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Has Dawkins lost credibility?

Obviously it's OK for creationist/ID'ers to mislead, lie and tell half truths. We should still respect them, and welcome them to the debate table.

After all, debating them wouldn't add any credibility to their stance would it?

And just because they have to mislead and take things out of context to be convincing, that doesn't mean their arguments can't stand on their own merit!
:rolleyes:

I know if I ran across a sales person that used the same tactics these folks use I'd not buy anything they were selling.

I guess some people have different standards for honesty and truthfulness.:con2:
But hasn't Dawkins said that he won't debate with IDers anymore? I think his point was that while he has to educate his opponents in teh fakken basics, they can "resort" to asking "clever" questions about "murky contradictions" and therefore "win" the debate.
 
Hoyle was an astronomer. I suspect he knew no more about biology than I do, and I'm just a dude with a BA in linguistics.
I think Francis Crick (as in Crick and Watson: DNA) might have known more about biology than you do, though. It seems to me that Crick agreed with Hoyle on at least one thing. Crick decided that biological life must not have evolved here on Earth (that's also what Hoyle the astronomer concluded) and each of them independently came up with conjecture that life therefore must have come from some other place in the universe. So that's an interesting fact for you to think about--biologist, linguist, astronomer or otherwise.
 
And as I already covered Von that conclusion was based on what they knew at the time to be true: i.e. recent discoveries mean that their conclusion is no longer sound.

But why should I be surprised that those who will insist on telling us what reality "is" are the one's who fail to keep up-to-date?
 
And as I already covered Von that conclusion was based on what they knew at the time to be true: i.e. recent discoveries mean that their conclusion is no longer sound.

But why should I be surprised that those who will insist on telling us what reality "is" are the one's who fail to keep up-to-date?
I wasted a while trying to find what you already covered.

If you want your comeback to be taken seriously, please specify what recent discovery(s) that indicate for you that Hoyle/Crick concluded unsoundly. Otherwise, your comment is vacant rhetoric.
 
Crick wondered if the basic building blocks of life might have come from other sources... at the time he died we hadn't discovered a lot of the extremeophiles... life is everywhere on this planet... and inside of it too. But Crick wasn't thinking of a "top down" plan where life is "seeded" on purpose--hi thoughts were more about whether DNA or RNA got a start elsewhere or if they started here...

increasing evidence shows that this planet appeared to have just what it takes for life to start here http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/04/primordial-soup.html ... that doesn't mean it did--but it seems increasingly possible...especially with the more recent recreation of miller-urey. Crick died over 10 years ago... a huge amount of information has been discovered since then, Von.

Karl Stetter has found archaea that live in boiling water and can thrive in conditions similar to our earth over 3.5 billion years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Stetter

And this is one of the top websites regarding the origins of life and it includes, Karl Stetter, one of the foremost microbiologists in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Stetter

To repeat, Crick's notion of panspermia was bottom up-- not intelligent design or planned as you propose... in just means the raw ingredients for life getting started may have come in on meteors after having gotten started elsewhere. But that isn't necessary given what we are learning about our own planet. That is still a possibility... but it comes pretty far down on the list... but it's much higher up than your suggested "pre-planned" seeding of our planet.

Since the discover that water once was on mars--there is increasing possibility that life and life-ish stuff may be abundant in our universe which means some could have fallen to earth as space dust or debris.
 
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Crick wondered where the basic building blocks of life came from... at the time he died we had discovered a lot of the extremeophiles... life is everywhere on this planet... and inside of it too. But his thoughts were more about whether DNA or RNA got a start or template elsewhere or if they started here... increasing evidence shows that this planet appeared to have just what it takes for life to start here http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/04/primordial-soup.html ... that doesn't mean it did--but it seems increasingly possible...especially with the more recent recreation of miller-urey. Crick died over 10 years ago... a huge amount of information has been discovered since then, Von.
That link has high noise content.

