Debate with a scientist

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John Human
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Debate with a scientist

Post #1

Post by John Human »

Back in December and January, I had a debate with a scientist at a forum for medieval genealogists, where people routinely ridicule the thought of directly communicating with deceased ancestors. (For an explanation of communicating with ancestors, see https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/535187/com ... -ancestors)

Toward the end of December, a “scientist and engineer� appeared and initiated a debate. For the very first time, somebody actually tried to refute me instead of the usual fare of contempt and insults. This self-identified scientist made it very clear that he dismissed my lengthy stories from ancestors as hallucinations, because of his reductionist materialist presupposition that any such communication at a distance, without some sort of physical connection, was impossible.

“Reductionist materialism� is but one solution to the so-called mind-body problem that exercised natural philosophers (“scientists�) in the 17th and 1th centuries. Are mind and body two separate things? If so, which one is primary? An overview of the mind-body problem can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem

Reductionist materialism means that things like astrology or shamanism or channeling or communicating with ancestors get summarily dismissed as “hallucinations� or “superstition.�

The conclusion of the debate (because the scientist made a point of bowing out without offering any counter-argument) came on Jan. 7. Here is the essential part of what I wrote to the scientist:
You made it clear that you consider mind to be an epiphenomenon of neural activity in the brain, and you go on to say: “To me, the mind is a function of a living brain, meaning that they’re not distinct. In my opinion, there can be no mind without some form of complex structure, like a brain.�

In response to your opinion that there can be no mind without some form of complex structure, the obvious question is, why not? I am reminded of the New York Times declaring that a heavier-than-air flying machine was impossible. Your opinion seems to be unscientific, and serves to block skeptical inquiry. It would also seem to be rigidly atheistic (denying the possibility of a transcendent deity), as opposed to a healthy skepticism when approaching questions that appear to be unknowable. Your position regarding belief in witchcraft, denying that it has anything to do with “truth,� also seems to be arbitrarily rigid and unscientific, opposed to a spirit of skeptical inquiry. However, perhaps you wrote hastily and polemically, and perhaps in general you are able to keep an open mind regarding subjects where you are inclined to strongly doubt claims that violate your pre-existing suppositions about reality.

Please keep in mind that, regarding the mind/body problem, there used to be (and still are) several different approaches, as opposed to the mind-numbing reductionist materialist view that is overwhelmingly prevalent today in science departments. Perhaps Leibniz’s approach was the most esoteric, and he was a renowned scientist and mathematician (as well as a philosopher and diplomat). His view was routinely dismissed but never refuted (as far as I am aware), but Leibniz’s influence simply disappeared from universities after protracted tenure battles in the mid-eighteenth century. However, Leibniz’s view isn’t the only possibility. I am intrigued by the thought that both matter and consciousness are manifestations of something underlying, which is not inconsistent with my own view of reality.

It seems to me that reductionist materialism (your stated belief) fails to explain the all-important phenomenon of human creativity, as measured by our ability to reorganize our environment (as a result of scientific discovery and technological progress) to establish a potential population density orders of magnitude above that of a primitive hunter-gatherer society in the same geographical area. (There is an important corollary here: Once a human society exits the Stone Age and begins using metal as a basic part of the production of food and tools, in the long run we must continue to progress or collapse due to resource depletion, especially regarding the need for progressively more efficient sources of energy. And there is another corollary as well: As a society gets more technologically complex, the minimum area for measuring relative potential population density increases.)

Is this human capability explainable in terms of matter reorganizing itself in ever-more-complex fashion? If you answer “yes� to such a question, the subsidiary question is: how does matter organize itself in ever-more-complex ways (such as the creation of human brains that then come up with the technological breakthroughs and social organization to support ever-higher relative potential population densities)? Does random chance work for you as an answer to this question? If so, isn’t that an arbitrary (and therefore unscientific) theological supposition? Or do you see the inherent logic in positing some form of intelligent design (an argument as old as Plato)? If you accept the principle of intelligent design, it seems to me that, to be consistent, the reductionist materialist view would have to posit an immanent (as opposed to transcendent) intelligence, as with the Spinozistic pantheism that influenced Locke’s followers and arguably influenced Locke himself. But if you go in that direction, where is the “universal mind� that is guiding the formation of human brains capable of creative discovery, and how does it communicate with the matter that comprises such brains? The way I see things, both the “deification of random chance� argument and the supposition of an immanent “divine� creative force have insurmountable problems, leaving some sort of transcendent divinity as the default answer regarding the question of the efficient cause of human creativity, with the final cause being the imperative for humans to participate in the ongoing creation of the universe.
The forum thread where this originally appeared is here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic ... yqswb4d5WA
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Post #121

Post by mgb »

DrNoGods wrote: Sure ... all the useless changes are possible too. But since they serve no useful function they don't make it into structures. There may be 1000 (or 100,000, or ???) useless changes for every 1 useful one, but when that useful one comes along it remains simply because it is useful.
I think you are missing the point. If only 1 in 100,000 changes are useful that slows down the process to a snail's pace. But evolution is happening very efficiently. That is why I say the dice are loaded.

