On 07/01/2011 04:02 PM, Paul Fuller wrote:
> I've said it before and I'll say it again - You write very well about
> complex topics.

Well, I like to think so. But then, everybody likes to think that 
they're intelligent, and they can't all be right...

> That is a good layman's introduction (I count myself as one). There are
> of course substantial bodies of research, competing theories and
> unresolved details several layers deep below each and every thing that
> you mentioned. However the overall picture is really shaping up and some
> aspects are very well understood by specialists in the field.

I was simplifying vastly, and there is a whole crapload of other 
interesting stuff I could have added also. But it's already an utterly 
huge post... (And huge posts usually result in everybody fixating on one 
passing side-remark.)

> Not only *what* happens and *how* but the *way* in which such mechanisms
> came about.

The more you look, the more interesting stuff you find.

> And yet, the uninformed masses have no problem saying that "it is
> obviously too complex to come about by chance and therefore must have
> been created".

Um, it *is* too complex to have been created by chance! :-P The point 
is, nobody is claiming that it was chance; they're claiming that it was 
a very specific method which, while it does /involve/ chance, also 
involves some very, very NON-random elements as well.

But you knew that already...

> Yeh, as if those who don't understand and perhaps can't
> understand the complexity have a right to dismiss out of hand the
> enormity of what is now understood at a very deep level. Then having
> dismissed it they assert their pet belief as the indisputable truth and
> go on to tell everybody else what they should and should not do.

A well-known writer once wrote "quod enim mavult homo verum esse, id 
potius credit". I think he was right.

I've actually met people like this, by the way. I know a guy, very 
friendly bloke, but he *always* has to be right. If he doesn't agree 
with what you're saying, that's it. There's nothing you can ever do to 
convince him otherwise.

For example, I said that War of the Worlds was written by H. G. Wells, 
and he insisted that Wells wrote The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds 
was by Gorge Orwell. I told him that he was wrong, but I wouldn't hear 
of it. I mean, hell, it's not as if I've been obsessed with that story 
for over two decades. It's not like I've actually got the book out of 
the library and read it. But no, he wouldn't hear of it. He's always right.

He's a nice bloke really, but he's a bit frustrating to be around. 
Eventually you learn to just smile and accept whatever he says, no 
matter how obviously incorrect it is.

> Unfortunately Behe has armed them with yet another false plank to rest
> their beliefs on - "See, even scientists don't believe that evolution is
> true". Uh, yes... One scientist who is refuted at every turn by actual
> experts in the field yet who continues to make such statements. Let's
> see some actual research published in peer reviewed journals that
> support your alternative hypothesis. Then there can be proper discussion.

Trouble is, Behe will just claim that nobody will publish his research 
because it's "controversial". As if which scientific theories get 
accepted or rejected depends on which scientists are part of the "in 
club" or something.

Unfortunately, there *have* actually been instances of scientists making 
genuine scientific discoveries and being laughed at by mainstream 
science for decades afterwards. Sometimes an idea is just so radical 
that nobody takes it seriously. Who an idea comes from should have no 
baring on its scientific validity, but sometimes that affects how 
willing people are to look at it. How similar a theory is to an existing 
one doesn't necessarily indicate how correct it is, but sometimes people 
act like it does.

I have no idea to what extent this problem has been solved in the modern 
era. I imagine there are probably still ideas that you would be 
hard-pressed to get people to accept, even with valid data to back it 
up. But then, I am not a scientist, so I couldn't say...

Behe, of course, is just using all this as an excuse to get bibles into 
schools, as is transparently self-evident.

> In defence of the tree kangaroos of New Guinea and Northern Australia,
> they quite likely are very well adapted to the same sort of niche as the
> sloths. Live in trees, eat low nutrition leaves which need to be
> fermented in order to extract energy, move slowly, conserve energy. If
> it works then evolution doesn't care how stupid *you* think they look.
> But you know that.

Indeed.

Actually, in general you find that low-energy habitats are populated by 
animals that move very slowly. (Take a look at the bottom of the sea, 
for example...)

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On 07/01/2011 04:09 PM, clipka wrote:

> One problem with that Intelligent Design Vs. Evolution discussion is
> that it perfectly fails to realize that evolution can be used as a
> design method. Virtually everything man-made is a product of
> evolutionary design.

