Springer in the news ... wow!

[oxmixmudd]

Moderated By: Sparko

Enjoy your vacation Jorge. I am banning you for a month for accusations of lying, flaming, abusing the staff and being a general asshat. Executive decision. If you don't want to make it permanent, behave when you come back.

***If you wish to take issue with this notice DO NOT do so in this thread.***
Contact the forum moderator or an administrator in Private Message or email instead. If you feel you must publicly complain or whine, please take it to the Padded Room unless told otherwise.

Jorge makes it fun around here ... don't ban him forever - please

[Sparko]

Jorge makes it fun around here ... don't ban him forever - please

If it weren't for that, we would have permabanned him long ago.

[HMS_Beagle]

If it weren't for that, we would have permabanned him long ago.

NOW you did it Pirate! Just wait until EXPELLED 2 comes out! Jorge will be a martyr and you'll be Black(listed)Beard.

[Sparko]

NOW you did it Pirate! Just wait until EXPELLED 2 comes out! Jorge will be a martyr and you'll be Black(listed)Beard.

Between the two of you, which one is Lex Luthor?

[rogue06]

Between the two of you, which one is Lex Luthor?

Beagle is like Lex, Jorge is like Dr. Hugo Strange. Or so I've heard

[Yttrium]

Beagle is like Lex, Jorge is like Dr. Hugo Strange. Or so I've heard

I think that's insulting to Professor Strange. Jorge might be a Captain Boomerang. He keeps throwing stuff, and the stuff keeps cycling around.

[TheLurch]

I have to say, i've only ever seen the argument that evolution isn't compatible with the 2nd law of thermodynamics from creationists. I've never seen any serious scientist take issue with this.

That's because the "serious scientists" you speak of either don't understand the argument and/or have been exposed to the cartoon version of it and greedily embrace that version because it suits their agenda.

I realize that Jorge isn't around, but out of curiosity, i went and looked at what i'd assume he'd consider the non-cartoon version of it, Granville Sewell's manuscript from the Biological Information gathering. And, well, it reads like a cartoon version - like he'd either never bothered to talk to anybody else about his ideas, and has no clue he did the equivalent of a basic math error to get to his conclusions.

His argument distills down to this: "Entropy is really about probability, and a sufficiently improbable event isn't going to happen no matter how much energy gets pumped into an open system. The current status of earth, with its jet airplanes and computers, is highly improbable. Therefore, something else must have happened."

There are at least two obvious flaws here, but they're related, and they're best illustrated with an example. What would you say the probability is that a container of water, fats, proteins, and sugars would, given a few weeks, spontaneously organize themselves into a living creature? Right now, even with all our biotechnological sophistication, we can't do anything like that. But put an egg at the right temperature, and you get a chicken out of it, with no intervention whatsoever.

So one, we see that Sewell's general gist - external sources of energy can't drive extremely improbable events - is violated constantly in biology.

Why does that happen? If you look in the micro scale, a biological system is (and i'm simplifying just a bit here) a collection of unlikely events that's driven to occur because energy in the form of ATP is burned at a prodigious rate. Lots of biological systems even function based on the ability of the cell not to get it right most of the time, but to be able to recognize and destroy the cases where things went wrong. It's incredibly wasteful of energy, but the result is the incredible sophistication of (in our egg example) a cute little yellow fluff ball on legs.

And that's Sewell's second mistake. He simply takes the start and end point, and declares it's impossible to get between the two. But really, he's looking at the collective result of an incomparably large number of events that, on their own, are simply improbable.


The thing that stuns me about this most is that Dawkins even wrote a book called "Climbing Mount improbable" that specifically deals with this topic. And Sewell is somehow ignoring it, which is why this seems like a cartoon of an argument. If this is the quality of the papers that meeting produced, then no wonder it's been ignored.

[Roy]

If this is the quality of the papers that meeting produced, then no wonder it's been ignored.

I guess I can come back now.

I've read several of the papers from their group hug, and Sewell's is typical. Jorge's paper on overlapping codes is just as bad - the authors have not only built in the creationist assumption that initial genomes are near-perfect, but also included that assumption even in the case where they have a specific measure of how effective a genome is.

They've set up their 'genomes' as crossing strings of letters and are validating them against a dictionary of English words. You'd expect that a mutation that changed e.g. SULLY/NUT to SILLY/NIT would be neutral, since both the before and after 'genomes' are valid words, but no! They included a precondition that 99.9% of their 'genomes' were already 'optimal', so this mutation has a 99.9% chance of being in an 'optimal' location and therefore being automatically rejected. Then they wax lyrical about how rare beneficial mutations are. Well, duh! If they're dealing with English words, which are typically less than 10 letters long, and 999/1000 letters in them can't change, then they've immediately prevented 99% of the words from ever changing, for no reason whatsoever.

