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I think that I said this basic thing a few times last year.
Just thought I'd improve on it and post it here;



This can be used as a starting point in an argument, when someone says that "evolution is false".
Many creationists don't actually understand the process, and this might actually be informative.

[edited to make it easier to read]

These are extracts from a debate I am still taking part in on the validity of Creationist science. I am fighting for evolution/big bang theory, and trying to take as many angles as I can. So far, opposition isn't great, but there have been a couple of point scorers. These are some of the posts I have made on various sub-issues. I am likely to use these in another debate if I don't have time or the will to write an orignal argument, so they may seem familiar to some of you. I am trying to take a more physical standpoint, embracing the questions that most biologists balk at.

Radiometric Dating

There are a good fourty radiometric dating methods, complimented and confirmed by other methods, such as the simple reading of tree rings.

All fourty agree in the areas where they overlap, and all those with a long enough range show dates as far back as around 4.5 billion years (actualy, most show a range back to around 3.5-3.7, but rocks from metiorites and other, non-changing sources shows a age of 4.5-4.6 is more likely. The 3.5-3.7 is simply the absolute minimum age if you were to ignore all extra-terrestrial sources, and the rock cycle/atmospheric effects), yet nothing newer than that. This is the age at which there was an event that locked in the amount of the radioactive isotopes, such as the formation of the Earth.

I don't want to go into too much detail about the techniques themselfs, as, although the basics are simple, I don't have the time to go into a lengthy explanation of the whole formation of isotopes and radioactive decay, exponential decay curves, and half lifes. Instead, I will simply give you a link to a Christian science site that explains it all in full, including a section overturning common misconceptions.

Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective

However, if anyone still has protests about the accuracy of the methods, I will be happy to fill you in, as I have actualy studied this in my physics course this year. As I said, most of the physics and maths is very simple, with most protests simply comming from ignorance about the language and terminology used by physicists, and the truth behind the dating methods.

Here are a list of just a few of the longer ranged methods of dating.

Parent Isotope-----Stable Daughter Product----Currently Accepted Half-Life Values
Uranium-238-------Lead-206----------------------4.5 billion years
Uranium-235-------Lead-207----------------------704 million years
Thorium-232-------Lead-208----------------------14.0 billion years
Rubidium-87-------Strontium-87------------------48.8 billion years
Potassium-40------Argon-40----------------------1.25 billion years
Samarium-147----Neodymium-143--------------106 billion years

The parent isotope changes into the daughter isotope, with an average of half the atoms from any given sample changing in the half life time. The closer the time period to the half life, the more accurate the dating method, as the statistics work out best for that period. However, for sufficient samples, where the abundancies average out better, the accuracy is greatly increased for many multiples of the half life, and for far smaller fractions. For example, you can use Carbon-14, with a half life of 5730 years, to date things as young as 1000 or so, to within a few dozen years, or as old as 50,000 to within a hundred or two. That is more than sufficient for most physical purposes.

Carbon Dating - A case study

I guess I had better delve into some of the details of dating then.

When an atom decays, it leaves behind a certain daughter element. For example, Chlorine-36 (commonly Cl-36) decays into Argon-36 (Ar-36), with a half life of 300,000 years. A few more details before I go onto the main point.

A half life is a statistical measurement. Basicaly, every radioactive isotope has a certain probability of decay occuring during any instant of time. For example, Cl-36 has a constant probability of decaying each second of its existence. After about 300,000 years, the probability of any of the atoms having decayed is 0.5. This means that, statisticaly, half of the atoms will have decayed.

So, after one half life, you would expect to see half of the original amount of Cl-36 in the sample, regardless of the original amount. But you can't be sure what the original amount is exactly. Unless you look at both the parent and daughter isotopes (in my example case, Cl-36 and Ar-36).

For every Cl-36 molecule that decays, you should find one molecule of Ar-36. So you can measure the ratio between the two chemicals.

You may think that you could find more Ar-36 from the atmosphere locked up in the original sample, but in reality, the methods include extra calibrations and involve a great deal more accuracy, due to isotopic ratios.

The normal example here is measuring C-12 against C-14. Carbon-12 is a very common, and very, very stable isotope of carbon, the normal form that is found everwhere. However, there is a also a good amount of radioactive carbon-14 found in the atmosphere, as produced in the atmosphere from N-14, itself constantly being replenished in the atmosphere.

