Materialism

[webolife]

Whether seen as sacred or profane, the universe is a tertiary system, built on a symmetric unity of threes.
At its most fundamental level[s] the system is in order and interfunctional, not random or chaotic, filled and connected with the essence of amberstuff.

[Grey Cloud]

Ha! I was just thinking that Unity is three. Yin, Yang and the circle; Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu; Osiris, Isis and Horus. Two opposites and the third element which unites them.
It might take two to tango but it takes three to do everything else.

And even they need a common ground to dance their rhythm of unity.

You are most correct sir. The music is the third element which unites (and controls) the two opposites forward/man and backward/woman. Da ra da da da...

[altonhare]

Not sure what Klypp and JL are getting on about...
Alton, the issue of viability is key here. For each generation to perpetuate itself, any and all alterations must be "viable".
The organism doesn't have the luxury of reproducing altered forms 1000 times only to have all but one of its alterations lead to nonviability. As Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins, et.al. like to say, life on earth has proceeded through many extremely LUCKY steps. The likelihood of even a single left-handed protein with a code capable of reproducing itself could arise from a random collision of chemicals, even given the presence of those chemicals to begin with, has been variously calculated or estimated at 1 out of a number many billions of times greater than the sum of all atoms in the universe.
Sorry, that just doesn't fly with me as a good causal explanation. And 1 out of 1000 is a generous "give" considering no such alterations have ever been confirmed, only assumed.

It doesn't make ANY sense to demand that ALL alterations are viable. None whatsoever. You have to justify this. I agree that *some* number must be viable, but there is no reason to think it is 100%. Most replications that occur result in something identical (or nearly so). Most of the time A just makes 1000 A's. Occasionally there is an alteration. If it is nonviable it eventually falls apart and A goes on its merry way. Occasionally an alteration is viable and now we have B.

In response to the calculation of Gould and Dawkins:

Newton thought the solar system should be "unstable" from his calculations. Thus he posited that GOD must come in every now and then to "lend a hand" to keep things in line. A century later Laplace showed that, over a period of time longer than Newton could examine, the solar system was fine. There was no God needed. What if Newton had said no, that can't be right, and pressed on? He may have achieved Laplace's discovery a century earlier.

When you wave at something in Nature that you don't understand or hasn't been explained and say "God" that is the opposite of science, not just by my definition. Doing this STIFLES knowledge. It says "we can't understand that, don't look there". So, because Gould and Dawkins did a calculation that makes life unlikely (but not impossible), you're going to wave your hand and say "God" (or Designer or whatever)?

What if they're wrong? What if they don't understand the mechanisms involved? What if they made the wrong assumptions? What if a zillion things. The environment present on earth during the early stages of life is not well known at all, but rather must be guessed at or assumed.

Finally, you keep saying "random". There has never been a random collision, motion, etc. I don't know why you keep talking about "random collisions" in your responses/rebuttals. A determinist who says that truly random events occur is a hypocrite and a self-contradiction.

[junglelord]

HI Alton,
Knowing God enlightens you.
Knowing religion stifiles you.

[altonhare]

HI Alton,
Knowing God enlightens you.
Knowing religion stifiles you.

My point is that, when we hit something we don't understand (like how life came about), we should press on trying to understand it in terms of a causal, non contradictory explanation/mechanism. Newton hit something he didn't understand and gave up, handing the problem off to "God". You can insert whatever word you want in for "God", I'm not interested in a theological debate. The point is that he gave up and decided that, if he (or someone) couldn't solve it right then, it must be acausal/unsolvable. This led him to miss out on a potential addition to our knowledge which Laplace later discovered.

