Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Richiyaado · 05-10-2002, 07:58 PM

Quote:

'id' concludes then investigates...

I disagree. They conclude, then agitate, instigate, pontificate and obfuscate. They do all this, but never investigate.

(And wasn't that supposed to be the first order of business, according to the Wedge strategy?)

hezekiah jones · 05-11-2002, 12:38 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Bilboe:
By "an advocate of ID," I mean that I believe that there is evidence of intelligent design in biological organisms. Is there enough to demand that it be taught in public schools? Maybe not.

If there is any it should be taught, regardless of the quantity. If there really is some, there will be more. But there isn't any - is there?

Quote:

I think if ID advocates were more cautious about their claims, it might help restore civility to the debate.

Yes. It doesn't help that Michael Behe compares himself to Galileo, or that one of Dembski's colleagues calls him the Isaac Newton of information theory. While we're at it Phillip Johnson is Learned Hand, Jonathan Wells is Francis Crick, and Stephen Meyer is Ludwig Wittgenstein.

There are real working scientists hardly anyone's ever heard of (aside from through the Discovery Institute's various quote-mining expeditions) far more deserving of any such comparisons.

Quote:

Who? I don't keep up much on what's going on in the political arena, I'm afraid. Didn't she oppose school busing in the 60s and 70s?

Phyllis Schlafly is an old bat conservative. She, like many other political conservatives, has written several newspaper columns declaring that "intelligent design" is a theory comparable with, and is an alternative to, evolution. She obviously doesn't know what the hell she's talking about.

But that's the kind of uninformed rubbish that's floating around out there, and the mugs are buying into it. Ask them to define "complex specified information" or "irreducible complexity" however, and you'll likely receive a blank stare. As Richiyaado says, the Wedge has accomplished nearly everything except its first order of business: evidence.

Quote:

I had a great thread about this in ARN. Since we've been told that they only have records up to March 25th, I'm afraid it's lost in oblivion. Maybe I should start a thread here on the same topic. But one thread at a time.

Yeah. What's worse, they lost William Dembski's paranoid rantings about Barbara Forrest and her leftist conspiracy to undermine the proud academic tradition of intelligent design and protect the insidious priesthood of dogmatic Darwinism.

I'd still like to know what's this "controversy" that Stephen Meyer and Jonathan Wells want to teach in Ohio. I have a funny feeling the only "controversy" here is the one cooked up by a few Discovery Institute Fellows quote-mining in the refereed literature.

wdog · 05-11-2002, 03:57 AM

I think the whole example is bad.
Prime numbers through 101 from any direction at all I think would be a strong indication of intelligence. That is unlike a biological organism where there is no indication that supernatural natural forces probably were responsible. So looking deeper into a biological organism's DNA is not the same as looking deeper into a radio signal of a sequence of primes.
If a creature were designed, it might be fairly obvious without deeper investigation.

Quote:

In the context of biology, that evidence might be something like finding pieces of a rocket ship in ancient rock (for directed panspermia), or finding a portion of Genesis 1 coded in the DNA (for theistic ID).

Well the nice thing about hypotheticals like these is that you can make up anything you please. Why should someone respond to that? Or better you respond first to this hypothetical: Elvis has been living in a hollowed out asteroid all these years, he then returns on a flying peanut butter and fried banana sandwich to tell us that he has definitive evidence that evolution was not directed, namely that he has been there the whole time to record every step.

Principia · 05-11-2002, 09:12 AM

I think it is illustrative to post the one reply on ISCID to Bilbo(e)'s question, by John Bracht:

Quote:

Thanks for a thought-provoking post. I want to post my initial thoughts. Keep in mind that most of this is off the top of my head and I'm just rambling out loud (or in print...).

Take your second scenario. I think we can say with confidence that the signal is from an intelligent source--there is no doubt about that. The fact that it seems to be broadcast in a way that we are not capable of seems a bit bothersome, but I don't think it really affects the design inference. We humans are incapable of broadcasting a signal diffusely throughout space, and we are used to thinking of radio signals as having a single source. However, I can see no reason why an advanced alien species could not overcome those limitations. In this case, the diffuse signal is a sign of even greater intelligence. Alternatively, we might investigate whether this signal originated with the big bang (which also caused the background radiation) and thus was front-loaded into the system. Del Ratzsch has an example like this, where a bunch of meteors crash on the moon, spelling out a verse from the Bible (I think it was John 1:1 but I can't remember). He claimed it as a defeater of the design inference, but Dembski just pointed out that the arrangement of the meteors travelling through space before the impact must have exhibited specified complexity and thus have been designed. Once we detect an intelligent signal, we may have to trace the "information trail" back a ways to find the source intelligence. If we find an intelligent signal embedded in the background radiation (or having similar characteristics to the background radiation), then it seems that we might investigate the possibility that the signal originated with the universe.

