Is abiogenesis a testable hypothesis or a conjecture?
James Goetz
evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
Al
> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
It's more an event, to which there could be conflicting hypothesees as
to the "how", can be constructed. Abiogenesis is just a description
for the transition from non-replicators to replicators. It's like
asking if blue is a theory. It isn't, but you can have a theory about
wavelengths that cause blue.
Al
R. Baldwin
news:3958302d-7f92-4d78...@d50g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
No. The occurence of abiogenesis is testable. Consider the alternatives:
1. Life began from non-life on Earth (abiogenesis).
2. Life began from non-life elsewhere and migrated to Earth (abiogenesis).
3. Life existed from the beginning of time on Earth.
4. Life existed somewhere from the beginning of time, and migrated to Earth.
There would be hypothetical empirical consequences that let us rule out any
of these alternatives, which satisfies falsifiability. Evidence about the
origin of Earth tends to rule out (3). Evidence about the origin of the
Universe tends to rule out (4). That means abiogenesis occured somewhere. We
don't have to worry ourselves about whether a deity was involved, because
that is not testable.
Free Lunch
>Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
>evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
It depends, abiogenesis is a big field. Some is supported by well
supported theories, some parts are less well supported and a few bits
are informed conjecture. You need to ask more specific questions to get
a useful answer.
Perplexed in Peoria
"James Goetz" <james...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
I suppose that depends upon what you mean by 'abiogenesis'.
The usual definition is 'the appearance of life from non-life'.
Given this definition, it is simple logic to conclude that there
are only two possibilities - either life has always existed (and
hence that the universe has always existed) or else that at some
point in time abiogenesis happened. (A third logical possibility
is that life doesn't exist yet, but we can rule that out.) We are
pretty damned sure that the universe has not always existed.
So, assuming that the universe came into existence sometime,
life must have come into existence sometime. And that is
abiogenesis.
Many people use the word 'abiogenesis' more restrictively -
they want it to mean 'life arising without a supernatural assist'.
I suppose you could consider this just a conjecture, but since
we don't usually invoke supernatural assistance in explaining
the origin of other features of the universe (such as molecules,
stars, planets, moons, rocks, raindrops, rainbows, and rivers)
it seems odd to invoke the supernatural just to explain the
origin of life.
I will admit though that we don't yet have a good theory of
non-supernatural abiogenesis, and certainly not one that
provides any testable hypotheses regarding the mechanism,
so I can live with calling it a conjecture.
Denis Loubet
"James Goetz" <james...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3958302d-7f92-4d78...@d50g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
No, abiogenesis happened, or we wouldn't be here talking about it.
HOW it happened is another matter entirely.
--
Denis Loubet
dlo...@io.com
http://www.io.com/~dloubet
http://www.ashenempires.com
AC
We may never know the precise steps that lead to life on Earth, but various
theories on abiogenesis are testable. First of all, they are testable
against the growing body of data on the conditions to be found early in
Earth's history, and they are testable just like any chemical pathway is.
--
"To every man fnording to his abilities."
Aaron Clausen mightym...@gmail.com
John Wilkins
> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
All statements in science are conjectures, no matter how well
established, liable to be overturned by new evidence or better theories
at any point.
Abiogenesis is something that calls for explanation, as all physical
phenomena do. We want to know what caused the physical process called
"life". We can test various scenarios for plausibility, and we do. In
that respect abiogenesis is no different to any other scientific field
of research.
But I get the impression that you mean the *fact* of abiogenesis is
conjectural. This can't be true because we know no life could have
existed on earth in the Hadean, and, further back, in the early moments
of the universe. So life began at some point, whether on earth or
elsewhere. It is not eternal, qua Aristotle.
The only other "explanation" is miraculous, which is no explanation at
all in science.
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."
raven1
<james...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Abiogenesis is a fact: life began to exist at some point. Whether it
occurred by divine fiat or natural processes is another matter
entirely.
---
"Faith may not move mountains, but you should see what it does to skyscrapers..."
Robert J. Kolker
> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
non-living ingredients it would prove that life could arise
sponteneously by natural processes. Of course this would not prove that
life arose on -this planet- in such a manner.
Bob Kolker
richardal...@googlemail.com
> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
It's neither.
It's a word which means life from non-living matter. God breathing
life into dust is abiogenesis.
However, that is not a scientific conclusion as it cannot be tested
using the tools of science. Scientific research into abiogenesis is
investigating several different hypotheses. These hypotheses are
testable, or they wouldn't be scientific hypotheses. In science,
"testable hypothesis" is tautological.
It isn't conjecture to say that abiogenesis has occurred because if it
hadn't we wouldn't be here asking these questions.
RF
Robert J. Kolker
> On Nov 20, 2:50 am, James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>>Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
>>evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
>
> It's neither.
> It's a word which means life from non-living matter. God breathing
> life into dust is abiogenesis.
No, that is not right. Abiogenesis means the transformation or
development , by natural process of non living matter into living
systems. Right now we don't know if this happened on this planet. It
means the emergence of life from non-life.
>
> However, that is not a scientific conclusion as it cannot be tested
> using the tools of science. Scientific research into abiogenesis is
> investigating several different hypotheses. These hypotheses are
> testable, or they wouldn't be scientific hypotheses. In science,
> "testable hypothesis" is tautological.
Not so. String Theory is not nor is it likely to be testable. The
conclusions put the testing so far beyond available technology that they
probably will never be tested.
Testability, is in part, technology dependent.
Three hundred years ago, a theory like Einstein's General Theory could
not have been tested since the technology did not exist. There was no
way to constract a controllable experiment prior to 50 years ago (or s0)
to test the Gravitational Red Shift.
>
> It isn't conjecture to say that abiogenesis has occurred because if it
> hadn't we wouldn't be here asking these questions.
That begs the question.
Bob Kolker
Desertphile
<james...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Are you claiming life does not exist? If not, then there's your
answer.
--
http://desertphile.org
Desertphile's Desert Soliloquy. WARNING: view with plenty of water
"Why aren't resurrections from the dead noteworthy?" -- Jim Rutz
James Goetz
> James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
> All statements in science are conjectures, no matter how well
> established, liable to be overturned by new evidence or better theories
> at any point.
According to who? Popper says that conjectures cannot be tested and
falsified while hypotheses can be tested and falsified.
>
> Abiogenesis is something that calls for explanation, as all physical
> phenomena do. We want to know what caused the physical process called
> "life". We can test various scenarios for plausibility, and we do. In
> that respect abiogenesis is no different to any other scientific field
> of research.
>
> But I get the impression that you mean the *fact* of abiogenesis is
> conjectural. This can't be true because we know no life could have
> existed on earth in the Hadean, and, further back, in the early moments
> of the universe. So life began at some point, whether on earth or
> elsewhere. It is not eternal, qua Aristotle.
I have no doubt that abiogenesis is a historical fact, but I do not
know what to call it. Do we say that we could falsify abiogenesis if
we found compelling evidence that biological life is eternal? And
since there is no such evidence, then abiogenesis if a firmly
established theory to the point where we call it a fact?
> The only other "explanation" is miraculous, which is no explanation at
> all in science.
Even if a miracle helped abiogenesis, then it would still be
abiogenesis. It just would not be naturalistic abiogenesis.
James Goetz
wrote:
> "James Goetz" <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
> I suppose that depends upon what you mean by 'abiogenesis'.
> The usual definition is 'the appearance of life from non-life'.
> Given this definition, it is simple logic to conclude that there
> are only two possibilities - either life has always existed (and
> hence that the universe has always existed) or else that at some
> point in time abiogenesis happened. (A third logical possibility
> is that life doesn't exist yet, but we can rule that out.) We are
> pretty damned sure that the universe has not always existed.
Does eliminating all logical possibilities make abiogenesis a testable
hypothesis?
> So, assuming that the universe came into existence sometime,
> life must have come into existence sometime. And that is
> abiogenesis.
>
> Many people use the word 'abiogenesis' more restrictively -
> they want it to mean 'life arising without a supernatural assist'.
> I suppose you could consider this just a conjecture, but since
> we don't usually invoke supernatural assistance in explaining
> the origin of other features of the universe (such as molecules,
> stars, planets, moons, rocks, raindrops, rainbows, and rivers)
> it seems odd to invoke the supernatural just to explain the
> origin of life.
I suppose. For example, I never heard of any philosophers or
theologians conjecturing about supernatural assistance in abiogenesis
without also conjecturing about supernatural assistance in the origin
of the initial conditions of the universe. That would be silly.
> I will admit though that we don't yet have a good theory of
> non-supernatural abiogenesis, and certainly not one that
> provides any testable hypotheses regarding the mechanism,
> so I can live with calling it a conjecture.
I guess that there is no way to falsify naturalistic abiogenesis, so
that must be a conjecture.
James Goetz
> On Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:50:46 -0800 (PST), James Goetz
>
> > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
> Are you claiming life does not exist? If not, then there's your
> answer.
I was not thinking about that. But now that you bring it up, how do we
know that we exist?
Frank J
> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
You seem to be confusing the fact of abiogeneis, which had to occur at
least once *by definition*, with hypotheses of how and when it
occurred. Do you agree that the evidence best shows that it occurred
only once or at most a few times, all over 3 billion years ago?
It may be that we will never know the "how" to any appreciable detail,
if that's what you mean. Even if we recreate life, the chance remains
that the process was different in the deep Precambrian. But the "when"
and "how often" is not only testble, it's pretty much settled.
James Goetz
> On Nov 19, 9:50 pm, James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
> You seem to be confusing the fact of abiogeneis, which had to occur at
> least once *by definition*, with hypotheses of how and when it
> occurred. Do you agree that the evidence best shows that it occurred
> only once or at most a few times, all over 3 billion years ago?
Yes. But does that make it a hypothesis or a well tested theory or a
conjecture or something else?
John Wilkins
> On Nov 19, 11:30 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> > James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
> >
> > All statements in science are conjectures, no matter how well
> > established, liable to be overturned by new evidence or better theories
> > at any point.
>
> According to who? Popper says that conjectures cannot be tested and
> falsified while hypotheses can be tested and falsified.
Popper's view of science is wrong. Scientists do verifying tests all the
time. Induction operates as a mode of discovery. And we classify our
results all the time - all operations Popper had no time for. In fact I
think the view of science that Popper held would lead to the immediate
cessation of all scientific research.
>
> >
> > Abiogenesis is something that calls for explanation, as all physical
> > phenomena do. We want to know what caused the physical process called
> > "life". We can test various scenarios for plausibility, and we do. In
> > that respect abiogenesis is no different to any other scientific field
> > of research.
> >
> > But I get the impression that you mean the *fact* of abiogenesis is
> > conjectural. This can't be true because we know no life could have
> > existed on earth in the Hadean, and, further back, in the early moments
> > of the universe. So life began at some point, whether on earth or
> > elsewhere. It is not eternal, qua Aristotle.
>
> I have no doubt that abiogenesis is a historical fact, but I do not
> know what to call it. Do we say that we could falsify abiogenesis if
> we found compelling evidence that biological life is eternal? And
> since there is no such evidence, then abiogenesis if a firmly
> established theory to the point where we call it a fact?
Umm... I'm not sure what you are asking. The scientific alternatives are
- life began at a point t, or life always existed. If the latter, we
have a real problem, because that makes life an inexplicable phenomenon.
The theories thereafter are about when point t was, and how it [might]
have happened.
>
> > The only other "explanation" is miraculous, which is no explanation at
> > all in science.
>
> Even if a miracle helped abiogenesis, then it would still be
> abiogenesis. It just would not be naturalistic abiogenesis.
James Goetz
> James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Nov 19, 11:30 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> > > James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > > > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
> > > All statements in science are conjectures, no matter how well
> > > established, liable to be overturned by new evidence or better theories
> > > at any point.
