Antievolution.org - Antievolution.org Discussion Board -Topic::The Bathroom Wall

Posted: Feb. 05 2016,23:36

Quote (midwifetoad @ Feb. 06 2016,05:15)

Fossil fuel use needs to be reduced worldwide by about 80 percent, while allowing Africa and India And China to grow economically. It seems possible for wealth and prosperity to grow without vast increases in energy use, but there will be some.

I'm guessing that you mean 80% of 2015 levels? Do you know of any data on what that would be in terms of 2005 levels? Are there any current accurate projections of when and how an 80% reduction could be realizable?

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Posted: Feb. 06 2016,09:29

I don't know of any realistic path to massive reduction in CO2 production.

In my lifetime technology has been unpredictable. I can recall -- before any streaming services -- internet gurus predicting the web would collapse under the load of commercial traffic.

At the moment, American states and even countries, are actively discouraging solar homes. Who could have foreseen that? They're competing with the grid.

If there's going to be a tipping point, it will involve big corporations seeing a path to profits. But it might not be existing energy companies. Might be Apple or Google, or some vole lurking in the shadow of the dinosaurs.

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Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

Cubist

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Posted: Feb. 06 2016,17:23

Don't count Elon Musk out. Among other things, Musk is building the world's largest factory for lithium batteries, to supply the need he anticipates for mass-market Tesla cars.

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Posted: Feb. 06 2016,18:22

Just in time for California to drop all subsidies and penalize connection to the grid. It's a trend.

There are places where you are not allowed to disconnect, and the economics suck if you do.

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Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

MichaelJ

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Posted: Feb. 08 2016,17:25

I used to work in the Energy industry. I remember being told 20 years ago that it was impossible for solar and wind ever to compete with base load coal. They even had the math to prove it. However the cost keeps dropping for renewables and in Queensland (here in Australia), the coal industry is asking for massive subsidies as half of all coal mines (and most of the mines that produce steaming coal) are currently losing money. I think that this is the beginning of the end for the coal industry.

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Posted: Feb. 08 2016,18:09

Australia is rather well positioned for solar.

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Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

OgreMkV

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Posted: Feb. 13 2016,13:17

A friend of mine posted a previously unknown (to him and me) criticism of Dembski. He's read Wesley's and another criticism of Dembski, so it appears to be a new thing.

Some of you might find this interesting and might wish to comment;
Deconstructing Dembski - Dread Tomato Adiction.

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Posted: Feb. 13 2016,13:51

Oh good, I do still have an account here. :-)

I did a lot of work putting that together, checking out any other possible interpretations, because it was difficult to believe Dembski would write anything so incredibly wrong. On top of that, no one else seems to have mentioned it.

Cubist

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Posted: Feb. 14 2016,04:55

Quote (Tomato Addict @ Feb. 13 2016,13:51)

Oh good, I do still have an account here. :-)

I did a lot of work putting that together, checking out any other possible interpretations, because it was difficult to believe Dembski would write anything so incredibly wrong. On top of that, no one else seems to have mentioned it.

It may be that Michael Behe has committed an even more egregious error than the one of Dembski's which you ~~vivisected~~ exposed.

In Darwin's Black Box, Behe defined a limited subset of evolutionary processes, to which subset he gave the label "direct Darwinian processes". This is not the error I speak of, 'cuz you can invent whatever new terminology you like, and as long as you're clear about what your new term means (and Behe was clear about his new term), it's all good.

Behe went on to demonstrate that that limited subset of evolutionary processes was incapable of producing an "irreducibly complex" system. This, too, is not the error I speak of, 'cuz the inability to produce a Behe-type "irreducibly complex" system follows logically from the way Behe defined his term "direct Darwinian process".

Having done the two things I listed above, Behe concluded… not that there might well be "indirect Darwinian processes" which could produce a Behe-type "irreducibly complex" system… but, rather, that absolutely no evolutionary process whatsoever could produce an "irreducibly complex" system, and because of this, any "irreducibly complex" system must necessarily have been produced by an Intelligent Designer.

That error of Behe's strikes me as being in the same order of magnitude as the Dembskian error you exposed…

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Posted: Feb. 14 2016,22:20

@Cubist, I've not read Behe myself, but I have no doubt that his errors are epic. That Dembski even tries to put Behe's Irreducible Complexity into a firm mathematical basis is piling error on top of error.

