Two Jehovah's Witnesses came to my door...

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Gedrene
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05 Nov 2011, 1:18 pm

AngelRho wrote:

DC wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

I am not exactly sure why people are saying that the development of the cosmos and biological evolution don't have something to do with each other when they naturally follow each other.

Ok simple explanation.

Let us say we are having a discussion about the applicability of Newton's second law to the flow rate of oil through a pipe.

You decide that you don't like this Newton fellow and that the reason oil is moving more slowly is because the invisible pixies are upset and have stopped farting. In order to make the oil move quickly we should paint the pipe pink because pixies like the colour pink and more happy pixies will come and fart near the pipe.

I say you are nuts and laugh at you.

Your insane delusional belief in pixies means that you also believe the universe was crapped into existence by the Great Pixie King after a particularly large curry one night.

You decide that you can disprove the Newton's second law by changing the subject to cosmological origins and correctly pointing out that I can not prove that the universe WASN'T created by the Great Pixie King.

This of course PROVES that the universe was in fact created by a bowel of the Supreme Pixie Overlord therefore the big bang didn't happen therefore atoms do not exist therefore oil does not exist and we should all bow down and worship pixies.

There is not a single thought, or argument, or debate about any topic in existence which can not be 'won' by following the same logic.

Could you avoid being quite so garrulous when you talk about saying people are being up their arse?

91
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05 Nov 2011, 3:34 pm

Gedrene wrote:

91 wrote:

Lets not forget that Dawkins himself is open to the idea that life on Earth was seeded by intelligent life.

I'd like to see where you got that from.

Its from an interview he conducted with Ben Stein for Stein's documentary 'Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed'.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_NNjUgE9fQ[/youtube]

Gedrene wrote:

On whose authority and what reason? The Miller-urey experiment itself managed to form many different organic molecules. If anything the experiment was too conservative in the mixture of volcanic gases that might have been present.

Miller thought that he produced twenty amino acids. Many scientsists found that in 2007 by analysing Miller's sealed tubes they found far over 20 amino acids.

Amino acids do not need to be developed Earth; we know that they exist in space. The Murchison meteorite tells us that the Chicago researchers were looking at the Abiogenesis problem too early in time-frame; since it is possible that amino acids were present when the Earth was formed. The experiment was a success if one's aim was to develop amino acids the experiment was a success in the sense that they manufactured these acids but not in the sense that this was a solution to the question of the beginning of life.

http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_ch ... iller.html

Paul Davies in his book 'The Fifth Miracle' kind of summed it up:
'I am now of the opinion that there remains a huge gulf in our understanding... This gulf in understanding is not merely ignorance about certain technical details, it is a major conceptual lacuna.’

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Gedrene
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05 Nov 2011, 4:38 pm

91 wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

91 wrote:

Amino acids do not need to be developed Earth; we know that they exist in space.

And the Miller-Urey experiment provided us with the evidence that amino acids can spontaneuously form in volcanic environments, thus making the exobbiological theory redundant by occam's razor. Furthermore the chance of life forming thanks to usual air and volanic conditions at the time is more reliable than a meteorite collision.

91 wrote:

The experiment was a success if one's aim was to develop amino acids the experiment was a success in the sense that they manufactured these acids but not in the sense that this was a solution to the question of the beginning of life.

This is untrue and I shall now explain why. Volcanic conditions are required for the formation of life because in warm conditions over 70 centigrade phosphoric acid can act as a catalyst for amino acids and allow for the formation of Proteinoids.
When in dense enough concentrations, something only possible in continuously high temperatures over a period of time, these proteinoids can become part of what are known as microspheres. These occur as some of the amino-acids are more hydrophobic. They are not considered life but life-like for these reasons:
film-like outer wall.
osmotic swelling and shrinking.
budding.
binary fission (dividing into two daughter microspheres).
streaming movement of internal particles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteinoid

So the Miller-urey experiment was very important as not only does it cut out the idea of needing asteroids but also matched the environment wherein the nextstage of complexity could be formed.

