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| Date: 2006/10/25 02:03:25, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
<blockquote> Rick already had perceived that if God exists He must have more than one purpose in creating. So, we talked about God’s seven different purposes in creating the universe. In light of these seven purposes, Rick wanted to know exactly what we humans are supposed to do. </blockquote> For help with this consult "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Dieties," wherein is revealed God's planner for your life. |
| Date: 2006/10/26 01:19:36, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
I would miss the endless mirth. After JaredL's theological smackdown another WD sycophant quickly realized he also risked the dour clergyman's withering gaze. He saved himself through the following obsequious bootlick:
You can't make this stuff up! |
| Date: 2006/10/26 13:36:25, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Beeb, you missed your chance to be deliciously empirical. Would that you paraphrased Philip Johnson and posted his words as your own, and activated the DS Nixplanatory Filter!! |
| Date: 2006/10/27 01:44:23, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
So there you have it. (As though we didn't already have it.) UD has devolved unashamedly into the assertion that belief in God, and Christ, results in more charity than atheism. "CSI" apparently refers to "Christ Scented Indignation," which we know does not emerge in incremental steps by means of natural processes. |
| Date: 2006/10/28 02:46:51, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||||||||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||||||||||
Thats the last bit of nonsense you're going to post here. Oldmanintheskydidntdoit is no longer with us for using "strain" twice in the same sentence. - DS
We don't tolerate lies here at UD. For continuing to press this point when you know it to be false, you're history, dude. -DS
Put? Poof. -DS
Not you, dude. Me. And stay out. -DS
Cat got your tongue? Don't bother checking back. -DS
Hasta la Vista Baby. -DS
That's it for you, buddy. -DS |
| Date: 2006/10/28 04:52:21, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
This is a fascinating and revealing request. Stephen Jay Gould described the relationship between Darwin's original model of evolution and his own additions and revisions in "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory," published posthumously in 2002. Indeed, the title of this masterwork, and the artwork on the paper cover of the hard cover edition, attempted to capture that relationship, which reflects both the retention and modification of a number of key Darwinian ideas at several levels. He devoted 1,400+ pages to fleshing out these relationships and revisions - and addressing his critics - sometimes in exasperatingly long-winded detail. What struck me in Dembski's question is the abject ignorance of Gould's published work it betrays. To state that Gould had to be "pressed" to express his views on Darwin, Darwinism, and the relationship between his theoretical innovations and Darwin's original adaptionist position is absurd. You couldn't shut the guy up. And to suggest that it was a dirty secret that, punctuated equilibrium notwithstanding, Gould remained fundamentally Darwinian is beyond absurd. Maybe even beyond beyond absurd. I, for one, miss SJG. (Recip gets misty, and can't continue...). |
| Date: 2006/10/28 06:01:25, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
It also strikes me that WAD requests "the exact quote as well as the exact reference" because he has no intention of actually reading Gould's material before subjecting it to his penetrating critique. Otherwise an approximate reference sufficient to snag the source would do. "Quote-mine" isn't irony for the sake of humor. |
| Date: 2006/10/28 15:35:07, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
D'OL! posts the following searing question:
Yes, what indeed would "count as evidence" for Intelligent Design? 941 words later we haven't the foggiest ID, but we do know is that when that evidence is found it will only impress ID researchers - not biologists generally.
So there will be evidence, but it will remain useless invisible evidence if you haven't taken the red pill. No doubt the product of the useless invisible research Bruce Chapman has told us about. We know this is heavy stuff because Denyese refers to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , which we all recognize as the the cutting edge of the philosophy of science, having been written just last - er - in the late 1940s while Kuhn was a graduate student at Harvard, and published in book form in 1962. She talks about paradigms, and all. I hereby twist her words to underscore the operative passage here:
|
| Date: 2006/10/29 02:05:31, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
WAD:
Choir member idnet.com.au then intoned, with perfect pitch:
Now D'OL! harmonizes:
Let's rub together two key ID concepts vis the origins of life on earth and see what sound they make. 1) The universe is designed for life. Dozens of universal constants, physical laws, and physical circumstances - from the strength of the electroweak force to the unique phase states of water to the emergence of habitable zones in the universe - display values and behaviors that are tuned with exacting precision to foster the emergence of life. Moreover, the earth, a “privileged planet,” has been endowed with the required dimensions and planfully situated in orbit around a specific class of star, at a specific distance, within a specific habitable zone of the universe such that not only is the emergence of life inevitable, but the emergence of intelligent organisms capable of making scientific observations and ultimately discovering these markers of design is inevitable. 2) It is impossible that life arose on earth without special intervention from an intelligent designer. The complexity observed in subcellular machinery of contemporary organisms tells us that it is impossible that self-catalyzing reactions capable of reproduction could have emerged without the special intervention of a designing intelligence. Indeed, other transitions observed throughout the history of life – the emergence of flagellar propulsion, multicellular body plans, the major phyla, human intelligence and morality – required the repeated infusion of additional information, hence the intervention of a designer or designers. So let's rub these ideas together: - The very fabric of the universe is designed for life, and the earth was situated to foster life. - It is impossible that life emerged and evolved spontaneously on earth. (rub rub rub) Nothing. (rub rub rub rub) Still nothing. I do smell something, however. |
| Date: 2006/10/29 02:48:30, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
|
Holy Moly, I'm going to split a gut! D'OL!:
I opposed Summers position, but D'OL! does provides another data point to consider. |
| Date: 2006/10/29 02:56:31, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
D'OL!:
Must...not...respond........ must...refrain......aaaarrrrrrgh!!!! |
| Date: 2006/10/29 05:16:13, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Always best to go the original: http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html Summers argued that men display more variability than women in many domains (larger standard deviation), rather than a higher mean. That results in a larger pool of extreme outliers (3, 4 SD above the mean - "in the one in 5,000, one in 10,000 class") among males. That is the pool from which physicists at top 25 research universities are drawn. Etc. His numbers were very much back-of-the-napkin, however, as he said himself: "I did a very crude calculation, which I'm sure was wrong and certainly was unsubtle, twenty different ways." Probably unwise to venture onto such emotionally contested ground with such ad hoc math. |
| Date: 2006/10/29 06:33:11, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
|
Summers' talk was certainly prescient on one point: "I would actually much rather stay-yes, and then I'm on my way out." But the distortion in D'OL!'s post was in this:
As I recall it, Summers position became untenable as a result of a large number of statements and actions that related to what many perceived as his bluntness and insensitivity. He almost certainly would have survived these remarks had he not already alienated a large fraction of the faculty through his confrontational and arrogant management style. |
| Date: 2006/10/30 02:27:31, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
A great deal of human design is evident in works of art that have no functional purpose - although they may be pleasing to look at (listen to, etc.). It follows that DS listens to a JS Bach two part Invention and concludes that it was not designed. He also now claims to know something about the designer that we hadn't heard before - indeed, this may be the first assertion about the designer on record: The designer doesn't design for aesthetic purposes - only functional ones. |
| Date: 2006/10/30 15:12:44, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
A quick read leaves one with the impression that this paper is more than a little suspect, and a wee bit looney as well. Setting aside the quaint notion that the purpose of good writing is to make one's ideas clear (rather than rendering them obscure), there are several points of which to take note: 1) The Origin-of-Life Foundation, Inc., with which one of the authors is affiliated, appears to be more interested in defining success in origins of life research in such a way that their specifications will never be attained - all the more to trumpet the absence of a scientific account of the origins of life. Several creationist pages cite the fact that the purported 1 million dollar prize has not been awarded. 2) The editorial board of this journal appears to include few biologists - rather, engineers, programmers, etc. are heavily represented. 3) The article contains no science whatsoever. Nor is it a review article, as little literature is actually presented and reviewed. Rather, it is a series of armchair declarations regarding both what the origins of life must entail (symbolic, computational processes that are by definition independent of physical causality, and that could not have arisen by means of physical causality) and the inadequacy of several extant lines of research into self-organizing/self-ordering systems to account for origins in these terms. 4) Late in the article our old friends "chance" and "necessity" repeatedly pop up, only to be dismissed as insufficient to give rise to computational/semantic systems that have what amounts to intentionality (in the philosophical sense of "aboutness" - more akin to representation than intent). That leaves...(guess what?) 5). At the conclusion of the article, which began by advertising itself as a technical review of conceptual issues concerning the OOL, specifically the purported conflation of the notions of "order" and "organization," the authors veer into quite bizarre realms that are miles off topic and betray hidden agendas. A quote captures it best:
In other words (and these are all that are really required to convey the intent of this characteristically opaque passage), agency, choice, and cognition are not, and cannot be, embodied within a neural network. Setting aside the dualism that this points to, what is such an assertion doing in THIS paper? (6) Last point - the authors offer NOTHING constructive of their own. The suggested tests of their mostly empty thesis are really tests of other models they have already, on an a prior basis, dismissed. My conclusion is that this is stealth ID, pure and simple. Well... maybe pure and complex. |
| Date: 2006/10/30 15:29:12, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Meanwhile, the usual suspects over at UD are wetting themselves in response to this paper - Scordova characterizes it as "such devastating critique." Given its emptiness of content and failure to make contributions of its own, I'm not surprised that they embrace it as one of their own. |
| Date: 2006/10/30 15:34:33, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Here I am editing out a duplicate submission. Youse guys have got to do something about yer server. It doesn't serve. |
| Date: 2006/10/31 10:19:02, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Stuff like this really leaves me scratching my head. Adams was invited to speak, and paid for doing so. The school provided facilities. The talk was very well attended. The speaker was provided ample time to make his remarks, although didn't use all the time made available. The audience was attentive and responsive. Adams was asked a variety of questions, only occasionally challenging, by students in attendance. Myers made no comments. The talk was brought to a close by the friendly sponsor. This converts to Socretes' final days and thought police looking out for dangerous and incorrect ideas that may upset the sensitivities of the elite and powerful. What is that? |
| Date: 2006/11/03 14:04:36, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
'Ova, time to take responsibility for posting McGrew's mistaken assertion and end your agonies. Only thusly will you attain a trim blowhorn tack. This is embarrassing. |
| Date: 2006/11/04 02:24:16, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Then Jehu wields huge panels of silvered glass into an impressive funhouse maze of re-reflected irrelevancy. As though to display his sense of irony he intones,
|
| Date: 2006/11/04 02:59:06, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
|
I was reviewing yesterday's spectacular events, stepping through 'Ova's blunder and the posts that followed like an FAA investigator at a crash site. Witnesses here know that the warriors at UD, all now burned beyond recognition, mounted a fierce defense of indirection by arguing points vis Ballard's paper: the developmental hourglass, gastrulation and cleavage, and so on, none of which had bearing upon 'Ova's bad behavior, and all of which were off-topic. Near the original point of impact I found this:
Here I think 'Ova had it right. 'Ova? C'mon dude. No more threads. Swallow hard. Think of cleavage. Then apologize. |
| Date: 2006/11/04 06:30:59, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
I think this goes to the hole in his skull. Well, maybe his nerve system too. |
| Date: 2006/11/06 01:46:56, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Apparently Ekstasis believes that his mind is broadcast into his body from a distant location. I'd suggest he reach up and adjust them rabbit ears a smidge. |
| Date: 2006/11/06 08:15:28, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Who reading the above did not recognize that DS meant to say "bologna non grata"? |
| Date: 2006/11/07 06:46:14, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
ID is science, and 'Ova has a firm scientific basis for his assertion:
See? Nothing here about being a cow, but Serp clearly had legs before he was cursed above all the livestock. |
| Date: 2006/11/07 18:21:51, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
At long last, some genuine scholarship at UD. Denyse O’Leary has posted a think piece backed by impressive journalistic research, as reflected in the many links to diverse expert opinion in support of her views. Many examples of her wide ranging scholarship: - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary on "Infighting among Darwinists." - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary to document "Media and Darwinists" as Id's best friends. - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary to document manipulations around what UK PM Tony Blair supposedly said. - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary on the Catholic church’s position on ID and evolution. - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary on the NSCE. - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary evolutionary psychology and weight gain in the modern world. - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary on evolution and music. - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary on warfare. - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary on cosmology and top down vs. bottom up models of the universe. - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary on Dobzhansky's religious views. - Denyse O’Leary cites Denyse O’Leary on the persecution of those embracing ID within academia. - Denyse O’Leary cites the Discovery Institute on scientific dissent from Darwinism. (Just to mix in a contrary view, I guess.) Ultimately, her close argumentation and mastery of such a wide range of sources overwhelms the skeptical reader and demands a response: D'OL! |
| Date: 2006/11/07 21:12:44, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
"I think, therefore I am muddled." D'OL! |
| Date: 2006/11/10 06:29:45, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Looks like ID's future is secure among Danish community college instructors. The formidable Wedge in action. |
| Date: 2006/11/11 10:34:43, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
If this isn't him, it should be...(posted at bigdumbchimp's blog): |
| Date: 2006/11/13 06:29:30, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
A strong handshake, earnest eye contact, well-spoken, and altogether charming. That's the personable Creator I know. |
| Date: 2006/11/14 11:40:51, Link 64.3.238.143 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
| I 1/2nd this most excellent idea. (What else would Reciprocating Bill do?) |
| Date: 2006/11/15 04:00:28, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Apparently, DaveScotsman has been writhing for days on end over Allen MacNeill's previous posts:
(The rare "True Scotsman" fallacy - contra the "No true Scotsman" fallacy).
Yes. In the same sense that ID "explains" biological complexity and diversity: by means of the "No true DaveScotsman" fallacy. |
| Date: 2006/11/16 09:46:04, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Gil, Gil, Gil. Dontcha see? "Previous assumptions" refers to elements of a scientific model of solar system evolution that resulted in falsifiable empirical PREDICTIONS. Stardust was designed to gather data that TESTED those predictions. And hear that note of glee in the voice of the project manager as he describes the theoretical revisions that will required by the outcomes of these tests? That's how real science works, and real science feels. And, OF COURSE the predictions of evolutionary biology are subject to observational tests, and disconfirmation. Man, you are NOT listening. Gil. Dude. We've been begging "design theory" to make unique, empirically falsifiable predictions, then do the relevant experiments, for YEARS. Years, man. Knock yer freaking selves out, man! But not being done. Apparently, can't be done. |
| Date: 2006/11/16 12:21:54, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||||||||||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||||||||||
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Here’s how I got caught in the Nixplanatory Filter. PaV said:
I said in response to PaV:
DaveScot stepped in to defend UD’s honor:
So there you have it. DS awarded to me the Red Ban of Courage for making the mildest of snarky comments – one that Dave acknowledged was accurate. But here is what really motivated my disappearance. My UDoom was sealed when I noted the ambiguity inherent in the various definitions of IC that have been offered by the lights of ID:
DaveScot then let it slip that computational simulations of evolution can generate structures and processes that appear to be irreducibly complex, but are not because they were built stepwise, and hence have the wrong provenance:
I was pressed for a clarification of this concession:
Davey became irritated for obvious reasons (the above would mean that IC is meaningless, because it can’t be reliably detected):
My demise at UD quickly ensued. |
| Date: 2006/11/18 08:42:16, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
This is somewhat misleading. The "Case for a Creator" is a rigid, leather, felt-lined container, not unlike a violin case (but somewhat smaller), with molded compartments for the safe transport of the Creator and the tools used for the design and manufacture of biological forms. Nanotweezers, pliers, stuff like that. If you've a creator, a good quality Case for your Creator is essential. |
| Date: 2006/11/18 09:22:16, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Quoting myself...
