Wilberforce1860 wrote:SpeedOfSound wrote:Wilberforce1860 wrote:...
You like to consider possibilities right?
Do you think it is POSSIBLE that there is a thing that people who have educations in life sciences and other sciences know that you do not know? Things that make such things as your RNA challenge embarrassing for you.
Is it possible? All I'm asking.
Certainly. I acknowledged that in my Welcome from Virginia introductory post. I believe Calilasseia knows more about many subjects in science than I do.
However, I know enough to determine whether the subject of how life arose from non-chemicals is settled or not. It isn't. RNA life could prove to be a total dead end. Until it is demonstrated, it remains a hypothesis, and not a fact.
Except that this "hypothesis" is accompanied by a vast raft of empirical evidence, that the requisite chemical reactions
work. On the other hand, we have
zero evidence for an invisible magic man. Once again, you have three guesses which of the two choices I'm going to run with.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Calilasseia wrote:It's amusing to see Wilberforce assert that abiogenesis isn't the topic of this thread, when abiogenesis, and canards about this subject, are among the topics I covered when compiling my canards list, which he was supposed to be addressing way back on page one ...
I'm not sure we need to discuss it more here.
Well those of us who accept the
evidence that the requisite chemical reactions
work, certainly don't feel the need to discuss that fact, because that fact is now overwhelmingly established.
Which of those chemical reactions were actually implicated in the origin of life is, of course, still open to question, but the mere fact that scientist can now generate model protocells in the laboratory, in order to investigate the behaviour thereof, tells those of us who paid attention in science classes, that the scientists working in the field have something a bit more substantial than blind assertions to offer on the subject. Or what part of the words "empirical demonstration" with respect to this did you not understand?
Wilberforce1860 wrote:I haven't gotten that far in your list. I'm on point [0], which is worldview.
Except that many of the topics I've covered in my list aren't a matter of "worldview", they're a matter of
empirical evidence.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:This includes immaterial versus the material
Still waiting for real evidence that "immaterial" entities exist, as opposed to being merely
asserted to do so.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:and various ways of knowing.
I've already listed two ways of knowing that have been demonstrated time and again to be
reliable generators of substantive knowledge, namely empirical test of postulates with observational consequences, and deductive proof of mathematical theorems. I'm still waiting for you to add to this list.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Some questions have been posed about things not explained by science
Except that most of those "questions" have been nothing more than blind assertions to the effect that because science hasn't alighted upon all of the answers yet, as a result of being a human endeavour subject to time constraints, this somehow means that unsupported mythological assertions purportedly constitute fact. They don't.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:or which might be better explained by creationism
Creationism doens't "explain"
anything. It's a gigantic pile of assertions, erected as a result of the desperate need on the part of mythology fetishists to keep their mythology alive.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:which is relevant to ways of knowing.
When are we going to see you provide
explicit statements about these purported "other ways of knowing"? We're all still waiting for you even to
define one of these.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:I'm not trying to settle anything in this thread, but to highlight where we agree or disagree.
But at some point, if you want us to treat your assertions as something
other than mere assertions, you're going to have to settle important questions.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:My objective is to determine what type of foundation for further discussions we have.
I'll tell you, right now, what are the foundations of
any process of discourse. Viz:
[1] Assertions, when first presented, posssess the status "truth value
unknown".
[2] The purpose of proper discourse is to
remedy that deficit, and assign a truth value to assertions presented.
[3] This is achieved by
testing assertions, to see if they are in accord with extant knowledge. Assertions that cannot be thus tested are useless, as they tell us nothing.
[4] Assertions that
are testable only tell us something
when they are tested.
[5] If the test tells us the assertions are
false, then those assertions are discarded.
Apply those five steps, and the rest follows.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:It may limit what we discuss (we know we won't agree on premises and thus can't agree on conclusions).
Those five steps above, are the means by which we determine
which premises are likely to form the foundations upon which to build substantive knowledge.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:To summarize what we have discussed I am working on several tables:
1. An update (minor revisions) to the table previously posted on "Attributes of Thoughts and Emotions Versus Other Things (Immaterial versus the Materal)" (p. 20, #385 and #389).
