Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
I think it is a guess, and I think it qualifies as an hypothesis, however unsatisfying, tentative, vague, or unspecific you might find it. Whether it can be refined to produce satisfactory grist for the scientific mill remains largely unprobed.
It doesn't have even the outline of a research plan. It doesn't offer anything in addition to the research that is already being done.
I agree with this assessment.
You're such a cutie!
acute, e'? Si, senor'.
They can't both be right. Either species were developed through foresighted intelligence, or they weren't. That's the controversy that's at issue.
This search is clearly not driven or funded or cared about, because it might produce a modulated narrow band carrier, with the implications of that discovery left entirely as an abstract exercise for later.
Regardless of the motivations for doing this, that exact scenario is what's likely to be in store shoud a signal within this band be detected. You can't just will science to be something that it's not. You have to search for data, then you have to interpret the data. When it comes to origin-of-species questions, we already have lots of data. We're mostly at the second stage with that.
Well, while I agree with the analysis, I do not think it implicates the generality or specificity of your hypothesis to a great degree. The measure is whether you make successful predictions where success isn't a foregone conclusion, or not--not how general your supposition is.
Science is about formulating productive hypotheses, guesses that conform to current knowledge and which predict evidence yet to be found. The exact nature of these predictions depends on the subject matter, but without prediction, it isn't science.
I concur.
I am not really into the details of SETI, but I would assume SETI is based on a null prediction, namely that no known natural phenomenon produces a narrow band radio signal at the frequencies being monitored.
As I have indicated, SETI's charter is broader than hunting for modulated narrow band carriers.
Null predictions are pretty common in science.
That there are no known phenomena that exhibit the behavior of modulated narrow band carriers is more like a data point and/or a research tool, than it is an hypothesis under investigation, in this case.
Darwinian evolutionary theory will not go away if ID proves true--it will just be modified. That wasn't true of the Michaelson-Morley experiment. The ether vanished--Darwin won't. Should the most likely versions of ID ever become true, it will be eaten by Darwinian theory, without more than a small hiccup. Not the other way around.
Care to elaborate on this a little? Any version of ID is by definition a departure from Darwin's theory. However small such departures would be, they would have earth-shattering implications if they were ever accepted by the scientific community.
It should surprise no one that a dramatic discovery engenders an intense scrutiny of all the assumptions leading up to it. There's nothing special about the fact that there are no known natural phenomena that exhibits narrow band modulation. And the clean high barrier you imagine exists between formulating hypothesis and gathering information is none-existent. There are occasional serendipiteous free gifts of scientifically useful data--much more 200 years ago than now,-- but most modern data gathering and experimentation arises from theories and opposing sub-theories about what and where that data is. Data gathering without a formulated notion about what we are looking for is generally about as useful as a fart in a hurricane--and if you'll think about it, I think you might agree that SETI researchers probably don't scrupulously avert their gazes anytime the notion that there might be natural phenomenon we haven't detected yet that exhibit narrow band modulation comes up, in order to defend the holy separation between data gathering and hypothesis.
I don't think you have a very accurate picture of how science works, or what it is, or the nitty gritty details of evolutionary theory if you think this is so.
ID comes in two big flavors. Naturalistic interference, and supernatural interference. Science, as we now perceive it, will never have anything to say, positive or negative, about supernatural interference because supernatural interference, by definition, is not detectable in nature: God may be directing every little sperm to every little egg personally, and science will never be able to prove otherwise--it hasn't the tools to look. Science only looks at natural behaviors, that leave detectable evidence in nature.
If ID is supernatural, it will never be science's job, or ability to tell, and we will still have to explain what creationists are now calling micro-evolution, and fossils that don't look like any living things, and why so much of living thing's machinery in virtually identical across the board.
If ID is naturalistic (little green men from another galazy planted us, or panspermiac migration planted us), than Darwinian theory is hardly modified at all--it is simply recognized that we were wrong in thinking its operations were confined to our planet.
That's not what ID is. ID stands for intelligent design. That by definition is not naturalistic. There's no design involved in simply seeding the earth with some biotic germ and letting nature take its course from there. Intelligent design implies that some intelligence actually intervened and made modifications or created entire new forms that could not have come about by letting nature take its course. Whether that theory is true or not depends on whether or not these forms could have arisen purely through naturalistic processes. If they couldn't have, then it would have to mean that something designed them. But that's the question to be answered.
Chortle! Very sharp!
Sez who?
There's no design involved in simply seeding the earth with some biotic germ and letting nature take its course from there.
Yea?--prove it. & at any rate, how is that any different from God inventing micro-species and letting them evolve?
Intelligent design implies that some intelligence actually intervened and made modifications or created entire new forms that could not have come about by letting nature take its course.
