Posted on 11/11/2004 3:44:08 AM PST by Lindykim
Can I ask Behe or Dembski?
Do you ever think about how your obstinate behavior here reflects upon on you, your family, your friends, your church? Would you want your friends to read your willfully ignorant and irresponsibly stupid posts here?
Or do you just prefer to think it is okay to lie for the lord? That all will be forgiven because, like the Communists, you believe the end justifies the means.
So they must follow your beliefs (naturalism) or they are quacks?
Maybe they were quacks before I even noticed.
That doesn’t answer the question and you know it…
No. Intelligent Design makes no predictions nor suggests a method of falsification. It fails to rise to the level of a theory.
But there are people who say he's a great man and a Nobel Peace prize winner. The latter point is even true.
I say that the people who glorify Arafat are ignoring the hard data of his life to advance some kind of Holy Warrior objective of their own. While people may disagree on this and that, reality isn't anything you want it to be.
Behe and Dembski are a pair of minor players from the fields of biology and information theory, respectively. They might never have been heard of if they hadn't hit upon the idea of playing up to the religiously credulous with their claims of intelligent design. Holy Warriors again. Objective data on the junk heap.
They have nothing to teach us. Their science is the science of throwing up the hands and saying, "God The Designer did it!"
I'm looking at the article, and I'm seeing some broad generalities that still require a "helpful monster" scenario. For example, "b. The type III export system is converted to a type III secretion system (T3SS) by addition of outer membrane pore proteins (secretin and secretin chaperone) from the type II secretion system." That still requires a multistep "leap" from the previous stage, as do several other steps.
I've been avoiding jumping into these discussions lately, but I wanted to make the point that "irreducible complexity" is not a term of art and that its use in practice is mathematically self-inconsistent. The use of this notion to "prove" anything betrays a fundamental non-understanding of the principles that nominally are behind it.
First, all biological systems must be reducible, since the laws of thermodynamics have not been repealed. And even if no person ever figures out a reduction, such a reduction does exist (see: Solomonoff, 1978). Furthermore, in the general case such reductions are intractable i.e. if you can not observe the transition path then it will generally be impossible to discern the reduction in most non-toy systems (see: Hutter, 2000). Though we can make really good guesses for some classes of system and under certain conditions (see: Feder et al, 1992), which is what we limit ourselves to in practice.
The second problem is that "irreducibly complex" sounds very suspiciously like an actual term of art, particularly in algorithmic information theory: Minimum Description Length (MDL) (see: Kolmogorov). The only obvious reason that they invented a new term for ID purposes rather than using a standard term that had been around for almost a half century in the field they were nominally borrowing from is that properties are ascribed to "irreducible complexity" that can trivially be shown to be nonsense when you call it MDL. This is the "mathematically self-inconsistent" part I mentioned above. It is pretty much literally as if I decided that "1+2=3" is convenient for my theory but I really need "2+1=4" for everything to work out, and so I redefine mathematics to support this notion. You can do it but it will be completely broken, which irreducible complexity is in fact. You can make the mathematics support it, but not any mathematics that actual mathematicians generally use.
BTW, the papers referenced have nothing to do with evolution or ID, but are actually seminal and fundamental mathematical papers (all relating to the broader field of information theory) that prove the general point that references them. It is sad that "information theory" ID theorists like Dembski actually have some type of pseudo-credibility with ID proponents when most of what they write is grossly inconsistent or outright disprovable with the core theorems of the field nominally being used to prove the point. (Dembski is one of the worst offenders of this and therefore attracts much ire from me.)
None of this speaks to whether or not there is a Designer, but most current ID theory that I'm familiar with is trivially disprovable with the standard theorem set of algorithmic information theory. Which is fine -- you just need to develop a better theory for ID -- but it does not exactly speak to the credibility of the people currently working on ID theory.
Oh, pleeeeeze. This sort of crap just makes us look bad.
What is your definition of "kind"? Be specific. For example, does the inability to interbreed imply a different "kind"? Can entities from two different "kinds" ever interbreed? What is the experimental test to determine if two entities are of different "kinds"?
What a brilliant idea. Somewhere right now a Berkeley liberal is applying for a Federal grant to run this experiment at the San Diego Zoo. Should make one hell of a special exhibit.
First, all biological systems must be reducible, since the laws of thermodynamics have not been repealed.
Huh?
Yes, everything is reducible in the sense that you're saying it (well, until you get to the Planck length, but that's another discussion), but not everything is reducible while still sustaining the life of an organism and the usefulness of the organ in question. The point of the irreducible complexity argument is that there are many systems that would require either "hopeful monster" leaps of many major mutations all working together at once to create them. If you try to put them together piecemail (as in one mutated gene at a time), you have to go through multiple unviable stages--which would violate the whole natural selection argument.
The rest of your post is so obtusely written that, given the monstrous error exhibited in your first argument, it's not worth the effort it would take to try to pull it together into something coherant enough to debate.
And on that note, I'm off to bed. If it's a slow news day and work day tomorrow, I'll pop back in. Goodnight, and thanks to all for the spirited debate.
"No one, however, has created a species."
Huh? This is simply incorrect. Humans have created many species. Sweet corn comes to mind . . .
Trivial. Check out the "Lincoln" threads in the Smoky Back Room. 37,000 and counting, last I looked.
Then neither is the fact that woolly mammoth went extinct in the last ice age replicable. Or that dodo birds ever existed. Or that George Washington had wooden teeth. Or that the earth was once the center of the universe. Or that Jesus walked upon the water. Or that Jesus was born of a Virgin. Or that Moses parted the Red Sea. Or that Adam and Eve were prevented from returning to the Garden because of a Flaming Sword. Or that there ever was a Garden. Or that Adam was created rather than evoluted.
In other words, according to this standard, nobody knows anything.
Creationists included.
False Assumption. There has never been proof that "species" are static and are not transitional forms from one species to another. There is no "entirely new species." All are in transition. This is what frightens you so, you are a transitional species. Not an end product. Only your hubris seeks to deny this fact.
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