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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26021 Posts |
 Posted - 01/13/2011 : 16:44:00 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by JerryB
Yeah it has to be a conscious entity. Can you explain how a non-conscious object, such as a rock, could actually "watch" something happen?
Observe: "Observation is either an activity of a living being (such as a human), consisting of receiving knowledge of the outside world through the senses, or the recording of data using scientific instruments. The term may also refer to any datum collected during this activity." |
Can you say how "the recording of data" must be done by something that conscious or intelligent? The data recorders I've used are pretty stupid and definitely not conscious.
But can you quote any of the classical QM scientists claiming that an "observer" needs to be either "intelligent" or "conscious?" You said you were going to research that. Have you?| Sorry that's an iscid link, but that's apparently where Tipler released it on the Web. |
Bwhahahahahaha!| I'm sorry but Darwinism has nothing to do with medical research. You are thinking about genetics and evolution, not people popping out of monkeys and the like. There is a big difference between the two concepts. |
Yes, one is the Darwinism from which flowed modern evolutionary theory, and the other is a silly lie about "Darwinism" put forth by creationists. |
- 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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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2011 : 17:24:37 [Permalink]
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JerryB:
I'm sorry but Darwinism has nothing to do with medical research. You are thinking about genetics and evolution, not people popping out of monkeys and the like. There is a big difference between the two concepts. |
Doink...
Relevance of evolution: medicine
Medical science is continually making rapid advances: new medications and treatments are developed and introduced at a rapid pace, but we can better take advantage of these advances by taking evolution into account.
Like all biological systems, both disease-causing organisms and their victims evolve. Understanding evolution can make a big difference in how we treat disease. The evolution of disease-causing organisms may outpace our ability to invent new treatments, but studying the evolution of drug resistance can help us slow it. Learning about the evolutionary origins of diseases may provide clues about how to treat them. And considering the basic processes of evolution can help us understand the roots of genetic diseases.
The case studies in this section illuminate how evolutionary approaches can make a difference in the world of medicine. |
Read on, Jerry.
I wonder how ID could be of service to medicine given that it has no predictive qualities.
And yeah Jerry. With comments like the one above, you really are a creationist. What does it matter if your God is not the Judeo-Christian God? If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck... |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26021 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2011 : 18:42:36 [Permalink]
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But Jerry is making a distinction between evolutionary science on the one hand, and something that he calls "Darwinism" (but which never existed as a scientific theory) on the other. As near as I can make out, according to Jerry's "Darwinism," pigs might grow wings or give birth to goldfish (ideas like that are found nowhere in On the Origin of Species or later scientific works, but only in creationist tracts), and animals can only "evolve" by hybridizing with other animals. So to Jerry, evolution is perfectly relevant to medicine, but his cartoon version of "Darwinism" never could or will be (from anyone's perspective).
My advice is that wherever Jerry writes "Darwinism," you replace it with "fliggle-warblies," 'cause it'll make exactly as much sense and have exactly as much resemblance to reality.
The sad part is that Jerry claims to have been taught fliggle-warblies in college. I've encouraged him to sue to get his tuition back already, maybe he'll take that advice someday. |
- 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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Cuneiformist
The Imperfectionist
USA
4955 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2011 : 19:47:25 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by JerryB
Originally posted by Cuneiformist
| Hardly. I could easily show you some of the explanatory power of evolution that ID would be hard pressed to show. |
Have at it...... |
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I had said elsewhere that I'd do this on another thread, but I decided to do it here, instead.
In 2004 a member of SFN, Peptide, engaged in a debate with some people from a now-defunct pseudo-skeptic/crypto-creationist/failed-humor website about the validity of evolution. I don't think the debate is preserved, but it's irrelevant; the other side truly was outmatched from the start. That, said, I personally learned from following the debate (part of the SFN discussion is preserved here) some of the most compelling evidence for evolution, namely HERVs.
Fortunately, Peptide, under the guise of another nickname, posted the section of the debate where he talked about HERVs here.
The general thrust of the argument is simple: Retroviruses insert their DNA into random parts of an organism's genome. Sometimes, the cell into which a retrovirus has inserted its DNA survives, and in some rare cases, those cells are reproductive (i.e. egg or sperm), and in some even rarer cases, those particular cells are actually used in reproduction. When that happens, this genetic "scar" of the retrovirus is passed on to the offspring.
After many generations, we can look at an organism's genome and spot those retrovirus "scars". When two organisms share the same "scar" it is almost certain that they share a common ancestor.