The ratio between C-12 and C-14 is normaly included in readings for Carbon dating. The ratio between C-12 and C-14 has been found by studies of trees (you can take readings of the ratio after a certain amount of decay), ocean sediments (these can be easily dated by measuring layers and depth) and ice cores (same as with sediments). Similar methods can be used to calibrate and check the accuracy of other forms of dating.

The other beautiful thing about it is the amazing agreement between the different forms of dating even with the assumptions made for the ratios. If you had just one form of dating, then there is no way to know how accurate the dating form is, but if you have, say, ten forms that agree to within half a billion years (which we do have), then you can assume that there is some accuracy at least. Especialy as all the dating methods involve well understood elements and decays. What is more, the majority of the elements other than C-14 and one or two other only form in stars, shortly before they go supernova. This means that there could only be a limited amount on earth. We can use what we have today to find the half life, and from that get the abundance from years ago, which can easily be used to work out aproximations (to within an order of magnatude normaly, often to within half that) of age.

Finaly, radiometric dating has been reinforced by other dating methods, such as stellar chemistry and geological dating. We can go onto that later, if anyone cares to object to it.

Big Bang


Evidence for the Big Bang

Lets start by reviewing some facts. The universe is expanding. This is a solid fact. We can tell this by the study of the redshift of stars. That it expands sugests that it started from a single points, and the best estimates from several thousand cosmologists suggests that this is what happened.

The evidence also includes the background radiation level that is constant throughout the universe. This was predicted by a team of scientists who were studying the big bang, and was discovered, accidently, at almost the same time by another set of scientists who were working in a totaly different field and had nothing to do with the first group.

And, as if that is not enough, the modeling of the big bang shows that a lot of what we see today is explained by looking at the conditions in those first fractions of a second.

I am not going into detail yet, as I can see that there will be a lot of objections, and I need to save the details for later, when I have time to explain in full.

The Big Bang itself - the unseen incident

The models we have today of the big bang actualy start shortly after the main event. They model the universe as it would have been just moments after it came into being (or not, see later notes for more information). These models show how, first, matter slowly formed from the pure energy. Gradualy, more and more detail emerged, with the four fundamental forces of the universe revealing themselfs as the universe expanded and cooled, and with atoms finaly forming, and more standard cosmolgy taking over. These events take place over a tiny time scale, with the majority of changes taking within the first fractions of a second.

But we can't see back to the bang itself. The reason is simple. When the big bang happened, physics started. Without physics, we can't describe, or even see, what is going on back then. Simply put, the big bang is impossible to describe with our current physics, unless we can find a theory that goes deeper than our universe. Guess what; we have some ideas now.

Big Bang variations - What caused the noise?

The orignal big bang theory had a few major drawbacks, one of which was that it didn't seem to add up. The maths was off. However, a quick re-working of the physics revealed an answer; Inflationary theory. The idea here is, that after the big bang, there was a period where the universe was small enough that, when random quantum fluctuations created a negative field, basicaly anti-gravity within the universe, it lent enough energy to force the budding universe to burst into a period of sudden expansion, from which (some say) we are still decelerating. Some actualy say that inflation is not over, and that we are accelerating again, as the forces of the universe tilt against the commonly known gravity to push things out again.

However, inflation is not along in workable theories. Another rider on the big bang/inflation theory is the idea of the big crunch universe. This is where the universe, after expanding, falls back into a single point (the event jokingly refered to as a gnab gib in H2G2), from which another big bang emerges. This theory works especialy well with string theory, as that theory states that a distance smaller than the plancks length is the same as the inverse distance, in all physical terms. So, a distance of 1/2 planck length is the same as 2 planck lengths. This allows the universe to effectivly keep compressing, with an aparent big bang occuring with the same physics we have, despite the universe being inverted from ours.

String theory, or to be exact, M-theory, also offers an alternative to the Big Bang, without changing any of the basic physics. For this one, you need to put away all of your conceptions about the universe and dimensions.

Firstly, I need you to accept the idea that there are more than four dimensions (that is three space and one time), with at least ten spacial dimensions and one of time. Now, for this theory to work, six of these dimensions are curled up so small that they do not interfere with normal life, and one is a very short line, which we will get into later. Our three standard dimensions are extended, giving us as much space as we have always taken for granted.

But now, I need you to take another leap. We need to imagine that our 'universe' is realy a three dimensional object, or 3-brane, within which we (or to be exact, all of the particles in our universe, other than gravitons, but that is not important right now) are stuck. This 3-brane takes the place of our idea of a three dimensional universe, and is likely shaped as we have predicted for our more conventional models of the universe.

