For instance, you can say, “And I say evolution is only a theory,” and the only consequences you might face are the risks of being elected to high political position as a Republican.
Alas, stupidity isn’t always this lethal
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Paul wrote:
“you can say, “And I say evolution is only a theory,”
I see that you still don’t understand the difference between a theory and a law. A theory is a mechanism that explains a law. While the law of gravity is well confirmed, there is no underlying theory that adequately explains that law.
Similarly with evolution. While it is a fact that evolution has occurred, there is no underlying theory (or mechanism) that adequately explains what we see.
When you use the term “evolution, you fail to distinguish between the fact of evolution and the mechanism. This is disingenuous and clearly unacceptable from a Professor of biology.
It’s called “General Relativity”.
On my holiday reading list:
Charlie Wagner Explains Science
Ann Coulter on Truth and Decency
Michael Richards on Interracial Harmony
and
Phyllis Diller’s Big Book of Beauty Secrets
ROFL. This is too cute. superb.
Zeno wrote:
“Charlie Wagner Explains Science”
How about “Zeno Explains Mathematics”.
Start by telling me if mathematics was invented or discovered.
Or, to look at it another way: Is there mathematics on Mars?
Geez, Charlie, I explain math every day. That’s my job. Why not give me a tough question? The answer is yes, there is math on Mars. Ask the guys and gals at JPL, who use math on a daily basis to navigate the Mars rovers — geometry works on the red planet (even though Euclid has not yet been spotted there).
“Start by telling me if mathematics was invented or discovered.
Or, to look at it another way: Is there mathematics on Mars?”
Invented. Mathematics is entirely a human invention. So there is only mathematics on Mars if there are people there. However, intelligent alien species, if they exist, may have invented the same or very similar mathematics.
I think you’re confusing mathematics and mathematical models of real world things and events. The models are created using mathematics and they are a handy way to describe real things but mathematics has no physical content. So you cannot “discover” mathematics in the same way you can discover water on Mars.
Says the person posting a message, on the Internet, with an electronic computer.
Oi!
Oh, good, let’s just fill this whole thread with eminently useful and deeply wise questions like ‘is there biology in an earthworm?’ ‘Is there astronomy in Andromeda?’ ‘Is there cooking in a buttermilk pie?’
If you want to blog about something interesting, Zeno, I suggest the history of the symbols used in differential calculus.
Why not tell Charlie Wagner to blog about something interesting? He’s the IDist trying to lecture PZ about science.
But you’re right about the symbols used in differential calculus (and integral calculus, too). Leibniz did such a good job of devising his symbology that many people can solve calculus problems by fairly mindless symbol manipulation. As a teacher, I’m not always sure that’s a good thing (esp. when it comes to trying to persuade students that the fundamental theorem of calculus is an important result when it seems obvious because it’s embedded in Leibniz’s integral notation).
A blog post on this topic would offer some interesting challenges because of the difficulties inherent in displaying math notation on-line, but perhaps worth the trouble. Florian Cajori has the definitive compilation of calculus notation in his two volumes on the history of math notation. Fascinating reading.
P.S.: Wait a minute. Damn… Is it possible that Llewelly was kidding?
How about:
Zeno Feeds the Trolls ;-)
Charlie Wagner Gets Added to Killfile
Charlie Wagner has been roaming the internet for years (unless I’ve mistaken him for someone else), and I don’t think he’s ever written anything interesting, aside from some unintentionally humorous screeds.
I was serious in the sense that the history of the symbols used in differential calculus is quite interesting (what little I know of it, that is), and in the sense that I believe you (Zeno) could write an interesting article on it. but I was trying to humorously point out that Charlie Wagner’s sort of questions all too often result in a thread full of boring drek.
charlie wagner:
The mechanism you’re looking for is called “natural selection”. You might have heard of it.
Zeno wrote:
“The answer is yes, there is math on Mars. Ask the guys and gals at JPL, who use math on a daily basis to navigate the Mars rovers –”
You missed my point. Let me put it another way: In 1950 was there mathematics on Mars?