As Peptide wrote:| What happens when two different SPECIES share the same ERV at the same letter of DNA? The very same logic applies. Given the improbable event of two separate infections leading to the same ERV the most likely scenario is that the two species share a common ancestor. Taxonomy, through the study of fossils, has come to the conclusion that apes and humans share a common ancestor. Therefore, knowing the implications of ERV production, we should find ERV’s at the same letter of DNA in each of these species. This is a prediction made by the theory of evolution. Not only that, but the patterns of similarities should also match cladistics. Cladistics is what many call “the tree of life” which show species branching off from one another. One such clade, constructed through the study of fossils, proposes that humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans all share a common ancestor. The first species to branch off were orangutans, the second were gorillas, the third were chimps, and the final branch resulted in humans. This allows us to make very precise predictions. If humans and orangutans share a common ERV at the same letter of DNA, then chimps and gorillas should also have that same ERV at the same letter of DNA because all of these species share one common ancestor. Since orangutans branched off before the other three, we should see ERV’s occuring after this branching. That is, there should be ERV’s common between gorillas, chimps, and humans that orangutans do not have. Since gorillas split off next, we should see ERV’s shared between chimps and humans that are not seen in gorillas or orangutans. In fact, there are seven ERV’s between humans and chimps that can only be explained by common ancestory, as well as the other ERV’s shared by humans and other apes. |
You can look at the charts to see a visual representation of this.
The end result is that these "scars" are exactly something predicted by evolutionary theory-- if two species had a common ancestor, then they would also share these "scars". Moreover, species that we assumed were more closely related (e.g. humans and chimps) should have more common scars than those without such a close relationship (e.g. humans and gibbons). And this is exactly what we see.
This is pretty compelling proof in favor of evolutionary theory. Indeed, it's unclear how an ID proponent would explain these "scars" and they certainly wouldn't be expected in design. Though-- having said that-- ID proponents have never really discussed how a designer works her/his/its magic (er, so to speak) so perhaps this conforms exactly to what ID says, too. If only someone would put forward a basic working model for such things.... |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13476 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2011 : 21:07:17 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
But Jerry is making a distinction between evolutionary science on the one hand, and something that he calls "Darwinism" (but which never existed as a scientific theory) on the other. As near as I can make out, according to Jerry's "Darwinism," pigs might grow wings or give birth to goldfish (ideas like that are found nowhere in On the Origin of Species or later scientific works, but only in creationist tracts), and animals can only "evolve" by hybridizing with other animals. So to Jerry, evolution is perfectly relevant to medicine, but his cartoon version of "Darwinism" never could or will be (from anyone's perspective).
My advice is that wherever Jerry writes "Darwinism," you replace it with "fliggle-warblies," 'cause it'll make exactly as much sense and have exactly as much resemblance to reality.
The sad part is that Jerry claims to have been taught fliggle-warblies in college. I've encouraged him to sue to get his tuition back already, maybe he'll take that advice someday.
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Oh yeah. I see. I remember that Jerry said evolution happens. So I asked him what his version of evolution is and he didn't respond to me. I'm betting it's some sort of micro/macro creationist crapola. He might have said, but I get lulled into a kind of stupor when reading page after page of his pseudo-scientific ramblings and honestly couldn't care less. But now and then something jumps out at me and I respond. |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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Hawks
SFN Regular
Canada
1383 Posts |
Posted - 01/13/2011 : 22:48:39 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by JerryB
Yes, ID has both predictive and explanatory aspects to it. First, it can explain the existence of all of life. And it can predict the extinction of populations.
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Bollocks. ID predicts nothing. |
METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL
It's a small, off-duty czechoslovakian traffic warden! |
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Dr. Mabuse
Septic Fiend
Sweden
9687 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2011 : 09:02:11 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by JerryB
Where did it come from? Well, no one knows for sure, but Hawking muses that the particles in this universe came from a singularity event in a black hole in another universe, |
I never heard of Hawking saying such a thing. Please provide citation and actual quote.
| One has to understand that after Tipler discovered the Omega Point, he went from a hard atheist relatively overnight to Christianity. This stressed his belief system and he began to write about all kinds of silly stuff. |
From what physicists and other scientists tell, Tipler's writing of silly stuff started with the Omega Point.
| For example, he tried to show how Christ was resurrected using QM. I place no stock in his writings after the Omega Point because they are from the aspect of fundamental Christianity. However, the Omega Point has been peer reviewed and it walks. |
Several of his peer disagrees. And just because it got published isn't a guarantee that it wasn't bunk. Was the Omega Point article refereed?
