This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Nigel:
You’re such an optimist.
abb3w’s summary of evolution:
joe4060:
Like others have said, that’s for you to answer. We know evolution happens, because we have evidence. We don’t know there’s a god, because there is no evidence for one (or more than one). If your god exists, it would have to be consistent with what we know; evolution (and geology, cosmology, history, etc.) will not just go away because you don’t like or understand it. But if there were a god, it would presumably be smarter than you are and could do things that way if it wanted to, whether or not there was a “need” for it.
Of course, if you really want to claim it must be the case that a god could not have created an old, lifeless universe with evolving organisms, you’re welcome to it. I think that would be awfully stupid, but you could do that.
Here are a few options to consider:
-Is it logically impossible for a god to create a universe without life, in which some part of a single planet (at least) eventually undergoes abiogenesis at least once, with life evolving from then on?
-Is that one of those powers this particular god isn’t supposed to have, because it isn’t supposed to be omnipotent?
-Is there some other god which prevented yours from working that way because it was more powerful? (I mean, we’re already conjuring up entities for no reason and based on no evidence, so why not add another?)
-Is it because evolution isn’t mentioned in the Bible, along with practically everything else worth knowing about? (Personally, I’d like to know why there’s no music theory in Bible.)
Owlmirror:
He didn’t, because the Earth is flat and at the center of the universe, obviously. We know that because it’s literally — or metaphorically, or literally and metaphorically — in the Bible somewhere. Thus, science is wrong. So is atheism, of course, but as we all know (because it’s in the Bible…), those are the same thing.
CR:
There’s the occasional person at rapture ready who opines over the good ol’ USA not being specifically mentioned in the bible and wonders why god left it out.
And the fact that according Rapture ready idjits only thing people who speak English can go to heaven. Of course, this may or may not include those who don’t speak proper ‘Mercun.
Question: So I don’t speakey Engrish as my first language, can I go to hevenz?
Answer: lol no dude, u gonna burn
So, English is the official language of heaven? I wonder how that conclusion was reached.
Judging from his own instructions in some of the earlier books, I’d guess Jehovah isn’t really the artsy type. Most of his favorite things seemed to involve dead animals of one sort or another. I could imagine him ditching his honorary worship sessions by modern christians in order to attend action movie screenings and Slayer concerts.
I would imagine KJV Only idiots, the lot who insist that the King James Version is the only one that’s valid ’cause it’s written in English. Raises a few questions too, especially if they’re talking about the 17th century version, because of erratic spelling.
I mean, fuck, it probably still had remnants of Middle English in it.
This is also a good moment to point out that my syntax sucks when it’s 4:07 am. Mock me!
A vision of heaven.
To the denizens of the Thunderdome,
I’m cross-posting this from the thread about Bill Reilly’s latest rant. I think that by the time I posted this, the conversation was winding down.
I really think that some of the Horde might have a bit of fun with this:
Hey Guys,
Is anybody up for some extra fun and pharyngulating?
I visit the website of the San Antonio Express News to keep up with what’s going on down there.
In the commentary of the Letters to the Editors, there are a group of real wingnuts. I enjoy reading the silliness that they write. There are some real dingbats there calling themselves Bookmark,Ricco and Texasconservative, among others.
There are also a couple of brave liberals called DanielMiller and AnnPW who are fighting the good fight.
There is a discussion there today about this same show, but with a very different spin.
I would love to see some of the horde descend upon them and teach them a lesson.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/article/Your-Turn-Nov-29-2012-4074807.php
Huh.
So heaven is a physical place where speaking occurs. I wonder, if someone speaks a foreign language on Earth will they still be able to in Heaven?
nigelthebold
“the evidence for evolution is overwhelming”
All this so-called evidence needs to get around two impossible problems.
1. There is the question of the origin of information of the vast quantities required for life at the most basic level.
All systems that enable life had to appear together at the same time for life to be possible.
For this reason alone, the notion that God employed evolution as a means of creating is completely nonsensical.
2. Evolutionary theory is self-refuting in its claim that natural selection is a means by which evolution works.
Natural selection by definition gets rid of, or selects against any useless physical parts, which means that it would also select against a useless partially evolved organ, limb etc. that requires great ages to become functional and of any benefit. Mutations would never survive natural selection long enough to fully develop. Natural selection actually PREVENTS evolution.
Both of these problems render evolution impossible.
Any evidence claimed for evolution is simply evidence that has been interpreted to fit the theory. And any evidence that is lacking is just made up e.g. transitional fossils, which simply do not exist.
To believe in evolution requires faith and since this faith is not based on evidence, it is a blind faith.
Evolution is a fantasy.
I love hummus and it fucking sucks that we ran out of olives.
(That’s all I have for you folks right now.)
No, it selects against deleterious structures, neutral structures hang around just fine.
_
Which is beggared by this:
The information tied up in life is the dregs of the tiny fraction of information that has been cast out of our solar system over it’s vast lifespan. We are, in effect, a tiny record of some of the things that happened over the past four billion years of energy flowing from the sun through our planet into the cosmos beyond.
Wow. Joe has apparently falsified evolution all by himself. He must have spent years studying evolution, putting in significant amounts of work, and succeeded in doing something no one else has. Once he submits his findings for peer review, entire scientific fields will have to be redone. Joe, what college did you go to? That school will go down in history for having you as a student. You will have awards and streets named after you. I sit in awe of your knowledge.
To think, all the knowledge acquired using evolution…just thrown out. Does someone have a handy list of all the sciences that will be affected by evolution being falsified?
@Tony
I am curious as to how our crop management will fare now that we’ve thrown out Evolution.
*6 months later*
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH SO MANY BOLL WEEVILS!!!! WHERE ARE THEY ALL COMMING FROM!? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Oh I can’t wait for ya’ll to rip that load of BS apart. I don’t know much, but I know transitional fossils HAVE been found*, and that natural selection isn’t the only mechanism by which evolution occurs (mutation & genetic drift).
* http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils#_
As for Joe’s first point, last time I checked, evolution has nothing to do with the origins of life. Let me check…
Yup. Evolution deals with the diversity of life, not the origin of life.
Like Love.
Yet another topic evolution says nothing about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA6QW4pXb0s
How do you know this? How vast are these quantities of information? If you’re going to invent quantities out of thin air (or even worse, out of non-physical air), then please be specific. What are the units? Show your work.
You’ll need to explain how and in what sense physical phenomena like living organisms require what you think is a non-physical phenomenon like information. If this is how you deal with the interaction problem (of dualism), you’re not dealing with it. Also, don’t forget that you still haven’t explained why information is non-physical.
By the way, earlier you said this:
“Metaphysical” doesn’t mean non-physical (and doesn’t need to be hyphenated). That is a bogus definition, and you should generally avoid philosophical terms you don’t understand, much like you shouldn’t even pretend to criticize science you don’t understand.
That is false. You get that life is extremely diverse, right? (You know, because it evolves.) I’d like to be charitable and assume you don’t mean all systems in any form of life. So which fucking systems “enable life” generally? If there are any — remember that your first step is specifying what the fuck those are, so that we could even follow this “argument” — then how the fuck do you know that, especially considering that you don’t believe abiogenesis happened anyway?
Except the kind of abiogenesis which can only be done by an undetectable sky wizard who likes writing absurd myths, of course. That’s the totally reasonable kind of abiogenesis.
Your fucking reason is what’s nonsensical.
Sure, why the fuck not. Who the fuck says our organs and limbs must have evolved from a “useless partially evolved organ, limb etc.”? Creationists who don’t understand evolution, that’s who.
Mutations don’t fucking develop. They’re just fucking mutations.
This is actually complete fucking nonsense.
Maybe your ignorant Creationist™ brand evolution, which has nothing to do with actual evolution as understood by actual biologists.
More assertions, which are false. We could do this all day, or as long as creationists continue to lie.
If that were true and you agreed faith is a bad thing, you should stop believing god. Dipshit.
You are an ignorant, delusional liar.
No, it doesn’t. See #2 above.
You have to explain which of those is wrong, and more importantly, what makes it wrong. You don’t get to claim that it’s impossible just because you say so.
You don’t know what information is, and you don’t know what life is, so your question doesn’t make sense.
If you’re trying to claim that abiogenesis is a problem, well, you don’t get to claim that abiogenesis is a problem. See #2 above. Evolution is a fact regardless of how abiogenesis happened.
No, they didn’t. And we know this because there are things now that are on the borders of life: viruses.
Are viruses alive, or are they not? If they are not, then what are they, given that they can replicate themselves? And what makes you think that your answers are correct when it’s obvious that you have no idea what what life is?
No, it isn’t. See #2 above. Evolution happens, and it’s a fact that it has happened and continues to happen. If God exists, God used evolution and uses evolution.
Evolutionary theory cannot possibly be self-refuting. You don’t know what evolutionary theory is, and you don’t know what natural selection is.
No, it doesn’t. Your “definition” is ludicrously wrong and stupid; you obviously have no idea what natural selection is. It isn’t a magical thing that goes around and checks “parts” to get rid of them, like some kind of damn magical factory inspector fairy.
Why are you so damn ignorant of the basics of evolution? Read #2. Learn, or shut up.
Obviously, “partially evolved” organs are not always “useless”. Why are you so damn ignorant of biology? This is basic stuff.
Living organisms are very plastic; they can adapt to use something that only exists in partial form, and gain benefit from it.
They aren’t problems, and evolution is both a fact and a theory.
But creationist stupidity and ignorance are problems that render them understanding of evolution impossible, until they are remedied.
You can remedy ignorance by learning. But you may be too stupid to know how to learn. Or you may love stupidity so much that you prefer it to learning.
Which is it?
Any evidence for evolution is evidence for evolution.
Of course transitional fossils exist, and are indeed evidence for evolution; creationist idiots just refuse to understand what they are.
To believe in evolution is to accept the facts of evolution and understand the theory of evolution.
To call it “faith not based on evidence” is just creationist idiocy; idiocy from religious fanatics who don’t even know their own religious text, let alone anything at all about biology.
Oh silly me, I thought thoughts actually were physical, you know that’s why alcohol affects it! But then I remembered that booze is called spirits so it all made sense!
Speaking of understanding things, I recently finished reading The Disappearing Spoon* by Sam Kean. It was very enjoyable and I learned a lot.
*Full title: The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and The History of the World from The Periodic Table of the Elements.
Joe:
What other fields of science do you challenge while knowing nothing about them?
If evolution says nothing about love, then thermodynamics says nothing about chemistry.
No solid refutations yet?
Um yeah thoughts are physical. That’s why they stop when you get whacked in the head by a giant steel girder
joe4060, why do you hate truth and love lies so much?
Is it because you’re a fundamentally evil person, or a fundamentally stupid person?
Do you enjoy being stupid and/or evil, or are you simply incapable of not being stupid and/or evil?
All of evolutionary biology stands as a solid refutation of creationist idiocy.
The fact that you have no solid refutation to evolutionary biology simply follows from the fact that all you have is creationist idiocy.
Joe,
Have you wondered yet why your arguments are not persuasive to us?
Um, I’m fairly certain I refuted you quite easily.
Joe,
No indications that you understand why your qualms don’t hamstring evolution? I refuted both of your points handily, as did others via different avenues.
There is no fucking reason to refute the idea that gravity is dead.
Unless you want to prove that gravity is a brain eating zombie.
So, smash your brain on the rocks!
Oh! Too late! Zombie gravity already got Joe.
@ Hurin
You are wrong here. Thermodynamics DOES have chemical implications. Love does NOT have general biological implications.
You know that most species procreate without any concept of love, do you? There are even species which have a mother that defends her eggs with her life, only to eat her own young if they don’t run up the trees fast enough after hatching. Love? I don’t think so. Those moms fail at an even lower level. Works out tho. Else those species would not exist.
Fuck love (in biology). Love is an investment and a commitment. And a joy (if you belong to my species). It has no purpose. But I like it.
There are species that make sex with their own offspring. Probably not appropriate for my species and definitely not for me.
Love is not conserved, neither is Sex. Love is a behavioral concept. It can be selected for or against. Sex can be advantageous or disadvantageous, depends on who you are. Being carnivorous has also nothing to do with evolutionary fitness, it is just what you do. You can get away without sex as a species. No problem whatsoever.
Since that is not the definition of natural selection at all, your objection is meaningless.
You are not entitled to make up false definitions of evolution, then refute your own false definitions, and then claim that that “refutes” real evolution theory.
Please go educate yourself about what evolution theory ACTUALLY says before coming back.
Yes, love does have general biological implications. In fact you admit this yourself:
Behavioral concepts have general biological implications. Behavioral concepts ARE general biological implications.
Anything associated with a living organism that can be selected for or against has general biological implications, and is relevant to evolutionary theory.
Every single reply to you has been a solid refutation, joe.
You don’t realize this because you don’t understand what evolution is.
Since you don’t understand what evolution is and what the theory ACTUALLY says, you have no credibility arguing against it.
You’re like George Lucas trying to argue that because Palpatine was a superior politician than Jar Jar Binks, it means that Mitt Romney is a better politician than Barack Obama. Your arguments may seem iron-clad to you, but that’s only because you made up the terms of comparison as entirely imaginary constructs in your own head, wholly divorced from reality.
Only a creationist could read a handful of refutations and then say with full confidence and more than a little adolescent smugness:
Here’s the thing, genius: the modern theory of evolution isn’t unchangeable dogma – it’s a constant work in progress, which is one of its key strengths (shared by many key scientific theories including gravitational theory and germ theory – neither of which seems to attract the trolls as much as evolutionary theory). Because of that, evolution is being added to and revised (and re-re-re-confirmed) every single day by countless scientists in countless universities across the globe, working at it from every conceivable angle. It is also a great deal more than just fossils, mutations and natural selection (which, if you’d ever paid attention, you would know). The theory of evolution is a 150+ year-old work in progress, backed up by innumerable lines of evidence from dozens of fields of study including but not limited to biology, geology, palaeontology and chemistry. It’s not simply a description of a biological fact, either; the principles that underlie evolution and scientific understanding of its processes contribute every day to understanding and progress in everything from medicine and genetics (it is in fact vital to fields like microbiology and virology) to computing to agriculture to the oil business to nanotech.
—
TL;DR?
Here’s the gist: given that evolution is as robust and well-supported (and frankly, bloody useful and in some cases indispensable) a scientific theory as you’ll ever find, if you want to “debunk” it you and your cadre of preachers and apologists (and other assorted proudly ignorant dupes and ideologues) are going to have to do a metric shitload better than rolling up to some scientist’s blog, regurgitating the same stock-standard copy-paste talking points we’ve been wiping our arses with for a century and smugly proclaiming you’ve overturned the whole fucking thing because INFORMATION! or because of whatever other flavour-of-the-month-catchphrase is making the rounds at your local 700 Club affiliate.
—
Bonus little gist: given that evolution operates according to every known law of physics and chemistry, you and little gang will frankly have to overturn ALL OF FUCKING SCIENCE, EVER in order to get your wish.
Of course it does, you twit. Chemical responses. The brain. And so on.
Tell that a Komodo dragon, you self centered human twit of a mammal.
Amphiox,
do religions have biological general implications?
Humans frequently kill their offspring. They often abuse their offspring. They often neglect their offspring. They often have sex with their offspring.
Wrong.
Radiation tolerance has general biological implications. Average heavy metal concentrations in the water have biological implications. Radon levels in the atmosphere have general biological implications.
If you fuck or not has NO biological implications. That is what you do because you belong to a species that fucks or does not fuck.
That is where you go wrong. Just because ONE organism can be associated with X does not mean ANY organism can be associated with X. Anything chemical or physical is probably affecting any biological entity, but a behavioral concept is only affecting the species exposing it or being receptive to it. Some will even exploit your behavior against you and for their own advantage.
Water temperature does not change my sex, I am not a fish. That is a special implication for some fish/amphibians/whatever or in your case, a demand for special pleading.
So, either you tell me how the fine structure constant of soft condensed matter or the Feigenbaum constant or speeding tickets or skin shedding have anything to do in general with our understanding of life or we are done here.
#43 Caine, Fleur du mal
All (=most) those horrible things you mentioned are fortunately not frequent at all. Although, they do occur. Just because even rare events happen all the time. Increase the number of observations/human individuals sufficiently and you will see them every other minute.
Homo sapiens still does not employ incest or infanticide on a regular basis in order to stay competitive. These options exists and they are utilized, but they have also been proven to decrease the fitness of our species (that might change in future days, some individual keep trying) or to be objectionable for various other reasons.
Yes they do. For humans.
Or are you going to insist that the definition of “general” must and can only apply to ALL life forms?
Because if so, then there is no point in me talking to you anymore, because you and I are working on different understandings of vocabulary.
This has jack squat nothing to do with what I wrote.
No. It also affects every species that is in competition with that primary species, or commensal with it, or shares the same environment with it, or is part of the same food web.
Which in the case of humans is pretty much every species on the planet.
And behavioral concepts exist in organisms other than humans as well.
Which is a general biological principle.
Word salad is not a valid argument in this or any other forum.
Origin of life.
Hint: google “RNA World”
And before RNA there was probably other, even simpler helical molecules used for information transfer.
Finally, several layers down, you may get to chemical systems too simple to be called “life” but relatively stable in the conditions of the early Earth.
Analogy: Likewise, there will not be a single computer suddenly passing the Turing test. Instead there will be many, many generations of proto-AIs gradually getting better and better at the Turing test.
“I would imagine KJV Only idiots, the lot who insist that the King James Version is the only one that’s valid ’cause it’s written in English. ”
Which is particularly stupid. Why would they ever believe that a translation of a book was somehow better than the original? At least Islam’s got that bit right; a Qur’an written in Arabic is the only one that counts because the original was Arabic. I believe the Jews also insist that the Torah be written in Hebrew (both these examples only apply to use in religious rituals, translations of both books do exist). That makes sense. “This copy is clearly better because it’s in my language, which is clearly the language of God, despite the fact it’s been through at least three translations to get to that language”? (Original to Greek, Greek to Latin, Latin to English; though there may very well have been more). That makes no sense whatsoever.
Still nothing?
What about an answer to my original questions?
Where does the information found in the DNA molecule come from?
What caused atoms, which have no intelligence, to assemble themselves into something complex enough to contain life?
Until a satisfactory answer is forthcoming, all you have in evolution is just another grubby baby murdering (abortion) religion, presided over by the devil.
In the meantime I will explain how you all came under the delusion that evolution is true; begining with the following verse.
The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness. 2Thessalonians 2:9-12
The preceding verse refers to the rejection of God’s offer of salvation. For example, you send your only son (john 3:16) off to war to rescue some people, who you also love, at great personal risk and cost to himself and his family, but then those same people make light of it and treat it as a joke or even disbelieve it and call you a liar.
Eventually, this kind of disrespect would make you boil with anger despite your longsuffering, kind and patient nature.
“…so I will choose their delusions, and bring their fears on them; because when I called no one answered, when I spoke they did not hear…” Isaiah 66:4
God’s wrath blinds before destroying.
“What greater and more horrible punishment and plague exist on earth than spiritual blindness or madness, namely, that a man no longer can or will listen when he is told how to be saved?”*
“…and God is punishing them in such a way that they go on in their folly and blindness… His wrath has already begun its work on them.”*
Evolution has simply hijacked what was already there, and cut off the part where God created it and tried to replace creation with a creation story of its own.
Evolution’s origin story, in its many variations, was impossible, absurd and embarassing; so it has been pushed as far away as possible by shovelling more and more zeros onto the age of the universe.
The foundation of evolution is the pagan worship of the universe, that is, the universe is “God.”
Who exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator. Romans 1:25
The good name of science is missused and abused in the defence of evolution.
*From: What Luther Says by Ewald M. Plass
@yubal
“If you fuck or not has NO biological implications.”
What, other than the fact it allows you to pass on your genes and produce offspring?
joe4060: Still nothing?
What about an answer to my original questions?
• how many Philistine foreskins did David give to Saul, 100 or 200?
• why does God have a penis?
@joe4060
“Until a satisfactory answer is forthcoming, all you have in evolution is just another grubby baby murdering (abortion) religion, presided over by the devil.”
This made me laugh :) Thank you.
“In the meantime I will explain how you all came under the delusion that evolution is true; begining with the following verse.
The coming of the lawless one is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness. 2Thessalonians 2:9-12”
This made me laugh harder, but it also raised a question; the verse is unclear. It says we (I assume in this context the “lawless ones” are atheists?) are “according to the work of Satan”, but that “God will send them strong delusion”. So which is it? Is God the one tricking us into not believing in him, or is Satan tricking us? Or are they the same being? Perhaps you could put your theological knowledge to use and explain this to me?
I’ve been a bit lax about reading all the threads the last couple of days, but it seems to me that there are a lot of comments from John Morales talking about God’s (or his human incarnation’s) penis.
[just an observation]
You. Do. Not. Know. What. Evolution fucking is.
Nothing you said needs refutation because it’s fucking mindless gibberish. You aren’t offering up criticisms of evolution, you’re offering up strawmen and your brain is such a rotting fucking cesspool you don’t have the capacity to understand that no matter how many times it has been pointed out. You are making shit up. You are fighting against imaginary shit. Your understanding of evolution is wrong BECAUSE YOU’VE NEVER LOOKED AT AN AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE ON WHAT EVOLUTION IS. You’re repeating the same, the very fucking same lies and misrepresentations that all you impotent creationist fucks present.
Try reading what an actual evolutionary biologist says about evolution instead of what creationists say evolution is, you morally and intellectually bankrupt asshole.
joe4060
Energy gradients
Catalysts
Clay substrates
Crystals
Sediments
Electrochemical affinities
Lipids
Huge amounts of time
…etc
Virtually all the component atoms of all life present on Earth today were present on Earth from the beginning. The ability of atoms to assemble complex structures is not surprising, considering how much gloop there was present for heat and material flows to act on. Scientists are busily working out the probable mechanisms for the origins of life, and creationists just spew the same pap over and over again.
Beatrice, I like making godbots uncomfortable — and let’s face it, they’re not here to actually discuss anything.
