"God" is just our name for the only alien willing to waste his time with the little pink monkeys on this mudball. He's actually an exile from his race because of his unhealthy obsession with intillectually stunted species.

I prefer science's willingness to concede that sometimes it just doesn't know, as opposed to forming convenient stories to fill in the gap.

There's a hell of a lot more backing up science. Christianity has a book. Just one, and it's about 2000 years out of date.

quote:

Originally posted by boogerhead:
"God" is just our name for the only alien willing to waste his time with the little pink monkeys on this mudball. He's actually an exile from his race because of his unhealthy obsession with intillectually stunted species.

Holy crap! Boog's a Gnostic! You think you know a
guy...

quote:

Originally posted by klik:
Guys, 250,000 dollars is a lot of money maybe we should take them seriously.

Quarter million, from a guy unwilling to be convinced.

A *even safer* bet would be for millions of dollars on the proof of existance of a diety.

Shit...I can't even convince myself that I exist.

Well, I'm convinced you exist, boog. After all, there's nearly as much written about and by you as there is about that guy from Nazareth (the place, not the band).

Big difference is, when you make a plea to boogerhead, he's more likely to respond than that other guy.*

*whoops. fell into the born-again trap, whereby you worship the guy from Nazareth, rather than his dear ol' da.

I'm sure it's a trick to screw with the unwary.

You think you're doing great praying to the great prophet and doing good works, but then you find the pearly gates locked and they won't open them up no matter how much you try.

Then next thing you know some spiky headed guy's giving you a tour of the new resort they just opened up on the shores of the burning river and asking you not to step on his tail.

Why? Because you broke the first shiny rule.

"Do not have any gods before Me. Do not represent (such gods) by any carved statue or picture or anything in the heaven above or the earth below or in the water below the land. Do not bow down to or worship them."

quote:

Originally posted by boogerhead:
Shit...I can't even convince myself that I exist.

You don't.

Fun editorial in the Times about ID.

Although you'll have to register to read it, I think.

quote:

SO get in line, intelligent designers. Get in line behind the hypothesis that life started on Mars and was blown here by a cosmic impact. Get in line behind the aquatic ape hypothesis, the gestural origin of language hypothesis and the theory that singing came before language, to mention just a few of the enticing hypotheses that are actively defended but still insufficiently supported by hard facts.

Exactly.

quote:

Originally posted by boogerhead:
Shit...I can't even convince myself that I exist.

No more cough syrup for you, young man. What did I say about seeing through the barriers of space time and contemplating existence?

cough syrup? Is that what that was???

quote:

Originally posted by Witness:
I would like to hear someone's ideas on how God came into being.

You HAVE to read Douglas Adams's speech on "is there an artificial God" in the posthumously published book "The Salmon of Doubt"...

PS. Q. What does the insomniac dyslexic agnostic lie awake in bed worrying about at night?

A. The insomniac dyslexic agnostic lies awake in bed at night worrying whether or not there's a Dog.

You're right, of course, Witness. And it's a great sermon stopper when you're being proseltyzed at by Jesus freaks. "No, my friend, you're going to Hell!".

There's an ABC segment on Brendan Nelson wanting to introduce ID into Aussie schools.

WHY THE FUCK ARE WE DEBATING THIS?

AND I'M SICK OF THE GOVERNMENT BEING SUCH A BUNCH OF US-FELLATING SYCOPHANTS.

God, why do we have to let the fucking US godbotherers drag us down?

There's a good piece in The Guardian by Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne against ID, full of passages I wish I had written:

"When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong."

"Intelligent design...is not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one. It might be worth discussing in a class on the history of ideas, in a philosophy class on popular logical fallacies, or in a comparative religion class on origin myths from around the world. But it no more belongs in a biology class than alchemy belongs in a chemistry class, phlogiston in a physics class or the stork theory in a sex education class. In those cases, the demand for equal time for "both theories" would be ludicrous. Similarly, in a class on 20th-century European history, who would demand equal time for the theory that the Holocaust never happened?"

"If ID really were a scientific theory, positive evidence for it, gathered through research, would fill peer-reviewed scientific journals. This doesn't happen. It isn't that editors refuse to publish ID research. There simply isn't any ID research to publish. Its advocates bypass normal scientific due process by appealing directly to the non-scientific public and - with great shrewdness - to the government officials they elect."

