[helene_t]

Michael Shermer had a nice comment on those prayer experiments in Scientific American (SA). After having debunked it from a scientific point of view he concludes:

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The ultimate fallacy of all such studies is theological. If God is omniscient and omnipotent, He should not need to be reminded or inveigled that someone needs healing. Scientific prayer makes God a celestial lab rat, leading to bad science and worse religion.

FWIW, patients who knew they had been prayed for did worse than patients who did not know it. The comment in SA (not Shermer) was that maybe there was an adverse psychosomatic effect of "am I so sick that they need to call the prayer team?". I'm not sure if that comment was serious or sarcastic, though.

[Gerben42]

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How do you think evolution works?, why don't species evolute backwards?.

Evolution works like this: Through random mutation and breeding there are minor differences between several animals from a certain group. Some of the differences work beneficial, others detrimental for the goal of making as many copies of the genes as possible. Those of the group with a larger evolutionary success will soon outnumber those without the beneficial difference. This is a continuous process.

New species evolve when they get seperated from another group and the differences between the two groups are so large that they can no longer interbreed. It could be that one of the groups is still the "original" but it need not be.

Sometimes evolution does go "backwards" but only by going forward. An example are cetaceans (whales, dolphins). After their predecessors roamed the land, they adapted again to sea life. Some forms are optimal for certain lifestyles so often you have species that are completely different but look similar: Convergent evolution. A good example are dolphins and sharks.

If you want to know more about how evolution works, check out:

"The selfish gene" (Richard Dawkins, 1976). This was his first book and not preaching about god or lack of god or things like that, rather an explanation how to understand evolution.

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I can hardly see that DNA chain can take in 42 chomosomes all the info of a human body, what I cannot understand is how a simple cell is able to read and interpret it inside itself.

46, not 42

The short answer is that a cell is not simple. For the complicated answer, ask a biologist. As far as I understand it, it is similar to a Turing machine reading a ticker tape. A string of DNA is a base plan for one or more proteins.

[Fluffy]

My 2 cents upon that:

-Praying for someone to heal is an egoist act, like asking for winning lottery so doesn't need to be heard.

-Whoever was praying, how do you know he did really pray, and how do you knwo he really believed in what he was praying for?

-And how do you know there weren't people praying for the other guys?

[Fluffy]

Gerben42, on Aug 22 2007, 12:12 PM, said:

Evolution works like this: Through random mutation and breeding there are minor differences between several animals from a certain group.

I have my problem with randomness, animals evolute to adapt to habitat changes, why does a bear become white on the pole and not orange?, they evolutie with a purpose, it is not as simple as random.

There are also zounds of possible tiny changes that wouldn't make a difference, another teeth, a small horn, and I don't buy that a specie would die for getting a tail or something like that.

[helene_t]

Codo, on Aug 21 2007, 09:06 AM, said:

P.S. Some of the worst leaders in history had been atheists: All soviet leaders and Hitler to name just some. So being an atheist does not always make you a good leader. 

Whether Hitler and Stalin were religious is disputed. In "The God Delusion", Dawkins discusses this at length, concluding that Hitler probably was religious and Stalin probably not, but since both kept contradicting themselves for opportunistic reasons, we cannot be sure.

If there is a difference between the behavior of the average religious ruler and the average atheist ruler, all kind of confounders could explain it. It could be that a ruler who thinks he depended on popular support would pretend to believe in whatever God the majority of his people believes in, while a more arrogant ruler would claim to believe in whatever he wanted his people to believe in. For example, Sadam Husein used to be considered an atheist until the second Gulf war. Then he became a devout muslim.

[hrothgar]

Fluffy, on Aug 22 2007, 03:29 PM, said:

Gerben42, on Aug 22 2007, 12:12 PM, said:

Evolution works like this: Through random mutation and breeding there are minor differences between several animals from a certain group.

I have my problem with randomness, animals evolute to adapt to habitat changes, why does a bear become white on the pole and not orange?, they evolutie with a purpose, it is not as simple as random.