Well, yeah, for sufficiently lose definition of "evolutionary".

I think the central sticking point is that most people believe that only 
a concious /mind/ can assess how good a design is and how to improve it.

> No, an intelligent designer does not rule out evolution - I guess an
> intelligent designer /will/ employ evolution. Nor does evolution /per
> se/ rule out an intelligent designer - it just doesn't necessarily
> require one.

I've seen a lot of arguments for and against whether ID should be taught 
in schools alongside evolution. For me, these all miss the main point: 
ID is not a scientific theory. It may or may not be correct, but it's 
not testable. Because it doesn't /predict/ anything.

Hell, it's not even a complete theory. ID says "life was designed by an 
intelligent entity or entities". OK, that's nice, but you've failed to 
specify who or what this entity was, where it came from, when it did all 
this design, /how/ it was able to design what we cannot, /why/ it went 
to all the trouble in the first place, or... actually, anything. You 
haven't specified a damned thing. You've presented a vague skeleton of a 
theory, rather than an actual fleshed-out theory.

For example, when did the designing happen? Are you asserting that all 
life was designed in one hit, back in the pre-Cambrian? If so, how do 
you account for the subsequent 4 billion years? Or do you assert that an 
invisible intelligence continues to shape the course of life even to 
this day? If so, what /the hell/ is your proposed mechanism for this 
invisible influence?

Likewise, /why/ did somebody do all this? If we knew what the design 
goal was, we might be able to test whether life as it actually exists 
satisfies that design goal, and you'd be in danger of having a testable 
prediction. But noooo. No indication as to what the design goal was. So 
no testability there either.

If the designer was trying to see how clever they would be, you might 
expect life to be as over-complicated as possible. But, although life 
*is* complex, there are endless ways that it could be even *more* 
complex, in same cases with a great increase in efficiency.

If the designer wanted to produce the most "perfect" design possible, 
then why the **** did he design creatures that live in water and yet can 
drown in it? (Not to mention being able to die of thirst while submerged 
in drinkable water.) Why the hell do whales /grow teeth/ and then 
reabsorb them?! Why do humans have 6 broken copies of the globin gene?

Saying that whales and humans were designed on purpose fails to explain 
these anomalies. Saying that humans evolved their current structure by a 
series of fortuitous accidents /perfectly/ explains - even /predicts/ - 
these exact traits.

In short, the argument of ID is "I can't think of a theory that explains 
this, so let's just pretend that the fairies did it". If you want to 
believe that, go ahead. But don't you dare try to pretend that it's science!

By the way, you know what else isn't science? String theory.

So check it out. Thousands of scientists and mathematicians around the 
world have devoted their entire professional careers to studying string 
theory. It all looks very "sciency"; there are equations in string 
theory that make general relativity look like 2nd grade math class. This 
is serious, highly respected research.

And it's /still/ not science. You know why? No testable predictions. Not 
a single damned one. There is no possible experiment, even 
hypothetically, which would prove or disprove string theory. (But that's 
the least of their problems; they're still trying just to make the math 
stop contradicting itself!)

The difference is, string theory could *become* science some day. If 
they ever sort out all the theoretical difficulties, we might end up 
with testable predictions. Maybe in 20 years time, we'll all laugh at 
the absurdity of string theory. Or maybe it'll be an unequivocally 
accepted part of proven modern science. Only time will tell.

Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is a thinly veiled attempt to get 
the Christian Holy Bible into schools. Let me make this clear: even if 
God exists, it's /still/ not science. /Science/ is the study of what you 
can /prove/. It's that the study of /truth/, only /provable truth/. 
We're not saying that God doesn't exist, we're just saying that such 
questions have no place in /science/. Now go sit in the corner.

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For someone with no chemistry or biology education past basic 
school-level, that was really interesting, thanks.  It answered some of 
the questions I had, and made me hungry to find out more...

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Invisible wrote:
> The more I read about molecular biology, the more interesting it 
> becomes. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOoHKCMAUMc

Really incredible stuff goes on. I'm never sure whether I'm more amazed that 
it works like this, or that we can figure out that it works like this.

> Mutations that are fatal are vigorously eliminated by natural selection. 
> And indeed, you can find genes that have barely changed for billions of 
> years. These are the so-called "highly conserved sequences".