>
> > According to who? Popper says that conjectures cannot be tested and
> > falsified while hypotheses can be tested and falsified.
>
> Popper's view of science is wrong. Scientists do verifying tests all the
> time. Induction operates as a mode of discovery. And we classify our
> results all the time - all operations Popper had no time for. In fact I
> think the view of science that Popper held would lead to the immediate
> cessation of all scientific research.
I asked "According to who?". Do I quote you for that interpretation of
science?
Robert J. Kolker
>
>
> Popper's view of science is wrong. Scientists do verifying tests all the
> time. Induction operates as a mode of discovery. And we classify our
> results all the time - all operations Popper had no time for. In fact I
> think the view of science that Popper held would lead to the immediate
> cessation of all scientific research.
True. But induction is not a valid form of justification. All basic
assumptions have to be discovered on the basis of experience. Induction
is not a valid method of -proof-, as Hume pointed out.
Bob Kolker
Robert J. Kolker
> On Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:50:46 -0800 (PST), James Goetz
> <james...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
>>evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
>
> Are you claiming life does not exist? If not, then there's your
> answer.
But did that life originate from non living stuff are does all matter
have some kind of life?
Bob Kolker
>
>
r norman
If you want to be taken seriously in this group, you must say
"according to whoM"
catshark
<james...@yahoo.com> wrote:
Since John has a PhD in the philosophy of science, you could certainly
quote him. Others would be David Hull and Imre Lakatos and, no doubt, many
others. Even Popper himself abandoned what he later called "naive"
falsification.
--
---------------
J. Pieret
---------------
Scientists rarely refute their own pet hypotheses
. . . but that's all right. Their fellow scientists
will be happy to . . .
- David L. Hull -
John Wilkins
Why not? Popper has been challenged for ages now - the volume below is
the beginning of it. But people like Hacking, van Fraassen, Larry Laudan
and others have added to it in the decades since.
Lakatos, Imre, and Alan Musgrave, eds. 1974. Criticism and the growth of
knowledge: Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy
of Science, London 1965. corrected ed. London: Cambridge University
Press.
James Goetz
Let me see if I understand this. (I seriously want to understand the
various systems of philosophy about scientific theories and
conjectures.)
According to Popper, scientific conjectures cannot be tested or
falsified while hypotheses must be testable and likewise falsifiable.
According to others, all scientific conclusions are tentative, which
means that all scientific conclusions are conjectures. And some
conjectures are verifiable while others are not currently verifiable.
And everything that has been verified is subject to modification or
overthrow. (Is it okay to say that something is verifiable if it can
be verified, or I am jumping to conclusions about this philosophical
system?)
I guess I see little difference between falsifiability and
verifiability, apart from the opposite approach.
And I assume from what you are saying is that Popper opposed induction
and classification. Is that correct?
John Wilkins
Verifiability means basically something like this: A hypothesis or
conjecture may be held to be verified if suitable tests, which could be
expected to rule it out, instead are shown to be consistent with it.
Popper made much of a simple logical point: that we may eliminate a
generalisation but never, if the domain is unlimited, prove it; a
logical operation referred to as Modus Ponens. From this logical point,
Popper held that no hypothesis can be verified. Given that prior to him,
verification meant "establish beyond all doubt" for the positivists,
this was correct. But there is a weaker sense in which verification
*actually* occurs in science, which is what I give here.
Popper was once attacked in public by a scientist (a physicist) who said
"I have been a researcher for thirty years, and I do not work that way",
to which Popper replied "You are a very *bad* scientist". The trouble
is, almost *no* science occurs the way Popper said it did, so his theory
of science fails to include most of the explanatory domain it is
supposed to explain.
If everything in science is provisional, and it is (for we are fallible
knowers) then verification doesn't mean what the positivists Popper was
attacking meant by it.
>
> I guess I see little difference between falsifiability and
> verifiability, apart from the opposite approach.
If verification relies on considerations like "can be expected to
falsify" rather than outright claims of "is falsifiable", there is a
very great difference. The former appeals to current knowledge as a
basis for testing putative new knowledge. Popper, however, thought this
was subjectivism (it isn't), and wanted an objective criterion. The
difficulty is that even Popper's own view of falsification fails that
test, because we are never sure what failed in a case of apparent
falsification - the hypothesis under test, or some ancillary hypothesis
(say, about how equipment works, or some other theory not being tested),
and so at best we can falsify some conjunction of hypotheses without
knowing which one was actually wrong. This completely undercuts Popper's
claim to objectivity, leaving a Bayesian approach the sole contender.
>
> And I assume from what you are saying is that Popper opposed induction
> and classification. Is that correct?
Yes. In both cases he thought they were unnecessary to science.
tgde...@earthlink.net
> On Nov 20, 6:41 pm, Frank J <f...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > On Nov 19, 9:50 pm, James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
> > You seem to be confusing the fact of abiogeneis, which had to occur at
> > least once *by definition*, with hypotheses of how and when it
> > occurred. Do you agree that the evidence best shows that it occurred
> > only once or at most a few times, all over 3 billion years ago?
>
> Yes. But does that make it a hypothesis or a well tested theory or a
> conjecture or something else?
Something else.
Unless you express what you mean by abiogenesis, it is unreasonable to
expect others to classify the word itself. The *way* something
(hypothesis, conjecture, whatever) is stated would affect the category
to which it is assigned.
-tg
Martin
Nick Keighley
life is an arrangment of mass/energy.
Did crystals originate from non-crystilline stuff are does all matter
have some kind of inner cystal?
Does a proton have an inner uranium atom?
--
Nick Keighley
James Goetz
> James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Nov 20, 8:40 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> > > James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > On Nov 20, 7:10 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> > > > > James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > > > On Nov 19, 11:30 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> > > > > > > James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
I lost you on the quotes below. Could you paraphrase them?
"If verification relies on considerations like "can be expected to
falsify" rather than outright claims of "is falsifiable", there is a
very great difference. The former appeals to current knowledge as a
basis for testing putative new knowledge. Popper, however, thought
this
was subjectivism (it isn't), and wanted an objective criterion."
"leaving a Bayesian approach the sole contender."
snip
Frank J
> On Nov 20, 6:41 pm, Frank J <f...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > On Nov 19, 9:50 pm, James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
> > You seem to be confusing the fact of abiogeneis, which had to occur at
> > least once *by definition*, with hypotheses of how and when it
> > occurred. Do you agree that the evidence best shows that it occurred
> > only once or at most a few times, all over 3 billion years ago?
>
> Yes. But does that make it a hypothesis or a well tested theory or a
> conjecture or something else?
If you mean the statement "abiogenesis occurred only once or at most a
few times, all over 3 billion years ago", without regard to mechanism,
I would call it a "conclusion", or a "well confirmed hypothesis." I'm
not sure that "theory" would apply, since it seems much narrower in
scope than, say, biological evolution.
In contrast, I would call the statement "abiogenesis first occurred
only a few thousand years ago, and occurred many times, producing many
biologically separate lineages" a completely unsupported hypothesis.
Which is why most of those who want their audience to infer that would
not dare phrase it in such descriptive terms.
>
>
>
> > It may be that we will never know the "how" to any appreciable detail,
> > if that's what you mean. Even if we recreate life, the chance remains
> > that the process was different in the deep Precambrian. But the "when"
> > and "how often" is not only testble, it's pretty much settled.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
John Wilkins
> On Nov 20, 10:58 pm, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
> > James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
...
> > > I guess I see little difference between falsifiability and
> > > verifiability, apart from the opposite approach.
> >
> > If verification relies on considerations like "can be expected to
> > falsify" rather than outright claims of "is falsifiable", there is a
> > very great difference. The former appeals to current knowledge as a
> > basis for testing putative new knowledge. Popper, however, thought this
> > was subjectivism (it isn't), and wanted an objective criterion. The
> > difficulty is that even Popper's own view of falsification fails that
> > test, because we are never sure what failed in a case of apparent
> > falsification - the hypothesis under test, or some ancillary hypothesis
> > (say, about how equipment works, or some other theory not being tested),
> > and so at best we can falsify some conjunction of hypotheses without
> > knowing which one was actually wrong. This completely undercuts Popper's
> > claim to objectivity, leaving a Bayesian approach the sole contender.
>
> I lost you on the quotes below. Could you paraphrase them?
>
> "If verification relies on considerations like "can be expected to
> falsify" rather than outright claims of "is falsifiable", there is a
> very great difference. The former appeals to current knowledge as a
> basis for testing putative new knowledge. Popper, however, thought
> this
> was subjectivism (it isn't), and wanted an objective criterion."
>
> "leaving a Bayesian approach the sole contender."
>
> snip
OK. Try this:
Anytime a hypothesis is tested relying on items of knowledge already
held by the researcher or the discipline, the test is what Popper would
have called "subjective". But all testing, negative or positive, relies
on this. Hence testing in science must be different to what Popper
thought we could do in science.
Since prior knowledge is required to test a hypothesis (for example, by
narrowing down the expectations to a manageable set, or to a restricted
domain), this effectively means that we are in the position of
Bayesians, who use prior expectations to adjudge the success or failure
of an inference.
backspace
wrote:
> That means abiogenesis occured somewhere. We don't have to worry ourselves about whether a deity > was involved, because that is not testable.
You are committing the fallacy of Retrospective Specification. Your
sample space consists of only two points: Either we are here or we are
not. The fallacy was discussed here
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/a15f99d82bf80359/bfe92b62a995f259#bfe92b62a995f259
Black Mischief, David Berlinski, p.294
I have spoken ...now of a specific protein. If any protein will do,
the odds improve. In a uniform
probability space , it is certain that one among the possible events
will occur. The British biologist Peter Medawar has seized upon this
point...and went in the wrong direction with it.
<quoting medaware>
In the games of whist or bridge any one particular hand is just as
unlikely to turn up as any other. If I pick up and inspect a certain
hand and then declare myself utterly amazed that such a hand should
have been dealt to me , considering the odds against it, I should be
told by those who have steeped themselves in mathmatical reasoning
that its prob. cannot be measured retrospectively, but only against a
prior expectation. For much the
same reason it seems to me profitless to speak of natural selection's
'generating improbability"...it is silly to be thunderstruck by the
evolution of organ A if we should have been just as thunderstruck by a
turn of events that had led to the evolution of B or C instead.
<End quoting medaware>
Berlinski says:"... Medawar is roughly right about probability. The
fallacy he refers to is retrospective specification and consists
precisely in reading back into an original sample space information
revealed only on the realization of the actual event. In poker , a
deal distributes n hands of equal probability: 1 in 2598160 as it
happens. This sample space is specified retrospectively if one hand in
particular is contrasted with 2598159 hands that remain; and
probabilities assigned to the partition so created. What appears
initially as one among equiprobable events becomes under RS an
improbable event in a sample space of only two points. It is
embarrassing for an author to point out such things...."
backspace
> "James Goetz" <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>
> news:3958302d-7f92-4d78...@d50g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
>
> > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
>
> HOW it happened is another matter entirely.
Which again as in my reply to R.Baldwin post.3 is the fallacy of
Retrospective Specification.
Your sample space is based on only two points: Either we are here or
not.
backspace
> The only other "explanation" is miraculous, which is no explanation at
> all in science.
Which is the fallacy of Appeal to Abstract Authority as discussed
here:
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/d0df9646a72d1178/af25af533043fc4c#af25af533043fc4c
richardal...@googlemail.com
> On Nov 20, 5:10 am, "R. Baldwin" <res0k...@nozirevBACKWARDS.net>
> wrote:
>
> > That means abiogenesis occured somewhere. We don't have to worry ourselves about whether a deity > was involved, because that is not testable.
>
> You are committing the fallacy of Retrospective Specification.
...and you are committing the fallacy of talking bullshit about
matters you refuse even to try to understand.
Go away and get and education.
