Posted on 12/20/2005 7:54:38 AM PST by snarks_when_bored
Fox News alert a few minutes ago says the Dover School Board lost their bid to have Intelligent Design introduced into high school biology classes. The federal judge ruled that their case was based on the premise that Darwin's Theory of Evolution was incompatible with religion, and that this premise is false.
It is SO past time for an INTELLIGENT debate on this issue. Why is it so hard to accept the idea that we just don't know for SURE how life began? And do those who refuse to accept anything but Darwinian evolution truly believe that any proof of evolution- if there should ever BE any- somehow "rains on the Christian parade"? I certainly hate to disabuse any "true believers" in the crowd (no I don't), but evolution as a implement of God is also quite acceptable to those who live in faith.
I do not believe that there is anything but an agenda at work in any rejection of ID...
See the following for some insight:
Dan Peterson, "What's the Big Deal About Intelligent Design". American Spectator, Dec.2005-Jan.2006.
http://www.discovery.org/csc/topQuestions.php
http://actionbioscience.org/evolution/nhmag.html
The fight over this issue, by the evolutionists, has only ONE purpose- and it ain't about "science".
Off-topic, but what does the CDC say is the typical failure rate for those using abstinence as the only form of birth control/STD prevention?
The study I saw compared each form of birth control WHEN PERFECTLY PRACTICED.
It didn't address the question of when any form was the only method practiced.
They also did not include Native Americans, who lived on the continent.
If I only count the members of my household, we have a 100% literacy rate. And every member was educated in a public school. Pretty good results from those incompetent public schools, huh?
;-)
"Are you implicitly invoking a god or gods for the inherent contradiction in that hypothesis? Or time travel?"
There is no inherent contradiction. As I have repeatedly pointed out, my hypothesis concerns the PROCESS of life originating and is not about one particular historical event.
It applies whether an event occurred yesterday, or thousands or billions of years ago.
A supposed event of ages past cannot be falsified and would be very difficult to verify.
"A teacher of an empirical science ought to continually remind her students that what they're being taught is (ideally) the current best account of the phenomena they're studying...not that it's the final word or the gospel truth."
Exactly correct. And that is why I object so strongly to the teaching of ID:
Scenario 1, wherein ID is not taught:
Scientist 1: "We don't understand this particular element of this theory. It doesn't make sense."
Scientist 2: "No, we don't. Therefore, we must study the problem, experiment, and try to formulate a hypothesis which will start us on the path to understanding it."
Scenario 2, wherein ID is taught:
Scientist 1: "We don't understand this particular element of this theory. It doesn't make sense."
"Scientist" 2: "Goddidit! Problem solved, next issue!"
No incentive to actually advance.....
Of course he does! They speak out against ID, therefore they are athiests! It's a self-proving "fact"! [/sarcasm]
(Come to think of it, that's sort of the way the whole "theory" of ID works, isn't it?)
Of course not. Check with Professor Milecki.
Assuming you refer to University of Kansas religious studies professor Paul Mirecki, his course was not one of religious instruction.
What sort of curriculum do you propose for your religion course, and how will you ensure that the instructor is qualified to teach it?
I would love to hear how the 2nd law of thermo does not conflict with evolution . You say basically it doesnt matter. How so? Your explanation is not based on any science; instead you ignore one of the most thoroughly tested laws in all science. The classical interpretation reads them at face value to mean the universe is winding-down irreversibly toward a heat death where all the mass=energy is still present but unavailable to perform work. These laws indicate the universe is not a perpetual motion machine.
Although , as you know, in the origins debate we typically hear of it as the universal tendency toward disorder or entrophy. There is another aspect of this law. The Second Law says that in a closed system, energy always distributes itself so it is no longer available to do useful work, and this will happen irreversibly.
Imagine a closed system of 2 rooms; a cold empty room next to a room full of hot steam. The non-uniform distribution of mass-energy - known as disequilibrium provides energy that is available to do work. This is called the available energy or free energy.
Imagine a steam engine in one of the rooms with pipes connected so that the hot steam powers the engine and the exhaust is then expelled into the cold room. The engine can then drive many devices to accomplish useful tasks. As the steam engine runs, the hot room gets colder and the cold room hotter. When the two rooms reach the same temperature the engine can no longer run, no matter what temperature the rooms or how efficient it may be. The system has reached equilibrium. All the mass-energy is still present. It has merely distributed itself so it can no longer do work. That available energy is now gone from the system forever. Process irreversible.
Look at Hawking's book on cosmology Brief History of Time. He gives us a fine example of evolutionary distortions.