You are confusing mutation with natural selection

Mutation operates randomly
Natural selection is not a random process

Mutation and natural selection have been tested extensively and validated using computer simulations. There are commerical products that use so called Genetic Algorithms as an optimization technique. (The MathWorks sells one such product called the GADS Toolbox [Genetic Algorithm and Direct Search]). Many companies are experimenting using Genetic Algorithms to design some VERY complicated products. You might not feel comfortable with the idea that random events can create complex systems, but it can be verified experimentally.

http://www.talkorigi...alg/genalg.html has a very good introduction to this type of analytic approach. Here's a quote taken from the article

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Obayashi et al. 2000 used a multiple-objective genetic algorithm to design the wing shape for a supersonic aircraft. Three major considerations govern the wing's configuration - minimizing aerodynamic drag at supersonic cruising speeds, minimizing drag at subsonic speeds, and minimizing aerodynamic load (the bending force on the wing). These objectives are mutually exclusive, and optimizing them all simultaneously requires tradeoffs to be made.

The chromosome in this problem is a string of 66 real-valued numbers, each of which corresponds to a specific aspect of the wing: its shape, its thickness, its twist, and so on. Evolution with elitist rank selection was simulated for 70 generations, with a population size of 64 individuals. At the termination of this process, there were several Pareto-optimal individuals, each one representing a single non-dominated solution to the problem. The paper notes that these best-of-run individuals have "physically reasonable" characteristics, indicating the validity of the optimization technique (p.186). To further evaluate the quality of the solutions, six of the best were compared to a supersonic wing design produced by the SST Design Team of Japan's National Aerospace Laboratory. All six were competitive, having drag and load values approximately equal to or less than the human-designed wing; one of the evolved solutions in particular outperformed the NAL's design in all three objectives. The authors note that the GA's solutions are similar to a design called the "arrow wing" which was first suggested in the late 1950s, but ultimately abandoned in favor of the more conventional delta-wing design.

In a follow-up paper (Sasaki et al. 2001), the authors repeat their experiment while adding a fourth objective, namely minimizing the twisting moment of the wing (a known potential problem for arrow-wing SST designs). Additional control points for thickness are also added to the array of design variables. After 75 generations of evolution, two of the best Pareto-optimal solutions were again compared to the Japanese National Aerospace Laboratory's wing design for the NEXST-1 experimental supersonic airplane. It was found that both of these designs (as well as one optimal design from the previous simulation, discussed above) were physically reasonable and superior to the NAL's design in all four objectives.

Williams, Crossley and Lang 2001 applied genetic algorithms to the task of spacing satellite orbits to minimize coverage blackouts. As telecommunications technology continues to improve, humans are increasingly dependent on Earth-orbiting satellites to perform many vital functions, and one of the problems engineers face is designing their orbital trajectories. Satellites in high Earth orbit, around 22,000 miles up, can see large sections of the planet at once and be in constant contact with ground stations, but these are far more expensive to launch and more vulnerable to cosmic radiation. It is more economical to put satellites in low orbits, as low as a few hundred miles in some cases, but because of the curvature of the Earth it is inevitable that these satellites will at times lose line-of-sight access to surface receivers and thus be useless. Even constellations of several satellites experience unavoidable blackouts and losses of coverage for this reason. The challenge is to arrange the satellites' orbits to minimize this downtime. This is a multi-objective problem, involving the minimization of both the average blackout time for all locations and the maximum blackout time for any one location; in practice, these goals turn out to be mutually exclusive.

When the GA was applied to this problem, the evolved results for three, four and five-satellite constellations were unusual, highly asymmetric orbit configurations, with the satellites spaced by alternating large and small gaps rather than equal-sized gaps as conventional techniques would produce. However, this solution significantly reduced both average and maximum revisit times, in some cases by up to 90 minutes. In a news article about the results, Dr. William Crossley noted that "engineers with years of aerospace experience were surprised by the higher performance offered by the unconventional design".