RF
<snipped>
Denis Loubet
"backspace" <sawirel...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:df760bd2-dadc-45de...@l1g2000hsa.googlegroups.com...
Are you suggesting we might be 50% here? Or maybe 60% here and 40% not here?
You're not making any sense.
--
Denis Loubet
dlo...@io.com
http://www.io.com/~dloubet
http://www.ashenempires.com
backspace
> >> > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> >> > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
> >> No, abiogenesis happened, or we wouldn't be here talking about it.
>
> >> HOW it happened is another matter entirely.
>
> > Which again as in my reply to R.Baldwin post.3 is the fallacy of
> > Retrospective Specification.
> > Your sample space is based on only two points: Either we are here or
> > not.
>
> Are you suggesting we might be 50% here? Or maybe 60% here and 40% not here?
>
> You're not making any sense.
>
> --
> Denis Loubet
Materialists have a priori predetermined the form any answer must
take: Matter created language. They are assuming that life on earth is
but one of many possibilities, infinite in fact. But then they say
because we are here we are simply here and the other alternative - our
non-existence didn't happen. What they have done is reduce the sample
space down from infinite possibilities to only one of two
possibilities: Either there is life or there is just dead matter. This
is a fallacy because they have after the event retrospectively
specified the outcome only at the realization of the actual event
namely life. And this retrospective specification has been done on a
sample space of two points: Life or non-life and not infinite other
possibilities.
Since the working assumption is that matter create language; when
Dr.Wilkins says that "..The only other "explanation" is miraculous,
which is no explanation at all in science..." he is trying to say
that all other explanations assume that Language created matter which
is to paraphrase him "not science". And who could after all refute the
all knowing all powerful abstract authority Mr.Science? He is
equivocating the undefined word "science" with his metaphysical belief
that matter created language. Faith is defined as the evidence for
things not seen. By his faith he believes that matter created
language. This is a faith based position he has no evidence for this
other than his faith. To insulate his religious belief he commits the
fallacy of appeal to abstract authority - Mr.Science.
backspace
> On Nov 20, 2:50 am, James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>
> It's a word which means life from non-living matter. God breathing
> life into dust is abiogenesis.
>
> However, that is not a scientific conclusion as it cannot be tested
> using the tools of science. Scientific research into abiogenesis is
> investigating several different hypotheses. These hypotheses are
> testable, or they wouldn't be scientific hypotheses. In science,
> "testable hypothesis" is tautological.
>
> It isn't conjecture to say that abiogenesis has occurred because if it
> hadn't we wouldn't be here asking these questions.
>
> RF
Which Richard again is just Retrospective specification on a sample
space of two points: Life or non-life. You think your answer is
brilliant but would you think
that somebody who triumphantly declares: "Look everybody I got the
tails end of the coin and not the heads end after flipping it just
once!" is a genius?
backspace
> In contrast, I would call the statement "abiogenesis first occurred
> only a few thousand years ago, and occurred many times, producing many
> biologically separate lineages" a completely unsupported hypothesis.
> Which is why most of those who want their audience to infer that would
> not dare phrase it in such descriptive terms.
But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
assumed that there was only one
abiogenesis event and thus one common ancestor? I think one reason is
to keep the weasel term "common ancestor" in the lexicon. Dawkins for
example told an australian YEC group that everybody is "confused", we
didn't come from a fish but from a common ancestor between a fish and
something else or something to that effect. It was the video where he
couldn't answer some question, froze up and then gave a completely
irrelevant answer. It was the irrelevant answer that everybody is
ignoring, there is some great insights into his thinking with that non-
answer especially if you read the thread about the common ancestor and
reflect his answer in the light of this thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/3b7d9b411887c7b5/f20412f90f39e7f7#f20412f90f39e7f7
backspace
> only a few thousand years ago, and occurred many times, producing many
> biologically separate lineages" a completely unsupported hypothesis.
> Which is why most of those who want their audience to infer that would
> not dare phrase it in such descriptive terms.
But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
wf3h
> On Nov 20, 5:10 am, "R. Baldwin" <res0k...@nozirevBACKWARDS.net>
> wrote:
>
> > That means abiogenesis occured somewhere. We don't have to worry ourselves about whether a deity > was involved, because that is not testable.
>
> You are committing the fallacy of Retrospective Specification. Your
> sample space consists of only two points: Either we are here or we are
>
seems backspace has committed a category error: confusing a random
event (hand dealt in a card game) with a non random event (events in
nature based on the laws of chemistry)
since creationists believe in magic, it's certainly no wonder they
don't accept the existence of the laws of nature
what's amazing is they think the non existence of natural laws proves
that an orderly, law giving god exists.
they're unable to comprehend they've argued themselves into a
contradiction.
wf3h
>
>
> Materialists have a priori predetermined the form any answer must
> take: Matter created language.
no one knows what a 'materialist' is in backspace's peculiar
vernacular. the creationist who obsesses over other's language is
chronically unable to define his own terms.
is a materialist a scientist? a christian who thinks there are rules
and laws of nature?
They are assuming that life on earth is
> but one of many possibilities, infinite in fact. But then they say
> because we are here we are simply here and the other alternative - our
> non-existence didn't happen. What they have done is reduce the sample
> space down from infinite possibilities to only one of two
> possibilities: Either there is life or there is just dead matter. This
> is a fallacy because they have after the event retrospectively
> specified the outcome only at the realization of the actual event
> namely life. And this retrospective specification has been done on a
> sample space of two points: Life or non-life and not infinite other
> possibilities.
whatever this means. categories are made to provide definitions.
whether or not those definitions are valid can be discussed. but the
mere existence of 2 categories does not mean those categories are
invalid.
another fallacy from the taliban christian mindset.
>
> Since the working assumption is that matter create language
since matter precedes language, such a conclusion is logical.
; when
> Dr.Wilkins says that "..The only other "explanation" is miraculous,
> which is no explanation at all in science..." he is trying to say
> that all other explanations assume that Language created matter which
> is to paraphrase him "not science". And who could after all refute the
> all knowing all powerful abstract authority Mr.Science?
since he did not personalize science, your effort to put words in his
mouth are noted...
He is
> equivocating the undefined word "science"
no one thinks 'science' is undefined.
words that ARE undefined include:
-god
-'bible'
-literalness
-truth
-religion
you might start there if you're confused. scientists have a pretty
good idea of what constitutes science. no religious person can define
'god' in such a way that the idea is meaningful to those outside the
community of believers.
with his metaphysical belief
> that matter created language. Faith is defined as the evidence for
> things not seen. By his faith he believes that matter created
> language. This is a faith based position he has no evidence for this
> other than his faith. To insulate his religious belief he commits the
> fallacy of appeal to abstract authority - Mr.Science.- Hide quoted text -
>
since matter precedes language, and since language is a creation of
brains...brains being material....language is a creation of matter.
wf3h
>>
> But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
> assumed that there was only one
> abiogenesis event and thus one common ancestor? I think one reason is
> to keep the weasel term "common ancestor" in the lexicon. Dawkins for
> example told an australian YEC group that everybody is "confused", we
> didn't come from a fish but from a common ancestor between a fish and
> something else or something to that effect. It was the video where he
> couldn't answer some question, froze up and then gave a completely
> irrelevant answer. It was the irrelevant answer that everybody is
> ignoring, there is some great insights into his thinking with that non-
> answer especially if you read the thread about the common ancestor and
i wonder if it's ever occurred to creationists in general..and to
backspace in particular...that, unlike creationists, scientists don't
base their conclusions on appeals to authority.
if dawkins got something wrong then he got something wrong. evolution
does not hinge on dawkins.
if the BIBLE gets something wrong (and it has), then it, by
definition, it is not divine.
backspace seems to have confused the bible with dawkins.
neat trick!!
backspace
> On Nov 22, 7:36 am, backspace <sawireless2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
> > assumed that there was only one
> > abiogenesis event and thus one common ancestor? I think one reason is
> > to keep the weasel term "common ancestor" in the lexicon. Dawkins for
> > example told an australian YEC group that everybody is "confused", we
> > didn't come from a fish but from a common ancestor between a fish and
> > something else or something to that effect. It was the video where he
> > couldn't answer some question, froze up and then gave a completely
> > irrelevant answer. It was the irrelevant answer that everybody is
> > ignoring, there is some great insights into his thinking with that non-
> > answer especially if you read the thread about the common ancestor and
> > reflect his answer in the light of this thread:http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/3b7d9b4...
> if dawkins got something wrong then he got something wrong. evolution
> does not hinge on dawkins.
wf3h do you know where this "common ancestor" nonsense came from? It
was the result of Bishop Wilberforce's - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Wilberforce
- criticism of Darwin. He used his rhetorical powers to mock and make
fun of stupid people believing they came from monkeys that showed
their willies for all the other monkey babes. The language terrorists
realized this and thus concocted their "common ancestor" weasel term.
mcv
>
> It isn't conjecture to say that abiogenesis has occurred because if it
> hadn't we wouldn't be here asking these questions.
Not quite. It's imaginable that life has always existed. Ofcourse for
that to be true, the universe has to have always existence, and there's
good evidence against that, but there was a time when a steady-state
universe was taken for granted.
mcv.
--
Science is not the be-all and end-all of human existence. It's a tool.
A very powerful tool, but not the only tool. And if only that which
could be verified scientifically was considered real, then nearly all
of human experience would be not-real. -- Zachriel
wf3h
> On Nov 22, 4:24 pm, wf3h <w...@vsswireless.net> wrote:
>
>
>
> > > if dawkins got something wrong then he got something wrong. evolution
> > does not hinge on dawkins.
>
> wf3h do you know where this "common ancestor" nonsense came from? It
> - criticism of Darwin. He used his rhetorical powers to mock and make
> fun of stupid people believing they came from monkeys that showed
> their willies for all the other monkey babes. The language terrorists
>
> - Show quoted text -
which, of course, has nothing to do with the questions i've asked, the
issues i've addressed, or backspace's consistent double standard which
he applies to religion and science.
his view is that all of science is meaningless...including the very
science on which his computer is based to tell us science is wrong.
his view is that religion is the ONLY meaningful concept, in spite of
the fact his only definition of 'god' is 'what the bible says god
is'...
evolution is a fact. backspace, due to his limited ability to
understand language, science, or religion, continues to play games
which destroy his religion, then insists religion is the only
meaningful concept.
his 'insistence' is actually special pleading, trying to get for
religion what he's unable to achieve by logic
and that is the case with all of religion. it's why religion is a
failure in general at explaining anything, and why it fails in
particular at explaining nature.
LT
>
> - Show quoted text -
<with a frustrated frown, LT watches backspace ride off into the
sunset on his majestic horse named Tangent>
wf3h
>
> - Show quoted text -
if only he'd used the whole horse....
Mujin
news:d8ee4180-21ce-42ff...@g21g2000hsh.googlegroups.com:
I only see two possibilities: either there is life in the universe, or
there is no life in the universe.
By all means name a third possibility.
richardal...@googlemail.com
Saying that the fact that we are here shows that abiogenesis happened
is simply saying that the fact that we are here shows that abiogenesis
happened. It's not "retrospective specification", or any other semi-
digested mush of word-salad you chose to throw at it.
It's like throwing heads and saying that the coin is showing heads.
To use an technical term (and I'm sorry to be using such high-powered
technical terms), it's "stating the bleedin' obvious".
If you won't get an education, at least get a life.
RF
J. J. Lodder
Jan
backspace
> > Which Richard again is just Retrospective specification on a sample
> > space of two points: Life or non-life. You think your answer is
> > brilliant but would you think
> > that somebody who triumphantly declares: "Look everybody I got the
> > tails end of the coin and not the heads end after flipping it just
> > once!" is a genius?
> Saying that the fact that we are here shows that abiogenesis happened
> is simply saying that the fact that we are here shows that abiogenesis
> happened. It's not "retrospective specification", or any other semi-
> digested mush of word-salad you chose to throw at it.
