Re: topmind: ID is potentially testable


topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:
topmind wrote:
neverbetter wrote:

|
--- 0.0000000000001 %
| <--------------------------------SANTA CLAUSE
--- 0.00000000000001 %

This seems like an unfair figure to me. Granted, some of the theories
are a bit much to swallow, such as the constant chimney climbing (we
are talking about a 300-year old fat guy after all, and how could he
keep his beard white if he spent all that time in blackened chimneys?).
But some versions of the Santa Claus theory are testable and after all
we do have the analogy with humans. Plenty of humans have worn a white
beard, driven vehicles drawn by reindeer, made toys and given them as
Christmas presents and even gotten shorter people to help out in their
tasks.


Oh great, fist the extremist evo nazi's are on my tail, and now the
Santa Nazi's also :-)

Actually it is similar to the definition of God issue. If you define
Santa as a guy capable of delivering 4 billion gifts in one night
without detection, then it is a long-shot. If you define him as a nice
guy in old Norway (where they actually dress sorta like Santa out of
culture) who gives a few dozen gifts to the local children, then the
probability estimation goes up.

Similary, "God" may simply be a dude(s) with a spaceship who tweaked
Ape DNA to produce humans. He/she/it could rightfully claim to have
"created man".

Yes. If you define "God", "Santa Claus" or "Intelligent Designer" so
that he's possible and testable, you'll find that he is possible and
testable. However, it doesn't mean that God/Santa/ID of any of the
other definitions people are more interested in are testable. It's just
a case of if you define a carrot as a potato, then carrots are
potatoes. If you define things very wide and broad, eventually concepts
become meaningless. The God who is worshipped by Christianity, Jews,
Islam gets his divine status from the idea that He's the sovereign over
everything, the creator of the whole universe, the Supreme Being who
defines the boundaries of good and evil and oversees everything, sees
your every secret thought and heart's desire, an eternal existence that
decides our ultimate fate. Those who worship this God would most likely
think that it's meaningless to call some dude with a spaceship God, if
he may be dead already and has no say about our morality or our
salvation, no power over us, doesn't answer or hear prayers and whose
only common feature with God-as-usually-defined is that he did some
experiments with primate DNA.

For example, if creationists scientifically proved that there was a
Biblical-type God and that he evolved with evolution before creating
man, then they have still made their point pretty much and have
Creation pretty close to what they claimed.

Sure but that's not what DNA-ID is going to prove if it finds patterns,
is it?

Not in the absolute sense. Patterns alone would not give us enough info
to distinquish between creators and fiddlers and hybrids.

And most would not be enough to tell that God evolved with evolution.

Unless perhaps the God or God-claimant gives us evidence.

If the tooth fairy decides to give us evidence we may be forced to
believe in the tooth fairy too. In the meantime, while we're waiting
for that to happen, any endeavour that relies on the off chance that
supernatural beings may at some point decide to give us proof that they
exist is more of a religious nature than scientific.

Like I said before, many milder religious people are more interested in
the origin of man far more than the origin of life or original
complexity. If fiddling is found in DNA, it boosts the speculation
about man being at least *shaped* by god-like beings (not necessarily
supernatural). We already "play god" with bacteria and crops.

I agree that finding logos or messages gives very little boost to
original-complexity-type speculation. But it is a strong boost to
interference-based versions of ID. The second is not necessarily
mutually-exclusive with evo even.

Somehow you seem to be replying beside my point. The speculations of
this type "If God claimant gives us evidence that he's been evolved we
might find such evidence" are not very fruitful in science, because
they're not based on actual evidence and as such there is an infinite
number of similar unfounded speculations. "If the tooth fairy decides
to start to mark the coins she gives out, we might find evidence for
dental economics." "If lateral batshake formations decide to give us a
call, we might talk with them. " "If there is a deep zen-buddhist
philosophy in Miami Vice, we might learn a lot about zen-buddhism by
watching Miami Vice." "If Santa Claus wants to prove his existence he
might start a website and we might find it if we google." Oh, wait, he
has a website: http://www.santaclausplaza.com/home


or anything you like as the
content of the pattern doesn't really matter if it isn't recognizable
as something that only God could know.

Depends on what kind of "God" we are talking about. The biggest
difference between religion and science fiction is that in religion the
"aliens" are very judgmental and nosey.

And harder to deal with as they can't be annihilated by a single pilot
doing a masterful flying manoeuvre.

It depends. One one says "god" they often mean superatural. However,
supernatural may simply mean that we don't understand the technology,
not that they are beyond the laws of physics (or the "outside physics"
if they have found a way to exit our universe).

There's plenty of technology I don't understand but I'm not prepared to
grant anybody divine status just because.

Tell that to Ipod and Tivo lovers :-)


In the "message in the bottle" link above, scientists propose it as a
way to "save" messages for future generations. And certainly mining DNA
that is already sequenced for other purposes is cheaper than digging
into mountains.

Lots of genomes are publicly available. Someone just needs to go ahead
and create specific search algorithms. It's a better hobby than some I
could think of.

