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DavidV

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Everything posted by DavidV

  1. "... what is beneficial to one entity in the hierarchy of life is harmful to another, and creationism gives us no grounds for supposing that one entity’s welfare will be preferred to another’s. In passing, the fundamentalist student might pause to wonder at a God who goes ·to great trouble to provide predators with beautiful adaptations to catch prey, while with the other hand giving prey beautiful adaptations to thwart them. Perhaps He enjoys the spectator sport. " - from The Extended Pheno...

  2. It is far easier to express oneself than to communicate. You can express yourself to a rock just as well as to a human being. But to communicate, you must understand how your words will be processed by another mind. You must estimate their level of knowledge, their potential for misunderstanding, their emotional response to your ideas, their capacity for new ideas, and their willingness to listen. As social animals, we evolved to optimize our communication by relying on non verbal feedba...

  3. "Evolution is the external and visible manifestation of the differential survival of alternative replicators. Genes are replicators; organisms and groups of organisms are best not regarded as replicators; they are vehicles in which replicators travel about. Replicator selection is the process by which some replicators survive at the expense of other replicators. Vehicle selection is the process by which some vehicles are more successful than other vehicles in ensuring the survival of their re...

  4. It is a religious point among many libertarians that deep down, most Americans want a free society. All evidence however indicates otherwise. Americans love the welfare-warfare state just like every other modern society - the difference in degree is not important. Does this mean that we should just "give up" and become fatalistic? Certainly not. It does mean that we ought to think realistically about what goals are achievable and worth investing our time and money into. I can't tell you...

  5. The double standard of creationism: Let’s consider the double standard posed by Creationists. They insist that we must see something directly for it to exist. Since we did not see the origin of the universe (actually we can still see it today, but never mind that), the formation of the earth, or of life, they insist that we cannot know how these happened. But THEY know, even though they never saw Genesis themselves, the seas parted, the dead come to life, and ghosts rise into to the sky. They don’t need evidence, because they have a book. We have thousands of independent data points which all point to the age of the universe and the earth and the common ancestry of all life, but this evidence does not count because we learned these things indirectly, through systematic observation and induction. But they have a book, and since they operate entirely on the primitive level of concrete-bound perception, deduction from the words in a book trumps any kind of inductive evidence. The amazing and unique thing about human beings is that by the use of reason we can know all kinds of things that we cannot see with our senses: we know that matter is made of atoms, we know the earth is round, we know the shape of our galaxy, we know what dinosaurs looked like, we know what the continents looked like hundreds of millions of years ago. There are many things we knew in detail before we ever saw them and then confirmed by observation: for example, we learned about atoms over hundreds of years and only “saw” them for the first time a few years ago. But there were no surprises in seeing atoms because we had indirectly learned all the relevant facts from indirect observation. We knew the earth was round long before we saw it from space. We sent probes to precise destinations at the edge of the solar system across billions of kilometers by deriving the universal laws of gravitation from dropping weights on earth. Even as they deny our kinship with other animals, creationists demand that we operate on a pre-human animal level: reject everything but the lowest-level perceptual induction, abandon the scientific worldview which makes your civilization possible and uncritically accept the theology you grew up with. This incidentally is the cause of ideological and religious violence: those who abandon reality as the arbiter of truth have nothing but raw coercion to convert the unfaithful to their side. Here is the one way that Creationists are more consistent than theists who accept evolution: they recognize that if the systematic application of reason in science spreads to ethics, politics or metaphysics, it would invalidate all religious beliefs not based on evidence, and thus they reject reason in science, against all the evidence in the world. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  6. The earth does not orbit the sun in a circle. Due to gravitational interaction with other planets, it's actually an ellipse, with the sun offset from the center. The shape of the ellipse, the time of year when the earth is closest to the sun, and the inclination of the earth all vary over time. When the three coincide to cause cooler summers, we get ice ages that cover most of the northern hemisphere with glaciers and cause the sea level to drop over 150 meters. Isn't that way cooler th...

  7. Every day, the organisms that form a coral lay down a thin layer of limestone in the coral equivalent of tree rings. Seasonal variations in coral growth allow us to measure the number of days in past years. Modern corals create 365 lines per year, but ancient coral fossils have more, over 410 for 400 million year old coral. This means a day in the past used to be much shorter with massive tides dozens of meters high. Over time, these tides converted earth's rotational momentum into the moon's...

  8. "Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evo...

  9. "Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration--courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth." — H.L. Mencken

  10. Why does no vertebrate have more than four limbs? Because 400 million years ago, lobe-finned fish with pectoral and pelvic fins began their journey onto land. While an additional pair of limbs would probably benefit many species (if the non-vertebrate world is any indication), the necessary genetic variation has never been available. The gap between two sets and three sets of limbs is just too wide for evolution to bridge, even over 400 million years. This is one of numerous examples of...

