Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Well, there are plenty of other plants that are so mutated that they are 
> now incapable of reproducing for themselves but for some special animal 
> that farms them. (I might mention, for example, the fungi that 
> leafcutter ants culture, for example.) The natural world is full of 
> complex partnerships such as this. I don't think you could call the 
> banana "unatural".

  Well, many people seem to think that anything that is man-made (or only
possible because of human intervetion) is by definition artificial and
unnatural (and hence obviously harmful).

  There seems to be this notion that "mother nature" protects people from
harm as long as humans don't tamper with her ways. In other words, as
long as something is deemed as "natural" (the product of natural processes
without human intervention) it's good and harmless, while anything that is
deemed as "artficial" is harmful (to both people and nature).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> So mathematics is not science?
> >
> > No, math is not science.

> I concur with Darren.

> Science is the systematic investigation of the real world. Math is the 
> systematic investigation of abstract systems of axioms of an arbitrary 
> nature.

  Aren't you confusing "science" with "natural sciences"? Natural sciences
study the natural world, but "science" in general can encompass more than
that.

  As for math, would you say that, for example, the branch of mathematics
called geometry studies how the real world works or not?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On 10/01/2011 12:16 PM, Warp wrote:

>    There seems to be this notion that "mother nature" protects people from
> harm as long as humans don't tamper with her ways. In other words, as
> long as something is deemed as "natural" (the product of natural processes
> without human intervention) it's good and harmless, while anything that is
> deemed as "artificial" is harmful (to both people and nature).

But of course. It's not as if millions of lives around the world have 
been saved by the synthetic compound Tamiflu, not that every year people 
are killed by toxic mushrooms, spiders, snakes and jellyfish.

In fact, you know what? Mankind has spent decades trying to perfect more 
and more powerful nerve toxins. And after years of creating such 
deliberately poisonous artificial chemicals, the most toxic nerve poison 
known to man is /still/ 100% natural. It's called botox. It isn't even 
hard to find.

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>> I concur with Darren.
>
>> Science is the systematic investigation of the real world. Math is the
>> systematic investigation of abstract systems of axioms of an arbitrary
>> nature.
>
>    Aren't you confusing "science" with "natural sciences"? Natural sciences
> study the natural world, but "science" in general can encompass more than
> that.

Well, I suppose if you wanted to be really pedantic about it, science is 
the study of that which can be experimentally verified (or falsified). 
Mathematics is /usually/ about what can be logically proven, which isn't 
exactly the same, but... there's perhaps some overlap there.

>    As for math, would you say that, for example, the branch of mathematics
> called geometry studies how the real world works or not?

Which geometry? Euclidean geometry? Elliptic geometry? Hyperbolic 
geometry? Some sort of non-homogeneous geometry?

Pure mathematics studies these geometries purely for their own sake. One 
or other of them /may/ correspond to the real world.

(For example, Euclid presumably proposed Euclidean geometry because he 
thought it corresponded to real figures drawn on real flat surfaces. But 
of course today we know that the universe actually has negative 
curvature, so hyperbolic geometry is probably a better match.)

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >    As for math, would you say that, for example, the branch of mathematics
> > called geometry studies how the real world works or not?

> Which geometry? Euclidean geometry? Elliptic geometry? Hyperbolic 
> geometry? Some sort of non-homogeneous geometry?

> Pure mathematics studies these geometries purely for their own sake. One 
> or other of them /may/ correspond to the real world.

  The very word "geometry" means "measuring land" (from ancient greek
geo = earth/land, metri = measurement). Geometry is one of the oldest
branches of mathematics (probably only preceded by elementary arithmetic)
and was, indeed, motivated by real-world applications (such as measuring
the area of a piece of land and dividing land into equal parts by area).

  If that's not science, I don't know what is.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>>>     As for math, would you say that, for example, the branch of mathematics
>>> called geometry studies how the real world works or not?
>
>> Which geometry? Euclidean geometry? Elliptic geometry? Hyperbolic
>> geometry? Some sort of non-homogeneous geometry?
>
>> Pure mathematics studies these geometries purely for their own sake. One
>> or other of them /may/ correspond to the real world.
>
>    The very word "geometry" means "measuring land" (from ancient greek
> geo = earth/land, metri = measurement).

And the very word "atom" means "cannot be cut". Not without a particle 
accelerator, anyway...

(For that matter, "electron" means "amber". Science and technology is 
littered with terms made up of Greek or Latin words, the literal meaning 
of which are utterly inappropriate considering what the term means today.)

> Geometry is one of the oldest
> branches of mathematics (probably only preceded by elementary arithmetic)
> and was, indeed, motivated by real-world applications (such as measuring
> the area of a piece of land and dividing land into equal parts by area).
>
>    If that's not science, I don't know what is.

