Speaking of people who can’t understand basic science, here’s Denyse O’Leary:
A couple of years ago, after I had been following the controversy for several years, I found myself listening to a long lecture by a Darwinist, replete with bafflegab and pretty lame examples. Finally, sensing (correctly) that I was unconvinced, he proclaimed to me, “You just don’t understand how natural selection works, do you?”
And suddenly, the penny dropped. What he meant was that I just don’t believe in magic. I can’t make myself believe in magic; I haven’t been able to since I was a child.
Natural selection is not magic; there are no miracles, no unexplained steps in the process, and once you grasp it, it’s simple and obvious. That O’Leary equates the two means the correct answer to the question was “yes”.
The real funny part, though, is that O’Leary is an intelligent design advocate and ardent Catholic. She does believe in magic!
W!!!!!! I gt th frst pst!!!!!
Crry n…
[warning: “first posts” will get disemvoweled or deleted. pzm]
This silly woman doesn’t even realize that she does believe in magic!
Well my irony meter just exploded. Thanks alot ignorant lady.
Ok,that does it,
I was kind of tossing between going to bed and going out,but after this fried brain stirfry,the strip club it is….its only down the road really….
O’Leary,what the…..
/facepalm
#4. LisaJ
I don’t use those things anymore: they keep blowing up, and I really hate repainting all the charred bits in my house.
Also, Genesis begins with magic: god speaks, and stuff appears ex nihilo. Religion seems to shut down the rational part of the brain.
I’m sure the reason for her not allowing comments on her blog is completely unrelated to her ironic stance on evolution.
Ever notice these people never allow comments?
So sayeth the Catholic:
I can’t make myself believe in magic; I haven’t been able to since I was a child.
Now that is a classic!
Perhaps she’d like to explain the science behind transubstantiation, because to an outsider, it looks awfully like a wizard (unsuccessfully) casting a magic spell over a piece of bread.
Yes, that’s right, no magic. Why would a man coming back from the dead be “magic”? Why would a talking donkey be “magic”? Transubstantiation? Nah, that’s not “magic”, persay.
If stupid were poison, she’d be a big bottle of dioxin with eyes.
Oh, my. How does the stupid grow so thick? Isn’t there some kind of law, or at least a neighborhood homeowners regulation, that you have to have it washed off every so often to prevent just such unsightly buildup?
Follow quickly with O’Leary bleating out “BUY MY BOOK” and then passing out flyers with 37 links to her blog.
two words: magic cracker
I suspect that it is, in part, an inability to hold more than a single variable in her head at once. Either it’s reproduction, in which case everything is static, or it’s mutation, in which case everything is random, or it’s natural selection, in which case it’s only diminishing in complexity since things can only be eliminated. Combining them requires thinking three things at once, which necessarily requires magic. Goddidit, on the other hand, is not magic because it’s a single idea that answers everything.
She may not allow comments, but her blog does have an email address you can contact her at: oleary@sympatico.ca
Thomas Theobald,
Dioxin isn’t toxic. It is only the tetrachlorodibenzodioxin that is.
Signed,
A nitpicky chemist.
What he meant was that I just don’t believe in magic.
*facepalm*
Doesn’t believe in magic, huh?
Reeeeaaally, we’ll just see about that:
Zombies, Dragons, Unicorns, Satyr’s, Angels, Demons, Giants, Talking snakes, Magical trees, Afterlife, Transmutation (Water into Wine), Ressurection, (Catholic only) Transubstantiation… etcetera… etcetera… etcetera…
And all of that is in Teh Bible.
*facepalm*
I run into this in one of the classes I teach, part of history, 19th century, is, of course the impact of Darwin. I teach in a rather conservative area with a large number of fundies of various (contradictory) denominations. They disagree about just about everything but that derned evilution! Every year I give examples of very simple natural selection, they either flat out deny that it has anything to do with evilution (?!?!?!?) or they insist that no “changes” took place. They can’t seem to understand that the simple fact that animal “A” lived long enough to have little baby “a”s while animal “B” didn’t live long enough to have baby”b”s and because of that “A” passed on the desirable trait while “B” didn’t pass on the less desirable trait is natural selection and is evolution.
As stated earlier … facepalm…
The clue is here “replete with bafflegab”.
She actually didn’t understand what was being explained, and she even knows it. She just doesn’t know she knows it. Y’ know?
How do you go from “you don’t understand” to “you don’t believe in”???? Two entirely different things.
Let me explain it all to you Godless heathens:
1. Science that we (the God fearing) can’t understand is magic.
2. Magic is bad.
3. But OUR supernatural stuff isn’t really magic (” Our God did it, and we have thousands of pages of rationalizations to back it up”) and is therefore ok.
:-)
Oh yes, the corollary: thousands of pages of nonsense become reason if our sources write them; they remain nonsense if “those others” write them.
Have I made myself clear?
If you are confused, pray to my God (His Noodleness) for guidance.
You know when you are a kid (if you grow up all in one place at least) you think that you and the people around you talk “normally” and people from other places have accents? Then you go somewhere else and they comment on your accent and at first it is confusing.
And you know how just occasionally you meet a slightly stupid adult who is still convinced they don’t have an accent?
That’s how Christians typically use the word “magic”. They know it means “strange rituals designed to influence nature in apparently impossible ways”; they just lack the self-awareness to see that they have any
“I don’t understand a word you’re talking about / wasn’t listening to a word you said, so therefore what you’re talking about can’t possibly be true.”
I just love people who think that personal ignorance is acutally a good thing in a debate.
Denyse O’Leary = fail.
WAT?
We just can’t detect ‘Jebons’, the particle that Jesus sends to transform the wafer. No magic here. Move along.
Expect a glut of this crap soon with the Darwin anniversary coming up.
Umm, sure, that question sounds like, “You don’t believe in magic?” to me. [/sarcasm off]
Pretty much what everyone else says, I’m just flabbergasted. Ollie and Matt, thanks for the effort, but I’m still completely dumbfounded by the idea that the religious can define “magic” in such a way.
This really made me squirm. Arrogance plus ignorance plus what the fuuuuuh?
Fixed.
Hi # 16,
Actually there are a few (7) different dioxins, including penta, hepta, hexa and octa forms of chlorinated dioxins that are contaminates of concern based on their toxicity. There relative toxicity is compared to 2,3,7,8 tetrachloro dibenzo-p-dioxin, when determining allowable concentrations for human health.
But that’s just me being a nit picky government regulator type guy.
And sadly embarrassed that Denyse O?Leary lives in my country.
PZ, you shouldn’t write she’s an “intelligent design advocate”. Somepeople might misread, and think that “intelligent” applies, not to “design”, but to her, which is obviously not the case (and she seems eager to confirm).
That woman is fucking stupid.
I use the program “EvoDots” to illustrate the evolutionary arms race for my entry bio students. Most of them say it helps them understand natural selection.
http://faculty.washington.edu/herronjc/SoftwareFolder/EvoDots.html
SG
Denyse O’Bleary said:
Evidently, she still hasn’t grown up. Pretty typical of a misological anti-science propagandist.
Gingerbeard:
“Actually there are a few (7) different dioxins, including penta, hepta, hexa and octa forms of chlorinated dioxins that are contaminates of concern based on their toxicity. There relative toxicity is compared to 2,3,7,8 tetrachloro dibenzo-p-dioxin, when determining allowable concentrations for human health.
But that’s just me being a nit picky government regulator type guy.
And sadly embarrassed that Denyse O?Leary lives in my country.”
Sure sounds like magic to me.
/Drop-out-art-student
Dang. Just realised I’ve picked up the ‘/’ meme…
When I read a comment like “I can’t make myself believe in magic” from someone who clearly does believe in magic I wonder how someone can be so unreflective. How can someone completely fail to examine their own beliefs?
Then of course I start to wonder which of my own beliefs are similarly unexamined. So maybe Denyse O’Leary does serve some purpose after all.
Gingerbeard:
“Actually there are a few (7) different dioxins, including penta, hepta, hexa and octa forms of chlorinated dioxins that are contaminates of concern based on their toxicity. There relative toxicity is compared to 2,3,7,8 tetrachloro dibenzo-p-dioxin, when determining allowable concentrations for human health.
But that’s just me being a nit picky government regulator type guy.
And sadly embarrassed that Denyse O?Leary lives in my country.”
Sure sounds like magic to me.
/Drop-out-art-student
Dang. Just realised I’ve picked up the ‘/’ meme…
She doesn’t understand natural selection? Let me see if we can find a nice simple explanation for her.
“…Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.”
Thank you, Charles, that was very well put.
Jason S@#36: If blinkered fucktards didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent them
Rich #25 wrote “We just can’t detect ‘Jebons’, the particle that Jesus sends to transform the wafer. No magic here. Move along.”
Detected and photographed (on this very site, even!)
http://pharyngula.org/images/jesusatomzoom.jpg
Richard Harris wrote:
She seems to be parroting back accusations that have been leveled at her.
