Posted on 01/27/2009 6:59:07 AM PST by betty boop
Edited on 01/27/2009 7:16:52 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
But the wise know they are pretty stupid..
For the more you know, the more you know of things you don't know..
Generating humility..
For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.
Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.
Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned.
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him?
But we have the mind of Christ. - I Corinthians 2:6-16
Yeah.. {cough} I'm rich too...
Somebody (up there) loves me.. I guess..
Well said.
A shortcoming that some would do well to recognize.
Science, via technology, has made human life infinity more comfortable and saved many lives, but that's all it can do. The why's and wherefore's will forever be beyond the reach of science, no matter how hard they try.
*Religion* deals with the rest of life and human needs which is why I fail to see the need by scientists to disparage it and try to prove (in cases like Dawkins) that it is nonsense and control it.
Scientists are quick enough to complain when anyone tries to have religion influence science.
The prevailing scientific method is one based on the elimination of final causes. For example, see here. However, such a philosophic view is abnormal and contrary to human nature. People do talk the talk and insist that students be indoctrinated with such philosophy, but, like Pyrrho or Hume, they can't really believe it, and they don't, unless they are crazy. This artificial state of affairs can't really continue. There's only so much anti-human, anti-commonsense philosophy that people will swallow before barfing.
In regards to information and messages, it is interesting how the scholastic doctrine of "substance" suddenly reappears. A message of pure gibberish with high informational entropy has no "substance" to it. A compressed message that does have decodable meaning may be indistinguishable from gibberish formally or materially, but it has "substance" to it. The substance is real, though only the mind can detect it. And that is exactly the scholastic doctrine on substance (and probably Aristotle's too.)
betty wrote: The theory doesn’t require knowledge of the origin of biological life in order to study life as a changing process. In other words, the theory takes it for granted that life already exists; and then tells you how it “speciates” (changes over time, the source of biological novelty and diversity).
Spirited: There in a nutshell, is the ancient pagan(and modern) creation-mythos.
In their book, ‘The Hiram Key,’ evolutionary materialists Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas explain that ancient Egyptians, “believed that matter had always existed; to them it was illogical to think of a god making something out of absolutely nothing. Their view was that the world began when order came out of chaos, and that ever since there has been a battle between the forces of organization and disorder. (There was) a creative force within (chaos) that commanded order to begin. This latent power which was within the substance of the chaos did not know it existed; it was a probability...within the randomness of disorder.”
Paganism is like a coin whose two sides are materialism and pantheism, which itself subdivides into materialist-pantheism and idealistic-pantheism. The former is the pantheism of the Ionians and Stoics for example, while the latter is for example, Buddhist. All variants are types of animism (hylozoism), which speaks of an immanent life-force existing throughout nature. Pantheism generally (but not always) anthropomorphizes the force. Materialism on the other hand, is a more highly refined animism which most generally speaks of the life-force in terms of energy. The Egyptian Pharoah’s were materialists of this sort.
Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism and apocalyptic history are really nothing more than animism in disguise.
Hegel’s dialectics are also animism, but of the ideal variety.
Nietzsche was also an animist of the ideal variant.
Darwinism is also animism, but disguised as ‘science.’ The ineffable forces within Chance, Natural Selection, and Probability are examples of animism (hylozoism).
The evolutionary materialist must denounce the spiritual attributes of mind, reason, and conscience because hylozoism states that these properties belong to dialectical matter.
Modernitys’ Pied Piper, Evolutionary Humanism, entranced its followers with impossible visions of something new and better. It called this wonderful vision Progress. But Truth reveals the ugly lie: Progress, as it turns out, really means regress-—a turning back to paganism and its superstitions.
Here, you'll find this interesting:
Haeckel and Natural-Scientific Materialism , V. I. Lenin.
Religion must carry a Yarn.. which is the cartoon of Cargo worship.. Literally all religion is some form of animism.. Judaism(in the bible) has thoughly proved religion does not work.. Buddhism/Hinduism adds to the experiment.. and natural materialism completes the circle..
Fortunately Jesus came to make ALL religion obsolete, AND DID. (ex: John ch 10, Rom 8)
Jesus however did preach evolution.. He said, "You MUST be born again"..
If you are not born again then you are living a cartoon that is animistic in nature..
Humans must evolve metaphorically maybe even literally..
Animism mocks God with Satans gospel.. "Eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and you will be like God".. (Gen ch 1-4).. The source of all religion..