I remember reading somewhere that there's a gene that controls how many 
fingers you have *and* something about the reproductive system, so any 
mutation in that gene tends to keep you from reproducing for entirely 
unrelated reasons. Hence the reason why everything from fish to bats to 
birds to people have five finger bones.

> Speaking of which, here's a thing: Every single living cell in the human 
> body (with a few exceptions) has the exact same genome.

Every single *human* cell. About half (or more) of the cells in your body 
aren't human, tho.

> I could go on about this all day. Suffice it to say that it's very 
> interesting stuff, but not very easy to find comprehensible material 
> about. But take a look at this paper I found yesterday:

I'm not sure why you have a job in IT instead of a job in teaching.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Invisible wrote:
> And it's /still/ not science. You know why? No testable predictions. Not 
> a single damned one. There is no possible experiment, even 
> hypothetically, which would prove or disprove string theory. 

This is no longer true.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
> > And it's /still/ not science. You know why? No testable predictions. Not 
> > a single damned one. There is no possible experiment, even 
> > hypothetically, which would prove or disprove string theory. 

> This is no longer true.

  Can you mention some predictions and tests of string theory?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> One problem with that Intelligent Design Vs. Evolution discussion is 
> that it perfectly fails to realize that evolution can be used as a 
> design method. Virtually everything man-made is a product of 
> evolutionary design.

  I'm not so sure you should be intermixing those two concepts. Just
because the same word "evolution" can be (somewhat loosely) applied
to both doesn't mean that they are related or that the same phenomena
or methodologies happen in them.

  Biological evolution has no driving force, no goal, no direction.
Evolution doesn't "try" to achieve anything, because evolution is not
a conscience with goals and plans. Evolution is a *by-product* of
uncontrolled random natural phenomena. Evolution is emergent behavior.
For this reason concepts like "the evolutionary ladder" and "de-evolution"
(and some sci-fi ideas that DNA has a "memory" of past forms in the
evolutionary history of the species) are nonsense because it would indicate
that evolution has a direction and a goal towards which it aims.

  Biological evolution is, basically, the change in the genes of large
populations of living entities. The changes consist of things like meiosis
and mutations, and some of these changes get naturally selected (by the
simple reason that all the other changes disappear due to extinction),
meaning that beneficial changes build up over time. The beneficial changes
are inherited by subsequent generations.

  The vast majority of the changes are very minute, and become significant
change only by building up over large periods of time (although there are
considerable exceptions to this, as sometimes significant evolutionary
change can happen surprisingly fast, in only a few tens of generations).

  There is no intelligence involved in this. It's simply emergent behavior
that happens naturally.

  Technological progress, on the other hand, is quite different. It has
a goal it aims for, a plan (in other words, the *purpose* of the new
technology or the changes to existing technology is determined *before* it
happens). Change in technology is seldom random, but driven by a specific
goal. Minute changes are not "inherited" because there is no genetic
information being passed from one generation to another. Very large changes
happen from one "generation" to the next, not because of random mutations
or "mixing of genes", but because of external design. There is no natural
selection. One "species" does not change gradually to another over a
large period of time and with numerous in-between generations, driven by
survival pressure and natural selection.

  The slow gradual change in biological evolution can often be somewhat
detrimental to living species. "Parts" cannot just suddenly jump from one
place to another, or suddenly change their shape or function. There are
many, many things in living species which are "poorly designed" and could
be much better, but them being better would require such a sudden drastic
change that it just can't happen. The required mutation would be so
astronomically improbable that it just won't happen (except in very, very
rare cases). A slow, gradual change would cause all the intermediates to
be less fit for survival, and thus it won't happen gradually either
(because these intermediates simply die long before they reach the
turning point and start again becoming fitter than previous generations).
For this reason most species of living beings have parts of their body that
are suboptimal.

  Technology is not hindered by this limitation.

  You could draw a broad similarity between evolution and technology in
that in technology good ideas are preserved while bad ideas are discarded
(similar to natural selection preserving good mutations while getting rid
of bad ones), but that's about it.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> I'm not sure why you have a job in IT instead of a job in teaching.

  Teaching needs social skills.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Invisible wrote:
>>> And it's /still/ not science. You know why? No testable predictions. Not 
>>> a single damned one. There is no possible experiment, even 
>>> hypothetically, which would prove or disprove string theory. 
> 
>> This is no longer true.
> 
>   Can you mention some predictions and tests of string theory?

