Le 2011/04/18 04:15, Invisible a écrit :
> On 17/04/2011 17:07, Darren New wrote:
>> On 4/17/2011 2:57, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> Yes, I know what a crumple zone is. But at 100MPH, there are going to be
>>> fatalities, no matter which way you design a car.
>>
>> I take it the UK doesn't have any Formula-1 races?
>
> Yeah, they do. But I'm pretty sure people driving road cars don't wear
> full-body flame-retardant suits, high-end crash helmets, custom-moulded
> seats, custom-calibrated seatbelts and heat restraints. I'm also fairly
> sure no known road car weighs as little as an F1 car, nor is quite as
> low to the ground. Also, walking around the Silverstone race circuit,
> there is a rather conspicuous absence of solid objects to collide with.
>
> If you crash a road car, you're not going to fly across a gravel trap
> for half a mile and then hit a deformable tire wall. You're either going
> to hit another car, or else a tree or a concrete wall. I doubt anybody
> is going to walk away from that alive.
>
> This is presumably why driving at 100MPH is an instant license
> revocation...

What about a head on colision against a concrete wall at over 200 Km/h?

There was such a crash here at Montréal a few years ago. The pilot was 
able to walk shortly after the crash to get into the ambulance. He only 
had some bruising.

Thankfuly, those F1 are realy tough, and the restrains excellent!



Alain

Post a reply to this message

Le 2011/04/18 12:13, Jim Henderson a écrit :
> On Sun, 17 Apr 2011 10:57:32 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>
>>>> Designing it so the car doesn't survive the crash but the people
>>>> inside do would be even more miraculous...
>>>
>>> You've never seen a car crash (or the results of one), have you?  Most
>>> of them are *designed* to crumple in order to protect the passengers.
>>
>> Yes, I know what a crumple zone is. But at 100MPH, there are going to be
>> fatalities, no matter which way you design a car.
>
> Um, can you guarantee fatalities?  Because I'm sure that it's happened.
> 100 MPH is two cars in a head-on collision doing only 50 MPH, remember.
>
> Richard Hammond is still alive, for that matter - he was going 288 MPH
> when the "car" (it was a dragster with a jet assist, as I recall) he was
> in crashed.  He didn't walk away from it, but he didn't die, either (as
> evidenced by the fact that he's still presenting on Top Gear).
>
> Jim

1 car hiting a wall at 50 is similar to 1 car hiting a stationary car of 
about it's mass at 100.

2 cars, each going 100, will fare about the same as ether at that speed 
against a wall.


Alain

Post a reply to this message

>>> If you take ID to be the idea that some protein(complexe)s can not have
>>> been evolved from earlier proteins, then that is a testable hypothesis.
>>> Stating and researching that idea was real science.
>>
>> So there's a theory, the theory has been repeatedly proven wrong,
>
> no it hasn't. All *cases* that have been put forward that should have
> shown support have in fact turned out to be in support of evolution.
> That does not prove there are none. For that to prove you need to
> examine all proteins that exist anywhere in nature.

That's like saying that to prove Newton's laws of motion, you need to 
examine every object with mass in the entire universe. This isn't how 
science works.

>> there's no particular reason to believe that it might be right in some
>> unknown case,
>
> You only say that because you 'believe' the theory and not the hypothesis.

No. I say that because there's nothing special about the disproven cases 
than suggests that they're unusual. If there was, you might have a case 
for suggesting that other examples exist which would, if discovered, 
support ID.

It's like proving that Fermat's last theorem holds for all prime numbers 
less than one million. You might well argue that the fact that these are 
*prime* numbers makes them special, and the theorem might not hold for 
composite numbers. But if you prove it for a bunch of numbers chosen at 
random, there's less room for doubt.

Of course, any scientific theory always has the possibility of being 
wrong, or at least incomplete. But based on available evidence, 
evolution looks pretty safe. (Then again, people said that about 
Newton's laws of motion. But on the first hand again, people still 
*teach* Newton's laws of motion...)

>> and yet people continue to assert the truth of this theory
>> as *fact*? Doesn't sound very rational to me...
>
> That is entirely a different matter. These people need not be the same
> as the ones that do the real research.

Fair enough.

