Enough is too much.
Is this thread going to stay on the front page forever?

Until some of us realize there’s actually an outside to go play in, rather than respond to each and every single comment that may/may not be about them.

Kralizec on July 2, 2008 at 2:21 AM

*head asplode*

Is this thread going to stay on the front page forever?

corona on July 1, 2008 at 9:08 PM

We can only hope, but alas, no….

I’m not aware of any experiments done to test the mechanisms of design

how does SETI do it? William Dembski has endeavored to do just that, perhaps you should read some of his books.

I don’t know that Behe’s Irreducible Complexity can be falsified

obviously miller thinks it can be, and he thinks he has.

Occam’s Razor

shouldn’t you just pursue the simplest hypothesis? Even Dawkins has admitted that biology appears to be designed…but of course isn’t. take the eye of a person, and the eye of a squid…they are rather similar…so you have either a wildly impropable chance of the same type of eye evolving multiple times, or the eye is designed.

given the immense complexity, why does it make sense to stick to a naturalistic explanation of everything, unless you are wedded to philosphical naturalism?

obviously as I have shown, irreducable complexity can be tested

right4life on June 30, 2008 at 4:48 PM

I’m not aware of any experiments done to test the mechanisms of design. Research has shown that the flagellum can be reduced, but that isn’t the same as Behe laying out a series of empirical tests to demonstrate design. I don’t know that Behe’s Irreducible Complexity can be falsified since there is an inexhaustible series of phenomena that he can point to and say “well how about that one–it’s really complex ergo must be designed”.

I’m also not sure how ID handles the parsimony principle. It seems that positing a designer is adding an assumption that hasn’t been measured by any of the tools that science currently has, and is inconsistent with Occam’s Razor.

davidk on June 30, 2008 at 9:31 PM

he’ll be back in a minute, he’s busy giving ronsfi ‘the shaft’

E1701 on June 30, 2008 at 8:28 PM

Wow!

Where the cheeseburger come from?

And while you’re at it, could you explain the Internet?

Yes Allah hates you! Yes, Allah hates you! Yes, Allah hates you,
The Koran tells me so.

Allah hates you, you will die
Blow your ass up in the sky
Say the salat, chop off Infidel head,
Eat falafel, go to bed.

Yes, Allah hates you! Yes, Allah hates you! Yes, Allah hates you!

The Koran tells me so.

I live to serve my manly muslim masters!

davidk on June 30, 2008 at 7:18 PM

as E1701 (pbuh) would say:

That is all christian propoganda! My muslim masters were living a golden age of peace, contenment, and spiritual bliss, with our many virgins ‘borrowed’ from the lands of africa that were in spiritual darkness and bondage from those heathen dog christians living in the dark ages!!

In that period, slavery was pretty much a standard in all but the most primitive barbarian cultures. Much of the Islamic golden age was built upon a massive base of slavery (it was part of the “loot” in their assorted conquests and piratical raids against Europe, and some of their treatises on African slaves read like something out of the South in the 1850’s). In Europe, during the Carolingian period, slaves may have made up to 20% of the population, and included large numbers of slavs (which is where the word “slave” is derived from in Europe). St. Patrick was taken by Irish vikings as a slave from England, spent seven years in servitude in Ireland, escaped, joined the clergy, and returned to Ireland as a free missionary. By the end of the Dark Ages though, most European states had outlawed the taking of slaves from among their people. The Byzantine Empire also relied on a slave base, just as Rome before it had. The Mongols made slaves out of all those they permitted to survive, and sub-Saharan Africa saw every major kingdom and tribe making slaves of their foes.

Taking defeated enemies as slaves remained common in most societies until recently – even by the time of Agincourt in 1415, French prisoners captured on the field were effectively the legal slaves of the men that captured them (they would rarely be used that way, but that legal standing supported the ransom concept), which caused a small uproar when Henry V ordered them to be put to death during the battle. Indeed, when Cromwell “pacified” Ireland, large numbers of native Irish living in areas Cromwell had deemed suitable for plantation were enslaved and shipped to the West Indies.

When you get to the European-African slave trade, race became a real factor – skin color was less a factor in earlier cases, because it was the same or nearly so between master and slave… Europeans enslaved other Europeans and Muslims, Muslims enslaved other Arabs, Africans, and Europeans, Mongols were equal opportunity slavers, etc. That trade originated on the Barbary Coast, with Muslim slavetraders selling African slaves to Europeans from places like Tripoli, while Zanzibar served as a slavetrading hub to Arabia right through the nineteenth century.

Upon arrival in the New World, the Spanish and Portuguese quickly enslaved natives, but this soured when most of them began dropping dead of smallpox and the like. African slaves were purchased from Muslim slavetraders in North Africa initially to make up the shortfall in labor, but the Portuguese, Spaniards, and soon the English and French realized that it was much cheaper to simply sail to West Africa, and negotiate without the Muslim middleman. There was no “white sailors abducting large numbers of African warriors”… European ships merely had to show up on the coast and offer a decent price, and coastal tribes and kingdoms would sell them as many slaves as they could use. They took slaves from enemy tribes defeated in battle the same way Europeans, Muslims, Mongols, and Mesoamericans did. The sheer value of the direct trade turned it into lucrative business for a tribe… simply continually war with your neighborhors, take as many slaves as you can handle, and sell them off. In the process of this orgiastic rush for slaves, the African kingdoms essentially annihilated each other.

E1701 on June 30, 2008 at 4:46 PM collapsing of its own sheer mass into a quantum stupidality

ROFLMAO! Thanks for some of the best comments I have read in these threads. Although I wondered why you bothered.

Quantum stupidality. Hahahahahah!

Well, the religion of peace was there first and had already enslaved (with the help with dhimmi tribal leaders) these fierce fighters.

And black people become Black Muslims because of the white man’s evil God?

RoPa4life on June 30, 2008 at 5:51 PM

my, how ‘mature’ of you to comment…so let me ask you, what do you call someone who credits the muslims with inventing algebra, and for some reason, minimizes their invasion of europe, and who can’t seem to find a bad word to say about them?

what your hero described was euthenasia…killing the old and useless…DUHHHHHHHHH

Annar on June 30, 2008 at 4:55 PM

and I’ve shown you to be a consummate liar and fool

so where does that get us?

European advances in mathematics had been dormant since the death of Boethius in about 525.

given that there were not any real advances in math anyway, from the Indian algebraic system until newton and calculus…

I was just puncturing a hole in the ‘muslims invented algebra’ lie.

you sir are a liar this is what you said:

As opposed to the Dark Ages, where the average life span was so short that you were dead long before you got to be what we would consider “old”, and where those who *did* survive to become old, unless clergy or royals, would at times be driven into the forests for the wolves, or starved to death if the family couldn’t support them without starving themselves.

patricide is the killing of one’s father….I didn’t see you mention ‘father’ in this quote.

you really are confused.

right4life on June 30, 2008 at 1:54 PM

You really do have problems parsing English sentences longer than three words. I might disagree with him on some points regarding Islamic influence but L1701 has shown you to be a consummate dishonest fool.

E1701 on June 30, 2008 at 4:46 PM

I’ve proven beyond a doubt, you are a dhimmi and a fool.

looks like the truth hurts.

pompous ass

Behe’s observations are a worthwhile ad hoc criticism of evolution but he doesn’t advance a theory of his own that can be tested. If he could offer a theory of how intelligence works within biological systems to effect changes, that would be scientifically exciting.

obviously as I have shown, irreducable complexity can be tested

and what do you think evolution gives you, even if it was true??

as coyne says:

To some extent these excesses are not Mindell’s fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of `like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.

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