I haven't found the article available to me online, so I haven't read it, but at least Michael Shermer claims there are a large number of assumptions that Tipler needed to pull out of his ass in order to make it fly.
I know Michael Shermer enough to trust his judgement that if he says there are serious flaws in an article, then there most likely is.
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Dr. Mabuse - "When the going gets tough, the tough get Duct-tape..."
Dr. Mabuse whisper.mp3
"Equivocation is not just a job, for a creationist it's a way of life..." Dr. Mabuse
Support American Troops in Iraq:
Send them unarmed civilians for target practice..
Collateralmurder. |
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JerryB
Skeptic Friend
279 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2011 : 10:14:22 [Permalink]
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I'm just going to ignore the parts of this post where you don't bring a cogent argument, which is most of it.
JERRY: He tells you point blank what he is discussing: "The general principle involved is the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy principle).....
DAVE: So what? |
So what? Because.....LMAO, you claimed that the calculation he used was not SLOT, he says it is:
JERRY: "You don't remember us discussing Feynman, Schrodinger and Ilya Prigogine ALL who worked with SLOT in open systems?"
DAVE: "No, they worked with entropy in open systems, not SLOT. The two are not synonymous."
So now you are going to squirm out by saying you didn't say that?? That disingenuous duck won't float.
http://www.skepticfriends.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=13863&whichpage=7#187776
No, you already agreed that life is not a system in equilibrium. Boltzmann's formula can only be used for systems in equilibrium, so you and Schrödinger both were wrong to use it on life. Schrödinger is just trying to make a point about life being an anti-entropic process in a book written for lay people, and so that book isn't particularly scientific and his errors can be forgiven for the sake of the discussion he was trying to have. You, on the other hand, expect people to agree with you that your calculations are both accurate and disprove Darwinism, and so you've got a much higher burden of proof to deal with. Yet you foolishly want to claim that if Schrödinger could do it, so can you. What is Life?, however, is not a thermodynamics textbook.
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I swear that just when I think you can't get anymore proposterous, the very next post you do it. Let me guess, you can just read Schrodinger's mind and know what he was thinking and why he wrote that book....LMAO
Schrodinger showed us how to use that formula to calculate negative entropy in the human body because that is a legitimate way to calculate it.
First you argued that the renowned physicist couldn't do simple math, you said he screwed up and the negative entropy should have come out a positive number. Hmmmm.....ya backed off that one.
Then you argued, well OK, but he showed us how to calculate entropy but that had nothing to do with SLOT. Hmmmm.....you're backing off that one, and if you do a turn around, I will just post the link again.
So now you are saying that he was wrong again, but heck maybe he wasn't, but he was just trying to make a point? A reference on this, please. A reference that Schrodinger was just wrong and one from him saying that he really didn't really mean what he wrote, he was just trying to make a point.
BAHAHAhahahahahah...........
Schrodinger was a physics professor at several European universities and was highly skilled in higher mathematics:
"Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933, for his 1926 introduction of Schrödinger's wave, the mathematical equation of wave mechanics that is still the most widely used piece of mathematics in modern quantum theory. It posits a non-relativistic wave equation that governs how electrons behave within the hydrogen atom. He worked on analytical mechanics, applications of partial differential equations to dynamics, atomic spectroscopy, color theory, cosmology, counter (or detector) statistics, eigenvalue problems, electromagnetic theory, general relativity, James Clerk Maxwell's equations, meson physics, optics, radiation theory, solid-state physics, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, and the unified field theory."
http://www.nndb.com/people/308/000072092/
That book was taken from a series of his lectures on thermodynamics. Yet you have the arrogance to assert that Schrodinger didn't know what he was doing with that simple formula and it is DAVE who is going to set the world straight on it. 
| Another argument from authority. SLOT is "all about" the mathematics, and the mathematics don't say what these examples say. In fact, dust settling out of the air is an anti-entropic process driven by energy supplied by gravity. Calling a house getting dusty an example of SLOT is absolutely ridiculous. |
No, you not understanding SLOT on even the simplest of levels is what is ridiculous:
"Few examples of Entropy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics:
- evaporation of water
- melting of ice
- cloud formation in the sky
- adding sugar to a cup of coffee
- carbon dioxide is dissolved in water
- spontaneous (natural) cleaning of a messy house
- shuffling of playing cards
- breaking a mirror or glass"
http://hubpages.com/hub/MECHANICAL-ENGINEERING-Thermodynamics---Entropy-and-the-Second-Law-of-Thermodynamics
You can't win for losing, can you? And I want the readers to see that you post NO references to support your silly arguments. That's because there is no one out there in science that agrees with Dave, but Dave.
| Then you agree that S and ΔS are different, and your cited author is wrong to use the word "entropy" to refer to both of them. |
Sure, technically that is true but he isn't wrong. You obviously haven't discussed this subject enough to understand the lingo of it. I have never discussed this with any thermodynamicist who didn't do the same thing. I do.
