Kelandon

Quote: Originally written by Stillness: Switch the positioning and you get my logical development. Your claim of what I said is different. Logically speaking, this is untrue. In formal argumentation, order does not matter at all; the distinction between premises, assumptions, and conclusions matters. As long as you plainly state which is which and account for everything that you need to, order doesn't matter at all. Quote: I’m not assuming anything about long time scales. You are. My conclusions are based off of observation. Strictly speaking, what you need in order for 3) to follow from 2) is something like this: "Things that are observed to happen only in one way cannot ever have happened in any other way." This is the assumption to which I've been objecting for a couple of pages now.

Rest?

It shouldn't be an adjective, because you can't do that in English. You can't "have a microscopic of advice" in English. Turkish? Persian? Kurdish? I am out of my element here, other than naming all the Middle Eastern languages I can think of.

Quote: Originally written by Tick tock tick tock tick tick.: The argument makes no sense, though. Everything is irreducibily modular from interdependence. Eyes can't function without brains. Brains can't function without circulation. Circulation requires eukaryotic cells. Those cells need mitochondria. Mitochondria require proteins. Proteins don't work if you remove some amino acids. Amino acids can't exist if you, oh, rip off the amino group. Carbon atoms are irreducibly modular: they cannot act as carbon if you remove a proton. Quote: Originally written by Stillness: Quote: Everything is irreducibily modular from interdependence. I don’t know your definition of the term you placed upon me, but in this instance I’m going to insist that we use the established term. You all just need to understand it. Everything is not irreducibly complex, but a whole lot of stuff is. This is my problem with the way that Stillness argues. This response completely missed the point of the objection to which he pretends that he's responding. This is how we can talk for twenty-three pages and get nowhere, which does not happen in any other discussion on these boards. I give up. Stillness, you're either a really good troll or completely daft. I can't figure out which one, and I'm tired of trying.

Quote: Originally written by Stillness: Quote: Originally written by Kelandon: Catch up to the objection that has been made with regard to interdependent parts. I didn’t miss it, I just didn’t see anything that wasn’t addressed in the other posts. It sounds like your argument is semantic You misunderstand me. "The objection that has been made with regard to interdependent parts" is the rest of the post, not the post that that preceded it. Yes, the post that preceded it made a point that was semantic, but I was merely pointing out that you have no grounds for being frustrate with people who don't understand you when you're actually mis-speaking. This post is solely for clarification. I'll make another, more useful post later.

Quote: Originally written by Stillness: What do you think Alo, is this an explicit detailed description or does it gloss over details? If you want a gene-by-gene chart, you're not going to get one. The science hasn't advanced that far yet. Your design glosses over far more details, though, such how the heck it happens and who's doing it and if it will ever happen again (and my favorite issue, which is, if efficiency was not the designer's top priority, what the heck was his top priority). Also, you're about two pages behind right now (which is why I'm dragging up an issue from a page ago). Catch up to the objection that has been made with regard to interdependent parts. Quote: Originally written by Student of Trinity: Yes, there are several large modules in the visual system, and abruptly removing any one of them makes it all useless. But this is absolutely not irreducibility in any sense relevant to evolution, because evolution is about changes far more gradual than anything as gross as abruptly removing an entire module. Harping on about how removing nerves or lenses or retinas makes eyes fail, and calling that irreducible complexity, is sheer dodge. It has nothing to do with the actual issue at hand. I mean, congratulations: you've proven that eyes can't evolve by having modern lenses suddenly pop into modern eyes that were only missing lenses. If you can possibly find anyone who thinks eyes could develop that way, you can really set them straight. But if you imagined that scenario had anything to do with evolution, you were really out of touch. To summarize: Interdependent parts do not make something irreducible by evolutionary standards. Evolution doesn't work by evolving one part and then another completely separately; it works by evolving both parts into primitive forms and then more complex forms. Your objection (that you "have seen no detailed theory as to how such a thing could occur") isn't really adequate. You have to show, in order to prove your point, that any such model is a worse explanation than design. Quote: Originally written by Kelandon: You're again making the leap from "We haven't seen it in our lifetimes" to "It didn't ever happen" (or at the very least "It probably didn't ever happen"). That leap is, as we have said over and over again, unjustified. That is, we have every reason to believe that the complex evolutions that you're objecting to could happen in principle, since we see the baby steps of them all the time.

Quote: Originally written by Stillness: Let’s try this again. When you all see the phrase “irreducible complexity” it seems you are interpreting that to mean “this system can’t develop by means of evolution” or maybe “this system is can only arise by means of intelligent design.” When I see "irreducible complexity," I think "complexity that cannot be reduced." It's hardly my fault if you're using words to mean things that they don't actually mean. Quote: It means that the parts that make it up work together to perform a function in such a way that if one part is removed the others become useless and the system fails. You're talking about interdependent parts. That's related to irreducible complexity, but it's not the same thing. Please use words correctly. Quote: What we don’t see evolution doing is creating irreducibly complex structures. We know that intelligent agents can though. So from observation it is reasonable to conclude that these structures were created purposefully. If you want to get around observable reality you need a strong theory as to why we should. You're again making the leap from "We haven't seen it in our lifetimes" to "It didn't ever happen" (or at the very least "It probably didn't ever happen"). That leap is, as we have said over and over again, unjustified.

