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 ...
I saw a program once concerning the darker side of near death experiences....some folks come back swearing they've been in hell but only God's grace with a stern admonition to change their ways had saved them from His eternal wrath!
The darker side of NDE's are what we should be paying closer attention to!
Boy are you anti-science. I guess you never took advantage of any of the technological acheivements in the last 100 years that arose from science. Either that or you got poor grades in science and now want to bash the heck oout of the people that do this sort of thing for a living. Yes, they are human like everyone else and they have their share of flaws, but that does not give you the right to bash them for spending almost a decade studying some very advanced subjects that most people would not be able to understand. Almost all of the scientist that have ever lived are alive today. Yet there is a great reluctance on the part of many people to actually talk to real, live scientists to even understand what science is and what they do. There is an incredible amount of knowledge out there that people like you don't even consider to be of relevance or importance even though that knowledge is the foundation for how we live today.
The idea of the 'trust us' mentailty is far removed from the truth. If you don't want to believe what scientists say, you are free to conduct your own research and publish your own results. Science encourages study and verification. Science is very open. The outrage scientists show results from people without even the slightest education of background trying to criticize somehting they haven't even educated themselves on. That's why I've posted repeatedly that ID will be the death of science. You have to throw out all of science in order for ID to be scientifically valid.
I realize that and my post was not meant in any way to imply otherwise. It was more meant to illustrate that just because someone does not base their moral system in religious beliefs does not mean that they are incapable being just as trustworthy and moral as anyone who does.
That is a bogus arguement. These 'probability' functions require precise understanding of all physical interactions involved. In your example, these come form hand waving arguements so the whole premise falls apart.
To my mind, the concept of a gene here or there in the DNA sequence mutating randomly and causing very small, and almost always harmful, changes in an organism seems convincing enough and well established.
But I have seen no satisfactory scientific explanation of what we see in the fossil record, which are sudden leaps by which new types of organisms appear in relatively short (from an evolutionary perspective) periods of time.
If this had occurred from the minor random genetic mutation that is well-established, it seems to me the fossil record would reveal life forms along the entire spectrum of possibilities, at every point in the spectrum. But that is not what we see, we see clumps of similar types of life forms. Furthermore, to account for the complexity of currently-existing organisms solely on the basis of random, small-scale genetic mutation, an amount of time that is for all practically purposes infinite is required, and that is not what the astrophysicists are telling us about the age of the universe.
At university I studied chemistry, with a heavy background in physics and mathematics, but did not become a professional scientist and have no particular expertise in biology, so I must limit my comments, and you can take them for what they're worth.
I will say this though; the molecular interactions among organic compounds is an immensely complex subject, and the workings of a simple cell many, many orders of magnitude of complexity beyond that, something I suggest people need to consider more fully when discussing simplistic theories of evolution to explain things.
later read/ping.
Har! That's a good one! I'm going to save that picture.
By that standard, would you say then that the "big bang" is not science?
bump
You know perfectly well that most of the Left is in fact doing the utmost to destroy our Constitution. OTOH, there are probably many believers in evolution trying to save it.
Please justify that. I notice a constant theme on FR is that everything someone opposes must be a "religion."
So we have a clear case of evolution of a new function here. Dembski doesn't deny it's evolution, but claims, implausibly, that somehow 'evolvability' was programmed in. In fact, there is an increased 'evolvability' of plasmids, and Pseudomonads, which are opportunistic catabolizers of a diversity of different strange compounds, tend to make use of this. But that's not an argument for design, it's an argument for evolution.
Well said. The truth is not served by ridiculous hyperbole.
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?
"Going to ruin the schools"......The schools have been ruined for decades. Where has this turkey been for the past umpteen years?
For some reason, creationists characterize any idea they think is stupid and wrong as religion.
ID, of course, is respectable because it's science.
"I.D. is not science, as it can't be tested. "
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.
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