The Argument Clinic

But usually, they at least have a vague idea what words mean. Bill’s response there was as if you asked him to describe the Mona Lisa and he said “Sonic the Hedgehog is having a laser battle with Godzilla, while the Spice Girls watch and keep score.” The words he wrote had almost no relationship to the text I asked him to summarize.

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I enjoyed this sentence so much that I asked Gemini for a source, just in case it was a cultural reference used by Kids These Days on the ticking tock thing or maybe the instantgraph. Here is the response: “Unfortunately, there’s no reliable source for that quote. It’s likely a humorous and creative made-up scenario! However, it does paint a pretty wild and entertaining mental image, doesn’t it?”

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I do my best. :wink:

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I think that all three approaches require radical redefinitions of scientific terms, but in Bill’s case, I agree that it goes much further than that.

I have looked at the variants in uniprot. I am not sure what argument you are trying to support with this data.

You expect us to believe someone who can’t even do grade school math can understand Uniprot? Please, don’t insult us like that.

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Are you talking about yourself :joy:

Then all of your claims regarding “all the data” have been deliberate falsehoods.

John
My claim is simply is that given a model that is based on 30% neutral AA substitution rate the data in uniprot is not unexpected. How is this controversial?

You might want to go back and review your initial claim.

Off topic, so I’m putting this here

Dave Barry’s account of his colonoscopy is so funny that it could injure people in any weakened state.

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Others are trying to argue the positive case that translatable codes can form in nature.

Perry Marshall has a 10 million dollar prize for anyone who can falsify premise 2 by showing nature forming a translatable code. Since the panel has not awarded any prize money over the last 8 years the hypothesis seems difficult to falsify.

I am not, however, asking for falsification in this case. Just an argument that the codes existence in the cell is not evidence for planned creation.

First of all, there is no code in the cell, certainly not in any sense that would raise questions as to how it could have gotten there. Some molecules assemble into long polymers on their own due to electrostatic interactions. Some polymers naturally interact with more primitive molecules that results in them assembling into the same or a related kind of polymer, reflecting the same sequence. All of this is chemistry, none of it is code. That it assembles on its own and self-replicates is in fact quite a dead giveaway: Code does not do that. Some chemicals can, given a chemical environment plentiful enough in the necessary raw materials.

Secondly, in order that data should serve as evidence in favour of a candidate hypothesis, there would first need to be a candidate hypothesis. What is this “planned creation” you speak of? Which testable predictions does it make? Are they consistent with the experimental data in question, and what would a physically possible hypothetical data set that is not consistent with this hypothesis look like? Considering consistency with experimental data, how do this hypothesis’ predictions fare when compared against other hypotheses that attempt to account for the same observable facts?

An idea that is beyond testing is an idea that is useless for the purposes of meaningfully rendering predictions. It fails at the one thing scentific ideas are supposed to accomplish. So, unless someone - best one among those proposing it - can articulate exactly what the model at hand is, and how one would in principle go about determining how well or poorly it matches observations, there cannot be any talk of any point of data being evidence in its favour, or, indeed, against it.

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Hi Gisteron
While I agree the use of the word code is only a word I think your argument fails to acknowledgement the differences between living organisms and matter. There is a reason we have not observed any life that is simpler than a bacteria which includes the ability to store chemical sequences (DNA) that are independent of different chemical sequences (proteins) yet determine the arrangements of the proteins chemical sequences.

This mechanism what ever we call it allows for the production of many different proteins that allow the cell to perform its functions such as turning chemical energy into work, acquiring chemical energy through movement and self replication.

The argument that this structure was produced overtime and not independently created has almost no empirical support other than pointing out similarities between life forms that are more complex. The theory needs to also explain the differences beyond untested speculative mechanisms.

Yes, and that reason is that we defined life in such a way as to require several complex mechanisms like that. There most certainly are more primitive structures than bacteria, and all of the chemical interactions happening inside a bacterial cell can and do, in fact, occur in a free medium saturated with the necessary ingredients and/or barriers, irrespective of whether any of us care to denote sub-regions of that medium as cells. Nature certainly makes no such distinction. Physics does not magically turn on its head on the other side of a membrane merely because some hairless apes arbitrarily decided that the inside has “spooky life magic” in it. Moreover, there are examples for more or less every level of complexity between elemental aggregates all the way up to living cells. Us agreeing on a label that happens only to encompass the latter is not a peculiarity of nature, but of our language. The chemicals involved see no dividing lines of this sort. These are meaningful abstractions for us as students of how nature works. Nature itself has no need for them, for it is not a person with thoughts that need organizing.

