Posted on 12/11/2002 6:28:08 AM PST by A2J
By WILL SENTELL
wsentell@theadvocate.com
Capitol news bureau
High school biology textbooks would include a disclaimer that evolution is only a theory under a change approved Tuesday by a committee of the state's top school board.
If the disclaimer wins final approval, it would apparently make Louisiana just the second state in the nation with such a provision. The other is Alabama, which is the model for the disclaimer backers want in Louisiana.
Alabama approved its policy six or seven years ago after extensive controversy that included questions over the religious overtones of the issue.
The change approved Tuesday requires Louisiana education officials to check on details for getting publishers to add the disclaimer to biology textbooks.
It won approval in the board's Student and School Standards/ Instruction Committee after a sometimes contentious session.
"I don't believe I evolved from some primate," said Jim Stafford, a board member from Monroe. Stafford said evolution should be offered as a theory, not fact.
Whether the proposal will win approval by the full state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education on Thursday is unclear.
Paul Pastorek of New Orleans, president of the board, said he will oppose the addition.
"I am not prepared to go back to the Dark Ages," Pastorek said.
"I don't think state boards should dictate editorial content of school textbooks," he said. "We shouldn't be involved with that."
Donna Contois of Metairie, chairwoman of the committee that approved the change, said afterward she could not say whether it will win approval by the full board.
The disclaimer under consideration says the theory of evolution "still leaves many unanswered questions about the origin of life.
"Study hard and keep an open mind," it says. "Someday you may contribute to the theories of how living things appeared on earth."
Backers say the addition would be inserted in the front of biology textbooks used by students in grades 9-12, possibly next fall.
The issue surfaced when a committee of the board prepared to approve dozens of textbooks used by both public and nonpublic schools. The list was recommended by a separate panel that reviews textbooks every seven years.
A handful of citizens, one armed with a copy of Charles Darwin's "Origin of the Species," complained that biology textbooks used now are one-sided in promoting evolution uncritically and are riddled with factual errors.
"If we give them all the facts to make up their mind, we have educated them," Darrell White of Baton Rouge said of students. "Otherwise we have indoctrinated them."
Darwin wrote that individuals with certain characteristics enjoy an edge over their peers and life forms developed gradually millions of years ago.
Backers bristled at suggestions that they favor the teaching of creationism, which says that life began about 6,000 years ago in a process described in the Bible's Book of Genesis.
White said he is the father of seven children, including a 10th-grader at a public high school in Baton Rouge.
He said he reviewed 21 science textbooks for use by middle and high school students. White called Darwin's book "racist and sexist" and said students are entitled to know more about controversy that swirls around the theory.
"If nothing else, put a disclaimer in the front of the textbooks," White said.
John Oller Jr., a professor at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, also criticized the accuracy of science textbooks under review. Oller said he was appearing on behalf of the Louisiana Family Forum, a Christian lobbying group.
Oller said the state should force publishers to offer alternatives, correct mistakes in textbooks and fill in gaps in science teachings. "We are talking about major falsehoods that should be addressed," he said.
Linda Johnson of Plaquemine, a member of the board, said she supports the change. Johnson said the new message of evolution "will encourage students to go after the facts."
I deal with that every day. :-)
Either way it seems to me that you are admitting the existence of God and that the Universe was created by God.
Sigh. What would it take to get you to actually follow an argument? The two points under discussion are 1) that it ain't possible to disprove the thesis that God did it (which is not, by any stretch of the imagination, equivalent to dispositive proof that God Did It), and 2) That Bishop Berkeley's conjecture that "someone imagined it up" is, insofar as material differentiation goes, exactly equivalent to "God created it".
If you'd like to address either of these points, please feel free.
Well, that's what it seemed you were saying when you said that:
Some algorithmic machinery had to exist if the universe was to exist, but the specific selection of algorithms is utterly arbitrary.
If that's not what you meant, then what did you mean?
My dear, you are describing an intrinsic capacity of all finite state machines.
Yes, I am – though I was only looking at inception. But as you said at post 5086:
Thank you so much for the great explanation of Kolmogorov complexity! That is not, however, what I mean when I speak of algorithm. I’m using the description right out of Penrose’s Emporer’s New Mind where he gives Euclid’s algorithm as an example, which I restate in Basic:
For the mathematical measure of any system, what you are calling "algorithms" is information, higher order information to be precise.
