Posted on 05/25/2005 3:41:22 AM PDT by billorites
I'm content to allow non-randomness explanations (as speculative possibilities) from whatever source, philosophy, science, etc. It just seems clear to me that the randomness piece of evolution makes it untenable. I'm content with the evaluation that the current evolutionary understanding is inadequate.
I know the direction to search is away from randomness-infected evolutionary theory. The best guesses lie in some non-randomness direction.
ID is promising in that it is a non-randomness direction. Add to my faith honest research and I'm content.
Hey, I got posts #1900 and 2000. One more and I
have a monopoly, and I can build a motel.
Do you understand the distinction between random with a continuous distribution, and random with a gaussian distribution?
Good luck chasing mirages in the shadows!
The textbook example you linked to had qualifiers.
Translation: We are quacks and frauds like Uri Geller, and our phenomenon is non-existent in double blind studies.
Sheldrake is another quack who's data goes south when his experiments are done with controls.
No, it's been a while since I've studied distribution of any kind.....stat & research classes at KSU in 95. The Gaussian rings a bell.....curve???? :>)
Ed, when I offer an opinion you can consider it right or wrong. That's up to you. Calling me a creationist liar proves nothing except perhaps that you are limited in your ability to intellectually oppose my opinion so you resort to what you guys call ad hominem argumentum. I think that's what you call it at any rate.
Richard Dawkins: “Society, for no reason that I can discern, accepts that parents must have an automatic right to bring their children up with particular religious opinions and can withdraw them from say, biology classes that teach evolution.”
If you think that is the writing of a man in favor of religious liberty, you're whacked. But perhaps you should ask Dawkins if his evil twin wrote it?
I understand that most of the translation work is done. The remaining work is to match fragment xyz to Biblical text abc or to Talmudic commentary 123 -- or is this piece of parchment something new?
The current theory, as I understand it, is the Essenes copied a minor portion by themselves, maybe 10-25%, but the rest were scripts written outside the community. One conjecture is that they believed they were already in the "end-times" and had been copying and burying scrolls for years The 66-72 Jewish revolt may have forced them to speed it up and accept outside texts.
... Also, fragments of every Biblical book except Esther have been found, as well as many other non-Biblical texts.
The wining and dining and seducing the King like in Esther probably wouldn't have appealed to them. But the Jews didn't have a "accepted" canon back then.
... as well as in the coming of the prophesied Messiah, whose kingdom they foresaw as drawing close to earth, which is exactly what Jesus claimed.
Orthodox Jews were expecting a strong triumphant King that would redeem the Jewish nation en masse. Jesus was clearly not the Messiah as the Jews understood him to be.
I am saddened when bright people fall for quackery. Conan Doyle was taken in by a couple of teenage girls and their pictures of garden fairies. The psychologist William James was sucked in by a medium, whom he labeled the white crow.
In my lifetime I have seen large numbers of people taken in by plants with feeings, pyramid power, Atlantis in beach stone, and a dozen others.
I always associated this with left wing, new age hippie thinking, but I will have to re-evaluate this.
It indicates that Euclid was intelligent. (Or whoever invented the algorithm.) Not all fields have an Euclidean algorithm.
This has experimental consequences. So far, all the experimental evidence comes down on the side of randomess.
From a previously posted example: in a bunch of radioactive atoms, some decay, some sit around. The half-life for decay can be measured as can the probability of any given atom decaying in given time interval. In both theory and practice, it cannot be determined which atom will decay next nor when a given atom will decay. Were such a determination possible, one could separate the "hot" from the "cold" atoms and label each atom by it's scheduled decay time. Labelled atoms obey Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics whereas unlabelled one obey either Fermi-Dirac or Bose-Einstein statistic. Experimentally only the FD or BE have been observed.
And yet Israel exists.
"I recently met in Jerusalem with Professor Leon Lederman, Nobel Prize winning physicist. We were talking science, obviously. And as the conversation went on, I said, "What about spirituality, Leon?" And he said to me, "Schroeder, I'll talk science with you, but as far as spirituality, speak to the people across the street, the theologians." But then he continued, and he said, "But I do find something spooky about the people of Israel coming back to the Land of Israel."" Gerald Schroeder
God works in mysterious ways. :-}
Technically, a Gaussian distribution is continuous. Did you mean Gaussian versus uniform?
Yes, it did, but it only had one suggestion that hardly bespeaks the utter lack of certitude involved in suggesting abiogenesis.
Well, I hope you're happy!
No.
Conjecture: inference based on inconclusive or incomplete evidence; guesswork.
Theory: Systematically organized knowledge applicable in a relatively wide variety of circumstances; especially, a system of assumptions, accepted principles, and rules of procedure devised to analyze predict, or otherwise explain the nature or behavior of a specified set of phenomena
Both definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary, Collegiate edition, 1976.
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