Unsatisfactory Scientific Explanations?

[whois]

But along with the other results that I posted it seems that our minds or something within us has some sort of ability beyond the physical and material world.

there is no "seems" to it.
it's a verified fact, the placebo effect it proof of it.

 

[Justatruthseeker]

there is no "seems" to it.
it's a verified fact, the placebo effect it proof of it.

Agreed, the effect of "belief" can not be denied. Such is why we were told to have the "faith" of a little child.

http://biblehub.com/mark/10-15.htm

If we truly believed we could move mountains - but then that little nagging doubt is always present in the back of ones mind in the subconscious. So no mountains get moved. We think we know better and that it is impossible - and so it is because that is what we believe. We may believe when we say God can move mountains - but ignore Him when He says we can move them too if we but believe. But it must be 100%, not 99.99%.

They believe the pills are going to make them better - and so they get better - despite the pills doing absolutely nothing. But they have a physical prop to base their belief on - the invisible on the other hand without a physical reference requires so much more.

 

[whois]

Agreed, the effect of "belief" can not be denied. Such is why we were told to have the "faith" of a little child.

http://biblehub.com/mark/10-15.htm

If we truly believed we could move mountains - but then that little nagging doubt is always present in the back of ones mind in the subconscious. So no mountains get moved. We think we know better and that it is impossible - and so it is because that is what we believe. We may believe when we say God can move mountains - but ignore Him when He says we can move them too if we but believe. But it must be 100%, not 99.99%.

They believe the pills are going to make them better - and so they get better - despite the pills doing absolutely nothing. But they have a physical prop to base their belief on - the invisible on the other hand without a physical reference requires so much more.

like i said earlier, i'm not into the god angle, just getting to the truth.
the work of kimura has cast serious doubt on the effects of natural selection.
here is what a cornell professor had to say:
Kimura, Ohta, Jukes, and Crow dropped a monkey wrench into the "engine" at the heart of the modern synthesis — natural selection — and then Gould and Lewontin finished the job with their famous paper on “the spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm”.
evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2009/11/modern-synthesis-is-dead-long-live.html

it seems the entire edifice of the modern synthesis is falling out.
www.theguardian.com/science/2010/mar/19/evolution-darwin-natural-selection-genes-wrong

 

[[serious]]

macro evolution, the diversity of life.
bacteria to man.
bacteria to starfish.
bacteria to plant.
bacteria to worm.

Those are examples, not a definition. I'm going to need a proper definition I'm afraid as I'm still not seeing what you mean by macro evolution

 

[whois]

Those are examples, not a definition. I'm going to need a proper definition I'm afraid as I'm still not seeing what you mean by macro evolution

you know exactly what i mean serious, i'm not into playing games.

 

[[serious]]

you know exactly what i mean serious, i'm not into playing games.

I legitimately dont. It appears to be, "a change of whatever arbitrary size I find sufficiently unbelievable" and micro as "anything demonstrated"

If there is some specific metric by which we can distinguish micro from macro, fine, let's identify it and discus. If you don't have any metric by which to distinguish micro from macro, I can't help you.

 

[whois]

i'm going to try this again.

you might need to define what you mean by macroevolution. It used to refer to emergence of new species which certainly has been observed in both nature and the lab. Some creationist/ID groups have attempted to redefine macroevolution more narrowly by saying it should be the emergence of a new genus or family, but those levels of classification are arbitrary, making the term functionally undefined. I'm afraid any discussion of macro vs microevolution must begin with definition of terms.

whether it's defined or not, evolutionists says it happened.
as a matter of fact they show it happened with the tree of life.
for example:
starfish evolved from centipedes.
birds evolved from dinosaurs.
marsupials evolved from frogs.
this is the type of macro evolution of which i speak, and there is no empirical evidence for it.
definitions are irrelevant here because evolutionists says it happened, and without any evidence to back it up.
sure, they provide an explanation for it, but they have yet to put those explanations to the acid test.
this "millions of years" garbage is exactly that, garbage.
modern computers can cut simulation times by at least a million

take a look at the following link:
www.cbc.ca/news/health/crispr-dna-gene-editing-1.3339346
we now have the tools to prove macro evolution.
it's going to be interesting if they can do so.