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Post #122

Post by DrNoGods »

[Replying to post 121 by mgb]
I think you are missing the point. If only 1 in 100,000 changes are useful that slows down the process to a snail's pace. But evolution is happening very efficiently.


Define "snail's pace." According to this Wikipedia article (first figure):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate

"The human germline mutation rate is approximately 0.5×10−9 per base pair per year.[1]"

For 3 billion pase pairs, that is 1.5 mutations per year in the human germline, or about 38 per 25-year generation. But this varies significantly. From the same article:

"The human mutation rate is higher in the male germ line (sperm) than the female (egg cells), but estimates of the exact rate have varied by an order of magnitude or more. This means that a human genome accumulates around 64 new mutations per generation because each full generation involves a number of cell divisions to generate gametes.[10] Human mitochondrial DNA has been estimated to have mutation rates of ~3× or ~2.7×10−5 per base per 20 year generation (depending on the method of estimation);[11] these rates are considered to be significantly higher than rates of human genomic mutation at ~2.5×10−8 per base per generation.[12] Using data available from whole genome sequencing, the human genome mutation rate is similarly estimated to be ~1.1×10−8 per site per generation.[13]"

There are many studies of population genetics of mutations, like these:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871823/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871816/

Mutations happen slowly in general, and evolutionary changes happen in proportion to the reproduction rate of the organism (eg. 20-25 years for human, tens of minutes for some bacteria, like Clostridium perfringens). The "forcing" is important as well (ie. the change that it is necessary to adapt to). So depending on your definition of "snail's pace", evolution may already be happening at a snail's pace. Modern humans have undergone little change in the 300,000 or so years that Homo sapiens have been around. But there are slow changes happening and some (relatively) fast ones ... such as human adaptation to high altitudes which has shown evolutionary change in humans in as little as 12,000 years (due to the need to adapt ... low altitude people don't show these adaptations). So you need to define "snail's pace" more quantitatively for that to be an argument against evolution.
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Post #123

Post by mgb »

DrNoGods wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate

"The human germline mutation rate is approximately 0.5×10−9 per base pair per year.[1]"

For 3 billion pase pairs, that is 1.5 mutations per year in the human germline, or about 38 per 25-year generation. But this varies significantly. From the same article:

"The human mutation rate is higher in the male germ line (sperm) than the female (egg cells), but estimates of the exact rate have varied by an order of magnitude or more. This means that a human genome accumulates around 64 new mutations per generation because each full generation involves a number of cell divisions to generate gametes.[10] Human mitochondrial DNA has been estimated to have mutation rates of ~3× or ~2.7×10−5 per base per 20 year generation (depending on the method of estimation);[11] these rates are considered to be significantly higher than rates of human genomic mutation at ~2.5×10−8 per base per generation.[12] Using data available from whole genome sequencing, the human genome mutation rate is similarly estimated to be ~1.1×10−8 per site per generation.[13]"
Ok, but you have to multiply that by the useful/useless fraction.

If that fraction is 1/x, divide by x. So, what is x? 10,000? 100,000?

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Post #124

Post by DrNoGods »

[Replying to post 123 by mgb]
If that fraction is 1/x, divide by x. So, what is x? 10,000? 100,000?


This is not a simple question. x depends on all kinds of things (size of population, generational cycle time, whether the beneficial mutation makes it all the way to fixed in the population, or disappears because it arises in an unhealthy example, etc.). This paper goes into gory detail on the issue:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1931526/

This one is much easier to read and their figures 3 and 4 show a beneficial mutation rate (to total mutation rate) of about 1e-5:

https://www.pnas.org/content/109/13/4950

So x would be 100,000 for beneficial to total ratio, but you defined x as useful to useless (so beneficial to deleterious) and not useful to total. Since most mutations are neutral, x would be much smaller than 100,000. But the adaptations of humans to high altitudes provides some easier numbers.

http://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/28/20/2189.full

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-alti ... _in_humans

In the last 10,000 years or so (only ~400-500 generations), beneficial mutations have become fixed in the population. There appear to be several mutations involved in adaptation to high altitude (and different mutations at different locations), and at a generational total mutation rate of 40-60 total germline mutations/generation, the total number of mutations using the middle ranges of these numbers is 450 x 50 = 22,500 total mutations. If (just picking a number) 5 mutations are required for high altitude adaptation that is a beneficial to total ratio of 5 / 22,500 = 2e-4 ... at the low end of the range shown in the second link above (Figs. 3 and 4 for U(b)), but still on those plots. So if beneficial to total is in the 2e-4 range, beneficial to deleterious would be much larger given that the vast majority of mutations are neutral.

