posted
Actually, if life could be created from scratch using simple chemicals and no intervention by intelligence, wouldn't that disprove intelligent design? At the very least, it would be strong evidence for abiogenesis.
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quote:Many things, though, such as governmentally funded arts, research, public television, public radio, and others, would seem to have problems under the principle.
Arts, TV, and radio are all pure expression – that is, expression is the ultimate goal.
Research has other goals: cure cancer, stop global warming, determine if the Caribou really care about oil wells in Alaska.
quote:But then I got to thinking, well why would Dag still support public schools, then, since they involve huge amounts of preference in speech? I'm pretty sure you justify it by education being a right (one of those not enumerated ones), as otherwise it would most definitely violate that principle.
Not at all. Education is most certainly not a right in the sense I would use the word here, although people have a right to education under the current law. It’s just that changing that law to remove that right from everyone would not be unconstitutional.
No, the reason I support public schools is because, again, the goal is not pure expression. The goal is education. Does it involve expression? Yes. A great deal of it. But the goal is not expression.
Again, though, I’d wonder why you wouldn’t think it OK to ban books from public school libraries if it’s OK to knock this show off the air.
quote:Under that framework, where non-enumerated rights justify content-based discrimination in their support, education seems to be okay. But then where do we put things like public television, or publicly funded scientific research, or publicly funded art? Well, there must be some right which justifies content-based discrimination in those cases for them to be justifiable under that principle in anything like their current form.
Again, that’s not my framework. Compare the EBS: it’s designed to fulfill a public function, one that requires expression, but that is an issue of safety and public protection. These are the very core of the police powers.
quote: And given any such right, the question ceases becoming "can the government discriminate based on content?" but "to what degree is it allowable the government discriminate on content in order to protect that right?", a very different question.
Content-based discrimination is inherently suspect. I never said it should never be used. I said, “I have a very serious problem with government funding of speech, because by its nature, unless it is unlimited, it requires content-based discrimination.” Pure expression, ad PBS is, serves none of the government purposes which justify the necessarily discriminatory policy.
posted
How would the life be being "created" without "the intervention of intelligence"? You mean set up some primordial soup and spark it with lightning? I guess when that works then it would greatly weaking ID.
String theory can't be proven or disproven, but that doesn't stop anyone from calling it science besides the die hard quantum mechanics.
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posted
The goal in public television, luckily, is not pure expression, a large part of the goal's education. Seems to me the content based discrimination you reluctantly accept under education would apply.
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posted
It can't be disproven by current technology, but that doesn't invalidate its general disprovability in a scientific sense.
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Perhaps it can eventually be proven wrong. Perhaps it can't -- either because we never figure out how or because it's not wrong.
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posted
String theory can be disproved in principle, in fact even with current technology. Granted, it would require a particle accelerator about the size of the orbit of Mars, but it's an engineering problem, not a fundamental one.
Intelligent design can also be disproven; by 'without the intervention of intelligence' I did indeed mean that humans would just set up the initial conditions, and then wait, just as in the amino acid experiments. Again, for this to work, it would probably require a lab the size of the Earth, and several hundred million years of waiting. That's what it took originally, after all. Again, this is an engineering problem. I don't want to give the impression that I'm holding my breath waiting for it to be solved, though.
I don't think intelligent design is good science. But it can in principle be disproved, unlike the existence of a creator. There are other, better reasons for considering it pseudo-science.
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quote:And string theory most definitely can be disproven in the scientific sense.
Yes, but Nova devoted 3 episodes to string theory. So why shouldn't PBS promulgate ID?
The thing is that ID isn't modelled after any particular book of scripture, so it doesn't rely on assuming the Christian God (as was mentioned near the bottom of the last page). It merely states that it is improbable that life and the various species arose by strict evolution. I don't see that it is a less valid view that strict uniformitarianism vs. punctuated equilibrium.
But maybe an instance of living macroevolution, meaning a viable Chromosome count change, would happen in my lifetime in one of the millions of species on earth.
Believe it or not, I am not a proponent of ID. But I find uniformitarianism to be flawed. The issue is not simply multiplying time by more and more factors. The issue is that in fifty years of observing all the species on earth, we haven't seen many chromosome count changes. (I'm not aware of any.) The length of geologic time cannot explain the lack of change in the breadth of life. Unless one resorts to puctuated equilibrium events in which large scale mutations are much more likely. And there would have to have been a lot of them. And as we know, the chances are largely against any particular mutation being beneficial instead of deadly.
The uniformitarian answer to this is "well, imagine time spanning even longer."
What really amuses me is the convention of comparing the history of life on earth to a day, of which our species has only been around for 30 seconds. I saw this on David Attenborough's Life on Earth, my Bio 103 class, and again on the video that mocked the biblical time account. I found it highly ironic.
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posted
Uh, trisha, there are large numbers of plants and insects which can become true-breeding polyploids. Just google for "plant polyploid speciation".