Also, just to get some perspective here: The ‘‘argument’’ you have a ‘‘me-no-likey’’ against is that things of the sort we know can and do happen are probably things that did happen. That is what you find there is insufficient empirical support for. And what you find a worthwhile alternative to consider is the suggestion that instead or ontop of things we know can and do happen, something happened that to the best of our knowledge would be physically impossible.

At least that’s the most charitable interpretation I can muster given the total nothing you chose to present as the hypothesis for which you suggest the non-existent cell code is evidence…

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This right here!
clapping

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And the way you seem to think that could best be shown is by "start(ing) from the assumption of creation and test if the evidence of the genetic code supports the inference that it is the product of creation.

But you have not shown how one would do that, i.e. what observations would be predicted if the genetic code was “the produce of creation.”

The claim has been made that, in fact, there is no such observation. That there is no empirical evidence that could show that the genetic code was not “created.”

If you were up to the task, you could challenge that claim by giving some examples. But you won’t, because you aren’t, and so here we are in The Argument Clinic.

Well, the fact that you consider Marshall an authority rather than a dishonest asshat aside, that a hypothesis may be difficult, if not impossible, to falsify is not necessarily a mark in its favour. It depends on how many observations could falsify it, and how many of these could have been observed, but were not.

For instance, the claim that gravity is caused by fairies whose existence cannot possibly be detected by any human means imaginable, is a very stupid hypothesis by virtue of the fact that it is “difficult to falsify.”

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Hi Faizal
This is @Dan_Eastwood argument and is on the surface true.

Creation itself is not falsifiable. What is falsifiable is if something observable is the direct product of creation or can it be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry. If someone showed a translatable code being formed in nature that would falsify that the transcription translation mechanism was a direct product of creation.

The example of this mentioned previously is Newton believing that the movement of the planets was guided because it did not fit his gravitational model. This was falsified by Einstein as his model accurately predicted the motion of the planets.

Where @Dan_Eastwood 's argument comes in is where Einstein falsified the motion of the planets was direct evidence against Divine guidance it did not falsify creation of the solar system or the universe.

The ad hominem attacks used against people you disagree with show weakness in your position.

No, it would not. You do this routinely. When asked for a prediction, you just make stuff up. It doesn’t work like that. The prediction has to be a logical consequence of the hypothesis. It cannot be just what ever you feel like plugging in when prompted for a testable claim. If there is no such logical link, then there is no logically closed falsification. You may pinky-promise all the world that you will retract your thesis if and when what ever condition you made up on the spot is met, but at the end of the day there is nothing to compel you to keep it but a sense of personal honour. And, with all due respect, that just doesn’t cut it, and it’s not even a matter of personal trust. A scientific thinker should not set logic aside just to keep such a silly promise to abandon a hypothesis without a legitimate challenge.

But that’s just false. Again, nothing about “someone guides the planets” precludes general relativity from being an accurate description of how the planets are being guided. Einstein’s theory does not conflict with the guide idea, no matter how much vindication it accumulates. For that matter, nothing about the postulates of general relativity implies that there are no guides making the planets move as they do.

What does conflict between Newton’s universal law of gravitation and Einstein’s field equations is their respective predictions regarding the actual motion of massive bodies when far from the low energy density limit. But that is not a falsification of either of them. It just means that at least one of them must be inaccurate on at least some scales. As it turns out, the experimentally measured trajectories are consistent with the predictions of GR on more scales than they are with the predictions of Newton’s law. Newton’s theory, then, is best treated as less general than Einstein’s. But it was noticeably less than perfectly accurate even in Newton’s day, and that fact did not wait for 1915 to be noticed. Einstein’s theory is not what falsified Newton’s. In general, theories do not falsify one another. Observations can falsify theories, to some extent or another, by failing to align with logically (or mathematically, as it were) inescapable predictions of said theories.

Newton’s theory wasn’t “guidance theory”. That’s not a theory. It does not help predict things, so it doesn’t do the one thing we do science for. His actual theory was that planets abide by his universal law. Then it turned out that Mercury doesn’t, at least not exactly. Going with “k, guess it’s magic then” is a form of giving up, not of developing a new theory to surpass the last.

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HI Gisteron
@Perry_Marshall hypothesis is that nature is powerful enough to form the equivalent of a translation transcription mechanism. This is a prediction. How would you test this? Could a predictive model be built that can test this hypothesis?

The question of the model is something just to think about. If the answer is very doubtful then I believe this is telling us something.