A quick caveat. Although many cases for the creator are available, you may be tempted to build your own. Great care is required in the planning and construction of a case for a creator. Although I haven't time to go into detail here, I can share a few crucially important preliminary thoughts: - the case must be extremely rigid, and impervious to environmental insults and events. - the interior atmosphere of the case must be carefully monitored and controlled - much as a high quality instrument case can monitor humidity. A Nixplanatory filter at every entrance is a good start. - it is ESSENTIAL that little can be inferred about the form and function of the creator (and tools) carried within the case from the case itself. This information can be used to cause harm to the creator itself were it to fall into the wrong hands. Cases for creators are easily destroyed when not properly constructed and protected. Don't let this happen to you! |
| Date: 2006/11/18 14:29:44, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Lets just make it crystal clear to DaveScot: Lay a bit on Kristine and the AtBC Shannon Style Legion of Warriors will descend upon you with Animal on the Attack Speed, Buzz Saw Strength, and World Championship Stamina. Grrrr. Revarding! Very very very revarding! |
| Date: 2006/11/19 15:32:11, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
This is a big tent, able to embrace all or any part of the Unidentifiable, Disembodied Supersensible Intelligent Telic Entity, or UDSITE. The primary remaining concern is whether the UDSITE works by means of descent with meddling, power-poofs, or front loading. |
| Date: 2006/11/20 11:53:33, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Vis SATs, IQs and DaveScot's notarized IQ:
Google MGCT and you'll see that it doesn't exist, other than than as a reference to, among other obscurities, Malignant Germ Cell Tumors, one variety of which is Gonadal Malignant Germ Cell Tumor. Which, come to think of it, must be what he meant. My bad. |
| Date: 2006/11/20 19:18:28, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
The blistering heat of this controversy is reflected in the huge number of comments offered to each of D'OL!'s provocative entries on this issue. "Does Darwin devalue human life?" 1 comment. "What did Hitler believe abut [sic] evolution?" 9 comments. "“Hitler as a Darwinist: Prof accused of academic dishonesty.” 0 comments. "Recent Posts." 0 comments. D'OL!: Don't go into heat if you can't stand the kitchen. |
| Date: 2006/11/23 09:16:15, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
GilDodgen said:
And this is the Privileged Planet? Peggy Lee said:
(R.B. sobs into his morning beer*. Should I shave today?) * a Corona |
| Date: 2006/11/23 09:51:48, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Tonight I curl up in front of the fire with Collapse and contemplate Thanksgiving Day. |
| Date: 2006/11/23 09:57:42, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
The scriptures DO suggest design, and that it was good: "She was breeding a DWARF, but she wasn't done yet. She had gray-green skin, a doll with a pin, I told her she was alright..." FZ |
| Date: 2006/11/24 11:27:31, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
This is vis the There are more things in heaven and earth, Paul, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy thread, specifically the manner in which DaveScot has painted himself into a corner regarding ploidy from which he cannot seem to extricate himself. I am not a biologist; although I possess a doctorate, it is in another field, and for the purposes of the debate over ID I am fully cognizant of my status as a layman. To reacquaint myself with the details of meiosis I literally pulled an introductory biology text from the shelf and squinted at the relevant chapter. Having done so, I can say, “OK, I get it” and can follow Allen’s contributions. I claim no expertise on the topic, and know when to defer to my betters. DaveScot, his ‘Tard’ cognomen notwithstanding, is a bright guy – probably a very bright guy. Some here will object to that characterization, but in my judgment his utterances sometimes display a broad range of knowledge, and he is often entertainingly articulate. I think an interesting character in some respects, too, e.g., I take at face value his assertions regarding his military career, his experiences at Dell, and his independent wealth. It is the above characteristics that make his stubborn, lead-lined denseness regarding topics such as cell division, computational simulation, “front loading,” etc. so fascinating to observe. But no thread has displayed his blind spots more clearly than “Heaven and Earth” thread, because the material in question is so accessible and, with a bit of brow work, within the grasp any interested and reasonably intelligent layperson. At these moments DaveScot reveals himself to be a high IQ, tragicomic ignoranus. I’m interested in understanding how that works. Dembski’s Christian commitments are on display elsewhere on the internet and obviously drive his efforts within ID (the mathematics of which I am in no better position to judge than I am DaveScot’s “biology”). He needs little further explanation. Guys like Joseph display Creo zealousness that is altogether too thick to be interesting. (In fact, Zachriel, why do you spend so much time debating a brick wall?) But DaveScot denies Christian commitments, claims to be agnostic, appears to have the equipment to enable him to grasp some of this stuff – certainly the high school biology on display in this thread – and yet utterly fails to do so. Has anyone here met the guy? Is he the Real Deal, e.g., a raving personality disorder on display? Perhaps this is all a game, and he doesn’t really believe the bullpucky he posts on UD. Or, perhaps this more generally displays the fact that belief is so often fixed for non-rational reasons, trumped by other considerations, and “reason” a weak tool. A lesson we all can take on board, BTW. So, what’s the deal with DaveScot? Anybody know? |
| Date: 2006/11/25 00:53:05, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
As I look over the various responses to my original query (“So, what’s the deal with DaveScot?"), I notice the following: Most responses ascribe to Dave something like impenetrable egomania, coupled with narcissistic power motives. Both motivations are served by his position in the cat-bird seat at UD, although “big fish, little pond” comes to mind in that regard. I don’t disagree, although this is mostly descriptive, and recapitulates the old psychological dilemma of ascribing behavior to traits that are inferred from the self-same behavior. What NO ONE has suggested is that DaveScot has something interesting and original to say regarding the origins of biological form and complexity, and the history of life on earth across deep time, and that he is passionate in pressing his ideas – passion that accounts for his abrupt and arrogant style. I’d wager that many posters here have had an interest in, and have been moved by, evolutionary biology for most of their lives. Ultimately, therein lies a commitment to “this view of life” that, for better and worse, organizes a view of the natural world and one’s place in it, a view that I find both thrilling and harrowing. Thrilling because it’s depth and complexity – and harrowing because of the vanishingly tiny place left to each individual within that picture, which rightly induces a kind of vertigo. Vexing, too, because the naturalization of human life necessarily also entails the naturalization of, among other things, intentionality, consciousness, and ethics. These are not problems for which we have solutions, or for which we even have a notion of how to arrive at solutions. In the end, something more like humility rather than arrogance accrues from this position. Bright as he may be, I don’t see a shred of evidence within Dave’s output that suggests that he has given real thought, in this way, to the positions and postures he has so glibly and arrogantly advanced, or that he is moved at all by the world-picture he would construct in place of modern evolutionary biology. Oddly enough, in contrast, I don’t doubt that Dembski is deeply moved by his Christian commitments - to a fault, which often renders him both dishonest and somewhat of a prick. But I might be wrong. It would be mildly interesting to somehow get into Dave's nut and see just what is on display there, once his combative guard is down (to the tune of Frank Zappa’s “What is the Ugliest Part of Your Body,” perhaps.) Mostly, however, if I had my druthers we’d all would move on from gawking at the train wreck that is ID and get on with grappling with the problems that confront us upon taking one’s place within the natural world. Vis DaveScot, perhaps George Bernard Shaw had it right: “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” |
| Date: 2006/11/25 12:58:04, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Guthrie:
Big topic - these problems hang on the horns of dilemmas that arise when grappling with agency and intentionality (the "aboutness" or representational powers of human mental states) within a framework of natural causation. As an example, we would probably all agree that scientific reasoning strives to approximate an accurate picture of the natural world, of which we are a part. Hence there is a normative element within science - essentially a value that is sought. Moreover, an adequate completed scientific picture of the world will include a complete casual account of the behavior of bipedal animals such as scientists, and therefore must either include a naturalized account of the operation of normative values within the natural world, or deny the causal reality of such values. How to integrate such normative representations into a causal story that supervenes upon biology (and ultimately physics) is miles from a solution. After years of struggling with computational models of human cognition and human language, the possibility that "intentionality won't be reduced and won't go away" has been raised by distinguished, pro-science philosophers such as Hilary Putnam (see Putnam's Representation and Reality for an example. The quote is from p. 1). Of course, you are extricated from this dilemma if you stipulate that we are in reality little detachable ghosts made of pure agency and value, chips off the big ol' Unidentifiable, Disemboweled Supersensible Intelligent Telic Entity that operate independent of physical and biological causality. Then you've NO insoluble philosophical problems whatever. None. |
| Date: 2006/11/25 17:04:28, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Not to mention position statements on creationism and/or intelligent design offered by: Academy Of Science Of The Royal Society Of Canada Alabama Academy Of Science American Anthropological Association (2000)* American Association For The Advancement Of Science (1923) American Association For The Advancement Of Science (1972) American Association For The Advancement Of Science (1982) American Association For The Advancement Of Science (Commission on Science Education) American Association For The Advancement Of Science (2002) * American Association Of Physical Anthropologists American Astronomical Society (2000) * American Geophysical Union American Geophysical Union (1999)* American Institute Of Biological Sciences American Astronomical Society American Society Of Biological Chemists American Chemical Society American Geological Institute American Psychological Association American Physical Society American Society Of Parasitologists Association for Women Geoscientists (1998) * Australian Academy of Science * Botanical Society of America * California Academy Of Sciences Ecological Society of America (1999) * Genetics Society of America * Geological Society Of America Geological Society of America (2001) * Geological Society of Australia (1995) * Georgia Academy Of Science (1980) Georgia Academy Of Science (1982) History of Science Society * Iowa Academy Of Science (1982) Statement Of The Position Of The Iowa Academy Of Science On Pseudoscience (1986) Iowa Academy Of Science (2000) * Kentucky Academy Of Science Kentucky Academy Of Science (1999) * Kentucky Paleontological Society Statement on the Teaching of Evolution (1999) * Louisiana Academy Of Sciences National Academy Of Sciences (1972) National Academy Of Sciences (1984) National Academy Of Sciences (1998) * North American Benthological Society (2001) * North Carolina Academy Of Science North Carolina Academy Of Science (1997) * New Orleans Geological Society New York Academy Of Sciences Ohio Academy Of Science Ohio Academy Of Science (2000) * Ohio Math and Science Coalition (2002) * Oklahoma Academy Of Sciences The Paleontological Society * Sigma Xi, Louisiana State University Chapter, Baton Rouge, Louisiana Society For Amateur Scientists Society For Integrative and Comparative Biology (2001) * Society For The Study Of Evolution Society Of Systematic Biologists (2001) * Society Of Vertebrate Paleontology (1986) Society Of Vertebrate Paleontology (1994) Southern Anthropological Society Virginia Academy Of Science (1981) * West Virginia Academy Of Science WAD's got a point. Somebody reading these statements might be mislead, and conclude that intelligent design creationism lacks scientific legitimacy. Can't have that. |
| Date: 2006/11/25 21:05:02, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
I was too hard on DS. Particularly when I said this:
This bugged me because it seemed so implausible, and maybe a little harsh. Then it occurred to me that there is wisdom buried in the Scotsman's output - deeply buried wisdom. To extract that wisdom I copied many of Dave's posts on UD into a text file and fed them into TextMangler, an old Mac utility that scrambles text using frequency tables, somehow extracting the essence of the writer while discarding the intended meaning. This seemed an appropriate approach. And Eureka! Dave's essence emerged. Here an unedited sequence of paragraphs of Dave-in-Blender that show great promise: "Imagine if it were a Jew instead of producing two heterozygous daughters identical to those made in the past. I wasn't necessarily satisfied with the diploid number in humans was common. In fact there's only one claim of it as a front-loaded self-limiting self-terminating process. It appears to be ranked more or less appropriately. Checking a few days. I note you don't qualify your statement that reproduction from just an egg is impossible only in mammals. Again, forgive my ignorance but isn't a cell that has the potential to become anything from a finite subset of building blocks for genes. IIRC they haven't found anything significant in that I don't know what I'm talking about regarding meiosis or you are. "This makes the universe is an NTSC video image is only to point out well enough. Modern man will take an active role in reversing the deterioration. Intelligence is the exact number of chromsomes (2n) and the solution along to the entire field of vision. The way color was added to black and white (brightness) content. That's because the human eye is much more sensitive to brightness of light than it is to interact with tRNA from a single celled protozoan to a defintion of diploid are in online biology glossaries from many major institutes of higher learning and so very many of them has time to do the kinds of things you suggest and get the training. The general rule of thumb is that releasing a DNA sequence from immediate selection pressure to keep them intact. "Excuse my ignorance. Pedantry in the past. Funniest thing at the end product you simply waste a little bit of modification to normal mitosis such that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This was not predicted by the mere synonymous substitution would render the sequences non-matching. This is something of a holy grail where biologically useful proteins are constructed from a finite subset of building blocks that produce the same major and minor biologically active sites needn't have remarkably similar sequences but still be components that produce the same enyzme emerging over and over again in a different modulation scheme. An intelligent watchmaker would almost certainly utilize the additional information capacity. Maybe even a blind watchmaker might stumble onto it by accident as it's just begging to be used as an additional information in it to know what letters are unpronouncable." See? I retract my previous comments. Dave shows GREAT PROMISE as a thinker, or as a sort of Soylent Green brainfood for other thinkers. I'm already thinking! I now also fear that Dave is being held captive at UD and has been embedding hidden cries for help into his posts. Naturally, he continues to put up that harsh, arrogant front as a form of indirection intended for his captors, but he's really crying on the inside, and thinking, and crying because he is thinking, and he wants us to know. |
| Date: 2006/11/25 21:21:47, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Kristine said...
You know, I always thought all that talk of Type III Secretory Systems injecting things from one organism to another was a little raunchy, and your comment brings that into focus. Whoa. |
| Date: 2006/11/27 17:45:18, Link 67.105.151.226 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
In reading this thread, I wonder if an element of humility is not in order. From where I sit, the most crucial drivers behind questions of religious belief pertain not to origins, but rather to the severe human dilemma presented by the inevitability of one’s personal death. Although I happen to believe that oblivion will follow my own death, and indeed all deaths, I would be lying if I denied sometimes bolting upright in the middle of the night with the full realization of that reality, accompanied by a very cold fear. Although this quickly passes, and indeed I cannot reproduce this feeling at will (psychological denial and intellectualization quickly reassert themselves, I suppose), it seems clear that this is really the central human dilemma. In view of that, I have enormous sympathy for those who cope with the spector of death by, in essence, denying its reality and positing an afterlife. In particular, having children and finding myself unable to even contemplate loosing one of them, I cannot fault those who have responded to such an unbearable grief by resorting to the comforting notion that death is not real. Probably one of the most severe costs that accompany what I perhaps vainly fancy to be my intellectual honesty is that such comforts will not be available to me should I be faced with a similar loss. Part of me is sympathetic to whatever cover an individual wishes to take in the face of those realities. A second point vis humility pertains more directly to questions of science and religion. I recall reading – I think that it was in Timothy Ferris’ “The Whole Shebang” - a description of some of the implications of inflationary models of the origins of the universe. Ferris invited the reader to imagine the observable universe – that volume of the universe from which light (and hence any causation) will have had time to travel since the big bang - as a sphere with a radius of 13.9 billion light years. Ferris asserted that, if inflationary models prove correct, that volume stands in proportion to the actual volume of the universe as the area of a silver dollar stands in relation to the area of the surface of the earth (I hope I am properly recalling this – I don’t have a copy handy). That, frankly, blows my mind. Undoubtedly, even if this proves to be inaccurate, the realities that do emerge from cosmology will be equally mind-blowing. My personal response to facts like these is one of awe and humility. Although we have mathematics based upon powers of ten with which to calculate on such scales, I find that it is not really even remotely possible to directly imagine the reality that such facts denote. Speaking for myself, I feel my level of comprehension of such things stands in relation to these facts much as an ocean going larva stands in relation to the Pacific ocean itself. Indeed, the universe being disclosed by contemporary science (and here I most emphatically include evolutionary biology) is so vastly larger and richer than any pre-modern view of any deity that I would argue that the concept of “God” is best properly viewed as an historical placeholder for these larger, vastly more rich realities, a placeholder that we could only just now have discarded. If some people are not quite ready for that, I understand completely. What we don’t find in this contemporary view, however, is a larger agency that resembles human agency, nor refuge from death. That’s the tradeoff. I am an atheist in that sense: I don’t believe in life after death, and I don’t believe that something resembling the human capacity for intentionality and design underlies this particular shebang. I am sympathetic to those who believe that it does, but happen to believe that they are mistaken. I wouldn’t presume to steal that belief from them, however. All that said, the battle over science classrooms at the K-12 level is over for now, and it had the right outcome. The battle was won at Doverloo. That was my primary concern. Personally, at the college level, I find it absurd to “pre-flunk” students who enter school rejecting contemporary evolutionary biology. Indeed, I feel that any student who takes such a course, fully masters the materials, and demonstrates full comprehension by means of the relevant exams should get the grades that his or her performance warrants, regardless of whether they have retained their earlier beliefs, because that’s the academic bargain at that level. |
| Date: 2006/11/27 22:16:17, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Very entertaining. Here was one poster's impression of Dave circa 1997:
Probably can't be improved upon. |
| Date: 2006/11/28 21:38:25, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Phonon, like a Photon but with two Ns, I was checking out your post, and there is Wally Shawn, and all the while I was taking in Law and Order, and I lifted my left brow to see none other than Wally Shawn in a cameo, which called to mind "My Dinner with Andre," wherein Wally Shawn, after listening to Andre Gregory babble for hours about New Age mystical ritual stuff, goes upside Andre's head with some very brief and simple empirical comments about "some things are real, and some aren't, and by and large we can know which is which," and so on, and right then I knew this was by design, all complex spiffified and everything, designed to go upside the head of ID, so now I'm going to look for my copy of Thomas Nagel's "The View From Nowhere," which recalls to mind that we don't really know everything, not even what its like to be a mysterian. Thanks for posting. |
| Date: 2006/11/30 18:25:13, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||||
On the Wikipedia thread here, Patrick claimed he too has been grievously wronged. Within a Wikipedia article on the vermiform appendix, this originally appeared:
Patrick substituted a much more detailed essay on the possible functions of the appendix, which began thusly:
But ALAS! He was almost immediately reverted, and his post identified as vandalism. He wasn't entirely unappreciated, however. Other sycophants at UD commented upon Patrick's erudition:
But Patrick is modest:
On a hunch, I googled the sentence, in quotes, "For years, the appendix was credited with very little physiological function." This turned up a 1999 "Ask the Experts: Medicine" response on Scientific American.com - which happens to be the revolutionary appendix essay Patrick posted on Wikipedia, word for vermiform word. See: Sci Am The original was penned by Loren G. Martin, professor of physiology at Oklahoma State University. The article, or portions of it, is repeated here and there across the net (blogs and so on), including Patrick's repeat post at Overbearing Ungulates. Where he again fails to credit the author. Way to go Patrick! See, there is research going on within the ID community. Not to mention a good deal of cutting and pasting. And good work digging up information hidden from us - buried, no less - DEEP within the vaults of Scientific American. Incredible? Impressive? Try, "ridiculous." |
| Date: 2006/11/30 18:34:21, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
WHOA! Now I see that bFast's "Incredible" and Patrick's "Not really impressive" (hey, stupid, he said "incredible," not "impressive") comments have been deleted - and a primer on how to post to Wikipedia posted instead. Isn't that just so SPECIAL! Too late IDudes! |
| Date: 2006/11/30 18:54:31, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Could that be a noodly appendage? Just a thought. |
| Date: 2006/12/01 12:36:36, Link 75.36.113.68 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
|
I'm sorta speechless. This must be the ID movement's soundtrack. Scroll down to bleeding fish to enter the abyss.
Is it me? I'm having a little trouble wrapping my head around "Darwinian fish bleeding." I'm not sure how much street cred you're going to earn with "Seeing Specified Complexity points to a purpose." |
| Date: 2006/12/02 07:47:03, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Time travel and ID: Back to the Future
Well, Dave, one doesn't commemorate the first anniversary of an event, one commemorates the event itself. And while you may already be fondly remembering the first anniversary of Doverloo, I'll need to wait another 2 1/2 weeks to do so. Must be a time zone thing. BTW, the citizens of my great State of Ohio, grateful to Almighty God, established a constitution that states "No person shall be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or maintain any form of worship, against his consent; and no preference shall be given, by law, to any religious society; nor shall any interference with the rights of conscience be permitted." |
| Date: 2006/12/02 10:33:26, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
(Apologies in advance for the long post...)