[webolife]

Alton, you seem to be skating over my main point, but if not, let me summarize what you seem to be saying or inferring:
1. Gradual accumulation of occasionally positive accidental [since you don't like the word "random"] mutations over time is for you a logical mechanism for the development of the myriads of life forms on Earth, both the 95% that have become extinct, and those diverse forms living today.
2. Under the rules of natural selection, every single mutation, in order to be passed on to the next generation must maintain or increase the viability of the organism, but...
3. The fact that no such positive mutation has ever been observed doesn't weaken this hypothesis.
4. Ignoring the illogic of a specifically coded information system like DNA coming about by accidental collisions of chemicals, assuming the necessary chemicals are available, every mutation from the DNA code of the original lifeform[s], say some kind of mycoplasm, that has resulted in the myriads of lifeforms mentioned in #1, has been accumulated and passed down by accident.
4. The virtually zero probability of such a huge amount of such unobserved mutations accumulating through accidental processes [under the circumstances that must exist in a "materialistic" universe] doesn't faze you in any way.
5. As long as we don't invoke a god, no matter how improbable or unobservable a process is, as long as it is deterministic, it is an ok explanation, and somehow this is more scientific than suggesting design.

(I'll take any definition of accident you can find.)

Is this what you are saying or inferring?

[altonhare]

webolife, I'm not intending to "skate over" your main point. I'm sure we'll figure this out evenetually.

1. Gradual accumulation of occasionally positive accidental [since you don't like the word "random"] mutations over time is for you a logical mechanism for the development of the myriads of life forms on Earth, both the 95% that have become extinct, and those diverse forms living today.

I don't like the word "accidental" either. It essentially implies that life "shouldn't" have happened, that it came about in spite of itself. Obviously there is life, there's no question of "should" or "accidents".

If an alteration results in something that reproduces itself (is viable), it is practically tautological that different life forms come about. We see it, it's there, it happened. I dropped this ball, it makes no sense to ask if it "should" have happened or if it was an "accident". We observe many life forms, therefore many life forms came about.

Now, "gradual" is a relative term. The occasional burst of radiation or some other such semi-catastrophic event could certainly alter an organism (or it's germ-line) such that it (or it's offspring) undergo dramatic changes in a relatively brief period.

2. Under the rules of natural selection, every single mutation, in order to be passed on to the next generation must maintain or increase the viability of the organism, but...

I never said anything about "rules of natural selection". Again, is a grasshopper more or less "viable" than an earthworm? The organism is just different. If it replicates itself more often than it falls apart, the species stays around. Period.

3. The fact that no such positive mutation has ever been observed doesn't weaken this hypothesis.

Neither Newton nor Laplace got to observe the solar system going on umpteen years either. Additionally I think 3 is predicated upon at least part of 2, which talks about natural selection, which I've never even mentioned.

As far as "natural selection" is concerned I think this mechanism may be capable of honing an individual species, and possibly producing similar sub-species, but I doubt it can be the primary mechanism by which the diversity we observe came about.

4. Ignoring the illogic of a specifically coded information system like DNA coming about by accidental collisions of chemicals, assuming the necessary chemicals are available, every mutation from the DNA code of the original lifeform[s], say some kind of mycoplasm, that has resulted in the myriads of lifeforms mentioned in #1, has been accumulated and passed down by accident.

What's an "information system"? Is it an ordered material? Is it the cyclic rotation of the moon? Is it a bunch of rocks that fell on the ground in the pattern "Hi!"? Is it the result of this chemical reaction, that chemical reaction, etc.? Is it the letters on your keyboard? Craters on the moon? Solar flares? What phenomenon of nature qualifies as an "information system"? Only DNA? What qualifies it uniquely as an "information system"? The observation that life depends on it? Okay so we have DNA, defined as an information system because we observe that life uses it.

Not "by accident". Every event had a specific cause and gave a specific result. Again if the result replicates itself more often than it falls apart then it stays around.

4. The virtually zero probability of such a huge amount of such unobserved mutations accumulating through accidental processes [under the circumstances that must exist in a "materialistic" universe] doesn't faze you in any way.

Their calculation is wrong. Just as Newton's was regarding the solar system. Just as the majority of calculations of relatively unknown phenomena have been wrong.

