Re: real theories vs imaginary tales such as natural selection

On Feb 22, 10:03 am, bryce.topmind.jac...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Feb 21, 1:59 am, topmind <topm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Free Lunch wrote:
Feel free, by all means, to make things up when you have shown yourself
to be wrong. Certainly making things up and lying is the best possible
way for you to get people to take you seriously -- if they hate science
or have a religious agenda. You have a history here. It's not one that
persuades me that you are merely misunderstanding things.
Misunderstandings do not go on for years.

If science was precise, somebody would have documented it by now.

Yes, and people have. Repeatedly. You have been provided summaries
and references to this documentation. You have chosen to remain
ignorant rather than educating yourself.

Continuing to claim that the scientific method has not been documented
is ridiculously dishonest.

People have answered your questions time and again, yet you reject the
answers and ask them because you have some private definition of
science, like the ID people do. Does your definition of science call
astrology science? Does it call religious doctrines science?

Like I said many times, I do not believe the concept is binary.

And, has been pointed out many times, your beliefs demonstrate your
ignorance and stupidity, but do not reflect on the underlying practice
of science.

Even your phrasing proves your lack of education. "Science is not
binary" is a meaningless statement. The scientific method is well
defined and can be summarized as observe, hypothesize, predict, test,
repeat. Observations must be replicable. Hypotheses must be
falsifiable. Using even this brief description, one can determine if
a particular set of behaviors is following the scientific method.
Either those behaviors meet the criteria or they do not.

The definition of a scientific hypothesis is equally clear cut. It
must predict something about objective reality, based on a empirical
observations, and the failure of one or more of those predictions must
serve to falsify the hypothesis.

Astrology is scientifically testable.

To be fair to Michael Behe, this is partially true. Astrology makes
predictions (although those predictions are not often based on
empirical evidence and the hypotheses don't serve to unify disparate
observations). The problem is that, when done rigorously,
astrological predictions turn out to be false.

More accurately, the predictions of astrology are no likelier to be
right than choosing answers at random. That is, there is no *causal*
relationship between the expectations of astrology and the
observations. Astrologers are 'right' often enough, given appropriate
vagueness in prediction and re-interpretation of the relationship
between prediction and result, that they can fool some people.

Basically astrologers rely on a willing suspension of disbelief and
the classic con of ignoring the failures and lauding the successes.
Con artists, for example, can do the math. If you write 10,000 people
that you have a sure-fire way to predict the way the market for gold
will move this week and tell half of them that it will go up and half
that it will go down, you will be right for 5,000 suckers. The next
week, you repeat the process, claiming (among the 5,000 previous
winners) that if they invest with you and your system, you will make
them a bundle. After 4 or 5 rounds, it will be a virtual certainty
that, among those that have seen you be right 4 times in a row, you
will find a sucker or two who thinks you actually do have a 'system'
for predicting winners.

Even religious doctrines can
testable to some degree. Nor can we rule out the (slim) possibility
that powerful or advanced beings are intervening with humans.

Unless and until you have empirical evidence for the existence of such
beings, speculation about them does not qualify as a scientific
hypothesis.

If you claim it binary, there must be a clear point where such ideas
no longer pass muster.

Explained repleatedly.

But you guys cannot even agree on such
boundaries. Professional scientists debate over whether SETI is
science or not.

Prove it. The SETI radiotelescope project is testing the null
hypothesis, namely:

"There are no narrow-band radio signals of ~21cm resonant wavelength
being emitted from planets orbiting nearby stars."

As Mark VandeWettering and others pointed out to you repeatedly during
your last infestation of this newsgroup, this is a scientific
hypothesis because:

"The hypothetical assumptions that underly the radio search for SETI
are that technological socities will use radio to communicate, as we
do. That they will be able to generate signals of comparable or
greater power than we can. That they will be scanning the heavens with
radio telescopes, as we do. That they will notice that there is a
region of the microwave spectrum which is lower in noise. That
contained within this band is the emission line for hydrogen, the most
common and lightweight element. That at a higher frequency is the
strongest emission line for the OH. That the signals they are likely
to use will be simple narrow band carriers, because they are easier to
detect. That these carriers will likely be Doppler shifted, since
they will originate from planetary bodies rather than stars.

These are a lot of assumptions, but the empirical consequence of
assuming these are that we should be able to test to see if these
assumptions hold: we can scan the heavens on a wide variety of
frequencies, looking for narrowband carriers within the target
frequencies."

Note the vast difference between this and the vague speculation of the
Bryce Jacobs cargo cult non-hypothesis ("There are no known sequential
prime digits (as defined by encoding algorithm X) longer than length Y
in the DNA of earth species.").

If there were clear rules, there would be no debate.

There is no debate, there is just you demonstrating your willful
ignorance and lack of education.

BJ

----http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/msg/dfa00a58f25f28ac:Bryce Jacobs (topm...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:

| First make a list of the first 500 prime numbers:
| A: 1, 3, 7, 11, 13, 17, 29 .....

.

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