(2017-12-16, 01:01 PM)Paul C. Anagnostopoulos Wrote: [ -> ]I agree. However, your "evidence" for evolution being invalid is a vague feeling that it will not eventually be able to explain everything. Since there is no proof in science, you do not have proof of your vague feeling.
Well perhaps a little bit of the evidence lies in the fact that you had to backtrack quite a lot as we discussed pre-evolution above. For example I had to remind you that you can't use the term evolution when talking about any pre-biotic chemical that isn't self replicating. James Tour's account should really make you think a bit - and he, like Rupert Sheldrake reports that privately many other scientists he has spoken to agree with what he has to say.
Pre-biotic chemistry probably looked like the bottom of a flask that has been used to perform an organic chemical reaction. You could probably take a planet that has only got to the tar stage, and spray it with DNA or RNA that coded for the molecules of life, and nothing would happen, they would all get degraded without triggering life!
Quote:So what you need is another theory that better explains the evidence. In other words, to reject the Theory of Evolution you need a better theory of evolution. You don't have one, because "it happened by immaterial magic" is not a scientific theory.
I await the probability calculations.
As you know there are far too many unknowns for such a calculation to be feasible, but the problem is that your 'side' doesn't do any calculations either - you just glibly assume evolution by NS must be true! Worse - you teach kids that evolution has been 'scientifically proved' and try to exclude alternative ideas.
David
DaveB Wrote:Well perhaps a little bit of the evidence lies in the fact that you had to backtrack quite a lot as we discussed pre-evolution above. For example I had to remind you that you can't use the term evolution when talking about any pre-biotic chemical that isn't self replicating. James Tour's account should really make you think a bit - and he, like Rupert Sheldrake reports that privately many other scientists he has spoken to agree with what he has to say.
I never claimed to have the solution to the origin of life. I agree that, strictly speaking, the term evolution applies to self-replicating organisms. However, life may have started with self-assembling organisms that were then selected by environmental factors. It's not strictly evolution, but it is a possible beginning.
Again, though, this is not proof that an immaterial intelligence is required.
Quote:Pre-biotic chemistry probably looked like the bottom of a flask that has been used to perform an organic chemical reaction. You could probably take a planet that has only got to the tar stage, and spray it with DNA or RNA that coded for the molecules of life, and nothing would happen, they would all get degraded without triggering life!
I do not know.
Quote:As you know there are far too many unknowns for such a calculation to be feasible, but the problem is that your 'side' doesn't do any calculations either - you just glibly assume evolution by NS must be true! Worse - you teach kids that evolution has been 'scientifically proved' and try to exclude alternative ideas.
Here is an evolution simulation that I wrote that precisely does do calculations:
https://schneider.ncifcrf.gov/paper/ev/evj/
There is a whole field of computational biology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_biology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computatio...Department
There is no proof in science. The Theory of Evolution has as much evidence for it as, say, the Theory of Gravity. If you want to argue about the origin of life, be my guest. But dissing evolution because it's "just like ID" is absurd. And, again, if you have nothing to replace it with, it'll be difficult to interest biologists.
~~ Paul
(2017-12-16, 09:37 AM)DaveB Wrote: [ -> ]This is where you are wrong - an invalid theory should be struck out in science, even if there is no alternative available.
Think of science as a large heap of unexplained phenomena. Over time people manage to explain some of these phenomena and transfer them to a new pile for explained phenomena. If one of those explanations turns out to be invalid, it is very definitely valuable to return the phenomenon to the unexplained pile - so that others can have a go at solving it.
By analogy, if you are doing a jigsaw, and you find you have placed a piece wrongly, it is wise to take it out - leaving it in place can only seed confusion.
Obviously (I think) any new explanation for the origin of life and its evolution will be very disruptive to science (something that even scientists claim to relish), and I would say that none of us here are totally clear about what that will be. I find the negative fact that evolution and the vague idea of life emerging from pools of chemicals does not cut it, interesting enough for now. Remember, that as I have explained repeatedly, I am not like a religious believer, who must believe a whole package of ideas at all costs. A partial understanding which has a low probability of being wrong, is far preferable.
David
David
I think Asimov's Axiom "Wronger than Wrong" is eminently appropriate to describe your logic. It's from his book "The Relativity of Wrong". Here's a reply to an English literature major. Hopefully you'll see the light - hopefully.
Quote:The Relativity of Wrong
By Isaac Asimov
I RECEIVED a letter the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important. In the first sentence, the writer told me he was majoring in English literature, but felt he needed to teach me science. (I sighed a bit, for I knew very few English Lit majors who are equipped to teach me science, but I am very aware of the vast state of my ignorance and I am prepared to learn as much as I can from anyone, so I read on.)
