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Author
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Topic: The role of chance in biological evolution
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John A. Davison
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Member # 1425
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posted 29. May 2006 11:59
Zachriel
You seem to have overlooked the condition under which I presented it. There can be no experts concerning an event which has never been observed. I will stick to my statement thank you very much. That has become my signature as follows.
"A past evolution is undeniable, a present evolution undemonstrable."
John A. Davison.
On a another matter, I am happy to announce that I have been invited to rejoin EvC, on a limited basis, to discuss the Prescribed Evolutionary Hypothesis. This I intend to do.
It is unfortunate that can't also be done at ARN, Pharyngula, Panda's Thumb, FringeSciences and, most especially, Uncommon Descent where the PEH pleads loud and clear for Intelligent Design as do every one of my papers as well as the publications of my sources on which they are so firmly based.
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Sandor Szabados
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Member # 1969
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posted 29. May 2006 12:11
Bruce,
quote:
Have you gone beyond the internet to verify the truthfulness of any of the reports you publish? What have you found?
Besides the internet, here are two sources listed on my site:
Howe, L. M., Mysterious Lights and Crop Circles (New Orleans: Paper Chase Press, 2000)
Silva, F., Secrets in the Fields: The Science and Mysticism of Crop Circles (Charlotteville, VA: Hampton Road Publishing Company, Inc., 2002)
During my ongoing research I found nothing that disproves what I presented.
Sandor
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Sandor Szabados
Member
Member # 1969
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posted 29. May 2006 12:28
Dr. Davison,
quote:
I am not an expert in evolution.
Although not of the Darwinian type, PEH is about biological evolution. You write about it with the authority of someone who knows. Therefore, by definition, you are an expert in evolution, though of the 'prescribed' type.
Am I making sense?
With greatest respect,
Sandor
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Bruce Fast
Member
Member # 924
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posted 29. May 2006 13:00
John Davison, "Is it necessary to question one's credentials here at "brainstorms?"
The reason I brought up Sandor 606's credentials was not to challenge their validity, but because I found it puzzling that in the modern political climate (with professors being denied tenure austensibly because of an ID position, with people loosing their positions at journals because they publish ID papers) why a doctoral candidate would risk his candidacy by announcing an interest in study that is not main-stream science.
Sandor 606, I do find it intriguing that you would place your doctrinal candidacy on hold because the case for NDE had not been made for you. I find this to be very powerful evidence against NDE.
However, Sandor 606, I personally am not prepared to count as "truth" the stories of crop circles without a much deeper validation of the character of those publishing. Your case for non-human crop circles intrigues the death out of me. Yet I cannot help but believe that the easiest way to obtain such data is for a hoaxter or two to "manufacture" the data. Some people get deep satisfaction out of having their creative fantacies validated as truth by others.
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Zachriel
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Member # 1793
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posted 29. May 2006 13:06
John A. Davison: "You seem to have overlooked the condition under which I presented it. There can be no experts concerning an event which has never been observed."
I didn't overlook the condition. That is precisely the condition I disagreed with. It is more than possible to reach reasonable conclusions about the past based on evidence observed in the present.
We can reasonably surmise that dinosaurs once roamed the Earth. That some were very large compared to modern animals. That some ate meat and some ate plants. That they had sex and laid eggs. And some people, we call them 'experts', are more familiar with this evidence and the means of inference than others.
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John A. Davison
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Member # 1425
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posted 29. May 2006 13:29
Just what has this to do with the subject of this thread?
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Zachriel
Member
Member # 1793
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posted 29. May 2006 17:02
John A. Davison: "Just what has this to do with the subject of this thread?"
You brought up the issue, not me. You can simply tentatively withdraw the claim as irrelevant if you choose.
However, the topic "The role of chance in biological evolution" may entail aspects of the history of life; hence, the ability to make valid inferences about the past are certainly important.
--
Barrow & Tipler: "The intrinsic strengths of these controlling forces of Nature are determined by a mysterious collection of pure numbers that we call the 'constants of Nature'."
Sandor 606: "The above is the final word in physics."
Hardly the final word if the mystery is resolved, even in part. It might be possible to show that any of the mysterious collections of pure numbers can be derived from the others. As this process of generalization is part-and-parcel of the history of science, this is certainly quite plausible. Examples from physics include the Universal Theory of Gravity unifying ordinary matter and the celestial, the unification of electricity and magnetism; the unification of light and the electromagnetic force; the atom as a simplifying assumption in chemistry; quantum physics as a simplifying assumption in atomic chemistry; the electro-weak; the relationship found between space and time; the relationship between space and gravity; and so on.
Last word? Hardly.
[ 30. May 2006, 20:18: Message edited by: Zachriel ]
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Sandor Szabados
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Member # 1969
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posted 29. May 2006 18:59
Bruce
quote:
I personally am not prepared to count as "truth" the stories of crop circles without a much deeper validation of the character of those publishing.
This article was published in a peer-reviewed journal. The author is a biophysicist. Not just a story, but solid scientific evidence.
http://www.bltresearch.com/anatomical.html
Sandor
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John A. Davison
Member
Member # 1425
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posted 29. May 2006 19:21
I am impressed with Levengood's paper which is published in a journal of high repute. Just because crop circles have often been faked does not detract from the possibility that they exist naturally. Indeed that seems to be the case. Thanks Sandor for providing the reference.
