Posted on 04/07/2006 4:16:49 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
Even as the evolution wars rage, on school boards and in courtrooms, biologists continue to accumulate empirical data supporting Darwinian theory. Two extraordinary discoveries announced this week should go a long way to providing even more of the evidence that critics of evolution say is lacking.
One study produced what biblical literalists have been demanding ever since Darwin -- the iconic "missing links." If species evolve, they ask, with one segueing into another, where are the transition fossils, those man-ape or reptile-mammal creatures that evolution posits?
In yesterday's issue of Nature, paleontologists unveiled an answer: well-preserved fossils of a previously unknown fish that was on its way to evolving into a four-limbed land-dweller. It had a jaw, fins and scales like a fish, but a skull, neck, ribs and pectoral fin like the earliest limbed animals, called tetrapods.
[big snip]
Another discovery addresses something Darwin himself recognized could doom his theory: the existence of a complex organ that couldn't have "formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications," he wrote in 1859.
The intelligent-design movement, which challenges teaching evolution, makes this the centerpiece of its attack. It insists that components of complex structures, such as the eye, are useless on their own and so couldn't have evolved independently, an idea called irreducible complexity.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Here you propose a thought experiment. It opens:
…you and nine other people are locked in a completely opaque, environmentally sealed, seamless, unmarked, soundproofed, motion-stabilized, climate-controlled, indestructible (at least by the occupants), and inescapable shipping container. Moreover, you and the others wake up in that container with no data pertaining to any other reality.You continue with the observation, “that container is one among hundreds on a ship* in the middle of an ocean is not something you or any member of your group know ab initio or are capable of ascertaining from your available data set.”
Okay. What happens next? Is there a question you wanted to pose to these incarcerated humans bobbing about on the bosom of Blue Water, completely in the power of the vagaries of the weather with no way to know what’s going on outside the shipping container?
Sounds like your classical conditio humana to me! [See: Hesoid]
My first question would be: Where did you ever get such a gaggle of clueless human beings? That, once incarcerated in a shipping container, lost their minds, their memory, their past experience and general knowledge of the world, such that they were totally helpless? When has a non-lobotomized or chemically-untampered-with person ever experienced such conditions of total helplessness?
In short, it seems the very design of your thought experiment puts up a screen against the very thing I most want to talk about. It is screened out by the application of this rule: “Moreover, you and the others wake up in that container with no data pertaining to any other reality.” It is suggested the presently “available data set” is not up to the job of engaging whatever problem is being raised in this thought experiment.
Well then, it seems to me you are positing zombies, not human beings. But no matter….
Now if the most important question is the number of containers on the ship or the weather conditions, then I grant you, these incarcerated humans are truly disadvantaged in the knowledge sphere — but still not totally ignorant! Some of them might recognize, for instance, what a ship’s roll feels like…. And so it is hasty to say the humans have lost all their knowledge. They still know some things, the knowledge of which could be of enormous value to their survival and the survival of the species.
I think you wanted a thought experiment that could focus on direct observables, and on that basis felt that humans — under the contrived conditions stipulated — would be “helpless.” In answer to which I’d only want to suggest: humans aren’t as helpless as they look; and contrived solutions tend not to endure.
Thank you ever so much for writing, King Prout. Somehow, I feel you are still unsatisfied with the way I have put these issues. If that’s true, then let’s go on from here….
Something expected and something found. The coding change needed to transition to various skin/scale/feather types isn't great.
The question is, what other explanatory hypothesis predicts a transition from reptiles to birds?
Coding changes?.. Whos the programmer on this project?...
It would have to be a project.. Scale to feather in one fell swoop is probably statistically impossible.. to belly laughing standards..
Whatever you want to believe.
Been that way for millinia...
You are beginning to sound like Francis Schaeffer (e.g. Escape from Reason) and "True Truth".
Cheers!
YHAOS, You are asking some interesting questions. That does not mean there is always an answer for those questions.
When I state ""What if there is, in reality, one more thing?", I am referring to the Conservation OF Mass and Energy. That Law states there is only mass and Energy in the Universe.
Do you agree with that? Do you have any indication there is at least one more thing besides Mass or Energy?
Mass and Energy exist in Space/Time.
Without Time there is no movement.
With movement there must be Space to move in.
Mass is solid Energy.
Are you able to define Energy without a comparision, or without stating what it does. Just saying what it is.
In my humble opinion, using comparisons, with my small amount of insight into Energy I am aware there is something there we don't know how to measure, or test.
There is no need to go into all that here, but when one just deals with examining simple questions about life on this planet and in this Universe we immediately observe the untold beauty and complexity upon complexity in the smallest particle of anything. Our DNA is just made of Mass and Energy??? Then how is it that such a massive amount of Information is contained in those spirals.
I hope I am making myself clear.
I am not running from any questions. I am amazed how we can so easily leave out one major cause and then make Laws and Theories as if we know what we are talking about. Then within five years we can say , Wait a minute . We need to redesign our Theories and one of our Laws.
Here is what I do believe.
With God all things are possible.
With out God No thing.