There are other glaring errors in that paper, such as the idea that a nucleotide that is unconstrained because it can be any of ACGT and still produce the same amino-acid can be considered to not be part of the genetic code, completely ignoring the possibility that different values can affect the viability of mutations in other nucleotides.

Tiggy was right when he said these papers had no place in a professional science journal.

[Sparko]

I realize that Jorge isn't around, but out of curiosity, i went and looked at what i'd assume he'd consider the non-cartoon version of it, Granville Sewell's manuscript from the Biological Information gathering. And, well, it reads like a cartoon version - like he'd either never bothered to talk to anybody else about his ideas, and has no clue he did the equivalent of a basic math error to get to his conclusions.

His argument distills down to this: "Entropy is really about probability, and a sufficiently improbable event isn't going to happen no matter how much energy gets pumped into an open system. The current status of earth, with its jet airplanes and computers, is highly improbable. Therefore, something else must have happened."

There are at least two obvious flaws here, but they're related, and they're best illustrated with an example. What would you say the probability is that a container of water, fats, proteins, and sugars would, given a few weeks, spontaneously organize themselves into a living creature? Right now, even with all our biotechnological sophistication, we can't do anything like that. But put an egg at the right temperature, and you get a chicken out of it, with no intervention whatsoever.

So one, we see that Sewell's general gist - external sources of energy can't drive extremely improbable events - is violated constantly in biology.

Why does that happen? If you look in the micro scale, a biological system is (and i'm simplifying just a bit here) a collection of unlikely events that's driven to occur because energy in the form of ATP is burned at a prodigious rate. Lots of biological systems even function based on the ability of the cell not to get it right most of the time, but to be able to recognize and destroy the cases where things went wrong. It's incredibly wasteful of energy, but the result is the incredible sophistication of (in our egg example) a cute little yellow fluff ball on legs.

And that's Sewell's second mistake. He simply takes the start and end point, and declares it's impossible to get between the two. But really, he's looking at the collective result of an incomparably large number of events that, on their own, are simply improbable.


The thing that stuns me about this most is that Dawkins even wrote a book called "Climbing Mount improbable" that specifically deals with this topic. And Sewell is somehow ignoring it, which is why this seems like a cartoon of an argument. If this is the quality of the papers that meeting produced, then no wonder it's been ignored.

I will take over for Jorge.

The problem is that the egg itself is a highly improbably event, and it is already organized and alive. You are starting with a complex organism and creating a chicken. That is nothing like starting with separate chemicals in a jar and pumping energy into it to get self-replicating DNA and life. You already have that in the egg.

[TheLurch]

I will take over for Jorge.

The problem is that the egg itself is a highly improbably event, and it is already organized and alive. You are starting with a complex organism and creating a chicken. That is nothing like starting with separate chemicals in a jar and pumping energy into it to get self-replicating DNA and life. You already have that in the egg.

Right - you have a single cell in the egg. But Sewell's argument doesn't make that distinction - it just says that thermodynamically improbable events shouldn't happen without intelligent intervention, even if you pump energy into the system. And the level of organization that comes out of that single cell is pretty highly improbable, thermodynamically. So, either you have some intelligence intervening with the egg, or Sewell's argument is bogus, regardless of the presence of that single cell.

Now, you can do the "aha, where did that single cell come from?" argument, but that gets into the fact that each event in the series of events that got you there is only improbable, and not impossible.

[TheLurch]

I guess I can come back now.

I've read several of the papers from their group hug, and Sewell's is typical. Jorge's paper on overlapping codes is just as bad - the authors have not only built in the creationist assumption that initial genomes are near-perfect, but also included that assumption even in the case where they have a specific measure of how effective a genome is.

Yeah, i was going to read Jorge's next. From various things he'd said here in the past, it seems his idea of overlapping codes is derived in part from the fact that histones are positioned in specific locations over genes. But their position isn't dependent on the underlying DNA sequence; instead, they're generally controlled by factors that bind at the promoters and enhancers - the regulatory regions - of the nearby DNA. If that's correct, then the whole thing is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the biology.

But i'll have to read it to know for sure.

[Sparko]

Right - you have a single cell in the egg. But Sewell's argument doesn't make that distinction - it just says that thermodynamically improbable events shouldn't happen without intelligent intervention, even if you pump energy into the system. And the level of organization that comes out of that single cell is pretty highly improbable, thermodynamically. So, either you have some intelligence intervening with the egg, or Sewell's argument is bogus, regardless of the presence of that single cell.

Now, you can do the "aha, where did that single cell come from?" argument, but that gets into the fact that each event in the series of events that got you there is only improbable, and not impossible.

No the egg is not that improbable given that you have a chicken making it.

[Wally]

No the egg is not that improbable given that you have a chicken making it.

Well, two chickens if you're counting.

[Sparko]

Well, two chickens if you're counting.

only if you want it to hatch.