Posted on 07/24/2003 1:55:39 PM PDT by Mr.Atos
I was just lisening to Medved debating Creationism with Athiests on the air. I found it interesting that while Medved argued his side quite effectively from the standpoint of faith, his opponents resorted to condescension and beliitled him with statements like, "when it rains, is that God crying?" I was reminded of the best (at least most amusing)debate that I have ever heard on the subject of Creationism vs Evolution, albeit a fictional setting. It occurred on the show, Friends of all places between the characters Pheobe (The Hippy) and Ross (The Paleontologist). It went like this...
Pheebs: Okay...it's very faint, but I can still sense him in the building...GO INTO THE LIGHT MR. HECKLES!!
Ross: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What, uh, you don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: Nah. Not really. Ross: You don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: I don't know. It's just, ya know, monkeys, Darwin, ya know, it's a, it's a nice story. I just think it's a little too easy.
Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact. Like, like, the air we breathe, like gravity... Pheebs: Uh, okay, don't get me started on gravity.
Ross: You uh, you don't believe in gravity? Pheebs: Well, it's not so much that ya know, like I don't *believe* in it, ya know. It's just...I don't know. Lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down, as I am being pushed.
Ross: How can you NOT BELIEVE in evolution? Pheebs: [shrugs] I unh-huh...Look at this funky shirt!!
Ross: Well, there ya go. Pheebs: Huh. So now, the REAL question is: who put those fossils there, and why...?
Ross: OPPOSABLE THUMBS!! Without evolution, how do YOU explain OPPOSABLE THUMBS?!? Pheebs: Maybe the overlords needed them to steer their spacecrafts!
Pheebs: Uh-oh! Scary Scientist Man!
Pheebs: Okay, Ross? Could you just open your mind like, *this* much?? Okay? Now wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the Earth was flat? And up until what, like, fifty years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess o' crap came out! Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?!?
Pheebs: I can't believe you caved. Ross: What? Pheebs: You just ABANDONED your whole belief system! I mean, before, I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you. Ross: But uh.. Pheebs: Yeah...how...how are you gonna go in to work tomorrow? How...how are you gonna face the other science guys? How...how are you gonna face yourself? Oh! [Ross runs away dejected] Pheebs: That was fun. So who's hungry?
Again, how many people consider natural selection issues when making moral choices? NONE! Your statement is absurd and does not reflect actual human experience. People can choose to be cruel or not be cruel and both choices are made all the time - it is a CHOICE, and has nothing to do with the gene pool! Furthermore, the word "cruelty" has no meaning if there are no absolute values. Like the word "evil" this word also suggest a moral standard to be deviated from - a standard of non-cruelty. By using the word cruelty in your posts, are you are acknowledging a universal moral standard. I think you should change your vocabulary.
Every time someone says "I don't know," another angel is born.
I agree with your first sentence, but not the second. I agree that calling RWP an imposter is despicable, but not everyone on that side of the debate is guilty of that offense.
Was Hitler wrong? By whose standard? Yours? Or did his actions simply militate against the universal law of natural selection, in which case he can't be right or wrong, just extinct? What is "civilized" - here is another word that suggests a standard. You keep using them. Who decides the standards of conduct and which ones are right and wrong? Is there a right and wrong?
Are angels "born?" How do you know?
Without the bold...
Evolution has been so thoroughly discredited at this point that you assume nobody is defending it because they believe in it anymore, and that they are ... defending it --- because they do not like the prospects of having to defend or explain some axpect of their lifestyles to God, St. Peter, Muhammed...
To these people I say, you've still got a problem. The problem is that evolution, as a doctrine, is so overwhelmingly STUPID that, faced with a choice of wearing a sweatshirt with a scarlet letter A for Adulteror, F for Fornicator or some such traditional design, or or a big scarlet letter I for IDIOT, you'd actually be better off sticking with one of the traditional choices because, as Clint Eastwood noted in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:
God hates IDIOTS, too! The best illustration of how stupid evolutionism really is involves trying to become some totally new animal with new organs, a new basic plan for existence, and new requirements for integration between both old and new organs.
Take flying birds for example; suppose you aren't one, and you want to become one. You'll need a baker's dozen highly specialized systems, including wings, flight feathers, a specialized light bone structure, specialized flow-through design heart and lungs, specialized tail, specialized general balance parameters etc.
