Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Sometimes very active discussions about peripheral issues overwhelm a thread, so this is a permanent home for those conversations.
That’s a good idea.
Ironically, if our side made a case for ID, it would make more sense than their own.
Toronto,
I smell a Sokal in the works . . . .
The problem is, even if you got them to buy into it and then exposed the hoax, they’d probably keep using whatever you came up with because it would be better than anything they’ve got now.
Well, if this is the crux of their argumentation, and if a picture is worth a 1000 words, one wonders why they don’t just send to a scientific journal a color photograph of six of them mooning the camera. With a devastating critique like that, who needs to do any work to demonstrate ID?
Patrick,
I clearly did not think that through!
Darwin was good at making the case for design: “What good is half an eye?” In fact, most of the best design arguments are Darwin quotes or paraphrases. And yet the smartest design advocates can’t seem to understand the simplest model of evolution. I will not accuse KF of this.
He lives in obvious fear that function isn’t isolated islands, so he must understand.
Nah, I think he is convinced that there is no convincin’ to be done, hence the bravado. No amount of papers finding function by ‘designed-random’ sampling of points in protein space will convince him that the space is not islanded where it matters most to him, and he knows that no-one is going to roll up with an OoL-in-a-jar or an Evolve-a-whale-o-matic anytime soon. When people started speaking, they had a rich, syntactically and grammatically complete language on Day 1. Prove me wrong.
It’s like repeatedly jabbing a spear in mercury in the belief that, if you can just find the right bit, a death-blow will be dealt.
The ultimate, shoulder-dropping response to any adducible evidence casts them in their mind’s eye as Crocodile Dundee – “That’s not evidence! This is evidence!”.
Exactly, Joe’s “design mechanism” is a term that simply refers to “actual” mechanisms.
Now KF, what are they?
I don’t want 6000 words in a specific format, just a short sentence defining the mechanism that “specifies” how the “design” must function before the design is actually implemented.
How does the designer change the “digital information” in a working cell?
Joe,
Is “design” really a family of mechanisms as kairosfocus thinks they are?
If you agree with KF, what are they?
If you disagree, where do you think he makes an error?
KF has not been handwaved away as much as he prefers to remain silent on the actual “family of mechanisms” required to actually implement ID.
Without “Darwinism” to critique, your side would not have any argument at all.
Prove me wrong.
Provide an argument that isn’t based on the improbabilities of “Darwinism”, but solely rests on the mechanisms of design.
Go to that “necessary” level of detail that Dembski handwaved away by labeling it “pathetic”.
Okay, let’s count.
10+ years and nothing from ID on the designer mechanisms required to actually “design” biological systems.
There’s nothing from ID but criticism of a theory whose proponents have the courage to offer mechanisms for scrutiny.
The chapter in a high school textbook covering ID, would be blank.
The base of an “island” is not at 90 degrees to the “0 fitness landscape”.
Ostriches, like IDists, don’t fear the landscape as long as their heads are firmly buried in the sand.
https://www.coursera.org/course/geneticsevolution
(Hat tip to Jonathan McClatchie at UD)
Seems a brilliant suggestion for the Joes and Mungs of this world. I’m even tempted to sign up myself! Dare I suggest KF give it a go. Might be more productive than demanding 6,000 word essays from random internauts.
If true, CSI can no longer be used as a “random process”/”intelligent designer” detector.
A) An object X, with less than 2^150 bits of information, can be considered to be a product of a “random process”.
B) An object Y, with just over 2^150 bits, can be considered to be the product of “intelligent design”.
C) An object Z, with the complexity required to be a designer of life and the universe, is NOT in any way a product of “intelligent design”.
If both object X, (low CSI), and object Z, (extreme CSI), do NOT require an “intelligent designer”, why does object Y, ( medium CSI)?
Prove? With no difficulty?
Evidently the longer the intelligent design creationists remain locked in their echo chamber, the more their language diverges from the mother tongue.
kairosfocus:
Shouldn’t he rest on the seventh day?
Why would you say something like this right after making a fool of your very own Joe?
Show some respect. 🙂
What was that in reference to?
Just before Mung posted the above he posted this:
To be fair, he did correct Joe, but the timing was bad.
Because they ask scientific questions that can only be replied to by your side with faith in the literal interpretation of Genesis.
Take it one by one. Name the people who have been banned. Link to their last UD post, and justify their banning.
374 Mung October 13, 2012 at 10:49 am:
You might as well add that we live under the bridge and lack front teeth.
That just keeps getting funnier and funnier. 🙂 Now I have to clean up the tea I snorted all over my desk.
Most of the time, the endless, muddled, run-on paragraphs of ID/creationists is a dead giveaway to their misconceptions about science.
But every now and then one gets a short snippet from an ID/creationist that tells volumes about their lack of understanding of basic chemistry, physics, and biology at even the high school level. This one tells a lot in just two short sentences.
Get the news with Morning Joe, weekday mornings on MSNBC.
Get the noise with Mooning Joe, 24/7 over on Uncommon Descent.
Would any other I.Dists at U.D. like to support Joe’s claim that naturalistic non-telic evolutionary theory is untestable, and does not generate testable hypotheses?
I have for some time entertained the fantasy of an internet debate between the “stars” of both camps.
My rules would be simple:
Two teams, each composed of a half dozen bloggers from each side, the ones having the most traffic as recorded by site analysis.
Each team would get one length limited post per 24 hour period.
Each post would be a consensus post, with all members of the respective team consenting to the content.
Topics could range from OOL to common descent to fine tuning to just about anything directly coming under the heading of biological evolution.
