"Irreducible Complexity"--intellectual laziness or what?

fm wrote-



I never get mad and I'm not going away while the debate is still live.



Not at all. I'll never match those I admire. I simply try to put the idea I'm carrying into words.

Wolf wrote-



Well then Behe is intellectually lazy if that's true. I know next to nothing about the guy. I would guess he's a good self-publicist and I have no objection to that.



I don't set out to confuse. These matters are complicated. And complex. And I try to leave something for readers to think about. We are dealing with human nature in what can be seen as an experimental society. 290 million people of very mixed origin and varying levels of integration,economic activity,geographical location and no accepted theological authority wrestling with a written constitution laid down 200 years ago for a society with no access to energy and only 30 million strong who were spread out over a vast area with only rudimentary communications and the centres and the outlying regions deeply suspicious of each other and of each other's ways. That is a potent mix and I'm only touching the surface here.



I'm suggesting it as background reading on the human nature issue. How people manipulate the fine points of dogma for political and economic ends.

Let's just take a simple example.

The decline of religious belief is likely to lead ,and most experts agree it has led,to more divorce. A married couple both consume the same newspaper and many other household items. All suppliers have an interest in defeating the saying "two can live as cheaply as one". So these suppliers, and most will advertise in media, are in favour of divorce and thus in the decline in religious belief. Media is a city manifestation so city people will tend to favour etc etc-you see the point I hope. But the irony is,and I'm fully aware of it, that the Dow is affected by the success or otherwise of the suppliers. It is a very complex situation but what Runciman highlights is that the leaders of the various factions are not interested in the dogmas themselves. The advantages of them are what they battle over. The followers are another matter.

I just think that those sections of society, the red states to be crude, who wish to reinforce religious sentiment ought to be allowed to do so if they express that wish in elections. Dover looked from here to be an instance where a number of city people had moved into an agricultural community and sought to impose a city outlook. There are similar places in England. I live near one. But we have the patience to allow elections to slowly shift the balance. We wouldn't allow a few individuals waving the Constitution about to cost us £5 million. Protestantism and its offshoots is a city strategy.

I'll express an opinion here for once. I think cities are disgusting.

One has to look at the social effects. The idea of "Sunday" is vanishing and when it has everyday will be the same. People's time off will cease to be integrated as it used to be. I am prepared to listen to experts on whether or not that is useful for society because it is such things that the debate is really about. IDers to me are seeking to protect their way of life in its every detail. There are big issues at stake. The Police take one of them seriously enough,foxhunting, that they have more or less refused to police it. That was a city based imposition on the countryside. And I wouldn't hunt. The Police take a different view on prostitution , as do local authorities, depending where they are.

All these many,many differences are focussed on the ID/anti-ID dispute and some of them go into the very marrow of the bones especially on the sexual selection issue.


Drew wrote-



Would you explain that please assuming it's not just a jest.

Its the very argument that Behe had used to try to explain how a mousetrap is engineered as an Irreducibly complex tool. Niles Eldredge and Dave Raup had subsequently taken behes IC example apart and showed how engineering never says that anything is IC'd.'


PS, having read Lord Runcimans stuff in a survey of Early Christianity, I wonder where you make any connection at all. If there is one please let some of us know.

The only thing I remember from him is that he's the author of
"Christianity asks us to do good and avoid evil, Whereas Islam makes one command good and destroy evil"

He was more astute at that differentiation than in anything to do with , or even remotely associated with the subject at hand.

If you dont wish to , at least try to be relevant, I shall ignore your posts with an announcement that was succesfully used by another thread meister.ie "
theres that annoying buzz again"

fm wrote-



Incorrect. It was unsuccessfully used by Joe on the Chicago thread which I have read every post on. I'm impervious to such methods.

It was also used in a national Sunday newspaper about me but it didn't prevent a regular correspondence between myself and some of the better journalists and,on two occasions, the owner, and it didn't prevent the buzzing. You're pissing in the wind with it.

I think you might consider using a machine gun if you had the power. Suppose others considered that you were buzzing annoyingly around the heads of young A2k readers. You have admitted being escorted off the premises at some meeting if I remember correctly and that has never happened to me.

A sweet American lady wrote this earlier today-

Thats because you like anonymity.
If youre not angry, why the use of ad hominems and surly terms? If you cant be relevant, at least be entertaining. Now you are creeping me out. You mean in the UK, theyve got a whole newspaper about you?
Do you know what kickapoo joy juice is?

Tools and machines evolve over time. Also, accidents and luck often prove to be as valuable as straight research.

It is possible to make many different machines that will accomplish the same job, but the one that wins in the market place is the one that works and is simple.

The corollary to evolution is clear.

Never heard of it but it sounds great. I really love American expressions and place names.



I do actually but I don't get it.

Obviously I will use ad hominems. They express feelings don't they and not abstract ideas. Feelings are more difficult to convey. Too much science tends to inhibit feeling.

Surly must be in the beholder's mind, as is also entertaining.

I thought the Runciman passage highly entertaining. I like droll wit. I think it boils down to thinking the human condition absurd. All the best writers have a sense of that. The rest are just pompous.

spendi And where do you fit?
Those of low self esteem are those who need stroking . Im glad you get it from someone. Trust me, you could never make anyone feel stupid, quite the contrary. Many people on these threads have gone over basic concepts with you many times and you still dont get it.
Now thats entertainment.

Thanks Drew but now I'm even more confused.

Are you suggesting evolution and man made artefacts have a similarity.

How about ladies garments?

