On Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:14:36 -0400, John VanSickle wrote:

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

Explain. :)

> 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.

Some undoubtedly did.  I didn't say "all", I said "most".  Finding 
counterexamples really doesn't disprove the point.

Jim

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On 20-4-2011 0:14, Darren New wrote:
> 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.

It does unfortunately.

> 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.

Don't confuse the messenger with the message. Most advocates of ID are 
Christians, but they could be muslim, jews and polytheists or animists too.

The devilish scheme they use is playing within our rules. It is clear 
that Creationism is not science, no hypothesis, no explanatory power, no 
evidence and not testable.

So what they do is formulate something as a hypothesis that is testable. 
It doesn't matter that every protein or whatever they throw at the 
scientists will be taken to pieces and strengthen the case for 
evolution. There will always be more examples to have them refute. The 
number is finite, so it is in principle decidable and testable. Only it 
will take decades to disprove all possible claims.

There are similarities with a filibuster. It is within the rules of the 
game, and you can not prevent it without braking the whole process. Yet 
is costs lots of time. And you can always hope that before they finished 
you can think of another useless hypothesis or even better that your 
party will have taken control of education and science funding.

> 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.

If you look closely at the statements of ID you will find that there is 
no reference to who or what that 'intelligent designer' is or even how 
many there are.
In practice a lot of ID advocates do not fully understand the concept 
and claim that they know the name of the designer. At that point they 
invalidate their own claim of it being a scientific hypothesis and their 
proposal will be taken out of the process.
I am always amazed by the number of stupid mistakes they make. If their 
proposals had been more intelligently designed they could have been so 
much more effective in their quest for the removal of critical thinking 
from the US.



-- 
Apparently you can afford your own dictator for less than 10 cents per 
citizen per day.

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On 4/20/2011 14:09, andrel wrote:
> On 20-4-2011 0:14, Darren New wrote:
>> 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.
>
> It does unfortunately.

No, really, it doesn't, even if you accept "ID" to mean "intelligent design".

You've simply found something that evolution fails at. But nobody has proven 
that there is no mechanism other than ID and evolution.

> So what they do is formulate something as a hypothesis that is testable.

And what is the hypothesis? That a particular protein didn't evolve? Or that 
some intelligence actually created that protein?

> If you look closely at the statements of ID you will find that there is no
> reference to who or what that 'intelligent designer' is or even how many
> there are.

But there's a reference to intelligence and design. "This protein could not 
have evolved", even if found, does not imply "someone designed it."

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

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On 20-4-2011 23:58, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/20/2011 14:09, andrel wrote:
>> On 20-4-2011 0:14, Darren New wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> It does unfortunately.
>
> No, really, it doesn't, even if you accept "ID" to mean "intelligent
> design".
>
> You've simply found something that evolution fails at.

indeed

> But nobody has
> proven that there is no mechanism other than ID and evolution.

indeed

>> So what they do is formulate something as a hypothesis that is testable.
>
> And what is the hypothesis? That a particular protein didn't evolve? Or
> that some intelligence actually created that protein?

That there are proteins (etc.) that didn't evolve by natural selection. 
Or even weaker that their presence is easier explained by design than as 
a result of natural selection. (hijacking Occam's razor).

I know of no other way of disproving that, than by checking each and 
every protein (etc.). I you know another way how to defuse this bomb, 
feel free to share.

>> If you look closely at the statements of ID you will find that there
>> is no
>> reference to who or what that 'intelligent designer' is or even how many
>> there are.
>
> But there's a reference to intelligence and design. "This protein could
> not have evolved", even if found, does not imply "someone designed it."

But in all likelihood it would imply that it's presence would be easier 
explained by assuming it was designed. By someone, something, a 
committee, or a mad scientist.

-- 
Apparently you can afford your own dictator for less than 10 cents per 
citizen per day.

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On 4/19/2011 3:14 PM, Darren New wrote:
> 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.
>
Not to split hairs here, but while its pretty damn obvious they "want" 
god to be the answer, in nearly all cases, there are still a small 
subset that may be serious about the whole, "Life here couldn't have 
evolved, so maybe space aliens..." Yeah, I know, its bloody idiotic, but 
ID can exist without god, in principle. Still doesn't help matters at 
all for them, since the central premise to the whole thing is, 
"Complexity doesn't happen by chance.", which is demonstratively false, 
in and of itself. On the contrary, complexity happens because the 
universe isn't some huge mass of stuff, all of which forms crystal 
lattices when it gets jammed together. The number of things that do is 
small, and even then, other things get mixed in and disorder it. The 
finite state of entropy isn't perfect order, its a stable, but near 
complete chaos. And, as things try to balance out and reach a stable 
state, the interim result is ordered complexity.

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On 4/20/2011 2:09 PM, andrel wrote:
> If you look closely at the statements of ID you will find that there is
> no reference to who or what that 'intelligent designer' is or even how
> many there are.
> In practice a lot of ID advocates do not fully understand the concept
> and claim that they know the name of the designer. At that point they
> invalidate their own claim of it being a scientific hypothesis and their
> proposal will be taken out of the process.
> I am always amazed by the number of stupid mistakes they make. If their
> proposals had been more intelligently designed they could have been so
> much more effective in their quest for the removal of critical thinking
> from the US.
>
And, if you look even more carefully, with the exception of outliers, 
nearly every single one of the advocates have admitted, at one point or 
another, that God is the answer they want, and why they invented the 
whole idiocy in the first place. Second problem is, those outliers are 
not accepted by the main branch of ID at all, or even acknowledged much. 
Third, no designer other than god solves the central problem, which is, 
if something made life here, something else had to either have *been 
made* or *evolved* some place else. A fact that gives up the entire game 
right from the start line.

