An Unfortunate Relapse; More Dissent from Darwin

I think you are dishonest but I don't consider you a liar. I don't think for a minute you are deluded, I think you are just taken in by the spirit of the age.

I keep trying to tell you that I'm not the enemy but our philosophical moorings keep us from actually agreeing. If you were going to be honest with yourself you would have to ask yourself some fundamental questions with regards to our origins. The most important being why this stubborn refusal to accept Creationism as an alternative to Darwinism.

We can do this one of two ways, you can accept the propositional truth of the common ancestor or you can face the possibility that God did indeed act and consider the implications of a special creation event.

Your choice.

How is it that one can entertain two notions in the same brain or institution: 1. intelligent design is a basis for dismissal and censure; 2. snowflakes and DNA self organize?

No, I'm saying you want to pick fault with evolutionary biologists revising the ToE as new data and new techniques become available, but at the same time you want to paint evolutionary biologists as a bunch of people who don't take kindly to new ideas or any kind of criticism that the ToE isn't perfect. Two mutually incompatible things.

If the latter were true there would be no revisions of the ToE don't you see, and as the former is true then the portrayal of scientists as this close bunch who gang up and ridicule all those who dare criticise the almighty ToE is ridiculous. The ToE is constantly being revised and updated, that is what science is all about, not confirming what is already known, New ideas are welcome and accepted.

The reason creationism isn't accepted is because it is not science, not even in it's tarted up alter ego of Intelligent Design.

Darwin may be like a long tail cat in a room full of rockers, but so what? As for your "wooden sword", why does that have any content? I find none. Enough with the freakin' metaphors, like "self-organizing."

What the h e double hockey sticks are you people talking about?

Try talking about ID without talking about the (presumed) character or politics of the people involved. It is a very simple concept, like "self-organizing." Both are a bit vague in similar ways.

All I need to say in response is that you have not made any substantive response to my posts #22 and #25, particularly where I defined self-organization:

"... self-organization is just a physical property of the system, something that can be described mathematically in many cases. It's the tendency of a system to stay away from its equilibrium state by means of self-interactions. Life is self-organization."

Which of the following concepts don't you understand: equilibrium? far-from-equilibrium conditions? dissipative systems? Tell me and I'll help you - unless the truth is too harsh for you.


Certainly:

ID has no explanation whatsoever for the twin nested hierarchy of phylogenetics which evolution explains.

There you go. I didn't need to say a word about the hidden agenda of fundamentalist Christians too embarrassed to say "God" instead of "Intelligent Designer" to show that their views are scientifically ridiculous.

Really? Show me the mathematics of ID, then. I can show you my math; can you show me yours?

For example, given that an aquatic creature has scales and fins, and assuming that it is Intelligently Designed (and nothing else), what is the probability that it has gills?

Suppose that we parametrize the many possible designs of cilia by how many core fibers they have. What is the expected distribution of number of core fibers in cilia design against prevalence in unicellular organisms, assuming that they are Intelligently Designed?

Suppose there is a pond in which there are fish with distinct left-handed vs. right-handed morphology, with matching predators. Suppose further that the fish are Intelligently Designed. What is the pattern for the distribution of left-handed fish vs. right-handed fish with time, and why?

If my definition has blood on it, it is only because ID was really intellectual hara-kiri from the beginning. Self-organization has equations; it makes predictions; it is testable. ID? Michael Behe himself admitted under legal oath that any standard by which ID is science also would admit astrology as science.



Well, what is it? If you don't know what it is, how can you possibly be qualified to comment on its various explanations and subtleties? It's not about winning or losing; it's just really about whether you even know what you're talking about at all.