The bottom line? In both cases we are still looking at an intelligent signal. We may just not be familiar with the method of implementation of that design; I don't think that weakens our design inference at all. In fact, Bill Dembski has commented that, if design is real, we shouldn't be surprised to see it pop up in unexpected places. Similarly, we might expect to see design pop up in unexpected ways.

Scientiae

wdog · 05-11-2002, 12:08 PM

We have a plausible natural explaination for the evolution of DNA, we currently do not know of a natural mechanism for generating a sequence of primes to 101 on a radio wave in space. There is not evidence of design in something like DNA when there is a natural explaination, the two examples are not analogous.

Dr.GH · 05-11-2002, 03:06 PM

Bilboe

Quote:

Me: I don't completely agree with Dembski, but I don't completely agree with
you, either, I'm afraid. You once talked about finding a hearth and fearing that it was in a
layer that would make it too old. I asked you what you would have done if it had been too
old. Would you have ceased referring to it as a hearth, or would you have tried to find
evidence of humans being around longer than what was previously thought?

Re: Hearths

First “layers” don’t make things old, time does. In two coastal drainages in southern
California, I have now discovered deeply buried cultural material. The depth at which
the hearths and other artifacts were encountered (over 15 meters) allowed the possibility
that they were considerably older than any known sites in California. The amount of
work involved in such a substantiating an exceptional find (if, say, the hearths yielded
C14 dates of 20K YPB) would take more of my time than I want to spend on such
matters at this point in my life. That is the “fear” that Bilboe seems to be referring to.

The other accusations s/he makes; “Would you have ceased referring to it as a hearth, or
would you have tried to find evidence of humans being around longer than what was
previously thought? “ The accusation of academic fraud (which Bilboe is implying) is
very serious. It shows to me that Bilboe has neither understanding, nor sensitivity to
scientific practice or the professional standards of scientists. First, I would have
re-examined the result, and submitted samples to multiple laboratories. Those results
would determine the significance of the discovery. As it is, regional deposition rates will
need to be reconsidered.

Re: Thinking

Quote:

And which Gedanken experiment are we talking about?

The word gedanken is German and means “to think.” A “gedanken” experiment is
a thought experiment, and your SETI story is a thought experiment. Think harder!

Valentine Pontifex · 05-11-2002, 07:12 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by hezekiahjones:
<strong>

Yes. It doesn't help that Michael Behe compares himself to Galileo, or that one of Dembski's colleagues calls him the Isaac Newton of information theory. While we're at it Phillip Johnson is Learned Hand, Jonathan Wells is Francis Crick, and Stephen Meyer is Ludwig Wittgenstein.</strong>

Martin Gardner's classic tome on pseudoscience was mentioned in another thread regarding Dembski's tendency to write in complex jargon. A bit earlier in the same page Gardner mentioned comparing oneself to Galileo, etc. Also Robert Park's much more recent Voodoo Science is very much recomended. Once can't help but think of Dembski, Wells, Johnson, etc. as well as their YEC equivalents when reading that book. Same M.O., different subject.

Vorkosigan · 05-11-2002, 07:41 PM

In fact, in California right now is a site called the Calico Hills archaeological site, which I sure Dr. GH is familiar with. Louis Leakey, the famed anthropologist, pulled thousands of tools out of the site in the 1960s. He was there supporting the long-time efforts of the site's major excavator, a woman whose name I have sadly spaced.

In any case, I often reference the Calico site because the alleged age of the tools is 200,000 years, or long before hominini were supposed to have arrived in N. America. Now, the stone tools, as you might imagine, were controversial. Some argue they are genuine human-made tools, others that they are geofacts. Statistical analysis seems to have demonstrated that all 11,000 tools discovered by Leakey were geofacts. There is nothing Homo-made at all.

Now, if IDers can apply their techniques to those tools and make an incontrovertible case one way or another, then they will have shown something about the promise of their techniques. Until they solve a "simple" problem like the stone tool one, though, it will be hard to take them seriously when they argue that the universe is an artifact.

Vorkosigan

[ May 11, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

Bilboe · 05-12-2002, 08:50 AM

HJ: "If there is any [evidence] it should be taught, regardless of the quantity. If there really is some, there will be more. But there isn't any - is there?

