A man can dream, Goose. A man can dream.
Be careful what you wish for. I’m currently trying to hold my head above water in a debate against a “Jerry Don Brauer.”
http://www.google.com/search?q=Jerry+Don+Bauer&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
It’s not so much that his arguments are good but rather that he has kept it up so long that point by point responses are taking hours to write, and he keeps chiding about not being able to keep up (all the while dragging things out with babbling tangents and extended incredulous insults) and throwing out all sorts of equations outside of my expertise to easily refute offhand without lots of work. It’s exhaustingly irritating.
Dealing with tangents is a matter of calling him out. Set a specific list of points to address and stick to them. As far as the insults, just keep pointing out that argumentum ad hominem* is a fallacy and could he please stick to the issues at hand rather than your personal history and sexual habits.
That said, dedicated Creationists are often experts at obfuscation. The thing to do (and it sounds simple here but is rather difficult in practice) is explain your points in simple, easy-to-grasp terms (Stephen J. Gould is a good example for this) and demand that he do the same.
Good luck to you, anyway.
As for nolies, I guess he got his head handed to him. Not quite fair, really, since it was about eight to one, but that was his poor choice of forum. He should have stuck to <put your favorite group of ignoramuses here>.
Stranger
Well, the reality is, I doubt that will make much difference. The guy sounds like some ID nutjob with a HUGE hcip on his shoulder that he makes up for by being glib and condescending (you see, HE has a degree and teaches these subjects for a living!)
Here, for instance is his calculation of how abiogenesis is improbable:
I keep telling him that you cannot model the natural world with random coin flips and that while there’s nothing wrong with the math, the math is irrelevant because it doesn’t tell us anything about the actual world or what can happen in it. He keeps retorting that I can’t tell him what magical “law” makes cells appear out of nowhere.
Good grief.
I don’t see why, my impression is that this guy is sitting back in his chair laughing while dedicated dopers write pages of responses and then not bothering to respond to them. Either that or his mind exploded from to much logic and common sense at once.
I personally feel incensed that he just left, and that I read 5 pages of responses only to find out he scampered off. Arrgh.
Dembski has, of course, been debunked many times. See here for example.
Dembski’s “universal probability bound” is meaningless in a non-random context. And I know of no one, aside form creationists and IDists, who believes that abiogenesis is solely the result of random molecular interactions.
Note that Brauer makes the same mistake as Dembski (he’s probably parroting Dembski, for that matter…) with respect to the scale at which this “universal probability value” applies. They’d like to apply it to cells, or flagella (seemingly ignorant of the fact that there are multiple types of flagella, some of which are much simpler than others). Without such a limitation of scale, one could simply point to any organism and claim that, because it contains more than 500 bits of information, it must be designed! That would reveal them to be special creationists, however, and would pretty much pull their movement to a screeching halt.
A further problem is that many, if not most (but certainly not all), genes fall below the UPB. Cytochrome-c, for example, a favorite topic for alleged design, is 339 bases long, and Hubert Yockey has calculated its “information content” to be between 233-373 bits – well below Dembski’s 500-bit limit for non-randomness – and many genes are about the same size as cytochrome-c. So, many genes are well within the range of “random” by Dembski’s own definition!
Even at higher levels of scale – cells, for example – there is the fact that not everything about a cell is determined by genetic coding, thus, taken as a whole, the entire cell is not bound by the UPB anyway.
So, I would say pin the guy on applicable scales for this UPB. Is it DNA strands? genes? cells? organisms?
Why don’t you ask for a cite where any legitimate biologist is claiming that cells appeared as cells without precursor stages? I see that his strategy is that he is doing disproofs of strawmen. Even Dawkins says that it is impossible for cells to the the result of abiogensis, I believe, and so that is not what happened.
I have an analogy for this. Say you have a combination lock of 100 stages of 10 numbers each, and to open it you must set each of the stages to the right number, in sequence. This is impossible randomly. But say each stage clicks when you hit the right number. Then opening the lock is trivial. Each precursor stage of evolution is like the click.
A word of caution.
I have no problem with folks discussing the errors of various theories or claims.
I have no problem with folks discussing the errors of various theories or claims as presented on a different internet forum.
If this has even the most remote chance of turning into some sort of inter-board argument, (even short of a “board war”), I will very much have a really serious problem with it.