Then there's that there are several human genetic disorders, some of them in name only (that is, they don't seem to have any downside) which result from having missing or extra chrosomomes (generally sex chromosomes). Just google for "sex chromosome abnormalities".
Chromosome count changes all over the place, those are two very common areas.
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posted
Sex chromosome abnormalities don't count. :sigh: If they don't render the person infertile, they are of a nature that they naturally erase in the next generation. (XXYs can have kids but the kids aren't necessarily XXY) All mammals have X and Y sex differentiation chromosomes, and they all have sex chromosome abnormalitites. Though the defect probably leads more quickly to natural selection in other species.
Insects also have the long and short chromosome system for sex differentiation. But it's referred to by two other letters, Z and W I think. I hadn't heard before that insects have reproducible polyploidy. That's actually kind of bad news, in my opinion. But I'll check it out.
quote:Polyploidy Despite the apparent difficulties most theories of sympatric speciation, one form of sympatric speciation is universally accepted -- the instantaneous mode in which changes in ploidy lead to instantaneous reproductive isolation. While extremely common in plants, it is less common in animals and well documented cases are found in the lower vertebrate classes: fish, amphibians, and reptiles.
For example, Gerhardt has identified a case in which a single species of Hyla tree frogs has undergone tetraploid formations. The formation of tetraploid (4n) from the fusion of two diploid parents (2n) leads to a new species of treefrog that can only breed with another individual that has similar ploidy (Gerhardt 198X). The fusion of gametes from a diploid parent and tetraploid parent produces triploid offspring which die during larval stages and the few hybrids that reach adult size are sterile (Johnson. While production of triploids can be achieved in the laboratory, triploids are rarely found in natural populations of Hyla tree frogs (Gerhardt 1982).
Because the diploid parental species achieves reproductive isolation from the tetraploid daughter species in one fell-swoop, sympatric speciation is easy to achieve. Indeed Gerhardt and his colleagues have found that the production of new tetraploid species has occurred several times in this species complex. Diploid populations of Hyla chrysoscelis probably gave rise to tetraploid populations of H. versicolor (Tymowska 1991).
In this case of polyploidy, the whole genome is doubled. In effect, the animal has the same number of chromosomes doing the same number of things. It just has a redundant pair. I'm trying to figure out how the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees survived the fusion of the chromosomes that are in two parts in apes and one part in humans.
[ January 08, 2005, 02:13 AM: Message edited by: Trisha the Severe Hottie ]
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posted
Human sex chromosome abnormalities don't breed true, certainly. But consider that we have bundles of them, and all the different sorts of species out there, and consider that the extremely frequent rate of sex chromosome abnormalities might in some species result in true-breeding variants, particularly those where sex is not dependent on chromosomes, but on environmental conditions.
And as for polyploidy, while initially they're "just duplicates", after the polyploidy event there's nothing holding the duplicate chromosomes in sync. One might receive a mutation while the other doesn't -- suddenly the animal has all the genes it had before, plus one.
Add a million years, stirring regularly, and you've got a radically different animal/plant/whatever.
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posted
Oh, and I did a little looking around: absent telomeres, fusing is the natural behavior of a chromosome. Now, when telomeres run down all together as the result of natural processes, the cell tends to die, or turn into cancer. But if something came along and only messed with the telomeres on one end for a chromosome or two (there's a number of scenarios that come to mind for this, mostly involving viruses and/or errors in reproductive cell generation) its quite conceivable those chromosomes would bind together, preventing the enzymes from nibbling at them, and resulting in a change in chromosome count without a phenotype change (or a genotype change, really).
posted
I have a cousin doing human genetics research for the University of Irvine. They recruited him specifically because he is a Creationist. It seems that nearly everyone in the field makes evolution the assumption, and that assumption limits the questions they're asking. My cousin doesn't buy into those assumptions, so he is a rare comodity. Because of his assumptions, he is asking unique, yet informed questions.
It's funny, I saw a long and interesting special on Nova about Memes. As far as I know, this isn't a proven or widely accepted science, and yet it was presented.
I think that a better choice for PBS would have been for them to run the creationist show, highlighting the funders, then run a typical, evolution as fact program immediately following. I think that PBS is very good at educating. What could be more educational than putting two impassioned viewpoints side by side?
quote: Add a million years, stirring regularly, and you've got a radically different animal/plant/whatever.
Yeah, this is the deus ex machina of the uniformitarian view.
The point about all mammals having xy sex differentiation is that the mechanism remains consistent across the class, so I doubt that it is a mechanism for evolutionary change.
It's not a problem of how the chromosome got fused in one person. It's how it got fused in two people who were able to mate with each other. It is further complicated by the difference in how an egg is formed versus how a sperm is formed. Which depends on whether you accept the commonly held theory that women have all their eggs in place before birth.
Uniformitarianism means that the event is either very common or either very rare, but it will continue to happen at approximately the rate that it has been happening in the past. I would find the virus argument persuasive if analogous processes could be shown in other closely related mammals.
