Posted on 09/08/2005 1:33:48 PM PDT by snarks_when_bored
Five critiques of Intelligent Design
John Brockman's Edge.org site has published the following five critiques of Intelligent Design (the bracketed comments following each link are mine):
Marcelo Gleiser, "Who Designed the Designer?" [a brief op-ed piece]
Jerry Coyne, "The Case Against Intelligent Design: The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name" [a detailed critique of ID and its history, together with a summary defense of Darwinism]
Richard Dawkins & Jerry Coyne, "One Side Can Be Wrong" [why 'teaching both sides' is not reasonable when there's really only one side]
Scott Atran, "Unintelligent Design" [intentional causes were banished from science with good reason]
Daniel C. Dennett, "Show Me the Science" [ID is a hoax]
As Marcelo Gleiser suggests in his op-ed piece, the minds of ID extremists will be changed neither by evidence nor by argument, but IDists (as he calls them) aren't the target audience for critiques such as his. Rather, the target audience is the millions of ordinary citizens who may not know enough about empirical science (and evolution science in particular) to understand that IDists are peddling, not science, but rather something tarted up to look like it.
Let us not be deceived.
Not every voice you hear in church or in your head is the voice of science.
Well, they'd TRY to kill you. If you survive, you're in!
If you can solve that, a Fields Medal may be in order. :-)
(unless you already have one of course)
Sigh. Started to write my post and fell asleep on the computer. Woke up about 3am.
Anyhoo, here are two pages I found that pretty much sums up what I was going to post.
Again my apologies.
I've been looking around, and I can find a few, simplistic, passing references to the idea that feathers evolved in part as camouflage, but these references either do not expound on the idea or suggest that coloration of the feathers served the camouflage purpose. See, e.g., http://www.evolutionary.org/talk.htm ; http://www.hras.org/sw/sciencedino3.html
I haven't found anything on your idea that feathers served to delay pattern recognition, which is really quite interesting. It certainly seems that simple light diffraction serving to "blur" the outline of prey would precede specific camouflage colorations.
I'll keep looking.
Oh pshaw, that is an artifact of the image processing. The original bitmap looks like a piece of speckled floor tile.
the trouble is that I have seen computer programs that "evolve" virtual creatures whose body plans and primitive locomotion looks just like that of the the creatures from the cambrian explosion.
That is while there is random selection there is not random results.
It just looks like the line about how many are called but few are chosen. Why? because few actually meet the criteria called for.
I'm not saying this particularly means anything.
But random selection seems to presume a disorder at bottom of things that breaks against the evidence of the eyes as severely as any promulgation that there is an ultimate invisible order.
You don't even have to imagine that universe. I have seen computer programs that "evolve" virtual creatures whose body plans and primitive locomotion looks just like that of the the creatures from the cambrian explosion.
That is while there is random selection there is not random results.
It just looks like the line about how many are called but few are chosen. Why? because few actually meet the criteria called for.
So what's the criteria. There are zillions of things that have to go just right from the macro the micro in order for creatures such as ourselves to even exist.
I'm not saying this particularly means anything.
But random selection seems to presume a disorder at bottom of things that breaks against the evidence of the eyes as severely as any promulgation that there is an ultimate invisible order.
These threads are always icky. It's the inevitable clash of world views.
What would you like? ;)
Yet another ID parody--this one about hurricane reconstruction. I love the part about God being anti-union! Guess there's a reason why they call him the Supremely Inteligent Being!
Hurricane Reconstruction May Require Intelligent Designer
http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/2005/09/hurricane_recon.html#more
You must keep your rapier invaginated, else you are issuing a challenge.
I'm way too old for a Fields medal.
I do think this is one of the more interesting problems in mathematics. Mostly because, it's simple to state and there seems no way to approache a proof.
Wow, incredible that you were able to deduce that, given that I only said "...bitmapped and run through a couple filters."
Note that Max(a,b)/(a+b) (for positive a,b) is always closer to the golden section than Min(a,b)/Max(a,b) is.
Some musicologists noted that, in Mozart's sonatas, ratios of exposition and development+recap, etc. were close to the golden secion but that total/development+recap was even closer. The used the above relation to show that this is always true. No musicological explanation needed.
"It's not entirely clear since advocates of "intelligent design" steadfastly refuse to say or postulate anything about how (or when, or where, or by what/whom) acts of "design" are actually implemented."
Do you think that thermometers should postulate anything about how, when, where or by what/whom acts of heat are actually implemented? If not, then why should design detection be different?
"But random selection seems to presume a disorder at bottom of things that breaks against the evidence of the eyes as severely as any promulgation that there is an ultimate invisible order."
Not necessarily. Natural Selection does not mean moving from a poorer organism to a better one, or from chaos to order or from imperfect to perfect. It means that organisms better suited to their environments survive and thrive.
Take elephants in Asia. We're now seeing elephant species evolve to be tuskless. The relatively few elephants born without the tendency to grow tusks are better suited to an environment where elephants are hunted for their tusks, so they survive to breed and tusked elephants are killed in greater numbers. Slowly, that is affecting the population and eventually under these circumstances tusked elephants will be the exception, a recessive trait that manifests rarely. The tusk trait may die out altogther.
Does that mean that the tuskless elephants somehow represent a more perfect elephant? Hardly. Elephants use their tusks to dig for food. Tuskless elephants have a harder time finding food, and would in other circumstances be at a competitive disadvantage. So they could be viewed as a "lesser" elephant, but are better adapted to survive in their particular environment.
That's natural selection in action. It cares not for perfection, or order, or anything else we might want to impose upon it. The only concern, if I may apply such an anthropomorphic term to a natural force, is which organisms will pass their genetic material on to future generations and how the species will evolve as a consequence.
Every gladiator knows -- there's a time for ingavination, and a time for ... dis-invagination.
Hey ... 400
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