So did adaptation to high altitude in humans over only 10,000 years or so occur at a "snail's pace"? That sounds like a fast adaptation rate to me ... only a few hundred generations. In 3-4 billion years of evolution what can happen? Small adaptations like this example can easily turn into dramatic new species, as observed.
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Post #125

Post by mgb »

[Replying to post 124 by DrNoGods]

I am very sceptical that these numbers can be pinned down. From your link;-

Gillespie (1) and Orr (2) have argued that there are general theoretical reasons to expect that �(s) should follow an exponential distribution, although more recent theoretical work has challenged the ubiquity of this claim (3). Many experimental studies are roughly consistent with this exponential prediction (4⇓–6), although here, too, we find significant exceptions (6⇓⇓⇓–10). In the present work, we maintain a relatively agnostic view toward the precise form of �(s), although we devote special attention to the exponential case because of its popularity in the literature.

So they are 'agnostic' about these values.

Also, these numbers would vary greatly depending on what part of the body is evolving. You can't compare adaptation to higher altitudes to, for example, the changes that are needed to make a ball and socket joint and you can hardly apply the ball and socket probabilities to the evolution of the brain.


Like I said, how many holes do you have to make in a skull to get them in the right place for the optic nerve to fit through?

Eyes and skulls evolve together so to get all the parts to evolve simultaneously you have to multiply fractional probabilities.

For example, if you just want holes in a skull you might be lucky. But when the holes have to arrive at the same time the optic nerve is evolving the chances are really against it because you have to multiply everything. And it is not just skull and optic nerve. It is everything needing to fit with everything else. The more sophisticated an organism is the more exacting the demands on each sub system and the smaller the fraction of useful changes.

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Post #126

Post by DrNoGods »

[Replying to post 125 by mgb]
I am very sceptical that these numbers can be pinned down. From your link;-


Yes ... that's why I said they can vary a great deal, but for ballpark numbers they seem consistent. And I also mentioned that the high-altitude adaptation was only about 10,000 years or so and 400-500 generations.

But if you want to look at formation of a ball and socket joint you have to look at the sequence of organisms involved from the very first appearance of its precursor, to the first implementation in an animal. Here is an overview:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10. ... 0610046620

It appears that the process for form ball and socket joints took some 100 million years (or more) starting when land animals first appeared. The above paper goes into some detail on the steps involved. As usual, it was not some sudden appearance of a working ball and socket joint as you might expect from an intelligent designer, but all kinds of fits and starts and branching along the way (as you'd expect from evolution by natural selection).
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Post #127

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mgb wrote: [Replying to post 124 by DrNoGods]

I am very sceptical that these numbers can be pinned down. From your link;-

Gillespie (1) and Orr (2) have argued that there are general theoretical reasons to expect that �(s) should follow an exponential distribution, although more recent theoretical work has challenged the ubiquity of this claim (3). Many experimental studies are roughly consistent with this exponential prediction (4⇓–6), although here, too, we find significant exceptions (6⇓⇓⇓–10). In the present work, we maintain a relatively agnostic view toward the precise form of �(s), although we devote special attention to the exponential case because of its popularity in the literature.

So they are 'agnostic' about these values.

Also, these numbers would vary greatly depending on what part of the body is evolving. You can't compare adaptation to higher altitudes to, for example, the changes that are needed to make a ball and socket joint and you can hardly apply the ball and socket probabilities to the evolution of the brain.


Like I said, how many holes do you have to make in a skull to get them in the right place for the optic nerve to fit through?

Eyes and skulls evolve together so to get all the parts to evolve simultaneously you have to multiply fractional probabilities.

For example, if you just want holes in a skull you might be lucky. But when the holes have to arrive at the same time the optic nerve is evolving the chances are really against it because you have to multiply everything. And it is not just skull and optic nerve. It is everything needing to fit with everything else. The more sophisticated an organism is the more exacting the demands on each sub system and the smaller the fraction of useful changes.
I'm skeptical too!
Please provide the evidence for the god concept you put forth in place of evolution so I can compare the two.
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Post #128

Post by mgb »

Clownboat wrote: I'm skeptical too!
Please provide the evidence for the god concept you put forth in place of evolution so I can compare the two.
"Evidence for" is subjective. I has been presented time and time again on this forum.

For me, the appearence of design is evidence for intelligence in evolution. You may disagree but I find the alternative explanations woefully inadaquate.

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Post #129

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DrNoGods wrote:
It appears that the process for form ball and socket joints took some 100 million years (or more) starting when land animals first appeared.
Yes but that is not all that happened. Entire species developed. The whole creature evolves, not just the ball and socket. This need for all parts of the creature to move forward together places great limitations on what is useful and what is not useful.

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Post #130

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mgb wrote:
Clownboat wrote: I'm skeptical too!
Please provide the evidence for the god concept you put forth in place of evolution so I can compare the two.
"Evidence for" is subjective. I has been presented time and time again on this forum.

For me, the appearence of design is evidence for intelligence in evolution. You may disagree but I find the alternative explanations woefully inadaquate.
I have examined your 'evidence' and found it wanting.
At this point, I don't even know what god you are desiring to put forth as the source for intelligence in evolution. You literally gave us here reading, absolutely zero evidence for whatever god is behind the intelligence you claim to see in evolution.

Not to mention, using the same pathway to eat and breath does not seem very intelligent. Does the lack of intelligence in evolution give you pause at all?
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