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.
There's an easy way to get people to stop responding to stupid posts. I wonder if Protagoras can figure it out.
Creationists want affirmative action for their ideas.
Reading protagoras' response, as so often in crevo debates, I am irresistibly reminded of the Black Knight Sketch
Ping to above.
It's really interesting that we are supposed to be blown away by some unpublished quote from an obscure Darwin Noteboook, but are supposed to ignore the main thrust of Hitler's appeal to Christianity as the basis for Nazism.
All part of the affirmative action plan for creationism. Special ideas need Special treatment.
The debate is over whether ID is science AND whether it violates the legal theory of "separation of church and state " (a legal concept which was recently rejected in another case).
But not in this case, because the perjury to hide the material involvement of a specific local religious sect was uncovered in court.
"Namely, that it couldn't have occurred naturally, I presume."
Actually even that is not agreed upon. Some IDers say the conditions that permit or cause evolution are proof of intelligence. Maybe, but I doubt it could be falsified in the strict sense that I am demanding.
Eh? So...you want to include the anthropomorphic theory under the umbrella of ID? Behe, who testified at trial, doesn't require acknowledgment of the anthromorphic theory to make his case.
"Insufferable complexity is a mirage."
There are randomly complex things, and there is information complexity. Information theory applies. We have nonlinear systems. We have interdependence.
and then there are clouds if inky balderdash about information theory one can throw up indefinitely, hoping our deponents will tire and withdraw. There is no demonstrated case of Beheian insurmountable complexity, and there likely never will be, because--as is the case with your base theory--the set of possible ways to naturally build anything demonstrably built is infinite.
We have the design encoded into DNA which has the potential to be transmitted as information by other means.
Applying information theory to a biological process is a doubtful enterprise at best. Information theory applies to discrete, set-theoretically well formed, independent entities where the information transmitted doesn't meaningfully interact with it's environment, and the transmitter can communicate something relevant, and surprising, to the receiving end's knowledge of itself. Biological systems are mathematically continuous, and the processes that utilize DNA are tightly coupled in chemical feedback loops. You can't make Shannon information theory apply usefully to biological processes--no one can, and the half-baked attempts we've seen at it have been ludicrously lacking in even the simplest of application tests one might expect of a biological theory.
(In other words, it might be possible to reproduce an organism from the DNA blueprint with just the information contained in it.)
No, not in any reasonable sense--you are getting your science from "Jurassic Park". There is way more to a creature than its DNA mapping into proteins. There is way more, in fact, to DNA, meiosis, and mitosis, than it's duplication and mapping into proteins.
"most any not-obviously self-contradictory hypothesis whatsoever is, in some sense, verifiable or falsifiable."
Untrue. Many statements might even be true or useful but not falsifiable.
Did I not say "most"?
In fact, mathematical statements are not falsifiable except where there is a specific correlation to some natural phenomenon.
That is not true--it is quite easy to make false statements in any abstract formal mathematics, to which you have not attached a set-theoretic domain of discourse, much less mapped that domain to the real world
I am tired of hearing lame attacks thrown about in every creation-evultion-science-religion debate saying ID is unscientific.
What? You just long-windedly agreed with me that it did not qualify for inclusion in high school textbooks. I guess I agree with you that, in the sense that everything under the sun is a science, ID is also a science.
"Abiogenesis is potentially falsifiable much in the same way that propositions such as 'Therapsids are the direct ancestors of dinosaurs' are. Woese is sneaking up on life's origin in exactly this manner, by treating the mutational clocks of our smallest ancestors in a manner similar to that employed by paleontologists to investigate the ancestry of dinosaurs: by treating DNA as fossil evidence, of a sort, and making predictions about what will be be discovered that isn't presently discovered, and seeing these predictions either succeed or fail."
Sorry, "abiogenesis is falsifiable because common ancestry is falsifiable" does not cut the mustard.
That is not what I said. I said the way we do science in both cases is similar. You summary is unwarranted and unduly confusing, but par for the course.
Neither are falsifiable. This is the biggest problem with treating natural history as a science in general. (it is part science and part history. And history cannot be falsified. It cannot even be tested in a controlled environment.)
Nonsense. Many natural sciences engage in meaningful falsification by predicting things that can be discovered, before they are discovered. If we took your thesis seriously, we'd have to discard most of geology, and 20th century astronomy.
It is circular when trying to apply the demarcation standard to historical events. It is possible to superimpose a variation of any interpretation of evidence on the actual evidence. This is because nothing ever can be truly falsified. If a prediction is wrong, the theory will only be modified to accommodate the new data.
There is nothing special about historical data in this regard. Phrenology and the ether withstood many attacks in this manner before the evidence available finally toppled them.
The bottom line is that no matter how much this fundamental flaw is hidden by piles of data, HISTORICAL EVENTS ARE NOT FALSIFIABLE, PERIOD.
This is nonsense. If we really took it seriously, we wouldn't be able to perform meaningful experiments at all, as soon as you stop running the oscilloscope, all it's accumulated data becomes historical.
That is why there is a difference between speciation and common descent. The first can be observed, even if in small increments. The latter can never be observed. We can observe continued speciation, but the reverse cannot be demonstrated conclusively. It may be reasonable, logical, and even supportable. But it is not falsifiable.
Than there is no way to demonstrate the formation of stars from dust. No one has ever observed the formation of a star from dust, nor has anyone actually observed a star undergoing more than one step of its Hertzsprung-Russel fate. There are only isolated static snapshots throughout the universe of dust in various degrees of concentration, and stars in various locations on the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram. Obviously, the notion of stars being born and dying is an unfalsifiable fantasy. You can only demonstrate micro-stellar evolution.
The theory that biogenesis could not ever occur by any means whatsoever will never produce reasonable evidence, because 'any means whatsoever' is an infinite set."
Here you fall into the same logical fallacy as so many others. You do not test for or falsify the negation of a hypothesis. You look for support. You remain open to falsification. The proposition is that intelligence is the mechanism by which life can form. The first task is to verify that life can form this way. All hypotheses, theories and laws are tentative to some degree or another. None require testing infinite possibilities to be considered verifiable and falsifiable.
So...once again the burnt hand goes wobbling back to the fire: to do science, since science is about stuff, you need some stuff to look at. There's such a thing as being so "open to falsification", that your brains bleed right out.
To the extent that abiogensis is about specific, tangible things--like DNA treated as fossil evidence, which can be poked at, and make predictions about evidence yet to be uncovered, it's may be possible to do science about it.
To the extent that abiogenesis is about "all the possible ways" a thing can happen, there are no observed limitations on behavior to be explained. This is not science, this is theology, and can only remain theology, until something occurs in the way of specific, positive, tangible forensic evidence you can draw inferences with sufficient specificity about to allow you to make verifiable predictions as to what you will find next.
You will never come to know that which you do not know until you first know that you do not know it.
Things that you do not know that you know, are not part of the set of things one ought to teach under the rubric of "science" in high school, or fund specific research projects for at your local university.
None that you are apparently able to grasp.
As usual, you refuse to provide evidence for your claim and respond to evidence for a counterclaim with insults.
Post number please
If you can't give the post number, your claims are invalid.
Your claims
Those are the wrong posts. I asked you for post numbers.
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