No it wasn’t. That’s just you making up this ad-hoc framing to his challenge.
You’re making that up. It’s not stated anywhere in the introduction to Axe’s paper that he expected some particular value, and he does not propose any sort of observation that would disprove or otherwise seem out of agreement with any hypothesis.
In fact compared to the other numbers Axe reports, from studies on other proteins by other authors, Axe’s stand out as the lowest among them by a very large margin.
They didn’t propose anything as a hypothesis. Rather Stadler lied to Tour about what the papers said (this was Stadler’s framing of it all) and Tour just sat there nodding along, being utterly clueless about evolution that he is. And none of the papers constituted anyhing like an attempt to disprove any hypothesis about a two mutation limit to evolution.
Dude this is getting increasingly ridiculous.
No, he wasn’t. Bechly actually set up a strawman of evolution that he refers to as “Darwinism”, which he proposes to be the idea that there is “no conceivable reason” we should’nt be able to find a pair of extant species that diverged (by some degree he doesn’t define) from a common ancestor within the last 5-10 million years.
And if we can’t give him an example that satisifies his unspecified/undefined criterion, he will declare Darwinism false (again because, he wrote, there is “no conceivable reason” why we shouldn’t observe the same high rates of morphological evolution at any point in time on “Darwinism”).
What’s most ironic about it all is the human-chimp split is suggested by Bechly himself to meet the challenge, yet he tries to excuse his way out of that by claiming that if we go that route it would support “human exceptionalism” (presumably to discourage us from suggesting the chimp-human split?). You know what, I’ll just agree to that. The human-chimp split having occurred within the last 7 million years meets Bechly’s challenge, and yeah humans are exceptional.
Here is one mention of Bechly having had to leave his post, I’ve seen this in various places. And Axe describing his leaving Cambridge can be found in various places as well, here is one description he gives.
I don’t know, but I expect it’s less than being a leader in a lab at Cambridge.
Actually, like Behe and Bechly, I read the ID arguments and investigated their evidence, and found them convincing. I’m more convinced now after seeing how ID arguments fare at Larry Moran’s Sandwalk blog, at Internet Infidels, at Peaceful Science, etc. They fare very well, as in nobody pointing to an unanswerable skeptic post here in this thread. Can you point to one?
Instead, counterpoint after counterpoint goes down, in a “restless fertility of bewilderment” (C.S. Lewis’ take on skeptics of Jesus’ resurrection)
Seriously? These other numbers are not absurdly tiny? 1 in 10^53 is not? 1 in 10^63? I begin to think you are the one who doesn’t understand exponents.
Well, that “million million” number is going to need some scaling, since it was “a protein substantially smaller than the transmembrane protein specified by the gene, T-urf13”. But we can leave that aside, 10^-63 is indeed a good confirmation of 10^-77, both are obviously ridiculously small numbers, pick one! They’re both problematic for evolution.
And I’m not sure why the fold difference needs investigating, or why I need to come up with a number for this difference.
Actually, they did experiments, did you watch the video?
He does citations as well, by “quotes” I meant to include citations.
I did look up some of the papers, they are the results of research, published in scientific journals. Not rhetoric.
Merriam-Webster has: “rhetoric: insincere or grandiloquent language”.
That’s fine, that is what I think you mean. Like trying to persuade people with only fine-sounding language.
Actually, my laptop reboots at random for some reason. I’m considering replacing it, with something I know also has a designer, I’m even willing to pay money and order one without first giving it a test drive.
I’ve made the analogy of a bridge here, bridges are not deemed trustworthy just because some number of vehicles have successfully gone over them. They also have to have an approved design, before building, and they also get inspected. No one is going to go over a bridge, or get on a plane, if they know it is the result of a mindless, unguided process! Particularly if that process had no aim or particular destination, such as a bridge, or a plane.
