101. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #193003 by Quine on June 14, 2008 at 12:29 pm

Hi Paula,

I am with Steve on the start of life thing. It is like the philosophical problem (Sorites Paradox) of asking at which added grain of sand does a pile of sand become a sand dune. There is no place where the addition of a single new chemical reaction capability puts us over some kind of bright line between non life and life.

It is reasonable to postulate that pockets of organic chemicals existed in contexts where energy was flowing from a more concentrated form into waste heat, and the waste heat had a place to go away. In this kind of place, molecules will form and breakup spontaneously sampling the phase space of all possible configurations. From time to time, some molecules will happen that have autocatalytic properties. This does not mean that they can replicate, but something about them in the context causes more of them to form, or defers them from breaking up, or both.

Getting strong autocatalysis in a single molecule probably took a long time. During this time, groups of molecules that promoted each other would tend to hang around (as a group) more than those which did not. By the time you get up to RNA, you have a true super hero of autocatalysis, a replicator.

102. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192991 by Quine on June 14, 2008 at 11:59 am

tx:

I'm good enough with AIG's date. Whatever it was, it is 1656 years after Adam.

Was this during the stone age? Did people with stone age tools build boats big enough to hold all the animals in the world? Where does this date fall on the historical scale of boat building technology? The archeological layers at Megiddo go back to the stone age, where's the flood?

103. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192987 by Quine on June 14, 2008 at 11:43 am

tx:

Perhaps calculating the odds of a virus or anything else accidentally forming and accidentally knowing how to interact with other micro-level, information-bearing substances would have been a good place to start their calculators smoking.

Retrovirus insertion and "knowing"? Here we have the equivalent of Satan burying all those fossils.

There is simply no way around the fact of common ancestry. These retrovirus events mark branching in the tree of life for other species as well. The virus absolutely does not have enough information carrying capacity (bits) to have the position selection ability tx suggests.

Abiogenesis and the exact mechanism of evolution (e.g. mutations) are just smoke thrown in to cloud the argument. Common ancestry, which we now know is a fact, is a show stopper for the conventional (creationist or interventional theist) theology.

104. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192720 by Quine on June 13, 2008 at 11:54 pm

RtG, did you miss the part about the evidence coming from retroviral inclusions, not supposed "design"?

105. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192706 by Quine on June 13, 2008 at 11:39 pm

RtG, you advocated teaching science. Thanks to DNA analysis, we now have conclusive scientific evidence that humans and chimps had a common ancestor. So, don't you think we should teach this truth to our young?

106. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192688 by Quine on June 13, 2008 at 11:09 pm

RtG, have you considered the damage done to our youth by indoctrinating them to believe all these Bible stories that they later learn are not true? Wouldn't it be better if they were taught to think for themselves from the beginning so they could at least start on a path of truth?

(Be sure to insert other Scriptures in other countries for "Bible" as used above.)

107. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192595 by Quine on June 13, 2008 at 1:57 pm

Mike, do you feel a computer virus is ontologically untenable?

108. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192587 by Quine on June 13, 2008 at 1:22 pm

See Blackmore on paranormal phenomenon.

109. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192554 by Quine on June 13, 2008 at 11:23 am

Another good thing to know about is the Genographic Project. Just as DNA has provided conclusive evidence that humans and chimps had a common ancestor, DNA is also providing conclusive evidence for the movements of human populations over the last tens of thousands of years. At no time in the last 60,000 years has the entire human population been hole up on a boat, let alone with representative samples of all the world's other living beings.

110. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192544 by Quine on June 13, 2008 at 10:58 am

Go look at the archeological history of Megiddo, one of best digs in the world. It is a stack of 26 cities going back to the stone age (older than YEC says the whole word is). No global flood; no dino bones.

111. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192532 by Quine on June 13, 2008 at 9:50 am

Finally, a serious challenge: tell us what kind of evidence would need to be presented for you to change your mind. Really.

This reminds me of the old joke about how many psychotherapists it takes to change a light bulb: just one, but the light bulb has to want to change.

In this case there seems to be a deep drive not to change that overrides the desire to think itself.

112. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #192058 by Quine on June 12, 2008 at 12:10 pm

Lose on igneous, so move the target over to sedimentary. Yawn.

There should have been a warning label on fizhburn's last post:

[WARNING: The following message contains logical reasoning and may be objectionable to those of sensitive minds desperately holding on to fairy tails.]

