[hrothgar]

Winstonm, on 2011-March-05, 09:11, said:

Surely this is a jest?

http://www.stumbleup...ead.php?t=45427

It is

http://en.wikipedia...._Baptist_Church

[hotShot]

Winstonm, on 2011-March-05, 09:11, said:

Surely this is a jest?

http://www.stumbleup...ead.php?t=45427

I was unaware that the education system needs improving that much.....

[PassedOut]

Winstonm, on 2011-March-05, 09:11, said:

Surely this is a jest?

http://www.stumbleup...ead.php?t=45427

To be consistent, young earth creationists must also hold that the earth is flat. Of course many of them these days choose to ignore the most preposterous aspects of the biblical creation story. The satire points out the funny side of this.

[blackshoe]

kenberg, on 2011-March-05, 08:49, said:

Back in Galileo's day they did. And therein hangs a tale, as the expression goes.

Indeed.

Si, il mouve.

It took the Catholic Church over 300 years to admit Galileo was right.

[luke warm]

PassedOut, on 2011-March-05, 09:51, said:

To be consistent, young earth creationists must also hold that the earth is flat. Of course many of them these days choose to ignore the most preposterous aspects of the biblical creation story. The satire points out the funny side of this.

i haven't come across any that do, do you have an example or two?

[PassedOut]

luke warm, on 2011-March-06, 08:59, said:

i haven't come across any that do, do you have an example or two?

Actually, it's quite easy to find young earth creationists who nevertheless deny that the earth is flat. In fact, Henry Morris, founder of the Institute for Creation Research, denied that portion of the bible story. So Morris (while he was alive) and his followers today are all examples of young earth creationists who reject the most preposterous aspects of the bible story.

It's much harder to find the more consistent creationists who accept completely the biblical geocentric flat earth account, although geocentrism had some assertive adherents during the Reagan years. The National Center for Science Education has a nice writeup on the history of the erosion of biblical literalism among creationists: The Creation/Evolution Continuum.

[mycroft]

I think people are getting conflated in this thread - I think I am the one using the phrase "religion of science". So I should reiterate my meaning of that phrase:

When people argue "science says X, so X Is Right" as a statement defying argument, that's not Science, that's faith in Science, and they're treating it as a religion.

I don't say that one has to be capable enough to read the papers and follow the chain of evidence to avoid RoS; but we all know people who take "science says so" as True Belief (mostly because they were taught facts learned from Science in science class, and were trained to believe Because Science Says So, rather than learning how Science works and doing it themselves).

I'm happy to say "I'm going to trust what science says barring some evidence" - and that evidence can include "the science was wrong", "perverted", or "corrupted", or even "there's good reason to believe that bias may have occurred that did one of the three." But that's not blind faith.

[blackshoe]

"The science was wrong" (or "perverted" or "corrupted") is not evidence, it is opinion. "Here are the data that the "science" used to arrive at its conclusions, but these data are not the data which were originally collected, which are here" is evidence. Evidence that can be examined and evaluated by third parties.

[mycroft]

Well, if the science came out of the tobacco industries' pet research groups, and we read the papers, and we point out the holes in the methodology that clearly make it bad science, it doesn't matter what the data is (not that we'd get access to that anyway).

That, combined with the clear issue of the research group being expected to come up with results that their backers will like, is evidence of "the science was wrong/perverted/corrupted", and that is a reasonable argument.

For more controversial "biased science" factories, everyone's mileage may vary (there are some who won't accept good science because it gives the wrong answer; there are some who think the methodology is wrong, but it isn't; there are some who think that the methodology mistakes they make are a result of trying to get the answer that think tank wants, and they may also not be correct about it; there are some where the methodology holes are as bad as the "faked science", but the holes are blind spots because of the group's bias; there are some where the methodology holes are as bad because it really is "get this answer no matter what"; people will believe it's one or more categories over depending on *their* bias).

[blackshoe]

If you were expecting me to disagree with any of that, Mycroft, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disappoint you.

