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Human Devolution
#51
RE: Human Devolution
And why should we care about your "opinions"?

Scare quotes are sure a fun way to easily dismiss someone, eh?
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#52
RE: Human Devolution
(January 20, 2017 at 3:22 am)Pulse Wrote: Unfortunately your duplicity betrays you, you still haven't answered who G.D. is but you post his "opinions" about academics as if it was Gospel. 
Don't project your faults on others. You are the one who is duplicitous because you want to make a case that Jesus created the world by using conclusions from Ben Stein who thinks Jesus is a useless fraud.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
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#53
RE: Human Devolution
Hmm, blindly accepting all of science except evolution, and trying to use it to disprove evolution. Again.

Why does that particular theory always cause such a stir?

Oh that's right. It makes magical creation accounts look ridiculous. Well, they already look ridiculous.

You're clearly not here to learn anything. You're here to make yourself feel better about your beliefs by slinging shit around at anything that you think opposes your viewpoint. You're incredibly aggressive and rude, and not worth dealing with. If evolution is "wrong", I wouldn't care. Makes no difference to me. I don't have to have all the answers. I don't need to gap fill with superstitious nonsense.
Feel free to send me a private message.
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#54
RE: Human Devolution
(January 20, 2017 at 4:03 am)robvalue Wrote: Hmm, blindly accepting all of science except evolution, and trying to use it to disprove evolution. Again.

Why does that particular theory always cause such a stir?

Oh that's right. It makes magical creation accounts look ridiculous. Well, they already look ridiculous.

You're clearly not here to learn anything. You're here to make yourself feel better about your beliefs by slinging shit around at anything that you think opposes your viewpoint. You're incredibly aggressive and rude, and not worth dealing with. If evolution is "wrong", I wouldn't care. Makes no difference to me. I don't have to have all the answers. I don't need to gap fill with superstitious nonsense.

Also the problem of copying and pasting long pseudo scientific answers from other people is that when people counter them, you don't have the knowledge or understanding to continue the conversation. So when I get round to answering Pulse's long copypasta about GAs he'll probably just end up repeating himself. Looking at that list of points, it's clear that the original author looked at the GAs mentioned in books written by atheist authors, and without actually understanding them, wrote down all the differences with natural evolution without care or knowledge about whether those differences were relevant or not.
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#55
RE: Human Devolution
Exactly, yeah.

Science just models reality. It has no beef. Religion keeps picking a fight with science. It should really stop that, because it will get beaten down every single time.
Feel free to send me a private message.
Please visit my website here! It's got lots of information about atheism/theism and support for new atheists.

Index of useful threads and discussions
Index of my best videos
Quickstart guide to the forum
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#56
RE: Human Devolution
(January 20, 2017 at 3:22 am)Pulse Wrote:
(January 20, 2017 at 12:56 am)Jörmungandr Wrote: [Image: Yawn.jpg]

So you don't have a response to Buchanan's rebuttal.  Big shock.

Unfortunately your duplicity betrays you, you still haven't answered who G.D. is but you post his "opinions" about academics as if it was Gospel. 

And you still haven't posted Buchanan's qualifications, or realised that he is An Evengelical Christian, and often quotes the Bible in his rebuttals in the comments section where there is plenty of dissent from his "opinions". 

Well done for quoting a Christian who quotes the Bible regularly  Clap

And that has what to do with his opinions of Sanford and his Genetic Entropy argument? It really shows what kind of mindset you have.

You really are shallow if you think my using a Christian as a source is some kind of fault. What kind of nonsense is that?

No substantive response to the points of the debate, so you make a bunch of irrelevant noise about sources. That's pathetic.

Do you have anything substantive and germane to say regarding his last comments about Sanford and genetic entropy?
[Image: extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg]
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#57
RE: Human Devolution
(January 20, 2017 at 4:10 am)Mathilda Wrote:
(January 20, 2017 at 4:03 am)robvalue Wrote: Hmm, blindly accepting all of science except evolution, and trying to use it to disprove evolution. Again.

Why does that particular theory always cause such a stir?

Oh that's right. It makes magical creation accounts look ridiculous. Well, they already look ridiculous.

You're clearly not here to learn anything. You're here to make yourself feel better about your beliefs by slinging shit around at anything that you think opposes your viewpoint. You're incredibly aggressive and rude, and not worth dealing with. If evolution is "wrong", I wouldn't care. Makes no difference to me. I don't have to have all the answers. I don't need to gap fill with superstitious nonsense.

Also the problem of copying and pasting long pseudo scientific answers from other people is that when people counter them, you don't have the knowledge or understanding to continue the conversation. So when I get round to answering Pulse's long copypasta about GAs he'll probably just end up repeating himself. Looking at that list of points, it's clear that the original author looked at the GAs mentioned in books written by atheist authors, and without actually understanding them, wrote down all the differences with natural evolution without care or knowledge about whether those differences were relevant or not.

I am learning fast about GAs and can see that you are incorrect to suppose they accurately reflect reality with its millions of variables. And from your mistaken notion that pesticide resistance increases information in the genome, I am not sure if you have expertise in biology itself, although I grant you are fluent in computational methods.

The appeal of GAs is that they are modeled after biological evolution. The latter is the main motivation for tolerating such an inefficient awkward process, very telling, wouldn't you think? The GA search technique begins with a large random pool of representations of “potential solutions.” Genetic algorithms are seen as a subset of evolutionary algorithms and as “evolutionary computation.” The methodology is inspired by modeling a random beginning phase space, various kinds of mutations, inheritance and selection. The experimenter chooses the fittest solutions from each generation out of the “evolving” phase space of potential solutions. The goal of the process is optimization of a certain function.