Now, I need you to make another leap. I want you to imagine that there is another of these 3-branes, almost identical to ours, seperated from ours, not in conventional space, but along that one, linear dimension. This distance is tiny, far less than an atoms diameter. The two dimensions oscilate along this dimension, with the dimension acting as a spring between two plates, only in more dimensions.

The period of this oscilation is in the order of a few trillion years. At one point in this oscilation, the two branes are seperated by a maximum distance, and at the opposite point, they actualy collide. This collision causes a massive disturbance within the branes, which apears to have the same effect as the conventional big bang. This collision is followed by a slow trillion or so years of entropy increase, leaving both 'universes' in total, unform disorder before they collide again, and the reset button is hit once more.


Anti-matter and the big bang

This part came after one of the Creationists declaired that the big bang violated the conservation of charge (not in so many words) by not having the same amount of matter and anti-matter at the start.

The idea that anti-matter and matter had to be created/exist in the same amounts relies upon the concept of CP symmetry. However, in recent years, this has been shown to be broken in several situations, some of which could explain how anti-matter becomes matter, or how matter is created without anti-matter.

Basicaly, C-symmetry is the symmetry behind reversing charges (such as replacing matter with anti-matter). This is broken by week interaction, where different charges act differently, proving not to be symmetrical at all.

However, if you factor in P-symmetry, you get rid of a lot of these problems. P-symmetry is Parity symmetry, effectivly reflecting the universe in a mirror and showing that it works just the same. Alone, this doesn't always work, but when combined with C-symmetry, giving CP-symmetry, you get a far more common form that seems to work a lot better.

However, not quite well enough. Today, money is safer placed on CPT-symmetry, which states that things are symmetrical only if you also reverse the direction of time as well.

Other symmetries have been found, which are included in supersymmetrical theories, such as superstring/M-theory or Loop Quantum Gravity (a quantum theory that includes gravity), but I don't want to go into that if I can help it.

Now, if you have to concerve CP, then you can't go fiddling with matter/anti-matter ratios. However, if you are allowed to break CP, then it is viable that matter/anti-matter ratios could have been disrupted early in the universes existance. This would also account for much of the energy released in the 'bang', which doesn't actualy require as much radiation in some of the models involving string theory or brane theorys.

This is a very short explanation, but I am sure you can google/wiki some of the appropriate terms to find more detail. To get you started, here is a article with slightly more information, although not as much technical data as I would like.
Physlink.com

Feynman - the definition of science and why creationism doesn't fit

I was reading Feynmans book, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out," in which he has a few different ways of defining science. None of them leave much room for religious beliefs.

Firstly, he says that for science to be true science, you have to doubt everything. It is no good to simply accept that one thing is the truth and then try to find out things using that as a base, unless you have evidence that thing is true in the conditions you are concerned about.

One example of this is rat running. This is where you do an experiment, usualy in psycology, where you put rats in a maze and see how they behave. Say, you read a report about rats that says they always display behaviour A in conditions X. You think about it, and decide to test whether that behaviour changes if you change to conditions. So, you want to run the rats in condition Y, to hopefully get a new behaviour, B.

However, you don't have access to the original experiment. So you have to make your own rat run and put in your own rats. So you test conditions Y, and sure enough, you get behaviour B. So, is that good science?

No. You could have gotten different rats to the original experiment, who always display behaviour B. You could have made the run slightly differently, so that a different condition, that you didn't mean to change, has affected the behaviour. You have to test both your new data, and the validity of the original data for your experiment to work.

This problem tends to crop up a lot in poor science, normaly the kind of science funded by companies to get quick results for advertising, or where you need to be shown to be getting new information quickly to get more funding. After all, who wants to go back and recheck an old, proven theory?

That leads me back to the main point. You need to doubt all sources. I mean, sure some theories have been shown to be very, very precise by endless experiment, but that doesn't mean that it will hold for your equipment. You need to check everything, and make no assumptions about which model your experiment follows.

In religion, doubt is discouraged. You are not alowed to doubt certain facts, such as biblical dogma or that what your religious leader says goes as fact. Many early scientists, such as Galileo, got into lots of trouble because they were willing to doubt the church.

For a true scientist to be religoius, he has to still have this doubt about everything. He can never be 100% certain about anything (although you can be 99.99999% certain, that last 0.00001% can come back to bite you in the arse later unless you admit that there are still uncertanties). So, a true scientist can not believe in god 100%, or they are leaving themselfs open to the idea that some things are beyond question, and hence damage their own science.

