AristotlesAdvance

Creativity requires mental flexibility. Nature gives us the dots, it is our burden to connect them. This can be done with originality or it can be pedestrian and plodding and all points in between. Ba'al Chatzaf "Connecting given dots" seems a similar idea to Keer's "arbitrary re-combination of existing elements" notion. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (author of the famous "Rime of the Ancient Mariner") spent the final decades of his life writing works on philosophy (including a treatise on logic, by the way), and he wrote quite a bit about the problem of imagination. For him, there are two types of mental processes going on: the first is, indeed, a mere "flexibility of mind" in which already given dots -- that are, note well, recognized as being "dots" rather than as something else -- are "arbitrarily" rearranged into some novel pattern of dots. Coleridge rejects the idea that this is an example of "imagination" at work; in fact, he uses a different word for this sort of pattern rearrangement; i.e. "fancy." He also rejects the notion that any sort of real originality or "greatness" can arise from the exercise of mere fancy. "Fancy", we might conclude, is the province of the 2nd-rater, the mediocre. "Imagination", however, is quite different. It might include elements of mere rearrangement, of course, but it goes far beyond it by actually attempting to perceive "in the mind's eye" certain relations among the given dots that cannot be perceived by a mere rearrangement. By his lights -- and I agree with Coleridge -- "imagination" is a mode of perception -- similar, in fact, to sight, except more commingled with conscious thinking -- and, like ordinary material perception (sight, hearing, touch, etc.), a means to knowledge of the real world. "Fancy", then, according to Coleridge, is "making things up", "rearranging" given things in some new pattern. "Imagination" might employ "fancy" to some extent but surpasses a mere rearrangement of parts by perceiving something about reality that wasn't perceived before, and therefore leads (or, at least, can lead) to new knowledge about the world. In fact, we might say that to the extent it actually does lead to new knowledge about the real world, then it was an example of imagination; to the extent that it does not lead to new knowledge, then it was simply an example of fancy. By this sort of division of terms, then, we can see "Imagination" as not only the mode of perception common to the "great" creators in the arts, but also -- relating this to the thread on scientific discovery and induction -- common to the "greats" in science, since it positions scientific research as an essentially creative enterprise, not entirely different from creativity in the arts. What this implies, of course, is quite profound: it implies that not only does imagination employed in the service of scientific discovery lead to the discovery of new knowledge, new truths about reality that weren't grasped before, but that imagination employed in the service of the arts can just as well lead to the discovery of new knowledge about the real world. Thus, a great novel, painting, or poem is not merely a clever or arbitrary rearrangement of elements; it shows us, or teaches us something about the real world that we did not perceive before. In sum, I side with Coleridge on this: imagination (as distinct from fancy) is a mode of perception, and like other modes of perception, it gives us information about the real world. Imagination is a means of gaining new knowledge about the world, while fancy is not. Please provide three good illustrative examples for each of your separate categories. Please provide three good illustrative examples for each of your separate categories. Please provide nine good reasons, in 6 dialects, in 3 different languages, why I should do anything for you, Keer, after you threw a little hissy-fit in another thread and sneered that you'd never respond to any of my posts. "Division of labor" doesn't mean "I do your work for you."