[kenberg]

Skepticism is a very useful trait and of course that should extend to scientific claims, especially any claim that begins "It has been scientifically proved that...". Mathematicians really do prove things, Fermat's Theorem really shows that it is hopeless to search for a counter-example, but the cost is that it purely addresses mental constructs. If we want to deal with the real world, there are always caveats.

It seems to me that youngsters should be taught that the ideal of science is open minded investigation and a willingness to change one's views when the evidence strongly suggests that your current belief, however much you wish it to be true, is false. Humans are fallible creatures and we all fall short of our ideals, but scientists accept the dominance of experimental evidence or they stop being scientists. Beliefs based on faith are of a different sort, or at least potentially so.

We all put together a worldview as best we can. I hold many beliefs that I cannot justify, and probably some that if I seriously critiqued them I would have to admit they are unlikely to be literally correct. It's OK. Life is not a Final Exam.

[phil_20686]

hrothgar, on 2011-March-04, 13:46, said:

Predictive Power

The examples that I am most familiar with are related to searching for specific types of fossils. Biologists have made specific predictions that transitional forms of type [X,Y,Z] should be found in specific types of strata. They have even launched (successful) expeditions to search for a given type of fossil in a specific type of location based on prediction.

Key Elements have yet to be tested

How is in any way, shape or form specific to the Theory of Evolution?

Falsification

First and foremost, we have experimental evidence that shows the emergence of a new species

http://www.newscient...in-the-lab.html

Try to be civil hrothgar.

Regarding your points: I knew about those expeditions, I just don't consider them to be predictive in the proper sense. Seeing that species A and species B look quite alike, and inferring that there is a species in-between A and B is only support for a much weaker claim that the development of species is continuous. Even intelligent design advocates don't question that. To be predictive, I would say that it must predict something that has not happened yet, not merely infer a missing link in what has already happened. The jury is out on whether evolution will have this kind of power, in the sense of making sensible predictions on the variations in the genome of a given population. Generally it is expected that if you reset the evolutionary clock, you will get a widely different world from this one, although I not recently that this has been disputed. Myself, I believe that evolution will have some degree of convergence, but at any rate, it will be virtually impossible for evolution to make the type of strong predictions that Karl Popper would like to see, at least in the lifetime of individuals. Even in the case of the article you gave, all of the populations that did not develop cit- had significant deviations in fitness - i.e. populations held in identical situations will tend to diverge rather than converge. At least in the short term.

As to the key elements that have not been tested, I was referring mostly to speciation. The article you cited most definitely does not refer to the emergence of a new species, as you claimed, but only to the emergence of a single new gene. Generally, to change species (in bacteria), you must make changes to at least some of the genes that are crucial to a cells functioning. This is very difficult, as most changes to most of these crucial genes will result in cell death after even a single mutation. In a sense, this is why species are stable in the fossil record.

The article you gave is very interesting, I had read other of their papers (where I got the 20000 generations of E.coli from) but I did not realise that they had discovered the emergence of a new gene. Let us be clear that this is Big News. It is the first example of a new and functioning gene with a new ability. My guess is that they are playing it low key until they can sequence the gene, as they will be worried that it might only end up meaning that E.Coli had this ability in the past, and "re-discovered it" rather than created it from scratch. (Obviously, if they had a gene that was different by only a few mutations that "broke" it in the past, it is much more easily re-discovered). I could probably do a literature search and find out, but I'm tired.

Finally, the article actually highlights the problem of evolution in complex species. According to the article, the rate of mutation in the genome is 10^-10 per cell per generation. And that is for a single mutation. Their populations were typically around 10^12, so they got a large number of mutations per generation, and it still took 35000 generations for the first example of a functional new gene. (According to their notes, all other phenotypic differences were due to changes in gene expression, not new genes per se). In general only a small fraction of the cells in a complex organism are involved in reproduction, eg in a female, mutations only matter in one cell per month, under the tenets of current evolutionary theory, only mutations in the egg can be passed on, so only they matter. Indeed, it is my understanding (although I'm not to clear on this) that all female eggs are present at birth, and they do not undergo cell reproduction, but sit with their dna mostly inert until they start to develop a few each month for the menstrual cycle. At any rate, only a tiny fraction of the cells in a higher organism have the chance to pass on mutations to the next generation, and ultimately, since only two cells are involved in reproduction, the number of cells in which mutations can be inherited is twice the number of humans born. Given cell mutation rates quoted from your paper, that implies that for a single mutation in a single gene, there would have to be 10^10 humans born, for a complete functional gene, 10^13 is a reasonable estimate. I.e., if we extrapolate the results of that paper to a human genome then we would have to infer that in the entire span of human existence, we have not created a single functional new gene. (The total number of all humans who have ever lived is definitely below 10^11 (100bn).)

