
We got one example. Let's look for others.

OK.

The concept of IC is:
We got no example. Therefor our idea is still correct.

No. The concept for IC is, "We don't know if we have an example of a natural process or a created process. A lot of people think it's a natural process, but it might not be, so let's look for evidence that it's not.

Apples and oranges, but both are fruit.

196 posted on 12/05/2005 9:04:01 AM PST by Question_Assumptions
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