The secondary dating relationship of the sedimentary layers that have been covered by igneous rock is only in one direction. Other techniques may be needed to tell exactly how much older the sedimentary layers are, but that they are older is a conclusive inference. So, when the RM data is already older than any possible 'flood' the argument is over before you even get to the techniques that establish how much older the previously deposited layers are.

113. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #191903 by Quine on June 12, 2008 at 4:54 am

Rev:

If you test something older than that with it, the result will be useless.

His twisted logic concludes that there is a vast conspiracy of scientists not to look for ¹⁴C in all those dinosaur bones in all the museums. If YEC were true, the world (and all bones from any source) could not be old enough to deplete the isotope from any once living tissue, no matter how fossilized. Thus, it must be that evil doers prevent the testing.

114. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #191651 by Quine on June 11, 2008 at 12:01 pm

fizhburn:

W.V.O. Quine had a theory of webs of belief that operates in much the same manner.

Here is the ref.

115. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #191641 by Quine on June 11, 2008 at 11:27 am

keith:

There comes a time when even the most disinterested of observers is finally driven to say, "Okay, enough's enough of this nonsense. Now listen up, stupid..."

Thank you.

116. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #191219 by Quine on June 10, 2008 at 12:03 pm

Steve, I was referring to a search for positive evidence for "Intelligent Design" not positive evidence for "irreducible complexity," which is what you argued on your blog and with which I quite agree. However, if you decoded a digital message from a section of DNA that then made a testable prediction (say, gave you the equations for quantum gravity), there is some point approaching infinite improbably at which it would have to stand as positive evidence that something intelligent put it there specifically as a message. Of course, I do not think this is going to happen, but I do expect some folks (you know who) to go alook'n.

117. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #191204 by Quine on June 10, 2008 at 11:21 am

There could be a search for positive evidence of Intelligent Design. I have been waiting for the announcement that someone has gotten money from Templeton to do massive computer processing (as in the "Bible Code" project) of the "junk" sequences from the human DNA record in order to find hidden messages from "The Designer." They could launch "ID@home" to use the computer cycles of all those believers out there to find the "Word." Of course, with the right decoding algorithm, they can find anything they want, and at some point become quite wealthy by selling click ads on the screens of the sheeple.

118. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #190801 by Quine on June 9, 2008 at 3:14 pm

Frankus1122:

... it is hard to believe that anyone witnessing the exchange could not be influenced as to correctness of 'our' position.

That is why it is worth doing even though it seems to have no effect on those humming loudly with fingers in ears.

119. Logical Proof of the Existence of a Divine Creator, Why Atheism is Not Logically Sound

Comment #190725 by Quine on June 9, 2008 at 12:59 pm

The only thing that could salvage this article would be a punchline.

Which would be:

"April Fool!"

120. Discussion between Richard Dawkins and Paula Kirby

Comment #190718 by Quine on June 9, 2008 at 12:44 pm

Steve:

ChristiansTogether:

The main reason for this is that atheists (most often) seek to disprove God from the Darwinian rationale (as seems to be the case for Dawkins). So what is being suggested is just an attempt to "mirror" these perspectives on each side of the question.

No. You are confusing the issue of creationism with that of theism. The main refutation of creationism is evidence for evolution. The main refutation of theism is the argument regarding the appearance of design of the universe.

I'd like to take Steve's observation another step in that our increasing understanding of the undesigned origin of life and its diversity does not directly show the nonexistence of the supernatural, but just fills in an incredulity that has the effect of knocking out one of the support legs from under Theism. If you then knock out the supernatural aspects of consciousness leg, the thing is pretty well ready to fall over. This means that it is unnecessary to put together a proof of nonexistence, which is good, because that is not going to happen (Teapot).

121. Logical Proof of the Existence of a Divine Creator, Why Atheism is Not Logically Sound

Comment #190699 by Quine on June 9, 2008 at 12:07 pm

Orwellian doublespeak, beginning to end.

Thanks SPS for the link to Robin Ince. I had not seen that one, and now echo Elli: "A magic man done it" !!!

I suggest an email to canadafreepress, with cc to Postelnik, simply stating that the guy is an intellectual fraud.

122. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #190325 by Quine on June 8, 2008 at 9:11 pm

This nitpicking the ToE is just a sideshow put on by the Theists to get their minds off the central problem that humans are not 'made' in the image of their deity, but descendent from apes. DNA evidence is fact beyond any theory. From these facts, we can also make conclusive inferences that also count as facts, just as we make conclusive inferences from the tracks in bubble chambers to establish facts about subatomic particles we never actually see.

