This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
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Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
No idea how to fix insomnia, but know pretty well how to cause it. I had no sleep issues for 26 years until fuckwit added mirtazapine to fluoxetine, which led to three months of getting only ~30 minutes sleep at a time before incredibly vivid dreams and horrible night sweats kicked in. That sleep deprivation plus constant hunger worsened the depression and anxiety, broke my sleep schedule, and led to a couple mini-meltdowns. Irony is the mirtazapine was added partly to help with what fuckwit perceived to be insomnia instead of me simply choosing not to sleep much on weekdays (20~21 up and 3~4 down on weekdays; 12~16 up on weekends).
Over a year after discontinuing the former and nearly a year since the discontinuing the latter, I now get maybe 4 hours of half-decent sleep before the dreams kick in and I get maybe 30~60 exhausting minutes at a time thereafter if I cannot force myself to stay up after the first dream wakes me up. Only partial solution I’ve found is to stay up >22 hours so the greater exhaustion keeps me out a bit longer.
Speaking for oneself alone would be a good thing here. Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and a whole bunch more don’t make me feel like any sort of midget. When it comes to philosophy, I think a lot of people have too much time on their hands.
From the [Lounge]:
Too broad a brush.
Kant’s essay on world peace is awesome. His ethics, though? *ragepuke* Childish at best. Murderous. Evil.
Wittgenstein: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist is a thing of beauty, and Alles, was sich klar sagen lässt [in updated spelling], das lässt sich klar sagen; was sich nicht klar sagen lässt, darüber muss man schweigen sounds oversimplified, but may not actually be – it’s definitely a great starting point. What I’ve read about his writings on “language games” is also good. But I still don’t feel stupid. “The world is everything that is the case” isn’t more impressive than “Everything is the way it is because it got that way”, written by the biologist – not philosopher – D’Arcy Thompson in his 1917 book On Growth and Form.
I’m even less familiar with Heidegger, but from reading mostly the German Wikipedia article on him I have to say his philosophy looks completely and utterly useless even after the thick layer of obfuscation is removed, and that’s before we get to his… relationship with… National Socialism.
That would be the end of internet commenting.
… and a lot of philosophy, a hell of a lot of politics, and as for religion …. :-)
also: what carlie said.
If I said “And this would be bad, why?” would that be too much like “All Cretans are liars”?
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations remains the only philosophy book that I would even contemplate finishing, if I have the time. What I did read of it, many years ago, impressed me.
Bertrand Russell thought him a genius, and Dennett has nice things to say.
So.
Everyone is in church?
or on the Salon thread?
wot is this “church” of which you speak … O.O
nope, I’m trying to fill in forms … :-(
opposablethumbs
I hope you have chocolate.
Just back from somewhat opulent Chinese meal myself, followed by a treat of JW Black on a 32nd floor rooftop, although it isnt clear what the main dish was here, the whiskey or my skin for the mosquitos.
Little bit of light entertainment ensued when my partner who is on first name terms with the Thai minister of commerce (kwokkwok!!, but it’s true) got denied access to the canapes in my hotel earlier today because staff considered her dress in violation of the “smart casual” dress code.
I only hope the 12yo duty manager will not pass the drubbing he just received down to the hapless and underpaid staff, but instead up to the morons who made that stupid rule and made their employees enforce it.
Off to KL tomorrow. I intend to be very drunk before I enter that Malaysia Airlines plane.
chigau,
Nah, just out on a nice day, trying to defeat bad mood and bike-riding incompetence.
There’s a bar of chocolate in the fridge, so I’m safe on that count at least! :-) Sadly, however, I have no rum … dammit.
I’ve got most of the way through the draft version on the computer; this is progress! Might try actually filling in the paper (paper?!?!) version tomorrow. Um, yay?
No, no, no. Except in extreme temperatures, fridge is no place for chocolate. It changes its taste too much! It is too late for that particular bar. Better eat it as soon as possible, so that you’ll have an excuse to buy another (and store it properly!)
I decapitated a room-temperature chocolate bunny for breakfast this morning.
Only decapitated?
So far.
Good, better not leave enough of the Bunny to exact revenge on you in the middle of the night.
Oh, it’s Eostre day, ennit? Alas, I has no chocolate in da house.
B-b-but I like cold chocolate! Ooh, this is thunderdome, right? Ha, I will openly declare that actually I have another, hitherto undeclared bar of chocolate in the freezer! And I sometimes eat a bit of chocolate straight out of the freezer! I love the texture and the texture combinations you get in your mouth eating frozen chocolate! /rebel without a case to make, iconoclast and chocolate-heretic
I think I’ll need the fainting couch for this.
This is worse than the pea schism. I can handle a couple of people badmouthing peas, but doing that kind of thing to chocolate! Too sad.
Ináji
The M&Ms are all gone?
In season, I keep the gin in the freezer.
But that’s not the same…
Chigau:
Aye. Those were peanut M&Ms anyway, horrible things.
There’s a gin season? Or, conversely, there’s a gin off-season???
I swear at the chocolate bars in the cooler at the grocery store every time I pass by them. The only thing being cold does to chocolate is eliminate all the tastes from the aromatics. :(
The only time I’ve liked cold chocolate is the chocolate shavings in Greater’s ice cream, because they’re something ridiculous like 90% fat so they don’t actually freeze in the cold.
I drink gin only as gin and tonic.
Gin and tonic is a summer drink so I keep the gin in the freezer so I don’t need to add ice.
Sometimes there is still some gin when I remember to buy tonic.
… the texture, the mouthfeel …. room temperature chocolate feels too cloying, even the high-cacao stuff, the way it sticks to your palate and coats your tongue; but when it’s cold you experience the whole range of textures from almost-friable to melting-and-gone in the time it takes to eat a piece … heaven :-)
::wants chocolate nao::
ah, ok, summer gin … I guess. Whisky (and rum) at any time of year for me. But I do take your point, whisky and rum are on the warm side. Summer caipirihna? Caipiroska in a pinch. None of which I have … oh well :-\
In the summer conservatives drink gin and tonic and liberals drink beer.
In the winter conservatives drink scotch and soda and liberals drink beer.
I don’t drink scotch.
Ever.
The Damn Bunny came and went, but cos I’m an Unbeliever it only left Rich Dark Cooking Chocolate droppings behind, out of its nestlet. Inna packet. I managed to survive them.
Chocolate: Frozen or room temperature? Deeeeeeep rifts.
Being a Texan, the only logical place to store your chocolate is in the freezer. Because 1) it’s above the melting point at “room temp” most of the year and 2) the aroma/texture combos you get as it melts in you mouth is amazing. I highly recommend taking a bit of a bit of frozen dark and not even sucking on it. Just let it sit there on your young until it’s gone.
Young should (obviously) be tongue.
Although I’m sure there are a lot of people dealing with chocolate-on-young today.
Why would anyone contaminate perfectly good scotch with soda water?
Chigau @ #530: Yeah, me either, mostly. But did you ever try a rusty nail? Equal parts Scotch and Drambuie. Neither one is drinkable by itself, but mix them together and the gagging-sickly-sweet-floral taste of the Drambuie cancels out the bitter-million-year-old-dirt-like-you’ll-be-sucking-up-after-you’ve-been-dead-a-hundred-years taste of the Scotch and all that’s left is a kind of a cinnamony flavor. Plus, they’ll knock you on your ass quicker than just about anything else.