John Morales,
I just found it amusing. It appealed to my inner thirteen-year-old’s sense of humor. :)
Heh.
I know the answer to that question, BTW, and it has to do with Asherah and the fact that before monotheism was established, Yahweh was but another tribal god.
(Look at the first commandment of the decalogue for echoes of that distant past)
Where does the information found in the DNA molecule come from?
seriously?
you know what a “base” is?
actually, the “good name” of science (whatever the fuck that really means), is supported by ATTACKING hypotheses, ones regarding evolution included.
Evolution has been attacked so much one might liken it to an unpopular umpire being beaten about the head and shoulders with an aluminum bat by every professional baseball player that ever lived, and walking away not just unscathed, but with a shiny uniform.
fitness is not relevant at the species level, unless the entire species is comprised of a single, closed, population.
that’s rare enough to consider it irrelevant.
Most fun analogy I have seen all week, and it works.
the reference to lucas in this context reminded me of this interview.
??
I’m not going to even look at the context of how this came to be.
I’m just going to sit back and enjoy it as one of the great mysteries of life.
You aren’t reading the replies, then? Do a “find in page” for “virus” and then for “RNA world”. That will get you started. And then don’t say “no one knows where information in DNA comes from” again until you can adequately explain what the RNA world hypothesis is, and what specific problems you have with it.
And then you’re not allowed to say anything about evolution until you explain which of the points Owlmirror laid out for you that you have problems with.
Also, you’re not allowed to talk about natural selection until you give any indication that you know what it actually is. It would be nice if you had some inkling that there are different types of selection, including frequency-dependent, sexual, and kin, but that’s a little too advanced for you at this stage, I fear.
Of course, nobody can actually restrict you from talking about them, but until you do the above, no one will treat you like the great debater you seem to think you are, and will instead look on you with pity as someone ranting about things you can never understand.
*will not make all your base joke* *will not make all your base joke*
carlie, of course not!
(Who’s on first?)
Yubal, you can’t say love doesn’t have any biological implications and then say it can be selected for or against. If it can be selected for, it DOES have biological implications. That’s kind of how selection works, you know? Also, you may want to read up on sexual selection. Our species has evolved to put a high value on love, so those individuals who can both love and show evidence of love end up being selected for by mates, which gives them more offspring, which makes them win the selection game. And since behaviors have a biological basis, their offspring will also tend to exhibit love behaviors and therefore be more successful themselves. Or, if you don’t want to believe that behavior is genetic, fine. Individuals who learn love behaviors still get chosen as mates more often, and then the offspring are raised with a model of love that they then learn, and get chosen as mates, etc.
John,
Third base!
I think that the idea that DNA contains “information” is another creationist deepity; in the same way that they confuse the colloquial use of “theory” (meaning “guess”) with the scientific use of the word, they seem to think that the word “information” must mean something like a book or a computer program, rather than understanding what scientists actually mean by the word. Creationists also seem to believe in some sort of “law of conservation of information”, which is obviously nonsense.
Sorry if this is all a bit vague; I’m just trying to clarify this idea in my own mind…
The idea that DNA contain information is no more meaningful that saying my eyes are blue, so my eyes contains the blueness information.
Çocuk Pornosu
Wow. So an omnipotent being is actually making atheists be atheists…and then punishing them for it?
Base pairs in DNA. They have the property to link to certain molecules due to their chemical properties and the enzymes around them. They’re the basis for RNA.
All physical.
We don’t know.
Yet.
You know why? Because science works by looking out for what actually can happen in the real world, instead of making up stories about impossible floods and goats that have spotted offspring by fucking near spotted wooden rods.
Just keep your teeth polished for the inevitable gnashing once we get a working hypothesis.
Nobody cares about your verses.
And yet, it agrees with what we know from geology, chemistry, astronomy, astrophysics, nuclear physics, anthropology, morphology…
The universe is. Worship not included. Unlike you, people who aren’t steeped in mythological thinking don’t need to project their own insecurities into nature.
Please. As if your lot fucking care about science or even truth. You hate education, you hate people that think for temselves, and above all you hate being wrong, so you fear going out to the world and actually learn something. You’re proud of being ignorant fools. You’re incapable of curiosity. Crawling around like fucking children, you hope to appease Sky Daddy by being obedient pets to a monster of your own making. Fucking abhorrent.
@joe4060:
Where does the information in a drop of water come from?
What happens to the information when the drop of water freezes into ice?
What happens when the ice melts?
Information in DNA is a byproduct of its structure. It is not granted Information by a Creator.
What you think of as “Information goes down ZOMG” applies to the universe as a whole, not necessarily uniformly.
To put it in terms you might understand: Information can increase locally while decreasing universally.
You can break chemical bonds (say, burning oil) to fuel a refrigerator to cool water so it freezes into a crystalline structure. You can then melt it, and refreeze it. You have to keep breaking bonds, decreasing structure to do so outside the machine, but within the refrigerator the amount of crystalline structure can increase.
Now think of life on Earth. Every day blind processes build structure in the form of DNA inside cells. Energy is provided by the sun and the radioactive core of the Earth, and the reservoirs of chemical energy which exist on our planet. There is a net loss of structure in this process, yet structured and information-laden DNA increases locally.
tl;dr: You still think you’re making irrefutable points.
That makes a huge amount of sense. They think of information as “some knowledge of how to do something”, rather than “opposite of chaos”.
yubal
An oak tree doesn’t have a nervous system. Do you think that fact implies that senses have no biological significance?
@ #13
“
Joe, have you ever heard of “emergent phenomenon”? You don’t need very much to get incredible amounts of complexity going. Google: “Conway’s game of life”. The rules of the game are really simple. They’re only rules, yet they may apply to chemical reactions or living creatures or whole communities. Go play for a while. No gods involved.
@
Oh noze, another fucking idjit.
@ John Morales / Beatrice
“Does GAWD ™ have a PENIS?”
I was hoping Joe would answer that. I guess he doesn’t know.
YHWH, as a sky-god, most definitely has a Penis. The whole idea behind sky-gods, other than being lords of heaven, is that they fructify the earth. This goes beyond gathering clouds. A sky-god that does not run around having sex with anything that moves is, IMHO, unthinkable. You mentioned Ashera. Though we know very little about her (the Higgs Boson of the religious world), I will put my cock on a block (a rather cheesy expression) and say that we will come up with more and more evidence of her existence. Though Xtians have turned YHWH into a right wanker, I can assure you (puts hand on babble) that YHWH and His Ashera are certainly still married and still having sex.
What they get up to? We don’t have much to go on, but I think it safe to say that their sexual shenanigans are likely similar to what Almighty Zeus and His Beautiful Cow-eyed Hera get up to when they feel frisky. Check out “The Odyssey” (free download on Pharyguwiki). Some really good soft PRON if you’re into that kind of stuff.
@ Mark W
Nigel Molesworth?
There’s a Monty Python for that. (hopefully that goes straight to the 30second mark)
bradleybetts 53
You can just go ahead and divide in two or more daughter organisms or reproduce asexually. Sex is a cute development but evolution works just fine without it. Like love. Or Olives. Sex is a result of evolution, not a requirement.
(Please don’t tell Amphiox, it will disturb his anthropocentric day dreams.)
joe4060:
Actually, it’s this question + assertion that’s non-sensical. You keep asserting there’s a question of the origin of information; there is not. We can even calculate the upper limit of information density in a given sphere. The “question of the origin of information” was solved over seventy years ago. The calculation to bound it at an upper limit is well over a decade old (but that’s just a question of details).
“All systems that enable life?” Which systems are those? Can you detail the systems required to enable life? Can you name even one?
This is incorrect. You’re definition of “useless” is what’s messing you up here. Look at mudskippers. They barely have nubbins for legs, and yet they ambulate around like nobody’s business. Or take a look at the recent long-term e. coli experiments by Richard Lenski. The ability to process citrate required two distinct mutations, neither of which was useful on their own. But those mutations happened, and though “useless,” one population of e. coli ended up with both mutations.
“Usefulness” is all in context. If mudskippers had to outrun something with real legs, they’d be screwed. But when no species has legs, the ability to crawl around is quite an advantage.
You keep getting bit in the ass by my gremlin.
Not only is evolution possible, we’ve seen it happen. You are denying reality by claiming evolution is impossible, especially when you do so based on your own ignorance.
Dude, now you’re just being intentionally obtuse. Willfully ignorant. You haven’t addressed the actual arguments against you — you just stick your fingers in your ear and shout “la-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you” over and over again.
If evolution doesn’t happen, explain the results e. coli citrate experiments. Did God just magically give one population the ability to process citrate? And yes, those mutations would be enough, in the wild, to give us reason to call it a new species.
So how did that happen if mutation and natural selection are just a fantasy?
@ 77 Hurin
In general? not necessarily
For you, and species like you? yes.
BTW: Plants have senses but just no nervous system. They can monitor where the light comes from and grow in that direction
joe4060:
Ultimately, it comes from entropic information. Up a level, it comes from the specific chemical properties of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and so on. Up a level from that, it comes from the specific sequences of polymers. These sequences don’t encode the information like a computer. They encode the information like a catalyst encodes for efficient chemistry. That is, DNA is a chemical template for RNA, and RNA is a chemical template for proteins.
Which level of information would you like to discuss?
Quantum bits don’t encode for the chemical properties of atoms, yet those atoms are made up of quantum bits. The interactions of molecules aren’t directly encoded by the atoms that make them up, and yet those molecules are made up of atoms. At every level, we see simple things making up far more complex things. Complexity arises out of simplicity.
You commit the Fallacy of Division here. The parts that make up a thing don’t have to contain the property of the thing. The pistons of an internal combustion engine don’t themselves contain the property of motion. Your odd insistence that atoms aren’t intelligent, and therefor can’t form intelligence, is simply illogical. You can see examples all around you of things being greater than the sum of their parts.
Oxygen and hydrogen don’t have the property of wetness at room temperature. Combine them, and you have a molecule of water. But that one molecule of water won’t make a wave. To do that, you need uncountable molecules of water. Get enough to fill an ocean, and you have many, many waves — which are information.
What caused oxygen and hydrogen to assemble themselves into something complex enough to be wet at room temperature, and to convey information?
I’ll let you in on another secret: life is just a very complex, very long-lived chemical reaction. The workings of a cell can be defined in terms of chemical reactions. Reproduction is just one part of that chemical reaction. So whether you believe God set it all in motion 10,000 years ago, or if you accept the evidence of reality and understand life kicked off 3.5 billion years ago, it’s all just one long chemical reaction. There’s no special “life-force” keeping it going.
Evolution doesn’t require faith. It’s not that we’re interpreting the same evidence differently. The problem lies with you, and your belief the car is powered by a gremlin in a squirrel cage. And to keep that belief, you have to ignore every single argument raised against you. You have yet to refute on single response to you.
So, you still got nothing? No response?
A sense is a perceptual ability, so that doesn’t make sense.
They do not represent to themselves, as a perception, where light comes from, or feel that they are growing in any direction, or whatever is happening given any other stimulus. So they do not have sensations.
I guess you could just insist, for no reason, the ordinary usage of the word is wrong and your bizarre one in which plants can sense things (though apparently not in the Secret Life of Plants sense) is right. Unless this actually matters in some way to whatever your point is, I think it’s usually pretty boring to have an argument over competing definitions.
Yubal –
You’re missing the point by about a mile.
Love, sex, revenge, sensing*, etc. are evolutionary because they are heritable behaviors that can affect an individuals reproductive fitness.
Also: F factors. Conjugation.
*claming that what a plant does is anywhere similar to the complicated vision of humans or the olfactory sense of dogs is like claiming the dinky Python script you wrote in 6th grade is anything similar to an operating system.
Joe –
Until you can explain why the remaining mitochondrial genes weren’t ported over to the nucleus, you probably should avoid this debate.
You may want to start here: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/biology/7-03-genetics-fall-2004/lecture-notes/
@ nigelTheBold
Using that name in a comment is like waving a red flag in front of a bull … for the sters. (Will the incantation work?)
@ yubal
What exactly is your point? Showing off your googlefu?
And before you start to say that bacteria are different, or this is just microevolution, or that single-celled organisms are different, keep in mind that entirely new plant species have been created as well. Verne Grant did it in the 1960s. Then Lorne Riesberg did it again. (just for two examples). And never mind all the crop and animal varieties we’ve brought into existence.
Also hawthrone and apple maggot flies as recently as 200 years ago..
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/VC1eSympatric.shtml
joe4060:
Looks like I misinterpreted this when I first read it. The question is even less sensical than I originally thought. It seems you’re saying atoms need intelligence to form something complex. Not intelligent; just complex.
That is one helluvan odd statement. Odd to the point of baffling.
You know how atoms (at least, those that aren’t inert) tend to form molecules? They do! Seriously. They form together, sometimes even in complex chains. You know how the do this?
Chemistry. Simple, every-day, ordinary, beautiful, logical chemistry.
Over at Greta’s, I pointed you to Conway’s game of life. theophontes did the same thing up-thread. This game has exactly four very simple rules:
1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
These four simple rules for very complex structures, including those that are capable of reproduction. It’s a demonstration that simple rules can lead to complex systems. No intelligence required.
Now, those four simple rules dictate the behavior of squares on a board. Those squares can be either on, or off. That’s it. So those rules affect only one kind of thing.
How much more complex would it be if there were ninety different things, each with their own set of 4 simple rules? (You can actually calculate that. Just in case you were wondering.)
The chemistry of the elements is a bit more than just 4 rules. It’s simple enough to understand. Chemistry is a well-understood field, at least at the fundamentals. But chemistry allows atoms to form very complex structures, even those that reproduce.
Hell, we’ve even found the building-blocks of life in space.
So how do non-intelligent atoms form something as complex as life?
Chemistry, Joe. Chemistry.
No intelligence required.
I suppose joe4060 has never met a farmer who uses evolution to produce better crops, heftier beef and more milk production. What a maroon
@ nigelTheBold
I have a real problem with the way Conway described the rules. You see it immediately (at least I do, because it bugs the hell out of me):
“Any cell with fewer than two neighbors , as if caused by under-population.”
He is saying : LIFE (simple) —–> LIFE (complex)
But this really weakens the true teaching power of the game. We should re-write the rules to take away the explicit/implicit emphasis on life within the rules…
We really need an explanation (analogy) that formulates as:
Simple chemistry —–>LIFE (complex)
At very least say that they are just squares on a chessboard, to which simple and strict rules are applied.
This is not a trivial point, Conway’s way of putting it will cause confusion in young children and the likes of joe4060.
@ theophontes (坏蛋)
The point is that people have some slight but persistent misconceptions of cause and effect when they are looking at the evolution of life. Reason for that is they are alive themselves and have terrible problems to look at it objectively for one moment.
If you crack it down to what defines life (BTW: that debate is over for a century or so, although the pro-virus people still stir it up once in a while) you end up with very few general things such as:
1. ability to pass on genetic information
2. responses to the environment
3. metabolism
4. a boundary to the environment .
5….
And then you have a bunch of possible details on how to accomplish those things.
1. Passing on genetic information works perfectly fine without sex although life is better with sex. I think we can all agree on that one.
2. Fungi, bacteria and plants do respond to their environment, they know whats going on around them and act accordingly. And just because you are fascinated about fancy eyes doesn’t change the fact that eyes still allow for nothing more than responses to the environment.
3. Every life form needs some kind of metabolism to exploit an energy source although photosynthesis pretty much runs the show right now.
etc.
In the end all those detailed things various species came up with don’t matter to what evolution or life is. They are results of evolution and evolution keeps acting on them.
theophontes:
That is an excellent point. People who are caught up in the trivial description rather than learning from the actual meaning will not understand the intent. Very true.
Granted, Conway wasn’t talking about life when he proposed his game. He was talking about information, and his intended audience was other computer geeks, so his description could be a bit sloppy. All he had to do was accurately describe the algorithm.
Hm. I’m sure there’s a way to formulate the rules to clarify the link between emergent complexity and the formation of life. Basically, change from a population analogy to an chemistry analogy.
@ nigelTheBold
Exactly this. I am certain Conway, likely dealing – as you suggest- with intelligent geeks would not have thought of the inherent liability once his game had caught on universally and now is used to teach children about emergent phenomena. I am sure we have his blessing to adapt the rules’ description to reflect this.
@ yubal
I think you are projecting here. Also the googlefu platitudes.
(Can you provide citations to prove your “point”?)
John’s question about God’s penis had me pondering a couple things. One of which is:
Could God have a penis so large no even he could fill it with blood?
theophontes (坏蛋)
the definition of life should have been in your mid-school biology textbook. Go to your attic find it and read it again.
Now, yubal, if you would justify your statement that “love [is] yet another topic evolution says nothing about”
instead of acting like what you really said was “love is not relevant to every species’ evolution”
then that would be helpful. Alternatively, you might say “what I meant to say was that ‘love is not relevant to every species’ evolution.'”
usingreason,
I would suppose that ‘the holy spirit fills all’ takes care of that.
Don’t be ridiculous. They don’t know a fucking thing. They respond. Responding is not knowing. Knowing is a kind of response, but not all responses are knowledge.
This is not fucking difficult to understand, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe you are peddling some Secret Life of Plants nonsense.
But we don’t just see with our eyes. We have brains that process visual stimuli, and plants do. They are what make us able to know things, and the lack of them is what makes plants unable to know things.
Why the fuck do you insist on using these completely inaccurate terms, especially since you thought it worthwhile to chide someone for “anthropocentric day dreams”?
Also, since no one’s mentioned it:
The analogy was that evolution has “implications”* about love, not necessarily the other way around. We don’t love things and determine if that says anything about evolution. We see how things evolve and determine if that says anything about love.
*Which is pretty fucking vague, but it’s your claim.
#97 strange gods before me
No part of that statement in #21 needs justification.
Allow me to pull this from talkorigins real quick:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-definition.html
any other questions?
Joe, I have noticed, is doing something that many religious people do (of many religions): cite their holy book (one that atheists explicitly deny the authority of) as an argument for why their holy book is accurate and therefore their religion is right.
I do not think the religious understand the concept of a recursive argument.
Whoops…
@ yubal
I stand corrected: Also the
googlefumid-school_biology_textbook-fu platitudes.@ SGBM
You will like: Linky: Is Yahwe a boy. (Discussion of Genesis. Link provided by NitricAcid)
#99 consciousness razor
You feel very special about yourself and your species, don’t you?
I give you one word that could have made a difference in understanding:
“general”
go figure where it belonged to.
OK. This is my first time in Thunderdome, and it’s going to be a hit-and-run because I can’t let myself get sucked into this right now.
With that preface:
Joe is operating from a fundamental misunderstanding of what information is. I think he’s channeling William Dumbski’s grossly errant view of information. In fact, if someone wants to do a cut-and-paste search of Joe’s assertions, you’ll probably find they are a straight lift from one of Dumbski’s books.
Joe and Dumbski are operating on the assumption that information is extrinsic. That it must be transmitted in order to be information. That information must be “created”.
BZZT. Sorry. Wrong.
Information is intrinsic. It is a property of the thing itself.
What has information? Anything and everything.
A cesium atom has information. We use it to run the atomic clock.
Salt has information when it organizes itself into cubes as a solid. Always and every time. And has information when dissolved into water. (That information pretty much helps run every biological process known to man, BTW. Na and Cl ion exchange are a fundamental part of biology, along with potassium and calcium.)
A snowflake has information, each and every time a unique water crystal forms. And the water that once was the snowflake has information and the water that the snowflake becomes has information, and the state change between water and snowflake has information.
The vast emptiness of space has information. It is part and parcel of what it is.
Information does not require transmission, nor does it require an observer, nor a creator. Information just “is”. It’s part of the system. It is intrinsic not extrinsic.
It is rank nonsense to declare that information must be created in order to be transmitted. I can’t even think of a proper analogy because it’s so wrong that it’s not even wrong.
Sorry for the intrusion. Carry on.
If it is true that “love [is] yet another topic evolution says nothing about”
then it would follow that we cannot learn anything about love via the study of evolution.
Do you think we cannot learn anything about love via the study of evolution?
+++++
yubal, I’ve noticed you before and I never had the impression that you’re a dumbass. I feel compelled to warn you: you are going to make that impression very quickly on a lot of people here if you don’t try to be clearer, and quit playing stupid games.
Coming in with a bang, Kevin!
I haven’t thought about Dempski in so long – yes, I do believe you are correct.
Kevin:
Thanks for that insight. I didn’t recognize this distinction, though it’s obvious in every post (both those that Joe has made, and those in response to Joe, including mine).
Excellent observation, and great post.
#106 strange gods before me ॐ
Yes. I do not think we can.
You might want to study neurochemistry or something like that instead.
Concerning the strange way of expressing myself: I am sorry. English is not exactly my first language. I learned it in my twenties.
Concerning me “playing stupid games”: I have a mental disorder that makes me appear to be a little weird and stubborn.
Not especially. I just think words need fairly specific meanings to be of any use. I’ve also thought for a long time that you’re full of shit.
It’s your species too, right? Could I be speaking to a species of plant, fungus or bacteria that “knows” and “senses” things?
If you are human, does being able to do that make us “special” or is it just a fucking fact which meaningfully distinguishes us from other things, that you can’t seem to fucking comprehend?
Ignoring questions and points is what you’re being criticized for.
On what basis? It’s already been explained how love can increase the fitness of the individuals bearing that trait.That, as you so well copied and pasted, changes the allele frequencies in the population to favor those who bear that trait.
yubal:
Wait. It seems you are talking about what we can know about love and how we can know it, rather than talking about evolution affecting the development of love.
At least, that’s how it seems.
’cause last time I checked, our neurochemistry was an artifact of the distribution of specific alleles, which has changed over time.
theophontes,
Thanks. I am familiar with the article. I’m going to rely on memory instead of reading it again, so if someone wants to shove a particular quote under my nose and say sg, you are forgetting this, that would not be unwelcome.
Like so many similar writings, it makes me say “uh, maybe? but honestly this is not a straightforward explanation of the data.” I am underwhelmed.
