Posted on 09/28/2005 6:31:31 AM PDT by gobucks
(snip) But in order to attract converts and win over critics, a new scientific theory must be enticing. It must offer something that its competitors lack. That something may be simplicity (snip). Or it could be sheer explanatory power, which was what allowed evolution to become a widely accepted theory with no serious detractors among reputable scientists.
So what does ID offer? What can it explain that evolution can't?
(snip) Irreducible Complexity (snip)
Darwin himself admitted that if an example of irreducible complexity were ever found, his theory of natural selection would crumble.
"If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down," Darwin wrote.
Yet no true examples of irreducible complexity have ever been found. The concept is rejected by the majority of the scientific community. (snip)
A necessary — and often unstated — flipside to this is that if an irreducibly complex system contains within it a smaller set of parts that could be used for some other function, then the system was never really irreducibly complex to begin with.
It's like saying in physics that atoms are the fundamental building blocks of matter only to discover, as physicists have, that atoms are themselves made up of even smaller and more fundamental components.
This flipside makes the concept of irreducible complexity testable, giving it a scientific virtue that other aspects of ID lack.
"The logic of their argument is you have these multipart systems, and that the parts within them are useless on their own," said Kenneth Miller, a biologist at Brown University in Rhode Island. "The instant that I or anybody else finds a subset of parts that has a function, that argument is destroyed."
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
That funny sound you hear is my knuckles dragging on the ground...
Oh well, I was getting tired of civility, anyway
You'll find this fellow sounds a LOT like a rational leftist, and this article discusses in huge detail how Julian was originally 'slandered'.
Ah, 'he sounds like a leftist', to gobucks, so the article must be false. That's logic, that is.
There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and justifying ourselves in our erotic revolt: we would deny that the world had any meaning whatever." [Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, 1937]
Of course, in the standard duplicitous creationist manner, gobucks omitted to note that Huxley was simply setting up a point of view to argue against. Let's post the rest of what the link says about Aldous Huxley, shall we?
As mentioned above, a conservative editor in 1966 printed a paragraph from Aldous Huxley on "the philosophy of meaninglessness" and "sexual mores," and added a title above the paragraph that read, "Confessions of a Professed Atheist." But what the editor failed to reveal to his readers was that Aldous was not an "atheist" when he wrote that paragraph, but was arguing against "atheism." The paragraph itself was taken from Aldous Huxley's book, Ends and Means, written in 1937 (chapter 14, the chapter on "Beliefs"), and he was not speaking about why people in Darwin's day "leaped at the Origin," but speaking about the rise of the "philosophy of meaninglessness" and materialism among the "masses" after the First World War, the generation of the 1920s.
And speaking of Aldous's generation in the 1920s and 30's, John Derbyshire wrote: "The second and third decades of the twentieth century were notoriously an age of failed gods and shattered conventions, to which many thoughtful people responded in obvious ways, retreating into nihilism, hedonism, and experimentalism. Literature became subjective, art became abstract, poetry abandoned its traditional forms. In the 'low, dishonest decade' that then followed, much of this negativism curdled into power-worship and escapism of various kinds. Aldous Huxley stood aside from these large general trends. Though no Victorian in habits or beliefs, he never entered whole-heartedly into the spirit of modernism. The evidence is all over the early volumes of these essays. James Joyce's ground breaking novel, Ulysses, he declares in 1925, is 'one of the dullest books ever written,and one of the least significant.' Jazz, he remarks two years later, is 'drearily barbaric.' Writing of Sir Christopher Wren in 1923, he quotes with approval Carlyle's remark that Chelsea Hospital, one of Wren's creations, was 'obviously the work of a gentleman.' Wren, Huxley goes on to say, was indeed a great gentleman, 'one who valued dignity and restraint and who, respecting himself, respected also humanity.' In his thirties, in fact, Huxley comes across as something of a Young Fogey."
-- John Derbyshire, "What Happened to Aldous Huxley," The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 6 (February 2003)
Is gobucks going to argue that Derbyshire is a leftist? Wonder why National Review keeps him on, then?
So let's summarize. The link gobucks provides shows that one line is pulled out of Aldous Huxley's 'Ends and Means' to make it appear that Huxley believed the exact opposite of what he actually believed. gobucks, having read this, proceeds to extract the exact same line and do the exact same thing that the link he himself cites debunks.
It's not just crassly mendacious, it's bizarrely stupid. Why would you post a link pointing out someone else's duplicity, and then commit the exact same duplicity?
BTW, for the information of others, Huxley was actually profoundly interested in religion, particularly after he went nearly blind at an early age; he wrote extensively, for example, about Meister Eckert, the Christian mystic. If gobucks weren't profoundly ignorant, he'd know he could hardly have chosen a worse example of an atheist hedonist. Gosh, even reading 'Brave New World' would tell you that.
I don't know how these guys sleep at night. I really don't.
I had been speaking tongue in cheek!
Aside from the fact that being a proponent of the theory of evolution entails more than the application of faith, there is also more than faith involved in religion.
Then you are aware that you can't calculate odds without knowing each step. So do you have a point?
I'm sorry your mother is dead. I'm not a liberal, Bryan Rehm is not an atheist, and almost nothing else you've posted in this thread has been true either.
That's what creationists said 50 years ago.
The quintessence of constantcy.
Why does my opinion have to be your truth?
And evolution STILL hasn't been proved, has it? Of course not. And now people are beginning to understand that it never will be. I think 50 years is a little long myself. I'd guess 20 or 25.
Sorry! Your post suddenly makes more sense.
I am always struck by the fact that random selection parallels a free society while ID parallels a society based on central authority.
Beyond that, while TOE makes sense to me, it doesn't necessarily rule out ID.
I understand your point. However, none of those scientists would want ID taught as an alternative to evolution because it is not scientific in nature. Science does not deny the existence of God anymore than it can prove the existence of God. On a more scientific note, ID fails to explain how the information, or 'design' came into existence. It simply capitulates.
I'm not sure, but isn't the basic "Prisoner's Dilemma" approach of "tit for tat" a reasonable appoach to both your formulation and the Golden rule?
I think Kant's Categorical Imperative says about the same thing too.
ID, of course, is respectable because it's science.
Intro ID science course: God or the IDer did it.
Graduate level ID science course: God or the IDer did it.
ID PhD thesis: God or the IDer did it.
Congratulations. You are now have a PhD in ID science.
Who says it can't be tested? There are plenty of ways to test it using statistics, and information theory and a variety of logical constructs. Stating something is untestable, is obviously incorrect coming from someone who believes in scientific theory.
And what predictions does ID make?
Hilarious.
Thanks for the additional information.
"Who says it can't be tested? There are plenty of ways to test it using statistics, and information theory and a variety of logical constructs. Stating something is untestable, is obviously incorrect coming from someone who believes in scientific theory. "
[And what predictions does ID make?]
Hypothesis 1: Scientific Atheists will tend to support abominations such as abortion on demand, genocide (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, probably Hitler)
That's a hypothesis in the social science realm. How about one in the hard biosciences?
Hypothesis 2: Evolutionary processes will have consistent attractors universallyt. For example, you might expect human-like creatures on other planets with developed morality, versus slime molds.
There will be more, but are you so doltish you can't make up your own testable hypotheses?
There will be more, but are you so doltish you can't make up your own testable hypotheses?
First, the examples you are giving are either not within the realm of biological science or are currently untestable. ID claims to be a biological theory. It should be able to make testable predictions in that discipline.
Second, responding to a simple legitimate question with personal insults is not a very good argument for your position.
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