Of course, this is not a problem for natural selection per se, because as previously alluded to, nearly all natural selection makes genes that already exist more prominent. In fact, many recent finds have suggested that natural selection is way more efficient than was previously believed, mostly because it is starting to appear likely that humans can "program" their offspring, via the inclusion of RNA in their reproductive cells (think its called epigenetic selection?). The exact how is still a bit of a mystery, but statistically significant differences in children have been correlated with information on the parents, like Stress, or Obesity: hence it is starting to look increasingly likely that RNA might be involved in "programmable" selection.

Since that was a bit of a long post, I will summarise it as follows:
(1) Evolution will always lack predictive power in a strict sense, because it will generally not repeat itself even in identical conditions.
(2) Speciation has never been observed in progress in the natural world. It is entirely unclear how a species can evolve a different number of chromosomes, since in it is believed that two individuals with different number of chromosomes cannot breed successfully, no matter how alike their genome. The chance of two individuals simultaneously evolving a mutation that complex is effectively zero.
(3) Natural Selection is probably more complicated/efficient than we currently believe. This would also make more sense of the vast amount of apparently unused DNA that we carry around - perhaps in stressful conditions we can start expressing some of these genes in our children to improve pheno-typic diversity.
(4) Current understanding of gene creation via random processes does not produce enough new genes to account for the differentiation of complex species. Either virtually all the diverse genes present in higher species were present in bacteria prior to the ascent up the evolutionary tree, or we are capable of far more rapid mutation by an as yet unspecified mechanism.

Finally, I will add that even among mainstream evolutionary biologists, there is deep dispute about the relative importance of various things. E.g. Multi-level selection vs selfish gene type models.

I think there remain too many unsolved problems in evolutionary biology to put it in the top tier of scientific achievement. Obviously, being a physicist, I am biased, but there is an economy and elegance in today's theoretical physics that is unmatched in any other scientific discipline. Using elementary field theory methods, I could, for example, prove that the sky is blue, better yet, I could get the exact scattering dependence of the atmosphere on the wavelength of light. For an encore, I could use some basic QM mechanics to compute the relation between refractive index and pressure, and compute the precise value of the proportionality constant. If I compared to measurement I would be better than 1% (on a dry day - humidity interferes with my measurement). All this requires only a double handful of postulates and one experimentally measured quantity (the fine structure constant).

Now if only elegance===usefulness

PS: People seem to be putting opinions in my mouth, so for clarification:
(1) I am not anti-evolution, I think it defiantly happened, I just think that current biologists faith in the details of the mechanism is misplaced.
(2) I am not against teaching evolution in schools. I just think its more important that parents should decide what their children learn. The danger of a tyranny of the majority leading to virtual indoctrination in schools is very real. It has happened before, and it doubtless will happen again.

[phil_20686]

I realise that I made a mistake above, I forgot to factor in that the human genome is much bigger than the e.coli. For the sake of completeness I should ahve accounted for the following factors:

(1) The human genome has roughly 10^9 base pairs, compared with 42000. This is quite a big difference.
(2) There must be some cell division in the eggs from the embryo until ovaries/testes are formed. I quick check online suggests 50 and 500 for woman and men.
(3) Most of the human genome is not expressed.
(4) A huge fraction of mutations will be fatal during foetal development.