Even if you had amino acid primordial soup the size of the universe (10^80 atom's worth) (and forget that you have to also have the rest of the DNA, the sugar structure) there is the mathematical probability of some minimum number of base-pairs to produce metabolism. That approach is not a likely scenario, that DNA came first, but it is something that we can conjure some probabilities with regard to. You have to choose some very small number of minimum codes to have the lucky thing pop into existence. Since that is so unlikely to happen, some "ratcheting" method seems like what we should be looking for, to get us from amino acids to something that metabolizes and reproduces. That gap is wide right now. So what has been filled in (Kauffman's book on autocatalytic sets had already been written before Crick died) in the meantime that makes you or Cyborg so sure that Crick would have changed his mind?

BTW, the Standard Model of evolution does not address pre-DNA life.
 
True... but you were discussing abiogenesis... and you were suggesting that Crick supported a version of panspermia along the lines of what you propose... and that is not the case. You have a top down sort of theory regarding life on earth. Francis Crick definitely had a bottom up view-- not one involving any sort of "intelligence"...

I'm sure Crick would have been increasingly convinced like most biologists that life on this planet likely started here... there is not a need to invoke an outside source. It could have happened... but that's still an abyss away from it happening for a "reason" or part of a "plan" which is what you believe happened. You see "unfathomable odds" and it suggests a designer to you.
 
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True... but you were discussing abiogenesis... and you were suggesting that Crick supported a version of panspermia along the lines of what you propose... and that is not the case. You have a top down sort of theory regarding life on earth. Francis Crick definitely had a bottom up view-- not one involving any sort of "intelligence"...

I'm sure Crick would have been increasingly convinced like most biologists that life on this planet likely started here... there is not a need to invoke an outside source. It could have happened... but that's still an abyss away from it happening for a "reason" or part of a "plan" which is what you believe happened. You see "unfathomable odds" and it suggests a designer to you.

To me Art', the mystery is more encompassing than the cause of biological origins. I recall that in a past thread you would use the term "design" with regard to the process of evolution. So what does that word "design" mean? It need not be a word with bad connotation. You attribute the design of biological systems to something, you just don't think it is anything but "bottom up" (as I've seen you tirelessly express). You believe any appearance of "top down" or "planning" is mere illusion. Perhaps. I've been there before so it is not an alien world-view to me. My allowing myself to consider that "bottom up" is possibly false is due to my observation that we know so little about what mechanism lies at the "bottom". Below the molecular level the quantum world appears to be separate from our macroscopic world. The quantum world is a world of potentialities; the universe doesn't provide a solid "result" unless it has to. It is very strange "down there" in the world at the "bottom". So while you have faith that there is sufficient ingredients at work at the bottom to conjure up something so astonishing as DNA, RNA and the protein molecules that are necessary to machinate between them in order for them to have function (sans purpose), I do not have so much faith. I am a skeptic with regard to the idea that the bottom up mechanisms at work at the dawn of meta-life had enough time in a mere few billion years. You have faith, with no evidence. You are guessing just as I am guessing. But in this forum, there exists a prejudice against my skepticism. Skepticism here is not omnidirectional, it blows in one direction. It is not open. But true science is not like that...science is tentative and there is nothing in science that yet guarantees no teleology... science ignores the possibility of teleology by axiom.

The exciting thing I hope I live to see discovered, is how we design. How do we create? Do we have something like a selection landscape in our neural network? Do we have a random generator that passes random thoughts through the selection process? At the root of our neural selection process, is there no real purpose? No... I think all would admit we create via a top-down process. We plan. We have goals. Our mere 10^11 synapses are sufficiently complex to be able to do that, if you believe the neural network is all that is necessary to support our minds (and you are not some kind of dualist).

So the broader question to me is: what is "creation" and what is "design"? We know it exists. We do it. It is a self-revealing thing and we know we do it. We just don't know how we do it. So until we know how we do it, the jury is out on how complex the natural mechanism is that does it. I doubt it is as simple as anything yet put forward eg: RM/NS or autocatyltic sets.
 