Personally, I would make the separation that "Euclidean geometry" is a 
mathematical theory, while "the real world conforms to Euclidean 
geometry" is a scientific theory.

(And, for that matter, a scientific theory which has been falsified as 
thoroughly as Newton's laws of of motion have been falsified. In other 
words, it's incorrect, but it's close enough to being correct as to be a 
useful simplification, most of the time...)

Mathematical theories exist independent of the physical world. For 
example, the Manhattan geometry surely doesn't describe any real-world 
situation (except something really abstract like network topology). 
Certainly it doesn't describe the physical shapes we see with our eyes. 
And yet, it is a perfectly valid and self-consistent mathematical theory.

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On 1/7/2011 9:28 AM, Invisible wrote:

> No sane Designer would have designed it this way.

Other than your belief that you would have done things differently, what 
is the basis for this claim?

Regards,
John

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On 1/7/2011 11:02 AM, Paul Fuller wrote:

> 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".

This claim does not come strictly from uninformed masses.  It is also 
made by people more knowledgeable than you and I put together.

Regards,
John

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On 1/7/2011 11:51 AM, Invisible wrote:

> 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.

Actually, it does.  It predicts, among other things, that the genetic 
code for organisms may have features of no present use, but which may be 
of use by descendant creatures.  An intelligent designer, especially one 
of the intellect required to design a eukaryotic cell, would have some 
capacity for anticipating future changes to the environment and can 
front-load the genetic code in preparation for this.

Be that as it may, I am against the teaching of life's origins on the 
public dime, because it is a matter of public debate, and is therefore 
incompatible with the principles that underlie a free society.  What 
invariably happens, when the government is allowed this power, is that 
the people who are in the wrong will go running to the government to 
have their view imposed by fiat, and all conflicting views suppressed to 
one degree or another.  At the present moment a person who is skeptical 
that natural selection is sufficient to explain the entirety of 
observable living systems is subject to exclusion from participating in 
scientific and educational endeavors, even when the topic has no bearing 
on the origin of life.  But in times past it was the other way around. 
"But we're not ignorant like they were then."  Actually, it's because of 
a shift in political connections.

As a practical matter, I of course oppose the teaching of views I 
disagree with, but I also oppose the forced teaching of views that I 
agree with, because that breeds resentment--especially if someone gets 
drunk with power and exceeds his authority--and I don't want my views 
getting blamed for some idiot's power trip.

Regards,
John

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>> No sane Designer would have designed it this way.
>
> Other than your belief that you would have done things differently, what
> is the basis for this claim?

OK, well sanity is something that medical professionals cannot strictly 
define, even for human subjects. So let's leave that out.

What I can say is this: If we had some idea *why* the designer designed 
life, we might be in a position to debate whether the way life works 
matches this goal or not.

ID helpfully omits to specify what the motivation was. With no design 
goal, we can't say a lot. Similarly, ID helpfully omits to specify 
anything about the designer (or designers) at all, so we have nothing to 
go on.

What we /can/ say is that no /human/ designer would have designed life 
this way. But that's probably obvious from the fact that humans have 
never designed anything even approaching the complexity of life. But, 
more particularly, artefacts designed by humans exhibit certain specific 
qualities.

Most obviously, man-made devices are highly discrete in their design. 
The task to be performed is split up into separate subtasks, which are 
performed by lots of little independent, orthogonal units, even if 
that's a less efficient way of doing things.

Compare the computer and the human brain. (No, the don't do the same 
thing. The resemblance is vague at best. But, very loosely, you could 
claim that both are giant signal processors, essentially.)

A computer has a CPU, connected by a narrow bridge to a completely 
separate RAM. It has several I/O devices, sometimes with their own CPUs 
and RAMs, needlessly duplicating functionality already present. In 
short, it is a collection of complex systems connected by simple 
interfaces. (Here "complex" and "simple" are obviously relative terms.)

Now consider the human brain. Rather than having one lump of tissue that 
receives sensory inputs, and a separate lump that stores memories, and a 
separate bit that compares one to the other, and another bit that 
generates motor outputs, what you /actually/ find is that all these 
circuits are all tangled up together. There are no "memory neurons" and 
"comparison neurons". Rather, the brain's ability to compare things or 
to remember things is an emergent property of a large network of more or 
less identical neural components, wired up in different combinations.

A human designer would have built a brain with lots of separate 
compartments. Evolution has built one with lots of related and some 
unrelated functions all tangled up together.

So, we can conclusively say that a human wouldn't have designed this 
organ this way. If we actually knew something about the hypothetical 
designer of ID, we might be able to test that claim as well. (But, 
helpfully, we cannot.)

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