91
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05 Nov 2011, 5:15 pm

Gedrene wrote:

I don't think it is a matter of viewing them as necessarily competing explanations; unless there is a truly divergent result of the two processes they mostly interchangeable. Since I am neither a geologist nor a biologist; I am open to hearing if there are amino acids that necessary but cannot be accounted for using the miller-urey experiment. That said, if discussing them as interchangeable competing explanations is redundant with regards to my point. The fact that amino acids are far more common that was previously thought and that they may have been on Earth since its formation reduces the profundity of the miller-urey findings. This was the point of the article I linked to at Duke University.

Gedrene wrote:

I appreciate the promise that was once presented by the study of proteinoids with regards to the formation of the first cell. We have however been studying them for decades and have revealed some critical issues with regards to their place in a theory of abiogenesis. This is straight from my mate's biology textbook; We have never seen one convert to a protein, they do not possess the ability to copy DNA, the dried and purified form proteinoids do not occur in nature, they have not been observed under natural circumstances; heating amino acids destroys proteins, viable protiens consist of only L form amino acids proteinoids have equal parts D&L form amino acids (D form acids render proteins nonfunctional). Each of these points will has been and will need to be the subject of major research. A quick check of google scholar will tell you that not a great deal of progress has been made on the subject.

Fox kept predicting that protienoid theory was about to fix the whole abiogenesis problem up until he died. His own lab published a massive critique of the theory. This book has a good discussion of the matter in it. Steven J. Dick, James Edgar Strick, 'The living universe: NASA and the development of astrobiology' Pg 42

This is rather moot unless you intend to claim that without Miller-Urey there would not have been any experimentation on amino acids which is quite separate research from the experiment to create amino acids.

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Last edited by 91 on 05 Nov 2011, 5:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Gedrene
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05 Nov 2011, 5:52 pm

91 wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

I appreciate the huge promise that is presented by the study of proteinoids with regards to the formation of the first cell. We have however been studying them for decades and have revealed some critical issues with regards to their place in a theory of abiogenesis. This is straight from my mate's biology textbook; We have never seen one convert to a protein, they do not possess the ability to copy DNA, the dried and purified form proteinoids do not occur in nature, they have not been observed under natural circumstances; heating amino acids destroys proteins, viable protiens consist of only L form amino acids proteinoids have equal parts D&L form amino acids (D form acids render proteins nonfunctional).
This is rather moot unless you intend to claim that without Miller-Urey there would not have been any experimentation on amino acids which is quite separate research from the experiment to create amino acids.

You see the issue with saying that Miller-urey wasn't important is that it shows how amino acids formed iin solution in earth's early atmosphere in and around ahot area, which proteinoids need to form and this will allow for the formation of microspheres.
At some point a cluster of proteinoids must have interacted with some other form of easily constructible replicating molecule such as RNA or a similar molecule such as PMA GNA or TNA must have interacted with proteinoids. These can form self-replicating RNA molecules. Presumably a microsphere can in chance allow RNA molecules to pass inside the proteinoid. Then it's simply a case of allowing the microsphere to allow the substrated to diffuse through slowly and allow the molecule to slowly proliferate. This is hypothetical however.

AngelRho
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05 Nov 2011, 8:10 pm

Quote:

Gedrene wrote:

AngelRho wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

Not really :/ since you already said that amino acids could form spontaneously.

Yes, really. Life doesn't spontaneously leap out of amino acids.

And now we're going in to fine definitions that you didn't care about earlier. Also you're wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteinoids

AngelRho wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

This is a weak excuse. Science isn't cut in to separate categories that have no overlap. You ever hear of a biochemist?

So apart from the facts we DO agree on, be careful not make the mistake of asserting that one necessarily HAS to do with the other since we are talking about separate scientific disciplines--chemistry and biology.

No we aren't. We are talking about two very closely related fields: organic chemistry and biochemistry.