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Zachriel
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Member # 1793
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posted 29. May 2006 19:36
Sandor 606: "This article was published in a peer-reviewed journal."
"The BLT Research Team Inc.'s primary focus is crop circle research"
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Sandor Szabados
Member
Member # 1969
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posted 29. May 2006 20:01
Dr. Davison,
You suggest natural causes as the origin of crop circles. The following is the opinion of another scientist who has studied them.
The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles
Scientific Research & Urban Legends
Dr. Eltjo H. Haselhoff, Ph.D.
http://www.deepeningcomplexity.com/
The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles is the first popular-scientific book about the world-wide appearance of large, geometrical patterns in farm fields and other land areas, usually referred to as 'crop circles'.
Crop circles are usually explained as the handiwork of creative pranksters. `Not true,' says Dr. Eltjo H. Haselhoff, Ph.D., former employee of Los Alamos National Laboratories. `The complexity of the crop circle phenomenon is tremendously underestimated, because its true nature is unknown to the general public.' `Obviously, there are people trying to imitate the real thing, but the suggestion that all of these crop formations are made by men with simple flattening tools is by far insufficient to explain the well-documented observations, like unambiguous and consistent biophysical anomalies in the flattened plants, inside the circles, all of which have been published in peer-reviewed scientific literature,' according to Dr. Haselhoff.
About ten thousand crop formations have been reported world wide since the late seventies, of which several hundreds throughout the USA, where the first one was reported in 1964. Along with the increasing number of crop circle events, there is also a growing number of eyewitnesses, who claim to have seen how crop circles appeared before their eyes in just a few seconds. Several of these people say that bright, fluorescent balls of light hovered above the fields at the time the circles were formed.
`Such a story sounds unbelievable, of course,' Dr. Haselhoff admits, `but after some straightforward research, it was discovered that the plant stems inside these formations had increased in diameter, as an effect of intensive heating, with an astonishing circular symmetry.'
`Moreover,' says Dr. Haselhoff, `this effect perfectly matched the radiation pattern of an electromagnetic point source at a height of four meters and ten centimeters above that field. Unbelievable as it may seem to the layman, this is solid physical evidence that these eyewitnesses speak the truth!' Dr. Haselhoff employed his analysis to other crop circles, investigated by others, and obtained identical results. However, the analysis failed dramatically on several man-made crop circles. He concluded that 'balls of light' must indeed be involved in the creation of crop circles, and submitted his findings to the international and peer-reviewed scientific journal Physiologia Plantarum, in which the article was recently published (Phys.Plant. 111 (1), pp. 124).
`This has important consequences,' says Dr. Haselhoff. `The hypothesis that these balls of light are involved in the creation of crop circles is now no longer just a hypothesis, but a scientifically accepted fact, until someone proofs the opposite. Moreover, it promotes all further discussions about this to a scientific level.' Dr. Haselhoff's findings are in perfect agreement with the opinion of the American researchers Burke, Levengood and Talbott, who suggested earlier in two other scientific articles that the plant alterations in crop circles may be described to electromagnetic effects. `Not one of these clearly anomalous plant alterations had been mentioned - much less explained - by the proponents of the vandal theory, nor can they be accounted for by the supposed methods employed to create crop formations through claims made by the self-described vandals,' according to the American researchers. 'The BLT team has been attacked by skeptics several times, but without good reason. Their conclusions are correct,' according to Dr. Haselhoff.
`I am not performing rocket-science or esoteric experiments, but trivial experimental physics,' says Dr. Haselhoff, `and the results are crystal-clear: something very strange is going on. No-one can deny this. Anyone who claims the opposite, clearly does not know what he is talking about, whereas I consider it the duty of every scientist to figure out what on earth is going on.'
[David Castelluccio, PhD]
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Sandor Szabados
Member
Member # 1969
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posted 29. May 2006 23:22
Zachariel,
quote:
It might be possible to show that any of the mysterious collections of pure numbers can be derived from the others.
Physicists consider the gravitational, Planck, speed of light, electron charge, Boltzman, neutron mass, and electron mass as irreducible constants. Ratios among these produce pure numbers. For instance: hc/e2=~137; neutron mass/electron mass =~1840
(W.H. McCrea, M.J. Rees, and S. Weinberg, "The Constants of Physics," London, The Royal Society, 1983)
Sandor
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Bruce Fast
Member
Member # 924
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posted 30. May 2006 01:20
Ok, so I am getting very intrigued now!
Sandor 606, your "depening complexity" link is broken, but "The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles" is available from amazon.com. I must buy it, and verify for myself that some of this stuff really is published in reputed journals.
Zachriel, is it your view that crop-circles are more than just "pranks"? As one who holds so clear a "party line" position re: NDE, I find such a view to be unexpected. What/who do you conjecture causes crop-circles. Do you have any reason to believe that crop-circles are not intellegently designed?
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John A. Davison
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Member # 1425
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posted 30. May 2006 07:00
I know nothing of crop circles except the fairy rings of some fungi. Nevertheless, it seems to be a valid subject for serious research. The capacity of plants to modify their immediate environment surely cannot be denied by any objective onserver.
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Sandor Szabados
Member
Member # 1969
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posted 30. May 2006 17:04
Zachriel,
quote:
"The role of change in biological evolution" may entail aspects of the history of life;
The title of the thread is "The role of 'chance' in biological evolution, not 'change'.
Sandor
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