5. As long as we don't invoke a god, no matter how improbable or unobservable a process is, as long as it is deterministic, it is an ok explanation, and somehow this is more scientific than suggesting design

It depends on exactly what you mean by "God" or "Designer". I used God as an example in the historical account of Newton to depict how scientists, when faced with something they can't explain, often invoke words like "God" or "divinity". Saying these words didn't help them understand Nature. If you define your "God" or "Designer" and show how It built life, that's different. That's an explanation. Newton appealed to the word "God" because he didn't have an explanation, you can just as easily utter the word "God" and offer an explanation. I have no aversion to the word God, Almighty, The Father, The Creator, Buddha, etc.

[junglelord]

Just as the majority of calculations of relatively unknown phenomena have been wrong.

Care to name ONE with the aberate math provided please, and the correction of said math, since you say the majority, you can surely provide numeral examples...

[altonhare]

Just as the majority of calculations of relatively unknown phenomena have been wrong.

Care to name ONE with the aberate math provided please, and the correction of said math, since you say the majority, you can surely provide numeral examples...

I already named one, Newton's calculations regarding the stability of the solar system indicated the solar system should not be stable. His error was that he did not consider sufficiently long times. In Laplace's calculation he found that there were periodicities arising on the order of tens of thousands of years which kept the planets more or less in line.

Unfortunately there is still doubt that Laplace's formulation is perfectly correct. The point here is that Newton reached a conclusion (solar system is unstable) that was later refuted by Laplace by taking more into consideration (in this case more time). Whether Newton was Right or Wrong (in some absolute sense) is not the issue. Obviously if we consider trillions of years we will probably find the solar system is not stable. Newton concluded that the solar system was unstable on small time scales, and thus said that God must "lend a helping hand" now and then. Laplace showed that if one considered longer time scales there were oscillating patterns that emerged which maintained stability without God.

Of course in still more modern times, with gargantuan calculation power, the issue of solar system stability has become exceedingly complicated. This is not the point of the story. Newton made an error and passed off the extra baggage to God. Laplace said no thanks and corrected the error, although this of course involved his own assumptions. If Laplace had been of an opposite disposition he may have decided that it is silly to believe the solar system is stable, and that God must come in and mess up the place now and then. Then Poincare comes along and says no, God doesn't have to "mess up the place", if we discard Laplace's assumptions we find that the solar system is plenty messy all on its own.

I am using this to parallel the typical progression of knowledge and science. People come up against phenomena they don't understand and either pass it off to God or actually try to understand it. If they want to understand it and say the word "God" that's fine too.

[junglelord]

How in the world is the solar system unstable?
God = Quantum

[altonhare]

Other examples include:

Ole Roemer got values for Io's position that were inconsistent with observation. At this point he could:

A) Discard Newton's equation and develop one that is consistent with the observation of Io and every other observed orbit

B) Assume his observation is incorrect and seek a way to amend this.

C) Assume God just moves the planets around to confuse us and "keep us guessing".

Roemer chose B on the hunch that the light he was using to observe Io's position propagated at a finite velocity, so Io's observed position is really its position some time ago. He could have chose (C) and continued on his merry way.

Lord Rayleigh calculated the black body spectrum using classical theories of EM. Of course he was spectacularly wrong because he did not understand EM. Just as Newton didn't understand emergent patterns over long intervals, Roemer didn't (initially) understand light's observed finite propagation, and how Gould and Dawkins don't know how DNA and ultimately life came about.

Incidentally I think they're calculation is already fundamentally flawed because it is probabilistic. If one calculates a 1 in a billion chance of life coming about in the observable universe, well obviously we're that 1 in a billion (gigabazillion?) chance. We wouldn't conclude the opposite of course, we see as plainly as we see anything that we're here.