<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvBWiZi99Dk?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param'>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvBWiZi99Dk?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvBWiZi99Dk?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object> How about letting Carl Sagan do it? It seems your assumptions for the Drake equation are such that life can’t exist, including us. Dawkins’ chapter The Worship of Gaps from The God Delusion would be more helpful here, but it isn’t available to share and I’m not up for retyping it. He calls this the “argument from blinding with science”, which consists of bringing up a scientific point your interlocutor has probably never heard of, and if they blink, pause, or in any way take you seriously, do the God did it victory dance. Googling a couple of your phrases pointed me to a 2009 article by Anthony P. Feiger, published by Campus Crusade for Christ, do you have a reference from an actual scientific source? A journal, something, well, more respectable? Peer reviewed, so we can all benefit from that great innovation called division of labor? How about, here we go again, a reference? A link, something we can check. Name a writer who has expressed a preference for a steady state cosmological model on the grounds that evolution needs more than the billions of years available to do it’s thing, to produce beings capable of discussing the issue. Link to a thread, a post, something. If there are many, this should take you no time at all. I'll be genuinely surprised if you can find even one, and that's including silly people like...names omitted on reflection, find them yourself. Sort of, but ultimately I’m Satan’s agent. The deal is every soul I win using Dawkins earns me a thousand years manning the roasting spit. Believe me, it adds up and eternity is a long time so you have to find ways to fill it. I've read the books I named, should I recommend books I haven't read or that I don't think are as good? Sagan admits that the question he and the Drake Equation are concerned with is not "how likely is it that one important element necessary for the formation of life -- such as a functional protein -- might form with no intelligent intervention at all, but merely as a result of random forces performing multiple trials over a given period time." They are concerned, as Sagan admits at about 2:40, with the question "How likely is it that at least some planets have "advanced civilizations" (which he defines as one capable of radio astronomy) in the Milky Way galaxy. So you are mistaken that my question -- limited to the likelihood of a simple protein of 300 amino acids appearing by chance -- is in any sense similar to Sagan's question -- which is the likelihood of an advanced civilization, outside of human civilization, existing in the Milky Way galaxy. Sagan then presents each of the variables in the equation. The only variable that has anything to do with my question above, indeed, that has anything to do with this entire thread, is the fourth variable labeled "f(L)", i.e. the likelihood that life can arise. However, since his entire demonstration is crackpot, I may as well go through it: N = total number of such advanced civilizations He claims -- or rather, he merely guesses, but no one really knows what N might completely depend on -- that N AT LEAST depends on the following: N( * ) = total number of stars in the Milky Way f( p ) = fraction of the total number of stars that have planets n( e ) = fraction of total number of planets that are "ecologically suitable" for life f( L ) = fraction of total number of ecologically suitable planets on which life actually arises f( I ) = fraction of total number of ecologically suitable planet on which life actually arises that actually develop intelligent life f( C ) fraction of f( I ) that develops communication systems f( L ) fraction of f( C ) that is "graced" (Sagan's term) with technological civilization I'll point out right now that, unlike my assumptions above, which are all simply restatements of actual established fact, Sagan and Drake's assumptions are entirely guesswork -- nothing established about any of them, though some of the guesswork is more uncertain than others. For example: 1. N( * ) is approx 4 x 10^11 (a decent guess, based on perceptual photographic evidence) 2 f( p ) is approx. 1/4 of #1 (far less certain, based on inferences from double-stars and star "perturbations") running total = 100 billion stars with planetary systems (logical status = as certain as #2 above, i.e., not too certain) 3. n( e ) = 2 (he invents this number out of thin air, and then claims that he is "being conservative". ) running total = 200 billion planets ecologically capable of supporting life (logical status = extremely uncertain since it was arrived at by multiplying a number -- "2" -- that is highly uncertain and was simply fantasized by Sagan) 4. f( L ) is approx. 1/2 This is truly laughable. Sagan claims that "under the right conditions" (ahem!) the "molecules of life self-assemble". Really? Well, we already have a place we can observe such things: planet Earth. Do the "molecules of life" (which he doesn't name) "self-assemble"? Really? Do these "molecules of life" actually turn into any sort of living organism? Or do they merely remain "molecules of life"? LOL!! Then he completely blows off any difficulty with a genetic code, reluctantly claiming that "it is conceivable that there might be some 'impediment' to forming a genetic code" (!!) (Got news for you, you scientific fraud. (i) codes appear NOWHERE in the physical universe EXCEPT living things (ii) codes are always products of intelligence, not physical processes (iii) a genetic code is completely useless without the rest of the cellular machinery. The issue of "protein-first, then DNA" or "DNA first, then proteins" is of a chicken-and-egg type. Cannot be solved, since DNA requires cells, and cells require DNA. The probability of the base pairs "spontaneously forming" into a helix, with a sugar molecule as the backbone, and the ordering of the base pairs coding for a specific sequence of amino acids that, when assembled by the ribosome, create proteins, is effectively zero. Then there's additional knotty problem of "protein-folding", i.e., after being snipped off and moving away from the ribosome that created it, each protein chain has to undergo a 3-D spatial change in shape -- "folding" -- for it to function. If it doesn't fold into the correct shape, it doesn't function.) And Sagan just blows all of this biochemical necessity away by assuring us that "the molecules of life self-assemble". No problem, Carl! Anyway, Sagan never was a serious researcher or scientist, but a combination academic and showman -- a bit like Dawkins, except more affable -- who is propagandizing for his view that intelligent life is ubiquitous in the universe. He also had a clear leftist agenda: he had always made it clear in his books that, because he had "proven" that intelligent life was everywhere, the U.S., and all industrialized countries with nukes (meaning, the Soviet Union, too) should divert most of their arms budget into SETI programs -- the peaceful and coexistent search for extra-terrestrial life. Pacifism was always his main agenda. He even participated in anti-nuke and anti-SDI demonstrations at the instigation of his third wife, a political activist named Anne Druyan. Druyan was also his television producer. But I digress . . . to continue: 4. f( L ) = 1/2 of the previous total (logical status = bullshit. Listen, Carl, you can make any assumptions you wish in order to force the final answer of the Drake Equation to equal a total you had in mind from the beginning, but that isn't science; it's propaganda (excuse me, I meant "showbiz", not propaganda). Running total = 100 billion planets that are likely to have life in the Milky Way 5. f( I ) is approximately 1/10 of #4 = 10 billion planets likely to have intelligent life (logical status = completely invented out of thin air based on subjective whim) 6. f( C ) is approx 1/10 of #5 = 1 billion planets likely to have intelligent life with communications systems and high technology 7. f(L) is approx. 10^-8 = likelihood that #6 has persisted over the lifetime of a given planet. Thus, N = 10^9 x 10^-8 = 10 So Sagan claims that there is a likelihood of 10 advance civilizations in the Milky Way. Logical status of this claim? Complete bull, based on numbers pulled out of hat. The real answer is: no one has a clue. No wonder you admire this guy. Then, at the end his magic show, Sagan changes his mind and changes #7 from 10^-8 to 10^-2, making the final number N = 10^7 or ten million. Since you're unable to do the simple calculation on your own -- and since your boy, Sagan, has performed a calculation that is not only irrelevant to the topic at hand, but is based on inventing numbers that he happens to like out of thin air -- I'll just have to do the calculation for you. Note: my doing YOUR homework assignment is not my idea of "division of labor"; I consider it more like unfair redistribution of my precious time. But since we live in the Age of Obama, "redistribution" seems to be all the rage, so here goes: 1. since there's no chemical or physical force biasing which amino acid occupies which position on the amino acid chain, there is, therefore, an equal likelihood of any one of the 20 essential amino acids to occupy any one of the 300 positions on the chain. The odds of any one of the 20 amino acids appearing at position #1 are therefore one-out-of-20, expressed mathematically as a simple fraction: 1/20 (that means "1 chance of any given amino acid appearing out of a possible 20 choices, OK?) The odds of any one of the 20 amino acids appearing at position #2 are exactly the same, because the amino acid in position #1 does not "bias" or influence in any way the appearance of any given amino acid for position #2. This is not speculation; this is established chemistry. So the odds of any one out of 20 possible amino acids appearing at position #2 are again 1/20. As in Sagan's Drake Equation, probabilities multiply. So the odds of a given amino acid at position #1 and at position #2 are 1/20 x 1/20 (i.e., 1/(20^2) = 1/400. The odds of any given amino acid appearing at position #3 are again 1/20, making the odds of positions 1, 2 and 3 with given amino acids equal to 1/20 x 1/20 x 1/20 = 1/8000 (i.e., 1/(20^3)) You can see that the exponent in the last expression equals the number of positions whose probabilities we are including in the calculation. So the total odds of a given sequence of 20 amino acids appearing in a chain of 300 amino acids will be: N = 1/(20^300) or (using log base10): log 20^300 = 300 log 20 log 20 is approx equal to 1.4 300 x 1.4 = 420 So, 20^300 is about equal to 10^420 10^420 is the "probability space", the total number of combinations, that are possible given 20 amino acids arranged in a sequence of 300 units long. The functionality of a protein depends on the sequence of these amino acids (as well as on other things, like protein folding). Though there is some -- some -- variation possible in the sequencing without impairing the functionality of the protein, for the most part, protein functionality is highly dependent on having a certain sequence and ONLY that sequence. Biochemists call that "protein specificity"; the sequence is specific to a given protein, and some arbitrary sequence won't do. But we're not through yet. There are several different kinds of chemical bonds possible between amino acids, the peptide bond being the only one that works in a functional protein. There is no biochemical determinism in the formation of a peptide bond or a non-peptide bond. Since the odds of a peptide bond forming are about 50%, or 1/2, in nature, and since there are 299 borders between the 300 amino acids, the odds of peptide bonds forming at each juncture are 1/(2^299). log 2^299 = 299 log2 log2 = 0.3 299 x 0.3 is approx 90 So 2^299 is about 10^90 So our total odds so far are: the odds of the specific sequence x the odds of the correct bond between each sequence: 10^420 x 10^90 = 10^510 But we're not through yet. Each amino acid has an equal chance, in nature, of appearing in either a left-handed form or its mirror-image right-handed form: i.e., the odds of either appearing must be 50% or again 1/2. So, The odds of amino acid appearing at position #1 being a left-handed form = 1/2 The odds of amino acid appearing at position #2 being a left-handed form = 1/2 etc. The odds that all 300 amino acids are of the correct form -- or "chirality" -- must be: 1/(2^300) This is approximately equal to the number we used above for 1/(2^299), so we can use the same result: 2^300 = 10^90 Factoring this into our running total, we have: Odds of a specific sequence = 10^420 Odds of only peptide bonds = 10^90 Odds of only left-hand amino acids = 10^90 Total odds: 10^420 x 10^90 x 10^90 = 10^600 Random processes, unguided by intelligence, or some other force capable of directing it toward a specified desirable goal, would have to blindly search through 10^600 possible combinations and perform the blind search within the available amount of time, which is 10^17 seconds. If a random force created one combination per second, it would have searched through only 10^17 combinations; hardly likely to hit upon the one combination of 300 amino acids; each with a peptide bond; each left-handed. If it created 10 combinations per second, it would only have searched through 10^18 combinations out of a possible total number of 10^600. Still unlikely to hit upon the right one without some guidance telling it where to aim. If it created a trillion combinations per second, it could only have searched through a possible 10^29 combinations out of a possible 10^600. Still highly unlikely to find, by means of chance alone, that one combination that is functional. At this point, we run into physical limitations, since there are boundaries to how fast a physical reaction can actually occur. We can calculate a very forgiving boundary, or "probabilistic resource" for the entire universe since t=0: 1. Within the known physical universe, there are about 10^80 fundamental particles. Any kind of physical process would obviously have to make use of some part of this total number of particles. 2. Material properties are such that it is impossible for any transition from one state to another to occur faster than 10^45 times per second. This frequency corresponds to something called "Planck Time", which is the smallest physically meaningful unit of time. 3. The universe is about 12 billion years old, which equals 10^17 seconds. Since any physical process must be specified by (1) at least one fundamental particle, and (2) the process cannot be generated any faster than Planck Time, and (3) the total number of such events must have occurred within the total amount of available time since the Big Bang, we have an upper limit for considerations of probability: 10^80 x 10^45 x 10^17 = 10^142 So, even if every fundamental particle in the universe were transitioning its state to that of an amino acid every 1/10^45th of a second for every second the universe has existed, you would have managed to blindly search through a possible 10^142 combinations out of a possible 10^600. These are not good odds for you. As stated above, the odds are similarly discouraging for the formation of DNA by random means, with its sequence of nucleotides, all of which, in this case, must be right-handed. Yet, given these odds, Sagan quips "Hey, no problem! Everything just magically self-assembles, and besides, we have billions of years to do it in!" What he means by "do it in" is "blindly search through the combinations of components that do NOT lead to life". As I have shown above, billions of years are not enough to search through 10^600 combinations for even one typical protein, let alone all the thousands of proteins necessary for something as complex as a human being. Regarding Objectivists and Steady State, you can do a little division of labor work yourself. Check the evolution archives at the SOLOpassion site, and look especially for old posts from Linzie, Gregster, Leonid, and Mindi.

