[Osx-nutters] The separation of church and state.

[David Cake]

At 7:24 PM +0000 4/12/07, Stefano Mori wrote:
>Politically we may not wish to give the Creationists an inch, but if a 
>Creationist says, "you don't really understand how life evolved", are 
>we to claim that we do, when in reality we are still studying the 
>question ourselves, or rather, the scientists are still studying it?

	We know enough to know that their worldview is wrong, and 
testably, provably so.
	Whether or not we understand all the details we would wish to 
understand beyond that is irrelevent.

>All we need to tell the Creationists is that their worldview isn't
>about Science.

	Sure, but as their whole reason to be is to clothe religious 
fundamentalism in scientific trappings, and claim that it is science, 
then this amounts to 'all we need to tell the Creationists is that 
they are wrong in every claim they make'. There is no room for 
compromise here, Stefano.

>  > Its a very restrictive model. It doesn't allow for input other than
>>  the availability of raw materials and it requires as its output fully
>>  funtional "modern" units (proteins and chromosomes). In a way, he is
>>  denying evolution, in the broadest sense, its chance to work on his
>>  model.
>>
>>  That doesn't mean that he is wrong. He may be right.
>>
>>  He may, however be devastatingly wrong, and he might be devastatingly
>>  wrong for a fairly simple reason. It might be that under the
>>  prevailing circumstances, the system was strongly distorted and that
>>  each of the single possible outcomes was far more likely than the
>>  total number of possible outcomes would lead you to think. You have to
>>  know how the system works in order to apply statistics to it. Hoyle
>>  would himself admit, that he couldn't define his system sufficiently
>>  well to be sure about whether his probability was reliable.
>
>
>It's a calculation and he's a mathematician and that will only get him 
>only so far, I appreciate that. Fuck, I've argued against over-
>reliance on models since forever.

	And wrongly. The problem was that his model was extremely 
simplistic, it was replaced by a more complex model with far more 
assumptions in it. According to your normal arguments against models, 
this increased complexity and higher level of implicit assumptions 
would make the more advanced model more suspect.


>  > I think you might get your eyes opened by reading a good book about
>>  probability. Its initially profoundly counterintuitive for about 90%
>>  of the population (myself included). We could consider the Monty Hall
>>  Problem as a very simple example of this issue.
>
>
>I love the one about how testing positive on a 99% reliable medical 
>test can still mean that you are unlikely to have the disease.

	Yep. Bayesian reasoning is important, and such a test can 
still be very useful (a test with a high false positive rate, but a 
very low false negative rate, can be useful for screening candidates 
who need to be further tested).

>Yes, I agree. The Creationists are barking up the wrong tree. As I 
>said earlier, if the system is doing something we don't know what, 
>then we just give the I don't know what a name and hope that one day 
>we can study it more closely and pick it apart and find sub-processes 
>or whatever and so on.

	I would argue that we have clearly already given this 
something a name, its called Evolution, and we continue to study 
evolution, and pick it apart, and find sub-processes, and additional 
mechanisms involved, and so on.
	In order to claim that there was a need to add anything to 
the theory besides evolution, you would need to point at something 
that clearly was not produced by evolution. There are interesting 
areas where we are not clear on exactly how something evolved, but so 
far nothing has been found that clearly wasn't produced by evolution, 
and many interesting tricky cases have been  explained using 
evolutionary theory quite satisfactorily.


>Well, I think there's a reason why Creationists picked on evolution
>for their little crusade.

	Because it clearly contradicts the Book of Genesis, and thus 
renders the Bible clearly not literally true, in an obvious way, on 
page 1.

	Cheers
		David