It is still theory that all living things have common ancestry because we have not looked at the genetic blueprint of each and every one. Perhaps some scientist will pull up an organism from a deep sea vent and find it can not be anywhere on the known Tree of Life. But we have checked humans and chimps and know that both descended from a common great ape.

Having established that, the problem for Theists is that they do not expect to be "hanging out" (literally) with Cheetah in the next life. There is no provision for chimps to be "saved" even if you trained a very smart one to go through the church motions just as well as a retarded Mormon. The retarded Mormon, supposedly, has that piece of divine non corporality (soul) that the (potentially) more intelligent and functional trained chimp can never have, and thus, is expected to exist, somehow, when both his and the chimps atoms have been scattered into the expanding sun at the end of solar 'life cycle.'

But we know that we all had an ancestor that had to have been "just an animal." This is not theory, but conclusive inference from the DNA. So, somehow, Theists have to dip into a bag of metaphysical mumbo jumbo and come up with when and how in an unbroken chain of mortal reproduction the non corporal was introduced, and how it reconstitutes in each person from a single cell. It is just not there, and I contend that we can conclusively infer that humans are biological organisms that, as all the other biological organisms on the planet, live until we die.

123. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #189895 by Quine on June 7, 2008 at 1:32 pm

Quine had a link to a very good video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxLR9hdorI

I especially liked the frame where he commented that his "calculator started smoking."

124. Holiday in Hellmouth

Comment #189879 by Quine on June 7, 2008 at 12:36 pm

"stripped screw of theological scholastics" I like that.

This piece goes along with the studies of people crushed by the collapse of churches during prayer services.

125. 'In Our Time': Trofim Lysenko

Comment #189876 by Quine on June 7, 2008 at 12:14 pm

So many interesting things in this show, I'm going to have to limit myself.

The part about the low calorie feedback into grandchild growth stats leads to the issue of what secondary and tertiary control feedback loops exist into natural selection that we have yet to explore. I have often wondered if there are forms of environmental pressure on sperm motility (beyond the known X-Y difference) that could select by changing population gene frequencies. I could see how something like that would be expressed in grandchildren if it requires homozygous instantiation (a pair of affected grandfathers).

Another thing was the part about Stalin not allowing Einstein's equations. We should collect all these things that show that Stalin was a nut case dogmatist so we can show that, not only did Atheism have nothing to do with it, but the guy was off his rocker in a way that made him act just like the leader of a state religion.

126. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #189806 by Quine on June 7, 2008 at 10:10 am

Frankus1122:

I was very confused by this statement until I realized you must have been looking in a mirror.
Now it all makes sense.

Straight from cognitive dissonance theory, when the unconscious mind is trying to get the conscious mind to face up to something it just does not want to be true.

P.S. Perhaps this part of the thread could be renamed "Lying to Yourself for Jesus."

127. A word for nonbelievers

Comment #189664 by Quine on June 6, 2008 at 11:17 pm

"Coalition of Reason" I like that.

128. Hints of 'time before Big Bang'

Comment #189630 by Quine on June 6, 2008 at 6:58 pm

Steve, I would not advocate censorship. I do advocate taking more effort to choose our words so as to better add to the public understanding of science.

Most of the public may "get" it in the case of the broken egg, but when you tell them that the hot gases in their car engine cylinders were more ordered just before the expansion stroke, most are not going to get it, although this is closer to what the physicists are talking about with the early Universe.

At least, clauses can be added to help things. For example, one could say, "and became less ordered, in the sense of being more randomly spread in a bigger space, and thus, less hot and compact."

I took burn0gas to mean that it would be fine if the public took "ordered" to mean "hot and compact" but they generally don't. burn0gas, did I misunderstand?

129. Hints of 'time before Big Bang'

Comment #189618 by Quine on June 6, 2008 at 5:38 pm

Yes, burn0gas, it is another one of those specific vocabulary things where the physicists know what they mean, but the public gets it wrong. Most of us in science and technology are just not used to taking politics into consideration when picking words. But now we have these issues of politics in science education, so I agree that we should change.

130. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #189615 by Quine on June 6, 2008 at 5:15 pm

The YouTube user, CDK007 (who did the clock evolution video I like so much) has put up part three of his Evidence for Evolution series. It is very good, and by about 3 min from the end I was ROTFLMAO.

131. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #189220 by Quine on June 5, 2008 at 8:49 pm

qster:

The fact is that no-one is likely to be convinced to change their mind by such exchanges - many atheists have come to their realisation from an alternative (usually theist) perspective. Any and everyone is exactly where they need to be in terms of their understanding of their existence and the concept of God. All knowledge and understanding is transitory. To place absolute trust in science is a mistake for the same reason.

Some people are convinced, as is shown in the Converts' Corner testimonials on this site. This is more likely for the readers of these threads than those who are doing the arguing. Watching someone have his/her points exposed to the light of evidence effects others even when the truth is ignored by the willfully ignorant.

Also, there is plenty of discussion of philosophy re science. Go read the Fleabytes thread. Science provides a way of finding out things that we can rely on (have predictive power). Science does not exclude the existence of other truth, but if you step outside science to find that truth, you have no way to be sure you are not drinking the Kool-Aid.

132. The Expelled Evolutionist

Comment #189200 by Quine on June 5, 2008 at 7:21 pm

I suspect he wanted to type: "mañana"

133. The Expelled Evolutionist

Comment #189185 by Quine on June 5, 2008 at 4:58 pm

Pathfinder:

What's the betting on Steve Zara and Robotowhatisname being lapsed Christians? I can smell it from here! Careful, guys/gals: Old Nich has your names on a ledger!

So, Pathfinder, if they never had been Christians, would they not be on Old Nich's list? What if they had lived 20,000 years ago?

I, myself, have to admit to being a lapsed infant. I can't get away from this because there are still elders around who can invoke the "changed your dipers" evidence on me.

P.S. to Steve Zara: "You'll be back."

134. The Expelled Evolutionist

Comment #189113 by Quine on June 5, 2008 at 1:33 pm

PZ:

Often we put too much emphasis on Charles Darwin

Yes, this causes the other side to relate to him (Darwin) as if he were equated with one of their prophets (personally) instead of dealing with the facts and inferences of the ToE. This is why I strongly believe our side needs to adjust (evolve) to their tactics by dropping the terms "Darwinism" and "Darwinist" from our vocabularies, and forcing ourselves to say "Darwinian evolution" when that is what we actually intend.

135. Opponents of Evolution Adopting a New Strategy

Comment #188746 by Quine on June 4, 2008 at 1:26 pm

Strengths: Explains the diversity of life.

Weaknesses: You have to be able to think to "get" it. (Easier if you can also read.)

136. Physicist Claims First Real Demonstration of Cold Fusion

Comment #187863 by Quine on June 2, 2008 at 10:07 pm

Yes, cold fusion is heating up again. Check out this article from New Scientist last year.

I have been checking on this from time to time over the last 19 years, and repeatability has always been the problem, in fact, unrepeatability is what has been repeatable. Again and again reputable scientists have seen something happen when enough deuterium is loaded into palladium, but cannot say exactly what, or reliably make it happen again.

But at the same time, it does not go away. Because palladium acts like a super sponge for hydrogen, it continues to be investigated for hydrogen storage and electrodes in fuel cells. We know from these studies that microscopic flaws in the surfaces impact the amount of hydrogen (or deuterium) that gets loaded into the metal. It is possible that the lack of repeatability may be related to the lack of atomically identical electrodes. If this is the case, and the nano coated pellets used by Arata are close enough to identical, then perhaps he and his team will be able to show it on a repeatable basis.

One thing is for sure, they would not make this claim and demo if they were not sure, themselves, because the history of this is so completely littered with the broken careers of scientists who could not repeat it. Skyhook is correct; we have to wait for independent confirmation. However, this is the fist time I think I will wait before betting against them.

137. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #187314 by Quine on June 1, 2008 at 10:47 pm

having discovered that I was taken in by an ancient Hebrew conspiracy?

I don't think it was so much a conspiracy as an attempt to hold the group together during the Babylonian captivity by writing down a mythic history (then redacted in the time of Ezra after the return to Judea).

Tx, I think you know you were not told the truth, just as you were not told the truth about Santa. That you have hung out here and posted this indicates to me that the logical part of your mind has come to this conclusion, but the emotional part can't face it, so you demand that we "say it aint so."

You know the fossil record is truly there. You know the flood story was picked up from the Babylonians together with most of the cosmology in Genesis. Trying to show us that the ToE is not reasonable is just you grasping at straws and trying to throw them against the wind.

The more you read here, the more you are going to notice the errors and falsehoods your creationist friends go around saying. You now know the banana you buy at the store was not created to fit the human hand and mouth. It is not going to get any better for you. If you really want to stay in that bubble of, what is now, self deception, you will need to stop coming here, go back to church and stop thinking.