Gedrene wrote:

No you weren't. You were basically saying that abiogenesis didn't occur because organic molecules didn't instantly form in to toads and you readily admit that amino acids can be formed. You also tried to put across this theory which is basically a christian creation doctrine in disguise and has no significant scientific basis except by using it as a convenient stopgap.

Strawman.

Strawmen aren't true.

AngelRho wrote:

But not a single toad has spontaneously hopped out of a test tube yet.

If you don't want to feel stereoyped then don't act like one

Gedrene wrote:

Maybe I was exaggerating, but the point still stands.

You can admit to it rather than hazard at it. Life has never spontaneously formed in a test tube.

Gedrene wrote:

If you say it takes billions of years, then you are admitting that it is essentially unobservable and thus unfalsifiable.

Fossils do not have to be alive for fossils to exist. I said that it took biollions of years of evolution for toads to come about, not for cells to exist. You're extrapolating my words to say what you want.

AngelRho wrote:

That's not observable, either, but it's a better hypothesis than classic abiogenesis.

You haven't even tried to look at the abiogenesis page on wikipedia have you? If you studied it you'd know that there are so many different theories that your assertion that atheists find abiogenesis a problem is patently false.

AngelRho wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

Not true, all of the atheists here have readily provided explanations of evolution through links and by criticizing extremely fallacious arguments on religious people's part.

Well, there you go. You have people providing explanations that are biased by anti-supernatural presuppositions. Bias is very unscientific, wouldn't you agree?

And your assertion that atheists are automatically biased is highly offensive, not to mention a charlatan-like ad hominem atack. You decided that they are biased because they are atheists whilst ignoring the possibility that they are atheists because they have evidence. I don't need this forum plagued by wan bigotry.

AngelRho wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

That's untrue. Evolution's driving mechanism is the theory of natural selection and the Selfish Gene theory.

OK, but now you're separating the biology from the chemistry.

You know if you didn't delete half of my response and your response then you couldn't make this argument:
You said this:

AngelRho wrote:

The main problem with evolution is its lack of a driving mechanism.

And I said that's untrue and explained what is true. No point trying to fudge in your biology and chemistry have nothing to do with eachother rubbish by way of a diversion.

AngelRho wrote:

And that's my central criticism of macro-evolution. If DNA/amino acids/protein polymers/reproductive cells (even single-cell organisms) cannot form, you get no life to even evolve. Without a working origins hypothesis or theory, you can't get even the beginnings of evolution. THAT kind of evolution is nothing but question-begging.

That isn't begging the question for the start. Begging the question goes like this:
God exists. Why? Because the bible says so? Why? Because he exists. I say this because a Jehovah's witness was basically saying that all the time.
Second I wasn't even talking about that at all. I was talking about howyou were wrong about there being no diriving mechanism and that the creation of cells isn't evolution, it's abiogenesis as you said yourself. You were trying to change the meaning of evolution by widening its definition so you could then make a criticism of it.

AngelRho wrote:

You can cry and scream "chemistry and biology have nothing to do with each other," but you can't have life without a precursor. Chemistry has yet to provide a precursor. Without a chemical foundation, you get NOTHING.

I think you're psychologically projecting now. Quit being so precocious. I already said that isn't true. You're just trying to tell me what to think.

AngelRho wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

Because you say so.

Look, ask DC if you don't believe me. That's the whole point he was trying to make. Chemistry and Biology are TWO SEPARATE DISCIPLINES.

And now you're you're just openly trying to discriminate against me because of another's behaviour. Fantastic.

Gedrene wrote:

Your explanation is ad-hoc and relies on a misrepresentation of actual ideas.

You need a better handle on philosophy, then. I'm barely a hack at this kind of thing, but at least I know the difference between ad hoc and strawman. If I've actually purposefully misrepresented anything, that would be straw man, not ad hoc. Ad hoc means that something is either too complicated or requires too many assumptions. Read up on Occam's razor.

AngelRho wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

...form despite the fact that frogs take billions of years to evolve.

