The Origin of Specious Nonsense. Twelve years on. Still going. Answer soon.

J C

Vivisectus wrote: »

The problem is that we have already seen this is neither here nor there... the proposed way of modelling the likelihood in terms of probability is quite wrong. You then deal with that by simply repeating the claim that this is not so.

Why is it 'quite wrong'?

Vivisectus wrote: »

... how did it prove this? All you have done is say that there is a sort of practical upper limit to probability

and then you claim that the creation of simple proto life is beyond this limit by saying "Even a single chain of amino acids is too unlikely to form": the chances of a 120 amino acid with 20 possibilities forming is 120 ^ 20.

I don't claim that ... quite obviously amino acids can be rapidly chemically combined into very long chains - the issue is that they also have to have specific functionalities in tightly specified time and place ... and that is were the UPB comes into play, when non-intelligently directed processes, like mutagenesis is cited as the 'producer' of the functional variety we observe within organisms.

Vivisectus wrote: »

But that is just plain wrong, as has been extensively demonstrated. It assumes that there is a huge amino-acid soup, in which these molecules are randomly linking and unlinking to make chains - which is what your mathematician modelled. But that is not what is proposed at all: it is a strawman argument.

What is proposed as the mechanism by which the functional variety from which nature selects comes about?

Vivisectus wrote: »

All you are doing is repeating the same one, over and over, even though it has been shown for what it is.

The truth bears repetition, especially when it is the truth and nobody can therefore reasonably deny it.

Vivisectus wrote: »

here you graciously admit that bio-chemistry exists... hurray!.

Thanks ... I don't deny reality allright

Vivisectus wrote: »

And another claim, based on your earlier one, repeated.

Like I have said, the truth bears repetition, especially when it is the truth ... and nobody can therefore reasonably deny it.

Vivisectus wrote: »

...no, it offers claims.



And more claims...

Really all this just boils down to you beating the dead horse of the UPB.

ID makes well founded claims ... and the only dead horse that is being flogged is the one that was supposed to evolve from something that looked like a glorified dog.:)

J C

Doctor Jimbob wrote: »

It doesn't matter how much bullshit you post, creationism will continue to be nonsense.

I could say the very same thing about Evolution ... but without citing the reasons, it would be just as invalid as your contention.

I have cited the reasons why Spontaneous M2M Evolution is mathematically impossible ... all you have done is name-called my posts and Creationism ... without presenting a scintilla of evidence to back up your contention.

Doctor Jimbob

J C wrote: »

I could say the very same thing about Evolution ... but without citing the reasons, it would be just as invalid as your contention.

I have cited the reasons why Spontaneous M2M Evolution is mathematically impossible ... all you have done is name-called my posts and Creationism ... without presenting a scintilla of evidence to back up your contention.

You could, but you'd still be wrong.

You've cited bugger all other than the inane ravings of straw clutching bible bashers. Lol at the not presenting evidence bit. Just lol.

J C

Doctor Jimbob wrote: »

You could, but you'd still be wrong.

You've cited bugger all other than the inane ravings of straw clutching bible bashers. Lol at the not presenting evidence bit. Just lol.

I'm clutching at nothing ... I have the Word of God in one hand and the fruits of Science in the other ... and they are both pointing in the same direction .. towards God as our Creator and Saviour.

Delirium

J C wrote: »

I'm clutching at nothing ... I have the Word of God in one hand and the fruits of Science in the other ... and they are both pointing in the same direction .. towards God as our Creator and Saviour.

FYP

J C

SW wrote: »

FYP

Have you now taken to censorship ... crossing out the bits of other peoples posts that annoy you ... because they are the truth ... and you have no plausible response ... other than to use the censor's pen, so that you can tell yourself that it never happened.:eek::pac:

Delirium

J C wrote: »

Have you now taken to censorship ... crossing out the bits of other peoples posts that annoy you ... because they are the truth ... and you have no plausible response.:eek::pac:

Not at all. You've repeatedly stated that science doesn't support what creationism claims. This is not censorship, this is reality;)

Vivisectus

Now can we please get back to answering my post - where hard facts have been presented that prove an intelligent origin for life.
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showp...postcount=2112

Covered that ages ago: the probability math is modelling something that no-one is actually proposing. It is a strawman argument.