#536 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge
I have had a Rusty Nail but it was long ago, maybe I’ll try again.
(I really enjoyed your descriptions of the tastes of Scotch and Drambuie.)
(You could write for a wine-snob
magazinewebsite.)The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge @536: That is the most disgusting thing I’ve heard of since I saw someone at a party mix Rémy Martin VSOP with coke. And Drambuie is an abomination. Oh, the humanity.
Only a bottle of (at least) 12 year old The Macallan can cleanse the horror.
Rob Grigjanis
Enjoy your bottle of
bitter-million-year-old-dirt-like-you’ll-be-sucking-up-after-you’ve-been-dead-a-hundred-years.
;)
Chigau, I would if I could afford it. If I won the lottery, I’d stock up on The Macallan, Laphroaig, a few other single malts, and for a change of pace, a case or two of this.
Rob Grigjanis
If I won the lottery, I’d by beer that cost more than $1 per tin.
LykeX
In Orstraylia room temperature means you’ve got a brown puddle. I’m a believer that a cold chocolate bar is better than a sticky mess.
Rob:
I’ve been a bartender for 15 years now, and I’ve served more than a few cognac/coke drinks to people. Ditto for Rusty Nails.
Want a really bleccch drink?
I’ve made a drink consisting of Johnny Walker Black Scotch
and Red Bull.
Tony:
Beats the pitchers of beer and tomato juice a lot of the women ordered at the tavern I used to hang out at 30-35 years ago. Still throwing up a little in my mouth thinking about that.
If one is mixing with beer, Clamato or V8 is the way to go.
My theory on the Rusty Nail is that it’s a “Lazy Man’s Long Island Iced Tea™”—a lot of flavors that cancel each other out so you don’t know you’re drinking anything until you’re standing there wondering when they carpeted the wall.
Whu…
Aren;t there some kind of bartenders’ professional ethics that would allow you to say “hell, no”?
jeez. Red-Labels’s the mixer; everybody knows that.
I used to drink Brown Cows.
one should be drinking appahjoos instead.
I buy $1 per tin beer.
(note the tin)
Mixing is a really good idea.
Tony @543: Yikes. Expensive alcohol + caffeine + sugar. That’s what I call conspicuous and disgusting waste. I can imagine maybe some JW Red in a cuppa tea after being lost in the wilderness for a couple of weeks, but that’s about it.
Sneaky fuckers at Malaysia airlines lounge hide the hard stuff in some nearly invisible unmanned bar around some corner, all that’s missing is the “beware the hungry leopard” sign.
But since its discovery, operation “too drunk to notice crashing into the Indian Ocean” is proceeding as planned.
My dad had a term for this state of mind, in particular when used for drunkenness early in the day or early into some function or event, he called it “die Lampe anhaben”, literally “to have the lamp switched on”. Very appropriate.
This is a bit out there, so feel free to skip it.
In Thunderdome #45, we were visited by a happy little bible bashing troll, going by the ‘nym John A (I think he turned out to be a sock puppet of someone, but I forget the details). Among much of the nonsense he posted, there was a particular claim that stuck in my head at the time:
I questioned it back then and I had a nagging feeling it wasn’t correct, but my Google Fu failed me and I couldn’t dig up any specifics, so I let it go. A little while ago, I came across a counter example and so I post it here, for reference.
Philo of Alexandria. He lived in that exact time period (although the exact years are estimates), he wrote works describing his contemporary situation, he mentions specific events occurring in Jerusalem, his works survive to this day… and he never mentions anything about Jesus.
So, John A was indeed talking out of his behind. Big shock, I know.
We now return you to your previously scheduled programming.
Ahhh, the Philospher discussion reminds me of the one time I shut my German teacher up. She was really a great person and wonderful teacher, but she had it for an argument from authority, quoting authors and philosophers at you.
So one time, during a project week, I was really angry and upset and had an argument with her and she went: “but Nietzsche already said…” and I snapped “Nietzsche was an asshole!”
I have a bit of a rule about “great thinkers”: If they couldn’t think of women or PoC as rational beings, even though others at their time could, they can’t have been such great thinkers.
Rawnaeris
yes, that’s it exactly!
Dalillama
..with anything????
and Rob Grigjanis
That’s it. I’ve come home and I’m never leaving.
Sadly, this
also applies … the cellars of my château en Espagne* are full of the good stuff. A body can dream.
* curious how where we have castles in the air, the French have them in Spain. Spain must have seemed an awfully long way off when that expression was coined.
@Al Dente, 529
How are you defining liberal? I’m a freedom hating commie who should get the hell out of America if I hate it so damned much – which is funny because I’ve never been to the American continent let alone the country – but I can’t stand the taste of beer. Acquired taste, sure, but why would you bother acquiring it? I don’t understand. I don’t understand at all.
Is it wrong that I hope Chaotic Inflation comes back? I wrote a lengthy reply to his comment @228, but it would be strange to post it after so long when he appears to have Elvis’d the building, so instead it’s just sitting in my notepad, unposted. That’ll teach me to lose my internets, I guess.
So anyway, I had a spare couple of hours this weekend, so I listened to the debate between Matt Dillahunty & Eric Lounsbery on the Dogma Debate podcast. One of Eric’s comments threw me a little “by the materialist worldview, a human’s life is of no more value than that of a dog or a roach.” (Paraphrased because I don’t recall his exact words and can’t seem to google them up.)
So I’ve been wondering, I understand why so many of their arguments rely on baseless assertions and fallacies, but why do they so often appeal to ego and existential dread? “If there’s no god, you’re worth no more than a cockroach.” “In twenty billion years, nobody will remember you!” I don’t understand why they use these types of arguments in debates. I mean, I understand why they work on people who have been primed to believe that you need to have an objective, universal and eternal value in order to have any value at all, but surely seeing it dismissed as the transparent nonsense that it is does nothing to shore up those who already believe, and it has no power to convince those of us who aren’t already primed for it… so… I don’t get it. What’s going on there? Any passing apologists are invited to explain this to me, because I don’t understand why people waste their breath on such cheap and ineffective tricks.
@ Athywren Re: argument from existential crisis
I will venture to guess that they use that route because it works on them. A lot of anti-choicers seem quite frightened at the thought they might not have ever existed. Also, when all you have is emotional manipulation…
@557
You are assuming that they grasp the refutation, or that the audience does. They probably don’t.
Those arguments are the ultimate “get off our planet, atheists” rallying cry. I’ve even seen liberal “non-fundies” (who complain that Dawkins only goes after fundies) go on to pull the “atheists cannot account for value or MORALITY” argument. They are victims of the severe philosophical poverty in our society (which may have been caused by christianity).
Speaking of philosophical poverty, I see that posted survey poll of the populations understanding of science. I’d be really curious what the results of a philosophy comprehension poll would be.
I’m sure the results wouldn’t be pretty, but it would be a hard poll to conduct. Are you thinking that they’d answer something like this poll (maybe not all of it), except with more descriptive phrasings that attempt to explain what the different options mean? I guess you could do it, but it seems like you’d have to turn it into a big word problem that they’re meant to solve, so that it’s not just quizzing people about whether they know the definitions of technical jargon (like what “Humean” laws are, or what a “p-zombie” is and how that’s not a Walking Dead type of zombie). Even after all that, assuming you could avoid biasing the results significantly by how you’re presenting the questions, I bet most still wouldn’t understand. They’d probably give mostly incoherent responses (or just non-answers), before they’d pick something like “I don’t know.”
