Dante
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Posts posted by Dante
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Intelligence is the cause of design and design has observable properties that match all designed objects.
What are they? Intelligence embodied in what entity in this case?
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I don't know anyone or anything now or in the past that can produce such things. Well except for humans perhaps but they would qualify as a poor candidate. I could guess, but that would be somewhat pointless.
I however believe that it isn't necessary to identify a concrete designer to know that it exists. It is sufficient to identify an object to be most likely the product of design and that would prove that there existed a designer in the past.
Even if we don't know who exactly built the Stonehenge and why there had to be someone who built it if we agree that it was built.
It works like saying that there had to be a common ancestor of apes and humans if evolution is true even though we can't prove that there was or what it was.
Both examples you give are examples where the advocate of the existence of said entity can specify the causal process by which the proposed entity came about. The natural processes by which stone structures are constructed by humans, and by which speciation occurs are well understood. It is one thing to make claims like that, and quite another to make a claim without specifying a possible causal process. The second is akin to proposing magic.
If I proposed in a court of law that someone, I don't know who, stole a knife from a crime scene and replaced it with a gun, I am on much firmer ground than if I propose that someone transformed the murder weapon from a knife into a gun. Unless you specify a process by which *some* entity could reach into the DNA of a population and make designed alterations, you're in the second case.
Is it not? You can ignore that sentence if you don't think so...Objective is an evaluation of a cognitive process. Reality is not objective, it just is. We can be objective or not in forming knowledge from reality, but reality itself just is.
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That's a rather hasty generalization. If preexisting organisms are used to create modified living beings than it would not be surprising to see inactive retro viruses in the the offspring. (You see organisms unlike computers can self reproduce) That would be the product of cost effectiveness rather than deceit.
Used by whom, through what causal process?
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For the most part a genetically modified life form carries the same genes and ERV-s as its original.
Does that prove that it had evolved?
That is the case because the original code is the baseline for the modified organism's code, which is also what happens in evolution. There would be no reason for a designer to operate in this way.
My question is this: is the existence of ERV-s sufficient to prove evolution? If yes, why? If not what would be sufficient?Yes. It is a confirmed prediction of the theory with no reasonable alternative explanation.
The theory of Evolution was established before ERVs and before the human and chimp genomes were sequenced. What was the basis for evolution before that? Plain ignorance?The fact that you think I could possibly give you every piece of evidence in favor of evolution in one forum post illustrates that you clearly don't understand the breadth and the depth of the evidence, stretching much farther back than the snippet I just gave you. The fact that evolution made this prediction about the genome before it was confirmed is a strength of the theory.
What part of what you said cannot be explained by a common designer and why?The part where completely useless code that a designer has no reason to bother with, because it does not show up in the phenotype, follows patterns completely consistent with evolution through common descent. The only reason a designer would have to write the code in this way would be active deception; to make it look like things had evolved from a common ancestor even when they hadn't.
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I stand by the distinction that Ayn Rand made in The Romantic Manifesto; and neither she nor I are making a primary / secondary distinction. An entity is everything that it is, there is no aspect of it that is primary versus others that are secondary. The important thing to realize is that we are aware of existence and that existence is composed of entities -- things -- and that the visual arts must be geared towards depicting entities -- things -- rather than smears on canvas, because being aware of entities is how we are aware of existence. We are not aware of existence in terms of smears of colors.
Why should existence outside of ourselves be the sole focus of art, though? I see no reason why art intended to evoke or explore certain emotions should necessarily do so by depicting physical entities. We are aware of and come to understand our own emotions through introspection, a process much trickier and less straightforward than perception. It comes as no surprise to me that much of the art being produced attempts to focus on those types of themes and issues, precisely because they come much less automatically than perception, and I also find it unsurprising that this art chooses a variety of methods to attempt evoking emotions and prompting introspection in viewers, rather than simply the depiction of physical entities.
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Please name a few.
A few... I guess I should name some more. Let's go with some of the evidence that comes from ubiquitous genes and proteins.