Like many creationists you seem to have an unfortunate habit of repeating the same old stuff long after it has been refuted, without actually addressing the refutation itself - or, apparently, trying too hard to understand what it actually is.

Vivisectus

J C wrote: »

Why is it 'quite wrong'?

I don't claim that ... quite obviously amino acids can be rapidly chemically combined into very long chains - the issue is that they also have to have specific functionalities in tightly specified time and place ... and that is were the UPB comes into play, when non-intelligently directed processes, like mutagenesis is cited as the 'producer' of the functional variety we observe within organisms.

Only one function is required: self-replication. The rest follows. You are modelling the spontaneous appearance of advanced functionality, but that is not what is being proposed at all.

You were shown a plausible way this could occur, starting with simple chemistry. Your UPB is never applicable to that. Your only objection to it, incidentally, was "You haven't done it in a lab!"... which is funny, given the fact that the number of confirmed instances of divine magic remains 0.

What is proposed as the mechanism by which the functional variety from which nature selects comes about?

Self-replication.

Like I have said, the truth bears repetition, especially when it is the truth ... and nobody can therefore reasonably deny it.

Religious logic at work! Just like the Bible is the word of God, because the Bible says so and it is the word of God!

ID makes well founded claims ... and the only dead horse that is being flogged is the one that was supposed to evolve from something that looked like a glorified dog.

And yet, when you point out that there is a problem with one of the ideas, all ID can do is repeat the same old claims.

Take Oldrandwisers post, and show me where your UPB applies?

Your only response so far has been to move the goalpost and demand someone replicate it in a lab. When we do that, you will simply do it again and demand we evolve it into a mammal within your lifetime.

Which, as I pointed out, is kind of funny, as it implies your own point of view is implausible unless you can produce instances divine creation in lab conditions!

J C

Vivisectus wrote: »

Why is it 'quite wrong'?



Only one function is required: self-replication. The rest follows. You are modelling the spontaneous appearance of advanced functionality, but that is not what is being proposed at all.

... but all living cells (including the so-called 'simple' one-celled organisms) have advanced functionality of inordinate complex functional specificity, each one of which breaks the Universal Probability Bound.

Vivisectus wrote: »

You were shown a plausible way this could occur, starting with simple chemistry. Your UPB is never applicable to that. Your only objection to it, incidentally, was "You haven't done it in a lab!"... which is funny, given the fact that the number of confirmed instances of divine magic remains 0.

It was a series of hopeful conjectures backed up with very limited laboratory demonstrations involving the application of the very best intelligent design that mankind can currently muster, given our current state of science and technology.
The fact that anything remotely approaching life hasn't been synthesized in the lab by the combined wisdom, intelligence and advanced technology of Mankind is a definitive indicator that spontaneous naturalistic processes certainly didn't do it.

Vivisectus wrote: »

Self-replication.

All self replication can do is to reproduce the organism involved ... not add new capacities not already pre-existing in the complex functional specified genetic information of the individual involved.

Vivisectus wrote: »

Religious logic at work! Just like the Bible is the word of God, because the Bible says so and it is the word of God!

Its scientific logic at work ... ID proponents have given the basis for their ideas on the origins of life ... and so far nobody has been able to disprove it.
That is the truth ... for scientific (and not religious) reasons.

Vivisectus wrote: »

And yet, when you point out that there is a problem with one of the ideas, all ID can do is repeat the same old claims.

Valid claims bear repeating.
... and the scientific basis and claims of ID have never been invalidated.

Vivisectus wrote: »

Take Oldrandwisers post, and show me where your UPB applies?

Which part of Oldrandwisers post are you referring to?

