GVC
Well-Known Member
I must have cut class that day...
Reduce Spending and Raise Taxes?
- Thread starter GoJazz
- Start date
Name two.
Name one.
Are you sure you don't mean hippos?
At times like this, you have to start wondering whether to pull the Poe card.
Apparently this bears into whales thing is based on this passage from Origin of Species:
A number of issues with the characterization:
1) It's obviously framed as speculation;
2) It's obviously not exactly state of the art, even if it was not framed as speculation;
3) He speculates about a creature that does not exist that would hypothetically become as monstrous as a bear rather than asserting that bears turned into whales;
4) The speculation is full of qualifications and caveats, acknowledging an extreme case and allowing for factors such as food availability and the presence of other animals occupying the niche.
In other words, it's about as accurate as most things Millsapa parrots.
A number of issues with the characterization:
1) It's obviously framed as speculation;
2) It's obviously not exactly state of the art, even if it was not framed as speculation;
3) He speculates about a creature that does not exist that would hypothetically become as monstrous as a bear rather than asserting that bears turned into whales;
4) The speculation is full of qualifications and caveats, acknowledging an extreme case and allowing for factors such as food availability and the presence of other animals occupying the niche.
In other words, it's about as accurate as most things Millsapa parrots.
PearlWatson
Well-Known Member
LOL! The entire Darwiniac bible is nothing but speculation about how there would be no "difficulty" for one type of species to randomly mutate into another more complex species. It takes more faith to believe in this ridiculous speculation than to believe in God.
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I've read the book, and even keep a copy in my library, whereever that has been stashed by the moving crew.
It's amazing that Kicky can't recognize that I've borrowed Darwin's writing style, which is perhaps whimsical in its more basic elements. Perhaps we should discuss the random possibilities of human thought, as a fine example of erudition.
A human with a desire to form a neural buzz system that "feels good" can very quickly adapt the connections to "make sense" of anything. Some would (snicker snicker) imagine this to be the very definition of Intelligent Design.
PearlWatson
Well-Known Member
Life violates the laws of thermodynamics.
The irreducibly complex "claim" is based on a biochemist's refutation of Darwinism on Darwin's own terms.
Darwin: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."
Biochemist: I can produce thousands of discoveries in microbiology since Darwin's day to "absolutely break down" his theory. Even a simple mechanism like a bacterial motor can't have formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications because it depends on the coordinated interaction of 30 complex protein parts. If any of those parts were absent the flagellum would be useless. I haven't even got to the blood clotting mechanism and the eye (just to name a few.)
Bye Bye broken down, busted theory. Hello Darwiniac cult refusing to accept the demise of their prophet's ridiculous theory.
PearlWatson
Well-Known Member
Actually, Darwin was a tedious nineteenth century writer who demanded extreme patience from his reader. I think that style was meant to intimidate the casual critic with sheer verbiage. Like the "speculation" about the bear who somehow got confused and started diving for insects instead of salmon, nineteenth century writers were great at making great monsters of gnats and missing the significant sources of intelligence.
Anyone who has read Darwin and seriously argues that that is "Science" is an idiot.
As an erudite English gentleman pampered by the hired sailing outfit in fine style, I doubt he got his toes in any sand on any islands. Galapagos or otherwise. The basics of his speculations were not original, they had all been put to print decades before, but by mere "cranks" with no financial backers.
The "Origin of Species" was a project conceived and backed by purposeful puppetmasters of the world stage with the deliberate intent to discredit religion on a "scientific" pretext. But Darwin grew reluctant to hatch the egg and more or less sat on his "golden" egg and milked his backers for more than a decade before his gave his backers what they paid for. His reluctance to take a strident anti-religious tone came out in some comments buried about 80% of the way through the literary bog, where most likely few of the "enthusiasts" for disbelief or his backers would notice. He said his work had no relevance to the existence of God and no bearing on anyone's religious faith.
Darwin's unoriginal theory, so launched by the erudite elitists who wanted to carve the ground out from underneath the feet of religionists, received contrived rave reviews in the press and high honors from the intellectual establishment. But the "findings" so published and heralded are nothing more than a collection of casual observations selected to conform to a pre-conceived conclusion.
Does anyone here know what "anecdotal" evidence is? Or why in many scientific disciplines it is just not good enough?
Popular speculations in the name of science are numerous.
When you observe "scientists" holding forth on opinions/beliefs that lack actual data or that are, so far, beyond our reach in time/space that nobody has yet been able to set up a definitive experiment that competently tests the hypothesis, what you are seeing is likely some form of modernist substitute for "religion".
People talking about the "Big Bang" really have little better information than people who talk about God speaking a word. What went before, in both cases, is just a blank.
If we are happy to extrapolate from scientifically demonstrated processes of adaptions in living systems producing varieties in species to conclude that this "answers" all the questions and affirmatively disposes of any possibility of "God", it only shows we just don't want to be "religious".
