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To: sallymag
Most people would say Intelligent Design or Creationism, but that isn't really right; those are both real scientific theories with testable claims and predictions.

Perhaps you would give a testable claim or prediction of Creationism and similarly for Intelligent Design. A testable clam that distinguishes these two would be of interest too.

323 posted on 12/14/2002 8:24:01 AM PST by Doctor Stochastic
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To: Doctor Stochastic
Er, may I offer a few possibilities with regard to your challenge:

Perhaps you would give a testable claim or prediction of Creationism and similarly for Intelligent Design. A testable clam that distinguishes these two would be of interest too.

Intelligent Design:

Dembski: Becoming a Disciplined Science:Prospects, Pitfalls, and a Reality Check for ID: Dembski, William A.:

Conversely, steganalysis seeks statistical tests that will detect the presence of steganography in a cover message. Consider now the following possibility: What if organisms instantiate designs that have no functional significance but that nonetheless give biological investigators insight into functional aspects of organisms. Such second-order designs would serve essentially as an "operating manual," of no use to the organism as such but of use to scientists investigating the organism. Granted, this is a speculative possibility, but there are some preliminary results from the bioinformatics literature that bear it out in relation to the protein-folding problem (such second-order designs appear to be embedded not in a single genome but in a database of homologous genomes from related organisms).

While it makes perfect sense for a designer to throw in an "operating manual" (much as automobile manufacturers include operating manuals with the cars they make), this possibility makes no sense for blind material mechanisms, which cannot anticipate scientific investigators. Research in this area would consist in constructing statistical tests to detect such second-order designs (in other words, steganalysis). Should such second order designs be discovered, the next step would be to seek algorithms for embedding these second-order designs in the organisms. My suspicion is that biological systems do steganography much better than we, and that steganographers will learn a thing or two from biology -- though not because natural selection is so clever, but because the designer of these systems is so adept at steganography.

Such second-order steganography would, in my view, provide decisive confirmation for ID. Yet even if it doesn't pan out, first-order steganography (i.e., the embedding of functional information useful to the organism rather than to a scientific investigator) could also provide strong evidence for ID.

My layman’s prediction: I predict we will discover algorithms underlying all of the natural world, including at the inception – the big bang. Current research pointing in that direction:

Yockey: Information Theory and Molecular Biology

Entropy in Logic and the Theory of Algorithms

Max Tegmark - Is “the theory of everything” merely the ultimate ensemble theory?

Schmidhuber - Algorithmic Theories of Everything

Iaian Stewart - Theories of Everything

Stephen Wolfram - A New Kind of Science

Creation:

My layman’s prediction: The Bible says that God spoke creation into existence. If that is so, we should expect to see residual harmonics of His speaking.

Bible:

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. – Genesis 1

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. – John 1:1

By the word of the LORD were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. – Psalms 33:6

Current Evidence for my prediction:

Physics News 4/27/2000

BEST MAP YET OF THE COSMIC MICROWAVE BACKGROUND (CMB). The CMB is a redshifted picture of the universe at the moment photons and newly formed hydrogen atoms parted company roughly 300,000 years after the big bang. First detected in the 1960s, the CMB appeared to be utterly uniform until, eight years ago, the COBE satellite provided the first hint of slight temperature variations, on a coarse scale, with an angular resolution of about 7 degrees….

The 36-member, international “Boomerang” (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geomagnetics) collaboration, led by Andrew Lange of Caltech and Paolo de Bernardis of the University of Rome, confirms that a plot of CMB strength peaks at a multipole value of about 197 (corresponding to CMB patches about one degree in angular spread), very close to what theorists had predicted for a cosmology in which the universe’s overall curvature is zero and the existence of cold dark matter is invoked…

The shape of the observed pattern of temperature variations suggests that a disturbance very like a sound wave moving through air passed through the high- density primordial fluid and that the CMB map can be can be thought of as a sort of sonogram of the infant universe. (de Bernardis et al., Nature, 27 April 2000.)

Big Bang Evidence Found – 5/2/2001

“The early universe is full of sound waves compressing and rarefying matter and light, much like sound waves compress and rarefy air inside a flute or trumpet,” explained Paolo deBernardis of the University of Rome La Sapienza, one of the members of the Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics (BOOMERanG) team. “For the first time the new data show clearly the harmonics of these waves.”

Harmonics in the Early Universe – 6/5/2001

The MAXIMA, BOOMERANG, and DASI collaborations, which measure minute variations in the CMB, recently reported new results at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. All three agree remarkably about what the “harmonic proportions” of the cosmos imply: not only is the universe flat, but its structure is definitely due to inflation, not to topological defects in the early universe.

The results were presented as plots of slight temperature variations in the CMB that graph sound waves in the dense early universe. These high-resolution “power spectra” show not only a strong primary resonance but are consistent with two additional harmonics, or peaks.

Cosmological Patterns and Galaxy Biasing (pdf)


324 posted on 12/14/2002 8:59:27 AM PST by Alamo-Girl
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