Vivisectus wrote: »

Your only response so far has been to move the goalpost and demand someone replicate it in a lab. When we do that, you will simply do it again and demand we evolve it into a mammal within your lifetime.

It is quite reasonable to demand that something that spontaneous processes supposedly achieved could be replicated by the cutting-edge technology of Mankind ... and when this fails miserably, it is also quite reasonable to conclude that the processes that originally produced life were not spontaneous ... but were actually the appliance of intelligence and creative capacities vastly in excess of our Human capacity.

Vivisectus wrote: »

Which, as I pointed out, is kind of funny, as it implies your own point of view is implausible unless you can produce instances divine creation in lab conditions!

... no, the challenge is for you guys to demonstrate what you say happened ... that spontaneous physical and chemical processes produced our genomes.

Doctor Jimbob

J C wrote: »

... but all living cells (including the so-called 'simple' one-celled organisms have advanced functionality of inordinate complex functional specificity each one of which break the Universal Probability Bound.

It was a series of hopeful conjectures backed up with very limited laboratory demonstrations involving the application of the very best intelligent design that mankind can currently muster, given our current science and technology.
The fact that anything remotely approaching life hasn't been synthesized in the lab by the combined wisdom, intelligence and advanced technology of Mankind is a definitive indicator that spontaneous naturalistic processes certainly didn't do it.

All self replication can do is to reproduce the organism involved ... not add new capacities not already pre-existing in the complex functional specified genetic information of the individual involved.


Its scientific logic at work ... ID proponents have given the basis for their ideas on the origins of life ... and so far nobody has been able to disprove it.
That is the truth ... for scientific (and not religious) reasons.


Valid claims bear repeating.
... and the scientific basis and claims of ID have never been invalidated.

Which part of Oldrandwisers post are you referring to?

It is quite reasonable to demand that something that spontaneous processes supposedly achieved could be replicated by the cutting-edge technology of Mankind ... and when this fails miserably, it is also quite reasonable to conclude that the processed that originally produced life were not spontaneous ... but were of by the appliance of intelligence and creative capacities vastly in excess of our Human capacity.

... no, the challenge is for you guys to demonstrate what you say happened ... that spontaneous physical and chemical processes produced our genomes.

Doctor Jimbob wrote: »

It doesn't matter how much bullshit you post, creationism will continue to be nonsense.

Point still stands.

Squeedily Spooch

J C wrote: »

... no, the challenge is for you guys to demonstrate what you say happened ... that spontaneous physical and chemical processes produced our genomes.

Like all those instances of divine miracles that can't be replicated? You take those on zero evidence.

J C

Vivisectus wrote: »

Covered that ages ago: the probability math is modelling something that no-one is actually proposing. It is a strawman argument.

Like many creationists you seem to have an unfortunate habit of repeating the same old stuff long after it has been refuted, without actually addressing the refutation itself - or, apparently, trying too hard to understand what it actually is.

Wasn't covered ... here is as far as we got ...
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=92944247&postcount=2112

J C

Squeedily Spooch wrote: »

Like all those instances of divine miracles that can't be replicated? You take those on zero evidence.

Divine miracles are matters of faith ... but ID is a scientific matter.

... so are you saying that the origin of life was a materialistic miracle?
... an oxymoron ... if ever I saw one!!!!:)

Doctor Jimbob

J C wrote: »

Divine miracles are matters of faith ... but ID is a scientific matter.

... so are you saying that the origin of life was a materialistic miracle?
... an oxymoron ... if ever I saw one!!!!:)

Go reproduce ID in a lab then get back to us.

I won't hold my breath.

Squeedily Spooch

J C wrote: »

Divine miracles are matters of faith ... but ID is a scientific matter.

... so are you saying that the origin of life was a materialistic miracle?
... an oxymoron ... if ever I saw one!!!!:)

Faith in the impossible. You're forever harping on about Dembski's nonsense and UPB, basically something that's uncomputable. Dembski just gives it a figure he came up with...somehow. It's been refuted loads and you just won't accept the examples or address them.

