Don't tell me there's no proof for evolution

We Went away for a holiday food fest and the Thumpistically inclined have got it all settled I see. Im not gonna bother even catching up.
HOWEVER
Im not in the "why" game (other than why some chemical binds to another chemical rather than to itself). The answers to "Why" gets all it needs in another building in the divinity school.


IF life persists ( because biochemical reactions occur AGAINST physico-chemical gradients and defy entropy while in the living state, ) why should it not volve to meet its surroundings??

One way to look at it is, mind is an information creator, matter is where ideas (as information) are stored and communicated.


Why did Henry Ford build the model T before the Ford Mustang? Why didn't he put catalytic converters before pollution was a problem.

Why didn't he put a radio with a CD player in the model T. The market (environment) didn't provide a need for it yet.

wow, your automobile analogy is a wonderful counter to the hypothesis of irreducible complexity

And yet there is no matter without form, and no form without matter. Two sides of the same coin if you ask me... which is why I am reluctant to speak of the mind as "not material". I see it as just a different form of "material", a different form of "stuff".

They say philosophy is "to know yourself". Being a mind myself, I believe i have a more intimate perception of minds than I do of matter, in the traditional sense of the word "matter" (stuff with mass and extention). Although I can't explain what a mind is, I don't usually need to. To whom would I explain it, if not other minds? However incommunicable my sense of what a mind "really" is, my intimate intuition remains that I have at leastsome first hand knowledge about myself. Through something mysterious called self-awareness or conscience. I know myself, if imperfectly. And further, I am convinced that other human minds are not very different from my own. I can understand you to a degree, or so I believe, because I believe you are very much like me, at the core: a human soul, or in more scientific parlance, a fellow human mind.

I also feel I understand the concept of information well, again because I am information. Information is "form", shape, structure, and ultimately, language.

But I can't figure out what matter is. Electrons? Quarks? What are quarks?

Turtles all the way down? No clue. No sense of deep intuitive understanding either, appart from phenomenal things like: has weight and size and permanence (conservation of mass). Can change though, often does... can be shaped into useful stuff... what else?

What is matter, "really", if not information. If not forms made of smaller forms made of smaller forms, etc.

If that's the case, the relation between mind and body is about the conversation between one type of information management system (the mind) and another type of information management system (the body). So it may not be that complicated a problem after all.

Yes, it was not materially possible to have certain life forms appear before a certain time, your gods could not engineer life in an instant. Or even in 6 days. So they are very patient gods...

I was just asking: if a god is involve, why all the billions years in development? The fact that it took so long for life to develop at start, is an argument against design, because it does take time for a stochastic evolution process to generate new viable forms of life, but why the wait if a god is at work?

I agree, you can't discuss it with a dog. You can share food with a dog and make the dog feel good, but dog's will not share out of a desire to sacrifice for another. By studying the patterns, it seems to me, that all information that we create as humans of good will, is meant to be shared and enjoyed.(preferrably with someone who can appreciate it, even a dog) Maybe that same pattern was followed when someone or something created the information stored in the matter of our universe (both organic and inorganic). It sure seems like a logical pattern to follow.

All information sharing is a process, you don't teach first graders Calculas, you relate to them on their level. If there is an omnipotent God, what grade level are you and I at compared to him, and where are we in the process? I agree that you and I are information, that makes our mind and bodies part of the process.

Or could I be wrong?. I could be misreading the patterns, that you are pointing out, and jumping to idealistic conclusions.

We know from quantum mechanics, that quarks and electrons are spinors. (Something spinning in a definite direction). If they are elementary particles, what is spinning may not be of importance to us, what is important is that we can sense them.(But, I am going to suggest that what is spinning is a piece of space) What's important is that we sense order. We also know that they are always paired with an antiparticle spinning in the opposite direction. By logic that is necessary because, if two particles next to each other are defined by which direction their outer boundary is spinning, if they spun in the same direction they wouldn't have a boundary and would intuitively be one particle with twice the space in it.

So matter is pieces of space spinning in a precise way, which are in turn arranged in a precise way. That precision is partially revealed by the shape of the space represented statistically by the atomic orbitals of the electrons.

