Darwin's Black Box - Michael J. Behe and Intelligent Design

[genero81]

I think maybe it's just intellectual egotism. Stove's writings are a bit too crass and unsophisticated for an educated person such as himself. However, you also stepped on the toes of your fellow travelers here. Maybe you can get honest about that? What's behind that? Do you know?

 

[Laura]

Thanks for all your recent responses hlat, fabric, Windmill knight, Turgon, Chu, ScioAgapeOmnis, Dakota, Gaby, genero81, Beau, and goyacobol. I think I am going to take a break from responding to this thread for awhile (at least with regard to the conflict/mirror) and just read it over a couple of times.

Interesting.

If you are taking a break to read, please read the ENTIRE thread from the beginning, and the various books discussed.

 

[ScioAgapeOmnis]

There are other examples too. We have modern cosmology that ignores electricity/plasma and makes up dark matter/energy to try to make equations fit observations, the already mentioned anthropogenic global warming that ignores solar/cosmic factors, etc. How about dietary science and its anti-fat pro-carb lipid "hypothesis"? How about anti-smoking science? We have so many examples! In fact, I think most of our technology is not a result of true understanding, but because we have "good enough" approximations (which is all a theory is), which gives us some control over a part of reality, regardless of whether we really understand it or not. Like, we can make planes fly, and still have no clue what the hell gravity actually is. We discovered gunpowder and used it before we knew what the hell chemical reactions even were, with no concept of molecular bonds etc. Do you think that the guys who build the Large Hadron Collider have that much more of a clue than the first guys to use sticky stuff to glue bricks into a pile? It's just a refined version of the same thing - we just observed more "stuff" and how it seems to behave, and stuck more things together in more elaborate ways. It's more shiny that's all.

It's too easy to confuse "hey we can build stuff and observe patterns" with knowing anything. This knowledge is just a refined version of "hey if you collect this brown stuff and heat it up, it gets sticky, and we can stick things with it and build houses". And working with chemicals, light, electrons, metals, is just more sticky stuff we found. If we had a clue, we wouldn't have to experiment and try stuff to see what happens all the time, and have constant accidental discoveries. We don't know what a drug will do before a trial, we don't know what will happen when melting 2 metals together, or what happens when a protein folds this way or that, even fundamental stuff like accidentally making "graphene" by using sticky tape on a pencil in 2004 - and then being blown away and going into a frenzy of research about what to do with it!

It has become a habit in science to take a model/theory and obsess over it until it's driven into the ground, only replaced when there's literally no choice anymore. Usually there are plenty of clues/evidence that should've made it suspect long ago, but they're either ignored, data is manipulated, or things are literally made up to make the math fit. A bunch of monkeys sticking sticky stuff into piles claiming to know things, we are!

Sometimes even if a model explains 80% of something, the last 20% can demonstrate that no part of that model was correct at all, it was just a coincidence because of incomplete data. You can have 10 different models perfectly explain the same thing - but only one of them, or maybe none of them at all, is going to be correct. It's not simply "refining" and "improving" but discarding, which can happen at any time. You could have a theory explaining 99% of a phenomenon, and the last 1% could demonstrate it to be completely and utterly wrong, and not useful at all to understand the phenomenon, unless you chose to only work with the part of the phenomenon that suits your purposes. It may only be useful the same as Newton's gravitation is useful - it's simply an approximation that's "good enough" when you don't care about the parts where you need Einstein to take over. And Einstein is more than likely "good enough" until you look at the parts where "quantum gravity" or other quantum stuff is needed - and again, there's no bridge to get you there.

