Annoying creationists

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delphi_ote said:
Yes. Please. Let's get back to the incredibly productive discussion about ev and evolution. We were so close to a breakthrough with our creationist friends. All we need now to show them once and for all they are wrong is a time machine and a notebook big enough to write the complete history of every molecule in the universe in. Don't let personal quibbles get in the way of such reasonable evidentiary standards. We only need to know everything there is to know about everything to prove to them the world wasn't created by a giant imaginary being. That seems perfectly fair to me and has yielded such an interesting discussion so far.

Oops. My sarcasm knob must be stuck on "maximum" again.
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:bigclap

Exceedingly well said. Flames are so much more productive. I knew we'd agree on something, one day!
 
The Atheist said:
Sensible discussion? In here?

Mate, you really do need to wise up. For sensible discussion, you need to go to Internet Infidels, or somewhere where people are able to have actual debates. At IIDB they have rules and rooms for just that - sensible debates.

This is the Randi Forum, where a small clique of posters rule and the word "sensible" has no place. (Most beautifully described as "The Kool Kids KliqueTM) If you want to start a cheerleading team, this is the right place, but it's clearly not the one for sensible discussion - unless, of course, you wish to agree with every word uttered by a bunch of boring twats*.

*I am NOT applying that term universally, or excepting me from it, but there are - as I'm sure you've noticed - people here worthy of debate. This place is a lot like Stormfront - none of those worthy of debate belong to the KKK. Here, it's just a different KKK.
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I take your point and I may look into IIDB. Nonetheless, I support kjkent1's call to stop this flaming. He, at least, has been consistently sensible in his postings.
 
kjkent1 said:
You would own the award.
[snip]
And so on and so forth...
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Should that post win the award (and should I decide I want the prize), I will summon the ghost of my Greek lawyer and her crocodiles. Where there is a will, as they say, there are several lawyers.

M

However, if someone should nominate it at this point, they would be nominating your poem, and I if Tricky included it properly as yours, I would be honor-bound to fight for your right to the prize.

m
 
Taffer said:
I'd just like to post this a second time, so everyone can see it. This is an example of an ad hominem fallacy. Please note that a personal trait of the arguer, namely that "he doesn't understand molecular biology" is used as a reason that his argument is wrong. It is a fallacy, because even if one does not understand the substance of an argument, the argument is to be judged by the argument alone, not by the knowledge of an arguer.

If anyone disagrees with this, then I ask a simple question. If I make an argument, then later think I was wrong, does that invalidate my initial argument?
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Correct. But the people who are most in need of this information have shown a complete lack of capability for learning such information because they have concluded they already know all there is to know on logical fallacies as well as science. Remember, the least competent are most likely to over estimate their competency. Oddly, these people never actually offer an argument or claim that one can fallaciously invalidate via ad hom--You have to at least be able to understand a claim in order to address it. Those who fling the most ad homs seem to also be the ones who are certain they aren't while bemoaning the fact that others are doing it to them.

But we are actually insulting them as many before have done according to one such member's sig line and the general consensus of many chatroom conversations--and these can be construed as ad homs, but not argument use the fallacy of an ad hominen attack--because no statement of coherency has been offered by "the Atheist", Kleinman, Hewitt, or Hammy--the annoying creationists drawn to this thread. And I'm quite sure "the Atheist" is not an atheist at all--he's the stereotyped version of what a creationist might think an atheist is--and I suspect another dishonest and evasive strategy by those who feel morally superior in lying for their "intelligent designer".

Of course, it is refreshing to find the most intelligent, honest, and engaging forum members on the same page as I am regarding: who is deranged, dishonest, and incapable of actual debate. How many people have engaged in conversations with the above and wondered if it was something about themselves...

It isn't. Nobody understands these guys. They do not engage in actual dialogue with anyone. If you find them impossibly arrogant, dishonest, obfuscating, and incompetent--then you are in the majority. If you think they are actually communicating something--see if you can sum it up for the rest of us-- although they are united in their hatred of "evolutionary fact"--they do not actually seem to understand one another's contentions or arguments. I suspect they all think the other creationists are wacky--but each thinks their own "argument" (that no one seems to understand) is the real key for showing just how wrong evolution is.
 
