Posted on 01/20/2005 12:54:58 PM PST by Jay777
ANN ARBOR, MI — The small town of Dover, Pennsylvania today became the first school district in the nation to officially inform students of the theory of Intelligent Design, as an alternative to Darwin’s theory of Evolution. In what has been called a “measured step”, ninth grade biology students in the Dover Area School District were read a four-paragraph statement Tuesday morning explaining that Darwin’s theory is not a fact and continues to be tested. The statement continued, “Intelligent Design is an explanation of the origin of life that differs from Darwin’s view.” Since the late 1950s advances in biochemistry and microbiology, information that Darwin did not have in the 1850s, have revealed that the machine like complexity of living cells - the fundamental unit of life- possessing the ability to store, edit, and transmit and use information to regulate biological systems, suggests the theory of intelligent design as the best explanation for the origin of life and living cells.
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm representing the school district against an ACLU lawsuit, commented, “Biology students in this small town received perhaps the most balanced science education regarding Darwin’s theory of evolution than any other public school student in the nation. This is not a case of science versus religion, but science versus science, with credible scientists now determining that based upon scientific data, the theory of evolution cannot explain the complexity of living cells.”
“It is ironic that the ACLU after having worked so hard to prevent the suppression of Darwin’s theory in the Scopes trial, is now doing everything it can to suppress any effort to challenge it,” continued Thompson.
(Excerpt) Read more at thomasmore.org ...
I didn't twist it at all, you just picked a poorly thought out metaphor. You picked a metaphor that was perfect for my position but absolutely worthless for yours.
I've read what you wrote. I'm repeating myself because that is my position and nothing you've put forth has given me even the slightest reason to change it. Effectively you have posted not a word, at least not a word that had any ability to convince or persuade.
That's a fair statement, js1138; nonetheless I imagine the physical laws are not violated.
My claim was that evolutionists didn't start distancing themselves from abiogenesis until about 10 years ago, when it became clear that spontaneous generation of life was very unlikely.
In support I have put up three links each of which quotes famous evolutionists on abiogenesis which indicates that abiogenesis was indeed part of the evolutionary theory in the past.
Here's the list of articles older than 10-15 years that clearly distinquish evolution as being different from abiogenesis...
My claim was that evolutionist disclaimers of abiogenesis didn't exist. How do you prove something didn't exist? Y'all could easily disprove me by showing where those same evolutionists or even any other evolutionists prior to 10-15 years ago distanced themselves from abiogenesis or drew a clear distinction between the two. Instead y'all prefer to call me "intellectually dishonest" for not offering evidence that those disclaimers didn't exist. While none of you can offer anything to prove me wrong.
If yall want to separate it now that's ok. I don't think you have evidence for either one but the distancing is occuring because abiogenesis comes under stronger criticism.
Without abiogenesis the philosophical underpinnings of evolution fall away. It doesn't make sense to say everthing happened from strictly natural causes except for the origin of life. If you allow God or intelligent design or ET or anything else other than natural and random processes to generate the origin of life, then you might as well allow those same forces in the development of higher forms of life. I
2) The simplistic "Where successful communications occur in nature, there is life." is not helpful at all for the fringes where the difficulty arises. By this definition, prions are alive (they are pieces of protein) and self-organizing automata are alive.
Self-organizing complexity (aka cellular automata) is a mathematical model proposed by von Neumann which is applicable to a wide range of disciplines – much like the Shannon mathematical model for communications. Self-organizing complexity may be useful in describing how complexity arose in natural systems – living or non-living. It is also very handy for designing artificial intelligence. It is not however “alive” in our four dimensions if space/time – it is, simply put, a mathematical structure with a wide range of application - like various geometries.
Math and the physical world are images of one another. Wigner called this the “unreasonable effectiveness of math”. Max Tegmark's Level IV theory proposed that existents in four dimensional space/time are mathematical structures in parallel universes. "Why pi?" asks Barrow, etc. Most recently we have seen this unreasonable effectiveness in physical dualities and mirror images of string theory.