Argument from analogy is not a valid form of inference. Why? Because you can start off with something true, apply argument from analogy and end up with something false. A valid form of inference always and always goes from true to true. As sure as the principle of con-contradiction is true. Ba'al Chatzaf Argument from analogy is not a valid form of inference. According to the old logicians (e.g., Whately), neither, therefore, is induction. However, induction, as a form of persuasion, is a valid form of argumentation. We tend to look down our noses today at the subject of rhetoric. Originally, "discourse" was divided into three subjects (which where, in fact, the first three subjects in the classical "Seven Liberal Arts" inherited from antiquity). The three subjects -- known as the "Trivium" (for "three ways") -- were grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Rhetoric was considered the epitome; logic, an important but subservient art.

Here's my pet revision of your pet theory: "Imagination" is central to induction, not the other way around. Furthermore, I side with the old logicians on this issue (great teachers of the subject like Richard Whately). For them, there was simply no such thing as "inductive logic." "Logic" is a deductive science, period. So-called "induction", for the old logicians, would fall under a closely-related topic -- rhetoric, i.e., a mode of argumentation and persuasion. Induction was usually treated as a species of "argument from analogy."

I do not believe it is that simple, nor do I believe that it is all that worthwhile to talk about imagination and "fancy" together in this way. At least not now in present day. Fancy is a very old term with its own connotations and contexts. Why would we re-animate it here? I don't think I would have cared for it even if I lived back then. Other than that, I guess I am down with you. rde Being all subjective. I do not believe it is that simple, Never claimed anything having to do with a subject like imagination was simple. nor do I believe that it is all that worthwhile to talk about imagination and "fancy" together in this way. I do. It's as important to distinguish "imagination" from "fancy" as it is to distinguish between "perception" and "sensation". Closely related? Yes. Identical? No. Fancy is a very old term with its own connotations and contexts. Why would we re-animate it here? Same can be said for the term "imagination." If you don't like the term "fancy," find another term. I brought it up because I posted on Coleridge's thinking about this topic.

Creativity requires mental flexibility. Nature gives us the dots, it is our burden to connect them. This can be done with originality or it can be pedestrian and plodding and all points in between. Ba'al Chatzaf "Connecting given dots" seems a similar idea to Keer's "arbitrary re-combination of existing elements" notion. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (author of the famous "Rime of the Ancient Mariner") spent the final decades of his life writing works on philosophy (including a treatise on logic, by the way), and he wrote quite a bit about the problem of imagination. For him, there are two types of mental processes going on: the first is, indeed, a mere "flexibility of mind" in which already given dots -- that are, note well, recognized as being "dots" rather than as something else -- are "arbitrarily" rearranged into some novel pattern of dots. Coleridge rejects the idea that this is an example of "imagination" at work; in fact, he uses a different word for this sort of pattern rearrangement; i.e. "fancy." He also rejects the notion that any sort of real originality or "greatness" can arise from the exercise of mere fancy. "Fancy", we might conclude, is the province of the 2nd-rater, the mediocre. "Imagination", however, is quite different. It might include elements of mere rearrangement, of course, but it goes far beyond it by actually attempting to perceive "in the mind's eye" certain relations among the given dots that cannot be perceived by a mere rearrangement. By his lights -- and I agree with Coleridge -- "imagination" is a mode of perception -- similar, in fact, to sight, except more commingled with conscious thinking -- and, like ordinary material perception (sight, hearing, touch, etc.), a means to knowledge of the real world. "Fancy", then, according to Coleridge, is "making things up", "rearranging" given things in some new pattern. "Imagination" might employ "fancy" to some extent but surpasses a mere rearrangement of parts by perceiving something about reality that wasn't perceived before, and therefore leads (or, at least, can lead) to new knowledge about the world. In fact, we might say that to the extent it actually does lead to new knowledge about the real world, then it was an example of imagination; to the extent that it does not lead to new knowledge, then it was simply an example of fancy. By this sort of division of terms, then, we can see "Imagination" as not only the mode of perception common to the "great" creators in the arts, but also -- relating this to the thread on scientific discovery and induction -- common to the "greats" in science, since it positions scientific research as an essentially creative enterprise, not entirely different from creativity in the arts. What this implies, of course, is quite profound: it implies that not only does imagination employed in the service of scientific discovery lead to the discovery of new knowledge, new truths about reality that weren't grasped before, but that imagination employed in the service of the arts can just as well lead to the discovery of new knowledge about the real world. Thus, a great novel, painting, or poem is not merely a clever or arbitrary rearrangement of elements; it shows us, or teaches us something about the real world that we did not perceive before. In sum, I side with Coleridge on this: imagination (as distinct from fancy) is a mode of perception, and like other modes of perception, it gives us information about the real world. Imagination is a means of gaining new knowledge about the world, while fancy is not.