Or in other words what will be will be. The original question is how
did life simply arose what is the probability of this happening. What
is the chance that a few happy molecules out of trillions could come
together in a point of space and time and form "life". The assumption
is that there was a point in time where there was no life. Thus the
sample space is the space of all molecules and its possible
combinations before life began, then by deception and slight of hand
the question is redefined mid sentence so that it becomes: Either life
happens or it didn't happen, which is irrelevant to the original
question. Remember what is the assumption that there was no life and
that molecules then
simply had to come together to form life - what is this probability.
Don't confuse the issues like
with common ancestor between man and ape/monkey/flea-scratching-
baboon.
Retrospectively after the event we now realize that obviously we
either have life or non-life. The mistake you are making is
extrapolating from the sample apace of two points , life or non-life
to the sample space of trillions of molecules before the time that
life started. This in itself is a logical fallacy something akin to
moving the goal posts or redefining the original question mid
sentence, I have just forgotten the formal name for this fallacy. Thus
we have three logical fallacies being committed in this thread and
Dr.Wilkins obviously knows this.
backspace
easy it is to fool yourself.
Many creationists and evolutionists use stock market technical
analysis to guess the markets. They are
deceiving themselves of course. Discussing the origin of life and
probabilities means we have ventured
into the field of statistical analysis with all its biases and logical
fallacies. In stock market punting the following are made
1) forward looking bias
2) survivalist bias
3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-snooping_bias
I would urge you not to gamble with your soul when doing statistical
analysis of the probability of life coming from non-life. Make certain
that you are not committing a logical fallacy such as thousands of
people do daily stuck to their monitors tracking the markets actually
thinking they know what will happen next and are just deceiving
themselves.
Shane
> On Nov 22, 9:57 pm, richardalanforr...@googlemail.com wrote:
>>> Which Richard again is just Retrospective specification on a sample
>>> space of two points: Life or non-life. You think your answer is
>>> brilliant but would you think
>>> that somebody who triumphantly declares: "Look everybody I got the
>>> tails end of the coin and not the heads end after flipping it just
>>> once!" is a genius?
>
>> Saying that the fact that we are here shows that abiogenesis happened
>> is simply saying that the fact that we are here shows that abiogenesis
>> happened. It's not "retrospective specification", or any other semi-
>> digested mush of word-salad you chose to throw at it.
>
> Or in other words what will be will be. The original question is how
> did life simply arose
No-one knows for sure, none of us were there. But the same is true of
the birth of my great granparents, and just because no-one alive today
was there does not mean I automatically assume that the manner of
their birth is unknown or unknowable, or should be ascribed to some
supernatural entity.
> what is the probability of this happening.
Before the event, who knows, depends on how many variables. You supply
me with the variables and I will give you the number. After the event
the probability is 1.
HTH
> What
> is the chance that a few happy molecules out of trillions could come
> together in a point of space and time and form "life".
What is the chance that with a well shuffled deck of cards you will
draw the cards out in the order you do so? (52!:1 in case you were
wondering). Yet each and every time a deck is dealt out odds of 52!:1
are realised. Go figure.
Now try it with 10 decks and the odds are now 520!:1, and yet we can
still realise those odds merely by laying the cards out. Try it with a
hundred decks, a thousand, a million, a million million, and no matter
how high the odds stack up, you can still simply lay out a sequence
that is untold quadrillions:1 against. Gee aint it amazing that these
highly improbable events are so easily realised.
However, all that aside, ISTM, that you are assuming a sample space of
trillions of molecules, but you have not demonstrated the validity of
that position. In the conditions that existed at the time, life may be
inevitable and until we can find another example of those conditions
we simply do not have enough data to say anything about the
inevitability or otherrwise of life. This then provides no comfort for
any side of the abiogenesis debate, save to say tha no-one can make
dogmatic statements about it (with the exception that life is now
here, where once it wasn't), and that includes your idea about the
size of the sample space.
[...]
Shane
Indeed that is good advice, as many things happen against the odds. I
am so glad that you are not proposing a "the odds are high so it
couldn't happen" argument.
snowbird...@gmail.com
>
> Or in other words what will be will be. The original question is how
> did life simply arose what is the probability of this happening. What
> is the chance that a few happy molecules out of trillions could come
> together in a point of space and time and form "life".
the probability is the same as for any other chemical reaction: pretty
damned good. it's not 'chance' as the creationists would have it; it's
the laws of chemistry. of course, creationists think that there are no
natural laws, and that this fact alone proves god created an orderly
universe
go figure
>
backspace
> On Nov 22, 6:36 pm, backspace <sawireless2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Or in other words what will be will be. The original question is how
> > did life simply arose what is the probability of this happening. What
> > is the chance that a few happy molecules out of trillions could come
> > together in a point of space and time and form "life".
>
> the probability is the same as for any other chemical reaction: pretty
> damned good. it's not 'chance' as the creationists would have it; it's
> the laws of chemistry. of course,
Which is yet another variant of appeal to abstract authority. There is
no such thing as a law of chemistry. There are observations of what
happens when chemicals are mixed and we assume that 5sec from now the
same reaction will take place if done by somebody else. But as
Prof.Herrmann has pointed out with his Ultra-logics we can't
extrapolate orm what we observe today into the distant past and
distant future. How for example did those enormous dinosaur birds even
manage to fly, in our gravity field their wings would snap even if
made out of titanium. It suggests that before the flood the gravity
constant differs from what it is today.
* http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/sauropods/biganims.html
Megafauna and the attenuated gravity of the antique system.
Copyright Ted Holden It is a fairly easy demonstration that nothing
any larger than the largest elephants could live in our world today,
and that the largest dinosaurs survived ONLY because the nature of the
world and of the solar system was then such that they did not
experience gravity as we do at all; they'd be crushed by their own
weight, collapse in a heap, and suffocate within minutes were they to.
A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we know them today requires that we
relegate the brontosaur, once thought to be one of the largest
sauropods, to welterweight or at most middleweight status. Fossil
finds dating from the 1970's dwarf him. The Avon field Guide to
Dinosaurs shows a brachiosaur (larger than a brontosaur), a supersaur,
and an ultrasaur juxtaposed, and the ultrasaur dwarfs the others.
Christopher McGowan's "DINOSAURS, SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS", Harvard,
1991 cites a 180 ton weight estimate for the ultrasaur (page 118), and
(page 104) describes the volume-based methods of estimating dinosaur
weights. McGowan is Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal
Ontario Museum.
This same look requires that dinosaur lifting requirements be compared
to human lifting capabilities. One objection which might be raised to
this would be that animal muscle tissue was somehow "better" than that
of humans. This, however, is known not to be the case; for instance,
from Knut Nielson's, "Scaling, Why is Animal size So Important",
Cambridge Univ Press, 1984, page 163, we have:
"It appears that the maximum force or stress that can be exerted
by any muscle is inherent in the structure of the muscle filaments.
The maximum force is roughly 4 to 4 kgf/cm2 cross section of muscle
(300 - 400 kN/m2). This force is body-size independent and is the same
for mouse and elephant muscle. The reason for this uniformity is that
the dimensions of the thick and thin muscle filaments, and also the
number of cross-bridges between them are the same. In fact the
structure of mouse muscle and elephant muscle is so similar that a
microscopist would have difficulty identifying them except for a
larger number of mitrochondria in the smaller animal. This uniformity
in maximum force holds not only for higher vertebrates, but for many
other organisms, including at least some, but not all invertebrates."
Another objection might be that sauropods were aquatic creatures.
Nobody believes that anymore; they had no adaptation for aquatic life,
their teeth show wear and tear which does not come from eating soft
aquatic vegetation, and trackways show them walking on land with no
difficulty.
A final objection would be that dinosaurs were somehow more
"efficient" than top human athletes, or had better "leverage".
Superposed images of sauropods and powerlifters at roughly equal-
weight sizes show the sauropod's legs to be puny compared to the human
athletes', as one would expect, since the sauropod's body was mostly
digestive system, the humans's mostly muscle. The better-leverage
argument would require the sauropod to be a spectacularly knob-kneed
sort of a creature whose knees and other joints were wider than those
of the human athletes, even though the rest of their legs were spindly
by contrast with the humans. A quick look at the pictures dispels
this.
By "scaled lift", I mean of course a lift record divided by the two-
thirds power of the athlete's body weight. As creatures get larger,
weight, which is proportional to volume, goes up in proportion to the
cube of the increase in dimension. Strength, on the other hand, is
known to be roughly proportional to cross section of muscle for any
particular limb, and goes up in proportion to the square of the
increase in dimension. This is the familiar "square-cube" problem. The
normal inverse operator for this is to simply divide by 2/3 power of
body weight, and this is indeed the normal scaling factor for all
weight lifting events, i.e. it lets us tell if a 200 lb. athlete has
actually done a "better" lift than the champion of the 180 lb. group.
For athletes roughly between 160 and 220 lbs, i.e. whose bodies are
fairly similar, these scaled lift numbers line up very nicely. It is
then fairly easily seen that a lift for a scaled up version of one
particular athlete can be computed via this formula, since the
similarity will be perfect, scaling being the only difference.
Consider the case of Bill Kazmaier, the king of the power lifters in
the seventies and eighties. Power lifters are, in the author's
estimation, the strongest of all athletes; they concentrate on the
three most difficult total-body lifts, i.e. benchpress, squat, and
dead-lift. They work out many hours a day and, it is fairly common
knowledge, use food to flavor their anabolic steroids with. No animal
the same weight as one of these men could be presumed to be as strong.
Kazmaier was able to do squats and dead lifts with weights between
1000 and 1100 lb. on a bar, assuming he was fully warmed up.
Standing Up at 70,000 lb.
Any animal has to be able to lift its own weight off the ground, i.e.
stand up, with no more difficulty than Kazmaier experiences doing a
1000 lb. squat. Consider, however, what would happen to Mr. Kazmaier,
were he to be scaled up to 70,000 lb., the weight commonly given for
the brontosaur. Kazmaier's maximum effort at standing, fully warmed
up, assuming the 1000 lb. squat, was 1340 lb. (1000 for the bar and
340 for himself). The scaled maximum lift would be a solution to:
1340/340^.667 = x/70,000^667 or 47,558 lb..
He'd not be able to lift his weight off the ground!
A sauropod dinosaur had four legs you might say; what happens if Mr.
Kazmaier uses arms AND legs at 70,000 lb.. The truth is that the squat
uses almost every muscle in the athlete's body very nearly to the
limits, but in this case, it doesn't even matter. A near maximum
benchpress effort for Mr. Kazmaier would fall around 600 lb.. This
merely changes the 1340 to 1940 in the equation above, and the answer
comes out as 68,853. Even using all muscles, some more than once, the
strongest man who we know anything about would not be able to lift his
own weight off the ground at 70,000 lb.!
Moreover, Kazmaier is using glutteal and lower back muscles in the
squat, and pectorals in the benchpress, i.e. extra muscle groups which
the sauropod he is being compared to would not be assisted by in
standing. Any tiny advantage in leverage which a sauropod might have
over the human lifter for any reason, would be overwhelmed by the huge
edge in available musculature and the usage of the extra muscle groups
on the part of the human in the comparison.
To believe then, that a brontosaur could stand at 70,000 lb., one has
to believe that a creature whose weight was largely gut and the vast
digestive mechanism involved in processing huge amounts of low-value
foodstuffs, was somehow stronger than a creature its size which was
almost entirely muscle, and that far better trained and conditioned
than would ever be found amongst grazing animals. That is not only
ludicrous in the case of the brontosaur, but the calculations only get
worse when you begin trying to scale upwards to the supersaur and
ultrasaur at their sizes.