It seemed that in one of my innumerable essays, I had expressed a certain gladness at living in a century in which we finally got the basis of the universe straight.
I didn't go into detail in the matter, but what I meant was that we now know the basic rules governing the universe, together with the gravitational interrelationships of its gross components, as shown in the theory of relativity worked out between 1905 and 1916. We also know the basic rules governing the subatomic particles and their interrelationships, since these are very neatly described by the quantum theory worked out between 1900 and 1930. What's more, we have found that the galaxies and clusters of galaxies are the basic units of the physical universe, as discovered between 1920 and 1930.
These are all twentieth-century discoveries, you see.
The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.
My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that "right" and "wrong" are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.
However, I don't think that's so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts, and I will devote this essay to an explanation of why I think so.
When my friend the English literature expert tells me that in every century scientists think they have worked out the universe and are always wrong, what I want to know is how wrong are they? Are they always wrong to the same degree? Let's take an example.
In the early days of civilization, the general feeling was that the earth was flat. This was not because people were stupid, or because they were intent on believing silly things. They felt it was flat on the basis of sound evidence. It was not just a matter of "That's how it looks," because the earth does not look flat. It looks chaotically bumpy, with hills, valleys, ravines, cliffs, and so on.
Of course there are plains where, over limited areas, the earth's surface does look fairly flat. One of those plains is in the Tigris-Euphrates area, where the first historical civilization (one with writing) developed, that of the Sumerians.
Perhaps it was the appearance of the plain that persuaded the clever Sumerians to accept the generalization that the earth was flat; that if you somehow evened out all the elevations and depressions, you would be left with flatness. Contributing to the notion may have been the fact that stretches of water (ponds and lakes) looked pretty flat on quiet days.
Another way of looking at it is to ask what is the "curvature" of the earth's surface Over a considerable length, how much does the surface deviate (on the average) from perfect flatness. The flat-earth theory would make it seem that the surface doesn't deviate from flatness at all, that its curvature is 0 to the mile.
Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, terribly wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.
There were reasons, to be sure, to find the flat-earth theory unsatisfactory and, about 350 B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle summarized them. First, certain stars disappeared beyond the Southern Hemisphere as one traveled north, and beyond the Northern Hemisphere as one traveled south. Second, the earth's shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always the arc of a circle. Third, here on the earth itself, ships disappeared beyond the horizon hull-first in whatever direction they were traveling.
All three observations could not be reasonably explained if the earth's surface were flat, but could be explained by assuming the earth to be a sphere.
What's more, Aristotle believed that all solid matter tended to move toward a common center, and if solid matter did this, it would end up as a sphere. A given volume of matter is, on the average, closer to a common center if it is a sphere than if it is any other shape whatever.
About a century after Aristotle, the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes noted that the sun cast a shadow of different lengths at different latitudes (all the shadows would be the same length if the earth's surface were flat). From the difference in shadow length, he calculated the size of the earthly sphere and it turned out to be 25,000 miles in circumference.
The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat earth to the spherical earth.
Mind you, even a tiny difference, such as that between 0 and 0.000126, can be extremely important. That difference mounts up. The earth cannot be mapped over large areas with any accuracy at all if the difference isn't taken into account and if the earth isn't considered a sphere rather than a flat surface. Long ocean voyages can't be undertaken with any reasonable way of locating one's own position in the ocean unless the earth is considered spherical rather than flat.
Furthermore, the flat earth presupposes the possibility of an infinite earth, or of the existence of an "end" to the surface. The spherical earth, however, postulates an earth that is both endless and yet finite, and it is the latter postulate that is consistent with all later findings.
So, although the flat-earth theory is only slightly wrong and is a credit to its inventors, all things considered, it is wrong enough to be discarded in favor of the spherical-earth theory.
And yet is the earth a sphere?
No, it is not a sphere; not in the strict mathematical sense. A sphere has certain mathematical properties - for instance, all diameters (that is, all straight lines that pass from one point on its surface, through the center, to another point on its surface) have the same length.
That, however, is not true of the earth. Various diameters of the earth differ in length.
What gave people the notion the earth wasn't a true sphere? To begin with, the sun and the moon have outlines that are perfect circles within the limits of measurement in the early days of the telescope. This is consistent with the supposition that the sun and the moon are perfectly spherical in shape.
However, when Jupiter and Saturn were observed by the first telescopic observers, it became quickly apparent that the outlines of those planets were not circles, but distinct ellipses. That meant that Jupiter and Saturn were not true spheres.
