Evolution vs. Intelligent Design discussion
A Question About Genesis
"They" refers to Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
The Hebrew name Elohim is plural. Literally; "In the beginning Gods, He created the heavens and the earth." One God with three persons in what is called, God.
they refers to God Jesus The Holy Spirit
Courtney wrote: "Didn't want to distract the Debate topic too far from it's goal, so I decided to make a new topic for my question.Anyways, Genesis 1:26 says "Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after..."
Actually, Rabbi Harold Kushner suggests exactly that - that G-d is speaking to the animals, and that would, from a theistic perspective explain that Human has both a spiritual and physical component. G-d simply asked the animals to pitch in their physical and instinctual traits, while He provided the spiritual traits.
It is highly improbable that the text is using "Elohim" to designate some sort of trinity or polytheistic idea. Rather the "Eloh- im " is used in the singular plural used in Hebrew to indicate infinity, vastness , beyond human scope, as in hashamay im (Heaven) and may im (Water/Sea
Mod
Yeah, sort of like later on where Genesis talks about all the sons of God that are running around the landscape, and where God talks about the Jews not having any other Gods. There were lots of Gods at the time. Wars between peoples were always wars between the Gods of those peoples. The entire Old Testament carries on to no end about that, with God targeting a whole list of tribes by name for genocidal elimination a la Numbers 31 -- genocide, infanticide, rape and murder. And theft, of course. Kill them all, steal all of their possessions and their virgin women for use as sex slaves.
rgb
Mod
I seem to recall that Jehovah had a real dislike for incense, and would do things like set you on fire if you used any. But he really liked those burnt offerings and those wave offerings. Cut out the liver, wave it just right. God loved that.
He must really miss it. I'm gonna make God happy. Now where can I find an unblemished lamb on a Tuesday night...
rgb
hey let me tell u something guys.u dont have any idea wat re u talking about.So just be careful in things tat u dont understand liked this one.So if u do me a favor can un please shut up!!!we re talking here about mu God(Dios)nd he is almighth enough 4 defensed himself.
so just be quiet.If u doesn't kno wat re u talking about
thank u
so just be quiet.If u doesn't kno wat re u talking about
thank u
He must really miss it. I'm gonna make God happy. Now where can I find an unblemished lamb on a Tuesday night...
u unrespectful.if u dont belived tat doesn't mean tat u hav the right 2 judged it.unrspectful
u unrespectful.if u dont belived tat doesn't mean tat u hav the right 2 judged it.unrspectful
Mod
u unrespectful.if u dont belived tat doesn't mean tat u hav the right 2 judged it.u..."
Actually, yes it does. Precisely the way you would (and I have no doubt do) judge satanic rites involving killing goats and dancing naked around a fire before falling to in an orgy. We would both consider this somewhat silly and hard on goats, not to mention uncivilized and superstitious.
The difference is that you consider your superstitious beliefs not to be superstitious, only other people's. And as far as I know, not even orthodox Jews still kill doves and sprinkle their blood all over the altar, slaughter whole cattle and burn their parts in a specified order on the altar, cut the throats of unblemished lambs, slice open their chest cavities, and remove their ribcages so that can wave fresh bloody ribs at the sky to please God. All of which is described as being pleasing to God -- he loves it, especially the savory smoke of burning animal flesh. That's why Cain slew Abel, after all. Abel was an animal farmer, and God liked burning meat. Cain only raised grain crops. God didn't like offerings of burned wheat, so he favored Abel, making Cain so jealous that he slew Abel.
It all makes perfect sense, right? As much sense as slaughtering random people because they burn incense (also detailed in the Old Testament) -- God hates the smell of incense. Only burning meat, not burning wheat.
Surely you want me to follow the directions given in the Old Testament for making God happy? Jesus commanded that his followers obey the Old Testament Law, which clearly includes these burned and wave sacrifices. I trust that you regularly perform these rituals?
Also note that if in fact your God is almighty enough to defend himself and he actually exists and he cares about people mocking the obvious barbarity of burning animals to make him happy, the obvious stupidity of waving pieces of meat at him (in a ritual way) to make him happy, then he can always:
* Appear in person (as Jesus) or in any other form he wishes and tell me himself. He's All Powerful! Surely this is easy for him. If he says shut up in person, I assure you, I'll shut up.
* Zap me with lightning. Very traditional. Look, it's raining outside. I'll even go outside in a bit and make it easy for him. Not easier -- one can't make anything easier for an infinitely powerful being -- and well, I suppose everything is easy so it's just as easy for him to smite me with lightning as I sit here.
* Any of an infinite number of other things. As you say, he can defend himself, although I can't imagine an infinite being considering anything I do to be an attack, any more than a primitive microbe on Mars can bother me.
Of course, you and I both know perfectly well that nothing at all is going to happen to me. Jesus didn't show up. No burning bushes or angels appeared. And no lightning. I'm not being disrespectful when I point all this out, I'm just pointing out facts that you know as well as I. You aren't "respectful" of Greek or Roman mythology (at least not as a religion). You treat it as a mythology. Superstition. Belief in gods and goddesses that don't exist, people performing rituals such as human sacrifice to the winds that were wicked acts no matter how religiously motivated they were. What, exactly, is the difference between these mythologies and yours?
rgb
hey let me tell u something guys.u dont have any idea wat re u talking about.So just be careful in things tat u dont understand liked this one.So if u do me a favor can un please shut up!!!we re talking here about mu God(Dios)nd he is almighth enough 4 defensed himself.so just be quiet.If u doesn't kno wat re u talking about
thank u
Translation:
Hey, let me tell you something, guys. You don't have any idea what you're talking about. So just be careful discussing things you don't understand, like this topic. Could you do me a favor and please shut up? We're talking about my God (Dios), and he is mighty enough to defend himself. So, just be quiet if you don't know what you're talking about.
Thank you.
Your logic is horrible. God is powerful enough to take care of himself, and can deal with literally anything, and so, you have to take care of him by telling us to stop talking about him, because apparently he can't deal with that himself. God is all powerful, but is simultaneously caused grave injury by discussions on an Internet forum. No, you're right, that makes perfect sense.
u kno something.u re right my GOD is all powerful for defend himself.So i i dont hav do it 4 him.BuT JUSt be careful.like God exist Devil too.incluse magic,withches nd demon.nd if u not re carefull.u dont in wat re u getting into.u even evr kno wat re talking about.read the bible dont made u cristian,just made u somebody who read it.nd u even can understand wat re talking about.so just be careful.cause if u dont kno how 2 paly this game.dont played
Ana wrote: "this is not a spelling bee."It's not even English.
Mod
It's not even English."
To be charitable Ana Diaz may not be a native English speaker, and I probably wouldn't sound much better in Spanish. But spelling and grammar aside, the content of your statements, Ana, is still incorrect. This isn't a game. There are no witches. There are no demons. There is no Devil. I'm open minded about God, but whether or not there is a God, the Bible is contradicted by many matters of fact and is certainly not divinely inspired truth from cover to cover, which makes it rather likely that the whole thing is a mix of stories, legends, a bit of history, and a whole lot of myth. Not something to be taken seriously, nor something that should be taken to be a source of moral truths or perfections.
rgb
I read a devotional a little while ago called "God and His Ways" by Bryan Smith and Coart Ramey. There was a whole section on why it says "us" when God speaks.
I dont know why, but most of the gods right from greek to the last one known are egoistic and selfish. But the contradictory fact is that they all preach to abolish ego and selfishness. WhY?
Mod
In the Western tradition. I would argue that this is untrue in Vedantic Hinduism as laid out in the Upanishads -- if anything it is the opposite. The Upanishads illustrate the Gods themselves learning to abolish ego and selfishness in order to rediscover that their Atman = Brahman. Vedantic Hinduism was being invented at almost exactly the same time as Buddhism (both around 500 BCE) and are, I'm sure, part of the same general tradition. Buddhism can even be viewed as a semi-atheistic variant of Vedanta, one that lets go even of Brahman and Atman, equal or not (but which is nevertheless puzzlingly transcendental).
I think your statement is probably borderline false on the other side as well -- I don't know that all of the gods of all of the religions preach denial. What of Eros? What of Dionysus? What of Loki? What of Krishna? I think this is far too sweeping a statement to be considered fact.
As for why -- probably because the Gods are proxies for social order in the cultures that invented or adopted them, and societies with selflessness and personal sacrifice memes were capable of producing heroes that would die for the dominant culture and hence tended to make it more fit to survive than competing cultures that were more decadent and self-serving.
rgb
rgb wrote: "The Proletarian Speaks wrote: "I dont know why, but most of the gods right from greek to the last one known are egoistic and selfish. But the contradictory fact is that they all preach to abolish ..."I was not remarking upon the paradox of scriptorial representation of god. Because if one is god it has to be formless, both saguna brahmam and nirguna brahmam at once.
You seem well versed in upanishads and scriptures, but for an accusation I made one need more keen observations. For example take the history of Krishna. He was a preacher among diabolics, lover among lovers, politician among sinners etc type of guy with exceptional tallent. May be we can say that he used more than 50% of his brain where as we humans used and is using only less than 1%.
But the fact, for example he was able to demonstrate himself as a saguna brahmam, should be scrutinized because first of all nobody has known who he really was or whether it was creation of a literary genious. Second of all, he was never able to demonstrate his nirguna side. And if you take any hindu scripture you can also get to read of other deities like Brahma, Vishnu, Maheshwar. And at many instances they have shown their ego and felt guilty for the same thing.
And it is my conception that god and the whole of society (this may be one sided thought of a deranged series of thoughts) is nothing but the mind itself. We fear death at each and every corner and in each and every breath we take though subconsciously itself. This fear requires a soothing effect that we project and we call that projection god.
Society as we know it is nothing but these collection of fears that our mind as we know have created. How can you justify the fact that one crime is punished with another crime. We see so called juries, judges, police officers, military, politicians, etc etc ruling us. punishing who they call criminals. What is the difference between any of them when compared with a criminal. Just a piece of exam paper that they took. Why did they took the exam? To serve ours and their fears better. Have their attitude and moreover Law provided a relief, None in a million years.
No this is not marxian and certainly this is not socialistic. But to be frankly speaking this is meer anarchy.
A society that cannot tolerate anarchy and synarchy at the same time is not a society at all. It is collection of individuals who lost their individuality and is helping others to lose theirs. More or less this is a collection of fears clustered in groups. And these fears and nonindividuals project something into their relgion and thus gods are formed.
A society that should be in its prime never will require a ruler, a king, or god. The concept of king is derived from the concept of god. As in someone to look after.
Sorry for bragging, but you just touched my favorite subject of all time.
Regards,
Proletarian Speaks
Mod
First, I think that you misunderstand the purpose and nature of the Hindu scriptures. Hinduism is a multi-tier religion, with one version of itself for what one might call "the masses" -- those that are relatively unadvanced along the path to enlightenment and who still need many gods and goddesses to stand as archetypes and advocates against the evils of the world -- and a second version that is revealed as one comes to realize that Hinduism is really a Monist panendeism. To both groups -- where there is no sharp boundary in between them, as each individual follows its own path across many lifetimes or just one from one state to the other -- theistic scripture of Hinduism (the Puranas plus the Vedas, including the Upanishads) is a mix of ritual specification (the older e.g. Rg Vedas) plus mythopoeic stories that entertain and transmit cultural continuity plus act as exemplars of an upward path and enlightened state. The latter include the Puranas, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata. Finally the Upanishads stand alone as a loose mixture of the two -- some are told as stories, but many are straight up specifications of and for Enlightenment, ways of discovering the truth that Atman = Brahman.