DaveScot approvingly reproduces the preambles of state constitutions that invoke God in various forms. (No more pretending that ID has nothing to do with God, even for Dave). By implication, he approves of the mingling of state and church. I recalled that one or two state constitutions included provisions intended to isolate matters of conscience and religion from the state. I looked into it, and found a handful: Alabama: That no religion shall be established by law; that no preference shall be given by law…that no one shall be compelled by law to attend any place of worship; nor to pay any tithes, taxes, or other rate for building or repairing any place of worship, or for maintaining any minister or ministry... Alaska: No law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Arizona: No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise, or instruction, or to the support of any religious establishment… Arkansas: No man can, of right, be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship; or to maintain any ministry against his consent…no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment, denomination or mode of worship, above any other. California: The Legislature shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Colorado: No person shall be required to attend or support any ministry or place of worship, religious sect or denomination against his consent. Nor shall any preference be given by law to any religious denomination or mode of worship. Delaware: No man shall or ought to be compelled to attend any religious worship, to contribute to the erection or support of any place of worship, or to the maintenance of any ministry, against his own free will and consent; and no power shall... interfere with, or in any manner control the rights of conscience, in the free exercise of religious worship, nor a preference given by law to any religious societies, denominations, or modes of worship. Florida: There shall be no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting or penalizing the free exercise thereof....No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution. Georgia: Each person has the natural and inalienable right to worship God, each according to the dictates of that person's own conscience; and no human authority should, in any case, control or interfere with such right of conscience. Hawaii: No law shall be enacted respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Illinois: The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination, shall forever be guaranteed...No person shall be required to attend or support any ministry or place of worship against his consent, nor shall any preference be given by law to any religious denomination or mode of worship. Idaho: The exercise and enjoyment of religious faith and worship shall forever be guaranteed...No person shall be required to attend or support any ministry or place of worship, religious sect or denomination, or pay tithes against his consent; nor shall any preference be given by law to any religious denomination or mode of worship. Indiana: No preference shall be given, by law, to any creed, religious society, or mode of worship; and no person shall be compelled to attend, erect, or support, any place of worship, or to maintain any ministry, against his consent. Iowa: The general assembly shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; nor shall any person be compelled to attend any place of worship, pay tithes, taxes, or other rates for building or repairing places of worship, or the maintenance of any minister, or ministry. Kansas: The right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience shall never be infringed; nor shall any person be compelled to attend or support any form of worship; nor shall any control of or interference with the rights of conscience be permitted, nor any preference be given by law to any religious establishment or mode of worship. Kentucky: No preference shall ever be given by law to any religious sect, society or denomination; nor to any particular creed, mode of worship or system of ecclesiastical polity; nor shall any person be compelled to attend any place of worship, to contribute to the erection or maintenance of any such place…No human authority shall, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience. Louisiana: No law shall be enacted respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Maryland: ...Nor ought any person to be compelled to frequent, or maintain, or contribute, unless on contract, to maintain, any place of worship, or any ministry… Michigan: No person shall be compelled to attend, or, against his consent, to contribute to the erection or support of any place of religious worship, or to pay tithes, taxes or other rates for the support of any minister of the gospel or teacher of religion. Minnesota: ...Nor shall any man be compelled to attend, erect or support any place of worship, or to maintain any religious or ecclesiastical ministry, against his consent...nor shall any money be drawn from the treasury for the benefit of any religious societies or religious or theological seminaries. Mississippi: No religious test as a qualification for office shall be required; and no preference shall be given by law to any religious sect or mode of worship; but the free enjoyment of all religious sentiments and the different modes of worship shall be held sacred. Missouri: That all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; that no human authority can control or interfere with the rights of conscience... Montana: The state shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Nebraska: No person shall be compelled to attend, erect or support any place of worship against his consent, and no preference shall be given by law to any religious society, nor shall any interference with the rights of conscience be permitted. Nevada: The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship without discrimination or preference shall forever be allowed in this State. New Hampshire: Every individual has a natural and unalienable right to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and reason; and no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his peers on, liberty, or estate, for worshipping God in the manner and season most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religious profession, sentiments, or persuasion; provided he doth not disturb the public peace or disturb others in their religious worship. New Jersey: No person shall be deprived of the inestimable privilege of worshipping Almighty God in a manner agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; nor under any pretense whatever be compelled to attend any place of worship contrary to his faith and judgment; nor shall any person be obliged to pay tithes, taxes, or other rates for building or repairing any church or churches, place or places of worship, or for the maintenance of any minister or ministry… New Mexico: Every man shall be free to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience…No person shall be required to attend any place of worship or support any religious sect or denomination; nor shall any preference be given by law to any religious denomination or mode of worship. New York: The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed in this state to all humankind... North Carolina: All persons have a natural and inalienable right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences, and no human authority shall, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience. North Dakota: The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference shall be forever guaranteed in this state … Oregon: No law shall in any case whatever control the free exercise, and enjoyment of religeous [sic] opinions, or interfere with the rights of conscience…No money shall be drawn from the Treasury for the benefit of any religeous (sic), or theological institution, nor shall any money be appropriated for the payment of any religeous (sic) services in either house of the Legislative Assembly. Pennsylvania: All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect or support any place of worship or to maintain any ministry against his consent; no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious establishments or modes of worship. Rhode Island: We, therefore, declare that no person shall be compelled to frequent or to support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatever… South Carolina: The General Assembly shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. South Dakota: The right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience shall never be infringed. No person shall be denied any civil or political right, privilege or position on account of his religious opinions… Tennessee: No man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or to maintain any minister against his consent; that no human authority can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the rights of conscience; and that no preference shall ever be given, by law, to any religious establishment or mode of worship. Texas: No man shall be compelled to attend, erect or support any place of worship, or to maintain any ministry against his consent. No human authority ought, in any case whatever, to control or interfere with the rights of conscience in matters of religion, and no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious society or mode of worship. Utah: The rights of conscience shall never be infringed. The State shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise or instruction, or for the support of any ecclesiastical establishment. Vermont: That all persons have a natural and unalienable right, to worship Almighty God, according to the dictates of their own consciences and understandings, as in their opinion shall be regulated by the word of God; and that no person ought to, or of right can be compelled to attend any religious worship, or erect or support any place of worship… Virginia: No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief… Washington: Absolute freedom of conscience in all matters of religious sentiment, belief and worship, shall be guaranteed to every individual, and no one shall be molested or disturbed in person or property on account of religion...No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise or instruction, or the support of any religious establishment. West Virginia: No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever…but all men shall be free to profess and by argument, to maintain their opinions in matters of religion...and the Legislature shall not…pass any law requiring or authorizing any religious society, or the people of any district within this state, to levy on themselves, or others, any tax for the erection or repair of any house for public worship, or for the support of any church or ministry, but it shall be left free for every person to select his religious instructor, and to make for his support, such private contracts as he shall please. Wisconsin: The right of every person to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of conscience shall never be infringed; nor shall any person be compelled to attend, erect or support any place of worship, or to maintain any ministry, without consent…nor shall any money be drawn from the treasury for the benefit of religious societies, or religious or theological seminaries. Wyoming: The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship without discrimination or preference shall be forever guaranteed in this state... |
| Date: 2006/12/02 16:53:33, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
Now my fish are bleeding. Stop it. But Joseph is right: ID has nothing to do with religion generally, or Christianity specifically:
It HAS been gratifying to get my props over at UDense. Click here, scroll down to "coon's age," and follow DS's link back AtBC. But this is nothing, visage-in-lights wise, next to my auto accident with Harvey Pekar in 1994, and subsequent extended depiction in American Splendor (in the "Windfall Lost" issue and story, for those of you aware of Pekar's brilliant work.) |
| Date: 2006/12/03 16:35:59, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
There is a link on This Page to a movie clip of the Lugubrious One delivering this talk at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Search for/scroll down to WAD. |
| Date: 2006/12/04 12:13:32, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
D'OL! writes on several difficult topics. One of them concerns John Searle's thoughts on consciousness.
Searle has written extensively and influentially on consciousness and intentionality over the last 20 years. While recognizing the difficulties inherent in discussing consciousness, he also analogizes the "mind-brain problem" to the "digestion-stomach" problem (I'll get a reference when I have at my library), taking a thorougly monist position: consciousness and intentionality are biological facts. I nominate her suggestion, by means of selective quotation, that Searle is supportive of mind-body dualism for the D'OL! hall of uncommon density. Humphrey, in 1976, originated the influential and hueristic hypothesis that the most significant selection pressure driving the evolution of large brain size in primates was the advantage conferred by the anticipation and representation of others’ behavior in the context of intensely competitive primate social hierarchies. Whiten and Byrne later codified as the "Machiavellian Intelligence" hypothesis, which has since given rise to a huge and important literature on the origins of human "theory of mind" (the indisputable evolutionary basis for the ability of human beings to construe others as displaying beliefs, desires, intentions, states of attention, etc.). So a second nomination: D'OL!'s suggestion that Humphrey was somehow "handicapped" by evolutionary models, when in fact it was his evolutionary perspective that leveraged his most important contributions, deserves a bust in the hall of uncommon density. D'OL! concludes her remarks by committing aggravated unintentional irony when she states, "The trouble is, we do not know what we do not know." Now there she is on to something, as it is clear that she has never read Searle, Humphrey, Freud, etc. |
| Date: 2006/12/04 12:46:37, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
D'OL! here is thinking that the detachable-ghost theory of consciousness doesn't present any "hard problems." |
| Date: 2006/12/04 21:27:40, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||||
A little more on Uncommonly Denyse and John Searle. D'OL! said:
U-Denyse would like to underscore that "mind and brain appear to be in different dimensions," providing comfort to those who would like to retain some sort of dualism. On her blog she continues:
By D'OL!'s lights, Searle doesn't quite know what to what to make of the relationship between evolution and consciousness. So what does John Searle actually assert about mind-brain dualism? How uncertain is he about the relationship between biological evolution and consciousness? Here is Searle, page one, paragraph one of The Rediscovery of the Mind:
The operative words above are "any educated person." Somewhat later in the book (p. 90):
We can conclude that John Searle provides comfort to those interested in maintaining a mind-body dualism, and those reluctant to grant a relationship between consciousness and evolution, so long as they don't actually read John Searle. On that basis his work can be used as a springboard for the detachable ghost theory of consciousness and intentionality that D'OL! commends to our attention. |
| Date: 2006/12/04 21:58:22, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
WAD approvingly quotes G. K. Chesterton:
Something like:
|
| Date: 2006/12/05 07:03:34, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Kristine said:
Right. Self-evident. Plus, after the water has dispersed, evaporated, etc. (after the Fall), its wetness, which cannot be reduced to any property of the H20 molecule and hence is an IMMATERIAL ESSENCE, continues independently of mere atoms (the obsession of materialists) for all eternity. ALL of it. This is the detachable ghost theory of chemistry. |
| Date: 2006/12/05 08:24:47, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
ke:
Note that when you are a Triune Dominant Over Ghost*, factor analysis is required to determine the fates of the many many mini ghosts. Hence the cross of eigenvectors. *Father, Son, and Hokey Spirit. |
| Date: 2006/12/05 18:11:17, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
As all "predictions" proffered by ID, this one is parasitical upon genuine science. One might suspect this given that no ID theorist need leave his or her armchair to "test" DS's prediction. But ALL predictions asserted to arise from ID prove to be equally parasitical. A good recent example: Scott Minnich claims to have proposed a theoretical prediction that is a test of ID, and to have made experimental headway vis this prediction. This concerns Behe’s flagellar mechanism, which he argues is incapable of having originated by means of natural selection because irreducibly complex, and Kenneth Miller’s rejoinder that components of the flagellar mechanism actually arose first for other purposes (as a secretory pump) prior to their exaptation to locomotion. Minnich has argued that if it can be demonstrated that secretory pumps arose after the flagellar mechanism, Miller’s argument would be refuted and Intelligent Design supported. Here, he claims, we have a clear demonstration of the empirical testability of ID. But this is exactly backward. It is indeed true that Miller’s model may be falsified through experimental investigation. That the secretory mechanism will be found to have arisen before flagellar propulsion is a prediction of Miller’s evolutionary hypothesis regarding this particular bit of contingent evolution. Miller’s model would indeed be falsified were it found that the secretory mechanisms arose after the flagellum. Miller would take his lumps and move on. This is how science works, and evolutionary biology is a science. And testable predictions such as these, which arise every day within biological science as evolutionary pathways are teased out, give the lie to DS' blank, dumb-ass statement that evolutionary theory makes no predictions, and hence has no value. What Minnich’s test of Miller’s model does not exemplify is an empirical test of ID. Quite the reverse: ID makes no predictions on this score. A designer - particularly one with no hypothesized characteristics that would permit the generation of a prediction - could have fabricated these molecular components in the order predicted by Miller, caused them to arise simultaneously, or given rise to the secretory mechanisms after the design of the flagellar mechanism. Hence empirical findings regarding the order in which the secretory and flagellar mechanisms arose can never be a test of ID. Indeed, Minnich's example again demonstrates that ID arguments boil down to attacks on evolutionary science that are otherwise devoid of testable content. DaveScot's latest prediction is, at a much grosser level, parasitical in exactly the same way. It is the Harvard project that places hypotheses "at risk" through exposure to experimental test, and ID that lolls about in its increasingly threadbare armchair, sniping at the outcome. Indeed, the facts of recent history show that regardless of what Harvard manages to demonstrate, proponents of ID will dismiss, deconstruct, distort, and ignore those results. Now there is a prediction for you. |
| Date: 2006/12/05 19:33:21, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
I'm quite prescient:
This didn't take long. They're already hard at it, in advance:
|
| Date: 2006/12/06 18:09:59, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
lkeithlu:
You landed a hard right and DS has a big honking shiner. You had it absolutely right, DS had it dead wrong, and was seen spinning ridiculous persecutory tales deep into the night in an attempt to rescue his position. Well done. And worth the ban. |
| Date: 2006/12/06 18:21:47, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DS:
Right. Wouldn't want anyone asking, "Did you run into a door or something?" |
| Date: 2006/12/07 10:00:51, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Joseph not only drank the Cool Aid, he is swimming in it. I understand the strategic decision to dodge questions vis specific characteristics of the telic entity - ANY response to such questions activates the absurdities entailed in claiming to build a science around supernatural intervention. But asserting that even the existence of an intelligent designer is itself irrelevent to intelligent design theory takes this simulated agnosticism (which has got to be both as exciting and as fertile as simulated intercourse) to new realms of emptiness and dishonesty: "We've detected design. But we aren't claiming there was a designer." (There's a warm area of the pool I'd avoid.) |
| Date: 2006/12/08 07:02:21, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Yesterday DaveScot took up the research tools of Intelligent Design (silk smoking jacket, pipe, leather armchair, internet connection) and found empirical evidence for front loading in a 2004 paper by Nobrega et al.:
DS finds evidence of a mechanism for the preservation of genetic information in the conservation of non-coding genetic information across mouse and human DNA. The researchers operationally defined a conserved area as demonstrating 70% identity across at least 100 base pairs. Using that definition, 1,243 conserved elements were found within the excised areas of DNA - a surprisingly high number. For DS, this is good news for the front loading hypothesis. What DS doesn't mention is that, within the same paper, the same criterion (at least 100 bp and 70% identity) was used to contrast genetic information across the DNA of human beings and fish, within these same areas of genome. NO conserved elements were detected. It follows that, whatever mechanism accounts for the high degree of conservation of non-coding DNA across the relatively closely related genomes of mice and men, it was insufficient to conserve any elements (as defined in the study) across fish and humans. Front loading would require conservation of information across vastly greater stretches of evolutionary time than has passed since the common ancestor of modern fish and human beings plied the seas. I don't see that the the most recent findings from DS Laboratories offer front loading much comfort. Igor! Brandy Snifter! Activate the Remote! |
| Date: 2006/12/08 12:18:03, Link 75.33.44.73 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Arden Chatfield:
I'm thinking there should be a blind watchmaker somewhere in this group. DS:
And I'm thinking, shouldn't that read "promoted?" |
| Date: 2006/12/09 10:00:17, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Zach quoted DS:
Always important to be thorough. Lean back into your headrest to prevent whiplash:
|
| Date: 2006/12/09 16:05:15, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Not long ago, DS enforced the scientific aims of UD:
That was then. This is now:
At which point Gil handed me a few tracts. This goes beyond apologetics. Consider yourselves to have been witnessed to by Uncommon Descent. Not that ID has ANYTHING TO DO WITH RELIGION...but 2,000 years ago a man died on a Cross. Can't someone stand up for Him now? |
| Date: 2006/12/10 08:59:23, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Here you will find a very interesting essay, What Good is Religion? An atheist's case for the value of religious diversity by Dmitri Tymoczko. I find that it speaks to the futility of the "conversation" that is taking place throughout the blogosphere between advocates of ID and religion on one hand and science/unbelievers on the other, as well as to love/hate relationship that is evident in this conversation. It also outlines a position relevant to the recent shouting match between "evangelical" and "Neville Chamberlain" atheists, activated by Dawkins' recent book, well in advance of that conflict. I met the author last night, a composer with an impressive background in philosophy (Harvard, Oxford University, Berkeley) who currently teaches at Princeton. The orchestra in which my teenage daughter plays (the Contemporary Youth Orchestra in Cleveland) performed the world premier of one of his compositions, and I had the opportunity to ask him about his experience as a student of, among many others, Hilary Putnam, whom I have admired. This morning I've been poking around his website and found this essay. Serendipity. |
| Date: 2006/12/10 10:19:32, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Intellectual Vitality Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No. No. No. No. No. Intellectual Standards No. No. No. No. No. Yes. Yes. Yes. No. Exiting the Ghetto Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Who knows? No. No. Yes. Attracting Talent No. No. No. No. Who cares? Yes. FUN!? What!? Weed? That last one explains a lot. I'll party with you I-Dudes. Should be VERY INTERESTING. |
| Date: 2006/12/11 11:44:59, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
This comment, posted on this thread, bears a bit of rebuttal as it bears a germ of truth (and a load of crap):
Crandaddy here describes a genuine conundrum within contemporary philosophy, and the philosophy of science, although he muddles things just a bit, in that intentionality (the "aboutness" of mental states) presents a problem distinct from that of consciousness. But he has the right idea. The question of how intentionality and reference, particularly intentionality that has a normative component, can be mapped into a scientific description of the natural world has presented an enormous conundrum to contemporary philosophy (and a correspondingly huge, thoughtful literature), with no solution in sight. What Crandaddy misses is that Intelligent Design provides absolutely no help in addressing this conundrum. None. Zip. Nada. If we were to stipulate that each of us, as physical and biological systems, had been designed and intricately crafted by The Maker herself to exhibit the states of consciousness and intentionality that we do, we would be not one whit closer to understanding how normative reference (meaning) relates to physical causation than we are now. ID gives no help whatsoever to this problem. The problem presents itself regardless of the origins of the physical/biological system displaying intentionality. What Crandaddy really wants to say, as he attacks naturalistic models of human cognition, is that a non-material (spiritual) dimension is required to account for the normative intentionality and consciousness we display. But that gets us no further than before (and indeed sets back the discussion a few centuries). How do "souls" (detachable ghosts) implement conciousness and intentionality? Would he like to specify the ghost-state transitions that correspond to normative reasoning? Does he really want to argue that this occurs independently of the human brain and the physical causation intantiated therein? The fact is that nothing whatever can be said about the spiritual components Crandaddy would add to the current materialist conception of cognition that actually brings us any closer to the problem of intentionality in the natural world, and neither he nor anyone else has the slightest notion of how to investigate these questions starting with such assumptions. That is worth noting. |
| Date: 2006/12/12 17:36:13, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
WAD posts on Jones, and a bitter, ugly, pathetic frenzy follows. "By their fruits you will know them." |
| Date: 2006/12/12 18:40:30, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||||
|
Words from WAD: At Uncommonly Dense, pinkie up and locked:
At Overweening Ungulates, pinkie retracted and stowed:
WAD is modest, too: At Uncommonly Dense:
At Overweenie Ungulates we learn:
And it's HILARIOUS!! |
| Date: 2006/12/13 17:39:42, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
That is physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. What he had to do with Doverloo was, well, nothing. FART sounds, WAD!? "Good attention to detail!" (Says DaveScot as he plants a kiss on WAD's left cheek.) |
| Date: 2006/12/16 14:59:16, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Ok, I listened to all the little characters pull his string. Where are the inanities? They don't have to be breathtaking or anything. But I didn't encounter any - just excerpts from Jones' devastatingly clear and on-target decision. Subtract those, and all we have is Dembski reading lines on helium, farting for all the world like Robert Tilton. Is that the funny part? |
| Date: 2006/12/18 20:39:53, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
From WAD's year 2000 exchange with Richard Dawkins:
Dawkins commits tu quoque; Dembski retaliates with toot quoque. That about wraps it up for ID. |
| Date: 2006/12/20 10:08:32, Link 75.33.49.52 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
| I've never been happier to have a comment deleted. Thank you. |
| Date: 2006/12/21 09:37:39, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Crandaddy executes a logical loop-de-loop:
Crandaddy: Howabout you request that Christians stop inducing conversions to a tangled and perversely manipulative worldview that, in the scenario you describe, is the proximate cause of the disastrous psychological consequences you envision? |
| Date: 2006/12/22 06:28:57, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
|
k.e: "Wow Church Lady is on virgin' on the ridiculous." Uncommonly Denyse doth unleash a mighty wind (but WHAT is she talking about?) She ends with:
This meandering bit of incoherence suggests that the teenage D'OL! took a step and said, "Well, that's it then." |
| Date: 2006/12/22 17:59:09, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Private use? What?? Everybody got that image fixed in imagination? |
| Date: 2006/12/22 19:21:21, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
|
In this exchange WAD starts to unravel. Badly. JB chastens WAD for his stubborn mean spiritedness, and WAD responds:
Did Elijah love the prophets of Baal? No; following some typically dreary Old Testament hijinks, Elijah induces the people to seize and kill the 450 prophets of Baal. Is WAD here expressing his love for his enemies? Advocating the administration of strong medicine as an expression of that love? No; he rather obviously identifies with Elijah, and envies Elijah's barbaric Old Testament fantasy-solution to the problem of stubborn unbelief. Yuck. |
| Date: 2006/12/22 19:56:50, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Uncommonly Denyse sounds as goofy as she reads. Click here and search for 'O'Leary' to download an MP3 of D'OL! lecturing on ID. Awwww, kinda cute. |
| Date: 2006/12/23 02:59:27, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Sort of like a erudite, constipated undertaker - reading word for word from a typed, single-spaced document, nothing extemporaneous, no connection to his listeners. Here is Dembski's lugubrious contribution to a collection of lectures on ID from a conference several years ago (2002?) - an invaluable collection, with many of the major players in the discussion represented (Dembski, Meyer, Behe, Gish, Ken Miller, E. Scott, Michael Ruse, Niles Eldridge, some gnomish stiff named Elsberry, and on and on.) Many thoughtful and interesting presentations from many perspectives. Probably the high water mark of ID being taken seriously and entering into dialog with its critics. Meyer is by far the slickest and smartest-sounding empty container in the ID bunch - he has a high IQ, scientistic patter nailed. |
| Date: 2006/12/23 03:21:30, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
OH! Hi Wes...I didn't realize you were standing there...nice weather we're having (mops brow) |
| Date: 2006/12/23 08:45:03, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Let me help a little here:
Better. |
| Date: 2006/12/23 09:58:40, Link 68.170.204.177 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
| Born in the Cleveland area, and currently reside in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. |
| Date: 2006/12/23 13:26:07, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
oldmanintheskydidntdoit wonders...