It seems to be part of the bluff:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2008/12/why-they-want-to-silence-us.html
“Tissue factor appears…”
“Prothrombin appears…”
“A Thrombin receptor is fashioned…”
“Fibrinogen is born…”
“Antithrombin III appears…”
“Plasminogen is generated…”
Antiplasmin arises…”
“A thrombin-activatable protein is unleashed…”
“Plasminogen activator springs forth…”
“Stuart factor appears…” – Russell Dolittle
And just how is all this leaping and springing different from magic?
And also the “meme” meme.
OT: Oklahoma is working on an “evolution” (or rather, not) bill
http://religionclause.blogspot.com/2009/01/first-2009-foray-at-evolution-teaching.html
And the Gutenberg site (free books online) released a bunch of Thomas Huxley books today
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/recent/last1
Science Goddess #33
Hehe I played, I got over 1000 black dots. In essence, I made cattle.
APOTAMKIN@42,
Are you really so stupid you can’t recognise metaphor?
GilDogen chimes in:
5
GilDodgen
01/06/2009
11:59 am
…he proclaimed to me, “You just don’t understand how natural selection works, do you?”
I understand how it works. It throws stuff out so it doesn’t get perpetuated. How throwing stuff out creates new stuff is what I don’t understand.
”
Erm, that would be Random mutation creating stuff, Gil. that’s why its RM&NS. And Selection is as much about choosing as discarding.
UD is now a singularity – so small, but infinitely dense.
“That woman is fucking stupid.”
And, in the grand tradition of all truly stupid people, she keeps right on talking, making sure no one can doubt for a moment just how incredibly stupid she is.
Oy.
“Sally appeared at the party.”
Now, that must mean Sally is magic? No, of course it doesn’t.
You’re really going, at the ultimate level, for a “god of the gaps” argument here. At some point we won’t know exactly why something happened, and will simply have to note that it did. This does not mean that scientists think there were supernatural processes involved.
It’s not possible to reason with the insane. Christians frequently say evolution = magic, but they always deny intelligent design = magic. Their logic is if the magician is a god fairy, then it’s not really magic.
A textbook case of psychological projection. “a defense mechanism in which one attributes one’s own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts and/or emotions to others.”
I really recommend anyone interested in how people develop erroneous and irrational beliefs to read Tavris and Aronson’s new book “Mistakes Were Made.” It’s a fun book, and will open your eyes to the nature of the naive opposition.
Some people have trouble undestanding math. I guess it’s magic, too. Well that explains everything. Personally, I’m geography-challenged. I guess it’s because I lost my wand.
Nick #46 “APOTAMKIN@42, Are you really so stupid you can’t recognise metaphor?”
In my experience, creationists (who are invariably biblical literalists) are simply not capable of understanding metaphors, even at a very basic level. If they were, they probably wouldn’t be literalists. Their creationism is very much a result of a under-performing brain.
@ Rich #25
They most certainly are detectable. They make a little “Wham” sound when they hit the cracker.
I think a good part of the problem here is an inability to separate mechanism from teleology.
Take a very simple example: your own birth. In order for that to happen, an enormous number of situations just had to come about in a certain way. Your father had to meet your mother, and his father had to meet his mother, and on and on and back and back. Mindboggling.
Now, at no single point in any of those meetings and encounters does one have to bring any “magic” into the process. There are no special forces coming in which defy all the known laws of physics and chemistry. You can follow every moment, step by step, and see how it all makes natural sense.
But what if you look at it backwards — working on the assumption that your birth simply had to be? It’s the goal. Suddenly, all those ordinary cause and effect situations require some special outside force, working along every step of the way to make sure that not one little part of the web of circumstance is omitted or neglected. You need magic.
That’s how they look at evolution. They don’t think to themselves that, if no part of replication, variation, and selection requires mysterious energy input, then the process as a whole won’t require it either. Instead, they take the whole thing and go backwards, choosing to see it all as a story about how the important, inevitable outcome came about for a reason. They’re post-dicting, by starting out treating the known endpoint as an actual end-point.
If so, then applying what we call “magic” to the process makes more sense than everything just happening to come together, exactly as “predicted.”
Well said Sastra. I’d nominate you for a Molly for that one.
This is one of the most common samples of failed reasoning I have encountered in my web surfing. They can not grasp that their inability to understand something does not, in itself, constitute falsification. A close 2nd are the ones who after failing to understand explanations given on some online forum for some bit of science they asked about they then triumphantly declare that because they could not understand any of the responses, no matter how grossly simplified, that “science does not have an answer.” Their inability to understand the answer not only invalidates it, but eradicates its existence.
To paraphrase one of one of my favorite humorists/cartoonists: you just can’ argue with logic like that.
Sorry, you just can’t argue with logic like that. Bad morning.
I think it’s funny that “natural selection” is such a difficult concept to Ms O’Leary that she has to call it “magic” so she can sweep it under the rug. I have the opposite problem: Natural selection is so glaringly obvious that it’s almost embarrassing that we need to have a term for it. I mean, really, the fittest survive, because they’re, like, fitter? It’s practically a tautology. (It reminds me of the anthropic principle, weak version only please, which is also a near-tautology but has a tremendous amount of explanatory power.) ok, ok, there’s more to it than that, but come on, it ain’t rocket science. Either no one has ever explained it clearly to her, or she’s thicker than a brick.
Steve_C, Sastra already has a well earned Molly. (I always love her summations of the arguments.) Some of us nominate previous Molly winners for Tentacle Clusters or some other addition to the OM for maintaining their quality posts.
The powerful tautology at the heart of biology is not “survivors survive” but rather “reproducers reproduce”. It’s hard to argue against that :) Evolution is not about the survival of the fittest, it is about the reproduction of the fitter.
CSBSH @#32 “That woman is fucking stupid.”
.
Please refrain from flattery. I had heard of this woman, but have never read anything she has written before now. Amazing! I particulary liked her statement on the Peppered Moth:
And if it did occur, it was soon reversed by widespread industrial cleanup. In other words, to the extent that natural selection does occur, it is apparently easily reversed.
Two evolutionary adaptions constitute no evolution at all!
Oh I knew Sastra had a Molly. I’m not a “science” guy and I just thought that post was really eloquent. I’m rarely eloquent that’s why I’m an art director and not a copywriter. But I love science and swatting down conservatives and fundies. I’m usually posting for work so I rarely have time to put together long well thought out posts. I’ve been commenting for over 3 years but no Mollies for me. :(
The thing is, you have to be truly, truly stupid to not be able to grasp the basics of natural selection.
Admittedly, I was in my late 20s before I even started to think about it (I hated biology in school), but as soon as I heard about the idea, I thought “that’s just so damn obvious!”.
I just cannot understand how someone finds it difficult to understand or implausible. Unless, of course, they have this firm belief that the world is only 6000 years old, in which case there’s not enough time for evolution to have occurred.
Fundie prayer time again:
May ignorance preserve us.
(Hey, it appears to have worked for O’Leary)
OT but amazing: ‘Spookfish’ has mirrors for eyes.
Maybe the creationist liar for jeebus, Denyse O’Leary, does understand natural selection, but it’s her job as a professional liar to call it magic. Or perhaps she’s more stupid than a dog. Of course most likely she’s both stupid and dishonest.
I like Darwin’s simple explanation: “I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.”
Magic is making a homunculus from mud, blowing on it and producing a man.
O’Leary is unclear on multiple concepts.
If god does it, it is not magic.
According to her profile Denyse O’Leary is a “Roman Catholic Christian.” This is either redundant or an oxymoron.
Denyse O’Leary has given the rest of Canada (ROC) another reason to dislike Toronto.
She’s also tapping a particularly rich vein of baloney that you sometimes see in these arguments:
YOU (“YOU” being NSF fellows, Nobel Prize winners, pretty much everyone who does science for a living, etc.) don’t know anything about science. WE know science. And darwinism isn’t science!!
What they’re trying to do is skirt the point that they’re anti-science.
The problem is that, for the most part, they’ve spent their lives in an intellectual milieu in which theology is considered a reasonable model of discourse. So it’s acceptable to redefine words on the fly, state your hunches and prejudices as facts and generally pull stuff directly out of your ass. And since religion tends to present itself as eternal verity, they assume that’s a normal mode for everyone.
However, that way of thinking really is anti-science. And by extension, so are they.
(That’s also why, when the Holy Joes say that teaching evolution is an assault on religion, they’re right. If their kids get exposed to that way of thinking, how are you going to keep ’em down on the farm?)
* * *
And Sastra @55? Freaking brilliant.
The important fact is that ID rhetoric has been reduced (from a very low level) to this.
If it weren’t for the fact that many voters and even legislators are either deluded or stupid enough to parrot such droppings, we’d have ignored these IDiots for at least the last five years.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
Creationist figure that if they say something often enough it becomes a point they can use to debate. Nothing creationist say is true. Really, is anyone all that suprised. When you are just making things up to support your religions creation myth, it doesn’t matter what you say cause it’s all bullshit.
O’Bleary’s comments are even funnier considering that her alternative to evolution as an explanation for the diversity of life on this planet is that someone (don’t ask who) “designed” something sometime somehow.
They really have nothing but their personal incredulity.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Arthur C. Clarke
Or in this case, any sufficiently advanced understanding….