From my link, at least, you could get a taste of the level of comprehension among philosophers. But as I said, I’m sure the public would be much worse.
@561
Well I’m the wrong person to ask for how to actually make a good survey. I suspect they could have brief descriptions for the various positions, but yes of course many people would still have no clue. Even in that link you gave, some people chose the option “not familiar enough with the issue”.
Watched Gravity tonight. A waste of time, and more than one near-fatal eyeroll. “I’d say a prayer for myself, but no one taught me how.” Ugh.
Ináji #563
Really?
OHGODNOOHGODNO
doesn’t count as prayer?
whodathunk?
@ Athywren
By all means post away.
More meat on a human!
More seriously: “value” is entirely subjective. To a roach, a roaches life has more value than that of a dog or human.
Human psychology is geared to religion not science, so you may have the question back to front. The question is not “why fairytales”, but rather why “truth”?
Our crappy brains, with their lack of processing power, rely on inference to make a coherent world view. These inferential systems regard everything as grist to the mill. One makes inferences with regard to fairytale creatures (Easter Bunny, Jeebus, YHWH, Santa Claus…) just as easily and effectively as with real flesh-and-blood people.
@ Inaji
Thanks, you saved me $10.
Yeah, Gravity was slick with a couple of big name actors, but it made no sense. Here I am, a mere biologist, and the physics in that movie was leaving me appalled.
You know, if 50 years from now we actually have large numbers of people living and working in space, they’re going to show that movie as a comedy. It is not going to hold up at all well.
Inaji:
Limbaugh: “And THAT’S why we need mandatory prayer in school, people!”
(Who the fuck knows what “prayer for myself” is and doesn’t know how to do it? At least the standard form of American Protestant prayer is simple as fuck.)
Much like Athywren, I “don’t understand why people waste their breath on such cheap and ineffective tricks.” The rational explanation, I guess, is that it sells. Ignorance wins one Oscars.
Science is a real buzzkill to fairytales. Without it, people can get carried away with such fare. We are, otherwise, primed to fill in the plot holes, and to get sucked in by Gravity.
I’ll wait ’til it comes on telly, then laugh.
I see we’ve picked up some new chew toys in recent days. I suspect we can thank the Faux News hit-piece for the influx of right-wing scum that has oozed into our comments section?
Try “Ender’s Game”. Only one big actor, but certainly made no sense to me whatsoever. Maybe they had to get Ford back into cinemas before the new Star Wars dustup next year, so the kids today know who the guy is.
Ratel.
“Honeybadger – don’t give a shit!” is up to new tricks.
***Trigger Warning***
I just had the misfortune to stumble upon the following thread discussing a controversial scene in the most recent episode of Game of Thrones that depicts a rape. The scene itself is deeply unpleasant, but the thread surrounding it – posted on a fairly high traffic site – is a nauseating rundown of pretty much every rape apologia trope there is, combined with the kind of open misogyny that leads arsehats to think that writing things like ‘no means yes, yes means anal’ is the height of humour. There is even some jerk repeatedly posting pornographic images faster than the moderators can delete them, often paired with an unbelieveably evil sentiment about 50% of the ‘participants’ of rape enjoying it 100% of the time.
How anyone can claim that there is no such thing as a rape culture when the internet is drowning in this kind of obsessive misogynistic hatred is beyond me. Seriously, only click that link if you are prepared to abandon any lingering shreds of respect for our species you may have managed to preserve thus far.
PZ:
My understanding of physics is, um, basic. As in very basic, and I was shaking my head through the whole thing at how bad it represented anything resembling reality. On top of that, the glurge was thick and nasty.
Of course, it’s Russians who start the wholesale destruction, because, well, why not? Medical engineer who trained for 6 months is a hysterical, useless idiot who can’t even grasp conserving oxygen. Experienced, about to retire astronaut plays loud country music, tells stupid stories, and plays at being the charming flirt. Insert lots of pretty CGI. Ooooh, a lone survivor, who doesn’t know how to pray, inspired by dead astronaut who will, of course, honor her request that he tell her dead daughter how much she loves her.
@ Inaji #573
I stand corrected:
I’ll wait ’til it comes on telly, then laugh.—-> I’ll give it a miss.Theophontes @ 574, it might be okay to watch if the sound is muted and captions are off. Still, the slaughter of physics might be too much. The CGI was very pretty, I’ll give it that much.
@ Inaji
Physics is about to slaughter me! I registered for a course in autonomous navigation for flying robots. I just went to collect one of the coursework books (Probabilistic Robotics). Oi Vey! It will give me nightmares of varsity maths. What was I expecting?
@ chigau
Apropos the above, if you happen to be wandering around Hong Kong during the next few months, I suggest wearing a crash helmet. My maths is very rusty…
Again, I’m still working on the reply I’m doing towards the initial bunch of responses I received re: the topic of evolution, but I should clarify more what really bugs me about evolutionary theory.
Myself and sceptics of the TOE don’t hate science. If I hate anything it’s the materialistic thinking that pervades science not science and technology itself. You may also add the consequent harm done to the environment which is obvious in pollution from nuclear plants.
All that is secondary though. What is of interest is the talk of the controversy and your demands of publishing the evidence against evolution which is a fallacious request. It is simply naive to think well-done research which actually definitively underscores how bogus the TOE will be accepted. Not even multiple ones.
The theory of evolution has from the get-go had the capacity to absorb falsifying evidence or lack of evidence:
-Lack of transitionals? Blame fossils.
-See an irreducibly complex eye? Make stories using ‘simpler eyes’.
-What’s the origin of the species? Personify nature and ascribe selective powers to it while shedding no light on variations.
-What of Mendel’s experiments that definitively showed recessive and dominant traits? Incorporate it into the theory never mind how it blows gradual evolution out of the water.
-Years of failed experiments of random mutations in fruit flies? Still insist random mutations makes novel traits for selection. Not even the fact of DNA repair to prevent random mutations hampers this.
-See soft tissues in dinosaur bones? Assume they must last for hundreds of millions of years.
-Repeatedly test for C-14 in fossils? Ignore this, any C-14 in fossils buried MUST be impurities that leaked in no matter how much is found and in how many fossils.
-What of a genetic code, how the heck can natural processes make codes? No problem we will figure out how evolution did it later on.
-What of the machinery in the cell and the genetic information in the DNA specifying them and their integration in a life-form, doesn’t this suggest design? Nope. Evolutiondidit.
-What of fossils of animals virtually similar to their modern counterparts? Call them living fossils and invoke evolutionary stasis.
-What of YEC? Dismissed as “Religion and not science”.
-ID? Definitively “anti-science” according to its opposition.
Why do we see all those examples? Because the TOE theory was never meant to be falsified, it was quickly co-opted as a prop to enable the meme of science accepting explanations which affirm materialism. To still pretend that evolutionists will consider evidence from opponents which will be falsify it in face of contradicting facts it has absorbed is laughable and a waste of precious time.
Or in other words, you’re a bigot. Thanks for playing; you lose.
You don’t know what a fallacy is. You lose.
You don’t know what research is, let alone what well-done research is.
[List of moronic creationist misrepresentations and distotions snipped]
You don’t know what a fact is, and you don’t know what a contradiction is.
So laugh all you want like the clown you are, and stop wasting our precious time with your bigotry, ignorance, and stupidity.
