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JerryB
Skeptic Friend

279 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  14:20:52   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send JerryB a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by podcat

JerryB: So exactly what is your job that makes you qualified to speak on this topic? What education and experience do you have?


As I said earlier, I'm a nobody. Let my argument supported by references from scientists and science depts of colleges and universities (not from creationist or TO sites) sway the logic of the free thinker, if it is to do so. Amen (sorry, just HAD to throw the amen in there
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JerryB
Skeptic Friend

279 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  14:27:16   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send JerryB a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Doc,

You didn't see the definitions at the top of the page: 2nd Law: All spontaneous events act to increase total entropy. That's why I sent you to the page. This professor may not be a leader in the field, I don't know him. I just posted that because he is using a similar definition of SLOT.
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JerryB
Skeptic Friend

279 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  14:30:35   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send JerryB a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by podcat

Ludwig Boltzmann was also influenced by Darwin:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Boltzmann#Energetics_of_evolution


Yes he was. Very much so. He would be rolling over in his grave if he discovered that I was using his famous formula against Darwinism. But, hey, this is science. You have to roll with the blows as the facts come in.
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JerryB
Skeptic Friend

279 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  14:37:42   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send JerryB a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by Hawks

Originally posted by JerryB

Originally posted by Hawks

Originally posted by JerryB

Genes aren't statistically independent? LOL...No, they communicate with one another to cause mutation conspiracies. Pssstt... You guys wanna mutate, tonight? Shh......Yeah the Warden is on vacation.

Here's something for you to ponder, JerryB. If genes were statistically independent then you are immediately claiming that there is no such thing as irreducible complexity. Oh, wait, you ARE claiming that IC exists. What gives?


Genomes are not irreducibly complex as evidenced that one may mutate and do nothing to the rest of the system. It can still function. However, I could see it argued that SOME of them could be--those that result in the death of the organism due to mutation, but I have never researched this.

If SOME of them are then you don't have independency. That should be fairly easy to comprehend...


Well, no. Because the system as a whole is not a dependent system.

The study considered the entire genome as a whole over time. Not any particular gene. And even if a mutated gene kills the organism, that says nothing that it depended on the rest of the genome for that action.
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Hawks
SFN Regular

Canada
1383 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  17:01:12   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Hawks's Homepage Send Hawks a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by JerryB
Well, no. Because the system as a whole is not a dependent system.

The study considered the entire genome as a whole over time. Not any particular gene. And even if a mutated gene kills the organism, that says nothing that it depended on the rest of the genome for that action.
Sigh. Your calculation was for 41,471 nucleotides, not one genome. From Wikipedia: The Boltzmann entropy is obtained if one assumes one can treat all the component particles of a thermodynamic system as statistically independent. Your calculation violates the above assumption. IC violates the above assumption.

METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden!
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  17:53:33   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by JerryB

Just what law or laws do you think mimic SLOT? In fact there is no other law from which entropy can be calculated because the definition of entropy is the measurement of the effect of SLOT on any given system.
So, you really do not think that some people have used the word "entropy" to describe things other than thermodynamics? Even though the Shannon entropy of a fair coin toss is 1 bit, while the Boltzmann entropy of a fair coin toss would be 0.69031×10-23 joules/Kelvin (and thus meaningless)? You don't think that context is at all important, and you think that the word "entropy" always refers to the result of Boltzmann's formula?
Your problem here is that you do not understand the entirety of the law.
The problem isn't my understanding of anything. The problem is all yours.
According to your argument, Boltzmann, one of the greatest thermodynamicists off all time was NOT one...
Ah, some good, old-fashioned misdirection. No, Jerry, I think that you suck at understanding how to properly apply mathematical formulae to solve real-world problems. I said nothing negative about Boltzmann whatsoever. It's all about you.
And Claude Shannon was also not a thermodynamicist? LOL:
Yeah, that would be funny had I said any such thing. Besides which, the quote says that thermodynamics is an application of information theory, not the other way around.
You simply have a low understanding of the field we are discussing.
No, I think you're a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Here is the way one of my favorite modern day physicist, Tim Thompson puts it: "The 2nd law is no different in statistical mechanics than it is in classical thermodynmics."

