Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
In a message dated 5/2/2005 7:46:42 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: A goof point Warren, but you forget that genes aren't the *only* unit of inheritance- culture is also inherited. Sawyer could have just as well postulated a race of hominids, humanoid pre-cursors, which are poised just on the critical cusp of breaking into counsciousness, and only need an inspiration or model to make the leap themselves. One of them would be bound to 'get' counsciousness eventually, and by imitation it would spread vertically and horizontally (and would exterminate any groups that didn't 'get' it.) This substitute model has the nice side effect that the character expouding it could easily segue into a learned disquisition on historical 'wolflings' as an example- humans brought up with no counscious human model from which to 'get' it. Except that cultural inheritence requires a brain capable of interacting with other brains in the society in a manner that generates culture. Culture does exist in other species in particular chimps where means of getting food may vary based on one member of the tribe via luck or intelligence ( a chimp einstein or at least a chimp henry ford) comes up with a new trick. But that is as far as it goes. In order for consciousness to be a cultural phenomena hominds must already have very complex brains. And brains don't come cheap. they are expensive and time consuming to build and maintain. having a big brain means having a big head. this requires changes in gestational strategies (humans are born very prematurely. Based on a variety of comparitive tests human gestation should probably be about 15 months. But the head would be too big to deliver so natural selection has favored early delivery of an infant that is completely incapable of even the most rudimentary tasks of independent life. By comparison at birth a chimp has the same degree of maturation as a one year child. So there has to be very strong evolutionary pressure (i.e a competitive advantage) for big brains capable of consciousness to evolve. The most likely advantage is that cognition communication and memory even in their most primative forms made hominids more successful. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On 5/8/05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In a message dated 5/2/2005 7:46:42 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: A goof point Warren, but you forget that genes aren't the *only* unit of inheritance- culture is also inherited. Sawyer could have just as well postulated a race of hominids, humanoid pre-cursors, which are poised just on the critical cusp of breaking into counsciousness, and only need an inspiration or model to make the leap themselves. One of them would be bound to 'get' counsciousness eventually, and by imitation it would spread vertically and horizontally (and would exterminate any groups that didn't 'get' it.) This substitute model has the nice side effect that the character expouding it could easily segue into a learned disquisition on historical 'wolflings' as an example- humans brought up with no counscious human model from which to 'get' it. Except that cultural inheritence requires a brain capable of interacting with other brains in the society in a manner that generates culture. Culture does exist in other species in particular chimps where means of getting food may vary based on one member of the tribe via luck or intelligence ( a chimp einstein or at least a chimp henry ford) comes up with a new trick. But that is as far as it goes. In order for consciousness to be a cultural phenomena hominds must already have very complex brains. And brains don't come cheap. they are expensive and time consuming to build and maintain. having a big brain means having a big head. this requires changes in gestational strategies (humans are born very prematurely. Based on a variety of comparitive tests human gestation should probably be about 15 months. But the head would be too big to deliver so natural selection has favored early delivery of an infant that is completely incapable of even the most rudimentary tasks of independent life. By comparison at birth a chimp has the same degree of maturation as a one year child. So there has to be very strong evolutionary pressure (i.e a competitive advantage) for big brains capable of consciousness to evolve. The most likely advantage is that cognition communication and memory even in their most primative forms made hominids more successful. I'm afraid I don't see your post's relevance- I suggested that counsciousness coulda been a random event, which would enable itself to be culturally passed down (and really enabling cultural inheritance in the first place, instead of depending on genes.). ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On May 8, 2005, at 6:47 PM, Maru Dubshinki wrote: I'm afraid I don't see your post's relevance- I suggested that counsciousness coulda been a random event, which would enable itself to be culturally passed down (and really enabling cultural inheritance in the first place, instead of depending on genes.). But it still won't work, because culture is fragile. Look at all the ancient languages we can't translate today. Cultures lost entirely. What's the mechanism by which consciousness is culturally transmitted? One doesn't practice it like a language, does one? -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress The Seven-Year Mirror http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On May 2, 2005, at 4:46 PM, Maru Dubshinki wrote: On 5/2/05, Warren Ockrassa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... _Calculating God_, yeah. As it happens I just finished it this weekend. It's an interesting read but Sawyer leaves a gaping hole in his story (two, actually), which he also did with _Hominids_. In CG Sawyer's aliens suggest that the current universe's physics are too precisely honed toward life's development for it to be an accident; the idea is that some kind of superbeing prearranged the current big bang expansion to have the state it does. What we don't go into is how that entity managed to survive the previous universe's big crunch. That's a pretty significant omission, to me. And of course the main basis for the argument that the Fohrlinors and Wreeds propose is the way extinction events occurred simultaneously on their homeworlds *and* ours (give or take a couple million years) -- now if something that incredibly improbable actually had happened, sure, there'd be something worth looking at. But in order to knock aside any doubts at all the book has to suggest an additional not one, but two literal deus ex machina events. Framed in that carefully constructed context it's hardly surprising the idea of god finds a lot of support, but the fact is that without that elaborately constructed set of premises, the argument falls flat. In _Hominids_, BTW, the problem I had was his suggestion that consciousness developed in human brains initially as a quantum state change, something random rather than emergent that altered the way a given brain operated once and forever in the distant past. Well, how exactly did that trait get passed along to offspring? It *must* have been an emergent property of brain complexity, something that existed in DNA, or else it would never have occurred again. -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books A goof point Warren, but you forget that genes aren't the *only* unit of inheritance- culture is also inherited. Yes -- but not biologically. If there is a discontinuity the culture gets lost. It is not innate. Sawyer could have just as well postulated a race of hominids, humanoid pre-cursors, which are poised just on the critical cusp of breaking into counsciousness, and only need an inspiration or model to make the leap themselves. One of them would be bound to 'get' counsciousness eventually, and by imitation it would spread vertically and horizontally (and would exterminate any groups that didn't 'get' it.) Reasonable, but not an argument for inheritance of a quality. -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress The Seven-Year Mirror http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On 5/6/05, Warren Ockrassa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On May 2, 2005, at 4:46 PM, Maru Dubshinki wrote: On 5/2/05, Warren Ockrassa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... _Calculating God_, yeah. As it happens I just finished it this weekend. It's an interesting read but Sawyer leaves a gaping hole in his story (two, actually), which he also did with _Hominids_. In CG Sawyer's aliens suggest that the current universe's physics are too precisely honed toward life's development for it to be an accident; the idea is that some kind of superbeing prearranged the current big bang expansion to have the state it does. What we don't go into is how that entity managed to survive the previous universe's big crunch. That's a pretty significant omission, to me. And of course the main basis for the argument that the Fohrlinors and Wreeds propose is the way extinction events occurred simultaneously on their homeworlds *and* ours (give or take a couple million years) -- now if something that incredibly improbable actually had happened, sure, there'd be something worth looking at. But in order to knock aside any doubts at all the book has to suggest an additional not one, but two literal deus ex machina events. Framed in that carefully constructed context it's hardly surprising the idea of god finds a lot of support, but the fact is that without that elaborately constructed set of premises, the argument falls flat. In _Hominids_, BTW, the problem I had was his suggestion that consciousness developed in human brains initially as a quantum state change, something random rather than emergent that altered the way a given brain operated once and forever in the distant past. Well, how exactly did that trait get passed along to offspring? It *must* have been an emergent property of brain complexity, something that existed in DNA, or else it would never have occurred again. -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books A goof point Warren, but you forget that genes aren't the *only* unit of inheritance- culture is also inherited. Yes -- but not biologically. If there is a discontinuity the culture gets lost. It is not innate. Exactly- like I suggested, the character-in-charge-of-exposition could use the historical examples of wolfling children to point that out precisely. ~Maru ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On 5/2/05, Maru Dubshinki [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip ~Maru The wordless teaching, neh? Actually he is GOH at the Houston ApolloCon coming up so I hope to hear a few words. -- Gary Denton Easter Lemming Blogs http://elemming.blogspot.com http://elemming2.blogspot.com ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On 5/3/05, Gary Denton [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 5/2/05, Maru Dubshinki [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: snip ~Maru The wordless teaching, neh? Actually he is GOH at the Houston