Says you. You haven’t written anything to demonstrate this, please expand. How about a reference? If there are “many” this should be easy. Try The Greatest Show on Earth, and/or The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. There are plenty of other books on the subject. You need to demonstrate that you’re worth talking to before anyone is going to invest the time distilling it for you. 12 Billion? How old do you think the earth is? There’s nothing about even the steady state view in cosmology that contradicts the earth being 4-5 billion years old. How many billions of years, by your reckoning, does evolution take to produce humans? News to me. Sounds like the party line of the Discovery Institute. Says you. You haven’t written anything to demonstrate this, please expand. No problem. Life as know it requires proteins; proteins are chains of subunits called amino acids; there are 20 essential amino acids; a typical protein comprises a chain of about 300 amino acids. Assignment: you have the entire age of the universe -- 12 billion years or 10^17 seconds -- to construct a protein chain of 300 amino acid residues, each residue being one of 20 possible amino acids. Constraints: No biasing or biochemical pre-destination: ONLY randomness is allowed to determine which amino acid appears at any position on the chain. ONLY randomness is allowed to determine the kind of bond (peptide or non-peptide) between one amino acid and the next. ONLY randomness is allowed to determine the left/right chirality of each amino acid. No DNA or pre-existing set of coded instructions is allowed as part of the assumptions. In this example, DNA doesn't exist yet. This is what's called a "Proteins First" scenario. I'll let you do us the honor of making this simple calculation. Then you'll see the absurdity of the probabilistic resources you have at your disposal: the immense number of possible combinations of the above variables having to fit into a room whose size measured in time -- 10^17 seconds -- is too small for it to fit. You either have to jettison chance as the mechanism by which a growing protein, ex nihilo, rejects useless combinations and zeroes in on only the one or two that will it make function in a specific and useful way (or, of course, you can retain chance, but bring in some additional mechanism that ultimately overrides chance); or, you can retain chance alone and assume a much bigger room measured in time -- a room that would have to be far larger than 10^17 seconds. The latter would imply a rejection of the Big Bang theory. I chose 12 billion years (putative age of the entire universe since the Big Bang) because I'm a nice guy: I'm trying to cut Darwinism and Materialism as much slack as possible by giving them as much time as possible, and there cannot be more than 12 billion years available to accomplish any particular kind of task. Your number of 4 billion years (the approximately age of the earth) obviously cuts down on the available time you'd have at your disposal to make a random process appear plausible. Additionally, Fred Hoyle might be correct (who knows?) in his suggestion that life could have been "seeded" on earth from someplace else (in his Panspermia scenario, pre-existing genetic elements float freely in space and are carried to possible hospitable environments by means of comets). See http://www.panspermia.org/ for serious technical discussion of this idea, as well as for quite excellent discussion and critiques of Darwinism. As for references, yes, that is rather easy. My opinion has been formed by by posters on sites like SOLO and ARI, whose members seem to reject Big Bang for some form of "It simply always existed" (i.e., Steady State). It also comes from 35 years of interaction I've had with Objectivists who make the effort to understand that there's a big problem with the hand-waving assumption that "lots of time and lots of randomness can make anything imaginable happen." Once they understand that even the entire available time in the universe since t=0 to t=now is not enough for any random process to plausibly sort through, or "blind-search", a probability-space that far exceeds the given probabilistic resources, they suddenly see the beauty of the phrase "It has always been thus", i.e., no Big Bang; they even claim to find some sort of blessing for it from Rand herself ("Existence Exists" somehow is taken to mean "There was never any Big Bang"). If you are not one of these Objectivists, then I'm glad to see that things are slowly changing for the better. Try The Greatest Show on Earth, and/or The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins. There are plenty of other books on the subject. You need to demonstrate that you’re worth talking to before anyone is going to invest the time distilling it for you. Are you Dawkins' agent or something? At any rate, one doesn't demonstrate intellectual worthiness by the standard of whether or not one has read a book by Dawkins. Just plain silly. Anyway, Dawkins is simply a crank, a propagandist for materialism and atheism -- not even, necessarily, for Darwinism, since he has admitted in various places that there are serious problems with the theory, though he resolutely stands by it anyway. The worldview he has faith in is not necessarily a Darwinist one, but a material one, since he has admitted in an interview on film that he can accept, at least for the sake of argument, the notion that life is a kind of super-hi-technology, designed by an intelligent designer, as long as we do NOT assume that the designer was "supernatural". This is just propagandizing on behalf of naive materialism and simple atheism. Not exactly a deep or original thinker. There’s nothing about even the steady state view in cosmology that contradicts the earth being 4-5 billion years old. If 12 billion years (age of entire universe since Big Bang) aren't enough time, then it follows that 4 billions years (age of Earth) aren't enough time either. How many billions of years, by your reckoning, does evolution take to produce humans? If random processes cannot produce a single functional protein of 300 residues in a plausible amount of time, then it follows that it cannot produce the thousands of functional proteins in a human being in a plausible amount of time. Humans may, indeed, have evolved, but whatever the process was, it obviously couldn't have involved randomness. And since randomness is the root idea behind Darwinism, it follows that Darwinism cannot explain how man appeared.

Yep. And that is precisely the reason that many screenwriters want to become directors: to protect their work. The only Hollywood screenwriter I can think of who commanded such overwhelming respect from producers and directors that they dared not alter his work (significantly) is Paddy Chayefsky, writer of such movies as "Marty", "The Americanization of Emily" (which was an adaptation from a novel), "The Hospital", and "Network." If I remember correctly, Chayefsky even gets a top credit in "Network" -- i.e., "A Paddy Chayefsky Story", or something similar -- right at the very beginning of the credit roll: before the stars (like Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Robert Duvall, et al.); before the producer; and before the director (Sidney Lumet). Highly unusual.

Exactly.

You don't grasp it because you don't know enough. That is remediable situation. Learn the math, learn the physics. Charity is not required. Your diligence is. I am not a physicist but I have taken the trouble to study the subject and I have a pretty good grasp of what the physicists are doing. I am (or was) an applied mathematician so my trade/occupation required that I learn the math thoroughly. My main function was problem solving rather than making or originating new theoretical material. My thing was clever use of the tools rather than inventing new tools. Ba'al Chatzaf Thought not an example of charity, Rand did claim merely that she had no opinion about Darwinism because, as she put it, "I am not a student of his theory." She said this during the Q&A at a Ford Hall Forum lecture in the late '70s.

With all due respect . . . If Leonid is serious about wanting to write screenplays, the place to start is not with books or software purporting to teach screenwriting (most of them are a waste of time and money); but, rather, in learning some basic principles of dramatic writing, i.e., start by writing ONE SCENE. Just a scene, with a beginning, middle, and end, that goes somewhere dramatically, and has a definite climax. For what it's worth, that's the usual method of teaching screenwriting -- or, rather, trying to teach it -- at the major film schools like USC, UCLA, NYU, etc. Students alway start by writing stand-alone scenes, not full screenplays. If you were trying to learn to write music, would you start off with a book on orchestration purporting to teach the reader how to write a symphony? Wouldn't you begin by writing, e.g., eight bars of melody that had a definite "shape" and a definite "high point" or climax before coming to a close? So start small. Start with a form and a size that is manageable . . . . . . Just write a simple 3-or-4-page scene, between, let's say, 2 characters. You don't necessarily have to invent anything; you can, as an exercise, choose a simple -- SIMPLE! -- scene between two characters from Atlas Shrugged and rewrite it as a dramatic scene. Now that I think of it, a scene from AS might be too much. Tackle something much smaller and far lighter. Here's an idea: choose a short story from someone who already provides the reader with memorable, colorful characters and pretty sharp dialogue -- O'Henry might be a good start, even if he's somewhat dated. O'Henry has many wonderful stories that are begging to be rewritten in dramatic form. And since he was so prolific, you've got plenty of material to choose from.