How heavy can an animal still get to be in our world, then? How heavy
would Mr. Kazmaier be at the point at which the square-cube problem
made it as difficult for him just to stand up as it is for him to do
1000 lb. squats at his present size of 340 lb.? The answer is simply
the solution to:
1340/340^.667 = x/x^.667
or just under 21,000 lb.. In reality, elephants do not appear to get
quite to that point. McGowan (DINOSAURS, SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS, p.
97) claims that a Toronto Zoo specimen was the largest in North
America at 14,300 lb., and Smithsonian personnel once informed the
author that the gigantic bush elephant specimen which appears at their
Museum of Natural History weighed around 8 tons.
Again, in all cases, we are comparing the absolute max effort for a
human weight lifter to lift and hold something for two seconds versus
the sauropod's requirement to move around and walk all day long with
scaled weight greater than these weights involved in the maximum, one-
shot, two-second effort. That just can't happen.
Sauropod Dinosaurs' Necks
A second category of evidence for attenuated felt effect of gravity in
antediluvian times arises from the study of sauropod dinosaurs' necks.
Scientists who study sauropod dinosaurs are now claiming that they
held their heads low, because they could not have gotten blood to
their brains had they held them high. McGowan (again, DINOSAURS,
SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS) goes into this in detail (pages 101 - 120).
He mentions the fact that a giraffe's blood pressure, at 200 - 300 mm
Hg, far higher than that of any other animal, would probably rupture
the vascular system of any other animal, and is maintained by thick
arterial walls and by a very tight skin which apparently acts like a
jet pilot's pressure suit. A giraffe's head might reach to 20'. How a
sauropod might have gotten blood to its brain at 50' or 60' is the
real question.
Two articles which mention this problem appeared in the 12/91 issue of
Natural History. In "Sauropods and Gravity", Harvey B. Lillywhite of
Univ. Fla., Gainesville, notes:
"...in a Barosaurus with its head held high, the heart had to work
against a gravitational pressure of about 590 mm of mercury (Hg). In
order for the heart to eject blood into the arteries of the neck, its
pressure must exceed that of the blood pushing against the opposite
side of the outflow valve. Moreover, some additional pressure would
have been needed to overcome the resistance of smaller vessels within
the head for blood flow to meet the requirements for brain and facial
tissues. Therefore, hearts of Barosaurus must have generated pressures
at least six times greater than those of humans and three to four
times greater than those of giraffes."
In the same issue of Natural History, Peter Dodson ("Lifestyles of the
Huge and Famous"), mentions that:
"Brachiosaurus was built like a giraffe and may have fed like one.
But most sauropods were built quite differently. At the base of the
neck, a sauropod's vertebral spines unlike those of a giraffe, were
weak and low and did not provide leverage for the muscles required to
elevate the head in a high position. Furthermore, the blood pressure
required to pump blood up to the brain, thirty or more feet in the
air, would have placed extraordinary demands on the heart (see
opposite page) [Lillywhite's article] and would seemingly have placed
the animal at severe risk of a stroke, an aneurysm, or some other
circulatory disaster. If sauropods fed with the neck extended just a
little above heart level, say from ground level up to fifteen feet,
the blood pressure required would have been far more reasonable."
Dodson is neglecting what appears to be a dilemma in the case of the
brachiosaur, but there are at least two far greater dilemmas here. One
is that the good leaves were, in all likelihood, above the 20' mark;
holding his head out at 20', an ultrasaur would, in all likelihood,
starve.
Moreover, it turns out that a problem every bit as bad or worse than
the blood pressure problem would arise, perceived gravity being what
it is now, were sauropods to hold their heads out just above
horizontally as Dodson and others are suggesting. Try holding your arm
out horizontally for more than a minute or two, and then imagine your
arm being 40' long and 30,000 lb......
An ultrasaur or seismosaur with a neck 40' - 60' long and weighing
25000 - 40000 lb., would be looking at 400,000 to nearly a million
foot pounds of torque were one of them to try to hold his neck out
horizontally. That's crazy. You don't hang a 30,000 lb load 40' off
into space even if it is made out of wood and structural materials,
much less flesh and blood. No building inspector in America could be
bribed sufficiently to let you build such a thing.
In fact, a cursory look at an elephant's skeleton reveals a structural
system much like Roman archicture with one and only one purpose in
mind, i.e. bearing the elephant's great weight. The legs are columns
and the spine is a Roman arch. A sauropod's neck, however,
particularly in the case of the recent ultrasaur and seismosaur finds,
weighed several times the weight of a large elephant and, if held
outwards horizontally, would actually arch downwards (the wrong way).
Reconstructions actually depict them like that, no thought whatever
having been taken as to the consequences, either by the scientists or
the artists involved.
And so, sauropods (in our gravity) couldn't hold their heads up, and
they couldn't hold them out either. That doesn't leave much.
Antediluvian Flying Creatures
A third category of evidence for attenuated felt effect of gravity in
antediluvian times arises from studies of creatures which flew in
those times, and of creatures which fly now.
In the antediluvian world, 350 lb flying creatures soared in skies
which no longer permit flying creatures above 30 lb. or so. Modern
birds of prey (the Argentinean teratorn) weighing 170 -200 lb. with
wingspans of 30' also flew; within recorded history, central Asians
have been trying to breed hunting eagles for size and strength, and
have not gotten them beyond 25 lb. or thereabouts. At that point they
are able to take off only with the greatest difficulty. Something was
vastly different in the pre-flood world.
Nothing much larger than 30 lb. or so flies anymore, and those
creatures, albatrosses and a few of the largest condors and eagles,
are marginal. Albatrosses in particular are called "gooney birds" by
sailors because of the extreme difficulty they experience taking off
and landing, their landings being (badly) controlled crashes, and all
of this despite long wings made for maximum lift.
The felt effect of the force of gravity on earth was much less in
remote times, and only this allowed such giant creatures to fly. No
flying creature has since RE-EVOLVED into anything like former sizes,
and the one or two birds which have retained such sizes have forfeited
any thought of flight, their wings becoming vestigial.
A book of interest here is Adrian Desmond's "The Hot Blooded
Dinosaurs. Desmond has a good deal to say about the pteranodon, the 40
- 50 lb. pterosaur which scientists used to believe to be the largest
creature which ever flew:
"Pteranodon had lost its teeth, tail and some flight musculature,
and its rear legs had become spindly. It was, however, in the actual
bones that the greatest reduction of weight was achieved. The wing
bones, backbone and hind limbs were tubular, like the supporting
struts of an aircraft, which allows for strength yet cuts down on
weight. In Pteranodon these bones, although up to an inch in diameter,
were no more than cylindrical air spaces bounded by an outer bony
casing no thicker than a piece of card. Barnum Brown of the American
Museum reported an armbone fragment of an unknown species of pterosaur
from the Upper Cretaceous of Texas in which 'the culmination of the
pterosaur... the acme of light construction' was achieved. Here, the
trend had continued so far that the bone wall of the cylinder was an
unbelievable one-fiftieth of an inch thick Inside the tubes bony
crosswise struts no thicker than pins helped to strengthen the
structure, another innovation in aircraft design anticipated by the
Mesozoic pterosaurs.
The combination of great size and negligible weight must
necessarily have resulted in some fragility. It is easy to imagine
that the paper-thin tubular bones supporting the gigantic wings would
have made landing dangerous. How could the creature have alighted
without shattering all of its bones How could it have taken off in the
first place It was obviously unable to flap twelve-foot wings strung
between straw-thin tubes. Many larger birds have to achieve a certain
speed by running and flapping before they can take off and others have
to produce a wing beat speed approaching hovering in order to rise. To
achieve hovering with a twenty-three foot wingspread, Pteranodon would
have required 220 lb. of flight muscles as efficient as those in
humming birds. But it had reduced its musculature to about 8 lb., so
it is inconceivable that Pteranodon could have taken off actively.
Pteranodon, then, was not a flapping creature, it had neither the
muscles nor the resistance to the resulting stress. Its long, thin
albatross-like wings betray it as a glider, the most advanced glider
the animal kingdom has produced. With a weight of only 40 lb. the wing
loading was only I lb. per square foot. This gave it a slower sinking
speed than even a man-made glider, where the wings have to sustain a
weight of at least 4 lb. per square foot. The ratio of wing area to
total weight in Pteranodon is only surpassed in some of the insects.
Pteranodon was constructed as a glider, with the breastbone, shoulder
girdle and backbone welded into a box-like rigid fuselage, able to
absorb the strain from the giant wings. The low weight combined with
an enormous wing span meant that Pteranodon could glide at ultra-low
speeds without fear of stalling. Cherrie Bramwell of Reading
University has calculated that it could remain aloft at only 15 m.p.h.
So takeoff would have been relatively easy. All Pteranodon needed was
a breeze of 15 m.p.h. when it would face the wind, stretch its wings
and be lifted into the air like a piece of paper. No effort at all
would have been required. Again, if it was forced to land on the sea,
it had only to extend its wings to catch the wind in order to raise
itself gently out of the water. It seems strange that an animal that
had gone to such great lengths to reduce its weight to a minimum
should have evolved an elongated bony crest on its skull."
Desmond has mentioned some of the problems which even the pteranodon
faced at fifty lb. or so; no possibility of flapping the wings for
instance. The giant teratorn finds of Argentina were not known when
the book was written... they came out in the eighties in issues of
Science Magazine and other places. The terotorn was a 160 - 200 lb
eagle with a 27' wingspan, a modern bird whose existence involved
flapping wings, aerial maneuver etc. How so? There are a couple of
other problems which Desmond does not mention, including the fact that
life for a pure glider would be almost impossible in the real world,
and that some limited flying ability would be necessary for any aerial
creature. Living totally at the mercy of the winds, a creature might
never get back home to its nest and children given the first contrary
wind.
There is one other problem. Desmond notes a fairly reasonably modus
operandi for the pteranodon, i.e. that it had a throat pouch like a
pelican, has been found with fish fossils indicating a pelican-like
existence, soaring over the waves and snapping up fish without
landing. That should indicate that, peculiarly amongst all of the
creatures of the earth, the pteranodon should have been practically
IMMUNE from the great extinctions of past ages. Velikovsky noted that
large animals had the greatest difficulty getting to high ground and
other safe havens at the times of floods and the global catastrophes
of past ages and were therefore peculiarly susceptible to extinction.
Ovid notes (Metamorphoses) that men and animals hid on mountain tops
during the deluge, but that most died from lack of food during the
hard year following. But high places safe from flooding were always
there; oceans were always there and fish were always there. The
pteranodon's way of life should have been impervious to all mishap;
the notion that pteranodon died out when the felt effect of gravity on
earth changed after the flood is the only good explanation.
Back to Adrian Desmond for more on size as related to pterosaurs now:
"It would be a grave understatement to say that, as a flying
creature, Pteranodon was large. Indeed, there were sound reasons for
believing that it was the largest animal that ever could become
airborne. With each increase in size, and therefore also weight, a
flying animal needs a concomitant increase in power (to beat the wings
in a flapper and to hold and maneuver them in a glider), but power is
supplied by muscles which themselves add still more weight to the
structure.-- The larger a flyer becomes the disproportionately
weightier it grows by the addition of its own power supply. There
comes a point when the weight is just too great to permit the machine
to remain airborne. Calculations bearing on size and power suggested
that the maximum weight that a flying vertebrate can attain is about
50 lb.: Pteranodon and its slightly larger but lesser known Jordanian
ally Titanopteryx were therefore thought to be the largest flying
animals."
Notice that the calculations mentioned say about 50 lb. is max for
either a flier or a glider, and that experience from our present world
absolutely coincides with this and, in fact, don't go quite that high;
the biggest flying creatures which we actually see are albatrosses,
geese etc. at around 30 - 35 lb.. Similarly, my calculations say that
about 20000 lb. would be the largest theoretically possible land
animal in our present world, and Jumbo the stuffed elephant which I've
mentioned, the largest known land animal from our present world, was
around 16000.