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I think design is a human term for pattern recognition... we have evolved to find certain patterns and interpret them as meaningful... we deduce meaning... but that doesn't mean the meaning was intended... I think it's backwards that humans see things as designed towards them... any creature that could think would think as much-- but the fact that humans find meaning and purpose in things doesn't mean that any entity meant for them to do so. There is a poster of butterfly wings with all the letters of the alphabet in butterfly wing patterns... http://www.butterflyalphabet.com/main/index.php
and my favorite sagan clip http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-522726029201501667&q=Cosmos
and pareidolia examples galore... http://skepdic.com/pareidol.html
not to mention, Heather Firth's Earth Erotica: http://www.heatherfirth.com/gallery1.html

Humans see "design" and meaning and "signs" in certain patterns... whether they are there or not. When you have systems evolving together they seem to "fit" amazingly well from a human perspective. Understanding natural selection and why we'd find significance in certain patterns is all that is required to understand bottom up design. I am quite convinced that you and others superimpose assorted meanings upon certain aspects of evolution so that you can believe it is designed for some purpose or reason that you've come to believe. I don't think there is any reason to think that natural selection alone can't explain it all and lots of reason why a designer is unlikely and unnecessary--and contradicts what we know about entropy and the way matter comes to be organized in spite of it (energy plus information via physical forces or evolved DNA strands...or other information systems shaping matter over time.)

But convincing you would be like trying to convince a lottery winner it wasn't his lucky sucks and "creative visualization" that caused him to win or that it wasn't prayer that saved someone's grandma or that feminists are not the cause of 9-11. Some beliefs are subject to readily being affirmed by confirmation bias and not so readily negated no matter how much evidence is available. Most people would rather hang on to there beliefs rather than consider they might be wrong or (gasp) test the null hypothesis (see if the reverse could be true.)

There's a world of drama going on in a drop of water in a microscope and on this planet long before humans and in deep dark parts of the ocean--life and death and evolution that doesn't care about us or what we find meaningful or "designed". And it will be doing so long after we are gone too. The universe is not about us. Neither is this planet. We just happen to assume it is... but every creature that can think, would naturally assume the same. We think that because we exist, there must be a reason for our existence... we seem so well designed-- and there is a "reason"-- billions of years of evolution and your parents having sex and that sperm uniting with that egg at that moment-- but nothing more profound than that.
 
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I think design is a human term for pattern recognition... we have evolved to find certain patterns and interpret them as meaningful... we deduce meaning... but that doesn't mean the meaning was intended... I think it's backwards that humans see things as designed towards them... any creature that could think would think as much-- but the fact that humans find meaning and purpose in things doesn't mean that any entity meant for them to do so. There is a poster of butterfly wings with all the letters of the alphabet in butterfly wing patterns... http://www.butterflyalphabet.com/main/index.php
and my favorite sagan clip http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-522726029201501667&q=Cosmos
and pareidolia examples galore... http://skepdic.com/pareidol.html
not to mention, Heather Firth's Earth Erotica: http://www.heatherfirth.com/gallery1.html

Humans see "design" and meaning and "signs" in certain patterns... whether they are there or not. When you have systems evolving together they seem to "fit" amazing well from a human perspective. Understanding natural selection and why we'd find significance in certain patterns is all that is required to understand bottom up design. I am quite convinced that you and others superimpose assorted meanings upon certain aspects of evolution so that you can believe it is designed for some purpose or reason that you've come to believe. I don't think there is any reason to think that natural selection alone can't explain it all and lots of reason why a designer is unlikely and unnecessary--and contradicts what we know about entropy and the way matter comes to be organized in spite of it (energy plus information via physical forces or evolved DNA strands...or other information systems.)

But convincing you would be like trying to convince a lottery winner it wasn't his lucky sucks and "creative visualization" that caused him to win or that it wasn't prayer that saved someone's grandma or that feminists are not the cause of 9-11. Some beliefs are subject to readily being affirmed by confirmation bias and not so readily negated no matter how much evidence is available. Most people would rather hang on to there beliefs rather than consider they might be wrong or (gasp) test the null hypothesis (see if the reverse could be true.)
Art', tsk tsk... You're doing it again. Flirting with me with that earth erotica.