In particular I think the author is — is there a word for this besides over-explaining? — trying to explain things that don’t need explaining. I guess, trying to explain the unimportant with the extraordinary. Yahweh’s behavior is not unusual in a way that suggests to me that it needs to be explained by some particular attribute over and beyond “is a very powerful, supernatural man who is a character in a time-before-time myth.” In this case it’s important to keep in mind that he’s a character, and sometimes he does things just for the story to move along. (I.e. the most likely answer to my question “how does Snake know?” is not “snakes are prescient” nor “Yahweh was talking to Snake” but “the narrative requires Snake to know this particular bit of strategic information.”)
I fully accept that Yahweh is a son of El, of course, that’s obvious. But I don’t think there’s good reason to suppose that he is an adolescent in even one of the proto-Genesis sources.
yubal,
Okay. I’ll try to keep that in mind. There are probably lots of opportunities for misunderstandings here.
So, basically I agree with nigel that there’s no reason to stipulate that, when we’re talking about neurochemistry, then we are not also talking about evolution.
And studying the evolution of love plausibly could tell us why love tends to be like this instead of like that.
Since joe4060 has no interest in actually discussing anything or learning anything, but just wants to blather in creabotese, it’s time for more Creabot-to-English translations.
Translation: I am still trolling!
Translation: I do not actually care about answers to my original questions, but I repeat them anyway, because I love trolling!
Translation: I do not know what information is, and I don’t know what DNA is.
Translation: I do not know what abiogenesis is, and I would not understand it even if it were explained to me in very simple words indeed.
Translation: I do not know what evolution is, nor do I care. I just want to murder babies and worship the devil!
Translation: Now I troll you with TEH BIBBLE!
Translation: I am too stupid to realize that these verses condemn God as a LIAR. But I love lies anyway, and I worship my lying God by telling lies!
Translation: The preceding verse condemns God as a LIAR, but I do not care what it actually says!
Translation: I am too stupid to realize that if Jesus is God, Jesus had NO RISK OR COST TO HIMSELF at all.
Translation: I am too stupid to realize that Christian doctrine is a joke and an unbelievable lie.
Translation: I boil with anger and disrespect, because I do not actually have a longsuffering, kind, or patient nature.
Translation: God lies to people before murdering them.
Translation: I do not actually know what evolution is, nor do I care.
Translation: I worship a God who is impossible, absurd, and embarrassing, and I am great at projecting the failings of my religion on that which I don’t understand and refuse to try to understand!
Translation: I do not understand how radiometric or cosmological dating works, nor do I care. All I want to do is circumcise zeros from numbers, because I like mutilating penes.
Translation: I do not know or care that the foundation of evolution is the foundation of all science, which is that the universe is not a lie. But I love lies anyway!
Translation: I do not care that this verse has nothing to do with science or evolution.
Translation: Look! I can cite more lying religious fanatics who agree with me!
Well, since it’s not an “explanation” in the scientific sense anyway, but an interpretation of a narrative and a characterization of someone in it, you could use “eisegesis“:
Of course evolution can tell us about love. Humans are products of evolution; everything that we are is the result of evolutionary processes. If we are capable of love, that capability must have come up somewhere in the evolutionary process, either as a survival trait or a neutral mutation. As such, studying evolution can teach us why we developed the capacity to love.
Note: This is not to suggest that we are solely the products of our genes (“nature”) Obviously there are many external factors (“nurture”) that determine individual characteristics, personality, etc. However, these characteristics must still fall within the very broad range allowed by the human genetic code.
What caused atoms, which have no intelligence, to assemble themselves into something complex enough to contain life?
Covalent and ionic bonding. Next question?
Joe needs to describe to us the science of adeiogenesis, and how its imaginary deity/creator came into being out of nothingness. My prediction, the silence of the presuppositionalists.
I don’t disagree with this at all.
What Dembski and other creobots are doing is, of course, equivocating between “information” as used formally in information science, the concept and used more generally: characters, words, and sentences, created by humans, and used by humans, to codify ideas and abstractions.
You can explain to them that this is bogus, and I suspect that Dembski knows damn well that that’s what he’s doing, but the point is that the rank-and-file creationists don’t know that there’s a distinction, and probably don’t care.
Damn.
A few months ago, I wrote a really good comment showing that information can exist in something that is not alive (which seems to be a portion of joe’s current idiocy) and, apparently, I don’t even qualify for a white belt in googlefu — I know I wrote it after August (because that is when I saw the late Cretaceous exposure up in Montana (I was at a forest fire)) but I’ll be damned by pasta if I can remember the context or even whether it was in Thunderdome or another thread infested by a godbot. And no, I don’t think I can write it again.
But trust me. It was good and apropos.
Copying-and-pasting from the “No contest” thread:
======
After thinking about it a bit, I think I would agree that information qua information is completely nonphysical, since it’s just an abstraction about physical properties. It is literally metadata. However, any attempt to store or process information is necessarily physical. This would be a form of computation, and computation necessarily involves, at the very least, an energy transaction.
I skimmed Feynman’s “Thermodynamics of Computation” (he discusses DNA transcription, by the way), and he suggests that energy costs of computation can be made arbitrarily low — by making the computation extremely slow. Hm.
Well, all computation that is actually done, and this of course includes the process of perceiving, learning, and practicing spoken and written language, is done rapidly enough that it does indeed take a lot of energy, especially given the physiological furnace that is the human brain. It’s just that Creobots don’t take into account the perception, learning, or practicing processes when thinking about “designed messages”. There’s not just the energy used by one individual, either. Language evolves in a society and culture, and the culture that uses language goes back millenia, all of the humans involved using quite a bit of energy to transmit the spoken and written language to the next generation.
In addition, there’s the point that the human brain has evolved to parse and learn symbols and language. The exact process isn’t exactly clear, but that too involved quite a lot of energy used over time. And we could probably go back even further; to the earlier ancestors that evolved perceptions and the ability to make sense of the environment, and even further back yet to everything that resulted in those organisms evolving.
If you wish to
make an apple pie from scratchwrite a line of text in the sand, you must first invent the universe. (h/t Carl Sagan)Creationists fail at energy accounting, among many other things.
@#121:
Was it this?
(Citing from the linked comment)
carlie
There are two reasons for me not responding to points and questions.
1. There were obviously irrelevant or nonsensical. I frequently save myself the time and effort to point out why.
2. I did not read your comment. This happens a lot when the person posting produces comments that qualify for 1) but is usually because I am offline.
My point exactly. You evolved and anything about you can be connected to factors that increase or decrease your fitness. Selection can act on future traits/alleles that are to evolve yet. Saying that evolutionary mechanisms act on something doesn’t change the fact that the particular something has actually nothing to do with what evolution does: enriching or decreasing numbers of alleles in future generations. It is just another factor that evolved and can be acted on by selection. Evolution does not make statements about particular traits or particular selection pressures. They are all valid in the first place. The note that love would be beneficiary is the hindsight statement of having it around. You can make the exact opposite statement that love is disadvantageous for individuals bearing that trait and you will see that happening in the right environmental setting. Both outcomes are contradistinctions. That is why evolution does not make predictions but we tend to make those kind of hindsight statements because we see the traits.
Evolution tells you that there will be changes of traits and alleles over time, and that’s about it. Quite boring if you ask me, although correct. And you know what? It does not have to be exciting.
So yes, if you want to learn more about love you should try it out.
Or study neurochemistry.
Or chemistry in general (@nigelTheBold) ’cause last time I checked, evolution was a phenomenon dependent on the occurrence of complex systems of self-organizing carbon chemistry.
Yes. How in the name of the seven pluperfect purple levels of hell did you do that?
So nice of a troll to come by and enliven the place a little.
yubal:
While I agree with you on this, that doesn’t mean it’s not interesting to study the history of those changes, as strange gods before me ॐ points out in #114.
But I think I understand what you’re getting at: if we want to know about the systems and processes and results of emotion, we’re better off studying the system as they exist, rather than concerning ourselves with the evolutionary history of those systems. The history really doesn’t provide us with any interesting information (except that of historical interest).
Is this close to your meaning?
@124,
The chemistry and neurochemistry of the human brain function within parameters set by the human genome.
Evolution is the process by which humans came into existence. Studying how the human genome evolved can tell us a great deal about our ancestors, about how particular traits came to be, and how we are related to other animals.
It might also provide a means for humans to improve ourselves, if we can figure out how to safely tinker with the genome. (A long shot, I admit.)
this is a bizarre phrasing.
technically, NOTHING is a requirement of evolution.
sex indeed shows a fitness advantage whenever there is need to generate increased levels of diversity in offspring.
in that sense, it is no different than any other trait, except that this particular trait allows for much FASTER evolution within a given population.
@127,
“The history really doesn’t provide us with any interesting information (except that of historical interest).”
A daring statement to make on the blog of a strong proponent of evo-devo! :P
Doug Hudson:
True, that, but I suspect the evolution of emotions (specifically love in the given example) falls more under evo-psych right now. I think I agree with yubal, in that studying the physical development of the brain as it relates to emotions is kind of predicated on us knowing the physical systems from which emotions arise. (Assuming that’s really what yubal is getting at.)
Otherwise, I’m all like, “We can study the evolution of the specific neurochemical structures in the brain that are responsible for emotion!” and yubal’s all like, “Yeah, but which structures are those, and what are the genes that contribute to them?” and I’m all like, “Beats the fuck out of me!”
Of course, I could be wrong. This is way outside my area of non-incompetence.
I think that’s a bit confusing.
You’re saying information is a non-physical abstraction (and that those exist). Very well. I disagree, and I don’t know of a good reason to think that’s true. But it’s understandable so far.
However, then you go on to say information itself (as opposed to something else) can only come in a physical package, so to speak: it’s “represented” in storage or in a process somewhere. If information is non-physical, then it obviously isn’t its physical representation. That representation (or whatever, as long as it’s physical) is what’s being stored and processed, because you can’t physically store or process non-physical things like abstractions, just like you said. You can’t do anything with information qua information (except maybe consider it as an abstraction), if that’s the definition you’re going with.
That’s why I don’t think it’s useful. Whether we’re talking about some technical concept in information theory or physics or computing, or just the ordinary way people are informed by information and get it from different sources, the idea is generally that you can do stuff with it (not do stuff with something else that’s somehow standing in for “actual” information that exists in its own separate realm).
The way I think of it, we use information to represent concepts or relationships of physical objects. To then turn around and say that we have to use (other) physical objects to represent those representations just seems pointless. Granted, I brought in the language of “representations,” but whatever you call it, there’s an extra layer in this onion that doesn’t seem necessary and doesn’t seem to do anything. Why not say those physical objects are the representations, and that those representations are the information, which means information itself is physical?
consciousness razor:
This is exactly my understanding of information. Even entropy (the most fundamental definition of information I know) is all about relative, measurable properties of physical systems.
Of course, I’m not the final arbiter on the definition of information. I’m just some guy on the internet.
But were you the first arbiter? Or maybe the millionth? It might count for something. Who knows? There may be a door prize.
But are you really “on” the internet? Isn’t it instead that some of the internet consists in things that you do? And are you “just” a guy with some connection to the internet, or don’t you do other things?
I turns out it’s been one of those days when I have lots of questions you don’t need to answer, Nigel. What’s your favorite color or sound or smell (you may only pick one)? What’s the funniest-sounding word you can think of right now? Are you sorry for infesting our precious Thunderdome with a silly creationist? Shouldn’t you be sorry? When did you stop answering loaded questions?
Uhm. Uhm.
Favorite smell is the one associated with the nape of my wife’s neck. (Perhaps TMI.)
Inseminate. (Perhaps also TMI)
Yes, I definitely regret bringing him over here.
Probably not. But I am.
I try to answer all loaded questions. Elsewise, they may accidentally go off, injuring innocent (or not-so-innocent) bystanders.
nigelthebold
All I have heard so far is ideas, conjecture, theorys, hypothesis, promise of future discoveries etc.
This still FAITH that proof will be found. Therefore, evolution is a religion.
“Not only is evolution possible, we have seen it happen”
You had better tell that to Dawkins then.
“Evolution has been observed. It’s just that it hasn’t been observed while its happening.”
A refutation of your claim that DNA is not a code or language to avoid the implication of an intelligent personal Creator.
The many individual systems within the DNA molecule need to communicate with one another in order for it to work as a whole.
DNA is like a machine or computer but which is far more complicated than anything made by man.
In order for communication to take place, a system of language is required which in turn requires an ‘alphabet’ of some description. In the case of DNA the alphabet has 3 billion letters. Why is this not an intelligent code or language?
If Morse Code, which is far simpler, is a code or language why not DNA which has 3 billion letters?
The question about atoms simply asks who or what caused their assemblage into what we see today.
Isn’t so cute when a godbot conflates faith in god, one done with no evidence whatsoever with faith in knowledge based on evidence.
Going by what the godbot is saying, turning on a light or driving a car is a religion.
I do wish the godbot would explain why gravity is dead and how it died.
But I can show my evidence for evolution to other people. How do you show that your faith is real? That you are not lying about your faith? I cannot see your faith. I cannot measure your faith. I have no way to tell if your faith exists. Go ahead. Show us some actual evidence for the existence of your faith (and the evidence needs to be visible to all, measurable, and replicable or it is not evidence). So, no, you fail again.
Fake answer:
Praying to God. Praying to Satan. Praying to Boltzmann Megalodon.Magic.Short answer: Memory is like a whatchacallit.
Long answer: SGBM’s comment (last thread) reminded me that we’d done this whole “information” blather from creobots recently, and which thread it was in. Kevin’s comment reminded me of my comment on that thread. And your comment reminded me that I’d seen that geology description, which of course had been on the same thread as the comment I had been reminded of just prior.
joe4060:
Then it must have been made by woman.
—
Because the genome is a DNA molecule. ;)
(It really is amusing how little this specimen knows about science and its own religious sources)
joe, if you believe in DNA, which you apparently do, how do you not believe in evolution? Have you ever worked with DNA? You can’t keep the stuff from mutating. The various transcriptases are error prone.
Do you believe in antibiotic resistance? If so, how do you explain its existence without natural selection of resistant organisms in the presence of a stress (the antibiotic)? If not, do you take 1000 units of penicillin for any infection and expect it to be adequate? It used to be…
Hm. Let me try again:
Information can be reduced to true/false values, and/or to “1”s and “0”s. While those are always about facts and/or quantities, and are always coded/represented in a given physical system that contains the information, they are not physical in and of themselves; they are non-physical abstractions.
In the case of DNA the alphabet has 3 billion letters.
What the? DNA has four “letters” (GACT). It has many “words”, but only four “letters”. It’s a silly analogy anyway. DNA is not a communication device in the same way language is.
joe4060:
Orbitals.
Joe @ 136
This has to be satire, right? This is a Poe–it has to be.
Sorry, the million or so scientific papers supporting evolution say otherwise. Evolution is a scientific conclusion, no faith necessary. Especially compared to the zero scientific papers supporting the existence of your imaginary deity/creator. You lose.
And where is your discussion of how your imaginary deity came to be from nothing….Put up or shut the fuck up.
Oh snap, really? I had no earthly idea that every written language used an alphabet, here I thought there were also pictographs and character-driven writings…
Because it is actually a cipher, whereas there’s no evidence DNA is, just your fevered speculation.
No, onychophora, that is by the book creationism babble.
More on orbitals and electron configuration
Ok, the joke’s gone on long enough. I think it’s time we let Joe in on the truth. No don’t bother trying to stop me, it is already done.
Joe, the truth is that you’re the only real person in the world. The rest of “reality” is just a hallucination. Don’t bother trying to figure out DNA any more. It’s just an illusion. Besides, we’ll be resetting your brain soon and you won’t remember it anyway.
Ready, everyone, Joe reset in 3, 2, 1…
By Jove, I think I’ve got it!
It’s true! It’s all true! DNA *is* a machine! Just like a computer or something! All the systems have to communicate and work together!
Just watch out for viruses! heh.
dianne
Who are these “everyone” you are addressing?
Since we aren’t real, how can we reset joe4060?
What …. never mind.
*puts on MIB dark glasses*
Chigau: These are mysteries beyond the knowledge of us mere imaginary beings.
You’re high. DNA has four “letters”, as Dianne noted. The analogy to written language is a bad one, again as Dianne noted, but I’ll continue it in order to illustrate your mistake:
The Complete Works of Shakespeare has around 5 million characters, but of course that large number is similarly produced by repeating the basic 26 of English, plus spaces and various punctuation marks.
Translation: I want to troll you some more!
Translation: I have not heard a single damn thing, but that does not stop me from lying.
Translation: I do not know that parsimony is, nor what a null hypothesis is, nor do I care.
Translation: I do not know what evolution is, nor do I care, but I enjoy lying about it.
Translation: I am too stupid to read and understand English, and to understand that there is actually a distinction between “seen it happen” and “observed while it’s happening”.
Translation: I don’t actually know anything about DNA, but that does not stop me from lying about it.
Translation: I don’t actually know anything about “systems” within the DNA molecules, nor how they “communicate” with each other, but that does not stop me from lying about it.
Translation: I don’t actually know anything about DNA, nor computers, but that doesn’t stop me from lying about it.
Translation: I do not actually know that DNA is made of base subunits, not letters.
Translation: I’m so dumb that I think that “4” is the same as “3 billion”.
Translation: I do not know what an “intelligent code” is, nor what a “language” is.
Translation: I do not care what caused the assemblage of atoms into what we see today. I just hate atheists who don’t blindly agree that it was my invisible person with supernatural superpowers.
You inadvertently lit the Owlmirror signal. People who do that often react that way, though rarely so eloquently. As for how he did it, he could tell you, but…
Holy fuck.
I’ve been skimming this thread, but thanks to Owlmirror I now see just how little of biology joe4060 knows.
Whoever homeschooled this person should be tried for child abuse.
..And joe4060 confirms for absolutely everyone here that he hasn’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about.
Nick Gotts, he confirmed that when he declared that gravity is dead.
Wormer, he’s a dead man! Marmalard, dead! Gravity…
Be fair — the specimen has an inchoate concept that boils down to vitalism — since the élan vital is the breath of God*, it must follow God exists.
—
* Which converts inorganic into organic matter, as described in Genesis 2:7 by an eyewitness.
nigelthebold
Natural selection and mutations
Why is natural selection, a principle recognized by creationists, taught as ‘evolution,’ as if it explains the origin and diversity of life?
By definition it is a selective process (selecting from already existing information), so is not a creative process. It might explain the SURVIVAL of the fittest (why certain genes benefit creatures more in certain enviroments), but not the ARRIVAL of the fittest (where genes and creatures came from in the first place). The death of individuals not adapted to an enviroment and the survival of those that are suited does not explain the origin of the traits that make an organism adapted to an environment. E.g., how do minor back and forth variations in finch beaks explain the origin of beaks or finches? How does natural selection explain goo-to-you evolution?
How could mutations – accidental copying mistakes (DNA ‘letters’ exchanged, deleted or added, genes duplicated, chromosome inversions, etc.) – create the huge volumes of information in the DNA of living things?
How could ERRORS create 3 billion letters of DNA information to change a microbe into a microbiologist? There is information for HOW TO MAKE PROTEINS and also for CONTROLING THEIR USE – much like a cookbook contains the ingredients as well as the instructions for how and when to use them. One without the other is useless (see creation.com/meta-information).
Mutations are known for their destructive effects, including over 1000 human diseases such as haemophilia. Rarely are the even helpful. But how can scrambling existing DNA information create a new biochemical pathway or nano-machines with many components, to make ‘goo-to-you’ evolution possible? E.g., how did a 32-component rotary motor like ATP synthase (which produces the energy currency, ATP, for all life), or robots like kinesin (a ‘postman’ delivering parcels inside cells) originate?
From: 15 Questions for Evolutionists @creation.com These questions are formulated for use by anyone involved in the defence of God’s truth. It does not matter who makes the bullets as long as they work.
joe4060, you’ve already shown you’re unable to understand the basics of biology. You cannot comprehend these questions you ask, let alone the answers.
Stop being a stupid fuck. You’re just making the people who believe in your god look like dipshits, and your god likewise.
Even this non biologist knows you have fucked this one up. Natural selection has jack shit to say about the origin of life.
You need to find a better source for your information about biology.
Your bullets are made of soap bubbles.
Nope, you don’t recognize natural selection for what it is, a very powerful tool for making sure beneficial mutations are added to the genome. You will find its power in scientific papers like this one. Unless you understand the scientific paper and acknowledge you are wrong, we will laugh at you as a proven liar and bullshitter for your imaginary deity…
joe4060:
It isn’t, O sadly-misinformed one.
(cf. #2 above)
Brownian,
ObQuote:
“Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. Now it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics, and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn… If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe our books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren, … to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call on Holy Scripture, .. although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” — St. Augustine (354-430)
joe4060:
Uhm, no. I’ve also reported on observations. The observation of evolution in e. coli in the Lenksi experiments is data. Recorded, measured data. It was evolution in action.
But beside that, what do you think a theory is? Yes, you’ve heard all about theories. That’s because science is all about theories. It seems part of your problem is that you don’t know what science is. You definitely don’t know what a theory is.
Let me help with that. A theory is an hypothesis that has made predictions that have been supported by data and observation. It has not made any predictions that have proven false. This is important. Very important. So important that without it, you can’t understand anything about the world at all.
For instance, consider the hypothesis that the universe is only 10,000 years old. This makes many predictions about what we’ll find in reality. For instance, considering that light can only travel at a certain rate, we’d not expect to see light from stars over 10,000 light-years away. Consider the half-life of radioactive thorium is about 14.5 billion years, and it decays into things like lead and radon, you’d not necessarily expect to find much lead or radon in samples that include thorium — at least, you wouldn’t expect to find them in ratios consistent with a 4.5 billion-year-old earth.
So, the hypothesis that the universe is only 10,000 years old makes specific predictions.
And as it turns out, those predictions fail on every level. Every single prediction made by a 10,000 year old universe fails.
The hypothesis that the universe is 14.5 billion years old and constantly expanding also makes predictions. It predicts that, given sufficient technology, we could see galaxies many billions of light-years away. It predicts that thorium will be found in with specific ratios of its decay-chain elements. And so on.