And the Dunning-Kruger effect rears its cerebrally-lesioned head.
Forget the fact that Denyse believes in the Catholic Jehovah and that magic is what theists call the other person’s religion. She thinks natural selection is magic? Seriously? I thought even the dumbest creationist could admit that yeah, some individuals die before reproducing and thus don’t pass on their genes to the next generation, and that there’s some systemic bias determining which individuals fit the former (those that are weaker, stronger, slower, faster, or what have you). Is that debatable? Seriously? Can one, as a human with an ostensibly functioning frontal lobe, really deny this? Could she have really failed to watch even one episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom? And she thinks she’s capable of critiquing evolution>
To Denyse’s family, wherever you are: please, if you have any compassion whatsoever, pull the plug on this brain-dead golem.
To follow-up on Alex @ #75
“Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology”
which I think I’ve paraphrased correctly from that font of so much great engineering wisdom “The Girl Genius” (http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/)
And I’ve also noticed that they only attribute the term “fittest” with physical terms, such as strength or speed. For some reason they don’t see that slugs and snails are very fit, thus explaining their very existence.
I think it’s their deep-seated emotional desire to have what they believe – magic – be a reality, and anything actually real that challenges those beliefs gets irrationally stifled in their minds, tripping up their logic at every opportunity.
Is it the fittest or the least unfit that survive? I wonder, because it seems to me that some features would carry forward if they are neutral/benign wrt environmental & reproductive variables. Evo-devo responders?
To followup Alex@75 even further, I rather like Asimov’s Corollary to Clarkes first law:
“When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion — the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right.”
We really miss you guys.
JC
O’Leary bleats that she listened to bafflegab. No, Denyse.
If you had been listening, that implies that you were paying attention. I’ll fix that first bit for you, Denyse.
“A couple of years ago, after I had been following the
controversymanufactuversy for several years, I found myselflisteningignoring to a long lecture by aDarwinistscientist, replete withbafflegab and pretty lame examplesthings I don’t understand and don’t wish to understand.True Bob @ #79
I like least-unfit. I think I’ll start using that.
True Alex, but that’s as much our fault as theirs, and the reason I included weaker and slower with stronger and faster as possible selection criteria. The ‘fittest’ in ‘survival of the fittest’ still means a combination of Lance Armstrong, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Stephen Hawking. I suspect the average person would be much more receptive to the ToE (and their understanding substantially greater) if teachers belaboured the point that, from an evolutionary point of view, snails and slugs are generally just as fit as any other species that’s well-adapted to its environment.
Maybe the potential of “survival of the fittest” to mislead is why Darwin didn’t, AFAIK, use it. Certainly it originated with Herbert Spencer, who probably did think of it as something close to “the strongest”, given his equation of evolution with progress.
It did originate with Spencer, but Darwin included it (with attribution–take note, lying creationists) in later editions of Origin.
Oops. In comment #83, I wrote:
I meant to write:
Brownian, OM,
Thanks for the correction – I’ll remember that.
I saw a really nice illustration belying this sort of misconception on the Science channel this weekend — it was discussing Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, and noted that Neanderthals were about as intelligent as HS, could make tools, and were slightly more robust physically, making it something of a mystery as to why they died out and we survived. They then revealed that HS had a slightly different skull shape, placing the voice box lower in the throat, leading to the hypothesis that Neanderthals could not develop language as effectively.
What? Was it a lecture of one?
How else would the ‘Darwinist’ know poor Denyse was unconvinced, since she was apparently inactive in this exchange?
What is magic?
I recently had some home remodeling using professionals for all the work this time. Previously, I used to do light carpentry, painting, tile laying, faucet replacement, some other things an amatuer can do, although slowly. I never did any real plumbing or electrical; not that big a cheapskate.
Watching the skill and speed of these workers, it sure seemed like magic to me and worth the mega dollars to get it all done in a few weeks instead of the months it would have taken me.
Also, must remark that the contractor was great. No complaints.
Kind of a two for one on the irony since the Catholic Church does accept evolution. So she is saying she is a good Catholic because she doesn’t accept magic, like science and the Catholic Church believes in.
Ah, the joys of viewing the workings a mind unchallenged in its ideas.
This topic kind of forced me to look for The Who’s “Man in a Purple Dress” on YouTube. Not really atheist in theme but close enough for me.
it was discussing Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, and noted that Neanderthals were about as intelligent as HS, could make tools, and were slightly more robust physically, making it something of a mystery as to why they died out and we survived. They then revealed that HS had a slightly different skull shape, placing the voice box lower in the throat, leading to the hypothesis that Neanderthals could not develop language as effectively. – CrypticLife
If you’re slightly more robust physically, you need more food. That Neandertals [note: “Neanderthals” is an obsolete spelling] needed more food than moderns is a lot more certain than that they were limited linguistically. As tools become more sophisticated, the trade-off between physical strength and food requirements is likely to shift. Greater food needs would also probably have meant smaller group size, meaning a group could maintain a smaller knowledge-base.
I have never known a creationist that hasn’t tried to separate themselves from the silliness of their beliefs by projecting that silliness away from them. That’s why most of their arguments are the same ones we use against them (circular reasoning, magical thinking. . .).
Creationists have little imagination. It’s not even their own imagination by which they adhere to wildly implausible magical deities; it’s other people’s imagination! (And generally, people who died thousands of years ago!)
They have been told what to believe, and then frightened into not allowing anything to persuade them otherwise.
Some people follow orders better than others.
Yes. Write intelligent-design advocate instead. The purpose of hyphens is to write down intonation.
Except for the highlighted Lamarckism, which is a) superfluous and b) wrong anyway.
All those that are well enough adapted.
What “enough” means depends on the environment.
no Linux version… I wonder if EvoDots run in Wine?
Wow, if she doesn’t understand natural selection (or has simply given up trying to) think how hard it would be to explain genetic drift.
I’m a TA for an introductory course on human evolution that is mostly populated with hundreds of non-science freshman, and it takes about two weeks for students to understand natural selection. Then they have to learn the other forces of evolution, and it’s all downhill from there for most of them.
Not at all. They were shorter and squatter, so they lost less heat, assuming equal clothing…
Just give it up, world at large. We don’t even know in which millennium the Neandertalers died out, if it was gradual or catastrophic, if it happened at the same time everywhere, and so on. Hey, we still don’t even know if limited interbreeding with H. s. sapiens occurred. As long as we haven’t got any facts, we can’t test anything!
BTW, contrary to earlier assertions, the voice box does descend in chimps just like it does in humans: post-baby chimps cannot swallow and breathe at the same time any more than we can.
EvoDots does run in Wine. And i’ve learned that the orange dots make me want to chase them, while the black dots survive because i don’t notice them half the time :-p
the orange dots won anyway, the bastards are too quick for me
I don’t believe in magic, just invisible people who create planets out of thin air and create people and animals and everything else on that planet. And that invisible people heals people, raises people from the dead, multiply food, turn water into whine, and make the sun and earth stop rotating or moving for a day. Definitely not magic. What a joke. O’leary is clueless.
Jason S. #36
I have a friend that’s like that. Saying one thing and believing another. She said almost the same thing about medical care. That humans shouldn’t be able to live forever through medical care but at the same time believes in the christian heaven where you live forever. My head wanted to pop.
The trees continue to sneeze in O’Leary World.
Re: Molly: I’ve long thought it should be renamed “Order of the Sastra”, myself.
To borrow a line attributed to Terry Pratchett: “I don’t understand. What’s wrong with you?”
Sadly, Mr. Straw Man is back. Just because she doesn’t understand something, doesn’t mean that thing is equal to magic. I’m sure there are plenty of other scientific things she doesn’t understand. I bet she thinks her cell phone works by magic and that the Earth spins by magic.
Wasn’t the correct answer to the question “No” i.e. “No, I don’t understand”? Or does that kind of logic work differently on the western side of the Pond?
Anyway… there’s a letter in today’s Times pointing out the sad coincidence of the glass and china company Waterford Wedgwood going into receivership (i.e. going bust) in the year of Darwin’s bicentenary. Josiah Wedgwood was Darwin’s grandfather, and it was his money that financed Darwin’s research.
@42: Deja vu, right down to the missing quotation mark in front of antiplasmin.
Bloody hell. One day I’m amazed by the generosity of people and it gives me faith in humanity. The next I’m completely overwhelmed by the stupidity.
This is one of those situations where the more you try to explain the more frustrated you will get until, eventually, you feel then need to punch someone.
@106
And once more, the mutating mouse is caught.
What kind of ego gets repeated satisfaction from negative attention, again?
“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.”
Pure jargon, used in an obfuscatory fashion.
Give me clear concepts such as “the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ even though they appear to remain bread and wine” or “there is but one God in three equal persons” any day.
Now, who’s up for burning some heretics?
Theists, pretty much any theist no matter how “moderate” or “liberal”, must accept teleology for their entire theology is rooted in it. From creation to eschatology, teleology is an underlying current. Jesus, for example, will return for a reason; the universe is directed toward a goal as the archer directs the arrow to the target (to quote Aristotle). The goal is salvation and we are the arrow. Evolution destroys teleology which pulls the rug out of all of theology including eschatology.