If I include this, and I trust my mental arithmetic, I think that every individual will have around ten mutations, and about one in every thousand people will have a functional new gene gene. (I had to guess some of the factors - I would guess this is trust worth to plus minus one order of magnitude). EDIT: realised I could look this up, try here: http://sandwalk.blog...tion-rates.html so roughly 100 mutations per person.

So if there are roughly 20bn humans who have lived since we divegred from the chimpanzee, we would differ in roughly 2000bn base pairs, or more than our our entire genome. Actual results suggest we differ by a few %, from which we infer that mutations on genes that actually matter are presumeably disfavoured, and we end up with lots of mutations on the sections of the genome that don't do much. Also, probably each individual will only have a total fraction of the total mutations. Probably depends on number of generations etc in a way that is too complicated for me to work out today. Not sure what the estimate should be for new genes. Human genes tend to be much more complicated than bacterium genes I think. Probably require a larger factor between number of base pairs and new genes. Not sure.

[phil_20686]

Winstonm, on 2011-March-04, 17:56, said:

Phil, don't look now but you are rationalizing your belief. You are simply explaining why and how an entire lost tribe of Israel lived in the Northeastern U.S. but left no trace of its civilization, and why it is reasonable to have a flying horse and stenographic angels.

If god wanted us to know he was real, he would have moved a mountain or regrown a missing limb. It is like the old question of why does god allow bad things to happen to good people? Why? Bad things happen to everyone in the same proportion - that is because there is no universal score keeper to say who is good and who is bad.

Now, you can rationalize about free will and bad things and good people, but Occam's razor points to the simple answer: no god.

This is fairly comic. You quoted scripture badly, and me pointing our your error is me rationalising.

That is an argument that has certainly got legs. Essentially, materialists refuse to believe that the concept of a "bad thing" might not be measured in purely material terms. As good an example as any of begging the question. The defense of suffering is logically sound, in that (1) some "bad" things might be good for you. (2) Restitution for suffering and sin can be balanced in an afterlife.

Finally, the Occam's razor argument only applies to two explanations that explain exactly the same things, but one has more postulates. Since we don't agree on exactly what the world is like, we obviously don't agree on what needs to be explained. It is precisely my contention that God's existence explains aspects of reality that you don't believe exist. Moreover, without reopening old ground on abstracts, I think God's existence provides a more complete explanation of the World we live in.

PS: On a humorous note, your contention that if only God performed a sufficiently impossible task people would believe, seems amusing from where I am sitting. Afterall, he tried rising from the dead, but people were non-plussed. More seriously, only people who doubt their own convictions would be persuaded by a miracle, those who don't doubt their convictions will only persuade themselves that its a hoax.

[phil_20686]

blackshoe, on 2011-March-05, 16:57, said:

Indeed.

Si, il mouve.

It took the Catholic Church over 300 years to admit Galileo was right.

This old chestnut. What actually happened was that Galileo annoyed pretty much anyone who had any power in medieval Italy, and that is not smart in a feudal society. The Pope was actually Galileo's friend, and protecting him from his various enemies right up until he put the Pope's words in the mouth of a character called "simpleton". This so incensed the Pope that he threw him to the Wolves, but then thought better of it and commuted his punishment to life imprisonment. Galileo's science was mostly irrelevant, it was just the excuse his enemies (who were many) used to get him jailed. The wikipedia article on this is quite good actually.

I don't want to get stuck into defending something which clearly shouldn't have happened. But its definitely more complicated that the meta-narrative in popular culture would suggest. Of course, when isn't History complicated. . Also, I'm not sure where you got 300 from, Im pretty sure opposition to Galileo's theory was essentially dropped in 1758, and was definitely overturned by 1820.

[blackshoe]

"Dropping opposition" is not the same as admitting he was right.

Galileo's political problems don't change the fact that the Catholic Church denied the science behind his claims, stating that it contradicted their faith-based view of the Universe.

I was under the impression that it was a 20th century Pope who finally came out and formally admitted the Earth is not the center of the Universe (or the Solar System) but perhaps it was a 19th century one. Does it matter? The point is, the science said "it's this way" and the Church officially refused to acknowledge it not because the science was wrong, but because it contradicted their world view.