Posted on 12/11/2002 6:28:08 AM PST by A2J
10 feet? anything you hear?
-- It would depend on how much a public nuisance you create, of course. Cops/juries are pretty good at deciding such matters.
public air waves? newspapers?
No one is forcing me to listen or read, are they?
You don't have the right not to hear a religious message. Even in a public place. It's not in the constitution.
Bull. -- You have no right to be a pest about proselytizing.
You might want to read some of the writings of Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia on the first amendment.
I've read quite a bit. What did I miss?
LOLOL! I got about a block down the road walking the dog after that post and remembered what I had typed:
Kudos to you for never stopping to ask questions!!!
I laughed so hard, I had to stop and my dog was very annoyed. Obviously, I meant exactly the opposite of what I actually said: Kudos to you for always stopping to ask questions!!! ... Duh!
So sorry about that.
Seems kind of illogical to me to say such a thing. Now who would know the Truth better than He who created everything? Is the Truth (with a capital "T") not objective??????
No. In fact, my brother-in-law is a famous neurochemist, and he tells me that it is the subject of much hilarity in his field. Indeed, he has relished lording it over me as a prime example of the presumption of physicists.
Here are some links and sources which may help to explain why I say that the genetic code contains algorithms:
Entropy in the Biological Sciences
Molecular Information Theory and the Theory of Molecular Machines
In the living cell, nucleic acids and proteins, which are scarcely on nodding terms chemically, deal with each other via an information channel, i.e. using software rather than hardware, written in a triplet mathematical code. The advantage of life ‘going digital in this way is much greater flexibility and fidelity (as is also the case with digitization in electronic devices). The situation can be likened to flying a kite versus a radio-controlled plane. A kite is hard-wired to the controller, and is clumsy to control by pulling on the strings. By contrast, a radio-controlled plane is easier to fly because the controller’s instructions are digitized and transmitted to the plane, where they are decoded and used to harness local energy sources. The radio waves themselves do not push and pull the plane around; they merely convey the information. Analogously, nucleic acids do not themselves assemble proteins, they relay the instructions for ribosomes to do it. This frees protein assembly from the strictures of chemistry, and permits life to choose whatever amino acid sequences it needs. So, far from deriving from physics and chemistry, biological information is quasi-independent of it. To explain the origin of this information-based control, we need to understand how mere hardware (atoms) wrote its own software.
Note that we must do more than simply explain where information per se came from. A gene is a set of coded instructions (e.g. for the manufacture of a protein). To be effective, there must exist a molecular milieu that can decode and interpret the instructions, and carry them out, otherwise the sequence information in the DNA is just so much gobbledygook. The information is therefore semantic in content, i.e. it must mean something (KEpers, 1985). So we are faced with the task of understanding the nature and origin of semantic, or meaningful, information. Since the very concept of information emerged from communication theory in the realm of human discourse, this is no trivial matter. Information is not like mass or energy: you can’t tell by looking whether a molecule has it or not. As yet, there is no ‘info-dynamics comparable to the dynamics of matter, let alone an understanding of how ‘meaning emerges in nature…
Can molecular Darwinism explain biogenesis? Maybe, but we have scant idea what those first replicating molecules might be. Examination of real organic replicator systems like RNA/proteins indicates that even the simplest replicators are extremely large and complex molecules, unlikely to form by chance. Moreover, the smaller the molecules the sloppier they copy, suggesting that molecules small enough to form by chance would be very bad at replicating information, and thus subject to Eigen’s error catastrophe (Eigen & Schuster, 1979), whereby information is eroded by the inaccurate copying process faster than natural selection can inject it.
I concede that if something like the RNA world (Cech, 1986) were given to us ready-made, it has the capacity to evolve into life as we know it. But it strains credulity to suppose that the RNA world sprang into being in one huge chemical transformation. Likely it would be the product of a long series of steps. We can liken the situation to a vast decision tree of chemical reactions, with the RNA world as one tiny twig on the tree. (There is the question of whether there are other twigs that could lead to life, but I shall assume here that the RNA route is the only one.) So we need to understand how a hypothetical class of simple, small replicators navigated through that decision tree and ‘found the RNA twig. Was this just a lucky fluke, or is there something other than a random walk involved?…
The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut
Complexity International – Brief Comments on Junk DNA (pdf)
Language Like Features in Junk DNA
The Genetic Algorithms archive
International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation – ISGEC
If otherwise means that I am forced to pay for the expression of your religion, yes.
And even on that narrowest of points, the evolutionists cannot gain a solid ground with the Cambrian animals and the numerous gaps in the fossil record - exactly where they are most important - speaking loudly against their theory.
That's been my sense as well. I laughed out loud the first time I read about it.
You've made it very clear that your position is that religion belongs in philosophy and not science.
With regard to philosophy, betty boop is the most qualified person known to me.
I never thought it was a treat tpaine… It sure did look like a threat though.
I have philosophers and mathematicians in my family. They're even worse about their presumptions.
I'm glad I could help out.
By the way, I do send my child to a private school.
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