It appears that Molly enjoys casual sex with passing strangers confident in the knowledge that any offspring will never take after “daddy”.
She hasn't done this just once either. This carry-on has been going on for 70,000 years. Not that Molly is that old. Her mother did the same, and her grandmother and so on. This is the problem you get when the father isn't around. Actually, it's worse than that. The little trollop doesn't even have her father's DNA.
Can you imagine the court case when suing for maintenance? "You little tramp - you have wasted the courts time - you look nothing like your father, and the DNA test came up with zilch. So who is the father?
Well, Molly is a fish (The Amazon Molly) that needs to "date" males of other species in order to reproduce. There is no male Amazon Molly. And here's the thing that Evolutionary Scientists are agog over: although the sperm of the stranger male activates development of an embryo, none of the male's DNA is passed on to the offspring and only the mother's genes are inherited.
Theory predicts that it should be impossible for any species to survive in such circumstances. According to Muller's Ratchet, a law devised by Hermann Joseph Muller, an American biologist, without the genetic reshuffling of sexual reproduction, an asexual population will accumulate mutations which over many generations should spell its doom.
So here is another wrinkle in our understanding of evolution. Which brings me to Intelligent Design (ID).
I think this is the most important thing about the Intelligent Design debate - we are challenged to look at what we know with a more critical eye. From what I've read there are enough gaps in Evolutionary Theory to make me think there are some important pieces of the puzzle missing. Much of this I expect to be explained by the latest happenings in genetics, and essentially the synthesis of genetics and evolution.
Whilst I'm neutral on ID (it doesn't help knowing nothing in this field) I'm enjoying warming my frontal lobes from the heat of debate. I'm looking forward to seeing "Expelled". Sounds like Expelled is to Evolutionary Biology as Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth is to the Environment. Actually, putting aside the debate around Evolution, it could be this movie speaks more to the willingness for the scientific community to be open to alternative modes of thought. I see much the same thing in the vaccination debates, and that is one area where I believe we don't get "full and frank" disclosure.
This is all starting to sound rather fishy. Do we follow the money? Who's yer daddy?
Related Link: Go Fish
Related Link: Molly want a snapper?
She hasn't done this just once either. This carry-on has been going on for 70,000 years. Not that Molly is that old. Her mother did the same, and her grandmother and so on. This is the problem you get when the father isn't around. Actually, it's worse than that. The little trollop doesn't even have her father's DNA.
Can you imagine the court case when suing for maintenance? "You little tramp - you have wasted the courts time - you look nothing like your father, and the DNA test came up with zilch. So who is the father?
Well, Molly is a fish (The Amazon Molly) that needs to "date" males of other species in order to reproduce. There is no male Amazon Molly. And here's the thing that Evolutionary Scientists are agog over: although the sperm of the stranger male activates development of an embryo, none of the male's DNA is passed on to the offspring and only the mother's genes are inherited.
Theory predicts that it should be impossible for any species to survive in such circumstances. According to Muller's Ratchet, a law devised by Hermann Joseph Muller, an American biologist, without the genetic reshuffling of sexual reproduction, an asexual population will accumulate mutations which over many generations should spell its doom.
So here is another wrinkle in our understanding of evolution. Which brings me to Intelligent Design (ID).
I think this is the most important thing about the Intelligent Design debate - we are challenged to look at what we know with a more critical eye. From what I've read there are enough gaps in Evolutionary Theory to make me think there are some important pieces of the puzzle missing. Much of this I expect to be explained by the latest happenings in genetics, and essentially the synthesis of genetics and evolution.
Whilst I'm neutral on ID (it doesn't help knowing nothing in this field) I'm enjoying warming my frontal lobes from the heat of debate. I'm looking forward to seeing "Expelled". Sounds like Expelled is to Evolutionary Biology as Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth is to the Environment. Actually, putting aside the debate around Evolution, it could be this movie speaks more to the willingness for the scientific community to be open to alternative modes of thought. I see much the same thing in the vaccination debates, and that is one area where I believe we don't get "full and frank" disclosure.
This is all starting to sound rather fishy. Do we follow the money? Who's yer daddy?
Related Link: Go Fish
Related Link: Molly want a snapper?
By jolly golly do we have infestation of female only Amazon Molly fish in the upper reaches of the Liarbour River?
ReplyDeleteWe do have a vicious Amazon Helen, Judith and Margaret sub species lurking in Lake Beehive.
I think this is the most important thing about the Intelligent Design debate - we are challenged to look at what we know with a more critical eye.
ReplyDeleteNot true. ID offers no explanation, has no testable theories and is not science.
ID simply says
- I (we) don't understand how this came about.