>>> BTW would dissecting the cases brought forward by Behe at al. count as
>>> spending time on ID? Because that would be an ideal way to teach
>>> students how real science works.
>>
>> I commend the idea.
>>
>> Right along side showing how String Theory, despite looking far more
>> professional than ID, is also not [yet] science.
>
> I also disagree on that. String theory is pure maths. I tend to think
> that maths is a science.
> I would agree that string theory is not physics yet.

String theory is mathematics developed explicitly for the purpose of 
describing the real world. And yet, it does not yet make any testable 
predictions. Someday it might, but it doesn't yet.

"Science" is usually defined as "the study of provable facts about the 
real world". Mathematics would fall outside that scope.

>> (And examining why it
>> has the potential to /become/ science in a way that ID does not.)
>
> Remember that in the unlikely case they do find an example of something
> that cannot have been evolved in an autonomous way, ID becomes science.
> We might think that it is just as unlikely as someone handing over the
> telephone number of God, but it might just happen.

Point being, until that day, ID is not science.

In fact, hell, even on that day, ID won't be science. The statement that 
there exist natural systems which evolution cannot explain will be 
science. But that's not ID. ID claims that God did it. This will *never* 
be science, since it is not possible to confirm or refute it by the 
scientific method.

(Note that not being science is different from not being true.)

Post a reply to this message

On 4/18/2011 2:46 PM, andrel wrote:
> On 18-4-2011 10:21, Invisible wrote:
>>>> You've got to admit, when you read about stuff like people believing
>>>> that ID is real science, it does make you wonder what kind of people
>>>> live there.
>>>
>>> If you take ID to be the idea that some protein(complexe)s can not have
>>> been evolved from earlier proteins, then that is a testable hypothesis.
>>> Stating and researching that idea was real science.
>>
>> So there's a theory, the theory has been repeatedly proven wrong,
>
> no it hasn't. All *cases* that have been put forward that should have
> shown support have in fact turned out to be in support of evolution.
> That does not prove there are none. For that to prove you need to
> examine all proteins that exist anywhere in nature.
>
Actually, this represents two huge problems with their hypothesis 
(please stop using theory, since that implies they already have some 
sort of evidence to imply it is/could be true).

First - Irreducible complexity is a non-starter, since it assumes, 
again, without *any* evidence, literally, that if you find a bridge, 
where one stone being removed makes it fall, there couldn't have been 
any sort of scaffolding to hold it up, later removed, which allowed it 
to be constructed. It had to have been intelligently designed. This is 
idiotic, since even such a bridge, having been so designed, required 
missing steps, which are not obvious from simply saying, "If you remove 
that one stone, it will fall down."

Second - If you want to call something a theory, you need to do research 
to test it. The only people that have *ever* tested it have been 
biologists, and their tests mainly consist of pointing out, usually well 
after the fact has already been established in their own research, that 
pulling some random thing out and saying, "See, irreducible!", doesn't 
work too well when 6 months prior someone had already described why it 
wasn't, but the ID people didn't bother to read all of the papers on the 
subject. The only "research" these clowns have done, to date, involves 
a) writing articles, which often repeat assertions already disproven, 
and sometimes using examples already shown to be invalid, b) scouring 
other people's work, hoping to find something that is irreducible, and 
c) writing more long winded papers, describing their hypothesis, while 
usually glossing over, or rarely, making excuses, as to why they can't 
yet describe what they are really looking for (in the case of ones like 
ontological depth, which they *said* they would have "soon", like 7 
years ago), how to find it, how to test it, how you would show it to be 
incorrect, through testing, or anything else resembling science.

In short, they have a hypothesis, which they want to fit preconceived 
data, but are using philosophy, instead of science, to "prove" it, 
wandering about picking up bits of stuff they think fit their useless 
guess.Its like if someone thought the debate over the existence of 
cyclops in ancient times was real, and they went about declaring that 
they *think* they found a skull (really from an elephant), and some big 
bones (from some dinosaur), which suggest they are right, and cyclops 
actually once existed. Meanwhile, we go on studying elephants, and 
digging up dino skeletons, and wondering what these kooks are babbling 
about, never mind why anyone is taking them seriously.