Stupidity is still dangerous.
“Some Fond du Lac parents have asked school officials to remove former U.S. poet laureate Maya Angelou’s autobiography from the high school curriculum.
Students at Fond du Lac High School read “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” in sophomore advanced English classes.
But some parents have objected to passages that describe Angelou’s rape and subsequent unwanted pregnancy. About 80 people attended a meeting at the school this week to discuss the book and the request to remove it.”
http://wfrv.com/topstories/local_story_328095450.html
If you haven’t read this book, you should–as well as subsequent Angelou books.
Let’s hope that one dumbass pair of parents won’t be able to censor.
“…the only consequences you might face are the risks of being elected to high political position as a Republican.”
A fate worse than death.
“…the only consequences you might face are the risks of being elected to high political position as a Republican.”
The only problem is that there are too many people who are willing to take that risk.
Ah, irony.
You obviously intend to pull some sort of intellectual sleight-of-mind here, so you may as well go ahead and do it.
Here, I’ll help:
In the sense that the consistent, logical rules of mathematics are universal, then yes, mathematics existed on Mars in 1950, as they do everywhere and everywhen.
OK, go ahead and spring your diabolical mental trap, with which to catch my poor brains in its teeth.
(Damn you, Socrates, and your irresistible method!)
Llewelly, I believe that he’s probably the same guy. I seem to recall him trolling the CompuServe Science Forum many years ago when I had an account on that service. He recently dropped one of his favorite phrases (something about evolution being “an unfolding algorithm”) from that time on one of these blogs (possibly this one) which let me confirm that he was who I thought he was. Yep, still annoying.
Heather wrote:
“I believe that he’s probably the same guy. I seem to recall him trolling the CompuServe Science Forum many years ago when I had an account on that service.”
I am the same guy. But I’m not a “troll”.
A troll is someone who posts controversial or provocative messages in a deliberate attempt to provoke flames. While I have been known to post controversial and provocative messages, I have never done it with the intention of provoking flames.
This is a message I posted in that forum more than 10 years ago:
“You go on and on and on, for page after page, telling me how wrong I am, and how tolerant you have been, and how polite everyone is, and how you ALL told me, and how I fell down, or stepped in it, or have egg on my face and why I don’t get any respect and how I have IGNORED your questions and how forgetful I am, and how deficient I am in knowledge and how unequipped I am to handle it, and what I said that I didn’t say, and how I mutilate quotes and make invalid statements and how I treat people to wild claims, utter non- sequitors, and how I omit answers and how I quote out of context, all the while, amusing Susan no end and earning the respect of all the learned members of the forum with your incisive wit and devastating logic. But there’s only one thing you’ve never done. You’ve never said anything to defend your theory of evolution. You’ve never answered any of my arguments with anything approaching a defense and you’ve totally ignored my questions. If we had an impartial jury, I’d have won this debate 6 months ago.”
Change that last sentence to “13 years ago”. Apparently, nothing has changed. It’s just as true today as it was in 1994.
Well, Chuckster, I wasn’t on that forum 13 years ago, so I’m not sure what you said, but how exactly does mathematics disprove evolution (I’m still trying to puzzle that one out)? Did you give evidence that the Creation happened and that the Earth is 6000 years old? Did you give evidence that radiocarbon dating, et al, is not a valid scientific technique? Did you give evidence that Charles Lyell was wrong? Did you give evidence that the DNA of humans and chimpanzees aren’t remarkably similar?
Did you give evidence that God exists? I await with bated breath!
Sometimes a troll is the last to know he’s a troll.
There are also math screw-ups – or at least the physical evidence of math screw-ups – on Mars. Just ask the folks at JPL who watched one of their Mars probes crash because one team of designers used English units and the other used metric, and the thing got completely confoozled.
IMO: Math was discovered. Ways to codify it were invented. 15 is 15 whether you write it “111111111111111,” “XV,” “15,” “1111,” “two hands plus one foot,” “SQRT(225),” or “1.5*10^1.”
charlie wagner fulminates:
And your point? If crying half a screenfull of “foul” (never mind resurrecting that half-screenfull of “foul” from 13 years ago; that’s just adding egregiously bad form to the mix) isn’t just about the last refuge of the out-debated and desperate, I don’t know what is.