138. The Challenge of the New Creationism

Comment #187261 by Quine on June 1, 2008 at 5:09 pm

We have been discussing the great value of this video on other threads, and folks have complained about download problems. I think it needs to be re-hosted. I would especially like to have a short clip of the laryngeal nerve part that I could quickly whip out, as needed, to bash the IDiots 'bout the neck and shoulders.

139. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #186871 by Quine on May 31, 2008 at 2:14 pm

Diacanu:

All they have in the end is "I WANT to believe it, leave me alone!".

I believe this is Dennett's "belief in belief."

140. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #186809 by Quine on May 31, 2008 at 10:39 am

Comment #186617 by txpiper

While I believe that natural selection has undergone absurd personification, the reality of adaptive development by way of RT feedback into germ cells is going to, in my view, harden the ID arguments.

That looks backwards to me. RT is a part of the known picture of the ways replicators keep going. To "harden" ID arguments (something like hardening not knowing) would require the observation of something that can't happen, even with RT. The more we find of mechanisms used by nature, the less of a gap there is to be filled by this invisible, yet friendly, designer (who must not be named).

141. Louisiana's latest creationism bill moves to House floor

Comment #186638 by Quine on May 30, 2008 at 10:16 pm

Okay, Teratornis, you have effectively hijacked this thread, so in spite of my reluctance to go into the subject here (gee, I thought we did have a thread for this recently) I feel the need to put forth some counterbalance to the doom and gloom. First, I do agree with many points you make here and in previous posts, so please do not assume I am against something unless I say so. Now to the issues:

Comment #186547 by Teratornis:

For all we know, in another hundred years, it might turn out that science was the worst mistake humans ever made. Maybe humans would have been better off remaining as hunter-gatherers for another million years. I hope that doesn't turn out to be true, but I cannot rule out the possibility.

I have noticed that you do not differentiate so much between science and technology, and tend (as is common with the public) to heap upon the shoulders of science the ills of technology. Science is finding out about the world; to even think "science was the worst mistake humans ever made" is to take the position that ignorance is bliss. Science and technology ratchet each other along. As we find out more about the world (science) we can use that knowledge to build new tools and devices (technology) so we can find out more about the world. On a parallel track, the agencies of commerce and politics use the resultant technology to make changes in the world, sometimes with terrible consequences (especially during war). Getting technology to be applied for benefit is critically dependent on the educational state of the public. As Diacanu mentioned above, creationism works against this.

I agree that oil is going to get more expensive. I do not agree that it is going to suddenly stop. We are already seeing that as price goes up, people cut back usage and find alternatives^[ref], at the same time some oil that was not cost effective to extract becomes viable. Later in this post I will go into this further. It does not help for some creationists to go around claiming that their deity put just this much oil in the ground because it is now time for the rapture; no need to develop alternatives.


Comment #186573 by Teratornis:

I would, however, prefer to see your facts, not your back. What's your plan for when oil prices reach $200/bbl? Then $300/bbl? $400/bbl? I mean your plan as an individual, not your plan for what whole countries should do.

I plan to drive less, pay more for many things connected to the cost of transport, go for a high mileage car^[ref] soon and then buy an electric car at the right time. More and more electric cars are becoming available^[ref]. The key technological advance is coming in battery development very soon. Here is an example of the use of silicon nanowires to increase the charge carrying capacity of lithium ion batteries by a factor of 10. We are just getting the economics of electrics now with $100 oil and the latest batteries, with $200 oil and the batteries of 2010, production ramp-up will be the limiting factor.

Comment #186585 by Teratornis:

Civilization survived for thousands of years despite creationism being the dominant point of view.

Not with the population well over the natural carrying capacity of the planet without our use of technology.

All you have to do is pretend to go along with the nonsense, and if it's easy enough for the preacher to do, it's easy enough for anybody.

I believe it was Jefferson who said, "Forced religion produces not piety but hypocrisy." Also, do you expect it will be so easy to meet women at the masque?

In constrast, civilization may not survive peak oil unless a lot of things start changing fast.

We will be changing our energy structure over a period of years, as oil production does decline, and things have started changing.

Comment #186590 by Teratornis:

This is why there are lots of people who are probably atheists, but won't even admit to themselves that they are - because they see themselves as swimming in a sea of believers.

This is what this site is working against, and yes, some creationists come here and find out for the first times in their lives that they have not been told the truth.