Isn't it a little obvious that anyone who has had chem 110 or above understands the difference between S and deltaS? You are not exactly revolutionizing the field here. In fact, I'm not even sure I know what your point is anymore.
| Why? In a "perfectly and newly designed genome," is there no such thing as a synonymous substitution? Would a "perfectly and newly designed genome" have a different genetic coding than the rest of life? |
Well of course, why would anyone or anything design something with defective genes in it to begin with, that would be silly.
There are lots of genomes (microstates) which correspond to a certain phylogeny (macrostate), thanks to synonymous substitution and the fact that most mutations don't immediately cause speciation. A "perfectly and newly designed genome" might (for the sake of argument) be the most optimal microstate, but that doesn't mean all the other microstates can be ignored.
To get a configurational entropy of zero with Boltzmann's formula, there can be only one microstate consistent with some macrostate, since only log 1 = 0. So now you'll need to defend two new ideas:
1) That your alleged designer designs genomes "perfectly," and
2) That there is only a single possible "perfectly and newly designed genome" (for each species, I assume). |
I don't have to defend #1 because it is so obvious. It is just silly to think that if a designer were intelligent enough to design man, it would also be stupid enough to insert deleteriously mutated genes where they didn't need to be.
And how could something mutate before it was even created? So that is out.
And #2 is just as obvious. There can be nothing possible but one microstate if the arrangement is perfect, it is either perfect with 0 disorganization or it is disorganized and the figure is something else.
| The only possible way for Boltzmann's formula to result in zero is for the number of microstates to equal 1, precisely. In thermodynamics, this only happens at absolute zero. |
No, not in thermodynamics as a field, but considering thermodynamic entropy in itself--heat exchanges. And we are discussing configurational entropy (or some call it logical entropy). Please get your terms straight. You are just confusing the readers.
| In information theory, this only happens if no information is being transmitted (the same message, over and over and over again). |
We are not discussing Shannon entropy either. Please stay on the subject.
| This would mean that a mutated genome would have to be considered a whole different system, since you're suggesting that a perfect genome only has one microstate. In other words, a genome with only a single microstate cannot mutate and still be considered the same genome for comparison purposes. In still other words, if that's what you're saying, that's fine, but then you can't do your ΔS = S2-S1 math because the two S would be measuring different systems. |
LOL.....Really? Well, you better get some emails off to all of the geneticists in medicine who are so confused in their field that they don't know that when genes mutate in a person's genome, that cannot be considered the same genome and they are now dealing with another patient
And delta means change. When genes mutate from healthy ones to deleterious ones, that is change. You accuse ME of having a shallow understanding of math?
| .....since you're drawing a straight line over six million years of real-world data, it's quite likely that you will miss most trends. Heck, if there were ten deleterious mutations per generation for the first million years, then to average 1.6 deleterious, there must have been 0.01 beneficial mutations per generation over the next five million years to get to an average of 1.6 for the whole six million years. In other words, by focusing on the two ends only, you're hiding any local trends. |
I wasn't looking for local trends--once again, this is most irrelevant. All I cared to show was that deleterious mutations were increasing and accumulating in the human genome over time. The study showed exactly that.
| They are exempt until they stop exchanging energy or matter with their environments, in which case they'll become isolated and they will tend towards equilibrium until "dead." |
Oh, that's brilliant. LMAO.....I would ask for a reference, but you wouldn't bother because even you know there aren't any.
I assume you meant "surroundings" rather than environment. Has it occurred to you that if earth ever reached a state where it could no longer give up heat to it's surroundings that the decay process would stop? But you have all these relatively small isolated systems running around inside a larger isolated system? How would further decay into one large system that consists only of randomly floating particles be possible at all then? They can no longer exchange anything between them in order to decay OR organize.
And who or what is going to build some infinitely energy efficient barrier around these systems to stop the exchange of matter and energy between them, the god Zeus?
