Posted on 02/19/2002 2:59:38 PM PST by Cameron
It's also responsible for the wheel. I don't buy it as proof of God/aliens, period.
You keep dodging back to this, but you can't make it fly.
OK, this time I mean it. Good night!
No, I'm simply asking you to substantiate a claim that you made (i.e. that there was no evidence of big leaps in design introductions).
I even attempted to give you an example (duck-billed platipus) of such a design leap to aid in your explanation, but you seem determined to avoid substantiating your claim at all costs.
Please see Post #194. Occam's Razor has already been debated on this thread. Without magic...
"It's also responsible for the wheel. I don't buy it as proof of God/aliens, period." - VadeRetro
I'm not selling it.
All that I did was to answer your request for an event that could be explained by Intelligent Design but not by Evolution. The genetically modified organs we see growing in pigs and rats in laboritories today clearly meets your prerequisites, and your desire to postulate on god and aliens rather than reflect on the sincere answer to your own question marks your own disingenuousness...
You weren't paying attention, because I very carefully stated it, though I knew that this is the kind of response I'd get. Degrees of freedom are unverified premises. We can ignore #1 (since it essentially cancels out with the second list). Selection essentially means "death". Are you saying that death is an unverified phenomenon? While you may be willing to contest it, I am pretty sure that everything dies, and that we aren't all dying at exactly the same time from exactly the same causes. We all get selected out of the gene pool eventually, whether it is death due to organ failure in old age or death due to adolescent stupidity. Therefore, this is not a degree of freedom. As for random mutation, that is also self-evident as it occurs literally everywhere all the time in biology. It is how we end up with weird genetic disorders and other anomalies.
3 degrees of freedom versus 2, yet you picked the loser and wrongly ascribed Occam's Razor as your reasoning.
I think you need to recount. Demonstrable facts aren't open variables, and don't confuse the hypothesis with the premise. Remember, the point of this isn't to determine how a specific case of speciation occurred, but to determine both what is possible and what is probable.
Self-evident to you, unproven to the scientific world. Random mutation might be responsible for self-evolution, but then again, it might not.
What you are trying to say is that since everything about Evolution is obvious, that Occam's Razor supports it, and that's a ridiculous tautology.
List all that is required for Evolution. List all that is required for Intelligent Design. Count the number of items and then apply William's theorem. If you can do it honestly, then you'll begin to see why Evolutionists don't quote Occam's Razor in any serious debate...
No, Natural Selection means that the most adapted species will survive and thrive. It is the least adapted species that dies off.
Further, if you are using Occam's Razor to question two theories, then all prerequisites for both theories must be listed as unproven degrees of freedom.
It is trivial to demonstrate the validity of the mathematics. Our computers are a bit slow to give a really nice example in a reasonable amount of time (i.e. you probably would turn up your nose at examples that ARE tractable as being too simple). On the other hand, quantum computers can sift extremely large combinatorial spaces in one shot, so that would make the O(k^n) into a O(n), which does make it trivial. And while very simple quantum computers have been built, I certainly don't own one.
Now you seem to be backtracking; perhaps seeking intellectual refuge in the wilderness of potential future engineering breakthroughs...
Don't be a twit. It isn't fantasy engineering, but just substantially fancier versions of existing capabilities. I'm not backtracking; what you take as backtracking is me dropping an argument that isn't going anywhere and trying to drag the argument back to a relevant point. I'm working a lot of hours these days (starting yet another new company) and don't have time to spend on this forum arguing facts that people aren't interested in hearing or even doing the most rudimentary research on.
Let me make this clear: not only were you WRONG to claim that such an exercise was trivial, but you were deceptive when you tried to extrapolate from that alleged triviality the false point that this was mathematically proven.
And this is exactly the kind of bullshit I don't have time for. Have you ever actually picked up a math text relevant to the subject we are talking about? It IS mathematically proven and a fundamental theorem that is used in a dozen different technical fields. The only reason I learned it was that it was a necessary mathematical foundation for work I do. You certainly won't find any mathematicians that will refute it. And it is simply laughable that you blithely confuse "infinite" with "finite but extremely large", which is something no one with any type of serious mathematics background would do. With all due respect, you clearly are not qualified to argue advanced topics of mathematics. You handle the evolution/ID argument pretty well but you are out of your league on the matter of the mathematics.
