Unintelligent Design

ah gotta love the modern paranoia where you can stick the word ‘big’ in front of something and instantly insight fear. ‘Big’ pharma…. ‘Big’ Oil………you name it, stick the world big in front of it and people will see scully-worthy consiracies and paranoia.I have to wonder how many people are actually going to believe this? I can see if the doc was the other way around- how ‘big’ religion was surpressing science to promote their own sprang-from-gods-loins-in-7-days schtick (ps want a REALLY creepy creation story? try egyptian. ‘big’ god jacks off, eats what comes out, and then spits out – or poos out depending on translation- life. waaaayy more fun than that whole garden thing ;)).

I don’t think it’s censoring so much as an unwillingness to legitimize crack pot ideas which have been PROVEN wrong. yes, some people believe certain things- but that’s the thing about beliefs- they don’t ahve to be real to still have impact. most religions are based, like much of what dictates morals and virtues in any culture, in myths and fables that teach us how to live our lives. it doesn’t take away from the impact of the ideas to say that no, actually, the world wasn’t made in 7 days and we didn’t come from a mythical garden.BUT because people, particularly it seems in north america, are so very very worried about offending christians, they legitimize these legends and beliefs as fact. we call it things like ‘pseudo science’ which, by having the word science in it at all, gives it credibility beyond a creation myth or a pattern of belief. and by teaching it in schools or showing it in movies alongside evolution, proven by science and logic to be the way things actually went down, we are robbing legitimate sciences of their punch. we are essentially denying logic and reality and saying the sky is purple so some people don’t have to be offended. I’m not saying you can’t believe certain things- by all means. but just because you believe it doesn’t make it fact; belief, in it’s faithful meaning, is all about a leap, chosing to believe in the face of logic. go ahead and do that, but stop trying to make actual scientists shut up.so no, it’s NOT censorship to not give air time to legends and personal beliefs that are not grounded in fact, no matter how those people scramble to back up their belifes- I always wondered why they needed to do that so badly. if they believe, isn’t that enough?

Weevil, I love what you said. I think it’s more that fear of losing sway with the populace, I think they’re so over-identified with their “faith”, that when IT’S being threatened, they feel as though THEY’RE under attack and are at risk of losing themselves completely. Therefore, they make shitty movies like this one, which is a double shame, because I always though Ben Stein, despite his loyalty to the worst people in history, was a cool guy.

Hedgy, I think ID is touted so aggressively and we don’t hear the creation myths of other religious systems is just a numbers game. The vast majority of North Americans identify themselves as Christians and, especially in the American south, where the ID-Evolution debates are the most heated, religious organizations have a lot of political sway, so they can get these issues taken seriously by important people and institutions. Outside of the southern US arena, the ID-Evolution debate is not that big of an issue in terms of making social or political change, but is more of a philosophical thing people discuss over beer. I learned recently too that Pope John Paul II said something to the effect of evolution is more than a theory and that it’s principles were not inconsistent with Christian beliefs. I mention this only to illustrate that not all people of faith are blind to scientific truths, nor do they let faith interfere with reason. I will add, that the new pope has alligned himself with IDers though.

When I think of prof’s who should be expelled for promoting insane theories in universities I think of those with 9/11 conspiracy theories, those who have support for terrorist leaders, or even refuse to use the word terrorist (as if blowing up a busload of commuters on their way to work, is the work of a noble freedom fighter, WTF?) and those who have attended Holocaust denial conferences. A quick googled search turned up tons of controversal prof’s whose tenure was protected in the name of free speech. I guess I just found it interesting that Ben Stein chose to explore why institutions are so quick to shut down this debate, and leave others to their crack-pottery.

Hedgy, just a note about quantum physics. Quantum theories are being horribly abused by new age types to say things like “if a particle can be in two places at once and it can be in two different staes at once, then everything around us is just an illusion and we can make it be whatever we want it to be.” In effect, they are trying to apply philosophical principles like existentialism or objectivism to the physical world.But it ain’t so. What I believe they are misconstruing is some conflation of 1) observer bias, 2) Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and 3) a quantum system’s superposition. A quantum particle has a number of possible states that it can be in – it’s location, it’s speed and direction (velocity), and its spin. It’s analogous to, but not the same as, the orbital around an atom that we learned about in high school chemistry – it’s a mathematical description of the region and the states that the particle can occupy. The uncertainty principle basically states that you can never know a quantum particle’s exact position and exact velocity (i.e. speed and direction) within that superposition because there is an observer effect or observer bias. By measuring the position, you interact with the system and change its velocity (speed and direction), OR by observing its speed and direction you effect its position. Because we can never know the position, the velocity, and the spin all at the same time, we describe the system in terms of the probabilities of these things. The superposition is sort of a probabilistic description of a system being in all possible states at once. This gives rise in some people’s minds to the oversimplified idea that something can be in more than one place at once or that it can be in two different states at once. Thus your idea (and, YES, I know you didn’t mean it literally!!) that a chair can be a chair and not a chair.I think a lot of people have (willfully) used this sort of wild idea of the world being made of gauzy stuff that flits in and out of existence and shifts around from one state to another to push their own particular sense of “unreality” on anyone who will listen. It’s an “if a tree falls in the forest” sort of thing.But the observer effect doesn’t change one thing to another, or make a whole thing materialize out of nowhere. It only describes what happens to teeny tiny individual particles at quantum scales. These quantum effects have no effect on the macroscopic state of matter – in other words, no matter the states of individual particles within individual atoms, the atoms are stable – they don’t change into other kinds of atoms, their bonds with other atoms are still stable – they still make up the molecules that form the wood and the leather and the cloth, and your chair is still just a chair.

ooopsie if you read the 5th paragraph BEFORE the fourth, this will flow better. i wish we could edit our own comments after submitting!

