Evolution vs Creationism/I.D. consolidation thread.

Originally posted by RJHinds
Trying to explain something to you is like trying to explain something to Ali G.

The Instructor

So far, you have totally failed to explain anything in a way that makes any sense.

Originally posted by humy
So far, you have totally failed to explain anything in a way that makes any sense.

Like I said, you are like Ali G.

YouTube

The Instructor

Originally posted by RJHinds
[b]What do I personally think Godel's Incompleteness Theorem has got to do with evolution?

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem showed that those looking to prove a theory of everything and an equation to represent it would never be able to do it, because there would be something they would have to assume that they could not prove and this applies to every ...[text shortened]... true or false. I believe evilution is based on many false assumptions.

The Instructor[/b]

Just to remind us of what your original point was I went back earlier and replied to one that seemed to sum up your position. I think you are confusing two issues. One is formal decidability in mathematical systems and the other is scientific epistemology.

It is true that a DNA sequence, or indeed an entire genome, can be represented as a Godel number. One would simply have to write "Chromosome 1:AGCTAGTC..." and then convert each character into ASCII and by regarding it as a number in base 128 (or 256 if you want unicode) one has a large number which uniquely represents that genome. However theorems about that DNA sequence rely on precise mathematical statements of genetics which I don't think we have yet. We can predict what proteins an individual sequence will transcribe, but that is entirely different from understanding the entire working organism based on its genome, which would be a perquisite . We don't yet understand the system well enough to identify or construct a sentence which is unprovable within the axioms of Genetics, because we don't yet understand genetics with the kind of precision to do that. The genome can mutate for random reasons (such as UV damage) and it's not clear how to include that in a Godel number for a genome. This kind of thing doesn't happen in arithmetic, 3 doesn't evolve into 4.

Even in physics we are not yet at the stage where Godel sentences matter. There is not yet a Total Theory of Everything - which in physics means a theory which has Gravity, the strong nuclear force, and electro-weak theory all wrapped up into one nice system - there are several candidates, but all have problems associated with them (mostly lack of evidence at the scales we can probe). No one has yet proved that Yang-Mills theories exist, never mind attempted to produce some kind of unprovable statement within them.

There are statements known to be unprovable within the standard model of particle physics even without Godel. The parameters, such as the electro-weak mixing angle, have to be measured. Some things are not specified by the theory anyway. This is not normally regarded as a problem with the theory.

The epistemology of science depends experiment or observation - I'll use experiment to mean both in the following - we assume our senses do not deceive us, repeatable experiments amount to knowledge of an imperfect kind, an assumption is that eventually someone is going to do the experiment correctly. Our measuring devices come with a precision, so that is one source of uncertainty. It is statistical in the sense that the likelyhood of the measurement being wrong by a certain amount is described by a Bell Curve. So if one requires a precision higher than the best available, one has to invent a new or improved method of doing whatever the measurement is.

The more interesting cases are ontological experiments such as particle searches. Famously the Higgs has finally been found. The justification for this is that fairly well understood physics predicted cross-sections smaller than observed. Detecting particles is a bit like a tossing a coin to see if it's fair. The conclusion that it's not depends on tossing the coin enough times that a discrepancy more than 5% (say) is incredibly unlikely. For the Higgs the requirement was "6 sigma" - this corresponds to a likelyhood of the result happening by chance this many times of 1 part in half a billion. This has been the standard since they had a particle disappear after announcing finding it at a likelyhood of 3 sigma (many years ago).

Conclusion:
A scientific fact comes with a statement of precision, or certainty. The likelyhood of the resonance detected at LHC being a phantom is one part in half a billion. This statement depends on the theory being able to predict cross-sections correctly. It has been carefully tuned to do just that at scales below the one we were probing at LHC. It is possible we have it all wrong but the likelyhood is low. It cannot be ruled out that the last 50 years of particle experiments have produced misleading results, but astoundingly unlikely. The likelyhood of the standard model of particle physics being incorrect at energy scales below about 1 GeV is to all practical purposes zero.

Science cannot detect God (see threads on agnosticism and atheism in debates and spirituality respectively) our experience is that our experiments are consistent with our theories, so if God does exist he doesn't confound scientific work, at least provided we don't attempt a Tower of Babel. So we proceed as if his existence doesn't make any difference to Scientific enquiry.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Just to remind us of what your original point was I went back earlier and replied to one that seemed to sum up your position. I think you are confusing two issues. One is formal decidability in mathematical systems and the other is scientific epistemology.