More fulminations straight from the horse’s mouth at Big Bang? Hah!:
Hmmmmmmmm………. is there a word for the astrophysical equivalent of an ID’er?
And sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but 90+% of all science is based on deductive reasoning. There may be a temporary inductive leap or hypothesis here and there, but you can be damned sure that
[1] the scientist(s) in question is/are quick to point out that “this is our current hypothesis; we suspect this is what may be happening, but we still have a lot of questions about such-and-such, and among those questions are [whatever they may be], so further work is needed,”
[2] they’re busting their butts trying to answer those questions, and
[3] the ones who are going to take them down if their hypotheses turn out to be crap are their professional peers, not outsiders taking incompletely-informed potshots at them.
Yes, newer theories may very well take the place of the current ones. It’s been happening for millenia. That’s the way science works. But merely pitching fits against the current ones is pointless, especially when it’s based on faulty and/or long-outdated assumptions. If you want to knock down someone’s theory, come up with a better one and be ready to show
[1] how you derived it; and
[2] the evidence to back it up (hint: you won’t find it in the Bible; even this Baptist preacher’s kid knows that…..sorry, just couldn’t resist that one).
(As for faulty and outdated assumptions, here’s one from your Big Bang page: “One of the basic assumptions of the big bang theory is that the universe is smooth and homogeneous on the largest scales.” Hah yourself. I don’t know of any reputable astrophysicist who assumes that any more. Ever hear of quantum foam? It’s no secret. Even general science mags like Discover and Scientific American have been talking about it for quite a while.)
If I haven’t pissed you off beyond all recall, I wonder if you’d answer a couple of questions. Exactly what is it that you’ve been teaching for 33 years? And why does the header on your site say, “here begins Homo ignoramus”?
‘Nuff said. (=ducking into bunker=) Now, where did I put that asbestos suit?
OMG……….his website even quotes bleeping VELIKOVSKY!!!!!!!!!! (Yuck! I just said the V Word! Excuse me while I go wash my keyboard with disinfectant.)
That explains a lot……….. Off with his vowels! Off with his vowels!
Sorry, I know that 3 posts in a row is extremely bad form. But I just couldn’t help myself – the man does such a wonderful job of setting himself up!
G’nite, all.
And why not? No prophet of kookdom has yet been more gloriously wrong.
(to paraphrase a noted scientist.)
This topic comes up regularly when you mix mathematicians with beer.
I’ve come across good arguments for both sides, but I’m starting to see it as a false dichotomy. The definitions and axioms used in mathematics are invented, but the theorems that follow are discovered. However, many of the axioms reflect what we see in reality (such as the axioms of the real numbers), so in some sense they are simply models of the real world. Definitions could be altered, with different theorems resulting, but the content would likely be equivalent.
Who the heck saves comments from 13 years ago?
JackGoff wrote:
“how exactly does mathematics disprove evolution (I’m still trying to puzzle that one out)?”
Read Sir Fred Hoyle’s “Mathematics of Evolution”. He says it so much better than I could.
anomalous4 wrote:
“And sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but 90+% of all science is based on deductive reasoning.”
With all due respect, the inductive method of investigation has been used since the 15th century and has been so successful that it has become synonymous with the scientific method. Aristotle used deductive reasoning, which led to many faulty conclusions. Galileo and Francis Bacon understood that while deductive reasoning was appropriate in the mathematical realm, this could not be carried over into investigations of nature.
In the deductive method, you start with few “true” statements and from those “axioms” you deduce many other “true” statements that logically follow from them. The inductive method starts with observations, which are the authority and from those observations draws general conclusions. However, unlike mathematics, in science nothing is ever “proven”. The best we can hope for is to be able to say what is most likely.
While there is a deductive component in scientific reasoning (making predictions based on general theories and laws), these general principles are not axioms and they are subject to modification when new observations contradict them.
