hedonologist

This came from the Behe, thread:

All that you say there looks correct, I was talking about the later meteorite, but I think the first group to do the tests, did mistake the bacteria DNA for alien, in the article I read. Another group who tested their conclusion dismissed the claim.

ps418, the article claiming that the meteor contained bacteria was posted in the Cygnus forums, in the evolution/creation forum. The place I found out about the contamination was the Reasons to Believe website.

My apologies for mistaking this for a Martian rock, if it was not, it doesn't affect my point, however, which is that we wouldn't want to trust someone because they carry some label of authority, especially if we want to convince those who don't consider them to be authorities.
Well the creators could be alien organisms who were only capable of building organisms, maybe out of other organisms. Humans look like they will be able to do this before long, so it is not necessarily miraculous. It would seem that getting rid of teeth and hair from embryos would be easy enough for them, but maybe it wasn't a priority if it doesn't harm their survival very much. I do agree that evolution sounds better on this point, however.
To the theist, the idea of a designer seems much simpler than matter "magically organizing" itself. And, anyway, the "simplest" answer is not always correct. If you have so much evidence you don't need to make assumptions based on preconceived notions of simplicity. I'm not saying that you don't have so much evidence; I just don't think Occum's Razor (bad spelling) is as useful for convincing anyone, it is less reliable, and is only useful when evidence is hazy.
You are speaking out of your range of knowledge. You don't know of one that had hair, rather. But it doesn't seem they would have for the following reasons:
Yes. Fur is much lighter out of water because it dries out. It seems like it would be a better insulator out of water as well because it fluffs. Maybe God designed whales to be amphibious at one time. Just kidding. Well, I mean that is possible but it would be macroevolution.

Huum. How about hair being used at one time to increase tactile sensation? Maybe it would be easier to detect a barnacle which were about to attach and a whale could rub up against another whale to wipe off the barnacle. Since Adam ate of the Tree whale genes have been suffering from the curse and the whales lost this hair, or the alien creators made a booboo and the hair gene broke eventually.
Hopefully they are trustworthy, but I wouldn't count on that unless I had to count on something. We are not even sure if they did any of these tests.

This is where I am most skeptical. Proving that there is a vestigial remnant is ironically much like proving that irreducible complexity could evolve. The evolutionist tries to show that a part of a supposedly irreducibly complex system could serve a function (thus that the irreducible system could come about gradually), while the creationist tries to show that a supposed vestigial remnant serves a function. It depends much on our imagination to come up with these possible functions, so whenever you settle for an answer you stop searching for other possibilities. As I speculate above, maybe "hair" served (a) different function(s).

[ January 04, 2002: Message edited by: hedonologist ]</p>

Kosh

I nominate this guy for best login name award
of the year....

theyeti

I also agree that evolution sounds better. Again, alien intervention is possible, but just as with the miraculous creator, it requires lots of extra assumptions. First of all the aliens have to exist, they have to be capable of bio-engineering, and they have to want to do it for no seemingly good reason. And worst of all, the aliens themselves must have come from somewhere. So what you're really doing is regressing the explanation back a step, and not really solving the mystery at all.

These additional assumptions should themselves have evidence for them if we are to accept the alien intervention hypothesis. If we can't find that evidence, then we need even more assumptions to explain why they didn't leave a trace. What it really comes down to is the rule of parsimony; all things being equal, we accept the theory with the fewest ancilliary assumptions. For the simple theory, the additional assumptions could be either right or wrong and it doesn't matter. But the more complicated theory requires those assuptions to be right, which is less likely than the other scenario. Of course, we will accept the more complicated theory if a) the additional assumptions are well evidenced and b) the simple theory is inadequate. Notice that b) alone is not enough, because we can always invoke additional assumptions to keep the old theory going, in which case it is at least equal in strength to the more complicated theory.

No one would claim that matter was "magically organizing" itself. It either does so according to the laws of physics or it can't. Exactly how life began it not yet known, but there is nothing that violates the laws of physics when creatures evolve, or even when they obtain greater complexity.