[helene_t]

Fluffy, on Aug 22 2007, 02:29 PM, said:

Gerben42, on Aug 22 2007, 12:12 PM, said:

Evolution works like this: Through random mutation and breeding there are minor differences between several animals from a certain group.

I have my problem with randomness, animals evolute to adapt to habitat changes, why does a bear become white on the pole and not orange?, they evolutie with a purpose, it is not as simple as random.

If someone says that the evolution of icebears was a random event, he's probably a creationist. By this I mean that when a someone says that something hapened because "God made it happen", it's often another way of saying "We can't know (at least not presently) how/why it hapened". Calling something a "random event" is (roughly) the same. Some scientists believe in objective randomness (as opposed to the subjective randomness related to our presently limited knowledge) at the level of quantum events but nobody would say that the evolution of the icebear was completely random (there could be some dispute about the accuracy with which it could theoretically have been predicted).

Natural selection is the antithesis of random evolution. There may have been no more light-fur (ultimatively: white) mutants in the arctic than in the temperate forrests. Whether a particular bear has slightly lighter fur than its parents is "random" in the sense that it's outside the scope of evolutionary biology to account for that particular incidence. But presumably a light-fur mutant in the arctic had an increased chance of passing on its genes to future generations. And that's the whole point.

I wouldn't use the word "purpose" any more than I would say that objects fall to the ground for a "purpose" (gravity). But maybe that's just semantics.

[Al_U_Card]

Free will.....an interesting concept that both rational and spiritual approaches to consciousness deny the existance of on a human scale.

The deterministic view of existance says that everything follows immutable laws and is therefore totally predictable.

The spiritual understanding of existance says that God is omniscient so therefore he is pulling the strings.

But what if we were the manifestation of a principle of change in the universal scheme of things? What if we were the nuclear seed of a crystal that is forming out of the supernatant that contains all of existance? Could we explain the vagaries and the complexities of life and our purpose in this way? Were we to start from the premise that we do have a purpose here and that how we accomplish it makes a difference to the success and duration of our activities?

Considering all the possibilities makes the probabilities fall into lines that condense into one solid and undeniable eventuality and it is up to us to determine and execute it.

[mikeh]

Fluffy, on Aug 22 2007, 07:29 AM, said:

Gerben42, on Aug 22 2007, 12:12 PM, said:

Evolution works like this: Through random mutation and breeding there are minor differences between several animals from a certain group.

I have my problem with randomness, animals evolute to adapt to habitat changes, why does a bear become white on the pole and not orange?, they evolutie with a purpose, it is not as simple as random.

There are also zounds of possible tiny changes that wouldn't make a difference, another teeth, a small horn, and I don't buy that a specie would die for getting a tail or something like that.

Fluffy, there is a vast difference between ignorance and stupidity.

We are all ignorant, to some degree, since no-one can know everything. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge, not a function of intelligence (at least, not invariably).

Your posts reflect a degree of ignorance of darwinian evolutionary theory... I assume that it was not taught in school and that you haven't studied it elsewhere. This is nothing to be ashamed of, but if you do think about the topics you say you think about, then you really should do some reading on this.

There are numerous excellent books on the topic: Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker or The Selfish Gene or Climbing Mount Improbable are good, as are (in a more gerneral way) the various collections of essays published by Gould.

Ignorance is readily cured...

Stupidity is a reflection of a relative lack of intelligence: it cannot be cured and is not the least bit blameworthy.... none of us choose our level of intelligence

But wilful ignorance.. the position of Creationists... that is reflective of a deeper failing... and one that is blameworthy, since it is a deliberate shackling of one's ability to understand the world.

BTW, for those who say that belief can be knowldege, in that one's belief in the divine aspects of Christ is a fact, it might be useful to understand the differences between revealed knowledge and deduced knowledge. One simple way to illustrate the practical differences is to observe that no amount of religious thought ever created any technology. I am not inviting answers that technology is bad... anyone using the internet to espouse their beliefs automatically makes an idiot of themselves if they write that... but note that the Vatican owns far fewer patents than does IBM Ask if prayer ever resulted in the development of technology that altered our lives for the better... then compare that to scientific research and reasoning... and remember that the development of evolutionary theory is regarded by many as one of the most brilliant applications of the scientific approach.