Stop twisting the argument. The hypothesis is that mutation/selection are adequate to cause speciation. Mutation exists and selection exists. These are verified premises. That mutation/selection causes speciation is purely hypothetical as we do not have any specific evidence of it happening even though there is nothing to suggest it is not possible. This hypothesis doesn't even demand that speciation IS caused by mutation/selection, only that it is a possible mechanism of many.
I've noticed in the last few responses to things I've written that you are having difficulty with reading comprehension. It would be a lot more fruitful if you actually addressed what I wrote rather than what you think I said.
This is a different way of saying the same thing as it applies to biology. "Natural selection" is actually about reproductive success and the termination of reproductive capability, which usually (though not always) means death in living organisms. "Death" may have been a poor bit of shorthand, but when I thought about it, what you wrote wasn't right either. I don't think anyone questions that there is variation in the level of reproductive success of individual organisms in a population.
It is because mutation and selection (in regards to speciation) are hypothetical that one must list them as individual degrees of freedom when working out an Occam's Razor problem for how speciation is achieved (i.e. via Evolution or Intelligent Design).
Post #194 does that. Please refer back to it.
"It is trivial to demonstrate the validity of the mathematics." - tortoise
Well, since you say that it is "trivial", you'll have no problem producing a demonstration of the mathematics for random noise creating a working version of Abode PhotoShop.
Trivial, indeed...
You said that producing this demonstration is "trivial". You claim that it doesn't require "fantasy engineering".
Please, show me an example of a useful software program self-forming in a random environment.
These are your claims, after all, and you do repeatedly claim that the demonstration is "trivial", so you'll have no trouble producing this demo, correct?!
You can say that again. It's too bad that many of either the religous or scientific persuation are so dogmatic that they are blind to the similarities of the philosophies.
I get a kick out of the "Creationists" vs. the "Evolutionists". What a phony issue -- there is nothing precluding a God from setting up an evolutionary mechanism to accomplish his creations (except perhaps a belief in the infallibility of men in writing, translating, editing, and interpreting a bible). In fact it would to be testiment to a greater (and comprehensible) God to fashion this mechanism. And it is clear induction that evolution is a real process that shapes phylogeny.
Ultimately, it may be that God is nothing at all -- the singularity that brought forth the whole universe! The all.
No, what you are citing is folklore, not science. Nobel Prize winner Illya Prigogine CONCLUSIVELY proved, back in 1987, that the very highest possible levels of order could NOT self-form in a chaotic system. There is a limit in every system as to the maximum level of order that can form naturally from chaos.
That's science. Folklore is that a million monkeys typing on a million keyboards for a million years will produce the collected works of Shakespeare. That's what you're trying to say when you claim that useful software programs can just form on their own in a computer if you leave it on long enough.
It is sufficient that we know such a process is possible, both for intelligent design and evolution. I've actually been intentionally ignoring the direction you are taking it because you won't like the results. For example, how do we verify this premised designer? By what process was the design accomplished? What were the physical mechanisms used for speciation by the hypothetical designer?
I can construct a very reasonable argument for the possibility of mutation/selection causing speciation without invoking anything that isn't trivially verifiable in chemistry and mathematics. Remember, the hypothesis is whether or not speciation is possible by these various mechanisms, not what actually CAUSED speciation. For the construction of a valid hypothesis we don't need to exhaustively test the outcome (and I am praying that the reason this is true doesn't have to be explained), but only construct a logical sequence from non-false premises. Note that "non-false" does not equal "true", though "true" is a subset of "non-false". All the "non-false, non-true" premises are what count against you in Occam's razor. The designer is a non-verified premise and therefore non-true, though it IS non-false and therefore an acceptable premise. Note that if man started doing serious gene engineering, man as the designer could be a valid hypothesis in some cases with a verifiable designer premise.
What, Man design something or use gene-splicing to program DNA?! Sshhhh... Don't give the game away just yet!
For science per se, yes, but not for Occam's Razor. Post #194 deals with Occam's Razor. Most of the rest do not.
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