That’s a hilarious list of misconceptions, misrepresentations, and all-around idiocies that biasevolution just published there. I have to confess this is a new one to me:
It’s an especially impressive addition to the list since in some ways the rediscovery of Mendel’s work saved the Darwinian idea of gradual evolution rather than blow[ing it] out of the water” because it provided a mechanism for circumventing the problem of blending inheritance, which was a common critique at the time. So not only is biasevolution wrong, he’s off by a full 180 degrees.
biasevolution (#577)
Apparently, what bugs you about evolution is that you’re badly misinformed about nearly everything evolution-related because you spend all your time looking at creationist sites and reading creationist books rather than sticking even a toenail into the vast resources that support evolution. All these “problems” you bring up just make me embarrassed for you, because if you had read anything about evolution by scientists—and there are dozens of books, websites and TV programs aimed at people who don’t know much about science or who are coming from a creationist perspective—you would know how appallingly ignorant you sound.
I mean, here are just a few of your failures:
We don’t lack transitional fossils. You lack knowledge of them, but that doesn’t say anything about the state of the fossil record. Go educate yourself.
Again, this is your lack of knowledge talking. Eyes aren’t irreducibly complex. Their evolution is very well understood, especially since similar eyes have evolved multiple times and we can now analyze them and their components at a genetic level.
Also, it’s evolution and not creationism that explains why the human eye has photoreceptors facing inward while the octopus eye has them facing outward. Evolution, being a process of consequences, can only result in adaptations based on what it starts with, even if that starting point is less than optimal. Creation would not be so limited, yet we find sub-optimal traits everywhere.
Mendelian genetics has been incorporated into evolution ever since it was discovered. As Lee1 notes, a way to explain how the distinction of traits was preserved over generations rather than lost due to blending was of immeasurable importance to biology. Rather than disproving evolution, it is the foundation of the Hardy-Weinberg theorem, which is how scientists can mathematically prove whether evolution is occurring in a population or whether the population is in evolutionary stasis. Of course, you wouldn’t understand the significance of this, since you still don’t know what the actual definition of evolution is.
Creationist sources have misinformed you that there are no transitional fossils, that eyes are irreducibly complex, and Mendelian genetics are fatal to the theory of evolution. You yourself are evidence that they’re not science, because anything that was science wouldn’t have to rely on blatant lies.
But seriously, what’s the point in arguing with you when you don’t know what evolution even is? If you want to stick around here, you should at least try to learn that definition and show us your understanding of it. Hell, we could probably spend an entire thread just getting you up to speed definition-wise before going into any of your other lies.
Anybody catch that the fans of that odious pissant Vox Day stuffed the Hugo nominations and he made it onto the shortlist? Granted, I’ve never read a piece of (avowed) fiction by him, so I can’t say with certainty that it’s not worthy. But I have strong suspicions.
Athywren #557
Well, first of all they aren’t baseless assertions or fallacies. What they are simply trying to do is show you what the logical conclusion of your worldview is. In other words without God, there is no standard of right and wrong or how we know what we know(epistemology) and no Axiology which is “the study of value, or goodness, in its widest sense.” Because God exists, there is a standard of value (objective value). Without God, value is made up by individuals and can only be subjective. So, since each individual decides what has value and what doesn’t, someone can decide that someone else has the value of a “cockroach” as you say and no one can tell him different.
You need to watch the Ken Ham(Answers in Genesis CEO) Bill Nye (the science guy from PBS) Debate. You will probably note quickly that Ken Ham does not answer all the questions from Bill Nye. If you watch the post debate interview with Ken Ham, he will tell you that he wasn’t trying to answer all the questions because he all had answer on his website http://www.answeringenesis.org. Ken Ham knew that he wasn’t going to change Bill Nye’s mind, so during the debate that wasn’t his goal, instead he engaged in convincing the millions of viewers of the problems with the millions-of-years worldview and to share the gospel. I would encourage you to watch the debate. It is pretty long (2:45:32) but millions of people have watched it and I think it is really good. Go to http://www.debatelive.org or I think it is also on YouTube.
It is the same way with the debate that you watched. Eric Lounsbery knew that Matt. Dillahunty wasn’t going to change his mind no matter how much evidence was given him so he targets the audience who are “primed to believe” as you said. It is the same way the Ken Ham Bill Nye Debate, Ken Ham used the debate as a worldwide stage to share the gospel to millions.
Oh look, impact the devil worshipping Hovind acolyte is back.
biasevolution, e pur si evolves.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/science/watching-bacteria-evolve-with-predictable-results.html?_r=2&
Watching people like you flail about trying to deny directly observed reality is amusing to say the least.
As for you, impact, there is no absolute objective morality in this universe. This too is directly observed fact. Live with it.
Amphiox #584
First of all…this proves nothing. The bacteria already had the DNA to do what Dr. Joao Xavier is calling evolution. In a mutation you never gain information, you will always lose information. A mutation is a mix up of the information it already has. This loss of information can be beneficial…like long haired dogs losing the DNA for long hair in the desert, but this is a loss of information and will never be regained.
Lastly and most importantly this bacteria mutated from bacteria to…….bacteria, so…not evolution. As a creationist, using the methods that Dr. Xavier is, I would expect to be able to make predictions that come true. (watch the Ken Ham Bill Nye Debate, Ken Ham shows a clip that also disproves this finding)
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2013/08/26/predictable-evolution
I am going to need a citation or three to back that up.
Dhorvath
It appears that that’s one that AiG pulled out of their collective asses.
Hey, noimpact, quick, define ‘information’. Go!
Dhorvath, OM #586
Well, first of all it is logical, if you have one parent that has for example LS (L=long hair; S= short hair) for its DNA and the other parent has SL, with the first letter being dominate respectively. You have the following options for offspring: LL, SS, LS, SL. Even in a mutation you will only get a mix of the letters L and S you cant get N because it isn’t possible.
Here are 223 sources
http://www.answersingenesis.org/search/?q=beneficial+mutations&search=Go
And here are 124 more just for starters.
http://www.answersingenesis.org/search/?q=are+mutations+evolution+engine&search=Go
Dalillama, Schmott Guy #587
I was talking about “information” in the context of DNA.
Unevidenced assertion, dismissed as creationist fuckwittery. Try again with peer reviewed scientific evidence, not your idiotic unscientific views….
AIG is not and never will be scientific evidence. Which requires something other than biblical fuckwitted presupposition. Which is why you don’t get any where…
As a creationist, Dr. Xavier lies and bullshits to prove his book of mythology fiction is true, despite the overwhelming evidence otherwise. Show otherwise with peer reviewed SCIENTIFIC evidence, not blather from presuppositional fuckwits like yourself.
You hate science. It has evidence you are wrong in the past, wrong now, and wrong in the future….
There’s where you go wrong. You deity is imaginary until you provide conclusive physical evidence for it, evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Something equivalent to the eternally burning bush. Your unevidenced assertions as to your deity being real are dismissed as fuckwittery until you actually produce the required evidence. You lose loser.
Nerd of Redhead
What is your definition of science?
noimpact #589
BZZZZT!!!! I’m sorry, that was not a definition. You lose, nincompoop.
As a primer for a fuckwitted idjit, start here. Keep in mind I have practiced science for 35+ years, and you will not get away with anything stupid. Which you have already attempted, and I showed you otherwise.