Stephen Wolfram was so taken back by the broad applicability of von Neumann’s theory, that he proposed A New Kind of Science based on it. And today, Kolmogorov complexity and algorithmic information theory is also causing a kind of sea change in our view of the physical world and abstractions thereof.
We ought never to be surprised when a mathematical theory fits the physical world hand-in-glove. A prime example is when Einstein needed to describe his theory of general relativity he was able to literally pull Riemannian geometry off-the-shelf. That particular application of his geometry was surely not the intention of the mathematician.
Likewise with Shannon’s mathematical theory of communications. It was not formulated to define life which occurs in nature. But it is amazingly effective in making a bright line distinction between life and non-life/death:
At the root, the biologist/chemist worldview is fundamentally different from a mathematician’s. The mathematician looks for structures. The absence of universality is a weakness in a model. In fact, to a mathematician, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Not so with the biologist whose theories can span geologic time frames with many absences of evidence.
Likewise, in looking at abiogenesis – the biologist/chemist focuses on the physical components – primordial soup v primordial pizza and the ilk. The mathematician, on the other hand, looks for the rise of information [Shannon, the successful communication itself], autonomy, semiosis and complexity.
And here, in looking for that which distinguishes life from non-life/death – when both consist of the same “stuff” – the biologist/chemist approach is characterization, the mathematician’s approach is mathematical structure. Hence, the difficulty in our making a “connection.” Perhaps we ought to quit trying?
Kewl.
Yup. Devastating argument.
They are intertwined by the fact that creationists and IDers cannot accept either.
In any case, it is presented as an opinion.
It is the verbal descriptions that are mistaken, not the "intuitive/learned" sense of trajectory. The behavior of baseball/frisbie catching humans and dogs is quite in tune with reality.
BB: That's a fair statement, js1138; nonetheless I imagine the physical laws are not violated.
JS: And electrons behave differently in a tunnel diode than they do in a wire of pure copper. Again, no physical laws are violated. (What does that mean, anyway? If physical laws appear to be violated, the laws are incorrectly formulated, by definition.)
Matter is neither alive nor dead. A physical object or structure can be alive or dead, just as a physical object can be a pile of rubble or a cell phone. It is not the physicalness that is important, but the structure.
Structures and assemblies can have properties that the constituent components do not have. Salt has properties that cannot be derived from the properties of chlorine and sodium.
For this reason, you cannot prove, from first principles or from statistics, that abiogenesis is impossible. You might be able to prove that a given hypothesis is faulty, but you can't derive all possible routes from the properties of known elements.
Science is a creative, and I daresay, iterative and evolutionary process. It proceeds through cycles of guesswork and testing. ID is one of those guesses. Unfortunately, it is the wrong kind of guess. Rather than guessing that something is possible and attempting to demonstrate the possibility, it guesses that something is impossible and engages in mathematical argumentation. You can't prove that something is impossible. You can only make repeated attempts and succeed or fail. In particular, you cannot prove from first principles, what the properties of a new complex organic compound will be. You cannot prove from first principles that chemical evolution cannot produce a replicator.
1... 2... 3...
Oh' that's right.... there are none!!! Can you prove me wrong?
If you go back 145 years to Darwin's Origin Of Species, you will find the first statement clearly distinguishing the origin of life via the creator, and subsequent evolution. Is that far enough back?
I'm 59, and I say your statement is a lie.
It seems that research is underway. I haven't studied this stuff, but it looks serious, and the author is for real:
The Artificial Self-Replication Page.
A google search on "Synthetic self-replicating molecules" is interesting.
It appears to me that self-replication occurs at a fairly low level in chemistry, almost as if nature were biased towards self-replication.
I don't know exactly what to make of that, but I would like to know exactly what the difference is between a universe in which a bias towards self-replication is "natural" and one in which it is exactly the same except "designed". I mean, after the moment of creation, what's the difference.
It means that when the salmon swims upstream to spawn, the cosmos rejoices.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.