You are just clueless in this subject, you don't think that ponds can freeze or thaw because they are in an open system and thus exempt, suppose.
Let me teach you some 10th grade physics. I am going to use a cup of coffee and define the cup as the barrier--anything outside the cup is the surroundings.
Now remember, the cup of coffee is defined as the system because that is what we are studying. If you start looking at the room, the atmosphere surrounding the house, heat energy being radiated into space at night as happens on earth or being returned to earth by the sun and radiation the next day, you are going to be confused because we only want to know what is happening to the cup of coffee. The cup is our system:
The coffee cools 1000 J and the room is at 300 Kelvin. Now here is Clausius' formula you like to throw around:
deltaS = deltaQ / T
deltaS = -1000J / 300K
deltaS = -3.3 J/K
Well gee, that cup of coffee just organized because it lost heat which is really strange since it is in an open system and SLOT don't even apply to it.....
| No, eventually the Sun will go red giant and the Earth will melt inside it. But even if that weren't to happen, eventually the Sun will run out of fusable atoms and so the #1 energy source for life on Earth will go cold. Once that happens, Earth will become an isolated system, and its entropy will increase like in any other isolated system. |
Um.....I'm afraid not. Should that happen, earth will still be able to absorb all kinds of things from space: energy in the form of light from stars, neutrinos and gamma rays and matter such as comets and meteorites. Still very much an open system.
| Again: if entropy can never decrease in any system (because SLOT allegedly holds universally), then we wouldn't be here having this discussion. There are two parts to SLOT, one which defines the change in entropy for all systems, and the other is when that equation is combined with the Third Law of Thermodynamics to find that in isolated systems, ΔS must be greater than or equal to zero. This is all in Wikipedia. |
I thought you said above: "No, they worked with entropy in open systems, not SLOT. The two are not synonymous."
Now it IS Slot, but there are two kinds of SLOT? Well I have news for you, there are about 30 different ways I can think of where SLOT is used differently depending on the system(s) being studied.
No, you just don't want to answer the question: is every scientist who also happens to be a Christian an "IDist?" Is "belief in a designer" enough to make one an IDist, regardless of the details of that belief?
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I ALREADY answered that question. Why do you keep asking the same questions over and over? It is irritating:
I stated that every Christian that believes Adam and Eve were designed in God's own image is an IDist, certainly to that extent. I also stated that doesn't mean they were a modern IDist and into the science I am espousing, this form of ID has only been around, what, 30 years or so? |
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JerryB
Skeptic Friend
279 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2011 : 10:49:57 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
By the way, Jerry, now that you've used the conclusion to your entropy argument as a premise to it, you've made it circular and thus logically flawed. But I'll ignore that for the moment. |
Good, since I have no idea what you are talking about and doubt you do.
| Let's focus, instead, on your assertion that a "perfectly" designed human would have zero configurational entropy. In protein-coding DNA (the kind that Eyre-Walker and Keightley looked at), triplets of nucleotides specify amino acids which get strung together into proteins. Let us consider the "perfect" human to be perfect because he has the set of proteins that are optimally efficient for functioning as a human. |
Fine, let us consider that exactly as you worded it and I bolded it above.
Each nucleotide triplet can take on one of 22 "meanings," 20 of which are "add one of twenty amino acids to a protein," one of which is "start a new protein" and the last of which is "stop building the protein." Since there are four possible nucleotides in each of the three positions in the triplet, there are 64 (43) possible combinations of nucleotides in each coding triplet (codon).
But these 64 possibilities only code for 20 possible amino acids and two functions, so there is a lot of duplication. A CGA codon can be substituted for CGU, and an Arginine amino acid will still be added to the protein, for example. These synonymous substitutions can be made without any reduction in the efficiency of the proteins, since the resulting proteins will be identical.
A simple division (64/22) shows us that on average, there are 2.91 duplicates for every codon. Some have more and some have less, but looking at the averages allows us a conservative estimate. A sample set of DNA that's 41471 nucleotides long (Eyre-Walker and Keightley's sample) will have 41471/3 or 13823 (rounded down) codons. Since, on average, each codon has 2.91 duplicates which could be present without disturbing the perfectness of the resultant creature (and because of that, the system lacks dependency), the total number of unique genomes which could make a perfect human is equal to 2.9113823.
That's 2.47×106412 microstates consistent with (in fact, indistinguishable from on the basis of proteins) the "perfect human" macrostate.