MrPudding

Did anyone see the 'Sky at Night' special last night? They had a really interesting chemistry experiment on it. They have a lump of ice which is similar to what they believe a comet is made of, very simple molecules, nothing complex. They put this lump of ice into a machine which allow them to fire a ball bearing into the ice at something like 28000 kph. When what is left of the ice in analysed after the impact they find amino acids have been formed. It appears that the energy of the impact forces simple molecules together to form more complex molecules. They are suggesting this might be how more complex molecule first appeared on earth, as a result of meteor impact. Of course, what probably happened is god squashed the simple molecule together with his fingers to make more complicated ones...

MrP

Vivisectus

... but all living cells (including the so-called 'simple' one-celled organisms) have advanced functionality of inordinate complex functional specificity, each one of which breaks the Universal Probability Bound.

Only if you model it to be like a dice-roll. But as has been demonstrated ad nauseam, no-one is proposing anything of the kind.

It was a series of hopeful conjectures backed up with very limited laboratory demonstrations involving the application of the very best intelligent design that mankind can currently muster, given our current state of science and technology.
The fact that anything remotely approaching life hasn't been synthesized in the lab by the combined wisdom, intelligence and advanced technology of Mankind is a definitive indicator that spontaneous naturalistic processes certainly didn't do it.

No, you claim that this is so. And when it does happen., you will simply say that it isn't real life, or complex life, etc etc etc.

All self replication can do is to reproduce the organism involved ... not add new capacities not already pre-existing in the complex functional specified genetic information of the individual involved.

Another claim: we have shown you models for selection that prove you wrong, but you simply ignore it and keep repeating yourself regardless.

Its scientific logic at work ... ID proponents have given the basis for their ideas on the origins of life ... and so far nobody has been able to disprove it.
That is the truth ... for scientific (and not religious) reasons.

No-one has been able to disprove that fairies live in my sock-drawer either, but that does not make the theory that they live there scientific. You once again display a very basic ignorance of the scientific method.

Valid claims bear repeating.
... and the scientific basis and claims of ID have never been invalidated.

No, what happens is that ID proponents stick their fingers in their ears and shout "I can't hear ANY evidence invalidating my theory nananana!"

Which part of Oldrandwisers post are you referring to?

Any. Where is the UPB applicable?

It is quite reasonable to demand that something that spontaneous processes supposedly achieved could be replicated by the cutting-edge technology of Mankind ... and when this fails miserably, it is also quite reasonable to conclude that the processes that originally produced life were not spontaneous ... but were actually the appliance of intelligence and creative capacities vastly in excess of our Human capacity.

There you have the ID mindset in a nutshell: take a piece of ignorance and in stead of trying to work it out, pretend it is some sort of eternal truth or elemental mystery.

According to this kind of reasoning, nuclear fusion was impossible until not too long ago, and it was "reasonable" to assume it would always be impossible. But hey! Now we can do it... for a few minutes.

... no, the challenge is for you guys to demonstrate what you say happened ... that spontaneous physical and chemical processes produced our genomes.

Ah! the double standard of ID: demand everything is proven in terms that you conveniently make narrower and narrower, but happily invoke magic intervention without feeling like you need to prove anything at all.

Vivisectus

J C wrote: »

Wasn't covered ... here is as far as we got ...
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=92944247&postcount=2112

I will repeat myself once more. You are modelling something like a single roll of 120 20 sided dice.

But what you are claiming to model with that is not like that at all.

There is no random soup of amino acids combining and recombining, while we hope for something complex to appear as if out of nowhere.

That is a strawman that you keep merrily attacking. No-one else is proposing this.

Vivisectus

Take Dembski's own argument: he proposed to calculate the likelihood of a flagellum of E. Coli appearing. he then happily proceeds to imagine a random soup of amino acids, which cluster together in random groups, which then accidentally form a fully functional flagellum, and proceeds to calculate the infinitesimally small chance of that happening.