http://www.tim-thompson.com/entropy2.html

There. You have it. Your argument on this point is so weak, it doesn't walk at all.
Nah, that's your strawman that's so weak that you have to keep it propped up.
And so Shannon entropy is not really entropy? LMAO. SLOT is a universal, ever-present law that uses many different formulas to calculate it's effect. You must agree, because you name three above--To which I could add about a dozen more definitions depending on the situation.
Really, do try to keep up. They all use different constants and units because they mean different things. "Statistical thermodynamics" is not a synonym for "information theory."
A bridge is a machine with well matched parts?
Move those goalposts!
You cannot have an ICS with a single part.
My bridge example had three parts.
Fine just pick two of your own examples and we will have settled this.
Again, that's not the point. Your pontifications don't match well with your ignorance.
If I told you that 2 + 2 = 4 in 1st grade math, I honestly believe you would argue that point. Are you here just to argue, or to win some points in debate?
I'd be here to have a discussion, if you showed the least interest in doing so. Instead, you seem to be here to do little more than insult people and to bad math.
Given the fact that donkeys and horses, dogs and wolves, lions and tigers all can produce living offspring "with their shared genes," I'd say that your alleged "biolgical law" has a boatload of exceptions.
"My" biological law? I'm afraid that once again, you are showing your education in science. I'm further afraid that a famous biologist named Ernst Walter Mayr came up with that definition many years ago.
So now it's a definition? I thought you said it was a "biological law."
I was simply paraphrasing him...
When did Mayr ever call the biological species concept a "biological law?"
If you understood this, you would realize that two examples you gave above fit this perfectly. Donkeys and horses produce mules, all of which are sterile.
Except for those that aren't, but you're just missing the point again.
The historical stuff in there is fine, but the rest is new-age nonsense. You (and Tipler) have failed to understand the QM meaning of "observation," and you (in particular) misrepresent the Double-Slit Experiments in your attempt to prop up the unevidenced suggestion that an observer must be "conscious" or "intelligent." The simple fact is that the wave functions of the photons in the DSEs always collapse, the only thing that's interesting is where they collapse.
LOL....science you don't like is new-age nonsense??
Asserting without evidence that there is an "universal observer" is not science.
Yup. And this nonsense being published, peer-reviewed and based on math that has been peer-reviewed, and it stands, means nothing?
Which third-tier journal has published an article positing a universal observer? I'm sure I could name a few that might do so, but they're not journals one should be proud of being published in.
It does to you because you obviously reject all science that conflicts with your belief system.
No, I only reject the non-science.
The difference between you and I is that if I were shown science that conflicted with my beliefs, I would change my beliefs.
But that's just false. You've already demonstrated your dogmatism.
You just bring rambling, nonsensical arguments to refute the science.
Just because you don't understand my arguments doesn't make them either rambling or nonsensical.
And you don't understand the slit experiments. The wave ALWAYS collapses when being observed and NEVER collapses when it is NOT being observed.
If you observe an interference pattern, then the photons have been observed, and their wave functions have collapsed.
Please educate yourself on this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc
Wow, that's really bad. "Simply by observing" my ass. The act of measuring changes the electrons, it's not like they just zip on through a detector without any effect. Heisenberg demonstrated this.
So I think it is myself and Tipler that understands this and you are the one totally lost.
No, because your knowledge appears to be coming from cartoons which stress exactly the wrong things.
So what? You think then that you can extrapolate that analogy to complex systems?
Moving the goalposts, again. You suggested that machines require designers. Instead of agreeing that they don't, you have demonstrated that your claim that you'll change your mind is nothing more than a lie.
You think that maybe DNA just fell out of the sky like the tree?
No, that's what you think. Please try to keep this straight.
You think maybe that Bill Gates was just walking through the woods one day, kicked a rock and Windows XP poofed out of it?
Why? Did Windows XP go through billions of years of modification and selection?
So, you're going to engage in special pleading, then? Everything we see that we know has been designed by an intelligence has been designed by humans, except (in your mind) biology.
What an interesting statement coming from you. I thought you believed that there is no way to detect design and yet you say that there is a way to know when something has been. Pray tell your methodology on this design detection.
Are you claiming that the only way we know that a Kenmore refrigerator was designed is to go through some sciencey "design detection" algorithm? That we can't go find Carl Figsworth and actually talk to him about his fridge design?
I'm not going to argue AGW with you right now.