“I can’t explain it, but someone who does understand it once wrote a book, go read that while I continue to not answer questions.”
The guy who invented the “747 from a tornado in a junkyard” argument has just about ZERO credibility on the matter of the mathematics of evolution.
Anomalous4 wrote:
“If I haven’t pissed you off beyond all recall,”
Not to worry. I don’t take anything personal.
I was a teacher of High School Physics and Chemistry before I retired in 2000.
The quote “Here begins homo ignoramus” is from “World’s in Collision” by Velikovsky. While I disagree with Velikovsky on many of his conclusions, the first few pages of WIC are right on. Click on the box to the right and read the whole thing.
Ah! Paul has decided to come out to play. ;-)
Y’know, the truly tragic thing about trolls is that most of them would have given up and packed it in long ago if people hadn’t kept responding to them.
(hint, hint) (nudge, nudge) (wink, wink)
IMO: Math was discovered. Ways to codify it were invented. 15 is 15 whether you write it “111111111111111,” “XV,” “15,” “1111,” “two hands plus one foot,” “SQRT(225),” or “1.5*10^1.”
Ok, my turn.
IMHO: Math was invented. Yes, 15 is 15 no matter how you write it, however, 15 is just our concept of a way to account for 15 items (real or not). Sure, those 15 items would still be 15 items on mars, and I am quite sure if there are other creatures in the universe at a stage of development where there interaction required any form of accounting (3 bleems are worth 1 zgrap), they would also require development of math. Trees could not care how many leaves they drop on the ground, but I do when it is my front yard (17 buckets on my compost heap). Humans need math to be able to convey ideas to other humans. Dogs do not know the difference between $100 or $1000, but I sure do, because I need to. Dogs only need to comunicate basic information (hungry, out, anger, happy, mine). Cats do not need to know the difference between 1 mile and 100 miles, but if I am going for a walk, I need a concept of numbers, which just leads to math.
Just because the concepts hold true anywhere (and any time) does not mean math was discovered. It just fits being able to understand the real world with numbers.
Dave
PS: I actually measure my walking distances with time (Z).
Sir Fred Hoyle’s credentials as a mathematician are sometimes disparaged because he was an astronomer, but he began his academic career as a prize-winning math student. Being good at math, however, merely means that one’s derivations and calculations are likely to be correct: it does not at all mean that you have the credentials to carry out successful calculations in other fields. Hoyle’s probability calculations are perfectly straightforward and unexceptional, but his assumptions are based on pure randomness. The role of randomness in evolution is often exaggerated, but atoms and molecules and proteins, etc., can combine in only a certain (though large) number of ways — and a “successful” outcome need not be unique. Furthermore, evolution is incremental — not shazam! in a junkyard. Hoyle’s valid calculations are only as good as his underlying assumptions, and they’re wrong.
Oh, is it already charlie wagner time again? One can base a calender on his periodic drive throughs.
For those who doesn’t know wagner, there are some easily recognized characteristics:
” – EVERYBODY expects the Wagnerian Inquisition!
Our chief weapon is repetition… repetition and dullness… dullness and repetition…
Our two weapons are dullness and repetition… and ruthless inefficiency…
Our three weapons are dullness and repetition and ruthless inefficiency… and an almost fanatical devotion to the Cause…
Our four… no… Amongst our arguments… Amongst our argumentation… are such elements as dullness, repetition…
– I’ll come in again. (Exit)”
Besides the mostly confused and repetitive argumentation are also insistence in the face of contradicting facts that: ID is correct but means panspermia, bigbang is incorrect (probably because it problematices his panspermia), observations are ‘laws’, and science is inductive.
Well, the scen is set, the actors have arrived, and the nice red uniforms are put on. Action!
Units are part of a physical description so it was a physical mistake IMO. But I don’t think that screws up your argument since math was certainly participating.
I fully agree.
Actually I think one can make a good argument that while induction is heavily used to explain isolated data sets and propose hypotheses, it is the method of proof by contradiction with data used in hypotheses testing that asserts valid hypotheses. This is related to the modus ponens used when falsificating whole theories.