Point of clarification, Dr. Xavier was the one claiming that his mutated bacteria proved evolution.
you have an immune system, right? Wiki has a decent summary of V(D)J recombination, which generates randomized receptor genes so that each white blood cell will have a unique target.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%28D%29J_recombination
Randomness generating functionality, in your own body every day.
Which refutes your fuckwittery. So, shut the fuck up unless you can show peer reviewed scientific evidence.
citing answers in genesis as your source of information about genetics is like citing Bernie Madoff as your source for how to manage your business.
laughable at best.
none of these clowns even understand the basics of information theory, molecular biology, statistics, or evolution.
do you really think people should be taking you seriously?
be honest now. do you really think so?
if so, I am genuinely concerned for your sanity.
impact (#588)
For fuck’s sake. You know so little about genetics you can’t even use standard notation. Capital letters are for dominant alleles, lowercase is for recessives. LS or SL would indicate codominance and would be the same in either parent.
your source has not the slightest clue what they are talking about. even common genetic polyploid mutations by definition increase information, no matter what information theory you are working with.
they lie to you. why do you eat it up like candy?
do the lies taste good to you?
I don’t want Wiki.’s definition, I wanted yours. but anyway…here is wikis definition,
As a science teacher for 35 years you should know that science is, “knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.”
That is not evolution. As Ken Ham say “the term ‘science’ has been hijacked by the secular world”. Evolution deals with Historical Science (can’t be tested) and has no place in the observational science. The term science has been used to mean both evolution and observational science and that misleads many.
Here is a challenge, is there any technology that has been developed based solely from molecules to man evolution?
Actually it is, based on a million or so scientific papers that support evolution, both directly and indirectly, versus ZERO that support Himikins….
Your questions don’t need to be answered. You need to show your imaginary deity really exists. Waiting, and will be waiting when I die, for your evidence that passes the needed level of evidence….
Polyploid mutations do not create new genetics. It just reshuffles and duplicates current information.
Look at cornells web site. An example they gave was two sperm fertilizing one egg.
http://www.ansci.cornell.edu/usdagen/polyploidy.html
There is no new information.
Assertion without evidence, dismissed as fuckwittery. Only more science refutes science. You opinion or that of AIG is irrelevant to science, since they are based on imaginary deities. Phantasms aren’t scientific.
Oh, and Impact, until your deity is no longer imaginary, nothing you do about “refuting” science makes your deity less imaginary….except in your delusional mind. Prove your theory, don’t try to refute the one that works….
That was Cornell University’s website.
How much Information™ was lost in The Flood?
The Bible doesn’t say how much information was lost. God brought the animals to the ark mostly two by two, so God very easily have chosen animals that had lost very little information to survive the flood. But the Bible doesn’t say, so that is speculation.
We lost the unicorns in the flood, I know that for sure!
impact
You are a funny person.
Cornell University’s website and the Bible are equally good sources of Information®.
impact:
Approximately how far, and for how long, did the light represented in this picture travel to get to us?
@impact
So, you’re not even going to acknowledge you fucked up the notation of your “genetics” example?
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/33/13875.short
wrong.
I ask you again… do the lies taste good to you?
do you enjoy having people lie to you, and you pass those lies on to others as if they were truth?
you violate the very essence of what your supposed savior taught. leave authoritarianism behind you and fucking learn something before it’s too late for you. or at least, do us a favor and don’t breed.
impact
“two by two” is more an Irish Rovers quote than a Biblical quote.
Your posts contain no new information. You just reshuffle and duplicate existing words.
biasevolution
You are trying to march to two different drums, and it is doing you no favours. The flams and paradiddles are becoming ever more incongruent. Daily, more people are realising this. The discord of trying to hold both science and your religious fables together is becoming ever more untenable. This process is driven by science’s tracking ever more closely to reality. I shan’t say that religion is becoming more removed from reality. It is what it ever was. It is your religious endeavor that is becoming ever less tenable.
impact
Each individual is free to persue their own values whatever they may be. However, there are limitations and proscriptions. These are social restrictions on what constitutes acceptable behaviour, and are often enshrined (there’s a religious term!) in law. Yes, we could theoretically allow adults to have sex with children (YHWH certainly has no problem with this), but societies have learned through long experience that tolerating such action (though “valued” by certain individuals) is extremely detrimental. We find such “values” repugnant, even though your god has endorsed, and does endorse, such.
There are both pragmatic reasons for such social and legalistic restrictions, as well as subjective, moral, reasons that well up through our human natures as social animals. There really is no need for your parochial ideas of an imaginary deity in all of this.
Dehumanising and belittling others (through, for example denoting them as “cockroaches”) is very much at odds with a humanistic world view. It is not at odds with a religious sensibility, where the fixation with “othering” extends to demanding eternal suffering of fellow humanbeings (though not cockroaches, I presume).
Ah, a classic creationist numpty! Just like the good old days!
@ impact
Oh please! Is Ken still bemoaning the fact that, as less people grow up in the ignorance and superstition of religious environments, his job has become progressively more difficult? His solution is to indoctinate children, so they become more pliable and credulous as adult flock.
Words mean what he wants them to mean, no more, no less. What a sick creep I find him to be.
There are 1,150 species of Tardigrades, were they all taken on board? If so, why? (No really, why the fuck bother? They don’t need no frikkin’ Ark.) If not, why did the bible lie to us?
Anyhow, how did Noah even know they exist? There were no microscopes back then.
Yep, that’s why I can’t drink milk as an adult, just like god created me.
And why my skin is very dark so I can’t produce enough Vit D in these sun-poor countries I inhabit.
Oh, wait….
You see, impact, declaring that there are God-given morals does not help us decide on absolute perfect values, because we can’t phone God for definite answers. All we have to go for, is the word of humans who are supposedly in contact with God, and they’ve repeatedly proven they’re as venal, corrupt and contradictory as the rest of us. You may think your God-given morals are right, but so do those other people who drank a different flavor of Kool-Aid – and you have no tools to distinguish true revealed knowledge from false revealed knowledge.
I’m so sick of information-based arguments against evolution. Either define which measure of information you’re using (Shannon entropy? Kolmogorov complexity? Something else?) or shut up.
It’s like trying to claim that walking violates conservation of momentum and refusing to explain what you mean by “momentum”. Except it’s worse, because there’s no actual conservation laws for information.
@ vaiyt
Worse than this. In questions of morality, religion is drifting progressively more out of step with humanity’s ever evolving moral understanding. The dichotomy the goddists pretend upon, Absolute Moral Truth ™ vs (Subjective) Moral Chaos, is a false one.
We spurn much of what the bible upholds as AMT, for its deleterious effects on society. We can hold biblical morality up to objective standards, and find it wanting. Further, by the same token, one can only adjudicate the moral value of biblical guidance in such matters from a position outside the bible. (And a rather objective, humanist position at that.)
The problems of a biblically defined “morality” parallel the problems with a Ken Ham defined “science”. As our understanding of the real nature of these becomes better understood, so their exposed positions become all the more clear.
The tide is running out on these people. Running back to the Ark is making diminishing sense.
vaiyt
I’m always wondering, what would a bible-believing person do if they went hunting in the woods, say in Sweden or Canada or some other place where this could happen, and came upon a bear attacking some kids?
Would they interfere? Clearly there’s precedence in the bible that god sends bears out to kill bratty children. Would they walk away and not risk interfering with god’s justice? Or would they be decent people, not give a shit about god’s justice and save the kids?