Another definition he likes to use, closely related to the first, is that science is not the passing on of information from one generation to the next. That is simply culture. Science is the questioning and refining of that information. Science is throwing out all the stupid, outdated or wrong ideas and building new ones up in their place. Science is progress.

Religion relies on us holding the information passed on from the past as dogma. You can't question it. To refine or improve a religion is to go against the teachings of that religion. You can't pick and choose the bits of a religion otherwise you stand the chance of throwing out one of the key parts of the religion. For example, Catholics now want birth control to be advocated by the church. However, this has long been a sin, and even if some of the cardinals and priests finaly cave, who says that God will change his mind that quickly? It may cause the whole Catholic religion to become null and void in his mind. Then again, some of the thousands of other minor changes may have already done that.

So, shortened version of the pervious writings;

Science relies upon change and doubt to exist.
Religion abhors change, and doubt is a major threat to it.

This tells me that any science that is based upon a religious belief is, at best, psydoscience, and at worst just religious teachings bound up in technical language. Unless you doubt the facts and evidence that your theory is based upon, then you can't call it true science. Taking anything at face value, without repeated studies and checking all findings, destroys any pretense of science.

Creationism and inteligent design take the idea of creator, without sound and repeateable empirical evidence, and build a psydoscience around it. Simply put, any real scientific theory that went along those lines would be thrown out by peer review as soon as they said it was dependant on non-repeatable evidence. You would have to find a new set of evidence that supported it at least before you could try to defend your ideas.

The only reason that Creationists are not always thrown out of serious debate is that people are still very sensitive about religion and offending or discriminating against people over what is, essentialy, an irrational belief. You are alowed to take the mick out of people for supporting a different political party, which they will have very good reasons for supporting most of the time, but not for believing in a different god, which they have no solid reason for most of the time.


Part 2
This part came after a post by a philosphy student, who tried to divide science into three parts;
Natural sciences inc. physics
Mathematics and applicable abstracts
Metaphysics and inapplicable abstracts, including theology.

I wish to repeat that I have never said that being religious means that you can't be a scientist, just that you can't mix religion and science at the same time and call the result real science, as creationists do.

Philosophy, and as an extension, metaphysics, is not science. It is pure thought, free of all restrictions and bounds of evidence. Sure, you can apply some of the same rules to physics and metaphysics, and the two can guide one another, but they are not aspects of the same thing.

Pure physics requires evidence. Repeatable, varifiable and observable evidence. It is the method of solving those problems we are now equipped to solve, and to explain the facts that we have now come to know.

Metaphysics requires only a grounding in previous knowledge, and no actual, physical, evidence. It is a method of thinking about those problems we are not yet equipped to solve, by making assumptions and leaps of faith.

There are some theories that straddle the two, for example, M-theory is rather metaphysical, but has a sound grounding in Physics, and the gaps its few leaps of faith have crossed are being closed, gradualy, by evidence from the physical world.

The fact is that the line between Metaphysics and true, experimental and theoretical pure physics is the deviding line between science and non-science. Philosophy remains beyond metaphysics, as does religion and all theology.

Your second science, mathematics, is not in itself a science. It is a tool, and can be applied by either side. Pure mathematics belongs on the metaphysical side of things, where problems are purely abstract and theorems are solved that bare no relation to the physical world. On the other side of things, mechanics solves problems presented to maths by physics, with real, practical applications. The two, along with statistics which also belongs on the physical side, work off of one another, with mechanics using the theorems and proofs that pure offers, and pure solving the problems and contemplating the new ideas put forwards by mechanics.

Basical, maths itself is devided into a scientific side and a philosophical side. However, here the gap is bridged far more often, and I see maths as the bridge between the abstract and the physical. Not a seperate, middle ground, but a flexable toolkit that can be used in either world.

If you aproach this problem from the philosophical side, as I suspect you have, then you are looking at it from the abstract eyes of someone seperated from science. The lines of science and non-science are hard to spot for most people who are not used to the strict rules. And here we come to the next problem. Pseudoscience.

Pseudoscientific studies and ideas are so common these days that people can bearly tell the difference. For example, people come up with very, very suspect 'proof' of a 'theory', and call that science. Dan Brown comes up with some unrelated facts and half-facts and convinces a few million people that he has proven that Jesus had children. This is not science. It is fiction based around the real world. These days, even scientists fall victim to this practice, falsifying results or interperating them in a way to please their sponsors rather than actualy follow true scientific practice.

