Random Chance or Natural Selection

Creationism, Evolution, and other science issues

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William
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Random Chance or Natural Selection

Post #1

Post by William »

[Quote from another thread]

bluegreenearth: Evolution is not guided by random chance but by natural selection

William: Q:. What is the difference?

I think the key word is "by" which - with the word "Guided" - implies some type of intelligent designer.
However, when I change the sentence with something along the lines of;

"Evolution is not the result of random chance but of natural selection" the implication of a Creator (some type of intelligent designer) is still to be seen in the words "natural selection".

Given [font=Georgia]Natural Selection[/font] is shown through science to be guiding evolution, it would appear that it is a substitute phrase which seeks to move our thinking away from there being a Creator, into that which is The Creation.

It bestows upon Creation the same necessity which theists bestow upon their Creators...the necessity of being able to guide a process intelligently and with purpose. Not just assigning The Creation with being nothing more than a mindless mishmash which accidentally came about purely by "random chance".

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William
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Post #71

Post by William »

[Replying to post 69 ]

William: Let me know if you would like to debate 1 on 1 regarding the Simulation Universe.

Since you appear unaware of your uncivil tone and off-topic personal comments, I accept your plea of ignorance and put it down to a particular personality type and if the mods don't pick up on it, I too, will ignore it in future.
I am not interested in going further off-topic in debating with you as to what constitutes uncivil tone and off-topic personal comments, as I doubt we will agree anyway and I have more interesting things to discuss.

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Post #72

Post by Purple Knight »

William wrote:Scientists have been using science to damaging effect since The Great Apes left the trees and became meat eating cavers.

They have yet to use their magic tricks to prove we are not living within a Creation, and their minions who worship their works and exalt them on high as the priests of their culture are just as frightened at the prospect.
Imma go ahead and admit that science as a community has this problem.

But science as a field is supposed to be based on exactly the opposite.

Nothing is to be worshiped. Nothing is above being disproven. You want to doubt that article? Cut yourself a big wet slice from that thar doubt cake and eat to your heart's content! Dig in! Eat articles until you burst out of your clothes, then your house! None are above being eaten!

Okay, maybe this multiple level metaphor about gluttony, doubt, and worship falls short, but the point is simply that nothing should be set on high to be worshiped. Doing that is the opposite of science.

The fact that scientists in modern day basically do nothing else tears my very heart in twain, and the evidence that they're just worshiping conclusions instead of pigging out on doubt like they should is the replicability crisis. It's a thing. Look it up.

(Also, it's not anybody's job to prove negatives, unless you want to try proving I don't have a unicorn, and when you can't, walking away in shame as you admit you lost the argument and that I do have a unicorn.)

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Post #73

Post by William »

[Replying to post 71 by]

Purple Knight:(Also, it's not anybody's job to prove negatives, unless you want to try proving I don't have a unicorn, and when you can't, walking away in shame as you admit you lost the argument and that I do have a unicorn.)

William: Generally my observation is that the idolizing minions of scientism are not known for admitting defeat, mores's the pity, as I would really like nothing better than to encourage them in healthy debate.

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Post #74

Post by Purple Knight »

William wrote:Generally my observation is that the idolizing minions of scientism are not known for admitting defeat, mores's the pity, as I would really like nothing better than to encourage them in healthy debate.
It's an unavoidable outcome of capitalism. (And note: I'm not advocating socialism!)

At the level of those who actually make money on science, money is a motivator, competition weeds out the unmotivated, and the demand is for strong results.

You get a maybe, you lose.

You lose, you don't get $$$.

You don't get $$$, you have to go do something else.

So who's not going to be gone, and who's not going to be scrubbing toilets? Who's going to still be in science?

That's right: The guy who didn't get the maybe.

Now if everyone is absolutely honest, and says maybe if they got maybe, you have an equilibrium where the best researchers are the ones who stay in, and those who didn't have the rigor were weeded out.

We had this for a long, long time.

But then people figured out the meta.

You had a few people fudging their numbers, because they knew what it meant if they got maybe: They got weeded out.

So they competed and won. By lying.

Well now, even the formerly honest guys had to lie just to keep up.

The push for strong, reliable answers actually encourages the exact opposite in the free market, once people figure out the competitive meta.

