Varangian wrote:

sennekuyl wrote:And Jesus said, "Free will! In Heaven? Over my dead body!" Gospel of John 45:82

Where has Robert Buyers gone?

Gate-crashed a conference on polar bears, perhaps?

Wow, I bet that scared the shit out of them.

John

z8000783 wrote:

Varangian wrote:

sennekuyl wrote:And Jesus said, "Free will! In Heaven? Over my dead body!" Gospel of John 45:82

Where has Robert Buyers gone?

Gate-crashed a conference on polar bears, perhaps?

Wow, I bet that scared the shit out of them.

John

No, it just turned a whiter shade of pale.

Atheistoclast wrote:

Regina wrote:

Atheistoclast wrote:I am tempted to appeal to Amnesty International to ask them to persuade PZ Myers to free all the prisoners of conscience, including myself, from the "dungeon" that exists at his site.

I actually think it makes a lot of sense. Atheistoclast is, after all, just a thought. That's what he says, at any rate.
So being incarcerated in a virtual dungeon must be like imprisonment in the county jail for real people.

I feels real enough to me. I feel I have been gagged and handcuffed. I take freedom of speech very seriously.

Well it costs you nothing to create a blog account on blogger or youtube etc so my guess is that you don't actually take freedom of speech that seriously but just want to force people to listen to you.

Atheistoclast wrote:I am tempted to appeal to Amnesty International to ask them to persuade PZ Myers to free all the prisoners of conscience, including myself, from the "dungeon" that exists at his site.

Demonstrating once again your incredible ignorance...

Rumraket wrote:

Atheistoclast wrote:

Regina wrote:
I actually think it makes a lot of sense. Atheistoclast is, after all, just a thought. That's what he says, at any rate.
So being incarcerated in a virtual dungeon must be like imprisonment in the county jail for real people.

I feels real enough to me. I feel I have been gagged and handcuffed. I take freedom of speech very seriously.

Trolling, spam and violations of posting rules aren't "freedom of speech".

+1

Atheistoclast wrote:It is the first joint conference between European and North American evolutionists. All the big names will be there. It is a perfect opportunity to seize the day and take the Darwinian bull by the horns. I will be the ultimate gatecrasher and party pooper.

Like Borat at a realtors convention.

Creationists are such wonderful comedians.!

Atheistoclast wrote:Rumraket,

Learn the difference between data and information.

Your hard drive can store copious amounts of data (binary digits or bits). However, it can presently contain no information. 2 Gigabits of data with all "0s" has no information value.

'Information value' is a very subjective term. 2 Gigabits of 0's still takes a couple of bits to describe, like "2x109 zeroes" That in itself is information and can have information value. It could form a set of measurements, which would make it very valuable depending on what was measured and so on.

Atheistoclast wrote:But such a large amount of space can potentially contain lots of useful information. However, we cannot quantify the value of any information. There is no definitive measure as to how much information something has. Hence, information is qualitative in nature. Generally, however, there is a positive correlation between data and information.

Which is why it's meaningless to declare that evolution can't produce "biological information" in the form of DNA sequence coding for sequence motifs, because you haven't really said anything about what it is evolution can't produce. You've just called it "information" and stopped there.
Purely from a chemistry standpoint, you're claiming single nucleotide insertions can't happen and be selected for, which is hilariously wrong of course.

Add to this of course, that like other creationists, he thinks information is a magic entity, and therefore needs a magic man. Turing, Shannon, Kolmogorov et al, tossed that notion into the bin years ago. Indeed, Turing's work, upon which the modern digital computer is founded, established two basic concepts, even if he didn't couch them in these terms, namely:

[1] Information is simply the observational data available, about the current state, out of many possible states, of a system of interest;

[2] Ascribed meaning is simply the interactions performed by another system, when that system receives the data covered in [1] above.

I've cited an apposite example from the world of microprocessors that encapsulates this. Basically, set up a stream of memory bytes with a specific set of values, and pass that stream of bytes to a number of different CPUs. Each of those CPUs will treat those bytes as having a different 'meaning', in the sense that for those CPUs, those bytes will encode different instructions. But since we're dealing with the same sequence of byte values, the information content thereof is the same for each instance thereof. Therefore conflating information content with ascribed meaning, as creationists frequently do in their apologetics, is erroneous.

Of course, I expect the usual apologetics to be erected at this point, to the effect that those CPUs, courtesy of their nature as human artefacts, were "designed" (which I don't dispute, but that's because we have evidence that they were designed), and that therefore, those interactions that constitute 'ascribed meaning' for those CPUs were the product of "intelligence", and therefore the same holds for biological entities. The last part of said apologetics, of course, being a mere blind assertion, and one that isn't supported by any real evidence. Indeed, we have much evidence to the effect that biological entities didn't require a magic man to produce them, no matter how much fetishists for 3,000 year old myths engage in wishful thinking to this extent.

Atheistoclast wrote:For the benefit of Calilasseia I am making a helpful suggestion:

...

If you want to be taken seriously by a peer-reviewed researcher like myself, then you have to either publish or perish.

Fucking comedy gold!

Atheistoclast wrote:

falconjudge wrote:Please direct us to your own peer-reviewed papers, A.

Please follow the links to 3 of them. They were all rigorously peer reviewed by experts in the field:

Just not a relevant field!

z8000783 wrote:Yes, what is light?

John

It's the absence of heavy.

Spearthrower wrote:

Atheistoclast wrote:

falconjudge wrote:Please direct us to your own peer-reviewed papers, A.

Please follow the links to 3 of them. They were all rigorously peer reviewed by experts in the field:

Just not a relevant field!

These guys are also experts in the field, therefore, qualified to comment:

Is evolution just a hunch and a line of reasoning?
Logic applied

Logic applied, but clearly was rejected as an unnecessary complication.