Here is how the secret weapon works:
See? Predict untestable "things like this." Get down to making testable predictions vis specific empirical findings only after the fact. Your theory never misses that way. Plus your armchair never cools. |
| Date: 2006/12/24 10:38:09, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
This thread arouses a bit of disquiet in me. Here is the level this kid is at:
A quick perusal of this kid's blog makes it clear that he is immersed in a culture of biblical literalism. He appears to hold his beliefs with utter sincerity, investment, and, to the extent possible for a 15 year old kid, commitment. Moreover, he is mapped into a network of creationist propaganda (both personal and web-based) and armed with all of the carefully constructed flapdoodle promulgated therein. Little or nothing didactic is going to be accomplished here, however careful and kind your posts. Chapman 08: I recommend that you read the AFdave Creator God Hypothesis thread. Anything you post here regarding biological origins founded upon your belief in "God's Creatorship" is going to be utterly shredded (even if kindly and patiently), often by professional scientists who frequent these fora. You are going to be overmatched at every turn. This all strikes me as a bad idea. Please tread very carefully, everyone. |
| Date: 2006/12/24 16:39:01, Link 70.239.9.192 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Start here. You may have to join the forum to send him a message. He doesn't apepar to have been active there in some time, so who knows if he'll see your message. |
| Date: 2006/12/26 14:19:10, Link 68.170.204.177 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
I feel that I need to step in here. This applies to everyone writing articles as well as writing comments. Professor Dembski excepted of course. The topic and purpose of Uncommon Descent is to instruct and promote the intelligent design work of Bill Dembski in particular and the ID movement in general. We are trying to convince that world that ID is based on math, science, and logic. While the implications tend to attract religious devotees in large number ID is not about religion. I consider atheism to be a contrarian religion and ID offends them as one might expect of anything that pleases the faithful. If you want a soapbox for your favorite religion (including atheism) go somewhere else. I realize that it’s hard to divorce our innermost faith from our writing and will try to tolerate a generous amount of spillage but the bottom line is if you’re warned to ease up, ease up or the axe will fall. Professor Dembski advised me to be ruthless in policing this blog. I’d naively hoped it wouldn’t come to that but as usual he was right. Stay on topic. Feel free to tell me I’m off topic if I wander but don’t expect me to ban myself if I don’t. (You know who.) |
| Date: 2006/12/27 19:46:02, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Richardthughs:
Exactly. He has jumped the shark. No doubt about that. |
| Date: 2006/12/27 20:22:34, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
GilDodg'em:
Now I'm getting lost. I just got with the Behe certified fact that it was the unbelievable, irreducible, specified submicroscopic subcellular molecular nanocomplexity evident within bacteria that renders inescapable the argument to design. Little tiny stuff that Darwin couldn't see, because he had a black box and all, and he was an atheist and all. And Darwinism comes tumbling down and atheists are seen rending their documents. Er, garments. I am pretty sure that Darwin could have seen Mozart - But NOW bacteria are just the starting point, because in 10^17 seconds flat one of those bacteria turned into Mozart, and natural selection can't explain THAT. If natural nanotech isn't enough, just get a load of the Jupiter. "Too many notes." |
| Date: 2006/12/27 20:37:25, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Stevestory:
Not to get technical, but would that not also be murky flapdoodle? |
| Date: 2006/12/28 22:29:28, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Guthrie said:
Alas, neither will EVER happen, because DS doesn't give a rat's ass about any of the ideas he promulgates over at UD. (BTW, did you know that the prototype rat's ass was envisioned at the moment of frontloading?) |
| Date: 2006/12/28 22:58:16, Link 69.15.193.114 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
This newfound vulnerability is an interesting development. I happen to be a clinical psychologist, mid 50's, although my relatively recent dissertation concerned the evolutionary basis of 'theory of mind' in human beings. My instrument is piano, and I once fancied myself a composer, although more recently I have struggled with intermediate level classical stuff such as Debussy's Suite Bergamas, a Brahms intermezzo, etc. (any one of which takes me months to master. By the time I learn one composition I've forgotten the last. Hence I keep my day job.) I envy the guitar - but if you play guitar and not piano, you might envy the piano, too. Musical tastes: Frank Zappa and the early Mothers of Invention (Uncle Meat, Lumpy Gravy, etc., but also Civilization, Phaze III and many other aspects of his work), many varieties of classical music, Leanard Cohen (particularly "The Future," which is the stuff creos ought to fear), Tord Guftavsen's sleepy jazz piano trio, some stuff like Cold Play and even Lady Sovereign* (witty stuff; I have a teenage kid so get to hear all manner of stuff with which I otherwise would never cross paths). Related hobby: a stereo system contructed from 50 year old components (tubes etc.). "Reciprocating Bill" actually derives from that hobby (University "reciprocating flare" mid range and high frequency horns from the early 50's, exemplified by my avatar). * To all you lurkers from UD who may be reading this stuff: "If you love me then, Thank You! If you hate me then, Fuck You!" - Lady S.O.V. |
| Date: 2006/12/30 09:30:25, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Autodidact DaveScot (comment 139) hereby discards 100 years of physics:
The import of Einstein's famous remark, of course, is that he was wrong. I guess Dave hasn't taught himself that bit of science history. |
| Date: 2006/12/30 11:13:00, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DaveScot again:
Mutations, and the impact of those mutations, need not be, and indeed are not, utterly "chance events" in the quantum sense to which Einstein objected. Indeed, each one has, at least in principle, a causal story (as does a coin flip). Rather, however they are determined, mutations are "random" in the sense that they occur without respect to their impact upon the local fitness of a given organism in the context of its ecological niche. Similarly, we flip a coin to assign the ball at the start of a football game not because coin-flips introduce quantum indeterminancy into the NFL: we flip coins because the outcome of the flip occurs without respect to the fortunes of either team. It is this sense of "without respect to their impact upon local fitness" that distinguishes random mutation from hypothetical design events (descent with meddling). Stephen Gould writes about this at length in "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory." Which is why autopedagogue DaveScot is a stranger to such notions. |
| Date: 2006/12/30 11:54:34, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
This is beyond parody:
|
| Date: 2006/12/30 17:15:06, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Uncommonly Denyse has posted an uncharacteristically clear and well-organized essay here:
No squinting or head scratching this time. U-Denyse is admirably clear: - The universe is a top down, mind first affair. "So let me start with the observation that the universe is either top down or bottom up. Family values conservatives are mostly top downers. That means that they believe that mind comes first and produces matter." - Lest there be any question which particular "mind" is on top: "both Darwin and his followers have made it clear enough - is that there is no need for God or a divine mind, because it can all happen by this process." - And let there be no doubt which particular brand of "divine mind" she has, er, in mind, and where we can best learn about it, its relationship to ourselves, the relationship between our detachable ghosts and our bodies, etc.: "The New Testament does not teach that “immortality requires the resurrection of the body” or that “the soul depends on the body.” The New Testament offers the fulfilment of ancient promises of restoration of the body as well as the soul damaged by sin (see, for example, Gen 3:15; Luke 24:37–39)" - Leaving the best for last, Uncommonly Denyse does not believe that there is any relationship between the sophistication of human social and cognitive functioning and the size and complexity of the human brain: "There is no reason to believe that simply increasing the number of neurons in a brain will produce a mind (or a soul) for the same reason as there is no reason to believe that simply increasing the size and power of a computer’s RAM will produce one." ID is not, however, a religious concept (channels k.e here), no siree bob. Nope. Not at all. (snicker) (giggle) One might suspect that one's position is in BIG trouble when clear writing weakens your argument. (Wowsers. We've lost quantum physics (slain by DaveScot) AND cognitive neuroscience in one afternoon.) |
| Date: 2006/12/30 17:32:25, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
That would be spanking the monkey. Which surely involves a banana. |
| Date: 2006/12/31 08:52:55, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Lou FCD:
This is why ID - The Board Game uses rubber brains. These guys are subtle. |
| Date: 2006/12/31 22:55:11, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Oops - channeling detachable ghosts sans thorough fact-checking is bad scholarship. |
| Date: 2006/12/31 23:08:46, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
This is thoughtful stuff; I was gripped with inspiration, and knew that we should call this "The Great Chain of Being," the "Scala Naturæ." I fell into a trance, and when I awoke, I found this beneath my quill: "God, and beneath him the angels, both existing wholly in spirit form, sit at the top of the ladder. Earthly flesh is fallible and ever-changing: mutable. Spirit, however, is unchanging and permanent. This sense of permanence is crucial to understanding this conception of reality. One does not abandon one's place in the chain; it is not only unthinkable, but generally impossible. (One exception might be in the realm of alchemy, where alchemists attempted to transmute base elements, such as lead, into higher elements, either silver, or more often, gold—the highest element.) In the natural order, earth (rock) is at the bottom of the chain; these elements possess only the attribute of existence. Moving on up the chain, each succeeding link contains the positive attributes of the previous link, and adds (at least) one other. Rocks, as above, possess only existence; the next link up, plants, possess life and existence. Beasts add not only motion, but appetite as well." My Lord will be well pleased. (a wiki-trance) |
| Date: 2006/12/31 23:14:07, Link 69.15.193.114 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Howabout a taco-supreme being? Since this is still an open question, and all. |
| Date: 2007/01/01 15:42:05, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
What this actually illustrates is the operation of human "theory of mind" and the resulting projection of agency, a capacity evolution crafted in apes, particularly the human ape, to facilitate social cognition and the prediction of others' behavior. As Dan Dennett has stated, it may be triggered and deployed in a way that is completely compelling in instances where we know it cannot be accurate, such as when agency is projected onto COG, onto a chess-playing computer, onto arrowed circles following particular pathways, onto the "situated agency" of insects, and onto organisms such as these. The take home message is that our intuition that complex behavior requires something called "mind," which floats above and is other than the organism, is mistaken. If the behavior of organisms that obviously cannot deploy anything resembling human agency can activate that intuition, we should regard that intuition as highly suspect, not embrace it as somehow true and begin seeing minds in amoeba. Of course, the detachable ghost hypothesis causes more problems than it solves:
At least DC has the guts to ask the absurd questions that arise as a consequence of his position. Will ID ever ask the analogous questions?: "How in the world does the designer move the molecules in our genomes?" (Also, "What would we see if Uncommonly Denyse was shrunk to the size of a paramecium?) |
| Date: 2007/01/01 20:01:29, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
Sauce for goose? Sauce for gander: |
| Date: 2007/01/01 20:09:51, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
ID finally gets around to doing real empirical science:  |
| Date: 2007/01/02 06:39:26, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Djmullen:
Yes. Can you imagine how those tomatoes suffered? Oh the tomanity, the tomanity. (Because anti-materialist philosophy lets us know that if tomatoes were enlarged to the size of people...) |
| Date: 2007/01/02 11:55:30, Link 64.3.238.143 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Richardthughs - BE CAREFUL. If you /QUOTE first, then QUOTE, that has the effect of placing the entire universe of speech into quotes, with the sole exception of the text you intended to quote. That eversion leaves DaveScot the only original unquoted speaker on the planet... (Reciprocating Bill stares into the abyss, and can't continue...) |
| Date: 2007/01/02 20:03:04, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Safety belts are worn for protection in a crash. So WAD's admonition seems appropriate. |
| Date: 2007/01/04 19:52:47, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
A placeholder for a lengthier essay: BWE earlier mentioned meditation, and in so doing called to mind the diversity of phenomena that may be subsumed, properly, under the rubric of “religion.” This touches on the notion of religious practice, as distinct from systems of religious propositions that may be tested, adjudicated “true” or “false,” etc. A question I would pose is, “Can religious practice, including practices such as meditation, disclose to the practitioner experience, and even comprehension, that is not easily accessible by other means?” A corollary question: “Are there facets of the experience of human beings in the natural world that are inexpressible by means of human language – yet may be grasped (although not expressed propositionally) in other ways?” I am an atheist, and certainly a devotee of scientific ways of knowing, yet I hold that the answer to both questions is “yes.” Human beings have the potential for inarticulate ways of knowing that can disclose experiences and, at times, comprehension, that cannot be expressed propositionally. Certainly these are the concerns of many of the arts; by the same token, elements of these experiences are the concern of some spiritual practices, which in some instances can guide persons to these otherwise inexpressible experiences. Moreover, there are forms of such practice that are compatible with, and indeed enhanced by, scientific ways of knowing (and that are themselves likely to be better understood by means of, for example, cognitive science). One can engage in such practices, harvest for oneself the experiences therein, and even legitimately characterize them as, in a sense, “comprehension,” and remain intellectually and scientifically honest. |
| Date: 2007/01/05 06:32:08, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Well said. That prompts me to ask, "What (if any) Christian traditions are analogous to Eastern practice in this way?" I suspect that there are moons that may be glimpsed by means of forms of Christian practice (perhaps more in the mystical traditions), that are otherwise unlikely to be easily seen. Perhaps the trouble starts when one returns to discursive language and attempts to express the inexpressible in propositional terms. At the dinner table. |
| Date: 2007/01/05 08:05:50, Link 75.33.40.4 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Not surprising, I suppose, for a tradition that begins with "In the beginning there was the. Word, and the Word was with. God, and the Word was God." |
| Date: 2007/01/05 10:41:55, Link 75.33.40.4 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
This wonderful story can be found in the Borges anthology "Ficciones." |
| Date: 2007/01/05 10:47:57, Link 75.33.40.4 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Honestly. The Blair Witch Designer. |
| Date: 2007/01/05 16:07:27, Link 75.33.40.4 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Then there was the infamous National Lampoon parody: Go placidly amid the noise and waste, And remember what comfort there may be in owning a piece thereof. Avoid quiet and passive persons unless you are in need of sleep. Rotate your tires. Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself, And heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys. Know what to kiss and when. Consider that two wrongs never make a right, But that three lefts do. Wherever possible put people on "HOLD". Be comforted that in the face of all aridity and disillusionment, And despite the changing fortunes of time, There is always a big future in computer maintenance. Remember the Pueblo. Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle and mutilate. Know yourself. If you need help, call the FBI. Exercise caution in your daily affairs, Especially with those persons closest to you; That lemon on your left for instance. Be assured that a walk through the ocean of most souls, Would scarcely get your feet wet. Fall not in love therefore; it will stick to your face. Carefully surrender the things of youth: birds, clean air, tuna, Taiwan, And let not the sands of time get in your lunch. For a good time, call 606-4311. Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog Is finally getting enough cheese; And reflect that whatever fortunes may be your lot, It could only be worse in Sioux City. You are a fluke of the Universe. You have no right to be here, and whether you can hear it or not, The Universe is laughing behind your back. Therefore make peace with your God whatever you conceive him to be, Hairy Thunderer or Cosmic Muffin. With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal, The world continues to deteriorate. Give up. |
| Date: 2007/01/05 18:39:04, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
They are hopeful monsters, I'll give them that. |
| Date: 2007/01/05 19:52:59, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Excellent. Although I first read it as "ape-theist," acknowledging that, whatever spirituality there may be, it is embodied, and never detachable. Let me share this essay, which I wrote perhaps 15 years ago: The Chordate Self I. I was brushing my teeth, or doing something else as ordinary, when suddenly struck: I am arches of experience emerging from the workings of my body, a transparent structure of color and action, transacting with an environment that is itself built of both awareness and physicality. A reality that includes body and experience. I am a tower of mental and physical homeostasis and balance, built of many rooms of knowing and behavior, a structure of self. We are bodies that make consciousness. Bodies like our own, in turn, may be fashioned by evolution only because such a body can make consciousness. Not spirits dwelling in bodies, able to fly out, but a di-polar reality that rises and falls as one. This single self has, as one pole, the matter/energy/message that comprises body; as another, the consciousness/volition/memory that comprises self. Self is something aware body does. I am saying that our bodies are spirits. Our spirits are bodies. Identity requires memory, and memory is information-in-context that requires, in turn, form and complexity and temporality. The emergence of life, consciousness and identity in history have therefore both required and resulted from the capacity of matter and energy to support and retain complex form. It is the compartmentalized physical transactions of matter and energy, and the capacity of matter and energy to accumulate information over contingent history, that permit natural selection to construct, among myriad other things, bodies and conscious selves. In doing so, matter becomes as much like spirit as it is like clay or ash. Why do we resist the inclusion of matter/energy in our vision of soul? Because spirits constructed as bodies cannot be built to last. That I am conscious-body now, body-spirit now, and later will not be, packs both fear and poignancy into finite experience. From that fear emerges empathy and caring, because I know that you share the same untenable predicament. In return, by accepting that awareness emerges from bodies, we fully share the history our of bodies across deep time, and the strange and evocative structures of our human bodies and brains remain our own, rather than something merely inhabited. I fold the natural history of biological structure into my own experience, and rejoice that my soul arose in nature. Viewed in this way, the experiencing self is grounded in evolutionary history, a structure of experience that is both individual and "transpersonal" in nature, a transpersonal experience rooted in history. II. Each of us partakes of a variety of levels of self-sense. Ordinarily, human experience is existentially social and verbal in nature, experience that is shaped by the "location" of personhood in an historical and cultural context, built from that person's unique history of environments, experiences, behaviors and relationships, through interaction with one's care-givers and the embracing culture they convey. Further, the biology supporting this experience in "cultural space" is unique to the extent that it originates with the genetic and historical particulars of that individual's life. These are the social and biological considerations of psychology, and are the most frequent referents of the Western concept, "self". There are deeper, much older strata of self that have identity in all human beings, because rooted in structural features of the human brain that are deeply invariant across individuals. Some aspects of this deeply invariant human neurological organization are "recently" evolved and, therefore, organize experiences unique to human beings, while other structures are almost unimaginably ancient, organizing a base stratum of subjectivity that is common to all vertebrate animals, a