Can you answer mallon's "common designer" challenge then? http://christianforums.com/t6873573-...challenge.html Go on! ^^

But he reminded me in our phone conversation that Darwin doesn't explain how life begins, "Darwin starts with life. He doesn't get you to life."
Thus the scramble at Altenberg for a new theory of evolution.
But Kauffman also describes genes as "utterly dead". However, he says there are some genes that turn the rest of the genes and one another on and off. Certain chemical reactions happen. Enzymes are produced, etc. And that while we only have 25,000 to 30,000 genes, there are many combinations of activity.
Here's what he told me over the phone:

"Well there's 25,000 genes, so each could be on or off. So there's 2 x 2 x 2 x 25,000 times. Well that's 2 to the 25,000th. Right? Which is something like 10 to the 7,000th. Okay? There's only 10 to the 80th particles in the whole universe. Are you stunned?"

It's getting pretty staggering I told him. But there was more to come as he took me into his rugged landscapes theory – hopping out of one lake into a mountain pass and flowing down a creek into another lake and then wiggling the mountains and changing where the lakes are – all to demonstrate that the cell and the organism are a very complicated set of processes activating and inhibiting one another. "It's really much broader than genes," he said.
Kauffman presents some of this in his new book Reinventing the Sacred .
And natural selection is back in the equation.
In his book Investigations (2000), Kauffman wrote that "self-organization mingles with natural selection in barely understood ways to yield the magnificence of our teeming biosphere". He said he's still there, but now thinks natural selection exists throughout the universe.

Introduction
Stuart A. Kauffman studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Thirty-five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free." He asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a "new" biology:

"While it may sound as if 'order for free' is a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution, it's not so much that I want to challenge Darwinism and say that Darwin was wrong. I don't think he was wrong at all. I have no doubt that natural selection is an overriding, brilliant idea and a major force in evolution, but there are parts of it that Darwin couldn't have gotten right. One is that if there is order for free — if you have complex systems with powerfully ordered properties — you have to ask a question that evolutionary theories have never asked: Granting that selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization of complex systems — that is, this order for free — and natural selection? There's no body of theory in science that does this. There's nothing in physics that does this, because there's no natural selection in physics — there's self organization. Biology hasn't done it, because although we have a theory of selection, we've never married it to ideas of self-organization. One thing we have to do is broaden evolutionary theory to describe what happens when selection acts on systems that already have robust self-organizing properties. This body of theory simply does not exist." (Chapter 20, "Order for Free", The Third Culture, 1995)

* * *
But the failure to prestate the possible preadaptations is not slowing down the evolution of the biosphere where preadaptations are widely known. Thus, ever novel functionalities come to exist and proliferate in the biosphere. The fact that we cannot prestate them is essential, and an essential limitation to the way Newton taught us to do science: Prestate the relevant variables, forces acting among them, initial and boundary conditions, and calculate the future evolution of the system…say projectile. But we cannot prestate the relevant causal features of organisms in the biosphere. We do not know now the relevant variables! Thus we cannot write down a set of equations for the temporal evolution of these variables. We are profoundly precluded from the Newtonian move. In short, the evolution of the biosphere is radically unknowable, not due to quantum throws of the dice, or deterministic chaos, but because we cannot prestate the macroscopic relevant features of organisms and environments that will lead to the emergence of novel functions in the biosphere with their own causal properties that in turn alter the future evolution of the biosphere. Thus, the evolution of the biosphere is radically creative, ceaselessly creative, in way that cannot be foretold. I find this wonderful.
I believe this fact means that the evolution of the biosphere is non-algorithmic. It cannot be simulated, certainly with continuous spacetime and quantum mechanics playing a role.

So dishonest people aren't liars, and deceived people aren't deluded? You really have a way with words mark.

If I am taken in by "the spirit of the age", then pray tell what this spirit might be?

Perhaps it is the denial of the existence of God - but I believe God exists. Perhaps it is the denial of supernatural miracles - but I believe miracles happen and I have witnessed them firsthand. Perhaps it is the denial of the inspiration of the Bible - but I believe that the Bible is divinely inspired and in fact the text leads me to reject creationism as much as scientific facts do. Perhaps it is the denial of orthodox doctrine - but I am a Calvinist Trinitarian and people far more fundamentally creationist than me have propounded far worse heresies than I have.