Don't make too much of my pointing out the boundary between humans and apes. It occurs to me that you might think I'm arguing "evolution up until Adam and Eve". I'm just using this example because it was the first clear case of nuclear speciation I came across. It naturally involves humans because we are most interested in the genes of humans.
P.S. Ladydove: I thought it was funny that a grad student at BYU discovered that walking sticks have gained and lost wings several times in their evolutionary history. It had been taken for granted that flight is such a beneficial mutation, no species would lose it again once having it. Evolution is full of such assumptions. They are critical to the shape of the taxological trees as they are typically received.
The trilobdontic tooth (grinding teeth) is likewise considered so beneficial that all species that have it are assumed to have a single common ancestor who posessed it.
P.S. on my way to bed I realized that all the examples of polyploidy are in species where self-fertilization is possible. Plants- obviously. Some insects in the absence of males will spawn haploid males. I'm not quite sure what happens with the frogs but I know there is parthenogenesis in some species. It seems especially likely that a frog with the equivalent of XXYY sex chromosomes might be able to act as both mother and father to the next generation. It is interesting to wonder whether the offspring of such would be diploid with genetic mixing or an effective clone as when a diploid frog undergoes parthenogenesis.
Actually, such a clone would not truly be a clone due to the crossover that occures during meiosis. Or at best it would be closer to a clone of one of the frog's parents and not the frog itself.
[ January 08, 2005, 11:11 AM: Message edited by: Trisha the Severe Hottie ]
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quote:The goal in public television, luckily, is not pure expression, a large part of the goal's education. Seems to me the content based discrimination you reluctantly accept under education would apply.
Nah. The inclusion of educational programs does not make the purpose educational. The purpose is to provide a forum for expression for some ideas that they fear would not be expressed otherwise. That some of that expression is educational is incidental. The “some” is what I have a problem with.
quote:--------------------------- The denial of government benefits because of the voluntary exercise of a right by a citizen is coercion. ---------------------------
doesn't seem to have a loophole for "but only when its pure expression".
When it’s not pure expression, it’s not the denial of a right. For example, students are allowed to wear black armbands to protest war. The response was expulsion or suspension (backed up by threat of expulsion) – that is, the government’s denying of the benefit of education based on the exercise of the right.
“Only when its pure expression” clearly and specifically applies to areas of expression, since the right to free expression MUST be denied to some by the nature of the program. “denial of government benefits” applies to much broader areas. As the major example I’ve given was NOT about expression, I’m wondering why you interpreted it this way.
None of the other examples you cite are at all parallel.
posted
Are you familiar with duck typing (in programming), Dag?
Take a look at the programs PBS has, particularly those its known for. Educational, educational, educational, news, educational, news. That's basically how it goes. And as the saying goes, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, its probably a duck.
You don't just get to arbitrarily say what the purpose of PBS is. Browsing through PBS mission statements (found through google), pretty much all of them hold up education as the central thing they do.
And as pretty much all the big PBS programs are educational or informational in nature, I think it makes a heck of a lot more sense to call PBS an educational endeavor than an "purely expressive" one.
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What, exactly, is so important about these (and all the other things I didn't list) that we need to be educated about them in particular, and not about other things?
posted
No switching the topic, Dag, from whether or not its educational to whether or not its good/important education. Those shows certainly are mostly educational/informational in nature.
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posted
Last I heard students in school certainly spent a fair amount of time studying literature and drama (which masterpiece theater overlaps in both directions). Plus, the show includes short but substantial segments on historical context and similar topics related to the pieces it shows.
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quote: String theory can be disproved in principle, in fact even with current technology. Granted, it would require a particle accelerator about the size of the orbit of Mars, but it's an engineering problem, not a fundamental one.
You contradict yourself. What you dismiss as an engineering problem would include creating technologies that we don't have yet.
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But even assuming that were true, it doesn't invalidate that string theory is, generally speaking, scientifically disprovable. Whether or not its scientifically disprovable with current technology isn't relevant.
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quote:Last I heard students in school certainly spent a fair amount of time studying literature and drama (which masterpiece theater overlaps in both directions). Plus, the show includes short but substantial segments on historical context and similar topics related to the pieces it shows.
That's informational, not educational, and the difference is key. The educational function of schools is to impart a defined set of skills on a defined audience. The educational function of PBS is what, exactly? Which skills are being taught, and who is the target audience?
A brochure (or even video or short commercial) about how to file taxes is knowledge the government needs to impart to carry on its functions. We, as a society, have decided that children should receive a certain type of education, as defined by both national and local standards. Even if PBS claims that it is educational, it cannot identify the target students nor claim to have any kind of ongoing curriculum.
The fact that it has news programs demonstrates further that its purpose is to impart information, not to educate in the sense that schools do.
Regardless, it is a government program that provides a forum for speech, and this forum is extremely limited. We have one example here of either content-based or group-based discrimination. The nature of PBS is such that this type of decision must be made constantly.
Having a program such as PBS puts the government in the position of preferring one type of speech over another, in a forum with no non-speech purpose.
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