The difference between Hinduism and any of the JCM religions is that nearly all Hindus are perfectly well aware that their myths are myths. Nobody sane thinks that there was actually a time when Shiva and Parvati walked on this earth and had a son via a bizarre process of parthenogenesis plus miraculous surgery to produce Ganesh. These are myths that convey many archetypical lessons and in the end are intended to provide one with insight that can help one live a better life and take another small step on the road to Enlightenment and release from the wheel of rebirth, reunion with Brahman. And if Christians openly accepted the idea that "Jesus" was an archetype -- perhaps a real person at one time whose real says and doings were more like those described in the Jefferson bible plus the Gospel of Thomas but not God or a Son of God any more than they were (something that Jesus repeatedly told them was true, although they generally ignored him and continue to ignore him today) then Christianity would be a whole lot more laid back and less concerned with orthodoxy and compulsion. One modern branch of Christianity has more or less memetically evolved to become less virulent in just this way. In this view of Christianity, Jesus isn't God -- Jesus is an example, an archetype, a human representation of what they want to become.
If one judges the world's religions on the basis of their creation myths and correspondance with actual cosmology, the JCM religions with Genesis get an F -- the myth in Genesis bears no resemblance to reality. None. Not even with a generous amount of poetic license. The best single line in the whole thing is "Let there be light", but light didn't actually happen at the beginning and the beginning wasn't 6000 years ago, it didn't happen until the electromagnetic interaction split off from the strong and weak nuclear, well into the process, and even then the Universe was dark for close to 200 million years afterwards before gravity succeeded in assembling the first protostars and fusion ignited to light up the dark. All of which can be seen, looking back in time 13.5 or so billion years with the Hubble.
Hinduism, OTOH, has the Universe begin as a giant, cosmic egg, which hatches to produce all things, at a time that is at least billions of years ago (Hindus argue about how long the Yugas are and how the age of the Universe should be translated, with some claiming that the correct interpretation does yield the observed age, but this requires a fair bit of poetic license). The point being, of course, that with a bit of allowance for the general ignorance of the early writers and mistranslation of manuscript copies and so on, the Hindu myths can be very loosely mapped into observational reality -- give them a B+, well above average for creation myths, or even give them an A for the best of show as I know of no other myth that comes as close.
In both religions, the Upanishads stand unique. Vedanta establishes Hinduism as monist panendeism, as noted above. Without bothering to go in and quote individual Upanishads -- "Not that which sees but that by which things are seen, that is the Brahman. Brahman is not the being that is worshipped by men" -- the metaphysical theory in summary it presents is that everything is God. God = Universe. It holds this to be true in a transcendental sense; not only are our physical bodies God, but our organization and in particular our Atman -- self awareness -- is God's organization and self awareness. So is the awareness of the unenlightened, the animals, the trees (such as it is) and even the rocks and the stars -- all is Brahman, and the laws of nature are the laws of Brahman that governs Itself to produce self awareness in an ever changing fashion, the mirror with which the Universe can see and admire Itself. Enlightenment consists of focusing one's awareness on self to the point where self expands to Self, to the point where one realizes the essential unity and eternity of all things, to where one sees one's entire life simultaneously as a static configuration of worldlines in an immense multidimensional being and as the joyful dancing of a cloud of self awareness appreciating the beauty of this structure, which is necessarily unchanging and static in meta-time. Time and entropy are required for life and awareness, but the macroscopic reality is necessarily timeless and free from entropy. Brahman's clever trick, then, is to create from Its Unity a state of Many, each with partial knowledge and with rules for evolution in time to permit discovery, to create a myriad of selves out of its Self to engage in the dance of Life for a time, then to erase it all and start over again, eternally.
This is vision is not unique to the Upanishads in Hindu theism -- it is the essence of the truth revealed to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the Geeta, when Krishna showed Arjuna his Visvaroopa -- a glimpse of Krishna as all of space and time, as Brahman revealed. Even the decomposition of Brahman into the trimurti of Brahma (creator), Vishnu (preserver), and Shiva (destroyer) is a primitive recognition of anabolism, metabolism, and catabolism in dynamic life processes, a realization of the laws of thermodynamics if you prefer, but the metabolic analogy is more apropos because Hinduism views the macro, multicosmos spanning Universe as being alive. All that exists, anywhere anytime anycosmos, is Brahman, and Brahman exists in an eternal state of blissful awareness of Itself, awareness that defines itself, an awareness that encompasses my typing of these characters to you as being one tiny flicker in the vastness of its being and your reading of them as another, as we for a moment share a glimpse of Ourself outside of the quotidian stream of awarenesses of our selves.
So please, separate out the lessons of the myth for living beings -- sure, we're all imperfect, trapped in our lives unaware of our true nature, and our egos and cravings for experience are God enjoying itself in a complex schizophrenic dream and there's nothing wrong with that although parts of the dream are pleasant, parts are painful, parts are heavenly, parts are nightmarish and seem "evil" in that they cause suffering as often as pleasure. So the stories reveal the gods (Devas) who are not Brahman in its Unity as being just as susceptible to the conflicts and delights of non-unified existence as humans, as they should, being mythopoeic reflections of ourselves, mere archetypes. Brahman, however, is timeless and in Brahman there is no such conflict.
So much for myth. Now, how about society? Well, if one chooses to believe the most what one can doubt the least in one's worldview, then one accepts the conclusions of evidence based science (provisionally, but as the best one can so far do to "know" our Universe). In that case the Universe is 13.5 billion years old give or take (in this Yuga, post Big Bang), the sun is a second generation star, the earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and life is roughly 4 billion years old. Life evolved for 4 billion years to produce animals that were recognizably human that invented language and a higher level encoding of social memes. This precipitated a burst of extremely rapid co-evolution of memes and genes, with the brain rapidly differentiating and specializing to produce speech centers and verbal reasoning centers even as language itself grew more complex and as the social ideas they memetically encoded produced ever more successful superorganismal societies in mutual and internal competition.
In this reality, all "laws" and "moral codes" are no more absolute reality than our genetic code -- they are simply the best (in terms of expressed superorganismal fitness) that the process of memetic-genetic co-evolution has yet produced. There is nothing transcendental about them, nor are they anything like objective, absolute truths. The fundamental truth is the life in the state of nature is ugly, nasty, brutish and short, and we always live in a state of nature. The miracle (as it were) of high level human co-evolution is that it has produced a state of affairs that significantly reduces the ugliness, the nastiness, the brutality, and extends the length of many -- most, even -- of the human lives on the indifferent stage of being. This matters not at all to the wind, to the waters, to the atoms and molecules that make up the world. It matters a great deal to us.
Finally, you seem to be addressing the need for a society to have a maximal amount of freedom in order to develop new ideas, or whatever it is that you intend with the terms "anarchy" and "synarchy". No real arguments, although understand that what you are seeking to optimize the self-optimizing process of social evolution itself. Understand this before you try to decide on the optimal mix, as there is mathematics underlying it, not just rhetoric. In other words, there is very likely an optimal mix of flexibility (to try new things) and conservatism (to preserve beneficial structure and not lose the thread of long-term identity) in social evolution, just as there is in all other exemplars of genetic optimization theory.
rgb
P.S. -- you might enjoy this (probably still unfinished, but good enough for the moment) essay:
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Philosop...
rgb wrote: "Oh, my, I can see that we'll have just a lovely discussion on all of this. Clearly you have thought a lot about the way things are. As have I.First, I think that you misunderstand the purpose a..."
You said and it also a fact that
"No real arguments, although understand that what you are seeking to optimize the self-optimizing process of social evolution itself. Understand this before you try to decide on the optimal mix, as there is mathematics underlying it, not just rhetoric. In other words, there is very likely an optimal mix of flexibility (to try new things) and conservatism (to preserve beneficial structure and not lose the thread of long-term identity) in social evolution, just as there is in all other exemplars of genetic optimization theory."
But what I am saying is that how can we optimize intelligence (not in the sense of IQ, EQ, or SQ, but in the enlightenment sense) with the social construct and polarization. Is it not the only reason that pure intelligence is not allowed in this type of social construct.
Why are we always forgetting the line "Post hoc ergo ante hoc." What follows causes what came before.
We tend to analyze every bit and corner of each and everything that we can get hold of, but at the same time fail to understand the beingness. We want to see purpose. We try to find meaning in every aspect of living rather than understand it. We use limited and yet contradictory "seeming facts" to define the unlimited and "the absolute." This is what I mean when I say there is no difference between the crime and the static, the law maker and the law breaker.
I chose this name for somekind of same purpose. In a social construct the proletarian never speaks. There is always someone who must speak for the proletarian. This is the case even the marxian point of view. So, this time, the proletarian decides to speak for himself. Rather than being represented by someone else.
I would like to know more about your thoughts. Hoping for more revelating facts from you.
Regards,
Proletarian Speaks,
Mod
Why are we always forgetting the line "Post hoc ergo ante hoc." What follows causes what came before.
I'm forgetting it because I've never heard it. It makes no sense, at least outside of context. In physics I'm familiar with two contexts:
a) The "usual" sense, in which cause precedes effect. This is the sense of causality used in elementary classical non-relativistic physics, where time still has a meaningful arrow/direction specified most generally as the direction in which the entropy increases. That is, in very broad terms in introductory macroscopic physics, the initial state of a system is more organized than the final state, and the initial state is the cause of the final state.
b) In a microscopic or relativistic expression of few-body physics (ideally one or two bodies) time is generally symmetric -- the equations of motion work as well forward in time as backwards in time. The differential systems being solved then are more typically expressed as "boundary value problems" and/or as initial value problems (since one generally wants the solution in the future as that is the direction of our entropy-driven awareness of events) but they could just as easily be formulated as "final value problems" as the dynamics is fully reversible in time. However here the term cause doesn't mean what it does in everyday speech.
Causality in physics has little to do with precedent or antecedent. It has to do with connection. Causality is merely a complete expression of interaction in equations of motion; we understand the causality of a system when we understand how all of the elements of the system change with time as a symmetric parameter describing the change, where the "causes" of the motion are the interactions between all of the elements of the system. Does the earth cause the moon to go around it in an orbit, or does the moon cause the earth to go around IT in an orbit? Physics doesn't know or care -- the earth and moon mutually attract, the solution to the equations of motion for the system based on that mutual attraction and other laws is for the earth moon system to evolve a certain way in time, forward or backward, with time a direction neutral parameter.
So no, I don't really understand what you mean when you say what follows causes what came before in the highly entropic context of social dynamics. It seems rather an oxymoron.
We tend to analyze every bit and corner of each and everything that we can get hold of, but at the same time fail to understand the beingness. We want to see purpose. We try to find meaning in every aspect of living rather than understand it. We use limited and yet contradictory "seeming facts" to define the unlimited and "the absolute." This is what I mean when I say there is no difference between the crime and the static, the law maker and the law breaker.