- I (we) don't know how to investigate how it may have come about
- Because 1 & 2 above I(we) conclude god dunnit.
As to Expelled, it has been proven to be a crock of shit, used lies and deceit to obtain interviews and has stolen copyright material and tried to pass it off as its own.
As to Expelled, it has been proven to be a crock of shit, used lies and deceit to obtain interviews and has stolen copyright material and tried to pass it off as its own.
ReplyDeleteAnd what do you think of Al Gore's film?
ID offers no explanation, has no testable theories and is not science.
I was focusing more on the fact that I see in ID debates a mention of the gaps in our understanding of evolution. I'll stay away from the "no explanation" bit - not my field.
Hmm,
ReplyDeleteI'm not too fussed about the Molly. There are certainly lots of advantages to be had in having genetic recombination but there is also way John Mayndard Smith called the
two-fold cost of sex" (which boils down to you only get to put half of your genes into the next generation and only have the organisms in a populations can carry young). Plenty of lineages have given up on sex to reap the short term benefits (natural selection is, after all, all about the short term) but in almost every case these lineages haven't survived for an great length of time; falling eventually to the costs of not having sex (lacking a means to purge deleterious mutations or bring together beneficial mutations that can work following an environmental change). In the dark depths of time when I too blogged I even wrote about a test of some of these ideas.
There are salamanders and rotifers that have given up sex for millions of years, I much more interested in what going on with these guys that 70 000 year old fish.
As for ID, you don't need to be an expert at anything to see that a supernatural explanation can't explain anything within science. ID is not science because it doesn't predict anything and therefore isn't testable. In fact it's just boring old natural theology which was kind of stupid when Augistine was doing and isn't any better now.
But of course the ID 'debate' isn't about whether people should be allowed to see a creator at work in the universe but whether this thread of theological thought should be taught in science classes! I'm gonna keep fighting on the 'no' side there.
I don't what gaps in evolutionary theory you feel may be hiding God, I would say that the descent of all life on earth from a single common ancestor is a scientific fact for which any theory of life must account and that natural selection as a means to achieve evolution must rank as one of the most successful theories in all of science.
You may want to read this site before you see expelled.
"Sounds like Expelled is to Evolutionary Biology as Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth is to the Environment"
ReplyDeleteI would change that to...
"Sounds like Expelled is to Evolutionary Biology as The Great Global Warming Swindle is to the theory of Global Warming"
Any film that uses an argument reductio ad Hitlerum is bound to be a meaningless crock of rubbish. Don't see Al Gore trying that.
ReplyDelete"Sounds like Expelled is to Evolutionary Biology as The Great Global Warming Swindle is to the theory of Global Warming"
ReplyDeleteYes, I think that sums it up nicely. Both are crypto-documentaries taking spinning half truths and a few outright lies together to arrive at predetermined conclusion which is point of political convenience. Though at lest the Swindlers didn't say Al Gore lead to the holocaust...
Zen,
ReplyDeleteExpelled was shown to the staff at my place of employement before it was released. While thought provoking it did have it's moments of "wait, that's not right". e.g. A couple of the claims that professors were fired for teaching ID/Creationism were, to me, clearly suspect and open to interpretation.
Ambush interview tactics are distasteful whether used by the left or the right.
All-in-All I'm glad I didn't pay to see the movie.
I'm not sure people properly divine my opinion on the "ID vs Evolution" debate.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I have read so far:
1. ID does not appear to fit the requirements of a testable theory.
2. I think there is more to understand with the whole evolution thing, but that doesn't worry me. Work in progress.
3. If God created the Universe, then he was really, really clever and I'd expect God to have engineered the whole thing just brilliantly, and science is generally just discovering those mechanisms.
4. Nothing science can uncover or explain proves or disproves God's existence. Two separate areas of thought. There is a crossover though of "wow, what were the chances..." which fuels unscientific thoughts, which may be totally true, just not easily testable.
4. I think Andy's line about expelled and Incon. Truth is much better worded than what I wrote - nice work Andy.
5. I'm still going to see the film for myself and see where it leads.
Nothing science can uncover or explain proves or disproves God's existence.
ReplyDeleteI can think of plenty of discoveries that would prove God's existence . . . the Book of Genesis (or Rig Veda or whatever) in binary code in the digits of an irrational number like pi would be pretty damn hard to refute.
Nah, some-one would just say that some aliens wrote Genesis using pi and a dna string cypher as a practical joke, and we'd be back to square one.
ReplyDeleteI don't think aliens get to set the value of pi...
ReplyDeleteI don't think your going to get to see expelled in NZ, might have to buy a DVD or something.
In general I agree with your other points, science is a tool by which we understand the natural world and can't be used directly to test supernatural hypotheses (though the results of scientific investigation can, of course, fuel philosophical thinking). Something like Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magesteria.