Indeed, looking only at the genetic code, it would have the appearance of information content. But there is more to it than that, from all that I have read! The information content is more like the database consisting of self-organized instructions along with the memory-results from what appears to be the operation of the finite state machine.
Because "algorithms" are defined in terms of proper information theoretic "information", they are bound by the same restrictions. Among these is that information is intrinsically context-free. This means that no arbitrary piece of information (or "algorithm" if you prefer) is more important or meaningful than any other. In any case where there is no known context, like the case we are talking about here, it is not possible to recognize "design".
If the genetic code were the only thing being looked at, this would be true.
And here is something else that will cook your noodle even more: It is not possible to perfectly define the "algorithm" of the universe within the universe. The nasty self-modeling inequality of computational information theory doesn't allow it; the best we can do is find a modest approximation to the real solution (the AIT analog of Godel's Incompleteness theorem).
I assert that one cannot perfectly define the big bang or the inflationary theory, but closeness is acceptable. Closeness notwithstanding, under laboratory conditions, perhaps we would be able to synthesize the FSM I described.
Worse, we can't even rationally assert the probability that it is because it is not possible for us to have the context to make that assertion.
Ah, but science does not leave the subject alone. IMHO, its first reaction is to offer the anthropic principle or plenitude when backed into the metaphysical corner:
Interview with Nicolo Dallaporta, one of the fathers of modern cosmology
It is very possible, but it is not physics. It is a metaphysics in which recourse is made to a chance that is so enormously limitless that everything that is possible is real. But in this way it becomes a confrontation between metaphysics in which chance collides with purpose. This latter, however, seems much easier to believe! Physics up to now has been based on measurable "data." Beyond this it is a passage of metaphysics. At this point I compare it with another metaphysics. Those who sustain these viewpoints (like Stephen Hawking, for instance) should realize that this goes beyond physics; otherwise it is exaggerated. Physics, pushed beyond what it can measure, becomes ideology.
When all of these factors occur together, they create a region of space that Gonzalez calls a "Galactic Habitable Zone." Gonzalez believes every form of life on our planet - from the simplest bacteria to the most complex animal - owes its existence to the balance of these unique conditions.
Because of this, states Gonzalez, "I believe both simple life and complex life are very rare, but complex life, like us, is probably unique in the observable Universe."
Carbon Resonance.
A carbon-12 nucleus is made from the near-simultaneous collision of three of these helium-4 nuclei [within stars]. Actually, what happens is that two helium-4 nuclei merge to make beryllium-8 [G1], but beryllium-8 is so unstable that it lasts only 10^-17 of a second, and so a third alpha particle (which is what a helium nucleus is) must collide and fuse with the beryllium nucleus within that time. Not only is this triple encounter a relatively unlikely event, but any such unstable beryllium nuclei ought to be smashed apart in the process. Therefore, it should be expected that carbon itself (and consequently all heavier elements) would be rare in the Universe.
However, the efficiencies of nuclear reactions vary as a function of energy, and at certain critical levels a reaction rate can increase sharply - this is called resonance. It just so happens that there is a resonance in the three-helium reaction at the precise thermal energy corresponding to the core of a star...
So if there was another resonance at work here all the carbon would be quickly processed into oxygen, making carbon very rare again. In fact, it turns out that there is an excited state of oxygen-16 that almost allows a resonant reaction, but it is too low by just 1%. It is shifted just far enough away from the critical energy to leave enough life-giving quantities of carbon untouched.
Strong Nuclear Force.
If the strong force had actually been just 13% stronger, all of the free protons would have combined into helium-2 at an early stage of the Big Bang, and decay almost immediately into deuterons. Then pairs of deuterons would readily fuse to become helium-4, leaving no hydrogen in the Universe, and so no water, and no hydrocarbons… An increase in the strong force of just 9% would have made the dineutron possible. On the other hand a decrease of about 31% would be sufficient to make the deuteron unstable, and so remove an essential step in the chain of nucleosynthesis: the Universe would contain nothing but hydrogen, and again life would be impossible.
Supernovae.
... In blasting apart a supernova, its precise interactivity (or lack of it) is such that it should have enough time to reach the stellar envelope before dumping its energy and momentum, but not so much time that it should escape. This property is partly a function of the weak force in a complex relationship which must be just as we observe it, to one part in a thousand. If the star's matter was not so effectively redistributed, it would simply collect about the dead star or fall back. It would not be available for new stars to make planets capable of bearing life...
Gravity.