 

[[serious]]

i'm going to try this again.

whether it's defined or not, evolutionists says it happened.
as a matter of fact they show it happened with the tree of life.
for example:

evolutionists claiming macroevolution has occured are using the scientific definition I discussed previously. They say it has occurred because we have observed it occuring. There was a trend following the direct observation of speciation to try and salvage the claim that macroevolution was impossible by changing the definition. However, no meaningful, nonarbitrary definition was ever provided.

starfish evolved from centipedes

no one who knows anything about the classification of organisms would make such a claim. Starfish and centipedes are as distantly related as starfish and people. In fact, it would probably be slightly less wrong to say centipedes evolved from people.

birds evolved from dinosaurs.

as evidenced by transitional fossils. More accurately, birds are the last surviving group of theropod dinosaurs.

marsupials evolved from frogs.

no they didn't. This one is at least not as out there as the first. No contemporary organism evolved from another contemporary organism. They came from a shared common ancestor. Yes, sometimes one branch stays a bit more morphological similar to that ancestral group, but that doesn't make it less evolved

this is the type of macro evolution of which i speak, and there is no empirical evidence for it.

two of those are wrong, one of which is way out there. As for the bird one, what feature or set of features is present in all theropod dinosaurs that is missing in all birds? I don't know of any.

definitions are irrelevant here because evolutionists says it happened, and without any evidence to back it up.
sure, they provide an explanation for it, but they have yet to put those explanations to the acid test.
this "millions of years" garbage is exactly that, garbage.
modern computers can cut simulation times by at least a million

take a look at the following link:
www.cbc.ca/news/health/crispr-dna-gene-editing-1.3339346
we now have the tools to prove macro evolution.
it's going to be interesting if they can do so.

for every non arbitrary definition of macroevolution we have, it has been proven to occur. That's why I'm asking you for YOUR definition of the term.

 

[stevevw]

there is no "seems" to it.
it's a verified fact, the placebo effect it proof of it.

I think theres more than a placebo effect. If you read the info from the Global consciousness Project which has bee going for years out of Princeton University it is showing some evidence for the mind being able to influence things in tests. When I mean influence things it can actually have a slight effect on altering instruments and show some sort of telepathic communication with other minds on a global scale. All these tests have been verified and checked against things like placebo effects and chance.

Good research over a period of several decades has given a scientific expression to our experience of subtle interconnections, and it clearly shows that the human mind is not isolated within the body. There is solid empirical evidence that we do interact directly with each other and the world in the domain of consciousness, despite physical barriers and separations.13 Repeated experiments show an effect on our instruments, not only of individual intentions, but also of group consciousness.
http://noosphere.princeton.edu/story.html

The tests done on prayer also took the placebo effect into consideration. Some of the tests were with people praying for strangers. So the people being prayed for didn't even know they were being prayed for. There was evidence that people had better health results across the board.

Science is just beginning to look into this area more and we need to refine things a lot more before we can discover the full potential of our minds and how it can influence things. Even if you want to use the placebo effect that is still a powerful force which can be harnessed to affect peoples health and well being. It is still basically using the power of the mind to have an effect on things. So maybe we dont know the full potential of our minds. Maybe the mind can have an effect on the material world. It seems there is a lot we dont know about the quantum world and consciousness and I would discount it just yet.

 

[whois]

evolutionists claiming macroevolution has occured are using the scientific definition I discussed previously. They say it has occurred because we have observed it occuring. There was a trend following the direct observation of speciation to try and salvage the claim that macroevolution was impossible by changing the definition. However, no meaningful, nonarbitrary definition was ever provided. no one who knows anything about the classification of organisms would make such a claim. Starfish and centipedes are as distantly related as starfish and people. In fact, it would probably be slightly less wrong to say centipedes evolved from people.as evidenced by transitional fossils. More accurately, birds are the last surviving group of theropod dinosaurs. no they didn't. This one is at least not as out there as the first. No contemporary organism evolved from another contemporary organism. They came from a shared common ancestor. Yes, sometimes one branch stays a bit more morphological similar to that ancestral group, but that doesn't make it less evolved two of those are wrong, one of which is way out there. As for the bird one, what feature or set of features is present in all theropod dinosaurs that is missing in all birds? I don't know of any. for every non arbitrary definition of macroevolution we have, it has been proven to occur. That's why I'm asking you for YOUR definition of the term.

