Posted on 04/04/2014 5:25:29 PM PDT by Moseley
The stakes are higher than most conservatives realize. When the fraud of man-made global warming finally dies, folks will start thinking: What else were we lied to about? How could the high priests of modern knowledge have confidently insisted something that was never remotely plausible?
A key element of progressivism is having wise philosopher-kings who make benevolent decisions for the masses. It is a core element of conservatism that you can make decisions for yourself. But for progressives, it is essential to convince the public that the designated authorities know better than you do, including what to eat, how to raise your kids, how to educate children, whom to vote for, etc.
Who will control society is up for grabs. The entire progressive religion depends upon maintaining public belief that their self-declared experts are all-knowing. Conformity is more important than truth. So desperate Warmists are intensifying their efforts even as their argument collapses in full view of everyone.
But a scientist with an opinion is not a scientist. A real scientist is cheerfully open to being proven wrong, eager for discovery more than for satisfying his ego. Many of the most important discoveries were not what a researcher was expecting. A scientist will have suspicions and a working hypothesis, but only with an open mind.
Instead, modern science has become a festival of speculation. Progressives simply speculate about what might be true and then read tea leaves for any hint consistent with their imagination.
We have special-effects television shows about dinosaurs showing the coloring of dinosaurs whose skin we have never seen and the sounds they make which we have never heard. Science shows tell us that the mother dinosaur is starting to worry that day about the storm approaching, and that the young dinosaurs are feeling playful.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
It still is - but what separates evolution from other theories is the fact that it affects our morality and social structure as shown by the quotes you decided to ignore.
Those aren't quotes from 'science.' 'Science' doesn't speak; individual scientists do. If you want to know if I have an issue with any of those authors, I'd say I'd have to see their quotes in context. I don't trust mined quotes.
But more to the point: whether I agree with them, or whether they're valid, has nothing to do with whether the theory of evolution is true. A scientific theory is not falsified because you or I don't like it's philosophical implications. People didn't care for the implications of the heliocentric theory, either. But we got over it.
“Evolution is a theory about the origin of life” is presented as false. It is not. I know many people like to recite the mantra that “abiogenesis is not evolution,” but it’s a cop-out. Evolution is about a plurality of natural mechanisms that generate diversity. It includes molecular biases towards certain solutions and chance events that set up potential change as well as selection that refines existing variation. Abiogenesis research proposes similar principles that led to early chemical evolution. Tossing that work into a special-case ghetto that exempts you from explaining it is cheating, and ignores the fact that life is chemistry. That creationists don’t understand that either is not a reason for us to avoid it.
-PZ Myers________
Abstract: It has been repeatedly proposed to expand the scope for SETI, and one of the suggested alternatives to radio is the biological media. Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but stronger in noise immunity is the genetic code. The code is a flexible mapping between codons and amino acids, and this flexibility allows modifying the code artificially. But once fixed, the code might stay unchanged over cosmological timescales; in fact, it is the most durable construct known. Therefore it represents an exceptionally reliable storage for an intelligent signature, if that conforms to biological and thermodynamic requirements. As the actual scenario for the origin of terrestrial life is far from being settled, the proposal that it might have been seeded intentionally cannot be ruled out. A statistically strong intelligent-like "signal" in the genetic code is then a testable consequence of such scenario.
Here we show that the terrestrial code displays a thorough precision-type orderliness matching the criteria to be considered an informational signal. Simple arrangements of the code reveal an ensemble of arithmetical and ideographical patterns of the same symbolic language. Accurate and systematic, these underlying patterns appear as a product of precision logic and nontrivial computing rather than of stochastic processes (the null hypothesis that they are due to chance coupled with presumable evolutionary pathways is rejected with P-value < 10-13). The patterns display readily recognizable hallmarks of artificiality, among which are the symbol of zero, the privileged decimal syntax and semantical symmetries. Besides, extraction of the signal involves logically straightforward but abstract operations, making the patterns essentially irreducible to natural origin. Plausible ways of embedding the signal into the code and possible interpretation of its content are discussed. Overall, while the code is nearly optimized biologically, its limited capacity is used extremely efficiently to pass non-biological information.
The “Wow! signal” of the terrestrial genetic code
No, that's not it. I reject your mistaken view of the scientific method. You don't speak for science, you don't understand it.