GIYF.  I can't follow the math, but
http://www.universetoday.com/72531/scientists-say-they-can-now-test-string-theory/

http://www.physorg.com/news88786651.html

http://www.physorg.com/news202553083.html

Googling "string theory test" brings up a bunch, but I haven't looked at 
many of them. Indeed, I myself thought it was a fundamental attribute of 
string theory that it could describe every possible set of physical laws, or 
some such.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> http://www.universetoday.com/72531/scientists-say-they-can-now-test-string-theory/

  While I know virtually nothing about string theory (well, string theories,
as there are many; the unified theory would be the so-called M-theory),
I find it a bit "unlikeable" for one reason.

  Newtonian mechanics are based modeling and testing direct observations
of physical phenomena. One could say that it starts from the observation
that gravity and interaction between objects behaves in a very consistent
manner, rather than being random or arbitrary. This very precise consistency
allows creating formulas to describe these behaviors. The formulas can be
immediately tested in practice. (For example, if a formula predicts that
dropping a weight from a certain altitude will take a certain amount of
time for the weight to hit the ground, you just can go and test it and
see if the prediction is correct. Moreover, you can perform the test
numerous times from different altitudes and see if the formula always
gives the correct result.)

  In other words, Newtonian mechanics are directly based on observation.
It's expressing with math what one can directly observe and measure. The
predictive power of these formulas is extremely significant and practical.

  Of course it was later observed that, while still behaving in a completely
consistent manner, not all natural phenomena behaved as described by the
Newtonian formulas. For example, the speed of light in vacuum does not
behave in a Newtonian way. (Of course Newton had no way of knowing this
because he lacked the technology to test it.)

  Special Relativity starts from the simple assumption that (besides space
being cartesian) the speed of light in vacuum is the same for all
(inertial) observers. That's about it. This is a rather fair assumption
to make because it's the result of a measurement (rather than being a
wild guess). From this simple assumption you can deduce the Lorenz
transformations (and from them the entirety of SR).

  Again, SR has strong predictive power which, although not as easy as
with Newtonian mechanics, can be relatively easily and directly measured.
You can set up tests and see if the results are as predicted by SR.

  Of course SR was lacking. It assumed inertial frames of reference and
didn't take any stance on accelerating ones.

  If I have understood correctly, General Relativity starts from the
assumption that the speed of light in vacuum is the same for all
observers regardless of their state (ie. inertial or accelerating),
and that inertial mass and gravitational mass are the same thing,
and that's about it. (Again, the mass equivalence is a fair assumption
to make because it's based on observation. The equivalence has been
known since the days of Newton, but it was unknown if it's just a
coincidence or whether there is a strong connection between the two.
Einstein started with the assumption that not only are they equal,
but they are actually the same thing.)

  While deducing the Lorentz transformations from the assumption of
c being the same for all inertial observers (and space being cartesian)
is relatively simple, deducing the GR equations from the further assumptions
is quite a lot more complicated and laborious, but in principle it's just
pure math, without further assumptions, "leaps of faith" or guesswork,
and hence not significantly more complex at a conceptual level.

  Again, GR as strong predictive power, which can be directly measured
with well-defined tests.

  GR has been *so* successful with its predictive power and successful
tests, that has long ago become the de-facto baseline for any new
theories in the same way as Newtonian mechanics were before it: Any
new theory has to have the same expressive power and give the same
predictions as GR, or it just won't cut.

  However, which observation or measurement is string theory based on?
As I said, I know next to nothing about it, but it just sounds to me
like string theory is based on *nothing* at all. It just throws a big
bunch of extra dimensions from nowhere, based on no measurement,
observation or other rational justification, and builds up a huge
bunch of random hypotheses based on these unfounded assumptions.
It almost sounds like the foundations of string theory is not on actual
measurements but on philosophical assertions. For example, the assertion
of 10 dimensions might have a *logical* foundation, but it's more of a
philosophical foundation than one based on actual measurements and
observations. It sounds more like metaphysics (in the philosophical
sense) than real physics.

  And why is it even called "string theory"? Shouldn't the proper term
be "string hypothesis"? String "theory" is *not* backed up by a wide
variety of observations, measurements, repeateable tests, correct
predictions and general acceptance in the scientific community.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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