You wrote of cognitive bias. One of the hardest of these is to see a future in which multiple things have changed in parallel. People can usually envision the world of the near future with one speculative variable, but that is not what happens; several changes happen in parallel and the reasons things had for the way they were done change like the rug being pulled out from underneath. In the late nineteenth century people worried that the increased population in the twentieth century would make it impossible keep up with the horse manure removal problem in the cities.

Here is my take on the next few years:

Oil will keep going up in cost. New sources will be developed and new technologies will be applied to extended recovery^[ref].

Car manufacturers will make more cars that use less fuel, and people will cut back on driving.

There will be a big push in solar^[ref][ref], wind^[ref] and nuclear ^[ref] power directed to increasing the electric grid. The railroads will increase their use of electric trains.

Air travel will be more expensive. Jet fuel will begin to be produced from other sources ^[ref] but will probably be one of the last hold outs for oil. Eventually, jets will convert to liquid hydrogen which will be made from water and grid energy. Because of its light weight and zero CO₂ pollution it will be an improvement, but aircraft fuel tanks will have to be redesigned.

Biofuels are just getting started. We are now switching over from food source materials, and will soon make the switch to fully bioengineered organisms for production of not only fuels, but also other chemical products that will no longer come from oil (i.e. fertilizer). Again, we need young people to understand biology and especially genetics to make the right decisions for this future.

Bottom line:

Trying to drive some sense into creationists and solving our actual energy, health and food problems all go together.

142. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #186498 by Quine on May 30, 2008 at 11:18 am

PZ has just put up a great video link to a presentation by Jerry Coyne about this whole subject of the public understanding of the ToE.

P.S. Coyne uses the term "Darwinism" repeatedly through this video, which I believe is not a good idea because the 'ism part carries the psychological baggage of terms like Marxism and Catholicism. Each place he used it, it sounded like he meant "Darwinian evolution" which would have been better (i.e. representing an objectively testable truth). We should leave the 'isms to the politicians and to those pushing religion.

143. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #186481 by Quine on May 30, 2008 at 10:46 am

Comment #186219 by alan baylis:

I am quite enjoying watching txpipers regular excursions into what people like him must think of as the devils lair.

I suspect this works both ways, in that, there are readers from his side, who are smarter than a fifth grader, sitting at home learning that so much of their world view just doesn't stand up.

144. That's it. Texas really is doomed.

Comment #186440 by Quine on May 30, 2008 at 9:40 am

Al, granting monopolies is in the commerce clause of the Constitution. An example is patents.

145. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #186189 by Quine on May 29, 2008 at 9:12 pm

... I don't really understand how death and aging genes could be considered replicators.

Already answered on this thread.

146. Group wants Wi-Fi banned from public buildings

Comment #186163 by Quine on May 29, 2008 at 7:03 pm

Santa Fe NM is notorious for weird local politics. One of the usual weapons is the nearly draconian building and zoning regulations that were initially put in to preserve the "traditional" look of the town, but have been used to whatever political end someone has found for them. I strongly suspect this is not about what it appears to be about.

147. Altruism in social insects is a family affair

Comment #186160 by Quine on May 29, 2008 at 6:47 pm

I hope to hear from E.O. Wilson that he accepts this proof.

I hope to hear Wilson's analysis, acceptance or not. This is what is so special about science. Wilson does not have to accept it, and the scientific community is not going to "expel" him if he does not. However, he is one of the greatest living experts on social insects, so I have confidence he will go with the evidence.

148. Fossil reveals oldest live birth

Comment #186102 by Quine on May 29, 2008 at 3:10 pm

Creationists can shut their eyes and pretend all they want, but the whole story is there in the rocks (the facts in the ground), and as time goes on we will just keep digging it up and adding to the heap of physical evidence.

149. Louisiana's latest creationism bill moves to House floor

Comment #185884 by Quine on May 29, 2008 at 12:21 am

Did you notice how many times they used the phrase "we are not aware of" with regard to evidence for the ToE? They did not add the "and we are not going to make ourselves aware of" part because then they would have to admit that they are straight out lying.

150. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #185869 by Quine on May 28, 2008 at 10:33 pm

Yet again, txpiper shows us that we have not plumbed the depths of his misunderstanding:

... the current idea which is "waiting on that lucky mutation".

There is no "waiting" in the "current idea." This comes from the fallacy of direction in evolution. Each living being is simply going through its life, not waiting for something. It only gives the false impression of direction in retrospect.

I also notice that all our attempts to broaden the understanding of the nature of mutations have fallen on deaf ears.