  11. Jesus loves me! This I know, For the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong; They are weak, but He is strong. Jesus loves me when I'm good, When I do the things I should, Jesus loves me when I'm bad, Though it makes Him very sad. Jesus loves me! He will stay Close beside me all the way; Thou hast bled and died for me, I will henceforth live for Thee.

  12. Religion doesn't work according to facts. In science, our conclusions are always derived from observation and subject to revision when new evidences comes in. In religion, we decide what the truth is first, and then ignore any evidence to the contrary. People who are used to a religious way of thinking often find dealing with reality very frustrating and confusing, as for some reason, it stubbornly refuses to conform to their preconceived notions about it.

  13. "What is it to be spiritual? To recognize the finer harmonies of conduct -- to live to the ideal -- to separate the incidental, the evanescent, from the perpetual -- to be enchanted with the perfect melody of truth -- open to the influences of the artistic, the beautiful, the heroic -- to shed kindness as the sun sheds light -- to recognize the good in others, and to include the world in the idea of self -- that is to be spiritual. There is nothing spiritual in the worship of the unknown and...

    1. Wotan

      Wotan

      This Status Update gets cut off at "There is nothing spiritual in the worship of the unknown and..."

  14. Why are Creationists so desperate to maintain their delusional worldview that they feel the need to openly lie and make up evidence to justify their religious beliefs? Why are they so utterly terrified to accept that the universe is 13.75 ± 0.11 billion years old and not 6000? We have LITERALLY THOUSANDS of independent data points which all point to the correct age of the earth and the universe. Why do they insist on being so delusional? What is the threat posed by reality?

  15. "I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world. " — Richard Dawkins

  16. "In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe......We live in a special time, the only time, wher...

  17. "The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, a...

  18. Stellar nucleosynthesis is entropic because the proton-proton reaction radiates 0.7% of the original mass as 26.73 MeV energy. Additional reactions produce heavier elements until finally supernova nucleosynthesis produces everything up to uranium in the last few seconds of a star's life. We can therefore calculate the entropy cost of the elements to create planets and life forms. Many stars had to die to create enough elements for life. Did life therefore evolve as soon as sufficient heavy e...

  19. We are informational beings in the eternal now: What are we? What sets us apart from the universe? We believe that we exist in limited time and space. We believe that we are defined by hereditary and environmental influences, leaving room for only a nebulous core of individuality. There is some truth in this perspective. But there is more. What is time? The present is the sum of everything that is past, and the future evolves from the present. We only see the past as fixed and future as malleable because our minds process information in one direction. But every existent can only act in accordance with its nature and causality. The future is as firmly defined as the past. Every grain of existence implies by its identity the sum of all it has been and everything it will ever be. Time is not a dimension that we move through. Time is the iteration of the possible states of the configuration space of the Universe. It is a single system slowly revolving through all the configurations both possible and necessary to it. All that exists is the eternal present. Time is one’s perspective of the Long Now. What makes us – us? We are machines, built out of matter and energy, but more importantly, we are information processing structures, the total of which defines our unique configuration. Many mistakenly place emphasis on either the genes or environment as determining structures. But there is no fundamental difference. Genes are triggered, expressed, or suppressed in response to environmental stimuli. Whether we are healthy or sickly because of good genes or good diet makes no difference to the end result. What matters is not our genotype, but our total phenotype — the sum of genetic and environmental influences. The particular combination is only important to biologists. As human beings, we contain two complex information-processing systems: the genetic and the mental. Of the two, our mental structure is the far more important. We are each unique configurations of information-processing systems that spend our lives gathering up memes and observations and spitting out conclusions and actions. Our mental structures work in method much like our genetic systems, absorbing, modifying and sharing memetic structures through Darwinian processes. On a rare occasion, we cut, paste, and synthesize ideas to form a new unique yet stable and contagious meme-structure and add it to the shared pool of ideas, sending ripples through our shared meme-space and the physical environment through which we enact our ideas. Mentally and physiologically, we are unique to a very basic level — it is just as unlikely for two people to have identical chromosomes as to have an identical understanding of an idea. Yet on both the fine details and the broad pattern of large structures, we share almost all of our mental and genetic identity with our species and genetically, with all life. There is no need to seek our identity in a mystical hidden soul. We are the unique yet utterly common sum of everything we inherit from the Universe. Our bodies are made from atoms created in the heart of dying stars and designed by a three billion year old genetic inheritance — each a unique information-processing system. As individual biological systems, our slice of the Long Now is small. But as information systems, we inherit all that is and contribute to all that will be. As the latest expression of the evolving complexity-generating process of nature, we are seeds of the growing intelligence of the universe. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  20. "Man is a Religious Animal. Man is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.... The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems question...

  21. "If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well...