There's literally only 1 correct model to explain how any phenomenon objectively works, but everything else will only ever work for a part of the phenomenon, and be either partially or entirely wrong when it comes to the complete picture. And right now, the issues being brought up about Darwinism aren't suggestive that it needs some work, but more like it missed the entire boat. The parts where his theory may work to explain anything, seem to be diminishing as more observation and analysis is made, and soon it may not even explain a cow fart :)

 

[Neil]

The way I see it, evolution can be looked at through the same lens as all the hype about the development of AI. We are able to make sophisticated machines that have the ability to adapt their behavior and modify their programming within certain parameters so that they are more versatile and can exude a certain veneer of intelligence when acting on their own. In reality, these machines are just expert systems running a vast array of logic gates and possess no freewill or consciousness as we understand it. They eventually break down and stop functioning after small problems compound for a long enough period of time, the machine lacks the context with which to react to situations, or the reality changes so much that the programming does not allow for adaptation to new circumstances; necessitating new intelligent input. It follows that 4D, having much, much more experience with this sort of thing, could create an AI that is stable for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So Darwinists can look at 2D beings, focusing on the periods of time between program rewrites, and surmise that they are some kind of machine running a sophisticated program and be more or less correct. They run into problems when they try to rationalize sudden rapid changes and the appearance of new species with theories of punctuated equilibrium. It seems obvious to me that ID is the most logical explanation for such events; the 4D designers decided to change the program by providing it with new inputs in order to achieve a different output. On the 3D level where consciousness can become seated in the "AI", there are all sorts of little oddities and discontinuities that crop up because the mind-body connection allows you to change your genetic expression to a degree beyond the periodic tweaks by the 4D designers, but like the UFO phenomenon, it is far enough from everyday experience that as long as you don't investigate it too deeply and ask too many questions, you can accept the scientifically proffered explanations and pretend it doesn't exist. In 4D the mind-body connection is probably so strong that intelligent design is simply self-evident and happens continuously from moment to moment. Due to the spiritual realities they must deal with in order to derive their powers and abilities, I'm also doubtful about the ultra-nihilism being truly reflective of 4D STS, it seems more like a philosophy the Lizzies designed in order to entrap humanity into a dead-end reality where it can easily be controlled; never able to comprehend being essentially an "alien experiment" and the methods through which this experiment is carried out. I can see them having a material bias, but I have a hard time picturing them having such a total focus on materiality. Maybe they have been made into an evolutionary dead-end by Orion STS, who are using various means to similarly entrap them and keep them from challenging their power, with the Orions possessing the true "Luciferian" hyperintelligence.

 

[Joe]

It doesn't really count as something against it, since you run into that same conundrum even if you're a creation of ID - "okay great, why listen to it?" Well, your apparatus of reason and sense is itself a creation of that random variation or ID, so damned if you do and damned if you don't. Maybe through some loophole you connect with yourself in the future and become self-creating in some way in a higher reality to free yourself, but until then you're just kind of along for the ride, OSIT.

Random variation or ID? ID is, by definition, NOT random. Your entire line of "thinking" in this post is bizarre and makes it seem like you really don't understand any of the essence of the points that have been made so far in this topic. ID posits meaning and purpose, random mutation implies no purpose and therefore no real meaning, in which case, yes, why listen to any ideas of morality since that's just the product of 'random mutation' and is ultimately meaningless. So "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law".

If you can't see the essential point here that over 1.5 centuries of this type of materialistic thinking has produced the society we live in today, and that that is probably BY DESIGN, and that ID provides the basis for meaning that is a psychological and spiritual bulwark against rampant materialism and nihilism, then I don't know what to say to you.

 

[Pierre]

Thanks for all your recent responses hlat, fabric, Windmill knight, Turgon, Chu, ScioAgapeOmnis, Dakota, Gaby, genero81, Beau, and goyacobol. I think I am going to take a break from responding to this thread for awhile (at least with regard to the conflict/mirror) and just read it over a couple of times.

While thinking about the matter you might want to take into account the I-Ching for 2019

 

[Joe]

This response is similar to the ones the neo-Darwinists like Richard Dawkins gave Ben Stein in his documentary, Expelled. In other words, if you are too stupid to understand then I won't waste my time explaining it to you. That's something you should watch out for because it's an indication of sacred cows and a defense of ideas that need to be put out to pasture.

Indeed. That approach is often taken by people in the grip of an ideology that they "just believe" because "everyone knows its true" because "some authority said it was true". Generally speaking, things that "everyone knows are true" are partial or complete BS.

 

[Joe]

Of course that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when whole complexes of theories and explanations get scrapped in favor of something better, like in the Copernican Revolution.

