Posted on 08/16/2005 11:23:20 AM PDT by woodb01
Plenty...
Correction... Evolution is concerned with how life began, and how DNA has manifested in phenotypes over successive generations.
Well there are a lot of differences because it is only an analogy. One key difference is that decks of cards don't reproduce like organisms do. So in order to make the analogy work a person must manually simulate the reproduction and mutation. Of course a better idea is to get a computer to do it.
Most uses of evolutionary algorithms on computers involve a mathematical based problem to be solved in which the desired result (the solution) isn't known beforehand. Running the same algorithm multiple time can yeild many differnent results. Sometimes the result can be suprising.
"Correction... Evolution is concerned with how life began, and how DNA has manifested in phenotypes over successive generations."
No, it isn't concerned with the origins of life. Nice try though :)
Evolution is religion.
ID is religion.
So this is just an issue of comparative religion?
Science can become A Faith, for the Materialist.
ID can never be anything but faith, to Science.
That was the position of the Cathlic church. The new pope may change his mind, but as it stands the Catholics have no problem with evolution.
Really? I can show you a never ending stream of highly complex object which I can prove were created by intelligent design.
Can you show me ONE complex thing that you can PROVE originated by an evolutionary process? (hint, snowflakes and crystaline structures don't approach the complexity I'm refering to, even if you could prove they weren't the result of I.D.)
"I can show you a never ending stream of highly complex object which I can prove were created by intelligent design."
Show us these *proofs* (and don't say they were made by humans, as no scientist claims that humans are not intelligent designers)
" Can you show me ONE complex thing that you can PROVE originated by an evolutionary process?"
Science never works in proof, only evidence. Try again! :)
Sure it is. In order to determine how change has occurred, if any at all, there has to be an origin. This is why the “missing link” is so important to the study of human evolution.
Humans did not evolve from apes; this much is a certainty in human evolutionary study. If evolution is concerned with human origin, it also is interested in life's origin. All living things have DNA...
Are you suggesting Dumbski has provided a mathematical proof of God?
The mutation of the virus? (crystalline structures... not living things... some even have DNA...)
Just asking.
I don't think that's what I said, no.
I'm not the one who needs to try again. I can prove that intelligent design exists. Call it "Science" if you wish, but what ever your "Theory" is, it certainly is not more intellectually superior to a process which can be PROVEN to exist.
Very well stated.
Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with New "Intelligent Falling" Theory
KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
http://theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4133&n=2
Could it be the opposite of what biology textbooks call "life?"
"Why not?" is not an answer to "Why?"
2. we like to understand things, for the sake of understanding them.
3. we like to understand things in order to come up with technical solutions to problems which make life less pleasant than it could be.
Both 2. and 3. are related to improving our condition. What is the evolutionary mechanism at play? Survival? Probably. If so, then when we embrace the goals of 2. and 3., we are assigning a purpose to the process of evolution that is illusionary. There is no purpose.
4. Understanding how the mechanisms of life work might just possibly teach us how the mechanisms of death work, and allow us to switch off those genetic factors leading to decrepitude and death.
Why is immortality preferrable to non-existence? What does it accomplish? According to natural selection, creatures have a survival instinct because those without one died off. Again, that is a process. To seek immortality as something desirable is to mistaken the process for a purpose. A fly may flee your swatter without knowing why. (All the flys that didn't have the flee function are flat). But we as humans know better. The jig is up. We seek to improve our condition because our mutation led to a survival instinct while someone else's did not. Now that we know, how do we pretend it is anything else? Why do we?
all, from a life-is-all-there-is, perfectly sound reasons based entirely on natural self-interest.
happy, now?
I was already happy.
It didn't seem to be a requirement for belief, as in de fide. To be the position of the church, there has to be some kind of consensus of the bishops and cardinals, no, like magisterium, ex cathedra? By the time it trickled down to me, I took it as the pope's private opinion which he made public. According to the media, which is known to garble and/or misquote what the pope says on any given matter, there was supposed to be some "new evidence" which was never clarified or forthcoming insofar as I know.
Some Catholics do have a problem with evolution, but they are no doubt in the minority now. I know because I've read some of the writings of various lay persons. Offhand, I can't think of any priest, traditional or novus ordo, who publicly expresses disbelief in evolution.
I don't have a problem with Catholics who believe in evolution so long as they leave me free to believe the Word of God on the matter (which Catholics believe, but may interpret certain passages a little differently, or leave them up for grabs as some seem to be now).
BTW I am a convert to the Catholic faith who is having some difficulties with parts of it which cannot be resolved on this forum.
Even if you accept the mutation of a virus as a the "origination" of a complex structure (as opposed to a minor change), you cannot PROVE that it occured by chance.
Since intelligent design can be PROVEN to occur, Intelligent Design or Intent can just as easily be proposed as the mechanism by which the virus mutated. And it is FAR AND AWAY the best explanation for how the virus originated in the first place, including it's ability to change (which may or may not have occured without intervention).
How about this one: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html#examples:electrical
A field-programmable gate array, or FPGA for short, is a special type of circuit board with an array of logic cells, each of which can act as any type of logic gate, connected by flexible interlinks which can connect cells. Both of these functions are controlled by software, so merely by loading a special program into the board, it can be altered on the fly to perform the functions of any one of a vast variety of hardware devices.
Dr. Adrian Thompson has exploited this device, in conjunction with the principles of evolution, to produce a prototype voice-recognition circuit that can distinguish between and respond to spoken commands using only 37 logic gates - a task that would have been considered impossible for any human engineer. He generated random bit strings of 0s and 1s and used them as configurations for the FPGA, selecting the fittest individuals from each generation, reproducing and randomly mutating them, swapping sections of their code and passing them on to another round of selection. His goal was to evolve a device that could at first discriminate between tones of different frequencies (1 and 10 kilohertz), then distinguish between the spoken words "go" and "stop".
This aim was achieved within 3000 generations, but the success was even greater than had been anticipated. The evolved system uses far fewer cells than anything a human engineer could have designed, and it does not even need the most critical component of human-built systems - a clock. How does it work? Thompson has no idea, though he has traced the input signal through a complex arrangement of feedback loops within the evolved circuit. In fact, out of the 37 logic gates the final product uses, five of them are not even connected to the rest of the circuit in any way - yet if their power supply is removed, the circuit stops working. It seems that evolution has exploited some subtle electromagnetic effect of these cells to come up with its solution, yet the exact workings of the complex and intricate evolved structure remain a mystery (Davidson 1997).
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