Posted on 04/10/2005 3:53:04 AM PDT by PatrickHenry
A pro-evolution group has organized what appears to be a successful boycott of Kansas hearings on intelligent design.
Alexa Posny, a deputy commissioner with the state department of education, told the Kansas City Star that only one person has agreed to testify on the pro-evolution side for the hearings scheduled for May.
"We have contacted scientists from all over the world," Posny said. "There isn't anywhere else we can go."
Harry McDonald, head of Kansas Citizens for Science, charged that the hearings, called by a conservative majority on the state board of education, have a pre-ordained outcome.He said that testifying would only make intelligent design appear legitimate.
"Intelligent design is not going to get its forum, at least not one in which they can say that scientists participated," he said.
Backers of intelligent design, the claim that a supreme being guided evolution, say it is a theory with scientific backing. Opponents believe it is an attempt to smuggle religion into public education.
Science has failed to educate the people about quantum theory also. The fact that you make sneering references to "happenstance" says more about the difficulty of the concept of natural selection than about its veracity.
Would you also like fries with that?
Go get your own results you have just as much access as I do.
Why do you identify the anti-scientists as conservatives? Is that a new litmus test for conservatism, being hostile to science? It seems that way on FR and it seems that way to most scientists I know.
The discussions on FR have driven some people I know away from the conservatives; they point out that if conservatives can't get science correct (and continually misquote people for example), why should they be able to get morals or economics correct?
Unfortunately, for many (if not most) scientists that I know, conservatives are lumped with the astrologers, scientologists, new-agers, and wiccans.
Oh please. ID proponents can hide their light under a bushel if they choose, for whatever political purpose they desire, but any assertion of a designer other than a supreme being just pushes the origins question back a notch. It's dishonest and should be shameful.
An algorithm (as we are using the term loosely in this case) may make use of random choices. There's much literature on the subject. One can plan to make a random choice and follow that choice.
Yes, you probably would. And I'd show up to watch.
Clearly, you are!!!! And, I would like to directly address some of the issues you have raised, following this context.
BTW, there is a growing tide among mathematicians and scientists who do not embrace Intelligent Design speculation of a designer - but also doubt the happenstance pillar of evolution theory (self-organizing complexity, master control genes, information theory and molecular biology, etc.)
Indeed, I could not agree more!!!!!!!
If an algorithm lies at the root of biological life (state changes, Rocha - self organizing complexity, von Neumann) -then the outcome is planned, directed, not happenstance.
If master control genes are largely immutable causing eyeness to evolve simultaneously across phyla between vertebrates and invertebrates (Gehring) - then the outcome is planned, directed, not happenstance.
Wow!! What a thoughtful contribution.
First, as with other posters, I object to the word "happenstance." I would prefer stochastic. Happenstance is not a scientific term, it cannot be defined, and it does have negative overtones. Stochastic, by contrast, captures the essence of you point (as I read it).
Indeed, a central pillar of evolution is the stochasticity of the evolutionary process. That is, the mutation process is stochastic (or more precisely, it is a Poisson process). The central question is, then, whether this stochastic process, under the force provided by natural selection, is sufficient to account for the evolutionary result. Let's take each of the individual issues in turn.
First, the general theory of evolution is divided into two natural components: the first is the observation that species have evolved over eons and the second is the explanation for this evolution, which is termed natural selection. These are essentially disparate aspects of the Darwin theory, and indeed, Darwin carefully distinguished the two. The observation of the evolution of species is an observed fact. We know that species have evolved. This observation is as simple as looking at dinosaur bones in a natural history museum, but can be as complicated as the development of man from, well, pre-man. Many have argued that the evolutionary observation is not sufficiently fine grained to establish that man did indeed evolve from earlier species. OK, but the database is constantly increasing. However, the second aspect is much more problematic.
Is the process of natural selection sufficient to account for the evolutionary changes??? Again, let's consider the components of this question.
Clearly, stochasticity exists in all aspects of nature. Indeed, all processes are ultimately stochastic because all of nature depends on quantum mechanics and quantum is explicitly stochastic. So, the stochasticity, per se is not a problem.
Then, is the natural selection process sufficient to overcome the stochasticity? Well, this is difficult to answer. It is a basic statistical mechanics question, and should be answered by calculating the entropy (which is what is done in other cases). However, in this instance we do not know how to calculate the entropy explicitly; therefore, it is difficult (impossible?) to calculate a measure of the stochasticity versus the observed ordering of evolution.
The biological ordering effect apparently violates the second law of thermodynamics. Indeed, many biologists have refered to the concept of "negative entropy" to identify this problem. Negative entropy is a philosophic rather than a scientific concept because negative entropy is physically impossible. The ID perspective, as you have pointed out, addresses this problem by asserting a designer to overcome this apparent increase in order:
When an Intelligent Design proponent looks at these things, Occam's Razor is that an intelligent designer must have been involved.
However, there are several problems with this.