It's interesting that you have to go back to Copernicus to find an incidence of a whole scientific complex or belief that was scrapped for something better. Can't you find something more recent?

 

[Joe]

Although I've done my best in talking about some aspects of it in this thread, I don't trust myself to have all the details down. I would leave that to the professionals who write textbooks on evolutionary ecology and the like. The wiki articles can provide some good sources on k/K theory, inclusive fitness

Did you read the wiki articles on "inclusive fitness"? They're mindbogglingly idiotic to anyone with two neurons firing. Consider the claim about squirrels from here:

Inclusive fitness - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

"Belding's ground squirrel provides an example. The ground squirrel gives an alarm call to warn its local group of the presence of a predator. By emitting the alarm, it gives its own location away, putting itself in more danger. In the process, however, the squirrel may protect its relatives within the local group (along with the rest of the group). Therefore, if the effect of the trait influencing the alarm call typically protects the other squirrels in the immediate area, it will lead to the passing on of more copies of the alarm call trait in the next generation than the squirrel could leave by reproducing on its own. In such a case natural selection will increase the trait that influences giving the alarm call, provided that a sufficient fraction of the shared genes include the gene(s) predisposing to the alarm call."

So a squirrel with "selfish genes" that require it to survive to spread THOSE genes, first and foremost, emits an alarm call, placing itself in mortal danger, so that the "alarm call gene" will be "selected for" and spread by the surviving squirrels. So actually, it's not the squirrel that is making the alarm call but the "gene for the alarm call" that is trying to propagate itself by taking control of the squirrel and overriding its self-preservation instinct i.e. the selfish survival instinct of all the OTHER genes in that particular squirrel. Oh, and by the way, the alarm call gene may not actually be in many other of the squirrels. It's a bit 'random' dontcha know! Make sense?

But wait, before anyone think that's "inclusive fitness" means that genetic relatives will be altruistic towards each other to spread the "shared genes" (how individual squirrels or shrimp, for another popular example, know who their genetic relatives are is anyone's guess, supposedly its the other squirrels or shrimp that the individuals 'hang out with'), NOT SO!

Evidence from a variety of species including humans, primates and other social mammals suggests that contextual cues (such as familiarity) are often significant proximate mechanisms mediating the expression of altruistic behavior, regardless of whether the participants are always in fact genetic relatives or not. This is nevertheless evolutionarily stable since selection pressure acts on the typical conditions, not on the rare occasions where actual genetic relatedness differs from that normally encountered. Inclusive fitness theory thus does not imply that organisms evolve to direct altruism towards genetic relatives. Many popular treatments do however promote this interpretation.

So in lots of cases, selfish genes being overridden in an individual in order to promote the survival of kin don't actually involve genetic kin at all! But, BUT, this is STILL "evolutionarily stable" because, ya know, squirrels and stuff are just wrong sometimes (and so is the primacy of the selfish gene, therefore) and it's okay for genes to be wrong sometimes. More imporantly, just in case anyone was under any illusion that natural selection evolved altruism in species, it DIDN'T! But, let's just reiterate the evolutionist point, "natural selection evolved altruism in species."

Has that cleared things up and instilled in you a confidence that evolutionists know what they are talking about? Good.

The point here, Whitecoast, is that everywhere you look at the theory of natural selection, you find nonsensical and illogical statements, over and over again, statements that neither make any logical sense nor map to observable reality. The problem, therefore, is not that these people are trying to figure out how species evolved, it's that they insist on using a theory that, REPEATEDLY, not only fails to explain how species evolved, it provides the best evidence that their foundational premise of natural selection, on which their house of cards is built, is WRONG. And yet, they insist, and insist and insist, and defame and denigrate anyone who points out the fecklessness of their theory and the abusive tactics they use to protect it.

 

[Joe]

But if you’re going to suggest I have some selection-and-substitution going on, I would like to hear evidence in support of your view.

Why don't YOU provide some evidence for that view? Because it is undoubtedly an accurate view. You, like anyone with a decent amount of self-insight, should be able to come up with LOTS of examples where you cherry pick data to suit your own needs. Yet you want us to do it for you?