There is only one view of the Scientific Method. It is clear and explicit.
Simply try typing out the steps of the Scientific Method.
There is no other alternative. There is no ambiguity in it.
The only way you can ignore the Scientific Method is by completely ignoring it.
Well that’s a bullshit premise for anyone who knows history…
Regardless, Darwinism has hard implications - for example, do you believe your mind ultimately comes from mindlessness?
From the History of Mathematics at the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews:
Tolosani, a Dominican who was a contemporary of Copernicus, wrote Heaven and the Elements which was published not long after On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres as an appendix to his book On the Truth of Holy Scripture. Tolosani wrote that Copernicus:From Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, Oxford University Press:... seems to be unfamiliar with Holy Scripture since he contradicts some of its principles, not without the risk to himself and to the readers of his book of straying from the faith ...
The arguments put forward by Tolosani against Copernicus were that, in addition to contradicting Holy Scripture, his ideas contradicted Aristotle's physics:
... in his imagination he changes the order of God's creatures in his system when ... he seeks to raise the Earth, heavier than the other elements, from its lower place to the sphere where everybody by common consent correctly locates the Sun's sphere, and to caste the sphere of the Sun down to the place of the Earth, contravening the rational order and Holy Writ, which declares that heaven is up, while the Earth is down ...
Copernicus and Kepler were deeply religious and yet both denied one of the prevailing doctrines of Christianity. This doctrine affirmed that man was at the center of the universe; he was the chief concern of God. The heliocentric theory, in contrast, by putting the sun at the center of the universe, undermined this comforting dogma of the Church. It caused man to appear to be one of a possible host of wanderers drifting through a cold sky. It seemed less likely that he was born to live gloriously and to attain paradise upon his death. Less likely, too, was it that he was the object of God's ministrations. Copernicus attacked the doctrine that the earth is at the center of the universe by pointing out that the size of the universe is so immense that to speak of a center is meaningless. But this counter-argument carried little weight with his contemporaries.do you believe your mind ultimately comes from mindlessness?
Define "mind" and "mindlessness."
As I said, you don’t speak for the scientific method. You think you understand it. You’ve convinced yourself that you get it and everyone else doesn’t. I get that. But you are wrong.
I'd say any putative "system" formed out of blind, random causes is unrealizable from the get-go — either in the mind, in the world, or in the laboratory. To say a "system" can be the product of dumb, blind luck strikes me as kind of silly — even under the conditions of the "eternal universe model," which postulates infinite time.
The machine model (or machine metaphor) has found its way from physics into theoretical biology in recent times. Indeed, Alberto Riva's intriguing Abstract is based on language of the machine — e.g., "cellular machinery" that "process information."
The machine metaphor sheds great light on certain biological/physical problems, but only up to a point. After that, it begins to obscure some very important facts about machines that some methodological naturalists deem irrelevant to their interests.
In particular, there are two vital, indispensable universal facts about machines that the scientific "machine metaphor," as applied to theoretical biology, totally omits/ignores, despite the fact that cells are biological existents — they are living systems.
(1) As a user of dozens of machines every day, I must report that not once have I detected any sign of Life in any one of them. They're all pretty inert till used.
(2) I use them because they're awfully good at extending my actions; they also happen to be purpose-built in support of my particular purpose: If I need transportation, I use a car. If I need to dry my hair, I use a blow dryer. If I want to plink targets at the range, I use a pistol. Etc. They were all designed to facilitate the purpose for which they were built. But not only did they not build themselves, neither can they autonomously execute their specified purpose themselves.
It seems to me for the machine model of cellular activity to be really apt, it would reflect the subjectivity of cells to the considerations outlined in (1) and (2).
If we do that, we might recognize that machines are subordinate to their users. If that is the case, in what relation of subordination does a living cell subsist?
Possible clue — to higher-order intelligence?
It seems theoretical biology in its present state finds such speculations totally irrelevant to the conduct of the biological sciences.
Anyhoot, thanks so much, Heatlander, for your splendid essay/post! (Sorry it took me so long to get back to you....)
Indeed, even closed loop control systems and/or robots can only respond according to the parameters or rules of their programming. They are not alive. Qualia (things which can only be experienced but not conveyed such as love, hate, pain and pleasure) - are beyond programming.
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