First, the amount of "negative entropy" cannot be calculated. Or more specifically, the change in entropy, indeed the entropy itself cannot be calculated for this application. We don't have a number for it. If we cannot quantify the change in entropy, how can we say that natural selection is insufficient??? Indeed, how can we say that natural selection is sufficient?? The problem is disturbing because in other fields we can calculate the entropy explicitly, using the canonical ensembles. But we can't here.
The second problem is that it is always difficult, indeed it is the most difficult calculation in science, to prove completeness. How do evolutionists prove that natural selection is complete, i.e. completely sufficient to account for the observation of evolution. The answer, frankly, is that we can't. That is a hole in the evolutionary explanation, and it is acknowledged by scientists (those of us that are fair and honest). The IDers as well as scientists have recognized this problem. However, the answers have been very different.
The scientific answer, and IMHO the only honest answer, is: "We don't know".
The ID answer, and IMHO the dishonest answer, is: "It must be an intelligent designer."
The fundamental problem with the ID answer (and there are several) is that it automatically excludes any other possible answer.
The second problem with the ID answer is that it asserts that natural selection is insufficient to account for evolution. Since we cannot calculate the entropy, we cannot assert this. Moreover, we know that the 2nd law of thermodynamics is not violated because entropy can decrease locally so long as it increases globally. Entropy is clearly increasing globally as the universe burns down. Moreover, the local decrease in entropy can be accounted for by an application of Helmholtz Free Energy. Since we cannot calculate the entropy, we cannot calculate the free energy, therefore, we cannot make this assertion.
That was you? Nice job!
This is simply not true. It is quiet easy to write an algorithm that has an indeterminate outcome.
The Socialist Party leaded even drove me back to Madison. He was perplexed when I asked him what was wrong with capitalism; he said the "concentration of power" in the hands of a few. I asked how "concentration of even more power" in the hands of the government would be alleviate the problem. He replied that he had never thought of that. (But he did know Norman Thomas.)
I memorized the Communist guy's (a buddy of Gus Hall) statistics; during my turn, I used them to paint a different picture. When he asked where I got my numbers, I just said from his presentation.
All and all, it was fun.
Thanks.
I'd be interested in the explanation of how 6000 year-old Sumerian agronomy can predict how my day will go.
Creationists are to legitimate science what losertarians are to legitimate politics. Every scientific advance since Copernicus discovered the Solar System has threatened somebody's religious worldview. And yet, amazingly, society continues to survive and even benefit because of it.
The big problem for me is: After the "trial", senators Schumer, Clinton, Feinstein, & Kennedy would repair to the conference room and "make up their minds" based on the evidence presented to them. Oh sure, I'd participate in something like that.You can easily think of situations where you wouldn't want your side to participate. Here's an example: Suppose Senators Schumer, Clinton, Feinstein, Kennedy, etc. announced a town hall meeting to discuss if the right to keep and bear arms is a good idea. The program is arranged to have seven participants -- six of whom are flaming dems, and there's a 7th seat for one token conservative. The moderator will be Michael Moore, and the audience will be from the campus of UC Berkeley.
That's the setup. They offer you the opportunity to present your side as the 7th panel member. Would you accept?
Do the words "Kangaroo Court" mean anything to you?
If this is so, PH, then my interpretation would be that Darwinist scientists have not got any real confidence in the theory. If they did, they'd show up and defend it. Their argument that they'd just be conferring legitimacy on ID is just a smokescreen.
By the same argument, the fact that NASA (probably) refuses to debate Richard Hoagland over ancient ruins on the Moon & Mars just goes to show how weak their confidence level is in their own views. And mainstream historians' refusal to publicly debate Holocaust deniers shows just how weak the case for the Holocaust really is. Etc. etc. etc.
Plus the article misrepresents the ID position in stating that ID claims that "a supreme being guided evolution." ID has never made any such claim. That is a complete figment of the neo-Darwinist imagination.
That's right. What ID really says is, "A supremely intelligent designer-being guided evolution." There's a world of difference between the two, isn't there? ;-)
They'd sign on to the "majority report" which had been prepared well before the "debate," and you'd be mentioned, very briefly, as holding a fringe view that was opposed to the majority's wisdom. Your name would be forever associated with the Schumer-Kennedy Report. Thank you for playing "legitimize the slime balls."
"The biological ordering effect apparently violates the second law of thermodynamics."
I'd guess the operative word here is "apparently." Believe it or not, there is work afoot in the physics community that seeks to quantify entropy in living systems, particularly the entropy of human organisms. If I might bring to your attention a recent article by Hungarian astrophysicist Attila Grandpierre, "Entropy and Human Organisms and the Nature of Life," which appeared in Frontier Perspectives (Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall/Winter 2004). Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate this paper on-line, but hope to have a text of it soon. If/when I do, I'll post excerpts for discussion.
BTW, Dr. Grandpierre is not at all an adherent of Intelligent Design theory. But certain of his experimental findings seem to support the idea that life and evolution are not the outcomes of purely stochastic processes.
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