And the strong answers just follow what the free market wants. If some dietitian wants to sell a bunch of books, and he wants to say oreos are exactly like crack to the brain, there's a demand for the strong answer that oreos act like crack on the brain, and you will get that answer, because that guy will pay for it.

Hopefully Nabisco will pay you if you find out oreos are good for you, but maybe they won't, and maybe there's not even a company naturally in your corner at all, which could easily be the case if your information helps no extant company, in which case the study you did is worthless.

The free market not only encourages fudged results, it encourages biased results.

And since the adherents just follow the journals, who just follow the money, basically science as a community is dead.

Science as a method - the scientific method - is not dead.

The idea that everything is up for debate is not dead.

Logic is not dead.

But just as rot, paedophilia, and corruption can consume organised religion, and each man must become a temple unto himself, bias and lust for money can consume the scientific community, so therefore each man must find logic in himself.

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Post #75

Post by DrNoGods »

[Replying to post 73 by Purple Knight]
And since the adherents just follow the journals, who just follow the money, basically science as a community is dead.


I think that is going a little too far. It is certainly true that there is competition for funding dollars, and I played that game for many years writing proposals, trying to get them funded as the organization I worked for did not pay the salaries of scientists ... we had to bring in external funding for not only our own salaries, but the salaries of any engineers or other help we needed. It really was survival of the funded, and you could not stray too far from the mainstream and expect to stay funded and employed. But saying the scientific community is "dead" I would not agree with.

As an example, I finished my graduate school program in 1985, the same year the ozone hole became a serious concern. I went to work in a research group designing and building instrumentation to measure the concentrations of atmospheric gases using lasers. These instruments flew on high-altitude balloons and research aircraft, and when the ozone hole problem became front and center NASA decided to throw money at it to understand the problem. A mission was organized to Antarctica where every measuring instrument available was utilized to study the atmosphere before, during and after the Antarctic spring.

Prior to the mission, there were three primary mechanisms proposed by the "bloody theoreticians" as my British colleague called them (and I expect they called us the bloody experimentalists ... the aircraft crew called us coneheads). Within three months of returning from the mission after all of the data was provided to everyone in the atmospheric modeling community, the mechanism had been worked out. Just one of the three mechanisms that had been originally proposed was proven correct. The mechanism for how the ozone hole formed each spring was now known, it was unambiguous, and the other two theoretical camps immediately folded and admitted that they were wrong.

Policy decisions and continued measurements resulted, and new proposals for continued research had to address the remaining issues surrounding this problem (ie. why wasn't it occurring in the Arctic to the same extent, why didn't existing models predict it and how could they be improved to better model the polar regions as well as the middle latitudes, etc.). We survived for some 5-6 years travelling around the globe making measurements to improve the theoretical models, and at the end of that period there was vast improvement in these models which trickled across several other disciplines (eg. improved weather forecasting models).

This kind of effort is still very common in science across all disciplines, and is not "dead." It is a textbook example of a problem being identified, and the science community being mobilized to understand it. I have no doubt that there are people who bias their results, lie, etc. to stay in the game, but I don't think this represents the majority of scientists. These kinds of people are weeded out in the end. Science continues to provide solutions to problems and a better understanding of how nature works, but like anything humans are involved with there will be bad actors. They don't represent the majority.
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Post #76

Post by brunumb »

[Replying to post 74 by DrNoGods]
...and the other two theoretical camps immediately folded and admitted that they were wrong.
Something you don't really hear from the religious or wooist communities. When a worldview includes 'magic' there is always a ready made excuse waiting in the wings.
George Orwell:: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Gender ideology is anti-science, anti truth.

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Post #77

Post by William »

[Replying to post 74 by ]

DrNoGods: I think that is going a little too far.

William: I hear what you are saying but it amounts to not being enabled to go far enough.

You story is the ambulance at the bottom of the hill...and also carries with it a whiff of a type of 'insider trading' as it were.

Scientists botch up the ozone with chemicals they helped design,

Image

and then contracts are handed out to other scientists to find out the cause and and of course - throw in a few who have had to fund-raise to be part of the operation, to make it appear slight to moderately moral...masterminds!

Image

The world is being held hostage and Scientists have a lot to do with how this prison-world is designed.

Image

Now we are entering lock-down with no foreseeable end at present. What will the wizards of science pull our of their collective hats next!

