Science Icon Fires Broadside At Creationists

London Times vis The Statesman (India) ^ | 04 July 2004 | Times of London Editorial

[PatrickHenry]

It was someone named "Bob J" promoting a link to his thread with multiple posts. Someone must have complained.

[FastCoyote]

"If under the right conditions "life" will "happen"(abiogenesis) then where is the need for a creator?"

If God created life THROUGH abiogenesis, that would make your arguments moot. Indeed, the God I believe in can create life anyway he pleases, yours can only do it through some magic trick, which creationist methodology you REQUIRE to be anti-logical (else a logical mechanism like evolution would be possible).

But no matter whether life was created through abiogenesis, creation, or random bits of chewing gum, the same moral questions and quest for purpose and a connection with God remain.

[MacDorcha]

well, you offered an opinion, and Doc Stoc did as well. guess what? they conflict. go ahead, argue with him on whether the Nazis cited tha Bible and Darwinism. he says so, i say so, you say no. you have opinion, i have the fact that that is what they taught in their schools.

also, i did not say evolution supported it, i said genocide did. genocided uses evolution, much like propaganda. i never said it was the correct useage, only that it was used.

and pack animals killing off others IS insensitive. what the hell do you think genocide is? humane? again, evolution is merely used by Nazis. another example is the Green Party and Communism. Green Party being the "evolution" aspect.

as for the NAzis saying that the less fit would not survive: the Nazis felt it was their DUTY to make it happen. "thin the heard" so to speak. this was to "ensure pure blood" and the survival and thriving of the Aryan race. it is the SAME mindset that causes pack animals to eat the young of an opposing male.

[MacDorcha]

i wont take it as an insult, so long as you assume that you are capable of enlightening me. i have several mentors far more qualified than yourself in my life, but by all means, if you can explain how life can exist without the Divine Spark, by all means, i beseech you.

also, Saying so is similar to saying that we are getting close to breaking the speed of light, and we just need to build faster rockets to do it.

i recall a gas of sorts being used in recent years. they shot a light beam through the gas, and it reached the wall BEFORE it hit the gas itself. the gas was behaving on a quantum level, and bypassed some laws of matter that we find in natural science. if we can make LIGHT go faster than LIGHT, wouldn't it stand to reason that we could make US (maybe travel isn't the right word, but....) get from point A to point B FASTER than light?


absolute zero, keep in mind, is not a "temperature" technically, so much as a speed of molecules. we achieved the speed not by super cooling a system, but by firing photons into the molecules at an opposing vector, thus attempting to stop movement much the same way can stop a car with a brick wall. (or an intruder with a tumbling bullet from a Colt .45) the trick is honing the power to be precise and to hold the movement long enough to note and study any changes in behaviour in the molecules. both of these "impossibilities" are becomng more and more plausable.

[MacDorcha]

Excuse me? The Nazis are dead and gone (except for a few nutcases chasing blues singers in Illinois). The Jews have their own country and are flourishing throughout the world, including in areas where they are not quite welcome (Europe, the Middle East).

if i recall correctly, their is a STRONG Nazi Party in Brazil...... i could be mistaken.

[MacDorcha]

their is
*there is

duh

[Doctor Stochastic]

i recall a gas of sorts being used in recent years. they shot a light beam through the gas, and it reached the wall BEFORE it hit the gas itself. the gas was behaving on a quantum level, and bypassed some laws of matter that we find in natural science

You recall incorrectly. It's important to know the difference between group velocity and phase velocity. Neither energy nor information was transmitted faster than light.

Absloute zero is a temperature; it's just a valid as 98.6F; only it's harder to reach. There are nevative temperatures too (think laser); they are just hotter than positive ones.

[MacDorcha]

Temperature is a measurment of the energy released in a given field. you stop movement, you stop energy release. you stop energy release, you achieve absolute 0. the "negative temp" you refer to is actually just a reversal of direction. the "hotter" aspect isnt true either, it just releases more energy.

if you want "negatives" to apply, wrap your brain around anti-matter. the equivelant of a proton has a "negative positive" charge, the electron has an "negative negative charge"

those seem simple enough to explain as simple inversions, but then the neutron equivelant has a "negative neutral" charge.

also, as a long overdue response to a post: you cant test God, so you say He isnt real. show me a "test" for life. given you can't "prove" mountains are or are not alive, i will assume you can't work that one either. given your line of thinking, "life" is as acceptable as God in theory.

how about we say this.

I , as i have stated in relation to this post, accept both a theory that exaplins how we became humans AND we came to be "living"

and you simply accept evolution, and reject the notion that an outside source created life.

same for you dimensio.

it is obvious we all have knowledge of the field, just differing philosophies to exaplin them.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for your replies! I have very much enjoyed your debate with Ichneumon.

Also please accept my apologies for being so late to reply. This was our nineth anniversary and we have just now started winding down. LOL!

Do you have any other goodies like that one?

Indeed I do. Here is another favorite site, Gerald Schroeder on: evolution and the age of the universe. Schroeder is a Jewish physicist.