For starters, every one of these things would be antifunctional until the day on which the whole thing came together, so that the chances of evolving any of these things by any process resembling evolution (mutations plus selection) would amount to an infinitessimal, i.e. one divided by some gigantic number.
In probability theory, to compute the probability of two things happening at once, you multiply the probabilities together. That says that the likelihood of all these things ever happening, best case, is ten or twelve such infinitessimals multiplied together, i.e. a tenth or twelth-order infinitessimal. The whole history of the universe isn't long enough for that to happen once.
All of that was the best case. In real life, it's even worse than that. In real life, natural selection could not plausibly select for hoped-for functionality, which is what would be required in order to evolve flight feathers on something which could not fly apriori. In real life, all you'd ever get would some sort of a random walk around some starting point, rather than the unidircetional march towards a future requirement which evolution requires.
And the real killer, i.e. the thing which simply kills evolutionism dead, is the following consideration: In real life, assuming you were to somehow miraculously evolve the first feature you'd need to become a flying bird, then by the time another 10,000 generations rolled around and you evolved the second such reature, the first, having been disfunctional/antifunctional all the while, would have DE-EVOLVED and either disappeared altogether or become vestigial.
Now, it would be miraculous if, given all the above, some new kind of complex creature with new organs and a new basic plan for life had ever evolved ONCE.
Evolutionism, however (the Theory of Evolution) requires that this has happened countless billions of times, i.e. an essentially infinite number of absolutely zero probability events.
And, if you were starting to think that nothing could possibly be any stupider than believing in evolution despite all of the above (i.e. that the basic stupidity of evolutionism starting from 1980 or thereabouts could not possibly be improved upon), think again. Because there is zero evidence in the fossil record (despite the BS claims of talk.origins "crew" and others of their ilk) to support any sort of a theory involving macroevolution, and because the original conceptions of evolution are flatly refuted by developments in population genetics since the 1950's, the latest incarnation of this theory, Steve Gould and Niles Eldredge's "Punctuated Equilibrium or punc-eek" attempts to claim that these wholesale violations of probabilistic laws all occurred so suddenly as to never leave evidence in the fossil record, and that they all occurred amongst tiny groups of animals living in "peripheral" areas. That says that some velocirapter who wanted to be a bird got together with fifty of his friends and said:
Guys, we need flight feathers, and wings, and specialized bones, hearts, lungs, and tails, and we need em NOW; not two years from now. Everybody ready, all together now: OOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm..... You could devise a new religion by taking the single stupidest doctrine from each of the existing religions, and it would not be as stupid as THAT.
But it gets even stupider.
Again, the original Darwinian vision of gradualistic evolution is flatly refuted by the fossil record (Darwinian evolution demanded that the vast bulk of ALL fossils be intermediates) and by the findings of population genetics, particularly the Haldane dilemma and the impossible time requirements for spreading genetic changes through any sizeable herd of animals.
Consider what Gould and other punk-eekers are saying. Punc-eek amounts to a claim that all meaningful evolutionary change takes place in peripheral areas, amongst tiny groups of animals which develop some genetic advantage, and then move out and overwhelm, outcompete, and replace the larger herds. They are claiming that this eliminates the need to spread genetic change through any sizeable herd of animals and, at the same time, is why we never find intermediate fossils (since there are never enough of these CHANGELINGS to leave fossil evidence).
Obvious problems with punctuated equilibria include, minimally:
1. It is a pure pseudoscience seeking to explain and actually be proved by a lack of evidence rather than by evidence (all the missing intermediate fossils). Similarly, Cotton Mather claimed that the fact that nobody had ever seen or heard a witch was proof they were there (if you could see or hear them, they wouldn't be witches...) The best example of that sort of logic in fact that there ever was was Michael O'Donahue's parody of the Connecticut Yankee (New York Yankee in King Arthur's Court) which showed Reggie looking for a low outside fastball and then getting beaned cold by a high inside one, the people feeling Reggie's wrist for pulse, and Reggie back in Camelot, where they had him bound hand and foot. Some guy was shouting "Damned if e ain't black from ead to foot, if that ain't witchcraft I never saw it!!!", everybody was yelling "Witchcraft Trial!, Witchcraft Trial!!", and they were building a scaffold. Reggie looks at King Arthur and says "Hey man, isn't that just a tad premature, I mean we haven't even had the TRIAL yet!", and Arthur replies "You don't seem to understand, son, the hanging IS the trial; if you survive that, that means you're a witch and we gotta burn ya!!!" Again, that's precisely the sort of logic which goes into Gould's variant of evolutionism, Punk-eek. 2. PE amounts to a claim that inbreeding is the most major source of genetic advancement in the world. Apparently Steve Gould never saw Deliverance...