Seriously...as usual you cast everything you think you know about me in terms you can understand: you think I am an icon of whatever you think is a "creationist" instead of seeing me as a skeptic of oversimplification when it comes to origins. Back eons ago when I was a graduate student my intended path was Artificial Intelligence. Back then, "pattern recognition" is about all my sponsor had to be worked on. MIT was working on things like worm paths, and I became soon disillusioned by the lack of progress being made at the time. Well....HAL was supposed to have reached consciousness in 1991 and we missed that benchmark :) .

No... it is naive to think that design/creation/intelligence is mere pattern recognition. Before we design, we have to first think of what it is that we want to design. Is your view that thinking about what we ought to design is also pattern recognition? How about the next meta-layer: how about talking to each other about thinking about deciding what we ought to design? There is something infinitely recursive about our self-awareness and our "will", and I believe whatever that mechanism is, it is prerequisite for "design".
 
No, because that would be a metaphysical value judgement and the theory does not make those.

It's akin to saying Columbus' arrival in the Western Hemisphere was "nothing but an accident."



I understand I might be oversimplifying here but, if everything we are to this point wasn't designed by anyone, and it never had a purpose.... and if on the other hand it wasn't an accident either..... then what is it?
 
The quantum world is a world of potentialities; the universe doesn't provide a solid "result" unless it has to.

Your problems then lie with the fact you don't understand the infinite.

No... it is naive to think that design/creation/intelligence is mere pattern recognition. Before we design, we have to first think of what it is that we want to design.

Why do we think to design something?

What is the point?
 
I understand I might be oversimplifying here but, if everything we are to this point wasn't designed by anyone, and it never had a purpose.... and if on the other hand it wasn't an accident either..... then what is it?

It's not so much your use of the term "accident" that I object to, because that word can simply mean "any event that happens unexpectedly, without a deliberate plan or cause."

It's the "nothing but an accident" phrasing that I can't agree with. If you think that your life is meaningless unless someone else assigned it a purpose, I feel sorry for you. Perhaps that's not the implication you meant, but it's how I read it.

If my parents told me tomorrow that I was actually an "accident," I'd shrug my shoulders and laugh. It wouldn't affect me, because I've really cared either way, and I've never envied people whose parents always had some great plan for them (take over the family business, become the family's first doctor, produce X grandchildren). I like that my life's purpose is mine to choose rather than having been decided for me.
 
Yes... "accident" like "random" is used to confuse more than clarify. Everything happens for a reason-- but not some grand pre-planned reason. You don't exist because the someone meant to bring forth you in particular-- you exist because you are what resulted during a particular sex act your parents had... it doesn't make you any less spectacular (and certainly you are having much more of an experience than all the other potential competitors in the who gets to fertilize the egg game being played that night), but it doesn't mean that it's part of any grand plan by some grand designer. The plan unfolds as it goes... the appearance of design is inevitable as information systems evolve together and humans use their brains to wonder about it. We never see the failures. We aren't the gametes that didn't become a zygote... we don't see the "near miss" miracles-- just the stuff that is--

But the dramas and stories of our world are no more interesting externally than the dinosaurs that lived long ago... or the battles in the ocean we are never privy too or what will be on our planet 10,000 years hence...much less what is going on on other planets. It's our perspective that makes it all seem so "geared towards" us and "meaningful". I don't know why people need a god or something outside of us to care or design or give meaning to this world-- but I think all evidence of such is just huge confirmation bias and not based in any actual logic in regards to what we are understanding. I think it would be weird not to notice "miracles" and attribute them to something "we don't understand"-- but that doesn't mean we can't understand them or that they are actual miracles or intentional or part of some big plan. Coincidences are bound to occur in a world like ours-- and humans are bound to give special meaning to some of those coincidences... and bound to get it wrong... they always have, haven't they?