Only by arguing with analogy could the use of finite data be called extrapolation or induction. And analogies are imperfect, or they would be isomorphies. Not that wagner is bothered by such details.
But quantum foam is inhomogenity on the smallest scales. wagner still has this backwards, since homogenity is one of the predictions of inflation which is a part of modern bigbang theories. (And of course also a part of the cosmological principle, that is so useful in other circumstances.) Such as in the current concordance Lambda-CDM model.
The out that wagner may cling to is that this isn’t verified to the usual standard yet. The upcoming Planck probe will give data to make the definitive test.
This is what I think too. Science such as theoretical physics help define new mathematics, and it is such a robust formalization that it is seldom that anything needs to be reconstructed. Some reconstructions I can think of are using delta-omega definitions of limits in analysis, and abandoning naive set theory to avoid Russell’s paradox. (Though I doubt a mathematician or platonist would say that the math structure really changed.)
There is one way that the platonic views of many mathematicians may be corroborated though. Theoretical physicists insist that reality is described by math “alone”. An argument of Tegmark in his ensemble theory for multiverses ( http://www.wintersteel.com/files/ShanaArticles/multiverse.pdf ) is that equaling the math description with physical existence takes out an unnecessary middle man.
Frankly, I don’t know if it is feasible, or what it really means. Which is why I’m still suspicious of such ideas.
Davis says:
=LOL= I can imagine. Back when I was in college it wasn’t beer, it was weed, but the same principle applied. Two friends of mine, a physics major and a math major, used to get into it regularly. It was great late-night entertainment.
charlie wagner says:
Garbage in, garbage out. Even Aristotle couldn’t come to valid conclusions by pulling notions out of thin air, making bad assumptions, or coming up with bad hypotheses and refusing to test them. The Greeks were notorious for that. With few exceptions (Archimedes and Heron, for instance) they believed that to come down from the lofty heights of the abstract and actually test their ideas was far beneath them, because getting one’s hands dirty was for the laboring classes. (Clifford D. Conner takes them to task for that and presents some strong arguments against the so-called “Greek Miracle,” and the “Great Man model” of science in general, in A People’s History of Science.)
Unfortunately, some “scientists” today do a similar thing. A guy I used to work with was so set in his ideas that we used to talk behind his back about “McMonigle’s Law of Research”:
“If the data don’t agree with your theory, throw out the data.”
I’m willing to concede that maybe I overstated my case and grant that induction is more than 10% of science. But when the rubber meets the road, hypotheses (inductive, essentially informed guesswork) are one thing; theories (deduced from further observation and testing) are another.
charlie again:
I did. But all that proves is that it’s possible to find a scrap or two of “reality” even in the crankiest of the cranks. Not only that, but poetic descriptions (whether by him or, to give a more recent example, the eloquently poetic but far more scientifically grounded Carl Sagan) don’t have much (if anything) to do with actual science.
The fact remains that your mentioning Velikovsky anywhere near anything related to real science does a major number on your street cred. I hope to God you didn’t bring him up in your classes, and if one of your students mentioned him, I hope you shot the crank down with phasers, photon torpedoes, blunderbusses, and water cannons.
Dave says:
Which begs the pesky question: How do the demonstrated abilities of babies and some animals to distinguish between (admittedly small) numbers of objects fit in with that? They don’t invent the concepts; they’re apparently “wired” to discover the relationships between them. Humans waybackinthewayback didn’t invent the concept we now write as “2+1=3”; they observed it, and eventually someone realized it was always so and invented names for the parts. (OK. In that sense, maybe math was “invented.”)
OTOH, as my math-major friend was fond of saying: “Numbers! That’s not math; it’s arithmetic.” =grin=
I just can’t resist this one: How about a second equation so I can solve for “bleem” and “zgrap”? =GD&R=
Dave again:
I hate it when I ask someone how far it is to a place and they give me an estimate of the time it takes to get there. How far is it to Pittsburgh from where I live? The mileage is the same (about 280), but while it might be 5 hours or more for someone else, that doesn’t matter. I could do it in 4 when I was younger, my foot was a lot heavier, and the radar detector and bat-out-of-hell 18-wheelers were my best friends. (These days I take the train, so it’s a moot point.)