It appears to me that what we call Science is very often an effort to explain "reality" with no mention of a Creator.
Just look at the inner ear of a child. That was no accident.
You see I have been using Mechanical objects for years. It is obvious to me that the inventors of many things have used the actions and abilities of the Human body to design there mechanical instruments.
Who designed the human body??? An Accident of mutation????
Really???
My one comment is that the issue seems to boil down to: how do we know what we know and how sure are we that we actually know it.
Lurkers might be interested in our previous investigation of that very point.
You can spin pretty fantasies to while away your incarceration, but even if one such tale happens to closely parallel the external or greater reality...
1. it has no effect on your situation, and...
2. it can never be tested from within the container
And the point here is: If you cannot test a thing, you can't even *claim* to know a thing to be any more valid than any other untestable thing. You and everything you know, even the parameters of knowing itself, are all stuck within your operational reality - whether that reality is "the Really *Real* Reality"[tm] or not.
I'll answer your objections obliquely:
1. Addendum to the Given: Allow some of the ten people to have some "memory" or pre-confinement data set relating to "reality" outside of the container. Some such sets are vague, all are fragmentary, and none agree.
Result: No change in the scenario - they still can't test squat, so they still can't know squat.
2. And what if, my dear, the inside of the shipping container doesn't look like the inside of a shipping container? I remind you of the parameters of the original Given: "...completely opaque, environmentally sealed, seamless, unmarked, soundproofed, motion-stabilized, climate-controlled, indestructable..."
I've been a dockworker, betty. I *know* shipping containers outside and in. If I woke up to find myself inside an environment as stipulated above, I would NOT recognize it as a shipping container.
I tend to use language VERY carefully, betty - it does not serve the reader to dismiss any stipulated detail as trivial.
science does not address a "Creator" for two basic reasons:
1. a Creator of the sort described in the various religious traditions humans have espoused cannot be described, defined, or subjected to testing on an empirical basis - nor can any claims concerning this Creator's nature: These Creator entities are supposedly quite capable of doing what they do without necessarily leaving any discernable trace.
2. it appears that physical reality functions without *need* of a Creator. Barring direct evidence of divine interference, science goes with the *natural* evidence it has.
Divine Creation *might* be the "Really *REAL* Reality"[tm]
otoh
Divine Creation might be an ad-hoc airplane built around a basalt cube.
And so there is no way to know anything until it can be “tested?” And I gather by “test” you mean according to the procedures of the scientific method? And so for all practical purposes, for you anything that cannot be so “tested” remains dubious in terms of having any actual reality?
But lots of real things exist that cannot be so tested. The scientific way of knowing cannot reach to them because they are non-phenomenal, “non-observables.” I gather you think that such things cannot be acknowledged as “true” until they can be tested; but this means they can never be “true” because the scientific method cannot apply to them. You acknowledge as much, King Prout. I take this view to be a view from “inside the shipping container,” so to speak.
And what of “testing?” As Niels Bohr famously remarked, in order to “test” something, you first must interfere with it. To me this means that the very act of observation modifies that which is being observed. So in a certain way, we never see the object of the test as it actually is in itself, but only as it is made to fit our experiment. So, this thing we think we “know” as the result of our test is actually not the same thing that it is in nature; i.e., in its own state prior to our “interference” with it.
Personally, I am fascinated by the “observer problem” — which, it seems to me, is not confined to quantum theory exclusively. It seems to be alive and well WRT relativity theory and also — arguably — WRT classical Newtonian physics. I think you have a pretty weird idea about God, about “divine interference.” You aver that nature itself seems to get along quite well without Him. You wrote:
These Creator entities are supposedly quite capable of doing what they do without necessarily leaving any discernable trace…. It appears that physical reality functions without *need* of a Creator. Barring direct evidence of divine interference, science goes with the *natural* evidence it has.To which I’d say: It appears that physical reality functions according to laws. The laws themselves are not material objects, and it is senseless to speak of a law as a random, fortuitous development. So one just naturally wonders where the universal laws came from.
To put it crudely, the laws are there because God put them there. God does not have to constantly intervene with physical nature because his lawful design — expressed via the Logos — is the very fundament of the world. Alamo-Girl’s term for this (which I love; but then both A-G and I are Platonists as well as Christians) is “the algorithm from inception.” The universe and all things in it evolve according to this algorithm, which is divine, and on which all things depend for their existence.
In short, physical reality “needs a Creator” — otherwise it could not be what it is, or even exist in the first place.
Both the classical Greeks and Judeo-Christianity see this issue in this way. Post-Enlightenment thinkers tend not to; for they have reduced reality to various descriptions according to materialist, positivist, utilitarian perspectives. Which just goes to show that there really is an “observer problem” implicit in science, and also in philosophy.
Personally, I think Greek metaphysics and Christian theology make the “true descriptions” about the ultimate nature of reality, of the universe. Methodological naturalism can give only very partial views of the “all that there is.” And those views may be partially distorted by the need to “interfere” with the object being observed.
Well, for what it’s worth, King Prout! Thank you so much for writing — I’m enjoying our conversation very much.