As Snoof says at 626, there is no Law of Conservation of Information that I know of. Apparently these creobots are unaware of Noether’s Theorem, so here’s the 411, geniuses:
Any time it’s observed that some quantity is conserved, it’s because there’s an underlying symmetry. Space is homogeneous, so (linear) momentum is conserved. Space is isotropic, so angular momentum is conserved. Time is homogeneous, so energy (remember that’s mass/energy) is conserved.
There are many more abstract symmetries that lead to conservation of rather abstruse quantities. If you yobbos think information is a conserved quantity, what we need from you is just a suggestion of a symmetry of which that conservation is a sign.
Just speculation on your part is fine—just give us a plausible suggestion of what that underlying symmetry might be. We’ll be holding our breath waiting, honest we will!
The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge @ 629
I’m still waiting for a meaningful definition of “information”. Or even some units to measure it with. I’m not sure we’re going to get an actual explanation as to why it behaves the way it does.
Hey maybe this “information” that impact babbles on about is “irreducibly complex” therefore not capable of being explained or measured.
I figure you might be intending to put “information” in scare-quotes to refer to creationist-brand “information,” but if not, then this isn’t exactly true. (Or we’re not sure if it is — even better, I personally am ignorant about that.)
I don’t know what the latest developments are, but there definitely is a concept of information conservation. It’s actually something of a problem in the context of black hole physics, since as you might suspect, wacky things like to happen when black holes are involved. I couldn’t do a very good job of explaining it all, so just look it up, but I don’t think they’ve really settled the issue yet. Information might be lost in the extremely pathological case of black holes (or maybe you can only have a consistent description within a light-cone or some such thing), but otherwise information is (in this sense) conserved. If it really is lost in black holes, that would make some physicists sad. Even so, that would only be an exception to the rule, so it would not apply to “everyday physics” involving evolution or run-of-the-mill thermodynamics or what have you.
But I digress. That has nothing to do with the “complexity” or “information” that creationists talk about. They’re not talking about information or entropy or anything a reasonable person talks about. Instead, it goes something like this:
1) Look at how “complex” this human eye is!
2) Science is hard.
3) I quit.
4) Therefore, praise Jesus.
You could apparently substitute any deity (or semi-hemi-demi-deity) in the last step, but you get the general idea (more like the lack of an idea). The general idea is that I’ve wasted my time even bothering to repeat what their claim is.
I find it fascinating that people like Impact are able to claim that morality comes from a god and that this makes it objective. “Moral” pronouncements are not a moral system, it´s obidience to authority and it has nothing to do with morality. Also, if your “morality” comes from what some entity says, it is the very definition of subjective. Just because it doesn´t come from you it doesn´t mean it is objective. When a dictator forces you to do something that is not an objective moral standard. The idea of an objective god given morality is so fractally absurd and contradictory that i find it amazing these people don´t seem to be able to notice.
consciousness razor@632,
There’s a brief item in April’s Scientific American about the black hole information-eating problem. Summary: it’s still a problem.
LykeX,
This made me giggle. It’s also the only way I can understand Impact’s argument.
<Homer Simpson>So far!</Homer Simpson>
For comparison, check this every week and marvel at the species count at the bottom – a thousand extant species of amphibians have been discovered in the last eight years, and they’re generally easier to find than tardigrades.
(I’ve been citing their numbers in talks and papers since 2006. They’re always the last thing I update before submitting the corrected proofs or giving the talk.)
Made me think of theophontes: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-26934924 – kitecopter.
@ David Marjanović
This would not phase Ken Ham. He has invented a way to weasel out of such logic: “kinds” …
…
(Seems his obtuse god packed in twice (” two of all living creatures”) as many tardigrades as required. What a waste of space.)
@ opposablethumbs
Exactly!
Now working on a very small one (using chopsticks for arms), which should be very much safer.
(And one that films in three dee … steal those glasses next time you go to the movies.)
E pur si increases information. E pur si evolves.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3519909/
Duplication plus further mutation of one of the duplicates = increased and new information. This is directly observed fact.
Live with it.
I note that the little graphic beside impact’s nym has a red shade to it. impact would not even be able to SEE red at all if it were not for a duplication mutation of an opsin gene, followed by further mutations changing its peak sensitivity profile, producing new genetic information, in his primate ancestors millions of years ago.
E pur si evolves.
This story makes me hate fundies and lawyers even more:
http://www.newsforage.com/2014/04/couple-accused-in-death-of-daughter-12.html
Ug, should’ve linked to the original article…
http://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/couple-accused-in-death-of-daughter-seek-to-exclude-mention/article_c9fcbe4c-c78b-11e3-b96c-001a4bcf887a.html
I was going to bring up that particular Hammy dodge. And just like “information”, “Kinds” in this context is an utterly meaningless word with no definition that exists only as a substance-less dodge and to dress word salads.
impact:
So, are we to assume that nothing short of an organism evolving into a different domain within a few days would convince you? And if bacteria mutating into bacteria can never be a challenge to creationism, does that mean that the creationist “kind” has now been set by you at the domain level? Did God only create three “kinds” after all? That’s some macro-evolution that had to go on there, to get all this diversity from only three created kinds! Yay, look how close you are to accepting common descent!
Either that or… you’re so ignorant of basic biology that you probably don’t even realize that bacteria are a domain, let alone how incredibly diverse it is and how distantly related some of its members are to each other. Are bacteria all the same to you?
impact:
Where’s your proof that any deity exists?
Where’s your proof that any deity exists and interacts with humanity?
Where’s your proof that the deity you worship performed any of the actions attributed to it in the bible?
Where’s your proof?
impact:
Ah, you’re a worshipper of ham (I prefer bacon myself). You display your scientific ignorance just as proudly as he does.
Seeing as how bacteria are never mentioned in the bible, I’m guessing they don’t ‘believe’ they exist.
Something I’ve always wondered about bible-folk; they point to Judaic banning of eating shellfish and pork as proof god gave them special knowledge about the world because we now know both often contain parasites and pathogenic bacteria.
If god was real, and god actually talked to the authors of the bible, why couldn’t god say, “Living things come in all sizes, including sizes so small you can’t see them. In fact I’ve made more living things that you can’t see than ones you can. Most of these living things you can’t see are benign, some are necessary for a healthy life, and a few can and will kill you faster than a lion. To avoid this last category: don’t shit in your water supply, wash your hands with soap, and cook your meat all the way through.”
Christopher:
Is your water supply contaminated with harmful bacteria?
Have you transmitted harmful bacteria through improper cleanliness?
Did you fail to fully cook your meat and now you and others are suffering?
::spits::
There are bacteria far, far, far more different from one another on genetic, morphological, and biochemical levels, than humans are from trees.
Yes, it is evolution.
Live with it.
Google “Lenski e coli citrate” for an example of evolution observed in the laboratory. Ham is lying when he pretends evolution hasn’t been observed.
Then google “Shubin tiktaalik” for an example of how “historical science” has been tested. Ham is lying when he pretends “historical science” can’t be tested.
One of many examples of a laboratory test for a “historical” hypothesis:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17928853
E pur si evolves.
I find that “ignorance about evolution” usually means “disagreeing with the theory”. Because one can clearly tell what evolution involves or evolutionists say and that rhetoric will still be tossed around. That said, I don’t spend all the time looking at creationist websites, I spend MOST times doing that but for a while I mostly scoured the web for articles and books on the theory starting from Darwin’s opus itself. I still ask myself the same thing I did after reading ‘Origin Of The Species’: how the heck did such an obviously bogus theory pervade science ?