How long have you been on this forum? How much of the psychological reading have you done? If you don't know that you, as a human being, tend to engage in selection and substitution of premises MUCH of the time, then you haven't learned much. There seems to be very little self-doubt in you whitecoast, and that's a problem. What part of Gurdjieff's 'man is a machine' did you not apply to yourself? All of it?

 

[Joe]

If you develop a hypothesis or theory that explains maybe 60% of the variance that is seen in nature, that’s still better than having no clue why things are the way they are. But if I were Stove I could just find an example of an object that happens to be part of the 40% and go, “See? Theory falsified”. But that is fallacious because that doesn’t nullify the 60% that was explained.

Say you empirically look at a ton of examples in the 40%, and refine and develop your theory to include other elements that explain an additional 20%, topping up now to explaining 80% of the variation in total. Would this convince Stove that the theory and process used to produce and elaborate on it is helpful? If Darwinian Fairytales is anything to go by, Stove would point to that item in the 20% of cases not explained and say that that disproves the theory, never mind the 80% it actually explained.

Say you did this, and then say that science does that, and then say that Dawkins is right about 80% of something. Do you actually think you're making any kind of valid point here?

Stop waffling and show HOW mutation + natural selection explain 60% or 80% of evolution. Talk about a straw man argument!!

 

[Joe]

That’s ultimately what all his wrong-headed counterfactuals come down to (his notions about cherishing one’s sperm and eggs as much children, or wondering why robins are able to be fooled by experimenters, or being genuinely puzzled why apes don’t permit child-napping). He makes the same fallacy back with Darwin and his talk about what is now called the r-selective nature of reproductive and survival strategies. It just shows a lack of understanding of the field and the other behavioral forces at play.

WHAT "behavior forces"? Explain how they make it make sense. All of those other "behavior forces" are THEORIZED in an attempt to make their sacred cow eat grass like a real cow! You still don't understand how a set of hypotheses that have NOT BEEN PROVEN and in fact are counter intutive, are being touted as a plausible answer! Stove is taking the core of what darwinists claim they are sure about and applying it 'in the field' and it doesn't work! And when it doesn't work, they come up with various "well it could be doing this" answers that they have NO objective evidence for in an attempt to defend their dodgy theory!

 

[Joe]

If biology doesn’t explain something currently, that doesn’t mean what CAN be understood is necessarily false.

The sun looks like it revolves around the earth. That's an explanation that "can be understood", if you don't know enough. Yet it IS false. You still fail to understand that ALL of the theory of natural selection and random mutation is a THEORY.

I can look at interstellar space through a telescope, observe the movements of stars and the light and radiation they emit and devise a grand philosophical explanation of HOW and WHY they are doing those things. I am correct about what I see, but there is no reason to believe that my philosophical theory is also correct. Why, because it's a THEORY! NOT based on any objective knowledge of understanding of the true nature of those things. Natural selection and mutation happen, the explanation as to WHY and HOW they happen is a philosophy, a BELIEF, and if I am wrong in that belief then the fact that I can see their functions is of little significance, because ANYONE can see that.

 

[Joe]

(implying that altruism is not selected for and therefore is not a good strategy). And here: “In the [materialist] view, why would you not cheat and act selfish and lie and scheme whenever you can get away with it? It will pay off, after all!” (Sometimes it can, but often it doesn’t, as JBP or Samenow stress in their books about crime and cheating not paying off long-term.)

Altruism is NOT selected for, according to ND proponents. Luc didn't say it was not a good strategy, he just said it was not "randomly selected for". JBP and Samenow are talking from a certain perspective, advocating a certain philosopy for certain people. For those in whom "natural selection" has selected for the most effectively selfish genes, cheating and selfish acts do pay off, they are the fastest path to getting to the 'top of the heap' if you learn how to cheat properly. Ask any congressman, for example. A logical conclusion from the work of Dawkins is that people who aren't good a cheating just need to breed with better cheaters.

 

[Joe]

It’s like a bunch of people telling you that you have a blue dot on your face. You look in the mirror and don’t see anything but everyone is telling you it is there.

In this case, he didn't even look in the mirror, but just insisted that he's not the kind of person who could ever have a blue dot on his face.