None of this makes any sense at all to me. I don't want to see purpose, I want to see truth. Purpose is a human, high level construct. The Universe needn't have a purpose, it just is. Similarly "meaning" is a human, high level construct, where understanding how things work all the way down to the reversible microscale is much less so. Regarding unlimited, that is in some sense axiomatically defined; the absolute means nothing at all, at least in reason.
But what I really don't understand is what you mean when you assert that there is no difference between the law maker and the law breaker. That's just nonsense, in human context and in nearly any other. Let me help you. Suppose I and a bunch of my friends form a society, and we collectively decide that being kicked in the balls and then whacked in the head with a baseball bat would be most unpleasant to experience. We therefore collectively make up a rule that says "if you kick somebody in the balls and then hit them with a bat, that's bad; we make it against the law to do this and if somebody does it anyway we'll all jump on him and kick him in the balls several times and then hit him in the head several times and club him about the body until he stops twitching", then we've made a "law" and specified a punishment for lawbreakers. We are law makers.
If, once this law is published and agreed upon, I get bored one night and sneak out, kick my neighbor in the balls really hard and then whack him in the skull with a bat, this is against the law, making me a law breaker. See the difference?
You'd get it more quickly if a lawbreaker broke down the door to your house just now and kicked you in the balls and whacked you on the head with a baseball bat, of course...
I chose this name for somekind of same purpose. In a social construct the proletarian never speaks. There is always someone who must speak for the proletarian. This is the case even the marxian point of view. So, this time, the proletarian decides to speak for himself. Rather than being represented by someone else.
I disagree. I think proletarians speak all of the time. If there is a problem, it is that evolution and nature sort out humans by ability, so that hewers of wood and drawers of water are, on the average, not as intelligent as those that end up doing more complex things. But even this rule has plenty of exceptions and is at most true on average. So sometimes people like George Bush are hardly proles but are still complete idiots, people like Einstein may be proles but nevertheless are quite bright. The thing is, that Einstein then doesn't remain a prole.
I know plenty of proles. In the US proles have all kinds of voice, and not infrequently speak for themselves, even when what they say is often pretty stupid.
You'd also have to convince me that you are by proper definition a "prole". Logic suggests that if the prole never speaks for himself, and you speak for yourself, you mist not really be a prole. So this is at best a sort of 'poetic truth' that is to say, a falsehood.
rgb
rgb wrote: "But what I am saying is that how can we optimize intelligence (not in the sense of IQ, EQ, or SQ, but in the enlightenment sense) with the social construct and polarization. Is it not the only reas..."That is what I am trying to say that everything surrounding a structure (here, the social construct) is a facade. Hence the falsehood is as necessary as the real image one can convene upon to the viewer.
You said:
"I disagree. I think proletarians speak all of the time. If there is a problem, it is that evolution and nature sort out humans by ability, so that hewers of wood and drawers of water are, on the average, not as intelligent as those that end up doing more complex things. But even this rule has plenty of exceptions and is at most true on average. So sometimes people like George Bush are hardly proles but are still complete idiots, people like Einstein may be proles but nevertheless are quite bright. The thing is, that Einstein then doesn't remain a prole."
But what is a proletarian? is it by defenition the working class. Yes but it is also more than that. Prole is a mind construct and it itself is classfied into different subconstructs. Therefore, since by defenition prole is related to an ideology it is hence an idea (see class struggle).
First of all, the proles does not realize they are proles. They are defined as such by the superior governing bodies or people who they work for. It is not as if they say "hey prole come here and do this job" but it is a sense of being as if in working under or working for or under his or her grace or under the shadow of somebody else. This can be regarded as a general consensus or may be a marxian theory.
I, with utmost respect, should disagree with you about the fact that the proles speak for themselves. No proles I have seen, met, or heard about has ever tried to create or invent or evolve. What I am saying here is that of an original thought and the proles lost their originality many centuries before.
Einstein was a prole, Yes I agree to it. But I never said that the proles do not have the brains or they are the stupidest organism that ever lived. It is the sense of being of geting ruled. He was ruled by the government for whom he worked for and the sponsors who give him money to conduct his research.
Was his thought original? yes in a sense it was one of the most original of thoughts that the century had ever seen, but was the cause or the effect of that thought original? Never.
An original thought should be one in which the cause or effect after the action which conducted the thought throughout its course, should be original too.
And I am sure I need not say about George Bush.
I am not saying that I have the original thought. But what I am saying is that it is definitely worth a try to have one original thought and conduct its course throughout with its originality until the cause or the effect.
______________________________________________________
You said:
"None of this makes any sense at all to me. I don't want to see purpose, I want to see truth. Purpose is a human, high level construct. The Universe needn't have a purpose, it just is. Similarly "meaning" is a human, high level construct, where understanding how things work all the way down to the reversible microscale is much less so. Regarding unlimited, that is in some sense axiomatically defined; the absolute means nothing at all, at least in reason.
But what I really don't understand is what you mean when you assert that there is no difference between the law maker and the law breaker. That's just nonsense, in human context and in nearly any other. Let me help you. Suppose I and a bunch of my friends form a society, and we collectively decide that being kicked in the balls and then whacked in the head with a baseball bat would be most unpleasant to experience. We therefore collectively make up a rule that says "if you kick somebody in the balls and then hit them with a bat, that's bad; we make it against the law to do this and if somebody does it anyway we'll all jump on him and kick him in the balls several times and then hit him in the head several times and club him about the body until he stops twitching", then we've made a "law" and specified a punishment for lawbreakers. We are law makers.
If, once this law is published and agreed upon, I get bored one night and sneak out, kick my neighbor in the balls really hard and then whack him in the skull with a bat, this is against the law, making me a law breaker. See the difference?
You'd get it more quickly if a lawbreaker broke down the door to your house just now and kicked you in the balls and whacked you on the head with a baseball bat, of course..."
Here you are contradicting yourself. When you make a law, it is tend to be broken. That is the reason why most of the time the law is "broken," because laws are meant to be broken.
You puport a law and amend it. Then somebody come and breaks the law. Then for establishing or reaffirming the law once again, you punish him. Here you yourself broke the first law you yourself created. He comes back again after he has healed his wounds and what does he do. He breaks the law again and you again punishes him for the law he has broken. This continues and a chain reaction starts and will continue forever and forever as it has been going on for centuries. Hence the term "Oxymoron."
______________________________________________________
Post hoc ergo ante hoc or What follows causes what came before.
This I say would be the most misunderstood statement of all time.
This misunderstanding is due to the highly regarded concepts such as time and space.
Everybody thinks that time is running. How can time run if it is static and continuous. And most of us think that space is static, whereas it is the space that is changing its form and it is also continuous.
But what exceeds both of these, the time and space, is the cause and effect or rather the action and reaction. And yet, this action and reaction is only affected by the rule of "post hoc ergo ante hoc". Because the reaction or the effect is the one that gives the purpose or meaning or whatever the action or cause was supposed to part. It is both the case in the physical as well as the nonphysical sense. In other words the material sense and philosophical sense.
Regards,
Prole Speaks.
Mod
No, no, actually when I make a law, I intend and hope for it not to be broken. When I (and society) make laws prohibiting rape, robbery, and murder, it is because we devoutly hope and intend that rapes, robberies, and murders do not occur because we ourselves do not wish to be raped, robbed, or murdered.
I think you are referring to laws in an imaginary society in which the dominant theme or meme is "class struggle", the same one that Marx hallucinated about, wherein the only reason the rulers of that society (who are always a semisecret cabal of the wealthy and powerful) pass multitudinous laws just so that the oppressed workers are forced to break them in order to survive or because they simply cannot keep track of them all, allowing the rulers to prosecute anyone at will who opposes them. Sort of like the situation that persisted for decades in the Soviet empire, in China, that persists in Cuba even today, in Iraq under Saddam, in Nazi Germany.
You need to clarify in your mind the difference between totalitarian government and its standard practices (which are often "classless" and applied whimsically and the basis of momentary shifts in power and alliance) and any of the sloppy semi-socialist democracies including the United States, where this practice is not unknown but is far from being the rule and is certainly not the basis of government.
In particular, you might read Hobbes instead of Marx. Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, even John Stuart Mill had more insight into the nature of man than Marx ever did. Marx was captivated by a snapshot of early industrialization. While his work was not all pointless, his basic assumptions were so distorted that most of his conclusions have proven so very, very, false.
If Marx had immigrated to the US, I think he might well have arrived at entirely different conclusions.
You puport a law and amend it. Then somebody come and breaks the law. Then for establishing or reaffirming the law once again, you punish him. Here you yourself broke the first law you yourself created. He comes back again after he has healed his wounds and what does he do. He breaks the law again and you again punishes him for the law he has broken. This continues and a chain reaction starts and will continue forever and forever as it has been going on for centuries. Hence the term "Oxymoron."
An oxymoron is a self-contradictory statement. Again, you seem to miss the point. We have passed a law against kicking people in the balls and whacking them in the head with a baseball bat, because (in the theory of the social contract) we don't want our scrotums crushed and skulls cracked, and are willing to give up our absolute right in the state of nature to kick people in the gonads and bop them on the head whenever we like in order to be protected from being so kicked and beaten. There is absolutely nothing self-contradictory about it. It is humans acting together in their best collective self-interest, giving up their right to be a bully at random in favor of being a collective bully to anyone who breaks the rules against bullying. This not only makes complete, consistent, sense, without this sort of thing there is no society as society is nothing but just such a set of collective agreements that permit humans to live together for mutual benefit. Without laws, there is no mutual benefit, there is just the rule of nature, where the strong take from the weak whenever and wherever they can get away with it, and do their best to avoid those still stronger lest their spoils be looted from them in turn.
Life in this state sucks. Calling for anarchy is simply incredibly stupid. In fact, if I were to take it at all seriously, I'd come right over their and give you some anarchy by kicking you in the balls and whacking you in the skull, repeatedly (presuming I'm bigger and stronger than you) until you are forced to go form a society of several friends who agree to come and collectively kick my butt because together you are stronger than I am individually. Oh wait! That means that you and your friends have invented "law", at least if you agree not to kick one another's asses while agreeing to kick mine.
Everybody thinks that time is running. How can time run if it is static and continuous. And most of us think that space is static, whereas it is the space that is changing its form and it is also continuous.
Um, I am a theoretical physicist, and I teach the theory of relativity, so no, "everybody" does not think time is "running". However, youre remarks here indicate a profound lack of understanding of mathematics, one that I suspect I cannot quickly cure. I suppose I will try, once, and we'll see where we get.
Spacetime is a four-dimensional manifold (with the possibility of being a projection down to four dimensions from a higher-dimensional manifold of unknown dimensionality). Calculus is the mathematics that describes related rates in a differentiable (continuous, smooth) manifold; it is the mathematics of change. Just as a simple matter of fact, we do not know if spacetime is continuous or if it is discrete. General relativity would have it be continuous, quantum field theory would have it be discrete, but the latter would discretize it at the Planck scale, which is far, far too small to detect so far leaving this an open question. Therefore, basing deep philosophical conclusions on its continuity (especially out of context) is a bit foolish, unless they don't depend on it being really continuous and work just as well for difference equations that coarse-grain average to become "smoothly" continuous on a macroscopic scale.