I wasn't arguing AGW, I was discussing your claims about consensus science, and showing that it wasn't the science you were talking about, it was politics. In other words, I was demonstrating that once again, you're full of crap.
You quite obviously have your hands full on the topic we are now discussing.
Hardly.
You don't know much about paleontology, do you?
Perhaps not, but have common sense and totally understand that one cannot detect speciation by looking at some freaking rocks.
Bwahahahahahahaha! You've written a paper which depends on people's common sense being wrong, yet have the balls to claim that your common sense is good enough to know that nearly 100% of biologists are wrong? Jerry, the entertainment you provide as you tie yourself up in knots is priceless. Don't ever quit.
ID is a body of thought as is anatomy or medicine or astronomy. There is no theory of astronomy. There are theories within it, of course. Same with ID.
Name one theory within ID, by your previously stated definition of "theory."
Why not get into some mathematical genomics?
I just did.
No, you said that was mathematical physics.
No. W is the total number of microstates which are consistent with a given macrostate.
Same thing.....sheeze.
But you haven't calculated how many microstates are consistent with "being human."
No, they didn't. Eyre-Walker and Keightley said nothing about entropy.
I don't care that they didn't. That's not relevant to their study from their perspective.
Then quit putting words in their mouths.
What they found was increasing harmful mutations in the human genome over a 6 million year time period. The genome would have had to order for homo sapiens to have developed such complexities over Chimp such as speech, science and engineering skills.
They didn't measure beneficial mutations, did they? How could they?
Guess what, this is evidence that the macroevolution you espouse didn't happen.
No, you're just conflating the terms "deletrious mutations" and "entropy" in a completely inappropriate fashion. There's no reason at all to think that an "ordered" genome is a good thing. Quite the opposite, since a fully-ordered genome would be all a single base, and thus wouldn't code for any sort of viable creature.
Nonsense. In fact, what you are stating makes no sense at all. Unless you are saying that one can use statistical mechanics on both systems, then I would agree.
You're the one trying (and failing) to apply statistical thermodynamics to a genome without so much as taking a single temperature measurement.
LOL, that's ridiculous. The study was done comparing the genome of chimp and man over what supposedly is a period of 6 million years. It was not accomplished in anyone generation.
It's still a spot measurement of the per-generation "entropy." You used the 1.6 mutations-per-generation number and claimed a trend. Can't say whether next generation it will be more or less, now can you? Of course, worse than that, you came up with a result that is utterly meaningless. And the fact that you are unable to expound upon the meaning tells me that you don't even know.
Admit it. This study has floored you...
Quite the opposite: such things are to be expected under evolutionary scenarios.
...and destroys your entire belief system as to man poofing from Chimps.
I have never believed that man "poofed" from chimps. You are the one positing a designer to "poof" things into existence which are impossible for nature to do on its own, remember?
Yeah, let's just ignore the units (which are actually joules/Kelvin, not joules) since they're inconvenient and turn your argument into mush. Let's also ignore the fact that your math is completely inappropriate to the problem class. Let's also ignore the fact that you've utterly failed to calculate the number of possible microstates that correspond to "being human," which is not the same as the total number of nucleotides per James Crow (since that would mean that any arrangement of nucleotides would create a human, which you know is false). There's so much we would have to ignore in order to agree with your argument here that we should just ignore the whole thing.
This entire paragraph is meaningless.
No, it's a short list of things that we would have to ignore in order to accept your mathematical argument.
Just add on joules/kelvin to the formula if you want because that is what it is, I thought I'd already said this.
But it makes your result even more meaningless. How many Kelvins are in a genome?
And don't go dissing the math. I sent you to a prestigious university that told us how to calculate it and used their math EXACTLY.
There's that ol' misdirection again. I wasn't "dissing the math," I was dissing you, Jerry. Use all the all-caps words you like, they don't mean that you understand the math. The site you sent us to was calculating the entropy of ideal gasses with an assumed uniform distribution of independent particles. You think those equations can apply in some meaningful way to deletrious mutations in a genome with a known not uniform or independent distribution, but you haven't told us why (and the fact that you think your argument stands tall with or without the units means you really don't know what you're talking about).
Maybe you would like to calculate the microstates of a mouse to show us it's mouseness.......Hehe
No, that's what you need to do to make applying that particular entropy calculation appropriate, at the very least. There's more work for you to do after that, but that would be a good start for you.