3. PE requires these tiny peripheral groups to conquer vastly larger groups of animals millions if not billions of times, which is like requiring Custer to win at the little Big Horn every day, for millions of years.
4. PE requires an eternal victory of animals specifically adapted to localized and parochial conditions over animals which are globally adapted, which never happens in real life.
5. For any number of reasons, you need a minimal population of any animal to be viable. This is before the tiny group even gets started in overwhelming the vast herds. A number of American species such as the heath hen became non-viable when their numbers were reduced to a few thousand; at that point, any stroke of bad luck at all, a hard winter, a skewed sex ratio in one generation, a disease of some sort, and it's all over. The heath hen was fine as long as it was spread out over the East coast of the U.S. The point at which it got penned into one of these "peripheral" areas which Gould and Eldredge see as the salvation for evolutionism, it was all over.
The sort of things noted in items 3 and 5 are generally referred to as the "gambler's problem", in this case, the problem facing the tiny group of "peripheral" animals being similar to that facing a gambler trying to beat the house in blackjack or roulette; the house could lose many hands of cards or rolls of the dice without flinching, and the globally-adapted species spread out over a continent could withstand just about anything short of a continental-scale catastrophe without going extinct, while two or three bad rolls of the dice will bankrupt the gambler, and any combination of two or three strokes of bad luck will wipe out the "peripheral" species. Gould's basic method of handling this problem is to ignore it.
And there's one other thing which should be obvious to anybody attempting to read through Gould and Eldridge's BS:
The don't even bother to try to provide a mechanism or technical explaination of any sort for this "punk-eek" They are claiming that at certain times, amongst tiny groups of animals living in peripheral areas, a "speciation event(TM)" happens, and THEN the rest of it takes place. In other words, they are saying:
ASSUMING that Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happens, then the rest of the business proceeds as we have described in our scholarly discourse above!
Again, Gould and Eldridge require that the Abracadabra-Shazaam(TM) happen not just once, but countless billions of times, i.e. at least once for every kind of complex creature which has ever walked the Earth. They do not specify whether this amounts to the same Abracadabra-Shazaam each time, or a different kind of Abracadabra-Shazaam for each creature.
I ask you: How could anything be stupider or worse than that? What could possibly be worse than professing to believe in such a thing?
53 Posted on 08/21/2001 05:40:40 PDT by medved
Not one has agreed that ALS is guilty of it.
Insider dope.
Must be good dope....
Alamo Girl posted a link to a .pdf a while back from a physicist with an oriental name working in Germany, where he discussed approaches of trying to include the classical observer in the quantum mechanical system by means of entanglement. (The paper had all sorts of other flaws, but the overall approach was quite intriguing). That's an ongoing problem at the philosophy/physics interface. But if you're asking can we described QM purely in terms that mirror everyday reality, the answer is, no we can't. But QM is by no means unique. When I was a kid, I used to look at science books in which the atoms were color-coded, and I thought for that reason that oxygen atoms were red (and hard and shiny looking!). Of course, even to talk about the color of an atom is specious. But yet everything we see in our everyday world has a color, so it's difficult to accept that to talk about the color of an atom makes no sense.
I would argue the laws that circumscribe what we consider everyday reality are naturalistic constructs, which work to do the things we want to do, but it aren't any more correct than the laws that govern the evolution of a wavefunction. QM is certainly explanatory with respect to the objects with which it deals; the measurement paradoxes are extraneous to QM.
Yes he was, by the cardinal rule derived rationally by multiple societies: Treat others as you'd want to be treated. He could not be trusted to act in a rational and civilized manner and posed a major risk to the rest of the world's survival.
Not so ... I was quoting ' truth in mystery ' --- veritas_en_enigma !
Yes, I am disappointed in quite a few people on the other side, but I'll get over it. I understand that several of them may have disliked being maneuvered into taking a stand. I understand also that some of them may have a sense we selected one of their number as a fire-hydrant to be !@#$ed on, in a divide-and-conquer strategy. Neither, IMO, is a tenable objection, but at this stage nobody's mind is going to be changed.
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