Value Chaser wrote: This lets the audience, particularly those who haven't read the book, catch a glimpse early on of Dagny's fact-based independance and James's "social metaphysics," No it doesn't. It merely replicates a scene literally from the novel that won't mean a thing to anyone who hasn't already read it and thought about the philosophical/psychological implications of it. The responsibility of the screenwriter -- whether writing something original or writing an adaptation from another literary form -- is to tell a story. The writer shouldn't be teaching philosophy; he shouldn't be giving glimpses of "social metaphysics." That can emerge from the storytelling, of course, but the first and last job of the screenwriter is to COMPEL ATTENTION ON THE PART OF THE VIEWER to look at a screen for 2 hours. It's a very practical job. There are several things wrong with Leonid's above attempt that illustrate why it won't work -- not to say that I don't like the writing, or that it isn't good; rather that it won't work, structurally and narratively, as effective screenwriting. A brief tutorial: First: Screenplays are a highly compressed dramatic form of writing, entirely different from the novel. The usual method of constructing a screenplay, used by the pool of writers in the old Hollywood studio system, and successfully repeated by the later post-studio-system writers, was to start first with an OUTLINE, the purpose of which was to grasp the "skeleton" of the overall movie. Screenwriters don't just put a piece of paper in their typewriters (or, rather, their printers) and then start with "scene 1" and keep writing until they have finished what they believe to be their story. They start from the opposite end. They first ask very practical questions about the overall movie they wish to write, such as "How long a movie would I like this be? Approximately how long of a movie will it take to tell the essential narrative story of AS?" They then use the usual rule-of-thumb (still good after all these years) of: 1 minute of screen time = 1 page of screenplay. Example: a 2-hour movie is 120 minutes which will require approximately 120 pages of screenplay. They then apply another tried-and-true rule: A dramatic story like a screenplay is actually a chain-link structure comprising a number of dramatically self-contained subunits called "scenes"; like the overall movie, each scene has a "beginning, middle, and end" with a definite dramatic climax that pushes the scene into the next scene. The average length of such a subunit, of course, can vary greatly, but traditionally 3-4 pages, with both description and dialogue, is taken as an "average" scene length. So taking 3 pages as an initial starting point, a 120 page screenplay will have about 40 scenes. Now you can start laying this out rationally (always with the proviso, of course, that you can change things as you go along, but you're at least creating a plan, a map, that you can follow): If you decide to follow a classic 3-part structure for the overall movie, you can, in advance, plan out X number of scenes out of the 40 scenes devoted to exposition (i.e., statement of the initial dramatic problem, i.e., "someone wants/needs/desires something and tries to pursue it, but his or her attempts at doing so are blocked by someone or something else" The first someone is the protagonist; the second someone is the antagonist); you can then map out Y number of the remaining scenes for the longer development section (i.e., the protagonist attempts to exercise her will and achieve her goal by trying ( a ) but is blocked by the antagonist and suffers a temporary setback; then she tries ( b ) and achieves only partial success; then she tries ( c ) and suffers a setback again; etc. During each attempt during the development section more is at stake; and -- another consideration that will require a separate thread to discuss fully -- each time the protagonist exercises her will to achieve her goal, more of her character is revealed. "Character" in screenwriting is revealed through action; and by action, I mean the concrete choices that character makes to achieve the goal that drives -- i.e., gives purpose to -- the entire movie). So, you have X scenes devoted to exposition of the dramatic problem and introduction of main characters; Y scenes devoted to development -- now this is very important: the FINAL scene of the development section (a/k/a "Act 2") is, technically, THE CLIMAX -- not necessarily the "most exciting" or "most action-packed" or "most violent" scene: but the dramatically most SIGNIFICANT scene. The end of ACT 2 -- the climax -- answers the dramatic question posed at the beginning: does the protagonist achieve her goal? Or does she not achieve her goal? Either answer is acceptable from a structural point of view. The remaining scenes -- "Z" -- are classically called a "denoument" (originally meant "an untying") but which answer the question: "What's the upshot, the result, of the protagonist having achieved or not achieved her goal?" This would be "Act 3", and is usually very short, since all you're doing is tying up loose ends (or "untying" tangled ones, in the case of the word "denoument"). I'm trying to show you that there's a lot of pre-planning and "laying out" or perhaps "mapping out" is a better phrase, that occurs in screenwriting prior to the actual writing of scenes. All of this should be done first and then put in hierarchical form in an OUTLINE. Summary: decide on the basic conflict in a story; decide on the antagonist and the protagonist; decide on an overall length of the envisioned completed film; use that to decide on a page-count for the screenplay; divide the page-count into a reasonable average length for each scene (3 pages/scene is a good average); create a skeleton outline in which each bullet point corresponds to the climax of each putative scene, and which logically moves the story along. In a 2-hour movies of 120 pages, you can reasonably assume 40 scenes (on average), and therefore, an outline with 40 bullet points -- each bullet point represents the "most significant" event of each proposed scene, i.e., the climax of each proposed scene. Once you have that, you can divide that into the larger sections for a 3-part, or 3-act structure: X number of scenes for Act I (exposition); Y number of scenes for Act II (development and story climax); Z number of scenes for Act III (the final upshot of the climax, the tying up of loose ends, etc.). At this point, you might even decide that 40 scenes are too few to tell the story; perhaps you need 60. All right, if that's the case, you must now assume that each scene, on average, will be compressed to about 2 pages -- you don't suddenly enlarge the entire page-count to 180 pages and assume that you now have a 3-hour movie. Second: Then, once you have an outline in which the logic of the story -- the story, not the details about the characters, because there's no room for that in an outline -- is readily apparent, THEN AND ONLY THEN do you start taking each bullet-point on the outline and fleshing it out into a scene description. The description can be, for the sake of clarity, approximately 3 paragraphs long: first paragraph for scene exposition; 2nd for scene development; 3rd for climax. The climax of each scene in your treatment exactly corresponds with its respective bullet-point on your outline. This step is usually called "THE TREATMENT" which is -- sort of -- what you have started with above. Again, classically, the purpose of the treatment is to describe the details of each scene in the 3rd person without any dialogue -- dialogue is another problem to solve and it comes later in the screenwriting process. Third: Third, of course, is fleshing out the treatment into a first draft of the screenplay, where you take each scene and flesh it out with dialogue so that it comprises about 3-pages of screenplay (as per the original "map" or "plan"). The great advantage to this method is that you can very easily tell if you are "over-writing" or straying from the storyline: if, for example, you find that most of your scenes are indeed 3 pages, but that one particular one requires 9 pages to tell satisfactorily, then you can ask yourself some tough questions regarding structure: have I actually found the essentials of this scene? Why is it 3 times longer than most of the other scene? If I leave it as 9 pages, can I then shorten some other scenes, or perhaps cut out some scenes entire?" etc. I admit . . . this part of screenwriting is not necessarily fun; it's more like solving a kind of narrative engineering problem and can very often leave you with a headache. After reading the rough draft of the screenplay, you now have 2 additional tools to help guide your writing: the initial outline, and the treatment. If you find that something doesn't "hang together" in the first draft of the screenplay, you're in a much position to fix it, since, if it turns out to be a purely structural issue regarding the logical flow of events, you can skip over the treatment and rework the outline -- you'll know where to look, Then you make adjustments in the treatment, and then the 2nd draft of the screenplay. Writing for the screen is a process and requires a method. There may be many, of course, but the classical one of outline, treatment, 1st draft is still one of the best and most practical, as long as you rigidly adhere to the purpose and integrity of each step of the process (e.g., NO scene descriptions in the outline; just story logic and narrative "beats". NO dialogue in the treatment; just 3rd person description of places, people, and the choices they make in action). Using your writing above as an example, I would ask the following: since the job of the screenwriter is first to identify the dramatic conflict of wills involved between a protagonist and an antagonist, the question is: who wants what? and why can't she have it? If our protagonist is Dagny (as I think it should be). The main dramatic question to answer is: what does she want? why can't she have it? who or what is blocking her from getting it? There are lots of elements in Atlas Shrugged, so deciding on which should be the essential one for screenwriting purposes is difficult. My own answer would be this: It's pretty apparent that what she wants is that motor. That's what used to be called "The McGuffin" (another example of a "McGuffin" would be those pesky "Letters of Transit" -- signed by General DeGaulle and which "cannot be rescinded, not even questioned!" -- from the movie Casablanca. That's what ultimately drove the characters to do what they did, including reigniting an old love affair. So Dagny is driven to do certain things because she wants/needs/desires that motor. Now, who or what is stopping her from getting the motor? Is it her brother? Is it Wesley Mouch? No. It's John Galt, the very inventor of the motor. So the interesting thing about Atlas Shrugged is that the antagonist -- the one stopping Dagny from getting what she wants -- is really the hero of the whole thing (though we don't find that out till much later in the story). So this is really a story between Dagny Taggart and John Galt, and all other characters (including Rearden) should be subordinate to the telling of that story. What this means, of course, is that, for the sake of narrative "drive", the plotline cannot follow exactly what Rand wrote in the novel: the conflict has to consist of Dagny trying to get the motor, and John Galt trying to prevent her from getting the motor . . . with the grand theme that Rand supplied of Galt convincing the productive members of society to strike and join Galt's Gulch being secondary to the pursuit and counter-pursuit of the motor. If you don't do that, then there's no real dramatic conflict: i.e., why should Galt's getting D'Anconia and Dannager and others to disappear somehow prevent Dagny from acquiring the motor? One is only very tangentially related to the other. They are related by a kind of philosophical theme -- not by dramatic conflict -- which is fine for a novel; but you cannot drive the plotline of a movie by means of a theme, philosophical or otherwise. You might actually choose some other goal than pursuit of Galt's motor for Dagny to pursue. That's fine. The main thing to remember is to decide clearly in advance on the dramatic forces that determine the respective wills (and therefore choices and acts) of the protagonist and antagonist. Finally, you should also realize that the terms "protagonist" and "antagonist" do not correspond to "good guy" and "bad guy." It's more structural and less judgmental than that. The first "takes action on behalf of a goal", the second "blocks the action of the first and tries to prevent the goal from being achieved." Personally, I don't think Atlas Shrugged will work as a feature film; too much compression is necessary and one would have to leave too much out for the sake of structure. It could, possibly, work well as a multi-part miniseries on television where the writer would have a lot more time than a mere 2 or 3 hours to tell the story effectively.