Quote: Originally written by Student of Trinity: If 'irreducible' doesn't mean 'impossible to reduce', then you've been abusing language badly. If all it means is that things break if you suddenly tear big important chunks out of them, then why on earth have you been talking so much, in this discussion of evolution and design, about such an irrelevant banality? Quoted for emphasis. This was exactly my reaction.

Quote: Originally written by Stillness: I can’t imagine it and I have never seen a model that explicitly and quantitatively details such changes. As Slarty has already objected, you're going from "I can't imagine it and haven't seen it" to "It can't exist." Irreducibly complexity says that such a model can't exist, not that it doesn't exist right now.

Updated. I followed most of the other links, too, just to make sure they're still up (because I don't check all of your pages on a regular basis ).

Stillness, that's still asserting impossibility. If any pathway at all is found in which your (as yet unproven) assertion is not true — that the parts are only useful after fully formed as a whole — then the structure is no longer irreducible. You have to show that it is impossible to construct an evolutionary pathway to create blood clotting, eyes, etc. All evolutionists have to do is show that it is possible to construct one. In other words, I'm calling you on your description of eyes as irreducible. Demonstrate that no proto-parts of eyes could have any value on their own without the full structure of an eye. If you can't do that, you can't prove that eyes are irreducible.

I'm confused. What on earth is your actual argument? You've conceded that forward evolution can and does occur, you've conceded that evolution can and does account for at least some of the variation in life that we see, and now you've conceded that irreducible complexity is not actually irreducible? What is left of the claims you've been making for twenty pages? If I ask you why you think design is a better explanation than evolution, what possible evidence can you have left? And your first definition is the most shamelessly circular I have ever seen. Your second is fine, I guess, but non-periodic and non-random forms can arise without the intervention of an intelligence, as we've discussed over and over again.

I just meant a list (not with any real functionality, unlike what I proposed on the previous thread). I s'pose I'll just make one for myself.

It would be useful to a list of calls in-app somewhere (in a separate window, maybe). I suppose I could just make a list in a text file and have it open at the same time as I'm editing anything else, but it'd be nice to have it available automatically.

Niemand's color-coding, Alinting, and snippeting are all worth attempting to match if possible.

To be fair, it was a concurring opinion, and Potter Stewart was failing to define "hard-core pornography," and the court came up with a better definition less than a decade later (as is detailed in the relevant article ). So even the Supreme Court can define things, given enough time.

My links list has been updated to reflect the loss of UA (and the release of Niemand's scenario, which puts him in the "Designers" category). Spidweb's links also have a link to his page, but I can't do anything about that.

I don't quite remember where we were in that other thread. As I recall, my last post involved the fact that irreducible complexity makes a statement about what cannot ever happen and therefore must justify that this cannot ever happen under any circumstances. Stillness seemed appalled and wanted to back into probabilities again, but irreducible complexity doesn't rely on probabilities. It relies on impossibility.

Quote: Originally written by Stillness: If you don't get it I'm not of much help quantitatively. My original quote was meant as I understand it - qualitatively. Life has a quality that distinguishes it from simply random or ordered phenomena. I imagine this is how Leslie Orgel meant it. You all are the ones that brought up quantitative measure when it really is not necessary for the point. Saying that life has specified complexity and other things don't is completely meaningless unless you can give a good definition of specified complexity. I suppose a qualitative definition would be sorta okay, as long as it didn't contradict itself, but your examples seem to contradict themselves. Quote: And explicit all-inclusive concise definitions are notoriously difficult. True, but that doesn't make it any less important. Scientists do give good definitions of things in real science.

I think we're done here. BoG is, for better or worse, not going to happen.

Should be fixed now. Thanks for mentioning it. That was an old link.

Quote: Originally written by Ishad Nha: May not detect the absence of the “i = i + 1;” in a while statement. It probably doesn't, because this would be harder to program than most of what Alint does. It requires recognizing a while-loop and checking if the variable is set anywhere within it. That's checking more than one line at a time, which I don't think Alint really does at the moment.

The original question was about Mac OS X. There is no resource editor on the Spidweb site. There's a scenario editor. They're totally different things.

If the point is to muck with BoA graphics, Niemand's Utilities page has Graphic Adjuster, which is the easiest thing to use.

Quote: Originally written by Randomizer: So if you don't know the significance of the first string, they would appear to have the same complexity of information. I think the point that both Stareye and Khoth were making in the other thread is that this makes "complexity" ill-defined. The second string of numbers might be my favorite 1350-number string, in which case the seemingly random set is no longer random to me, but it's random to everyone who doesn't know that. This makes something "complex" if some importance can be assigned to its order, but "some importance" is completely arbitrary and does not make for a good mathematical principle. Quote: Originally written by Student of Trinity: How on earth do probability distributions ever enter physics, in which everything is deterministic? This at first sounds a little funny, because so much of modern physics is probabilistic, not deterministic, but I suppose you're talking about a classical description as much as anything, and in classical physics, everything is deterministic.