A ubiquitous protein is a protein which is present in every life form, and is absolutely essential for the functionality of an organism. For example, Cytochrome C is a ubiquitous protein found in all living organisms: humans, chimpanzees, bacteria, fungus, and bananas. All proteins are composed of amino acid sequences. In order to work properly, a particular protein does not have to have the exact same amino acid sequence in every organism, as we shall see, but if an organism doesn’t have some amino acid sequence that yields a functional Cytochrome C protein, it will die.
Ubiquitous genes are the genes which code for ubiquitous proteins. For any given ubiquitous protein, there are a great number of possible genes which would code for that protein (just as, with any computer program, there are many, many different ways to write the computer code which will produce that program). No one particular Cytochrome C gene, for example, is necessary for humans. All that is necessary is that we have any one of a number of genes which will give us the protein we need (in the analogy, all we need is the working computer program; it doesn't actually matter what the code looks like). By the way, by "a great number of possible genes," we're talking in the neighborhood of, with our cytochrome c example, a minimum of 2.3 x 10^93 possible functional sequences. This is due partly to the fact that several different genetic sequences can code for the same amino acid, but mainly to the fact that only about 1/3 of the amino acids in cytochrome c are actually necessary to produce its function; the rest are unrestricted by natural selection and free to mutate without harming the organism.
Now, this is important. We have a situation where any of an *incredibly* great number of genetic sequences will produce basically the same protein (more possible sequences than there are atoms in the universe). Now, without common descent, what would we expect to see? Well, there is no reason for the genetic sequences of different species to be related. We would expect a random distribution of the possible genetic sequences to produce the protein (there is no reason to think that humans and chimpanzees and mice all share the same underlying code, because there are so many different possibilities which make pretty much the same protein). However, what does common descent predict?
Well, common descent says that all organisms descended from a universal common ancestor. It also says that different species had their most recent common ancestor at varying times; the most recent common ancestor of humans and bananas would be much farther in the past than the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. You can think of it by comparing it to a family tree. My most recent common ancestor with my first cousin is only two generations in the past; our grandparents. However, my most recent common ancestor with my third cousin is four generations in the past; our great-great-grandparents.
Let's take a ubiquitous protein in my grandparents. Passing it down from them to me involved two reproductive events. This means that there are two opportunities for the protein sequence (really the DNA sequence, which then produces the protein sequence) to mutate. Thus, my DNA sequence has a small chance to be different than my first cousins (two generations of mutation worth). However, what about the ubiquitous proteins in me and my third cousin? Well, there, our common sequence is four generations in the past. Since the split, there have been four reproductive events; four chances for mutation. Thus, we would expect that the more distantly related someone is from me, the greater chance of mutations, and thus the greater number of mutations, and the more different the code.
The same logic applies to evolution. Common descent predicts that our protein sequences will be most similar to organisms most closely related to us (chimpanzees, for example), and the farther back in time the proposed common ancestor is, the more different the sequences should be. Thus, taking our cytochrome c example again, the cytochrome c protein sequences between us and chimpanzees should be very similar, while the cytochrome c protein sequences between us and bananas should be much more different, and with bacteria it should be even more different.
So, what do we find? Is our prediction in the absence of common descent right (random distribution), or is the prediction of common descent correct (distribution corresponding to the evolutionary tree of life)?
The cytochrome c sequences of humans and chimpanzees are identical. Looking farther out on the evolutionary tree, to other mammals, we see about a 10 amino acid difference between us and them. The farther back the supposed common ancestor according to evolution, the larger difference we see. When we go out to the most distantly related organisms, we see the largest difference in protein sequence (about 50 amino acids with the yeast Candida krusei). (Source: The Making of the Fittest, by Sean B. Carroll)
To conclude, we see in ubiquitous proteins exactly what evolution would predict that we would see.
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Please name a few.
