This forum was closed on October 1st, 2010. However, the archives are open to the public and filled with vast amounts of good reading and information for you to enjoy. If you wish to meet some Wardrobians, please visit the Into the Wardrobe Facebook group.

ID-entity theft

Postby Boromir » April 19th, 2008, 7:32 pm

Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.

Digory
Boromir
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 257
Joined: Jul 2005
Location: Croatia

Postby prebe » April 19th, 2008, 8:41 pm

Last edited by prebe on April 20th, 2008, 5:26 pm, edited 3 times in total.
User avatar
prebe
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 25
Joined: Apr 2008

Postby prebe » April 20th, 2008, 9:59 am

User avatar
prebe
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 25
Joined: Apr 2008

Postby Kolbitar » April 20th, 2008, 10:56 pm

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before. --Chesterton

Sober Inebriation: http://soberinebriationblog.blogspot.com/
User avatar
Kolbitar
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 667
Joined: Feb 2000
Location: Exile

Postby prebe » April 20th, 2008, 11:12 pm

I have thought :wink:
And I have conluded that in my determinstic, materialistic world view, it is feasible to have organisms evolving developing an ability to interpret their own intelligence to a certain degree. I don't see why deterministic materialism would preclude that. Intelligence can (no will) through evolution gradually try to explain itself. If nothing else then driven by sheer marvel of the power of reasoning.

The point of your sentence being (I think) that there is a limit to what degree an intelligence can explain the way it works? Meaning that an intelligence has to have certain physical properties to be so or so advanced, and the more advanced it gets, the more the physical properties grow, and the harder they are to understand right?
User avatar
prebe
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 25
Joined: Apr 2008

Postby Boromir » April 21st, 2008, 10:31 am

Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.

Digory
Boromir
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 257
Joined: Jul 2005
Location: Croatia

Postby westsands410 » April 21st, 2008, 11:38 am

This is an interesting discussion, folks :smile:


For myself, I tend to be suspicious of any suggestion that others are automatically wrong, because they don't understand what I'm saying - that is, those who propose an alternative to Intelligent Design, or Evolutionary Theory, are not by necessity in error simply because they are not experts or specialists.

There is, in some circles in the UK at least, the expectation that one should espouse Evolutionary Theory without question, that it is proven knowledge rather than a theory. There is also the pressure, in the UK at least, to regard anything spoken by a mainstream scientist as being indubitably true; this is, IMO, getting close to quasi-religious dogma.


Personally, I think the jury's still out on the issue of Evolution and ID; I'm close to being convinced that there is a Creator behind the universe, and behind the development of life on this planet, but I'm just not sure about the method(s) that the Creator might have used in bringing intelligent life about. As I see it, a mindless universe could not bring about rationality.
"Many phenomena — wars, plagues, sudden audits — have been advanced as evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man, but whenever students of demonology get together the M25 London orbital motorway is generally agreed to be among the top contenders for exhibit A." - Terry Pratchett
westsands410
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 197
Joined: Jun 2006
Location: The beach, at Lat: 56° 22' 00" N Long: 2° 48' 30" W. Alternatively, Sussex.

Postby alecto » April 21st, 2008, 12:38 pm

"irreducible complexity" is an example of three dimensional thinking. There is an assumption that just because there is no way to make a system function that is somewhat similar to but not very similar to an existing functioning system (e.g. the totational mechanism at the base of a Euglena flagellum) that this has always been the case. This kind of argument ignores the great time across which evolution has available to occur. (The argument itself may not be valid in three dimensions for the Euglena, but it is a well-known example.) There seems to be an assumption that may originate in religion, a kind of "cart before the horse" error, namely that the thing is always being imagined to have exactly this use throughout time (i.e. as if the Euglena was created exactly the way it is some time ago.) But we don't know where the Euglena ancestors might have used their wheels 100 million years ago, and what the useful parameters for what their wheels were then.