Cubist

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Posted: Feb. 14 2016,23:28

Behe's error is not in defining "irreducible complexity" as a thing. The notion of a system whose proper functioning requires that every last one of its components be present & intact, is not particularly exotic or unreasonable. What is unreasonable, is arguing that "irreducible complexity" is a thing which can only be produced by an Intelligent Designer. Way the heck back in 1918, a gent name of Muller showed how bog-standard evolutionary processes can generate irreducible complex systems. Muller used the term "interlocking complexity" rather than "irreducible complexity", but by either name, it's the same concept: A system that consists entirely of critical failure points.

rossum

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Posted: Feb. 15 2016,06:24

Quote (Cubist @ Feb. 14 2016,23:28)

Behe's error is not in defining "irreducible complexity" as a thing. The notion of a system whose proper functioning requires that every last one of its components be present & intact, is not particularly exotic or unreasonable. What is unreasonable, is arguing that "irreducible complexity" is a thing which can only be produced by an Intelligent Designer. Way the heck back in 1918, a gent name of Muller showed how bog-standard evolutionary processes can generate irreducible complex systems. Muller used the term "interlocking complexity" rather than "irreducible complexity", but by either name, it's the same concept: A system that consists entirely of critical failure points.

To give Behe credit, he did recognise his error. He changed from his initial "IC cannot evolve" to "IC is unlikely to evolve" after his error was shown by good and useful work such as Thornhill and Ussery (2000) and Lenski (2003).

Behe then tried to determine just how unlikely IC was, which resulted in Behe and Snoke (2004). as featured in the Kitzmiller trial, and which showed that evolving IC wasn't really that difficult after all.

Behe was actually doing science properly. He proposed a hypothesis, and amended that hypothesis when it was shown to be incorrect. After investigation, the amended version didn't really say anything new or useful so it died, from the scientific point of view anyway.

rossum

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Lethean

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Posted: Feb. 18 2016,13:28

The podcast Reasonable Doubts have been a favorite of mine for the last couple of years. Sadly, the episodes were coming less frequently and knowing they having been producing them for several years it seemed likely they were going to officially stop and the cast members would move on to other things.

Well, a few months ago the announcement came and was followed quickly by the final podcast. I haz a sad. But I haz idea. Go back to the first episode, which I have never heard, and maybe listen through the catalog of episodes.

So, I went back to their old blogger.com site to find it* and found myself confronted by a pic of this dapper young man whom they interviewed in their very first episode about the "post Dover" situation. It was a pleasant surprise (and listen) and thought I'd take a moment to say thank you very much Wesley for all the work you put in over the years and for being a gracious host here at AtBC.

(* The entire catalog is available in their RSS feed but it wasn't working properly until just recently. Someone must have revamped the entire deal in the last week or so.)

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Posted: Feb. 18 2016,14:42

Cubist and/or Rossum:
As it happens I have an ID blogger on the FB line, insisting that Behe's claims from 1996 have never been disproved. If Behe himself changed his claim, that's all the leverage I need. Can you walk me thru to the source where Behe says this himself?

I have the Behe and Snoke (2004) and Lych (2005) papers at hand.

rossum

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Posted: Feb. 18 2016,16:06

Quote (Tomato Addict @ Feb. 18 2016,14:42)

Cubist and/or Rossum:
As it happens I have an ID blogger on the FB line, insisting that Behe's claims from 1996 have never been disproved. If Behe himself changed his claim, that's all the leverage I need. Can you walk me thru to the source where Behe says this himself?

I have the Behe and Snoke (2004) and Lych (2005) papers at hand.

Unfortunately, my reference is a link to the ISCID Encyclopedia definitions of IC (IIRC there were three, Behe1, Behe2 and Dembski), and the ISCID site is now dead.

There is a relevant quote from Darwin's Black Box: "Even if a system is irreducibly complex (and thus cannot have been produced directly), however, one can not definitely rule out the possibility of an indirect, circuitous route. As the complexity of an interacting system increases, though, the likelihood of such an indirect route drops precipitously." (DBB, p40)

The obvious question is to measure just how unlikely it is.

The Behe and Snoke paper looked at the probability of evolving simple IC systems, though there they are called "novel protein features that require the participation of two or more amino acid residues".

HTH

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Henry J

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Posted: Feb. 18 2016,20:26

Well of course getting to any one particular "irreducibly complex" system is highly unlikely.

But that's starting with the wrong question.

The appropriate question is, how likely is it to produce something, anything, that works?

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Posted: Feb. 19 2016,07:17

Remember the Texas Sharpshooter.

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k.e..

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Posted: Feb. 19 2016,09:35

Quote (midwifetoad @ Feb. 19 2016,15:17)

Remember the Texas Sharpshooter.

Yeah, I googled Lenny Flank and ended up at Land Over Baptist Church. Man they make UD look like they're run by a bankrupt small town lawyer.

Very strange ..... I thought Lenny was a Buddhist + Marxist + Trotskyist snake collector.

That reminds me of a couple of jokes.

