Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.
They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.
After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."
That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Bear in mind that you are building this argument on assumptions about the truth of natural selection and the possibility or probability of other explanations existing.
You can't formulate any mathematical rule that distinguishes a produc of selection from a product of some other cause.
I think you are missing the point. The only thing a mathematical formula will tell you about a pile of 1,000 face up nickels is the odds of 1,000 nickles randomly falling into a pile face up. It will not tell you whether the nickels randomly fell there or were placed there. Given no certainty, you need to make a judgement call about what you think the most likely explanation for those 1,000 face up nickels is. Do you think they were placed there on purpose or fell there randomly? You could make the case either way. And what's important here is that it can be reasonable to make a judgement call either way in the face of unknown or unknowable factors. You guess based on the preponderance of evidence and probability, not simply possibility. Other people might guess differently. But it's still just a guess and it doesn't mean that the question doesn't exist or that one perspective or the other is invalid. It just means that two people look at the same evidence and consider different things to be the most likely explanation.
You seem to want certainly. As Dimensio pointed out, "Nothing in science is ever 'proven beyond a shadow of reasonable doubt'." If that's true, then why are you demanding a level of evidence and certainty to prove intelligent design that the theories of natural selection and evolution that you support can not even achieve?
the biggest problem for ID is that we can see selection at work in real time. ID does not bring any ongoing process to the table.
Why is this relevant? Plenty of scientific theories about how things originated and formed (from the origins of life in a primordial soup to the formation of our moon and solar system) are not necessarily observable as ongoing processes. The absence of an ongoing process does not preclude the possibility of looking for evidence of processes that happened in the past but are no longer happening. What you really need to do is think about these demands you keep making and questions you keep asking in the context of other branches of science. Are they really requirements for a theory to be reasonable or are you simply demanding that any competing theories about the origins and development of life share the characteristics of evolution because that's the incumbant theory?
I am not assuming the coins were placed there or occurred randomly. I am saying they were placed ther by a process that we can observe, model mathematically, emulate on a computer, and which is sufficient.
It's your turn to produce an agency whose properties can be observed, described and modeled, and which is sufficient.
Nope.
Maybe I am your wife.
Why go through all of that trouble when it won't answer the key question, expecially if a person created the pile with the intent to make it look random? Suppose the computer model determines that the pile could have occurred naturally. Does that mean it did?
It's your turn to produce an agency whose properties can be observed, described and modeled, and which is sufficient.
Why is that necessary? There are plenty of other scientific theories that cannot be observed, modelled mathematically, or emulated on a computer -- for example, the full process of pre-animate organic molecules forming the first life on earth. Does that mean it's not legitimate science to propose such a theory?
Randomly-occurring placemarker.
I bet you'll be right.
You are appearing immensely ignorant in the cleanest sense of the word, and not worth exchanging anything with.
If you have a well constructed model that produces the kinds of outcomes you are investigating, and if that model closely mimics naturally occurring behavior, then it's a pretty good candidate.
If you wish to compete in this arena, you need to produce a competing model that better mimics the natural phenomenon.
Texas is already shipping NOLA refugees to Arkansas so they will have room for their own.
There is no foolproof test for alien life. We have been examining martian chemistry for twenty years or so and still don't know exactly what to look for.
WONDERFUL WORLD, SAM COOKCan you tell that I'm bored?
[Additions in blue, deletions in small]Don't know much about history,
Don't know much biology.
Don't know much about a science book,
Don't know much about the French I took.
But I do know that I ain't no kin to monkeys!!But I do know that I love you,
And I know that if you love me, too,
What a wonderful world this would be.Don't know much about geography,
Don't know much trigonometry.
Don't know much about algebra,
Don't know what s slide rule is for.
But I know that Darwin was an idiot!But I know that one and one is two,
And if this one could be with you,
What a wonderful world this would be.
Which one?
Nope. I'm too bored to notice.
I'm so bored I'm rereading my probability texts.
Your worst nightmare.
"We had tons of fun with his allegedly 'irreducibly complex' systems.
Could you send me a link or two?
Oh My God!!! Blue Meanies!!
[sung to the tune of "Yesterday...." by the Beatles]
Leprosy.....
I'm not half the man I used to be,
All my skin is falling off of me
Now that I've got leprosy.....
Syphilis .....
it all started with a simple kiss.
Now it hurts when I take a p*ss.
Oh why did I get syphilis?
[REFRAIN]
Why (why? [echoed]) did she have to go?
I don't know; she wouldn't say.......
She said 'something's wrong'
then I found out she was ga-a-a-a-y ....
Lobotomy....
half my brains have been scraped out of me.
I not only think that 'one and one' are 'three'.....
but now believe in ID Theory.
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