So it's unfalsifiable, then? If you can't falsify (test) something, it's not science. It's science fiction. And I repeat: Amino acids are NOT life.

I don't need frogs to evolve froma primitive substrate in order to prove abiogenesis and I don't need frogs to evolve in order to prove evolution. I have already provided links that solve the problems you make referred to by abiogenesis. Saying that just because a theory doesn't have evidence is therefore science fiction is a comment worthy of a person who has no understand of how science actually works.

There's no need to selectively quote in order to worm through:

Gedrene wrote:

You say that organisms could have been formed and then decided that this wasn't good enough because frogs didn't instantly form despite the fact that frogs take billions of years to evolve.
You obviously haven't read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Current_model

LKL
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05 Nov 2011, 10:07 pm

Wrt. Dawkins on Expelled:
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/2394
quote:

Quote:

Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe).

http://www.expelledexposed.com/index.ph ... ew-tactics
also, for the lulz:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/03/expelled.php

Vigilans
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05 Nov 2011, 10:16 pm

^That's something that always occurs to me, in that a "Creator" would have to have gone through some sort of process of creation or evolution itself. The few times I have presented this to ID advocates or the other euphemisms they choose to label themselves as, they come back with answers along the lines of "Well God is infinite". Oh, okay, thanks for answering my question. I guess that's settled.

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91
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05 Nov 2011, 10:44 pm

__________________________
Note again, so I am not taken out of context, I subscribe the theory of evolution and am not a supporter of the intelligent design movement.
__________________________

@LKL

Watch the full interview.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlZtEjtlirc[/youtube]

Dawkins when cornered usually reverts to a sort of pathological condescension. Take these statements about him from his own peers.

Oxford Historian Tim Stanley
'We are left with two possible conclusions from Richard Dawkin’s flimsy sick note. The first is that he doesn’t understand Christian apologetics, which is why he unintentionally misrepresents Craig’s piece.'
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timst ... ane-craig/

Dr. Daniel Came, Atheist Philosopher at Oxford
“The absence of a debate with the foremost apologist for Christian theism is a glaring omission on your CV and is of course apt to be interpreted as cowardice on your part. I notice that, by contrast, you are happy to discuss theological matters with television and radio presenters and other intellectual heavyweights like Pastor Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals and Pastor Keenan Roberts of the Colorado Hell House.”

Vigilans wrote:

That's something that always occurs to me, in that a "Creator" would have to have gone through some sort of process of creation or evolution itself. The few times I have presented this to ID advocates or the other euphemisms they choose to label themselves as, they come back with answers along the lines of "Well God is infinite". Oh, okay, thanks for answering my question. I guess that's settled.

I actually mentioned this a couple of pages ago. It is point three of Dawkin's own central argument. Here is what I said:
Elementary rules of inference tells us that this sort of logic does not work because it leads to an infinite regress. One does not need an explanation of the explanation in order to make an inference.

What Dawkins is doing here is actually invoking regress. For example take the monolith in 2001; you can recognize that it is not naturally occurring but you not need an explanation of how it was built or what it is in order to posit its non-natural origins.

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phil777
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06 Nov 2011, 12:19 am

The last time Jehovah's witnesses came to my door, I just talked with them about stuff regarding religion, mostly from my classes. <.< And I made it pretty clear that no one in the household would be interested. ^^;

cw10
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06 Nov 2011, 12:32 am

Gedrene wrote:

AngelRho wrote:

cw10 wrote:

Gedrene wrote:

cw10 wrote:

I think you confuse these two concepts as most people do:

A. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/evolution

has only a passing reference to:

B. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ ... +evolution

That's evolution as a word. I think your term cosmological evolution is actually a mistake. What you should actually say is cosmogony. Also It doesn't have a passing reference to the theory of evolution. It takes upp all of definition three.

