Quake3World

[xeno]Julios wrote:I find Dembski troubling - an extraordinarily educated thinker, yet he seems to be missing something fundamentally obvious - the very idea of natural fucking selection means that complexity emerges. The fact that there are environmental constraints means that the complexity that survives will be of a constrained type.

Hence, it seems, and may indeed be, FUCKING SPECIFIED.

I was trying to think of a way to say that. His No Free Lunch bit doesn't seem to explain away the possibility of environment affecting searches.
If you're trying to reach the highest point of a hill, for instance, and you have millions of people walking randomly, SOMEONE is going to reach the top of a hill. If those that don't reach the top are then removed from the equation (selected against), it means you do in fact have a constrained search.

Dembski also worries me because he seems to take mathematical stabs at biology without having much knowledge about it. One of his NFM claims is that searching for the "right" amino acid sequence in a small protein is impossible because the universe can't compute 20^100 or so calculations. However, he still is stuck in thinking that there are "right" or "wrong" combinations for proteins. He also doesn't address the fact that most mutations in peptide sequences don't alter the protein's function. Even if we evolution was trying to find the "right" protein, the number of possible permutations wouldn't be that high. To him, though, it's all numbers.

[xeno]Julios wrote:I find Dembski troubling - an extraordinarily educated thinker, yet he seems to be missing something fundamentally obvious - the very idea of natural fucking selection means that complexity emerges. The fact that there are environmental constraints means that the complexity that survives will be of a constrained type.

Hence, it seems, and may indeed be, FUCKING SPECIFIED.

Kind of makes you crazy doesn't it?

werldhed wrote:
He also says scientific explanations are useless unless they provide "causal adequacy." Darwinism isn't "causally adequate" enough to explain irreducible complexity, but intellegent design is. Therefore, ID is the better theory.

You're kidding, right?

:icon19:++

I highly recommend reading Hume's "Dialogues Conerning Natural Religion"....very readable and directly on point.

I read it but intelligent design to me only sounds like an unprovable theory. Like life after death or string theory... There's hints that maybe that might be it but no one can say.

werldhed wrote: @tnf: I'm curious, what method do you use to argue against students who bring up arguments like Dembski's? I suspect I'll have to deal with such questions soon enough. Personally, I find one point ID propentents have a hard time grasping is that there is no statistical probability that shows it's very unlikely humans could evolve. We are not a "goal." It's like picking biological outcomes from a hat. What are the chances you'll pick all the right mutations to arrive at where we are today? The probability is 1 -- we ended up this way because that's what happened. if you picked a different set of mutations that gave us all tentacles, the ID people would just be asking, "What are the chances all the correct mutations would happen to give us tentacles?" The chances are all exactly the same. It's like asking, "If you drive around randomly, what are the chances you'll end up where you end up?" It's a pointless question because you don't have a destination.

They will spout of a probability - saying to odds of whatever nucleotide sequence 'randomly' assorting is infitesimally small.
Here is a method that I developed that works well -

Ask them what the odds of last week's lottery numbers coming up were. It's usally around something like 1 in 2 or more million (that might even be off by a large margin) - in any case, its large.
Now, ask them what the odds of the previous weeks numbers coming up were - same thing as before. Now ask them what the odds of that two week sequence of numbers coming up is (the individual probabilities multiplied together.) Now, add a third, fourth, fifth week in there. Pretty soon you've got a given sequence of numbers that have come up that have an almost infitesimally small chance of arising. But guess what? Those numbers DID come up. In the early phases of molecular evotion, those random collisions that occurred were producing random results like the lottery numbers. The problem that Dembski types fall into is that they say that the sequence of nucleotides/amino acids/whatever that produce a given complex system was the 'target' from the beginning, and then use the probability arguments afterwards. In doing so, they completely miss the fact that there was no initial 'final goal.' No matter what the odds were, order evolved. Back to the lottery numbers. Lets say that a given 4 week sequence represents the structure of a crude molecule. Now, lets say that this sequence (this molecule) has the ability to catalyze the formation of more of itself (very simple catalytic activity) - from a statistical perspective lets say that it simply increases the odds of more of 'itself' being produced by a factor of 1/1000 even. Even at that small factor, the probability of that particular sequence (structure) arising again is COMPLETELY different than it was before the original molecule with the simple catalytic activity was created randomly. Pretty soon there will be an exponential changes in the frequency of that molecule being found. Now, from here it is not a huge leap to polymerization of simple monomers - monomers that are, at first, catalyzing their own formation and polymerization....