So assuming they understand the mechanism PERFECTLY i.e. they made all the correct assumptions and their model is perfect, they understand the precise mechanism in all its detail and captured it. They calculate a 1 in ~1080 "chance" of life coming about on earth. Well, here we are, the 1 in 1080. Their calculation doesn't refute the observation that we are, indeed, here. Their insanely low probability indicates to me:

1) They made the wrong assumptions and premises

2) They don't understand the mechanism involved

But again, it's just a probability. It's not a conclusion. The conclusion is that we're here, life arose, no doubt. Just because it had an immensely low "chance" of occurring, so what? It happened. Maybe they they made the right assumptions and know the mechanism. Either way we're here, by some mechanism.

Saying "there's a probability of X of event A happening according to this mechanism" is no better than saying "I don't know how A happened". At best, a calculation can only be used to persuade others to believe your explanation. If I pose an explanation and calculate a probability of 90% people will likely believe my explanation instead of one that calculates a probability of 1080. But does this make my explanation True? The second one may actually be True. Probabilities don't add anything to an explanation, they just make other people believe or disbelieve.

[webolife]

"Obviously, here we are, so it doesn't matter how 'lucky' that makes us." (Not intended as a direct quote)
That is tantamount to saying, "It just happened." So much for causality.

Your insistence on the occasional viable alteration/mutation invokes the "rules of natural selection" whether you mentioned them or not. Yet your admittance that the mechanism of natural selection is adequate for fine-tuning species or the development of subspecies, yet inadequate to cause phylogeny, is precisely my "main point". Perhaps you are thinking, "There must be some good mutations, otherwise we wouldn't be here?" So despite the preponderance of scientific evidence against this, you still believe?

What other mechanism do you offer for the evolution of biodiversity on Earth? The only other mechanism offered by evolution gurus such as Dawkins is "blind chance". What definition of "accident" don't you like? By the way, you said the calculation for the formation of a viable/self-reproducing protein by chance was "insanely low", yet you chose a probability for comparison of 1 in 10^80, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the calculations offered, which range from 1 in 10^240 to 10^500, depending on the author. And incidentally, neither the late S.J.Gould nor Richard Dawkins like the probability numbers, opting instead for the "it doesn't matter, here we are...LUCKY US" view. Both of them, however subscribe wholeheartedly to the mechanism of natural selection for phylogeny. So again, what other mechanism do you offer? Remember, this is the "materialism" thread...

[altonhare]

"Obviously, here we are, so it doesn't matter how 'lucky' that makes us." (Not intended as a direct quote)
That is tantamount to saying, "It just happened." So much for causality.

Indeed it is. Upon observing that we are, indeed, here we now want to explain it. Explanations are always causal by definition, otherwise they wouldn't be explanations.

Your insistence on the occasional viable alteration/mutation invokes the "rules of natural selection" whether you mentioned them or not. Yet your admittance that the mechanism of natural selection is adequate for fine-tuning species or the development of subspecies, yet inadequate to cause phylogeny, is precisely my "main point".

Great! We have a point of agreement.

Perhaps you are thinking, "There must be some good mutations, otherwise we wouldn't be here?" So despite the preponderance of scientific evidence against this, you still believe?

Are you saying all the scientific evidence states that there were little or no "good" (by which I assume you mean viable) mutations?

What other mechanism do you offer for the evolution of biodiversity on Earth? The only other mechanism offered by evolution gurus such as Dawkins is "blind chance". What definition of "accident" don't you like?

The Holy Definition:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/accident

In particular "any event that happens unexpectedly, without a deliberate plan or cause". Additionally, like I said, the word "accident" carries with it the idea that whatever happened "shouldn't" have happened. That makes no sense except in debates about human morals/ethics. The comet hit the sun. Someone says "It happened by accident" What the hell does that mean? Were you standing next to the comet, intending to send it veering off past the sun, but your finger slipped? I guess you shouldn't have slipped if you didn't want the comet to hit the sun!