And indeed, this is exactly what we observe. Every specific prediction made by a very old universe has been shown to be correct. (At least, those that we’ve been able to observe. There may be some outstanding predictions that have been neither confirmed nor invalidated.)
In science, it’s this ability to correctly predict that is proof.
The same is true of evolution through natural selection. It has made some very specific predictions about what we’ll find. And those predictions have invariably turned out to be correct.
Evolution is one of the best-proved theories in all of science. About the only one that has had more rigorous testing is Newtonian mechanics.
There’s really only one way to show evolution to be false. Demonstrate that one of its core predictions is incorrect. That’s really about it.
You might be able to supplant evolution without proving it false, but to do so is far harder than disproving evolution. You’d have to come up with a scientific hypothesis that explains our observations and data better than evolution. This would require specific predictions that evolution can’t predict.
But we’re talking a scientific explanation. One that relies on what we can observe.
That’s nigel’s gremlin biting you in the ass again. You have it in your head that there’s some kind of intelligence going on, when none is required — or even evidenced. You seem to think that because something is complex, it must be designed. And yet you’ve not given one good reason this assumption should be taken seriously, other than the fact that you believe it to be so.
First, let’s take a look at whether or not intelligence is required to process a language. This seems to be something you’re all hung-up on, and it’s easy to demonstrate that intelligence isn’t required for language processing.
Siri.
Now, I’m not saying DNA is like a computer. Although DNA is Turing-equivalent, it’s not the same as a computer. It just means it’s capable of computation. I’m simply pointing out that you don’t need intelligence to use a language, so your claim that intelligence is necessary simply falls apart. We have examples in our world were non-intelligent things understand language sufficiently to be useful.
Now, on to the language part.
Yes, the cell is a seriously-organized system, with important timings and processes that need turned on and off and so on and so forth. But that doesn’t mean a designed language is necessary to coordinate all this.
Again, I’m going to use computers as an analogy. Understand, this is just an analogy. I’m not claiming DNA is a computer. I’m going to talk about processing, which is distinct from communicating.
Computer programs are written in fairly simple languages. Programming languages are necessary because us computer geeks don’t think in terms of systems of logic gates, we think in terms of high-level logic. These languages are compiled down into machine code, which are only numbers. It is this machine code that is vaguely analogous to DNA. (Again, I emphasize that this is an analogy only.)
The processor in a computer (the CPU) loads one code at a time. This code causes the circuitry in the processor into a certain configuration. The CPU doesn’t “understand” what it is doing even here. There’s no understanding required — it just automatically re-adjusts its internal configuration.
This configuration causes other events to happen — perhaps one part of the CPU is forced to become a copy of some bits in memory. Maybe it causes two parts of the CPU to combine in a way that simulates addition. And so on.
The important thing to know about this process is simply this: at no point does the CPU have any context. All it has is the configuration it’s currently in, and the “code” that instructs its next configuration change. That’s it. There’s no intelligence. No context, which is required for language. No understanding, which is required for languages to be built in the first place (though, as I demonstrated with Siri, not for language processing).
The code in DNA isn’t a language. It doesn’t have to be. All that’s required is a specific chemical reaction triggered by an exposed piece of DNA. And that chemical reaction is not any different than any other chemical reaction — it’s dictated by simple chemistry.
This all goes back to emergent systems. Simple rules lead to complex systems.
I think I’ve said that before, haven’t I?
Have you checked out Conway’s Game of Life yet? Have you looked at the complex systems that are a result of four simple rules?
You realize that quote is from an interview almost a decade old, right? And that the Lenski experiments produced the observed evolution results in 2008, four years later?
So you also realize that quote is irrelevant, correct?
Because DNA doesn’t represent a language. It’s a code in the same way textile industry punch-cards are a code, or CPU micro-code is a code. I have pointed this out several times already, as have others. It’s like we’re telling you how an internal combustion engine works, and you keep worrying about the gremlin.
This is called begging the question. I know what you’re asking, but the only answer with any kind of scientific backing is, “No-one caused it.” As for what caused it: most likely super-heated sulfurous vents in the deep ocean.
But you still haven’t answered the question: if the universe is only 10,000 years old, how is it we see light from galaxies billions of light-years away?
Ogvorbis
“But I can show my evidence for evolution to other people”
Where is your evidence for evolution since you cannot even explain how everything initially came into existence? Evolution needs something to work with in the first place.
If you have no solid proof how everything began without a Creator then you are believing a theory in blind faith.
My evidence is the creation itself.
Had I been there, I would have replied to Augustine:
“But of course, this is what happens when you have no way to objectively evaluate information; it is what is to be EXPECTED when one relies on such modalities to inform oneself. You can’t criticize the ignorant Christian without criticizing yourself.”
“Look, the 2013 F-150s are out.”
“Can’t be. The Ford Motor Company needs something to work with in the first place. Since you cannot even explain how everything came into existence, you cannot show me evidence of Ford trucks. QED.”
Once more, the non biologist points out where you are wrong.
Evolution has nothing to say about how the universe began. It has nothing to say about how life began. It is about how life adapts to the conditions that organisms are living in.
It is not good to argue when you have no idea what the terms mean.
Where is your evidence for evolution since you cannot even explain how everything initially came into existence?
your brain is malfunctioning.
suggest you see a mental health care professional about that, instead of wasting time on this board, repeating the same thing that has already been made clear to you is a strawman over and over and over again.
your brain is either resetting itself through the mechanism of denial, or you’re just out and out lying.
no other alternative at this point.
aren’t you concerned for your own welfare?
if you had a busted leg, wouldn’t you go to the doctor to get it fixed?
seriously, your brain is just… broke.
joe4060:
Where is your evidence for God since you cannot even explain how God initially came into existence?
(Godbots are oblivious to irony)
Category error. Actually, here. Besides, you haven’t explained how your imaginary deity came into existence. Until you do, and provide conclusive physical evidence for it, it doesn’t exist…Still waiting from when I first posed that to a godbot years ago. You are long on presupposition and short on evidence…
joe4060:
Again, part of your failure is in thinking that DNA is like a language, in which deep context is required. If you realize that the encoding sections of DNA that make proteins are just chemical templates, this makes a lot more sense.
But if you wish, I can write you a perl script that takes randomness and selects only the beneficial information changes and produces information. I’ve done it before.
In any case, this is one of the things that evolution predicted, and has turned out to be true.
Again, Joe, we have observed this very thing. You ask how it can happen, and I can say: It doesn’t matter how. What matters is, it does. And we have observed it. We have documented it. We have the specific mutations that occurred to make it happen.
So we know we have a process that causes mutations to occur. We know we have a system that only selects the ones that are beneficial. You have admitted yourself that natural selection can weed out the bad, keeping on the beneficial.
Since we know beneficial mutations happen (since yes, we were there), ones that add information to the genome, you have just admitted evolution works.
How those mutations happen is a grand topic in biology. But if all you want is a list of how they occur, check out this list.
Funny thing, joe; even though all of us answered that first sentence differently, no one was wrong in what they said.
You realize that quote is from an interview almost a decade old, right? And that the Lenski experiments produced the observed evolution results in 2008, four years later?
while Lenski’s experiment was a nice controlled experiment, we’ve directly observed the evolution of traits within populations in the field for over 100 years now.
Nerd of the redhead
“Millions of scientific papers” are countered by millions of scientific papers that say there had to be a Creator.
God does not require a causation or origin, since he has always existed.
…the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity. Isaiah 57:15
Prove with with citations, or shut the fuck up because you lie and bullshit….
As you show with prima facie evidence by citing a known book of mythology/fiction. Prove otherwise with solid and conclusive evidence. You lose…
That is not verifiable joe.
Quotes from a patchwork book does not cut it.
joe4060:
Such ignorance is most amusing; what you refer to as ‘creation’ is actually ‘that which exists’.
(It presumes that what exists has been created, which is the point you’re supposedly trying to prove, and is technically known as begging the question)
It seems hung up on the whole ‘good/bad’ mutations thing, too. I suspect it thinks that there are no ‘beneficial’ mutations, therefore there’s nothing to climb a peak on a fitness landscape.
joe4060:
God did not exist until naked apes imagined it.
(John, Thunderdome 10:184)
Nerd, just where did the “the” come from?
None of them said that, since science ignores your imaginary creator. Until you prove how it came to exist and that it actually exists by showing evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Which means the equivalent of the eternally burning bush. Put up or shut the fuck up, which is what a person of honesty and integrity, like a scientist, would do. Only liars, bullshitters, known conmen, and theologians will continue with trying to make their points without evidence….You prove my point….
makes me think Charlton Heston had something to do with it.
really?
there are MILLIONS of SCIENTIFIC papers concluding there had to have been a creator?
show me ONE.
nigelthebold
“You ask how it can happen, and I say: It does not matter how [i.e. you don’t know]. What matters is, it does. And we have observed it. We have documented it.”
If it has been observed then they would know but it has not been observed that is why they don’t know.
How can things be documented if no one knows how it happened?
Just make it up I suppose
I think evolution belongs in the category of “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”
Ichthic
creation.com
joe4060’s #162 is copypasta from this, at Greta’s.
/psa
(Which may well be copypasta from somewhere else, of course.)
Yes! That’s it. Thousands of scientists all over the world are just making shit up.
If only you were cognisant enough to realize just how insulting you are.
Fixed that for you godbot. You have nothing scientific to offer to refute the scientific evidence presented to you, but you have no scientific evidence to present to refute your delusional presuppositions. Abject losership in full swing….
joe4060:
Priceless!
john morals
Where is your evidence that everything created itself?
“Thunderdome” More like a shack full of intellectual midgets
One must be fair, cm. Joe did say where he got the drivel from.
That is why I joked that his bullets were made of soap bubbles.
Joe, this is where you will find the scientific evidence to refute the science that refutes your presuppositions. It won’t be found anywhere that presupposes your deity exists or that your babble is anything other than mythology/fiction….
says the man who has no idea what the words he is using means.
Someone doesn’t know the meaning of the words “documented” and “happened”.
I’m fairly certain that it is possible for the traffic cop who documents your speeding violation not to know how an internal combustion engine precisely works.
But then, no one knows how God created light just by saying it. So I guess Genesis is not a document.
*sigh*
I guess it’s testament to how brain-damaging joe4060’s posts are that I managed to miss the explicit attribution.
Sorry.
He asked for a paper, not a web site.
joe4060:
Why do you imagine it needed to be created?
In other words, you can’t explain how god came to be, so you cheat by just declaring, without any evidence to back it up, that god does not require a causation.
[can… not… resist…]
“”
Well, we may be midgets, but at least we’re intellectuals. :)
Joe6040
(my bolding)
I find this really funny because this is the part where you have inadvertently conceded that religion is an inferior way of learning about reality.
Notice that no one on this thread has tried to deride christianity by comparing to science, and then attempted to characterize that as a bad thing because it makes people vote for assholes with their heads on backwards.
Pause to consider the implications of that for a moment.
Sounds good to me. I don’t know that your mythology has any sympathetic characters in it, but Lucifer gets major points for being opposed to that sniveling liar jesus, and his brutal imbecile of a “father”.
If this passage was an attempt to be insulting, try harder next time.
Genesis 1:11 “Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so.”
Genesis 1:12 “The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds.”
It says it right there, in plain words. God did NOT produce the vegetation. God instructed the LAND to produce vegetation. The land, as in the non-living chemicals that make up the earth. God gave the command, but it was the LAND that produced the plants, by its own mechanisms.
God may have created the animals and the humans, but not the plants, it was the LAND that created the plants.
ie, Abiogenesis
Even the bible itself admits that abiogenesis occurred.
And yet here we have joe, blaspheming against his own holy book.
Speaking about God’s truth, I note joe4060 still hasn’t clarified whether it was 100 or 200 foreskins that David give to Saul to merit his daughter.
(And he still hasn’t worked out it’s testing his knowledge of his own Holy Scripture — a test he has failed so far)
A short stature frees up more resources for a bigger brain.
joe,
If you came to believe evolution was true, how do you think it would change you – how you think about yourself, how you think about human beings, how you treat others?
#131 nigelTheBold
Actually, I was done here.
Has anyone thought about working out how much information has been added to the hard drives and memory chips of the world’s datacenters and proxy servers (not to the mention the internet browser caches of its readers’ computers) by this and the last thread?
Anyone? I have, but anyone else? ;-)
yubal, you’ve been done, alright.
cm, less than one YouTube video’s worth, by far.
Joe
never lets (even the most rudimentary) self awareness get in the way of unintended hilarity.
Joe:
I’m not a professional scientist, but since you don’t seem to respect the pros anyway, I might as well take a crack.
You keep trying to convince us that randomness can never create non-random structure, but everyone here knows that’s wrong. You can take a random output (like mutations) and apply an algorithm (like natural selection) and get organized structure. That’s a real life no shit fact.
I know this is a fact because I remember the day back in high school when I spent an hour programming my graphing calculator to draw a Sierpinski Sieve when I should have been paying attention in calculus class. I spent most of the hour trying to figure out how to use the the calculator’s random number generator without access to the instruction manual. The non-random structure of the Sieve comes from the random numbers being plugged into a straightforward mathematical rule … what people with booklurnin call an algorithm.
The take-away from that story is that a half-bright high school student with a mid-range model Texas Instruments graphing calculator can do an experiment in an hour that conclusively and empirically demonstrates how weak your shit is.
So one more time: mutations will inevitably produce new variations. Some variations will become more numerous than its alternatives because they replicate more efficiently. The reason for the greater efficiency can be straightforward or it can be an incredibly convoluted chain of causes and effects. The details can be fascinating but they don’t really matter to the argument. The point is that there’s a slow but inevitable, inexorable physical process going on. More-efficient replicators will become more numerous than less-efficient replicators. That’s just what “more efficient replication” means. That’s your straightforward mathematical rule. Your algorithm.
And the important thing to realize is that there isn’t anything to apply the brakes to this process. There is no force to say “Whoa there, this organism is too different from its remote ancestor! This lineage must stop gradually changing over the eons!”
The question is not how evolution could have happened. The real question is: given 4 billion years, how could it not? What could have possibly stopped it? What, specifically, do you object to in the 2nd post of the thread?
Heh. It is true evolution gets in the way of Biblical literalists’ story, but the Babble is not that good a story.
(What Saul did to the priests of Nob!)
Owlmirror:
I’m still not following this. I’m okay with saying abstractions like numbers exist. I don’t think that’s my problem, anyway. You’re saying a physical system “contains” a non-physical thing. That doesn’t sound right to me. If we’re calling that thing it contains “information” or “Boltzmann brontosauruses” or whatever, that thing is physical if it’s in a physical system. Right? If the thing in the container isn’t information but something else, then maybe that’s a good reason to use another term for it. But using the same term for both a physical thing and a non-physical thing is confusing, even if there’s supposed to be a very close relationship between the two. Or maybe I’m the confused one. I don’t know.
———
joe4060:
Where to begin … again?
One more time:
-Evolution is not a theory of abiogenesis.
-Abiogenesis is not a theory of cosmology.
The big bang was about 13.7 billion years ago, and if that wasn’t the “beginning” of time itself, it’s the earliest time in the observable universe we can know about right now with any confidence, based on all the best available evidence. Just to make sure, read that sentence one more time, and look at the number and to what it refers: the entire observable universe.
Abiogenesis, in terms of the beginning of life on Earth, happened about 3.5 to 3.9 billion years ago. That’s easily found out by looking it up in wikipedia, but there may be better estimates from more reliable sources, which would nevertheless be in or near that range.
So, the beginning of life on Earth was about 10 billion years after the big bang. It’s easy to see these did not happen at the same time, but they’re not even close to being about the same thing. The beginning of life and the beginning of existence itself (if the big bang has anything to say about that) are different issues. They shouldn’t be confused, and they will not be explained the same way.
(Maybe you would explain them the same way, as if they happened at the same time and for the same reasons: that a god did it, as described in one or another of the chapters of Genesis, for example. I realize that’s just a big undifferentiated mass of bullshit, which can be awfully confusing if it’s taken as having any relationship with reality or the truth or even sincerely believing something for no particular reason. But remember that right now, we’re talking about the scientific theories you’re arguing against, not your creationist dribble.)
Now, we’ve long since had the universe and for quite a while the Earth, once we have life on Earth — after abiogenesis occurred, however it may have worked — then evolution works up to the present day, as described in comment #2. (This is the fucking link to it. It’s short. Read the fucking thing.) Ask questions about stuff you don’t understand. But if you really think you know better and understand why it’s wrong, that is the thing you would argue with if you argue with evolution. If you want to contend with abiogenesis or the big bang, go ahead, but you’d at least need to be slightly less of a proudly ignorant asshat to know they aren’t all the same fucking thing or that they’d require the same fucking evidence.
John, it’s even more frightening to realise that YouTube comments are information.
*shudder*
First, provide the context and citation for that Dawkins quote, because I’m guessing he’s talking about macroevolutionary trends, not evolution in general. However, you need to realize that Dawkins isn’t exactly considered an authority on all things around here. Invoking his name on a weird quote isn’t going to get you much more than a shrug and a “Well, if that’s what he said, then he was wrong”.
Anyway, what’s with the pirate theme? It’s s’posed to be gladiatorial.
OH MY GOD NO IT HAS FOUR WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
Cut the guy a break. He’s only off by 2,999,999,996. That’s what creationists call a rounding error.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilotum_nudum
250 billion base pairs.
And all it can do is sit there and photosynthesise and provide relief for jock itch. It’s a tragedy. So much information imparted by god. Probably the most underperforming species ever. It’ll be in hell for sure.
The godbot has zero interest in finding out stuff or following people’s citations but rather is content with hectoring us with its inanities*; it was very early on referred to bases (the DNA genetic letters), but didn’t even bother to follow up.
(But at least it still squeaks)
—
* As Nerd noted quite early on.
Which is good; the one in the other thread done broke.
simulateddave:
Depends on what you mean by “random”. If by random you mean “having no definite aim or purpose”, then it’s obvious that randomness cannot produce non-randomness. Randomness can only breed more randomness. To think otherwise is simply irrational.
joe4060:
Dude, do you even bother reading what I write?
I gave a link to a list of processes for how it happens. We know how it happens. My point is, we’ve observed it. We Know it happens. How it happens is irrelevant to your questions, which all require that evolution doesn’t happen. You’re not question the how, in the long run. You’re questioning whether or not it does. And we have proof that beneficial mutations happen. Mutations that add information to the genome.
No, are you going to address this, or continue to ignore it?
Your response is meaningless. I gave a link to proof that we’ve observed it. (Actually, as Ichthyic pointed out in #178, we observed evolution in progress over a hundred years ago.) You haven’t rebutted a damned thing — you’ve just denied it. That’s hardly the same thing. In fact, it’s effectively tacit admission you don’t have any rebuttal at all.
So how about it, Joe? Did you start this with the intent of actually pursuing the science? Or were you just full of copy-and-pasted shit from the get-go? And do you want to believe things that are demonstrably provable? Or would you rather just ignore the evidence against you, and believe things that are provably false?
And about that billion-light-year-away light we see…
And the irrational posted anyway…Joey, go back to your cave. You have nothing to add to any discussion above a grade school level. Which is all of them around here…
simulateddave:
*snort*
Beer out my nose. Ouch.
joey:
It depends. I have a 10-line perl script that shows randomness + selection = information. It’s the “selection” part of “the theory of evolution through natural selection” that makes the difference. So randomness + selection = life as we see it makes perfect sense.
I think this one has pretty much laminated himself into a corner.
joey:
As others have noted, you leave out the selection step, but even so, are you familiar with the ideal gas law? ;)
(Gas pressure is very precisely predictable, though it’s the sum of many many molecules with with individually random momentum)
I think someone is trying to start a new Pharyngula meme.
nigelTheBold:
Let’s stay with the definition of random (having no definite aim or purpose) that I’ve given in my previous post. It cannot be reasoned that things that have no definite aim or purpose (random) can result in things that have definite aim or purpose (non-random).
If you start with only randomness in the beginning, then anything that results could only be more randomness. So that must also mean that “life as we see it” is also random.
John Morales:
I was clear from the start what definition of random I was using.
And yet it has nothing to do with how it interacts with selection.
Even away from the abortion argument, you do a piss poor job.
Who could have guessed that?
joey:
And I was clear that the pressure exerted by an enclosed gas is not random, though it’s entirely produced by the aggregate of the random momenta of its constituents.
Joey, read this paper, then apologize for you fuckwittery, and go away and never post here again as you aren’t worthy…You are totally and utterly refuted…
If that’s what it meant, then it would mean the definite aim or purpose of randomness isn’t to produce something non-random, yet that doesn’t mean something aimless or purposeless could not (aimlessly) produce something else which itself has its own aim or purpose.
But that’s not what random means in this context anyway. It’s just a lack of order. Orderly doesn’t always mean teleological.
You might try reading just a bit after the bite-sized quote you pulled out of that wiki article (my emphasis):
**How about that, an example of an orderly pattern produced by randomness. Which you said can’t happen, and to even think of is irrational. Because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Jainine:
You’re probably right it has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. It’s a Friday evening and I found myself with some rare time to kill. So I’m reading Thunderdome posts in reverse order, and that statement by simulateddave simply caught my attention, and for some reason I felt like responding to it. It might be derailing the current discussion, but hey…this is Thunderdome.
——
John Morales:
And I agree with you. But it’s unrelated to what I said, simply because we’re using two different meanings of the world random.
consciousness razor:
But that isn’t the definition I gave. Again, I’m speaking of “no definite aim or purpose”. If I meant “just a lack of order”, then I would have said so.
Just laminating it on for size.
Seeing if it laminates.
y’lam?
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
joey:
No, I’m using yours: “having no definite aim or purpose”.
(Are you now claiming gas molecules’ momenta have definite aim or purpose?)
Did you read what I said at the very beginning, just before that? How about you respond to that? I’ll quote it again:
“If that’s what it meant, then it would mean the definite aim or purpose of randomness isn’t to produce something non-random, yet that doesn’t mean something aimless or purposeless could not (aimlessly) produce something else which itself has its own aim or purpose.”