Twenty years ago there was an argument like this about the eye, namely that the eye could not evolve because eye precursors were not useful, and in the sixties an issue with birds that feathers were not useful except for flight, and that they were too complex to evolve without making the flightless pre-bird unable to survive in the meantime. That was before they got the idea that the average flightless pre-bird with feathers might have been able to kill a human in 1.3 seconds.
Sentio ergo est.
User avatar
alecto
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 510
Joined: Dec 2005
Location: Austin, TX

Postby prebe » April 21st, 2008, 12:49 pm

Last edited by prebe on April 22nd, 2008, 11:49 am, edited 2 times in total.
User avatar
prebe
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 25
Joined: Apr 2008

Postby prebe » April 22nd, 2008, 11:43 am

User avatar
prebe
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 25
Joined: Apr 2008

Postby Lark » April 23rd, 2008, 4:51 am

All,

The following is some notes I made from book: The Language of God by Francis Collins, a well known geneticists who, in his book, tries to reconcile what he believes are overwhelming evidence for God and for evolution.

I believed most of what he wrote about God prior to reading the book and, at this point, find my self believing in some sort of evolution after reading his book.

Here is a summary of some of, what I concider, are overwhelming evidence for some macroevolution (to misquote C.S. Lewis, I find myself being the most dejected and reluctant evolutionary convert in all of America :smile: ); the following is my summary of some of the arguments Collins makes in his book.

Can anyone show me where these agruments faulter and point me to the truth?

A. Argument for a common ancestor between man and mouse. We have the whole genome of each.
1. Genes on both DNA ( man and mouse) are generally maintained in the same order on both DNA.
2. There are so called jumping genes , a group of base pairs that can insert itself at random positions into the genome and does so at a low level today. Some of these genes have a lot of mutations (I guess not so many that you can’t still recognize the jumping gene), (these are called ARE’s , ancient repetitive elements). They are called ancient because they have lots of mutations. Some of the ARE’s are truncated (this can happen when they moved from one section of the DNA to another. In some cases some truncated ARE’s can be found in the same position on the genome of the mouse and human (ie between genes A and B for example)(apparently these examples are ARE’s with exact same sequences of base pairs). Because they are in the same position and old they are thought to have come from a common ancestor a long time ago, ie the genome of a creature that diverged and became man and a mouse.

B Another argument for a common ancestor.

Human and apes have a lot of physical features in common. Their DNA is also 96% similar and a 3rd reason to surmise that they come from a common ancestor: chimps and apes have 24 chromosomes (this is the DNA that can be seen during cell division) while humans have 23. The size of the 24 chromosomes suggest that two of them fused together in the past to make the 23 chromosomes of humans (that is, the size of all the chromosomes is the same for the chimp and man except one of the man chromosomes is equal to two of the chimp chromosomes). Also if look at the details of the suspected chromosomes that appeared to have fused together these is more evidence that they fused together: there are special sequences of base pairs that occur at the end of chromosomes and these sequences are generally not found elsewhere in the chromosomes, but these sequences are found in the middle of the chromosome of the man that appeared to have had fused together.

C Another argument for evolution.
One gene, caspase-12, is found in same place on chimp and human genomes. In humans, however, it has several mutations unlike the gene in the chimps so it does not work in humans; it does work in chimps. This suggests man evolved from chimps and over time the caspase-12 gene received some mutations. There are apparently other genes where a similar argument could be made.






CASE AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN (ID) (See pp 189-190 in Language of God).

ID was initially (still?) a case against evolution but now new advances in the inspection of the genome have made strong cases for evolution.