Capisce?
[ /Moderator Mode ]
Nolies may just be gone for the weekend, you know. Or not.
E-Sabbath, you’re right, I shouldn’t judge so quickly. It’s no excuse, but I guess my wit was fried from reading 5 pages of intense evolutionary discussion. I hate it when I’m so late to get to a topic. And if the OP comes back, my deepest apologies.
That said, I couldn’t let this one go without saying something and better late than never…
Potassium-argon dating does not assume the Earth is a closed system. It does require a certain type of rock however.
For the not so chemically inclined, potassium-40 is a relatively prevalent isotope , and has a half-life of of 1.3 Billion years. K-40 can undergo beta-minus or beta-plus decay (I believe 89% and 11% respectively). Beta-minus decay produces calcium-40, but beta-plus decay gives us argon-40. It is this decay that results in the relatively large amounts of argon in the atmosphere. Fun fact, since you have about 1 lb of potassium (and a few hundredths of a gram of K-40), about 500 atoms of K-40 decay in your body every second. The argon passes through the skin and into the atmosphere.
Now, normally the argon from K-40 beta-plus decay goes to the atmosphere. However, when magma is laid down and cools, argon begins to form, and some rocks have a leakproof-like structure that traps the argon in. And by measuring how much argon there is, we can use the half-life to determine how old the rock is, and in turn all else that was found at that layer. So yes potassium-argon dating requires the rock to be a closed system, but that isn’t that much of a hang up as long as you look for the right rock and take multiple samples. As I’m sure you’re aware the technique was use by Donald Johanson in 1974 to date “Lucy”, the Australopithecus afarenis hominid found in Ethiopia.
I hope that makes the difference clear. All I’m doing is building on what others have said. Potassium-argon dating is very handy and rather accurate. No the Earth is not a closed system, but that doesn’t mean what you implied, that somehow meteorites were messing up our dating systems or something. If I misread you, please inform me so and I will alter my arguement. Also, if you want, though I’d have to study up on it, I could also go into U-238/U-235 dating which works for even older samples.
Oh yeah, cite: Descriptive Inorganic, Coordination, and Solid-State Chemistry Second Edition, Glen E. Rodgers
I would never mention the name of any other board here (it was my understanding that this was verboten anyway). Besides, it’s my own private Idaho. 
Finch, I can’t say I exactly understand what you mean about “scale.” And your arguments certainly wouldn’t seem compelling to a layman: even the genes with information underneath the UPB are remarkably unlikely to occur by chance, so it hard seems like a like a win.
It strikes me that creationists do have some sort of foothold here as long as there is no causal model of abiogenesis that we can point to that would make the assemblage of a self-replicator a plausible occurance. I’ve always sort of made do with citing things like Speigelman’s monster (which has been found to be stable and evolving with far fewer base pairs than any modern organism, albiet in a pretty darn artificial habitat), and noting that natural processes are causal, no coin flips. But while that makes sense to me, to a creationist, that’s doubly unconvincing because to them the fact that nature is causal looks like a restriction on what is possible, making the origin of life even more unlikely.
What I probably need are some good examples of very very simple chemical processes found in nature that increase or decrease the likihood of this or that particular reaction. I’m not a chemist, so I have no such colorful examples. But it seems to me that that would be enough to show that random coin flips cannot in any meaningful way model what is “possible” in the natural world.
I find it pretty amusing that here on the dope, probably the best we can do is talk shop about debating creationists: the actual creationists almost never stick around to debate anything directly.
Not a problem. I just figured I’d mention it (to everyone) before we had an issue rather than later.
I found this helpful discussion of Borel’s law on talkorigins:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/borelfaq.html
Anyone know anything more about his crystral example as applied to refuting the idea that life’s origins can be pre-ruled out because they are unlikely?
Dembski argues that “complex specified information” is “any specified information whose complexity exceeds 500 bits of information”. But, at what level do we check for that 500 bits of information? Whole organisms could certainly be said to contain more than the requisite 500 bits of information, thus it could be argued that organisms cannot be the result of random accumulations of chance events. Similarly, even individual cells contain more than 500 bits of information. Entire genomes contain more than 500 bits of information. Several genes contain more than 500 bits of information – though many contain less. Individual DNA strands can contain pretty much any amount of information, depending on how big a strand you are looking at.
