Posted on 05/30/2002 7:40:53 AM PDT by Gladwin
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:34 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Two House Republicans are citing landmark education reform legislation in pressing for the adoption of a school science curriculum in their home state of Ohio that includes the teaching of an alternative to evolution.
In what both sides of the debate say is the first attempt of its kind, Reps. John A. Boehner and Steve Chabot have urged the Ohio Board of Education to consider the language in a conference report that accompanied the major education law enacted earlier this year.....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
LOL
You do realize that you're completely mad, don't you?
First off, we don't know what the processes are. The theory of evolution is descriptive -- it basically says organisms change over time, eventually giving rise to wholey different types of organisms. Secondly, chemicals in general and amino acids in particular occassionally evince a stronger tendency to hook up with certain other chemicals, making random combinations a moot point. Additionally, certain short chains of chemicals may form readily and concurrently and later be joined up in a longer chain, meaning that one does not need to go through sequential steps to arrive at the longer chain, as several of the preceding steps were done simultaneously (sort of like erecting a prefab house). Therefore calculating how long it would take to form 100 amino acids into a single protein is moot if such factors as those mentioned above are not taken into consideration.
I wholeheartedly agree.
But it will take a lot more for me to accept uncaused effects.
I could be just a stubborn old cuss, but there it is.
Shalom.
Statistics and information theory would show that DNA is almost certainly non-random. Whether or not it's information has to be teased out of what the non-randomness does. I don't think information theory is up to that.
It's nice of you to stick up for the gays, the commies, and the Nazis like that...
(Hee hee!)
I understand. It becomes quite a bit easier to accept after you meet Him.
Shalom.
That was my point. Just because the book is historically accurate does not prove the existence of a God. Floods happen all the time and people build houses and towns and boats all the time.
Overstated, pertaining to?
EBUCK
OK. That's what I thought SETI was all about, though.
Thanks for the info.
Shalom.
I don't see anybody but Christians pushing it. No, that's a bit too broad: I don't see anybody but American Christians pushing it. My religious German friends are clueless about it.
For example, I can know that my wife loves me, but I have no idea how I could prove it to not be true.
Dimensio:
It is currently accepted that human thought processes, including emotion, are a result of chemical reactions in the brain. If this is true, then while the technology for observing and quantifying those reactions does not yet exist, either the theoretical possiblity that those reactions could be measured exists (from which you could define what establishes "love" and test to determine its presence) -- or, it could be the case that human thought processes are something beyond any natural explanation (in which case it's outside the scope of science).
Hmm. I would have recommended that he leave a pair of panties under the front seat of his car. That should clear up any doubts.
This isn't correct, as you make a distinction that doesn't exist. "Randomness" is just a description of the entropy for a given datastream and tells you absolutely nothing about the subjective value of the information content of the datastream. What "randomness" tells you is the relationship between the size of the datastream and the information content it contains.
There is no mathematical distinction between subjectively interesting data and subjectively uninteresting data with the same information content. To do so would be analogous to asserting that Swahili is "random noise" because you don't understand Swahili. Information theory tells you how much information is there, not how to interpret it. It is a common fallacy to ascribe more value to a pattern that you recognize than one that you don't.
Entropy has no relation to apparent complexity, at least as "complexity" is used in normal jargon (it does have a relationship to Kolmogorov Complexity, but that is something else). Humans aren't particularly good at discerning if something is actually complex in an information theoretic sense or not, particularly since most people really aren't familiar with how mathematical complexity is actually measured. In an information theoretic sense, many things that appear "complex" to humans aren't if a rigorous evaluation of information content is actually made.
SETI's looking for a broadcast amounting to a conventional AM or FM radio signal. Those would be pretty easily distinguished from noise because they consist of a powerful signal over a very narrow range of radio frequencies having a much lower pattern impressed on them. There's no known natural phenomenon producing such.
Pulsars caused a stir in the early 1960's because they initially seemed to fit that pattern.
This defines God into a meaningless concept.
Is mathematics a "meaningless concept" also?
Again, numbers interact as they do based upon the laws of mathematics. The universe and all life therein interacts as it does based upon the laws of Life (God).
Science is used to perceive, understand and use these Laws to manifest life to its fullest. That has plenty of meaning for me.
Please see post 21
EBUCK
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