Irreducible complication

PeterZ wrote:
Agreed. Does it follow that one can respond to violence in a completely unrestricted manner and still be moral according to the code?

I suspect that equivalent restrictions are not absolute. Treating an enemy as I would want to be treated by an enemy is self defeating if the result is a continuation of hostilities. Treating an enemy horribly strikes me as eminently moral if it shortens the conflict and reduces the overall harm caused by the conflict.

And you´re back to trying to justify pretty much all the most disgusting shit that has ever been done by humans, great job.

It means there is no such thing as warcrimes and that use of WMDs should be standard procedure.

I wonder if you had said the same if for example Germany and Japan during WWII had actually adhered to that idea.
Japan COULD realistically have employed biowarfare against USA, and Germany COULD have made slightly different prioritisations and made ghost towns out of Eastern USA with chemical weapons.

Planning for both options existed but were completely rejected, mostly on moral grounds(including the should be damned obvious one, we use, then THEY may use it on us).

Both options would probably even have been a lot more effective than their historical choices.

Especially if both did it, as that would have left USA with drastically reduced ability to function for years.

aairfccha wrote:Congratulations, you have discovered the core problem of deontological ethics: Rules, applied in an absolute fashion, may degrade into absolute nonsense if you don't realise when the logical base no longer applies.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems apparently do not just apply to mathematics, especially the first one.

Just as the moral value of a menu of options degrade when confronted with responses guided by a moral code that is incompatible with one's moral code, the consequences of any choice further strays from accepted morally Good results.

Killing people in job lots is not considered a "good" outcome. Yet, killing violent terrorists prevents quite a bit of harm. So, whether one is evaluating a moral code by the choices one makes or the consequences of one's actions, some objective "Good" is required. Trying to compare various subjective "goods" breaks down to which argument can bring more force to bear, since force is darn near the most universally applicable objective argument between two groups humans.

The same applies to arguments guided by seeking virtue. Assuming everyone seeks virtue, how can the virtuous violent radical Islamist coincide with the virtuous Jew or Christian? Both the Jew and Christian would refrain from seeking to kill in confrontations with the radical Islamist, while the Islamist would not. Pursuit of virtue would lead the Jew and Christian to avoid killing, while his pursuit of virtue would lead the Islamist to seek opportunities to kill.

Gödel's incompleteness theorems show why the deist's search for an absolute moral code (deontological, consequential or virtue based) is so attractive. Absent that objective referent, moral arguments between people invariably break down to the application of force or physical separation.

Minor nit pick. The virtuous Jew and virtuous Christian tend to respond vigourously to attacks by the virtuous Islamic Fundamentalist. Israel reacts manifold to a Palestinian attack, and the western powers dump tons of bombs on ISIS.
I dislike Muslim fundamentalists as much as anyone, but don't pretend that we don't hit back hard.

Daryl wrote:Minor nit pick. The virtuous Jew and virtuous Christian tend to respond vigourously to attacks by the virtuous Islamic Fundamentalist. Israel reacts manifold to a Palestinian attack, and the western powers dump tons of bombs on ISIS.
I dislike Muslim fundamentalists as much as anyone, but don't pretend that we don't hit back hard.

Note, please use IS as short instead, because Isis is a NAME, and i doubt the thousands with that as their first name likes it much(166 people with it as a first name just here in Sweden, despite it being Egyptian/Greek).

Considering it´s also a goddess, well, no matter what an organisation called itself, i very much doubt "you" would refer to it as JESUS even if it fit the words of its name or was the "official" acronym.

Daryl wrote:Minor nit pick. The virtuous Jew and virtuous Christian tend to respond vigourously to attacks by the virtuous Islamic Fundamentalist. Israel reacts manifold to a Palestinian attack, and the western powers dump tons of bombs on ISIS.
I dislike Muslim fundamentalists as much as anyone, but don't pretend that we don't hit back hard.

I don't believe I did as you accuse. My point was that in striving for virtue, one seeks to avoid killing if one is Jewish or Christian. Killing someone in self defense may not be a sin but neither is it virtuous.

So killing does not promote virtue for the Christian or Jew.

It takes two to make peace. It only takes one to make war.

If your enemy wants to kill you, and succeeds, your moral code is irrelevant.
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If she weighs as much as a duck, she's a witch!

A point which needs emphasizing: a workable improvement in methods of testing theories is much more important than the theories themselves. Sometimes said improvement is technical, sometimes it is philosophical.

Examples from the 1600s: Rene Descartes, from theory said there was no such thing as a vacuum. Pierre Gassendi, using a different theory stated a vacuum could exist. Then the primary method of testing used historical authorities. The scholastic movement of the early middle ages and the overlapping but mostly later renaissance movements both found there were too many contradictions to come to certainty. Blaise Pascal, using barometric measurements decided that Gassendi was probably correct. He wasn't the only experimenter, but stating correctness as probability rather than certainty was a philosophical improvement. This may have come from his work (with Fermat) in codifying probability mathematics.

Later in the century, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, improved magnifier optics, thus discovering microorganisms.

Further developments on the technical side led to Louis Pasteur's discovery of chemical handedness, which in turn led to the very fruitful work on details of what various microorganisms do.

With genomic sequencing, we have another technical improvement. As always, there are problems of usage: reference the contamination by human DNA that caused many early results to be incorrect. IMO this may still cause some problems. Do you think other problems will appear? Given dropping costs, many more results can be expected.

