We're sure gettin' some nasty religion arguments going on in The FRee World.
With so many posts which turn to blows between Protestants and Catholics, I wonder if we're becoming a religion site instead of a political site.
(If you want on or off this list please freepmail me.)
Hank
Except for Anthropogenic Global Warming.
< /sarcasm>
You need to ponder the difference between the weight of the evidence and the concept of proof. Science depends on the weight of the evidence. Proof is limited to logic and mathematics, which deal with representations of reality, not the reality itself, which is the subject of science.
In science the weight of the evidence approaches, but never equals proof. That means the probability associated with the accuracy and precision of the theory and the representations used therein approaches one, as the weight of the evidence increases. Theory is simply the limit of an accurate representation, as the uncertainty appoaches zero.
Note that the age of gullibility arguably got started in Genesis 3.
read later
You want postmodernism? Here’s postmodernism.
“Ultimately, the [evolution versus creation] argument is about how you interpret the facts—and this depends upon your belief about history. The real difference is that we have different ‘histories’…, which we use to interpret the science and facts of the present.”
“Creationists and evolutionists… all have the same evidence—the same facts,” he insists in another article on evidentiary proof, emphasizing that our presuppositions frame how we interpret those facts. “Christians,” he writes, have the Bible and the stories therein provide “a set of presuppositions to build a way of thinking which enables [Christians] to interpret the evidence.” Evolutionists, on the other hand, “have certain beliefs about the past/present that they presuppose, e.g. no God... so they build a different way of thinking to interpret the evidence of the present.”
That there can be multiple definitions held by multiple people is obvious. Arguing over the definitions as a method to discover some kind of larger truth is a waste of time.
*sniff* *sniff* What’s that? OH! I know. It’s the smell of trolls! Seems some people only come here to post about one topic; Evolution/Creationism. Wonder if they actually have any conservative bent at all or are just agenda pushers...
I will happily debate Ms. Hewitt. Her article was full of factual error, logical error, and scientific anachronisms. Her “Hewitt Supposition” or whatever she called it, that species “have always existed as they are today”, but vary within species like the famous sooty moths is Lamarckian evolution. She suggests that species somehow adapt to their environment without proposing a competing mechanism to natural selection. It’s the old “Giraffes grow long necks because they stretch them to eat leaves argument that has already been discredited.
If I misread her horrible prose and she does believe in natural selection within species, but not across species, then she either doesn’t understand natural selection or the meaning of “species”.
She has the unbridled ego to throw out BOTH creationism AND evolution of species through natural selection, putting herself above God AND Darwin. Without either, her statement that the species have always existed as they do today, means the existed before the Earth existed. They were neither created, nor did they evolve from lower orders of chemicals. I own a credential verification company. Please let me have the name of the university, date of graduation, and name at time of graduation. If by some miracle she has a “Masters in Genetics”, I can verify it and also let the school know she doesn’t deserve it.
But so far as what the meaning of "is" is, you're in the clear.
While the postmodern dodge is fairly standard evolutionist boilerplate, the article itself was disappointing, especially when it got to the "Hewitt conjecture". She needs to read some recent RNA research and then come back with a better theory.
I must assume
What follows this appears to be nothing more than a littany of strawmen. I've never know you to be a fan of that sort of thing.
Very interesting article and thread. Thanks to all contributors.
To say nothing is proved in science simply means that we can never say with 100% confidence that a given theory is 100% valid. At best, we can say all available evidence supports a theory. However, since we can't know what evidence we might find in the future, we must leave open the possibility that an existing theory might have some flaws and have to be modified. For example, Newton's "laws" were supported by all the available evidence until various experiments in the late 19th century uncovered evidence that was not consistent with them. Hence they had to be modified, despite having held up unchanged for some 400 years.
This has nothing to do with postmodernism. Modern philosophers of science do not claim, as does postmodernism, that there is no objective reality. On the contrary, a scientist must assume that an orderly set of relatively stable physical laws govern the natural world, which exists as objective reality. The only claim is that our understanding of those laws will always be imperfect because of limits on our ability to observe natural phenomena. We can never observe everything since we are not gods.
That is humility, not postmodernism.
Just read the article and am, to be generous, not favorably impressed due to tripping over errors every few words.DNA does not code for triglycerides.
Eukaryotes are not just “multi celled organisms”.
Point mutations are not “almost always deleterious”.
There are more neutral mutations than beneficial or detrimental.
Recombination is not usually either neutral or deleterious, instead it is so beneficial that recombination is a major reason sexual reproduction is maintained instead of the more efficient asexual route.
Female gametes do undergo mutation (both eyebrows raised at the counter-claim).
New alleles are not required to be dominant.
We have observed speciation.
Wow. Ow. The pain. She apparently does not understand enantiomers. The directionality of an alpha helix is controlled by the stereochemistry of the amino acids involved, and that is controlled by biosynthesis. Same with DNA. It *can’t not* twist the way it does. Whee! Grab two complimentary DNA strands, drop them in buffer, heat, cool slowly, and watch them spontaneously match up and coil into a right-handed helix. That happens all on its own because that’s the lowest energy conformation.
“This does not, of itself, prove the Hox box does in fact control limb structure, since the product of the mutant gene is a shortened form of the required protein, therefore unrecognizable to the body and possibly treated as many other toxic elements are and consigned to the furthest limbs.”
Pardon me but, ZOMG WTF LOL?? Homeobox genes do in fact control body patterning, the truncated Hox gene would not be “unrecognizable to the body”, merely unable to interact with its substrates, and organisms do not ship toxins out to their extremities (”Hmm, this looks poisonous. I guess instead of letting it go on its way to the liver to be detoxified I’ll ship it to my hand. Who needs hands anyway.”)
“There is no genetic evidence which demonstrates the final skeletal form is purely and solely genetically driven.”
No one ever said that the skeleton was “purely and solely genetically driven”. Our skeletons are constantly modified by the stresses we place upon them (which is why astronauts have to worry about osteoporosis as their relatively unstressed bones are broken down by osteoclasts) but genetics!! pretty much is what runs the basic structure.
“That it is a combination of factors, including the environment which the forms develop in, which directs the final shape, and that the shape found in all animals, (with a series of minor variations) is so, not because of “descent” from a common ancestor, but because in the environment of this world, it cannot take another.”
She can’t even come up with something original. Evolutionists have studied distributions in morphospace and determined that some body plans are not possible to reach from current body plans or just plain not possible. However, the fossil record clearly demonstrates evolution of body plans.
All in all, massively error-filled, not the work of an expert. I would say she’s an educated layman, and an excellent example of the saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
Either you and I mean something different when we say "degreed geneticist" or she's a disgrace to her field. Geneticists understand homeobox genes and body patterning and understand why DNA coils the way it does.
I prob'ly won't have time these days to do more than lurk, but the thought would be nice.
Cheers!
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Cheers!
We're sure gettin' some nasty religion arguments going on in The FRee World.
With so many posts which turn to blows between Protestants and Catholics, I wonder if we're becoming a religion site instead of a political site.