On 4/22/2011 11:58, Jim Henderson wrote:
> That's the problem with having a holy book that's used as a 'set of
> directions' where it's been translated, re-translated, interpreted, re-
> interpreted, and heavily edited over a couple millenia.

Yeah, except the Qu'an isn't really quite like that.  It's all one giant 
unambiguous book written by one guy in one lifetime.

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

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On Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:32:31 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 4/22/2011 11:58, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> That's the problem with having a holy book that's used as a 'set of
>> directions' where it's been translated, re-translated, interpreted, re-
>> interpreted, and heavily edited over a couple millenia.
> 
> Yeah, except the Qu'an isn't really quite like that.  It's all one giant
> unambiguous book written by one guy in one lifetime.

But I think you'll find that it's been interpreted/translated a few times.

Jim

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On Fri, 22 Apr 2011 22:32:31 +0200, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:

> On 4/22/2011 11:58, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> That's the problem with having a holy book that's used as a 'set of
>> directions' where it's been translated, re-translated, interpreted, re-
>> interpreted, and heavily edited over a couple millenia.
>
> Yeah, except the Qu'an isn't really quite like that.  It's all one giant  
> unambiguous book written by one guy in one lifetime.
>
unambiguous?
http://www.google.co.za/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=ambiguous+quran&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

-- 
-Nekar Xenos-

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On 4/21/2011 3:35 PM, andrel wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I know it would be hard to find a sensible way to construct something in
> such a way that it could not have been evolved. Precisely because your
> bridge example is a known pitfall (and the paragraphs above therefore
> effectively a strawman argument). But simply the fact that you believe
> it is not possible does not mean you have in any way proven it to be so.
> Man and nature are often more inventive than either of them would have
> though.

Which then brings up Russel's Teapot. Its that a strawman argument, but 
an accurate description of the problem. There is no logically 
conceivable way that you can construct something in genetics where it 
just appears, any more than with a bridge, so trying to find one that 
did is like chasing invisible teapots. Its a useless pursuit of 
something that you can't be 100% sure doesn't exist, but for which there 
are lots, and lots, of evidence to suggest that its simply an 
unnecessary complication to go hunting for it.

The first step, if you want to hunt for such a thing, is to come up with 
a plausible description of what, and where, it will be found. Given a 
few thousands years, some idiot is bound to find a teapot (if for no 
other reason that that by then some other idiot will have accidentally 
left one in an airlock, before someone else went EVA). By the same 
token, if some clown keeps hunting long enough, they are bound to find 
something "designed", but not because DNA was designed, but because 
someone actually inserts some designed DNA in someone/something, then 
dies, or something, without telling anyone.

Its the only conceivable condition where you can spend your time looking 
for the genetic equivalent of Bigfoot, and actually find something that 
isn't a man in a gorilla suit.

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On 4/22/2011 14:00, Nekar Xenos wrote:
> unambiguous?
>
http://www.google.co.za/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=ambiguous+quran&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Perhaps "ambiguous" was a poor choice of word compared to "contradictory".

I was really referring to Jim's quote "the one that says 'kill the infidels' 
or the one that says 'Islam is peaceful'."

The answer is "whichever comes later."

One may reasonably be confused about what something unclear means, but one 
cannot be reasonably confused about which instructions are applicable and 
which aren't. Unlike, say, the Bible, where some people think what Paul (and 
later popes) wrote supersedes what Jesus said, and others don't.

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

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On 4/22/2011 8:52 AM, Darren New wrote:
>> No, just to the point where it is in principle provable, but in practice
>> not.
>
> But nobody has even come up with an idea of how you would show a protein
> could not have evolved. "Irreducible complexity" doesn't show a protein
> could not have evolved. So how would you recognize such a protein?
>
They have tried math that claims its unlikely, if you 1) get the math 
wrong, 2) make a lot of assumptions from the start, and 3) presumes you 
have less time to do it that was actually available. Its the lotto 
ticket hypothesis. I.e., one person's odds of winning at 1:6 billion is 
stupidly low, so it should be somehow equally improbable for 100 million 
people, attempting it twice a week, for an entirely unspecified length 
of time, to do it either. In reality, people manage to win it almost 
every time tickets are sold. In short, their *entire* argument hedges on 
the odds of a solution happening with *one* attempt, in *one* step, 
within *one* organism, instead of in like 900 trillion gazillion 
attempts, with similar numbers of individuals, over multiple steps.