The fact is that if this "spirit of the age" has left me a Bible-believing, miracle-trusting, Trinitarian Christian, then perhaps it is not much of a spirit at all. Perhaps the dogmatism is only in your head.

Really? You are not the enemy? But you have said yourself:

You can embrace the Scriptures as redemptive history or you can embrace Darwinism as a substitute, you can't have it both ways because Darwinians won't have it.

Well to me, if I embraced the Scriptures as redemptive history (and I do), then anyone who did not would be an enemy to me in some way, since they are enemies with God to reject His Scriptures. And if I believed that all Darwinism was predicated on rejecting the Scriptures as redemptive history, and I believed that all who rejected the Scriptures as redemptive history were enemies in some way, then I would have to believe that all Darwinism was an enemy to me, and that all Darwinists are.

You are right that I am not your enemy. But it is only precisely because I embrace the Scriptures as redemptive history. Doesn't that throw a spanner in your tidy dualism? If Darwinism is antithetical to Christianity, how can I be a Darwinist and yet not your enemy?

In any case, my "stubborn refusal" to accept Creationism is really just a reasoned view of the evidence at hand. You and your views have consistently failed to explain almost all the physical evidence surrounding evolution, whether they be cranial capacities or genetic traits. Even creationists when they try, by "baraminology", to separate animals into kinds, cannot avoid lumping humans with apes - they can only separate them on shoddy theological bases instead of biological facts. I was once a creationist too. Physical evidence has brought me where I am, and physical evidence will get me out - if only you had any!

Of course God did indeed act in a special creation event: God used evolution to create humanity.

What's "Darwinism"? Do you mean "evolution" or "neoDarwinism"? Because no one subscribes to Darwinism anymore. There's a difference, believe it or not.

And with all these recent appeals to the movie Expelled (which no one here has even seen yet, to my knowledge), I'm starting to wonder if the YECs here are aware that the door swings both ways:

http://evanevodialogue.blogspot.com/...evolution.html

Not to mention many of the evolutionary creationists who have been dismissed from the communion table for their beliefs. I make no bones about the fact that I was dismissed last year. I no longer held to the tenets of my church. If those martyred professors don't hold to the tenets of science, why should they expect to be kept on (and given tenure, for that matter)?

OK. I will bit. I am a young earth creationist open to new ideas and I am willing to change and consider new data.

Now, I want to publish a text book for elementary school kids and and endowed chair for creation science at Harvard (for me or someone like me). And I want to start next week. That ok with you?

So, the guys in Expelled, The Movie who said they were persecuted by Darwinists are liars?

In CF, if you deny the essential tenets of Darwin, you are not entitled to your point of view. You are considered an idiot. Evolutionists exclude all others fundamentally.

Now, you may say creationists refuse to ackowledge basic facts of life. But, if you can say with a straight face that evolutionists do not exclude all nonevolutionists from the category of worthy scientific inquiry, then you need the reality check.

Its "not science." Oh ok, then my problem is portraying evolutionists as people who "ridicule" others when all they do is exclude all creationism from the category of science. I think that speaks for itself.

My thesis is that neoDarwinism is Intelligent Design, except they have this foolish quibble about metaphysics. You can't presume to be as vague and maleable as a proponent of "self-organizing" and then presume to exclude creationists and ID'ers.

Now we are pushing the boundary of fibbing. ID is also a mathematical relationship just like "self organization." It fits your bloody definition.

You are kind of funny asking me if I know what equilibrium is. Seems you really think these "arguments" are worth "winning" at all cost. What's up with that?

"The twin-nested hierarchy" is more word salad. You might was well refer to snipe-related, left-handed Kranitz rods. Its just more vague concepts dressed up to try to improve on the rather simple, and perhaps vague "common designer" issue. "Common designer" is obviously right at the theoretical/a-priori bedrock of unprovable assumptions, which is exactly where "neoDarwinism" now finds itself. You keep confusing specialized words with real conceptual bedrock. You also keep proving Mark right by refusing to deal with the logical correspondence of ID and neodarwinism. Its like you are afraid to touch the ID lepers.