Cap'n Refsmmat

Hi again, cabinintheforest. I thought you said you wanted us to ban you so you could go away. Change your mind so soon?

How is it a result of a commitment to materialism? Proponents of alternative hypotheses, such as intelligent design, claim that their hypotheses do not require appeal to supernatural powers or God -- the intelligent designer could just as well be an alien, for example, or a time-traveling prankster from 32nd-century Earth. If scientists were unfairly biased towards materialistic hypotheses, they'd still have no reason to choose evolution over forms of ID. I'd also like to ask what you believe the alternatives to materialism are. For example, is there an alternate "scientific method" that does not assume materialism? What are its advantages over the current system?

In any case, I believe we did intervene in at least one of those cases to stop an off-topic subject from being pursued.

Perhaps Hawking's book should be allowed to explain itself.

We post suspensions in the Announcements forum, but I don't think many people keep up-to-date on that. I'll see if I can get banned members to appear different from regular members, like they used to.

Yes. Identical IPs, actually. I sense Mr. Cabin has an ideological crusade against evolution that he wishes to carry out. You develop a nasty suspicious mind after enough time running a site like this.

Hey cabinintheforest, I thought you wanted to be banned. Why'd you decide to come back as 14darryl14? Can't get enough of us? I do notice these things, you know.

[math]\begin{array}{cc} 1 & 2 \\ 3 & 4\\ \end{array}[/math] or [math]\begin{pmatrix} 1 & 2 \\ 3 & 4 \\ \end{pmatrix}[/math] See here for more info: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics#Matrices_and_arrays

What do you consider "normal knowledge of basic maths"? What subjects do you know?

I like this one, posted in response to someone attacking a YouTube video: On the other hand, in eight months they've made as many posts as we have in eight years. It's apparent this sort of behavior brings them together as a group -- like-minded people like to hang out. Interesting, but definitely not a model I'd like to emulate.

cabinintheforest has been banned for persistent profile message spamming. Many of the messages were abusive and had to be deleted.

The accurate statement may be easy to find, but with no fundamental understanding of the basis of religion, it's hard for people to accept these explanations. Sure, you might look up the Trinity to be sure you've got it right, but when you're an atheist, the idea of one thing being three things that aren't the same thing simultaneously gets rather difficult to understand. You could try to understand the deeper theological explanations of it, but things just get harder from there.

It's very easy to make inaccurate generalizations when you're talking about religion in general. It's very tempting to say, "Well, religious people think ______, but clearly that's wrong, so..." when you'd be hard-pressed to find religious people who hold that exact position. I suppose when you're talking science you have clear context and clear subject matter. You're talking about whether a certain thing is possible, whether a certain theory is true, or whatever; the relevant facts are visible and available for your inspection. When discussing religion, it's difficult to define many concepts -- what exactly do they mean by "spirit"? -- and the definitions vary between groups, religious beliefs are variable, the relevant facts are more philosophical than empirical, and very few people have a grounding in the philosophy of religion, or the fundamental theology of their religion. (I've heard many Christians proclaiming things that would be called heretical by an early Church leader.) Also, not very many of us are into serious study of religion. I'm taking courses in the field out of curiosity, but I'm no expert, and I doubt many people here are. Whereas we have practicing biologists, physicists, and chemists here who can talk with real expertise about science.

Part of the assumptions of the NFL is that the fitness function cannot change in response to changes in the organism. (Or whatever it is we're simulating.) The fitness function can change independently of the organism and NFL will still hold, but not otherwise. These assumptions are required to prove the No Free Lunch theorems true. However, evolution allows for the fitness functions to change in response to changes in the organism. For example, if my organism moves to a new environment because of a mutation (say it moves to a different part of the intestines because of a small change in how it attaches to the intestinal wall), the traits required for fitness can change drastically, and so the fitness function changes. Hence, the No Free Lunch theorems do not apply, and there isn't a mathematical reason why evolutionary searches cannot be faster than random walk without using imported information. Hmm. Well, we're talking about several different things here. There's common ancestry, which is part of (or rather, an extension of) evolutionary theory, and which can be demonstrated without knowledge of how the changes accumulate. (Darwin operated without knowledge of genetics, for example.) Now, there's also theory that explains how we believe those changes occur -- natural selection, genetic drift, sexual selection, mutation, gene duplication, and so on. What we've explored so far really only scratches the surface of these mechanisms. Exaptation, for example, explains many complex functions, but it's hard to observe: first you have to fully understand the function of some biological system, then see how it was mutated slightly to serve a new function. I believe bacterial flagella, once researched, ended up being an example of this, but it took quite a bit of work to see it. Exaptation is hard to observe particularly because small, unimportant adaptations can end up being coopted to make major changes. For example, Lenski (due to various experiments) postulates that there was an intermediate mutation that made it easier for citrate to be metabolized. That intermediate adaptation was not originally noticed because it provided little or no difference in the major functions of the bacteria, but it later allowed a mutation to begin citrate metabolization. Mutations like these could easily have occurred in the E. coli without being detected, so further research is needed. Furthermore, we must consider that the E. coli were not in an environment where the fitness function changed very much, or at all. They have stayed in the same medium, under the same conditions, for thousands of generations. As I mentioned above, the NFL theorems cease to apply when the fitness functions can change -- but the bacteria in Lenski's experiment have nowhere to go to experience new environments and selection pressures. They can't mutate and suddenly find themselves struggling to survive in their new environment, or accidentally put off a chemical that attracts a predator, or whatever. So: Lenski showed that interesting mutations can happen. We have a long way to go from Lenski. Let's not draw hasty conclusions just yet -- evolutionary theory still has some tricks up its sleeves.