I have many others which I've been researching these past few years. Here is the latest version of an article I've written containing my musings and links to all the various source articles: Evolution through the back door.

I've continued researching since my last update and hopefully will have more to add to it in the next week or so.

As a microbiologist I would say that Alamo Girl got it exactly right. I would like to hear her take on viruses. Personally, I don't consider them to be life - but instead the code of life run amuck. Calling a computer virus a virus is very apt. It is code designed to take over or disrupt and then just replicate itself.

Thank you so much for agreeing with my statement concerning Anthrax spores!

js1138 also asked me about viruses. My opinion is that viruses are alive under the definition of life as information (Shannon, paraphrased as "successful communication").

My understanding is that a virus works by incorporating its DNA into the host DNA. If the virus successfully communicates with itself and its environment then it passes the information benchmark and would be considered "alive".

[Doctor Stochastic]

Temperature is a measurment of the energy released in a given field.

No. Temperature is not an energy anymore than a kilogram weighs an hour. Your mistakes in posting elementary thermodynamics do not increase your credibility in other areas. VI = ON

[edsheppa]

You might keep an intestinal parasite alive for a while without a live host, but it would not reproduce.

Why wouldn't they be able to reproduce?

And anyway I say that you don't have to be able to reproduce to be classified as living. Mules are alive. You do agree with that, right?

For some reason [Passenger pigeons] required a critical minimum number of individuals in order to survive.

Are saying that Passenger pigeons weren't alive because they went extinct?

My original question is, how is [Parasitism] conceptually different from the need of a virus or prion for a host in order to reproduce?

I didn't say viruses and prions aren't parasites, just that they're not alive.

It is true that prions and viruses do not metabolize, but they take over the metabolism of their host and bend it to their own reproduction.

I think it is more interesting to think of them as epiphenomena of DNA-based life.

And they evolve.

Yes but that is a characteristic of populations. It is the individuals that are alive - or not in the case of prions and viruses. As with reproductive capacity, "evolvability" is neither sufficient nor necessary to be classified as living. If some kind of cell were engineered to reproduce without any error whatsoever, we would still classify it as living.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your replies!

Information is distinct from communication, just as electrons are distinct from electricity. It doesn't help to blur the distinctions between the two, it only muddies the issue.

This is a common misunderstanding of the term "information" wrt information theory and molecular biology. Most people have a tendency to think of information like a sheet of paper or database or DNA – an informative “thing”. But information theory as it is used in molecular biology is more specific which is why I keep raising the name Shannon and give a paraphrased definition for information, i.e. information is successful communication. Which is to say that information is the successful communication per se and not the message by itself.

This might be a bit clearer by referring back to the links provided by Doctor Stochastic at post 674 and by me at post 684. From that post, here is the definition of information:

information: Information is measured as the decrease in uncertainty of a receiver or molecular machine in going from the before state to the after state.

"In spite of this dependence on the coordinate system the entropy concept is as important in the continuous case as the discrete case. This is due to the fact that the derived concepts of information rate and channel capacity depend on the difference of two entropies and this difference does not depend on the coordinate frame, each of the two terms being changed by the same amount."

--- Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Part III, section 20, number 3

And here’s more to untangle the confusion:

I'm Confused: How Could Information Equal Entropy?

If someone says that information = uncertainty = entropy, then they are confused, or something was not stated that should have been. Those equalities lead to a contradiction, since entropy of a system increases as the system becomes more disordered. So information corresponds to disorder according to this confusion.

If you always take information to be a decrease in uncertainty at the receiver and you will get straightened out:

R = Hbefore - Hafter.

where H is the Shannon uncertainty:

H = - sum (from i = 1 to number of symbols) Pi log2 Pi (bits per symbol)

and Pi is the probability of the ith symbol. If you don't understand this, please refer to "Is There a Quick Introduction to Information Theory Somewhere?".

Imagine that we are in communication and that we have agreed on an alphabet. Before I send you a bunch of characters, you are uncertain (Hbefore) as to what I'm about to send. After you receive a character, your uncertainty goes down (to Hafter). Hafter is never zero because of noise in the communication system. Your decrease in uncertainty is the information (R) that you gain.

Since Hbefore and Hafter are state functions, this makes R a function of state. It allows you to lose information (it's called forgetting). You can put information into a computer and then remove it in a cycle.

Many of the statements in the early literature assumed a noiseless channel, so the uncertainty after receipt is zero (Hafter=0). This leads to the SPECIAL CASE where R = Hbefore. But Hbefore is NOT "the uncertainty", it is the uncertainty of the receiver BEFORE RECEIVING THE MESSAGE.

[snip]

You continued:

Have you not "prejudiced your verb choice" with information? And is this thus circular reasoning?

Not at all. I have not presumed a cause. In fact, the cause of such information is very much open research to this very day.

So a computer network is alive?

Computer networks are not autonomous. Artificial Intelligence researchers however seek to develop such an autonomous entity.