So yeah, I agree this thread has become a bit of an insult fest. Let's calm down a bit and get back to the subject(s) at hand, assuming there are any subjects anyone cares to discuss. It's also become a bit of repeat theatre.

~~ Paul
 
Paul C. Anagnostopoulos said:
So yeah, I agree this thread has become a bit of an insult fest. Let's calm down a bit and get back to the subject(s) at hand, assuming there are any subjects anyone cares to discuss.
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Always the optimist, eh?

It's also become a bit of repeat theatre.
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Indeed. In fact, if you want to get back to the biology, you could probably make kleinman's next half-dozen posts yourself.

Or if you like I could write a computer program to generate them.
 
LostAngeles said:
Why don't you stop in sometime, get warm. I'm sure all the forumites there would love to have you.
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Which one is it? There are 67 million results at Google for chat room and it'll take me a while to get through them.

(And don't bother suggesting it to try and get rid of me, that won't work either!)

Is there a profanity filter? I work much better without them.
 
Jon the Geek said:
Please, please, PLEASE don't call things I say "clever." Being both an American and a JREF chatroom addict, I'm afraid that might get me beat up.
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Hey, there's clever, then there's clever.

One request, though.

We're all agreed that the insult-fest is over, but could you please post it in here as I need to have it in a post to copy it into my sig and it's is easily the best I've seen.

If anyone threatens to beat you up, send 'em to me.

No wuckin' furries!
 
OK, trying once again ...

RecoveringYuppy said:
No, but actually reading it would be. ....

The technique is simple: Compare two genomes from two different species. The areas with the most accumulated differences will be the ones with no selection pressure and therefore, inactive.
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Damned if that has any bearing on the question I asked, which was
What medical breakthroughs depend on millions of years (of evoutionary change)? Is it not really years or decades of evolutionary change for any such breakthroughs you might cite?

The keywords include medical breakthroughs and depend on millions of years.

I asked in response to the assertion:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr Richard
Genuine ... medical breakthroughs have been made by comparative genomic studies that are based on the assumption that both coding and non-coding sections of the genome are subject to evolutionary change over millions of years.
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I'm requesting clinical (or should I say, useful) medical breakthroughs.
 
hammegk said:
OK, trying once again ...


Damned if that has any bearing on the question I asked, which was
What medical breakthroughs depend on millions of years (of evoutionary change)? Is it not really years or decades of evolutionary change for any such breakthroughs you might cite?

The keywords include medical breakthroughs and depend on millions of years.

I asked in response to the assertion:



I'm requesting clinical (or should I say, useful) medical breakthroughs.
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The problem is your question. And rest assured, you are not requesting anything. You want to pretend the inability to answer means that your intelligent designer is real. Actually all medical breakthroughs take eons of evolutionary change....because it took eons for humans to evolve to the point where they developed language and math and measurement...and then science and the scientific method--an evolving system in itself which is refined as we learn the ways humans commonly make errors in logic (in case you haven't noticed.) The stuff that works sticks around and grows and is added too--like math. The stuff that doesn't like Zeus and rain dances fade away.

Today, there was a press release showing that we can turn on a particular gene in a mouse and reverse the devastating effects of a terrible neurological disease called Rhett syndrome...But first we had to discover chromosomes and then DNA and then the genes and what they coded for and find animal models that expresses the same protein in the brain... DNA tests, forensic tests, Paternity tests, tissue typing--all dependent on what we've come to understand about evolution...all honed through time. Germ theory? We had to invent microscopes to see them...but we figured out they were there before we ever did...we figured out they reproduced similarly to the cells in our body before we got the evidence which proved it. We later learned that their dna codes for the same amino acids as our own cells.

You ask the most idiotic questions--All medical break throughs involving life forms have to do with years of accumulated evolutionary data. The more we know, the more tools we have for finding out more.

So what great results has your "intelligent design" hypothesis brought to this planet except to make arrogant and ignorant individuals who think they are more moral because they've been able to find credibility in an absolutely unbelievable and rather barbaric and nonsensical myth? Does it have a single breakthrough going for it. Does any creationist "hypothesis"?