The debate would continue for at least three months and the contents published as an online book. The debaters could split the proceeds.
The only problem is that they would never engage on a level playing field.
That’s why we’re all here! 🙂
The other problem is that you can’t get any two intelligent design creationists to agree on any details of their pseudoscience. Can’t leave anyone out of the big tent.
Someone stumbled on my thought.
Joe G seeks some validation:
Rich comments at AtBC:
What a bizarre question. Does he really think anyone is going to pipe up and say “Yes, Joe, posting pictures of genitals is an entirely appropriate action for a grown-up to take when they can’t persuade people of the validity of their arguments”.
Yet … in the only response, gpuccio tips him a wry wink, – “I have great resilience [smiley-face]”. Well done for not calling us c—s, GP. Good on yer.
Lizzie sighting!
http://talkrational.org/converse.php?u=286&u2=19
We’re in trouble now! Get the place tidied up!
What will we do if she decides to rigidly enforce the Moderation rule that:
Do not use this site as a peanut gallery for observing the antics on other boards. (there are plenty of places on the web where you can do that!)
? I think that one needs to be slightly bent, in view of the back-and-forth exchanges with Uncommon Descent — there TSZ is playing a vital role.
What will we do if she decides to rigidly enforce the Moderation rule that:
Do not use this site as a peanut gallery for observing the antics on other boards. (there are plenty of places on the web where you can do that!)
I’ll try blaming you!
I’ll take the blame. I suggest debates in parallel. I’m a pragmatist, and it seemed like the only way to get more than an occasional IDer to debate.
Also, it seems, that the parallelism developed out of KF and Joe’s response to something I said here.
I more than half hope she does. As entertaining as this has been, carrying on parallel conversations grants moral sanction to an offensively unethical practice. While the owners of UD certainly have the right to ban people, or moderate them into oblivion, simply for disagreeing with intelligent design creationism, actually doing so demonstrates a deep character flaw. Free speech is important, and you either support it or you don’t.
I would love to see these conversations taking place in a truly open forum such as this one, but if the IDCists of UD can’t summon the minimal intellectual courage required to participate then they deserve to wallow in their sty of an echo chamber. UD would be dead in two weeks without the input of the reality based community here and the very small number of non-IDCists allowed to post there. Let them reap what they’ve sown.
Joe 31
You got it. Thanks for being honest.
Thought Petrushka and others might be interested in Todd Wood’s take on a new paper published in Nature that seems to support the suggestion that functionality in proteins is not too susceptible to the odd residue substitution. The paper is apparently only available on subscription, unfortunately.
http://toddcwood.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/biochemistry-tour-de-force-in-nature.html
Hat tip SteveF commenting at Larry Moran’s blog, Sandwalk.
critical rationalist:
Have you established that we never use induction? If so, how did you do it without reasoning from particular observations to the general? (As this was off topic elsewhere, I’ve brought it to the Sandbox for anyone who would like to discuss induction).
I can always be induced to talk about induction.
If abducted, I could be forced to talk about abduction as well.
I believe someone already linked to that, and I think I quoted from it in the gpuccio challenge thread.
Stuff like this has been building over the last few years. It directly contradicts the isolated island doctrine,
This particular experiment means that 75 percent of a particular gene is noise. I would say junk, but it is probably necessary for some currently unknown structural reason. But it is noise, because substitutions make no difference.
It could be like the part of a digital waveform between samples, required a placeholder but whose value is irrelevant. Reducing the exponent in a calculation of bits of information is rather important.
I was going to draft a probing comment.
See the following http://xkcd.com/1122
Note how the future is unlike the past in countless ways.
critical rationalist:
Are you asking me to use the examples in the cartoon to reason from the particular to the general?
You said:
How does linking to a cartoon illustrating people using very weak inductions support your point that “the idea that we actually use induction, in practice, is a myth”?
Dr Who: Are you asking me to use the examples in the cartoon to reason from the particular to the general?
Why would I ask you to do something that is impossible?
As the cartoon points out, no one was elected president of a country for tens of thousands of years. Then a president was elected. Given all those past observations, was it “highly improbable” that a president would be elected? Why is probability “valid” in other cases, but not in respect to whether a president would be elected? What about all the other cases illustrated in the cartoon?
We tend to overestimate the validity of probability in nearly all cases.
Dr Who: How does linking to a cartoon illustrating people using very weak inductions support your point that “the idea that we actually use induction, in practice, is a myth”?
How does the character stating facts represent examples of very week induction? There is no prediction or probability made in those statements. Rather, you seem to be imposing it.
Also, note the last two panels. One of the two “streaks” will break because they are contradictory. And that is just the two illustrated in the cartoon.
Again, the future is unlike the past in countless ways. And we can say the same regarding the distant past.
Theories are tested by observations, not derived from them.
I think the brain is a Markov selector (and evolution also). I wish I knew what that means, but alas, math isn’t my strongest suit.
a future predicting mechanism.
I think you may be right.
If they don’t have the courage to come here, it’s highly probable they don’t believe they have a strong argument.
critical rationalist:
I thought you might be giving me particular examples in order to make the induction that induction in general does not work.
Why is it impossible to reason from the particular to the general? Would it be necessary to observe every action in the universe before hypothesising that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and proposing that as a universal law? Is it a myth that humans make hypotheses like that one?
Certainly. And how does it follow from that that we don’t use inductive reasoning?
Theories are certainly tested against observations, but that does not mean that they are not derived from them.
Can you give me an example of a hypothesis that could be made without making any observations? What that you haven’t observed would it be about?