[Fluffy]

mike I don't like that you say I am ignorant and don't tell me why. I told you what I think, if you know I am wrong, you will know why, if its just because I contradict Darwin, (or maybe Dawkin?) then I guess I am no more ignorant than you.

And about the stupidy thing, I am not claiming that darwin is wrong, not that human free will exists, I am challenging your beliefs (the same way some other atheists are challenging me with mines), I could address you to read the Bible and learn just the same way you are doing with that Dawkin guy who I don't know about, but that is lazy, boring and unchallenging (and I haven't read the Bible either so wouldn't know where to send you ).

So what's up with this Dawkin? (please don't paste me his full biography!). You are making me remember a Simpson's chapter where everyone believes the leader is the best, and his word is the truth (sectarian chapter), hehe.

[Fluffy]

to Helene: If I understand right, bears would mutate to every color on every region, then the bears who had wrong fur would end up disappearing after some generations cos of probabilities.

Ok, that makes sense.


But minor changes can take a lot of generations before natural selection takes effect!. Lions whith 3 eyes, deers with 2x Tongue, tail-less dogs, they aren't out there, indeed I cannot imagine why one of those would survive over the other.

To richard: A computer simulation won't take into account probabilities of a horned chicken dying because it got stuck on a tree.


Oh, and don't bother to attack creationism or god, I don't claim he has anyhing to do with evolution.

[helene_t]

Fluffy, if you want to understand evolution you'd better read about it on talkorigins or in some biology book. Professional writers on the subject have done better jobs than Mike, Gerben, Richard and I can do here.

[Fluffy]

helene_t, on Aug 22 2007, 03:55 PM, said:

Fluffy, if you want to understand evolution you'd better read about it on talkorigins or in some biology book. Professional writers on the subject have done better jobs than Mike, Gerben, Richard and I can do here.

I just wanted to make you think that maybe it wasn't foolproof, and that your beliefs can be wrong, just the same way ours or mines can be.

[mikeh]

Fluffy, on Aug 22 2007, 10:31 AM, said:

mike I don't like that you say I am ignorant and don't tell me why. I told you what I think, if you know I am wrong, you will know why, if its just because I contradict Darwin, (or maybe Dawkin?) then I guess I am no more ignorant than you.

And about the stupidy thing, I am not claiming that darwin is wrong, not that human free will exists, I am challenging you to demostrate me otherwise (the same way some other atheists are challenging me with other questions regarding my beliefs), I could address you to read the Bible and learn just the same way you are doing with that Dawkin guy who I don't know about, but that is lazy, boring and unchallenging (and I haven't read the Bible either so wouldn't know where to send you ).

So what's up with this Dawkin? (please don't paste me his full biography!). You are making me remember a Simpson's chapter where everyone believes the leader is the best, and his word is the truth (sectarian chapter), hehe.

I feared you might take my post as an insult: it was NOT intended as such.

I know that, amongst a lot of North Americans, there is the thought that ignorance IS the same thing as stupidity. It is NOT.

There are many, many areas of human knowledge about which I am profoundly ignorant: not 'proudly' ignorant, but profoundly. There are other areas of which I am largely ignorant and still others about which I am well-informed.

Ignorance is the state of 'not knowing': not a state of intelligence or reasoning power. The most intelligent person in the world is ignorant in many areas of human knowledge: there is too much information available for any one person to know.

Your posts reflect ignorance, not stupidity. Ignorance can be cured, stupidity, unfortunately, cannot. I, and others, were trying to give you some suggestions for how you can learn the answers to the issues that apparently trouble you in terms of understanding evolutionary theory. Those sources (and others, since I read heavily in the 'popular science' field) helped me reduce the extent of my own ignorance in that area.