For that matter, the definite aim or purpose of randomness (as defined by the OED) also isn’t to produce something random. Yet it manifestly does produce random things (at the very least), without needing that as its aim or purpose. That because, according to that definition, it doesn’t have one at all.
Randomness produces things, doesn’t it? So without having the aim of producing non-random things, why couldn’t it produce non-random things (which, by this definition, have a purpose)? What exactly is supposed to be stopping that from happening? Aimlessness?
joey:
But that’s how I was using it. I added something else, but not to the definition of random.
A random event happening all by its lonesome? Random.
A random event happening in the real world, where it has to interact with other events (both random and non-random)? Still random, but the results are less-than-random.
Sure, life is random. We could’ve been something else entirely, had nature shot craps differently. Hell, there’s no reason homo sapiens exists, except for randomness. So in that respect, we’re totes random.
On the other hand, our physiology is not entirely random (and on that, joe4060 and I agree).
So I’m still confused about your point.
Joey, the presuppositional godbot, is trying to pretend the aim is decided by its imaginary deity. You know the deity where it can’t produce any evidence it exists, or that its alleged holy book is anything other than mythology/fiction. You know, physical evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Something equivalent to the eternally burning bush.
In other words, Joey is a professional liar and bullshitter who should be derided and mocked at every opportunity. It has nothing to offer to any discussion, as it has no basis in reality….
Let me put it this way
How did everything come into existence from nothing?
If there is no evidence that it did, then why should we believe that it did?
The Big Bang Theory (before the Big Bang there was nothing)
Nothing begets nothing. What property does nothing have that allows it to come into existence? it cannot have any properties; otherwise it would not be nothing.
Anything that has a beginning in existence cannot be its OWN cause; it requires causation.
The logic that everything came from nothing, of its own accord, without cause (design without a designer) could at best be described as a mad pagan fantasy.
The question could also be asked: why was it the universe that came into existence rather than something else? And why did it begin to exist at THAT particular moment, instead of any other moment?
If things LOOK designed then logically they ARE designed.
The cause of the universe would need to be a transcendent, uncaused, timeless, changeless, and immaterial (outside of time and space). There would need to exist beforehand, a personal, all powerful, unembodied mind that could cause everything to come into being from nothing.
For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. Romans 1:20
DThen you should have no trouble presenting evidence how your imaginary deity into being from nothing. You can’t presuppose “eternal”. THAT IS ACKNONOWLEDING YOU HAVE NOTHING BUT PRESUPPOSITION.
Same with your imaginary deity.
Only in the fantasy of a presuppostionalist liar and bullshitter such as yourself. Remember your imaginary deity.
Nope, design is imagined by those looking at it, not the facts.
Including itself, coming from nothing. Which is the utter and total fatal failure of your fuckwitted philosophy. What created the creator. Put the fuck up or shut the fuck up.
Since your deity/creator is a presuppositional fantasy of yours, this is an utterly and totally illogical piece of bullshit.
A Universe from Nothing.
consciousness razor:
I’m not sure what you mean by “the definite aim or purpose of randomness”. Have I suggested somewhere (mistakenly) that randomness has purpose?
How can something aimless/purposeless produce something that has aim/purpose? What “aim” or “purpose” would this thing have?
Again, I don’t know what you mean by “definite aim or purpose of randomness”. It’s an oxymoron.
Again, exactly what purpose would these non-random things have? Does a hydrogen atom have a purpose? What about a star or a galaxy?
nigelTheBold:
But see, you’re conflating the two definitions of random in these two paragraphs. As with my discussion with CR above, I’ll simply substitute “random” with “purposeless”.
I’m going to assume that you think that the process of evolution is purposeless. Do you feel that our physiology is purposeless? If so, at what point does actual purpose come into existence?
nigelTheBold:
Just raising the question on how purposelessness can give rise to purpose. It can’t. So given the premise the universe began with absolute purposelessness, then can there really be such a thing as true purpose in this universe? Purpose must simply be an illusion.
simulateddave
“Given 4 billion years how could it not?”
Thats presuming that it is 4 billion years old.
Why would randomness remain anything other than randomness?
What would cause randomness to become less random?
two posts above I meant to say…
Do you feel that our physiology has purpose?
joe4060:
Look, are you going to sit still and address one epistemological question at a time, or are you just going to jump around like a cat on a hot tin roof?
Okay. Let’s look at this rationally. Like scientists.
We know rationally that 0 = nothing. We also know rationally that 1 – 1 = 0. That is, something plus the negative of that something is 0. So we know we can effectively have something from nothing, as long as the negation of that something also exists.
Now, do we see this in nature?
As it turns out, yes. Virtual particle pairs pop in and out of existence all the time. We see this exhibited in the Casimir effect. So not only do we know you can get something from nothing, we have proof this actually happens. All the time!.
Do you sense a theme with your challenges here? That your challenges have already been addressed, and there is scientific, observable data to show how it works?
The same is true here. You can get something from nothing — as long as the negation of that something exists.
Well, if this is a universal fact, then the same is true of God. Otherwise, you’re just creating an exception that could also apply the to the universe. If you just claim without logic that everything needs a cause, but that God doesn’t, then why should you assume the universe needs a cause? There’s no logical reason to assume one needs a cause, but the other does not.
And of the two, we’ve observed a universe. We’ve not observed a God.
Also, let’s consider the reasons you’ve given for the necessity of a God. “Life is complex,” you say, “and so needs a creator.” But the creator is, by definition, far more complex than life. So if the necessity of a creator is dictated by the complexity of life, then the additional complexity of a creator surely necessitates a far grander CREATOR of the creator? And that further complexity of the CREATOR necessitates something grander still?
And so on.
Because if it were something else, we’d be different beings asking the exact same question.
If your parents hadn’t fucked the night you were conceived, but the night following, you wouldn’t be you. Instead, it’d be Josephina asking all these silly questions. This is called the anthropic principle. You’re here because of chance. If chance were to have gone a different way, it would’ve been someone else considering their lot in the universe.
But mostly, who’s to say there aren’t a lot of different universes out there? Just like you are only one in 9 billion asking, “Why me?” there might be another 9 billion universes out there, with different people asking, “How did I get here?”
Not that a bunch of different universes are required to explain why you’re here. You’re here because of random chance, selected for by nature, and the fact that your parents were feeling particularly amorous on one particular night, and your father ejaculated at just the right time.
This is demonstrably false. The rose rock looks designed, but is a natural formation. The appearance of design is not indicative of design.
Plus, there’s all kinds of design flaws in anatomy. I mean, long thoracic nerve. Amiright?
So the logic you’ve presented is self-refuting. You explain the complexity of life by proposing a creator who is, by definition, far more complex than life. So, by the very logic you employ, the creator can only be explained by something of even more complexity.
But if you propose the creator needs no cause, then the same is true of any complexity you are trying to explain. If the infinitely-complex creator needs no cause, then the far less complex universe needs no cause. Nor does the life that falls within it.
So are you sure you want to pursue this line of argument? I assure you, it is not philosophically fulfilling for the creationist.
And that’s another problem: not only is reality arrayed against you. Bare philosophy is your enemy as well. Both that which we observe, and that which we can logically deduce, insist you are wrong.
That’s gotta sting.
Now. About that billion-year-old light…
joe4060:
What makes you think it did?
Why do you imagine you should believe it did?
Nope: “The Big Bang is the first moment in the history of the Universe where we can describe it as a hot, dense, expanding state, full of matter, antimatter and radiation.”
You are the one who claims to believe that the universe had to be caused, rather than just existing.
Also, so many ridiculous and incoherent concepts!
• something cannot exist if nothing exists;
• something cannot be transcendent if there is nothing to transcend;
• postulating something is uncaused to account for the cause of something that is not known to be caused is otiose;
• something timeless cannot be a cause, since causation is a time-bound concept;
• something changeless cannot be a mind, since thinking involves changes in mind-state;
• something immaterial is not made of anything, hence it must be nothing rather than something.
joe4060:
You said it yourself in #162:
The randomness creates variation in the genome. I’ve pointed how mutations happen, and I’ve pointed out that we’ve observed and documented beneficial mutations that have added information to the genome, leading to a new species.
I’ve done everything you’ve required to demonstrate evolution is true — by your own admission, in #162.
But, let me answer your question:
Natural selection.
Or selection of any type, really. Randomness creates the pool of information. Selection selects the bits that make sense. Those bits are then slightly modified in a random fashion to create the next pool of information. Those that make the most sense are selected.
It works. I have a 10-line perl script that does exactly this. The principle is simple to comprehend, simple to demonstrate. We’ve seen it in action.
So exactly where is your comprehension problem? Or, if you’ve progressed beyond simple comprehension, what’s your problem with the algorithm? Why do you think it won’t work, in spite of the fact that it’s been demonstrated both in computer models, and on life itself?
Those are your options. Either you have a comprehension problem (which seems likely at this point), or you have a logical problem with it. And if you have a logical problem, can you please present it?
Because so far, all you’ve managed to demonstrate is comprehension problems. You’ve not made it past nigel’s gremlin.
nigelthebold
“I gave a link to a list of proccesses for how it happens”
…ON OCCASIONS, the effect may be positive in a given environment.
This just means a bad mutation may occasionally have an advantage in a particular environment. It is still a bad mutation.
“And about that billion-light-year-away light…”
Who cover yourself with light as with a garment, who stretch out the heavens like a curtain Psalm 104:2
As the heavens and stars expand away into the distance they leave a trail of light behind. When we look at the stars thats what we see.
You’re a fucking idiot
Natural processes. You haven’t shown otherwise, which requires you to cite the peer reviewed scientific literature. But then, if you weren’t an abject presuppositional loser, you would know that. LOSER.
No seriously the conversation is done. You are an idiot.
This is the greatest tragedy of my day, so see you write that and know you will NEVER have the understanding needed to realize how fucking impossibly stupid what you just wrote was.
You have figuratively just shat yourself in front of everyone and are now leaving a fine trail of urine around your feet as you smugly assert how awesome you are.
“He presses some buttons, and the sound of a subway train echoes around the room. he turns it down so that the slow, hypnotic electronic beat that follows becomes ambient. A woman starts to sing, I don’t know who she is but her voice is soft yet rasping and the beat is measured, deliberate… erotic. Oh my. It’s music to make love to.”~50 Shades Darker
joey:
I think you arrive at the right conclusion by the wrong reasoning.
No, there’s no purpose to the universe. But that doesn’t mean there’s no purpose.
First, purpose requires an intentional agent, which implies intelligence. As the universe is not innately intelligent*, the universe as no purpose. And in the way you seem to mean, it can’t have a purpose, as the universe is doomed to either heat-death, or collapse.
But that doesn’t mean that intentional agents that exist within the universe can’t have purpose. It just means there’s no eternal purpose (whatever the fuck that means).
* This assumes the universe isn’t some vast quantum computer with built-in artificial intelligence, designed specifically to run a simulation of a universe that might give rise to intelligence, in which we are mere objects running in a planck-time-scale event loop. Hell, this would be perfectly in-line with joe4060’s conception of creation, but make a fuck-ton more sense. Yet I still don’t buy it.
Joe I swear to every conceivable god if you cite the bible one more frelling time I will start responding with copypasta of gay porn fan fic
We don’t know (and it doesn’t need to be the case) that everything came into existence from nothing. Something could have always existed, and there’s no need for that “something” to be a god. But if there were a state in which nothing existed, then there was nothing to stop things coming into existence, so that doesn’t seem like it would need any other explanation. (Assuming we could ever have one, what would there be to explain?)
Like I said, you don’t need to, but that doesn’t mean the alternative is the existence of a god. There may have always been something, and thus never a case where literally everything came from literally nothing. It doesn’t make a difference. It’s not relevant to the existence of a god, for which you have no evidence.
False. That is not the big bang theory. Read about it.
Not necessarily.
Thus, it has no properties which would prevent something from coming into existence. If the idea is that there are no physical laws or any other rules (except necessary ones like logical consistency, which we’ve just decided should be applied to it), why couldn’t something exist? What’s impossible about that?
Why? Causation is just our way of talking about how one event is related to another. That itself isn’t a physical law, and there’s no reason to think it could be applied to “everything.”
What’s “pagan” about it? Pagan religions are either dead or absurd parodies of dead religions. And something coming from nothing wasn’t exactly popular in antiquity anyway, when pagan religions were. But you’re really ignorant. Does “pagan” just mean “not Christian”? If so, who the fuck cares?
So now we’re assuming there was time before there was “everything”? That “nothing” includes time, which means it isn’t absolutely nothing?
That’s not logical. That’s just assuming the way things look is the way they are, which is just the mark of gullible, incurious person who’s probably going to remain ignorant. But everything doesn’t look designed anyway, definitely not intelligently designed.
Several non sequiturs packed together right there. This is not good for you.
Why would it need to be any of those things? How many unembodied minds (or even embodied ones) have you ever seen causing things to exist, out of something or out of nothing? What does it mean to “cause things to exist”? I can make sense of “cause something to happen,” because you can interact with that thing which already exists, to change it or its relationship with other things. But if there’s nothing there, how would anything “cause it to be”? How are you not blazing right past the problem and pretending you’ve solved it? It only makes the claim worse by saying it was done by an unembodied mind, since it would also need to be explained how that interacts with physical stuff at all, the way we can because our minds are embodied in a physical system.
Without excuse, eh? This is a thinly veiled threat of eternal punishment, right? I’m guessing my punishment in hell will be hearing dumbass apologists coming up with an infinite number of variations on Pascal’s wager.
Since your deity is imaginary, and the babble is book of mythology/fiction, this is a meaningless statement showing you arent’ arguing from evidence, but presupposition. Loser territiory, as only losers have nothing but presupposition. Which is typical of all godbots, creobots, and IDiots. They can’t show their imaginary deity exists….
joe4060:
Uhm, you realize that, if it gives an advantage, it’s a good mutation?
Dude. There’s no gremlin in the engine. Stop talking as if there is.
joe4060:
And what we see is galaxies over ten billion light years away. That’s not a trail of light you see. It’s light that has travelled over ten billion years. That’s a bare requirement. As galaxies can’t travel faster than the speed of light, and light can’t travel faster than the speed of light, galaxies that we observe over 10 billion light years away would take over 10 billion years to see.
That’s just simple logic, Joe.
nigelthebold
“What would cause randomness to become less random”
This refers to the origin of the process of natural selection i.e. what caused natural selection to begin without someone or something to bring it into existence in the first place.
Its no good claiming the credit for something that already exsists.
Nope. Saying that the purpose isn’t X is consistent with saying there is no X whatsoever.
How? Aimlessly or randomly, I suppose. The purpose a product has would depend on it, not on the (nonexistent) purpose of its origins.
There’s no need to depend on the universe for a purpose, so it doesn’t matter that the universe is purposeless. You make purposes yourself just fine without having to ask the universe for permission.
There is no origin of NS as your imaginary deity doesn’t exist to do so. It just happened when life occurred, and there was advantage to those with certain traits. Try understanding science, not repeating idiocy from elsewhere.
Whereas you keep claiming something that doesn’t exist. Your imaginary deity and your mythical/fictional holy book. What an abject loser without evidence….
nerd of the redhead
So you hate God. How can you hate something that does not exist?
Evolution: a delusional presupposition.
How can I hate something that is a figment of your imagination. I keep asking you to show it isn’t just a delusion in your feeble mind. That requires solid and conclusive physical evidence which you are incapable of presenting, as it doesn’t exist, and you know that. An honorable person of honesty and itegrity would shut the fuck up. why can’t you?
Evolution, supported both directly and indirectly by over a million scientific papers. Your imaginary deity/creator, supported only by your delusions… I win, you lose.
nerd of the redhead
Evidence? Go and look in the mirror and you will see evidence, since you are made in God’s image
Because energy went into processes that produced non-random change.
The second law of thermodynamics essentially states that randomness increases in systems which are left to their own devices. Systems which have external energy being pumped into them can buck this trend for a finite period of time. They can produce complex assemblies which have non-random behavior.
If the sun went out tomorrow, evolution would stop and everything would die.
Consider this a warning shot
Who this this god you talk about? It doesn’t exist, and you haven’t show the physical evidence that would pass muster with scientists, magicians, and professional debunkers as being of divine, and not natural (scientifically explained), origin. Your presuppositions are your delusions. We, and the lurkers, all know you are a delusional fool without evidence. Otherwise, you would lead with it rather than your OPINION and your ATTITUDE. Both of which are in the toilet.
nigelTheBold:
I wonder if joe4060 will invoke Last Thursdayism to explain billion year old light…
****
Joe4060:
I agree with you about the universe. Everything looks designed. To be designed, there must be a designer. Odin did a great job when he created the universe. No idea why you think the creator in the bible did it. Everyone knows the god of the bible isn’t real.
Hurin midnight dj
Energy? What can energy do? It does not have a mind to design and guide any processes. It is just energy.
That the trouble with evolution it can only go around in circles. Its proponents always end up looking up their own backside.
Stick to playing records brother.
Since your deity is imaginary, existing only between your ears, this is a nonsensical and meaningless statement. Either prove your presuppositions or shut the fuck up.
#281
Bollocks. Latest data showed it was either saturn or. Abzur and thiamat. . .those odinites again…
No, that is you and your imaginary deity that doesn’t exist. You can’t put up, you can’t shut up. The realm of liars, bullshitters, con-men, and godbots worldwide. Loser city….
Odin didn’t create the universe. Odin killed Ymir and formed Midgard from his body and the oceans from his blood. Ymir formed when the primordial fire of Muspell met the primordial ice of Niflheim and produced a fertile region in Ginnungagap.
Odin wasn’t even among the first Gods in the nine worlds. His mother and father were licked out of a block of ice by a cow.
Joe4060:
Odin, Vili and Ve created the Earth out of Ymir’s carcass. They made humanity in their image. Sadly, I learned that I was made in the image of Loki. Apparently all gay men are made in the image of trickster god of humanity. You lucked out I guess, if you are heterosexual. Looking like Odin is sooooo much cooler than looking like Loki.
That doesn’t work, Cupcake. That god of yours and his son identify as male. I have different equipment, along with half the human race. We aren’t made in that image at all.
tony 2012
“I agree with you, everything looks designed.
No idea why you think the creator in the Bible did it”
Well then who did?
Hurin:
Sigh…ruined my plan.
joe4060:
I told you: Odin created the universe.
And evolution is guided by Odin.
You would know that if you were not following the false evil biblical god.
Joe
There are a finite number of things energy can do. Energy can enhance the rate at which elements combine to form chemical structures, and there are characteristic patterns in the structures that form. Those patterns are rigorously determined by the quantum mechanical properties of the stable atoms this universe can furnish. Some subset of the structures that form are a useful basis for lifeforms.
Lifeforms come about because as complexity builds, at some point self replicating structures can form. Once those have been formed, the can be shaped, not just by the fundamental physics and chemistry, but also by replication dynamics determined by the environment of the planet they are present on. Its determinism all the way down. You just imagine the universe to be a lot less structured than it actually is.
Tony:
So did a fucktonne of other gods.
Caine fleur du mal
“That god of yours and his son identify as male”
So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis 1:27
If you want hate God just hate him. Why keep looking for excuses?
Tony
For that I apologize. I did not mean to ruin your plan, but I do take cows very seriously.
From here on the now closed New Rules thread :
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/06/the-new-rules/comment-page-1/#comment-423708
@189.pelamun, the Linguist of Doom
What if your “knowledge” about this “certain poster” was totally wrong and a gross misunderstanding on your part?
What if you and others here are too quick to judge people as supposedly “vile human beings” based on little on no or precious little evidence other than disagreements on a few issues or points?
What if the person you’re accusing of favouring genocide isn’t in favour of it at all and even seeks to prevent it perhaps by methods you disapprove of? (Thereby ironically putting *you* closer to the pro-genocide side of the line?)
Now I don’t know who this “certain poster” pelamun, the Linguist of Doom was or is.
But in some past comment threads people have wrongly accused me of being all sorts of horrible things – including, go figure, a nazi – merely for supporting the right of the world’s tiny single Jewish nation to defend itself vigourously against the Islamic nations seeking to wipe it off the map.
Yes, I may have said the odd OTT thing when tired and drunk but as I have since repeatedly pointed out this does NOT make me a nazi. (Note esp. Ing – only people who actually espouse nazi policies which include oh yeah wiping out jews and destroying Israel and are members of neo-nazi parties should be so described!) Nor any sort of rightwinger; just because the leftwing has at times displayed a strong unfortunate tendency towards anti-Semtism / Judaeophobia doesn’t necessarily make someone who is pro-Israel a rightwinger. The political Right too has its anti-Semites.
At the risk of being accused of tone trolling – an excuse commonly used to dodge questions like do these people actually sometimes have a good point – I do think some commenters here tend to fly off the handle rushing to judgements and condemning too quickly and too strongly.
I also see that this blog is sometimes heavily biased towards or at least very soft on Islam relative to other faiths (eg. Christianity and Judaism) and is frequenctly too harsh on Israel applying the standard leftwing double standard against it and in favour of the Arab side of this ongoing conflict.
I suppose I can expect a whole series of bullying abusive comments in response to this calm, rational and reasonable comment here. Which is why i really hate this whole unmoderated thunderdome idea and will probably just put this up for others to consider and do little or no more here.
Here’s an idea: if you hate this whole unmoderated thunderdome idea, stay the fuck out of it and don’t attempt to use it in a deliberate and desperate plea for attention.
Corrections for clarity :
1. What if you and others here are too quick to judge people as supposedly “vile human beings” based on no or precious little evidence other than disagreements on a few issues or points?
2.Now I don’t know who this “certain poster” pelamun, the Linguist of Doom referred to there was or is.
3. .. the political Leftwing has at times displayed a strong unfortunate tendency towards anti-Semitism / Judaeophobia ..
