At 04:17 AM 5/26/2012, Jojo Jaro wrote:
There appears to be some interest in this subject, so I will
continue discussing it as long as people want to discuss it by
responding. Apoligies to Bill in advance if this is inappropriate.
What was clearly inappropriate was such a thorough hijacking of the thread.
First, let me make something very clear. My goal in brining up this
discussion is to try to draw a parallel between what is happening
with Hot Fusion and Darwinian Evolution Theory. Maybe, we can
begin to understand the hostility towards Cold Fusion and as part of
the Scientific Community, begin to rectify it.
In Hot Fusion, the science appears to be "Established". There are
decades of work associated with it. There appears to be some
"established" theories. Hence, when people like Parks, Huzienga and
others dismiss Cold Fusion out of hand, they are simply appealing to
the "Triumph" of the prevailing theories. In their minds, these
theories are well founded and well established.
They are, in their territory. The problem was in extending them
beyond what was known, and assuming that such extensions were *part
of the known theory.* In fact, there were plenty of scientists in
1989-1990 who knew that existing theory did not rule out cold fusion
and, in fact, one example of catalyzed cold fusion was known,
muon-catalyzed fusion. So why could there not be another? The 1989
DoE review explicitly recognized that the "impossiblity" argument was
weak and impossible, itself, to prove. Rather, in 1989, what could be
said -- and this was at least somewhat reasonable then -- was that it
had not been "conclusively demonstrated" that LENR was real.
In the minds of those to whom LENR was a threat, either to their
comfort level with the depth of their understanding of what was
possible in physics, or more directly to funding for hot fusion
projects, this was translated into "bogus." Kind of a leap, eh? And
then the color of "bogus" was smeared over all reports considered
similar, thus completely bypassing the normal process of scientific
inquiry. It was a socio-political phenomenon, and has been covered
well by Simon (2002, Undead Science).
In Darwinism or Neo-Darwinism thought, once again, there "appears"
to be some "established" theories (Albeit a theory you can drive a
Mack Truck thru.).
Straw man argument, Jojo.
In the same vein, people like Jed who dismiss Intelligent Design
and Creationism as "quack" science, are just as quick to point out
the Darwinian Evolution is "fact" just as Parks would point out
that Hot Fusion is "fact" to the exclusion of anything else. You
see, the point that I am making is that without realizing it, Jed
has the same close-minded tendencies as Parks do.
The straw man is "Darwinian Evolution." What's that? By name, it is
referred to a person and to ideas expressed in the 19th century.
Why doesn't Jed study the principles of Irreducible Complexity, or
Specified Complexity, or Biological Chirality, or Abiogenesis, or
Improbabality or DNA Information, or Cell complexity, or the
Bacterial Flagellum etc. These are legitimate fields of science
where there are published papers.
Because he's not interested, my guess. Why should he be?
For me, I'll ask "what is the *experimental evidence"? The stories we
tell about our experience are not evidence. Theories, *all of them*
are stories. They are useful to the extent that they empower us to
predict the consequences of actions.
But there is another realm of theory, theory that "explains" the
past. That can be useful as a mnemonic device, that's about it. Such
theories can collapse very complex sets of data into something simple
for memory to grasp, and this is useful, as well, as a possible way
to predict new discovery about the past, and perhaps, sometimes, to
predict the results of controlled experiment; but controlled
experiment in the field you are addressing, Jaro, is not so easy to come by.
What happens with this kind of theory is that people line up based on
whether they like the implications of the theory or don't. People who
take the concept of divine creation as if it were some kind of
scientific principle, in contradiction with some sort of mechanistic
concept of evolution that they imagine -- or know -- that others
hold, are offended by theories of evolution. But, in fact, they made
up the contradiction. And, I'll assert, it has nothing to do with
real faith. It's more along the lines of imagining a splinter in the
eyes of others, while ignoring the beam in one's own.
And "scientists" who use theories of evolution as if they were some
sort of refutation of creation stories are simply doing the same
thing on the other side, making up a story of contradiction. That has
nothing to do with science.
I suspect that if I meet Jed in person, and hand him a math paper by
Stephen Myers on Specified Complexity and Improbability, he would
let that paper drop to the ground without looking at it.
Well, I doubt he would be that rude. I certainly would not, and I'd
probably read any paper that anyone took the trouble to hand me. I
might even read it carefully, if it were comprehensible and at all
interesting. Jed would, almost certainly, look at it, if he accepted
it. If you dropped it on the floor, *you dropped it on the floor,* not he.
Why, because just like Parks, he believes in his pet theory so much,
so convinced by its correctness, that he is willing to be
"unscientific" and "close minded" about Intelligent Design, while in
the same breath accuse Parks of being close minded to Cold Fusion.
Just be aware, Jojo, that you are describing yourself, better and
more accurately than you are describing Jed, whom you do not really know.
Folks, there is a parallel here. We all have our pet "Hot Fusion"
theories that we can not and will not deviate from. For Parks, its
Hot Fusion, for Jed, its Darwinian Evolution, for me, its
Intelligent Design and Creationsim. We are all pretty guilty of
close-mindedness and unscientific behavior. Except that, I realize
my close-mindedness, Parks do not, and Jed does not seem to.
Do you *actually realize* the depth of your own "close-mindedness"?
Do you realize how difficult this can be? It's quite possible to
transiently recognize it, but to routinely ignore it. But then, of
course, you can clothe yourself with the mantle of "self-realization"
while not actually maintaining self-realization, based on those
transient recognitions. It appears to take real training to truly
move beyond this kind of limitation.
And finding that kind of training is not necessarily easy, and one
has to want it.