transpersonal stratum that is vastly more ancient than the neurological powers that originated with the evolution of hominids. Evolutionary biology tells us that the essential axis of vertebrate organization, the axis of brain, spinal column and associated deployment of senses, reflects a body plan established something over five million centuries ago. This axis defines the absolute core functioning of the vertebrate life-machinery, a core responsible for governance of the internal living milieu, regulation of respiration and heart action, and the expression of drives and appetites. Similarly, the integration of sense information and the coordination of volitional behavior follow neural pathways that are organized through a biology of awareness and behavior that is equally ancient, having originated with this 570 million year old body plan. These ancient platforms of experience and behavior lay down in each of us a deep stratum of experiencing self that I call the "chordate self", a structure of awareness that originated with the evolution of the chordate body plan. In short, underlying the psychological self is a deeper, more ancient chordate self in which we all silently partake, a self that is profoundly other-than-human, utterly non-verbal and shared with countless other vertebrate species. The Chordate Self. Spiritual endeavors, those that invite widened awareness as a means to understanding, direct attention away from the inherently limiting particulars of individual history and away from the talkative narration of recent brain structures, to an essence of human awareness and human circumstance that is independent of personal history. The resulting profoundly transpersonal experiences, experiences that are fundamentally "neurohistorical" in nature, are in reality an experience of an ancient, transcendent non-verbal chordate self, refracted through the "enchanted loom" of more recent neocortical self-awareness and verbal narration that initiate and guide the spiritual effort. It is interesting to consider some aspects of eastern discipline in this light, such as Yoga, with its interest in the deployment of energy and experience throughout the spinal column, essentially an exploration of one's phenomenological roots in chordate neural organization. Meditation of all varieties tends to place one's experience more in synchrony with transpersonal elements of self that are irrelevant to personal history, equating these neurohistorical transpersonal experiences with experience of divinity. In a sense this may not be mistaken, finding in these experiences a record of contingent evolution over very deep time, our true "creator". Similarly, LSD and similar substances become an occasion for a kind of neurohistorical sacrament. Whatever consciousness is, and whatever new ontological and phenomenological dimensions are drawn into existence through the addition of LSD to the human brain, nothing could more clearly demonstrate the neural basis of consciousness than its profound alteration through the insinuation of tiny amounts of such a simple substance. Thus altered, one possesses a brain of a new kind, capable of experiences associated with this new sort of brain. As a new individual, one is free to directly experience one's neurohistorical, chordate self apart from the vagaries of individual personal history, then re-enter that familiar psychological self able to refract everyday experience through the lenses of memory of this neurohistorical sacrament. (and so forth) |
| Date: 2007/01/06 09:14:01, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Skeptic:
But there ARE alternatives. One is that neither pole of this dichotomy - there IS or ISN'T something "outside" of the universe (or "before time") - has any meaning. This is rather like demanding to know whether there IS, or IS NOT something north of the north pole. As it happens, it is not that one answer is correct and the other mistaken; rather, neither has any meaning: "There is nothing north of the north pole" has no more meaning than "there is something north of the north pole." So it is not that your answer to your question is correct (or incorrect). Rather, the conceptual tools that you are applying, which are so useful in ordinary contexts and that you conceptualize as sweeping out all of the possible alternatives, may be wholly inappropriate to the issue at hand. That is the alternative that you and so many others are not seeing. |
| Date: 2007/01/06 09:25:07, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Lenny:
Here I wonder if, having aptly jettisoned parents floating in the sky, you are not over-valorizing freedom, agency, and the personal self. After all, another tradition of the East, particularly Buddhist and Zen Buddhist traditions, is to underscore the illusory nature of the personal ego, and to attempt to experience (however briefly) its dissolution. |
| Date: 2007/01/06 21:01:08, Link 70.238.249.68 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Contemptible ignorance. |
| Date: 2007/01/06 21:21:55, Link 70.238.249.68 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
GilDodg'em quotes Steven Meyer:
THAT's a problem. I suggest informing your science with a mechanism concocted 25 or 30 centuries earlier. |
| Date: 2007/01/07 08:27:49, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
A demonstration of the power of selection:
Then, like the Three Stooges singing "hello, Hello, HELLO...": 5 RESPONSES SO FAR 1. Atom // Jan 6th 2007 at 11:57 pm I agree. 2. IDist // Jan 7th 2007 at 12:10 am I am a software engineering student..what we see in life is programming, software engineering, DESIGN! 3. benkeshet // Jan 7th 2007 at 1:03 am Agreed. 4. kairos // Jan 7th 2007 at 8:33 am I completely agree too. 5. Joseph // Jan 7th 2007 at 9:06 am I have always thought as Dr Meyers answered above. {edit} These guys should GET A ROOM. {edit} 6. Mats // Jan 7th 2007 at 9:36 am I agree as well. |
| Date: 2007/01/07 10:07:19, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Garrison Keillor, on yesterday’s Prairie Home Companion, included a somewhat nonsensical reference to intelligent design in a Dusty and Lefty skit. While on the desert, Dusty waxed philosophical about a variety of topics, much to Lefty’s (Keillor’s) annoyance. Turns out the weed he has been chewing has psychotropic properties, and Dusty needs to recover in the hospital. Lefty awaits his recovery in a tavern, where he encounters a threatening, pugilistic cowboy, who brags that he wrestles pigs, tackled typhoid, knits better than anyone in the county, and demands both “quit staring at me” and “look at me when you say that.” Eventually he espouses the notion that Hawaii (from where the program originated this week) gives evidence of intelligent design, and of a designer who wants us to experience happiness, grace, and love. After wondering where he came up with that notion, Lefty points to the contradiction between his espousal of grace and his pugilistic threats: Lefty: “You wouldn’t know grace if it came up and bit you.” Pugilist: “That’s the thing about grace. It would never come up and bite you.” A fist fight ensues, and many blows are exchanged. Lefty finally remarks, “You know, the fact that we are fighting shows that we love each other.” Pugilist: “Huh?” (hesitates) Lefty socks the guy and knocks him out. He comments to Dusty as they skedaddle, “I know its harsh, but sometimes you’ve got to throw these guys a paradox in order to get away.” |
| Date: 2007/01/07 20:41:44, Link 70.230.29.224 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DaveScot:
Savor this moment. |
| Date: 2007/01/08 06:40:08, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DaveScot
Super-secret ID research under way. |
| Date: 2007/01/08 11:57:28, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
This is becoming very entertaining. Review the Meyer quote:
My emphasis. But DaveScot says:
Again, my emphasis. So, Davey, it follows that the value of Meyer’s view, and GilDodg’em’s quote of Meyer’s view is... (And the full quote is, “If you can’t do, teach. And if you can’t teach, become Blog Czar where neither doing nor teaching matter.”) |
| Date: 2007/01/08 13:26:59, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
From the exploding creationists peeing in the dark thread:
Can't they get anything right over there? It goes, "We aim to please. You aim too, please." |
| Date: 2007/01/09 06:34:43, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DaveScot whips out a few thousand lines of of code WHILE centering his stream by ear:
This codes for the straw prediction that something proportionate to 1/3 of mutations should be beneficial, because he can divide the fitness domain into harmful, neutral, or beneficial. But LO! We don't see beneficial mutations anywhere near that often. Only "few if any" mutations are beneficial. Hence evolutionary biology is refuted and life is designed. Dave's passage crashes for at least two reasons: 1) The discussion at AtBC pertained to the nature of randomness, specifically, the fact that mutations, however determined, are random with respect to the local fitness of a given organism in a given environment. They need not be, and in fact are not, truly random, equally probable, etc. This fact, by itself, makes no predictions regarding which mutations will in fact be beneficial, not the least because this is often determined, in part, in relation to environmental/ecological contingencies. DaveScot's code fragment entirely misses the point of this discussion, owing to poor comprehension. 2) No one, but no one, but DaveScot himself has suggested the absurd assertion that, because you can characterize the fitness implications of a given mutation as either harmful/neutral/beneficial, and mutations are pseudo random in the above sense, that we therefore predict a roughly equal distribution of mutations among these domains. Methinks you squeezed your weenie a bit too hard as you excreted this gem, Dave. |
| Date: 2007/01/10 19:20:01, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||||
|
IQ is a slippery business. We don’t have to look far for an object lesson; indeed, take a squint at the meandering opening chapter of “The Design of Life” by Dembski and Wells, available through links at Overbearing Ungulates:
Smart guy. But they continue:
This bad outcome notwithstanding, Wells and Dembski offer Sidis as evidence of intelligent design:
Is it a surprise that certain biographical facts regarding Mr. Sidis didn’t make it into Dembski and Wells’ account? From Wikipedia:
It strikes me as amazing that Dembski holds out this life as an exemplar of intelligent design. Accepting their account at face value, Sidis’ life was tragic and, ultimately, devolved into mediocrity. Moreover, the intelligent design of his brain apparently didn’t extend to his cerebral vascular system, which killed him before the age of 50. And, obviously, the lesson here is that IQ alone doesn’t guarantee productivity, relevance, or a particularly well-adapted life. The Wiki article concludes by noting that, during the last years of of his life, Sidis “devoted himself to his hobby of collecting streetcar transfers, published periodicals, and taught small circles of interested friends his version of American history.” Sound vaguely familiar? (minus the REAL genius IQ) |
| Date: 2007/01/10 20:29:54, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Kevin Padian on DaveScot: "Dembski’s cerberus and familiar, who specializes in character assassination and slander." As though to affirm Padian's characterization, DS goes after Barbara Forrest, on Dembski's behalf: "In any state she’s a totally gutless, craven wimp." Did I mention that IQ alone doesn’t guarantee productivity, relevance, or a particularly well-adapted life? |
| Date: 2007/01/11 06:33:16, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
OW! That HURTS! (Whiplash injury) |
| Date: 2007/01/11 07:36:04, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
WAD discloses his longings:
Repetitive dream images that quickly volatilized as he awoke naked on Rosarita Beach one Sunday morning with a mouthful of sand, an empty bottle of tequila, and no idea which hotel was his. |
| Date: 2007/01/12 08:42:19, Link 75.33.40.4 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Wade expected the Talk Origins article to be front-loaded with bibliographic entries that emerge as time passes and the articles themselves arise in the publishing environment. It could happen. |
| Date: 2007/01/12 10:28:02, Link 75.33.40.4 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
I think this question, posed by WAD, was supposed to be a breaking ball, but it didn't break, and instead hung right over the plate:
I, for one, have never read or heard an account of evolutionary mechanisms, offered by advocates of ID, that accurately presented the many facets of contemporary evolutionary theory and the evidence that supports it. Never. So the question should be, Do the distorted, straw-accounts of evolutionary theory and the evidence that supports it presented by ID theorists reflect misunderstanding, or deliberate distortion and dishonesty? Of course, the answser varies. Most of the idiots commenting at UD clearly don't, in fact, have (or want) a clue vis genuine evolutionary biology or its implications. Others (WAD, Meyers, Wells) almost certainly understand evolutionary theory, and instead embark on a program of deliberate distortion. |
| Date: 2007/01/12 18:15:10, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Holy impression management! DS finally permits his image to appear and selects this photo? What, is he sitting there in his boxers? And that's Dembski's "Make my day-planner" look. |
| Date: 2007/01/12 18:43:02, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
OMG, its the first Irreducibly Complex NOODLY APPENDAGE! |
| Date: 2007/01/12 21:20:09, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Regarding hallucinogens, there are caveats in order. I came away from those experiences (early to middle 1970s) with utter conviction that what I had experienced were "neuroepiphanies," the disclosure of brain structure in vision and other cortically mediated experiences (and much more), and the utter identity of my conscious experience with my neurobiology. As I remarked in my earlier-posted essay, "nothing could more clearly demonstrate the neural basis of consciousness than its profound alteration through the insinuation of tiny amounts of such a simple substance." There are very interesting models of consciousness (the thalamocortical model of conscousness comes to mind) that are consistent with those experiences. But not everyone came away with the same conclusions. Others with whom I shared these experiences (or at least the substances that initiated the experiences) emerged with very different conclusions, finding in their explorations deep spiritual significance regarding the immateriality of soul, the reality of repeated and reincarnated lives, and so on. Stuff I regarded as fairy tales. Yet everyone was, unquestionably, an earnest and open-minded explorer. A final caveat recalls the sober reality that a companion of ours, who similarly frolicked in the meadows of neurotransmission, became quite psychotic, developed paranoid delusions, and required psychiatric hospitalization for many months. He may well have been vulnerable to developing such a disorder in a way that we were not - but that is hindsight. His earlier experiences were much like our own. So I would never get into the business of commending these substances to others. Very risky. |
| Date: 2007/01/13 10:01:03, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DaveScot says:
Boy, that's for goddamn sure. |
| Date: 2007/01/13 12:04:45, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
 |
| Date: 2007/01/13 12:42:41, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Not many know it: After the Bar Closes has a theme song. Leonard Cohen's Closing Time from The Future: Closing Time Ah we're drinking and we're dancing and the band is really happening and the Johnny Walker wisdom running high And my very sweet companion she's the Angel of Compassion she's rubbing half the world against her thigh And every drinker every dancer lifts a happy face to thank her the fiddler fiddles something so sublime all the women tear their blouses off and the men they dance on the polka-dots and it's partner found, it's partner lost and it's he11 to pay when the fiddler stops: it's CLOSING TIME Yeah the women tear their blouses off and the men they dance on the polka-dots and it's partner found, it's partner lost and it's he11 to pay when the fiddler stops: it's CLOSING TIME Ah we're lonely, we're romantic and the cider's laced with acid and the Holy Spirit's crying, "Where's the beef?" And the moon is swimming naked and the summer night is fragrant with a mighty expectation of relief So we struggle and we stagger down the snakes and up the ladder to the tower where the blessed hours chime and I swear it happened just like this: a sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss the Gates of Love they budged an inch I can't say much has happened since but CLOSING TIME I swear it happened just like this: a sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss the Gates of Love they budged an inch I can't say much has happened since CLOSING TIME I loved you for your beauty but that doesn't make a fool of me: you were in it for your beauty too and I loved you for your body there's a voice that sounds like God to me declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really really really you And I loved you when our love was blessed and I love you now there's nothing left but sorrow and a sense of overtime and I missed you since the place got wrecked And I just don't care what happens next looks like freedom but it feels like death it's something in between, I guess it's CLOSING TIME Yeah I missed you since the place got wrecked By the winds of change and the weeds of sex looks like freedom but it feels like death it's something in between, I guess it's CLOSING TIME Yeah we're drinking and we're dancing but there's nothing really happening and the place is dead as Heaven on a Saturday night And my very close companion gets me fumbling gets me laughing she's a hundred but she's wearing something tight and I lift my glass to the Awful Truth which you can't reveal to the Ears of Youth except to say it isn't worth a dime And the whole dam place goes crazy twice and it's once for the devil and once for Christ but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights we're busted in the blinding lights, busted in the blinding lights of CLOSING TIME The whole dam place goes crazy twice and it's once for the devil and once for Christ but the Boss don't like these dizzy heights we're busted in the blinding lights, busted in the blinding lights of CLOSING TIME Oh the women tear their blouses off and the men they dance on the polka-dots It's CLOSING TIME And it's partner found, it's partner lost and it's he11 to pay when the fiddler stops It's CLOSING TIME I swear it happened just like this: a sigh, a cry, a hungry kiss It's CLOSING TIME The Gates of Love they budged an inch I can't say much has happened since But CLOSING TIME I loved you when our love was blessed I love you now there's nothing left But CLOSING TIME I miss you since the place got wrecked By the winds of change and the weeds of sex. |
| Date: 2007/01/13 15:43:52, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
You're right, Phonon, but your point is mute. |
| Date: 2007/01/14 15:40:35, Link 70.239.21.53 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
What, did DaveScot express irritation? |
| Date: 2007/01/14 21:22:24, Link 70.239.21.53 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
I think the initial successes of ID flapdoodle aged me a bit, however. |
| Date: 2007/01/15 06:43:49, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
What they mean to say is that evolutionary theory is a seance stopper, while ID and the seances are compatible. |
| Date: 2007/01/15 17:26:47, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
We have these challenges:
I set up both experiments, exactly as described by Dembski: autoclaved goo at one end of my basement, the invitation cage at the other. Look what I got!  (Not sure who wins that) |
| Date: 2007/01/16 18:47:04, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
I think you're onto to something there. Wait. Let me restate. JoeG HAS invented a new sort of explanatory filter: one that filters all scientific explanation. |
| Date: 2007/01/16 19:00:53, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Absolutely. As I previously observed (on 12/23): Meyer is by far the slickest and smartest-sounding empty container in the ID bunch - he has a high IQ, scientistic patter nailed. |
| Date: 2007/01/16 19:24:42, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Don't dismiss this out of hand. Think about it: NOTHING is wasted. After providing delicious nutrition AND becoming the foundation of tropical cultures, the banana gives us the peel, which upon discard onto a suitably smooth surface deploys in five-sided, petal-like manner, and thereby carefully places a lubricated membrane in contact with said surface while facing a tough, non-slip grip upward - arranging for generations of mirthful pratfalls and humorous missteps! The designer cares about us, and wants us to laugh! |
| Date: 2007/01/17 06:33:28, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
"Miracle." DS admirably boils ID's problems down to a single word. The prescient classic:  |
| Date: 2007/01/17 10:02:47, Link 75.33.44.218 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
I'm tawkin' caveat, not prohibition. And don't neglect the first, and maybe more important, caveat. Vis messing up messed up people, it isn't that simple. There is current research demonstrating that some hallucinogens benefit persons suffering disabling obsessive compulsive disorders. And I don't know that we know that it is only those with a priori psychiatric conditions, perhaps prodromal, who suffer harmful consequences. After all, we are pointing to experiences that often profoundly reorganize experience of oneself and one's place in the world. Such consequential experiences may not be compatible a minority of otherwise healthy people. And my point above, even if it were true that hallucinogens only mess up messed up people, that we can't necessarily know in advance who those people are. |
| Date: 2007/01/18 09:43:31, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Attention! Attention! |
| Date: 2007/01/18 11:03:16, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
DaveScot, autodidact that he is, is unfamiliar with much of the literature pertaining to evolutionary biology. But does he read what he himself writes? Apparently not. Start here.