Instead of spreading your bile over every thread that offers you an opportunity, start one of your own. "A Case Against Objectivism", perhaps? OK. I offer the recent posts of whYNOT as Exhibit A. You may also find that not everyone is as easy meat as I am. Easy meat? Sounds exciting. Are you a woman?

Cells have been around billions of years (or billyuns and billyuns of years, as Carl Sagan would have said). Computers have been around for less than one hundred years. The line of cell development goes all the way back the Archea, at least 2.5 billion years. Fossils of these one cell critters can be found in the stomatilites. There is no evidence of intelligent design of living things prior to humans. Now that Craig Venter has made a genuine living cell from non-living components the situation has changed. How do we know Craig and his team did it? They have all reported on their activities and have t.v., photographs and documentation to back them up. When you can present as convincing evidence of an Intelligent Designer making the earliest living cells on this planet perhaps you have case. Ba'al Chatzaf Billions of years aren't enough time. There's the problem. (Which explains why many Objectivists, when they understand this, feel the need to drop the Big Bang model and adopt a Steady State one. They feel that this gives them almost infinite time for the "random walk" necessary to create a living thing ex nihilo. With infinite time at one's disposal, they can claim that "anything is possible.") This reminds me of the dust-up two years ago when the story of Obama's "long-form" birth certificate (or lack thereof) first started to go viral. The AP ran a story with a headline proclaiming something like "Official at Hawaii's Dept. of Health Claims Obama's Original Birth Certificate Proves He Was Born in U.S." When you actually read the article, however, the doctor in charge of the DofH said nothing of the kind. The doctor was quoted merely as saying that she had seen A BIRTH CERTIFICATE and that it was "genuine." So how does that prove anything one way or the other if we don't know what was on the certificate? It doesn't. The AP, it seems, was simply hoping that many readers wouldn't go past the headline. Same here. Headlines scream that Venter "created life." The Guardian proclaimed that Venter had proven "The Complete Triumph of Materialism." He did not. Even Venter admits, in the body of various articles, that he did NOT "create life from scratch." Venter and his team took an already existing cell, removed its genome (keeping the epigenetic machinery such as the cell membrane) then inserted genetic code that had been copied from some other organism. Because they had used a computer to sequence the relevant bit of code from this second organism, the press mistakenly asserted that the sequence was "designed by a computer." No. The computer was a tool that was used to understand a relevant genetic sequence from organism ( A ); that sequence was then copied -- not invented out of thin air, but COPIED -- and the copy inserted into the genome of organism ( B ), whose original genome had been removed. The second organism then began to function and replicate. To drive home to the world that this was, supposedly, an "artificial" and "novel" genome, Venter and his team additionally inserted bits of non-functional genetic material that, when decoded, would reveal Venter's website, the email addressees of his team, and various famous quotations from history. These, of course, are irrelevant to the new organism's functioning. If you take a pre-existing commercial music CD and copy some of the music onto a second blank CD, and if you put this second CD into a computer and the computer reads this second CD and plays the snippet of music, that doesn't show that the computer came about originally through a random process or that it could have done so; it also doesn't show that the original CD or the copy could have come into being without the intervention of the guy doing the selecting, the copying, and the inserting. Venter's accomplishment is a clear example of "technological evolution"; i.e., taking a bit of pre-existing technology ( A ), grafting it onto a bit of pre-existing technology ( B ), and arriving at a "novel" technology ( C ). Like all examples of technological evolution -- the evolution of the automobile, for example -- it requires intelligence, pre-planning, and goal-directedness. No step in this came about, or can come about, from randomness which is then "selected" for some sort of "survival value." The survival value is the end-goal that Venter and his team had in mind; they selected every element of the process in line with this goal. Venter and his team were acting in a manner opposite to that of Darwinian processes. Show me what, in nature, can effectively substitute for an intelligently-designing Craig Venter and his team and you might have a case. So far, you don't. And, by the way, if you're going to claim that "lots of randomness acting over lots of time" is an effective substitute, you'd be wrong. You only have 12 billion years to accomplish this; it turns out, on calculation, that 12 billion years aren't nearly enough time, which is one reason that even non-ID researchers now claim that, at best, random mutation + natural selection might be necessary for life to appear and speciate, but they aren't sufficient. Something else has to be present, too, though they don't know what. Some rely on the magic of "self-organizing systems", some rely on other novel causes. At any rate, neo-Darwinism -- pure randomness plus natural selection as the two and only two causes for life and speciation -- has quietly faded from academic research as a plausible mechanism. In public announcements, of course, Darwinism is still "the party line"; behind closed doors, however, there is severe doubt.

