Posted on 02/08/2003 7:54:52 AM PST by Ethan Clive Osgoode
One side has the truth, the other propaganda.
Why do these propagandists keep coming back here and recycling their false propaganda?
On this very long thread we exhausted thousands of posts exploring information theory and molecular biology. The emphasis was autonomy and self-organizing complexity. Somewhere along the way I offered the hypothesis that algorithm at inception is proof of intelligence design and provided several methods of falsification. The debate on that thread is particularly informative because of contributions of many Freeper experts and thinkers. There is a lot of useful information to be “had” – but it cannot be realistically copied into this thread.
I don’t wish to argue the case again here, but I do suggest anyone interested in the particulars of the debate might want to click on the above link.
Indeed. It was for that very reason that I prepared my much-reviled "List-o-Links," so that we could begin each new thread with some references to an ever-growing backlog of previously-discussed material. But the creo side kept complaining to the mods, so I gave it up. I understand their gripe. It's much better for their side if each new thread starts with an empty slate. That way they can repeat the same often-refuted material over and over.
You and I have tried to come up with a method to summarize but we couldn't find one. So, it appears de novo arguments and on-subject linking is all we can offer at the moment. Sigh...
Tell me, has it been proven yet that manned airplanes can fly faster than sound? I have no Popperian angst concerning the proposition "The Bell X-1 proved that manned airplanes can fly faster than sound." Do you?
Why do these propagandists keep coming back here and recycling their false propaganda?
For the same reason that all tyrants repeat lies on and on ad infinitum - in the belief that repetion will make their lies true.
Have you no shame? You call my posting of Darwin's definition of evolution my own strawman version? How disonest can you be??????
Here it is again, the definition of evolution as Darwin said it. Posted here because the evolutionists are too dishonest to even state what their theory is and constantly attack those who oppose it by saying 'that is not evolution'. It is the evolutionists who do not wish to be 'tied down' to a specific description because that way they can dance and shuffle their way out by saying 'that is not evolution, you are ignorant' (without ever saying what the theory is of course):
"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse;. a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows."
From: Charles Darwin, "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"
Thanks for posting the link to the thread, it should be read by those interested in the problem of information theory. It also has lots of links for even more information.
I think the question of algorithm at inception is pretty much of a closed book by now. Since all living things known to man have DNA and that DNA symbolic code is translated completely arbitrarily into amino acids by RNA, it is impossible to say that there was no algorithm at the inception of life. Unless materialists can show that rocks, carbon and other inert matter started a school to teach RNA how to read the code, a materialist origin for life is utter nonsense.
However, the question here goes further. The materialists are tyring to work backwards as one could say. They are trying to prove by saying that life can arrange itself intelligently to save the theory of evolution now that it is obvious that the complexity of organisms require intelligent programming to change it and make those changes work. The evolutionists have no evidence for such a thing of course. It is also an obvious fact that until recently not even man could genetically change itself - whether he wished to or not. So to say that species have been intelligently modifying themselves since the beginning of life is to me totally absurd and without any validity.
At least we have a name for the founder which is a lot more than one can say for the Creationists. Your founder was some bronze age story teller. LOL
I suspect you are speaking about autonomy and self-organizing complexity.
It is possible to write a program (and presumably a genetic code) which self-organizes and creates more code. But it is not as simple as it sounds and even then, there's the enormous problem of original algorithm at inception that could give rise to such a thing. For lurkers, I recommend these links:
The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut
Here's something for you.
http://www.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/stovehelp.html
Neutralizing success words, after the manner of the best authorities
(From David Stove, Popper and After, chapter 1)
How to rewrite the sentence: Cook discovered Cook Strait.
- Lakatos:
- Cook `discovered' Cook Strait.
- Popper:
- Among an infinity of equally impossible alternatives, one hypothesis which has been especially fruitful in suggesting problems for further research and critical discussion is the conjecture (first `confirmed' by the work of Cook) that a strait separates northern from southern New Zealand.
- Kuhn:
- It would of course be a gross anachronism to call the flat-earth paradigm in geography mistaken. It is simply incommensurable with later paradigms: as is evident from the fact that, for example, problems of antipodean geography could not even be posed under it. Under the Magellanic paradigm, however, one of the problems posed, and solved in the negative, was that of whether New Zealand is a single land mass. That this problem was solved by Cook is, however, a vulgar error of whig historians, utterly discredited by recent historiography. Discovery of the Strait would have been impossible, or at least would not have been science, but for the presence of the Royal Society on board, in the person of Sir Joseph Banks. Much more research by my graduate students into the current sociology of the geographical profession will be needed, however, before it will be known whether, under present paradigms, the problem of the existence of Cook Strait remains solved, or has become unsolved again, or an un-problem.
- Feyerabend:
- Long before the constipated and boneheaded Cook, whose knowledge of the optics of his telescopes was minimal, rationally imposed, by means of tricks, jokes, and non-sequiturs, the myth of Cook Strait on the `educated' world, Maori scientists not only `knew' of the existence of the Strait but often crossed it by turning themselves into birds. Now, however, not only this ability but the very knowledge of the `existence' of the Strait has been lost forever. This is owing to the malignant influence exercised on education by authoritarian scientists and philosophers, especially the LSE critical rationalists, who have not accepted my criticisms and should be sacked. "No doubt this financial criticism of ideas will be more effective than [...] intellectual criticism and it should be used". (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. LVIII, 1978, p. 144).
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