And much more. I suspect this piece is preaching to the choir (it's in The Guardian, after all), but as an argument against ID it's pretty devastating.

This thread has grown into a pretty decent one-stop-shop for anyone interested in the evolution/ID issue. I teach a course on evolution for non-majors at my university and I have found material on this thread that was very useful. Thanks to all (esp. Colin).

G

quote:

Originally posted by G-natrix:
This thread has grown into a pretty decent one-stop-shop for anyone interested in the evolution/ID issue. I teach a course on evolution for non-majors at my university ).

G

Jesus, dude, there's enough people trying to shut this discussion up. That posting has to be one of the ultimate thread-killers.

Nonetheless and undeterred ("Silence alone is strength, all else is weakness" -- a quote from Carl Sagan's "Contact" -- I'm just being weak here) --

Since you all keep asking, I'm going to do a bit of arithmetic here, and show you what I think is real "intelligent design". This is a precis of the beginning of David Sloan Wilson's first monograph on population biology, which I read in draft in 1977, and have had ticking in my head ever since. It's arithmetic, folks, the hardest thing is the ">" ("greater than") symbol.

I just want to take a tilt at orthodox Darwinism, and show you that there are very simple alternative pictures.

Let's look at an "altruistic" trait. This is where you do some work on the environment that is of benefit (gain) to every member of your species in your area, but done at your own cost. The gain to every member of the species (including yourself) is g, the cost is c. So imagine the altruist (A) going head-to-head with the selfish type (S).

The selfish type gets all the gain, g. The altruist also gets the gain, but at cost c. Total gain for selfish type: g. Total gain for altruist: g-c (gain minus cost).

Condition for altruism to win out:

g-c > g

This can only be satisfied if the cost is negative (i.e. not really a cost). Conclusion: altruism loses. (This is the basic Darwinist picture -- altruism cannot be advantageous).

Scenario two. Let's imagine random scattering of altruistic and selfish types. Let's imagine that they end up head-to-head in small environments (imagine two frogs in one pond) where they only feel each other's effects. I know this is a lot of assumptions, but they're very simple and clear.

There are four possible equally likely "scatterings" of two individuals of the species. AA; AS; SA; SS. (This is like tossing two coins, heads and tails).

Let's assume (another assumption, but give me some space here) that the benefit is simply cumulative -- if you have two altruists doing "good deeds" on the environment, the benefit simply doubles. This is a really simple but plausible kind of assumption. An altruist does something good to the environment; two altruists do twice as much good. Now let's look at our four "ponds", each with two frogs.

Where you have two altruists, AA, each experiences twice the gain g, at individual cost c. Therefore you have two altruists who each experience gain (2g-c). (Gain from both, at only your own cost).

Where there's AS or SA, you have the head-to-head situation. The altruist gets gain (g-c), the selfish type gets gain g.

Where you have two selfish types, SS, there is no gain for either.

So the scenario is this: four equally likely possibilities:

A (2g-c) A(2g-c)

A (g-c) S (g)

S (g) A (g-c)

S (0) S (0)

So on average, if you take the total gain for the scattering of A types, you find a total gain of:

2 x (2g-c) + 2(g-c)

and if you take the total gain for the selfish types, you have just

2g

So the condition for altruism to be selected for, i.e. to put out more offspring into the total environment, is now:

2 x (2g-c) + 2(g-c) > 2g

And that simply reduces to this:

g>c

in other words, the gain must just be bigger than the cost. It DOESN'T MATTER that the selfish types are getting the gain without doing the work. The clump where there are more altruists feels a bigger gain, and there are more altruists there (... having your cake and eating it) -- so the altruistic trait will be selected for. Now the condition g>c, gain must be bigger than the cost, is the simple condition for ANY trait to be selected for.

So you can see that "altruism isn't altruism" -- if you allow RANDOM SCATTERING in a CLUMPY ENVIRONMENT (i.e effects are felt locally, two frogs in a pond, and they don't affect frogs in the pond next door) -- not such unlikely assumptions -- altruism is as viable as selfishness.

Again, if you are in contact with university biologists, GO AND ASK THEM -- is there a condition under which absolute altruism can be viable? And they will say 'no'. Show them this arithmetic and ask them the question again.

It can very simply be generalised (using the binomial distribution, the heads-or-tails distribution) in statistics, to "ponds" containing however many frogs. That was how David Sloan Wilson originally did it, the above is my simplification.