ApolloCon coming up so I hope to hear a few words. -- Gary Denton The speech which can be spoken is not the true speech. ~Maru When a link points at a web page, do you examine the link, or the web page? Fools hear this and laugh; if they did not, that would not be the Web. :) ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On 28 Feb 2005, at 12:31 am, Warren Ockrassa wrote: On Feb 27, 2005, at 4:14 PM, d.brin wrote: [from the NYT article] So biology students can be forgiven for wondering whether the mysterious designer they're told about might not be the biblical God after all, but rather some very advanced yet mischievous or blundering intelligence -- extraterrestrial scientists, say. Those wacky wolflings. At least they're starting to figure it out! A page of links about the story: http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/dover.html An article on The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/4/27/03541/2520 -- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/ Invest in a company any idiot can run because sooner or later any idiot is going to run it. - Warren Buffet ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On 5/2/05, William T Goodall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 28 Feb 2005, at 12:31 am, Warren Ockrassa wrote: On Feb 27, 2005, at 4:14 PM, d.brin wrote: [from the NYT article] So biology students can be forgiven for wondering whether the mysterious designer they're told about might not be the biblical God after all, but rather some very advanced yet mischievous or blundering intelligence -- extraterrestrial scientists, say. Those wacky wolflings. At least they're starting to figure it out! A page of links about the story: http://www.geocities.com/lclane2/dover.html An article on The Pseudoscience of Intelligent Design: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/4/27/03541/2520 -- William T Goodall Mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/ Invest in a company any idiot can run because sooner or later any idiot is going to run it. - Warren Buffet Robert Sawyer has a novel about intelligent design. A spaceship lands at a Toronto museum and an alien gets out and says take me to you paleontologist. The aliens are studying the actions of God on several worlds in this part of the galaxy. It is not a God that any Christian fundamentalist would recognize. -- Gary Denton Easter Lemming Blogs http://elemming.blogspot.com http://elemming2.blogspot.com Warran Buffet says that Bush is a complete idiot on taxes and Social Security, appoints Bill Gates to his board. ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On May 2, 2005, at 11:09 AM, Gary Denton wrote: Robert Sawyer has a novel about intelligent design. A spaceship lands at a Toronto museum and an alien gets out and says take me to you paleontologist. The aliens are studying the actions of God on several worlds in this part of the galaxy. It is not a God that any Christian fundamentalist would recognize. _Calculating God_, yeah. As it happens I just finished it this weekend. It's an interesting read but Sawyer leaves a gaping hole in his story (two, actually), which he also did with _Hominids_. In CG Sawyer's aliens suggest that the current universe's physics are too precisely honed toward life's development for it to be an accident; the idea is that some kind of superbeing prearranged the current big bang expansion to have the state it does. What we don't go into is how that entity managed to survive the previous universe's big crunch. That's a pretty significant omission, to me. And of course the main basis for the argument that the Fohrlinors and Wreeds propose is the way extinction events occurred simultaneously on their homeworlds *and* ours (give or take a couple million years) -- now if something that incredibly improbable actually had happened, sure, there'd be something worth looking at. But in order to knock aside any doubts at all the book has to suggest an additional not one, but two literal deus ex machina events. Framed in that carefully constructed context it's hardly surprising the idea of god finds a lot of support, but the fact is that without that elaborately constructed set of premises, the argument falls flat. In _Hominids_, BTW, the problem I had was his suggestion that consciousness developed in human brains initially as a quantum state change, something random rather than emergent that altered the way a given brain operated once and forever in the distant past. Well, how exactly did that trait get passed along to offspring? It *must* have been an emergent property of brain complexity, something that existed in DNA, or else it would never have occurred again. -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress The Seven-Year Mirror http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On 5/2/05, Warren Ockrassa [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... _Calculating God_, yeah. As it happens I just finished it this weekend. It's an interesting read but Sawyer leaves a gaping hole in his story (two, actually), which he also did with _Hominids_. In CG Sawyer's aliens suggest that the current universe's physics are too precisely honed toward life's development for it to be an accident; the idea is that some kind of superbeing prearranged the current big bang expansion to have the state it does. What we don't go into is how that entity managed to survive the previous universe's big crunch. That's a pretty significant omission, to me. And of course the main basis for the argument that the Fohrlinors and Wreeds propose is the way extinction events occurred simultaneously