Consider all; the things that persons do and fetuses don't do. Ba'al Chatzaf Consider all; the things that persons do and fetuses don't do. "Persons" and "fetuses" both turn into old people. Seems to me that's an important similarity. One could just as easily say "Consider all the things that 30-year old men do that 30-day old newborns do not; ergo, 30-day old newborns aren't people and have no rights. Listen, I think a good argument can be made for the view that a fetus doesn't become a person until it has graduated law school and is capable of supporting its parents. Then it's a person; then it's a mensch.

Brief article on biologist Paul Nurse, Nobel laureate: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2010/nov/12/biology-quantum-leap In the past, we have seen biological explanations as commonsense. They have explained how genes direct the manufacture of proteins or account for the appearance of disease through the behaviour of bacteria and viruses. But such simplicity is likely to disappear in the near future, argues [Paul] Nurse, who won the 2001 Nobel prize for physiology for his work on the role of DNA in cell division. The structure of DNA may be elegant and may reveal the mechanism that controls heredity, but its real importance lies with the way it stores digital information. Nor is it the only system in a living being that stores and processes information. The cell can be seen as a tiny computer, for example. If computers didn't evolve by means of random mutation and natural selection, then neither did cells. Both require intelligent input.

What ever a fetus is, I will tell you what it is NOT. It is NOT a person and has no rights its mother is bound to recognize. A fetus is the property of its mother and its mother may dispose of the fetus, qua fetus, as she will provided public health laws are not violated in so doing. Ba'al Chatzaf It is NOT a person and has no rights its mother is bound to recognize. Obviously untrue. Even the law -- as confused as it is on this issue -- recognizes that the fetus is human and has rights. If this were not so, then a man who batters a pregnant woman and kills the fetus would not be charged with murder -- and the man often is. If the fetus were only a "thing", the most he would be charged with is property damage. That the law doesn't apply the same reasoning to doctors who kill the fetus with the consent of the mother is simply an anomaly.

Mortimer Adler popularized philosophy longer and better than Rand ever did and Adler had no problem with the Academics. He had full standing as a scholar. I did not agree with Adler's placement of Aristotle at the top rung of philosophy (I would place Hume and Hobbes there), but I never doubted the quality of Adler's presentations. A-1. Top notch. Ba'al Chatzaf Thanks, Ba'al! I've recently come across a site with videotaped interviews from 1978 of Friedrich Hayek -- quite interesting! One of his comments that caught my attention was after Hayek was asked by one of the interviewers (who, believe it or not, was the famous Leo Rosten, author of "The Joy of Yiddish", and who, it seems, had attended the London School of Economics -- go figure!) if he knew Mortimer J. Adler during the years that he (i.e., Hayek) taught there. Hayek replied that he arrived at Univ. of Chicago just after Adler left, but he certainly knew Adler's colleague, Robert Hutchins, quite well. Hayek claimed that the entire UofC had the best "cross-pollination" of ideas and scholars from the various departments of any university he had ever known, and that he knew that this had very much been the influence of Adler.

This is not the first time I've seen Objectivism criticized for the reason that some of its proponents are not highly educated. Probably for good reason: it's true. For me, it's another form of elitism - the plebs are getting uppity. After all, what right does one have to espouse or apply a philosophy without having studied and grasped ALL philosophies? (Also, science, economics, politics, aesthetics, and so on.) Ah, yes, the elitism of having gone to school and studied something, at least, about intellectual history and making use of those insights before shooting one's mouth off in order to promote one's favorite author. Yes, elitism. Excellent analysis. Rand popularized philosophy, and academic high-brows won't forgive her, - See what I mean about shooting one's mouth off without knowing any background information? What about Will and Ariel Durant's "Story of Philosophy"? or their "Story of Civilization"? What about all those books popularizing philosophy by Mortimer J. Adler? What about the important books and articles by Eric Hoffer (who wrote "The True Believer")? There are many more. The fact is, Rand is in the tradition of those who popularized philosophy; the assertion by her acolytes that she invented the whole genre is demonstrably false. their gripe is that many O'ists didn't 'earn their stripes.' No, their gripe is that many are just plain ignorant, and their ignorance leads them to silly conclusions. That's a different charge. It is those Joe Soaps of Objectivism, like myself, who have long made the choice to integrate its principles in living, that really bothers them, apparently; that this is a beneficial system for one's own personal, private and independent life. the proof's in the pudding, and nobody, with all the superior intellect/education in the world, can take that away from one. Stop crying. No one's trying to take away your intellectual security blanket. A.A., whatever I write here is my own opinion, and much of it is a 'work in progress' - so I don't pretend to expertly represent Objectivism. Whether or not O'ism "takes root" influentially, is a (hopeful) prediction on my part, but ultimately I am more engaged in its direct value and application to me, here and now. I believe that the majority of Objectivists independently experience this. Does that answer to your 'cultist','True Believer', attack? Definitely. You're saying that it's OK to be a cultist True Believer because you are absolutely SINCERE in your cultist True Belief. This feeling is no different from those who follow other cultist True Belief systems like Scientology. They, too, are quite sincere that "The System" (or as Hubbard followers call it, "The Tech") has changed their lives for the better.

Even if it's not yet a human life, No, a fetus is a human life. It can't be anything but human. a foetus is a potential human life No, it's actual, not potential. It's an actual human life that is potentially a newborn human; the newborn human is an actual human life that is potentially an infant; an infant is an actual human life that is potentially an adolescent; the adolescent is an actual human life that is potentially an adult; etc. The only potentiality that appears before a fetus is the "gleam in mommy and daddy's eyes." THAT is potentially a human being. Once they get to work and make a fetus, the potentiality has been actualized, and what they are left with is an actual human being at a very early stage of actual development. Rand's dichotomy between "in actus" and "in potens" is misapplied. She favored unrestricted abortion because she couldn't tolerate any principle interfering with an adult women's right to enjoy herself. Claiming that the aborted fetus wasn't really human yet permitted her to do so with a perfectly clear conscience.