It’s a pity that “fit” has mostly lost its meaning as suitable or appropriate. We still see it in verb form: the curve fits the data, the dress fits the woman. But as an adjective, it pretty much only means physical fitness now. But evolutionarily, when the most fit are the smallest and scrawniest, because humans don’t hunt those ones, “fit” then means small and scrawny…
It’s like “theory”, now in popular usage to mean “guess”. Also, just for fun, “Nimrod”, the mighty hunter. Bugs Bunny is to blame for that one: his sarcastic use of it to sneer at Elmer Fudd turned into the only popular use.
So there’s another reason why technical language is important.
#100 “I don’t believe in magic, just invisible people who create planets out of thin air and create people and animals and everything else on that planet. And that invisible people heals people, raises people from the dead, multiply food, turn water into whine, and make the sun and earth stop rotating or moving for a day. Definitely not magic. What a joke. O’leary is clueless.”
In light of the above, here is a little something from Vox Day’s book that might need a little feed-back
Ironically, for all their supposed reliance on reason, the new atheists believe in improbable things like “multiple universes”. This is an “utterly non-scientific theory invented solely to get around the problem of the anthropic principle.” Faced with the unwelcome fact that there are 128 fortuitous coincidences in the fundamental constants of physics, which suggest that the existence of life is no accident, atheists postulate “a potentially infinite number of universes” just so “our wildly improbable universe” can be found to be “mathematically probable.” Here again they use a double standard – the multiverse theory is just as “unfalsifiable as the God Hypothesis and far more improbable.”
I was going to argue that they had slightly larger brains, which would have increased their need for food, but wikipedia suggests that notion has been dispelled (in the early 90s, it was thought that the larger brains and denser bones were cold-weather adaptations.)
Unfortunately, my knowledge of hominin evolution is outdated. Anyone out there with the latest edition of Richard G. Klein’s The Human Career: Human Biological and Cultural Origins?
“Silver Fox”:
They do, do they?
What’s your basis for this assertion?
How do you know they are “improbable”? Do you have any background in cosmology to determine whether they are improbable or not?
Fixed that for you, more or less.
And fixed that.
Really SF, if you posit that God exists as a person, bring forth the evidence for it. The anthropic principle isn’t evidence for a person, after all.
Here is a physics account of possible actual multiverses:
Recycled Universe
Vox Day resides in the Underverse.
Oh for fuck’s sake. He’s quoting VOX DAY. Jesus fucking christ on a cracker!
My headache just got worse.
Those were my thoughts.
The anthropic principle by the sheer size of this universe. To assume that there’s a creator behind it so life is all for just one species out of billions on one planet which is one of hundreds of billions of stars orbiting in this galaxy, which in turn is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe… to think this is all for us is absurd to the highest degree.
“The Anthropic Principle is based on the underlying belief that the universe was created for our benefit. Unfortunately for its adherents, all of the reality-based evidence at our disposal contradicts this belief. In a nonanthropocentric universe, there is no need for multiple universes or supernatural entities to explain life as we know it.” – Caroline Miller
“Really SF, if you posit that God exists as a person, bring forth the evidence for it.”
Wait a minute fellows, I’m not positing anything. Post #100 said he didn’t believe in magic stuff: Vox Day pointed out that atheists do believe in magic. I just asked for some feed-back. I wouldn’t know a multiverse if I saw one walking down the street.
SF, VD is full of shit. It’s a baseless assertion that the so-called “new atheists” believe this.
I still don’t get it. I’m being serious. I’ll ask again: How do the people who make these arguments deal with the fact that the Earth is one dink planet in this enormous cosmos, the vast majority of which is inhospitable to life in any way we understand it? That it didn’t appear for billions of years, and then life didn’t emerge here for billions more years? And what has any of this “no accident” nonsense to do with the Judeo-Christian god of myth?
Has Vox polled a sample of atheists to see how many believe in the “magic” of the multiverse?
Hell the fuck no. It’s a bullshit statement backwards and sideways.
Do some scientist have a hypothesis about mulitverses? Yes. Is that magic because Vox motherfuckin Day doesn’t get it?
No.
Caroline: “To assume that there’s a creator behind it so life is all for just one species out of billions on one planet which is one of hundreds of billions of stars orbiting in this galaxy, which in turn is one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe… to think this is all for us is absurd to the highest degree.”
But isn’t the above merely a conjecture? Maybe it is for us. Where are the others? Where is the evidence? you seem to be holding an empty bag here.
Are you saying there is no anthropic principle”?
He did no such thing.
Please demonstrate how the multiverse hypothesis is “magic”.
There’s your problem, you do listen to Vox Day.
For the record, a multiverse may be unobservable but it’s still built on the same principles as this universe. The concept of God is not magic because it’s beyond observation, it’s magic because it violates the laws of nature.
Vox Day is wrong, and you are foolish for taking him as an authority.
SF, your attempted tu quoque has been called.
Atheists have no god-belief; other than that their beliefs encompass the gamut of human beliefs – including dualism, the supernatural and all sorts of pseudo-science.
So, while no doubt many atheists believe in magic (Wiccans spring to mind), this is not relevant to PZ’s point (that Denise thinks evolutionary theory is magic, when it’s anything but, but does believe in magic whilst claiming she doesn’t).
Which parts of that statement do you think are conjecture?
This time it was me! Fucking hell, can’t you even read names?!?
Is it conjecture? Sure. But so is the anthropic principle. Hawking equates it to a man living in a rich neighbourhood seeing no signs of poverty.
Where is the evidence? The milky way galaxy has between 200,000,000,000 and 400,000,000,000 stars. The sun is just one of them. It’s an average galaxy of which there are around 100,000,000,000 of those in the observable universe. There are millions of species that live on the planet now, all of which have played the same 3.5 billion year genetic shuffle we have, and billions of species that did not make the cut.
Now our observation point is essentially a static image on the galactic scale. We did not observe the path to us, we did not observe the path to almost all other life as it currently stands. We just are. Our measurement of the cosmos was really recent. It’s only within the last 400 years that our ability to look beyond our near frame of reference and see some more distant objects, and only in the last century that we’ve seen the sheer scope that exists. Hubble’s observations of red-shifting as well as Einstein’s theory of relativity have put the cosmos into a perspective that seems almost impossible from our perspective. We are now able to observe the universe on a galactic level, and that galactic level makes the local level assumption that the anthropic principle needs in order to be valid an absurdity.
Given what we know of biology, what we’ve observed of intelligence and awareness in other species, and what we’ve seen of the universe around us, the anthropic principle is a misrepresentation of the cosmos.
That there are billions and billions of stars is not conjecture.
The number of planets is almost conjecture (because they are hard to detect) nut they have been discovered.
The sheer odds of it dictate that if only 1% of stars had planets and of that 1% only 1% could support life and of that 1% only 1% actually supported life…
Guess what?
That’s still millions of planets with life.
Do some scientist have a hypothesis about mulitverses? Yes. Is that magic because Vox motherfuckin Day doesn’t get it?
No.
Fuck Vox Day. But… Whenever I read about the current cosmological theories, there’s a lot of stuff that sounds to me about as well-supported as “goddidit.” Sure, there could be a multiverse – but what’s the evidence we’ve observed that directly supports the existence of other universes? It sounds plausible, to me, for sure – but then I suppose “we’re all polyps in the great grundlesplat’s colon” is also plausible – unless there’s hard evidence that supports one theory over another. And have the steady-staters been proven wrong, or are they just no longer fashionable?
Being just an ignorant skeptic, I have to say that a lot of the stuff some scientists talk about could just as easily be word-substituted s/string theory/fairy dust/ or s/meme/demonic influence/ and it’d make exactly the same amount of sense, and have the same supporting evidence.
Are you saying there is no anthropic principle”? – Silver Fox
I certainly am: it’s bullshit – if you mean the strong anthropic principle that we can deduce that the universe was “meant” to have life from the fact that it does (the weak principle simply says the universe must be such as to permit life’s appearance, which is of course true). In the first place no-one has shown that deviation from our universe’s constants would make life impossible. See for example an article in New Scientist for 2 August 2008 Is our universe fine-tuned for life?, by Michael Brooks. Second, even if this were shown to be the case, we have no way of estimating the probability that the constants would have values close enough to those we find to allow life: to apply concepts of probability, you need to know the set of equiprobable outcomes from which you are selecting, and here we have no idea. Third, even if we had such a set, and it turned out that our universe is very improbable, all that would mean is that we live in an improbable universe. So what? My existence is undoubtedly far more improbable – am I entitled to conclude that the universe was designed to produce me? I have a sizeable ego, but not nthat big.
The idea of a multiverse is not magic, as has been noted – but unless a theory which implies its existence also has observable consequences for our universe, it remains beyond the bounds of science.
I don’t think we need look beyond Earth itself to realise the universe was not ‘made for us’ – humans can only live on the one-third of the planet that’s land, and much of that isn’t inhabitable due to climate and/or lack of access to food and water.
There are plenty of other species which can lay a far more compelling claim to it having been designed for them.
