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 ...
"Hypothesis 1: Scientific Atheists will tend to support abominations such as abortion on demand, genocide (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, probably Hitler)"
This is your answer to what ID will predict? Do you even realize that Hitler was a creationist and Stalin killed Darwinists?
" Second, responding to a simple legitimate question with personal insults is not a very good argument for your position."
I think that WAS the totality of the position. Not much of an argument. Not that we expected much.
I think that WAS the totality of the position. Not much of an argument. Not that we expected much.
The Intelligent Designer would be displeased.
For the same very good reasons they don't teach alchemy and astrology, they are not sciences. Why is this so hard for some people to understand? If you want to teach Divine Creation myths, do it in the history department
How is this a prediction of ID? ID is not a theory about scientific atheism.
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.
Since we know of no life on other planets, we can't study it. This is hardly testable.
Forget I asked, OK? I knew you couldn't come up with anything valid, but I thought what you did come up with would be better than this.
I guess you must be right, again, RWP. I must be bizarrely stupid. That's why I included those links ... so someone could find the stuff you found, and expose the 'truth' about what Huxley really meant. I must just hunger for the ridicule. But you didn't say thank you for the slow pitch ... I agree, you must be tired.
By the way ... Huxley lost his Mom at the age of 14. Isn't funny how these famous leftists have so much in common? Kant could surely relate as you well know.
Oh yes, that wasn't all. His sister died the same month he lost his mom. Major bummer. And then, lo and behold, an older brother committed suicide - hanged himself after suffering a nervous breakdown a few years later. Julian himself suffered a breakdown and spent time in a nursing home ... during the exact same time. (All this while Dad is happily impregnanting a new wife ... funny, strange like).
Here is more from Answers.com:
In his later years: His ideas were foundational to the forming of the Human Potential Movement. He was also invited to speak at several prestigious American universities. At a speech given in 1961 at the California Medical School in San Francisco, Huxley warned:
"There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it."
Funny/strange again ... a really weird vegatarian wrote this - and Prozac American stoned on wide band porn moves blythly along....maybe he wasn't really 'predicting' but prophecying? There is a critical difference you know. One is respectable, the other is beloved ... if you are on his side of the fence for either.
One last tidbit: In 1938 Huxley befriended J. Krishnamurti, whose teachings he greatly admired. He became a Vedantist in the circle of Swami Prabhavananda, and he also introduced Christopher Isherwood to this circle. Not long after, Huxley wrote his book on widely held spiritual values and ideas, The Perennial Philosophy, which discussed teachings of the world's great mystics. (Are you seeing the pattern RWP?)
He started meditating and became a vegetarian. Thereafter, his works were strongly influenced by mysticism and his experiences with the hallucinogenic drug mescaline, to which he was introduced by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond in 1953. Huxley's psychedelic drug experiences are described in the essays The Doors of Perception (the title deriving from some lines in a poem by William Blake) and Heaven and Hell. The title of the former became the inspiration for the naming of the rock band, The Doors. Some of his writings on psychedelics became frequent reading among early hippies."
Oh, yes, his Dad was a professional herbalist. And Wow ... I didn't know that about how the Doors got their name.
Ends and Means indeed...
I know of the link already. But I was already familiar with the Aldous Huxley distortion, and knew it was a distortion without having to search the web. Creationist fibs usually circulate through here at least 50 times before we've shamed all of you into giving them up, and then you just go find some more. But this particular fib was in my strike zone, you might say; when I was in college, I read pretty much everything Huxley ever wrote, from Crome Yellow to Island. Hey, the sixties got to Ireland about 10 years late :-)
You apparently have all of us figured out, as victims of broken homes (my parents would be amused to learn this, were they still around; they would have celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary this year). And you have the advantage, of me at least. I don't understand you all at all. As PH once said, it's like whack-a-mole. You never learn, and you never change. Once 'Huxley was an atheist' is slapped down, we'll have 'Dawkins is a Marxist' or 'Genomics says chickens are closer to humans than monkeys' again.
And you wonder why we're so contemptuous and arrogant.
"or are currently untestable. "
Who said something has to be currently testable to be a hypotesis"
"ID claims to be a biological theory. It should be able to make testable predictions in that discipline."
And you should be able to come up with a testable prediction that would disprove ID as well.
"Second, responding to a simple legitimate question with personal insults is not a very good argument for your position."
I said doltish, not dolt. I just think you ought to be able to provide a test of ID on your own terms. I provided some questions not easily answered within about two minutes. Shouldn't you be able to do much better?
"Hypothesis 1: Scientific Atheists will tend to support abominations such as abortion on demand, genocide (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, probably Hitler)"
[This is your answer to what ID will predict? Do you even realize that Hitler was a creationist and Stalin killed Darwinists? ]
No, that isn't my final answer, it is in response to the statement that ID could make NO hypotheses AT ALL. I bumped off a couple quickies in 30 seconds, I didn't expound on the entire universe of possibilities. AND I didn't claim the hypothesis was correct, only that such a hypothesis might stem from ID conjecture, that it would be testable.
The controversy is entirely due to the evolutionary dogmatic insisting that ID must be synonimous with "God". I note humorously that the supporters of ID need not go there; the opposition will make sure it's there in order to maintain a target to attack.
"Since we know of no life on other planets, we can't study it. This is hardly testable. "
Not testable? I guess you've neveer heard of SETI? Boy, you must live in a cardboard box to not know about SETI. Testable doesn't mean there is already an answer to the question.
"I knew you couldn't come up with anything valid, but I thought what you did come up with would be better than this."