"But in 1972 the first of a spectacular series of finds suggested
that we must drastically rethink our ideas on the maximum size
permissible in flying - vertebrates. Although excavations are still in
progress, three seasons' digging - from 1972 to 1974 - by Douglas A.
Lawson of the University of California has revealed partial skeletons
of three ultra-large pterosaurs in the Big Bend National Park in
Brewster County, Texas These skeletons indicate creatures that must
have dwarfed even Pteranodon. Lawson found the remains off four wings,
a long neck, hind legs and toothless jaws in deposits that were non-
marine; the ancient entombing sediments are thought to have been made
instead by floodplain silting. The immense size of the Big Bend
pterosaurs, which have already become known affectionately in the
palaeontological world as '747s' or 'Jumbos', may be gauged by setting
one of the Texas upper arm bones alongside that of a Pteranodon: the
'Jumbo' humerus is fully twice the length of Pteranodon's. Lawson's
computer estimated wingspan for this living glider is over fifty feet
It is no surprise, says Lawson announcing the animal in Science in
1975, that the definitive remains of this creature were found in
Texas.
Unlike Pteranodon, these creatures were found in rocks that were
formed 250 miles inland of the Cretaceous coastline. The lack of even
lake deposits in the vicinity militates against these particular
pterosaurs having been fishers. Lawson suggests that they were carrion
feeders, gorging themselves on the rotting mounds of flesh left after
the dismembering of a dinosaur carcass. Perhaps, like vultures and
condors, these pterosaurs hung in the air over the corpse waiting
their turn. Having alighted on the carcass, their toothless beaks
would have restricted them to feeding upon the soft, pulpy internal
organs. How they could have taken to the air after gorging themselves
is something of a puzzle. Wings of such an extraordinary size could
not have been flapped when the animal was grounded. Since the
pterosaurs were unable to run in order to launch themselves they must
have taken off vertically. Pigeons are only able to takeoff vertically
by reclining their bodies and clapping the wings in front of them; as
flappers, the Texas pterosaurs would have needed very tall stilt-like
legs to raise the body enough to allow the 24-foot wings to clear the
ground The main objection, however, still rests in the lack of
adequate musculature for such an operation. Is the only solution to
suppose that, with wings fully extended and elevators raised, they
were lifted passively off the ground by the wind? If Lawson is correct
and the Texas pterosaurs were carrion feeders another problem is
envisaged. Dinosaur carcasses imply the presence of dinosaurs. The
ungainly Brobdignagian pterosaurs were vulnerable to attack when
grounded, so how did they escape the formidable dinosaurs? Left at the
mercy of wind currents, takeoff would have been a chancy business.
Lawson's exotic pterosaurs raise some intriguing questions. Only
continued research will provide the answers."
Note that Desmond mentions a number of ancillary problems, any of
which would throw doubt on the pterosaur's ability to exist as
mentioned, and neglects the biggest question of all: the calculations
which say 50 lb. are max have not been shown to be in error; we have
simply discovered larger creatures. Much larger. This is what is
called a dilemma.
Then I come to what Robert T. Bakker has to say about the Texas
Pterosaurs ("The Dinosaur heresies", Zebra Books, pp 290-291:
"Immediately after their paper came out in Science, Wann Langston
and his students were attacked by aeronautical engineers who simply
could not believe that the big Bend dragon had a wingspan of forty
feet or more. Such dimensions broke all the rules of flight
engineering; a creature that large would have broken its arm bones if
it tried to fly... Under this hail of disbelief, Langston and his crew
backed off somewhat. Since the complete wing bones hadn't been
discovered, it was possible to reconstruct the Big Bend Pterodactyl
[pterosaur] with wings much shorter than fifty feet."
The original reconstruction had put wingspan for the pterosaur at over
60'. Bakker goes on to say that he believes the pterosaurs really were
that big and that they simply flew despite our not comprehending how,
i.e. that the problem is ours. He does not give a solution as to what
we're looking at the wrong way.
So much for the idea of anything RE-EVOLVING into the sizes of the
flying creatures of the antedeluvian world. What about the possibility
of man BREEDING something like a teratorn? Could man actively breed
even a 50 lb. eagle?
David Bruce's "Bird of Jove", Ballentine Books, 1971, describes the
adventures of Sam Barnes, one of England's top falconers at the time,
who actually brought a Berkut eagle out of Kirghiz country to his home
in Pwllheli, Wales. Berkuts are the biggest eagles, and Atlanta, the
particular eagle which Barnes brought back, at 26 lb. in flying trim,
is believed to be as large as they ever get. These, as Khan Chalsan
explained to Barnes, have been bred specifically for size and ferocity
for many centuries. They are the most prized of all possessions
amongst nomads, and are the imperial hunting bird of the turko-mongol
peoples.
The eagle Barnes brought back had a disease for which no cure was
available in Kirghiz, and was near to death then, otherwise there
would have been no question of his having her. Chalsan explained that
a Berkut of Atlanta's size would normally be worth more than a dozen
of the most beautiful women in his country.
The killing powers of a big eagle are out of proportion to its size.
Berkuts are normally flown at wolves, deer, and other large prey.
Barnes witnessed Atlanta killing a deer in Kirghiz, and Chalsan told
him of her killing a black wolf a season earlier. Mongols and other
nomads raise sheep and goats, and obviously have no love for wolves. A
wolf might be little more than a day at the office for Atlanta with
her 11" talons, however, a wolf is a major-league deal for an average
sized Berkut at 15 - 20 lb.. Chalsan explained that wolves
occasionally win these battles, and that he had once seen a wolf kill
three of the birds before the fourth killed him. Quite obviously,
there would be an advantage to having the birds be bigger, i.e. to
having the average berkut be 25 lb., and a big one be 40 or 50.
It has never been done, however, despite all of the efforts since the
days of Chengis Khan. We have Chengis Khan's famous "What is best in
life..." quote, and the typical Mongol reply from one of his captains
involved falconry. They regarded it as important. Chengis Khan, Oktai,
Kuyuk, Hulagu, Batui, Monke, Kubilai et. al. were all into this sport
big time, they all wanted these birds big, since they flew them at
everything from wolves and deer (a big berkut like Atlanta can drive
its talons in around a wolf's spine and snap it) to leopards and
tigers, and there was no lack of funds for the breeding program
involved. Chengis Khan did not suffer from poverty.
Moreover, the breeding of berkuts has continued apace from that day to
this, including a 200 year stretch during which those people ruled
almost all of the world which you'd care to own at the time, and they
never got them any bigger than 25 lb. or so.
Remember Desmond's words regarding the difficulty which increasingly
larger birds will experience getting airborne from flat ground?
Atlanta was powerful enough in flight, but she was not easily able to
take off from flat ground. Barnes noted one instance in which a town
crank attacked Atlanta with a cane and the great bird had to
frantically run until it found a sand dune from which to launch
herself. This could mean disaster in the wild. A bird of prey will
often come to ground with prey, and if she can't take off from flat
ground to avoid trouble once in awhile... it would only take once.
Khan Chalsan had explained the necessity of having the birds in
captivity for certain periods, and nesting wild at other times. A bird
bigger than Atlanta would not survive the other times.
One variety of teratorn, however, judging from pictures which have
appeared in the December 1980 issue of "Bioscience" magazine, was very
nearly a scaled-up golden eagle weighing 170 lb. or so, with a
wingspan of 25' as compared to Atlanta's 10. In our world, that can't
happen.
HTML 2.0 Checked! Converted and validated Thu 16 Mar 95 by Colin
Rafferty.
richardal...@googlemail.com
> On Nov 22, 9:57 pm, richardalanforr...@googlemail.com wrote:
>
> > > Which Richard again is just Retrospective specification on a sample
> > > space of two points: Life or non-life. You think your answer is
> > > brilliant but would you think
> > > that somebody who triumphantly declares: "Look everybody I got the
> > > tails end of the coin and not the heads end after flipping it just
> > > once!" is a genius?
> > Saying that the fact that we are here shows that abiogenesis happened
> > is simply saying that the fact that we are here shows that abiogenesis
> > happened. It's not "retrospective specification", or any other semi-
> > digested mush of word-salad you chose to throw at it.
>
> Or in other words what will be will be.
No, in other words what is, is.
Try reading for comprehension.
Oh, sorry. You can't.
RF
<snipped>
wf3h
> On Nov 23, 6:14 am, snowbirdresid...@gmail.com wrote:
> >
> > the probability is the same as for any other chemical reaction: pretty
> > damned good. it's not 'chance' as the creationists would have it; it's
> > the laws of chemistry. of course,
>
> Which is yet another variant of appeal to abstract authority. There is
> no such thing as a law of chemistry.
not a single scientist agrees with that. in fact, no one agrees with
that except for creationists who ramble on about 'orderly universes
created by law giving gods'.
so immediately you're wrong.
There are observations of what
> happens when chemicals are mixed and we assume that 5sec from now the
> same reaction will take place if done by somebody else.
and that is called a 'law'.
But as
> Prof.Herrmann has pointed out with his Ultra-logics we can't
> extrapolate orm what we observe today into the distant past and
> distant future
we certainly can do that. you're wrong again.
. How for example did those enormous dinosaur birds even
> manage to fly, in our gravity field their wings would snap even if
> made out of titanium. It suggests that before the flood the gravity
> constant differs from what it is today.
irrelevant. the fact that the STRENGTH of gravity changes does NOT
negate the fact there are LAWS about gravity
the creationist has himself confused....again.
>
> "It appears that the maximum force or stress that can be exerted
> by any muscle is inherent in the structure of the muscle filaments.
hey backspace...don't look now...but it appears you're appealing to
the LAWS OF NATURE to make this claim...you know...the laws you say
don't exist....
seems you just contradicted yourself.
what a surprise.
>
> By "scaled lift", I mean of course a lift record divided by the two-
> thirds power of the athlete's body weight.
hmmmm...another law of nature...which you say does not exist.
why do you keep appealing to laws which you say don't exist, when YOU
YOURSELF are using them??
>
> How heavy can an animal still get to be in our world, then? How heavy
> would Mr. Kazmaier be at the point at which the square-cube problem
> made it as difficult for him just to stand up as it is for him to do
> 1000 lb. squats at his present size of 340 lb.? The answer is simply
> the solution to:
>
> 1340/340^.667 = x/x^.667
ah. another appeal to the laws of nature
just can't help yourself, can you?
hey backspace...thanks for throwing your own argument in the dumpster.
richardal...@googlemail.com
<snipped>
How for example did those enormous dinosaur birds even
> manage to fly, in our gravity field their wings would snap even if
> made out of titanium.
Where in seven hells did you get this bit of ignorant garbage from?
The "dinosaur birds" were small, most of them no bigger than a modern
pidgeon.
If you're referring to pterosaurs, which are neither dinosaurs nor
birds, the reason why they were able to fly is that their bones were
extremely light and extremely strong for their weight. The bone is
very thin, and laminated so that fibres are following the lines of
stress. We have made engineering models of pterosaurs, and it is
perfectly possible to build such a model using conventional materials
such as balsa wood and aluminium, neither of which material is as
strong as bone.
It's worth noting that gliders (sailplanes to you colonials) are able
to fly with larger wing spans than pterosaurs, carrying much more
weight than any pterosaur.
> *http://www.bearfabrique.org/Catastrophism/sauropods/biganims.html
>
> Megafauna and the attenuated gravity of the antique system.
> Copyright Ted Holden It is a fairly easy demonstration that nothing
> any larger than the largest elephants could live in our world today,
No it isn't, because we have many organisms larger than the largest
elephant. The blue whale is one such example.
> and that the largest dinosaurs survived ONLY because the nature of the
> world and of the solar system was then such that they did not
> experience gravity as we do at all;
Well, tell that to the scientists investigating the biomechanics of
extinct organisms who have concluded nothing of the sort.