[quote="The E]"Devolution" is a "not even wrong" concept. It implies that a state of perfection exists that organisms are either evolving to or evolving away from, which is, to put it simply, complete bullshit. Cavebound animals losing their eyesight is not "devolution", it's adaptation.[/quote]
We may be defining words in different ways. Mine: Evolution is genetically caused increase in function. Devolution is genetically caused loss of function. Intra genome adaption is the expression of different parts of a genome according to which better fit the current environment. Given mutation accumulation perfection now isn't at all probable.

Microevolution in microorganisms has been demonstrated using high confidence evidence. Chloroquine resistance in the various malarial bacteria is an example. The mutations in P. falciparum show two sites at amino acids 76 and 220 of PfCRT and less than ten others, with site 76 being needed. Estimates based on the time between use of CQ and the first appearance of resistance are on the order of 10^20 total organisms. Other high confidence observations or experiments with microorganisms have been done, such as "Gauger et al. Reductive evolution can prevent populations from taking simple adaptive paths to high fitness. BIO-Complexity 2010;2:1>9." This is possible because of the short generational times of micro organisms.

ID workers think that micro evolution, with also intra genome adaptions are all the constructive adaptions. This is based largely on: 1) the large number of alleles between, and 2) the much longer generational lengths; within higher organisms. Example: The current state of chimp-human genome differences requires millions of base pairs to be changed. You might estimate the time for even 10^6 generations. The use of probabilities is centuries old.

Devolution, defined as the loss of function, is destructive. This has been documented from high confidence observations and experiments in higher organisms.

Those basing their testing on the assumption of the TOL cannot accept true irreducible complications, whatever the evidence. Others, hopefully, will use observation and experiments to decide whether a given instance is factual or only appearance.

Rob Stadler's six criteria of high confidence science, like its predecessor (a hierarchy of scientific evidence) are contemporary philosophical improvements, and should be employed. As mentioned earlier, IMO, Stadler's book is worth getting simply for appendix A, which discusses how these differ.

Other difficulties for the tree of life paradigm from genomics are various rogue data, such as the existence of taxonomically restricted genes including "orphan genes." Current estimates give 10%+ as the usual amount of TRQ. If even 5% is right, we will reach a point when the TRQ genes are known to outnumber the common genes.

Shouldn't we use the best current methods to distinguish between proper extrapolation or using handwaivium to reconcile data and theories?

DDHv wrote:We may be defining words in different ways. Mine: Evolution is genetically caused increase in function. Devolution is genetically caused loss of function. Intra genome adaption is the expression of different parts of a genome according to which better fit the current environment. Given mutation accumulation perfection now isn't at all probable.

Well, then your definitions are completely and utterly wrong, but I think we covered that already.

Are you aware of what you're doing here? You're using the terms of evolutionary biology, but without any understanding of what evolutionary biology has defined those terms to mean.

You are, to put it simply, not even wrong.

Here's the correct definition: Evolution is the process of change in living organisms over time. Devolution does not exist. End of story.

Now, you can of course continue to use your own bullshit definitions for terms. But all you're proving by it is that you are an ignoramus.

ID workers think that micro evolution, with also intra genome adaptions are all the constructive adaptions. This is based largely on: 1) the large number of alleles between, and 2) the much longer generational lengths; within higher organisms. Example: The current state of chimp-human genome differences requires millions of base pairs to be changed. You might estimate the time for even 10^6 generations. The use of probabilities is centuries old.

And you still do not understand them. Pity, really.

Devolution, defined as the loss of function, is destructive. This has been documented from high confidence observations and experiments in higher organisms.

And you're wrong. Your example was the loss of sight in cave-dwelling organisms. What you see as devolution is just adaptation according to the rules of evolutionary science; by living in an environment in which sight is largely irrelevant, the evolutionary pressure to keep functional eyes around ceases to exist. The gene complex responsible for eye development thus becomes an area that is considered neutral for the fitness of the organism as a whole. If a mutation arises that reduces the function of the eye, it's not going to be selected out; if mutations arise that increase the functionality of other sensory organs, they will be selected for, run that for a couple hundred generations, and you'll have a population that will have increasingly poor eyesight.

Those basing their testing on the assumption of the TOL cannot accept true irreducible complications, whatever the evidence.

This is your reminder that the sum of evidence brought forth by creationists such as yourself is nil.

Shouldn't we use the best current methods to distinguish between proper extrapolation or using handwaivium to reconcile data and theories?

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Doing that has brought us to where we are in evolutionary biologoy. Not doing so has led to creationism.

Perhaps it needs to be underlined an extra time that "devolution" as such really does NOT exist.

Even development that has purely negative effects is still effectively evolution, it just tend to result in something that does not spread or survive.

This is one of the reasons the phrase evolutionary dead end and similar are used.

It is however very rare that evolution happens in purely negative ways, and it´s quite possible that such never survives more than a handful of generations, and we simply have not yet been able to figure out the advantages of some apparent disadvantages that DO survive.

Possibly what some might think is a backward step is actually not. If an organism has a specific energy budget, then over time attributes that don't contribute (like sight in deep caves) may atrophy, leaving more resources for more useful features in that environment. Isolated species in small island environments often end up smaller to conserve their local resources. This is not a conscious process just a survival preference over generations.

Tenshinai wrote:Perhaps it needs to be underlined an extra time that "devolution" as such really does NOT exist.

Even development that has purely negative effects is still effectively evolution, it just tend to result in something that does not spread or survive.

This is one of the reasons the phrase evolutionary dead end and similar are used.

It is however very rare that evolution happens in purely negative ways, and it´s quite possible that such never survives more than a handful of generations, and we simply have not yet been able to figure out the advantages of some apparent disadvantages that DO survive.