I know that some theists find that invoking God is better. But in this case you truly are talking about "magically organizing" matter; it's just that God does it to the matter instead of the matter doing it to itself. You haven't really changed the problem at all, you've simply reworded it, just like with the aliens.

And, anyway, the "simplest" answer is not always correct. If you have so much evidence you don't need to make assumptions based on preconceived notions of simplicity.

Like I said before, simplicity doesn't need extra assumptions. It's complexity that does. But the real issue isn't so much what's "correct", but how we know what's correct. Since science has to rely on empirical evidence, we start with the simple and work our way up. We can not merely assume the complex.

I'm not saying that you don't have so much evidence; I just don't think Occum's Razor (bad spelling) is as useful for convincing anyone, it is less reliable, and is only useful when evidence is hazy.

Ockham's Razor is just the parsimony that I talked about above. There are two reasons for it: 1) as per above, the theory with less additional assumptions is more likely to be true all other things being equal. And 2), the simpler theory is easier to test, because we don't have as many things to control for. Number 2 here is an empistamological consideration -- how we are able to obtain confidence in its being correct.

I answer the rest of your post after lunch.

theyeti

theyeti

I'm not making this up. It is well known that adult whales are more or less hairless. I should clarify that many often have little bits of hair in certain areas, like near the blowhole, that are used for sensation. But the point is that they're not covered in hair like most other mammals, including ourselves (yes, you are covered in hair). You can see this <a href="http://whale.wheelock.edu/archives/ask99/0336.html" target="_blank">ASK archive</a> page for more details.

Right. According to evolution, whales were amphibious at one time. That is why we see features like embryonic hair and vesitigial legs and pelvises. Also, baleen whales were onced toothed, which is why we see embryonic teeth.

Actually some whale hairs probably are used for tactile sensation, like a cat's whiskers, but they are relatively few. But again, this doesn't explain why an embryo has body hair that is later lost.

I assume you're joking here. The loss of the hair is a good thing as far as the whales are concerned. It's the fact that they retain the ability to grow it in the embryonic stage that makes no sense, except as an evolutionary left-over.

Well, I have no probelm trusting them at all. Scientists do not have a reputation for being dishonest, though creationsts do. What I trust of scientists is this: they are not idiots, they are not Satanists, and they have lots of other professionals looking over their shoulders to see if they screw up.

Just in case, I did a PubMed search to see what I could come up with. There were lots of older articles about protein sequence comparisons that involved whales, but I couldn't get the abstract. But I did find this article" <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=801543 1&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">Molecular evidence for the inclusion of cetaceans within the order Artiodactyla.</a> The authors compared DNA sequences and the sequences of 11 proteins to discover that whales are most closely related to artiodactyls. (Unfortunately, none of the proteins was alpha keratin, the one that makes up hair). However, other articles discussed whale keratinocytes, which I think are the cells that hair grows out of. Interestingly, the artiodactyl relationship was unexpected until some fossil intermediates were found: <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=115650 23&dopt=Abstract" target="_blank">Skeletons of terrestrial cetaceans and the relationship of whales to artiodactyls.</a>

I like the analogy in a way. But how is hair going to have a function in an embryo? It's not to keep it warm, and it's not for sensation. And if it has a function, why is it being lost before adulthood?

As far as evolution is concerned, they don't have to be functionless. The point is that they can be functionless and still make sense. Even when functional, as with the tiny hairs used for sensation, the point is that they are derived from hair used to keep warm. Why is the same structure being used for a different purpose? The evolutionary answer is that an existing structure is being coopted to another function. There is no creationist answer, other than "goddidit" that way. Why do whales have hair, (albeit tiny ammounts) and yet also have every other feature common to mammals? Why not some of the features and not others? Why do they have lungs, even though gills would make more sense? Again, the explanation is that they're derived from a common mammalian ancestor. The creationist has no explanation. It is the exlpanatory coherence of evolution that makes it so satisfying.

theyeti