anyone that has access to the tree of life can easily see where i got my information.
and regardless of what you say, science has no empirical proof of it.
your explanation above is a typical example of the kind evolutionist use to "explain" their dogma.
if there is empirical evidence then please provide it, sorry, saying it's so doesn't make it so.

 

[whois]

I think theres more than a placebo effect. If you read the info from the Global consciousness Project which has bee going for years out of Princeton University it is showing some evidence for the mind being able to influence things in tests. When I mean influence things it can actually have a slight effect on altering instruments and show some sort of telepathic communication with other minds on a global scale. All these tests have been verified and checked against things like placebo effects and chance.

i wouldn't go quite that far, but i do know the placebo effect is a fact, and it's been verified over and over in medical literature

Science is just beginning to look into this area more and we need to refine things a lot more before we can discover the full potential of our minds and how it can influence things. Even if you want to use the placebo effect that is still a powerful force which can be harnessed to affect peoples health and well being. It is still basically using the power of the mind to have an effect on things. So maybe we dont know the full potential of our minds. Maybe the mind can have an effect on the material world. It seems there is a lot we dont know about the quantum world and consciousness and I would discount it just yet.

whatever you do, don't tell dawkins.
this man will turn into a raving lunatic, more than what is typically usual.

 

[Loudmouth]

anyone that has access to the tree of life can easily see where i got my information.
and regardless of what you say, science has no empirical proof of it.

Koonin completely disagrees.

"The comparative infrequency of HGT in the eukaryote part of the biological world means, however, that in this case the conceptual implications for the TOL might not be as drastic: the evolutionary histories of many eukaryotes appear to produce tree-like patterns (e.g., 27])."
http://www.biologydirect.com/content/6/1/32

 

[Loudmouth]

sorry, macro evolution has not been observed.

You don't observe the hypothesis. Macro evolution has been tested and is supported by observations.

the acquisitions of RNA nucleotides would be the same process as gene mutations.
how do you think science knows this is a failure?
there are 3 reasons:
1. RNA cannot acquire enough nucleotides before mutations destroy it.
2. RNA cannot acquire a cell membrane for some reason.
3. it is unknown how RNA transitions to DNA.
the key point in the above is number 1.
every single experiment has ended because of it.

i've yet to see any papers that support this idea.
frankly, i think it's a concept "invented" because gradualism required it.

Any references to back any of that up?

 

[Loudmouth]

there is no "seems" to it.
it's a verified fact, the placebo effect it proof of it.

Huh? How is the placebo effect beyond the material or natural world?

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

The problem, or one of them, is that the physical sciences, at least as they are presently constituted, haven't even got the necessary concepts available to them. If you ask a physicist for a definition of "red" he will give you a particular wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, but there is nothing in his lexicon which corresponds to what Joe Bloggs means by "red".

It's not a conceptual problem, but an epistemological problem. Science is a necessarily objective enterprise, and so cannot directly address the essence of subjective experience; there's a philosophical divide of the same order as the interaction problem (the dualist notion of the immaterial influencing the material). Science can only describe qualia as the subjective experience of certain patterns of neural activity.