  22. Infinities do not actually exist. Each specific set of entities is discrete. But the causal chain itself is not an existent. It is the set of all entities that have ever existed. That is a theoretical construct (like infinity or a singularity in mathematics) rather than a discrete set of entities that we can point to. If I walk from one side of the room to the other, my body exists in an infinite number of locations along that path during the time it takes me to do so. But it only exist...

  23. There is no such thing as "chance" or "randomness" in nature. Chance is just what we say when we don't know why. There is only causality.

  24. Bob the Intelligent Designer creates the Universe: People who claim that the earth is younger than it is (4.54 ± 0.05 billion years) tend to do so for two reasons: either because they claim the evidence points to it or because it was created recently but made to look as it were old. Considering that all the evidence shows the universe to be 13.75 (± 0.11) billion years, a claim that it is literally millions of times younger requires massive ignorance of obvious observations – such as starlight or canyons cut into bedrock. But let’s consider the other common argument – that the universe was only made to appear young. Perhaps the stars were put in place with the light beams already in progress. That is an interesting philosophical question. What are the implications of an Intelligently Designed universe? To avoid taking sectarian sides, let’s call our creator Bob the Universe Builder. How would Bob’s universe-creating activity change the way we look at the world? Let’s consider a few scenarios: Some people believe that Bob “got things started” via the Big Bang or some other mysterious event, and then let things run on their own, much as they would in a purely naturalistic universe. In that case, cosmology would certainly be different, but biology could generally be left alone. This view was plausible until recently, when physicists and cosmologists for how the Big Bang got started and why the laws of nature are what they are. Suddenly the starting point is not so mysterious as to need a supernatural explanation. What is the creation theorist to do – retreat once again to the next frontier of scientific discovery? Perhaps we can make a more general argument.Whether the universe was created 13 billion or 6 thousand years or yesterday, we can generalize the creationist argument and make some conclusions about it. Suppose we grant that the universe looks as if it evolved purely by natural laws, but in fact some intelligent agent created it more recently. What would that imply? Let’s first consider the universe going forward. If the universe is naturalistic from the present onwards (gravity causes rocks to fall, horses don’t become unicorns, etc.), then we can assume that it will remain so in the future. So as far as our understanding of new phenomena around us, the existence of a non-interventionist creator makes no difference. But what about the past? If we assume that all the evidence points to a natural universe (for example the stars look billions of years old, even if they were only put up there yesterday), then it makes no difference whether the universe only looks natural or it really is natural. Before he could create the universe, Bob would have to calculate the precise makeup of the universe on his computer (which could be his “brain” – the details are irrelevant) to determine the initial state of his Creation. For example, if he creates the universe after the Triassic period, he will have to figure out where to place all the dinosaur fossils. If he wanted to maintain the pretense of age, he could not place them just anywhere. He would have to carefully arrange sedimentary layers to simulate geological processes. The only way to do this consistently would be to simulate the entire history of the observable universe on his computer. There is no way to shortcut the process. So, for example, if a dinosaur fossil is 200 million years old, Bob must calculate its gravitational effect on every atom and subatomic particle in a light cone expanding to 200 million light years over 200 million years. Alternatively, consider the implication for evolution: even if did not happen in “real” reality, to create a plausible explanation for the variety of life on earth and their fossil predecessors, Bob would have to calculate the form of every ancestor by playing out the life of every plant, animal and bacteria in his “virtual” earth to derive their fossils and their present form. Because the present state of any object in the universe is the total of all the interactions of that object with all the other objects in its sphere of influence, and there is no way to know the sum of all these states without calculating all of them sequentially. To avoid glaring inconsistencies from being discovered by scientists, Bob would have to calculate the interaction of every entity in the universe with every other entity in its causal sphere to the minutest level of detail. And given the sub-atomic perspective granted by modern science, that detail must be very fine indeed. This would mean that there couldn’t be any observable difference between a simulation of the universe and the real thing. Whether the universe was ever a simulation in someone’s “imagination” or is simulation today makes no observable difference and this has no relevance to our understanding of reality. My conclusion from this chain of thought is this: There is no essential difference between “Young Earth” Creationism and the more “respectable” theory of Big Bang Creationism. Neither is there any point speculating about a perfectly simulated universe (aka various theories that the universe exists “in the mind of God”.) The only logical conclusion is to regard the universe as always having been purely naturalistic. Original entry: See link at top of this post
  25. ♫ "Generals gathered in their masses Just like witches at black masses Evil minds that plot destruction Sorcerers of death's construction In the fields the bodies burning As the war machine keeps turning Death and hatred to mankind Poisoning their brainwashed minds Oh lord yeah! Politicians hide themselves away They only started the war Why should they go out to fight? They leave that role to the poor Time will tell on their power minds Making war just for fun Treating people just like pawn...

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