on their homeworlds *and* ours (give or take a couple million years) -- now if something that incredibly improbable actually had happened, sure, there'd be something worth looking at. But in order to knock aside any doubts at all the book has to suggest an additional not one, but two literal deus ex machina events. Framed in that carefully constructed context it's hardly surprising the idea of god finds a lot of support, but the fact is that without that elaborately constructed set of premises, the argument falls flat. In _Hominids_, BTW, the problem I had was his suggestion that consciousness developed in human brains initially as a quantum state change, something random rather than emergent that altered the way a given brain operated once and forever in the distant past. Well, how exactly did that trait get passed along to offspring? It *must* have been an emergent property of brain complexity, something that existed in DNA, or else it would never have occurred again. -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books A goof point Warren, but you forget that genes aren't the *only* unit of inheritance- culture is also inherited. Sawyer could have just as well postulated a race of hominids, humanoid pre-cursors, which are poised just on the critical cusp of breaking into counsciousness, and only need an inspiration or model to make the leap themselves. One of them would be bound to 'get' counsciousness eventually, and by imitation it would spread vertically and horizontally (and would exterminate any groups that didn't 'get' it.) This substitute model has the nice side effect that the character expouding it could easily segue into a learned disquisition on historical 'wolflings' as an example- humans brought up with no counscious human model from which to 'get' it. ~Maru The wordless teaching, neh? ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
A very good NYT article on intelligent design
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/magazine/20WWLN.html February 20, 2005 THE WAY WE LIVE NOW Unintelligent Design By JIM HOLT Recently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth-grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent designer? To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory -- creationism dressed up as science -- its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point. As one Pennsylvania teacher observed: ''The first question they will ask is: 'Well, who's the designer? Do you mean God?''' From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence. But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety. Such disregard for economy can be found throughout the natural order. Perhaps 99 percent of the species that have existed have died out. Darwinism has no problem with this, because random variation will inevitably produce both fit and unfit individuals. But what sort of designer would have fashioned creatures so out of sync with their environments that they were doomed to extinction? The gravest imperfections in nature, though, are moral ones. Consider how humans and other animals are intermittently tortured by pain throughout their lives, especially near the end. Our pain mechanism may have been designed to serve as a warning signal to protect our bodies from damage, but in the majority of diseases -- cancer, for instance, or coronary thrombosis -- the signal comes too late to do much good, and the horrible suffering that ensues is completely useless. And why should the human reproductive system be so shoddily designed? Fewer than one-third of conceptions culminate in live births. The rest end prematurely, either in early gestation or by miscarriage. Nature appears to be an avid abortionist, which ought to trouble Christians who believe in both original sin and the doctrine that a human being equipped with a soul comes into existence at conception. Souls bearing the stain of original sin, we are told, do not merit salvation. That is why, according to traditional theology, unbaptized babies have to languish in limbo for all eternity. Owing to faulty reproductive design, it would seem that the population of limbo must be at least twice that of heaven and hell combined. It is hard to avoid the inference that a designer responsible for such imperfections must have been lacking some divine trait -- benevolence or omnipotence or omniscience, or perhaps all three. But what if the designer did not style each species individually? What if he/she/it merely fashioned the primal cell and then let evolution produce the rest, kinks and all? That is what the biologist and intelligent-design proponent Michael J. Behe has suggested. Behe says that the little protein machines in the cell are too sophisticated to have arisen by mutation -- an opinion that his scientific peers overwhelmingly do not share. Whether or not he is correct, his version of intelligent design implies a curious sort of designer, one who seeded the earth with elaborately contrived protein structures and then absconded, leaving the rest to blind
Re: A very good NYT article on intelligent design
On Feb 27, 2005, at 4:14 PM, d.brin wrote: [from the NYT article] So biology students can be forgiven for wondering whether the mysterious designer they're told about might not be the biblical God after all, but rather some very advanced yet mischievous or blundering intelligence -- extraterrestrial scientists, say. Those wacky wolflings. At least they're starting to figure it out! -- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress The Seven-Year Mirror http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
