Hoover Institute video on Mathematical Challenges to Darwin's Theory

[PureX]

LOL....all that because I merely asked how much you've looked into big bang models and the mathematical basis for a singularity?

You weren't "merely asking". You were asking because you assumed that the math was an automatic ticket to validity.

I'll take your reply as a tacit admission that you haven't spent much time looking into either, which means your depictions of them aren't really worth much, no different than someone saying all sorts of things about the Bible even though they've never read it.

Yup, and there is the implied lack of validity that your leading question was leading you to.

You could have just said "I've not really studied either very much" and we could have proceeded from there.

Except I'm not going to accept your bias for things mathematical as a means of denigrating my intelligence. As you were trying to do, and as you are doing.

But obviously my simple question touched a nerve, so......here we are.

Funny how such under-handed insults do that. Here, try this one ... And you could have just apologized if you were smarter and more honest about your own intentions.

 

[Eric Hyom]

So I'm curious why you didn't do a Google search and find an explanation of how hard skulls evolved. I did, and the information is available for free. It's right there.

I looked at a number..

Summary
The evolutionary origin of the brain and braincase of fishes remains largely elusive.

There is still much uncertainty about precise homologies between parts of the skull of distinct groups of fishes, due to the fact that the vertebrate skull shows a remarkable morphological and anatomical plasticity.
Origin, Development and Evolution of the Fish Skull (Chapter 8) - Evolution and Development of Fishes

Others sites I found started from a Hox gene. This is very much like saying the chicken came from an egg.

 

[Eric Hyom]

Because you are not being clear about what you mean by 19% of a skull. Do you mean 19% thickness so that it is very thin and not effective to protect a brain? Or do you mean like a broken light bulb where the top 81% is missing? In that case a brain would have no protection at all, and an animal would likely not live very long. I don't know where you conjure this line of questioning. Legitimate questions still have to be based on facts and knowledge to be answerable, you can't invent irrational questions and expect an answer.

There is a lack of evidence as to how the skull evolved.

Like you say, if 81% was missing like a broken light bulb, the brain would have no protection. The other route you suggest is that the skull is pretty much complete, but only 19% thick. Somehow blind nature would need to randomly mutate possibly millions or billions of cells into a skull shape in one hit. But that goes against gradual and incremental steps. When we genuinely do not know how the skull evolved, we just keep asking questions, in the hope we get nearer the truth.

Nilsson and Pelgar plotted a path of 1829 incremental steps towards the evolution of an eye lens. How could something similar be done for an abstract shape like a skull?

 

[Eric Hyom]

Scaling issues decrease with increased
computing power & more generations.

Reading through the story of the algorithms for the evolved antenna, it could not be used to make a complete robotic version of ourselves. Once it has been designed, how do you go about making what has been designed? At the very least, you would need a 3D printer to make the shapes. But 3D printers need programming. Could you use the same materials to make replicas of bones, muscles, ligaments and tendons?

And just a thought, what came first, the brain or the skull? As F1Fan said, if the brain came first, it would have no protection. Three billion years ago, life had no need for a skull. Plot an incremental path from three billion years ago, to show how the skull could evolve. Nilsson and Pelgar did one for the eye.

Step 1, mutation, is random. Mutations don’t arise in order to fill a current “need” of the organism. They are blind and they lack foresight, so they also can’t anticipate future needs. In this sense, they can reasonably be described as random. They can also be thought of as “random” in the sense that they are not automatically helpful; a new mutation may turn out to be beneficial or harmful or neutral.

 

[Revoltingest]

I don't see anything wrong with the mechanism of evolution up to a point.

Does something force it stop at some point?

 

[Revoltingest]

Reading through the story of the algorithms for the evolved antenna, it could not be used to make a complete robotic version of ourselves.

The fitness function for an antenna wouldn't
ever select for androids....just optimal sending
or receiving signals.
In biological evolution, selection is for survival
(& carrying on genes) in various & changing
environments. This will mean vastly more diversity
than a single simple fitness function over far far
fewer generations.

The point of the antenna evolution example is
only to show the concept....not to prove anything.
You ask many questions, perhaps thinking that
they're unanswerable, thereby arguing against
evolution. But there are answers. Some known,
& others not yet. This is how things go with science.

 

[Brian2]

Does something force it stop at some point?

I don't think anything forces it to stop. For a believer in creation however there can come a point where God has said that He did something and a believer might draw a line there and say that it could have been a direct act of God at that point.
Science after all is making educated guesses based on the available natural evidence of possibilities and on the naturalistic methodology of science. It is not as if science "knows" exactly what happened in the past.