ID still holds to the impossibility (shown mathematically) that certain complex systems, like the blood clotting cascade, human eye, bacterial flagellum could not have been developed by the gradualism of evolution. But there have been some advances that have weakened that claim. For example, the blood clotting cascade is claimed by believers in ID that the blood clotting cascade is irreducibly complex, that is, unless all of it was created at one time it could not have evolved. It is just too complicated to come about by random mutations in the known amount of time; and this has been shown to be true in some cases mathematically. But because of a recent discovery, a new model has been proposed that made the evolution of the blood clot cascade more plausible. The discovery is that of gene duplication. Genes duplicate themselves sometimes. Also the proteins (a gene makes a protein) for the blood clot cascade are not that different from each other. Therefore, a plausible model for the evolution of the blood clot cascade is as follows: a gene for a simple blood clot mechanism evolved and then this gene was duplicated several times. Then random mutation working on these duplicate genes developed the other genes in the blood clot cascade. This model does not require the whole blood clot cascade group of genes to be developed at once from simple molecules.

Some complex systems still seem to be irreducibly complex but as has been shown in the case of the blood clot cascade new discoveries are making the claims less likely to be true.

Here is a quick list of where I still find fault in evolution; I don't have time right now to develop these more.

CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION; or that evolution does not explain all of the phenomenon in life

1. Paucity of intermediates.
2. Cambrian explosion.
3. Man’s sense of morality (how can you get an aught from an is?)
4. Complexity of life (ie did God get life going and then evolution took over; maybe somewhat directed by God)
5. Existence of anything; seems there is always some place for some creation; the Big Bang for example. Seems whenever something happens there is a cause; big bangs just don't go bang on their own; seems to imply a creator.

6. Seems the universe was made for life: all the various physical constants that if they were just slightly slightly different then life as we know it could not exist.
Lark

You are not your own. You have been bought with a price. 1 Cor 6:19,20
Lark
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 14
Joined: Sep 2005
Location: Los Angeles

Postby Karen » April 23rd, 2008, 1:24 pm

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library. -- Jorge Luis Borges
User avatar
Karen
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 3733
Joined: Jul 2002
Location: Pennsylvania, USA

Postby Boromir » April 23rd, 2008, 5:37 pm

Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.

Digory
Boromir
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 257
Joined: Jul 2005
Location: Croatia

Driving Behe to distraction

Postby alecto » April 24th, 2008, 3:51 am

I read a chunk of a reference to Michael Behe touting photoreceptors in the human eye as "irreducibly complex" and decided to look for any evidence of molecular precursors to rhodopsin (the class of photoreceptor in the human eye.) The point of such a search is to identify simpler but still useful molecules that could serve as examples of what a prior evolutionary stage might have looked like, as has been done for the gross striucture of the eye.

Only 20 minutes in, I got my first really good molecule, indicating that the process of looking for such things is not too complex. Our molecule is bacteriorhodopsin:

http://www.rcsb.org/pdb/static.do?p=edu ... b27_1.html

Now of course the suggestion of such a molecule is open to all of the "missing link" arguments since I have found only one molecule in 20 minutes. This is to say that since I haven't figured out all the steps in a process, it must be impossible. Of course, by such reasoning none of us are reading this, since I am sure none of us actually understand all of the mechanisms of information transmission on the internet, therefore there are missing links and surely such transmission is impossible - but now I have shunted into another track.

Bacteriorhodopsin is the photoreceptor for a kind of photosynthesis I have not heard of. It also feeds protons to the other protomechanical wheel (i.e. not the one in Euglena). It's also a "placeholder" of sorts for the more complex electron transport chain in "higher" cells since it performs its function. And it's primary function is converting low entropy sunlight into high entropy reaction products, thereby allowing bacteria to increase their own order and make fools of their gigantic multicellular human neighbors (or is that cousins) who think such things are impossible.

Like most things involving evolution, my little search has led me to something REALLY COOL, which makes me wonder about the real relationship between God, evolution, and creationism.
Sentio ergo est.
User avatar
alecto
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 510
Joined: Dec 2005
Location: Austin, TX

Postby Lark » April 24th, 2008, 5:06 am

Lark

You are not your own. You have been bought with a price. 1 Cor 6:19,20
Lark
Wardrobian
 
Posts: 14
Joined: Sep 2005
Location: Los Angeles

PreviousNext

Return to Religion, Science, and Philosophy

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered members and 14 guests