The evidence from retroviruses is some of the strongest evidence for common descent. A retrovirus is a virus which reproduces by inserting itself into the DNA of its host. Then, when the host cell divides and replicates its DNA, it replicates the virus as well. Retroviruses don't have particular points in the DNA that they like to choose; they are equally likely to insert themselves at any spot among the billions of base-pairs of the genome. If such a virus inserts itself into a germ line cell (a sperm or an egg), and if this sperm or egg cell is then used to make a new organism, then that virus will be in the DNA of every cell in that offspring's body. This is called an endogenous retrovirus.
You should already be able to see how unlikely this is to happen in any particular case. The cell has to be a germ line cell, and a very specific one at that (the particular sperm or egg used in reproduction). Also, it's not enough for the new organism to simply be born with the ERV. In order for the ERV to spread throughout the population, the descendants of this particular organism must be evolutionarily successful. As a result, the addition of a new ERV into a population is incredibly rare, but over millions of years it happens with some regularity.
So, let's say that we take a look at your DNA, and we see an ERV (or at least the remnants of one; they tend to decay, as all useless code does, after extremely long periods of time because selection does not exert pressure to keep mutations out of useless coding) in a certain point in your DNA. Then we look at my DNA, and we find the same ERV, or bits of it, in the exact same spot. How can we explain this? The immense improbability of this rare event happening to two different people in the exact same spot on the genome (out of billions of possible base-pair locations) rules out two different occurrences. The only explanation is that we share a common ancestor whose DNA was invaded with a retrovirus. This easily explains what would otherwise be a statistically impossible coincidence.
In this way, ERVs can be used to show common ancestry. Finding the same ERV in the same spot in two people's DNA strongly indicates common ancestry. So, how is this relevant to evidence for evolution? You can probably guess.
Scientists examining the human genome, along with the genomes of many other animals, found a number of these occurrences. Humans and chimpanzees share seven ERVs in the same spots in our genomes (list of journal article references found here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#retroviruses). Literally the only explanation is that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor. We're talking about useless code here, which is not expressed in the phenotype of an organisms. There is no design incentive for this result to occur.
This alone is compelling evidence for common descent, but what people simply don't grasp is how much other evidence there is just like this, and how well it fits into the evolution model. We can look at humans and several different kinds of apes, and find the exact same things as we do with just humans and chimpanzees. Here's a phylogeny (a chart that shows evolutionary relationships) that shows what ERVs are shared by what apes, and the point at which the insertion happened.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/images/retrovirus.gif
Transposons are similar to ERVs, though they lack the tools to cross cellular barriers, and they thus provide the same kind of evidence. In the human α-globin cluster alone there are seven Alu elements (a specific kind of transposon), and each one is shared with chimpanzees in the exact same seven locations (source: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#transposons). The evidence overwhelmingly presents a coherent picture of common descent over millions of years.
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... if transgenderism or even homosexuality can be shown to be at root a psychological problem, then one ought to work on checking one's subconsciously held premises, and fixing them according to man's life as the standard -- it doesn't mean accepting the psychological condition and then modifying one's body to match it, as this would be primacy of consciousness.
If transgenderism or homosexuality can be traced to a neurological problem, then as science advances the way to fix the problem would be to get the neurological operation to better connect the brain wiring....
And if it turns out not to be a "problem" at all? If it just turns out to be another instance where someone looks at one of their physical characteristics and wishes it were different, like DonAthos' short/tall example?
The point is that what you are is not determined by one's psychology, it is determined by what one is metaphysically; and this takes precedent over any psychological or neurological issue. Normal functioning is the standard, not the malady.The standard of what is "normal" is not a numbers game; it's not determined by a vote. It's a scientific question.
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If it is true that transgenderism is a medical problem or a psychological problem, that doesn't mean that philosophy ought to butt out and not say anything about it. On the contrary, a rational philosophy would say that if it is a medical or psychological problem, then a person who has the problem ought to work on fixing it -- which doesn't mean getting a sex change, it means taking into account that while the person has male body parts, his psychology or his neurology contradicts this, so fix that problem.