4. At the risk of being accused of tone trolling – an excuse commonly used to dodge questions like, ‘do these people actually sometimes have a good point’
5. This blog .. is frequently too harsh on Israel applying the standard leftwing double standard against it and in favour of the Islamic Jihadist (not soley Arab butalso iranian and Islamist more generally) side of this ongoing conflict.
6. Which is why I really hate this whole unmoderated thunderdome idea and wish it were moderated more fully and made more reasonable and less prone to gang up bullying and abuse in tone. (Gasp that dreaded ‘t’ word!)
For the 11tinth billion time StevoR, no one is judging you too quickly or harshly. We listened to what you said and are judging you on that. You are a fucking horrific person.
@298. Caine, Fleur du mal :
Given the choice of an alternative thread venue I would.
If the “New Rules” thread had been open I’d have posted that there.
I notice also you have totally failed to consider and address the substance of my comment and merely committed the attributing motivation / casting aspersions personal attack logical fallacy.
Just as I called it in the comment itself. How predictable. How sad.
Yeah STevOR boo fucking hoo. I wish the rules were more strictly enforced to keep racist genocide promoting shit heads who dishonestly hide behind antisemitism all the while fapping to nazi-esq propaganda would be removed after the 6th thread they hijack. But here we are again, watching you spurt hate cum all over your face
Oh and also? People have been respecting that 3 post rule and that ignorance rule. People have been giving you far more slack than an asshole like you deserves and generally leave you alone unless you bring it up. Which you do, because you’re an obsessed hateful moron.
Caine:
. Odin is ::wink wink::
Comment by StevoR blocked. [unkill][show comment]
@300. Wrong Ing you fucking liar. Totally and completely 100 % wrong and the exact opposite of the truth as per your usual.
The horrible person is you – but you of course fail to recognise and acknowledge that reality.
You owe me multiple apologies – and lost badly and repeatedly by Godwin’s law – & you know it, I know it and everyone here knows it.
Time you tried to redeem yourself by being honest, thoughtful and offering those long overdue apologies to me and everyone else and changing your views and behaviour to align with reality and being a decent rational human being.
I’m not holding my breath though.
Tony:
No, no. Isis, Osiris and Mithra, they are all real. And that Zeus, talk about a jealous bastard…
You really, really, don’t want to piss off Tiamat, though.
SteveoR:
If you don’t like the Thunderdome, simply do not come here. I don’t believe I have read your comments that imply a support for genocide, but given that many people have, and they feel you support that, have you ever stopped to think WHY they feel this way?
Dude people have shown you how you sound just like Bin Laden.
I’d feel very bad about myself, except I’m not the cheerleader for murder.
Gee I’m sorry, I’ll go out and buy some piano wire to strangle one of my Arab friends tomorrow, happy?
And, Caine, Fleur du mal, killfilling people you disagree with to hide from reality and considering what they have to say.
That’s cowardly and further shows you’ve lost the argument too.
@Tony
Oh don’t even give this fucker that benefit of doubt.
He bugged me demanding to know HOW I could be friends with Muslims or Arabs since the idea was so alien to him.
Tony:
:snort: Stevo is a full on genocide fan. He’s a fucking moron who comes across as a stone cold sociopath. He’s best ignored, otherwise he’ll spill his loathsome rhetoric of hate all over the damn place.
StevoR:
Self-serving putative opinion based on an unwarranted inference.
(Pitiful that first you whine about purported bullying, then crow when you’re ignored)
Ing! You are being so unfair! It is a well known fact that brown skinned muslims are a sub-human species of primate. That makes it ethical to call for the nuking of the countries they come from!
Ing:
I wasn’t actually trying to give the benefit of the doubt. I don’t recall reading the inflammatory posts by StevoR. If anyone has a link handy, I will take a look.
I just wanted to point out to him that there might be a justifiable reason for the animosity directed his way.
Ever the idiot, I see. I’m not arguing with you, fuckwit. Refusing to pander to your incessant need for attention isn’t cowardly, it simply speaks to my not suffering fools at all, let alone gladly. There are plenty of people here who are worth paying attention to – you aren’t one of them.
ReReading about that israel thing here, just a quick question for all of you who care about it.
Three state solution, yes or no and pro and cons please.
@Tony
If he responded to me telling him “I am mad because what you’re saying means you’re advocating the death or endangerment of people I know and care about personally” with “NO YOU’RE THE BAD PERSON WHO SHOULD CHANGE THEIR VIEWS, GODWIN’S LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAW IS IRREFUTABLE!!!!” What the fuck makes you think you can get through that lead dense wall of fat surrounding his brain?
Tony, if you ask SG, I am sure he will provide a link.
@yubal
My ideal is the fantasy that Israel can exist as a real equitable state and not have apartheid and treat all its citizens equally. Partially because I think it’s an abomination for Israel to get anywhere near the ‘master race/living space/apartheid’ shit. But I’m a moral monster so can’t trust me
I assume StevoR is pissed because people told him he didn’t understand USA culture and law, and he doesn’t feel comfortable continuing that argument, so he’s dealing with his lingering anger by trying to start a fight on one of his usual, preferred topics.
Does that sound about right, StevoR?
If, within the last day or so, you had another, different fight, unrelated to the Bill O’Reilly thread, then I’ve probably misunderstood your motivation here. Please feel free to point me to that other fight so I can issue any appropriate correction.
A SINGLE issue or point is more than enough to make a judgement of vile inhumanity when that issue is something like the bombing of innocent children.
Of course StevoR’s pissing about being bullied would ring a lot more true if he didn’t fucking bring the topic up himself out of the blue seemingly because he specifically wants to start a fight over it.
#320
That was an brilliantl example for how not to answer a question.
Please try again.
@SGBM
Any chance you can provide a link to any of the numerous times where someone other than me pointed out the assholery and comparison to dehumanizing propaganda? Cause you know, it isn’t just me. I’m just the person who was to mean and insensitive to point out to the jerk that it is fucking personal.
What if we think those “methods” (as you coldly describe them) are genocide and that person thinks it isn’t? Shouldn’t we expect that person to give a coherent explanation of why it isn’t genocide, if it involves killing large groups of people? And when they don’t give such an explanation, shouldn’t we continue to think that person supports genocide?
@yubal
Go fuck yourself, you’re not in charge of the conversation and no one gives a shit about your games
Hilarious how joe the incompetent illiterate contradicts his own argument in his own selected quote.
And of course the pitiful cherry-picking is noted:
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? John 14:10
Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. John 4:15
So where in the bible is there any quote comparing God to a mother?
@309. Ing, the lying bullying Jihadist sympathising scumbag :
No. I don’t want and have never asked you to kill or even break away from your friends – I want them to stop being fucking Jihadists who want to committ genocide against Israel!
I’m not the hateful one. I don’t go around calling people nazis or supporting and excusing Islamic Jihad.
No I asked politely about your Arab friends afetr you raised the topic.
Yes I do find islam an alien, evil fucked up death cult. because it is.
Yes I do find it hard to see how you can be friends with Muslims because, y’know supporting jihad and supporting women being imprisoned behind burkas, genitally mutilated and honour killed as the Arabs do is kinda the exact fucking opposite of the progressive values I’d expected you as a poster here to have.
But then I’m the sort of “hateful” person who opposes homicide-suicide bombings, FGM, women in burkas and being genitally mutilated, honour killed and generally treated like shit. You cleraly support that – and the genocide of Israel’s six million plus Jews and the replacement of the worlds only tiny jewish state with another fucking Jihadistan. So yeah, call me the bad guy here. Make me laugh at you some more.
You have no idea who I am and keep imagining a ridiculous strawperson in my place. Well I am NOT that fucking strawman you wrongly created in your minds and its about fucking time you realised that and behaved accordingly.
If you choose not to express an opinion on the subject matter thst is fine for me. Just keep out if you have nothing to say. OK?
Yes, Sreverino, you fucking got us. We all coddle anything Islamic. Because atheists and Muslims are natural allies.
I hope you have no friends who are christian because of the Phelps clan, Terry Jone and all people who advocate for the murder of medical personal who provide abortions. Because of progressive politics and blah, blah, blah, fucking blah…
Ing,
I think this comes close to what you’re asking about: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/02/04/say-what-ron-paul/comment-page-1/#comment-264208
Bonus, in that thread StevoR explicitly advocates pre-emptive war.
@326.consciousness razor :
Not if they repeatedly clarify and tell you that you’ve misunderstood and that they do NOT support genocide.
Which i have done.
I do NOT support genocide.
How many times do I have to fucking say that?
I support fighting Jihadist terrorists and their enablers and supporters.
I support doing so vigourously and not letting those terrorists aquire and use The Bomb.
I support the use of deadly force if it is needed to save lives and prevent genocide from being committed against innocent parties.
What part of this exactly do you have a problem with?
As for killing “large numbers of people” – war unfortunately happens. The Kaiser’s troops and their allies in World War I had a large numbers of people killed. The Arabs lost large numbers of people in the numerous ongoing Arab-Israeli wars. The hordes of Genghis Khan lost large numbers of people. It sucks but sometimes if you’re not to be destroyed yourself it is unavoidable.
Do you choose your own nation, friends and family being killed or your enemies? When this is, lets remember, you cannot bargain or make reasonable arrangements with them which when it comes to terrorists we cannot?
Israel keeps offering peace to its foes. Its foes keep rejecting peace. The Islamists Jihad against Israel (& also the West) keeps going even when the Jews offer 90% + of what the Arabs demand.
What is Israel supposed to do – committ another Masada mass suicide? Would that make y’all happy?
Eep! There is a decent person around here who uses a nym very much like “Steverino”.
+++++
consciousness razor,
Thanks!
+++++
joey,
It’s nice to see you again. Might be a bit confusing with joe4060 around here too, and I am a bit dismayed to learn that you are even more willfully ignorant than I previously imagined you to be. but I’m glad you dropped by.
@ steve
It might be actually a good idea not to fight at all and to figure ways that leave everyone space.
@332. strange gods before me ॐ :
Note that I’ve already stated I’ve gotten carried away and said things I later regretted when I was drunk, tired and emotional. Mea culpa.
Don’t forget I later apologised for and clarified some of my comments.
Yes, pre-emptive war to stop genocide for before it happens rather than after is, I think, preferable to the worst case alternatives such as allowing genocide to happen first in a situation where war is clearly inevitable.
(See the history of the 1967 Six Day War and read some of the Islamists rhetoric promising genocide and extermination of the Jewish state for instance. Rhetoric the Jihadists have never backed away from and renounced.)
Your problem with pre-emptive war then is what? You’d prefer Israel was, say, hit by Iranian nukes before they responded to the threat of them aquiring them?
@335. yubal
If only that were possible. If only.
But the Islamists cannot seem to accept israel exists and are determined to destroy it so what’s Israel to do then?
The Jewish state has tried and keep trying to make peace. They have given up lands gained with Israeli blood,sweat and tears in wars the Arabs started – the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza strip, parts of Judea and Samaria (aka the “west bank”), southern Lebanon and in return they get continued rocket fire and Hamas and Hezbollah unceasingly trying to exterminate them.
StevoR, so it’s just the Middle East conflict that has you advocating pre-emptive war?
—
PS do you have any idea of the proportion of Muslims living in the Middle East out of the total number of Muslims?
StevoR:
Do you think Australia should have gone to war with Indonesia (Islam is the State religion) after the 2002 Bali Bombing by Jemaah Islamiyah?
[correction]
Oops, it’s Malaysia that has Islam as the State religion and not Indonesia (though the vast majority of its populace is Muslim).
What? I’ve never seen you apologize for anything important, like all the times you’ve advocated genocide.
Not true.
No matter how many time StevoR says it, it does not make it true.
Or perhaps we could say that StevoR supports courses of action and policy decisions that lead, inevitably, to genocide.
So, perhaps he really doesn’t support genocide, but is instead just a stupid idiot who doesn’t realize that the things he supports will cause genocide.
Unfortunately, StevoR claims to be Australian, so perhaps this might be more relevant to him: Israel authorises settler homes after UN vote.
There are many ways of fighting Jihadist terrorists. Some ways lead directly to genocide. Some ways promote the possibility of genocide. Some ways do not.
StevoR supports the first two kinds of ways, and stays curiously silent about the third.
It has not been legitimate to gain lands through war no matter who started the war, no matter how much is paid in blood, sweat, or tears, since WWI, at the least.
If someone attacks you and invades your land, you are entitled to fight back and drive them off your land. But you are NOT entitled to follow them back into their own land and take their land from them, beyond what is needed in the short term to win the war of self-defence, after which you are obligated to give that land back immediately after peace is settled.
Israel “gave up” lands they were NEVER ENTITLED TO POSSESS in the first place.
It should be noted that the PLO in the West Bank has been seeking a negotiated peace with Israel since at least as far back as when Abbas became leader.
Israel’s response is to ignore them, put diplomatic and bureacratic roadblocks to them at every turn, and to engage in courses of action that legitimize their domestic rival, Hamas.
If Israel were truly interested in negotiating a peace, they could have had one with Abbas’ PLO at any time.
But that is apparently not what they want.
Pick any number. It is not the number of times you make an assertion, but what that assertion is and whether it’s true.
But for the sake of argument, let’s just say it’s one. Now since you’ve clearly exceeded that number, you can shut fuck up and go away, because your bigoted, violent fantasies — whether you call it “supporting genocide” or not — are not welcome here.
Notice how StevoR automatically assumes that Ing’s friends are “Jihadists who want to commit genocide against Israel”, when he knows absolutely nothing about Ing’s friends EXCEPT that they are Arab.
And StevoR has the nerve to ask Ing to apologize to him.
Simply pathetic.
water->ice
done.
how many millions of other examples do you wish to see?
oh, and about your personal definition of random?
yeah, you don’t get to randomly redefine words.
No need for SGBM to post a link. After reading the racist fucking comments by SteveoR @329, I am fucking disgusted.
If I could killfile that racist scumbag on my phone, I would.
How did “Israel” come to be a country?
[please use non-religious sources of information]
And for someone who hates the Thunderdome, he sure doesn’t have a problem being here.
Fuck you SteveoR.
earlier this week:
Israel and Palestine agree to cease fire and begin negotiating peace settlement.
UN votes to upgrade Palestine observer status.
Israel responds by ramping up illegal housing development in Palestine by 3000, DIRECTLY in the middle of Palestine.
hmm.
maybe it has far less to do with ISLAM and far more to do with right-wing politics?
idiot.
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, in favor of a Partition Plan that created the State of Israel.
common knowledge.
ROFLMAO
spoken just like a creationist.
interesting.
Ing,
Also http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/15/wanna-see-something-funny/#comment-433076
and http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/08/15/wanna-see-something-funny/#comment-435682
Bonus: in that thread StevoR acknowledges that he has advocated genocide, but wants people to stop talking about it because he was drunk.
I will quote and agree with Nick:
Ichthyic
re: Israel
I was trying for, like, rhetorical… like…
Well, I find myself officially detesting StevoR. Thanks for the links SGBM.
Let’s launch a pre-emptive strike against another country that we are not at war with so that they don’t kill us.
Yeah, starting a war, killing huge swaths of people to prevent them from MAYBE attacking us.
Thats disgusting. I completely understand the disgust people have for StevoR.
@ joe4060
You do realize that evolution is a fact? It already exists. Can you agree at least that much? I refer to evolution here specifically. We can get onto abiogenesis (quite a different topic) shortly.
Joe, we don’t hate your imaginary sky-deity (as suggested, it simply does not exist). What we do hate, and strive to undo, is the damage the lie of gods’ existences (there are many, yours is only a small part of the problem) does in society . You are a case in point. Through your indoctrination into goddist claptrap, you are living your life as someone deluded and separated from our shared reality. You sit there typing away on a device that has everything to do with the science that we are discussing . And sweet fuckall to do with any of the myriad imaginary gods . Yours is truly not unique, get over yourself already . For thousands of years, millions of people have suffered from like delusions. There really is nothing special about yours.
Have you ever noticed that worshippers of Wotan, Shaka, Zeus, The Flying Spaghetti Monster and the like are delusional? That they are worshipping something that simply is not there?
StevoR is moderation itself.
StevoR:
Ing, go apologize to StevoR right now for having
ArabMuslimJihadist friends (it’s all the same anyway, right).I see I’m a bit late, but in case anyone thought StevoR had mended his ways, here he is quite recently discussing the most efficient methods if massacring Palestinians with his buddy slc1: http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2012/11/17/violence-again-in-gaza-and-israel/#comment-141476
@ SGBM #113
I take it you are trying to understand it very much from the point of view “within the story”, following its own inner structure and logic. This is a world in which snakes talk and clay becomes flesh. I must confess (though I understand your approach is a good and rewarding one) that I am at the same time trying to get to grips with the context and the driving forces of the writer. I am also interested in the tropes he (male priest) draws upon. In my case, unlike yours, I need to know why the snake can talk. Does this have a rational explanation (“prescient wrt earthquakes”) or was it simply a common symbol (“wisdom”?) of the time, or did it refer (Lilith) to other myths that abounded at the time.
There is some commonality between the Redactor and Homer. They are both using this amazing new (at the time, for this purpose) medium of writing to fix the many word-of-mouth myths that make up the basis of their religions. The beauty of the spoken word is that, while it provides a narrative to make sense of life, it is forever flexible and makes alliance for an ever changing social, political and cultural landscape. The gods (certainly plural in the early accounts) could, through their actions, create a rational around these changing circumstances. By fixing this in a divine book (this is less true of Homer) the entire exercise became so much less flexible.
We currently deal with the likes of Joe4060, who having linked his world view to an arcane and irrelevant “holy” book, remain ever at odds with the reality about themselves.
dysomniak,
“if most of the Gazans don’t know what’s hit them”
I don’t even know what to say.
From dysomniacs linky:
StevoR somehow imagines that murdering said women with Daisy Cutter bombs is a “progressive” way to resolve feminist issues? Has this person grown up under the deleterious effects of bigoted Israeli propaganda (in which case there may be chance of reform) or is he like that normally?
A suggestion: Thunderdome was for locking up such trolls until they either reform or get banhammered. There is no reason why Mano’s blog should have to suffer. This is an excellent place to act as a large troll pen and will help keep the rest of FTB nice and clean.
Maybe not progressive, but those women will certainly never again suffer from sexism. Or anything else. Ever again.
This is as simple as I can make it
1. Everything in existence has a begining
2. Evolution does not have a begining
3. Therefore, evolution does not exist
All it does is claim credit for what is already there
It is completly pointless trying to defend something that does not exist, which was the whole object of my argument with Nigel, that is, to show that evolution is simply non-existent.
Creation has: In the begining God… Genesis 1:1
“Evolution” has: In the begining… DOH! Homer 101
@ Beatrice
I am not really in favour in completely silencing even such disgusting ideas as StevoR.
A huge problem, as far as I find, on goddist blogs is that they are very quick to ban outright whoever calls out their imaginary deity (be it GAWD ™ or ALLAH ™ ) . There are no comebacks, with the result that they devolve into syncophantic echo-chambers without any outlet for disagreement. On the other hand, there is no reason we would need to endure the likes of StevoR on every single thread. Further, in spite of his bigotted idiocy, StevoR is not that stupid. Perhaps if he has the chance to argue with people he otherwise respects, he may wake up and start to realise the error of his ways.
…except your God
theophontes,
I don’t know. On one hand, StevoR might improve. On the other, he has already been allowed to write things that would have gotten others banned long ago.
I’m not necessarily in favor of banning him, but confining him to Thunderdome might be a good idea. I’m sick of his hateful spiel being repeated in nearly every thread topic of which can in any way be connected to Islam.
joe4060, you are funny.
As Beatrice notes, your own contention works against you.
This is the form your argument:
(And you’ve claimed God did not have a beginning, so… ;) )
@
When did YHWH begin? Do you have any evidence for what you say?
Where do you get the idea it does not? Please give credible citations.
False premises ==> your statement is invalid.
Joe, do you notice that you are desperately seeking scientific endorsement for your religious views, whereas science is not seeking any endorsement from your imaginary deity? You realise that it is you who has the problem?
Please read nigelTheBold’s gremlin story again. I am afeared that you simply do not understand what he means – whether or not you think it pertains to yourself.
Who made you believe in YHWH? Your parents, your local priest, …? If you had been brought up in a Jewish or Islamic community, do you honestly think you would still hold your current convictions?
You have the opportunity to tell us these things right now. To witness for your Jeebus and Sky-daddy. If your arguments are convincing, you may win support for your Dieu-du-jour.
Um, theophontes.
Perhaps you’ve have made a teensy tiny error in that penultimate paragraph…
@ Beatrice
It is more than tiresome. If we can confine it all to one single carbuncle thread, we can keep all the verbal pus in one place.
If incarcerated denizens want to post on other threads thereafter, they will have to prove to the myrmidons of the Thunderdome thread that they have well and truly outgrown their crap.
@ John Morales
They are two different questions. First, very generally: “why YHWH?”. Secondly, he has very specific beliefs wrt his current delusion that diety.
(Indeed, I was a little unclear. I blame the free beer at Chinese (Xiamen) airports.)
FIFM:
1. Who made you believe in YHWH? Your parents, your local priest, …?
2. If you had been brought up in a Jewish or Islamic community, do you honestly think your convictions would be identical to those you currently hold? Explain to us why.
theophontes, no worries.
(May Osiris delay your flight)
BREAKING NEWS…BREAKING NEWS…BREAKING NEWS.
Some joe called joe4060 has completely destroyed the Theory of Evolution in a few comments on the Pharyngula Blog which is part of the Freethought Blogs.Com website.
Scientist worldwide are scrambling to review their previous research and are desperately trying to discover the identity of this awesome scientist and investigate what according to my source must be “ground breaking research”.
Although nothing has been reported yet, my source predicts that we might see some scientists committing suicide “Wall Street Crash” style due to the complete refutation of their life’s work.
Elsewhere, the biologist Prof. PZ Myers who is the owner of the Pharynula blog has been seen wandering aimlessly through the corridoors at the Universiry of Minnesota, Morris, where he is an associate proffessor mumbling incoherently something about a “craker”.
First indication of Prof? joe4060’s theory seems to be based on the astonishing revelation that “GOD DID IT”.