All too many evolutionary computationists fail to realize the purely formal nature of GA procedures. GAs are not dealing with physicodynamic cause-and-effect chains. First, what is being optimized is a formal representation of meaning and function. A representation of any kind cannot be reduced to inanimate physicality. Second, “potential solutions” are formal, not merely physical entities. Third, at each iteration (generation) a certain portion of the population of potential solutions is deliberately selected by the agent experimenter (artificial selection) to “breed” a new generation. The optimized solution was purposefully pursued at each iteration. The overall process was entirely goaldirected (formal). Real evolution has no goal. Fourth, a formal fitness function is used to define and measure the fittest solutions thus far to a certain formal problem. The act of defining and measuring, along with just about everything else in the GA procedure, is altogether formal, not physical.

Despite the appealing similarities of terms like “chromosomes”, GAs have no relevance whatsoever to molecular evolution or gene emergence. Inanimate nature cannot define a fitness function over measures of the quality of representations of solutions. GAs are no model at all of natural process. GAs are nothing more than multiple layers of abstract conceptual engineering. Like language, we may start with a random phase space of alphabetical symbols. But no meaning or function results without deliberate and purposeful selection of letters out of that random phase space.

No abiotic primordial physicodynamic environment could have exercised such programming prowess. Neither physics nor chemistry can dictate formal optimization, any more than physicality itself generates the formal study of physicality. Human epistemological pursuits are formal enterprises of agent minds. Natural process GAs have not been observed to exist. The GAs of living organisms are just metaphysically presupposed to have originated through natural process. We can liberally employ GAs and so-called evolutionary algorithms for all sorts of productive tasks. But GAs cannot be used to model spontaneous life origin through natural process because GAs are formal.

From my research its simply far fetched that GAs reflect reality accurately.

In addition ‘Genetic algorithms’ use completely unrealistic ‘genome’ sizes (very small), mutation rates (extremely high) and selection coefficients (very high) (  Schneider, T.D., Evolution of biological information, Nucleic Acids Research 28(14):2794–2799, 2000.) . They also do not take into account non-viability—that is, an organism would not be viable at all (and therefore evolution could not proceed!) until the system that is supposedly evolving in the computer actually worked. Real-world organisms need to be viable and maintain viability. ReMine addresses the problems of mutation rates and selection coefficients for the evolutionary story, showing that the neo-Darwinian mechanism just cannot explain the amount of information in genomes.

Again to think GAs reflect reality with its multi variable complexity is simply wrong.

See ReMine, W., The Biotic Message, Saint Paul Science, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA, 1993.
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#58
RE: Human Devolution
(January 20, 2017 at 5:50 am)Pulse Wrote: Despite the appealing similarities of terms like “chromosomes”, GAs have no relevance whatsoever to molecular evolution or gene emergence. Inanimate nature cannot define a fitness function over measures of the quality of representations of solutions. GAs are no model at all of natural process. GAs are nothing more than multiple layers of abstract conceptual engineering. Like language, we may start with a random phase space of alphabetical symbols. But no meaning or function results without deliberate and purposeful selection of letters out of that random phase space.

I admit I have only skimmed through your discussion on GAs, but it seems to touch the usual conundrum of a structure which must appear fully formed, or else it could never have formed at all, which hints at a designer.

Like a roman bridge, where you may place any stone of the arc randomly and it will most definitely fall.... it only becomes a bridge when all stones are in place and pressing against each other.
So... how did the Romans build bridges, if they couldn't set stones and expect them to remain where they put them?

The answer is obviously Scaffolding.
Structures that are absent after the fact. Structures that can be built from the ground up to aid in building the more resilient final structure.
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#59
RE: Human Devolution
(January 19, 2017 at 6:21 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: There is no such thing as devolution. Evolution is a directionless process. Now kindly fuck off until you have something worthwhile to bring up.

Boru

Au contraire your majesty. We can see Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland devolve from the United Kingdom as I type.

@ The liar who started this thread, why should I take heed at a person who listens to a man (John C Sanford, after googling him I didn't go further) who is a YEC with an argument which consists solely of a Gish gallop of PRATTs?

If you want your pet theology to be taken seiously as science you have to provide evidence in its favour. Even if you do manage to disprove evolution (you won't but that's by the by) that doesn't do anything to help prove creatardism.

(January 19, 2017 at 9:20 pm)Aristocatt Wrote:
(January 19, 2017 at 6:31 pm)Pulse Wrote: Living things are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals such as granite fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity. [L. Orgel, The Origins of Life, John Wiley, NY, 1973, p. 189]

The open systems argument does not help evolution. Raw energy cannot generate the specified complex information in living things.

So you used a very special word here.  That word was cannot.
Please prove that raw energy cannot do what you claim it can't do.


If you could do that you'd be famous!

He cannot because he cannot define the term Complex Specified Information. Even the term's creato William Dumbski DBS cannot define the term, mainly because the term's meaning changes depending on what Dumbski is trying to refute.
Urbs Antiqua Fuit Studiisque Asperrima Belli

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#60
RE: Human Devolution
Nah, that couldn't be it.
I'm sure there is a reason he hasn't responded to my request. There's no way someone who is so knowledgeable in evolution and genetics that he can confidently determine evolution doesn't exist, could possibly have overstated his position on a key aspect of his debunking of either abiogenesis or biogenesis(which he is trying to debunk isn't exactly clear).
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