I think, both Greek metaphysics and Christian theology cannot show "all there is".. but many of the the ones on the christian theology side as O.K. wid dat.. We don't even know all thats possible.. deciding all there is premature, if even possible..
Many christains have chosen the best option I think(not knowing all thats possible).. That said, its not a hard rule what even being a christian, IS.. You may not "be a christian one minute" and "be one the next"..(re-born)..
Even then, the "test"(christian test) is iffy.. its not for us to decide.. What ever you are, you are.. A tree is known but its fruit, true, but the metaphor includes that some trees don't fruit for years.. merely leaves.. Then at some time the tree displays in all its glory.. blossoms and fruits..
The christian experience must be in humility and gratitude.. not so with Methodological naturalism..
Romanticism - if it feels right, it is "right"
Rationalism - if it is informed with consistent internal logic, it is "right"
Empiricism - if it works under hostile testing, it is provisionally considered correct.
Empiricism is a relatively new way of looking at things.
Seems to work a whole lot better than the earlier modes.
It's fairly easy to see the difference in civilization before and after empiricism.
You do realize, don't you, that you've, in effect, thrown a beaker of mercury on the floor and have asked me to pick it up (the mercury, not the beaker)? How much I ultimately pick up may have a great deal to do with how much grief I want to bring down on my head. [grin]
It's true, I think, every entity must have a place to stand (and in which to act). In my view, both (to stand and to act) are the one and the same as to time and space, and 'to stand' or 'to act' is simply another way of saying 'to exist.' This is an understanding of universal proportions, so far as I can tell. It's scientific; it's legalistic; it's philosophical; it's practical. It is basic to much of what we discuss in this forum. Likewise, the oft mentioned Lisa Randall, and her discussions in the book, Warped Passages. But, it is no less basic to why the drafters of our constitution created a territory (DC) to serve as a federal seat of government. And why, incidently, they viewed serfdom to be a miserable sort of existence, and the ownership of property to be a right of such immense value.
For cryin'-out-loud, even the dead are ceded a place to stand.
Hence, my better understanding in some things leads to my interest in others where I understand little. Intuitive interest, if examined (pursued), leads to the discovery of reasons for the interest. Thus, my reference to the integration of understanding, as opposed to the narrowing of understanding (I think someone herein recently described this last as "knowing more and more about less and less", which, back in my salad days, was a popular observation hinting at a profound wisdom on the part of the observer).
If I'm asking some interesting questions, that's because I have precious little in the way of answers that are satisfying to me.
You ask me to define Energy, 'without a comparision, or without stating what it does.' I normally don't do definitions. But, it does depend on the context to a very great degree, of course. In matters scientific, I leave definitions to the Masters of the Universe. They are, after all, the learned experts of that discipline (science, not the universe). But, to answer your question directly; no, I can't define Energy within the confines you stipulate. Perhaps we will hear from a Master of the Universe who can so define Energy, or who will explain why we are such pathetic idiots to believe a definition so bounded is even reasonable.
But, I should like some definitions. For instance; what is 'randomness'? Unpredictability? Chance? Or, what? Whatever it is, I should like it to be the same tomorrow as it is today.
I understand you are not running from any questions, nor is there any need for you to run. There can be no separation between God and the truth He created. There can, however, be a considerable separation between truth and our feeble understanding (believer and unbeliever alike) of what it is:
“Since therefore falsehood alone is contrary to truth, it is impossible for the truth of faith to be contrary to principles known by natural reason.”
And again,
“. . . no opinion or belief is sent to man from God contrary to natural knowledge.”
. . . . . T. Aquinas, Of God and His Creatures, Book I, Chap. 7
Augustine, as I recall, has expressed similar sentiments, but I don't have his observations immediately at hand.
Science, I think, is always an effort to explain 'reality' without reference to a Creator (even by scientists who, after some fashion or another, believe in a Creator), creating a kind of certainty which generates, in turn, a very comforting security.
OMG, js - the Creos got a mole in Darwin Central. They know about the low wattage bulbs.
We're in big trouble.
Coding changes?..
For lack of a better phrase, yeah.
Whos the programmer on this project?...
Evolutionary processes.
It would have to be a project..
Define the word "project" as you are using it in this context.
Scale to feather in one fell swoop is probably statistically impossible.. to belly laughing standards..
Perhaps, perhaps not (you sort of "forgot" to show your work leading to this conclusion of yours, concerning whether some simple structure vaguely featherlike enough to be marginally worthy of the name could arise through any sort of single mutational event from pre-existing integument structures), but even if so, I'm not sure what your point is, because they would not need to develop in "one fell swoop" as you put it.
...full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
So then.. a feather might develop from a scale in stages?..
The question would be why.. Why would scales develop into scales?.. Especially in stages.. A feather ANY feather is quite a complicated piece of work.. Not to speak of the organ(s) needed to support the growing and support of feathers.. and design work needed for various kinds of feathers.. for various functions and parts of the body..
After feathers design phase, variations could easily modifiy to further handle more unique tasks..
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