Sure, a good design is not all that is needed for good function. Just ask my laptop…
Great. So, in other words, a laptop with a working theorem-proving program is not in fact reason, and the person who built and/or programmed it isn’t reason either. So it is not an example of reason coming from reason. So we are still short a definition, and what you suggest for an example instead is also not an example. Back to square one, then: I have no clue what you mean by reason coming from reason, and I have at this point basically no confidence that you have any more of a clue of what you mean than I.
Fine by me.
Correct. They are not equivalent. All thoughts are – ultimately – physical processes[1], but not all physical processes, not even all those within a brain, are thoughts.
So? You asked and/or conjectured how I would put it. You asked and/or conjectured what statements I would agree with. You can find my more precise and careful choice of words any flavour of odd you wish. None of this is an actual problem for my position or even for how I express it, especially after sufficient explanation is provided and understanding is achieved. I would not say that you “produce the driving-to-the-grocery-store action”, because in my opinion such phrasing suggests that actions such as driving to the grocery store are products, and I find this to be a bit of a category abuse, if not outright error. If it is odd to you that I would insist on calling that a carrying out instead, that’s fine. If somehow calling it a production is more natural/intuitive to you, that’s fine.
Frankly, this is a bit of a moot tangent. This still doesn’t help with the reason-comes-from-reason gibberish, after all, because ultimately the reasoner is not itself reason. So even if it was fair to say that “reasoning” could be paraphrased into “producing reason”, it would still not be the case that reason comes from reason, because the producer is still not the product in this instance.
Actually, I stand corrected. In law, there is a proprietary definition of “fact”. Courts do not decide what is in actuality true, but a verdict is indeed a finding of “fact” in the legal sense of that word.
I trust my laptop because it, and machines much like it, have proven mostly reliable in the past, both in my own direct experience with them, and in the experiences of many other users.
If it is a demonstrably well-functioning plane that passes standard testing for safety and function, yes. Would you not?
No. Even if we were all this silly and only ever trusted things based on whether we thought some trustworthy intelligence made them to be as they are, that would not mean that everything we trust is, as a matter of fact, actually made by an intelligence. We could be wrong about the origins of things we trust, even if the things never betray our trust.
What people believe about something is not an indicator of what is actually true about it. Even if it’s everyone’s belief. Even if we all believe really really hard. Truth is not a matter of choice. Grow up.
When ever controls are in place, the patient suddenly doesn’t have information they couldn’t have known anymore. The miraculous magic-vision somehow only works when there is no guarantee that the unknowable information is actually never delivered to the patient. That’s what I mean by the ghost getting blinded when ever the study itself is single or double blind.
What does being part of nature mean in the first place? If you encounter a thing you knew not before, how do you decide if it is part of this universe? To me, if something fits in with nature, if it obeys natural law, if it does all the things expected from a natural thing and violates none of the principles upon which we are led to believe nature rests, then I see no reason to open up a second category for it. For all practical purposes, it is just another thing of nature. Perhaps a rare one, if it took us so long to discover it, but ultimately a natural one, in that it behaves regarding other natural things just like it was one of them.
Not really. Precursors to his 1905 paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies – the paper that introduced special relativity as we know it – were basically already in the shelves with a number of other researchers. Poincaré in particular basically already had the entire thing done and ready for publishing. Had Einstein not come first, his would be the name we remember for it. For that matter, the central coordinate transformation in special relativity is named the Lorentz transform, which is a name that’s curiously not Einstein. Not to downplay his brilliance, but he was one of many, and his ideas were the logical next steps someone else would have taken at roughly the same time, had he not happened to be the one.
General relativity, a generalization built upon the 1905 paper and some subsequent works by Einstein himself and colleagues, was published in 1915 and was basically wholly uncontroversial. There were perhaps a handful holdouts, but by 1919 there was basically hardly any doubt of it left among professionals, as much as the press would suggest that the solar eclipse that year is to thank for finally “proving” the theory.