There is no science done by ID people, there is no research conducted by 
them, unless doing the equivalent of google searches constitutes 
"research", and no "theory", just a desperate guess, they want to be 
true, so that either God had to do it, or, for some of the crazier ones, 
they can take Genesis, and some made up "timeline" for the age of the 
earth seriously.

Post a reply to this message

On 4/19/2011 2:04 AM, Invisible wrote:
> In fact, hell, even on that day, ID won't be science. The statement that
> there exist natural systems which evolution cannot explain will be
> science. But that's not ID. ID claims that God did it. This will *never*
> be science, since it is not possible to confirm or refute it by the
> scientific method.
>
> (Note that not being science is different from not being true.)
Mind, if you stated the hypothesis as, "Science can either identify, or 
at least test for, whether something is true or not.", then this would, 
given all collective evidence, suggest several facts - 1) In all cases 
where you can actually collect data, this maxim is true, 2), in all 
cases where data cannot be collected, this maxim is false, and 3) in 
those cases where the maxim fails, the reason is not that the data never 
existed, but has become, via time, etc., unavailable, 4) there is 
usually some grounds to assume that the data had existed, and could have 
been collected, had such collection been timely.

Apply the same to the god question as you get - 1) No data can be 
collected, 2) There is no evidence to suggest that such data ever 
existed, 3) Therefor, lacking evidence that data was *ever* available at 
all, the implication is that you are attempting to find non-existent 
data, for an non-existent object. QED - Its highly improbable that the 
stated thing being examined is "true".

Post a reply to this message

Le 2011/04/19 05:04, Invisible a écrit :
>>>> If you take ID to be the idea that some protein(complexe)s can not have
>>>> been evolved from earlier proteins, then that is a testable hypothesis.
>>>> Stating and researching that idea was real science.
>>>
>>> So there's a theory, the theory has been repeatedly proven wrong,
>>
>> no it hasn't. All *cases* that have been put forward that should have
>> shown support have in fact turned out to be in support of evolution.
>> That does not prove there are none. For that to prove you need to
>> examine all proteins that exist anywhere in nature.
>
> That's like saying that to prove Newton's laws of motion, you need to
> examine every object with mass in the entire universe. This isn't how
> science works.

What you need to examine depends on what you want to test.
For gravity, you only need a representative sampling. If all samples 
falls within experimental bounds, it's comfirmed.

If you want to prove something but you did not find a single case that 
match, you need to continue searching as long as you can, or find a way 
to prove that it can't be.

In the case of ID, you effectively need to find and test every single 
protein, enzimes, peptides and aminoacids in existance and their 
predecessors to find at least one that can't possibly happen naturaly.
You also need to do the same with every sugars and glucides, as well as 
lipids.
And then, finding one may not be enough, as it may be the result of the 
degradation or a particuliar splitting of another molecule. So, you also 
need to demonstrate that that degradation or splitting can't appen naturaly.

>
>>> there's no particular reason to believe that it might be right in some
>>> unknown case,
>>
>> You only say that because you 'believe' the theory and not the
>> hypothesis.
>
> No. I say that because there's nothing special about the disproven cases
> than suggests that they're unusual. If there was, you might have a case
> for suggesting that other examples exist which would, if discovered,
> support ID.
>
> It's like proving that Fermat's last theorem holds for all prime numbers
> less than one million. You might well argue that the fact that these are
> *prime* numbers makes them special, and the theorem might not hold for
> composite numbers. But if you prove it for a bunch of numbers chosen at
> random, there's less room for doubt.
>
> Of course, any scientific theory always has the possibility of being
> wrong, or at least incomplete. But based on available evidence,
> evolution looks pretty safe. (Then again, people said that about
> Newton's laws of motion. But on the first hand again, people still
> *teach* Newton's laws of motion...)
>
>>> and yet people continue to assert the truth of this theory
>>> as *fact*? Doesn't sound very rational to me...
>>
>> That is entirely a different matter. These people need not be the same
>> as the ones that do the real research.
>
> Fair enough.
>
>>>> BTW would dissecting the cases brought forward by Behe at al. count as
>>>> spending time on ID? Because that would be an ideal way to teach
>>>> students how real science works.
>>>
>>> I commend the idea.
>>>
>>> Right along side showing how String Theory, despite looking far more
>>> professional than ID, is also not [yet] science.
>>
>> I also disagree on that. String theory is pure maths. I tend to think
>> that maths is a science.
>> I would agree that string theory is not physics yet.
>
> String theory is mathematics developed explicitly for the purpose of
> describing the real world. And yet, it does not yet make any testable
> predictions. Someday it might, but it doesn't yet.
>
> "Science" is usually defined as "the study of provable facts about the
> real world". Mathematics would fall outside that scope.