…Suppose gravity was stronger, by a factor of 10^10. This seems quite a lot, but it would still be the weakest force, just 10^-28 of the strength of electromagnetism. The result would be that not as many atoms would be needed in a star to crush its core to make a nuclear furnace. Stars in this high-gravity universe would have the mass of a small planet in our Universe, being about 2km in diameter. They would have far less nuclear fuel as a result, and would use it all up in about one year... Make gravity substantially weaker on the other hand, the gas clouds of hydrogen and helium left after the Big Bang would never manage to collapse in an expanding universe, once again leaving no opportunity for life to emerge.
Water.
These and other odd features of water are a consequence of the hydrogen bond - the attraction of the electron-rich oxygen atoms of water molecules for the electron-starved hydrogen atoms of other water molecules. This in turn is a function of the precise properties of the oxygen and hydrogen atoms, which also determines the H-O-H bond angle of 104.5 degrees - only slightly less than the ideal tetrahedral angle of 109.5 degrees. It is (incidentally) the hydrogen bond which holds together the two strands of DNA… It is also the hydrogen bond which is responsible for the crystalline structure of ice, which is in the form of an open lattice: this makes ice less dense than the liquid. As a result, ice floats. If ice was denser than its liquid form (as is the case with most other substances) then it would collect at the bottom of lakes and oceans, and eventually build up until the world was frozen solid. As it is, it forms a thin insulating sheet which prevents evaporation and keeps the waters below warm.
Proton-Neutron Mass Difference.
The difference in mass between a proton and a neutron is only a little greater than the mass of the relatively tiny electron (which has about 1/1833 the mass of a proton). Calculations of relative particle abundances following the first second of the Big Bang, using Boltzmann's statistical theorem, show that neutrons should make up about 10% of the total particle content of the Universe. This is sensitive to the proton:neutron mass ratio which is (coincidentally) almost 1. A slight deviation from this mass ratio could have led to a neutron abundance of zero, or of 100%, the latter being most catastrophic for the prospects of any life appearing. Even if there were 50% neutrons, all of them would have combined with the remaining protons early in the Big Bang, leading to a Universe with no hydrogen, no stable long-lived stars, and no water. And no life.
Antimatter and the Photon/Proton Ratio.
Why is there matter in the universe, but no appreciable quantities of antimatter? In the colossal energies of first millionth of a second of the Big Bang, particles and their anti-particles would have been created and destroyed in pairs, equally. Once the temperature fell sufficiently, photons could no longer be readily converted into particle-antiparticle pairs, and so they annihilated each other. The present ratio of photons to protons, 'S', is 10^9, which suggests that only one proton (and one electron) per billion escaped annihilation.
As I mentioned to PatrickHenry, one of the things you gotta love about science is that it will eventually accept the evidence and theories, though there may be a lot of kicking and screaming along the way.
Nonsense. They just don't do it as well as we do. Counterexamples to your thesis abound.
Thus, you comparison is grossly absurd. Animals have no morals, i.e. they have no sense of "ought" as humans do.
Animals have very distinct senses of right and wrong, and they make moral distinctions all the time. Spend a day at the zoo watching the elephants "aunties" taking care of, correcting and educating offspring they are unrelated to. You'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference in motivation between humans and elephants in this regard.
Furthermore, you have just stated in other words that morals are man-made.
I have not. I have stated that they are a natural evolutionary development we inherited from our ancestors, going very far back.
In that case pal, I can't be wrong!
So far, my opinion is that it would be work for you to catch up what the argument is before you could either be right or wrong.
My morals (even if my system is objective and not subjective as yours is) are, from the relativist perspective right for me, just as yours are right for you. Therefore, you don't even have a basis to argue the matter since no moral system can be wrong in your rationalist darwinian world.
This isn't has hard a problem as you are making it. Anything that's good for me but way bad for my tribe is immoral, this ain't rocket science.
I don't give a flip what natural selection says - I have a will and Natural selection is a non-entity with no moral force whatsoever - if I want to go contrary to natural selection, I can do so and many people do - they slaughter each other for no good reason.
Morality isn't automatically binding whether it's supplied by God or nature. It is just a sentimental tendency that's acute in primates, it is not a contract with reality or a force of nature, and I didn't see the nazi priests deserting their posts in the SS just because a few Jews were being slaughtered, and I didn't see Martin Luther blanching at the thought of murdering anabaptist women and children, so let's not be getting on too high a horse about this.