This report has been brought to you from the YOU WISH NEWS CORP.
The leading news channel and publisher from CLOUD CUCKOO LAND.
Your lie and your fallacious thinking starts here unless you prove your imaginary deity’s beginnings and existence. You make claims, you have shown no evidence for either. Makes everything you say lies and bullshit.
“Where you there?” is the stupid question creobots use against evolution. Now, were you there? Nope, you and nobody who is a creobot was, as man didn’t come about to later in the creation tale. It was written down after the fact. Your deity doesn’t exist, so it can’t be the word of it. It is all a creation myth borrowed from a neighbor. The Isreali scribes loved writing down other folks tales as their own.
Liar StevoR, you are the horrible person, being a paranoid islamophobic advocate of genocide. When are you going to apologize to us for spewing you hate, and then fade into the bandwidth with shame…I’m not holding my breath for you to do the honorable thing, as you have no honor.
You don’t support genocide, but want Islam atom bombed. What part of that is exactly a definition of someone supporting genocide don’t you understand? Oh, the logical position… Your word is worthless, nothing but lies and bullshit.
No, it isn’t. You just admitted it has advantages in a particular environment! News flash: there is not a single “perfect environment” out there. There are millions of microenvironments out there, and those environments themselves change frequently.
That’s why evolution doesn’t stop, and why most populations that can’t evolve quickly die out. There is no “chain of being”, there is no “perfectly adapted” state that organisms strive for. They are simply selected in or out according to what the situation was in their parents’ generation. There is no objectively “good” or “bad” with regard to the vast majority of situations; it’s all context-dependent to their own environment/situation. There are all kinds of examples of “bad” mutations conferring a selective advantage – go search for “good genes hypothesis” and see what you find. No, wait, you won’t, will you, Joe? You haven’t even tried to understand what’s been written here, so I don’t believe for a second that you’ve even clicked on any single link that anyone has provided to you. That way you can say things like “no one’s ever proved it”, because you think that if you refuse to look at it, it ceases to exist. You’re scared of the information, Joe. That’s what it really comes down to. That’s why you won’t read it.
So you honestly think God sits around and builds every snowflake individually? I guess that would explain why he’s too busy to end world suffering.
SteveoR – no, I don’t dredge up your past comments when I comment at you. Honestly, I don’t have enough brain space to keep track of all the commenters here and what they’ve said in the past. Rest assured that when I criticize what you say and your apparent attitude in saying it, I’m speaking of the actual comment I’m referring to. If you don’t want people to complain at you, stop making horrible and clueless comments.
Except your god, I presume?
BUZZZZZZ! WRONG! It starts with the first imperfect replicator. Just because we don’t know exactly which one or how it appeared, it doesn’t mean it’s somehow eternal.
Since your premise is incorrect, the conclusion is void.
The problem is: you can’t define evolution out of existence with just words. It’s based on real world data. We’ve seen it happen. You want to replace it? Provide a better explanation. One that is actually useful and explains all the data. Good luck, you’ll need it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20547195
Some progress in the UK – might prevent a few more joe4060s.
Joe @370:
Joe4060:
What prevents you from realizing that you do not understand evolution? You are quite insistent that your beliefs are correct, but how do you know that? Don’t you need to understand a field of science before attempting to rewrite fundamental basics of said field? Do you even understand that evolution is a key piece of many scientific fields of study?
John Morales@374,
Hey! You’re right! So joe4060 has finally discovered the succinct and elegant Proof of Atheism we’ve all been longing for. Thanks joe! Spread the word everyone!
****joe4060’s marvellous Proof of Atheism****
1) Everything that exists has a beginning.
2) God does not have a beginning.
3) Therefore, God does not exist.
QED
Also, StevoR, go fuck yourself. Nobody here needs to prove yet again that you’re a fucking idiot who thinks the Muslim world is the Land of Evil full of murder-bombmen who will kill us in our sleep if they’re not nuked first.
Why do you assume our friends are “fucking Jihadists” or “want to commit genocide against Israel”?
See, this is the problem. You’re so fixated on equating the Muslim world with Mordor that you can’t even imagine Muslims thinking about the same things everyone else does. Your arguments hinge on Muslims being a featureless block of people who can, apparently, only do two things, hate Jews and blow themselves up.
You also keep equating the Muslim world with the Middle East and Arabs, which only make you sound even more like the racist scum you are.
joe4060 we are made in gods image?
then god is ugly with some stupid on the side
I refuse to be made in the image of any god who would have the image of me for an image.
theophontes,
Huh? I don’t accept the distinction you’re trying to shove me in to.
Look, I’m fine with any reason at all, as long as there is compelling evidence for it. All of the above is interesting when accompanied by evidence. If you could show that it was common in related mythologies for snakes to talk but no other animals, then I would grant that as probably relevant to understanding what the authors were saying. And then we could discuss what it is about snakes-in-culture that leads to them speaking, and what it is about nonmythical snakes that might lead to them being portrayed that way in the culture.
But if you need to know why the snake can talk, then that can cause you to be more accepting of far-fetched nonsense than you ought to be. I suggest you try not to need it. The snake might talk because it’s just that kind of story and you’re supposed to suspend disbelief.
He’s been at this for years and years and years, so that’s really fucking naive for you to imagine. It’s like imagining that clever liberals can simply talk a homophobe out of being a homophobe, when what’s missing is any gay friends and family. A homophobe doesn’t give up homophobia without also having compelling emotions that interfere with disgust and hatred. StevoR is, as his older, overt* antisemitism demonstrates, a person who is exceptionally prone to xenophobia. He can’t be talked out of it. What could make him stop hating Muslims and Arabs would be to have several Muslim and Arab loved ones who he interacts with often. But we can’t do that for him.
*As opposed to his current, concealed antisemitism. He’s still an antisemite, conflating Israel with Jewish people generally. If he ever again allows himself to comprehend an Israeli government action so horrific that he can’t stand it, and must speak out against it, he will therefore blame “the Jews” for it.
joe4060:
I’m not sure what you mean here. Natural selection is not something that exists as an independent entity. It is itself a cause. If you need to look for a “cause” of natural selection, it’s simply that the universe — or reality, if you will — has different environments that require different features for life to survive. On earth, those environments are constantly changing, often because of life itself, and so life will constantly change.
“Natural selection” doesn’t need anything to begin it. It’s a feature of reality.
You’ve not made an objection to my case in support of evolution. All you’ve done is denied it. I’ve even demonstrated where you support the argument for evolution.
But your simple argument falls apart at #2.
Evolution does have a beginning. It began with the first self-replicating molecules.
We are currently ignorant what those molecules were, where they formed, and the exact process by which they formed. But don’t confuse ignorance with reality. Reality isn’t predicated on what we know. It’s predicated on what is.
There’s one thing I do know. Dogmatically religious people like you have been ignoring science for a very long time. There were people who believed the earth was flat for the longest time, simply because the Bible said so. This in spite of the fact that educated folks knew the earth was round. Hell, Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth to around 2% accuracy circa 240BC.
Later, religion was responsible for the attempted suppression of the Copernican model of the solar system. They interpreted the Bible to say the earth was the center of the universe, and so the sun must revolve around the earth, not the other way around. Galileo was forced to repent this idea. Giordana Bruno was tried for the heresy of suggesting the sun was but another star. He was burned at the stake.
I find it amusing that there are still people who are in complete denial about what science tells us of reality. Here I’ve demonstrated were many of your original assertions were just complete wrong. An intellectually honest person would admit to themselves (even if not to us) they were wrong in those instances, and re-evaluate what they know and how they know it. But you’ve not done that. You just move on to another argument as if the last one didn’t happen. You don’t address the issues arrayed against you. If you admit they even happened, you simply dismiss them.
Now you present ignorance of something as proof that it didn’t happen, simply because it goes against your beliefs. This is no different than the flat-earthers. There are those who claimed we never went into space, because the photos that came back were of a spherical earth, not a flat one.
Your denial is exactly like that.
Here are some facts to help you on your way.
The fact is that the Miller-Urey experiment produced organic compounds from inorganic compounds. This indicated something interesting — the principle of self-assembly. The concept of self-assembly was so profound that many people predicted we’d find organic molecules in space.
And we did. We’ve found amino acids, one of the building-blocks of life, in the tail of a comet. We even have models of how these very complex molecules form. We know how they form.
But really, that doesn’t matter. Our insights into abiogenesis simply don’t matter to the argument at hand. What matters is the fact that you wear your ignorance on your sleeve, and proudly call it “knowledge.” When people demonstrate reality to you, when they show you the incontrovertible observations and data of reality, you skip off to some other contentless “argument.” An argument that is invariably nothing but denial.
When you first posted over at Greta’s, you posted actual arguments. Very bad arguments, arguments which had been refuted many times before, but at least they were arguments.
But they weren’t yours, were they? You didn’t even understand the very arguments you were posting. You simply cut-and-pasted like a good little religious robot. And now that you’ve been lured into trying to defend those arguments, you find you can’t. You just don’t have the knowledge required, the understanding that is necessary, to defend those arguments.
And now you’re falling back on Sunday-school philosophy in an attempt to rescue yourself. Sorry, but that just doesn’t cut it. You can’t dodge refutations when it’s been logically demonstrated that evolution occurs. You can’t just say “light trails” to the problem of billion-year-old light in a 10,000 year-old universe and expect it to mean anything, to sound anything other than stupid. You can’t claim something didn’t happen just because we don’t know all the details of how it happened.
Reality doesn’t work like that, Joe. And that’s where we life — reality. We know about reality because we can observe it. Denying these observations like you’ve been doing is not only denying science. You’re denying reality.
One last question before I’m done.
If God exists, as you propose, and if God created the universe, as you propose, the it seems to me the best way to know about your god is to study its creation, the universe. It seems that taking the word of a book that was written down and carried forward by fallible humans is an inferior way to getting to know your god. It seems the best way would be to study the perfect creation, which is beyond human fallibility.
Denying what we observe of reality is denying God’s creation.
So tell me, Joe — if this is true, would you deny your god’s creation?
Hello! Christians seem to have hijacked this online poll re the Pledge of Allegiance. Can we take it back?
http://atheism.about.com/b/2012/11/29/daily-poll-should-the-pledge-of-allegiance-say-under-god.htm?nl=1
Frankly it’s silly that not-stupid is being floated as a reason to think someone might be talked out of being a racist, antisemitic xenophobe.
There are lots of stupid, loving, tolerant, anti-racist people in the world. And lots of intelligent, hateful bigots. Sure, stupidity correlates with need for closure, and need for closure correlates with bigotry, so these aren’t totally unrelated variables. But they’re not terribly strong correlations. If you encounter an intelligent bigot, there is no reason to be surprised.
(This is all for the sake of argument. Maybe I’ve missed something, but I’ve never been impressed with StevoR’s intellect. Certainly he doesn’t stand out as clever among the crowd here.)
Weather report: sunspots.
SG:
QFT. In particular, Stevo has been here a long time now, continually spewing his bigotry and hatred. Many people have taken the time to talk calmly and in-depth as to why his stances are wrong. Hasn’t had the least effect.
Stevo isn’t interested in changing his mind, he’s only looking for platforms to spread his hate.
Genes don’t look designed to me. Neither do creatures. Because I know something about the process by which they came about.
and yes, spoiler alert: SteveOR is a terrible fucking person. The shit he says that is horrible tends to have people telling him that. Because it’s terrible fucking shit. I’m unsurprised he’s inflicting his hate elsewhere, though.
I posted this in an email to another evolution denying crackpot. In a sense, I think it actually relates really well to this thread and the ripping apart of the Godbot. If he’s not going to understand science, perhaps an approach from another angle is required… (do give me feedback about just how well my comparison worked please, guys)
Joe4060 let me see if I can simplify this for you. Amongst other things, I am: 1) an aspiring entrepreneur, and on a related note I am also 2) a budding journalist (so my wish to be a journalist is connected to the business I would look to set up, basically).
Now because of 1, I can empathise with scientists, because in a way Entrepreneurs and Scientists share quite a good deal of similarities. Just as an entrepreneur must figure out an idea with a Unique Selling Point, craft a business plan, engage in market research, get their financial figures exactly right, see if their business actually is capable of selling, and then eventually go to investors to help their business get to the next level; so too must a scientist create an observation/hypothesis, constantly and repeatedly experiment, revise and retest their claims, submit for peer review in credible science journals, and all the while seek grants from science organisations to convince them that the work they are doing is worthwhile.
Now why is this relevant? Because while the really GOOD scientific theories that turn out to be the very best explanations we have for certain truths we end up deciphering, the proponents of ID nearly ALWAYS complain about a lack of funding and/or resources, especially when it comes to an organisation like the Discovery Institute. I mentioned that earlier and you didn’t even address it, but don’t you find that telling? If the work being done on ID is as worthwhile as the proponents claim it to be, then why aren’t these ID “scientists” stocked with the resources and/or funding they need? Could it be because maybe the mainstream scientists who pretty much universally reject ID as you even vaguely define it know something you don’t?
As for 2, that’s a lot more simple. If ID was truly about to make it as a legit scientific theory, don’t you think it would be major fucking news? Even if we discount the supernatural God hypothesis that you apparently don’t adhere to (although I would suggest a Conflict of Interest and a leaning in one particular direction considering an occupation you’ve confessed to holding), the notion that there was indeed some sort of “designer” (even though you refuse to even design WHAT it is) behind the creation of the universe and things that we see all around us would still be a BIG FUCKING DEAL, and whoever successfully got it through the scientific process would, as I said, become mega fucking rich and they’d be subject to several awards including probably being the most major recipient of the Nobel Prize for the sheer epic scale of what they would have discovered.
I may not be the best in terms of discussing science, but when I can use simple logic tied to my areas of expertise to debunk ID, then I can damn well deliver devastatingly good points.
Dunning-Kruger syndrome.
well, there’s also the issue that at their most basic level, the arguments actually AREN’T defensible.
Which is why I decided to killfile him a while back. Nothing worth reading unless you are a like minded paranoid bigot. So when he starts really posting up a storm, I just turn on GreaseMonkey and don’t see any content of his. When he goes away, I turn GreaseMonkey off as it is a distraction.
And of course living things DON’T look designed. Almost anyone can look at a skyscraper and a tree and see that one is designed and other not, or camera and an eye, or a flagellum and a motor.
The clear, stark differences in class and type are self-evident.
nigelthebold
“Natural selection is not something that exists as an independent entity. It is itself a cause”
At one time natural selection did not exist. What caused natural selection to come into existence?
Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
“It began with the first self replicating molecules”
What was their cause?
“We are currently ignorant what these molecules were”
Exactly, what was their cause?
Evolution does not have an account of its origins. So why should anyone believe it?
The Miller-Urey experiment simply shows what happens in nature anyway and does not prove anything. It was shown to be a farce in 1953 already.
It is he who sits above the circle of the earth… Isaiah 40:22 [700 B.C.]
A sphere has a circular profile from any angle.
If people want to believe that the earth is flat against all evidence that is their business.
An interpretation of the Bible that is not coupled with observed reality is the cause of the problem. It’s peoples interpretation that is at fault.
Isolating verses from the commentary of the surrounding scripture is also a common means of misinterpretation.
“We know about reality because we can observe it”
Exactly. But this requires that we observe the WHOLE of reality, not just the parts that suit our world view.
And it does not matter how many tickets or bits of paper someone has; it’s telling the truth that is important.
“Denying what we observe of reality is denying God’s creation”
You can’t have it both ways.
“Reality does not work that way Joe”
Reality can look after itself. Its how we INTERPRET reality that matters.
The following argument shows that evolution is not founded in reality and is false because it does NOT HAVE A COSMOLOGICAL ORIGIN.
THE UNIVERSE CANNOT COME FROM NOTHING OF ITS OWN ACCORD WITHOUT CAUSATION.
1. Everything that begins to exist (comes into being) has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause
The cause of the universe would need to be transcendent, uncaused, timeless, changeless, and immaterial (outside of time and space). There would need to exist beforehand, a personal, all powerful, unembodied mind that could cause everything to come into being from nothing.
1. Everthing in the universe has a beginning
2. Evolution does not have a cosmological beginning (something cannot come from nothing without causation) for it to be established in.
3. Therefore, evolution does not exist
To believe in evolution you have to be either completely deluded or have infinite faith.
A question for one of the physics majors….has anyone done any work yet trying to predict when the next force split will occur?
joe, #179:
joe, #370:
And thus does joe the blasphemer vanish in a puff of logic.
*POOF*
Writing it in caps does not magically make it true.
Electronic configuration. No imaginary deity needed.
You imaginary deity is not part of reality. It is only a delusion in your mind.
Abiogenesis, no imaginary deities needed. You lose again.
We can’t deny the creation of something that doesn’t exist. What part of that don’t you understand? Your deity is only a delusion in your mind.
Yes, the truth is your deity only exists as a delusion in your mind. Show otherwise with the equivalent of the eternally burning bush, or shut the fuck up.
Unevidenced OPINION of a presuppositional fuckwitted and delusional idjit, so *POOF*, dismissed as utter and total figment of its imagination, just like its imaginary deity.
Citation needed.
Lie, anywhere organic molecules exist, the chance for life to arise exists. Once that happens, evolution.
Nope, you haven’t proven the case for your imaginary deity, which require solid and conclusive physical evidence, like the equivalent of the eternally burning bush, not the presuppositional fuckwittery of someone who won’t acknowledge they are engaged in presuppositional fuckwittery.
Fixed that for you by putting in your presuppositions where they belong, in the fallacious argument category. You lose, and will lose until you stop pretending your imaginary deity exists and actually provide real evidence for it. Which you haven’t to date. Nothing but evidence explained by science, like mankind through abiogenesis and evolution.
Now, keep in mind that I’m a history major, but didn’t life and reproduction ’cause’ natural selection? Seriously, you christlicker, why do you refuse to understand that there is a difference between abiogenisis and evolution? You are, obviously, doing this on purpose in order to protect your precious world view, right?
Wrong. Complete and total category error.
Natural selection is a process, not a thing. Processes can either occur or not occur, and they occur when the conditions for their occurrence are present. If the conditions for their occurrence are not present, they do not occur, but the concept of the process still exists, and always will exist, even if the process itself does not occur. Concepts are timeless.
There was a time when natural selection did not occur. But the concept of natural selection as a process is eternal.
Processes do not come into existence. They start to occur.
Amphiox:
Thanks. I didn’t think of it that way.
This is one reason I actually love arguments (well, not arguments as that would involve exchange of information both ways) with creobots. It is unusual that I do not learn something new or have my understanding adjusted.
Go Amphiox, now that that crucial observation has been stated, maybe some light will shine on Joe 4080…
Notwithstanding that “transcendent” is a meaningless word, suppose this were indeed true. Even if it were, this:
does not follow. Nothing about “uncaused, timeless, changeless, immaterial” requires “personal, all powerful, unembodied mind”.
In fact,
“personal” required interaction with humans, which requires time, and thus CANNOT be “timeless”.
“all powerful” means possessing at the very least the ability to manipulate matter, and thus CANNOT be “immaterial”.
“mind” requires thought, which requires alteration, and thus CANNOT be “changeless”.
If there is a cause of the universe, by DEFINITION, that cause CANNOT be personal, CANNOT be immaterial, CANNOT be unembodied, and CANNOT possess a mind.
See, Joe4080, there is an example of faith. keresthanatos’ comment #415 is a perfect example of unevidenced faith. Much like what you keep asserting. Which is completely different from evolution which has shitloads of evidence — fossils to live experiments — supporting it.
And kersthanatos? I think your faith is misplaced.
Genesis 1:24-25
Genesis 6:5-8
Right there in the bible. God CHANGED HIS MIND. God is not changeless.
joe the blasphemer blasphemes again.
Well, his faith is that light would shine on joe. Not necessarily that joe would see it….
Dear lurkers, these are only some of the fallacious presuppositions that Joe espouses:
His imaginary deity exists.
His babble is anything other than a book of mythology/fiction.
His OPINION can refute science.
His unevidenced and illogical presuppositional argument can refute science.
Anything other than more science can refute science.
That a million scientific paper can be dismissed with a sweep of OPINION.
That it has an argument that isn’t nothing but presuppositions
That presuppositions are irrefutable and don’t need to be shown to be true.
That evidence explained by science (natural processes) are evidence for the stupornatural.
That its deity is eternal.
That the creation of the creator doesn’t have to be explained.
That evolution isn’t scientifically a fact
That natural selection isn’t a powerful tool that doesn’t need deities to work.
That beginnings means a creator.
That it isn’t a delusional fool who should shut the fuck up.
This is a start of a list. Please join in, and I can include any non-duplicate presuppositions in future lists for future presuppostional idjits like Joe.
Simple question, Joe: do you understand what the term “emergent property” means?
Even worse. Xe claimed that a million scientific papers are refuted by creation.com.
Imperfect replication combined with differential survival.
There will always be some traits that are more adequate for the continued existence of whatever environment the replicators are in. The replicators which have these traits will replicate more successfully. Bam. Natural selection.
(actually, natural selection can happen even with perfect replicators, but those are at a gigantic disadvantage compared to imperfect ones and doomed to meet an adaptational dead-end)
Because it exists. We’ve seen it happen, and we have evidence of it happening in the past.
Eppur si muove.
A sphere has a circular profile from any angle.
We never learned anything reliable about the world by “interpreting” verses of the Bible, though. The priests and saints of yore “interpreted” that the Earth was stationary and the Sun revolved around it; that
Now apply this to yourself.
Your argument is bunk, because assumes the only alternatives are
1) the universe was magicked into existence from YHWH
2) the universe cam from nothing
There’s plenty of alternatives, some of which were cited on the responses to you.
The cause of the universe would need to be transcendent, uncaused, timeless, changeless, and immaterial (outside of time and space). There would need to exist beforehand, a personal, all powerful, unembodied mind that could cause everything to come into being from nothing.
Bunk. A (so far) unknown cause is not the same as no cause. And again, it’s not necessary to know the origins of something to explain how it works. We can know if someone was murdered before finding out who commited the murder. We can know how gravity works with enough precision to put things in orbit and send people to the moon, without knowing exactly how it began.