Once we take the obvious premise that we were built for the environment and not the other way around, that we are just one of millions of survival machines on this planet (including many intelligent creatures that are not us), the anthropic principle just becomes silly. You might as well hold a banana in your hand and conclude that God designed bananas just so they can be held by humans.
And have the steady-staters been proven wrong, or are they just no longer fashionable? – Marcus Ranum
They’ve been proven wrong. The consensus on that among relevant experts is as overwhelming as that for evolution in biology.
The idea of a multiverse is not magic, as has been noted – but unless a theory which implies its existence also has observable consequences for our universe, it remains beyond the bounds of science.
If it’s got the same amount of evidence supporting it as “goddidit” it’s indistinguishable from magic, no? Isn’t that what “beyond the bounds of science” means?? Where is the line between science and “bullshit we made up”?
“But so is the anthropic principle. Hawking equates it to a man living in a rich neighbourhood seeing no signs of poverty.”
Far be it for me to take on Hawking: He has enough to contend with without me, but wouldn’t it be more accurate if he said the anthropic principle equates to a man living in a middle class neighborhood seeing no signs of poverty or wealth.
Posted by: SC, OM | January 7, 2009
I still don’t get it. I’m being serious. I’ll ask again: How do the people who make these arguments deal with the fact that the Earth is one dink planet in this enormous cosmos, the vast majority of which is inhospitable to life in any way we understand it?
Not only that, the Earth is in the unfashionable part of the Milky Way.
The Earth was created for boats, not people, stupid. After all, if there was no surface water whatsoever, boats wouldn’t float. If the earth was entirely covered in water, there’d be no place to produce the boats. Clearly, 4.6 billion years of local physics occurred for the sole purpose of enabling shuffleboard aboard the QEII.
@134 – thanks for the update. It seemed like a joke that had gotten out of hand to begin with, but I’m out of my depth there.
And I thought the anthropic principle was just Hoyle reasoning backward that ‘since we’re here and we’re made of carbon, there must be nuclear processes that turn hydrogen into carbon’ How did it get coopted into being about whether the universe was made for us? Was that just cretinists stealing the name ‘anthropic principle’ because it sounds all scientifical?
Shit. My Recycled Universe link did not work. Here is a correction.
Here is the link to the Michael Brooks article: Is our universe fine-tuned for life?
“That’s still millions of planets with life.”
But you have no evidence of life. You are appealing to a statistical hypothesis which may or may no pan out. Again, there is no evidence but only what may be a statistical fallacy.
Jebus, Silver Fox the idiot returns quoting Vox Day. If there wasn’t already proof for his having gone off the deep end, that clinches it.
Marcus,
It’s a conjecture, based on extrapolating from known evidence, not an attempt to incorporate new evidence into theory. For example, the brane cosmology model would account for the cosmological constant and explain much else.
That’s how science progresses, first the conjecturing, leading to hypotheses if the conjectures can in principle be tested (falsified). The problem with these models so far is that they’re untestable.
—
SF @136, that was relevance-free. Perhaps you could get back to whatever point it was that you were trying to make?
You know, your fallacious comparison and allegation of a double-standard @112.
All of this time I thought the earth was created for bacteria and beetles.
If it’s got the same amount of evidence supporting it as “goddidit” it’s indistinguishable from magic, no? – Marcus Ranum
No. Magic is things happening because people say the right words or go through the right rituals and thus call on supernatural forces: it always involves intentionality. The mutiverse is what Popper calls metaphysics – not science, but potentially a precursor to it. There have in fact been suggestions that the influence of “other universes” might be detectable – can’t point you to a reference right now, but these ideas are certainly floating around.
I never said life did exist on other planets. Just that it’s very likely.
I thought the anthropic principle was just Hoyle reasoning backward that ‘since we’re here and we’re made of carbon, there must be nuclear processes that turn hydrogen into carbon’ – Marcus Ranum
Yes, that’s an excellent example of using the “weak” anthropic principle, which is sound. Not sure who first came up with the “strong” (or better “woo”) anthropic principle – which is, stripped of babble, that as we’re here the universe must have been made for us.
Emphasis mine. What a bunch of crap (from the king of crap, Vox Day). How can he write that in the context in which it was written, and not recognize the inherent irony?
Just how does Vox know that it’s “far more improbable”? I don’t believe that he’s show his work.
No, it’s not. Something working within the laws and boundaries of nature = not magic. Don’t get what is unknown/unknowable and what violates the principles of nature mixed up.
And if perchance this is the only planet on which life has ever existed, how does that support an argument that the universe was created for life, especially given the questions and points I and others raised above?
The world is a microbial world– and it pains my entomological pseudosoul to admit it. Most importantly, evidence is that it took between 500 million and a billion years from the formation of the earth for life to develop. It took another 2.5 to 3 billion years for multicellular life to develop. Multicellular live is a much more difficult optimization plateau to reach than simply ‘life.’
Silver Fox- you need to read Mark Twain’s essay ‘Was the world made for man.’ Also, change your moniker, perhaps Grey Onager?
No. The anthropic principle (as the religious see it) pertains to the earth being made for us – that we sit atop the hierarchy of all creatures, as written in the bible. Your analogy allows for the option of something better (i.e. someone can be richer than middle-class), which the anthropic principle doesn’t.
I propose a new internet law.
Anyone who quotes Vox Day as support of their argument auto-fails.
We’ll call it the Law of Vox Day Fail.
or something
Given what the anthropic principle states (that we have to take into account that the laws of physics and chemistry have to take into account that intelligence has arisen), no. We are looking at a place rich in life, and one where we are the dominant species. We are in a rich area of the cosmos in terms of life. As we have seen through spectrometers and by looking at meteorites / comets, the building blocks of life are littered throughout the cosmos.
Of course we don’t, but even if we searched the entire universe and found no life whatsoever, it still wouldn’t mean that the anthropic principle is valid. The sheer magnitude of the universe is not to make the idea of life more probable elsewhere, it’s to put into perspective the tiny amount of time and space humans operate in the grand scheme of things.
The universe has existed for at least 13,000,000,000 years, humanity has existed for around 200,000 years. Taking us into account in the scale of the universe (let alone if we shrink the frame of reference to just this planet) to think it was all made for us is nothing more than wishful thinking. We are but one species out of millions that currently survive on this planet, and we are one billions that have come before it.
David Marjanović, OM@98:
Science 11 February 2005:
Vol. 307. no. 5711, p. 840
DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5711.840a
Prev | Table of Contents | Next
News Focus
NEANDERTALS REVISITED MEETING:
Calorie Count Reveals Neandertals Out-Ate Hardiest Modern Hunters
Also, the scientists talking about these things, in my experience, recognize that there is no reason to accept them without evidence. In talks by and interviews of James Gates re superstrings that I’ve read, for instance, he’s made it very clear that people should be skeptical unless and until tests are done and evidence rendered. (Of course, I wouldn’t understand it if it were. :)) Are there some who overreach in their conjectures/claims? Probably, but from what I’ve seen these aren’t often the scientists themselves, but others who’ve taken the ideas and run with them.
I propose; “Eewww! You got VD of the brain!”
Agreed. There needs to be a distinguishing between tentative explanations in science and absolute explanations such as God. The multiverse seems but one of many tentative proposals on the unknown, it’s by no means dogma. Vox Day fails on that count, and fails on the count that science is the atheist dogma. It’s a really lame straw-man attack by Vox Day and it’s surprising that Silver Fox thought it profound enough to echo.
I’d suggest “This one has failed the VD test.”
Silver Fox, you’re right. It is just conjecture at this point, but it’s obviously very well-reasoned conjecture.
As for Vox Dim,
Notice how he has to imbue the “new atheists” with creationist’s traits by using the word “believe” (in an ironic attempt to make them appear less reasonable)? No they don’t “believe” these things; they hypothesize these things, along with many other mathematical models. And why wouldn’t they? They’re exploring reality as opposed to simply believing things.
And this:
Here he pretends he is knowledgeable on what is scientific and what is not.
Vox Day, speaking from the heart of his bottom.
There seems to be a fair bit of confusion in this thread regarding the anthropic principles, weak and strong. Perhaps, in the interests of clarity, further posters could specify which of the two principles they’re referring to when they say “anthropic principle”. The difference is important – it’s rather like talking about “relativity” and not specifying whether you’re referring to Galilean, Special or General Relativity.
Natural selection, so simple even a bird can do it.
A peppered moth with outstretched wings, upon a lichen covered rock in dappled sun, abides.
Atop the rock, a Rock thrush perched, for grander view of wooded glen, a home for his new bride.
In time a nest, and eggs, then young, with gaping hungry mouths, incessant and impatient cries, such noise the thrush, the least, could not abide.
He scoured blades of grass and twigs, tree trunks, branches, leafy sprigs. On logs, through briers, that weedy patch, for living morsels there to catch.
So, frantic he at last decides, a meal of worm for young and bride. Back to his favorite rock he glides, beneath his feet, the moth yet hides.
