Science vs. Creationism

[babe]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, so if you claim something, tell people the EXACT way you did it, others try (which is what peer review is about) and nobobdy replicates the result, you consider that a fallacy with peer review? It's like saying you did an experiment and 2+2 ended up being 5 and when everyone else does it, they get 4. If that were to happen to me, I'd try to replicate the results again.

There's a difference between authority and expertise. Religion is about authority. Science is about expertise. If I'm reading your angle correctly, you'd be fine with ANYBODY publishing a supposed cure for cancer because they used the scientific method and got a result that can test for cancer that no one else can duplicate.

You must be a REAL friend to the snake oil salesmen out there.

If religion were about "authority", Jesus didn't get the memo. Neither did Confucious, or Buddha. According to these folks, "religion" is about personal accountability, personal virtue, and personal truth. According to their teachings, there is an enlightened path for a good or better life that is so far above the commonplace paths of mankind it is remarkable if a human can come close to the better way.

The medieval clerics of Catholicism needed ignorant folks who didn't know the teachings of Jesus, and the cloak of state sanction as well as the swords and axes of state police to enforce that ignorance. They killed people who would read the bible, calling them "apostate" or "heretics", the same way statists today need to marginalize people with personal values who try to live better moral lives rather than be mere pawns dependent upon authority.

yah I know that a lot of "evolutionists" want the State to enforce their doctrine in public schools.

So much so, sometimes they will just misrepresent what someone like me says to cram me into some little corner of the discussion, throwing out some dismissive allegations that are just false.

I said "Peer Review" isn't part of the scientific method as it was defined a few decades ago. And that's the fact. It is not publication in a "Peer-Reviewed" journal that makes a result valid, it is actual validity. And in "Science" there is no person or authority that can make a result valid. You and many others today mistake state sanction for validity. That is exactly the same thing that clerics and lot of ignorant folks did when medieval states sanctioned religious doctrine and enforced religious beliefs or norms of society with austere punishments including capital punishment.

If I read a scientific report, I will do my own thinking. Maybe I will see something wrong with the idea. Maybe I'll think it is unsettling to my convictions. Maybe I'll want to see what others find out in their efforts to check the report. Before anything becomes accepted, it is---was---- commonplace for a lot of critics to rush to their labs and try to prove it wrong somehow, even after it was published in Science or JAMA, or whatever other peer-reviewed journal.

 

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I've simplified the different beliefs on origins:

From molecule to man by genetic mutation

by an intelligent force (ID)
or
by spontaneous generation​

gradual (Darwinism)
not gradual (Punctuated Equilibrium-to match the fossil record)​

We also have kinds were designed "whole cloth" in different periods (creationism)

I don't have to choose another theory to see that gradual spontaneous generation doesn't fit what we are seeing.

What the different fields of science are saying about the Darwinism:

Information theory: chance with or without necessity is incapable of CSI

Biochemisty: biological systems are irreducibly complex

Genetics: "Microevolution" involves a decline in genetic information.
"Macroevolution" requires an increase in genetic information.

Paleontogy: "The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.’"

Punctuated equilibrium is still fairly gradual in the rate of changes, unless you think 5 million years or so is not gradual. For that matter, punctuated equilibrium could be true at the same time as the most gradual of accounts; there are a variety of ways this could happen.

There has not been, and it looks likes there never will be, an successful field test of using CSI to detect design when design is not know beforehand. It is a biologically useless concept.

We have seen irreducibly complex systems develop in the laboratory through mutation and selection.

"Microevolution" (really, there's just evolution) involves mechanisms like retroviral insertions, gene duplication, and segment reversal. Any can lead to an information increase on their own, and serve as more than enough to power any information increase needed for "macroevolution" (again, there's just evolution, the macro-micro distinction is artificial, subjective, and biologically meaningless).

We have filled in most of the gaps we had from paleontology in the past 150 year, we no longer need great leaps of imagination.