The "doyen" of population biology at the time, John Maynard Smith, dismissed these ideas as "just kin selection" (i.e. directing your altruistic traits at members of your own family). I remember how David Wilson was completely distraught at this criticism -- how could anyone think this was kin selection? -- but that was how it was written off. David never quite recovered from this, I think. His later work is much more complex. But I think it was all there in the original. I've only seen the first few pages of his book "Unto Others" (that's all Amazon.com will allow...) but he starts with a much more complex model. I think he got it right the first time.

Now let's think about God and intelligent design. What the ARITHMETIC is saying is that in a clumpy, scattered world, altruism can be exactly as viable as selfishness. IT'S YOUR CHOICE (as a species) -- let's put it like that, even if we're talking about random mutations. As conscious agents, it IS our choice whether to be selfish or altruistic.

The really interesting thing comes when you model what happens when you allow "evolution by indirect effects", ie by effects on the environment. Normally the matrix elements mediating two species' interactions, i and j, are just Aij. But now all the other species k can have an effect on the environment that can evolve, so you need to look at matrix elements Aikj, for all species k, to see all the influences on species i and j from ALL other species k on the environment. This is like saying: you've got birds (i) that eat termites in wood (j). You get an elephant (k) that knocks down the tree and exposes the termites to the birds. It influences the way i eats j. Because Dariwinists cannot see the "environmental" effect, as it looks "altruistic", normal Darwinism actually cannot see these matrix elements.

The moment you introduce the Aikj, summing over all species k in the ecosystem, making these RANDOM plus or minus amounts (random mutation...) you find that the overall biomass of the system goes UP. Try it - model it. It's a kind of miracle. The reason is that feedback chains are being set up that knock the "big predator" that's hitting a lot of species negatively. Work it out for yourself.

The upshot: a connected, coherent, co-operative ecosystem emerges that can drive the selfish "big predator" to extinction. The complete antithesis of Darwinism, which sees only "survival of the fittest". I see the alternative as "survival of the most fitting", in every sense of that word "fitting" -- the more altruists that can fit into a given space, the higher the benefits they will all enjoy, the more offspring they will put out.

Conditions for this kind of system to evolve: random scattering; clumpy environments.

Is that so unlikely?

Further conditions for altruism and co-operative networks to emerge (as shown by David Sloan Wilson's later work):

Culling in a broad swathe (broad is the way to destruction, pals); and

"Population viscosity", i.e. factors which slow down the spread of a population. Altruism is favoured by genetic relatedness (clumping) of members of your species in your immediate environment. This is now actually a bit more like kin selection.

Are these such unrealistic assumptions? Is the world not a bumpy place where it's not so damn easy to move around? David's models show that selfish types have to keep moving -- the local population gets genetically "wise" to them, and anyway, they're fouling their own environment and have to keep moving on.

This isn't tricky arithmetic, but it shows that a very simple set of conditions will allow overt selfishness to be matched by co-operative behaviour. And the co-operative network can then wipe out the selfish "big predator".

Is that enough for today? I have to go to work now, which I really don't want to do.

The Intelligent Designers want NOT to think, and yet know they're right -- after all, they've got god on their side. I think God is in the numbers. I really do. I think numbers have their own intelligence. I think a "lumpy" universe with random scattering and difficulty in dispersal is the perfect "field" in which to evolve a deep co-operative network, as we visibly see in the ecosystem around us.

This is all without even touching on the quantum physics and all that crap. But if the "intelligent designers" want to be scientists, they have to demonstrate a MECHANISM by which this "intelligent design" operates. The quantum picture does that too. It postulates that ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION is the 'intelligent organiser'. It says -- study the radiation from different parts of the sky, and see if it gives a picture. Jesus says "I am the Light" -- so for Christ's sake, STUDY light, use photomultipliers and spectrum analysers, and see what DNA is REALLY doing. If these guys would say stuff like that, they could be taken seriously as scientists.

In the meantime.... I really have to go to work.... (one of the curses of being in the newspaper business, someone has to go in on Sunday to make the paper happen on Monday).

Have I gone some way to shutting this thread up some more? I have more up my sleeve, you know. Beware.

quote:

God, why do we have to let the fucking US godbotherers drag us down?

They may drag you all down to hell yet.