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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 22, 2012 - 03:29am PT
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Jonnnyyyzzz - so it's your contention that an "intelligent" designer created you to be 1/10th human, contaminated your genome with 8% [occasionally active] retroviral DNA, and gave you a 'mind' which depends on a leftover viral mechanism which constantly rewrites your neural genetics as you have new experiences? And that seems plausible to you by 'design'?
People have such sanitary and Snow White views of life's real mechanisms which, under the hood, become unimaginably strange if not entirely horrific in turn. The constant churning of genomes happens by some incredulous means at every turn - many hopelessly gruesome and 'cruel' from a human perspective. And what we know about disease, symbiosis, and parasitology alone is so perverse and blood-curdling (literally) as to cast any 'designer' in the most severe moral light imaginable.
And it all matters because if a 'designer' could manage the information of a forming universe at every crucial yoctosecond along the way then 'they' would have no problem scripting every aspect of your conscious existence and perception every nanosecond of the day. The notion any such 'designer' would then simply be of the hands-off, Johnny Appleseed variety is as ludicrous as the rest of the fairy tale. No matter how you look at it, if such a 'designer' existed, then behavior would be deterministic by default and 'free will' (and randomness) would, by definition, have to be a granted exception [by design]. And one could easily suppose any such 'designer' would have as extensive a religious, cultural, and social agenda as the Discovery Institute itself (and its spin-offs).
From my perspective it's really the fact that folks have such a limited and fairytale view biology that makes such beliefs plausible - once you take the time to look under the hood you'd be so horrified at the true mechanisms of life as to deny the possibility of any 'one' stepping up and actually accepting responsibility for such a sordid and ugly business as life.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 22, 2012 - 03:33am PT
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Largo - So we're just going to swap out 'mind' for 'life' and have the same merry-go-round session all over again where you can't be pinned down to proffer anything except the improbability of it all? Really - is that as good as it gets?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Feb 22, 2012 - 04:55am PT
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Interesting how the original question of this thread was how to teach evolution,
a seeming pedagogical issue with scientific overtones,
and here we are discussing God again.
This should tell us something about how humans
are hard wired whether we like it or not.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Feb 22, 2012 - 05:11am PT
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True that - hardwired for fear certainly, that we quell it with 'god' is another matter altogether.
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WBraun
climber
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Feb 22, 2012 - 10:12am PT
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hardwired for fear
That is the stupidest dumbest thing ever said.
You're a terrible scientist ...
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Feb 22, 2012 - 10:47am PT
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What happened here? Have we been invaded by Creationists who want to look at Intelligent Design?
ID is, in most cases, just a way to put Jesus into the classroom.
As for the actual moment when the first ancestor cell originated? Who knows? It is an interesting topic, and there are at least some biochemists looking at it. Since there is no fossil evidence of it, it will be a heavily postulated theory...probably.
As far as computing goes, there is a branch called "evolutionary computing."
Ed probably knows more about this than I, but I am pretty sure that it is now commonly used in some types of engineering. Specifically cell phones and networks and all that. Electrical engineering. A computer helping to design a better computer and things like that.
As for me? I'll stick with what I know. The rock record. Please forward all of your rock record comments to me.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Feb 22, 2012 - 11:03am PT
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Largo, as to your idea of a 747 or a supercomputer, or even a rubik's cube appearing out of the shifting sands, it has already happened.
Single celled life existed from at least 3 bya. There are fossils.
Multicellular life appeared around the Cambrian, which is where the gloves came off as far as the diversity of life. Somehow getting over that multicellular hump was very difficult.
If you accept the evidence in the rock record, we went from a one cell ancestor to trilobites to fish, to reptiles, to mammals (tree shrew) to humans. Then humans went out and gathered all of the raw material and put that 747 and supercomputer together for you.
All that the 747 represents, if we were a billion years in the future looking at the past fossil record, would be similar to stone tools. You can see changes that are due to what biological life leaves behind.
I can look at a core taken from 10,000 feet and see all kinds of stuff. Worm burroughs show up very well. Same with dinosaur footprints and nests of dinosaur eggs. You don't see the dinosaur, but you can see the nest.
So you might not see the human skeleton next to the 747 buried beneath 10,000 feet of sediment, but you would see the 747.
It wouldn't be hard to put the fossil record of humans into a coherent story. We are currently dominating the planet.