So, with a W of 2.47×106412 (the natural log of which is 14765), I calculate the entropy of the "perfect" human (let's call it S0) to be 2.04×10-19. You calculated the entropy of modern humans (let's call it Snow) to be 9.98×10-23 (which we'll round up to 10-22), based on the same Eyre-Walker and Keightley study.
Therefore, given ΔS = Snow - S0,ΔS = 10-22 - 2.04×10-19
ΔS = -2.039×10-19 Therefore, because the change in entropy is negative, we can conclude with mathematical precision (and all those references) that the entropy in humans has decreased over the last six million years.
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There can be NO entropy in a perfectly ordered genome when we are considering entropy as disorder and you as much as say that where I bolded above.
This entire post simply makes no sense. All you calculated is the possible ways a genome can be arranged and still function perfectly at the time of design. That's not order OR disorder over time. It's just the ways a designer could have DUNNIT.
So go back and do the math correctly considering what we are discussing:
deltaS = S2 - S1
deltaS = 10^-22 - 0
deltaS = 10^-22
Entropy is positive showing that the genome has disordered. Not going to let you twist the math, Dave.
That is not entropy increasing or decreasing over time |
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JerryB
Skeptic Friend
279 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2011 : 10:57:24 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Dave W.
Can you say how "the recording of data" must be done by something that conscious or intelligent? The data recorders I've used are pretty stupid and definitely not conscious. |
Data recorders record data to be interpreted by intelligence. I have yet to see a data recorder pop itself into existence and begin recording data for it's own benefit. That point is so obvious, I shouldn't have to waste my time pointing you that direction.
| But can you quote any of the classical QM scientists claiming that an "observer" needs to be either "intelligent" or "conscious?" You said you were going to research that. Have you? |
I will as soon as you explain how a non-conscious object, such as a rock, can actually "watch" something happen in any meaningful way. |
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JerryB
Skeptic Friend
279 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2011 : 11:14:09 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Kil
JerryB:
I'm sorry but Darwinism has nothing to do with medical research. You are thinking about genetics and evolution, not people popping out of monkeys and the like. There is a big difference between the two concepts. |
Doink...
Relevance of evolution: medicine
Medical science is continually making rapid advances: new medications and treatments are developed and introduced at a rapid pace, but we can better take advantage of these advances by taking evolution into account.
Like all biological systems, both disease-causing organisms and their victims evolve. Understanding evolution can make a big difference in how we treat disease. The evolution of disease-causing organisms may outpace our ability to invent new treatments, but studying the evolution of drug resistance can help us slow it. Learning about the evolutionary origins of diseases may provide clues about how to treat them. And considering the basic processes of evolution can help us understand the roots of genetic diseases.
The case studies in this section illuminate how evolutionary approaches can make a difference in the world of medicine. |
Read on, Jerry.
I wonder how ID could be of service to medicine given that it has no predictive qualities.
And yeah Jerry. With comments like the one above, you really are a creationist. What does it matter if your God is not the Judeo-Christian God? If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck...
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If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is probably trying to sell you insurance.
And the link above doesn't discuss Darwinism, it discusses evolution. We all know that the study of mutating organisms is a big part of medicine. But the study of dinosaurs morphing into birds is not. That's why it is very important to distinguish Darwinism from evolution.
But I have already posted one example of the predictive qualities of ID:
One example of this is the work of English physician William Harvey, considered by many to have laid the foundation for modern medicine. Harvey was the first to demonstrate the function of the heart and the circulation of the blood.[2]
According to Barrow and Tipler [3], Harvey deduced the mammalian circulatory system using the epistemology of teleology: "The way in which this respect for Aristotle was realized in Harvey's works seems to have been in the search for discernible purpose in the workings of living organisms- indeed, the expectation of purposeful activity..... he tried to conceive of how a purposeful designer would have constructed a system of motion."