I like what Bob Park wrote re the (strong) Anthropic Principle:
“The fundamental parameters of the universe are such as to permit the creation of observers within it.” I believe an equivalent wording would be: “If things were different, things would not be the way things are.” –(Bob Park)
When used in apologetics, the Anthropic Principle turns into the Fine-Tuning Argument (FTA).
Kel #158 wrote:
My understanding is that speculative hypotheses such as String Theory and Multiverse Theory rest on a few observations, and then a lot of math. The God hypothesis just doesn’t have the math. And, of course, the scientific proponents of string and multiverse don’t insist that there’s some singular loyal virtue in believing that they exist, by taking leaps of hope beyond evidence. They’d love to settle it with evidence, if they could. They don’t think the lack of it makes them better people.
There’s another significant difference. Even though we’re talking about realms and areas outside the familiar universe, not even the toughest critics consider either String or Multiverse theories to be “supernatural.” Even if they can’t ever be tested by science.
Why not? Because there’s no mind or mind-like component involved in either theory, infusing meaning into the nature of things. Nobody is claiming that one of the dimensions of superstrings is “love,” or that the strings all vibrate in the energetic harmony of Consciousness. The other universes are not supposed to be ranked in some sort of progressive hierarchy of value and virtue.
That’s a significant difference right there, I think.
@161, Martin Gardner catalogs them as the Weak Anthropic Principle, the Strong Anthropic Principle, the Final Anthropic Principle, and the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle, referred to as WAP, SAP, FAP, and CRAP.
#32: “That woman is fucking stupid.”
From a natural selection point of view, I really hope she’s just stupid.
How’d that line go again…oh yeah:
“One million sperm, and YOU were the fastest?”
Something working within the laws and boundaries of nature = not magic. Don’t get what is unknown/unknowable and what violates the principles of nature mixed up.
OK, I’m convinced, now. Of the opposite viewpoint.
What scientists are doing, when they’re hypothesizing multiverses, is coming up with new hypothetical extensions to our “principles of nature” that are untested and which may be, in fact, untestable.
Saying that this or that is in accordance with nature, or that the math works, is circular logic – since you’re basically saying “my extension to the laws of nature is still in accordance with the laws of nature because it doesn’t contradict them.” The FSM’s noodly interference with reality is also untestable and also does not contradict observable reality. We all understand that the FSM is a joke, yes? If something is indistinguishable from a joke maybe it’s not magic but it sure isn’t science, either. Especially when it may not be possible to distinguish it from a joke. :D
The steady state theory was, I believe, initially an expression of Gamow’s notorious sense of humor. But, as people looked at it, they realized that it was (at first) consistent with observable reality and – until it was eventually proven false (as we are told) – it was considered as one of many theories. OK, now we see why Popper wants theories to be falsifiable: if they aren’t then they’re on an equal footing with the FSM or “goddidit”
Thinking about it a bit more – the multiverse theories are saying that there may be gigantic foamy masses of universes and it may be impossible for us to ever tell if they are there, or not, etc. That’s just about the same level of bullshit as hypothesizing a triune god that operates undetectably from a private dimension. Ugh. Sorry. We shouldn’t enshrine evidence-less speculation because it comes from scientists any more than if it comes from popes or imams.
Anthropic Principle: The reason that the Earth (all 0.5% of it) seems so hospitable to us is that we evolved to suit its conditions.
Richard Feynman joke regrding a posteriori conclusions:
“You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight.
I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine it? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what is the chance that I would see that particular one tonight?”
It’s easy to make any ordinary situation seem extraordinary if you treat it as fateful.
Thinking about it a bit more – the multiverse theories are saying that there may be gigantic foamy masses of universes and it may be impossible for us to ever tell if they are there, or not, etc. That’s just about the same level of bullshit as hypothesizing a triune god that operates undetectably from a private dimension
It’s not just mere speculation, it has mathematical rigor behind it. If you can come up with a way to do calculus on the FSM then you can argue about it’s implications for the world. Scientists are going to examine the logical implications of any theory, and if it turns up counterintuitive results, that’s not going to stop them. Also looking at the mathematical results is how you start looking for ways to find physical confirmation.
The weak anthropic principle is all we can talk about, once that is dismissed then the need for the strong anthropic principle diminishes. i.e. once it’s established that the universe isn’t just made for us, it’s not going to be made any more for us if we move the maker any further back in the process.
I’m looking over this Vox Day material. His new book is The Irrational Atheist – Dissecting the unholy trinity of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens
The guy really knows how to turn a phrase. I guess when you graduate from Bucknell and is a member of Mensa you have got to have some smarts.
Some of his remarks:
“Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God both at the age of nine”.
“The unholy trinity is fond of saying that science and religion are incompatible…They were compatible for centuries…the enemies of religion prefer to forget that, in 1794 revolutionary atheists inspired by the Enlightenment beheaded Antoine LLavoisier, the father of modern chemistry.
The guy has a way of gut-punching.
Seti at home is beginning to look at a much broader bandwidth than previously, so maybe it will finally detect the weak signal letting us know we are not alone in the universe.
That’s the best he’s got? No wonder you enjoy his work.
Ah, Silver Fox confirming he is a fool by admiring Vox Day, the idiot.
Dawkins and Hitchens too that long to realise that God isn’t real? Maybe they are irrational. Even Ricky Gervais got there by age 8…
Perhaps the reason they “forget” this is the simple fact that it was deists, not atheists, that beheaded Lavoisier. BTW, he was beheaded because he was a top level tax collector – it doesn’t really matter who beheaded him, because it had nothing to do with his standing in science.
I’d say Vox Day is better known for his gut-clenching.
If by gut punching you mean making an ass out of himself, yes he does.
I find it amusing when someone assumes that the other person doesn’t understand something because the other person doesn’t agree with them.
For those interested in reading an interesting book on the subject of multiuniverses and the anthropic principle I recommend Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design.
Sad to say, it’s the only book I’ve read on the subject, so there may be better out there.
Vox Day on morality:
http://brentrasmussen.com/log/node/1178
Beautiful stuff really.
Vox Day, Sociopath for Jesus™
Gut-punching? If strawmen can be said to have guts, then I suppose he is. Bowel-clenching is probably a better way to describe the reaction to his nonsense.
Oh look! Intelligent Designer is here, like Silver Fox wasn’t sufficient already. They come in pairs, like Batman movie villains. Time to grab a snack. It’s going to be a long, entertaining night on Pharyngula.
“The unholy trinity is fond of saying that science and religion are incompatible…They were compatible for centuries..”
When atheists say that “science and religion are incompatible,” they don’t mean that scientists can’t be religious.
Instead, they mean that, when religious claims are taken as hypotheses, filtered through the scientific method, and measured against our current understanding of reality, they fail to stand up well.
If you go to http://www.reddit.com/domain/uncommondescent.com you can see that Denyse O’Leary (and michael behe, and william dembski, and casey luskin, and davescot) used to have multiple accounts here at Reddit spamming their shit. She’s posted as leary, oleary, and doleary. probably dleary too.
SF:
Bwhahahaha! Yeah, gut-punching himself…
Boy that’s a good one! Heh.
I find it annoying when people who don’t understand something assume they’re competent to disagree with it.
If I showed up at your company blathering about your poor programming based on what I learned about programming in Basic on an Apple IIe in the mid-80s, do you think you’d be able to detect whether or not I was talking out of my ass?
If not: I cite my credentials as the owner of a PS2 and as someone who once rented Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within when I say you’re a lousy fucking programmer Randy, and you should give up and start driving a taxi instead. Please don’t assume I don’t know what I’m talking about just because I happen to be disagreeing with you.
Not necessarily. You just need an IQ in the top 2% of the population and pass their little test to get into Mensa. I know where my IQ stands; how about you, Silver Fox?
Please stop. You’re making me feel sorry for you.
Posted by: Silver Fox | January 7, 2009
I’m looking over this Vox Day material…
The guy really knows how to turn a phrase. I guess when you graduate from Bucknell and is a member of Mensa you have got to have some smarts.
Why don’t you find other graduates of Bucknell who are members of Mensa and look over their stuff. I am sure that VD is not the only person who is both.
Funny thing, I have admired plenty of writers who have not graduated from Bucknell and were not members of Mensa. (Or at least bragged like it was a great accomplishment.)
Some of his remarks:
“Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God both at the age of nine”.
Deciding that you are an atheist is not necessarily a rational process. I left my faith behind when I realized I felt nothing after I was saved. So they both became atheists at age nine. As adults when they could rethink it, they did not reject it.
“The unholy trinity is fond of saying that science and religion are incompatible…They were compatible for centuries…the enemies of religion prefer to forget that, in 1794 revolutionary atheists inspired by the Enlightenment beheaded Antoine LLavoisier, the father of modern chemistry.
Quite a few high ranking members of the French government were executed during the French Revolution. But I had no idea that hordes of french atheist were leading the Terrors. Or VD had his facts all wrong.
The guy has a way of gut-punching.
VD aims lower then that.
@Silver Fox
Gut-punching, or hitting below the belt?
You might even find a few who are not only both, but didn’t have to rely on Daddy’s tax-dodged money to do it.
But then again, you theists don’t care about quibbling little details like a lack of ethics and morals.