There is nothing about ID that isn't religion. Anything that implies 
otherwise has only been added as window dressing, while being rejected 
when talking about the real purpose, or the ravings of a few UFO people, 
who sort of like the idea, because they never look past the implications 
of life being created here, to the consequence of where/how it had to 
have started some place else.

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On 4/20/2011 3:26 PM, andrel wrote:
>> But there's a reference to intelligence and design. "This protein could
>> not have evolved", even if found, does not imply "someone designed it."
>
> But in all likelihood it would imply that it's presence would be easier
> explained by assuming it was designed. By someone, something, a
> committee, or a mad scientist.
>
Sadly, you can make a similar argument with the bridge analogy. That 
bridge, since there is no way it could stay up if you removed certain 
things, "could not have been designed", so it must QED be a natural 
formation. The only reason we don't hear people making this sort of 
moronic claim is purely bias. In both cases, the correct answer is, "We 
don't know what scaffolding may have existed, which allowed it to 
evolve/be built." In either argument, lack of understanding of how it 
could have formed doesn't prove the assertion that one or the other 
solution is true. Only finding, a) in the case of DNA, a species that 
still has part/all of the precursor, b) figuring out how such a 
precursor might have happened, or c) in the case of a bridge, watching 
someone build a similar one, gets you any place. What doesn't get you 
any place? Postulating that some invisible architect, alien, god, or 
otherwise, simply "inserted" the whole, complete, design into the genome 
(or dropped a complete bridge in place), without themselves using some 
sort of scaffolding to do it. Frankly, it doesn't matter if they used 
mental scaffolding and then just sequenced the gene from that, or 
anti-gravity beams, to lift the rocks. You still need some sort of 
"process" to get the result.

ID's central premise, sadly, is that it just "poofed" into being. Hell, 
even the ones arguing "front loading", fail to grasp that any such 
"master genetic code", to avoid breaking the organism fatally, while 
inserting new features, has to take clear steps, in which it replaces 
parts of the system, only as possible, before reaching and end result. 
You don't get to, in a running machine, replace entire sections of the 
guts, unless you can turn the thing off, or reboot it, or something. 
What "front loading" suggests is nothing less that replacing a whole 
mess of "working" code, all at once, the same way you would your video 
drivers and core kernel drivers, without either rebooting the machine, 
or restarting the kernel. Which, doesn't work. Thus, to do it, you need, 
again, something that can simply "magic" the changes in, whole cloth, 
without restarting/rebooting/etc.

There is a reason why a lot of biologists use the term IDiocy to 
describe this. Sadly, a few too many comp-sci people fail to grasp why 
its similarly intractable in terms of computer code (where, the 
equivalent in that would be taking a running application, and inserting 
new code into it, without breaking links, jump points, functionality, or 
mangling the data being processed, mid-change).

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On 4/19/2011 3:24 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> 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
No it can't. Not in science. In science the two terms have clear and 
distinct differences. The only place they mean the same thing is in 
non-scientific language, where they get used damn near interchangeably. 
This leads to serious confusion in the non-scientific world, since its 
about the equivalent of trying to go from the normal world into 
politics, where lie = reasonable opinion, and truth = negotiable 
interpretation.

If you want to understand something, you need to use clear definitions. 
Outside of the scientific community, the distinction between hypothesis 
and theory is muddier than hell, with guess and theory being used to 
mean the same thing, and hypothesis having no use at all. In reality, on 
a scale of 1-10, where 1 = guess, and 10 = theory, hypothesis is, maybe 
a 3 or 4. There may be sufficient cause, from experience, to presume 
that an hypothesis is worthy of examination, but it isn't yet a theory, 
since you haven't "done" anything to actually test it.

The last thing needed is to muddy the waters more, by claiming that an 
untested hypothesis = an established theory.

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On 4/20/2011 4:01 PM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> There is a reason why a lot of biologists use the term IDiocy to
> describe this. Sadly, a few too many comp-sci people fail to grasp why
> its similarly intractable in terms of computer code (where, the
> equivalent in that would be taking a running application, and inserting
> new code into it, without breaking links, jump points, functionality, or
> mangling the data being processed, mid-change).
To clarify, other requirements - The application be monolithic, not 
include scripting/JIT compilation, and have massive crosslinking, such 
that a minor change "might" be OK in the running code, but if you do 
need to reboot (split off a clone, or produce other sorts of offspring), 
some form of reboot "will" happen, and your change has just broken 500 
other steps in the process, since its a critical part of some library, 
which just happened to not cause problems in the "running" 
implementation, but causes a whole shitload of errors, during start up 
(like a zip library, which works fine for a set sized data sample, but 
breaks when you try to unzip entire branches of the boot code, which are 
larger, or smaller, than being handled in the "running" instance).

In any case, even if you could produce such a thing, and have it self 
modify safely, it only helps the front load argument, not the "it didn't 
evolve" one. You still have to show where the front load code is, which 
means doing research, and... these people don't *do* research.

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On 4/20/2011 15:26, andrel wrote:
> That there are proteins (etc.) that didn't evolve by natural selection.

OK. Let's grant that that is the actual hypothesis.

> even weaker that their presence is easier explained by design than as a
> result of natural selection. (hijacking Occam's razor).

Designed by whom? An naturally-evolved creature? Who then selected that 
protein unnaturally?  As soon as you say "naturally-evolved aliens might be 
the intelligence" then you've broken your hypothesis.

Seedless grapes and bananas were evolved by natural selection. It happened 
to be humans doing the selecting, but it was natural selection and evolution.

So again, even if you find a protein that you think could not have evolved 
naturally, then you have to prove that nobody who is naturally evolved 
created it.

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

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