 

[Revoltingest]

Science after all is making educated guesses based on the available natural evidence of possibilities and on the naturalistic methodology of science.

....& testing predictions made by the theories, which
would either confirm (not prove) or disprove them.
This is to be "useful", a feature religious beliefs lack.

 

[Brian2]

....& testing predictions made by the theories, which
would either confirm (not prove) or disprove them.
This is to be "useful", a feature religious beliefs lack.

I would say that there are not many places where God said that He did it and that these places don't detract from the theories or the predictions made by them.
If God for example set up a system where hereditary information is stored and used in the genetic code, that does not detract from evolution or predictions made by it.
Similarly for other things that could be seen as evidence for an intelligence and life giver behind everything.

 

[Revoltingest]

I would say that there are not many places where God said that He did it and that these places don't detract from the theories or the predictions made by them.
If God for example set up a system where hereditary information is stored and used in the genetic code, that does not detract from evolution or predictions made by it.
Similarly for other things that could be seen as evidence for an intelligence and life giver behind everything.

The safest religious view would be that deities
started our universe with all its initial conditions
& physical laws. Then it simply unfolded as it
did & does, all without any guidance.

 

[Brian2]

The safest religious view would be that deities
started our universe with all its initial conditions
& physical laws. Then it simply unfolded as it
did & does, all without any guidance.

Yes I suppose the deist position is safe for a scientist.
If I am a Bible believer then the Bible says more about what God did than that and that is always going to clash with science no matter where I might draw a line. Not that science knows exactly what happened back then of course or for that matter Bible believers don't know exactly what God did when He said stuff like "Let the earth bring forth plants" etc. Everything may have happened exactly as science suggests but with God doing it all through nature.
This of course is where many Christians end up and go the way of poetry and creation myth for Genesis, which of course is still true but the story is not seen as a historical narrative.
I find it hard to leave the historical narrative out of it completely however and Genesis imo agrees with much of science in the order of events and I can even see evolution in there.

 

[PureX]

Numbers are imprecise representations of reality. By themselves they are meaningless except to enable us to apply an abstract ideology about proportional relationships that we invented, to the world around us.

When we do this, and it "works" for us, it works for us only to the degree that we ignore the imprecision between the proportional ideals and the reality we are applying them to.

Ten sheep plus ten more sheep do not equal twenty sheep. In fact, no one sheep equals any other. So that when we allow our numbers to represent sheep, they can only do so to the degree that we ignore their representational imprecision. All our mathematical calculations are inaccurate in this way. But they work for us so long as the ways they are inaccurate are not relevant to the function we are applying the calculation to.

It's important to understand this so that we don't fall into the mistake of thinking that math defines reality. Or that reality is mathematical. We need to know that if our applied math says reality is X as opposed to Y that this is fundamentally untrue. That we are imposing an ideology on the world around us and then interpreting that imposed ideology as the truth of the world.

It's especially important to understand this when we are using math to speculate, and then to validate our speculations. That's a clear recipe for blind confirmation bias.

 

[Revoltingest]

Yes I suppose the deist position is safe for a scientist.
If I am a Bible believer then the Bible says more about what God did than that and that is always going to clash with science no matter where I might draw a line. Not that science knows exactly what happened back then of course or for that matter Bible believers don't know exactly what God did when He said stuff like "Let the earth bring forth plants" etc. Everything may have happened exactly as science suggests but with God doing it all through nature.
This of course is where many Christians end up and go the way of poetry and creation myth for Genesis, which of course is still true but the story is not seen as a historical narrative.
I find it hard to leave the historical narrative out of it completely however and Genesis imo agrees with much of science in the order of events and I can even see evolution in there.

The ad hoc approach: One can read poetic prose to
comport with one of various (sometimes competing)
scientific theories.
No harm done, so it sounds good to me....just not for me.

 

[Audie]

Only to a fool.
Why? Do you think it’s clever?
Facts are facts, whether you want to deal with them or not.

You and the other creationist here both
posted gishes, which is inherently dishonest.

 

[PureX]

The safest religious view would be that deities
started our universe with all its initial conditions
& physical laws. Then it simply unfolded as it
did & does, all without any guidance.

But the initial set up IS the ongoing guidance. You are imposing a separation that does not exist. The possibilities and impossibilities that were in place from the start of the existential event are still in place. They have changed, somewhat, but they are still controlling what and how existence, exists in almost every detail.