But no-one but him is proposing this. Perhaps the problem is that he is trying to do what you have referred to as "cutting edge molecular biology". The man is only trained as a mathematician and theologian. That would explain the rather whopping error he makes: even if his calculation made sense and modeled something meaningful, he is calculating the wrong process anyway and does not seem to have noticed this. He should have calculated the probability of the appearance of DNA that codes for the flagellum in stead. The randomly formed flagellum whose spontaneous generation he modeled would not even be inherited.

It is a strawman position, and not a very clever one either. I am amazed it seems to continually confound a "practicing scientist" - just what IS your field? Surely you can discuss it without giving your identity away? - to the point where I have to repeatedly spell it out.

Now just to avoid future confusion:

Dembski models the random appearance of complex life-forms (or functional parts thereof) as if they appear because of completely random processes - as if amino acid positions are determined by truly random dice-rolls.

They are not.

Vivisectus

Another problem that is never addressed: All of ID focuses on what didn't cause the species we see today. It then claims that the only other option is intelligent design.

But that is both a deeply unscientific position, and a fallacious one: it claims that by disproving one specific explanation, you have exhausted all possible explanations, and that all that is left is another one for which you have provided no positive evidence.

By way of example, let us say I cannot find my socks in the morning, and I go over all possible explanations that I can think of for why those sock are missing. When I have exhausted all the explanations I am aware of and have ruled them all out, is my conclusion that the sock was removed by some intelligent agent a warranted one? Or is there a possibility that there is an explanation that I am simply unaware of, and is the proposed intelligent agent just another hypothesis that requires positive evidence to support it before I can come to any conclusion?

It seems to me that ID proponents opt for the former: it is, after all, the way they propose to investigate how the different species appeared. As such it is a profoundly anti-scientific point of view.

Vivisectus

While we are on the subject, here is a another really good example:



Design? We could think of nothing else, and since we seem to be psychologically geared towards attributing agency when we look for answers, it was assumed by some to be designed by an intelligent agent.

Incidentally, these rectangular blocks meet Dembski's criteria for "specified complexity".

PopePalpatine

Why don't we all state our scientific qualifications to get the ball rolling? I'm a computer science undergraduate whose course involves a general science course for the first year, and I chose mathematical and experimental physics.

Vivisectus

Ok - I don't have any.

It occurs to me that me and Dembski are equally qualified to talk about molecular biology

Doctor Jimbob

General science undergraduate with biology and palaeontology specialisations, working on a Biology master's.

Vivisectus, I'd hazard a guess that you're significantly more qualified than Dembski to talk about molecular biology :pac:

Brian Shanahan

I'm business studies graduate who did chemistry for the LC. I've also read a lot of science books, varying in complexity from Terry Pratchett's Science of Discworld series, through Stephen Hawkin's Brief History of Time (borrowed off a housemade who was doing Appl. Physics when I was in first year of college) to Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics (I never finished that one, had trouble wading through his prose).

So I'm not qualified in any sense, but I am intelligent enough to understand the generalities, and interested enough to self-learn.

Brian Shanahan

Just messing around teh interwebz and I saw a job opportunity at the Noah's Ark Zoo Farm, for those interested in talking about goddidit, the flood, the uniform universal cloud cover pre flood, Noah riding dinosaurs and all the other little joys that working in such an environment would bring.

Doctor Jimbob

Minimum of three years relevant experience?

Lol.

robindch

Brian Shanahan wrote: »

[...] saw a job opportunity at the Noah's Ark Zoo Farm [...]

From which:

Noah's Ark wrote:

We're seeking an enthusiastic individual qualified to ND level who holds a chainsaw certificate [...]

Presumably for dealing with people whose IQ is above 50.

J C

robindch wrote: »

From which:Presumably for dealing with people whose IQ is above 50.

... as chainsaws aren't used for dealing with people ... it is likely to be required for fencing and general woodland maintenance in the Noah's Ark Zoo.:cool:

Anyway, here is a video which goes to the heart of the issue with ID ... I give you Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford., John Lennox:-