But a physicist is the wrong person to ask for a biologically relevant definition of what is perceived as 'red'. Neuroscientists can tell you that it isn't only related to a specific range of frequencies of light, but also to a whole range of other visual factors; it is affected by the colour nature (hue, value, tint, shade, and saturation) of the overall illumination; with the colour nature of the surrounding areas, with the 3D structure of the environment, and so-on. See Color Illusions for some illustrations. Paul Churchland's paper 'Chimerical Colors' (Philosophical Psychology Vol. 18, No. 5, October 2005, pp. 527–560 - now, sadly, behind a paywall) demonstrated how a simple triplet circuit of opposing colour processing neurons in the primary visual pathway could give rise to the full colour space we perceive, and account for context relative colour changes. More importantly, this neural model predicted there should be three types of colours possible to experience outside the natural colour spindle (i.e. 'chimerical', 'self-luminous', and 'hyperbolic' colours), that are never seen in nature. He went further and gave colour plates with instructions for how to see examples of these literally extraordinary colours.

This kind of work, and the work on visual anomalies (colour blindness, tetrachromacy, etc.), means we know in great detail how our colour perceptions are generated, and why they vary between individuals, and with context, the way they do; but the essential subjective quality of the experience ('qualia') is outside the scientific remit.

Personally, I suspect it's an 'empty' question, like asking why you are you, in your part of the world, rather than someone else in another part of the world.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

you might need to define what you mean by macroevolution. It used to refer to emergence of new species which certainly has been observed in both nature and the lab.

The wikipedia article is a pretty good summary. The section on 'Misuse' is probably relevant here

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

I think theres more than a placebo effect. If you read the info from the Global consciousness Project which has bee going for years out of Princeton University it is showing some evidence for the mind being able to influence things in tests. When I mean influence things it can actually have a slight effect on altering instruments and show some sort of telepathic communication with other minds on a global scale. All these tests have been verified and checked against things like placebo effects and chance.

Verified and checked by whom? The original PEAR studies under Robert Jahn in Princeton, on which the Global Consciousness Project is founded, were shown to be flawed in many ways, and failed replication under stricter criteria three times - one of which was by the PEAR researchers themselves (i.e. they couldn't replicate their own findings when they tightened up the study). The GCP is open to similar criticisms; the usual progression with these studies is that interesting results are claimed on first pass, but with each subsequent pass in response to criticism, the tighter the controls and blinding, and the more careful and objective the data and analysis, the smaller the apparent effects become, until they merge into background noise.

If you cast your net widely enough looking for something sufficiently poorly defined, you'll almost certainly see something that looks like what you're after; but don't hold your breath for anything useful to come out of it. Feynman's Principle springs to mind: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

The tests done on prayer also took the placebo effect into consideration. Some of the tests were with people praying for strangers. So the people being prayed for didn't even know they were being prayed for. There was evidence that people had better health results across the board.

There have been many studies done on the efficacy of prayer, and again, the better the design, controls, and blinding, the smaller the effect. A meta-analysis of 14 intercessory prayer studies found no effect overall.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

i wouldn't go quite that far, but i do know the placebo effect is a fact, and it's been verified over and over in medical literature

Yep, placebo and its evil counterpart nocebo are real effects; but they're entirely neuro-biological, i.e. mediated by brain function and its influence on the autonomic, hormonal, and immune systems.

 

[FrumiousBandersnatch]

...Maybe the mind can have an effect on the material world. It seems there is a lot we dont know about the quantum world and consciousness and I would discount it just yet.

I used to spend a lot of time as a child wishing I could affect things with the power of my mind, like a comic-book hero... but wishful thinking is one thing and the real world is something else. We know enough about quantum mechanics and the brain to know they don't work magic together; if the brain uses quantum effects outside of normal biochemistry, it will be for small-scale functional optimizations. Biology apart, quantum physics itself tells us you won't see mind remotely affecting matter; the only field or force with the range and strength to have significant effect over human-scale distances (besides gravity) is electromagnetism, and we know what it can and can't do, and what is needed to generate a significant influence with it. Electric eels can pack a remote electrical wallop, but human biology isn't up to it.

 

[whois]

Yep, placebo and its evil counterpart nocebo are real effects; but they're entirely neuro-biological, i.e. mediated by brain function and its influence on the autonomic, hormonal, and immune systems.

but why?
why should belief evolve?
using this line of reasoning, you can easily come to the conclusion that belief in god is only natural.
you could even take it further by saying belief in the supreme can make us supreme.
in this case, can we assume that god is a vital part in the evolution of humanity?