The classical scale (much larger than atoms) is such a limit. In this limit, space and time are both changing their form because of differential relations between them brought about by e.g. the constraint that the speed of light be the same in all frames. In this limit, it is possible to formulate equations of motion which describe the related rates of change of quantities such as position and time with reference to opjects (e.g. "particles") in the real world. These equations of motion empirically turn out to have predictive value, in particular they predict the trajectories of those particles, their position as a function of time.
In some cases the trajectory functions are invertible, which means that they can equally well be transformed into the time as a function of position. In others, the inverse map is not single valued, that is to say, it is not a function. Examples include a ball thrown straight up. Given its initial conditions, one knows the height of the ball as a function of time, but one cannot uniquely tell the time as a function of height because the ball gets to nearly every height twice, once on the way up, once on the way down, at different times.
Note that fundamentally, we don't give a rat's ass about whether or not time is "running" in this description. We have a function of an independent variable (time). Tell me a time in the future, I'll tell you where the particle is. Tell me a time in the past, I'll tell you where the particle is. In fact, there is no "now" inherent in the problem -- the solution has a trivial formal transformational invariance as I set the zero of my clock to occur at different times, changing from one "time" to another.
You seem to be stuck in Aristotle's time. Since Newton -- who wrote his first law just to explicitly refute Aristotle -- physics has not been either post hoc or ante hoc. There is no "action" or "reaction" in Newton's laws, unless you state them imprecisely and badly in English. In mathematics Newton's third law is a simple mathematical symmetry that is instantaneous, true in the now. There is no direction of time inherent in the statement, no post or ante at all. This is equally true of Newton's second law.
Of course, Newton's third law is false -- there are numerous exceptions in nature, the most notable one being the magnetic force between charged particles. The correct formulation of N3 equates only the components of interparticle forces along the line connecting them -- that is, it only works for radial force laws. And then there is the minor problem that the Universe is neither Newtonian nor Galilean, so that Newton's laws are all false, and aren't even formulated in the correct manifold where they approximately hold.
If you then strip away the bullshit and look at what modern formulations of physics do say, it is that "cause" in English (with its implicit time sense) is not equivalent to the meaning of the word "cause" in physics. The latter is mathematical and precise and is generally time symmetric -- it means "interact" far more than "cause".
And, as I said in my previous post, this leaves us with the problem of perceptual time. Humans very definitely experience the world from the past through the present into the future. We live in a state of manifest broken time symmetry, which is initially a bit mysterious given the time symmetry inherent in microscopic laws. The paradox is resolved by not the microscopic laws, but the macroscopic laws that one obtains averaging out the microscopic ones over very large numbers of particles. The physics that describes this averaging is called "statistical mechanics" and it is enormously difficult (and closely tied to field theory, which has to do much the same thing even at the microscale).
From stat mech, time irreversibility emerges because the complex Universe tends to evolve from a more ordered state to a less ordered state, just because it is more probable that it does so. When one averages over ignorance of state of the bulk of the Universe, one obtains an clear signature of time associated with the increase of entropy. Our minds operate on entropy and information, hence we experience entropic time. In entropic time, "causes" precede "effects" and Aristotelian physics appears to hold -- clocks run down, objects in motion come to rest, things fall apart -- and our human experience has me writing this reply to you after your silly post because your silly post caused it -- your silly post was not caused by this reply, at least not in any sense that matters.
Of course what really caused both of them was an enormous number of time-symmetric microscopic interactions with no before or after, but that "contradiction" arises only because we are now abusing English, using the word "cause" in two completely distinct ways, one of them the quotidian one where organized, macroscopic, contextual causes precede equally organized, macroscopic, contextual effects and the pretty much completely irrelevant sense of cause as microscopic law-of-nature-driven interaction in physics. Obviously, since they are really completely different senses of the word they will lead to contradiction, but there is nothing deep or philosophically revealing about this, only abuse of language.
To avoid this sort of abuse in the future, lets agree to use normal English to converse in, where "cause" in ordinary conversation precedes effects because the alternative contradicts the meaning of the word cause and makes it a made up word that cannot help but confuse the listener. If we are going to discuss physics, then sure, we can agree in context to use the term "cause" to mean interact with in a way that is as symmetric or not as the particular, specific interaction in question.
rgb
rgb
Nobody's denying the fact of entropy here, I see. But the very essence of entropy contradicts evolutionary theory. Go figure!
But the very essence of entropy contradicts evolutionary theory.No it doesn't.
Evolution is all about the opposite of entropy. Order out of chaos (if you don't think an explosion produces chaos, please explain why), greater complexity out of lesser complexity, and an ever-improving universe and human race. What else is natural selection about? (For the record, I'm not discounting natural selection. It happens, and has been clearly documented. But it doesn't pan out exactly the way evolutionary theory requires.) So evolution contradicts entropy, definitely.
Mod
Entropy isn't a human word that is a synonym for "disorder", let along "chaos". Entropy is the natural log of the missing information, the microscopic state information one dumps going from a full microscopic description of mechanics (where there is no entropy as all microscopic interactions are time reversible and conserve information) to an "average" macroscopic description.
A moderately correct statement of thermodynamics -- which is not the correct theory for the time evolution of open systems such as those in which genetic optimization and evolution occur -- would be that the state evolution of macroscopic systems close to equilibrium is determined by competition between the ordering effects of reducing internal energy in a structured way and the disordering effects of the comparative volumes of phase/state space that are accessible given the total internal energy available (which is directly proportional to the temperature). At higher temperatures disorder is favored as there tend to be far more disordered states compatible with the internal energy/temperature than ordered states. At low temperatures order is often favored as there aren't enough disordered states that have the requisite amount of average energy. Classic examples of this competition are the phase transitions from gas to liquid, liquid to solid, increasing order as one decreases the temperature.
There is no analog of a temperature in genetic optimization (although one can insert one and mix the methodology with e.g. simulated annealing to create a hybrid optimization algorithm). There is no analog of entropy, outside of the large size of the state space being searched -- certainly not an entropy that bears any strong resemblance to thermodynamic entropy.
In the classic genetic optimization algorithm, reproduction with mutation followed by natural selection, randomness is your best friend: in this sense the algorithm relies on the constant diffusion of "entropy" into the population via mutation to drive it through the space being searched. Mutation/entropy is indeed disordering, and if one relies on mutation alone it almost always produces negative diffusive drift away from optimal solutions. However, the process of reproduction (with crossover) followed by selection is very anti-entropic -- it throws away all of the bad mutations, and keeps only the good ones (or the neutral ones, or the members of the population that didn't mutate at all and hence are no worse than they were before.
To give you a clear metaphor, imagine that you are trying to build a poker hand consisting of a royal flush in spades. To do this, you take a really big deck (made up of a few hundred decks of cards, well-shuffled) and compare two approaches:
a) You simply deal out five card poker hands, look at them, and see if they are a royal flush in spades.
b) You deal out (say) a hundred such hands. You rank the hands in some ordinal way according to how close they are to a royal flush in spades -- say a point for each non-duplicate card in the desired run of five. So a hand of AH, 3C, 10S, 7D, 10D would have one point (for the 10 of spades) etc.
Next you eliminate the fifty hands with the worst point count (most of them probably have zero points), randomly selecting ones to keep from the pool that has the minimum kept score. You "twin" each of these hands out of the big deck and the discards, and then randomly select two cards from each hand to exchange with a randomly selected partner for each of the hundred hands (so the first swaps with the 17th, the second with 29th, and so on until no hands remain). Finally for (say) five of the hands you randomly pull a card out and replace it with a card drawn randomly from the deck -- this is mutation, the only step that introduces "entropy" (randomly samples parts of the state space).
Now you iterate: Look at all of these 100 hands, throw away the fifty worst hands, twin, swap, mutate, repeat, until at least one hand is the desired royal flush in spades.
Which one goes faster? Randomly pulling poker hands from the deck, or this obviously highly selective algorithm?
I promise you, the latter is way, way faster. In fact, poker games that involve selective passing of cards (and there are lots of them that involve passing three to the left, two to the left, one to the left, etc) are well known by poker players to require a far better hand to win than a five card straight up poker hand, because things like a straight flush in spades become relatively likely instead of a very unlikely shot indeed!
Evolution is so damn efficient that to anyone who actually writes genetic algorithm optimization code (as I have) it feels almost like "cheating" compared to straight up monte carlo sampling based on JUST disorder/entropy sampling the space. It can find needles in metaphorical haystack via a process that is not that distant from systematically halving the haystack and keeping the half with the needle in it until there is no haystack left -- with the added bonus of replacing pieces of hay randomly from time to time with what might be a needle, in case you started with a haystack that didn't have even ONE needle in it.
So evolution is not "the opposite of entropy". Entropy is the log of the missing information in thermodynamics, evolutionary algorithms are an optimization process that relies on a mix of highly selective but random processes and the gradual diffusion of random information into the population in which the process occurs. Evolution in nature is remarkable only in that it provides its own optimization criterion in truly vast ecology of many successful populations existing in collective competition, a system so complex that it cooperative superorganismal relationships can and do emerge from the churn of the process and provide strong advantages to whole patterns of mutual behavior and role within the sub-populations represented. It's really quite amazing, while still being completely understandable.
rgb
Where does the new "random information" come from?
Mod
That is why entropy is indeed the log of the missing information.
Assuming that you ask because you really want to learn about randomness and not because you want to imply that God is somehow picking and choosing specific genes to tweak by cheating on the random process, it is useful to examine "random number generators" in computing. This is something that I am a genuine World-Class Expert on -- as you can see if you visit e.g.
http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/...
or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudora...
(and note that my program is the second reference at the bottom). At the very least, I know a lot more than the average scientist or mathematician about random numbers and random number generators, let along lay person.
Software random number generators are a complicated oxymoron, hence the term pseudorandom number generator that is often used (the pseudo is understood even when it is not said explicitly). If you can generate a number by means of an algorithm, then it isn't by definition random -- it can be reproducibly predicted if one reconstructs the appropriate state of the generator, and the generator produces exactly the same sequence of numbers every time from the same initial state.
Nevertheless, such a generator -- if it is well and carefully written -- can produce sequences of numbers that are very difficult to differentiate from truly random sequences. That is, all patterns of numbers one can imagine occur, on average, with approximately the correct frequency, where "on average" and "approximately" are themselves self-consistently imprecise at the levels required for truly random numbers. In general there is also no way to take a sequence of numbers from the generator and deduce the state of the generator that created them -- if there was it would be far too easy to crack various forms of encryption. Randomness, then, as far as testing and measurement are concerned, is a matter of examining sequences of numbers and using them to generate various statistical measures that have a known and computable distribution if the numbers used in generating them are "random enough", while also verifying the property of "unpredictability" -- lack of any inverse map from any given sequence to the state the produced it so that the next number in the sequence cannot be predicted from a knowledge of the sequence so far.
Hopefully, that made sense. Basically, you do some arithmetic -- often quite simple arithmetic -- and out of the arithmetic you deterministically get a number that cannot be predicted and that is distributed, on average, the way random numbers are theoretically distributed, to all orders, and this process produces "good" random numbers to the extent that they empirically match this distribution and are unpredictable.