He misinterprets the probablities involved in the Second Law of Therm. He has the reader imagine 2 boxes: one containing oxygen and the other nitrogen. These boxes are joined together and the intervening wall is removed. As predicted by the second law, the gases will mix throughout the box. What is the probablility the oxygen gas will randomly move back to its half the box? Hawking claims it can happen. Do you?
Good grief. The law of gravity gets use-tested every day, with a high potential for failure, if it is incorrect. It, in fact, failed the perehelion of mercury test, and was replaced with a better theory early in this century, and continues to fail interesting tests every day, that await explanation at the present moment. The law of gravity is fecund with tests that can and do fail, right now.
Experimentation is not a draconian boolean function as you seem to think. We call things sciences where we have a practical window of observation that allows us to run many tests, or make field predictions, some of which fail and some of which succeed. Our task is to put together a picture from this rich source of information. It is extremely rare (as far as I know, unknown) that one single test makes a definitive cut. ID fails to be a science, on the level that evolutionary theory or the theory of gravity is a science simply because there's no practical, routine way for us to examine it.
Trying as hard as I could to even make out what your contention is, for the last half-hour has yielded me nothing but a headache, from trying to gobble a 90 cent bag of words to get at a 1 cent idea. If ID were a significant science, you could tell me what test I could run tomorrow, with a reasonable budget, to see how good a predictor of events it is. If you cannot meet this challenge, you do not have a science worthy of being mentioned in high school textbooks.
Your premise is not the law of gravity. It contains no useful approximation of anything observable. It's about something that supposedly never ever happens, even over untestable amounts of parallel recombination on the early Earth. You want to claim proof of something you aren't even thinking of testing but you also don't want to admit that. You are STILL pretending not to see. This is the creationist dummy dance, the endless brazen pretense that the obvious is not.
You have been saying my statement is logically flawed rather than lacking in supporting evidence, so your comparison does not identify why the law of gravity meets your requirement, but mine does not.
More dishonesty. Your premise is not an attempt at reasoning at all and cannot be evaluated as sound versus unsound. It can only be evaluated as practically testable.
Every law of physics is potentially limited in scope and may fail someday. It has already happened to most of Newton's Laws. The Law of Gravity is getting a hard look after some disturbing cosmological data emerged a few years back.
But Newton's LOG, like his first three laws, will always be useful over a huge scope, just as it has been from the first. Your law of formations of life has a tiny domain just now. All the life we know of now traces to a single origin and we don't know for sure what that was. You have basically formulated your law to argue that that very data point was a "Goddidit" miracle, i.e, to beg the question.
You have openly hoped that science will create life in a lab, thus providing a second data point. You will then extrapolate back to the first point and yell, "Intelligent Design!"
What's funny about this is I can post two rows of skulls which appear for all the world to morph from chimpanzee to man and one creationist after another will attack me for interpolating evolution between the data points. Creationist make a science of refusing to infer. No interpolation allowed. No extrapolation allowed. Not, that is, until they need it to yell, "Goddidit!"
Newton, working on his LOG, was uniting Galileo and Kepler's laws, which separately were based on lots of observations. He basically knew the behavior was there and reliable, it just needed a more comprehensive and basic explanation than had been separately provided by the earlier laws. When he described the underlying lawfulness, that was an increase in human understanding.
Your law is an attempt to say, "Forget understanding this. God did it." That is not an increase in human understanding as most people see science.
You dug yourself a very deep hole. I think at this point you are probably too embarrassed to admit your argument is flawed even if you can see it plainly.
Look up the logical fallacy of tu quoque sometime. You made your premise that life never forms in an unguided fashion from nonlife. You will never test it. You know you won't. You don't have the integrity to say you won't. I'm confident that the lurkers are not idiots.
I've told you before: your hypothesis is falsifiable but not testable. You do not intend to test it other than to periodically yell that it has not been falsified.
VadeRetro: "Why isn't new life forming from scratch in some warm mud puddle right now?"
unlearner: Because it can't, in my opinion. If abiogenesis can happen, it might be happening somewhere. But unless we observe it or make a testable model for it, then it is not science.
There is a pressing reason which you at least superficially do not appear to know. This is important, really. This is a bad place to play dumb.
If you are that pig-ignorant of abiogenesis theory, you have no business announcing that it will be falsified by some non-test of your devising. You don't know what you are talking about, if you're telling the truth. However, I think you are a holy warrior liar for the Lord and are not telling the truth about what you know. Prove me wrong and say the words.
Here's a hint. You're going to do an experiment to try to form a certain organic from inorganics in the lab. You've got some beakers, tubing, etc. sitting out ready to be set up. Which of the following do you do?