Einstein got the Nobel Prize for another of his 1905 papers, where he described the photoelectric effect, because unlike coordinate transformations, there was actual legitimate debate as to whether the Newtonian corpuscle view of light could be salvaged, given light’s unambiguously wave-like nature in so many experiments. The photoelectric effect lends support to the idea that light energy is delivered in discrete quanta, which would otherwise be a dubious trick Max Planck used to calculate a black body spectrum that is consistent with both the Raleigh-Jeans Law and Wien’s. So, if anything, that was the more controversial topic to comment on, and yet that is what he got the prize for, instead of the oh-so-controversial relativity most everyone was basically onboard with. Ultimately, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Einstein as late as 1921, well over half a decade after general relativity, and three times as long after both the photoelectric effect and special relativity, so to say that time-to-verify is what held up the process when the thing he wasn’t awarded for was neither particularly controversial and definitely verified years before the award given out, makes no sense here historically. That’s not to mention Einstein’s other two 1905 papers of similar impact, regarding mass-energy equivalence and Brownian motion (which you’ll notice is named after Robert Brown who described it in 1827, and not Einstein who developed a statistical theory for it upon which much of modern statistical physics and therefore thermodynamics rests[2]), or his great works of other years, such as the 1907 paper that gave a quantum theoretical explanation of the heat capacity of solids. Suffice it to say there was no shortage of works that could have served to justify the award, but the Nobel Prize in physics can only be awarded once per person, so the committee had a choice to make – and boy were they spoiled for it with Albert Einstein.
By the way, I will use this opportunity to point out that you said you believed Einstein got the Nobel Prize for “photovoltaics”: A technology that wouldn’t exist until several decades after Einstein’s death, and the principles of which were first documented even more decades before Einstein’s birth. This time around I’ll leave it to others to draw their conclusions about how prepared you are to have a discussion about the history of physics or its controversies.
And speaking of quantum mechanics, what about entanglement, if that’s what you meant, is well described as a “lone voice at first” type of thing, rather than an experimentally repeatable phenomenon that at most calls into question some naive classical intuitions but is otherwise just a thing that in fact can demonstrably occur in nature whether we like it or not?
The question is not whether it ever happens that bad ideas just fizzle out. Your suggestion was they should, that this is at least a recognizable pattern. Giving one example is not an explanation as to why this would be a general rule.
“Motion of atoms” is a bit too simplistic for an expression for my liking. I have expressed exactly how I would rather extend and/or interpret the phrase, if we are to commit to using it. At this point, since it is clear how much is meant by it, I’m okay with using this shorthand for the sake of brevity and not waste your time or my own explicating all the subtleties with every use of the phrase. I understand that it is an attempt at mockery, an appeal to the absurd on your part, but I cannot be bothered taking any offense to it, especially when doing so won’t get you to bother adjusting the language. So, “motion of atoms” it is, for all I care. ↩︎
Granted, there are formulae in that statistical theory of brownian motion named explicitly after Einstein, since he literally introduced them. And after Stokes, since there are only so many things you can name after one man before referring to them becomes confusing for the sheer magnitude of his impact. There are a few more names like Einstein’s in this way. ↩︎
It’s not “general knowledge” to me. So, yes, I would like an independent, oobjective, reliable source to substantiate this. That means all DI and ID-related sources are excluded.
Given Tour’s long and well-documented history of spinning tall tales about things that are dubious at best (You never did get around to quoting any OOL researcher publicly proclaiming they were on the verge of creating life in the lab, did you?) we can safely file this away in the category of “Things that never happened.”
Well, if it’s a fact, let’s see what kind of evidence you come up with.
Last I checked, none of them are giving away their books or accepting speaking engagements for free.
I never claimed that people were being financially penalized for supporting theistic evolution, so I don’t really see your point here.
Pretty simple: Doug Axe received an endowed chair, which usually offers generous remuneration and job security, only because he is a shill for ID. He certainly does not have anywhere near the scientific accomplishment of people who usually receive such an honour.
Just pick pretty well any of your comments and random and then read the responses. That should suffice.
The sheer breadth of your ignorance is so vast it is almost impressive.