The point is that random number generators have zero actual entropy. They are completely deterministic but -- lacking the knowledge of the state of the generator -- they are nevertheless unpredictable. Their entropy is limited to the amount of information that is required to specify the missing state (usually not much). However, if one accepts one's ignorance of this state as the starting point, there is a second way of evaluating the entropy of the distribution, one that simply looks for correlations in the sequences, as correlations can be used to compress the information and represent the true information content and "apparent randomness" of the sequence in a quantitative way.
For a really good random number generator, this "experimental entropy" of a generated sequence is indistinguishable from the expected entropy of an actual random sequence. Card shuffling (to return to our original example) is one way of generating that "not really random but completely unpredictable" sort of sequence, and a deck of cards that has been shuffled enough times, well enough, has no observable residual correlation with its initial state or order.
A card sharp, of course, has often learned to shuffle cards badly -- precisely intertwine odd and even cards, for example -- in such a way that they introduce no entropy into an apparently well-shuffled deck, producing a cold-stacked deck that one would expect to be random based on the number of shuffles (if they were honest, good shuffles). Some random number generators are similarly non-random and produce easily detected correlations in their sequences. Hence the need for careful testing of RNGs and the need not to play cards with strangers for money...;-)
Now comes the interesting part. The visible Cosmos is very very big, and is not at all systematically correlated at large length scales. We have no idea what the state is of most of the atoms in the sun, for example, and as soon as they are in one state they bounce around into another. The sun behaves a lot like a really enormous deck of cards being constantly shuffled by the many microscopic interactions that make its internal parts bounce around. It constantly is made even more sort-of-random by interacting (exchanging information with) other well-shuffled but distant stars, with the planets, with pretty much everything else in the Universe. In order to predict the trajectory of a single molecule precisely, one would have to be able to predict the trajectories of everything precisely.
Obviously, we cannot do this. So even though those trajectories may all be completely deterministic, without the slightest hint of real randomness, they are all enormously well-shuffled and as far as we are concerned they are totally unpredictable and "random". They may have zero entropy as far as the entire Universe is concerned -- just like a deck of cards no matter how well shuffled is in a definite state and has zero true entropy -- but lacking knowledge of that state we are forced to make our best guess using only the incomplete state information we do have.
So now we are at long last around to where I can answer your question. The new random information in actual genetic evolution comes from "everything else" outside of the gene that mutates. Typically, for example, a cosmic ray or natural radiation from the earth -- in a completely unpredictable event from the well-shuffled Universe -- hits a particular gene or chromosome and alters it.
Some of these alterations are destructive -- this is one way you get cancer, by radiation or oxidizing free radicals or just physical damage, viral interpolation, heat -- all unpredictable and random as far as we can ever tell -- damaging DNA and eventually turning on cell immortality so that the damaged cells replicate without bound.
Some of the alterations are neutral -- we have lots of "junk DNA", for example, that is not expressed and is basically a leftover "fossil" of the evolution process that has been surrounded by DNA that is expressed and does pretty much nothing, usually. Mutations of fossil DNA that aren't expressed don't affect the organism or reproductive process.
Some of the alterations are positive. Two genes can fuse and produce a completely new gene. One gene can break apart, pick up some base pairs, and stabilize as two new genes. Sometimes these genes do good things and increase the viability of the cell or the offspring, make it more likely to survive to reproduce.
Quite a bit of the variation in offspring is equally random but is the direct result of random shuffling, not mutation per se. This son has his father's eyes, his mother's lips, and is thus different from either one of them (even though he shares 50% of his DNA with both). The randomness here is from the mechanical process of the sperm and egg cells combining -- where there is a bit of "natural selection" involved in determining which sperm wins the race to start with -- and in the chemical process that matches up the genes from both parents and discards half of each. This is every bit as random and undirected as mutation, but the source of the randomness is the more immediate biochemistry of the actual environment where the zygote is formed.
In both cases, then, the "randomness" is simply our lack of knowledge of the exact state of the entire relevant part of the Universe that determines the outcomes, plus the observation that the distribution of such outcomes satisfies all the axioms that we would expect a truly random process to have. In any event, we find no evidence whatsoever for the kind of systematic deviations from randomness that would signal an "intelligent" (nonrandom) designer or process. As I noted before, genetic algorithms built using really good random number generators work so well that they appear to be cheating when compared to a naive conception of randomness that ignores the enormous power of the process to discover order and create structure that optimizes the system's survival of the natural selection step.
rgb
The deck of cards illustration is not really a good comparison because all the possible information is already there. That's not so in the case of an amoeba or some "simple" (actually highly complex) organism. An amoeba simply doesn't have the necessary genetic material to become even a tadpole, let alone a dog, bird, dinosaur or a person.
Mod
The deck of cards illustrates that it is entirely possible for a genetic algorithm to search a very, very large space of alternatives efficiently but nondeterministically. However, as I pointed out, actual genetic mutation involves all sorts of processes including twinning of genes followed by further mutation, so that the number of genes and chromosomes is not constant. Real evolution is not just reproduction (with or without crossover) and natural selection -- mutation is an essential step.
There is also a lot more overlap in the genetic material of different species than you seem to allow for. Some of the "solutions" found by evolution were found long, long ago and are present in nearly every living organism as good enough solutions to universal problems. Others are much more recent mutations that add new functionality on top of what was already there.
Again assuming that you aren't trying to suggest that evolution is impossible without God, if you are serious about learning you might read articles such as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_dup...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergen...
and so on. You will learn that it most certainly is possible for a purely mechanical and statistical process to produce the observed diversity of species, many times over, over the four billion years that evolution has been operating on this planet. Evolution is clearly evident even in the short timeframe of the post-Darwin era where people have looked for it, and it is routinely accomplished in the laboratory and barnyard.
If your goal is to try to suggest that evolution is impossible and necessitates some sort of intelligent designer or deity, go ahead and say so, and make your argument. But the argument is going to have to be more subtle than just "humans are very complex, therefore they must have been designed" (by what, an even more complex entity that was not designed?)
Not to mention the fact that in the fossil record and in the triumphs and tragedies of everyday reproductive life there is an enormous amount of evidence of evolutionary change, and no evidence at all for the kind of "designed all at once" ecosystem that a presumably competent intelligent designer would come up with. You have to postulate an intelligent designer that simulates unintelligent undirected design over a time frame of billions of years, which is so implausible as to be laughable. Whether you intend billion-year-old space aliens or a lying deity that hides all evidence of its activities -- why? There is no evidence for either one...
Evolution is all about the opposite of entropy. Order out of chaos (if you don't think an explosion produces chaos, please explain why), greater complexity out of lesser complexity, and an ever-improving universe and human race. [...:] So evolution contradicts entropy, definitely.No, evolution does not "contradict" entropy. Rgb has already gone to great lengths on this, but let me see if I can address it in a less technical way, perhaps without the use of the words "optimization" or "logarithm." Let's look at the various ways the argument fails:
1. It relies on a near-total lack of understanding of what entropy actually is. Entropy has, as rgb pointed out, nothing to do with human concepts of "order." Rather, entropy is one of the forces, along with free energy, that govern chemical reactions. It is certainly not some statement that everything in the universe will always progress towards what humans consider "less ordered."
2. It violates common sense. The field of evolutionary biology is 150 years old, and millions of scientists have worked on it, many with advanced degrees. Entropy is covered, among other places, in freshman chemistry. Almost anyone pursuing an undergrad degree in almost any science has to take freshman chemistry. Anyone trying to become a physicist, biologist, meteorologist, veterinarian, geologist or electrical engineer has to learn about entropy. For this argument to hold any weight requires that in the 150 years of evolutionary study, none of the millions of people studying it actually understand entropy, or have perhaps never even heard of it. It is simply unreasonable to think that such a simplistic argument based on one of the most basic concepts in science could somehow slip through the cracks for all these years, past all these people.
However, I supposed it isn't completely impossible that you are the single greatest expert in entropy in the last 150 years, in which case I'm sure you wouldn't mind elaborating in a highly technical and thorough way on exactly how evolution violates entropy.
3. It is a self-defeating argument. The argument is that evolution could not have happened because it violates one of the basic laws of physics, which would be impossible. But what is the alternative? Creation. Creation of anything, any mass or energy, violates the first law of thermodynamics. Which would be impossible by the very logic used in the entropy argument. So the essence of the argument (entropy, therefore creation) is to basically say that it is impossible for the impossible to not have happened. Not exactly the soundest logic on the block.
So let's conduct a little experiment. Go get a jar. Fill this jar with oil, water and some peppercorns. Shake it up. Everything will be all mixed up; chaotic, you might say, or disordered. Set the jar down. Wait. After a while, the various components of the mixture will separate. You will have a layer of oil on top of a layer of water, and a layer of peppercorns at the bottom. Without intervention, relying only on natural forces, ostensibly in accord with the laws of physics, this system has gone from less to more order, a seeming violation of entropy. So how did this happen? Let's consider the possibilities:
1. You have, with this simple experiment, made a major scientific breakthrough and disproved the law of entropy. Despite centuries of research, somehow there has never been a physicist, chemist, etc., who owned a bottle of salad dressing. Congratulations. Please credit me when you publish this groundbreaking paper.
2. You have magical, physics-defying, god-like powers.
3. You didn't actually defy entropy, you simply don't fully understand it and what constitutes an impossible "violation."
So, which do you think it is?
Greetings - Dan!Anything is possible, but is anything probable?
This is important when considering the origin of life. Since the first organism would be expected to have one RNA consisting of 100 nucleotides, what is the probability that one RNA molecule would randomly emerge spontaneously? We will assume for the moment that the conditions were perfect and nucleotides just happened to be at the right place at the right time.
With the probability known, we can begin to conceptualize the possibilities.
Richard William Nelson
Replying to rgb:So are you saying that mutation creates new genetic material?
Here is the dictionary definition of this highly controversial word...
mutation: n.
1. The act or process of being altered or changed.
2. An alteration or change, as in nature, form, or quality.
3. Genetics.
1. A change of the DNA sequence within a gene or chromosome of an organism resulting in the creation of a new character or trait not found in the parental type.
2. The process by which such a change occurs in a chromosome, either through an alteration in the nucleotide sequence of the DNA coding for a gene or through a change in the physical arrangement of a chromosome.
So mutation can create a new characteristic, but that's just the expression of the now-changed previous genetic material. I do not see any new material being created here. Do you? It looks like the First Law of Thermodynamics is being violated just as clearly by evolution as by special creation. The only difference between the two options is that while evolutionary theory assumes only one level of existence, special creation holds that there is another level -- the spiritual level -- with its own laws, and which can interact with the physical world at will. I'm definitely not a theologian (or a scientist), but common sense begs the question: what exactly does evolution require mutation to accomplish?
Since the first organism would be expected to have one RNA consisting of 100 nucleotides, what is the probability that one RNA molecule would randomly emerge spontaneously?Well I don't know where you get this idea that life had to begin with the spontaneous appearance of 100-nucleotide RNA. I won't waste my time trying to track down better information on this because, for the moment at least, it's not necessary. How probable is it that abiogenesis would occur? I don't know. But don't make the mistake of assuming that if something is improbable, it couldn't have happened.