OTOH, I know that one of the places I walk to regularly is a half mile away, but I can’t seem to get it through my head that it takes about 15 minutes to walk there. I’m always 5 minutes late. So maybe in this case I should take a leaf out of your book!
Torbjörn Larsson says:
=ROFL= “That’s right up there with the original!” quoth I, while visions of him sending the Valkyrie after us dance in my head – visions I’m incapable of having without their being followed immediately by:
“Kill dhe wabbit, kill dhe wabbit, kill dhe wabbit…”
Torbjörn Larsson says:
Ah yes, beware the pitfalls of anecdotal “evidence.” No matter how many piles of “evidence” of that sort you manage to scrape up, unless the deductive kicks into gear in an effort to produce a viable theory to explain what you’re seeing, you might as well be Dpk Chpr, or Cs Lskn, or Wld Bll Dmbsk, or……..
BTW, point taken on quantum foam, although I’ve read that an astrophysicist or two here and there are looking at how it might be incorporated into an explanation of the observed nonuniform distribution of matter. I gather that the idea is somewhat analogous to moving from hypothetical massless, frictionless, reversible stuff into the more complicated real stuff.
However, not being a physicist (astro- or otherwise), I’ll leave it at that. Someone feel free to correct me if I’m full of bull.
I don’t think anyone doubts that the concepts of distinguishing small numbers, essentially counting, perceiving spatial relationships, essentially geometry and measurement, or elapsed time periods, again measurement, have evolved. That was the reason behind the inventions IMO.
Ah, you were referring to the clustering of mass into galaxy clusters! Yes, it is one of the predictions of inflation that initial quantum spacetime fluctuations were magnified and is responsible for that. My bad.
Inflation is thought to be both responsible for the large scale flatness (spacetime homogeneity) and mass clustering (mass inhomogeneity).
I don’t think anyone doubts that the concepts of distinguishing small numbers, essentially counting, perceiving spatial relationships, essentially geometry and measurement, or elapsed time periods, again measurement, have evolved. That was the reason behind the inventions IMO.
Ah, you were referring to the clustering of mass into galaxy clusters! Yes, it is one of the predictions of inflation that initial quantum spacetime fluctuations were magnified and is responsible for that. My bad.
Inflation is thought to be both responsible for the large scale flatness (spacetime homogeneity) and mass clustering (mass inhomogeneity).
Torbjörn says:
Point taken. I think my math-major friend would use that as a distinguishing criterion of “arithmetic vs. math.” I always kicked ass in arithmetic because I could relate to numbers and counting, and in geometry because of the spacial element and being able to draw pictures of so much of it, but anything more abstract than that – fugeddaboutit!
Yeah, that was it. Thanks for supplying what I couldn’t quite dredge up out of my pointed little head. My knowledge of physics is permanently arrested somewhere between Galileo dropping things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa and Newton figuring out that planetary orbits are elliptical. Beyond that, my eyes just kind of glaze over. All I end up with are vague mental pictures.
So am I right in presuming that charlie’s assertion (quoted above) does have some truth in it – to my admittedly not-overly-knowledgeable mind, it looks like he “got” the flatness part – but it’s wrong in being oversimplified and incomplete? I knew something was up with it, but couldn’t put my finger on exactly what. Thanks again.
I was wondering if perhaps the talkorigins.org site had any specific rebuttal to Hoyle’s “Mathematics of Evolution”. While they don’t even mention it, a google on Panda’s Thumb led to this interesting paper by Jason Rosenhouse:
How Anti-Evolutionists Abuse Mathematics
http://www.math.jmu.edu/~rosenhjd/sewell.pdf
In summary, Hoyle’s methods and base assumptions were crap.