Harvey commented to Robert Boyle how he conceived the layout of the circulatory system. He reasoned the shape and positioning of the valves in the system and invited himself to imagine “that so Provident a cause as Nature had not so placed many values without Design; and no Design seem'd more possible than that, since the Blood could not well, because of the interposing valves, be sent, by the veins to the limbs; it should be sent through the Arteries and return through the veins.” |
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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26021 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2011 : 11:31:07 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by JerryB
There can be NO entropy in a perfectly ordered genome when we are considering entropy as disorder and you as much as say that where I bolded above. |
Why would you consider entropy to be "disorder" when I'm discussing configurational entropy? There are multiple ways to specify each amino acid in DNA. That means that there can't be a single correct way, even in a "perfect" organism. There's no difference between CGA and CGU codons, for example, since they both specify Arginine. The "perfect" genome necessarily has more than one possible configuration (microstate), and thus its entropy cannot possibly be zero.| This entire post simply makes no sense. All you calculated is the possible ways a genome can be arranged and still function perfectly at the time of design. |
Indeed, that's exactly right.| That's not order OR disorder over time. |
That's why I took your measurement of what the entropy is now, and subtracted to get ΔS, just like you did.So go back and do the math correctly considering what we are discussing:
deltaS = S2 - S1
deltaS = 10^-22 - 0 |
But I just calculated that the configuration entropy of the "perfect" genome isn't zero. You're just declaring it to be zero with no evidence or justification whatsoever.| Entropy is positive showing that the genome has disordered. Not going to let you twist the math, Dave. |
You're mathematically wrong about the configurational entropy of a "perfect" genome. Again, the only way for something to have a configuration entropy of zero is to have only a single possible microstate. That's false for genomes due to the fact that multiple different codons can code for identical animo acids, even for genomes coding for the "perfect" set of proteins.
So unless you can explain how CGA is a more "perfect" codon for Arginine than CGU (for example), and thus that there is only a single configuration of DNA which codes for the perfect set of proteins, you'll have to face the fact that so long as life is DNA-based, the "perfect" being will have a non-zero entropy because it will have more than one possible microstate. |
- 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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Dave W.
Info Junkie
USA
26021 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2011 : 11:39:42 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by JerryB
Data recorders record data to be interpreted by intelligence. I have yet to see a data recorder pop itself into existence and begin recording data for it's own benefit. That point is so obvious, I shouldn't have to waste my time pointing you that direction. |
So you're saying that if I set up a Double-Slit Experiment with only data recorders, turn the experiment on, then turn it off, I can walk into the room and find nothing at all on the film because I haven't "observed" the data in the recorders, yet? So are the photons without collapsed wave functions trapped halfway between the source and the screen? How long can we maintain these uncollapsed wave functions? How do the photons know that I haven't examined the data in the data recorder yet?| I will as soon as you explain how a non-conscious object, such as a rock, can actually "watch" something happen in any meaningful way. |
There you go again, trying to apply "meaning" to something which doesn't require "meaning" to function. Or do you really think that particles care about where they are going and who is looking? |
- 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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JerryB
Skeptic Friend
279 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2011 : 11:52:50 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Cuneiformist
Originally posted by JerryB
Originally posted by Cuneiformist
| Hardly. I could easily show you some of the explanatory power of evolution that ID would be hard pressed to show. |
Have at it...... |
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I had said elsewhere that I'd do this on another thread, but I decided to do it here, instead.
In 2004 a member of SFN, Peptide, engaged in a debate with some people from a now-defunct pseudo-skeptic/crypto-creationist/failed-humor website about the validity of evolution. I don't think the debate is preserved, but it's irrelevant; the other side truly was outmatched from the start. That, said, I personally learned from following the debate (part of the SFN discussion is preserved here) some of the most compelling evidence for evolution, namely HERVs.
Fortunately, Peptide, under the guise of another nickname, posted the section of the debate where he talked about HERVs here.
The general thrust of the argument is simple: Retroviruses insert their DNA into random parts of an organism's genome. Sometimes, the cell into which a retrovirus has inserted its DNA survives, and in some rare cases, those cells are reproductive (i.e. egg or sperm), and in some even rarer cases, those particular cells are actually used in reproduction. When that happens, this genetic "scar" of the retrovirus is passed on to the offspring.
After many generations, we can look at an organism's genome and spot those retrovirus "scars". When two organisms share the same "scar" it is almost certain that they share a common ancestor.
As Peptide wrote:| What happens when two different SPECIES share the same ERV at the same letter of DNA? The very same logic applies. Given the improbable event of two separate infections leading to the same ERV the most likely scenario is that the two species share a common ancestor. Taxonomy, through the study of fossils, has come to the conclusion that apes and humans share a common ancestor. Therefore, knowing the implications of ERV production, we should find ERV’s at the same letter of DNA in each of these species. This is a prediction made by the theory of evolution. Not only that, but the patterns of similarities should also match cladistics. Cladistics is what many call “the tree of life” which show species branching off from one another. One such clade, constructed through the study of fossils, proposes that humans, chimps, gorillas, and orangutans all share a common ancestor. The first species to branch off were orangutans, the second were gorillas, the third were chimps, and the final branch resulted in humans. This allows us to make very precise predictions. If humans and orangutans share a common ERV at the same letter of DNA, then chimps and gorillas should also have that same ERV at the same letter of DNA because all of these species share one common ancestor. Since orangutans branched off before the other three, we should see ERV’s occuring after this branching. That is, there should be ERV’s common between gorillas, chimps, and humans that orangutans do not have. Since gorillas split off next, we should see ERV’s shared between chimps and humans that are not seen in gorillas or orangutans. In fact, there are seven ERV’s between humans and chimps that can only be explained by common ancestory, as well as the other ERV’s shared by humans and other apes. |
You can look at the charts to see a visual representation of this.