The origin of life somewhere in the universe is something about whose probability we can't really say much. It would be like asking what the odds are of drawing a particular name from a hat without knowing how many names are in the hat and how many pulls there are going to be. How many planets are there, have there ever been or will there ever be in the universe that could support life? We have no idea. We can make very rough estimates, but we really have no clue. Furthermore, is our universe but one iteration in an endless cycle of Big Bangs and Big Crunches, the universe forming and reforming itself over and over, stretching backwards and forwards infinitely through time? We don't know.
So what are the odds of life arising on any given planet? Who knows, but let's say it's 1:1,000,000,000,000,000. If there were only 100 planets in the universe, then the odds of life arising somewhere in it would be pretty slim, and it would be unlikely to occur. However, if there were 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets in the universe, then it would be almost certain that life would arise on some of them.
Don't make the mistake of viewing the probability from the perspective of the outcome rather than of the conditions. Life happened to arise on Earth, and happened to arise at this point in time. But there is nothing special about this time and place. It could just as easily have happened somewhere else, earlier or later.
To illustrate: imagine you are in a football stadium, like the University of Michigan stadium, which holds over 100,000 people. Imagine the the stadium is full. No one's in the bathroom, no one's getting food. Every seat is full. Someone walks out to the center of the field, blindfolded, holding a high-powered rifle. He starts spinning in a circle, aiming out towards the crowd and after ten or twenty seconds pulls the trigger, sending a single bullet into the crowd. Now, the bullet is going to hit someone. (I know this isn't strictly true, there are aisles and sky and whatnot, but you get my point). From the perspective of the conditions - full stadium, single bullet - someone is going to get hit. It's guaranteed. But from the perspective of any one person, it's highly improbable. 1:100,000, more or less. So let's say the bullet hits you. You will think, "Why me? What are the odds?" and perhaps ascribe some meaning to the fact that something so improbable (from your perspective) has occurred. But, the thing is, this is what anyone would think. Someone was guaranteed to get hit, and that person would almost certainly have these sorts of thoughts. There's nothing special about you that makes your getting hit any more improbable than anyone else's. You were in the stadium; someone got shot; it happened to be you. You can't draw any conclusions about divine intervention based on this perfectly normal and probable outcome.
Put another way, consider the lottery. For any one person, the odds of winning the lottery are so slim that it's essentially impossible. So, by the logic that says that life arising naturally out of non-life is so improbable that it can't have happened, no one should ever win the lottery. And yet, people win the lottery all the time.
Mod
So are you saying that mutation creates new genetic material?
Here is the dictionary definition of this highly controversial word...
mutation: n.
1. The act or process of be..."
Is there something wrong with your mouse? Or do you not have a library? I made it really easy, putting links to the wikipedia page describing a way that new genetic material gets introduced into cells. And books on evolutionary biology exist in abundance in any University library or bookstore. Buy one. Learn.
Then you'll perhaps be able to reply without suggesting that twinning of genes or insertions violate the first law of thermodynamics (because you will know that the amino acids from which DNA is built are themselves being built in cells out of food, violating no physical law) and understanding that they are a form of mutation, which is a word that simply means "change".
You also might look up the word "intercalate" -- it is used a whole lot by molecular biologists who work with DNA.
Regarding probability -- you assume that you have sufficient prior knowledge to be able to assert that there is no reaction pathway in any physical environment that existed at the time of abiogenesis that leads smoothly from the known processes that form the key amino acids found in genetic material and the key cell structures, e.g. a cell membrane (both of which are proven in the laboratory and/or have strongly supported hypotheses supporting them) and simple self-replicating chains of these molecules.
Once you have self-replicating molecular structures of any sort and just add time, evolution is perfectly capable of bridging the gap to complexity just as it continues to do so even today.
But in any event this argument is specious. It boils down to I can't see how such a thing could be possible, therefore it must be impossible. Not only impossible, but so impossible that a hypothesis of a far more complex entity that exists outside of the known laws of physics is somehow more likely than any solution that is based on physics.
Of course you don't bother to compute the probability of the existence of that supernatural "infinitely" complex entity or you would realize that in order to explain something that is at first glance improbable (but which in fact may be nearly inevitable at some stage in normal planetary evolution across the cosmos using ordinary physics and chemistry) you have created something that is infinitely less probable and completely inconsistent with the very foundational laws you are using to (badly) guestimate the probability in the first place!
Why is it so very difficult to imagine that natural pathways to abiogenesis exist without violating any of the laws of physics, chemistry and thermodynamics? Why do you so very badly want for their to be some kind of "magic" associated with the process?
Oh, wait, I know, I know! It's because you read this book written way back in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age by primitive tribesmen that would have made the Taliban of today (their close spiritual cousins) seem downright cosmopolitan, and you'd rather believe in their superstitions than in the painstakingly accumulated network of evidence and explanation that consistently explains pretty much everything we can see, using powerful instruments, from a length scale of fermi on the small side to a length scale of billions of light years on the large side. Wow, that makes perfect sense. Gosh, I guess I'll have to modify my astronomy class lectures this summer and instead of teaching the big bang and current cosmology I'll teach that the stars were all created on day four and placed in the heavens about a geostationary earth just to divvy up the seasons and provide humans with signs, just like it says in the Bible.
rgb
Mod
rgb
rgb said: "That's like saying "a snowflake contradicts entropy" just because it is clearly highly ordered -- and yet was formed by a microscopic process that absolutely accounts for both internal energy and entropy changes in the macroscopic free energy. It just betrays an ignorance of what entropy is."I'm sorry; I don't mean to be a spoilsport, but I really don't understand you. I know that entropy isn't a synonym for disorder. There is order everywhere; in fact, I think that is a strong argument for ID. But when the snowflake was formed, wasn't some of the original energy lost (not destroyed, just rendered unusable)? Or did I just totally misread my science textbook?
I will look up "intercalate". As I said before, I am fascinated with words.
Regarding mutations: Could you give me an example of a beneficial mutation? One that has been accurately observed and documented -- not a hypothesis. I would like to know.
Thanks for answering my questions,
Pansy
Pansy, Benficial Mutation: "Professor Richard Lenski's twenty-year project examining the evolution of E. coli. They reported that, as a result of a beneficial mutation, his organisms had acquired the ability to metabolize citrate - or more correctly an ability to transport it through the cell wall prior to metabolizing it. This was an entirely new ability for this species - an increase in complexity provided by a beneficial mutation." see http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Lenski_r....hp
Mod
Obviously your assertion begs any number of questions and is logically inconsistent -- one way or the other you have to postulate order somewhere that was not intelligently designed in order to come up with an intelligent designer. So the real question is: Is it more sensible given the evidence of what we can see and no more to postulate a designer for a system that is already enormously complex where order appears in every single case we examine out of its built-in laws operating in an utterly impersonal and mechanical way, or to just believe that the Universe is a mechanical place with natural law that gives rise to ordered structures all by itself?
Note well that in the former case you are doing the moral equivalent of proposing a Matrix-like Universe, one where there is an invisible veil between our eyes and the true nature of reality. Perhaps there is no Universe at all, and we are all just power units in the Matrix, or simulated intelligences in an enormous computer, or... obviously there are an infinity of such speculative embeddings of what we can see in a hypothetical "super" universe where our cosmos is variously a subspace of a larger space, or an informational construct (mind, not matter at all), or anything you like. All of these things are perfectly lovely ideas for science fiction or fantasy stories, but sane people do not take fantasy -- defined as any one of these speculations written down in the absence of observational evidence to support it -- seriously. And quite obviously the Bible is just one of many such fantasies, and is not even a particularly good one. The Hindu creation mythology is considerably closer to what we actually observe -- and is still a fantasy, a myth, a lie, not supported in any sense by observation.
As for entropy, what is your point? I'm perfectly happy to discuss entropy at any level you like -- I've worked in condensed matter physics implementing calculations in statisical mechanics for most of my professional career, so I imagine I can address any of your concerns at any level you like -- but we do have to agree on that level -- entropy on the macroscale is often defined as e.g. dS = dQ/T -- the heat flow into a reservoir at constant temperature, which is a suitable form for certain thermodynamic computations -- but that isn't what entropy is -- it is the log of the missing information, a direct measure of the flow of order/disorder in irreversible physical processes occurring as a (sub)system is placed in contact with and interacts with its surrounding environment. The point is that evolution does not "contradict entropy" any more than the formation of a snowflake or some other ordered macroscopic system does.
Finally, regarding mutations -- they happen all of the time. My wife constantly struggles with them as she practices medicine, as we are systematically breeding antibiotic-resistant superbugs by abusing antibiotics all over the world and evolving them. My son is studying them at this very moment by exposing marigold seeds to gamma rays (to give a few seeds the same probability of mutation that many seeds would have over a much longer time) and then germinating them to see if e.g. new colors are produced, new features good or bad are observed. That's the way science proceeds -- and yes, this experiment and others like it have been done many many times and yes, some of the mutations are favorable. Do you want references?
If you want even more evidence, look at the history of corn. Or rice. Or nearly any cultivated vegetable or plant. Humans are enormously efficient evolution-creating engines, we naturally select the animals and plants we live with to preserve and amplify beneficial traits as they occur through mutation. A few hundred years ago dogs bore no resemblance to dogs of today -- one can create new dog breeds remarkably rapidly because dogs have particularly plastic DNA and seem to have a high mutation rate.
As always, google and wikipedia are your friends if you really want to learn instead of just arguing for a prior conclusion that you aren't prepared to give up no matter what the evidence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation...
Bear in mind that scientists all over the world are a) not stupid -- they are the smartest people mutation and natural selection produces in the human population, on average, often by a wide margin; b) are not people of bad will -- they are not, actually, part of any global satanic conspiracty and want nothing more than to understand how things really work in a consistent way; c) more or less universally accept the evidence for the age of the Universe, for evolution, for modern physics and chemistry and so on not because they are antichrists but because they blindly accept it on authority -- they accept it because it makes sense.
You simply will not find that a single tiny bit of the crap on Creationist, inerrant biblical apologist sites you might read is well supported by reason or evidence, if you actually look at it with anything like an open mind. That's just the way it is, sorry. And note that I'm not suggesting that you should believe it because I or anyone else says it is correct -- you should believe it because when you study it the hard way -- by actually working until it does make sense to you, working over a long time to really get the big picture and looking at all of the evidence and not carefully cherrypicked lies, you come to the conclusion that it is most likely true.
In particular, if you were raised without the Bible, in complete ignorance of Genesis etc, there is no way in hell that you would ever look at the world with microscopes, telescopes, modern tools and mathematics and using the scientific method to advance explanatory hypotheses and end up concluding that the world is 6000 years old and that the earth was created before the sun.
Seriously.
rgb
Greetings!Here is a perspective taking the RNA World approach. We know that a self-replicating RNA is composed of roughly 100 nucleotides, and RNA is composed of 4 different types of nucleotides. This means that the chance of forming one self-replicating RNA alone by chance would be 4 to the power of 100.
That means the number 4 is followed by 100 zeros - or expressed another way 10 to the power of 60. Since the number 4 followed by 100 zeros exceeds the estimated number of atoms in entirety of the universe - expecting chance to get life started is quite a mountain.