I thought that was the point. An improbable (but still possible) mutation occurred within the countless generations, gave benefit to the organism, and the mutation was soon present in the entire population. That's evolution. Now, whether it happened fast enough is a different matter entirely, and I think it'd be hasty to make a judgment on one experiment on one species of bacteria in a single unchanging environment.

This is how most biological experiments are done. You know, in a lab, under set conditions, checked by scientists throughout, observed, with peer-reviewed reports published. Why do you dismiss those experiments but not the ones in psychokinesis? I'd love to see links to these videos and reports, but I think you ought to open another thread about it.

You can observe chromosome banding patterns under a sufficiently good microscope. You really shouldn't dismiss things when you don't even understand them.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that I recently discovered that the No Free Lunch theorems don't apply to evolutionary searches. This renders a lot of our previous discussions (and your previous objections) irrelevant. Whoops. This leaves us back where we started, with no mathematical reason why evolutionary searches can't be faster than random searches. Otherwise, yes, I think your goals are more achievable (if still difficult to observe on timeframes less than decades). But unless you catch them on video, I doubt cabinintheforest will be impressed.

The only "evolution" to Hegel was Lamarckian evolution. This is not surprising, given that Lamarck was wrong.

The beliefs of evolution were not articulated before Darwin and Wallace, except through Lamarckianism, which is wrong. Again, Hume, Kant and Hegel were dead before biological evolution was proposed as a theory. If you want to prove otherwise, point me to the books and chapters where they discuss it. I can easily get my hands on their works to see if you're right.

That's not what "observable" means. Also, you don't get to disqualify evidence because we didn't type it out ourselves. It's still evidence, regardless of who typed it or observed it. Why does it matter if you get it from us instead of some other guy? In fact, you should prefer some of our links, because some are written by actual biologists in actual peer-reviewed journals -- which certainly get higher credence than CreationWiki.

Hume, Kant, and Hegel were all dead before the theory of evolution ever existed (i.e. before Darwin wrote Origin of the Species). Stop making stuff up.

If you've ever watched a magic show, you'd shut up about video evidence being so reliable. Now... as I pointed out before, Lenski has samples of all of the bacteria. If you have a lab and you want to see them, he can send you some. He's made this offer to doubters in the past, but it turns out that none of them had labs. Lenski's website also has detailed information on the genetics of his bacteria, the raw genetic data, procedures on how he performed the experiment, instructions on how to perform it in your own lab, and so on. He has made numerous publications in peer-reviewed journals, where other microbiologists scrutinized his data and methods for problems. If you want to throw his data out, you need stronger evidence than "I don't like it, so it must be a hoax." You don't have the right to say "I disagree with this, so he must have just made it up." You need reasons. As for macroevolution... what's stopping lots of changes, like Lenski's citrate mutation, from building up over time? The E. coli he has in the lab now are much different from the ones 20 years ago -- different in size and shape, metabolizing different food sources, and so on. They have accumulated mutations.

All of these tests have been done. They are not thought experiments. Scientists have samples of MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the lab. They've exposed them to antibiotics and watched resistance emerge over time, taking samples, observing things under the microscope. Lenski watched citrate metabolism evolve in E. coli. He still has the samples of bacteria as they evolved the ability -- frozen samples of bacteria from before and after the transition. He has sequenced DNA. What more do you want? A video of a tiny cell shaking its fist and shouting "I'll figure out this penicillin stuff, just you wait!"?

Can you point me to any biology textbook, evolution paper, or scientist who says that an ape will evolve into a human in a matter of minutes or hours? Or that an ape will evolve into a human at all? Because if you can't, you're asking for us to prove something no evolutionary biologist actually believes. Evolution doesn't happen while the organism is alive, you know. Giraffes didn't stand out in the African plains stretching their necks until they got to be long enough. Evolution happens when you give birth to offspring, and they're different from you.