Jeepers, but the author is a devoted acolyte of Darwin - beginning the second essay with his profession of faith that the theory of evolution is a physical law above the physical "laws" of Newton, i.e. that gravity is merely an "agent" of evolution. Talk about a horse/cart error and zero consideration of geometric physics - though he could be excused because relativity may not have been in currency in his day.
He is quite the story teller - then again historical sciences are story telling, e.g. archeology, anthropology, Egyptology. Indeed, scientific theories are stories - ditto for political ideology, etc.
Sir Karl Popper famously criticized Marx and Freud because their theories were unfalsifiable. And I suspect the same should be said of many if not most story tellers. But one day science, technology and reality (both physical and most importantly, Spiritual) will catch up with their spin.
In this case for instance, Osborn bets the abiogenesis farm on energy. And in the 1950's Urey/Miller went down that path simulating lightning strikes. They had some success in creating amino acids that way but their experiments went no further.
About the same time, Crick/Watson discovered DNA - the message of living biological organisms - but neither they nor Urey/Miller understood the full import to molecular biology of information theory, founded on Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications (1948.)
Although "information theory and molecular biology" has been used successfully in both cancer and pharmaceutical research - it wasn't evidenced until the Wimmer experiment in approximately 2002 (bootstrapping polio from a message, e.g. off the internet) the relevance of information (successful communication) to any theory of abiogenesis.
And on this thread, Szostak is touted as being on the leading edge of abiogenesis experiments. And what is his focus but the same "information theory and molecular biology."
We are interested in applying directed evolution to nonstandard nucleic acids, as a way of asking whether life could have evolved using genetic polymers other than RNA. TNA (threose nucleic acid) is a particularly interesting nucleic acid synthesized by Albert Eschenmoser's group (Scripps Research Institute) in a search for possible progenitors of RNA. The sugar-phosphate backbone of TNA uses the four-carbon sugar threose, which might have been easier to come by prebiotically than the ribose of RNA. Despite the one-atom-shorter sugar-phosphate backbone repeat unit, TNA oligonucleotides can base-pair with themselves and with RNA and DNA. We have recently devised an approach to the enzymatic synthesis of TNA libraries, and experiments aimed at the in vitro evolution of TNA aptamers and catalysts are in progress.
And of course the origin of (biological) life is directly hinged to that question - and requires an origin for autonomy and semiosis (language) as well because the message in information theory requires both sender and receiver as well as encoding and decoding. And in the theoretical prebiotic "soup" without autonomy, the message is a broadcast and the soup remains a soup.
Evidently, Szostak is aware of this and trying to address these points at once in his experiments:
Szostak's model will eventually have to come to terms with this need to gather (non-autonomous) messages while not losing the ability to toggle back to being autonomous.
And here:
Obviously, Osborn's story is obsolete. And Szostak's story may end up becoming obsolete as well.
But that's what science does: a theory is a story which only has value to the extent it is falsifiable (Popper.)
The more a theory (e.g. relativity) survives attempts to falsify it, the more confidence we can have in the theory. But to the author of the articles you linked, the theory rarely is elevated to the status of a physical law (e.g. the second law of thermodynamics.) Though indeed, in some disciplines - particularly historical disciplines like evolution biology - the theory is elevated (wrongly in my view) to the status of a paradigm. For them, it may as well be "holy writ."
[[Indeed, the remarks regarding homochirality in his article strongly suggest that such molecules are already “prepped” in a special way for life.]]
The origins of life macroevolutionists will deny this, claiming it still ‘could have happened’ by chance (and we;ll get soem long-winded drawn out ‘explanation’ of how al lthe right elements ‘could have’ aligned themselves and seperated themselves from the wrong types, so that nature could ‘do it’s magic’
Of course, we’ll not get an ‘explanation’ as to how these molecules were purified before they miraculously aligned themselves, and seperated themselves before the whole ‘natural process’ began
[[Yet this does not appear to affect the teleological status of meta-information: Because it points to purposes, goals, in nature, we can speak of it as meaningful.]]
I can appreciate scientists wishing to opine strictly with scientific responses, but my goodness- when enough information points to intent, design, and intelligent assembly, it simply becomes silly trying to further the arguement on a purely scientific/Naturalistic level.
For instance, if I and several peopel were to uncover 1000 intricately carved urns which had symbols and wording on them in a consistent maner fro mvase to vase, two lines of forensic hypothesising could be taken- one natural including causation, the other intelligent causation.