The end result is that these "scars" are exactly something predicted by evolutionary theory-- if two species had a common ancestor, then they would also share these "scars". Moreover, species that we assumed were more closely related (e.g. humans and chimps) should have more common scars than those without such a close relationship (e.g. humans and gibbons). And this is exactly what we see.
This is pretty compelling proof in favor of evolutionary theory. Indeed, it's unclear how an ID proponent would explain these "scars" and they certainly wouldn't be expected in design. Though-- having said that-- ID proponents have never really discussed how a designer works her/his/its magic (er, so to speak) so perhaps this conforms exactly to what ID says, too. If only someone would put forward a basic working model for such things....
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Admittedly, this is one of the oldest and most interesting arguments for Darwinism and I have debated it often over the years. However, it is very easily refuted if one understands retroviruses.
Furthermore, it says nothing at all about design. Surely there are no readers out there that think we IDists don't understand that after the completion of design, the organisms won't deal with viruses and retroviruses. We know very well that they will.
Here is the key argument for your side of the debate: "What happens when two different SPECIES share the same ERV at the same letter of DNA? The very same logic applies. Given the improbable event of two separate infections leading to the same ERV the most likely scenario is that the two species share a common ancestor. Taxonomy, through the study of fossils, has come to the conclusion that apes and humans share a common ancestor. Therefore, knowing the implications of ERV production, we should find ERV’s at the same letter of DNA in each of these species. This is a prediction made by the theory of evolution."
The assertion that similar species share the same ERV at the same letter of DNA is true. But the rest of this argument is not.
There exists species specific viruses, as example, if I catch the flue, my cat probably won't come down with it.
There also exists cross-species viruses such as rabies and if my cat catches it, I CAN come down with that.
The reason that the same ERV infects separate species at the same letter of DNA is because that letter of DNA is PRESENT in those same species.
It doesn't know if it is a man or a monkey. It just recognizes that particular area and knows that it can reproduce there.
So, there is no evidence to show that we have retroviruses in the same areas of our genomes because one organism sprang from another. The answer to that would be that this is a cross-species virus and infected the same letter of DNA because it was present in multiple organisms.
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JerryB
Skeptic Friend
279 Posts |
Posted - 01/14/2011 : 11:58:52 [Permalink]
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Originally posted by Kil
Originally posted by Dave W.
But Jerry is making a distinction between evolutionary science on the one hand, and something that he calls "Darwinism" (but which never existed as a scientific theory) on the other. As near as I can make out, according to Jerry's "Darwinism," pigs might grow wings or give birth to goldfish (ideas like that are found nowhere in On the Origin of Species or later scientific works, but only in creationist tracts), and animals can only "evolve" by hybridizing with other animals. So to Jerry, evolution is perfectly relevant to medicine, but his cartoon version of "Darwinism" never could or will be (from anyone's perspective).
My advice is that wherever Jerry writes "Darwinism," you replace it with "fliggle-warblies," 'cause it'll make exactly as much sense and have exactly as much resemblance to reality.
The sad part is that Jerry claims to have been taught fliggle-warblies in college. I've encouraged him to sue to get his tuition back already, maybe he'll take that advice someday.
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Oh yeah. I see. I remember that Jerry said evolution happens. So I asked him what his version of evolution is and he didn't respond to me. I'm betting it's some sort of micro/macro creationist crapola. He might have said, but I get lulled into a kind of stupor when reading page after page of his pseudo-scientific ramblings and honestly couldn't care less. But now and then something jumps out at me and I respond.
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Pseudo-scientific ramblings? I'll take that as a compliment...
I believe that evolution is a change in the gene pool of a population over time. But I also believe that science prohibits this change from going toward complexity as a tendency.
So do I believe that organism can change? Yes. But do I believe that man could have sprang from a common organism such as an amoeba-like critter? Nope. |
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An intro to Intelligent Design for skeptics