My point, then, is that in order for this “universal probability bound” to be meaningful in determining what “things” may or may not have been designed, it must be applicable only at a given scale. At the cell level or higher, pretty much everything contains more than 500 bits of information, so the UPB tells us nothing, unless one wishes to ascribe to special creation (i.e, everything is therefore designed). At the level of DNA strand, one can examine any length of DNA and can come up with any value for “bits of information” that one wants. But, DNA strands don’t tell us anything useful about an organism, in themselves. The gene seems like a viable level of scale, as the molecular level seems to be where most IDers focus their evolutionary critiques. But even here, many genes – even fundamental ones – fall below the UPB value. So this would imply that only some genes were designed, while most were not.
If one wishes to change the focus of the argument and state that no gene could have arisen through random chance, that’s fine – but that then throws the whole UPB argument out the window as a “valid” tool for determining design.
To put it another way, if the UPB has any meaning, then there must be biological entities which fall below that value which can most certainly be ascribed to chance (even if that is not what is actually theorized by scientists; physics and chemistry surely play a much larger role in abiogenesis than does pure chance). Otherwise, the whole concept is pointless.
Well, specifically the question is about self-replicators. Wouldn’t the random appearance of something like a Universal Turing Machine be above e UPB, not mention one with a program running on it to reproduce with modification? Wouldn’t even the simplest self-replicator require far more information than chance can account for?
Again, my response is that we still cannot judge because we don’t know excatly what stucture we are attempting to account for the existence of, let alone what local processes would be relevant to its appearance. But I can certainly understand why that answer is unsatisfying not only to scientists (who thrive on being unsatisfied and trying to find out more to attain the satisfaction of knowledge), but also to creationists (who thrive on being unsatisfied because they want to stop there and declare it impossible: above the UPB, and so on)
How does one define the amount of information in a self-replicator? How much information does a 4 base strand of RNA have? Is it more than 4 ** 4? Is there information in chemical bonds? Does a molecule have more information than scattered atoms? We can measure energy states, but does the fact that a water molecule is more stable than two hydrogens and an oxygen apart mean that the more complex water molecule has more or less information than the individual atoms?
I don’t think information is a relevant meaure here, myself.
We might think the question is about self-replicators, but it doesn’t appear that’s what the IDers think. The quote you posted from Brauer, for example, refers to cells:
If his argument is that cells are “too complex” to form via natural processes, then he is arguing for special creation, not ID. If he wants to argue for self-replicators, then the complexity of cells is irrelevant. That’s what I meant when I said he should be pinned on what scale, exactly, this UPB is supposedly applicable for (and I would contend that it is inapplicable for any biological entity, as it has not been established that probabilities alone dictate the formation of any molecule, self-replicating or otherwise).
IDers or creationists? Unless they claim the created cell is exactly like those today, which I doubt IDers would, they would have to contend that there is something irreducibly complex in the original cell. I don’t see anything in a remotely honest hypothesis of ID that would prevent the evolution of cells from self-replicators. I don’t ever remember seeing a Creationist, on the other hand, who did not put forth the strawman of abiogenesis leading to a cell. They seem particularly obtuse about this point. Perhaps they love the 747 in a windstorm analogy so much they can’t give it up.
BTW I am not contending that there is such a thing as an honest ID hypothesis - but there is always a first time.
I take your point. I think it might be possible to advance a scientific ID theory, i.e., one that can be tested using the methodology of the sciences. I find “irreducible complexity” to be even more of a red herring than abiogenesis, especially when one considers the phenomena termed “preadaptations” (though of course what they are is successful adaptations for a particular mode of life that can then be adapted to serve a function in another mode).
This is not to suggest that anything laid before the public at this point under the ID heading meets those criteria. And I suspect part of the argument for or against it would be in practical statistics – not nolies’ “time and chance” garbage – that take into account things like template-reproduction, where a biochemical once produced acts as a template or catalyst for replicas of itself, and the concept of econiches.
But ID as it’s presently advanced suffers from the same problems as the other alternatives to the evolutionary model advanced by religionists – it’s special pleading in behalf of a preconceived result. And honesty, intelligent observation, and a devotion to the truth that God is supposed to be the god of, mean that the evolutionary model is the only reasonable one, in the absence of a trickster-god epistemology.