Isaac Newton, toward the end of the seventeenth century, showed that a massive body would form a sphere under the pull of gravitational forces (exactly as Aristotle had argued), but only if it were not rotating. If it were rotating, a centrifugal effect would be set up that would lift the body's substance against gravity, and this effect would be greater the closer to the equator you progressed. The effect would also be greater the more rapidly a spherical object rotated, and Jupiter and Saturn rotated very rapidly indeed.
The earth rotated much more slowly than Jupiter or Saturn so the effect should be smaller, but it should still be there. Actual measurements of the curvature of the earth were carried out in the eighteenth century and Newton was proved correct.
The earth has an equatorial bulge, in other words. It is flattened at the poles. It is an "oblate spheroid" rather than a sphere. This means that the various diameters of the earth differ in length. The longest diameters are any of those that stretch from one point on the equator to an opposite point on the equator. This "equatorial diameter" is 12,755 kilometers (7,927 miles). The shortest diameter is from the North Pole to the South Pole and this "polar diameter" is 12,711 kilometers (7,900 miles).
The difference between the longest and shortest diameters is 44 kilometers (27 miles), and that means that the "oblateness" of the earth (its departure from true sphericity) is 44/12755, or 0.0034. This amounts to l/3 of 1 percent.
To put it another way, on a flat surface, curvature is 0 per mile everywhere. On the earth's spherical surface, curvature is 0.000126 per mile everywhere (or 8 inches per mile). On the earth's oblate spheroidal surface, the curvature varies from 7.973 inches to the mile to 8.027 inches to the mile.
The correction in going from spherical to oblate spheroidal is much smaller than going from flat to spherical. Therefore, although the notion of the earth as a sphere is wrong, strictly speaking, it is not as wrong as the notion of the earth as flat.
Even the oblate-spheroidal notion of the earth is wrong, strictly speaking. In 1958, when the satellite Vanguard I was put into orbit about the earth, it was able to measure the local gravitational pull of the earth--and therefore its shape--with unprecedented precision. It turned out that the equatorial bulge south of the equator was slightly bulgier than the bulge north of the equator, and that the South Pole sea level was slightly nearer the center of the earth than the North Pole sea level was.
There seemed no other way of describing this than by saying the earth was pear-shaped, and at once many people decided that the earth was nothing like a sphere but was shaped like a Bartlett pear dangling in space. Actually, the pear-like deviation from oblate-spheroid perfect was a matter of yards rather than miles, and the adjustment of curvature was in the millionths of an inch per mile.
In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.
What actually happens is that once scientists get hold of a good concept they gradually refine and extend it with greater and greater subtlety as their instruments of measurement improve. Theories are not so much wrong as incomplete.
This can be pointed out in many cases other than just the shape of the earth. Even when a new theory seems to represent a revolution, it usually arises out of small refinements. If something more than a small refinement were needed, then the old theory would never have endured.
Copernicus switched from an earth-centered planetary system to a sun-centered one. In doing so, he switched from something that was obvious to something that was apparently ridiculous. However, it was a matter of finding better ways of calculating the motion of the planets in the sky, and eventually the geocentric theory was just left behind. It was precisely because the old theory gave results that were fairly good by the measurement standards of the time that kept it in being so long.
Again, it is because the geological formations of the earth change so slowly and the living things upon it evolve so slowly that it seemed reasonable at first to suppose that there was no change and that the earth and life always existed as they do today. If that were so, it would make no difference whether the earth and life were billions of years old or thousands. Thousands were easier to grasp.
But when careful observation showed that the earth and life were changing at a rate that was very tiny but not zero, then it became clear that the earth and life had to be very old. Modern geology came into being, and so did the notion of biological evolution.
If the rate of change were more rapid, geology and evolution would have reached their modern state in ancient times. It is only because the difference between the rate of change in a static universe and the rate of change in an evolutionary one is that between zero and very nearly zero that the creationists can continue propagating their folly.
Since the refinements in theory grow smaller and smaller, even quite ancient theories must have been sufficiently right to allow advances to be made; advances that were not wiped out by subsequent refinements.
The Greeks introduced the notion of latitude and longitude, for instance, and made reasonable maps of the Mediterranean basin even without taking sphericity into account, and we still use latitude and longitude today.
The Sumerians were probably the first to establish the principle that planetary movements in the sky exhibit regularity and can be predicted, and they proceeded to work out ways of doing so even though they assumed the earth to be the center of the universe. Their measurements have been enormously refined but the principle remains.
Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.
(2017-12-16, 11:07 PM)Paul C. Anagnostopoulos Wrote: [ -> ]Here is an evolution simulation that I wrote that precisely does do calculations:
https://schneider.ncifcrf.gov/paper/ev/evj/
Huh. Now is when I find that my browser of choice, Firefox (and most other browsers, including Google Chrome), no longer supports Java applets - and in any case, the page you get to when you click
Launch Evj has this caveat up the top: "
Sorry! This will not work currently - I have to set up the program for the new java security requirements."