Keep in mind – these estimates do not include the attachment of sugars to the nucleotides to form the simplest RNA molecules - and these estimates do not take into account that without the other hundreds to thousands of biologically active molecules for metabolism nothing will happen. RNA cannot replicate without a village.
Origin of life estimates are out-of-this-world: possible – certainly not probable.
Richard William Nelson
Mod
Here is a perspective taking the RNA World approach. We know that a self-replicating RNA is composed of roughly 100 nucleotides, and RNA is composed of 4 different types of nucleotide..."
Ah, so you are certain that only one pattern out of all 4^100 forms the unique self-replicating RNA? Or is it possible that, say, 4^99 or 4^98 or 4^97 of them are actually self-replicating? Have you exhaustively built all of these patterns and tested them? Do you know the laws that govern when a piece of RNA is self-replicating and when it isn't?
And while you are working on that estimate, bear in mind this. Human beings contain 3.3 Giga base pairs. By your argument, every human is absolutely impossible -- we just don't exist. Only we do. The number of permutations of state for the entire Universe is a number that dwarfs that number and is good friends with infinity -- they play golf together, their kids go to the same school. The probability of finding it in THIS state is therefore one over a number that is good friends with infinity, something a gnat's eyelash away from zero. Yet here it is, in the state that it is in. So if you want to estimate probabilities, bear in mind that anything at all in that you find in the Universe is "infinitely" improbable if you formulate the question naively. If you want to do statistical mechanics, you have to study two additional things: The size of the entire phase space of possible "particular/desireable" classes of outcomes (which is often much more difficult than guestimating the size of the total phase space) and in the case of dynamical models or markov chains where processes ergodically sample the possibilities, some idea of the rates of diffusive drift. These latter depend strongly on the available pathways from any random initial state to the final class of state, and computing that is often insanely difficult even for relatively simple markov chains, e.g. importance sampling Monte Carlo with various thermalizing "moves".
Here the actual dynamics plays a key role. This is what I do (or at any rate, did for around fifteen years) so I know quite well of what I speak. Some well-known "local" transition rules, e.g. Metropolis, are well-known to be much slower than other "local" rules, e.g. heat bath. Non-local transition moves such as cluster methods change the exponent of how rapidly a search samples "good" regions of the phase space. Physical interactions that drive the actual dynamics in actual systems are often excellent approximations of these local and nonlocal moves in a numerical simulation, and relaxation times in actual system often scale in ways that are quite understandable from the simulations (at least in simple models).
So I have quite a few papers where I have studied lattices of (say) 100 x 100 x 100 atoms, where each atom can be in an infinity of states -- (its state maps into all the points on the surface of a 3D sphere of constant radius). Even if we simplify greatly and assume that the atoms can only be in two states, the size of the state space was 2^(10^6) -- kind of makes your 4^100 seem tiny, doesn't it? Obviously I had no chance of searching it and simulating physical phenomena in thermal equilibrium, because those states in thermal equilibrium constituted a tiny fraction of that space. Except that of course, I did, easily (well, if computing for a few years on gigaflop-scale computers is easy:-) using a suitable markov chain, one that actually closely resembles the microscopic dynamics that nature uses to thermalize such a system.
So I'm afraid that your argument asserting that abiogenesis is "not probable" is naive in the extreme. It might be improbable -- but more likely, it is damn near inevitable and probably happens all of the time in our Universe. To quote something I read a long time ago and can no longer attribute (sorry), if you pick up a haystack and give a shake and out pops a needle, there are two possibilities. One is that you are just the luckiest guy imaginable. The other is that the haystack is lousy with needles.
Science is based on the general premise that the second possibility is a lot more plausible and reasonable than the first. It also will keep you from having all of your money removed by friendly strangers in games of "chance", BTW.
There is one other interesting computation to do. I realize that the only reason you promote the notion that abiogenesis "must" have had an intelligent cause is because you have a prior belief in the intelligent designer that is going to completely ignore what I just said no matter what. Even if SETI discover ten alien civilizations tomorrow (making a real mess out of the Bible, because now God not only didn't follow Genesis and make humans and their geocentric earth to be "special", he mass produced intelligent life forms and humans aren't even the number one entry in the game) it almost certainly won't affect your belief. You'll just rationalize it differently, since your belief makes no sense already -- why pretend otherwise?
To make it quite clear why it makes no sense, let's do another little computation. As noted humans have 3.3 GBPs. There are order of ten billion humans who have ever lived as "recognizably" human. Those humans, functioning as a memetic superorganism that we can historically trace as an emergent self-organized phemonmenon over the last hundred thousand years or so have had a written language for only the last four or five thousand of those years -- various Sumerian works, e.g. Gilgamesh etc, seem to be just about the oldest examples of written language we've been able to find, suggesting that it probably took roughly half of the Holocene for humans to get from nomadic hand to mouth survival in the preceding Ice Age to where their memes were preserved by means other than word of mouth from generation to generation. "Philosophy" as an actual discipline is roughly 2500 years old (at least as successfully recorded and forward propagated via written language). The successful scientific model for philosophy is only roughly 500 years old. Since it was developed, humans have gone from knowing almost nothing about the Universe to having a damn good idea how the Universe works (and of course the methodology constantly improves that knowledge -- that is what it does). Only in the last fifty of those years have we had the tools and the knowledge to begin to systematically decode the riddles of genetics. Only in the last twenty of those years -- post PCR -- has the science systematized so that we can actually observe things and manipulate things at the genetic level by means other than radiate/mutate/wait and selectively breed (a methodology that has been enormously successful, of course, in breeding bananas that "fit the human hand and are designed for eating" of course, to quote another idiotic demonstration of how "God" must have designed the banana when in fact humans deliberately evolved the domesticated banana and continue to do so today).
This set of numbers and historical events gives you some small idea of how enormously unlikely it is to go from any space of possibilities to a space where actual amino acids and base pairs can be created and physically manipulated "intelligently". Our collective experience and intelligence are just barely up to the task even now, although if you look, almost all of the improvement in our ability to do so relative to stone age tribesmen has occurred in our lifetimes out of all of the age of the Cosmos.
This is the level of complexity you are attributing to a supernatural entity, your invisible intelligent designer, to God. Or rather, you are attributing far more intelligence and complexity -- enough so that a reasonable person would find the portrayal of a God whose name was Jealous and who was apparently whimsically likely to go off in a hissy fit and curse people with death and flood the world and cause people to explode into flame and burn to ashes on a whim -- all actions that a mere enlightened and intelligent human would never do now but that were standard operating procedure for our cruel and barbaric ancestors who drew a picture of God that is strangely like a really really powerful and demented picture of themselves as they wished to be.
So please, do some sort of seat of the pants estimate for how likely the emergence of this super-being is from any reasonable field of possibilities. If God is intelligent, then God lives and thinks in time. Thought is a process of dynamical transformation of a large, well-organized set of possibilities. Thinking about something, observing something, involves the exchange of information with the "something", and hence requires a state of relative entropy, contradicting the property of omniscience. If such a being exists -- and I am perfectly happy to entertain the hypothesis, and actually do think about the information theoretics of Deity because it is quite interesting and some actual theorems can be proven given the hypothesis of Deific existence -- then it is infinitely less likely, on top of whatever field of being that supports its intelligence and existence, than "mere" abogenesis, even abiogenesis the hard way by direct sampling undriven by any as-yet-undiscovered process that makes it rather likely or nearly inevitable at certain early stages of planetary development.
In other words, however unlikely abiogenesis might be, postulating an intelligent agent the started out our particular process simply means that you think that it already happened for that living intelligent agent, one that is far, far more complex and hence (by your own argument) less likely. At least we can imagine a number of ways abiogenesis might plausibly have occurred -- we have no evidence upon which to base our rational imagination of a supernatural intelligent agent as a plausible cause.
Intelligent design thus -- laughably -- fails the test of Ockham's razor. Fails it really, really badly. To explain one possibly unlikely thing -- where the haystack argument suggests that it is actually rather likely and just not yet understood -- you invoke a far less likely thing, an infinite superbeing that carefully prepared that messy old haystack so that it looks completely random and yet so that its one needle would stab you in the hand the first time and only time you stuck your hand into it. And what haystack did that being fall out of?
You might as well postulate that the scenario portrayed in the Matrix movie series is the true nature of reality. The world only looks real -- it is really a massive computer simulation. The appearance of reality is the result of an elaborate deception, and is really controlled by inscrutable beings that can program in anything they like, so that you can think that you are eating steak and lead a fortunate life if those programmers decide that you should, or you can live in implacable conflict with them if only you can see behind the curtain.
But just where did that layer of reality come from, the one where those programmers and that massive computer abide? Is it just another layer, simulated by a still more complex and massive computer? And where did that computer come from?
All great fantasy speculations, but rational people recognize them as fantasies not because they are not possible, but because they are implausible, and in any event so far there is no evidence to suggest that they are true.
rgb
Greetings – Esk!Great points – will respond to at least some.
Esk – “Ah, so you are certain that only one pattern out of all 4^100 forms the unique self-replicating RNA? Or is it possible that, say, 4^99 or 4^98 or 4^97 of them are actually self-replicating? Have you exhaustively built all of these patterns and tested them? Do you know the laws that govern when a piece of RNA is self-replicating and when it isn't?”
My point was simply - what is the probability that a self-replicating RNA moelcule could arise de novo? There is a very strong argument that self-replicating RNA could not have been “The Original” molecule – because self-replication is, by definition, conservative not creative.
Esk – “Human beings contain 3.3 Giga base pairs. By your argument, every human is absolutely impossible -- we just don't exist.”
My point was not that it was impossible – just improbable. When in the gene counting business, keep in mind the fruit fly has more genes than humans. This is not what one would expect from actions of evolution.
Esk – “Here the actual dynamics plays a key role. This is what I do (or at any rate, did for around fifteen years) so I know quite well of what I speak. Some well-known "local" transition rules, e.g. Metropolis, are well-known to be much slower than other "local" rules, e.g. heat bath…”
Are these “rules” natural laws? Please explain what are the natural laws.
Esk – “So I'm afraid that your argument asserting that abiogenesis is "not probable" is naive in the extreme.”
The “not probable” position finds lots of company. Francis Crick wrote – “an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that, in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle.” Biologist Robert Shapiro in the 1999 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, writing on the subject of abiogenesis concluded – “cannot be excluded as a rare event on early earh, but cannot be termed plausible.”
Esk – “I realize that the only reason you promote the notion that abiogenesis "must" have had an intelligent cause is because you have a prior belief in the intelligent designer that is going to completely ignore what I just said no matter what.”
My discussion is centered on scientific evidence – not about beliefs. The exclusion of beliefs, bias, subjectivity, etc, is the single reason why the Scientific Method revolutionized the study of nature.
The remainder of your comments centered on beliefs and/or philosophies – these have no place in science. In the science community, beliefs must be left at the door.
Like Darwin, science is attempting to discover the natural laws that account for the origin of species. Evolutions problem is the obvious – the old Central Dogma of mutation and natural selection is bankrupt and a comprehensive theory has still not emerged – as evidenced by the failure of the Altenberg-16 Summit.