What do you know that they don't?
>they'd be crushed by their own
> weight, collapse in a heap, and suffocate within minutes were they to.
Complete and utter bullshit.
>
> A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we know them today requires that we
> relegate the brontosaur, once thought to be one of the largest
> sauropods, to welterweight or at most middleweight status. Fossil
> finds dating from the 1970's dwarf him. The Avon field Guide to
> Dinosaurs shows a brachiosaur (larger than a brontosaur), a supersaur,
> and an ultrasaur juxtaposed, and the ultrasaur dwarfs the others.
> Christopher McGowan's "DINOSAURS, SPITFIRES, & SEA DRAGONS", Harvard,
> 1991 cites a 180 ton weight estimate for the ultrasaur (page 118), and
> (page 104) describes the volume-based methods of estimating dinosaur
> weights. McGowan is Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal
> Ontario Museum.
Not any more. Chris retired a couple of years ago. I miss talking to
him at symposia. He's a nice guy. You should read his books rather
than the misleading and out-of-context quotations on which you rely
for this particular piece of semi-digested ejecta.
RF
John Wilkins
> On Nov 23, 6:47 am, backspace <sawireless2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> <snipped>
>
> How for example did those enormous dinosaur birds even
> > manage to fly, in our gravity field their wings would snap even if
> > made out of titanium.
>
> Where in seven hells did you get this bit of ignorant garbage from?
> The "dinosaur birds" were small, most of them no bigger than a modern
> pidgeon.
>
> If you're referring to pterosaurs, which are neither dinosaurs nor
> birds, the reason why they were able to fly is that their bones were
> extremely light and extremely strong for their weight. The bone is
> very thin, and laminated so that fibres are following the lines of
> stress. We have made engineering models of pterosaurs, and it is
> perfectly possible to build such a model using conventional materials
> such as balsa wood and aluminium, neither of which material is as
> strong as bone.
>
> It's worth noting that gliders (sailplanes to you colonials) are able
> to fly with larger wing spans than pterosaurs, carrying much more
> weight than any pterosaur.
Specify which colonials you are talking about. In Oz we call 'em gliders
too. I used to go every weekend with my family, and got quite a bit of
time up as a passenger.
Course, pterosaurs didn't have a Chipmunk tow plane to get up in the
first place.
--
John S. Wilkins, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Philosophy
University of Queensland - Blog: scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts
"He used... sarcasm. He knew all the tricks, dramatic irony, metaphor,
bathos, puns, parody, litotes and... satire. He was vicious."
J. J. Lodder
Your posting has no relation with anything that went before in this
thread.
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-snooping_bias to see just how
> easy it is to fool yourself.
> Many creationists and evolutionists use stock market technical
> analysis to guess the markets. They are
> deceiving themselves of course. Discussing the origin of life and
> probabilities means we have ventured
> into the field of statistical analysis with all its biases and logical
> fallacies. In stock market punting the following are made
> 1) forward looking bias
> 2) survivalist bias
> 3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data-snooping_bias
And no relevance either.
> I would urge you not to gamble with your soul when doing statistical
> analysis of the probability of life coming from non-life.
You think I should take Pascal's wager instead?
> Make certain
> that you are not committing a logical fallacy such as thousands of
> people do daily stuck to their monitors tracking the markets actually
> thinking they know what will happen next and are just deceiving
> themselves.
No -logical- fallacy in sight here,
Jan
J. J. Lodder
It's not hard to argue that everything that happens
has zero a-priori probability of happening,
Jan
Mujin
25ba00...@i29g2000prf.googlegroups.com:
[snip]
> Try reading for comprehension.
You ask too much - the guy can't *write* for comprehension, let alone read
for it.
richardal...@googlemail.com
> <richardalanforr...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > On Nov 23, 6:47 am, backspace <sawireless2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > <snipped>
>
> > How for example did those enormous dinosaur birds even
> > > manage to fly, in our gravity field their wings would snap even if
> > > made out of titanium.
>
> > Where in seven hells did you get this bit of ignorant garbage from?
> > The "dinosaur birds" were small, most of them no bigger than a modern
> > pidgeon.
>
> > If you're referring to pterosaurs, which are neither dinosaurs nor
> > birds, the reason why they were able to fly is that their bones were
> > extremely light and extremely strong for their weight. The bone is
> > very thin, and laminated so that fibres are following the lines of
> > stress. We have made engineering models of pterosaurs, and it is
> > perfectly possible to build such a model using conventional materials
> > such as balsa wood and aluminium, neither of which material is as
> > strong as bone.
>
> > It's worth noting that gliders (sailplanes to you colonials) are able
> > to fly with larger wing spans than pterosaurs, carrying much more
> > weight than any pterosaur.
>
> Specify which colonials you are talking about. In Oz we call 'em gliders
> too. I used to go every weekend with my family, and got quite a bit of
> time up as a passenger.
>
Ozzies, Kiwis, Yanks, Cannucks - what's the difference? They all live
far away and speak English with the wrong accent.
> Course, pterosaurs didn't have a Chipmunk tow plane to get up in the
> first place.
That's because they could get airbourne by jumping off the backs of
dinosaurs. Actually, that's my rather minor contribution to the BBC's
"Walking with Dinosaurs". They ignored pretty well everything I told
them about plesiosaurs (they preferred the more televisually appealing
version provided by non-plesiosaur workers) but latched onto an idea I
floated in the pub after one of our meetings. I speculated the large
sauropods were so huge that they carried with them an entire ecosystem
on their backs, with small mammals and pterosaurs making their homes
in the rough, warty skin, and feeding on parasites and insects
attracted to the droppings. That may be a huge pile of shit to you,
but to a dung beetle it's food and shelter. I was slightly surprised
to see the pterosaurs nesting on the backs of dinosaurs when the
programmes were aired, and my friend Darren (who knows everything)
assures me that the idea didn't come from anything published in the
literature. (No, really: he does know everything. He has an eidetic
memory, reads every vert-pal paper he can get his hands on, and can
read from the images of the pages he holds in his head. So he can tell
you not only when and where something was published, but tell you on
where and on which page a passage came from. He's corrected me on
papers I wrote myself!)
RF
Robert J. Kolker
> Not any more. Chris retired a couple of years ago. I miss talking to
> him at symposia. He's a nice guy. You should read his books rather
> than the misleading and out-of-context quotations on which you rely
> for this particular piece of semi-digested ejecta.
Indeed. I learned soaring using a Schweitzer D-33 with an L/D of 22.
There are even fancier soaring planes with an L/D of 70. I flew a Grobe
GlassenFluger with an L/D of 70. I was able to get up to FL180. I had
to use oxygen.
Bob Kolker
Raving
> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
Does this infer that if abiogenesis can be construed as a testable
hypothesis, the plausibility of abiogenesis can be absolutely asserted
or (exclusive) eliminated?
<sarcasm extreme>
Sincerely,
Raving
Frank J
> On Nov 22, 12:00 am, Frank J <f...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > In contrast, I would call the statement "abiogenesis first occurred
> > only a few thousand years ago, and occurred many times, producing many
> > biologically separate lineages" a completely unsupported hypothesis.
> > Which is why most of those who want their audience to infer that would
> > not dare phrase it in such descriptive terms.
>
> But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
> assumed that there was only one
> abiogenesis event and thus one common ancestor?
It isn't. Just ask Carl Woese (among many). Even Darwin himself did
allow for a few forms (IIRC in the "breahed by the Creator"
statement).
> I think one reason is
> to keep the weasel term "common ancestor" in the lexicon. Dawkins for
> example told an australian YEC group that everybody is "confused", we
> didn't come from a fish but from a common ancestor between a fish and
> something else or something to that effect. It was the video where he
> couldn't answer some question, froze up and then gave a completely
> irrelevant answer.
His "freezing" had nothing to do with common ancestors, but with
natural selection and information (when he reallized he had been
scammed). But if you mean elsewhere in the video, I will speculate
that he meant CA as a *species* not as an *individual.* Granted, the
concept is hard for most people to understand, and anti-evolution
activists exploit it to the fullest.
If you want a classic weasel word, look no further than "common
design".
Frank J
> On Nov 22, 4:24 pm, wf3h <w...@vsswireless.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Nov 22, 7:36 am, backspace <sawireless2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > > But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
> > > assumed that there was only one
> > > abiogenesis event and thus one common ancestor? I think one reason is
> > > to keep the weasel term "common ancestor" in the lexicon. Dawkins for
> > > example told an australian YEC group that everybody is "confused", we
> > > didn't come from a fish but from a common ancestor between a fish and
> > > something else or something to that effect. It was the video where he
> > > couldn't answer some question, froze up and then gave a completely
> > > irrelevant answer. It was the irrelevant answer that everybody is
> > > ignoring, there is some great insights into his thinking with that non-
> > > answer especially if you read the thread about the common ancestor and
> > > reflect his answer in the light of this thread:http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/3b7d9b4...
> > if dawkins got something wrong then he got something wrong. evolution
> > does not hinge on dawkins.
>
> wf3h do you know where this "common ancestor" nonsense came from? It
> - criticism of Darwin. He used his rhetorical powers to mock and make
> fun of stupid people believing they came from monkeys that showed
> their willies for all the other monkey babes. The language terrorists
>
> - Show quoted text -
BTW, you must know that Michael Behe has no problems with common
ancestors. So do you agree that he too is using what you call a
"weasel word" too?
And do you agree that "common design", which does not in any way rule
out common descent as the method of design actuation, is a weasel
word?
TomS
<8adf627b-e21c-4bee...@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com>, Frank J
stated..."
>
>On Nov 22, 8:30 am, backspace <sawireless2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Nov 22, 12:00 am, Frank J <f...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> > In contrast, I would call the statement "abiogenesis first occurred
>> > only a few thousand years ago, and occurred many times, producing many
>> > biologically separate lineages" a completely unsupported hypothesis.
>> > Which is why most of those who want their audience to infer that would
>> > not dare phrase it in such descriptive terms.
>>
>> But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
>> assumed that there was only one
>> abiogenesis event and thus one common ancestor?
>
>It isn't. Just ask Carl Woese (among many). Even Darwin himself did
>allow for a few forms (IIRC in the "breahed by the Creator"
>statement).
There is a cover story in the December issue of Scientific American:
"Are We Living With Alien Cells? Did life on Earth arise more than
once? Strange forms may still survive?" by Paul Davies.
--
---Tom S.
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
attributed to Josh Billings
TomS
<8adf627b-e21c-4bee...@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com>, Frank J
stated..."
>
>> On Nov 22, 12:00 am, Frank J <f...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> > In contrast, I would call the statement "abiogenesis first occurred
>> > only a few thousand years ago, and occurred many times, producing many
>> > biologically separate lineages" a completely unsupported hypothesis.
>> > Which is why most of those who want their audience to infer that would
>> > not dare phrase it in such descriptive terms.
>>
>> But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
>> assumed that there was only one
>> abiogenesis event and thus one common ancestor?
>
>It isn't. Just ask Carl Woese (among many). Even Darwin himself did
>allow for a few forms (IIRC in the "breahed by the Creator"
>statement).
TomS
<8adf627b-e21c-4bee...@d4g2000prg.googlegroups.com>, Frank J
stated..."
>
>> On Nov 22, 12:00 am, Frank J <f...@comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> > In contrast, I would call the statement "abiogenesis first occurred
>> > only a few thousand years ago, and occurred many times, producing many
>> > biologically separate lineages" a completely unsupported hypothesis.
>> > Which is why most of those who want their audience to infer that would
>> > not dare phrase it in such descriptive terms.
>>
>> But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
>> assumed that there was only one
>> abiogenesis event and thus one common ancestor?
>
>It isn't. Just ask Carl Woese (among many). Even Darwin himself did
>allow for a few forms (IIRC in the "breahed by the Creator"
>statement).