It is true that a DNA sequence, or indeed an entire genome, can be represented as a Godel numb ...[text shortened]... e proceed as if his existence doesn't make any difference to Scientific enquiry.

To state that science cannot detect god requires that it is impossible to
detect god for all possible definitions of god.

I am not sure that that is true.
I am pretty near certain that you can't prove it.

Thus that statement is unjustified.

It may or may not be possible for science to detect god/s.

Originally posted by DeepThought
Just to remind us of what your original point was I went back earlier and replied to one that seemed to sum up your position. I think you are confusing two issues. One is formal decidability in mathematical systems and the other is scientific epistemology.

It is true that a DNA sequence, or indeed an entire genome, can be represented as a Godel numb ...[text shortened]... e proceed as if his existence doesn't make any difference to Scientific enquiry.

Well. doesn't that at least support the idea that we can not claim evilution as a fact because we have never observed it and don't know enough about the biology to make such a claim? It is a leap of faith.

The instructor

Originally posted by googlefudge
To state that science cannot detect god requires that it is impossible to
detect god for all possible definitions of god.

I am not sure that that is true.
I am pretty near certain that you can't prove it.

Thus that statement is unjustified.

It may or may not be possible for science to detect god/s.

RJ's God is all powerful so can avoid that, my comments wrt God were personalized to him. I realize we differ on this - I don't apply scientific criteria to the existence of God - the more-or-less absence of non-biblical evidence is a fairly natural thing for an all powerful entity - so I'm an agnostic. I don't need to rule out finitely powerful gods if I cannot prove an all powerful one doesn't exist. My argument here depended more on supernatural entities not interfering with most experiments, since they are consistent with our theories and each other - our experience so far is that if they exist God and the Pixies aren't messing us up.

My major point was that RJ is confusing formal undecidability with the caveats that scientific epistemology has built into it. Science hasn't developed to the point where we can name a set of axioms, so Godel isn't something to worry about yet. Scientific knowledge comes with defined uncertainty. We may be wrong, its just implausibly unlikely (*) or at least controlled. In fact in physics we expect we are wrong, we expect the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be eventually overturned by new physics at some energy scale, it's just we also expect the new physics to be consistent with the the Standard Model at lower energy scales. More importantly the Godel argument was getting boring.

(*) I'm restricting this claim to fundamental physics. Biology's too messy and I don't understand it well enough to say that with any authority.

P.S. - can we keep the atheist/agnostic argument to the threads in Spirituality and Debates, it's not that I mind arguing about this stuff, I just don't want to keep track of three threads on more-or-less the same thing in three different forums. In any case I think we agree that Science should take a practical point of view and just get on with it.

Edit: Although the brief existence of faster-than-light neutrinos is evidence for the existence of Gremlins 😉

Originally posted by RJHinds
Well. doesn't that at least support the idea that we can not claim evilution as a fact because we have never observed it and don't know enough about the biology to make such a claim? It is a leap of faith.

The instructor

But it's a controlled leap-of-faith. We claim Darwin's theory of Evolution due to Natural Selection as a Scientific fact, which is one that comes with caveats about it's epistemology. My training is all in physics, so I'll make the following statement about physics - it's abstractly possible that we have physics totally wrong, it's just that the likelyhood is stunningly small, provided the energy scales involved do not exceed what we can access.

We do make the assumption that in the past the world was pretty much as it is today. There is no way of absolutely ruling out the Biblical Creation or Flood provided a false trail is left to keep God's existence uncertain. In science we just proceed on the basis it wasn't, and if it was then either eventually we'd spot the inconsistency or the universe is too good an imitation of what we expect it to be on the basis of most physics cosmological models say it should be for us to do anything other than believe the evidence and fashion our theories as if it wasn't.

Originally posted by DeepThought
But it's a controlled leap-of-faith. We claim Darwin's theory of Evolution due to Natural Selection as a Scientific fact, which is one that comes with caveats about it's epistemology. My training is all in physics, so I'll make the following statement about physics - it's abstractly possible that we have physics totally wrong, it's just that the ...[text shortened]... do anything other than believe the evidence and fashion our theories as if it wasn't.

Well, I took Physics I and II for Students Of Science and Engineering when I was in college. There was nothing in those Physics classes that had anything to do the age of the Earth. Of course those classes were in practical Physics and not in Theoretical Physics. So I would be interested in what you think Physics has to do with the age of the Earth.

Here is a video of a person presenting evidence in several sciences (Not Physics) for a young Earth.