And I thought you could definitively rule out ID as smart as you are. But while the ID people have no definitive proof, neither do you have the logical nail to finish the coffin lid. So, someone is a close minded scientist (anyone see the irony here?), and it isn't me. I'm not a creationist. But neither do I see any real border between a universe run by ID and one run by straight science.
Arguably the most blatant and transparent non sequitur that I have ever seen!
Anyone can make any assertion, and here is proof...
You are welcome ...(fwiw, I couldn't remember who said it either ... but it was amazing how fast folks just had to go look it up. Don't be afraid to come back into the water btw...the sharks here love the movie Shark Tale ... for a reason.)
"Do you even realize that Hitler was a creationist..."
Now the true colors are showing!! Please don't stop.
"So DNA replicates by RNA transcription. Except when the IntelligentDesigner waves the magic wand." Yeah, that'll work.
The question was 'And what predictions does ID make?'
You proffered two 'hypothetical' tests.
Hypothesis 1: Scientific Atheists will tend to support abominations such as abortion on demand, genocide (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, probably Hitler)
This is not an ID based hypothesis. ID claims to be a biological scientific theory. So this does not qualify as a testable ID hypothesis/prediction.
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.
This is not part of any ID 'theory'. And not testable.
And you should be able to come up with a testable prediction that would disprove ID as well...I just think you ought to be able to provide a test of ID on your own terms.
In science, the burden of providing testable predictions is on those submitting and advocating the theory. By your logic, I could in turn say my theory is that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster and you must come up with a testable prediction that would disprove it.
If you want to continue this discussion, provide a testable prediction for ID. Otherwise, forget it.
Honestly, I don't have you guys all figured out. For one thing, why on earth would anyone read everything Huxley ever wrote? Didn't you even consider what I said about predictions as opposed to prophecy? You shouldn't be reading junk, b/c you'll dream about it. Then you'll get it hardwired into your mind during the REM cycle of sleep, and then it is, wa la, part of you. Think of the day's thoughts are tons of unwinding balls of yarn. By the end of the day, you have a tangled mass in your head. REM serves to detangle all of it, and then in addition, weaves all of it into the reference map for thinking...
No wonder you are not a golfer - to you, golf doesn't make sense, does it? It is not something to be experienced, but endured, maybe ... like bowling perhaps. rwp, the key to mutual demystification is golf. I'm sure of this.
And I don't wonder at all the contempuousness and arrogance - recall I have walked many halls of academia, listened thoughtfully to guest seminars, and sipped white wine and munched cheese. It is a familiar tune, first off, and second off, there is definitely a basic wisdom reason as well. You guys are not merciful. In general, a proper reaction to a 'lost conservative' should be mercy. Even more so if one or more of them are deliberately deceptive. Such people, in truth, can only be bad for the Republican Party, in that a narrow group of noncommited voters is their only audience. But they are certainly not going to vote for Hillary. They are indeed on the 'right' side of the fence, and thus merit mercy. Their religious beliefs are definitely NOT going to create more democrats. But, somehow, such people earn, here at the premier conservative forum, not mercy. But contempt. So, what does this do? Whose interests are served as a wedge is so thoroughly driven between 'rational conservatives' and 'social conservatives', esp if the latter get demoralized ... by an 'ally'?
And as for never learning, if someone would link to one mainstream conservative magazine which denounces I.D. as harmful for repbulicans, maybe that would make a difference. But it is the ubiquitousness of that view here, and its absence out there, which convinces me of what should be 'learned'.
No wonder you are not a golfer - to you, golf doesn't make sense, does it? It is not something to be experienced, but endured, maybe ... like bowling perhaps. rwp, the key to mutual demystification is golf. I'm sure of this.
You've gotten my attention. I am an avid golf addict. But I missed something. How does this fit into this thread? I'd be fascinated to read your thoughts on this.
It appears that *some* Huxley said something very much like what I remembered :-). I don't know whether I originally read a slightly muddled paraphrase, or whether my brain stored it in a mixed-up way. But anyway, my original post was significantly erroneous, so it doesn't bother me that it was challenged. One of the good things about FR is that people pay attention to what I say, and point out when I've messed up ... unlike at home, where people say, "Uh-huh, sure, that's nice ... is the dryer done yet? I need my running shorts."
BTW, I love your golf imagery!
I liked his writing. And I tend to read authors like that. If I find something I like, I look at the other things he's written. I read 20 Patrick O Brian novels in sequence one summer.
Their religious beliefs are definitely NOT going to create more democrats. But, somehow, such people earn, here at the premier conservative forum, not mercy. But contempt. So, what does this do? Whose interests are served as a wedge is so thoroughly driven between 'rational conservatives' and 'social conservatives', esp if the latter get demoralized ... by an 'ally'?
You argue as if the Dems winning is the only bad thing that could happen. It isn't. In a two party system, we choose between the lesser of two evils, and the relative evil can always change. A total theocratic takeover of the GOP might not make me vote Dem (I can't think offhand of anything that would do that), but it would certainly cause me to vote Libertarian.
Also, there are other values, like truth. I expect Dems to lie, so it doesn't bother me at all when they do. I don't like it when conservatives do it. I expect better from conservatives. (Though this was never any consolation to me when my Dad said it to me to explain why I wasn't allowed to do what the other kids all did)
And as for never learning, if someone would link to one mainstream conservative magazine which denounces I.D. as harmful for repbulicans, maybe that would make a difference.
I can link to columns by John Derbyshire and George Will that argue this. NR tends to present both sides of the issue (as long as they're both conservative), so they're not going to denounce ID monolithically.
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