John Wilkins
It reprises Carol Cleland's thesis of multiple abiogenetic chemistries.
Carol is a philosopher, working through a NASA grant.
Raving
> > stated..."
>
> > >On Nov 22, 8:30 am, backspace <sawireless2...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > >> On Nov 22, 12:00 am, Frank J <f...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> > >> > In contrast, I would call the statement "abiogenesis first occurred
> > >> > only a few thousand years ago, and occurred many times, producing many
> > >> > biologically separate lineages" a completely unsupported hypothesis.
> > >> > Which is why most of those who want their audience to infer that would
> > >> > not dare phrase it in such descriptive terms.
>
> > >> But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
> > >> assumed that there was only one
> > >> abiogenesis event and thus one common ancestor?
>
> > >It isn't. Just ask Carl Woese (among many). Even Darwin himself did
> > >allow for a few forms (IIRC in the "breahed by the Creator"
> > >statement).
> > [...snip...]
>
> > There is a cover story in the December issue of Scientific American:
>
> > "Are We Living With Alien Cells? Did life on Earth arise more than
> > once? Strange forms may still survive?" by Paul Davies.
>
> It reprises Carol Cleland's thesis of multiple abiogenetic chemistries.
> Carol is a philosopher, working through a NASA grant.
A "thesis of multiple abiogenetic chemistries" does not make much
sense.
- Multiple inoculations by *one* abiogenetic chemistry? ... Perhaps.
- Multiple inoculations by *several* quite different abiogenetic
chemistries? ... Unlikely.
An essential aspect of living process seems to be an intense degree of
coherent integration with itself. Think of it as if all living things
use the same standardized sizes ... metric or imperial units .. a
common thread size ... etc.
Trying to combine imperial & metric nuts and bolts with differing
types of thread measures thrown in for further diversity is not a good
idea.
I am not against the possibility of multiple abiogenetic chemistries,
per say. I am concerned that contemplating the likelihood of such a
plausibility seems to ignore the major factor which makes it
unlikely. ~~~> Incompatibility of co-interaction.
TomS
<7114f3d4-377c-48de...@i12g2000prf.googlegroups.com>, Raving
stated..."
"Perhaps the most intriguing possibility of all is that alien life-forms
inhabit our own bodies." And he refers to some possible very small
organisms. "Although such claims remain controversial, it is
conceivable that at least some of thse Lilliputian forms are alien
organisms employing a radically alternative biochemistry". (page 69)
The article is available online:
<http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=are-aliens-among-us&sc=SA_20071119>
Desertphile
<james...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Nov 20, 12:26 pm, Desertphile <desertph...@nospam.org> wrote:
> > On Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:50:46 -0800 (PST), James Goetz
> >
> > <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
> > > evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
> >
> > Are you claiming life does not exist? If not, then there's your
> > answer.
> I was not thinking about that. But now that you bring it up, how do we
> know that we exist?
Since we *DO* exist, abiogenesis is a fact. Surely both are
obvious.
--
http://desertphile.org
Desertphile's Desert Soliloquy. WARNING: view with plenty of water
"Why aren't resurrections from the dead noteworthy?" -- Jim Rutz
jillar...@webtv.net
James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> Is abiogenesis a conjecture
>>> because we currently have
>>> no way to evaluate it with
>>> a testable hypothesis?
>> All statements in science
>> are conjectures, no matter
>> how well established, liable
>> to be overturned by new
>> evidence or better theories
>> at any point...snip...
>> Abiogenesis is something
>> that calls for explanation,
>> as all physical phenomena
>> do. We want to know
>> what caused the physical
>> process called "life".
>> We can test various
>> scenarios for plausibility,
>> ...snip...
>> But I get the impression
>> that you mean the *fact*
>> of abiogenesis is
>> conjectural.
>> ...snip...
>> This can't be true
>> because we know
>> no life could have
>> existed on earth...snip...
>> ...in the early moments
>> of the universe.
>> So life began at
>> some point, whether
>> on earth or elsewhere.
>> It is not eternal,
>> qua Aristotle.
> I have no doubt that
> abiogenesis is a
> historical fact, but
> I do not know what
> to call it. Do we say
> that we could falsify
> abiogenesis if we found
> compelling evidence that
> biological life is eternal?
> ...snip...
The relevant arguments came down this way:
1] Abiogenesis is a conjecture because all science is formed by general
laws based on induction.
2] Abiogenesis is logically demonstrated and such reasoning is
knowledge because it meets the same standard to our most certain form of
reasoning which is mathematical reasoning.
The appeal to #2 has some status in science but mathematics tells us
nothing new about the world because it makes an analogical
identification to observation rather than an inductive one. It has more
plausibility in physics than biology. Physics uses both induction and
analogical mathematical identifications.
The problem is: are analogical identifications essentially scientific
identities of what we call 'life'?
That is a challenge posed by 21st century technology. 'Artificial life'
is purported to replicate 'natural life' by analogy, and that
replication will be a duplication by behavior without the need for
biological 'vital force'. Which means the general laws of physics, in
the category of 'force', does not require the subset of 'vital force' to
account for any organization or origination of what we categorize as
'existence'. That is because 'existence' would be logically related to
'thinking' and not to 'life'.
The categorical separation of 'life' from 'existence', may go against a
common sense Aristotlean notion of a vital force but not a Parmenidean
one of thinking and being as tautalogical. This logical uncommon sense
notion was considered a demonstration of logic by Parmenides. I point
that out to those here who think any logical demonstration can hold more
weight than induction.
Today some technologists hold: that such separation of 'existence' and
'life' can be tested by the 'Singularity' experiment and that remains to
be seen. If that test is positive, 'abiogenesis' cannot have a logical
meaning in the way it was presented here, and all the logical arguments
here are meaningless.
Because abiogenesis is a biologically related term, and biology is about
inductive observations, #1 is the more the plausible argument. Note that
Wilkins mentioned 'induction' and not 'analogy' in his statements about
science and conjecture. I'm perplexed by his quote above. It is logical
to rationalize such propositions by a hunch, but it broke the seal of
induction by analogizing it as a fact that abiogenesis happened in the
world when the 'singularity' test is in progress.
'Inductions' are about evidence and that means, at the very least,
'abiogenesis' starts at a circumstantial point of argument. If it has
property or history, it is not because it has the name 'abiogenesis'. A
date of factuality, in the recording of when something happened in the
world, is a requirement for circumstantial evidence in the legal system.
Science must meet and exceed that requirement and induction is the way
to do it.
So if we are to begin to judge it as something more than a
circumstantial property, a scientist must present the date of fact it
had being. Today there is no validity that establishes it beyond a
reasonable scientific doubt other than an analogical argument- from
categorical logic to that of its being an historical event, by analogy-
which becomes the argument of it, as a 'fact' of being, in time, "t".
This kind of analogy to t is ambiguous. It is an argument by #2 and
physics has established itself more the 'study' for such scientific
advantage.
If the 'singularity' test is positive, then 'existence' happens without
biology but not without some kind of physical force which we are
uninformed about. But it would not be a vital force in a biological
sense of the phrase. Or, in a more radical proposal, 'artificial
existence' is evidence of 'artificial genesis' and any analogical
propositions may be related to physical states in a way not yet
understandable. If the test is negative, the vital force notion gets to
hold plausibility.
Vjillar
James Goetz
> James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > James Goetz <james.go...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > > I guess I see little difference between falsifiability and
> > > > verifiability, apart from the opposite approach.
>
> > > If verification relies on considerations like "can be expected to
> > > falsify" rather than outright claims of "is falsifiable", there is a
> > > very great difference. The former appeals to current knowledge as a
> > > basis for testing putative new knowledge. Popper, however, thought this
> > > was subjectivism (it isn't), and wanted an objective criterion. The
> > > difficulty is that even Popper's own view of falsification fails that
> > > test, because we are never sure what failed in a case of apparent
> > > falsification - the hypothesis under test, or some ancillary hypothesis
> > > (say, about how equipment works, or some other theory not being tested),
> > > and so at best we can falsify some conjunction of hypotheses without
> > > knowing which one was actually wrong. This completely undercuts Popper's
> > > claim to objectivity, leaving a Bayesian approach the sole contender.
>
> > I lost you on the quotes below. Could you paraphrase them?
>
> > "If verification relies on considerations like "can be expected to
> > falsify" rather than outright claims of "is falsifiable", there is a
> > very great difference. The former appeals to current knowledge as a
> > basis for testing putative new knowledge. Popper, however, thought
> > this
> > was subjectivism (it isn't), and wanted an objective criterion."
>
> > "leaving a Bayesian approach the sole contender."
>
> > snip
>
> OK. Try this:
>
> Anytime a hypothesis is tested relying on items of knowledge already
> held by the researcher or the discipline, the test is what Popper would
> have called "subjective". But all testing, negative or positive, relies
> on this. Hence testing in science must be different to what Popper
> thought we could do in science.
>
> Since prior knowledge is required to test a hypothesis (for example, by
> narrowing down the expectations to a manageable set, or to a restricted
> domain), this effectively means that we are in the position of
> Bayesians, who use prior expectations to adjudge the success or failure
> of an inference.
That is clear to me. And I also found your archive "Evolution and
Philosophy:
Is Evolution Science, and What Does 'Science' Mean?"
John Wilkins
Dick
<bobk...@comcast.net> wrote:
>James Goetz wrote:
>> Is abiogenesis a conjecture because we currently have no way to
>> evaluate it with a testable hypothesis?
>>
>Testable in principle. If someone could synthesize a living thing from
>non-living ingredients it would prove that life could arise
>sponteneously by natural processes. Of course this would not prove that
>life arose on -this planet- in such a manner.
>
>Bob Kolker
"If someone could synthesize"? Doesn't someone count as
intelligence. Strikes me as different than natural abiogenesis.
Wirehair
news:8f058320-29a5-485e...@y43g2000hsy.googlegroups.com...
> On Nov 20, 5:10 am, "R. Baldwin" <res0k...@nozirevBACKWARDS.net>
> wrote:
>> That means abiogenesis occured somewhere. We don't have to worry
>> ourselves about whether a deity > was involved, because that is not
>> testable.
>
> You are committing the fallacy of Retrospective Specification. Your
> sample space consists of only two points: Either we are here or we are
> not. The fallacy was discussed here
Did you start making new words in the sixth grade or did you start earlier?
Wirehair
> On Nov 22, 12:00 am, Frank J <f...@comcast.net> wrote:
>> In contrast, I would call the statement "abiogenesis first occurred
>> only a few thousand years ago, and occurred many times, producing many
>> biologically separate lineages" a completely unsupported hypothesis.
>> Which is why most of those who want their audience to infer that would
>> not dare phrase it in such descriptive terms.
>
> But this is the question I asked a while ago around here. Why is it
> assumed that there was only one
> to keep the weasel term "common ancestor" in the lexicon. Dawkins for
> example told an australian YEC group that everybody is "confused", we
> didn't come from a fish but from a common ancestor between a fish and
> something else or something to that effect. It was the video where he
> couldn't answer some question, froze up and then gave a completely
> irrelevant answer. It was the irrelevant answer that everybody is
> ignoring, there is some great insights into his thinking with that non-
> answer especially if you read the thread about the common ancestor and
> reflect his answer in the light of this thread:
>
How long have you had these feelings about "Dawkins"?
Wirehair
> On Nov 20, 6:30 am, j.wilki...@uq.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote:
>
>> The only other "explanation" is miraculous, which is no explanation at
>> all in science.
>
> Which is the fallacy of Appeal to Abstract Authority as discussed
> here:
> http://groups.google.com/group/talk.origins/browse_frm/thread/d0df9646a72d1178/af25af533043fc4c#af25af533043fc4c
>
>
Did you learn to use a computer all by yourself or did your mother help you?