 

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Professor Maciej Giertych, M.A.(Oxford), Ph.D.(Toronto), D.Sc.(Poznan), is head of the Genetics Department of the Polish Academy of Sciences at the Institute of Dendrology in Kornik, Poland.

Scientists do occasionally become creationists, which is why the number of biologists supporting evolutionary theory is around 96%, not 100%. Congratulations on finding a member of the 4%.

"I felt uneasy lecturing about positive mutations when I could not give an example. "

Well, now that he's seen nylon-eating bacteria and the results of Lenski's experiments, he no longer has to worry about that.

 

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I suppose you get tired sometimes. . . . .

Sometimes.

"Evolutionary Scientists" expanded the scale and the duration of the phenomenon beyond any practical possibility of observation, ...

We've use evolutionary theory to predict live species like the naked mole rat and fossils like Tiktaalik rosea. So, the practical possibilities of observation seem to extend fairly far and wide.

Missing from this theory is a coherent defintion of what "Life" is, as well as any truly scientific demonstrations of any of the alleged steps.

At it's most basic, evolution requires two hings: reproduction with variation, and selection. As long as something reproduces in manners that allow variation, and there is selective pressure on it, whether it fits some other definition of life is not relevant.

 

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No doubt by dawn there will be some kind of a smear laid down here discrediting the Prof quoted above.

Let's hope we get more specific information that "He's a crackpot" and "Reputable Scientists have exposed him" as a fraud, a dupe, or a schemer hell-bent on re-writing high school textbooks

While there is a great deal of such information to be had, it wasn't really relevant.

 

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So I watched the little snippet.

I wouldn't buy a used car from the guy on the left.

I assume you mean Krauss. That's a good instinct; his personal behavior leaves a lot to be desired (according to the rumor mill around conventions).

He is nonetheless correct on this video.

 

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In my day, the high school and college textbooks clearly alleged that Darwin's theory provided a stand-alone explanation for the origin of Life.

In my day, the books I used separated abiogenesis from evolution. However, I have no reason to say that all books were so careful

To a fascist State, religion is a problem because it postulates some higher power, some higher authority, than a few rich men.

Can you name any actual fascist states (no, Russia and China don't count, they are communist) that were unfriendly to religion generally (as opposed to specific religions that withheld government support)?

 

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Examples of designed algorithmic variation...not spontaneous generation.

The bacteria remain bacteria.

That would be a prediction of evolutionary theory: the descendant of bacteria are bacteria. It would have be a miracle, and a disproof of evolution, if they were anything else.

This information, that contains that UofU experiment has some pretty interesting stuff on inheritance:

The study of epigenetic effects poses no issue to evolution, rather, it's folded into it.

 

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"Genetic literature on the subject often confuses mutations with alleles, or even mutations with recombinations. The finding of an allele that is useful for some purpose is not the equivalent of demonstrating a positive mutation — similarly when the find concerns a useful recombinant of alleles existing in the gene pool."

Lenski's experiments found beneficial mutations in some generations not present in their prior generations.

 

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Your source says this but duplication ain't new information...it is more information, like 2 copies of the same book would have more words, but not new words. (you can learn this from information theory).

Information theory says the opposite. Given a single letter "k" and some measure of information, then for any chosen amount of information m, you can create a string x where the difference in information between xk and xkx is larger than m. There is no limit to the amount of information that can be added by gene duplication.

 

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A book is inanimate.

Even so, it's false for books.

https://recursed.blogspot.com/2009/01/test-your-knowledge-of-information.html

 

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The analogy is sound since I took it straight from the theory.

I will give you enough credit to assume you took it straight from Dembski, or one of his acolytes, and assumed Dembski was telling you the truth.

Dembski was not telling you the truth. He is lying to you, and giving you a false understanding of information theory. He is counting on your lack of education in actual information theory to make himself sound plausible. He is playing you for a fool.