With what does a tree "communicate"? Or a single-celled photosynthesizing algae?

In both cases, itself and its environment.

And what is the distinction between "communication" and "exchange"? Is a decomposing cow corpse alive because it exchanges tissues and gases with the bacteria consuming it, and the surrounding environment?

The bacteria is alive because it has information (Shannon, paraphrased as successful communication) – the cow is dead, because it ceases such communication.

Is a dead whithering plant alive when it "communicates" its water content to the atmosphere?

The plant is not communicating with itself or its environment.

And on your other reply, you asked:

How is "dormant" different from "dead" (or "alive" for that matter)? I don't think that's going to be an easy one to answer without begging the question of the definition of "alive".

It all comes down to information (Shannon, paraphrased as successful communication). A spore is dormant but still has information. That means it is alive albeit in a very deep vegetative state. Once it detects a food source, the spore comes out of its dormant state. The anthrax spore is alive.

Bacillus anthracis is a relatively large (1-2 µm), Gram-positive, spore-forming, non-motile, non-flagellated facultative anaerobe. The spores are exceptionally stable under extreme conditions and can survive decades of dormancy. The microorganism grows readily on certain nutrient media, including those containing blood. The processes of sporulation [formation of spores] and capsule formation are observed only when the bacteria are cultivated on certain nutrient media and under certain conditions.

The life cycle of Bacillus anthracis has four major phases: vegetative phase (from spores to replicating bacteria), intense growth phase, stationary phase, and sporulation phase. Anthrax spores have a relatively high level of resistance to high temperatures and disinfectants.

Bacillus anthracis forms a poly-D-glutamic acid capsule while in the host animal, when grown with nutrient media containing blood or blood plasma, and in the presence of CO2. Bacillus anthracis does not sporulate in so-called "capsule-forming" media as efficiently as when it is cultivated in vivo. According to current knowledge, the capsule is neither immunogenic nor toxigenic, but is considered as a virulence factor as it protects anthrax vegetative cells from the bactericidal components of serum and phagocytosis. The capsule plays its most important role during the establishment of infection and is believed to be less significant in later stages of the disease, which are mediated by the anthrax toxin.

BTW, speaking of things coming out of a dormant state with a vengeance, here is the spooky life cycle of the Pfiesteria

[Gargantua]

"Fundamentalist heaven is apparently a front row seat overlooking hell."

Earthly perspectives are not valid in the hereafter, and there will be no view of Hell from Heaven. There is nothing a true Christian will not do or say to encourage a fellow sinner to take another look at their single biggest mistake... having turned their back on the one path back to salvation, Jesus Christ.

It's notable that you take the time to criticize my harsh tactics while you give a free pass to those who blaspheme against God.

Those whose names are not written in the Book of Life (you...?) will burn for eternity in Hell with Satan's demons. The pain of that experience, though great, will not compare to the pain of being forever separated from God the Father.

I wish better than that for you, but I can only use any means at my disposal to exhort you. The choice is yours. Let no man say he has not heard.

[Gargantua]

"Fundamentalist heaven is apparently a front row seat overlooking hell."

Earthly perspectives are not valid in the hereafter, and there will be no view of Hell from Heaven. There is nothing a true Christian will not do or say to encourage a fellow sinner to take another look at their single biggest mistake... having turned their back on the one path back to salvation, Jesus Christ.

It's notable that you take the time to criticize my harsh tactics while you give a free pass to those who blaspheme against God.

Those whose names are not written in the Book of Life (you...?) will burn for eternity in Hell with Satan's demons. The pain of that experience, though great, will not compare to the pain of being forever separated from God the Father.

I wish better than that for you, but I can only use any means at my disposal to exhort you. The choice is yours. Let no man say he has not heard.

[Gargantua]

"There is nothing a true Christian will not do or say to encourage a fellow sinner to take another look at... Jesus Christ."

I should also note that there is nothing that a minion of Satan won't do or say to lead another further away from the one true Path to Salvation... Jesus Christ.

Go ahead and prove my point some more.

;-/

[PatrickHenry]

Diabolical placemarker.

[VadeRetro]

Both links were to a thread about an onstage sex act which allegedly occurred "to save the rainforests" although it happened during a rock concert in Norway IIRC. Not your usual BobJ post but maybe his condition is changing.

I thought it amusing, although one link would have done it.

[steve-b]

The Nazis survived longer than the Jews

Odd; I see plenty of Jews, and only a few pathetic remnants of the Nazis.

[steve-b]

You've also not explained what your ultimate point is.

I thought his point was abundantly clear: "them thar EVILutionists are like NAZIS!"

Of course, it's easier to follow the "argument" if you've slummed at DU long enough to recognize this variation of their standard swipe at Republicans and conservatives.

[steve-b]

In 1944, Hitler had lasted longer than 6 million Jews.

In 1952, Josef Stalin had ruled longer than any American president, over a larger area than the United States, and had killed more of his enemies than any American. Ergo, by your theory of politics, communism is superior to constitutional republicanism.