And it gets better when there is another body and mind in the room. (ALERT what follows is a leading question!) Has anybody in history, claimed to know the mind of God, and said he was the words or physical representation of his ideas?

Could you explain your statement further.

Mohammad?

(peace be upon him)

I was talking more about being there when the ideas or information was put into the DNA during evolution. That was before Mohammad's time.

irreducible complexity (q given hypothsis of moern ID movements), states that a phenotypic expression can be traced to a"starting point", whereas stndard evolutionary thinking that recognizes that these expressions can be traced farther and farther back to where a modification served an altogether different purpose on an individual.

Behe tried to show that "blood clotting" was such an irreducible complexity . He stated that it took a certain minimum number of enzymes to accomplish blood clotting in animals, whereas a colleague of ken Miller (on a whim) traced blood clotting to before a point when an organism even needed its blood to clot.

Your attempt at comparison of "The evolution of" a car's parts was such a neat refutation of "IC"

, and why all the " phenotypic test dummies" that got selected "out" through time and just litter up the fossil record ?

ps, where did the concept of evolution as a purely stochastic process get legs here?

I don't understand how it refutes it. I think if intelligence steps into the process by engineering new car parts, like catylitic converters, that is evolution by design or engineering. To refute IC, the people on the assembly line and the fork lift drivers delivering the parts, would had to have wore blindfolds part of the time and hoped a car that produced less pollution appeared from randomly changing parts once in a while, and all the engineers would had to have been fired before they engineered the first car, or the factory. If I am wrong, could you explain how my reasoning is wrong.

So if somebody like Ken Miller traced the evolution of car models back to when they didn't need catalytic converters, does that mean the engineer that designed the catalytic converter has to give his paycheck back?

I believe you missed the point. Ill try to explain better later.

Yes, obviously you don't understand, or you're being willfully obtuse. Irreducible complexity means an organ or system which is too complex to have been evolved. The truly lame example the ID crowd often use is the eye--but that one is easily blown out of the water.

Irreducible complexity is a direct (and hilariously lame) attack on the very concept of evolution of organs and systems. Your analogy actually supports the idea that organs and systems evolve. Sadly, I have no confidence that the nickel will drop for you.

I have never said that I don't believe in evolution. I said I don't believe in Darwinian evolution. I don't believe that random mutations can provide the information necessary to the DNA code for natural selection to select for macroevolution. I believe in the evolution of all biological organisms. The fossil record reveals it, just like the poster in my Ford dealer shows the record of the Ford mustang's evolution by picturing every change in model over time.OK, I'm tired of being ridiculed. I am ready to be convinced. Blow it out of the water.

I didn't ridicule you, I pointed out why FM has said that your statement contradicts the concept of irreducible complexity. I am ridiculing the ID crowd. Here is a simple explanation of the likely path of the evolution of the eye at youtube. I used a search criterion of "irreducible complexity and the eye" and got 219,000 hits in .51 seconds.



If you feel that you are being ridiculed, perhaps you should take the hint and the opportunity to inform yourself more fully before wading into such a discussion.

"During evolution" is now. It was also during Mohammad's time. Evolution never stopped.

Thats where the IDers and their Irreducible complexity concept fall off the truck. using jacobs concept of the automobile (and NOT the guys who built it like he is wont to do), evolution really begins with a "water lifting evice" like a shadoof.After that a piston pumping device, was followed by th External combution engine and then the internal combustion. ALL these devices are functionally and design related.
They all contain parts that were first used for something ntirely different than what they wound up being.

Ken Miller, at the Dover Trial was shown a mousetrap as an example of IC.(Nothing preceded the mousetrap design that snaps and kills a mouse by a loqded spring clip. Miller gave it a few minutes and then came up with a list of antecessor devices that led up to the spring trap. (What the IDer lawyer missed, like our brianjacob was that the concept of the specific spring trap, was developed through history and was begat by the spring clip, which was begat by the invention of wire, which was begat by making spring steel tools which was begat by something like a metal pry bar ). Miller added several just for laughs, like a spring powered tie clip.
ID, requires incorporating "special Creation" for the appearances of new species and phyla. Even at the genic level, they fail to understand that many genes often control only one expression and one gene can often affect many xpressions. Thats why the "Haldane dilemma" falls apart and was so admittd by Haldane himself.