YouTube

The Instructor

Originally posted by RJHinds
Scientist have already determined that they can store their own information in DNA and to write their own programs in it. Have you forget this? I believe you were the one that posted a link to it.

The Instructor

The ancients on Easter Island used rope as a language. Does that mean rope IS a language?

Originally posted by sonhouse
The ancients on Easter Island used rope as a language. Does that mean rope IS a language?

This exposes the basic illogical of RJHinds.

I can sum up what is fundamentally wrong with his deeply erroneous claim in just two sentences:

Godel's Incompleteness Theorem only applies to languages which expresses HYPOTHESES.
The genetic code is not only not a true language but in nature it obviously does not express hypotheses (because that is totally nonsensical ) thus Godel's Incompleteness Theorem does not apply to either the genetic code nor evolution which is not even a language in any sense by any stretch of the rational imagination

I didn't bother to post this to him here because he has already demonstrated that he is too stupid to get it.

Originally posted by humy
This exposes the basic illogical of RJHinds.

I can sum up what is fundamentally wrong with his deeply erroneous claim in just two sentences:

[b]Godel's Incompleteness Theorem only applies to languages which expresses HYPOTHESES.
The genetic code is not only not a true language but in nature it obviously does not express hypotheses (because that is tota to post this to him here because he has already demonstrated that he is too stupid to get it.

It is obvious the motivation for such statements as the attempt to force DNA to be seen as a language: If it is a language, it by definition has to come from an intelligence making up the language, a language therefore that could in theory be deciphered by another intelligence.

So it is an offshoot of the 'intelligent designer' hypothesis.

Since he has shown zero in the way of personal creativity in any of these issues, I would conclude this is not his own idea but just a repaving of something he found on the internet, some right wing creationist nutter with a degree in biology or something.

The Young Age of the Earth

YouTube

The Instructor

Originally posted by RJHinds
The Young Age of the Earth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W12jUKnPbHI

The Instructor

Well first off, your buddy DOCTOR Robert V Gentry is not a doctor, does not have a PHD and therefore does not have the academic creds to make sweeping statements about the age of the Earth. He is NOT a nuclear physicist, he is at best a nuclear engineer working on designs specified by the ACTUAL Phd nuclear physicists.

A masters degree is by definition, redoing the work of someone else, there is no actual creativity of something new scientifically in an MS degree. That comes with a PHD.
In that regard I know of which I speak. I work directly with 2 Phd's, very high powered guys, degrees from MIT and Cornell in material science. We also have some engineers with MS degrees. The MS degree engineers are working on new designs for our company BASED on the original work done by our resident Phd's.

He was terminated from Oak ridge laboratory for his participation in Mclean V Arkansas, the law suite trying to force creationism to be taught along side evolution, which they lost, fortunately for the sanity of the world.

His polonium halo data has been proven to be bogus which is the centerpiece for his so-called research.
It is not science when you START with a built in agenda.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/gentry.html

I guess you assume we have some kind of problem remembering the times you have put this bogus video up before.

Originally posted by sonhouse
Well first off, your buddy DOCTOR Robert V Gentry is not a doctor, does not have a PHD and therefore does not have the academic creds to make sweeping statements about the age of the Earth. He is NOT a nuclear physicist, he is at best a nuclear engineer working on designs specified by the ACTUAL Phd nuclear physicists.

A masters degree is by definition me we have some kind of problem remembering the times you have put this bogus video up before.

That talk origins site is an atheist evolution site that spread lies in an attempt to keep the theory of evilution alive. It is not a credible scientific site. The video gave references to peer reviewed articles in reputable scientific magazines. The only ones that challenge those articles are unreputable sites like your talk origins.

The Instructor

WhOriginally posted by RJHinds
That talk origins site is an atheist evolution site that spread lies in an attempt to keep the theory of evilution alive. It is not a credible scientific site. The video gave references to peer reviewed articles in reputable scientific magazines. The only ones that challenge those articles are unreputable sites like your talk origins.

The Instructor

The fact remains he is not a nuclear physicist like he claims. MS degrees are almost entry level for the big boys. Are you disputing he got canned for being involved with a clear creationist legal proceeding?

I'll say it once more: When someone comes into an investigation, scientific, forensic, medical, whatever, if that person has a built in agenda, anything he says will be suspect. He will twist, seize anything he can to try to prove his agenda. That is not science, that is subverting science to his own ends, and those ends are clearly stated. He is just another apologist for the creationist fairy tale.