Where exactly from 'philosophy' do you get the addendum that fixing this mismatchdoesn't mean getting a sex change? Philosophy says one should fix the problem of his or her sex/gender mismatch, okay, good... oh and by the way that means altering one's gender rather than one's sex. Where the heck does that one come from? All philosophy can tell us in response to this problem is that we should use reason, science, and medical technology to better our lives.
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It's quite simple: DH showed no respect for Dr.Peikoff in a recent podcast about transsexuals stating that Dr.Peikoff was engaged in armchair philosophizing at its worse when he stated that transsexuals were violating nature by changing their sex and claiming that nature had made a mistake with them, and then only referred to a Wikipedia link as her backup.
Making statements about how people should feel about their gender based on their sex, regardless of personal experience, is the definition of armchair philosophizing. Armchair philosophizing involves forgoing the obtaining of facts about some subject matter in favor of guessing or theorizing about the way things "must be" in regards to a certain subject; in this case, the relationship between gender and sex. If you're upset about the Wikipedia source, if you can find a source making a scientific argument that gender and sex must always match that isn't from Westboro Baptist Church or some similar religious nutjob source, I'd be surprised.
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I always thought that refered to a type of male who attempts to gain the admiration of women by being "nice" to them rather than having any of the virtues that women actually want. That is the context I see it usually used in.
I guess in general the idea is that if you have all the right qualities being nice is just a bonus, and if you don't being nice is pointless. I have basically learned in life that you can get away with a lot of stuff if you are productive, good looking, and have good hygene.
Well 'getting away' with something is always more complicated than people generally suppose. Anyways, the general connotation of the saying is that people who get ahead do it by screwing over others, and those who don't do so won't advance. There is the more sympathetic interpretation of the saying, which is that nice, shy guys who don't put themselves out there won't achieve success in relationships, career, etc. That's certainly true, but being nice/good and being assertive aren't mutually exclusive.
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"Good guys finish last." That one bugs me.
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Excellent post. You might be interested in a past topic of mine with a similar, though slightly different focus, also prompted by discussions in other OO.net threads at the time, here. I think occasionally, with topics that get particularly heated, it's important to defend the practice of civility in online discussions, particularly in a forum we all care about.
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Suppose I wrote a sports story stating: "Jeremy Lin is admittedly good at shooting, driving, passing, and rebounding. But he's weak when it comes to defense and turn-overs. These are two flies in his soup."
Would people be justified and correct in assuming I was referencing won ton soup, and thus I was implying that he and all other Chinese people should stick to working in Chinese take-out restaurants -- the only things these people are any good at?
The SNL skit referred to earlier in the thread was funny precisely because it stuck solely to stereotypes like this; they referenced chopsticks, Chinese food, and other things that are obviously and unoffensively connected with Chinese people. The joke was that we aren't allowed to make the same references with respect to black people; for example, them showing up late or liking fried chicken. These are the harmless kind of stereotypes and associations that we as a society should be able to poke fun at without worrying about political correctness, and that's the point the skit was making.
The words nigger, chink, kike, etc. are not even remotely the same as these type of harmless references. Those are slurs invented and used to convey inferiority, disdain, hatred. They have no place in civilized discussion.
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The problem is due to the specific context of this headline, not the word by itself.
Yeah, I think we've all got that.
Those groups don't have the power to affect ESPN's sponsors or viewership over this. Asian Americans don't care about the PC idiots who "advocate" for their rights by policing speech.Obviously ESPN thinks differently. They've got more market analysts under their employ than I do.
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Punishing those "chink in the armor" guys was a grave injustice, and I'm surprised and disappointed anyone here even disputes this. Firing and suspending those guys was raw evil.
Chink is an obvious racial slur, and if you put that as the title of an article you can expect to get fired. ESPN's gotta do what it's gotta do.
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Why are you speculating on what I'm basing my opinions on? You don't even know me.
My speculations are quite general, and I think they are an accurate description of how people form conclusions about the guiding spirit of any particular organization or movement. It's certainly what I do most of the time. For example, I have a certain idea of the ideology that drives the Obama administration, which I've extracted from reading his statements and those of his appointees, looking at the laws and regulations they have passed, etc. It's the most time-effective way to operate, really. All I'm saying is that if someone offered me an objective index systematizing the statements and actions of the Obama administration, I wouldn't turn my nose up at it. If someone's willing to take the time to do it, I'll incorporate the results, and change my opinion if necessary.