Make sure they realize that the process begins randomly, and, as such, picking a given structure or DNA sequence or whatever and giving the 'odds' that it would form is meaningless. Once some non-random events begin to happen (the situation mentioned above) we cannot make meaningful probability calculations. There is an underlying assumption under Dembski's work that these probabilities don't change much. Even if he does address this issue (I think his "No free lunch" stuff does to some degree, but don't quote me on that...) there is really no debate about this situation. You can't apply statistics and probabilities based on systems that require randomness to a system that is not random.

Let me know if that 'lottery number' example makes sense...I didn't describe it very well here...it is kind of tough to put into print because I am a pretty animated speaker and usually am throwing all sorts of diagrams and shit on a whiteboard while doing this (sort of like goodwill hunting). But at the least it helps them realize that there is a MAJOR flaw in the logic. "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins does a pretty good job discussing this topic as well...using the example of a monkey at a keyboard....but you could substitute Kracus for the monkey in your example.

Kracus wrote:I read it but intelligent design to me only sounds like an unprovable theory. Like life after death or string theory... There's hints that maybe that might be it but no one can say.

Do not insult string theory by comparing it in any way, shape, or form to ID. String theory has the potential to be experimentally supported/verified - ID has no chance.

Basicly there's odds to everything happening and the universe is so infinitely large that the odd's of it NOT happening are even more remote.

tnf wrote:

Kracus wrote:I read it but intelligent design to me only sounds like an unprovable theory. Like life after death or string theory... There's hints that maybe that might be it but no one can say.

Do not insult string theory by comparing it in any way, shape, or form to ID. String theory has the potential to be experimentally supported/verified - ID has no chance.

Now how can you really say that? I mean really if your going to be objective you have to stay objective. What better way to remain objective than to simply state neither has any definable proof yet.

Because ID is a PHILOSOPHICAL viewpoint.
There is no scientific "yet" when discussing ID.



ID will not and can not be proved or verified scientifically. It is an example of INDUCTIVE thought...not DEDUCTIVE thought...no matter how hard the supporters say otherwise.

Yeah I suppose that's true.

Billy Bellend wrote:

Too many big words?

when it comes to science, i dont believe in can will not / can not , meh

Huh?

Billy Bellend wrote:when it comes to science, i dont believe in can will not / can not , meh

ID is not science.

Not even close to it.

tnf wrote:

Billy Bellend wrote:when it comes to science, i dont believe in can will not / can not , meh

ID is not science.

Not even close to it.

Based on what your saying though I might argue that the process that the intelligent being that created the unvierse (playing along here) would be concidered scientific would it not?

The way they are trying to put the theory forward, it is nothing more than a philosophical construct based on intellectual surrender (it is too complicated for us to completely understand at this point, thus it must have been designed/created.)
That's not really science. It's dangerous. Think about diseases and whatnot. What if we had used the ID strategy and never really developed a germ theory of disease. "We can't see anything causing the sickness. We can't understand what is happening. It must be evil spirits. End of story."

Well honestly I'm an atheist anyway so the idea any intelligent being created us is completely rediculous so I defninitely agree with you.

people have always come out wrong when they say "never"

science will eventually unravel every single mystery.

tnf wrote: "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins does a pretty good job discussing this topic as well...using the example of a monkey at a keyboard....but you could substitute Kracus for the monkey in your example.

As a long term wearer of glasses, I find the way Dawkins uses the "half an eye" example to own the complexity argument very funny.

Billy Bellend wrote:people have always come out wrong when they say "never"

science will eventually unravel every single mystery.

What makes you think there's a limit to what science can discover?