Richard William Nelson
My point was not that it was impossible – just improbable.The thing you keep missing in your statements of probability is the number of dice rolls involved. How many chances have there been for this improbable event to happen? If you roll a die, you have a 1/6 chance of rolling a three; roll it twice and your chances of getting a three jump to 1/3. How many times were the dice rolled in the universe before "life" turned up? You can't just say, "Golly gee, there are a lot of sides on those dice, so it would be really unlikely that you would roll your number." If the die has X sides, and the dice have been rolled X^100 times, then it's not really improbable anymore, is it?
When in the gene counting business, keep in mind the fruit fly has more genes than humans. This is not what one would expect from actions of evolution.
Why not? Because we're bigger, so we should have more genes? Because we're God's chosen, the ultimate goal of evolution, so we should have more genes? We're not descended from fruit flies, and we branched off from our common ancestor with them very, very, very long ago. What do the sizes of the human genome and fruit fly genomes have to do with each other at all?
Greetings - Dan!Agree with "If the die has X sides, and the dice have been rolled X^100 times, then it's not really improbable anymore, is it?"
Perhaps true - if dice is the best probability model for life and the universe.
Please note that the fluit fly has MORE genes than humans - that conradicts the evolutionary concept of geater complexity.
Richard William Nelson
Greetings - Nathan!Agree - "Clearly it isn't impossible since it is what happened.
Then, the question centers on the "how" - by chance alone?
Richard William Nelson
Greetings - Nathan!Acknowledging that the universe and life just happened - through a world of improbabilities - by some unknown factor is certainly not an intellectually convincing answer.
Richard William Nelson
Greetings - Nathan!Would agree with your premise - all things are possible.
Also the probability of events happening by chance can be estimated. To not acknowledge the size of the probability - even though it has obviously happened - is not in alignment with scientific investigation.
We need to look beyond lotto numbers. What we are looking at, from an RNA world perspective, is equivalent to 4 to the power of 100 - for just the arrangement of the nucleoides in one RNA moelcule to arrive by chance alone. That is the number 4 followed by 100 zeros (4^100).
The question - how likely is this event given that 4^100 exceeds the the of atoms in the universe? On top of that, we need to add the probability of arranging sugar bases - not to mention the proteins required for replication.
Possible - not probable - alone. Staggering numbers that even Richard Dawkins has not overcome. But you are certainly entitled to your position - which I will respect.
Richard William Nelson
Mod
Would agree with your premise - all things are possible.
Also the probability of events happening by chance can be estimated. To not acknowledge the size of the probabili..."
Look, Richard, you are still under the impression that 4^100 is a big number. It is not. The number of particles in the Universe is not a big number either. Big numbers start to arise in physics when you put an "exclamation point" after one of these numbers -- something like (4^100)!
That little factorial symbol is what you get when you start counting permutations. It's fairly obvious from your remarks that you've never taken a course in statistics or actually studied statistics, or else if you have you've deliberately ignored or misrepresented your responses.
Out of the sheer goodness of my heart, though, I will try to instruct you -- again -- if you promise to actually pay attention this time. Start by visiting here:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/sn...
Go ahead, read the article. It is quite relevant. The most important thing to note is that water molecules contain roughly 10^18 molecules, and that while all of those molecules might or might not be water (most are, but impurities are certainly possible), there are quite a few isotopically distinct kinds of water molecule that occur with various probabilities -- water with one or both hydrogens that are tritium or deuterium, water that has O16 or O18. All of these, having different weights and slightly different electronic structure, act differently in the construction of a snowflake.
Now let's consider two specific aspects of the construction of a snowflake by utterly natural and impersonal interactions. First of all, let's think about a number that is starting to be "large" as far as physics is concerned -- the number of permutations of those 10^18 molecules of the 20 or more different kinds of water molecule (ignoring the finite probability of defects and contaminants). If we again naively represent the types of water molecules by digits (as one often does with amino acides in DNA), each possible snowflake is a number with 10^18 such digits. There are thus something like 20^(10^18) possible order-preserving arrangements of water molecules selected 10^18 at a time.
Note well that this is a far larger number than 4^100. In fact, it is a far bigger number than 4^(3.3x10^9). By your incredibly naive argument regarding "complexity" -- fruit flies vs humans -- snowflakes must be designed and hand built, churned out by little fairies or something, because they have greater complexity than either a fruit fly or human being -- if complexity is measured by simply counting permutations in some large (but not yet, believe it or not, all that large) set of possibilities.
(As a parenthetical insertion -- you really need to stop visting Christian websites for your information. The fruit fly has only around 136 million base pairs compared to a human's 3.3 billion, and has only half as many genes. If you want to read an interesting article on how humans are using fruit flies to study evolution, you might visit here:
http://www.rps.psu.edu/indepth/toolki...
But I doubt that you will. It would interfere with your prior conclusion that evolution is impossible in spite of the fact that rather large numbers of people are studying it and it is observed all of the time and is even mathematically starting to be well-understood!)
This makes the probability of having the particular combination of water molecules order of 1 OVER this largish number. This number is quite small compared to the number of snowflakes that fall in a year, even adding in all of the snowflakes that fall on all of the icy planets around all of the stars in the Cosmos for all of the lifetime of the Cosmos, making it unlikely but not impossible that no two identical snowflakes with ~10^18 molecules in it have ever been formed (even allowing for the actual probabilities for the constituents and the point symmetry group for the snowflake, which create a bias in the actual sampling of the possible permutations, much like loaded dice).
But this still isn't the surprising thing about snowflakes. Not only do they have more complexity than a naive conception of human DNA wherein the internal permutations of isotopic mass and chemistry of its rather large molecules are not taken into account -- but they are snowflakes. That is, they have a six fold (approximate) structural symmetry. They are ornate. They are beautiful. They look like a made thing! To again reference an absurd teleological argument for God, if one were walking in the desert and looked down and saw a snowflake (through a microscope, of course, so its structure could fully be appreciated) and one were completely ignorant of all science one would say "Wow! How unlikely is that! This looks like a carefully designed piece of sculpture that could only have been created by an intelligent agent, because wherever I look about me in the world with my naked, untrained eyes I see disorder in nature except where I and my fellow humans with our great intelligence create works of art with symmetry and design not unlike this. Except that this is even finer work than our own best efforts, so its designer must be correspondingly more intelligent and artistic."
Of course then this silly fellow finds another snowflake, then another, then another, and before long he's up to his rear in snowflakes and grumbling about having to shovel his driveway and perhaps he curses the malign Creator of all of these tiny works of art or the invisible fairies or whatever intelligent causal agent he invents to explain their order in an apparently disordered world.
To make the order/disorder question "crystal" clear and start us on the path to appreciating really large numbers, let's imagine that the bond length between all of those water molecules is roughly 1 angstrom. When we ignore the interactions between the molecules and their symmetry (as you do in your naive 4^100 estimate) then we can arrange all of those water molecules in a row 10^18 x 10^(-10) = 10^8 meters long -- a single chain, linear molecule 100,000 km in length -- a third of the distance from the earth to the moon, give or take. Now imagine all of the arrangements of all possible selections from our "alphabet" of 20 or so different isotopically different kinds of "water", each with its correct weight, such that every water molecules is exactly 1 angstrom from one or more neighbors, so that the entire structure is "bonded". These arrangments range from the single long strand with its 20^(10^18) combinations to a nice simple cubic 10^6 molecules to the side. These are all of the physical arrangements of 1 angstrom bonded "stuff", and this is starting to look like a pretty big number because for each of them we have (once we have chosen and index order scheme, easily enough done) all of those permutations.
What strikes us as "unlikely" about snowflakes is that they are enormously improbable arrangements in this space. Nearly all of the arrangements (ignoring isotopic permutations) are "disordered". They have no particular symmetry. Thus having symmetry at all is naively "unlikely". Then, there are rather large number of symmetries the arrangements can have -- I won't bore you with a discussion of point groups and so on but surely this is quite clear. So arrangements with sixfold rotational symmetry about some axis are a very, very small part of this very, very large space of possibilities, and yet is still enormously large -- including e.g. six "arms" each 1/6 of the length of the linear chain we started thinking about.
Now we can finally get to the point. You are asserting that just because there are 4^100 possible arrangements of the amino acids in RNA it must be very unlikely for self-replicating RNA to form "by chance" in any conceivable chemical environment". You state this without any knowledge that I can discern of their actual reaction dynamics -- the forces that bind them in the first place -- or the statistical mechanics that underlies the formation of structured collections of molecules -- it is just the big number that impresses you.
Yet the numbers that describe the humble, ubiquitous snowflake dwarf those numbers. The permutations of only 100 objects is a big number compared to things like the number of atoms in the Universe, sure, but it is tiny compared to all the ways all of those atoms can be arranged in space and time, making the probability of any particular arrangement "infinitely small" -- just as is the probability of getting any particular sixfold symmetric snowflake -- and yet snowflakes themselves happen all of the time.
Now, nobody with any sense actually thinks snowflakes are made by invisible fairies or hand-crafted by some Deity one at a time. No, if there is indeed such a Deity, It set things up so that snowflakes are self-assembling -- they aren't unlikely at all, they just look that way to the naive eye. Any particular snowflake is unlikely, but that one gets snowflakes under the right conditions instead of just tiny lumps of sleety ice -- that is purely automatic.
One is thus led to study the processes whereby water -- a polar molecules that can work all sorts of "miracles" because of its surprising natural tendencies to structure itself in interesting ways at different temperatures and its remarkable ability to act as a medium for biological chemistry -- can nucleate and grow crystals with sixfold symmetry every time under the right conditions instead of never as one would estimate in ignorance of the actual physics.
That is why I asked if you had exhaustively done the counting of all of the permutations of even 4^100 that are self-replicating. Have you considered the weighted probabilities of getting certain combinations? Have you considered all of the intermediate steps in the reaction pathways (and note well that there are far, far more such pathways to consider than there are permutations in the final product so that you can be sure that none of the ones that lead to self-replicating molecules just happen to be favored in a chemical environment that might exist on a young planet? Have you taken into account all of the possible catalyzing environments that might have been present at that time, the sources of free energy that might have driven it, the physical environments that might have existed?
Finally, have you ever actually studied genetic optimization algorithms? This is the part of abiogenesis that is very difficult to model, because there are so many ways for a evolutionary process to emerge and dominate the time evolution of any system with any sort of sorting mechanism that selects only certain classes of outcomes. To me it is not at all implausible that chemical environments might exist that favor abiogenesis -- over a few hundred million years of reactions sampling a vast permutation space of chemical outcomes. It certainly wouldn't be surprising if one turned up, any more than it should that the Urey Miller experiment showed that one way or another producing the raw materials was not all that improbable
In any event, the snowflake clearly demonstrates the fallacy in your telelogical argument. Naive estimates of probability are just that -- naive. Proability in physics and chemistry is structured by the microscopic interactions, and can easily lead to "unlikely" end molecules, whether or not we understand yet the pathways involved.
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Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
Books mentioned in this topic
Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms (other topics)Algebra of Probable Inference (other topics)
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science (other topics)
An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (other topics)
Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (other topics)
Anyways, Genesis 1:26 says "Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth."" according to the version I am looking at, and my question is, who is this "us"? Surely, he is not talking to the animals? So then, someone/thing else? When were THEY created?
I found this unusual, and was wondering if anyone had an explanation to offer.