We now have machines that can build any arbitrary protein we might care to have. We've learned to trick ribosomes the same way retroviruses do, and make them step and fetch for is inside the reticulum to build any structure we like, anywhere in the cell. It's not out of line to think that we will shortly be able to design "entire new forms" ourselves. You're massively kidding yourself to think others from different worlds couldn't if they exist and can get here. Little green men don't take their marching orders from you.
Whether that theory is true or not depends on whether or not these forms could have arisen purely through naturalistic processes.
If they couldn't have, then it would have to mean that something designed them. But that's the question to be answered.
If it couldn't have been designed, something must have designed it. huh.
Well, while I'm cogitating that, let me point out that that's the Behe version of ID, and it hardly constitutes the entire corpus of ID. And your take on this is rather unlikely on several counts.
No form of science, as we currently understand science, will ever be able to demonstrate that there's something that functions in the natural world, that can't be designed in the natural world. Natural science neither proves nor disproves things infallibly for all time, it isn't capable of that sort of ubiquitous closure. You need something on the order of a godelian formal proof from the world of math--not that you'll get one, and not that natural science is somehow forced to accept the infallibility of formal maths as applied to the real world.
If you insist that only supernatural interference theory is ID, that means it permanently isn't science's business: science is about naturalistic explanations, involving detectable evidence. Beyond that, science has no special competence, or business.
And, finally, even if you could demonstrate that there are natural phenomena that could not be designed by natural events, you still haven't demonstrated that God must therefore exist and have designed them. All you have demonstrated is that things exist that weren't naturally designed.
Yea?--prove it. & at any rate, how is that any different from God inventing micro-species and letting them evolve?
It doesn't at all, that's my point. "Letting them evolve" is the antithesis of designing them. Perhaps I should remind you that Darwinian theory takes no position on the origin of life itself - merely on how life developed from its pre-Cambrian, protozoic, unicellular state.
We now have machines that can build any arbitrary protein we might care to have. We've learned to trick ribosomes the same way retroviruses do, and make them step and fetch for is inside the reticulum to build any structure we like, anywhere in the cell. It's not out of line to think that we will shortly be able to design "entire new forms" ourselves. You're massively kidding yourself to think others from different worlds couldn't if they exist and can get here. Little green men don't take their marching orders from you.
This paragraph doesn't make sense in the context of this exchange. Nothing here is in conflict with anything that I've said. All you've done is give a bunch of examples of intelligent intervention and design.
[Whether that theory is true or not depends on whether or not these forms could have arisen purely through naturalistic processes. If they couldn't have, then it would have to mean that something designed them. But that's the question to be answered.]
If it couldn't have been designed, something must have designed it. huh.
That's not what I said. What I put in brackets above is exactly what you quoted from me. You might want to look it over again.
No form of science, as we currently understand science, will ever be able to demonstrate that there's something that functions in the natural world, that can't be designed in the natural world.
Where you get the idea that ID is claiming otherwise, I'm not sure. Is ID theory claiming that life was designed "outside the natural world"? (whatever that's supposed to mean)
If you insist that only supernatural interference theory is ID...
It might be helpful if you could point out where I insisted any such thing. "Supernatural" is a complete strawman term, and a circular argument. It's no different from the word "fantasy" in that regard.
The epicycyles brought it closer. You don't need Copernicus for that.
Do you have an interest in this period of history or are you just busting my chops? ;)
But according to the Ptolemaic model, each of the planets and the sun moved in its own separate sphere. What Galileo showed was that Venus's "epicyle" carried it around the sun in a neat circle. That was quite groundbreaking, because it established the sun as the center of at least one planet's motion. And since the other planets all had epicycles that had an uncanny ability to move with the sun (Mars, Jup, and Sat are in the middle of their retrograde phase always and only when the sun is at the opposite end of the sky), the conclusion is inescapable.
Do you have an interest in this period of history or are you just busting my chops? ;)
Well, I have an interest in the history of astronomy, that's for sure. I wasn't trying to cause trouble or nuthin'.
I think you are misapprehending the nature of ID theory, on two different scores: 1) "letting them evolve" is not the strong ID naturalistic position. There's no reason to suppose that thentan green lizard people can't tinker with genes to any extent at all, any time they like. 2) There's no big distinction that I am aware of between ID beginning-of-life and ID constantly-tinkering; unlike the case with Darwinian Evolutionary theory. Having no positive forensic evidence to spin one's theories off of, after all, leaves one free to speculate quite widely.
That's not what I said. What I put in brackets above is exactly what you quoted from me. You might want to look it over again.
Having reviewed what you said twice, I failed to see in what manner I have not rather accurately paraphrased your statement.
Are you serious? Are you new to this subject?
Well then, we are in agreement. I too feel that naturalistic ID is a viable possibility. Which still doesn't make it a science worthy of mention in high school textbooks, any more than pyramid crystal energy, monuments on mars, crop circle study, or the homeopathic value of mega-diluting medicinals--all of which have massive, published followings that we could, but shouldn't, placate in public school science class.
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