OK Dave. We get that you can’t grasp the sense in which mutations are random – that mutations are random in the sense that they occur without respect to the local fitness of the organism in which they occur – and that you insist on conflating “random” in this sense with the false assertion that evolutionary theory predicts that mutations are equally likely to be beneficial, neutral, or deleterious. We get that you missed the fact that ALL standard models of mutation+natural selection posit that benficial mutations are relatively rare. We GET that. No need to make a fool of yourself. But there is more. In the above quote you assert that natural selection is really “deselection, as it works in almost all cases to deselect organisms whose genome has wandered from its optimized incarnation through random degradation.” Hence it shouldn’t be a surprise that adapted organisms remain, well, consistent with their “kind,” and retain the integrity of their genome. But just Monday you marveled as follows:
Ok, Dave, which is it? Does NS work to conserve forms? Or to degrade them? And, given that in your first post you identify stabilizing selection as a mechanism for removing deleterious mutations and ensuring the integrity of adapted organisms, why also posit an elegantly designed genome that is maintained over time by means of error correction (as you have argued elsewhere many times)? |
| Date: 2007/01/18 17:47:12, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Dear WitlesS, Virtually every antediluvian animal I know is argumentative, confrontational, even pugilistic. So I think it highly likely that they would contradict biblical teaching, just to piss you off. |
| Date: 2007/01/18 20:30:54, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Not sure about a rock. But a box of rocks just posted the above, and that's got to count for something. |
| Date: 2007/01/18 21:16:18, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DaveScot does ID research, and comes up with the following: DS renders the above as follows:
Never mind that a year ago David was flaming UD commenters who denied common descent. I would have sworn that the SAT includes questions pertaining to charts and graphs. [Edit] DaveScot's rendition calls this to mind: Q: Why are women so bad at measurement? A: They're constantly told that this is six inches (finger and thumb four inches apart) |
| Date: 2007/01/20 17:57:57, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
We're friggin' BUSTED.
See? No? Maybe I can clarify. One of the authors, Swartz, is an associate professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, and is interested in how bats evolved their capabilities. See? Busted! See?! They are using research to challenge assumptions. They coordinated expectations as they designed their experiment. Assumptions. Evolutionary biologists studying evolution. EXPECTATIONS, for God's sake. Oh, the italics, the italics. (OK, OK, I don't get it either.) |
| Date: 2007/01/20 22:33:49, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Uncommonly Denyse holds forth on evolutionary psychology here. Denyse - your entire essay counts for nothing, for a very simple reason. Given that you reject the essential notion that evolution proceeds by means of the selection for adaptations that further survival, you should execute a Full Stop right there. Your position is that "evolutionary psychology is mistaken because human beings did not arise in the manner understood by evolutionary biology; human beings were designed, and human adaptations have no other meaningful history." Full Stop. We understand that everything that follows beyond that Full Stop is simply polemics, and ultimately a particular (and peculiar) brand of Christian apologetics. For those of us who grasp that humanity has a very deep history, and that adaptations displayed by contemporary humans (both physical and behavioral) share that history, the effort to better understand that history is a worthy scientific endeavor. That said, evolutionary psychology is confronted by a very specific, difficult problem: increasingly as one moves deeper into the past, behavior leaves few fossils. It follows that our knowledge of the behavioral dimensions of that history is likely fated to remain somewhat incomplete and speculative. It does not follow that human behavioral adaptations have no such history. We are not entirely bereft, however, because there are several lines of observation and experimentation that permit a certain degree of "triangulation" upon facets of that history. These include comparative investigations into the behavioral endowments of primates generally and the great apes specifically (such as pursued at the Max Plank Institute in Germany); developmental psychology (which traces the emergence of behavioral endowments that have a clear genetic, and hence evolutionary, basis); cultural anthropology and cultural psychology (which tease out that which is universal from that which is cultural in human behavior); and cognitive neuroscience, which in some cases discloses neural structures that have clear bearing upon specific aspects of the evolutionary history of, for example, human empathy and human theory of mind (mirror neurons come to mind). Broadly speaking, constrained speculation vis these lines of investigation from within the framework of human evolutionary psychology has been an effective heuristic for these investigations, and human behavior, cognition, and development often are, in turn, illuminated by this research. Your position, grounded as it is in the Full Stop of "design," is irrelevant to these efforts. Very much in the same manner that ID contributes nothing substantive to our understanding of the natural history of the physical complexity of living organisms (because it denies that any such history exists), and has therefore rendered itself irrelevant to meaningful scientific investigation before leaving the gate, your ID position on the origin of human behavioral adaptations (e.g., origins in a "divine mind") contributes nothing to our understanding of the origins of human behavioral adaptations, including the intelligence that you apparently admire. |
| Date: 2007/01/20 23:23:51, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Jason sez
I wonder what Jason thinks all that gooey stuff inside him is DOING. |
| Date: 2007/01/21 08:46:05, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
It seems axiomatic to me that any person, at any given moment, expresses three tiers of history: one’s personal history, the history of the culture in which one is embedded, and evolutionary history. These are progressively more general, yet expressed simultaneously. As I write these words, I express ideas that arise from a personal history that is in many ways contingent and idiosyncratic - as is everyone’s - hence the uniqueness and incompleteness of my subjective view of the world. Simultaneously, these words carry forward elements of my enclosing culture, in that their lexical meanings and grammatical functions were historically established and stabilized within our language community over no more than the last 7000 years, the span over which languages as diverse as Sanskrit, Gaelic, Latin, and Greek evolved from a common linguistic ancestor. Hence their appearance here simultaneously reflects something of my own purposing and a contingent thread of Western linguistic history, as carried forward in both writer and reader. Also reflected herein is our human evolutionary heritage. Arguably, the ability to both construct and comprehend grammatically complex speech is an evolutionary adaptation of the human species (e.g. Pinker and The Language Instinct). Nested at still greater removes are aspects of hominid, primate, mammalian, and vertebrate organization, reflecting progressively deeper evolutionary origins and increasingly ancient expressions of chance and contingency. All told, each of us carries forward, and is embedded in, an astounding quantity of personal, cultural and biological history, with the result that many human psychological states often carry “the ancient alongside the new” (thank you Daniel Povinelli). On this view, there is no necessary contradiction between explanations at the individual, cultural, and evolutionary levels; all may, and oftentimes must, operate simultaneously in human behavior. |
| Date: 2007/01/21 09:31:57, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Mother of God, this dead horse again. I thought I smelled something. Is it really necessary to remind Gil that arson investigation is dis-analogous with ID in that we ALREADY KNOW A GREAT DEAL ABOUT THE AGENTS WHO COMMIT ARSON, and that knowledge informs the inferences of arson investigation? Holy shit. |
| Date: 2007/01/21 21:41:53, Link 70.239.21.239 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Nothing to determine - all fires are arson. In some instances the arsonist is a person. In the remaining the arsonist is God. |
| Date: 2007/01/21 21:46:24, Link 70.239.21.239 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
I think Dave just confessed to being the agent behind the rash of Dell battery fires that occurred when he was there. No doubt he regarded that as an "Act of God," given his misplaced self-esteem. |
| Date: 2007/01/23 00:33:46, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
"God of the Gap-toothed" is starting to feel right. |
| Date: 2007/01/23 06:48:32, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
BarryA starts to come around: B: "Wow Grandpa, you're saying that some Injuns designed and made these things?" G: "No. They clearly display design, and I am an expert in detecting design. But I am not saying there was a designer." B: "Grandpa, but who made them? Do you think it was just one tribe, two, or even more?" G: "We don't speculate on who made them. I can reliably detect design, but can't say anything about a designer, or whether there were two designers." B: "Wha...Ok. Wow, Grandpa, but when were they made? Can we tell if they were made last week? Or maybe thousands of years ago. That would be COOL!" G: "I see design. And they could have been designed last week, and they could have been designed thousands of years ago. My design expertise doesn't give me any way to tell." B: "Ok Grandpa. But wow! Wouldn't it be cool if we could find out about the Injuns? Where did they live? If we could figure out where they lived, and what they were doing with these pointy things, we would know where to look for more, and how deep to dig!" G: "Grandson, you just aren't listening. I am not saying there were Injuns, or anything about a designer. I am saying they clearly display design, which I can prove mathematically, but we can't say anything about a designer." B: "Grandpa, wouldn't it be cool if we looked at the pointy things and figured out how they were made? I wonder if they were all made the same way? Does it take a long time, or can they make one right away?" G: "These objects absolutely reflect design. Any idiot can see that. But you have to understand that we can't say anything about a designer, or even that there was a designer, or two designers, or when they designed, or how they turned the design into a real thing, or why they were designed, or anything else. I am only interested in detecting the design they display." B: "But Grandpa, I'll bet we can figure out SOMETHING about the pointy things that would tell us if they are old or not, or something about the designer, or how they made them, or when, or why. WHY won't you think about that?" G: "Grandson, that's the last bit of idiocy I'm going to hear from you. Hasta la vista Baby!" (Grandpa smacks the shit out of his insolent grandson, and permanently terminates their relationship). |
| Date: 2007/01/23 16:05:14, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Title? "Inherit the Wind." |
| Date: 2007/01/24 06:36:14, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
TRoutMac is a doughy-looking guy name Peter Chadwell who lives in Bend, Oregon. On the basis of the dopey photo he uses at Overweening Ungulates I would have sworn he was a lonely hebephile attempting to ingratiate himself with the teens. Instead, he's got a pleasant-appearing wife, two small children and a new home in the suburbs. (Which doesn't mean...). He does a lot of fly fishing and looks like he could be a likable guy, so long as you confine the conversation to catching flies with a hook. Trout came up in his dad's print shop and trained at an art institute in Seattle. He appears to be unencumbered by science education or knowledge of evolutionary biology. These are perfect qualifications for the Discovery Institute, and he has at least two pro-ID essays that were originally published in the local newspaper reposted at the DI website. A Christmas wreath was stolen from his front door in December. He literally called the police and thereby made it into the local police blotter. (Unless there is another guy named Peter Chadwell in Bend, in which case I hit the wrong address and should return the wreath). |
| Date: 2007/01/24 08:28:25, Link 75.36.104.64 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Lee humps consciousness:
I wonder if Lee's detachable ghost understands that it is nonsensical to simultaneously insist that higher human cognitive processes are not material in nature AND that such processes emerge from an exquisitely designed physical system of neural circuits that display CSI? (ID never dares indicate whether this is CSI Miami, Vegas, or New York). |
| Date: 2007/01/25 12:51:41, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Gil: Were we programmed with such an intuition - with the ineluctable sense that our lives must have some ultimate purpose and meaning - our intuition would be of no help in deciding whether this proposition is true. A programmed intuition is roughly as useful as a compass programmed to always tell us that we are facing north. |
| Date: 2007/01/25 14:14:34, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
True or false: "This statement is false." |
| Date: 2007/01/25 18:16:21, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Consciousness. Here's how it works: See, atop the brainstalk and under the noodlepacks are two rumballs. Everything harvested by the eyestalks and earwigs and bodybag echoes through the rumballs, which hum and sing and strobe and scan the noodlepacks through massive bundles of sparky angelhair. Yet ten times more information descends from the noodlepacks into the rumballs than the reverse (hence the phrase “the remembered present”) as the noodlepack-rumball echochamber is gaited by the reticularactionbaiting system, which is stretched over the brainstalk and rumballs like a cheap stocking. I know, you’re thinking that the frontal noodlepacks and the mesobrainstalk danglingbasil also grow echoing motorplants through more massive bundles of sparky angelhair. And you’d be right. All goosed and framed and valence-tagged by intrinsic mammaryanimal noodlepaths for SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, PLAY, ATTACHMENT, PANIC, and so forth. That's it in a nutshell. |
| Date: 2007/01/26 06:12:22, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Only a comminted apetheist lays eyestalks on the astonishingly interconnected human noodlepacks, sparky angelhair - indeed the entire bodybag - and fails to see Irreproducible Complicationality. And only a dogleg maternalist believes these obviously designed structures evolved in 10^17 seconds flat, or that they have anything to do with human altrutheism, Mozartacity, and ultimately human spreedom and moronality – all the province of the eterminable detachable ghost. Open your earwigs to the truthiness before it is too lame. |
| Date: 2007/01/26 06:28:40, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Wow. It's like they're getting warmed up to take on the Urantia Book. |
| Date: 2007/01/26 07:47:49, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
But it's good to know that DS is scouring this thread daily for tidbits:
Dave, although you took thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move. |
| Date: 2007/01/26 09:46:31, Link 75.36.104.64 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
The mice were doing ID research? |
| Date: 2007/01/26 12:52:45, Link 75.36.104.64 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
A disorder known as tardive davekinesia. Very serious stuff. |
| Date: 2007/01/26 21:18:35, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
Wow. You are FAST. |
| Date: 2007/01/27 07:45:41, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Uncommonly Denyse engages in reasoning:
It seems so simple when put this way. It is almost as though she quivers at the threshold of understanding that attacks on conventional evolutionary biology, the entire content of UD, provide zero positive support for ID. And that ID has been dead for going on two years. |
| Date: 2007/01/27 22:06:11, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Gil really made me think:
Gil is on to something here. Doubt is flooding in, and with it several additional examples: - Darwinism can't explain the evolution of funny hats worn by Bellhops, or why we love them so. - Darwinism never predicted William Shatner's acting skills, or why we love him so. - Darwinism is silent on R. Buckminster Fuller's writing style. SILENT, I tell you. - Ditto: Frank Zappa's mustache. Not a word. - I've scoured Origin of Species. Not a clue vis the origins of the acoustic suspension speaker. - Darwinism fails to tell us why the Fokker D7 and North American P-51 are both intuitively recognized as beautiful airplanes. I have a much simpler explanation: we were designed to create and enjoy Bellhop-hats, William Shatner's acting, R. Buckminster Fuller's writing (especially Synergetics), Frank Zappa's mustache, the acoustic suspension speaker, and the beauty of the Fokker D7 and P-51. But not the Farman 4X. That's not in there:  (Farman4x proves we possess an innate, designer-given aircraft aesthetic sense. Take THAT, Darwinism.) (That's DaveScot just behind the prop, servicing the aircraft.) |
| Date: 2007/01/29 08:36:48, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Yes. All perceptual states are also, at some level, brain states. Yet some of them also usefully refer to states of affairs outside the organism (the brain states that accompany vision, for example). The question then becomes whether the states we attain through our 'practice of choice' are simply reinforcing, or additionally disclose something important about ourselves in the world. So, in addition to the peril of failing to recognize possible falsity of these perceptions, there may also be peril entailed in assuming that they are false. As before, the problem arises when the model building begins: when we attempt to attach propositions to whatever it is we feel has been dislosed by those states. With respect to vision, we spend a lifetime in "triangulated" interactions with others, with a common visual focus upon an external object or property at the apex of that triangle, making statements that grow out of that state of joint attention. Indeed, we're wired to do so, and learn how language refers (and connects to indicia of attention such as gaze direction) in that context. There can be no easy apex vis the experiences we are discussing; hence the narratives we build around them often diverge, and sometimes go awry. |
| Date: 2007/01/29 09:42:12, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
TRoutMac is in solidarity with SteveStory. I'm finding that strangely distrurbing:
|
| Date: 2007/01/30 18:49:58, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Yes - and there is strangeness in the air.  |
| Date: 2007/01/31 06:07:54, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Bubba bends over and it's Left Behind. |