Natural selection can't help but produce the appearance of grand design in the brains of the humans it evolved. People don't exist for a purpose-- the fact that you get to exist means that you get to experience the egotistical sense of existing for a purpose... and some also get to understand why this thinking is backwards and revel in all the knowledge humans are uncovering and the fact that they get to be alive in a time where they CAN know this.

I just don't see any evidence for design that doesn't fit in with the known ways humans confabulate or confirm certain types of bias or beliefs.

And I don't see any evidence that Dawkins could have answered the question better without a concrete definition as to what is meant by "information" being added to the genome... more genes does not equal higher functioning.

More efficient coding leads to the evolution of information and the objects that information codes for.
 
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It's not so much your use of the term "accident" that I object to, because that word can simply mean "any event that happens unexpectedly, without a deliberate plan or cause."

It's the "nothing but an accident" phrasing that I can't agree with. If you think that your life is meaningless unless someone else assigned it a purpose, I feel sorry for you. Perhaps that's not the implication you meant, but it's how I read it.

If my parents told me tomorrow that I was actually an "accident," I'd shrug my shoulders and laugh. It wouldn't affect me, because I've really cared either way, and I've never envied people whose parents always had some great plan for them (take over the family business, become the family's first doctor, produce X grandchildren). I like that my life's purpose is mine to choose rather than having been decided for me.


Why do you make personal assumptions? I never claimed to be married to one theory or the other. I am just asking a hypotetical question.

And you didn't give it an aswer.
 
Yes... "accident" like "random" is used to confuse more than clarify. Everything happens for a reason-- but not some grand pre-planned reason. You don't exist because the someone meant to bring forth you in particular-- you exist because you are what resulted during a particular sex act your parents had... it doesn't make you any less spectacular (and certainly you are having much more of an experience than all the other potential competitors in the who gets to fertilize the egg game being played that night), but it doesn't mean that it's part of any grand plan by some grand designer. The plan unfolds as it goes... the appearance of design is inevitable as information systems evolve together and humans use their brains to wonder about it. We never see the failures. We aren't the gametes that didn't become a zygote... we don't see the "near miss" miracles-- just the stuff that is--

But the dramas and stories of our world are no more interesting externally than the dinosaurs that lived long ago... or the battles in the ocean we are never privy too or what will be on our planet 10,000 years hence...much less what is going on on other planets. It's our perspective that makes it all seem so "geared towards" us and "meaningful". I don't know why people need a god or something outside of us to care or design or give meaning to this world-- but I think all evidence of such is just huge confirmation bias and not based in any actual logic in regards to what we are understanding. I think it would be weird not to notice "miracles" and attribute them to something "we don't understand"-- but that doesn't mean we can't understand them or that they are actual miracles or intentional or part of some big plan. Coincidences are bound to occur in a world like ours-- and humans are bound to give special meaning to some of those coincidences... and bound to get it wrong... they always have, haven't they?

Natural selection can't help but produce the appearance of grand design in the brains of the humans it evolved. People don't exist for a purpose-- the fact that you get to exist means that you get to experience the egotistical sense of existing for a purpose... and some also get to understand why this thinking is backwards and revel in all the knowledge humans are uncovering and the fact that they get to be alive in a time where they CAN know this.

I just don't see any evidence for design that doesn't fit in with the known ways humans confabulate or confirm certain types of bias or beliefs.

And I don't see any evidence that Dawkins could have answered the question better without a concrete definition as to what is meant by "information" being added to the genome... more genes does not equal higher functioning.

More efficient coding leads to the evolution of information and the objects that information codes for.




Now that, on the other hand, is an answer.

Yes, I can see that. I agree.
 
Why do you make personal assumptions? I never claimed to be married to one theory or the other. I am just asking a hypotetical question.

And you didn't give it an aswer.

I didn't make an assumption. I drew an inference from your wording, but specifically said that it may not have been your intended meaning.

And my answer was that "everything we are" may, in one sense, be an accident. It's just that "accident" is not a terribly meaningful label. It doesn't carry the bleak, nihilistic connotation that most people who use that label in this context intend.

But yes, articulett gave an excellent answer.
 

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