Of course, what's really amazing is that you keep on forgetting what your argument is, instead trying to pin it on me and then laughing at me for it.
And IDists...
No surprise there, since most IDists are creationists.
...and skeptics who know it is scientifically impossible to determine speciation by looking at a rock.
Can there ever be scientific evidence that a murder occurred if the murderer doesn't confess?
Major changes happened gradually. Minor ones quickly. That's what Gould was saying.
And he would know this.....how? Was Gould there?
Brilliant creationist argument you've got there.
And how does Gould explain that we see species emerge in the fossil record relatively suddenly; and stay the same until the become extinct in the record?
Punctuated equillibria is Gould's explanation of those observations. You can't even remember what your argument is supposed to be, can you?

One more thing:
And even if a mutated gene kills the organism, that says nothing that it depended on the rest of the genome for that action.
No, it says that the rest of the genome depended upon the absence of that mutation for viability.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
Evidently, I rock!
Why not question something for a change?
Visit Dave's Psoriasis Info, too.
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R.Wreck
SFN Regular

USA
1191 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  19:50:18   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send R.Wreck a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Jerry is engaged in a ludicrous crusade to dress up ID Creationism in some sort of scientific suit, and failing miserably. As a brief side trip though, I thought it would be useful to go back to the roots of ID Creationism, just to ground the discussion in reality, if only briefly.

I came across this from Michael Shermer the other day. The whole post is good, but this part is particularly relevant:

Finally, I did not (or did not mean) to say that every last proponent of ID is a Christian (exceptions provided by Crocker include Ben Stein, Anthony Flew, David Berlinski, and Steve Fuller), only that most of them are, most notably ID’s founding fathers: William Dembski, Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, Paul Nelson, and Phillip Johnson. But don’t take my word for it. Here are their own words:

“Thus, in its relation to Christianity, intelligent design should be viewed as a ground-clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration.” —William Dembski, “Intelligent Design’s Contribution to the Debate over Evolution: A Reply to Henry Morris,” 2005

On February 6, 2000, Dembski told the National Religious Broadcasters at their annual conference in Anaheim, California: “Intelligent Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God…. The job of apologetics is to clear the ground, to clear obstacles that prevent people from coming to the knowledge of Christ. … And if there’s anything that I think has blocked the growth of Christ as the free reign of the Spirit and people accepting the Scripture and Jesus Christ, it is the Darwinian naturalistic view.”
(Quoted in: Benen, Steve. 2000. “Science Test.” Church & State, July/August, online at http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs7002.htm.)