Aargh, blockquote fail. I’ll try again
I find that “ignorance about evolution” usually means “disagreeing with the theory”. Because one can clearly tell what evolution involves or evolutionists say and that rhetoric will still be tossed around. That said, I don’t spend all the time looking at creationist websites, I spend MOST times doing that but for a while I mostly scoured the web for articles and books on the theory starting from Darwin’s opus itself. I still ask myself the same thing I did after reading ‘Origin Of The Species’: how the heck did such an obviously bogus theory pervade science ?
*raises eyebrows*
Oh you do starting right of from the Cambrian. But honestly, fossils aren’t my thing. My way of looking at it is pretty simple. I do the same thing some “sceptics” I know do WRT consciousness: Ockham’s razor. If I don’t subscribe to UCA I make less claims about a fossil. I need not invoke ‘evolutionary stasis’ or be puzzled about what ancestor it is etc. Another is that I would, as Darwin did too, expect far more chimeric fossils, never mind the rarity of fossils. If in a hundred thousand years human evolved to this amount hen in over 3 billion years I would expect a whole host of fossils because the number of life-forms that would’ve existed be very huge.
If you really, really understood IC you WOULD NOT argue with it. You would find that it would be as silly as say arguing against variation or heredity, or the principle of flotation. The reason is this: if you must design a system towards some given function or set of function you would need critical parts. For one, you must have a source of energy for that system. Two, it must have a set of interacting parts that work towards the function you want, you can even add parts to fine-tune it to better perform that function (eg adding capacitors to fans to smoothen out voltage reduced). To then argue that an eye ain’t IC is laughable. All the accounts supposedly falsifying IC or showing how it evolved routinely assume simple IC precursors or point to other IC systems lacking a part and say IC is refuted for a system as Miller did in the blood clotting cascade (akin to arguing because some cars don’t use clutches cars ain’t IC).
When you design a better eye let me know. In the meantime feel free to cut your eye out. I find dysteleology arguments disgusting for four reasons. 1) they shift scope from the design argument into an ad-hominem attacks on the design quality 2) they typically ignore the fact that we are still learning about the eye and are unaware of the constraints and range it is designed for 3) they are done by people who can’t even design better eyes 4) the pretence part is the worst of all because when ‘evodoesit’ it’s good enough but ‘goddidit’ is bad, bad BAD!
Even if I told you evolution is a change in allele frequencies or a change of traits in a population over time you wouldn’t be impressed. How would you when I don’t believe crucial aspects of the theory ?
Mendel’s laws never helped Darwin because they suggested variations were discrete and had limits beyond which more variation couldn’t be attained. I think centuries of experiments and selective breeding have confirmed these facts beyond all doubt. It’s just that Darwin urged against limits to variation (despite the evidence) because his theory required the contrary.
And what have I learnt from you. That transitionals exist, eyes aren’t IC (lol) and Mendelian genetics puts evolution beyond all doubt. I’m sorry but I disagree. And what I’ve written above demonstrates the holes in your theory.
I just learned that the formula frequency of lovemaking – frequency of quarrels accurately predicts marital stability. Hint: you don’t want it to be negative. Brought to you by that marvellous book by Daniel Kahneman.
Are you an idiot? The theory of evolution does not rely on fossils. It’s 2014, even if there wasn’t a single fucking fossil on the planet because bone was preserved even worse that what it already is, there are so many ways of proving common descent nowadays that it is entirely ludicrous to take a position of hyperskepticism, or in your case, denial, on the issue.
Incomplete dominance and codominance.
And please…please know that Mendel is not the end all of genetics….it´s the very beginning. We´ve learned SO FUCKING MUCH about genetics since Mendel….and all of it screams very loudly that you are pathetically wrong. Just like your hero, Ham, you think you are educated enough about the subject to make valid criticisms. You dream yourself to be competent about a subject you know virtually nothing about because instead of understanding current biology, you are attacking bits and pieces of Darwin and Mendel as if the last 150 years hadn´t happened. You are like a little child smuggly lecturing the teacher because “Nooo, you know nothing…my friend hammie says”. Since i assume you are an adult…it´s embarrashing….
By the way, if you think inventing cosmic hiperpowerful wizards to “explain” everything by magic is more parsimonious than evolutionary theory you have to be fucking high.
biasevolution #653
Did that make sense to you when you wrote it?
Maybe you could give a short definition of irreducible complexity? I ask now because every time I’ve asked people in the past, I’ve gotten a different version, so I’m not sure what the term means anymore. E.g. this…
…is a perfectly valid refutation of some definitions of IC. Some definitions say that a system (X) with constituent parts (a, b and c) is irreducibly complex if every part is required. I.e. if removal of any individual part causes a loss of function. For such a definition, pointing out that “X-a” retains function does indeed refute the claim that X is irreducibly complex.
Incidentally, for this to be relevant for evolution, it must be a complete loss of any function. Evolution doesn’t work with intentional design, so there’s no problem with a structure changing its function along the way.
So, if you think it doesn’t apply to your definition, you need to make it clear what that is.
Bullshit. What they’re doing is pointing out that what we see in nature in fact doesn’t look like it was designed at all. The “flaws” we see are perfectly consistent with evolutionary history, but not with intelligent design. That’s the point.
We can explain why these features exist and you can’t. You have to appeal to a designer that’s simultaneously brilliant beyond all human measure and a complete bumbling idiot, as each feature requires.
biasevolution (#652)
If it’s so easy, why do you get it so wrong? You previously brought up this inane list of six types of evolution—which was invented by a creationist and has nothing to do with actual science—because you are under the misconception that evolution “HAS to explain everything.” No, it doesn’t. You think that because you believe that evolution is some sort of master theory meant to wholly supplant every part of the Christian creation story. It’s not. Your myths are just plain irrelevant to science.
Anyway, you clearly have zero interest in learning how you’re wrong. My first response was never really for your benefit, but to point out how you are so laughably ignorant you don’t even have the capacity to understand how you’re wrong. I have no desire to waste my time attempting to engage your nonsense and lies. It’s like we’re talking vehicle maintenance and you keep bringing up flux capacitors and eight speed microprocessor turbodrives with autopilot. Even worse, you’re speaking in some bizarre dialect that you don’t even realize is different from what everyone else here uses. It’s absurd.
In fact, I think you should be banned unless you can, at a minimum, a) honestly allow yourself to be corrected on how scientists conceive of and describe evolution,¹ and b) make explicit what evidence would change your mind about creationism/evolution.²
The point is you need to understand is how scientists think about evolution. You are not allowed to disagree with the definition of evolution any more than you’re allowed to disagree with the definition of internal combustion. Evolution is what it is, even if you don’t accept it as true. You cannot declare science faulty for failing to live up to definitions and concepts no scientist ever uses, like your idiotic question on the previous page about why micro-evolution (which you incorrectly define as “kinds reproducing after their kind”) is evolution. Micro-evolution (insofar as scientists even use the term) is evolution because, like all evolution, it is change in allele frequency in a population over time. Refusing to acknowledge that is not “disagreeing with the theory,” it’s just fundamentally wrong.
…………….
¹ To start with, none of this nonsense about there being six different kinds of evolution. You would have to acknowledge everything on this page.