My claims on the guiding principles of the United States are mainly based on studying its laws, and the well documented ideas those laws are based on. My conclusions are confirmed by looking at the history of the United States, and Americans' willingness to actually fight for those principles.Yeah. "Studying" and "looking" definitely fall under the kind of informal methodology I'm referring to.
While I agree that the Heritage Economic Index you posted is objective, it paints only a partial picture (and a fraction of the picture, at that - far outweighed by the two most important characteristics of freedom: free speech, and political participation open to everyone). It doesn't contradict anything I said. As for the other list, that's a joke. Freedom House is not a consistent advocate of the principle of individual rights, and its list is superficial at best. Those countries it lists as equivalent to the US in political and social freedoms all have laws restricting both political participation and speech.It's funny that you criticize my usage of an economic index because it leaves out "free speech, and political participation open to everyone," and then dismiss the second index out of hand as well, seemingly without checking whether it includes free speech and open political participation. Let's look at the technical notes, rather than just the name of the organization. Here are the characteristics that are being taken into account:
A. Freedom of Expression and Belief: Measures freedom of the press, religious freedom, and freedom of cultural expression.B. Association and Organizational Rights: Measures freedom of assembly and organization, the ability to create trade unions and other free private organizations.
C. Rule of Law: Ascertains if there is an independent judiciary, protection from political terror, and equal protection under the law.
D. Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights: Includes free private discussions, property rights, personal autonomy, and personal freedoms.
I actually agree with your criticisms of Freedom House, which is why I did not post one of their more general 'freedom' indices, which often incorporate things like measures of democracy, which in actuality means the "freedom" for the majority to vote itself political privileges. I chose their civil liberties index specifically because it reflects actual political freedom.
And, more importantly, on a cultural level those nations do not identify with individualism the way Americans do. Their laws are ambiguous and their history spotted with episodes of tyranny and abuse precisely because their culture is a victim of trends. Sure, the trend right now is democracy and so called "democratic values", but there is no reason to believe that is their cultural identity. They certainly have yet to show a willingness to fight for those ideas, which is quite telling of the depth of their convictions.Okay, so if I did not share this generalized picture of all other countries besides the U.S., what facts would you point me towards to support that picture?
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Noted. I stand by my statement. I don't see what that list has to do with it.
You don't see what the facts have to do with it? You're making very general and abstract claims about the ideology driving the U.S. as opposed to other nations around the world, with nothing to back it up except a generalized opinion gleaned informally from readings in history and current events. The general ideology driving a nation isn't something we can just observe out in the world, like the color of a nation's flag. Getting a rigorous idea of the state of a country's governance requires a systematic survey of the evidence. Freedom indices are one such attempt to systematically quantify these wide generalizations; an attempt to ground them in facts, in other words.
In your original reply to this, you criticized that this index was only economic freedom. Since in response I went ahead and found one for civil liberties as well, I'll post that too. Note the U.S. gets the maximum score for all years measured in the index, and so do several other countries, including Australia, Canada, Sweden, and Switzerland:
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For one, those countries don't have the same ideology the US has. Not in practice (unlike the US, they have done very little to defend freedom in the past 50 years), and not even in theory (their laws are nothing like the constitution built on the principle of individual rights the US has).
Just wanted to correct your apparent view that the U.S. is far and away the most consistently adherent to an ideology of freedom: http://www.heritage.org/index/default
Three of those four countries listed rank higher than the U.S. in overall economic freedom, as well as a few others. The simple point is that interventionist foreign policy is much more highly correlated with retaliation than is economic or political freedom.
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suffice to say BC's philosophy is best characterized as deathist. personally I think deathism is obviously irrational (and horrifying), and I do not think objectivism is compatible with any sort of deathism.