| Date: 2007/01/31 07:04:36, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Oddly enough, I have a serious relationship going with a rabbit. One of my kids worked in a pet shop a couple of years ago and brought home "Chandler," only to promptly ignore him for a year or so, during which time he did nothing but exhibit pure, unblinking Buddha Nature. I felt sorry for the animal and took it over. His cage came up to my attic office and I began tending to him much more attentively, including daily periods free from his confines. At first he displayed classic learned helplessness and wouldn't jump out of his box even with the cage removed, but now he dashes about and visits a number of points around my office, kicking up his heels with a giddy shake of his head. I can almost hear "yippeee!!" Then he sits most of the day, in one spot. Go figure. I've been surprised to observe how he carefully confines his pellets to his cage, and there sequesters them in a neat pile. My Buddy Rabbit. >Sigh< |
| Date: 2007/01/31 09:18:01, Link 75.36.104.64 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Chandler was extremely tactile-defensive at first and still freezes when picked up (which made it easy to trim his extremely gnarley nails.) Now he tolerates being stroked and picked up, and I am working on getting him more accustomed to being handled. We've got a few cats and a dog but he holds his own with them. Fortunately for Chandler I discovered before it was too late that he was enjoying gnoshing on some power cords behind my desk. |
| Date: 2007/01/31 18:19:38, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
|
Uncommonly Denyse is a precious resource. Remarking upon John Horgan's ten year old "The End of Science," she first quotes Horgan: "Evolutionary biology reminds us that we are animals, shaped by natural selection not for discovering deep truths of nature but for breeding." She remarks,
Uh, Denyse, I hate to break this to you, but...Oh, never mind. This paragraph can be improved considerably by moving the first word from beginning to end:
|
| Date: 2007/01/31 20:59:15, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||||
Meanwhile, ScornedOva throws buckets of pasta against the wall:
On the surface, half way down, and at the bottom. Because, Sal, you're right: the concepts discussed therein are totally irrelevant to ID's brand of IC. Utterly unrelated. (And it's not a paper. It's a lecture.) We need a new name for this - something more primitive than quote mining - something like clang association in schizophrenia. Clang mining. "Look, it says complexity, and it says irreducible! It supports ID! IC permeates everything!! Gaaaaaa!!! But 'Ova contains himself, and continues:
A five year old newspaper piece that, if anything, completely undermines the "cosmological" version of ID (fine tuning of constants, etc.), reporting the assertion of solid state physicists that what appear to be noncontingent physical laws are actually contingent, and derived. But they're too dim over at ARN to notice:
So much for fine tuning. Sal concludes by tossing a few cheese-filled rigatoni. Something about emergent qualities = incomputability, again utterly unrelated to ID's notion of Irreproducible Complexification. He breathlessly concludes,
No, we're not going to let you suggest that, Sal, until you provide SOME sort of warrant for doing so. Or at least a bit of pesto. |
| Date: 2007/02/01 07:29:56, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
So it's pasta AND anti-pasta. Maybe we've underestimated ole' Sal. |
| Date: 2007/02/02 10:35:53, Link 75.33.35.186 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Or that you have two siblings who embrace creationism, who you nevertheless love and with whom you want to maintain good relationships. That is my experience, and it has somewhat shaped what I bring to this discussion, and provides some perspective regarding what is important in this discussion and why. (Which is not to say that all of our mislead guests deserve THAT level of courtesy...) |
| Date: 2007/02/02 10:52:24, Link 75.33.35.186 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
There's got to be a guy who keeps the ventilation running. |
| Date: 2007/02/02 13:41:10, Link 75.33.35.186 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Otherwise known as a "smirkin' merkin." |
| Date: 2007/02/02 22:20:55, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Dave pauses a LONG time, trying to decide if this is flattery or sarcasm. Can't decide. (Me neither) |
| Date: 2007/02/02 22:31:42, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
Is it permissible to insult oneself? I'm a pretentious lying fuckwit, a hornwielding bunny-loving pussbag. I've had enough of my bullshit, and I want to be able to tell me that when the occasion arises. Is that OK? |
| Date: 2007/02/02 23:04:29, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Wow, can I be a moderator too? |
| Date: 2007/02/02 23:23:16, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
I was being sympathetically facetious! It sounds like (sometimes) thankless #### when the dogs of flame are loosed. [edit] What is with these ridiculous pound signs for #### and ####, er, he11 and dam, when meanwhile I can call myself a cocksucking motherfucker who can't understand normal thinking? (self-censored). When I'm sick to death of myself, I mean. |
| Date: 2007/02/03 13:11:22, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
So, DaveScot's idea of a clinical trial is to toss the stuff into his dog's dish. Clearly, internalizing all that hard core ID research has honed a fine scientific mind. |
| Date: 2007/02/03 21:53:07, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Got to be the rumballs, or it won't work. |
| Date: 2007/02/04 01:33:18, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
A Positive Theory of Intelligent Design. As Howard Van Till has observed, Intelligent Design requires both “mind-like” and “hand-like” actions. While it is a commonplace that Design requires the origination of planful, mind-like intentions, it is perhaps less obvious that design also requires a mechanism by means of which mind-like design is impressed, hand-like, onto matter/energy. What has been lacking in the ID literature is a positive theory of these mind-like and hand-like phases of design, and of their interaction, one that generates testable hypotheses and hence promotes ID to the status of a genuine empirical science. Avocationist was challenged to provide such a theory, but was unable to do so. It is my aim here to step up and suggest such a positive theory, one that I hope gives rise to both theoretical and empirical investigation that further shapes and informs the science of Intelligent Design. It is also my aim to draw upon the creative brilliance and generosity often displayed by participants of AtBC to build upon and expand this potentially revolutionary new view of nature. What follows is a brief abstract of this positive, empirical theory. I. Biological causality reflects the operation of two basic, complimentary units: Thinks and Poofs. A Think is a mind-like, timeless-sizeless representation of a Thing. A Poof is a hand-like manipulation of matter-energy such that the appropriate Thing is physically instantiated. A Think without a Poof is incapable of interacting with matter/energy, is therefore undetectable, and hence remains a somewhat of a theoretical abstraction. Similarly, a Poof can arise IFF informed by at least one Think. Because they perforce must arise together, a Think and its corresponding Poof are often denoted by the couplet shorthand ‘Think’n Poof.’ When several Thinks give rise to a Poof, a Thinks’n Poof has occurred; when a single Think gives rise to several Poofs, Think’n Poofs have occurred. And so on. Given sufficient agentic and material resources, a Think’n Poof (or derivatives) gives rise to a Thing. Moreover, Balanced Think’n Poof calculations give rise to testable empirical predictions arising from the combinatorial mathematics of Thing Theory. II. Thinks and Poofs are initiated by units of pure intelligent agency known as Rodins. At the current state of theoretical development the Rodin remains a placeholder concept that has yet to be given empirical grounding. It is unclear, for example, whether there is a single Rodin, two Rodins, or countless Rodins and, if there exist more than one Rodin, whether all Rodins give rise to equally efficacious Think’n Poofs. It is also unclear whether multiple Rodins stand in cooperative, competitive, or other relationship to one another, whether Rodins borrow Thinks inferred from the Things originated by other Rodins, whether Rodins have degrees of omniscience, and so forth. However, we have every reason to believe that these questions can be given empirical formulation and resolved through an appropriate combination of laboratory and field investigation. With the above limitations in mind, we may begin to sketch the moving parts of Intelligent Design, grounding it in a calculus of Rodins, Thinks, Poofs, and Things, and indeed begin to explore the operation of these entities in any given instance of Intelligent Design. IV. Intelligent Design may be said to have occurred when a Rodin gives rise to a Think or Thinks, which in turn invoke a Poof or Poofs in order to originate a Thing. Rodin-initiated Thinks are mind-like, agentic, timeless-sizeless representations. Poofs do the hand-like work of actually arranging matter/energy to conform to the specification of a given Think, giving rise to a Thing. A Rodin may “choose” to formulate a grand system of interlocking Thinks all apiece, yet implement such a Think-Structure imperceptibly over deep time by issuing Poofs only slowly and sequentially. Alternatively, a Think-Structure may give rise to thousands of simultaneous Poofs, yielding an (only apparently) saltational Thing-Structure that instantaneously mirrors the underlying Think Structure. Biological Things that display Irreducible Complexity almost certainly issue from the latter sort of process: a single Rodin exerts its intrinsic intentionality to originate a complex biological Think Structure which is in turn effected by means of multiple simultaneous, interlocking Poofs. (The reader may find it helpful to imagine countless little hands equipped with little minds issuing from a Rodin or Rodins, swarming over and grasping bits of matter-energy - say, base pairs in a DNA molecule - and manipulating them with special tweezers to form irreducibly complex biological Things.) V. It should be clear from the above that a calculus of Rodins, Thinks, Poofs and a completed, empirical Thing Theory promises to dissolve some of the knottiest problems in biology today. For example, we may now confidently sketch the origins of life on earth: a Rodin or Rodins originated a complex Think-Structure that gave rise to both simultaneous and sequential Poofs that created the first biological Thing, detonating life on earth. All that remains is to supply the details. In the future we hope to infer the properties of agentic Rodin or Rodins themselves, by tracing Think-Poof-Thing pathways much as the electrodynamic properties of elementary particles may be inferred from the ephemeral trails left within a cloud chamber. We anticipate that the biology of the 22nd century will be characterized by Rodin simulations, the computational modeling of Biological Think-Structures, the detection and deconstruction of Poof-efficacy at the Think-Thing interface, and a completed Thing Theory. Ultimately we may see the triumph of what has been derisively called the "Big Think" theory of the origins of the universe. We may also confidently anticipate that a bankrupt Darwinism with truly be a “think” of the past. I look forward to your vigorous challenges and suggestions. |
| Date: 2007/02/04 09:16:09, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
You make my point. An arsonist first creates a Think ("I THINK I will burn down this here building"), lights a match, and POOF - the building is destroyed. What other explanation is there? Indeed, it is extrapolation from human agency that tells us that Think-Poof causation is operating in nature at many levels: Whenever we observe Think-Poof, we also see an actor, and see agency, a Rodin, if you will. All Thinkers originate with at least one Rodin. Indeed, Think-Poof causation is likely to revolutionize other disciplines, most notably psychology and philosophy. |
| Date: 2007/02/04 21:55:32, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
What we are witnessing here, after a somewhat stunned silence, are dogleg maternalists being penetrated by the pure postdoctive power of Intelligent Design when equipped with casual moving parts. Mysteries are falling: OOL, the Cambridge explosion, the obvious CSI of fire, arsenic investigation, the problem of intentionality - all now require restatement, and university departments across the world will awaken tomorow to the reality of their own adolescents. Dembki, Meyers, even DaveScot have been too busy cultivating their creationist constituencies to fully actualize a theory of Intelligent Design that calculates in units of Rodin and develops the Think-Poof-Thing cycle into a completed Thing Theory. I have no such commitments and intend to press this fight to its logical conclusion.
With his usual brevity Henry sums up the new status of Darwinism. |
| Date: 2007/02/05 06:40:00, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Your meter must be equipped with a incredulometer. That should be easy because standards for what can't be believed are precisely quantifiable (see Dembski's Design Inference - we stand on the shoulders of giants). Once so equipped, place your Poof-O-Meter near a complicated object, like a creature. If it can't believe that the object arose by means of natural (Rodin-free) causes then you may begin to entertain Think-Poof hypotheses. This is an important step because you are then free to concentrate upon the issue of credulity and cease time-wasting investigation into dead-end just-so stories about natural causation (like high winds in a junkyard). If the incredulometer really really really really can't believe that the object arose by natural means, you have your Think-Poof. Time to start speculating about the Rodin (one, two, more, nice, nasty, surly, smite-prone, etc.). |
| Date: 2007/02/05 10:17:13, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
DaveScot performs the additional labor saving service of eliminating most of the comments that would actually be worth reading. Only those of bootlicking ignorami remain, and those are easy to ignore. |
| Date: 2007/02/05 19:38:26, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Now, look at this here title. I do believe that WAD has once again committed aggravated unintentional irony. |
| Date: 2007/02/06 11:35:34, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
One discipline after another will fall to a properly conceived ID, based upon a rigourous examination of Think-Poof phenomena. Yesterday arsnic investigation, today industrial plant management, tomorrow...CANCER RESEARCH. Elsewhere on this board revolutionary cancer cures are being discussed, but not from the perspective of intelligent design. This again reflects the sad reality that top ID theorist such as Dembski and O'Leary refuse to model the designer. I'm not so shy as Dembski. (Not as tall, either, and I don't wear big glasses. I wear little tasteful 21st century glasses. I don't know about O'Leary.) Cancer research will be illuminated by the application of Rodin numbering to biology. Cancer, rather obviously (and why no one has suggested this before is beyond me), is a disorder of competing Rodins. Most of our bodies reflect the design efforts of the single common Rodin, whose monumental Think-Structure and sequential Poofs are evident in the nested hierarchy that is seen in the biological world (as so often argued by Zachriel). Mine does. Cancer arises when Two or Many Rodins battle over the design of and control over a single body, operating from contradictory Thinks and issuing competing Poofs. The resulting Thing-Structure becomes increasingly irrational, having been guided by multiple strands of teleological influence, and oftentime ultimately succumbs. I wouldn't want that to happen to my Thing-Structure, and neither would you. I propose that, rather than dabbling with chemicals in a dog dish, ID researchers trace cancer cell lineages back to the moment of divergence from the original Think Structure issued by the common Rodin. That moment of divergence directly records the Poof actions of the competing Rodin or Rodins, and thus discloses information about that Rodin (or those Rodins). Various types of cancer clearly reflect variation in Rodin Think style, Poof-efficacy, and desired Thing-Structure. Incredulometry will be important here, as well, because some cancers are malicious beyond belief. Carry on! |
| Date: 2007/02/07 06:11:45, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Philosophy: check. Rene Descartes' work can be restated as a Think-Thing dualism that was closer to correct than not. |
| Date: 2007/02/07 08:38:21, Link 75.33.35.186 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
And they call this the "Priviledged Planet." [edit] Oh, and Gil, most players of the English language game are clear that what is intended by "final resting place" is, "This is where his carcass is stashed." |
| Date: 2007/02/09 19:06:20, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
With all that wink and sparkle passing between Hunter and Schlussel, I'm thinking they left the studio and got a room. |
| Date: 2007/02/10 09:11:01, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DaveScot prevaricates.
Dave, why obfuscate by quoting Leakey's casual statement? Now is your chance to state it loud and clear: "I, Dave Springer, believe that human beings and the extant great apes share a common ancestor." Go ahead, don't be shy. Grow some stones. |
| Date: 2007/02/10 11:03:09, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Absolutely. Even DaveScot, with his ridiculous theory of "front loading," may be seen to harbor views on topics crucial to an understanding of evolution that separate him from the YEC and OEC denizens of UD. Examples: - I gather that he accepts something like the inflationary big bang and a universe that is on the order of 13.9 billion years old. - He accepts that the earth has a history of approximately 4.5 billion years. He accepts our understanding of the geological column. He therefore parts ways with all young earth creationists. - He appears to accept a history of life spanning something on the order of 3.8 billion years, and accepts our basic understanding of the fossil record. - He accepts common ancestry. Therefore he accepts descent with modification. Here he sheds old earth creationists and separates himself from those who blather on about "barriers" between species. - He accepts that homo sapiens are great apes, and share common ancestry with other great apes. That leaves him with "front loading." However, he repeatedly argues that common experience with human design activities establish that design need not be, and is not, supernatural in nature, and therefore argues that front loading was accomplished by super beings who were, nevertheless, not supernatural in nature. Here he sheds the remaining deists. [edit] He does retain hard science fiction authors, however. But he rejects and reviles contemporary evolutionary biology. That leaves him in the corner with JAD - a fate he deserves, I would say. |
| Date: 2007/02/12 06:34:55, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Uncommonly Denyse wanes philosophical:
You know, I was about to slam Denyse for holding forth on a film that, apparently, she hasn't seen. But then I realized that I already know that her book sucks, and she hasn't even finished WRITING it yet. |
| Date: 2007/02/12 10:50:39, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||||
Scorned'Ova admires integrity:
Read the The New York Times article. The guy appears to be amazingly talented, capable of speaking out of not just two, but three sides of his mouth. I can't do that...can you? Left side of mouth: makes assertions that comport with standard evolutionary accounts of adaptive radiation.
Right side of mouth: is a YEC in the Bishop Ussher tradition.
Third side of his mouth: He supports ID's account of the Cambrian explosion.