² Of course, the problem with (b) is that you would want to do so based on your misunderstanding of science, not on how science actually works. No one can show you a transitional fossil if you have some bizarrely aberrant idea of what a transitional fossil is. No one can demonstrate change between “kinds,” because “kinds” is not only an unscientific concept, it has no concrete definition to begin with. You would have to apply the corrections from (a) to (b).
Bwuh?
What evolutionary changes in humans – in any species of the genus homo – would be apparent in fossilized bone?
Neanderthals have gone extinct. Homo floresiensis has gone extinct. But what changes in the distribution of heritable characters would show up in bone being fossilized today that wouldn’t have shown up in bone being fossilized 100kya?
Got anything at all?
Point 2: there have been a great number and diversity of fossilized species over the last billion years. I’m neither a biologist nor a paleontologist and know fuck-all about microfossils and how one might identify speciation in fossils of single-cell organisms, but it’s possible that there’s fossil evidence of speciation for the previous couple of billion years in the shapes of life forms preserved in earth’s rocks from that era as well. But even if there wasn’t, there’s evidence that single-celled organisms did exist at that time from morphological preservation in rock. Combine that with a whole host of geologic data about the chemical prevalence and availability of different elements and isotopes AND genetic data, and the amount of information that can be reconstructed regarding single-cell life’s evolution is vast.
Please present evidence that there is not a great number of species preserved in fossils over earth’s geologic history. Your claim that there is not a great number is not sufficient given the evidence of my own exploration of fossil beds just this spring.
@consciousness razor, #561:
Um…
1. David Hume’s mathematical estimates of Schopenhauer and Schlegel’s combined alcohol consumption over time?
2. “prime” zombie? The first brain-eater? Kind of like patient-zero in epidemiology?
Yeah, I’ve read a bit of serious, academic philosophy – maybe a couple thousand pages, which I admit isn’t much, but which has certainly exposed me to quite a few of the basics – and I am completely unfamiliar with “Humean laws”. I can only hope that they aren’t ethics/metaethics since that was my philosophical interest and I’ll feel really stupid if I’m unaware of an important term in that branch of philosophy. As for p-zombies, well, I was familiar with the term, though I’ve only seen it used once or twice and I couldn’t resist a little fun-poking.
Still, i think I would perform quite poorly on the test proposed by consciousness razor in #561.
azhael (#656)
Then there’s the ridiculous idea that individual acts of creation for each “kind” (or whatever) is somehow more parsimonious than the one-time emergence of a universal common ancestor. And it gets even more silly when you realize this cosmic hyper-powerful wizard gave each “kind” a genome that arranges into a family tree with other “kinds” and that this tree matches family trees based on morphology, even though none of them should be discernibly related.
@661 A.Noyd
Even if taken purely as speculative hypothesis on paper, naturalistic ones beat the crap out of any theistic one when it comes to parsimony or explanatory power…that´s even without the need to see how they fare when compared with reality…at which point we all know what happens….well, not all of us…Impact still thinks magic is a better “explanation” for why there is a rabbit in the hat than a concealed compartment, even though we can see the inside of the hat and we have footage of how the rabbit got there.
My sister took the kid fossil hunting last Tuesday. They found three or four of them in about an hour. Fukken Gold Dust, I tell you…
biasevolution
Just shows how little you are prepared to look at the evidence for evolution. The fossil record tells a story, and it ain’t creationism.
azhael (#662)
Exactly. “God” is not a parsimonious answer to why whales are related to cows and can occasionally develop hind legs. Or why seals are related to bears. Or why bats are related to horses. That is just completely fucking stupid design for someone who supposedly wasn’t constrained by anything.
Easy, a million or so pieces of scientific evidence to back up the theory. Compared to no other SCIENTIFIC theory.
IC is a religious fuckwittery pretending to a scientific theory. It isn’t well defined, it has been refuted heavily, and is meaningless. You present no evidence, as your word alone isn’t evidence of anything other than you bias.
Who gives a shit what a religious fuckwit believes? Your ignorant belief is irrelevant to me, and to science. The fact that you think you have a point is laughable.
Showing your religious authoritarian bias, thinking Darwin was the last word. Genes and the genomes of living beings support evolution. They don’t support your idea. You must prove your deity/creator isn’t a figment of your imagination and really exists. You haven’t done that, and you can’t. We both know that. All you have is your faith. Which science laughs at, as it in no way refutes science except in your delusional mind.
Nah, think of philosophy of science, somewhere in the crossroads of epistemology and ontology. It’s about what natural laws are. Very simply put, laws aren’t, according to Hume, something separate from the stuff, which “makes” stuff “obey” the rules. There’s no “necessity” entailed by laws, in addition to saying the stuff does this or that. There’s no ontological difference between laws and other true statements. When there’s a law, it’s just a generalization of what stuff does. It’s a sort of summary about the world which gives you some really useful, powerful information (to make lots of predictions and test lots of ideas, for example). Laws aren’t some giant list of disparate facts about every detailed thing — they’re the general facts that give us the most information about the world with the most concise, pithiest statements we can. That’s what makes them different from “ordinary” facts, not some metaphysical difference, like saying the laws “necessitate” that stuff happens, or they’re somehow ontologically distinct from the stuff which is happening.
If you’re not taking the word “laws” too literally, as a legalistic concept, as if there’s a law-giver or as if those are separate things from the (metaphorical) law-abiding citizens which constitute objects in the universe, then it probably wouldn’t even occur to you to think of it another way. It’s mostly people just being confused about the meaning of an unfortunate word-choice, or else having a very weird conception of what sort of stuff there is in the world — theists, platonists, and so forth. To be fair, I guess I make the alternative sound more stupid than it really is, probably because I just wrote this pretty quickly while not having enough coffee, but it is still pretty stupid.
The idea was that you wouldn’t already need to know the definitions of the terms, since the problems would give you enough information to figure it out.
Anyway, I’d give you more credit than most people.
Are you suggesting that every single system in the world is irreducibly complex? Or that every designed system in the world is irreducibly complex? Or every biological one?
IC is a fake, arbitrary concept, superficially “true” only inasmuch as it was predefined as a tautaology, with zero utility in biology.
To argue that IC, as defined by Behe and the rest of the ID movement, is somehow a barrier to evolution is equivalent to claiming the principle of flotation means that ships made of metal are impossible.
The sun shines.
E pur si evolves.
Systems that fit the ID definition of IC evolve all the time, and with ease. This is observed fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcAq9bmCeR0
E pur si evolves.
Sure there are limits. I suspect that no thermophilic bacteria will ever evolve the ability to live in the core of the sun.
That you think that existence of such limits is somehow a problem for Darwinian evolution merely demonstrates that you comprehend neither Darwinian evolution or Mendelian genetics.
Ha! Oh, that’s great – once again 180 degrees off from reality. You’re really that ignorant of the history of selective breeding in plants and animals, but you’re making these authoritative statements about it? You’re a funny guy, biasevolution.
Amphiox @ 669
Well… it depends. See, the stated definitions of Irreducible Complexity are “the system will cease functioning if any single piece is removed” and “the system will cease functioning if a specific piece is removed” (and cedesign proponentsists will vacillate between the two, often in a single sentence, as is convenient for their rhetoric) but the actual definition of Irreducibly Complex is, “Can’t evolve, was created by
Godan Intelligent Designer”. As such, stuff that fits that last definition couldn’t possibly be observed evolving.An opportunity to mention Emma Goldman once again!
NEW THREAD.