Then there is the whole part of how things even get preserved. If anyone cares, I can go into that.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 22, 2012 - 12:00pm PT
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But since everything that is testable has been tested with the same results, statistics tell us that there is a high probability that everything with an observable effect has a physical cause.
probably an inappropriate calculation, the probability requires both a knowledge of the occurrences and a knowledge of all possible attempts... the numerator and the denominator... since you have set these to be equal, the probability is 1, but you actually don't know the denominator...
you said "high probability," (<1) so what do we learn from those "tests" that failed?
the scientific method is something that is widely debated in philosophical circles, not so much in scientific circles, but you could ask, from a scientific point of view, whether or not it is "correct."
Can you set up a test of the assertion that "every observable effect has a physical cause"?
one can take the entirety of the observations, though obviously these would have to be categorized. If you were a religious person you may be predisposed to accept "miracles" as an observation. By their nature, miracles are not reproducible, they also have the most notable character (at least the notorious miracles) of being highly non-physical. They are observations that are reported singly and by groups (sometimes large groups).
How do we deal with this category of observation?
In general, we seek a more common place interpretation, or we investigate the causes that might be mis-interpretation of unusual and unfamiliar physical phenomena. This generally explains a vast majority of witnessed miracles to just faulty interpretation of something very unfamiliar to the witnesses. But there are a class of miracles that remain that are unexplained.
Those we will disregard as "unexplainable," that is that there is insufficient information to form a scientific reason to explain the observation. But in some ways we've disregarded the information because it doesn't fit our scientific view point.
This may be entirely legitimate, often a scientist may just believe that these are explainable by physical reasons but the conditions are not sufficiently well known to do that, or that the witness(es) are just being dishonest (or are deceived by their own lack of understanding of what they are experiencing).
To avoid these problems in science, we require a more rigorous definition of "observation" and reject observations that do not rise to those standards. This opens science up to the accusation that it chooses a very restricted domain of experience to explain, which is true.
Note that the perception of violating these standards of observation can bring a lot of pain and suffering on those perceived to violate them, as evidenced by the range of responses in the science community to the OPERA collaborations open discussion of their observation of superluminal neutrinos... a matter yet to be resolved. However, the openness of the collaboration allows for independent confirmation of their results.
The most interesting thing to note is, I believe, that by following the rigor of the scientific method that science becomes more connected and unified, not less. So the various aspects of science for which we now appreciate the interconnectedness were previously unconnected... physics and chemistry and biology and geology, etc... can all be seen as unified. It was not that long ago when they looked like entirely different fields of knowledge.
So one infers that the idea that "every observable effect has a physical cause" could be correct, it is certainly useful for science.
Once again, this world view is in distinction from a world view that would require a supernatural explanation to some things. The two views are incompatible, in my opinion. At some point one has to draw a line and that line is impossible to draw... or if one does, it gets pushed back by an expanding scientific understanding of physical phenomena.
Take for instance the speculations of what occurred before the big bang... you might protest that we cannot know anything about it, but the pre-big-bang fluctuations of the vacuum are imprinted on the cosmic black body radiation, which is observable... so the nature of what was happening before the universe came to be is knowable to us. That's a mind blowing concept, and relatively recent consequence of our understanding of cosmology...
...if we cannot even draw the line t>=0 then it is problematic to require a line to be drawn.
This supports my contention of the incompatibility of the two world views: natural and supernatural.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 22, 2012 - 12:03pm PT
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I was being to obtuse in my comment above about the supercomputer...
if we are the result of evolution and a natural explanation of life
and we built that supercomputer
then if you look at the supercomputer end point
and the universe's natural existence
then the supercomputer can be thought of as having come into existence "naturally"
our entire lineage has a role to play in the occurrence of that event..
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Feb 22, 2012 - 12:32pm PT
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Largo - So we're just going to swap out 'mind' for 'life' and have the same merry-go-round session all over again where you can't be pinned down to proffer anything except the improbability of it all? Really - is that as good as it gets?
I'm simply pointing out that there are some serious leaps in logic in explaining the "creation" of things. It seems that many insist that things are just so, but can offer nothing much to demonstrate the mechanism by which, for instance, one of the most complicated widgets in the galaxy - the DNA helix - can emerge, entirely undirected, from the primordial soup - other than - by God, it just "happened," or the statistics indicate . . . Or by weaving remarkably poetic pictures of the caldron of creation with all that heat and those anxious gasses and hellfire and pressures and volcanoes and the dad-burn helix crept outta the mud because it took it's sweet time, like billions of years, and accomplished it's goal by way of indescribably small steps, and failed a gazillion times, but it just happened anyhow because . . . . And how stupid I am and not understanding the complexity of evolution because the fosile record says this and that.