Now, perhaps I am missing something. But how does a guy who believes the earth is 10,000 years old take a position on events that occurred 500 million years ago (or 65 million years ago) - and what value can that position have? This level of integrity reminds me of that of an attorney defending a bank robber: "Your honor, my client was not even in the bank at the time of the robbery. And if he was, he had nothing to do with the robbery. And if he did, he didn't use a gun. And if he did, the gun wasn't loaded." [edit] "...and he has no idea who paid for those books." |
| Date: 2007/02/12 13:06:23, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
(Reciprocating Bill checks tree). No - this is the right tree. No one here has suggested that he should not have been awarded his degree. Rather, I characterized him as lacking integrity. If the Times article is accurate, Ross argued in one venue (the DVD) that intelligent design accounts for the events of the Cambrian explosion. He argues elsewhere that the earth is no more than 10,000 years old, and that a Biblical account of creation is accurate - in short, that there was no Cambrian explosion (nor Cambrian period). None of the pressures you describe vis committees and the machinery of attaining an advanced degree account for this particular contradiction. He also appears to be unconstrained by any need for consistency or honesty - one cannot mount an intellectually honest argument that intelligent design best accounts for the events of the Cambrian explosion if one doesn't accept that such events occurred in the first place. That's the tree. |
| Date: 2007/02/12 13:28:15, Link 67.105.151.226 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
|
This one had to ripen before I could post on it. DaveScot:
"Organ life?" That struck me as odd, both in the DS quotation and the original University of Pittsburgh article. So I contacted the author of that article: "Dear Ms. White; "In your article on professor Jeffrey Schwartz, posted on 2/9 on the University of Pittsburgh website, you quote him as stating (in the penultimate paragraph), "The history of organ life is undemonstrable..." Because this statement doesn't make much sense in this context ("organ life?"), I wonder if he might have said, "The history of the origins of life..." or something similar. The intelligent design creationism community has already pounced upon your description of Dr. Schwartz's statements as supporting their position, so an accurate account of his statements is important. See: http://www.uncommondescent.com/archives/2056 Thank you, (Reciprocating Bill), Ph.D." She replied: "Dear Dr. (Reciprocating Bill), Thank you for pointing out the error. That should have been "organic life". We will correct it on the Web site. Best, Trish Way to read for comprehension Davey! |
| Date: 2007/02/12 18:23:43, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Heddle, You would (and may have) a point if this accurately characterizes his statement on the DVD. However, as the Times reported, "He appeared on a DVD arguing that intelligent design...is a better explanation than evolution for the Cambrian explosion, a rapid diversification of animal life that occurred about 500 million years ago." If this is accurate, your charitable framing of his hypothetical argument would read, "even assuming an old earth, which I don't believe, ID offers a better explanation than evolution for the events of the Cambrian period." This is a very different animal, which (in my opinion) doesn't hang together, even framed charitably. |
| Date: 2007/02/12 21:15:25, Link 70.239.4.220 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
"He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." —H. L. Mencken, American editor, satirist, and philologist, on Warren G. Harding, The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1921 |
| Date: 2007/02/12 22:13:54, Link 70.239.4.220 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
This is certainly requosive (quoting myself), but the above certainly characterizes the work of Uncommonly Denyse, as well as DS. |
| Date: 2007/02/14 07:01:25, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
DS originally mindlessly repeated, "The history of organ life is undemonstrable..." Perhaps he thought Schwartz was envisioning the history of livers and spleens. Or the Hammond B3. Way to read for comprehension! |
| Date: 2007/02/14 08:05:44, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
And don't disrespect imitation. Imitation has been promoted from "a cheap behavioral trick" (relative to insight and intelligence) and is now recognized as a very sophisticated form of cognition with important implications for the evolution of human 'theory of mind.' Unlike mimicking, imitative learning consists of reproducing the intentional actions of others, including both the end result or goal at which they are aiming and the behavior or strategy by means of which they are attempting to accomplish that goal. See Andrew Whiten's work with an "artificial fruit," a box equipped with several defenses that must be surmounted before a food reward contained within may be obtained. In one example, the primate subject must withdraw two rods from restraining rings, remove a pin that restrains the barrel of a handle that blocks the lid, and then neutralize the handle by either rotating it or removing it to retrieve the fruit - with some actions occurring in the correct order. Whiten and others have presented distinct sequences of these alternative actions to several species (chimps, gorillas, Capuchin monkeys, orangs, etc.) and observed various degrees of talent for imitation. Very interesting stuff. |
| Date: 2007/02/14 12:00:17, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
WAD is VERY ENTHUSIASTIC about the abstract of an article by Nigel Goldenfeld and Carl Woese:
Not so much the body of the article, which really has rather little relevance to the revolution that is ID. The first sentence:
Nothing for ID here. Move along. |
| Date: 2007/02/14 15:54:51, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Augmented by what Michael Tomasello has called "the ratchet effect," whereby improvements in imitated technique are retained and passed on through further imitation. Ultimately teaching emerges, which builds upon both imitation and theory of mind. Then you've a potent brew. See Tomasello's The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999, Harvard University Press) for an interesting treatment of the interaction of evolutionarily grounded capacities for imitation and theory of mind and the explosive emergence of culture. |
| Date: 2007/02/14 16:03:28, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Of course, 2001, A Space Odyssey quite explicitly depicts an intelligent design scenario, as the monolith (or who/whatever is behind it) repeatedly intervenes in human evolution. It even has its own Dave. (Uh, that would be SCIENCE FICTION, lurking UDudes.) |
| Date: 2007/02/14 16:36:33, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Here a bit of honesty erupts from Scorned'Ova, as he characterizes his next contribution as a "quote mine." His nugget of quote-ore:
The rock matrix from which his little gem was carefully extracted:
So: The article from which this bit of ore has been extracted describes a mechanism through which genetic novelty and complexity - the very phenomena that ID argues cannot have emerged through natural means - appear to have emerged by natural means. Note that the "combinatorial explosion" of horizontal gene sharing omits any notion of design or a designer. If this view is correct, ID is obviated. Worse: the authors go on to acknowledge the applicability of more conventionally "Darwinian" processes once a "transition to the present era of vertical evolution" has occurred. Cold comfort for ID, 'Ova. |
| Date: 2007/02/14 17:42:29, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
 |
| Date: 2007/02/14 20:17:43, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
WAD is mad.
Does WAD really believe that science should be defined such that the Declaration of Independence can be reformulated as a scientific utterance? Reborn pansy Christian. |
| Date: 2007/02/14 21:01:56, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
WAD is mad in the OTHER sense of "mad."
So, now WAD rejects "materialistic" accounts (i.e. naturalistic accounts) of matter, energy, and various forces? This guy is loosing his bearings. |
| Date: 2007/02/15 06:45:11, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
We chortle at the suggestion, but ideas that are essentially equivalent to IC were actually batted around by linguists after Chomsky. Chomsky himself took an anti-evolutionary position. Although he believed that the underlying structure of human language is innate, he did not accept that it was a product of natural selection. Instead, he asserted that the human mind possesses an emergent, irreducible essence, and argued that few if any other genetic configurations could support this essence: "In studying the evolution of mind, we cannot guess to what extent there are physically possible alternatives to, say, transformational generative grammar, for an organism meeting certain other physical conditions characteristic of humans. Conceivably, there are none—or very few—in which case talk about the evolution of the language capacity is beside the point.…When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the “human essence,” the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man and that are inseparable from any critical phase of human existence, personal or social." (From Language and Mind, 1972, p. 98) Others, like Bickerton, have taken similar positions: Bickerton early argued that syntaxes simpler than those of contemporary complexity would not have functioned. So he proposed an essentially saltationist view of the evolution of language. He later abandoned that position, however (because it was blown out of the water.) All this was fiercely opposed and, in my opinion, refuted by Pinker and Bloom (beginning with their 1990 BBS article "Natural Language and Natural Selection") and many others, who have no difficulty imagining earlier, simpler forms of syntax that embody fewer rules than does contemporary human language. But the notion did get some serious play. |
| Date: 2007/02/17 09:23:54, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DaveScot can't keep his bears straight:
What he means to say is that 3.5 billion years ago the designer or designers front loaded into the earliest single celled organisms the genetic information required to provide these adaptations to an interlocking ecology of multicellular species, accompanied by mechanisms of error correction of sufficient robustness to protect that genetic information over deep time. Those instructions were then triggered into expression by environmental conditions that had been anticipated 35 million centuries in advance of their occurrence. Nobody here believes that "nature adapts herself." Too improbable. Oh, and Yogi looked for picnic baskets and evaded Mr. Ranger in Hanna-Barbara cartoons that bear somewhat greater relationship to reality than does the theory of "front loading." Smokey the Bear admonished us vis forest fires. Can't you even keep your bears straight? |
| Date: 2007/02/17 22:21:56, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Are you a seamstress? A little proper dressmaking and you won't be so lonely. |
| Date: 2007/02/18 08:16:06, Link 68.170.206.15 |
| Author: Reciprocating Bill |
|
The Shermer/Dembski debate has become the occasion for bracing scientific discussion over at UD. This discussion demonstrates the powerful heuristic value of the ID paradigm within a scientific context. Many of these questions would never even be entertained by those who are blinded by materialism. Examples: - Are all YECs rude? Or just the rude ones? - Does Salvador understand prophecy? - Are Dr. Dembski’s views unbiblical? If so, should he be confronted? - How much trust should we bestow upon persons who claim infallibility? - Why do science if reading and interpreting God’s Word is sufficient? - Is not physics awaiting a new science or theological interpretation to reconcile quantum theory and relativity? - What facts overturn a plain reading of the bible? What happens when the facts change tomorrow? - What does Luke 3:23-37 mean? - Did trilobites co-exist with size-12 leather-soled shoes, heels slightly worn? - Has anything as dramatic as homo sapiens appeared since they first appeared? - If humans were the last major species, how did the writers of the bible know this? - What does Romans 1:20 mean? - So, we find another extinct organism. What if we should find that that is not extinct? - Was Antarctica a warm place once upon a time and then we had global cooling? - How do you know what the time span was from Adam and Eve to the “fall” and beginning of their progeny? And the final, telling scientific question: - Why do some willfully refuse to recognize that design is a real phenomenon and attempts to quantify it is real science and it is not breaking any rule to apply what we learn from those attempts to biology? The future of ID is assured, because it is pursued by individuals who have ACTUALLY HEARD DIRECTLY FROM GOD, AND CAN DISCERN WHICH OF THE THREE PERSONS OF THE TRINITY IS SPEAKING. Not that ID has a thing to do with religion. |
| Date: 2007/02/18 22:37:33, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
This giddy, off-topic conversation Dave is having with himself is starting to read like a manic episode, complete with racing thoughts, flights of ideas, and self-congratulatory grandiosity:
Getting any sleep, Dave? "Old Charlie stole the handle and the train it won't stop going - no way to slow down." |
| Date: 2007/02/19 06:41:45, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
DS continues his solitary rant:
A. A period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood. B. During the period of mood disturbance, three (or more) of the following symptoms are present: - inflated self-esteem or grandiosity - decreased need for sleep - more talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking - flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing - distractability (i.e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli) - increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) - excessive involvement in pleasurable activities that have a high potential for painful consequences. Those would be the symptoms. |
| Date: 2007/02/20 19:10:49, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Holy fucking shit. |
| Date: 2007/02/20 21:29:51, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
Dave is too young to become the old man in the corner quite yet. We may, in fact, be witnesses to a heretofore unseen evolutionary transition, with new cell types, tissues, organs (and organ lives), even a novel body plan, a new organism capable of entirely everting itself in order to nest comfortably within WAD's obsequious humors while simultaneously displaying to the external world frat-paced pricklebush knoboxiousness. Which can only be accomplished through determined autodactyle polishing of one's knob. Where's my camera? |
| Date: 2007/02/21 18:18:07, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Feeling a little puzzled here. DaveScot is also no cell biologist, geneticist, cosmologist, oncologist, climatologist, mathematician, information theorist, anthropologist, paleontologist, cosmologist or - come to think of it - expert on any other topic on which he Googles forth at UD. That's never stopped him before... ...But as I read this post I see that his admission of ignorance didn't stop him HERE, either. More expression of his autodactyle knob polishing, one supposes. Truth be told, I'm becoming downright bored with Dave's utterly predictable monopoly of UD. C'mon Bill, Sal, Gil, Denyse, where are you? Wait.... a new Uncommonly Denyse tidbit....oh BOY! It's time for the WORD JUMBLE game! Back in a bit. |
| Date: 2007/02/21 19:24:57, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Uncommonly Denyse doesn't disappoint. From her aptly named blog "Mindful Hack" (as she certainly is a hack):
So, Mr. Intelligence and Mr. Consciousness are these - somethings* - that perceive, reason, calculate gains and losses, and react, with no underlying basis in neural activity, or anything else. They perceive and react out of conscious perception. That's the explanation. No need for further 'splanation, because they are conscious, and intelligent. And NO need for Mr. Gooey Stuff. I await her description of where and how Mr. Consciousness harvests, say, visual information from Mr. Gooey Stuff. Does he watch little movies on the backs of our retinas (this would explain why the retina is wired backward - so Mr. Consciousness can watch the goings on outside.) At the thalami? At V1? Frontal lobes? Backal lobes? Also, U-Denyse needs a description of how Mr. Consciousness and Mr. Intelligence, after consulting Mr. Perception, work together to make Mr. Gooey's muscles wiggle. Do they tickle motor plans within the midbrain? Toggle neurons along the motor strip? Diddle ganglia within the spine? Or just push and shove arms and legs directly? Mother of God, what does she think that Mr. Gooey Stuff is DOING in there? Well, in the case of Uncommonly Denyse, not much. But in OTHER skulls, what is he doing THERE? What kills me about this position is that advocates of ID, on one hand, argue that the human brain is an instance of IC that couldn't have arisen by means of natural selection, and, on the other, that the brain has nothing to do with human consciousness and cognition. Without batting an eye. (You can't beat stuff like this on your best day, Dave.) *Detachable ghosts. |
| Date: 2007/02/23 06:13:29, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
WAD in a moment of honesty:
inveigle verb [ trans. ] persuade (someone) to do something by means of deception or flattery Of course, Bill can only speak for ID. |
| Date: 2007/02/23 06:23:59, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
These are the posts that assure us that DS doesn't give a rat's ass about any of the assertions he makes at UD. It's all autodactyl knob polishing. |
| Date: 2007/02/24 07:52:56, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
"Scientists state that hydrogen is the most plentiful substance in the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe." - Frank Zappa Without abundant stupidity, posts like Gil's latest wouldn't be possible. Isn't it interesting that the universe has been arranged to supply to us such sublime pleasures? (Not sure, however, if a GilDodg'em post is a "higher" pleasure or a "lower" pleasure, since they entail autodactyl knob polishing.) |
| Date: 2007/02/24 12:56:45, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
WAD continues an argument by analogy:
I'm starting to see WAD's reasoning here. The designer includes vestigial structures in many organisms so they SELL. Manipulation through nostalgia. It follows that we are PRODUCTS. And the Privileged Planet is a bodacious warehouse. An ID prediction: A glossy catalog and price list are embedded in the deepest layers of human DNA. There may also be a "buy it now" button in there somewhere. [edit] It also appears that WAD is lifting his skirt just a bit vis the designer. Designers, truth be told, who are competing with one another. Designers who observe one another's products, and sometimes copy one another's work. That accounts for what we call "convergence." ID Science marches on! |
| Date: 2007/02/25 07:48:05, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Nightlight applies the logic of "designed vestigial structures" to devastating effect:
Let's really push this generalization to demonstrate its POWER. - a lawn sprinkler demonstrates that rain is not a natural phenomenon, but rather the product of intelligent agency. - man-made ponds and reservoirs demonstrate that lakes and seas are not natural phenomena, but rather the result of intelligent agency. - a trench dug by a back hoe demonstrates that the Grand Canyon is not a natural phenomenon, but rather the result of intelligent agency. - a breeze generated by a window fan demonstrates that wind is not a natural phenomenon, but rather the result of intelligent agency. However, Frank Zappa notwithstanding, I can't think of a physical phenomenon within nature that generates stupidity analogous to Nightlight's post. Ergo... |
| Date: 2007/02/26 05:12:31, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
My sleep was disturbed by long shadows of tall foreheads. (>shivers<) (But I always imagined a "Scrotus.") |
| Date: 2007/02/26 06:29:21, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Uh, what exactly IS the topic at UD? |
| Date: 2007/02/26 06:40:31, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
"Errortainment." |
| Date: 2007/02/26 19:51:44, Link 65.43.172.14 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
300 million people and they they had to go to Canada to find her. |
| Date: 2007/02/26 21:47:51, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
'Ova's ignorance of the armchair literature is shocking.
(The above was carefully peer reviewed, in that I peered at it while reviewing. Hey, if that's good enough for the DI, it's good enough for me.) |
| Date: 2007/02/27 17:55:13, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Scientific Think-Poof theory postulates that Thinks are initiated by Rodins - about which we know little. The feline in the cartoon is filling in for a Rodin, not a Think. In the fanciful and amusing scenario depicted therein, Think-Structures have been pre-compiled within the computer for simultaneous poofactualization into Thing-Structures. Metathingorganization is apparent in the sequential poofactualization of these Thing-Structures (organisms). Indeed, we may speculate that the cat has triggered a Frontloaded sequential saltationist poofactualization of preplanned Thing-Structures, and that the intent of the cartoon is to subtly convey the compatibility of Think-Poof theory with Front Loading. Isn't that obvious? |
| Date: 2007/02/27 18:00:19, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
I'll be here until my scheduled deposition. Then it's "Poof." |
| Date: 2007/02/27 20:10:55, Link 65.43.172.14 | ||||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||||
Riddled by friendly fire. Usually a bad sign. |
| Date: 2007/02/28 09:00:29, Link 75.43.180.108 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Tribune7 waxes poetic...
...hoping that relative obscurity will alow him to quote artists without attribution. From The Future by Leonard Cohen:
And so on. |
| Date: 2007/02/28 16:04:40, Link 75.43.180.108 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Pronounced "piss-id." At least when I read it. |
| Date: 2007/02/28 18:16:05, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Here are three things that are alike: - A depiction of the Christian cross. - A monument depicting the ten commandments. - Statements promoting intelligent design. Thank you for clarifying that. |
| Date: 2007/03/01 06:42:29, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||
Anyone who absorbs the actual data, rather than fraudulent pencil-whipped liberal pablum vomited by a scientific industry committed to fomenting hysteria to protect otherwise wasted careers, understands that rice warming is a hoax. |
| Date: 2007/03/01 12:00:39, Link 64.3.238.143 | ||||||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||||||
And this would be "Walley-World." |
| Date: 2007/03/01 20:31:56, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Next: ID Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Turkmenistan. |
| Date: 2007/03/02 06:24:37, Link 68.170.206.15 | ||
| Author: Reciprocating Bill | ||
Try as you may, you can't shin |