You said no one had demonstrated a potential source of morality other than God. Obviously, you are wrong. Morality has a keen survival value for any slow breeding social mammals, such as ourselves. If you don't like the answer, don't ask the question.
The tendency to morality from evolutionary sources is easy to see. Like many who have gone before you, you make much of the fact that the tendency is not the details of what, exactly, morality should consist of. Personally, I think that's making a mountain out of a molehill. If you want an explanation as to the source, it is the tendency in humans you are, in my opinion, asking about.
Is it tough to figure out what's moral when you don't live in the tribal mannner that spawned the tendency? You bet it is. That does not gainsay its historical sources.
I certainly agree with your assertion that any computable problem can be converted to a Turing machine!
My hypothesis asserts that an algorithm (as defined above) cannot arise from null.
Hugs!
Well this is certainly true insofar as you have to have some positive Kolmogorov complexity for any kind of computation to occur. Quite a bit more if you want something interesting to happen.
That said, one could question your hypothesis by questioning your assumption that our universe and/or whatever is outside our universe ever had a null information substrate. We have no reason to believe this was the case (or the opposite for that matter), and the very fact that you can't bootstrap machinery from a null Kolmogorov complexity makes it doubtful. I see no reason to invoke another degree of freedom by positing a bootstrap from a null substrate (remembering that timeline causality in the conventional sense is merely an artifact of our cozy corner of the universe), since positing a non-null substrate is just as reasonable and doesn't make mathematicians do the monkey dance. My weapon of choice here would be Occam's Razor.
For the non-compassionate, a bit of prodding is a futile exercise. They need to be reborn into better families. Nothing short of that has much of a track record in reforming amateur or professional sociopaths.
Those who think it's peachy scaring people into morality or compassion by threatening them with hell if they don't--and holding out the carrot of heaven if they do--follow the written rules, are engaged in wishful thinking of mind-boggling dimension, in my humble opinion. That's not morality--that's an invitation to have a culture based on hypocrisy. Did you know that most financially successful men in the Western christian world serruptitiously cheat on their wives according to Kinsey et. al.? Isn't that great? Isn't that they kind of thing we want our children to imbibe? Isn't that a fantastic basis for intergender trust and co-operation?
You vastly overestimate the problems here, and you vastly overestimate how good the solution has to be to be useful. Stanford had a research robot doing things like this clear back in the 60s, when memory and computing time was relatively scarce. The internet's internals, in fact, are peppered with problems of similar complexity and makeup, with similar needs for code that's quick to load and execute and out-of-the-box insight, working off the SNMP databases to control traffic on the internet--something a human operator would have a great deal of trouble dealing with, although for the human, the interface would look just about identical to a power grid or refinery control room--or the control room of blocks-world at Stanford labs.
By the way, your interlocutors have not mentioned, that I've noticed, the Kurzweil engine, which is publicly commercial, which is not a jumbojet of a code hog, but which does a great job on even some fairly obscure script and flowing italic typefaces. I've seen it hit around a 97% success rates even on faded scanned in faxes. And that includes being able to pick off letters I couldn't make out by eyeball. Given that--I'm not in the least surprised to hear that closely held proprietary software is doing even better nowadays.
That is not what analytically accute naturalists believe, what they believe is that they have no especially keen warrant to make any suppositions about where the universe came from, limited as they are, during office hours, to having suppositions about things for which there is material evidence to work with.
Carl Sagan, if alive, would take exception to you saying he is not accutely analytical. There are many others who call themselves naturalists who believe in the Big Bang - it's a naturalistic theory. Who are you kidding?
Last time I checked in at philosophy central, materialists rule out immaterial explanations, and naturalists merely confirm naturalistic explanations without claiming exclusivity. The commonly seen pat phrase is "Naturalism is the doctrine that the methods of philosophy are continuous with those of the natural sciences."
Abstract logic? It's common sense. Nothing means, ahem, "nothing". Nothing by definition is not anything. Where do electron/positron pairs come from? You tell me.
They arise in pairs from nothing, and when they collide, they go back to nothing. Ask your local particle physicist.
While you are at it, perhaps you can tell me where all the matter in the universe came from.
By latest best guess, approximately the same place electron/positron pairs come from.
Well, "most scientists" certainly do have opinions about the origins of the universe. By your standards, they are all whistling in the dark as there is no evidence.