He didn’t do the proper preliminary research into population dynamics or biostatistics, and assumed that the majority of mutations were negative – which is contradicted by known genetics (the majority of mutations are neutral). Hoyle then calculated that negative mutations would “swamp out” any positive ones, based on assumptions of environmental conditions that he completely pulled out of his arse.
Basically, Hoyle’s “Mathematics of Evolution” is an exercise in being a crank, by way of bad science and bad mathematics.
I’ve been reading about another famous scientist who suggested panspermia (which is what Hoyle was arguing in favor of, rather than any sort of creationism), and while Francis Crick also suggested panspermia, he didn’t try to back it up with crap biology; rather, he suggested that both Earth-based and space-based origins of life should be researched.
The above paper by Rosenhouse also takes on Berlinski. Going by the description, it does look like Berlinski correctly proposed the mathematical equations to demonstrate ID, or in plain English terms, if some intermediate genome sequence has zero fitness, then the genome sequence that follows must therefore be irreducibly complex.
The problem, of course, is that Berlinski and Behe pulled a fast one by suggesting that this was somehow applicable to exiting biological systems rather than to genomes. As Rosenhouse says:
Erratum: In the last paragraph before the final quote, for “applicable to exiting biological”, read: “applicable to existing biological”
anomalous4:
I wouldn’t use his confused description, but read the comprehensive articles on wikipedia instead. (The main article is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang .)
But I went over to his site and took a look. It seems like he has conflated the flatness of spacetime (which gives the homogeneity and blackbody character in the CMBR spectra) with the inhomogeneities in mass (which gives the small inhomogeneities in the CMBR spectra and the galaxy clustering).
The homogeneity is not a bigbang prediction but a prediction from inflation. charlie discusses mostly bigbang, but the addition of inflation to the basic theory gives a lot more and more precise predictions.
Owlmirror:
I found your find interesting too.
Of course, Hoyle also used the argument from ignorance in his junkyard story. It is the filter of selection that gives genetic algorithms their power and speeds them up immensely.
It seems Berlinski used another definition than Behe for ‘irreducible complexity’. An inferior one, since it is never observed in nature. :-)
But Behe’s IC is also ludicrous from the start. It is a form of local simplicity, since one can’t remove a component without loosing functions. And as Mark Chu-Carroll on Good Math, Bad Math blog notes, this means it is easily recognized from the start as a bad concept since global simplicity is illdefined: “given a system S, you cannot in general show that there is no smaller/simpler system that performs the same task as S.” ( http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/06/the_problem_with_irreducibly_c_1.php )
And indeed, as your quote shows, evolution both produces Behe’s IC and produces from it, by various workarounds from simpler or more complex functional systems.
anomalous4:
I wouldn’t use his confused description, but read the comprehensive articles on wikipedia instead. (The main article is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang .)
But I went over to his site and took a look. It seems like he has conflated the flatness of spacetime (which gives the homogeneity and blackbody character in the CMBR spectra) with the inhomogeneities in mass (which gives the small inhomogeneities in the CMBR spectra and the galaxy clustering).
The homogeneity is not a bigbang prediction but a prediction from inflation. charlie discusses mostly bigbang, but the addition of inflation to the basic theory gives a lot more and more precise predictions.
Owlmirror:
I found your find interesting too.
Of course, Hoyle also used the argument from ignorance in his junkyard story. It is the filter of selection that gives genetic algorithms their power and speeds them up immensely.
It seems Berlinski used another definition than Behe for ‘irreducible complexity’. An inferior one, since it is never observed in nature. :-)
But Behe’s IC is also ludicrous from the start. It is a form of local simplicity, since one can’t remove a component without loosing functions. And as Mark Chu-Carroll on Good Math, Bad Math blog notes, this means it is easily recognized from the start as a bad concept since global simplicity is illdefined: “given a system S, you cannot in general show that there is no smaller/simpler system that performs the same task as S.” ( http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/06/the_problem_with_irreducibly_c_1.php )
And indeed, as your quote shows, evolution both produces Behe’s IC and produces from it, by various workarounds from simpler or more complex functional systems.