No problem, I thought - I'll just download the source code from the provided link (
evjava.zip), and run it as a standalone Java program. Unfortunately, "
The requested URL /paper/ev/evj/evjava.zip was not found on this server."
A pity, because I'd like to see the program you wrote.
(2017-12-17, 07:56 AM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]Huh. Now is when I find that my browser of choice, Firefox (and most other browsers, including Google Chrome), no longer supports Java applets - and in any case, the page you get to when you click Launch Evj has this caveat up the top: "Sorry! This will not work currently - I have to set up the program for the new java security requirements."
No problem, I thought - I'll just download the source code from the provided link (evjava.zip), and run it as a standalone Java program. Unfortunately, "The requested URL /paper/ev/evj/evjava.zip was not found on this server."
A pity, because I'd like to see the program you wrote.
Oof, the Java security requirements. Good luck to the person who is going to fix that.
I, too, cannot get to the pages. I've told Tom Schneider so he can fix it.
It's a simulation of the evolution of DNA binding sites.
https://schneider.ncifcrf.gov/papers/ev/evj/index.html
Edited to add: Looks like it's fixed now. You can download the program.
~~ Paul
(2017-12-17, 01:57 PM)Paul C. Anagnostopoulos Wrote: [ -> ]Looks like it's fixed now. You can download the program.
Thanks. I did and it runs. I don't (at least for now) though have the mental energy to devote to working out exactly what the point of it is and how it proves its point. If I find that energy, I'd like to think I'll get back to you, either here or privately.
(2017-12-14, 07:47 PM)Kamarling Wrote: [ -> ]I don't pretend to understand all of your arguments but I think there is some confusion over what we all mean by mind. For me, mind or intelligence is fundamental but that is not to say that it can be described in identical terms in all circumstances. For example, mind at work in a worm is probably not at all like mind at work in a human. Similarly, mind at work in a human cell is not like the workings of the human mind.
Speaking for myself, I have quite a different concept of mind as it applies to living systems. I think of them as being self-aware to some extent and able to act upon information from the environment which, in turn, enables them to select according to what they have learned from that information. I'd go further to say that information exists in a field, access to which is shared so that systems of like nature can share that information and act accordingly. This all presupposes a purpose so I think that evolution is purposeful.
I am right there with you and with the quotations that you cited. I strongly agree that observation of nature leads one to think that information is getting shared at deep levels.
The definition of the mental process, in my humble view, is very simple. Mind is the overall process of living things processing and transforming both kinds of information, formal bits and logic, as well as functional/meaningful configurations. So that minds are involved from the faint signals within a cell controlling metabolism -- all the way to herd behavior of a species. Information that is objective - just like matter and energy.
(2017-12-19, 04:53 PM)stephenw Wrote: [ -> ]I am right there with you and with the quotations that you cited. I strongly agree that observation of nature leads one to think that information is getting shared at deep levels.
The definition of the mental process, in my humble view, is very simple. Mind is the overall process of living things processing and transforming both kinds of information, formal bits and logic, as well as functional/meaningful configurations. So that minds are involved from the faint signals within a cell controlling metabolism -- all the way to herd behavior of a species. Information that is objective - just like matter and energy.
I just would like to clarify in my mind what your position is in the science of consciousness. My interpretation of this and other statements is that you apparently believe mind (and consciousness) is inherently one and the same as data processing. And consequently you don't consider Chalmers' "hard problem" to be a problem at all. Am I correct in this, or have I misunderstood your position?
Oldest fossils ever found show life on Earth began before 3.5 billion years ago
Researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have confirmed that microscopic fossils discovered in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old piece of rock in Western Australia are the oldest fossils ever found and indeed the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth.
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-12-oldest-f...began.html
(2017-12-19, 02:11 PM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks. I did and it runs. I don't (at least for now) though have the mental energy to devote to working out exactly what the point of it is and how it proves its point. If I find that energy, I'd like to think I'll get back to you, either here or privately.
The primary point was to demonstrate that a model of the information content of DNA binding sites was accurate. It evolves DNA binding sites. As it does so, it shows a picture of the canonical base sequence of the sites and calculates the amount of information in those sequences.
In the process, of course, it became one of the poster children of the ID folks to claim that the information was "smuggled into" the program. The program certainly provides the equivalent of environmental pressures to evolve the sites, but the actual site sequence and information content evolves from random chromosomes.
Which brings up the interesting question of environmental pressures. We might make the argument that the information in evolved biological mechanisms is "smuggled into" those mechanisms from the environment. We might even be able to make a case for the information in the mechanisms being a formal transmutation of the information in the environment.
~~ Paul