The prosecution rests its case

I know some folks that are like a baby's diaper. The creationist/ID/IC folks nearly always fit that category.

Oh- we're all absurd alright.

The gracious thank-you from the lady was unsolicited. It had no effect on me. I offered the quote in response to something you said fm. Why do you twist everything around like that? It was your offhand dismissal of Runciman. I was merely demonstrating that not everybody takes such a negative attitude. Some people will pick up on a reference. All the anti-ID references are predictable and repetitive. If just one person read R it would be worth it to me. And just saying a book is good is not enough to get me reading it.



Are you kidding? Evolution theory and scientific method are dead easy especially in their basic concepts and seen in isolation.

Football is, as many women say, and some men, just 22 blokes chasing a ball around a field. Oh yeah! That's the sort of intellectual laziness I'm dealing with. Football, like these other matters,is connected up to a social system. It's a bit lazy to blurt out that IC is intellectual laziness as if that gives you the upper hand and you can say with a self-satisfied smirk-



If only life was that simple eh? We would still be swinging through the trees with that sort of chattering prevailing. It's like you've come to a grinding halt with your mantras. About 1970 I would guess. Some reward you might have got with a big round of applause after you had wowed them with patterns of words which they congratulated themselves on having understood and been thereby "improved" and which were reported in one of those artefacts made out of wood pulp with ink inserts which people only read the classifieds of. Apart from the ones bored shitless I mean.

Guess this thread is dead. Thanks spendi

Science is fookered.Physical science I mean.

The top priority is holding off death.

If science carries on like it is in a very short time,on a 4.7 billion years time scale,and counting,99% of the population will require continuous intensive care monitoring and wheeling around in bath chairs in well manicured gardens or,in the winter months,entertaining by an unbroken succession of "on the edge of your seat" exciting sporting contests.And 99% can win any election that's ever been invented.

It will also have designed and perfected a multi-dimensional mobile video phone with which citizens will be able to keep in instant contact with everybody they know and which will give them a blow job and inform them of their up-to-the-minute status at the bank. Possibly darn their socks as well but I shouldn't get utopian so rashly.

It will conjure into existence food experiences where you won't even have to lick your own lips. Each can of beans will have a lip-licking device.

And these wonderful benefits will require that the government only takes about 99.9% of personal,an old fashioned word,income in taxes.

Scientists are staving off redundancy with an esoteric language which the clerics of the dark ages tried with Latin. They believe the effect to be hypnotic. What use is a nuclear physicist when the stores are loaded up with bombs. He couldn't just switch to brain surgery. If we don't need any more nuclear physicists there's only general labouring he's qualified for.

The trick now,since science has done the business, for which grateful thanks is in order, like the horse in Animal Farm, is how to be happy with the results. That task is for the sociological and psychological disciplines.

Here's another bit from Runciman-

"In spite of the difference over the Creed,which was the first symptom of dangers likely to arise in the future,there was in the early eleventh century no feeling that the unity of Christendom had been broken nor any desire for a break."

Swap ID v anti-ID for Creed and 21st for eleventh and Union for Christendom and then put the same words in the mouth of a historian in 3006 AD.

fm wrote-

That's a bit of a premature judgement. It again underestimates A2Kers but it may well be correct. If the thread was dependent upon your presence on it then it must have been about you. I thought it was about irreducible complexity. Sorry.

What were we talking about again?

Irreducible complexity and who has the energy to discuss it.

Irreducible complexity? I'm all for it. It would make my like a whole lot easier as all I'd have to do is shrug my shoulders and say "damned if I know" and the problem is solved....the checks come much faster that way also, no boring time consuming research to slow things down.

That's right Acqu-

We're in the sunny uplands now. What more do we want to know? Just think how cheap the beer will be when the government gets rid of all these scientists who have been costing a fortune in occupation therapy finding out that the supernova in the photograph which is 800 million light years away ceased to exist 432 billion years ago and that white noise is its dying last breath and that the moon is slowing down in its orbit by a milli-second per century. That money could be spent on ladies fashions.

They keep saying that fewer young people are going into science and that the reason is that young people are stupider than they used to be. What a load of booloocks that is. They know which way the wind is blowing is the reason. It's much more satisfying becoming a celebrity even if it is only for 15 minutes each.

A team of researchers here have discovered that if you slice a Battenburg cake lengthways,both vertically and horizontally,using a sterilised stainless steel blade and a spirit level,you can get four handy sized mini sponge cakes (one pair yellow and the other pair pink)

And did you know that there are thousands of species of flies ranging from 1/4 inch long up to 3 inches and their eyes have 1000 lenses which can all move independently of each other. This is why they are so quick to move when you try to swat them. So what you should do is shine a torch on them before bringing the aerodynamically perfected swatter into operation and spray the resulting goo with a specially developed disinfectant which kills 99% of all known germs.(Only £3.99 from all approved retail outlets and complete with kiddi-lock).

You're dead right about the checks and if that effect is congruent with reduced boredom you would have to be a complete IDIOT to turn your nose up at IC. Who wants to know how everything works anyway.All that matters is that it does. Ask your lady friends.

A noble pursuit, I'm sure



Really? I never heard that reason before. I always thought it was because of the one you mentioned below.



Less people are going into science, because:

a). They dislike it, maybe because their teachers aren't engaging enough.
b). They think it's too difficult and can't be arsed (not stupidity, but rather laziness).
c). They think that doing "easier" subjects are more rewarding. Get a good grade, go into business and earn huge sums of cash.
d). They realise that science doesn't pay very well.