This guy Vox is got statistics coming out the gazoo
A couple of chapters in the book are about wars. The “high-church” atheists assert that religion causes war but Day proves otherwise. He shows that over the past 232 years, 671,070 American soldiers have died in 17 wars of which only one-half of one percent can reasonably be attributed to religion. This amounts to 14 soldiers per year. Turning next to the Encyclopedia of Wars compiled by C. Phillips and A. Axelrod, Vox examines 1763 wars fought from 2325 B.C. to modern times. Of these wars, only 123 can be reasonably be attributed to religion – 6.9% of those recorded. Since half of these wars were waged by Muslims, this means that, apart from Islam, the world’s religions are responsible for only 3.3% of all wars. The evidence is conclusive. “Religion is not a primary cause of war”, Vox concluded.
Now, that’s a lot of homework.
It’s a lot of GIGO.
Ah, Denyse O’Leary, Canada’s answer to the question “What the fuck?“
All that homework, and yet he can’t pull out one statistic showing any gods exist.
This is what you don’t understand, Silver Fox (among many things): we’re not like you. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris aren’t the Holy Trinity of atheism. There is no Holy Trinity. There are no priests, no priestess. We don’t sit around waiting for the next sermon. We don’t follow holy men, and we aren’t waiting for them to reveal some sort of truth. What we’ve been waiting for is you theists to demonstrate some, any, the teeniest iota of evidence for God. And you haven’t done so.
You could demonstrate to me that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris have lied every time they’ve opened their mouths. You could demonstrate they eat babies on Sundays and stab kittens on Mondays. You could demonstrate that they’re aliens hell-bent on enslaving Earth. It wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t change the fact that you godbotherers have utterly failed to produce a shred of evidence besides inference that your god(s) exist, and in fact have produced a lot of evidence that the entities you all claim to chat with on a daily basis sure as hell aren’t the same entities (a problem for monotheists) and don’t seem to be distinguishable from non-entites (a problem for all theists).
So stop wasting our fucking time wanking off to Vox Day and produce some evidence. Just one thing that can be definitively attributed to your god–not any god, not nature, not chance, not bad statistics, and not wishful thinking.
Otherwise, fuck off. You’ve gone from being a boring troll to being a boring troll with his lips planted tightly around the base of Vox’s cock (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; he’s kind of a twat to women and so probably enjoys any attention he can get). It’s pretty clear if you weren’t already a Christian you’d be forking your dough over to the first cult leader asking you to cut a check. We’re not interested in your man crushes.
Besides, Silver Fox, if the god of the Christians really exists and the others don’t, then wouldn’t Christianity be the only religion that demonstrably improves people’s behaviour?
You Christians sure like to pretend all religions are somehow equal when arguing with atheists, but truthfully all religions other than yours are false. Why is Vox treating all religions as a cohort when he knows that only one is true and the rest are figments of human imagination? He knows non-Christians are deluded and no better than selfish atheists. If his theology were true, you’d see wars being fought for any number of reasons including religion (even Moses was prone to destructive outbursts in the mere presence of other religions) save for the glaring omission of Christianity.
Put another way, if religion improves people’s behaviour, then why are the false and non-existent gods just as effective as Jehovah?
I wonder if Vox Day can see auras.
I am an atheist who grew up in a Southern Baptist congregation, and i’m reminded of a sermon our pastor, Reverend Wilson delivered some twenty years ago. He cited scripture that proscribed witchcraft, devination, fortune telling, astrology, clairovoyance, etc. He noted that many modern folks hold superstitions such as “lucky numbers”, not opening umbrellas inside, black cats, walking under ladders, salt over the shoulder, etc. He preached about the fact that God’s Holy word, the Bible, told us to eschew superstition. He said that this was because a.)God commanded it. b.)All of this superstition was either unreal nonsense, or worse, a link to the “supernatural” realm of Satan and his minions. c.)Ultimately, all we need to rely on is God and his word. This is why we Christians are to eschew superstition! It wasn’t until many years later when i recollected this episode from my youth, that i realized that all literal belief in religion/deities, let alone a literalist, fundamentalist interpretation of all of the incredulous tales from the Bible, and all of the accompanying dogma is the height of superstition.
And in discussion of life on other planets:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16366-alien-asteroid-dust-hints-at-earthlike-planets.html
The candidacy of life as we know it living elsewhere in the universe is getting more plausible by the day.
Incidentally, the anthropic principle (since I’ve seen this come up here again), which is widely misunderstood, is simply a rule of thumb for reasoning; it states that our reasoning about our place in the universe has to take into account the biasing factor of our being here.
It’s called a selection effect, something like asking the question “what’s the smallest fish in the pond” and scooping up everything in the pond with a net to find out, only to see that there are no fish smaller than n-inches. In reality, this does not mean there are no such smaller fish, it just means your net might not be fine-meshed enough to catch them, and the conclusion to your argument should take into account that bias.
The anthropic principle just means that any conclusions we reach or arguments we make about our place in the universe have to take into account the bias that any part of the universe we’re in will look like it was made for us no matter what the overall reality is. Many of you may recognise this as Douglas Adams’ famous “sentient rainwater puddle” marvelling at how the hole in the street is perfectly shaped to hold it.
For anyone interested in a fascinating look at the (yes I’m about to plug a book) anthropic principle, I’d suggest Nick Bostrom’s “Anthropic Bias: Observation Selections Effects in Science and Philosophy“.
I may be missing the point here but I don’t think Vox is trying to prove or disprove God. Whether or not there is a God, society is better off with theists than with atheists. I think that is the basic issue he is dealing with. Its a sociological not a theological matter.
Vox describes “high Church” atheists as university men who hate religion and demand that others join their “anti-theist jihads”. The “low-church” atheists are those who simple describe themselves as “no religion”. “High-church atheists, he says, boast that atheists are more moral than theists. He notes that it is true that only two-tenths of one percent of “high-church” atheists comprised the imprisoned population of England and Wales in the year 2000, the “low-church” type made up 31 percent. Measured against their proportion to the overall population, that meant that atheists were four times more likely to go to jail fro crimes than were Christians. He has supporting references in end-notes on almost every page.
So what he seems to be dealing with here is how theistic belief adds to the moral fabric of a society.
Which is, of course, utterly incorrect. Hitchens and Dawkins were born atheists, just like every other human being, since all religions are taught – as illustrated by the vast number of different religions and sects in the world.
What VD should have written was that, at age nine, they rejected the religion they were indoctrinated into and reverted to the natural state of atheism.
So much for ‘gut-punches’; he can’t even get the basics correct.
Silver Fox, no matter how much you describe what Vox Day says, it doesn’t make your position any more credible.
Silver Fox,
A question: why do you think your wank-fantasy, VD, didn’t choose to use the statistics from his own country (the USA) to support his theory?
Seems that VD is going through a lot of work trying to force atheism into religious drag. High church atheism, low church atheism, and anti-theist jihad. Everyone is an oxymoron.
And, oh, for some one who is trying to argue that any believe is better than no believe, he is showing his anti islamic bias. In Islam, jihad is a struggle to improve oneself under the love of allah. It can be peaceful or it can be violent. Depends on which interpretation one follows. (Gee, that one sounds familiar.) But VD means the violent kind of jihad. Nice guy.
correct me if I’m wrong here but it seems to me that the term “survival of the fittest” really implies the one that more successfully reproduces therefor perpetuating what ever adaptations that they posses is the fittest. the strength, speed, eyesight or lack of, all just serving in the end the need to reproduce. That would explain why we see life spreading out in all directions instead of a “ladder”. Like music it is not only a progression of low to high or simple to complex but is full of numberless variations and combinations with new ones always emerging.
I’ve often wondered if Denyse O’Leary is actually Denis Leary under heavy disguise and pulling off a wonderful piece of satire. It’s the only way to explain the garbage she comes out with…
It can’t be, it looks nothing like a plagiarised Bill Hicks rant.
So what he seems to be dealing with here is how theistic belief adds to the moral fabric of a society. – Silver Fox
Which is why France, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands and Japan are so much more violent than the USA. Yep, I’m convinced.
Of these wars, only 123 can be reasonably be attributed to religion – 6.9% of those recorded. – Silver Fox
As determined, of course, by Mr. Venereal Disease himself.
I wonder if Vox Day can see auras. – Kel
No, his head’s too far up his arse.
On the war thing: if the US is, what, 80% Christian, wouldn’t that be fair to say that more than 80% of all people killed by American soldiers are therefore killed by Christians? How many did Christians kill in WW2? What about Vietnam, and the two Gulf Wars? Christians have done a heck of a lot of killing.
Why, in the US civil war alone Christians killed 620,000 Americans!
It’s amazing what you can make numbers say.
Re. the Vox Day debacle: can we invoke the rule which says that, if the best evidence you have for your intelligence is membership in Mensa, then you’re probably not actually that bright? Genuinely intelligent people usually have actual achievements to point to.