Its about as honest an attempt to describe why "Irreducible Complexity" 
is even a valid concept as it would be if they included the joke math, 
where you are made to prove that X = Y, by dividing by zero at some 
point in the process. There only other hole card is the whole 
"ontological depth" thing, which is just more hand waving. The principle 
behind it being, "If we have a coherent description of what this was, 
and how to measure it, it would amount to, 'Wow, this is X times more 
complex that that other thing, thus Y times less likely to happen, in 
the same, one step, single organism, single attempt case IC claims had 
to happen for evolution to work.'"

Its one of the ironies of the whole idiot mess that evolution says, "You 
don't just get things popping up out of no place, it happens slowly, in 
all cases.", yet the central themes of ID/Creationism are that things 
*do* just pop into existence, without any precursors, in DNA, but that 
somehow this disallows rabbits hatching out of chicken eggs, while, at 
the same time *claiming* that this is exactly what evolution proposes. 
The stupid thing being, one would think that under the, "god did it!", 
hypothesis, this is precisely how entire species would have had to 
happen. lol

Even their claims about what evolution says (but doesn't), and therefor 
ID, are incoherent with respect to their own argument about how you get, 
say parrots, if the only birds on their stupid boat had been doves.

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On 4/22/2011 15:03, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Its the only conceivable condition where you can spend your time looking for
> the genetic equivalent of Bigfoot, and actually find something that isn't a
> man in a gorilla suit.

Except, in that case, it *is* precisely a man in a gorilla suit.  Humans 
tinkering with DNA are no more unnatural than beavers building dams. The 
only way you'd actually be justified in teaching that anything discovered by 
evolution is in doubt is if there was a *supernatural* source. Aliens 
visiting and modifying the DNA doesn't mean the DNA didn't evolve. Not even 
large black rectangular aliens.

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

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On 4/20/2011 10:09 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Apr 2011 16:08:25 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
>> No it can't. Not in science.
>
> I didn't say "in science".  In common usage, and that's part of the
> problem with the Creationist argument (which I stated before):  They
> misuse the word "Theory".
>
> Now, if you couple the idea that ID is not science but evolution is, you
> can use "theory" in describing both - because one has the context of not
> being science, and one has the context of being science.
>
> It is a legitimate *linguistic* usage of the word.  My point was to
> illustrate that this is the device used by creationists to argue that
> it's science, and it's born out of ignorance of the *scientific* usage of
> the word as compared to the 'common usage' use of the word - or it's born
> out of malicious use of the same word intended to cause confusion in
> those who don't understand that words can actually mean more than one
> thing, and that the *context* is important.
>
> Jim

Ok, lets put it another way.. Fag may be a legitimate word to be used to 
describe a cigarette in some places, but using it a lot in the context 
of a gay right rally, because you flat out fail to grasp what the 
difference is, is probably a bloody stupid idea.

So, sure, using the layman's "theory" might be legitimate, its ***not*** 
legitimate if the thing being discussed is scientific evidence, since 
doing so is not going to help you find out which is which, any more than 
running around San Francisco during a pride parade yelling, "Anyone have 
a fag?", is going to get you a tobacco product.

As someone that cares about the distinction, and this goes for most of 
the people "in science", I don't give a flying frak what the "layman's" 
definition is. Its allowing that definition to go unopposed that creates 
everything from sympathy for Anti-vaxers, to climate change denialism, 
to, "Its not creationism, honest!" 'teaching the controversy' nonsense. 
If any fool can claim *anything* they pull out of their ass is a 
"theory", how do you expect anyone to know the difference between the two?

Definitions matter. And, if the definition that is undermining good 
sense is a problem, the solution isn't to shrug your shoulders and go, 
"Ah, well, they use the word differently." No, the solution is to make 
it clear that the murky gibberish version used by the public is *not* 
the correct definition of the word, and more to the point, get 
politicians, news agencies, and other people, where ever possible, to 
stop bloody using it interchangeably with, "I pulled this out of my ass 
this morning."