The process of evolution based on natural selection is falsifiable. However no evidence gotten so far falsifies the theory and tons of evidence corroberate the the theory. The theory of evolution by natural selection which is interaction between the organism and the environment by physical processes governed by physical law is totally consistent with physics and chemistry and can be observed (in some cases) in real time. In other cases the processes is very slow and takes a long time (relative to human life-span) and must be inferred by indirect means. No better falsifiable theory has been proposed and the theory of evolution addresses a large range of biological phenomena. Intelligent Design is a looser. It is not falsifiable by any empirical means. It is NOT a scientific theory. Unless there is clear evidence for the existence of a Designer operating according to a design scheme consistent with observable phenomena the hypothesis is unsupported. Berlinski is a very clever chap, but his is more glib than profound. Ba'al Chatzaf The process of evolution based on natural selection is falsifiable. True, but only to those (like you) who are intellectually honest, and don't feel that the entire edifice of "Science" will crumble if natural selection is proven incorrect -- or, at least, insufficient to account for all the things that are claimed for it. In practice, however, most Darwinian True Believers (DTB) play the ad-hoc "one-up" game: after showing that a certain process either did not exist or could not exist to perform the selection, a DTB will simply ASSUME and INVENT some other "plausible" process that maybe, might, perhaps, could have performed the function of selecting the trait in question. This, of course, is an illegitimate way of arguing, but DTBs do it all the time. Then the skeptic is left with an infinite regress of "perhapses" and "maybes" that he is supposed to refute. However no evidence gotten so far falsifies the theory and tons of evidence corroberate the the theory. I'm afraid this is incorrect. The truth is this: to the extent that Natural Selection has been proven true, it is completely trivial and says nothing about the larger questions of "did life arise originally from non-living entities; if so, how?" and "Given the existence of primal organisms, was it merely the twin processes of mutation and natural selection that accounts for speciation?" And again, to the extent that we actually see undeniable change over time -- as in the Burgess Shale -- an explanation that relies on mutation, natural selection, and slow, gradual change over time, is inadequate. Natural Selection is either false or merely trivially true. The theory of evolution by natural selection which is interaction between the organism and the environment by physical processes governed by physical law is totally consistent with physics and chemistry and can be observed (in some cases) in real time. Such as? No better falsifiable theory has been proposed and the theory of evolution addresses a large range of biological phenomena. Only a "large range"? Interesting. That marks you as an independent thinker, and not a DTB. The latter, you see, would dogmatically assert that Darwinism addresses ALL biological phenomena. I'm happy to hear that there is at least one class of biological events that you believe cannot, or might not, be explainable merely by reference to random mutation hoisted up "mount improbable" by means of an inexplicable, unaccountable "Natural Selection." Intelligent Design is . . . is not falsifiable by any empirical means. Absolutely it is. All you have to do is take a biological process -- the vision cascade, for example -- and give a plausible Darwinian pathway for its existence. Such pathways, of course, are asserted to exist in much of the professional literature -- sort of on faith; but when pinned down to cite precisely how such a pathway came into existence, advocates beat a hasty retreat, suddenly remembering a dinner date they have to attend. It is NOT a scientific theory. Unless there is clear evidence for the existence of a Designer Oh, that's simple: that something can be shown to have been the product of intelligence in no way requires that we know anything about who the designer was. All we have to show is that design is a better explanation for the existence of said phenomenon than a non-design (i.e., either random or deterministic) explanation. Berlinski is a very clever chap, but his is more glib than profound. Berlinksi might even agree with you on that; to my knowledge, he has never claimed to be profound. However, being glib never prevented anyone from also speaking the truth. Here's a link to a relevant (and glib) article by Berlinski, originally appearing in "Commentary" magazine: http://www.idnet.com.au/files/pdf/The%20Origin%20of%20Life%20David%20Berlinski.pdf "On the Origins of Life"

My opinion is hardly subjective, unless by subjective you mean my opinion is . . . mine. Since your opinion is clearly subjective, why would your own estimate of your own opinion --which is simply your opinion regarding your opinion -- be anything else? I majored in bio and philosophy. Wow! Impressive! So did Sheldrake. Except, he's written a number of books and done a lot of research, and you've merely blogged and vented your subjective opinions. dropping McClintock's name, as has been done for decades now, is an irrelevant cliche. This is an argument? Haven't seen or read any refutation of her work (or Shapiro's work) and its implications. "Irrelevant cliches" don't win Nobel prizes in science. Maybe you should simply take the time to read her work, read Shapiro's work, and make the effort to understand how it affects previous models of evolution like Darwinism. I won't be reading further posts by you. I'm hurt. (Yet another thin-skinned ignorant, capital "O" Objectivist snit-fit.) Wanna know what the problem is, Keer? College was a long time ago, and you simply haven't kept up with the latest news. In short: you're stuck in the past.

David Berlinski's daughter, Claire Berlinski, is now an up-and-coming conservative author and journalist. FYI, she's interviewed by Peter Robinson on "Uncommon Knowledge", webcast from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Here's a link to part 1 of a 5-part interview: http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=ODYwNDVkYTcxMzVhNGI1OTk1ZGU3NGYxMmYzMGQ4MzI=

One problem is that "true individualism" (as opposed to "false individualism"?), critical thinking, and a stronger emphasis on individual rights do not require Objectivism -- with or without a capital "O" -- to defend them. They are the "common ground" of a number of systems of thought, including classical, enlightenment, and 19th-century liberal/utilitarian. Another problem is that, to the extent Objectivist writers have turned their attention to the above values, I don't see that they have done any better or more effective job of defending them than other systems of thought. A third problem, of course, is that Objectivism appears to be profoundly anti-scientific-method. It approves, of course, of the PRODUCTS of scientific investigation, especially when such results can be translated into technology. When it comes to the realm of pure theory, of course, they are often cranks, criticizing various theories on the basis of the theories' apparent deviation from beloved Objectivist notions of epistemology, or apparent adherence to despised systems of thought such as that of Kant. Because of this, Objectivists have lately started on the not-unexpected activity of rewriting intellectual history (e.g, the recent book on scientific induction). Furthermore, it is quite apparent from discussions with Objectivists about traditional 19th and 20th century ideas of biological evolution, that they are quite ready to throw out a cosmological theory such as "Big Bang" and adopt a steady-state model in order to give themselves enough time for putative Darwinian processes to work (since, as can be shown, a Big-Bang model claiming that the entire universe cannot be more than about 12 billion years old is not enough time for random processes + "natural selection" alone to have accomplished the creation of life from non-living entities, not to mention the apparent speciation of life from an original primal form. To get these results, Objectivists -- those who finally manage to understand the arguments and what's actually at issue -- realize that their universe needs far more time than a mere 12 billion years. That's why they usually gravitate [sorry for the pun] to some form of steady-state model).

Absolute nonsense. Nor is there any mystery in the causal chain from gene to protein to phenotype (i.e., the biological form) of the organism. No mystery whatsoever. Anyone who makes such an arbitrary assertion is ignorant of the biochemistry and is relying on the ignorance of others in order to spout such mystical nonsense. Well, I'm glad we have that cleared up! No mysteries at all! And your knowledge and expertise in this subject come from where -- the fact that you've read Atlas Shrugged? Organisms do not evolve. Species do. That your child is not identicasl to you is not a violation of the law of identity. Nor is there any mystery in the causal chain from gene to protein to phenotype (i.e., the biological form) of the organism. No mystery whatsoever. Anyone who makes such an arbitrary assertion is ignorant of the biochemistry and is relying on the ignorance of others in order to spout such mystical nonsense. Rupert Sheldrake is a pseudo-scientific crackpot who makes no well-defined predictions not already better explained by verifiable science. Nothing in evolution contradicts the law of identity, which is not the law of immutability. Absolute nonsense.