Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Not-Quite-Science Forum Existential observations (Introductory facts of rife?)

Mr. Natural's Fortune Cookie sez:

Modern day 'Finalized Reality' is like a trolley schedule - there'll be another one along shortly.

Today's hypotheses are often perceived and presented as theories, and conversely.

Things have never been more like they are today.

The meteorologically scientific sky is falling.

Lao Tzu's 'butterfly theory' is empirically and politically correct (rig for heavy turbulence).

Prediction:
There will be a change in the weather.

Evolutionism will give way to ID.

I like D A morgan's idea of the purple rhinoceros. Mind you Atlas holding the world on his shoulders is pretty good.

Could you add anything to flesh out these statements?

ID is already dead.

My prediction: If evolution ever "gives way" to another scientific theory, that theory will in no way be related to the stories in Genesis.

soilguy posted:
ID is already dead.

If you say so.

Then again I want you to believe it's dead.

Then your desire has been fulfilled. ID has no standing in the scientific community. It can't be falsified.

ID can be falsified (in part) - and it has (in part). The 'Irreducible Complexity' of the tail motor in Flagellum has been shown (I'm sure) to be able to be built up by a step process.

Although the latest hope of the IDers sounds interesting:

"Many place great hope in the mathematical ideas of William A. Dembski, an associate research professor in the conceptual foundations of science at Baylor University.

Mr. Dembski has developed an algorithm he calls the "explanatory filter" for detecting design in anything, both inside and outside of biology. For instance, it could help detectives determine if a death was accidental or intentional, he says.

To explain any particular event or object, the explanatory filter first seeks to determine whether a predictable proc-ess is the cause. If statistical techniques suggest not, the filter asks whether the event occurred simply because of chance. If the probabilities argue against chance, then the event must have been caused, on purpose, by some designer, according to Mr. Dembski, who laid out the arguments in his 1998 book, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities.

He is now starting to apply the technique to molecular systems to see whether evolution by natural selection could plausibly form such systems. So far, he says, Darwin isn't coming up a winner. "The Darwinian mechanism cannot do the design work in biology that biologists attribute to it," says Mr. Dembski."


Also (and please don't think I'm trolling - I'm just asking for an answer) is Macro Evolution falsifiable.

Ie. We know mutations of different types exist, but how would you disprove that they can add up to form a complex system like a tear duct which doesn't only clean the eye, but responds to chemical release in the brain during emotional responses to events. How did the tear duct become linked to the brain in such a way by mutation?

Sorry if it's a stupid question but i'm relatively ignorant about such matters.

Blacknad.

A so-called example of ID can be falsified, it's true, but the hypothesis itself cannot be falsified. Finding out the the flagellum is not irreducibly complex doesn't falsify the idea that an irreducibly complex mechanism, that can't be explained through evolution, isn't out there.

"Macro-evolution," known as plain ol' evolution to biologists (there is no difference between it and "micro-evolution"), can be falsified because the theory makes predictions. If those predictions fail, the theory must be altered or rejected for another one.

Dembski will never get anywhere with his algorithm, because it demands an intelligent designer which is unidentifiable through science.

Certain claims of ID can be falsified, just as certain claims of young earth creationism can be falsified. It's not whether certain claims can be falsified that makes a thing a science, but whether the core itself is subject to an experiment that might prove it false, if it were false.

Mr Dembski writes with authority to lay people who do not realize that he is speaking outside of his own area of expertise. Mr Dembski uses the "no free lunch" theorems from information theory as "proof" of his opinions, but somehow never delivers. But Dembski doesn't really have any scientific credentials in this area:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2004/05/dembskis_mathem.html


The No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems were developed by David Wolpert, a certifiable genius who certainly understands NFL. What does he say about Dembski's use of his theorems? Look here:
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/jello.cfm

We all know that as the complexity of interacting parts increase, so does the chance that it was intelligently designed. There becomes a point when the object under study reaches the level where engineering is without question.
There the investigation of ID becomes apparent when there is shown a purposful arrangement of parts or complexity of a part. Typically there is a detectible identifiable function of the system or it can be described by its internal logic.

"We all know that as the complexity of interacting parts increase, so does the chance that it was intelligently designed."

We don't all know any such thing. Lots of people know lots of stupid things. But some people actually go out and try to figure out real answers to the questions. Not you, of course, but people who are honest and want to know the real answers do exist.

I believe the initial quoted statement has some validity. I assume that most reasonably thinking people will agree that certain "things" that exist in the world demonstrate, as the whole of their existance, a level of complexity that requires a conscious effort.

Case in point, a thing which in all existances of are identical (at least down to a very finite level), is not a subject of nature. The complexity involved in having all existances of that thing exist and be identical by random occurance is simply unbelievable.

This specific interpretation of the initial statement is testable and fallsifiable, and yet proves true (or at least, not false).

All other existances of the same TV in my room are identical, therefore this theory states that the complexity of such an occurance happening by nature or random, suggest that instead, the thing was designed intentionally. The same test applies to all assemply line made objects and many other man made objects. As we know these were down with an intelligence behind the design, they all support the theory. Meanwhile, there is nothing in existance that is so exactly identical in all occurances that is not man made, to prove the theory wrong.

So his initial statement is true:

"as the complexity of interacting parts increase, so does the chance that it was intelligently designed"

His theory, however, is vague, and therefore untestable (a statement not a theory). There is a point at which the complexity of a thing does rule out random occurance.

The problem is that this has little relevance in the discussion of intelligent design vs. evolution as the lines grow blurry and become untestable long before there is any application to the question.

Rather than taking the approach of insulting him, however, this approach difuses the comment without need for an emotional response, keeping the debate an intellectual one.

"The complexity involved in having all existances of that thing exist and be identical by random occurance is simply unbelievable."

Intuition is a good starting point for science, but it is not science, per se. Order does arise in nature all the time from random events. The intuition of people who do not do any homework on the subject is not the same thing as an actual calculation. He doesn't know the odds and neither do you.

"Rather than taking the approach of insulting him, however, this approach difuses the comment without need for an emotional response, keeping the debate an intellectual one."

So you're telling me that I need to keep it at the same "intellectual" level as trilobyte? Maybe you could suggest that rather than taking the approach of insulting evos and making up factoids and false reasoning, he might do a little actual homework on the subject. OTOH, he's apparently not the only one who wants to make up false factoids.

Creationism is not science. ID is not science.
Evolution is science.