How exciting and entertaining. Evidence indeed that Natural Selection is intelligent...but how wise?

Image

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Post #78

Post by Purple Knight »

DrNoGods wrote:This kind of effort is still very common in science across all disciplines, and is not "dead." It is a textbook example of a problem being identified, and the science community being mobilized to understand it.
Yes, with the help of a flood of funding from the government.

The absolutely pure capitalists do not want any government, just businesses.

In all fairness I should have excluded specifically government specifically funding something it specifically wants the true answer to, whatever that answer may be. (And even government would suppress findings in extreme circumstances.)

But yes, you're right that when I said dead, that is not totally correct. Real science is sometimes done in the scientific community. The only thing is, every time one of those weasels who is paid for biased results gets money, that effect pushes someone with integrity out of the business.

As bad as the replicability crisis is now, it's only going to get worse. This is my prediction, based on my hypothesis of the way the free market and science interact. This is me employing the scientific method, if only on a small-time basis.
William wrote:Scientists botch up the ozone with chemicals they helped design,
I would bet good money that wasn't the answer.

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Post #79

Post by DrNoGods »

[Replying to post 76 by William]
You story is the ambulance at the bottom of the hill...and also carries with it a whiff of a type of 'insider trading' as it were.

Scientists botch up the ozone with chemicals they helped design...


You're missing a very important part of this story, and describing it as if the development of chlorofluorocarbons for industrial applications (air conditioning, the manufacture of foam for car seats and furniture which was actually one or the larger offenders, and others), was all done intentionally by scientists so the next generation (!) of them could come in and save the day. It was nothing of the sort, by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn't until the 1970s when Paul Crutzen, Sherwood Roland, and Mario Molina published a series of papers warning that these compounds might cause depletion of ozone that scientists first realized it could be a problem. They won the Noble Price in 1995 for this work:

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemi ... s-release/

The proposition that scientists developed the compounds knowing of this potential atmospheric impact, just so they could be the "ambulance at the bottom of the hill" to come in and collect funding to study it, is utterly ridiculous. That is not how this particular event played out, nor other similar chemical episodes (eg. dioxins). Chlorofluorocarbons were not known to have any atmospheric effects for many decades after they were developed.

The air conditioner was invented by Willis Carrier in 1902, the first residential unit was installed in 1914, and the first single room ACs were installed in 1931. By the mid 1950s they were selling at 1 million per year, but still very expensive so only the well-to-do had them. It was the early 1970s before they became popular enough to make a dent in atmospheric chemistry when the cost came down and Freon-12 was the primary refrigerant. Only then was it realized that these refrigerant compounds might percolate into the upper atmosphere and be broken apart by UV light (with a time constant of several years to get to those altitudes), and scientists started looking at the problem. The business people and early inventors who developed air conditioners and the other systems that used these compounds had no idea whatsoever that they could have any impact on the atmosphere. And they certainly had no plans for their grandchildren to secure funding for their scientific work as ambulance chasers.

Do you think that there is some secret pact among scientists that stretches across generations where they create problems so that their descendents (somehow all becoming scientists) can make a living from them?
Now we are entering lock-down with no foreseeable end at present. What will the wizards of science pull our of their collective hats next!


And now you are suggesting that it is the world's scientists that somehow invented COVID-19 and are foisting it upon the world so they can come in to save the day? That is an even more ridiculous idea. The various graphics did nothing to make your comments any more sensible. I think you have a lot to learn about how science, and scientists, actually work if you think COVID-19 was a product of scientists pulling tricks out of their hats with the goal of ruining the world!
Last edited by DrNoGods on Thu Mar 19, 2020 11:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
In human affairs the sources of success are ever to be found in the fountains of quick resolve and swift stroke; and it seems to be a law, inflexible and inexorable, that he who will not risk cannot win.
John Paul Jones, 1779

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
Mark Twain

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Post #80

Post by DrNoGods »

[Replying to post 77 by Purple Knight]
I would bet good money that wasn't the answer.
And you would win that bet! Hopefully the white hats in science can continue to win over the black hats.
In human affairs the sources of success are ever to be found in the fountains of quick resolve and swift stroke; and it seems to be a law, inflexible and inexorable, that he who will not risk cannot win.
John Paul Jones, 1779

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
Mark Twain

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