I was going to leave this thread for good... but I can't sleep again, so I'll go ahead and post a few more of my thoughts.
Skyclad: Maybe we're trying to submerge the "oooh, flame me, flame me!" mentality.
Then again, perhaps we're just allowing you to attempt to rationalize the complete and total randomness and chaos associated with the development of your own intelligence, deeming it completely worthless and incoherent. Great detective work. Keep it up. One day you will prove that your thoughts ultimately have no value. For if all of creation could create itself by random chance and through naturally random processes, your work means nothing. You can't make a difference that couldn't be made by Moonbeam's "brute force" techniques.
"the code for life works on two levels, it writes both the software and the hardware. This means that the selective machanism of evolution, survival of the fittest, acts on both the efficiency of the hardware, and the complexity or functionality of the software. That means that that evolution is working not only as Microsoft but as Dell. Over time, we get, not only a better Windows, we get faster processors and laptops that can survive a fall from the table. The only difference is that evolution has tryed out trillions and trillions of inovations by brute force to make a machine that will now do the intelligent design. "
And yet, aren't you glad that computers don't just randomly apply brute force hacking techniques to break into your computer system?
Oh no! Your computer has been hacked! The password has been changed! What do you do? Well, according to your philosophy... nothing.
The technique of brute forcing requires a design in and of itself, the technique requires the code and the pattern itself to search through all the possible combinations. What you're talking about is brute force not by simple mere bit iterations, but random electrical strikes caused by lightning surging through the lines, producing usually destructive problems but this ONE time causing just the right voltage drops across these capacitors and the subsequent discharge through only the right sequence of the millions of transistors to produce the right code to "crack" the life password. Or... would you go ahead and "make the jump" that the brute force attempt required intelligence behind it?
Yeah, that's right. Somebody more likely sat at a keyboard and typed in the right password. This was the person who set up the system to begin with.
In the long run, what you're telling me is that if I take a stack of notecards in a helicopter up about 10,000 feet and drop them, that they will randomly sort and select themselves to produce "Anandtech Off Topic" on the parking lot below me. Oh, no, you say, for it requires trillions of times to make this happen. You're right. I'll do it a few more times, and I'll take the helicopter up 25,000 or 40,000 or even 50,000 feet (although by that time I'll need more than a helicopter) and perform the same experiment.
What does science tell me? That those notecards ain't gonna spell anandtech.
And yet you'd have me believe that if I did it enough times for millions and billions of years, that it just might happen... just once.
Worse, you call me unscientific for not believing you, and instead, for believing that if I happened upon a bunch of notecards that spelled "Anandtech Off Topic" and I believed that somebody arranged them that way -- without *ever* having met this individual -- that I am unscientific and it is more rational to believe that these notecards fell from 40,000 feet and randomly arranged themselves in that situation.
I'm sorry. I don't see it that way. We see an ordered universe. Our very existence is composed of something far more complex than the words "Anandtech Off Topic," yet you say it happened by chance. No? Ok, you say it happened by "natural selection," which I would argue is an unguided process without a creative mechanism. You say it happened by "survival of the fittest" as if only the most fit cards would arrange themselves in the pattern and the rest blow off to Antarctica or something. You still haven't come up with a creative substitute for an intelligent designer to explain the design we see in nature. When we observe the structures formed by ancient cultures, we believe they were formed not because we have met any of the members of the ancient culture -- because we haven't -- but because we know that these designs require a designer. Can anyone explain to me why this is "so obviously" not true with the complex design I like to call "life"?
Here's the problem for presenting evolution, natural selection, and survival of the fittest as a package that accounts for the mechanisms of all life:
A complex set of random polypeptides, translated to English: "FJDSLNMCVI EIFJ SFDLNE ENJFNDKNM"
A less complex but intelligently designed set of random polypeptides, translated to English: "POSTCOUNT = POSTCOUNT + 1"
One of these was obviously designed intelligently, one was not. Both are complex, but only one is likely to be the result of a random process -- and this is assuming that the selection is made on things which already exists -- so the task becomes further. Yet you tell me it happened. Ok.
The polypeptide idea I got from Geisler. His idea that intelligence produces order and complexity: order (Like "POSTCOUNT POSTCOUNT POSTCOUNT", so repetitive but specified), and complexity (Like FDJFKDSL DFJEI EFJI), so neither repetitive nor specified, to produce the (COMPLEX && SPECIFIED) combination required to signify intelligent life. I grant that complexity does not necessarily require a cause. But specified complexity? Like something designed to communicate a message or provide a given organized function? So in other words, (the "snowflake" example came up earlier, and I've seen it in a previous thread as well,) things like snowflakes, the Grand Canyon, and Niagra Falls are certainly orderly and are natural wonders -- and awesome ones at that. But they in no way equate to the intelligent design of, say, Mount Rushmore or a nuclear fusion power plant, or an automobile or a computer system -- yes, even an iMac. Grrrrrr. I wish the iMac didn't require intelligent design.
I'm also really big on the principle of causality, which I think is central to the scientific method. And that in itself poses problems if you call the universe uncaused, for if the universe as a whole is uncaused, why can it's parts (some or all) also be uncaused? And hence you have random phenomena, unexplainable in partiality or entirety by these things I like to call natural processes. So you lose science. The principle of evolution as an end-all be-all philosophy ultimately crushes under its own weight. It's self-defeating. Commits suicide. Shuffles off its proverbial mortal coil.
No, I'm not going to get into it with you about whether we've got little dogs or big dogs or black people or white people or little horses or big horses. They never lose their "horseness," "dogness," or "peopleness," so I'm not calling that evolution, even though you'd like to call it "microevolution" and start making jumps back to the original life that came from the primordial soup that came from... oh, I forgot... you've ditched causality. In that case, I blew up from an explosion in a garbage truck yesterday and started posting this morning. I'm up to... what... well over 700 now ... but I think I'll get some sleep.
Good night. Don't let the uncaused bedbugs bite. Not that it matters because hey, survival of the fittest is a natural phenomena and it really shouldn't bother you. If it does bother you, perhaps you should go on a crusade to eliminate all bed bugs and prove to the world that you are the superior race. Oh, then we get into the cosmic "should." Do I mean morally, ethically, or am I just tired? I'm just tired.