Maybe. Again, I am only claiming testability, not tested.

And if someone does any testing, you're claiming the wrong specs were
used, instead of the ones you refuse to give because it's not your
burden?

I am not sure what you are refering to.

Well, you complained that Zachriel used wrong specifics but haven't
been willing to say what should have been used instead.

The way I see it, both SETI and DNA-ID have a handicap here since they
don't start from puzzling evidence in need of explanation, the
rationale is more along the lines of "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there
was some puzzling evidence that we might explain by invoking
aliens/Gods/robots, let's go look for some."

That is an interesting observation. Many don't consider SETI a legit
scientific endevour either.

I didn't say it wasn't legit, there's nothing wrong with trying to find
out if there are narrowband patterns in some data, it's just that it
starts out from speculation, although perhaps not quite as iffy as "If
Alien Genome Project left its logo somewhere in the ecosystem we might
find it", "If Tooth Fairy sends me e-mail I'll know that she exists" or
"If Thor decides to prove his existence by sending out some great
lightnings which form hammer patterns we'll be able to observe quite
fabulous thunderstorms."


It would convince me, for sure, but DNA-ID isn't going to make God
confess, is it?

I am just saying that the "original complexity" issue is not
necessarily a stumbling block. It may partly depend on whether you are
interested in finding the origin of complexity or the origin of life on
earth in particular. One is a grander question.

Most christians would be fairly happy with evidence that God (or an
alien claiming to be God) merely managed the process to lead toward
humans. Whether God actually used evolution as a tool or did it all in
a snap is not material to them. Thus, their question more likely
revolves around who guided the final product (humans). Original origin
is not the main question most will be concerned with.

Sure, purists may still not be satisfied, but lack of satisfaction is
the fate of most purists anyhow.

I guess my point here is that testing for original origin of complexity
is not necessarily the main question being tested. Evidence of
"guidence" is easier to test for than "from-scratch" creation.

Do you count inserting any non-functional patterns such as pictures and
prime numbers as guidance or should we find evidence for the elves
inserting functional code to conclude guidance? Does DNA-ID have
anything to say about the latter?

I do not understand your question.

The way I see it: what the regular ID is most interested in is the
source of complex biological functions or functional DNA. Where did the
flagella come from, how could the eye or the nervous system evolve if
they did, and so on. The origin of non-functional or junk DNA is not
usually considered a problem for non-directed evolution, even by IDers,
the functions are. The ID hypothesis is based on the assumption that
somebody guided the formation of functional DNA or some of it.

I think this is the right-wing (and most vocal) version of ID. Many
middle-wingers suspect that God may have used evo, and simply
interfered or "guided" it to create man.

Just man? Isn't that kind of partial interference covered by "somebody
guided the formation of functional DNA or some of it"? It seems to me
that the difference between apes and humans is so slight as there are
no new organs or biological functions involved that there isn't much
that God needs to do to guide evolution at that point if all the rest
before that was created by natural evolution. He might have had to
insert the soul but this does not appear to be covered by 'guiding
evolution'.


Now what the DNA-ID seems to be all about are messages in the DNA.
There seems to be no reason to suppose that the picture of Mona Lisa
also happens to code for any important biological functions such as
proteins involved in the making of the bacterial flagella or the
vertebrate eye. In theory, there's nothing to say that all functional
DNA couldn't also be interpreted as pictures, but designing it so
requires so much more sophistication that any limited designers would
probably go for the easier option and put messages in separately from
functions. So we're most likely talking about non-functional 'junk' DNA
which isn't used to produce proteins. I'm not aware of any tests we
could use to determine if the functional bits of DNA that aren't part
of Mona Lisa were originally thought up by a genetic engineer.

The question I was asking is: in your book, does inserting functionless
'junk' DNA to make a point count as the same kind of guidance as the
guidance involved in guided evolution and intelligent design, in which
the designer considers the functions and how they could be improved?
Even though inserting functionless bits does not necessarily mean that
the inserter had anything to do with designing the functional parts.

This seems to relate to the origin versus guidence issue described
earlier. DNA-ID is probably a better test of the second.

I don't see why, if you mean "origin" as in "created from scratch" and
"guidance" as in "helped evolution along towards some specific goal",
which both involve interference with functional DNA. If I'm right
saying that DNA-ID would be more likely to find images and patterns in
non-functional DNA because the pictures that can be forced into
functional genes are constrained by what works biologically (*) and
produces an useful protein then what's to prevent both the
creator-from-scratch and the just-helping-evo-along-a-bit-designer
from leaving their logos in the non-functional part.

(*) Of course, an omnipotent designer could by definition make anything
work, even a human with no DNA and proteins at all, so if the creator
is omnipotent all genomes may be giant messages which can be read in an
infinite number of ways backwards and forwards and sideways in an
infinite number of languages and make sense each time

Findings may
not make right-wingers happy, but middle winger Christains may be right
at home with it. (They may attribute the fiddling to angles or perhaps
even satan).

-T-

.

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