Evolution debate: State board should reject pseudoscience

Columbus Dispatch ^ | February 17, 2002 | Editorial

[aMorePerfectUnion]

From the title, I assumed the State Board was supposed to reject evolution...

AMPU

[VadeRetro]

Einstein hoped that underneath the Heisenberg principle there was still real determinism lurking. You'd never be able to get to it, but he hoped/assumed that, say, an electron still had a real, finite position with real momentum, etc.

He was wrong. In the absence of a definite interaction, the electron is like a little wave. It can go down two tunnels at once as a wavefront and make interference patterns with itself coming out both tunnel ends. Or, you can detect which way the electron goes, and the interference patterns vanish.

The experiment is usually done with photons, but Feynman discussed an electron version in his lecture series. Anyway, the un-collapsed wave function is like Schrödinger's alive/dead cat. It's as indeterminate as you can get.

[AndrewC]

If only evolution researchers shared your intuition!

Isn't Shapiro an "evolution researcher"?

[Nebullis]

What I am left with after this conversation, is that you accept evolution as the evidence supports it. Yet, you argue against the side which presents this evidence instead of the side which denies it. I'm left wondering if you really know what you believe, or if you simply know what doesn't feel good, emotionally.

[AndrewC]

In that sense, there is no such thing as random in evolution

I'm glad we agree. I never put up the straw man. "Random" mutation is mentioned by Darwinians.

[Nebullis]

Isn't Shapiro an "evolution researcher"?

Not primarily, but he certainly has an interest in it. He shares your desire to eliminate the indeterminate.

[VadeRetro]

Now you're gonna get it. But most of us wind up saying something like that sooner or later.

[PatrickHenry]

In the absence of a definite interaction, the electron is like a little wave. It can go down two tunnels at once as a wavefront and make interference patterns with itself coming out both tunnel ends. Or, you can detect which way the electron goes, and the interference patterns vanish.

I've never liked QM. I haven't studied enough to denounce it, and I suppose that would be wildly foolish, given all the experimental evidence. But I just don't like it. So I ignore it. I am grateful that QM also ignores me. Sort of a stand-off.

[VadeRetro]

I've never liked QM.

It's so counter-intuitive as to be appalling. When I first heard about the "particle" going both ways as a wave unless you "measured," it actually upset me. But that's really how the little buggers act.

I like it now for the jaw-dropping moments of disbelief it induces. (Well, I like reading dumbed-down articles about it.) In a way, it's too bad the macro world doesn't behave like that.

[PatrickHenry]

It's [QM] so counter-intuitive as to be appalling.

Well, to be quantum-mechanically correct, I both like QM and dislike it, at the same time. I never know which until I stop to think about it. But then I forget what I was thinking about, so it all works out.

[PatrickHenry]

Hey, I got post #888. I wonder if this thread will get to 1,000? That would be a first for a crevo thread.

[Nebullis]

Please don't wax mystical!

[AndrewC]

What I am left with after this conversation, is that you accept evolution as the evidence supports it.

Yes, when the evidence supports it, not supposition and most of what I see is supposition. I have made it known long ago that I am not a literalist when it comes to the Bible. The words of the Bible are much more figurative than literal. Jesus taught in parables. The mysteries were explained in allegory. So on. I do not expect to come upon any talking serpents in my excursions through the forest. Nor do I expect to find the pillars about which Hanna prayed. But I have no doubt that God created all or of his infinite nature. And as I also related before, I conjecture-- If God can be proven we have no free will.

[VadeRetro]

Yeah, but the old-style threads couldn't get this big. Kind of like modern rushing records compared against Jim Brown's 14-game wonder in 1963.

OK, so no thread I ever started totalled more than 2 or 3 hundred. (Grumble, grumble!)

[Nebullis]

OK, so no thread I ever started totalled more than 2 or 3 hundred.

But there were endless CONTINUATION threads.

[VadeRetro]

Now, now! They only SEEMED endless!

[Nebullis]

Yes, when the evidence supports it, not supposition and most of what I see is supposition.

I see you arguing inconsequential details, not major suppositions.

When you allow God the use of natural processes you've already fudged on the literal occasion for a redeemer and it doesn't matter anymore how life started or how it evolved.

[stryker]

I can't believe this argument is going on again. Even Darwin didn't believe Darwin. Johnson put the classical theory of evolution through survival of the fittest to death in his classic, "Darwin on Trial." The Darwinist now starts from a preconceived notion just as idiotic as the creationist. An entire new theory is needed to explain the great leaps in development in the complexity of organisms in the very short time once life appeared. As for creationists, they cannot even read the Bible correctly, which clearly states that God is recreating a previously destroyed world, and which notes further in the writing of the prophets that a populated world had existed even prior to the one destroyed. In total, counting then the flood, there are three destructions, leaving Noah and his sons and daughters as the seed of modern Man. Hence, the fossil record is in no conflict with the Bible, which even speaks of a time when giants roamed the land. Dumb Christians, dumb scientists, makes a dull boy.

[AndrewC]

not major suppositions.

Since when is a major supposition not a supposition.

[AndrewC]

When you allow God the use of natural processes you've already fudged on the literal occasion for a redeemer and it doesn't matter anymore how life started or how it evolved.

So you're saying I must claim God supernaturally interferes in every birth in order for each person to have a soul. Nonsense.