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On 4/21/2011 3:30 PM, Warp wrote:
>    In principle, if they succed, it could not only sabotage the teaching
> of evolution, abiogenesis and even cosmology, but could possibly cause
> a chain reaction with all kinds of other fields of science. After all,
> if one pseudoscientific hypothesis is taught at schools in order to "teach
> the controversy", what stops other pseudoscientific hypotheses from doing
> the same? Perhaps homeopaths, faith healers, anti-vaccination people and
> germ theory denialists will start demanding to "teach the controversy" to
> medical students, holocaust denialists and conspiracy theorists will start
> demanding to "teach the controversy" in history class, flat earthers will
> start demanding to "teach the controversy" in geography class, and so on.
>
Too late, some colleges have "alternative medicine" programs in place, 
as additions to the existing medical education (or, in a few cases, as a 
different curriculum, where they decided to just make money printing 
diplomas, instead of the almost as lame, "People seem to like it, so 
lets sell it!", BS which has led to it sneaking in at other places. 
Mind, you could also look at some so called colleges, like Liberty U, 
which don't even make a pretense at teaching *anything* useful too.

Not too sure about geology, unless you include "the flood produced the 
Grand Canyon", which I am sure Liberty U teaches, but.. revisionist 
history in the US is only "revisionist", when you contradict the 
existing mangled history that they made up to explain what happened in 
each state (hint, you get a different version of even things like the 
Civil War, depending on if you are in a few southern states, versus... 
every other state...)

In short, this BS is already happening. And, as I stated upthread, part 
of the problem is a general refusal to reject certain redefinitions of 
terms, or properly explain why they are invalid definitions, such that 
we have no word other than theory in science to describe theories, but 
90% of the people in the country think the word means, "I pulled this 
out of my ass to explain something."

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On 4/22/2011 12:05 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:30:19 -0400, Warp wrote:
>
>> Jim Henderson<nos### [at] nospamcom>  wrote:
>>> I was thinking of something else (but of course I can't remember what
>>> now).  You are correct that ID does try to pretend to be - I guess I'm
>>> having a problem with "scientific" being combined with "religious
>>> belief" and that's what led me to say "anti-scientific" - as I see
>>> 'religious belief' as being antithetical to 'knowledge'.
>>
>>    The whole idea with the "intelligent design" movement is to mask the
>> fact that it's simply repackaged creationism, by removing all mentions
>> of "God" and other theistic claims.
>
> Yes, but a rebranding of creationism as "intelligent design" doesn't mean
> it's not religiously motivated.  I guess for those who don't see through
> that deception and who have a very limited understanding of what
> scientific discovery actually is might think it was 'an appearance of
> science'.
>
>>    In the worst case scenario the whole schooling system could get
>>    sabotaged
>> to a catastrophical point. Science, technology and progress would suffer
>> enormously.
>
> Yes, and I think ultimately this demonstrates the real danger of this
> type of theistic thinking - not to mention that when it enters the public
> schools, it violates the establishment clause of the US Constitution.  If
> a public school is teaching religious theology about the creation of the
> universe (whether they use religious metaphors or not), I'm sorry, that's
> state-sponsored religion, and that's unconstitutional.
>
> Jim
Strictly speaking, its only a violation if it only covers "one" creation 
theory, from a single religion. The problem is: a) there is no way in 
hell they would allow other creation theories. b) they would play the 
same idiot game as they do in government, if allowed, which is to say, 
"Since we don't have any X people here, we are only going to address the 
creation beliefs of the people that actually are in the class." In 
government this argument goes, "Since we couldn't find any priests from 
other religions, we decided to just go with the Jesus ones." c) a lot of 
them would ignore the requirement anyway, and only teach the Bible's 
version, figuring that, since everyone there is Christian, they can get 
by with it, without anyone suing them (also a common city government 
tactic for this sort of BS, and even already in some schools, where they 
teach creationism as right anyway, and only teach evolution as much as 
needed to "look" like they tried, on a government test).

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