2. A table entitled "Arguments For and Against Immaterial Qualities of Thoughts and Emotions"
3. A table entitled "Ways of Knowing"
4. A table entitled "Thread Comments and Responses on Ways of Knowing"
5. A table entitled "Questions, and Ways of Knowing That Answer (or Don't Answer) Them
Except that the contents of your tables fail woefully to address key issues.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Reading through all posts to date is going more slowly than I had hoped. I am on page 32.
I have made reasonable progress on the tables, but don't want to omit from consideration any points made by thread posters on pages 32-51 (and counting). I don't plan to post the tables until I get through reading all relevant posts. I can't predict when that will be.
Makes one wonder how I found the time to examine hundreds of scientific papers in detail, doesn't it?
Wilberforce1860 wrote:I will be on vacation from September 17-September 21 to visit my mother and celebrate her 90th birthday. I may not be able to read or post during that time.
I managed to fit my posts in between helping to run an entomology society. It isn't that hard.
Moving on ...
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Calilasseia wrote:Wilberforce1860 wrote:SpeedOfSound wrote:Find a leaf on a tree. Look at it and tell me everything that is going on inside the leaf. Not just reductive science, I want to know what each chloroplast is up to right now. For every branch in every vein tell me how it got that way. What encoded it's particular unique shape and network of veins? What's in those veins? Exactly? What is the stuff in those veins doing?
I am not remotely qualified to do as you ask.
But the point is that there
are people who are qualified to answer these questions, and what's more, they've produced solutions to the requisite problems, and demonstrated that those solutions
work in real living organisms.
Take for example, the question of how the veins in a leaf acquired their particular pattern. This is a question that is tailor made for what are known as reaction-diffusion systems, the first paper on these having been published way back in 1952, by none other than Alan Turing, the mathematician who cracked the Engima code during World War II. Quite simply, he demonstrated, in that paper, submitted to the Royal Society, that a wide range of observed biological structures can be accounted for, by the presence of two substances, one promoting cell growth, the other inhibiting cell growth, moving through the requisite tissues in a manner described by a system of parabolic partial differential equations.
Now it so happened that he was ahead of the game with respect to the discovery of such substances in actual living organisms, and experimental verification of the applicability of his reaction-diffusion system hard to wait until various foundations were laid in molecular biology, such as the discovery of DNA, the discovery of the genetic code, and the development of tools facilitating the analysis of the behaviour of the proteins coded for by various genes. However, once these foundations were in place, scientists alighted upon
dozens of proteins that perform Turing-type morphogenetic functions, in accordance with his mechanism. In metazoans, there are the
hox genes (at the last count, something like 30 of these were known), the
bmp genes (20 of these are currently known), the
wnt genes, the
fgf genes, and a host of other genes such as
dlx1,
dlx2,
barx1,
barx2,
pax6 and
pax9.Indeed, over at the now defunct Richard Dawkins forums, when Stevebee turned up there, I had much fun embarrassing him with 17 scientific papers covering the role of many of these genes in tooth morphogenesis, which he, despite claiming to be a professional dentist, knew nothing about. I'm also aware of at least 10 scientific papers covering the application of the Turing morphogenetic system to the development of mimetic wing patterns in
Papilio dardanus butterflies.
Now it turns out that quite a few of these genes possess a section known as a homeobox domain, and homeobox proteins possess numerous roles in signal transduction cascades, which, in short, are chemical pathways determining which substances are activated in a given location, and which substances are deactivated. Some of these proteins are themselves growth promoters in certain circumstances, growth inhibitors in others, and in other circumstances, affect whether or not other growth promoters or inhibitors are themselves allowed to perform their usual function.
Even more interestingly, it turns out that organisms
other than metazoans have homologous collections of genes. Plants, for example, possess homeobox genes that perform functions analogous to those of the
hox genes in animals, and since the homeobox domains are tightly conserved right across the entire biosphere, we can apply molecular phylogeny to the different homeobox domains, and determine 'family trees' for those genes, leading back to simpler antecedent common ancestors. What's more, the variations found in plants behave in pretty much the same way as those found in animals, in fungi and for that matter, in single celled yeasts. In the case of single celled organisms, some of those genes originally controlled the internal organisation of those cells, and when multicellular lineages arose, several of those genes were then co-opted to perform growth regulation functions within
groups of cells, and thus the foundations for tissue differentiation were laid.