Excellent dissertation on quantum physics there prof jammie. But to understand that all, you have be able to mentally envision five independant dimensions… I am sure you know that even though it was not described here.

Nope, you don’t need five dimensions for this discussion, just the standard four :-)I did leave out quantum entanglement though. It would have complicated the argument.

If the aomeba worked well enough to last this long, why did it need to evolve on a parallel branch..??It just doesn’t make sense.

It didn’t need to, it just did… some random thing took it down a random path

I’m not quite sure what you mean about evolving on a parallel branch. Do you mean why did anything else other than amoeba evolve at all, since the amoeba was doing just fine?Evolution isn’t a process by which species evolve to a certain level of perfection and then just stop evolving.There is random mutation in any genome, however well “perfected” it may be. Individuals among a species are always born a little different from their parents (or parents cells). Otherwise it would be a world of clones and there would in fact be no evolution. (But there would really be no life since the beginning of life had to have been an evolutionary process in itself.)Most major mutations are “bad” – they don’t confer any survival advantage and in fact leade to survival deficits (or plain ole failure to be born in the first place). A very few mutations are “good” – thy confer some survival advantage in the current niche, OR they confer some advantage is a very similar niche toward which the newly evolved critter can move. So those individuals that have this mutation are able to start to form a subgroup of their species that is specialized to do something a little tiny bit differently from previous generations.This subgroup with “new genes” has evolved. It may eventually add a few more little random mutations here an there that let it move into a whole new niche, and it may no longer be able to reproduce with it’s distant cousins – those amoebae that have continued to be born with the “old” genes.This is how new groups can come along and still leave the old groups continuing to happily do their thing as they always have.

WAKE UP PEOPLE – WE’RE JUST A GIANT SIMS GAME AND MY NEIGHBOURS ARE BEING EATEN BY WOLVERINES!!!!!! Now pass the Solent Green.

I think TTFN just took her own advice from that other thread, and dropped some acid. I think I hear Grace singing White Rabbit right now…

Really? All I can hear is “We Built This City”… Grace, why have you forsaken us?

Ah yes, “We Built this City.” The theme song for the story of a man and his wooden wife. No I don’t mean Bill Clinton.

Speak for yourself.I’m planning to don my batsuit and climb the New York Times building to draw attention to this matter later this week. Look for me on the O’Reilly factor.

I’m pretty sure that “Mannequin” will be looked upon by historians as the precise moment in time when humanity began to devolve… or at least when it jumped the shark.

We Built this City for Sex? With Mannequins? And then became Ents?

Thanks Miranda! And here I was fearing I would be exposed as a total hack! (Which I am, but I guess I did pretty well for throwing it together…)And your joke was so bad it was good LOL

Wow, you mean there was a real life physicist on our team all this time? Tres cool… Suck on THAT, you who shall remain nameless!

I thought your friends were all epiderm and no innerderm?Is there a survival advantage for solid wood friends over hollow rubber friends or vice versa?Which niche can each best fill? What environmental pressures can each best survive?Can a wooden cat be both dead and alive at the same time? A rubber cat?

My cat’s name is Schrodinger. Unfortunately, everytime I open the box, he’s still alive.

Nice.I like your style on the coast, Miles. Now more than ever.

And Miles if you make the box airtight you might have more success.

CC, that was Schrondinger’s Cat, to which a couple of posters have referred in various manners. The idea is commonly understood to say the cat can be dead and alive at the same time, but the idea is really to illustrate small-scale quantum principles. Macroscopic systems (non-quantum, “real world” systems) like cats do not really operate this way.The idea was that you put a cat in a box and introduce some mechanism by which the cat is killed if the in the state of some quantum particle that is attached to the mechanism changes in a certain way. Because, as described below, we can never truly measure the particle’s quantum state, we describe it as a set of probabilities of it being in one state or another, or somewhere in between. This is the only we way we really understand quantum systems – we have to sort of envision them as being in all states at once.Since we imagine the state of the particle as being in states at once, we have to imagine the mechanism by which the cat is killed as also being in all possible states at once. Thus we can never know if the cat has been killed or not and in principle, we have to image that it both has and hasn’t been killed at any given moment.The real idea here is that, while we can only see a quantum system as a blurry set of possible states, there must (in principle) be some way to draw the line and decide if it is really in just one state or the other. After all, the cat must either be dead or not dead, right? (That’s the debate, nobody really knows.)And yeah, there must be some punishment for liking that song. Perhaps we can put you n the box and see what happens?

Thanks Jammie. I tried to explain it only to realize I don’t really remember much about quantum mechanics. I keep getting hung up on trying to understand how the observer, by opening the box, would influence the outcome. Wouldn’t the cat, or the Geiger counter, or even the atoms around the decaying atom act as observers by influencing, or being influenced by, the state of the decaying particle? Just because we cannot measure the particle’s quantum state, does not mean that particles around it can’t. Does it?

Oooooooh, I love that quote CC and Miles – that’s exactly what I was trying to explain to Hedgy about the new agers bastardizing the physics.

ARGH So many typos in my last post! ARGH

Yeah, I think the cat was more of a joke than anything, meant to illustrate that trying to apply quantum principles at non-quantum scales is sort of ludicrous.

The way I understood is the cat is important in so far it is an anchor. That the ‘dervishes, whirling side by side in opposite directions’ operate in isolation. If it is in any way anchored, only the one side (on or off) is recognizable. The question of the other side is interesting too (non visable dark matter perhaps? just throwing that out there). Well, it’s bedtime… Gone to curl up with my cat. *Night*Night*

Nite all.

Haha I know I’ve been trying to wade throuhg it! look at what I started – and all because I recently ran across some random thing about quantum and thought it was cool 😉