But in fact we are all "religious" in some way or another. Any time we allow our minds to wander beyond our power of proof/fact we are prone to be dreamers in search of "answers" that just meet our need somehow.
I consider religion to be a separate human capacity from knowledge or "science", much like developing a business enterprise is a separate talent from being about to keep a set of books to record expenses and income.
Scientists are the tedious little beancounters who glory in the task of making our thinking square up with facts. As smart as some scientists are, it is their passion to satisfy the human mind with self-sufficiency just like it is the passion of many old-style religionists to satisfy the human heart/mind/soul with "meaning" or "understanding" of some transcendent sort.
I think self-sufficiency is a dangeous illusion for humans to believe in. Well, about as dangerous as other illusions we love to believe in. . . .
When you observe "scientists" holding forth on opinions/beliefs that lack actual data or that are, so far, beyond our reach in time/space that nobody has yet been able to set up a definitive experiment that competently tests the hypothesis, what you are seeing is likely some form of modernist substitute for "religion".
People talking about the "Big Bang" really have little better information than people who talk about God speaking a word. What went before, in both cases, is just a blank.
If we are happy to extrapolate from scientifically demonstrated processes of adaptions in living systems producing varieties in species to conclude that this "answers" all the questions and affirmatively disposes of any possibility of "God", it only shows we just don't want to be "religious".
But in fact we are all "religious" in some way or another. Any time we allow our minds to wander beyond our power of proof/fact we are prone to be dreamers in search of "answers" that just meet our need somehow.
I consider religion to be a separate human capacity from knowledge or "science", much like developing a business enterprise is a separate talent from being about to keep a set of books to record expenses and income.
Scientists are the tedious little beancounters who glory in the task of making our thinking square up with facts. As smart as some scientists are, it is their passion to satisfy the human mind with self-sufficiency just like it is the passion of many old-style religionists to satisfy the human heart/mind/soul with "meaning" or "understanding" of some transcendent sort.
I think self-sufficiency is a dangeous illusion for humans to believe in. Well, about as dangerous as other illusions we love to believe in. . . .
Why would there be difficulty in mutating into a more complex species?
In what way? Please take any law you think is violated, lay it out in reasonable detail, and show the violation.
Dr. Behe was a very good biochemist. However, he has not been a good evolutionary biologist. He has no objectively applicable standard for an irreducibly complex system. Every example he has put forward for irreducibly complex systems have turned out to have reduced, effective, contemporary counterparts in the biological world within a ten-year timeframe. I am sure he will eventually come across one that no reduced, effective, contemporary counterparts; merely reduced, effective, historical counterparts; as even the blind squirrel finds the occasional nut. Meanwhile, as a theoretical position, irreducible complexity is undercut by the mechanism of coaptation and also the process of the Muellerian two-step, rendering it basically a non-starter.
You have confused the notion of "useless" with "useless as a flagellum". The actual count is 20 parts, by the way. Just because the other 19 parts can['t make a flagellum doesn't mean those 19 parts have no use at all. In fact, in contemporary bacteria, 18 of those parts are already known to have uses that are not related to being a flagellum. Giving that mixing-and-matching parts almost randomly is a common activity in bacterial genomes, and billion years of history for just one of the other two parts to have possible been used, the creation of the flagellum is not any sort of mirabcle at all. Nick Matzke has gone into considerable detail on one particular pathway for it's creation, but it's hardly the only possibility.
Feel free to go there. Do you think both notions may have been discussed before? That the reason scientists have disagreed with the positon these systems are irreducibly complex is because there are contemporaneous simplificaitons of each?
What's a "Darwiniac cult"?
It's perfectly natural that since many people take their version of biological origins on faith, they assume that biologists do this as well. It's hard for those who use faith in that way to understand the skepticism others bring to almost every claim. However, science runs on this skepticism, not on faith in Darwin nor anyone else.
I've never read more than snippets of Darwin, but that sounds like a lot of scientists when wrtiing about science.
In the sense that books are not science, sure. Darwin discusses science in his book, but he would not be able to perform science in them.
There are witnesses otherwise. Not to mention all the work he did in his own yard. I have no doubt he was eridite, English, and pampered, but he was also willing to get in the dirt.
As with many great scientists, Darwin did not originate ideas, but brought them together in a way that made sense of things. Natural selection, random variation, inheritence of traits, and species differentiation had all been observed before, but Darwuin was the first to being them together in a systemic manner using the first three to explain the latter.
Conspiracy stuff snipped.
Yes, I know. In fact, I even know the difference between anecdotal evidence and epidemilogical evidence. Do you think you can make an argument that Darwin, in particular, relied on anecdotal evidence for what he said where firm conclusions? That would be fun to read.