But that view point makes ID and the goals of the ID crowd superfluous. We already have the argument from design , it's been part of Islamic theology for a very long time and church fathers also took it up. Why, if you accept science and theological thinking to be different, would you imagine a supernatural cause needed to become part of biology (and why start that scientific revolution in high school science classes...)?
It seems to me you don't think we need to include the supernatural in biology, you just want you metaphysical wondering informed by science in which case we just need to keep on doing evolutionary biology and you can keep reading the results.
But in Expelled you'll find the argument that scientists are close minded because they refuse to include supernatural thinking in their science - even though, ID being non predictive, doing so would limit their ability to actually do anything.
David (you know the one I mean):
ReplyDeleteI'm not suggesting aliens set the value of pi. I was saying they could use pi as part of their cypher key, although that would only be if there were aliens visiting the planet in the first place. The chances for that would be pretty remote.
Why, if you accept science and theological thinking to be different, would you imagine a supernatural cause needed to become part of biology
Huh? Who is this "you"? There may be a couple of ifs and imagines that don't quite reflect my opinion there.
in which case we just need to keep on doing evolutionary biology On the other hand, I thought the whole point about ID was that evolutionary biology may never lead to a full explanation of how we got to where we are, because the whole story may be something greater than evolution in itself.
Isn't it a little dogmatic to assume evolutionary theories will ultimately answer "everything"? That approach could be limiting.
I don't think 'you' is you in this case Zen, this is what happens while I write long comments while I'm meant to be doing other things...
ReplyDeleteWhat I meant was that is seems from your earlier comment (and correct me if I'm wrong) that you wouldn't want supernatural elements entering into biology or any other science.
But the people that back ID show no such restraint. They want supernatural view-points to be included in the way we do and teach biology and presumably any other science that treads on their view of the world (since they've let their magesteria overlap and had metaphysical beliefs impinge on the physical world!)
On the other hand, I thought the whole point about ID was that evolutionary biology may never lead to a full explanation of how we got to where we are, because the whole story may be something greater than evolution in itself
Well a certain conservative court in America decided the whole point of ID was a (failed) attempt to get around the fact that teaching creationism in public schools was previously ruled unconstitutional. We could be more charitable and say it's an attempted critique of modern evolutionary thinking but to that we have to admit it's a miserable failure, none of the metrics but which they propose design can be detected in the universe actually work. "Irreducible complexity" is perhaps the funniest in this regard
There are plenty of prominent biologists that critique current evolutionary thinking, often in very high ranking journals , and such a critique can be very valuable indeed because it allows new theories (here in the scientific sense meaning predictive framework that explains observed facts) to be developed. But the IDists appear to not bother with the actually building a new theory stage, their approach is to attempt to find holes in the present theory then claim they can only be fixed by shoving God into the gap. Which seems to this atheists a very poor place to put ones god - what happens to him if science does close the gap? (cf 6000 year old earth creationists). The other stange tatic employed by IDists is to attempt to start their revolution in the classrooms of 15 year olds, not quite straight out of Khun...
Isn't it a little dogmatic to assume evolutionary theories will ultimately answer "everything"? That approach could be limiting.
I should perhaps have said biology, just being a little parochial! What I meant was science as a tool requires that we set aside supernatural causes, there is no other way that it can work. This doesn't require anyone to believe that there is no more to the universe than the things science can measure.
It's just that testable, explanatory theories are the only way we know to learn to learn about the physical world. As it happens evolution is the only show in town when it comes to describing the wondrous exuberance of life on earth. Perhaps one day there will be another theoretical framework that does an even better job (it would have to deal with the fact that evolution has happened though) but ID simply can't be that theory.
Hope that is all a little clearer now.
(BTW I adopted this tag while NZC had a wondrous exuberance of Davids - thought employing the same tag everytime might be a good way to set my comments apart from others)
Yep, pretty much in agreement with your comments.
ReplyDeleteA minor point though: I agree that creationism isn't a "science" and therefore need not be part of the science curriculum, but equally, I think it would be fair enough to explain in early science classes that science does not prove or disprove God. Just as some religious types over-hype their theories, some secularists are no doubt guilty of the same. However, apologetics is a completely separate course!
some-one would just say that some aliens wrote Genesis using pi and a dna string cypher as a practical joke
ReplyDeleteYeah, but that viewpoint would be limited to wacko's on fringe websites questioning the overwhelming scientific consensus.
so danyl, what's the reason that you constantly put down Christianity? Your geekish ramblings and permanent state of creating cynicism and giving undue criticism is an indicter that you are either psychotic or fear a judgmental God?
ReplyDelete