Accidents and "should/should not" language don't make any sense unless we're talking about people's opinions, usually about morals and ethics. Hopefully the way life actually came about is not a matter of anyone's opinion nor are we trying to pass moral judgement on this mechanism.

A mechanism? Again where do you want me to start? Fusion of atoms inside stars, the dispersal of these atoms, the formation of a solar system, the landing of specific atoms on a big enough rock to hold an atmosphere...?

Atoms reacted, bonded, stables ones hung around and bonded some more, etc. A complete explanation would be enormously detailed and extremely complicated. There's a reason we don't fully understand this particular phenomenon yet, just as Newton didn't understand why the solar system didn't fly apart and Rayleigh didn't understand BBR. All the conditions, temperature, what atoms are present, etc. etc. etc. we still don't know for sure. We are still studying this, and don't have The Answer yet, but that's not reason to write it off as acausal (i.e. hand the baggage off to God). Exactly the opposite, in science such a situation is the grandest opportunity to learn and understand something new!

By the way, you said the calculation for the formation of a viable/self-reproducing protein by chance was "insanely low", yet you chose a probability for comparison of 1 in 10^80, which is many orders of magnitude greater than the calculations offered, which range from 1 in 10^240 to 10^500, depending on the author.

1080 isn't "insanely low" to you? It was just a low number that popped to my mind and seemed small enough to illustrate the point. You said the probability was calculated as "orders of magnitude more than the number of electrons in the universe". The generally known value for that is somewhere around 1080 so I used that. I didn't know you meant hundreds of orders of magnitude greater.

And incidentally, neither the late S.J.Gould nor Richard Dawkins like the probability numbers, opting instead for the "it doesn't matter, here we are...LUCKY US" view.

Then I pity them, they've gone the way of Newton and Rayleigh in the sense that they've "given up" trying to actually explain and understand what happened. They didn't say the word "God" but it's no different! They are no longer looking for explanations.

Both of them, however subscribe wholeheartedly to the mechanism of natural selection for phylogeny. So again, what other mechanism do you offer? Remember, this is the "materialism" thread...

Well, sometimes bursts of radiation altered genomes, sometimes the chemical environment altered genomes, etc. I'm sure I could think of other catastrophic events, but I wouldn't be nearly as good as someone who does this for a living like a biologist/geologist. This *in addition* to the traditional natural selection could explain the diversity of life observed. These are just hypotheses and theories, you can believe or disbelieve them. I just don't see a reason to "give up the search" for explanations and hand it off to acausal "God". Scientific history tells me this is the wrong move, and my philosophy tells me it's wrong period. As far as science is concerned, we should do the opposite, we should look harder for causal explanations if the current ones don't convince us!

[webolife]

Actually our two viewpoints converge at several points here.
However, I say "It just happened" is NOT an explanation at all.
Your bursts of radiation, etc. offer no help to the evolution of life, if such bursts result in entirely or even mostly deleterious effects to the DNA information system. Since these deleterious mutations are the only type that have ever been observed, you must believe that the opposite is true in order to support your explanation, despite the scientific evidence to the contrary. It is interesting that you challenged me on this point by changing "ever observed" to "ever happened."
Alton: "...all the scientific evidence states that there were little or no "good" (by which I assume you mean viable) mutations" --- keyword is "were" --- science can state nothing of a process that supposedly happened in the past unless currently observed processes support such a statement. Change this back to present tense, and my answer is "yes".
If you believe the opposite, you must presuppose your conclusion. Another "main point" of mine.

By the way, I do distinguish between the irreducibly complex and specific informational system of life and other abiotic systems.
Most "materialistic" explanations do/can not make any distinction. It's all just interacting chemicals with an occasional shot of starlight thrown in for good measure. Drink deep, and dream away the world.

[webolife]

Also, Alton, you continue to define "causal" as antonymous to "design". Just because you define it so, does not make it so.
The inferrence of a designer, as odious as it may be to your philosophy, is not odious to the practice of science.