I could argue that naturem given enough time, ‘could have’ formed these urns in a purely natural manner- making hte case for just one urn- I could hsow that tremendous winds worked the clay into hollowed out vessels, while at hte same time the clay was rolling around, it somehow managed to result in ‘primitive’ symbols markings, and that bird droppings hitting hte vessels, resulted in ‘primitive’ look-alike symbols on the outside of the urn. I could then argue that a cataclysmic heating event solified the clay, and the result was a ‘proto urn’. I could point to events in nature that ‘under hte right circumstances’ produce ‘similiar looking’ hollowed out vessels of clay, and clai mthat since lower levels of ‘information and ‘assembly’ exist, then it can’t be argued that hogher levels of informaiton and examples of IC in 1000 uncovered urns are infact IC.
However, since there is an abundance of ID and IC invovled in the 1000 urns, it would be silly to try to argue that nature did all this by some uncontrolled forces of nature, so we MUST then argue both the scientific evidence AND the implications, just as forensic science must argue for intelligent causation vs unintelligent causation when examining a crime scene or scene of investigation.
Of course we’re not talking static objects, but dynamic living systems which are subject to manipulation via mutaitons, however, once again, it all breaks down into the base points of informaiton, and whether this can arise naturally, and if not, then there is only one other alternative, intelligent causation- so again, it is not a case of ‘going beyond science’ to argue intelligent causation, but rather it is a mandatory arguement for intelligent causation when there is enough evidence to suggest this, and I beleive the evidence of informaiton, especially metainformation, is a very strong arguemtn for hte need for intelligent causation, and should NOT be excluded, and that doing so would infact be as unscientific as my argument that the 1000 clay urns must be naturally caused. Arguing from a purely naturalistic viewpoint in such matters renders the arguement, in the face of overwhelming evidnece to the contrary, unscientific. It makes such arguemtns pure apologetics.
[[Here he is trying to simulate the spontaneous rise of an undirected, meaningless pre-cursor “message” in lieu of a coherent message fragment, i.e. the RNA. And to affect the message, Szostak proposes the spontaneous rise of autonomy in montmorillonite clay.]]
This is al lwell and good, but once this low level informaiton arises- He is not going to be able to demonstrate higher level metainformation arising in the clay- he can’t. There simply is not a source for the higher level metainfo available to the lower level in nature- He’ll have to make hte arguement that htis higher level metainfo is somehow capable of arising from this lower level info over billions of years as it supposedly progressed via mistakes and as this lower level somehow managed to beat all the odds and impossibilities and law breaking processes while it was locked away in it’s clay coccoon.
Here again is just another attempt to take pre-existing ID/IC already established, and deconstructing it, and inventing intelligently designed ‘natural processes’ that defy natural, biological, mathematical and chemical laws, and claiming that since ‘lower levels of assembly exist, then higher levels can’t be argued as IC’. Of course they won’t be able to show that any of hteir intelligently designed, carefully controlled, and carefully directed ‘natural processes’ ever occured in nature, but they’ll be quick to attack IC in this manner when they invent their intelligently designed, natural law violating process of simple construciton of lower level info assembly.
If you are not born again then you are living a cartoon that is animistic in nature.. Humans must evolve metaphorically maybe even literally..
I could argue that naturem given enough time, ‘could have’ formed these urns in a purely natural manner-
Thank you for sharing your insights, dear CottShop!
Nevertheless, we know that even though a particular event may have been feasible it doesn't mean that it actually happened. For Elizabeth Taylor to have forsaken her beauty, wealth and career and have fallen in love with hosepipe may have been feasible, but it didn't happen. Isn't that right, hosepipe?
The big question is whether others would be influenced by the true believer's "spin" on whatever he accomplishes (if he does.)
Like Wimmer, he begins with a message albeit a tiny fragment. So he stacks the deck in his favor. I find his work interesting but not illuminating and nowhere near as significant as Crick/Watson or Wimmer.
As they say, the proof is in the pudding - or in his case, the montmorillonite clay. For if the phenomenon was widespread enough in montmorillonite clay in a prebiotic world to bootstrap life from non-life in sufficient numbers to account for what we see in the time frame involved - it should be there still today.
Even so, as you suggest, he doesn't lay a glove on inversely causal information (successful communication) in biological life - or temporal non-locality (as I prefer to call the phenomenon.)
For newly arriving lurkers, the term refers to the organism becoming informed of something that hasn't happened yet, e.g. the need to do maintenance or repair.
LoL... True.. its true Taylor when young was serious eye candy.. If she would have shown me the slightest attention it would have scared me to death.. I fantasize about Ann Coulter(I'm a sinner) these days.. but living with her would/could be a kind of HELL.. God forbid you make her mad.. She would verbally slice and dice you.. and worse tell you the truth..
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