In a feature article in the Christian magazine Touchstone, Dembski was even more succinct: “Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.”
(Dembski, William. 1999. “Signs of Intelligence: A Primer on the discernment of Intelligent Design.” Touchstone, p. 84.)

“Christians in the twentieth century have been playing defense. They’ve been fighting a defensive war to defend what they have, to defend as much of it as they can. It never turns the tide. What we’re trying to do is something entirely different. We’re trying to go into enemy territory, their very center, and blow up the ammunition dump. What is their ammunition dump in this metaphor? It is their version of creation.”
(Phillip Johnson, quoted in Benen, Steve. 2000. “Science Test.” Church & State, July/August, online: http://www.au.org/churchstate/cs7002.htm>.)

Johnson was even blunter in 1996: “This isn’t really, and never has been, a debate about science…. It’s about religion and philosophy.”
(Quoted in Jay Grelen, Jay. 1996. “Witnesses for the Prosecution.” World, November 30, online at: http://www.worldmag.com/world/issue/11-30-96/national_2.asp.)

“Johnson calls his movement ‘The Wedge.’ The objective, he said, is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic, thus shifting the debate from creationism vs. evolution to the existence of God vs. the non-existence of God. From there people are introduced to ‘the truth’ of the Bible and then ‘the question of sin’ and finally ‘introduced to Jesus.’”
—Description of Phillip Johnson’s Wedge Program, “Missionary Man.” Church & State magazine, 1999


This, to get back to the title of the thread, is why ID is stupid.

Carry on.

The foundation of morality is to . . . give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibliities of knowledge.
T. H. Huxley

The Cattle Prod of Enlightened Compassion
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JerryB
Skeptic Friend

279 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  21:15:34   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send JerryB a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by Hawks

Originally posted by JerryB
Well, no. Because the system as a whole is not a dependent system.

The study considered the entire genome as a whole over time. Not any particular gene. And even if a mutated gene kills the organism, that says nothing that it depended on the rest of the genome for that action.
Sigh. Your calculation was for 41,471 nucleotides, not one genome. From Wikipedia: The Boltzmann entropy is obtained if one assumes one can treat all the component particles of a thermodynamic system as statistically independent. Your calculation violates the above assumption. IC violates the above assumption.


Please do not reply to me again without references from a known scientist or university science department.
Edited by - JerryB on 01/01/2011 07:50:20
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Kil
Evil Skeptic

USA
13476 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  22:13:10   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Kil's Homepage  Send Kil an AOL message  Send Kil a Yahoo! Message Send Kil a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by JerryB

Originally posted by Hawks

Originally posted by JerryB
Well, no. Because the system as a whole is not a dependent system.

The study considered the entire genome as a whole over time. Not any particular gene. And even if a mutated gene kills the organism, that says nothing that it depended on the rest of the genome for that action.
Sigh. Your calculation was for 41,471 nucleotides, not one genome. From Wikipedia: The Boltzmann entropy is obtained if one assumes one can treat all the component particles of a thermodynamic system as statistically independent. Your calculation violates the above assumption. IC violates the above assumption.


You are whistling air out your ass. Do not reply to me again without references from a known scientist or university science department.
Gee whiz JerryB. Your reply to Hawks doesn't seem like a reply at all. To me it looks like nothing but an insult and an order which you aren't authorized on this site to make. Perhaps you would like to reconsider your reply?

And really. Given that what you are proposing is considered by most biologists to be fringe or crank science, I would think that by now you would be used to people questioning you as they have been doing here. Must be frustrating to be the only genius in the room. But hey, that's your cross to bare, and you are baring it willingly I guess because no one is forcing you to post here, eh?



Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.

Why not question something for a change?

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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  22:45:58   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by JerryB

Do not reply to me again without references from a known scientist or university science department.
You'll need to work to your own standards, then: supply references supporting the idea that "genomic entropy" should be calculated as you have done.