Every medical breakthrough involves millions of years of evolution...and eons of accumulated data that no intelligent designer thought to mention. It is the same truth for all humans and whether one believes in it or not it's still true. Just like the earth was a sphere long before humans evolved and way longer before they learned to describe and correctly interpret it's physical properties.
 
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Dr Adequate said:
Or if you like I could write a computer program to generate them.
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Code: 
while(true) {
           if(skeptic.argument.equals("ev shows information gain works in evolution"))
                   print "Ev proves evolution can't work fast enough!";
           if(skeptic.argument.equals("ev is not a complete model of evolution"))
                   print "Information gain is impossible in evolution!";
           else
                   print randomLogicalFallacyOrAdHom();
}
Someone will have to write that last subroutine, but I think I've got a decent outline.
 
hammegk said:
The keywords include medical breakthroughs and depend on millions of years.
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:eye-poppi
That really just suggest a stunning level of ignorance, Hammy. I'm sorry. I suggest maybe you go outside. We have these things called newspapers. If you pick one up and read it, you can catch up to the rest of civilization. You are at least 30 years behind modern medicine. We're talking about the fundamental forces that formed all of the molecular structures in our bodies. Can you really imagine for a second that studying and understanding those won't help (or hasn't already helped) us make medical breakthroughs?

I don't know if I should laugh or cry at the thought someone like you has access to the internet yet somehow remains completely ignorant. You could answer your own question by typing those keywords into Google for Christ's sake! I know it has more letters than Randi, but can't you make the slightest effort to educate yourself?
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
Thank you for your response. Perhaps I should try to give an example from my own field about what I’m trying to get at and what (I think) some of what John is proposing.

My main job nowadays is designing digital circuits. This involves thinking about the functionality the design needs to have and coming up with small pieces of logic that when connected together will provide that functionality. With modern formal languages, such as VHDL, the level of abstraction that I can use to describe these small pieces has increased immensely, as has the size of them.

For example, where as in the past I would have had to have drawn a schematic diagram showing the individual logic gates to implement a multiplier, today I can use the ‘*’ operator between two named signals and the software tools will infer a multiplier. So here is a first level of abstraction. When I’m designing circuits, I no longer think in terms of the logic gates in a multiplier, I think in terms of the type of multiplier I want. I know the connection is there to the gate, but it is of no real use to me.

Now, when I have finished the design, more often than not it will be required to control the implemented functionality with a microprocessor. I’ll choose the exact processor on the functionality it has. How that functionality has been achieved, I very rarely care. So now I’m thinking of complete systems and understanding the functionality that is useful to me. Could I look at the microprocessor schematic and see how it performs its wonders? Sure, but the complexity of it is likely to be too great for me to be able to understand the overall behavior.

So now we’ve got the block of logic that I designed and a block of logic I didn’t, but I’d argue that at an appropriate level of abstraction, I can understand both equally well for my needs.

The huge advantage to this approach is that I, a single person, can construct systems that are far beyond my ability to understand in their entirety. I think a similar approach could be useful in understanding how evolution of one level is related to evolution of another.
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Yes, I think I see what you are saying and I think I agree. It is a general thing that data systems can contain subsystems or can be subsystems to higher systems. This is why you can have these levels of abstraction in software and I think similar things happen in evolution.
As I see it, the way this works in evolution is that you start of with "hardware," a mixture of organic chemicals. You also have a data input, which is the sun. (The sun because it is the only data input powerful enough to need no separate power supply or amplifier.) The "program" arises from the properties of organic chemistry and from the selectivity associated with high energy events on the prebiotic earth.

You then let the selection and interpretation processes of evolution run and the chemical oscillations will evolve. In due course this will build a store of accumulated, selected information (which, according to soem approaches to evolutionary epistemology, is "knowledge") and build up higher levels of abstraction as it does so. Rather like a computer beginning with machine code, then assembler, then high level language etc. In biology, this will give you the multilevel selection that Sloan Wilson (and I) talk about.
However, a key thing to notice is that this picture doesn't make genes into replicators; in fact, on this basis, evolution doesn't actually need a physical replicator at all (though they can be present) and genes are just one phenomenon appearing at the biological level of evolution.
 
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