Detecting design or intent in nature

[Heywood]

Lets look bird nest evolution. Pendulous nests evolved from pensile nests. Pensile nests evolved from cup nests. The evolution from cup nest to pendulous nest happened over thousands of generations. It is not a man made system, but it required the intellect of the bird. Your claim that all systems which appear to require intellect are man made is false.

If you accept Chas's definiton of biological evolution, "the imperfect replication of replicators" you cannot then say birds nest evolution is biological evolution. Birds nests do not reproduce.

Okay, if you want to call bird actions "intellect," then it's no sweat off my nose. I'd call them "instinct," but whatever.

I do consider instinct to be a form of intellect. Somewhere in this thread we talked about whether or not a paramecium had intellect. Anyways your claim that bird actions are all instinct is in doubt.

Study suggest birds learn to build nests

What I would like to see done is this experiment. Take eggs laid in a pendulous nest and hatched them in a cusp nest. Would that generation of bird build a pendulous nest or a cusp nest? If it built a cusp nest indicating it had learned nest design I doubt you would yield.

[bennyboy]

Okay, if you want to call bird actions "intellect," then it's no sweat off my nose. I'd call them "instinct," but whatever.

I do consider instinct to be a form of intellect. Somewhere in this thread we talked about whether or not a paramecium had intellect. Anyways your claim that bird actions are all instinct is in doubt.

Does what you just quoted really look to you like me making a claim to you? I usually use the word "intellect" about species capable of high level cognition and creative problem solving. If you want to say that birds or paramecium have "intellects" and have "implemented evolutionary systems," then fine. I will accept your definition of the word. That's what ". . . but whatever" means.

And here, silly me, I thought you were trying to demonstrate that biological evolution ITSELF was made by an intellect. But we can laugh about that together now, because it turns out you were just trying to give birds a fair shake. And I'm definitely not one to look down on other species.

[Heywood]

But if you are trying to show that biological evolution itself (or anything else in the universe) was created by an intellect, then the updated chart should clearly show why you can't use evidence about human- (or now animal-) created evolutionary systems:

Your chart is wrong. Your conclusion is wrong. Let me explain it this way. Lets define evolutionary system as any system which contains the elements replication, heritable traits, change, and selection. There is some set which contains all the evolutionary systems. Lets call this the "Big Set". Now it is possible that the Big Set only contains evolutionary systems which required intellect. It is also possible that the Big Set contains a mixture of evolutionary systems....some which required intellect and some didn't. Which condition is more likely to be true?

Each time you examine an element of the Big Set you can say one of three things about that element.
A) the element required intellect.
B) the element did not require intellect.
C) whether or not the element required intellect cannot be determined.

What I am arguing is that each time you examine an element from the Big Set and it turns out it required intellect, while never coming across an element which did not require an intellect, the likelihood that all the elements in the Big Set required an intellect increases. The reason the likelihood increases is explained in this thread:

How we determine facts

What you and Chas are claiming is that we can't learn anything about the composition of the Big Set unless we examine every element of it.....and that is just false. We can draw conclusions about the Big Set by looking at all the elements available to us.

[Chas]

What you and Chas are claiming is that we can't learn anything about the composition of the Big Set unless we examine every element of it.....and that is just false. We can draw conclusions about the Big Set by looking at all the elements available to us.

Nope, that is not what I claim because that was not your argument.

You have now made a new claim which is not equivalent. It has, however, some of the same flaws as your first argument.

You have yet to justify calling evolution a system or that it requires implementation.
You have not understood that the things you claim as 'evolutionary systems' are not equivalent to biological evolution.

You are so emotionally attached to your god premise that reason escapes you.

[IATIA]

What you and Chas are claiming is that we can't learn anything about the composition of the Big Set unless we examine every element of it.....and that is just false. We can draw conclusions about the Big Set by looking at all the elements available to us.

But we cannot know until every member of the set is examined.

[Heywood]

What you and Chas are claiming is that we can't learn anything about the composition of the Big Set unless we examine every element of it.....and that is just false. We can draw conclusions about the Big Set by looking at all the elements available to us.

But we cannot know until every member of the set is examined.

You can't know that the speed of light is constant until you measure the speed of every photon that exists or has existed in the entire universe. That is impossible. At some point you measure enough and call it good.

The fact is, the observational evidence thus far supports the proposition that all evolutionary systems require intellect.

[Cyberman]

And the first time we observe a photon that doesn't travel at lightspeed in circumstances where it should, then barring error it will have falsified what we know of the speed of light. Science, in a word.

[Heywood]

And the first time we observe a photon that doesn't travel at lightspeed in circumstances where it should, then barring error it will have falsified what we know of the speed of light. Science, in a word.

And the first time you guys present an evolutionary system which was observed not to require intellect, my argument is falsified. Science, in a word....barring error of course.

[Chas]

And the first time we observe a photon that doesn't travel at lightspeed in circumstances where it should, then barring error it will have falsified what we know of the speed of light. Science, in a word.

And the first time you guys present an evolutionary system which was observed not to require intellect, my argument is falsified. Science, in a word....barring error of course.

Your arguments show that you do not understand biological evolution.
You misunderstand it at its very core.

It is not a system.

It is the inevitable outcome of imperfect replication of replicators.

It needs no implementation.

Your argument is bollocks.

[helyott]

But we cannot know until every member of the set is examined.

You can't know that the speed of light is constant until you measure the speed of every photon that exists or has existed in the entire universe. That is impossible. At some point you measure enough and call it good.

The fact is, the observational evidence thus far supports the proposition that all evolutionary systems require intellect.

I love the way you argue.
Lots of observations showed that light speed is constant in univers.
Expermimental proof showed it.
But you say we can t know it. The higher scientists agree that the light speed is constant. In science one thing is right, if you proof your assertion and if others can make experiments that can find the same conclusion. The conclusion is supposed to be right as long as we haven't prooved that s in some cases it can be wrong.

But what you are saying is wrong. Why ? Because the hypothesis you give us can 't be prooved as a necessity to what we can see around us.
Nobody have scientificly prooved what you argue.
Your hypothesis would explain everything, but in fact explains nothing.

your argue isn't a scientific one that's why, it's easy for you to keep it. But in fact you can't prove with scientific proofs that your explanation of life and an evolutionary system needs intelligent design.

In fact, you show as a proof a system that contain non organical living beings living in an evolutionary system as a proof.

What you are showing as a proof isn't.

In fact we can easily create climate simulations on computer, but even if some of them can show us how the climate runs, it don't explain anything about what is supposed to be the reason of this evoluting system of climate.