And no, I'm not suggesing that an external Intelligent Design model or Big Dad in the sky directed the whole shebang. I am simply, as usual, just raising questions that pester me.
Simply because there are fundamental elements in motion, they will bump into each other and quite possibly bond as their properties allow and through a billion different combinations they might end up in complex combinations that survive or not according to various factors. However in the real world, the one we live in, which is strictly a material world according to some, remarkably complex things never simply organize themselves without some internal or external direction and most of all, without some intentionality. What we have here is a thesis saying that this intentionality and the mechanism by which the helix arose are the same things, meaning the intentionality and matter are not separate, just as gravity does not exist separate from matter.
At this point it would seem that mater has inherent intentionality. The sticking point is to insist that this inherent intentionality has no inherent smarts or intelligence, but can produce, by way of blind chance, something that we, with all our brain power, could only understand and appreciate in recent times. And then to go on and say, Ain't it grand, how Nature simply does this "on it's own." It is this "on it's own," with the implication that there is no intelligence or intentionality at play, that makes me wonder, considering the complexity of life. What does this, "on it's own," actually mean?
I'm not saying this is not so - as unlikely as it seems - but if it did, it is so miraculous that it makes Jesus Christ walking on water look like a 5.1 slab.
JL
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A race of corn eaters
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Feb 22, 2012 - 12:45pm PT
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I'm not saying this is not so - as unlikely as it seems - but if it did, it is so miraculous that it makes Jesus Christ walking on water look like a 5.1 slab.
Exactly. This incredibility or unbelievability or marvel or "miracle" or wonder (of it all) is precisely what deeply impassions many and leads some (the nature investigators, students of nature, naturalists, whatever you prefer to call them) to dedicate their lives to the subject.
I venture to say youre bumping up against at least a couple of them right here on this climbing site.
One can have a lifelong passion for nature investigation - believe it or not - just as some have it for some art form or adventure sport like climbing.
.....
I think what we're all witnessing in American culture 21st century right now is a public still largely scientifically illiterate trying to make sense of evolution and its implications including the narrative it tells foiled against centuries of religions and theologies that tell a different narrative.
It does make sense though: the less science or nature investigation background - esp across years and years allowing for its assimilation - the more difficult it would be (a) to piece together the pieces of the evolutionary story; and (b) to make sense of it in the context of one's day to day "practice" of living.
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Jonnnyyyzzz
Trad climber
San Diego,CA
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Feb 22, 2012 - 12:55pm PT
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Base 104 I don't want to speak for largo but I think the 747 he and others are talking about is the first life and the need for vast amounts of genetic info in DNA needed for RNA to transcribe said genetic info to then order the many amino acids into very specific strings that would somehow be then get folded into the many specific proteins that would need to be put together in order (like a 747 is put together in order) all at the same exact time in the same microscopic cell sized place and have it all instantly start working together to preform the very complex functions needed for survival (in whatever kind of environment was present where and when this would have taken place) of even the simplest of single cell life. All this needs to happen and produce a relatively stable base of self replicating life before natural selection/ evolution can even begin to work as it dose through the slight mutations of genetic code that happens every so often when a cell divides. I don't think anyone here has a problem seeing how evolution is fact and preserved in the fossil record. That's pretty apparent and not really being disputed here.
Edit: Sorry Largo missed your post while I was eating
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A race of corn eaters
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Feb 22, 2012 - 01:07pm PT
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At this point it would seem that matter has inherent intentionality.
I suppose if one wanted, he could personify a Na atom and a H20 molecule and then say they "intend" to get together or that they "desire" to get together to make sodium hydroxide.
In this manner of speaking, the matter (of Na and H20) would have "intentionality."
Feynman might've said something like this. He always spoke in metaphors, metaphorically, right?
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Have we read (1) The Blind Watchmaker (2) the Selfish Gene (3) Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (4) Cosmos (5) Biology (by Helena Curtis or Campbell)? They are a good start.