Now, if you persist in seeing my posts as insulting to you, then that is either ignorance arising from imperfect understanding of English (and your grasp of English FAR exceeds my grasp of the only two other languages in which I can ever attempt to communicate) or stupidity: but I very much doubt the latter And I do apologize for hurting your feelings, if that is the case.

Finally, as to Dawkins, he is a very intelligent man with a great deal of academic standing, as well as a prolific writer who is able to make complex topics reasonably accessible to laypeople. That is not to say that he is perfect... who is?

For example, he and Gould, another brilliant scientist and writer, strongly disagreed about the level at which natural selection works. Gould tended to favour the theory that the evolutionary process worked primarily at the level of the organism, while Dawkins felt that it worked primarily at the level of the gene: see The Selfish Gene. They sniped at each other from time to time, but they always agreed about the underlying notion of evolution. Reading both will give you a more balanced view than reading either alone: but Dawkins, especially the 3 I mentioned, will give you a more immediate understanding of the theory.

Anyone who debates the validity of evolution without actually learning what it is, is an idiot.

Thus, as others have pointed out, many of those opposed to evolutionary theory think that it is based on random change. To a degree, that is true, but it is only a part of the truth, and if the theory stopped there, it would make no sense. It is the coupling of natural selection to random change that drives what appears to us to be 'purpose'. What we see as purpose is possibly an artefact of the human brain's propensity to see patterns and purpose where there is none. You can read about that as well, if you want I am not making this stuff up.

Chance leads to mutations: look at the history of birth defects in areas exposed to radiation. Copying errors when cells divide create mutations. There are many reasons for mutations at the molecular level (and I am ignorant of many of them, no doubt). Some mutations have no apparent effect. Others may have coded for blue eyes, not brown.

Over geologic time (and another problem is that our brains can't comprehend geologic time intuitively), there will be a vast number of changes within the reproductive cells (for animals and plants). The huge majority of the 'mutants' produced by this process will be either non-viable (consider the viability of most deformed human children... those kept alive these days would mostly have perished if born 10,000 years ago) or will render the organism disadvantaged in the competition, within its species, for reproductive success.

However, a tiny number will generate a competitive edge.

I understand, but do not pretend to know with certainty, that even this edge is not enough: it also helps that the organism, or its descendants possessing the same mutation, will be in a small population: perhaps part of a group that has moved from one valley to the next, or part of a group cut off from the main population by a volcanic event etc.

While this process takes a LONG time, and the changes are incremental, the process is now well understood and validated scientifically not only by the fossil record but also by molecular biology and mathematics.

And the creationists arguments that what use is half a wing, or half an eye.... and clearly the human eye is too complex to have arisen from one mutation.... read the books...there isn't room here to set out the logical arguments and evidence on this point... but the knowledge is out there if you want to cure your ignorance.... the same way I cured mine.

[Fluffy]

Don't take as insults thing on BBO forums, but you wrote loads of lines wich helped me on nothing .

Telling me real data is a bit disapointing, I don't have it, nor wanna know it. I just enjoy discussion.

That's the only fun thing, since actually this discussion is like which football or (put your favourite sport here) team is best. No matter how many truth you, me or whoever is actually right says. I know nobody is gonna change his mind.

What I mean is: the discusion of prove me god exists, and prove me god doesn't exist is futile, nobody can demostrate one nor the other, but it can be fun and challenging at least.

[Wackojack]

No goverment has the power to abolish religion. What we must do is educate ourselves out of religion.

[jtfanclub]

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to Helene: If I understand right, bears would mutate to every color on every region, then the bears who had wrong fur would end up disappearing after some generations cos of probabilities.

Well, actualy, white isn't a mutation. All furred mammals can have white fur, it's just super duper recessive: white fur is fur with no pigment (not to be confused with white skin, which is a mutation). If you take two ordinary mammals and breed them, breed the lightest colored kids together, then the lightest grandkids, etc. you'll eventually end up with some white ones. Breed the white ones together, and they'll stay white (mostly). This is how white lab mice were produced.