Yes, that is correct, they are all whistling in the dark because there is no evidence. Evidence is something made out of material, and material came after the big bang started. My contention could be gainsayed by finding peepholes into other universes through investigations of dark matter or string theories or such, but presently, they are whistling in the dark--or at least, certainly not doing science as we presently understand science to be done, when they open their yaps on the subject.
Why don't you tell them to shut up?
Why don't you try herding jackrabbits?
So you do actually believe we'd be more, um, faded looking if we existed because someone (or God) dreamed us up? And where was the proof you were going to offer up? If I were whipping up a good illusion of reality, don't you think I'd take the trouble to condition your mind, when I created it, to convince you everything was really real?
I think you're the one whose been sucking up his ontological philosophy from hollywood movies. Just because pseudo-reality has more glitches than a dog has fleas in a hollywood movie like "Matrix" does not make that a blueprint for the solution to a problem that's stumped the best players in the philosophy game for going on 200 years.
No (for approximately the millionth time). Me and science make no claims of proof. We claim we have a good story that has endured a lot of critical flak from biological scientists, and a lot of uncritical flak from folks such as yourself. Your loud blue noises to the contrary notwithstanding, science has not shown evolution to be virtually impossible. If it had done so, I would have read about it EXTENSIVELY in "Nature" and "Science".
For the purpose of the analogy, I can assume that the contents of my hard drive are an extension of the memory of my computer. Taken altogether, the genetic code looks like that memory. If I were to print it out, it would be a huge string of numbers and letters.
I could analyze the huge string and see that portions of it are programs (algorithms) which created other programs. In this analogy, these programs self-organized - wrote their own programs, leaving data behind, including “failed” programs, like an archive - and symbols to “stand for” larger chunks of program or data.
By using analytical techniques, I set out to account for everything in the string and ultimately, am able to reduce the huge string into a single program which spawned all of it. That program would look something like a particularly smart BIOS.
The BIOS is the bootstrap program that is hard-wired into the computer, so that when you apply power, it loads the operating system (e.g. Windows) and so forth. In the case of the genetic code, that BIOS is already “juiced” and is self-organizing. It writes its own programs, remembers what did and didn’t work, and replicates itself. But I digress. Back to the BIOS.
I can see by looking at the BIOS that it is a program (algorithm) in itself. So I ask myself “how did that program get written?” By looking around at all the raw ingredients available (e.g. periodic table of elements) - I can see that it would have to become autonomous, write a line of code, become non-autonomous and gather ingredients, become autonomous again, write another line of code, and so forth.
At that point, I scratch my head and say “Hey, that process is an algorithm itself – a finite state machine – that exists separate and apart from the BIOS of our genetic code. Logic couldn’t have come from nothing.” And from that I conclude there was an intelligent designer.
I summed all this up as succinctly as possible by saying that algorithm at inception is proof of intelligent design. And I offered two methods of falsifying it:
Show that the information content at inception contains no algorithm, e.g. that the BIOS in my example is truly random information.
IMHO, tortoise’s argument is a variation of the plenitude argument, i.e. “all things that can exist, do exist.” That is basically the position that Doctor Stochastic took earlier.
I’m with Dallaporta on that one, the plenitude argument is metaphysics. For that reason, I don’t think it ought to be a basis for falsification. But I’d appreciate any input on the subject.
In summary, science is at a very interesting point in a thought experiment trying to tackle John von Neumann’s challenge The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut. With such great thinkers in physics, information theory and mathematics pursuing the challenge – it promises a fascinating ride for all of us.
that has certainly been the goal of social reformers -- everypne for Chrisian comminities like the Amish, to socialists, communists, and your friendly neighborhood Uncle Nanny.
There might be truth in your assertion. I saw a recent article claiming that nearly all imprisoned violent criminals had three things in common: brain deficits, paranoia, and a history of being abused. Folks with only two of these were able to reform. This may just be another round of futile psychologizing, or it may turn out to be useful.
However, in my experience, non-empathizers with great intelligence turn out to be great hypocrits. They learn the utility of uttering platitudes like "I feel your pain" at appropriate moments, but never demonstrate this when they think no one is watching.
Robert Nozick, the recently deceased Harvard philosopher who wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia which caused a huge stir around 25 or 30 years ago, presented the problem of being unknowingly hooked up to an "experience machine" which would flawlessly reproduce for you all the sensory input of real life. If I recall, the issue wasn't whether one could tell the difference between the machine and reality (it was assumed that one could not) but whether -- for the individual involved -- it really was different enough that he should care one way or the other.
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