@ #57:
@ #145:
You have to bear in mind that a large number of them are so unintelligent they’ve gone through all their life without understanding anything much. It has always seemed to them that other people used magic words which miraculously convinced others and even performed magic rituals with strange symbols to get answers out of nowhere (ie maths). They tend to have similar difficulty with morality. They really can’t tell the difference between a coherent argument and an incoherent one, between good and bad, right and wrong.
That’s why you get so many of them throwing big words together, especially scientific ones, almost at random and then simplistically expecting everyone to be impressed. The problem is endemic in creationism and is the same sort of behaviour which Sokal was mocking among “advanced” philosophers. They’re essentially all cargo cultists. They never did “get it” at school and they’ve carried on not getting it in their adult life.
Yet they still have the vote – each one being equal (in a “democracy”) to that of someone who does understand and has well-informed opinions. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Bush wasn’t an anomaly.
the enemies of religion prefer to forget that, in 1794 revolutionary atheists inspired by the Enlightenment beheaded Antoine LLavoisier, the father of modern chemistry. Janine, Bitter Friend, quoting Silver Fox quoting Venereal Disease
Robespierre and a lot of the other Jacobin leaders were deists, devotees of the “Cult of the Supreme Being” which Robespierre invented. If VD were right (when wearing his “any religious belief is better than none” hat), they should have been pussycats. AFAIK none of those in power at any stage of the revolution were atheists. Jacques Hebért and some of the other enragés were, although they instituted a “Cult of Reason” which looked rather like a religion (probably the only time and place where the the tedious “atheism is a religion” claim had any validity). These atheists were suppressed by the Jacobin deists – Hebért was himself guillotined by them in the same year as Lavoisier. This being the quality of his “homework”, SF (i.e. either ignorance or lies), I wouldn’t put any trust in anything VD says.
“Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God both at the age of nine”.- Silver Fox, quoting Venereal Disease
And most Christians become such after long and exhaustive rational enquiries as adults, don’t they? Odd coincidence that so many of them live in predominantly Christian societies and have Christian parents who take or send them to Christian churches, isn’t it?
Silver Fox, you think VD is any good is irrelevant. He has been proven time and time again to be a liar and bullshitter, and has absolutely no credibility amongst anybody other than non-thinkers like yourself. That you believe him diminishes your already low credibility.
Time for you either to put up evidence for your imaginary god, or acknowledge he doesn’t exist. A third option for credibility is to simply fade away. Otherwise, you become the annoying fly who must be swatted, which you will be. You are simply too credulous to have anything interesting to say.
I graduated from Bucknell. I have never bothered trying to become a member of Mensa, viewing it as a rather pompous organization, but my IQ has tested on the higher end. All that being said, take it from me: while Bucknell is a good school, I knew plenty of people who graduated from it who were… less than impressive.
Vox Day tops the “less than impressive” list. In fact, it sort of makes me shudder that we share an alma mater.
Mr Twaddle wrote:
No, that is not the anthropic principle. That is evolution.
JM Inc. wrote:
Somehow that seems backwards from what I understood the anthropic principle to be. The principle was proposed as kind of a “non-answer” to the question of why certain physical constants are the values they are. The issue is that there is no theory to account for their specific value. That is, you could speculate that the charge on the electron is larger or smaller than it is and then work out its effect. You would not generate any contradictions but the universe would be radically different than it is now and completely incompatible with life. It would not just be a different shaped hole for the intelligent puddle; it would be a hot frying pan instead of a hole (for example). Looking at all these “arbitrary” constants, it appears that if any of them were even slightly different than what they are, the universe would be incompatible with life as we know it (and very incompatible). So the original anthropic principle was simply to say “well, they are what they are because if they were different we wouldn’t be here to ask about it”. I think this is now called the “weak anthropic principle” because it does not imply any purpose to the values. The strong principle says the values are such so as to produce life; implying purpose. Neither really answers the question of why those values are what they are: the first just sweeps it under the rug, the second just pushes the question to the realm of deism almost. Neither do any of the current TOE’s (theory of everything), they just seem to say “let there be an infinite number of universes with all possible values of fundamental constants, and we just happen to be in this one”. That doesn’t really seem to be a good answer either. (really just a restatement of the weak anthropic principle)
Brownian @ #195
Sounds like your exasperation meter pegged today.
I am also guessing that Venereal Disease thinks that Stalin’s murderous rampages had something to do with atheism.
Lee Picton, you would be correct about that.
Silver Fox, as far as Vox Day’s claim goes, no, I don’t think you’re missing that point, and I appreciated your honesty in noting that this argument (and its counter-claims) are sociological, rather than theological.
However, I don’t think the two should be so easily divorced. I won’t presume to speak for any other atheists, but I’m one because I’m interested in the truth (momentarily leaving aside the epistemological questions that arise from such a claim.) Whether or not that truth is difficult to swallow, or what the immediate sociological repercussions of the acceptance of that truth is irrelevant to me. Further, in the long term, a truth-seeking society is more likely to survive than one that prefers myths, be they pleasant or not. (For an examination of the ill-concieved behaviours resulting from a preference to myths rather than reality, consider the actions of the American executive branch of government for the last eight years.)
To analogise, imagine a child brought up to believe in Santa. The idea that there is a benevolent and immortal entity that universally rewards children for positive behaviour rather than conditions of birth is a pleasant and relatively just one, at least from a Rawlsian perspective. Further, such a belief might even entail positive behaviour, at least more so than the absence of such a belief. But if that belief about the nature of the universe is wrong, its persistence in the mind of that child into adulthood is going to cause more problems than it solves because it necessarily impairs that individual’s ability to make decisions that are appropriate for a real, non-Santa-containing universe. Most of us know and accept that part of being a responsible adult involves making decisions that are difficult, primarily because these decisions and their consequences reflect the reality of world in which we live, rather than our belief about it. Responsible adults are realists, at least about most things.
Thus, even if VD’s assertion about the relative behaviours of theists and atheists is true (which I don’t accept based on his notoriously poor reasoning any more than I accept the claim by some atheists that all theists are amoral slaves to the whims of their respective deities), it doesn’t mean that any belief in a deity is better than non-belief, especially in the long run. (And further, the behaviour of most cult leaders and the reprecussions for their followers and their followers’ loved ones would bear this out.)
Consider this: for the first time in history, we’ve hammered out a method of understanding the nature of the universe that’s relatively divorced from the biases inherent in human perception and especially divorced from wishful thinking–at least more so than any previous method. We’ve also spent millennia hammering out a method for determining better (or worse) ways to live, namely ethics. The transition from a deity-decreed moral system to one determined by humans through an understanding of reality may be painful, but so is growing up. (And again the theology creeps up; all moralities produced by false religions are necessarily anthropogenic but decreed by oligarchic fiat rather than argumentation–how can those be better?)
In short, No Virginia, there isn’t a Santa Claus. And it’s time you realised you shouldn’t be hitting your little brother; not because Santa won’t bring you a shiny new bicycle if you do, but because [insert rational arguments here].
you could speculate that the charge on the electron is larger or smaller than it is and then work out its effect. You would not generate any contradictions but the universe would be radically different than it is now and completely incompatible with life. – Steve M
As I noted above, the claim that such a universe would be incompatible with life has not been proved. The form of the argument tends to be “If constant x were lower, there would be no atoms/molecules/planets/stars”; but the ability of physicists to calculate all the implications of such a change is very doubtful: other forms of complex structure and process, not possible in our universe, might then become possible. See the link given by ProfMTH@140.
And the Anthropic Principle is nowhere near as difficult to explain as the Tulseopic Principle — if the universe had been different, I wouldn’t be here. My existence is of course even less probable that some generic notion of “life”, since not only is it the physical constants but all the minute details of human history that have produced me. So, by the logic that others have provided, the obvious purpose of the universe, the reason its very fabric and history are as they are, is to generate…me.
Don’t worry, I won’t let it go to my head.
What’s hard to understand about the Tulseopic Principle, Tulse? Maybe it’s easy for me since I’ve always believed it, but I like to think it’s pretty evident to all but the most strident skeptic that the entire universe was designed to produce you.
Of course, as a young child I had difficulty swallowing the fact that I’m just a cog in some other entity’s master plan, but eh, at least you’re an entity I have evidence for.
Naah, SteveM I think you’re still missing the point. The anthropic principle is a rule of reasoning; it’s not meant to predict or explain anything, it’s merely meant to remind us that by definition, our existence entails that no matter what the ultimate reality is, it’s going to look, locally as though it’s made for us, because by definition, wherever we are is going to be a place where we happen to turn up, and if it wasn’t a place very likely to turn us up, we wouldn’t be here to consider it. That’s the selection effect, even if there were a hundred types intelligent of life, all with radically different physical requirements, no matter how unlikely any of them are, or how likely, they’re all going to think the universe, or at least, the part they live in locally, was obviously special to them. No form of intelligent life finds itself somewhere where it can’t have been; so the evidence doesn’t distinguish between the hypotheses.
Brownian: What evidence? All you have is words on a screen connected to a name, joined with vague consistancy. Meanwhile for God, you have puppies and sunsets and flowers! God provides all those things, even in that Arctic outpost that you call home, which conveniently none of the internet ghosts will ever come to in order to “prove” “their” “existence”.