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Jonnnyyyzzz
Trad climber
San Diego,CA
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Feb 22, 2012 - 01:17pm PT
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I think the formation of life is the same - given the right circumstances, life emerges. Its not accidental, it will be proven to be a repeatable formula, as we believe it is the case with stars. The universe will be shown to be positively filled with life. How could it not be so???? The number of factors needed for a place like here are many and when added up they produce odds that far out number the places in the universe that they could all happen at together. That probably makes us rare
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Feb 22, 2012 - 01:24pm PT
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The number of factors needed for a place like here are many and when added up they produce odds that far out number the places in the universe that they could all happen at together. That probably makes us rare
that is not a correct calculation, it simply isn't valid...
to demonstrate it's invalidity, please show your numbers
cut-and-paste is ok as long as you can defend each step of the cut-n-paste argument without resorting to the authority of who wrote it...
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Feb 22, 2012 - 01:35pm PT
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HFCS
Good point. We can see "directedness" and "connectedness" in all of the universe. To see "intentionality" where you see directedness and connectedness is to read your belief into the matter.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Feb 22, 2012 - 01:40pm PT
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JL, DMT,
The idea that things are so complex that they could never arise from simple laws of matter have always bothered people.
First it was finding out that the Earth orbited the Sun. That didn't go down well with the church.
Then it was natural selection. That is pretty much all that Darwin was postulating. Natural selection is a really obvious idea if you think about it.
Now it is the complexity and wonder of the entire Universe.
"Science" isn't anything special. If you have ever figured out that you have a clogged fuel filter or replaced an old light bulb, you are "doing science." It sounds all puffed up and important, but it is really an everyday occurrence.
So far almost all physical phenomena can be explained by natural processes.
Just because nobody knows how life formed does not mean that the answer is not coming in a few hundred years. The idea of putting a supernatural creator into the equation makes it very easy to toss up your hands and stop thinking about things.
You could say that God killed your engine. Then you won't look for the clogged fuel filter. It is really the same thing.
When you start tossing in supernatural explanations without really understanding the chemistry involved (which I do not), then you are sort of giving up on studying the problem.
Maybe the origin of life will never be figured out. Perhaps it is so rare that Earth is the only place in the Universe with life.
Also, the idea of Panspermia has been tossed around for at least a century. That would be an alien civilization or God or whatever you want to call it, seeding the Earth with some simple life like bacteria.
That is all it would take to get life going.
There is even a group that promotes doing this to other planets. We now know that our sun is not an unusual star (yeah, we now know that the sun is just a star). We assume that the composition of elements on the Earth is also nothing special. We have examined the chemisty and composition of other planets, comets, and asteroids enough to know that the composition and minerology is not odd, either.
So from a glance, there is nothing unusual about the Earth. Everything we know about it can, in a specific or general sense, be explained by very common physical and chemical processes.
The only sticking point is how did the Universe happen? What caused the Big Bang (or whatever beginning), and also how did life originate?
The origin of the Universe is probably easier to figure out than the origin question.
Most people don't look at the origin question as we are discussing it here. Most people on Earth ascribe to one religion or another, and they all have their own origin stories. None of which jibe with a common ancestor in the organic muck.
We do know that for several billion years, life was all single celled organisms such as bacteria. Nobody has a creation myth that we arose from a single bacteria like single ancestor.
All of the religions I know of also promise eternal life. I see that as an evolutionary idea. Everyone is afraid of death. It is very comforting to believe that you will live forever screwing 72 virgins.
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Feb 22, 2012 - 01:43pm PT
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HFCS. We are talking about the same thing, but I am reducing it to a fundamental and simple question. One that people have been arguing about on this thread for quite a while.
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Jonnnyyyzzz
Trad climber
San Diego,CA
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Feb 22, 2012 - 01:45pm PT
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Ed I got that number from min 21:15 through 24:00 of that video posted. Here it is [Click to View YouTube Video]. I think I said universe and should have said galaxy sorry for the confusion.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
-A race of corn eaters
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Feb 22, 2012 - 01:47pm PT
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Nobody has a creation myth that we arose from a single bacteria like single ancestor.
Nobody? I beg to differ. :)
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Marlow, it's always risky speaking in metaphors, as you know. Not always the best strategy esp in mixed company. I was just trying to accomodate the intentionality idea some.
Some science purists or language purists don't even like the use of "Mother Nature" - their argument is that this (needless personification) could be confusing and misinterpretted, even for example extended to deification. Oh well.
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re: the (evolutionary) creation myth
Many if not most evolutionists (or evolutionary naturalists or evolutionary physicalists) support the view (or have the belief) that life on Earth arose from a single microbial ancestor.
Taking into account esp the "universality" of the genetic code, Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins - to name two - espouse (or "believe in") this creation model. As do I.
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