Me: The problem is that "evidence" can be ambiguous or controversial. Take OJ's socks soaked in blood. To me it looks like the police were trying to add evidence. To others it may not. I take apparently irreducibly complex molecular machines as evidence of ID. Others don't, but instead see an evolutionary problem awaiting a solution. So should we teach public high school students that Behe's examples are evidence of ID? I'm willing to say No. I think it's an area of controversy. I wouldn't mind teaching them that there are gaps in our knowledge of our origins, such as molecular machines.

Bilboe · 05-12-2002, 09:00 AM

Dr.GH,

I'm sorry if anything I said gave the impression that I would ever in anyway accuse you of thinking of fraud. That had never occurred to me. My only point was that the same sort of inference takes place in your work that takes place in ID. In your case, we know that there are humans around. However, had you found the hearth in a depth? rock? deposit? that was dated, say 200,000 years old, and you had this rechecked a couple of hundred times, would you give up calling it a hearth? Or would you suggest to your colleagues that they had better rethink when humans first came to California?

Thanks for the info on "gedanken." I thought you were referring to our esteemed member at ARN. Now I finally understand why he calls himself that. I'm a guy, by the way. You can call me Bilbo, Jules, or Julian, or "Hey, Stupid," but you don't have to call me Ray. BTW, I read that comment you made in a survey a while ago about liking to fish, and ever since then I have this picture of you sitting in your fishing boat, with your laptop by your side, just in case the fish aren't biting.

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05-11-2002, 12:08 PM	#15
wdog Veteran Member Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Ohio, USA Posts: 1,547	We have a plausible natural explaination for the evolution of DNA, we currently do not know of a natural mechanism for generating a sequence of primes to 101 on a radio wave in space. There is not evidence of design in something like DNA when there is a natural explaination, the two examples are not analogous.

05-11-2002, 07:41 PM	#18
Vorkosigan Contributor Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Barrayar Posts: 11,866	In fact, in California right now is a site called the Calico Hills archaeological site, which I sure Dr. GH is familiar with. Louis Leakey, the famed anthropologist, pulled thousands of tools out of the site in the 1960s. He was there supporting the long-time efforts of the site's major excavator, a woman whose name I have sadly spaced. In any case, I often reference the Calico site because the alleged age of the tools is 200,000 years, or long before hominini were supposed to have arrived in N. America. Now, the stone tools, as you might imagine, were controversial. Some argue they are genuine human-made tools, others that they are geofacts. Statistical analysis seems to have demonstrated that all 11,000 tools discovered by Leakey were geofacts. There is nothing Homo-made at all. Now, if IDers can apply their techniques to those tools and make an incontrovertible case one way or another, then they will have shown something about the promise of their techniques. Until they solve a "simple" problem like the stone tool one, though, it will be hard to take them seriously when they argue that the universe is an artifact. Vorkosigan [ May 11, 2002: Message edited by: Vorkosigan ]</p>

05-12-2002, 08:50 AM	#19
Bilboe Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Posts: 54	HJ: "If there is any [evidence] it should be taught, regardless of the quantity. If there really is some, there will be more. But there isn't any - is there? Me: The problem is that "evidence" can be ambiguous or controversial. Take OJ's socks soaked in blood. To me it looks like the police were trying to add evidence. To others it may not. I take apparently irreducibly complex molecular machines as evidence of ID. Others don't, but instead see an evolutionary problem awaiting a solution. So should we teach public high school students that Behe's examples are evidence of ID? I'm willing to say No. I think it's an area of controversy. I wouldn't mind teaching them that there are gaps in our knowledge of our origins, such as molecular machines.

05-12-2002, 09:00 AM	#20
Bilboe Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Posts: 54	Dr.GH, I'm sorry if anything I said gave the impression that I would ever in anyway accuse you of thinking of fraud. That had never occurred to me. My only point was that the same sort of inference takes place in your work that takes place in ID. In your case, we know that there are humans around. However, had you found the hearth in a depth? rock? deposit? that was dated, say 200,000 years old, and you had this rechecked a couple of hundred times, would you give up calling it a hearth? Or would you suggest to your colleagues that they had better rethink when humans first came to California? Thanks for the info on "gedanken." I thought you were referring to our esteemed member at ARN. Now I finally understand why he calls himself that. I'm a guy, by the way. You can call me Bilbo, Jules, or Julian, or "Hey, Stupid," but you don't have to call me Ray. BTW, I read that comment you made in a survey a while ago about liking to fish, and ever since then I have this picture of you sitting in your fishing boat, with your laptop by your side, just in case the fish aren't biting.

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