Without cosmic evolution there would be no "Theory of Evolution" which is merely the study of biology. Cosmology invokes everything. Evolution occurs in many systems e.g. language, culture, chemistry, geology; it means change. "Theory of Evolution" means change in DNA only.

Exactly.

I didn't say Cosmology. I said Cosmogony. Cosmological evolution isn't a phrase anyone uses scientifically unless they're trying to make some pedantic argument about the theory of evolution.

Well no. I'm not referring to the origin of said universe, merely the changes that happened after it happened. Now the "Theory of Evolution" was coined by Darwin, but even he wasn't the first to see how life changed from form to form. Anaximander (If I remember correctly) was one of the first people in the world to see the concept evolution in life systems.

I don't see why cosmological evolution wouldn't be used. It's the study of how the entire cosmos changed from beginning to now, and even important in mapping it's future. Well I guess some would call that a unified theory, but unified theories are plentiful and none of them are actually unified. Even a grand unified theory will not incorporate biological systems, or geology for example. So I think my point is valid. But I take yours also, but I think we're talking about two different things.

Cosmogony falls into the realm of faith and philosophy. Great thinkers like Saint Thomas Aquinas make very good arguments for a first cause. The best scientific theories are just a pipe dream in my opinion. They fall outside the realm of this universe as far as testability. They are rooted as much in hope and faith as religion is, though there are convincing models but even those models are subject to loop back interference patterns. Maybe the universe on some substrate of reality looks like a Mandelbrot set. Look deep enough and you'll see yourself staring back at you as you slowly zoom in. Wouldn't that be interesting, and that would suggest the universe is shaped like a Möbius strip, but I'm not a fan of steady state theories anyway, so I'm going to nix that one.

Pardon me while I think in a thread.

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06 Nov 2011, 1:08 am

I love that you did that. That is all.

LKL
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06 Nov 2011, 2:28 am

@91:
Dawkins' 'pathological condescension' is merely honesty, when faced with repetitive, increasingly stupid arguments that the arguer thinks are 'cornering' him. Think about it: this entire movie, which creationists were sooo proud of, is basically just one giant Godwin with some trumped-up charges made by non-productive academics trying to pass off their poor reviews with cries of 'Prejudice, prejudice!'

Stein is basically badgering Dawkins with gap arguments and asking him to make guesses about improbable things. Is that supposed to be ...informative? Convincing? And that's the worst they can do, even with 90 minutes that they could 'creatively' edit to suit their purposes?

Frankly, the entire 'Expelled' production was such a poorly thought-out, poorly executed debacle (plagiarism, even!) that I'm more than a little surprised that you even brought it up in the first place. It's like 'Yasha yelling, "Journ-O-list!" over and over and thinking it means anything.

91
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06 Nov 2011, 2:37 am

LKL wrote:

I am not an advocate of intelligent design. They do however have a point when they discuss the presumption of naturalism in science. Naturalism is a philosophical position and ought to be treated as such.

LKL wrote:

Dawkins' 'pathological condescension' is merely honest

Its just a symptom of his lack of respect for people who don't agree with him and it is not an attitude that is limited to those who deny evolution. That said some of my atheist friends who have met him found him quite pleasant and encouraging.

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LKL
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06 Nov 2011, 3:33 am

When you're presented with the same debunked claims over and over by people who think themselves clever to present such claims, it's pretty difficult to be anything other than condescending.

As for naturalism, Dawkins is a scientist; what do you expect? No other position is testable, and therefore no other position has any place in science.

91
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06 Nov 2011, 4:32 am

LKL wrote:

No other position is testable, and therefore no other position has any place in science.

Naturalism is not testable. The proposition 'there is only the natural' is not in any way verifiable through it's own measure of testability. As a starting position it is self-refuting. As a general rule I would agree that a methodological naturalism is implicit in most scientific inquiry but pushing it to the limit that the brights movement does falls into the problem I just mentioned. Also certain claims of ID are testable; irreducible complexity for example is testable. It has been tested and found wanting as an explanation. So obviously some non-naturalistic claims are also testable.

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