It's not 'deathist' to say that one cannot be logically argued into valuing one's life. Either you do, or you don't. Given that you do, then philosophy can establish a standard to guide your actions, based on what is good for your life or bad. However, the ultimate given is the fact that you choose to live.
I think all that is a little beside the point with regards to the question. Although it's unclear, the question seems to focus on the standard to guide one's life, given this choice has been made. To answer that question, the only coherent standard is to organize your life and values around what is good for you personally: a fulfilling career, rewarding friendships, healthy living habits, etc. Some of this is objective and universal, and some of it depends on your preferences and personality. Rand's ethics is an attempt to outline the universal principles that one must adhere to in order to live well, so I'd go there for more information.
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It utterly amazes me that 13 and possibly Dante (and a few others I'm sure) consider that Ayn Rand contradicted herself when she required intelligibility in art...
When have I ever, ever opined about Rand contradicting herself on art? My only post in this thread was to point out the first time you brought me up for no reason. Didn't we just learn to be careful about attributing views to people that they don't actually hold over in the Checking Premises thread?
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Well, if Dante and Mr. 13 are not Kantians posing as Objectivists or Kantian trolls, then I will apologize for the implication that you were. However, if you are going to uphold Kant as an advocate of reason, then I think you need to check your premises.
Oh good, I'm a Kantian now. I haven't even posted in this topic yet. >.<
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I don't think DH actually advocated that we could eat babies, given that she did eventually (even in the podcast) say that it would be immoral. However, the way she handled the issue during the podcast and during the AltosCon live session was to state that the Supreme Court had come to the conclusion that brainless babies don't have rights, and therefore began to speculate that we could eat them. This turned into a session of let's eat human baby baby-backed ribs, and I think her comment that it would be immoral to actually do it was lost in the disgust many of us felt for her bringing up the topic and the possibility that we could eat brainless babies. I don't think she handled the podcast nor the session very well, as if she had decided that eating brainless babies was immoral, then she should not have presented it as she did and should not have encouraged her audience to celebrate eating human baby baby-backed ribs. If there is a general misunderstanding of her position, she has no one to blame but herself. [bold added]
Hmmm... that's interesting... let's look back in the thread a bit.
Yes, insofar as there are people out there who seem to cherry pick their ideas from Objectivism on a personal like basis -- i.e. I like Ayn Rand's views on capitalism, but insofar as she disregards God, I cannot be for Objectivism as she presented it, so I am a Christian-Objectivist -- this is an act of subjectivism; of making a decision based on emotions, rather than reason.
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Now, if one holds onto a rationalistic argument that can be shown to be unconnected to reality and therefore not true based upon an emotional attachment to one's mis-generated ideas, then yes, this would be a form of subjectivism. [bold added]
So making emotional decisions without regard to the facts of reality (such as a concrete statement that a certain action is immoral), doing that is understandable in this case, because the emotions are ones that you personally share, and in that case it's the speaker's fault. But subjectivists and rationalists are people who unapologetically hold ideas based on emotions (like disgust, say?) without regard to facts.
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By the way greed is one of the deadly sins. Are you sure we want to affiliate something like that with self interest?
I know nobody cares, but still...
As is pride, and advocates of rational self-interest damn well shouldn't give that one up.
The fundamental problem with the idea of greed is not simply that it carries a negative connotation, but that with greed that negative connotation is inexorably tied to the idea of "too much." In common usage, greed is much more closely tied with wanting too much than it is with disregarding others' rights. Plenty of instances of greed don't even involve rights, like the food example sNerd gave. The implication inherent in the word is that selfishness must always be limited, that it cannot be allowed to overstep its bounds or it hurts everyone involved. The problem, of course, is that rational selfishness should not be limited; it should be one's guiding principle in life. Violating rights is bad, regardless of whether the intentions were selfish or selfless, and rational self-interest is good up to any degree, it cannot be excessive. The word should just be thrown out.
An argument with an intelligent design advocate/anti-evolutionist
in Biosciences
Posted
Name a biological structure that you think is irreducibly complex.