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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (97736)	3/12/2005 12:53:59 AM
From: cosmicforce	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

< I don't know if they're on the right track or if they're just a bunch of (really smart) guys playing and designing computer games> This is precisely how people described quantum theorists in 1900. Nobody could believe that there were limits to what people got to know. Then Gödel showed that some axioms could not be verified within the system in which they were formulated. That made the whole proof of God thing impossible for people on Earth. This was possibly one of the great disappointments of clerics and philosophers of the age, who had, up to that time, embraced mathematics as revelation of God's mind. Well, God got the last laugh! We don't get to know him except through an unverified system called a probability density function. Almost immediately on the heels of Gödel came theoreticians that could demonstrate that the theory of the past 100 years, the mechanical universe, was a gross oversimplification. Mechanics doesn't explain nuclear fusion. Ironically, gods very well could live in the spaces between substance and non-substance, yet only one religion is not dogmatically at odds with the fabric of the fundamental universe: Buddhism. Now, we have simulations of dynamical systems approaching the complexity of life, and the minds in other sciences haven't yet grasped the full meaning of quantum theory. Even basic chemistry's assumption of path independence may be wrong on large scales of complexity. That's LIFE! And it doesn't matter whether its amino acids or silicon flipflops. In very small, but potentially complex relationships, we just don't get to see why a particular thing happens by simply summing its parts. It doesn't keep us from looking, but emergent phenomena can't be studied except as a wave function that varies over time...

To: Brumar89 who wrote (97736)	3/12/2005 12:23:36 PM
From: goldworldnet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

It may be debatable whether there is meaning in this mysterious universe, but it is certainly evident that man needs it. * * *

To: Brumar89 who wrote (97736)	3/12/2005 7:16:01 PM
From: Tom C	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Nice post Brumar89! I haven’t kept up with the field since I got my undergraduate degree in Biology over 25 years ago. I’m going to make a few comments but don’t take that to mean I didn’t enjoy the post I just finished reading. In fact, however, just how complexity arises was never really resolved, and in the end I believe that it is only with the ideas of this book that this can successfully be done." P. 861, A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram Yes, Evolution addresses how species arise. I don’t claim to understand “complexity theory” but many small perturbations giving rise to complexity sounds a lot like the role of chance mutation in evolution theory. She is the one who came up with the idea that the mitochondria found in organism's cells (maybe a couple thousand mitochondria in each of our cells making up about 20% of our cells area) originated as separate organisms who somehow entered into a symbiotic relationship inside other larger cells and became specialized parts of those cells. I remember this theory from Biology 101. If it’s true how does this conflict with Evolutionary Theory? I don’t see a conflict here. What in Evolution would preclude this theory? Oh wow, yet another alternative to darwinian evolution. Fred Hoyle and Francis Crick … "The spaceship would carry large samples of a number of microorganisms, each having different but simple nutritional requirements That’s interesting stuff. Even if it is true I don’t see a conflict with The Theory of Evolution. First, I don’t remember Evolutionary Theory making any predictions on how life came about. Second if Crick’s theory conflicts with evolution theory how did the seeded microorganisms turn into the various species we see on earth today. My theory would be natural selection and chance mutation. Darwin’s theory was called the Origin of Species, not the Origin of Life on Earth! Just because there are alternative theories regarding the origin of life does not invalidate the theory of speciation. The problem I have with ID is that it’s not science. You and I can have theories. Even if they turn out to be true that doesn’t make them science or scientific theories. The scientific method is: 1. Observation and description of a phenomenon. 2. Formulation of a hypothesis to explain the phenomena. 3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations. 4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by independent experimenters and properly performed experiments. Item number 3 is actually fairly important. If I take ID hypothesis at face value what does it predict? I’m not even going to mention number 4. I should read the text you mentioned but on the surface it seems like a few straw men are set up and knocked down. I’m not sure that those straw men have anything to do with the actual theory of evolution. The Big Bang theory, which Hubble came up with almost a century ago, had the same kind of problem The primary straw man seems to be that the theory of evolution has something to do with the origin of life.