Most scientists, starting with quantic physicists, are uneasy about the 
string theory exectly for the fact that, by it's very nature, there is 
no way to observe or realy test it.
It will probably stay forever at the stage of a mathematical abstraction.

>
>>> (And examining why it
>>> has the potential to /become/ science in a way that ID does not.)
>>
>> Remember that in the unlikely case they do find an example of something
>> that cannot have been evolved in an autonomous way, ID becomes science.
>> We might think that it is just as unlikely as someone handing over the
>> telephone number of God, but it might just happen.
>
> Point being, until that day, ID is not science.
>
> In fact, hell, even on that day, ID won't be science. The statement that
> there exist natural systems which evolution cannot explain will be
> science. But that's not ID. ID claims that God did it. This will *never*
> be science, since it is not possible to confirm or refute it by the
> scientific method.
>
> (Note that not being science is different from not being true.)

Post a reply to this message

On 4/19/2011 14:51, Alain wrote:
> In the case of ID, you effectively need to find and test every single
> protein, enzimes, peptides and aminoacids in existance and their
> predecessors to find at least one that can't possibly happen naturaly.

That has nothing to do with proving ID.

The problem is that there are an infinite number of untestable theories out 
there. In order to show *any* support at all for ID, you not only have to 
find something that didn't/couldn't evolve naturally, but you have to show 
how it *did* come from God.

Depending, of course, on what you mean by "naturally". It's entirely 
possible one might find something that could not have arisen without the 
interference of intelligent planning and forethought but which is 
nevertheless completely naturally evolved.

But disproving that every single molecule of life on Earth is evolved does 
nothing zero nada towards proving what *did* happen with that molecule. Even 
*if* every single protein could not possibly have evolved naturally, that 
doesn't tell you anything about how it *did* come to be.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

Post a reply to this message

On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:38:22 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> Actually, this represents two huge problems with their hypothesis
> (please stop using theory, since that implies they already have some
> sort of evidence to imply it is/could be true).

Just a fair point, "theory" can also mean "hypothesis", just as it can 
mean "body of knowledge about a scientific subject".

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On 4/13/2011 4:02 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:

> You'll get no disagreement on either of those points.  The best example
> of that (at the risk of Godwinning the thread) is Hitler - some claim
> that Hitler was an atheist because he did things; others claim that he
> did bad things because he was an atheist.
>
> But most of the people who *actually* did the bad things (not that Hitler
> didn't) were undeniably Christians who were following Hitler.  Hitler's
> actual choice of beliefs really is a minor detail in the Holocaust.

They were by no means "undeniably" Christian.  There is good ground to deny.

When contacted by American chaplains, many German prisoners-of-war 
professed either atheism or nature-worship.  It is true that most were 
nominally Christians (specifically, either Lutheran or Catholic), but 
they had long abandoned whatever faith they had acquired from either of 
these churches.

Regards,
John

Post a reply to this message

On 4/14/2011 1:42 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/14/2011 10:00, Warp wrote:
>> I think Canada proves that hypothesis wrong, as Canada isn't any less
>> multicultural as the US (and guns are quite popular there too).
>
> Perhaps evidence against, yes. I think there's much more inter-culture
> hatred in America (intolerance?) than in Canada, even if there are the
> same number of different cultures. That's more what I was talking about.

 From what I have read, an American living outside of our major inner 
cities, and outside of the South, suffers the exact same crime rate as 
anyone in Canada.  Our high crime is very closely linked to inner-city 
poverty and drug gangs.  Outside of those areas we are just as peaceful 
as any other industrialized nation.

Regards,
John

Post a reply to this message