Hasn't this been answered repeatedly on this thread? The earth/sun energy exchange is not a closed system. Someday the entropic piper will have to be paid, since the entire universe is presumably a closed system, but we are not talking about the entire universe, we are talking about a tiny piece of it, for a very small slice of time, so entropy can run uphill within it, just like eddy currents can briefly travel in the opposite direction from the flow of the river that produces them.
Usable energy is being pumped onto the earth by the sun all the time, which produces highly usable energy gradients that do work to produce highly regular, differentiated effects such as hurricane weather cells, ocean currents, whirlpools, bubbles, snowflakes, crystal lattices, and life.
It is a fundamental point of quantum theory that, in fact, it can happen. Just not with a very high probability. On a subnuclear scale, where events are occuring at an extremely high rate compared to rate at which you can perform your test with two rooms full of gas, it happens frequently enough that the transistors that allow you to communicate on this medium make use of the phenomenon.
I already did that.
Your explanation is not based on any science; instead you ignore one of the most thoroughly tested laws in all science.
No, I just explained how the 2nd Law works. You are the one attempting to apply it to an abstract realm with shoddy reasoning. You can't hand-wave thermodynamics in that way. I'm not ignoring it at all - it doesn't look to me like you're paying any attention at all to the definitions of entropy and a closed system are, in the first place.
The Second Law says that in a closed system, energy always distributes itself so it is no longer available to do useful work, and this will happen irreversibly.
Okay. The sun hasn't finished distributing all its energy yet. Hence it can still do useful work on Earth.
All the mass-energy is still present. It has merely distributed itself so it can no longer do work. That available energy is now gone from the system forever. Process irreversible.
And this will eventually happen on Earth (practically) when the sun has exhausted its available energy and the core of the earth has cooled. Till then, thermal exchange still applies, and also the ability of localized systems to decrease in entropy. I agree, without the sun or geothermal heat, evolution couldn't occur. Then again, neither could life.
Look at Hawking's book on cosmology Brief History of Time. He gives us a fine example of evolutionary distortions. He misinterprets the probablities involved in the Second Law of Therm.
You understand thermodynamics better than Hawking? I don't think so.
The laws of thermodynamics always apply (to systems with large numbers of particles anyway), but not in the ways you are thinking. The article from the Institute for Creation Research that you (apparently) cite most of your 'information' from makes several key mistakes in the application of this concept. It makes the point that direct application of energy to system tends not to order a system (i.e. the old tornado in the junkyard argument. It ignores the fact that complex organic molecules, living organisms etc. act as an intermediate system for the absorption, processing and releasing of energy - the concept of the increasing order (decreasing entropy) of intermediaries of heat/energy flow is a commonly observed process in thermodynamic systems. As I said, a global increase in entropy is necessary for a localized decrease. The laws of thermodynamics are indeed present in evolution, and in fact, evolution occurs in concordance with these laws, not in spite of them.
He has the reader imagine 2 boxes: one containing oxygen and the other nitrogen. These boxes are joined together and the intervening wall is removed. As predicted by the second law, the gases will mix throughout the box. What is the probablility the oxygen gas will randomly move back to its half the box? Hawking claims it can happen. Do you?
You distort Hawking's statement. Given a probabiblity of an infinite number of years, it could happen, but not under any practical circumstances (not in the multibillion year age of the universe would this occurrence be even remotely likely to occur). His point was that thermodynamic laws are statistical in nature, not that this is something one would observe in reality.
I'm not sure what it is you're trying to say that the 2nd Law really tells us - is it that no system can ever have a local decrease in entropy? You're wrong. The creationist 'definition' of the 2nd law would hold that plants can't grow, embryos can't form, a hurricane can't form due to natural weather, and an endothermic chemical reaction can't even occur. The only thermodynamic conditions that are necessary for evolution to occur are the same as those required for life to exist and reproduce.
There's a good and simple reason why scientists don't take groups like the Institute for Creation Research seriously: their science is wrong on a multiple number of levels. Their blatant distortion of the meaning of basic physics principles is not a point that scores well for this organization's favor.
Shhhh...
You'll wake up the comatose, and break their daydreams of the halcyon days of slavery, infant deaths of 200+ per thousand per annum, and life expectancy of less than 40 years.
Those beautiful days before suffrage, emancipation, women's liberation and equal representation.
The literacy rate in America SUCKED prior to the creation of the public school system.
Period.
First, assume there is one molecule of O2 and one of H2. Calculate the odds that one will be in one box whilst the other is in the other one.
Now assume there are two O2 molecules and two H2. Calculate the odds again. They won't be zero.
Now find the formula for the odds as a function of N, the number of molecules. This formula will never equal zero, but will be very small, as soon as N is at all large.
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