What do you get for a man that has everything? ....Penicillin.
What do you get for a man that has nothing? <insert answer here>

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Wesley R. Elsberry

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Posted: Feb. 19 2016,21:43

Lethean -- Thank you for the thank you, and you are very welcome.

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Richardthughes

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Posted: Feb. 20 2016,14:29

Quote (Lethean @ Feb. 18 2016,13:28)

The podcast Reasonable Doubts have been a favorite of mine for the last couple of years. Sadly, the episodes were coming less frequently and knowing they having been producing them for several years it seemed likely they were going to officially stop and the cast members would move on to other things.

Well, a few months ago the announcement came and was followed quickly by the final podcast. I haz a sad. But I haz idea. Go back to the first episode, which I have never heard, and maybe listen through the catalog of episodes.

So, I went back to their old blogger.com site to find it* and found myself confronted by a pic of this dapper young man whom they interviewed in their very first episode about the "post Dover" situation. It was a pleasant surprise (and listen) and thought I'd take a moment to say thank you very much Wesley for all the work you put in over the years and for being a gracious host here at AtBC.

(* The entire catalog is available in their RSS feed but it wasn't working properly until just recently. Someone must have revamped the entire deal in the last week or so.)

+1

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Amadan

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Posted: Feb. 28 2016,11:29

Feck!

Edited by Wesley R. Elsberry on Feb. 29 2016,10:58

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The whole truth

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Posted: Mar. 01 2016,11:30

Priests and church leaders sexually abused hundreds of children in Altoona Diocese: AG office

http://www.pennlive.com/news....er_home

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OgreMkV

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Posted: Mar. 03 2016,20:33

Current and former chemistry teachers, I have a question.

You are given a limited number of reactants to teach as much about chemistry as you can. You can have 6 - 8 reactants. But you have to teach conservation of mass, all reaction types, balancing equations, acids bases (you can have 3 indicators, not included in the 6-8 reactants), solutions, limiting and excess reactants, percent yield, gas laws, etc, etc, etc.

What are you 6 to 8 choices for reactants?

What tools do you need to do these things?

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Henry J

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Posted: Mar. 03 2016,22:19

I would ask if water is regarded as a reactant, but if I asked that somebody would say something about elemental sodium...

OgreMkV

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Posted: Mar. 04 2016,07:50

Quote (Henry J @ Mar. 03 2016,22:19)

I would ask if water is regarded as a reactant, but if I asked that somebody would say something about elemental sodium...

Actually, that's a good question.

In general, I don't think it would be, but most reactions take place in water (at least at the level I'm thinking about).

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NoName

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Posted: Mar. 04 2016,08:12

Why only 6 - 8 reactants? That seems artificial and entirely unhelpful, especially if you're going to cover redox reactions. I think a 'minimum kit' is going to run to a couple of dozen reactants.

You can do a lot with lead, copper, silver nitrate, sodium, and water. You could go with pure silver and add nitric acid (sodium hydroxide is free given sodium and water). If you're using silver nitrate, you want sodium thiosulfate as well, simply for cleanup if nothing else.

I worked in a high school chemistry class for almost a decade and we had at least 2 orders of magnitude more reactants available than '6-8'. Okay, that was 'chemistry for dummies', chemistry, and organic chemistry, but I'm pretty sure you want more than 6-8 to cover that list of topics.

OgreMkV

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Posted: Mar. 04 2016,08:21

Quote (NoName @ Mar. 04 2016,08:12)

Why only 6 - 8 reactants? That seems artificial and entirely unhelpful, especially if you're going to cover redox reactions. I think a 'minimum kit' is going to run to a couple of dozen reactants.

You can do a lot with lead, copper, silver nitrate, sodium, and water. You could go with pure silver and add nitric acid (sodium hydroxide is free given sodium and water). If you're using silver nitrate, you want sodium thiosulfate as well, simply for cleanup if nothing else.

I worked in a high school chemistry class for almost a decade and we had at least 2 orders of magnitude more reactants available than '6-8'. Okay, that was 'chemistry for dummies', chemistry, and organic chemistry, but I'm pretty sure you want more than 6-8 to cover that list of topics.

The issue is that I'm developing a simulation for chemistry. At this point, it's proof of concept.

But each additional reactant results in a huge increase in possible reactions, equations, and results (including accurate images of the results).

We'll get there eventually (I hope), but I'm trying to be as useful as possible with a small kit.

And redox reactions are not going to be considered at this point.

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BWE

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Posted: Mar. 08 2016,14:25

Quote (midwifetoad @ Feb. 08 2016,16:09)

Australia is rather well positioned for solar.

if they could just figure out how to harness the added energy of the higher UV spectrum there...

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