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But minor changes can take a lot of generations before natural selection takes effect!. Lions whith 3 eyes, deers with 2x Tongue, tail-less dogs, they aren't out there, indeed I cannot imagine why one of those would survive over the other.

First of all, natural selection just weighs the odds. The fittest does not usually survive.

OK, lions with 3 eyes shouldn't happen. The gene that handles this is a mirror, which means you'll always end up with an even number. I would guess that four eyes wouldn't survive even to birth, because the space in the head normally used by critical functions of the brain would end up being used by the eye sockets (take a look at a skull, and you can see how much space the eyes take up).

Being born with *no* eyes does happen, I know of a cat that happened with recently.

Deer with two tounges probably couldn't breathe, and would suffocate. Most of the tongue actually sits in the throat. Doubling that mass would choke the animal, as would no tongue at all.

A dog with no tail, if I understand correctly, does happen. Remember that tailless (and almost tailless) dogs were bred out of animals with long tails, over many generations, selecting out minor mutations.

My questions is, what happens to humans with these odd mutations? It's well known that quite a few humans are born with tails, which get snipped off by the doctors. But humans born with no eyes, or four arms? Why don't hear about them? Admittedly, humans have a lot fewer kids than cats or mice, so in absolute numbers you shouldn't expect to see them much. But we ought to see *some*.

I suppose a theory that doctors deliberately abort kids with obvious and terrible mutations wouldn't go over well...

[Al_U_Card]

You can be well-informed or uninformed.

If you are not ignorant then you are AWARE.

Awareness is the precursor to and the motivator of consciousness. Despite the apparent chicken and egg conundrum, you must gain awareness to validate your level of consciousness. Consciousness is a state of being and not an effort or a condition. We become aware of those things that have a direct impact on our perspective and affect our intention. They serve to elevate and to fortify our consciousness which can then consolidate and employ these effects for the purpose of our own evolution.

[hrothgar]

Fluffy, on Aug 22 2007, 06:53 PM, said:

To richard: A computer simulation won't take into account probabilities of a horned chicken dying because it got stuck on a tree.

Actually, it will...

I don't know of any case where a computer simulation is specifically designed from the get go to model a chicken with horns getting stuck with in a tree. However, computer simulations are designed to deal with general cases that are analogous to a chicken with horns (getting stuck in a tree).

From my perspective, the important points to recognize about computer simulations are the following:

1. Genetic algorithms are able to outperform "intelligent design". I can point to a large number of cases where a genetic algorithm operating stochasitcally is able to outperform human specialists working on the same problem. Genetic algorithms won't yield an optimal situation in every case - one can always create a perverse landscape - however, they do identify very good solutions in lots of cases.

2. Genetic algorithms are able to converge on solutions that exhibit "irreducable complexity" in the Michael Behe sense.

[mikeh]

Fluffy, on Aug 22 2007, 11:49 AM, said:

Don't take as insults thing on BBO forums, but you wrote loads of lines wich helped me on nothing .

Telling me real data is a bit disapointing, I don't have it, nor wanna know it. I just enjoy discussion.

That's the only fun thing, since actually this discussion is like which football or (put your favourite sport here) team is best. No matter how many truth you, me or whoever is actually right says. I know nobody is gonna change his mind.

What I mean is: the discusion of prove me god exists, and prove me god doesn't exist is futile, nobody can demostrate one nor the other, but it can be fun and challenging at least.

If I read your posts correctly, you don't accept evolutionary theory; you want to 'discuss' your opinions, but you have zero interest in actually learning anything.

If this is correct, then I feel sorry for you, and sorry for wasting my time posting in response to you.

Someone who says: I don't believe you: 'I am admittedly ignorant on the topic, and I want to discuss it with you, but I am not prepared to learn anything about the topic either while discussing it or in order that my contributions mean anything' is wasting everyone's time.

It's like saying that 'I think that Precision is a bad bidding method, but I have never learned to play Bridge, and I'm entitled to my opinion anyway'. You are entitled to your opinion, but that opinion is worthless.