When you cross metaphysical philosphy and pseudoscience, as creationists are apt to do in these days of declining doubt about evolution and the big bang, you get a theory that apears to have a grounding in true science; physics and its fellow natural sciences, but is realy a house of cards, built on foundations that only exist in the heads of theologists and philosophers.

Christian science (or to be exact, religious scientists) are not the problem. It is the position of using Christian or religious metaphysics and philosphy to try to create physical theories through pseudoscientific means that causes the vast majority of their theories to be shown as false, and where creationism and inteligent design is now trying to fight from.

To let you in on a more scientific mind, may I direct you to a speach by Richard Feynman, given in 1969 (explaining some of the stories he tells, particularly the one about women) to a group of science teachers. Feynman was the least philosphical scientist I know of, but probably the most scientific. He thought deeply about problems and how to solve them, regardless of what the problem was. He famously helped solve the mystery of the Challenger disaster, by analising how the management had ignored the mechanics reports of safety faults and corner cutting.

What Is Science?

And a second one, on the dangers of pseudoscience and the dangers of selective reporting, as well as some side notes on scientific integrity, or the nearest to morality that most non-biological scientists will need to get.

Cargo Cult Science

Argument against argument from complexity

My main opposition to the argument from complexity is that it is based on the assumption that human beings build complex things. This isn't strictly true. Humans are limited in their ability to understand the laws of nature. We copy what nature does in lots of small chunks, then mash them all together.

Consider the modern PC. One single intelligence did not build it, amazing though it is. It is the product of the work of thousands and thousands of researchers, logistics managers, clerks, and the people that fund the whole process (us). That's just scratching the surface. Not one person is capable of designing and building the modern PC. And it's still nowhere near as complex as a multicellular organism.

We observe, then, that complex forms come from nature, not intelligence. Intelligence makes simple, but useful things. Our ability to create more complex things comes not from our elevated intellect, but our vast numbers (working together) and our collective, huge desire for what is a very useful device.

This reveals the absurd nature of the argument from complexity. This does not, however, disprove an intelligent designer's existence. Such a designer could have created "simple" laws of nature. The complexity we observe is merely a result of that. One can observe how complexity originates from a simple set of rules by observing the famous, "Game of Life".

Note 'could have', though. There is no reason why an intelligent designer would be required to leave evidence of his handiwork, so it is impossible to ever know that the universe has been designed. It is therefore not a credible scientific theory, and it is also irrational to believe that it is true. It is often used to explain the unknown; nobody understands how life began on the Earth, so it is illogical to say that it must have arisen through intelligent design.

I'm not active on Gaia anymore. Too many fools, kids and stupidity. I will probably check in from time to time to keep up on PM's and stuff, but rarely check anything else.

Before I go, I just want to cross post a few of my journals from my Red Vs Blue account, which is where I am most active online. Feel free to look me up, I shouldn't be too hard to find, and will change my title (under the username) back to TANSTAAFL.

Anyway, until someone finds me again, see ya and enjoy.

Everything has parents or a parent that survived long enough to reproduce and have its offspring survive to the present moment, passing along its unique features with a few mutations, but not so many that it could not survive. It has inherited the biological makeup of its parent or parents, who survived to produce offspring, so it is likely equipped with the living tools it needs to reproduce itself.

Everybody knows all this and knows what it means. The logical consequence of it all is called 'evolution'. Everyone can make the logical deduction and thus intuitively understand the processes involved, as evidenced by the ancient technology of husbandry and horticulture, the application of said understanding.

All the 'skepticism' and opposition to evolution is caused by a significant political, religious, and cultural momentum which gathers its strength from the positive and to a certain extent negative associations people have with aforementioned political, religious, and cultural groups; most visibly identified as certain Christian denominations. It is less a lack of comprehension of evolution as a deliberate and concerted attempt at 'counter-comprehension', the result of a culture clash between the secular and religious (again, principally protestant Christian).

In other words, it's not that people don't understand evolution, it's that they're motivated by the influence of certain social groups to oppose all aspects of secular social groups, especially anything that is perceived to contradict the uniting cultural aspects of their own social group. The word 'evolution' and all things tied to it carried negative emotional connotations for them. For rational people, opposition to evolution is an affront to reason. It is precisely because of this that the two groups can't find common ground, and why their 'discussions' on the subject tend to be so fruitless.

In this thread.