The fun part being, of course, that reaction-diffusion mechanisms are also found in a number of
non-living chemical systems. A variation on the theme of one-component reaction-diffusion systems is the Zeldovitch Equation, used to describe combustion processes. Another variation is the Rayleigh-Bénard Equations, used to describe certain classes of thermal convection that arise in certain exothermic chemical reactions. Even more interestingly, a system of parabolic partial differential equations in this class can lead to the emergence of Schrödinger's Equation, which historically was derived via a different path, but understanding how this is achieved requires fairly deep understanding of the calculus of variations within tensor fields.
This is simply one example of the
vast body of knowledge that has been developed, without once referring to mythology.
This is a great post (up to here, where there is nothing for me to disagree with), and thanks for mentioning some of the things Turing proposed in the area of biology. At the time he proposed it would you classify this as an "intuitive leap"?
No, because he spent years analysing the problem. Which is why he was able to submit his original paper to the Royal Society.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Calilasseia wrote:Wilberforce1860 wrote:SpeedOfSound wrote:Now try telling me all about one single rock the size of a plum by looking at its outside.
Ditto.
I await your point.
I think I've made the point adequately above. Namely, that scientists have alighted upon
testable natural processes in
enormous quantity. They are able to describe, in exquisite detail, and with empirically verifiable quantitative accuracy, the behaviour of systems that even just a century ago, were regarded as dark mysteries.
And in doing so, they have stumbled upon new dark mysteries.
No they haven't. They've alighted upon
additional questions that are within the remit of testable natural processes to answer.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:For example, where does the information in DNA come from?
The arrangement of the nucleotides within the molecule. Change that arrangement, and you have
different information. Indeed, as I've already stated on numerous occasions in the past,
information is nothing more than the observable data with respect to the current state of a system of interest. This view of information was the basis upon which Turing wrote his 1936 paper
On Computable Numbers, within which he introduced the world to Turing machines.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Please describe in exquisite detail, and with empirically verifiable quantitative accuracy.
See above.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Science is not qualified to answer some of the dark mysteries that we have discussed on this thread
Wrong. Another blind assertion that belongs in the bin.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:as it does not address the issue of intent.
If there's no entity possessing intent responsible for a given class of entities and phenomena, then your objection is irrelevant.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:For example, why do we have to die?
Wear and tear combined with energy equations. Quite simply, if you cannot extract from your food, sufficient energy to support your life processes, they grind to a halt. As time passes, that capacity becomes reduced.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Nor can it determine the origin of the big bang
Please tell that to the world's leading cosmologists. Who are busy working on the solutions you assert above purportedly don't, or never will, exist.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:nor whether there is life after death.
Well since this is merely another untestable assertion from supernaturalists, it's not the fault of science that it can't test untestable assertions.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Calilasseia wrote:Not once did the scientists responsible for those advances in knowledge, regard the
ad hoc introduction of asserted magic entities as necessary, and through those advances, demonstrated that said
ad hoc introduction of asserted magic entities was superfluous to requirements and irrelevant. It's testable natural processes all the way down,
Science is great when it operates within its limited sphere.
Those limits are rather less of a constraint than you think.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Calilasseia wrote:and there is
zero evidence that this state of affairs is going to change any time soon.
I hope not. But it doesn't mean it will somehow be able to answer questions of intent
Oh but we
can answer those questions, in the case of
entities whose existence is established, such as human beings. There's an entire branch of science devoted thereto. It's called psychology.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:or where matter came from
Steinhardt & Turok are over there.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:or what happens after death.
You decompose.
Wilberforce1860 wrote:Calilasseia wrote:The only people asserting otherwise, are pedlars of duplicitous apologetic fabrications, desperately trying to prop up mythology-based doctrines, in the face of supertanker loads of evidence that those mythology-based doctrines and their assertions are plain, flat,
wrong.
I won't address that in this thread.
At some time, if you want to try and persuade us that creationism is something other than a grandiose castle of assertionist fabrications, you'll have to.
by 
Something that can't be detected, has no known mechanism[s]. Something that can't be modelled or described. 
WF believes that he has found holes in science and he also believes that we are like we think he is. That we refuse to see the holes. 