The building blocks of evolution are molecules formed from very common elements, water and energy from the sun. The cause of evolution comes from things we know exist. No immaterial interference needed.
Most of the difficulty science has is not finding out A scenario for the beginning of life, it’s figuring out THE correct one. It’s possible that we’ll never know for sure, unless we find evidence that rules out competing hypotheses. But hey, that’s how grown-up people find out what really happened, as opposed to sitting in our butts and making up just-so stories to justify our biases and bigotry.
As opposed to denying it, which requires wilful blindness to evidence or infinite faith on your own ego.
It seems that joe has quit “squeeking….” guess I’ll have to step up and take his place….. at least I have a thick hide and am not afraid to follow the links that are provided.
I forgot thick skull also… forgot my neandertal heratiage.
Well, that is a presupposition that I totally missed (which is way I asked for help). Good eyes Ogvorbis, have a dirty glass of your favorite swill…*looks at the evil of eye of the Pullet patrol and adds two bowls of popcornz with bacon*
Another fundamental category error by joe (and a classic piece of creationist dissembling):
Evolution theory is a theory that explains the diversity of life, NOT the existence of life. It is an origin theory for the origin of DIVERSITY, as can be seen from the very title of Darwin’s seminal work, (On the Origin of SPECIES), and indeed Darwin explicitly wrote that his theory is not intended to explain the origin of life itself.
Evolution explains why life exists in the PATTERN that we observe it to exist in, a nested hierarchy of countless different species, rather than some other pattern, such as say a single super-adapted species, or a random scattering of completely unrelated species sharing no features in common.
Evolution theory works regardless of where or how the original organism(s) came from, whether by abiogenesis, or special creation, or transdimensional transport, or closed time loop, or whatever.
Which is why we stated from the very beginning that joe does not understand what evolution IS. Not only does joe get the simplest basic details of the theory wrong, he does not even understand what the theory is FOR, and attacks it for not explaining something it was never intended to explain.
Not to worry. 90 proof will kill anything living in the glass (unless it has evolved resistance (in which case, all liquor drinkers are in deep trouble__.
gah, holy shit, borked everything ever, sorry people.
Imperfect replication combined with differential survival.
There will always be some traits that are more adequate for the continued existence of whatever environment the replicators are in. The replicators which have these traits will replicate more successfully. Bam. Natural selection.
(actually, natural selection can happen even with perfect replicators, but those are at a gigantic disadvantage compared to imperfect ones and doomed to meet an adaptational dead-end)
Because it exists. We’ve seen it happen, and we have evidence of it happening in the past.
Eppur si muove.
Oh, I can play the Biblical quotes game too.
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
4 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
The Bible says there is water above the sky, and the Sun hangs UNDER it. How’s that for cosmology?
We never learned anything reliable about the world by “interpreting” verses of the Bible, though.
Now apply this to yourself. Dismissing evolution because it doesn’t fit your world view, and thinking your bits of paper supersede evidence, is exactly what you’re doing.
Exactly. We need to interpret reality in a way that is consistent and reliable. Science has an excellent track record on that.
Number of working hypotheses, accurate predictions and new data brought to us by the bible = zero.
Your argument is bunk, because assumes the only alternatives are
1) the universe was magicked into existence from YHWH
2) the universe cam from nothing
There’s plenty of alternatives, some of which were cited on the responses to you.
Bunk. A (so far) unknown cause is not the same as no cause. And again, it’s not necessary to know the origins of something to explain how it works. We can know if someone was murdered before finding out who commited the murder. We can know how gravity works with enough precision to put things in orbit and send people to the moon, without knowing exactly how it began.
The building blocks of evolution are molecules formed from very common elements, water and energy from the sun. The cause of evolution comes from things we know exist. No immaterial interference needed.
Most of the difficulty science has is not finding out A scenario for the beginning of life, it’s figuring out THE correct one. It’s possible that we’ll never know for sure, unless we find evidence that rules out competing hypotheses. But hey, that’s how grown-up people find out what really happened, as opposed to sitting in our butts and making up just-so stories to justify our biases and bigotry.
As opposed to denying it, which requires wilful blindness to evidence or infinite faith on your own ego (to assume YOU have all the right answers).
I keep forgetting to explain that all swill/grog is served in purposely dirty looking glasses, but the glasses/tankards are sterilized like a normal bar equipment between uses. No sign of anything causing disease be transmitted, but then the glasses/tankards are stored downwind of the aged grog…Nothing dares to grow there…but the hangovers…
Save for that which has evolved to be resistant to the sterilization process. That which does not kill it can make it stronger?
Has anyone else noticed that joe keeps claiming that evolution is a religion (bad) and evolution requires faith (also bad)? Xe doesn’t seem to realize that xe is damning hir own beliefs.
I have been wondering if this is taught among some anti-science Christians as a way of innoculating them against theistic evolution. Like, they think if evolution is a religion, then a person can’t be a Christian and accept evolution, because this flavor of Christianity mandates that they can’t have two religions.
Mind, I haven’t seen that being explicitly argued. I’m just wondering.
Long answer: Self-replicating systems adapting to changing environments over a large number of generations. Like those bacteria that can metabolise nylon.
Short answer: Chemistry. Suck it, biologists!
Oh dear.
We’re all well aware that causality is a basic principle of nature. Simply reiterating that fact and then asserting – with no logical premise – that the universe’s cause MUST be God does not constitute a compelling argument for the existence of whatever deity you’re batting for.
What you have to do is prove that all causes require a Prime Mover, AND that the Prime Mover in question could only possibly have been your chosen brand of deity. The proof must make sense independently of human perception and explain what exactly it is about physics that makes it a deficient explaination for the universe as it currently exists.
Good luck with that.
And THEN you have to prove that the Prime Mover itself does NOT need a cause. And THEN you have to prove why it is that only the Prime Mover has this property of not needing a causem, as otherwise that same property of not needing a cause could be shared by other things, and the whole ricketing edifice of illogic and supposition comes clattering down around your ears.
It’s simply baffling to me how someone like Joe Numbers can look at Natural Selection and think it somehow needed to be arranged and set up.
Fer cryin’ out loud Joe, this is NOT ROCKET SCIENCE.
If a herd of deer are living in a place which has bitter cold winters and cool summers, then the individuals with heavier fur coats will have a survival advantage over the others. Even if its only a small advantage, next year there will be a few more of the heavy-fur deer. No one has to do anything, it’s just what happens.
what gets me is that it always seems to be used as an insult… by religious people.
and they don’t see the irony.
at all.
I’m curious, since it wasn’t a farce, what on earth crazy Joe could be referring to here?
Icy comets at high angles to the ecliptic?
the projection is strong with this one.
…Still waiting for crazy Joe to show me a single scientific paper that concludes, through experiment, that there must be a deity somewhere.
just one Joe.
you said there are millions.
joe4060
The dark carnival has always existed outside of time and space. It was formed before your diety was preyed into creation. Your stories from the bible are just a poor demented glimpse of what the dark carnival offers. I hope you discover the truth before you see the dark carnival where you will be judged and found wanting.
shorter answer: physics. suck it chemists?
@ joe
Were do all those conclusions come from? Why is that the only remaining option?
Why personal?
Why all powerful?
Why unembodied (<-whatever that means) mind?
Why couldn't it have been a simple fart of a cockroach in a parallel universe that led to the generation of our universe?
(assuming that cockroaches in at least one parallel universe do fart)
The same could be said of pretty much any natural process that theists question, including the ‘beginning’ of the universe; assuming ‘beginning’ is even an appropriate term.
443 Ichthyic
yes.
(PS. please don’t tell the sociologist)
Fred Salvador #445
I’m thinking baby steps here.
No, that’s not true. What I’m thinking is more like “Fucking hell, how can something as simple as critters living or dying be confusing, even for a creobot?”
Ichthyic are you a physicist?
It was chilly here today.
@442: Not cool. You can pretend to worship Odin, the FSM, Cthulhu… but I draw the line at juggalo.
You and me.
Cage match.
Three rounds.
I was just thinking that to people like joe, everything is a religion, in the sense that it is authority-based, and has no way to be checked, it’s all just faith, and faith is the point. They just believe what they are told, like drunks in a pub, or goobers in a trailer park, and they really do not comprehend the reality-check nature of science, because (a) their minds don’t work that way, and (b) somebody told them it was wrong.
Well, that’s wrong in several assumptions, but if we go ahead and allow it, that doesn’t make it your god, nor does it imply the purpose of the universe has anything to do with us humans. As I say, it may be that the universe is the hyper-dimensional equivalent of the crotch rivet on a suit of Gundam armor, with some sort of rust going on, and us living off that rusting. The armorer who made it could be a personal, all powerful, unembodied mind that caused everything to come into being from nothing, but not good enough to keep the stars from forming and fouling up the rivet.
#449 A. R. I believe Ichthyic is a fishycist
#450 vaiyt ok but don’t mess with the paint, I may go off like Rude Boy
broboxley: You missed. You were aiming for 448 no?
I see that a lot. It would be more compelling if “physicist” wasn’t shorthand for “engineer”.
Now go back to your pendulums and magnets and spinning chairs; I’m busy doing experimental work on abiogenesis on behalf of biologists who are incapable of doing it themselves :-P
Fred Salvador: Oh, because we can’t make bacteria/enzymes that do your reactions faster than your puny total synthetic approach? Bah! I say, Bah!
hmm A.R I have #449 on my screen, wonder if the boss purged something
broboxley: I assume you were shooting for keresthanatos? I have him at 448.
Too bad, I like watching their skin ripple when I ask that question(408). The actual name of the phenomena is spontaneous symmetry breaking.
broboxley:
I’ve got it at 448.
Remember, folks, this stuff happened in the past so you need an historian to really make sense out of it.
And we can write more gooder than those sciencey majory persons.
Nice. And by nice, I mean shitty and classist.
keresthanatos:
Phenomenom. Singular. Even this physiciste manqué knows that.
Short answer: it won’t. We’re done. HEP’s over, except in the lab.
cool, one less thing to worry about.
or a biologist
or a chemist
done all 3 at one time or another.
have degrees in 2 of them.
which is why I know it’s little more than fun and fancy to claim one field of endeavor underlies all of another.
minimalism tends to miss emergent properties.
hey, the moment you can elucidate a hypothesis at the level of behavior a sociologist can, from basic physical principles, I’ll go ahead and tell them, and at the same time quit being a biologist myself since you could certainly derive something like a keystone predator hypothesis from basic physics too!
good luck!
;)
“Reactions”, you say? :-P
Seriously though, we shouldn’t fight like this; all of the sciences are equally important and fantastic. Besides which, we all know who the real enemy is here…
… don’t we, philosophers?
And by “philosophers”, I mean “fast food restaurant shift managers”. Or possibly “marketing consultants”. Or maybe “parking attendants”. Or any other career that philosophers go into, since “philosopher” hasn’t been a career for two thousand years.
computer technician….sigh
And by “philosophers”, I mean “fast food restaurant shift managers”. Or possibly “marketing consultants”.
nono… HR departments!
Ever heard of Dan Dennett?
…weird lookin’ guy? bigass beard?
;)
465 Ichthyic
If I ever have problems that require the skills of a chemist or physicist I go ask one….although, the chemistry/physics touching my field is actually not that difficult…No need to dodge a collaboration. Gives me more time to deal with my stuff.
trouble is more finding a good theoretician for computational analysis when you need one.
Dan Dennett? Pfft. Call yourself whatever you like; if you’re working in the field you studied, you can’t be a philosopher :-D
How about Paul Feyerabend?
#471
meh, you prolly trip over them everyday. They are called ‘nix admins
http://xkcd.com/705/
or even a good statistician.
I want to say I’ve heard of him, but there are a few occasions in the past where I’ve said I’ve heard of someone and have been mistaken, so the best thing to do would be to chuck my entire methodology in the bin and simply ask random people who have no way of knowing if I’ve heard of him to vote on wether or not I’ve heard of him.
Epistemology, woohoo!
Sounds like you’ve heard of him.
Now you’re thinking with anarchy!
So you say the Bible’s not supporting a flat Earth, because people interpreted it the wrong way. Funny. But you know it isn’t flat because of improvments in science, not because of improvements in Biblical interpretation. So what good is your Bible-based epistemology, if it can’t do any better than garbage in, garbage out?
I guess you didn’t notice that immediately before the quoted bit is this:
Will you now give a geometrical description of what the foundations of a sphere aren supposed to be? If there’s more than one, it couldn’t be the point in the center. Or is that supposed to be a metaphor for dirt or something, which isn’t really any kind of “foundation”? Whatever the answer is, how would you know that’s what it means and that whatever that may be is something true about the real world?
Also, who is it talking about anyway? An astronaut? An ancient alien? You defined god as “outside of time and space,” and to be at some angle relative to some position on the Earth in order to see its circular profile, so it couldn’t be about god. Whoever “he” is would have to be somewhere in space. Because geometry is about spatial relationships. Remember?
Did you forget that your god isn’t supposed to live in the sky? Or are you lying about a god which actually does live in the sky? Or is every word of the Bible not actually true? Or does your god not exist, because you’re making all of this up as you go along? Or is it not just that it doesn’t exist, but that your god cannot exist, because it has contradictory properties?
I’m just going to call all of that an “own goal.”
And how about answering everyone else’s questions and responding to what they say (including objections they make about points you keep repeating)? Do you know how real conversations work? Atheists are real people. You can talk to us. Try it out.
Big ass-beard
Yubal
O.o
Might I ask what field you are in, and what sort of computational analysis (just out of curiosity)?
I’m working on a degree in physical organic and materials chemistry, so I have warm fuzzies for computational/theoretical chemistry (although I don’t do all that much of it myself).
Whoops, I switched some ideas around in editing and borked the sentence. Let me fix it:
Why does it seem like every time someone makes a completely bogus ahistorical claim, somehow it always happened two thousand years ago?
Did Jesus do all of that shit?
joe4060 if your infallible word of god is correct
The messiah has to be of the lineage of David
please explain how Jesus is a descendant of David
David the Israeli King, with the strange anglo name
Joe,
You seem very hung up on descriptions being complete in order that they be meaningful or true. Would you say that our description of something uncontroversially present in our lives, say gravity, is complete? Does this have any implications for gravity’s existence?
Have you not understood from the foundations (beginnings) of the earth?
It is he who sits above the circle (common symbolic interpretation completeness or wholeness) of the earth… Isaiah 40:22 [700 B.C.]
I suppose someone will now accuse me of apologetics, it is not. It is just the way that I interpreted the passage.
whoever “he” is would have to be somewhere in space, so it couldn’t be about god……consciousness razor
The christians conseder this matter moot, as it is common to here God described as everywhere and nowhere at once. Some kind of superposition I suppose.
sorry, interpreted should really be parsed.
Hurin,
Molecular and Structural Biology.
You always find someone who can dump a protein structure in a force field and do some simulations, I can do that myself. Problem is to find someone who is able to get a meaningful functional model out of it.
yes, damn him!
Broboxely, David is a Hebrew name, originally.
Oh madogodess, a messiah fight. awesome. In that it isn’t.
All messiah are inferior to the madogodess, after all.
If that’s what it means, then people haven’t been around since the Earth was formed. Like joe4060 said, “An interpretation of the Bible that is not coupled with observed reality is the cause of the problem.” There goes young Earth creationism.
But the answer to it is supposed to be “no”? That’s a bit confusing. If the person asking knew they haven’t understood since the beginning of the Earth, why would he bother jerking everyone around?
joe4060 is apparently some kind of fucking expert on this, so for now I’ll go with his interpretation of it as claiming the Earth is a sphere and that some dude sits in the sky. But it’s apparently not the deity he believes in, because it doesn’t exist in space.
That’s totally better than flat-Earthism. Wouldn’t want to be worse than that.
You mean “some kind of nonsense”?
Which Christians? joe4060 clearly doesn’t consider it moot. Is he an atheist too and just fucking with us?
maybe an atheist but most likely just fucking with us.
Ichthyic
He came here to set father against son, mother against daughter, one person against another so to speak, I do not recall any scripture stating that he came here to found a common dating system….
Don’t try to lay that shit on my boy….
(you really wouldn’t’t think that calling Jesus “my boy” on some Christian blogs would lead to so much hatred)
And where are the snarkies ???? I left a wonderful sudo Malapropisms (help me,,,, I can’t stop….)/non-sequitur that caused a delightful cognitive dissonance when I read it and not a snark on it (spell checker caught it but I liked it).
Joe apparently has not spent a lot of time thinking about some of the really darker aspects of the Bible. He hasn’t connected the dots yet.
Joe,
You define your god as “transcendent, uncaused, timeless, changeless, and immaterial”. How do arrive at this conclusion? God changes his mind and directly interferes in the world a shitload of times in the Bible, where does your understanding of the Christian god come from?
In addition why are you so sure it’s the correct interpretation of the Christian god, how do you know the Gnostics aren’t correct and the god of the bible is an incompetent tyrant who took the credit for a different being’s work? How do you know that Shin Megami Tensei’s version of god as a cruel tyrant who oppresses all other supernatural beings and can be killed (but unfortunately comes back) isn’t correct? How about Kamen Rider Agito where “god” is actually the devil and father of mankind with an army of animalmen warriors who kill all those who disrupt his order? How about any of the numerous other thousands of creation myths? Have you ever considered WHY you believe in your particular interpretation of your god?
I have absolutely no hope you’ll actually consider what I’m saying and evaluate your religion critically, but what the heck right? It’s always fun to needle a creationist.
joe4060:
The universe. No! Wait! Nachos. Nachos caused natural selection.
Look, are you actually going to read what I write, or are you just going to keep repeating your Sunday School teacher? Because believe me, it’s getting tiresome trying to explain simple logic to someone who refuses to listen.
I’m used to dealing with people intelligent enough to get things the first time. I really don’t want to have to explain this again.
The Bible does not have an account of its origins. So why should anyone believe it?
Oh, sure, you claim to have an account of its origins. But were you there? No. I thought not. So why should I believe you?
Oh, sure, the Bible claims to be true. But that’s hardly an account. Hell, the movie Fargo claims to be true, but is not. Why should I believe the Bible, which is far older than anything the Coen brothers have done?
Why should we believe evolution happens?
Because we’ve observed it. We’ve documented it. It’s the only logical conclusion to reach from all we’ve seen.
We have far more evidence that evolution is true than the Bible is true. Yet you seem to trust the Bible.
Really? In what way was it shown to be a farce? You make that claim, but not presented evidence. I, at least, have presented evidence. You have not. I wonder which claim has more intellectual standing?
Also, are you claiming we haven’t discovered amino acids, the building blocks of life, in the tail of a comet? Because honestly, that’s far more damning evidence against your claim that life needed God to kick it off.
But really, I’d like to know what source you have to say the Miller-Urey experiment was a farce. Also, I’d like to know what you mean by “farce.”
Doesn’t matter. The Bible claims the earth is a square:
So, are you going to become a flat-earther now?
I’m noticing that with you. Hell, you can’t even present the scripture required to validate your young-earth interpretation. You do that based on the statements of other humans, not on the evidence of God’s creation.
I mean, 13-billion-year-old galaxies observed from earth. Fact. Amiright?
And you’re looking at one part: a book that doesn’t even say what you think it says. People who interpret it for you, and you just accept it, like a good little sheep.
Galaxies 13-billion-light-years away. DNA that appears to be the result of 3.5 billion years of evolution. These are the things that I observe as a WHOLE. You ignore much of it, yet delude yourself into thinking you’re observing THE WHOLE.
You can’t observe THE WHOLE and ignore actual observations, Joe. Actual documented facts. Like the evolution of e. coli in a citrate environment. Which I notice you have not commented on even once. Are you ignoring inconvenient facts, Joe? Not taking into account THE WHOLE?
I’m not the one trying to have it both ways. YOU are. YOU are the one trying to claim to speak for God, to know God’s will, to know the history of God. I’m only pointing out what we’ve observed about God’s creation. I’m only explaining what we’ve observed, and what we’ve concluded from those observations.
You are the one denying all of that. You are the one trying to have it both ways.
Really? You’re actually saying it doesn’t matter what really is? You’re saying God’s creation doesn’t matter — the only thing that matters is what we think?
That’s really fucked up, Joe. Whether you believe in God or not, that’s really fucked up. It’s like you don’t care what God intended. You only care what you think. That’s strangely arrogant. Self-centered.
Prideful.
I never claimed that, Joe. Look back at what I’ve written. I’ve never once claimed that.
I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up. It has nothing to do with evolution.
Joe4080
THE UNIVERSE CANNOT COME FROM NOTHING OF ITS OWN ACCORD WITHOUT CAUSATION.
Why not????
joe4060:
You should think on this statement a little more. It really shows what’s going on here, both with the nature of scientific research, and your understanding of science.
Yep. The Miller-Urey experiment simply shows what happens in nature anyway. Because that’s what science does. It demonstrates what happens in nature.
In fact, that’s the entire point of science — to figure out what happens in nature. That’s all we have, after all. Nature. Reality. The universe.
So when you claim that evolution just takes credit for something that already exists as you did in #271, all you’re doing is saying that evolution occurs. All the scientists have done is figured out what already happens, and given a name to it.
And you’re exactly right. Evolution already existed long before we figured it out and gave a name to it. That’s the whole idea of science: to figure out what already exists, and give it a name, and figure out its parameters and measurements and criteria and boundaries, and maybe even figure out the mathematics of its model.
So you’ve said it several times already — all scientists are doing is figuring out what already exists.
And you know what?
That’s what science is all about.
and nigel the bold….I don’t know where you poor deluded people get your information….anyone who is everyone knows that is was a “giant purple mushroom screaming tacos, tacoooossss” (a relitave o mine on mauthers syde of the phyla) that started this eveloutionary dance
Extra props to the one who google-fu is skilled enough to find this..in less than 0.41 seconds.
and so ends my inanity for the night… It is my humble wish that this intrusion of mine into this wonerfully fun place be the “most absolutey worst thing,…” … “ever” to happen to any of you this week.