Letters to the Editor

• @J. Tarrou - absolute Balderdash and poppycock!

  [Read the article: The evolution of creationism]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  First of all, I am not a creationist.

  Difficulty in parsing what? Variation of pattern and characteristics are reasonable and explainable by natural selection. The creation of new patterns and novel characteristics are not so easily explainable. The creation of novel biological mechanical structures is not likely to be a random process.

  Breed chickens that fly and fly well. It should be far easier to do that than start from scratch. How do you build a flying bird from scratch? You need wings, with bone structures, muscles and a nervous system capable of making flying possible. Then you have to have a metabolism and food that provides the energy to fly, plus you need those extra light bones and an entire body adapted to flight. If the bird is too big, it doesn't fly, and if the wings are too small or not fast enough, it doesn't fly. There is your irreducible complexity, the kiwi, the ostrich and the chicken.

  Now "evolve" a cat or dog some wings so it can catch birds easier. How long have we been manipulating the genes of dogs and cats and no matter what we do we still basically have only dogs and cats.

  DNA is the text. If you saw a book and understood the letters and words would that be all you needed to know? What about the author, the editor, the publisher, the culture, the language, the historical and social context, the meaning and the intent. These are the higher order dimensionalities which I refer to. Just because you don't see them when you look at the text doesn't mean that they do, or did, not exist. And sure, a lot of that is random, but not most of it.

  Problem is that most people define that higher order dimensional thing as "God" and anthropomorphize it to being a old guy with a white beard and a nasty dispostion. I do not. When you have an unknown in science it simply is an unknown. When you are in flatland and a 3d sphere passes through, you have a higher dimensional phenomena which requires a 3 d perspective to parse and and 4 d perspective to grasp and that is hard to do when you only have 2 dimensions to work with. These unknowns are that from which our percieved reality is projected or "sliced: from.

  Down to the molecules of life - what is the problem with that concept, they are molecular machines which move and process other molecules and they just do it magically if you do not take into account a higher order than what is percievable in which their characteristics and behaviors are defined and again, you need the code, the decoder and the transmission method to all have evolved concurrently to make any sense. Build a computer without one of these components - software, cpu, storage and the connections between them. There is your irreducible complexity again.

  Go ahead, take away the ribosome. See what good your DNA and RNA is then. (virii, i know but those are derivatives, not originals).

  The size of the universe has nothing to do with the red shift or wavelength, i don't follow that and I came up with my own variation of string theory when I was in high school and that was in 1969. The best explanation for why we can only see 14.5 billion years is that what do you expect from the emmission of a photon/wave? Maybe a 14.5 billion year lifetime is enough for light as a particle and waveform and it simply excedes the energy that was behind it in the first place and it simply ceases.

  The real radical concept is that even the farthest edge that we can see is still in the center of the universe as we are and from that distant perspective we also would be at the edge of the known universe. The scale is unimaginable. But no matter where you are you are at the center. There is no edge. There is no radius. There are more than three spaces.

  I think that the biggest handicap is the notion of three space which has been hammered into our minds as there are as many dimensions as there are variables which can be used to describe an object or process. Those cute little quivering rings you see on PBS when they talk of string theory are like only a slice of path of a vibrating string and those are only a slice of a vibrating three dimensional string object and that is only a slice of a four dimensional string object - on and on and on until all of the harmonics are accounted for each state.

  I do not reside in flatland, 3D or 4D constructs. How many variables can you deal with?

  I have a fair grasp of a little science - no one can grasp the whole thing or even a small fraction of it. I used to believe in evolution, but now only believe that it's currency is in the observation of change fronting for random chance and slippage (Hofstadter) and errors in copying code. Even chaos theory isn't random.

  Why have a religious faith and fervor in the notion that random chance produces life in it's many variants. Slack exists within the constraints of workable structure and functioning systems. Random is a subset of the order, order is not a subset of the random.

  When you don't understand something, it is easy to believe, once you understand something, faith takes a back seat to knowledge.

  Question faith, especially if it claims science.

  Hey, I am not a target.

  Permalink Tuesday, November 13, 2007 12:04 AM