 

[Revoltingest]

But the initial set up IS the ongoing guidance.

Exactly.
And it ended there....so I propose.
Thereafter, energy, matter, spacetime, & the laws
of physics autonomously "directed" development.

 

[PureX]

Exactly.
And it ended there....so I propose.
Thereafter, energy, matter, spacetime, & the laws
of physics autonomously "directed" development.

But it didn't end there, clearly, as it's still in effect. The same possibilities and limitations that effected the way existence happened initially, are still effecting how it's happening, now.

You can say there has been no further meddling in the process, as far as you can tell, but you can't say the directing possibilities and limitations have stopped. Because they haven't. And they are still determining what existence is.

 

[Revoltingest]

But it didn't end there, clearly, as it's still in effect.

Exactly!
It's odd how you appear to agree with me,
but then proceed as though arguing.

 

[F1fan]

I looked at a number..

Summary
The evolutionary origin of the brain and braincase of fishes remains largely elusive.

There is still much uncertainty about precise homologies between parts of the skull of distinct groups of fishes, due to the fact that the vertebrate skull shows a remarkable morphological and anatomical plasticity.
Origin, Development and Evolution of the Fish Skull (Chapter 8) - Evolution and Development of Fishes

Others sites I found started from a Hox gene. This is very much like saying the chicken came from an egg.

OK, so what we do with this is admit: we are still working on it and don't know yet. Given all the other evidence for evolution, and all the failures and success of evolution, skulls went through the same process, not magic.

There is a lack of evidence as to how the skull evolved.

Like you say, if 81% was missing like a broken light bulb, the brain would have no protection. The other route you suggest is that the skull is pretty much complete, but only 19% thick. Somehow blind nature would need to randomly mutate possibly millions or billions of cells into a skull shape in one hit. But that goes against gradual and incremental steps. When we genuinely do not know how the skull evolved, we just keep asking questions, in the hope we get nearer the truth.

Yes, the work is ongoing. We don't assume magic because we have had non-rational religious influences in our social experiences. Just get the science right.

Nilsson and Pelgar plotted a path of 1829 incremental steps towards the evolution of an eye lens. How could something similar be done for an abstract shape like a skull?

I'm not sure what is abstract about the shape of skulls, but they are what they are because they were a successful change to organisms over time. As I noted the evolution of bone skulls and vertibrates came from cartilage. I suspect cartilage was adequate for animals in water, but not on land, and the animals that evolved to live on land had mutations where, over time, bone replaced the cartilage. To my mind bone would be an advantage on land due to the effects of gravity. As we know humans in space lose bone density due to the lack of gravity, and land animals need to support themselves, so the evolution of bones, heavy bones, was necessary for survival. Of course there is gravity that fish experience in water, but the effect is not as structural since their bodies are supported by the water.

 

[Jose Fly]

You weren't "merely asking". You were asking because you assumed that the math was an automatic ticket to validity.

More assumptions on your part.

This isn't that difficult. You made a series of claims about how and why scientists proposed a singularity, most of which didn't align with what I'd read about the subject. So I was naturally curious about where you got your views about it, which prompted me to ask if you'd looked into the actual science behind it.

Apparently you see that as some sort of attack, which is quite revealing IMO.

Yup, and there is the implied lack of validity that your leading question was leading you to.

Nope, I neither said nor implied anything of the sort.

Except I'm not going to accept your bias for things mathematical as a means of denigrating my intelligence. As you were trying to do, and as you are doing.
Funny how such under-handed insults do that. Here, try this one ... And you could have just apologized if you were smarter and more honest about your own intentions.

Wow, I really touched a nerve, didn't I?

As I said, you made a series of assertions about how and why scientists proposed a singularity, claims that were quite different than what I'd read. So I figured I'd ask where/how you got your info from. That's it. And from that simple, basic point you've assumed all sorts of things, pretty much all of which are wrong.

But I think it's fairly obvious what's going on. You made a series of inaccurate assertions about a field of science (and the scientists who work in it) that you've not studied or looked into, and you got called on it. So now, rather than just be open and honest and acknowledge that you don't really know all that much about the actual science, you're stomping your feet and waving your arms, crying about having your intelligence questioned.

Why would you do all that? Because the alternative (admitting your ignorance) makes you look bad and renders your claims about the science rather worthless.

The funny thing is, if you'd just been open and honest from the start, we probably could have had a decent conversation. Oh well.