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
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Machi4velli
SFN Regular

USA
854 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  23:31:58   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Machi4velli a Private Message  Reply with Quote

Genomes are not irreducibly complex as evidenced that one may mutate and do nothing to the rest of the system. It can still function. However, I could see it argued that SOME of them could be--those that result in the death of the organism due to mutation, but I have never researched this.

If SOME of them are then you don't have independency. That should be fairly easy to comprehend...


JerryB cannot just throw out the effect of dependent events. Even if they seem to be a small proportion of the total, dependence tends to be amplified the more you attempt to apply theorems that assume independence. When you move past the science and into the math of your model, the mathematical jumps need to be deductions.

These are matters of pure logic and probability, you just cannot arbitrarily decide to assume independence when it isn't true. All of these papers assuming this can essentially be ignored until someone can justify why it is acceptable to assume independence here. It's not quite mathematically sound, but it would probably meet scientific standards if someone could empirically determine the extent and manner of the dependence and use this to bound the error that will invariably be introduced by incorrectly applying ideas that require independence. If this error is small enough, we could take these papers more seriously.

Even with this, there could still be problems, and it is ideal to actually work out the math if you can first understand the dependence well enough.

"Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people."
-Giordano Bruno

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge."
-Stephen Hawking

"Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable"
-Albert Camus
Edited by - Machi4velli on 12/31/2010 23:32:34
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Powerwise
Troll

12 Posts

Posted - 12/31/2010 :  23:51:50   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Powerwise a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Jerry b = evolutionist+troll.
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Powerwise
Troll

12 Posts

Posted - 01/01/2011 :  00:49:27   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Powerwise a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by JerryB


Fixed it for you!

Ooops. Nothing in the quote box? That's because I fixed it for you.



Kil


Warning Official Warning Warning

We can take care of this site without your help Powerwise. We've been at this for a while, and really, the person in this thread who is doing the trolling is you. Keep it up and you will get exactly what you are trying for. No problem... Edit this post and you're gone.



Edited by - Powerwise on 01/01/2011 00:49:46
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Dave W.
Info Junkie

USA
26020 Posts

Posted - 01/01/2011 :  02:28:06   [Permalink]  Show Profile  Visit Dave W.'s Homepage Send Dave W. a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by Machi4velli

These are matters of pure logic and probability, you just cannot arbitrarily decide to assume independence when it isn't true. All of these papers assuming this...
Jerry has offered no papers which assume this. He's only offered a paper which estimates that there have been 1.6 bad mutations per generation in the human genome since the human/chimp split, and then Jerry himself (not the authors of the paper) decided to assume (despite the evidence in the same paper) that such deleterious mutations are statistically independent and uniformly distributed, and so he figured he could apply Boltzmann's formula, and then ignore the units on the result (units which make no sense at all when applied to DNA bases, since they would imply that the lower your core body temperature, the less entropy there is amongst your codons).

- Dave W. (Private Msg, EMail)
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Bongorider
New Member

Cuba
7 Posts

Posted - 01/01/2011 :  04:43:54   [Permalink]  Show Profile Send Bongorider a Private Message  Reply with Quote
Originally posted by JerryB

Missing the point. The point is that it can no longer function as a chain saw. The chain saw, which is the system, can no longer function. Period. Sure, I can still use the piston as a paper weight, but that does not a chain saw make.




Aren't you missing the point? The parts comprising the incomplete chainsaw do not have to function as a chainsaw, if the saw blade can be used as a saw or weapon then it is still useful. The analogy is that parts of a biological system can arise independently and if they contribute to the survival of the organism, then they are more likely to be passed down genetically. Explain why you are placing such importance on the function of the final system given that various parts which comprise it can have value.

In addition, your argument is that removing critical parts of a system causes the system to fail, this I don't dispute, but please explain how you are inferring from this that the system arose spontaneously and fully formed.
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