Now, to respond to Harry's points:
Yes, it is normal for a theory to have holes and shortcomings, while
the basic idea is still "useful". I think Quantum Mechanics falls
in that category. But the issue with Darwinian Evolution theory is
that there is a "hole" the size of an aircraft carrier at the center
of the theory. There is a enormous improbability problem at the
heart of Darwinian and NeoDarwinian theory. Huxley, a staunch
Darwinian Evolutionists, who made many assumptions favorable to
Darwinian Evolution theory, still end up calculating that the odds
for the Darwinian Evolution of a Horse at 10^300,000. (That's a
number with 300,000 zeroes.) Just to put this is perspective,
anything with odds of less than 10^50 is considered in Statistics to
be an "Impossible" event. There are only 10^98 atoms in our known
Universe. (If I remember correctly.) Even if the universe was a
Billion Billion Billion Billion Billio Billion Billion times older
than it's currently acceptable "Big Bang" age, that would still not
leave enough time to evolve a horse based on the Gradual Natural
Selection premise of Darwinian Evolution Theory.
Folks, Darwinian Evolution Theory is DEAD. Science and math killed
it. Let us mourn Darwinian Evolution Theory just as we mourn the
death of Hot Fusion theory.
Great, Jojo, you have revealed, here, a great deal about yourself.
What you present as a "hole the size of an aircraft carrier" at the
"center" of "the theory" is
(1) Much larger than an aircraft carrier, as you point out. It's
larger than the universe.
(2) Based on a naive assumption about the nature of evolution, which
is that it is driven by random combination alone.
(3) And is further based on a common error, that of assuming that an
experimental result cannot be unfathomably rare.
The second is the most interesting, but let's deal with the last one
first. Suppose I run a random process that chooses 1 out of 10
possibilities, equally distributed as likely. And let's say that I
run this process 300,000 times. That's actually fairly easy to do. I
get a result. I look at the result, the generated sequence of
numbers, and calculate the odds of my getting this result by chance:
it is 1 chance in 10^300,000. Therefore the process could not have been random?
This example might seem a bit unfair, because all combinations are
considered equally "acceptable." Not all genetic combinations would
have been observable, but every result that we observe as a living
thing, is acceptable. The observable result is equivalent to the
random result in our little thought experiment.
Okay, the second objection. Evolution is driven by, as we normally
understand it, anyway, mostly random process in generating changes to
the genome. Most of these random changes have no effect, they are to
inactive regions of the genome, and the age of some genetic sequence
is routinely estimated by using a reasonable mutation rate and
observing the accumulation of changes in that sequence, across a
population; as well, the history of populations that were once
unified and that have been separated can be estimated. Do you
understand, Jojo, that this is a routine use mutation rates, that
such "evolution" does occur? (And this can be demonstrated in the
laboratory with rapidly multiplying organisms.)
This is evolution simply on the level of change in the genome. It happens.
Of course, if we are talking about the evolution of some specific
complex feature, we are not looking at the "garbage DNA." We are
looking at active sections of DNA, that produce cell protein
activity, more than mere copying of the genome, and complex biology.
What can be produced by random mutation in such sections? What is the limit?
It is rather obvious that small changes can result, but the issue
raised here is the development of a complex structure that allegedly
doesn't have intermediate useful states. It's alleged to be
impossible, by creationists, there *must* be a driving from a
"creative" impulse of some kind.
And, of course, there is such a driving, it's obvious. It is manifest
in the selection process. A change that is not useful and that is
actually a weight against survival will be selected against. We know
that such changes do occur, they manifest as "genetic diseases," but
most such changes probably don't even result in a viable organism.
Only a few are compatible with survival at all, a baby won't make it
to term. (There is a point in human development where the mother's
body is looking for a biochemical signal from the baby. If that
signal is absent, the embryo will be naturally aborted.)
The argument for impossibility of the development of complex
structures from random evolution depends upon a conception that
1. There could be no useful intermediates.
2. There could be no rapid combination of mutations to bypass some
alleged "obstacle."
That is, a useless structure, taking energy to construct and
maintain, will not long survive, but it might survive long enough,
through enough generations, to generate the next step, something
actually useful.
This is a type of impossibility argument, based on invention and
assumed knowledge limiting a vast universe of possibilities into
something narrow and presumed to be understood.
In this, indeed, there is a resemblance to the rejection of cold
fusion. There is a failure of imagination.
Many physicists (certainly not all!) in 1989-1990 rejected cold
fusion because they imagined it was a process that they believed they
knew and understood. What they were rejecting was that what they knew
and understood -- or believed that they understood -- could possibly
be happening at low temperatures. This is crystal clear in the
writing of Huizenga, when he reported, in the second edition of his
book, Cold Fusion, Scientific Fiasco of the Century, on the results
from Miles. Huizenga recognized the importance of Miles' work, and he
said that, if confirmed, it would solve one of the major mysteries of
cold fusion, the ash. We have to remember that when Miles published,
the ash wasn't known. Only a very few, including Preparata, had
considered helium a possibility, so rare was helium as a result from
normal deuterium fusion. Miles' work, on the fact, provided
significant evidence that the ash was helium, probably entirely.
Huizenga then went on to expect that Miles would not be confirmed,
and his reason was that no gammas were being observed. And that
betrays, quite clearly, how he was thinking. He was *assuming* that
if cold fusion was real, and if helium was the ash, the reaction must
be d+d -> He-4, which requires, he believed, a gamma. However, "the
conditions of cold fusion are not the conditions of hot fusion." What
was known was the behavior of deuterium under plasma conditions, the
conditions of hot fusion.
Deuterium will fuse at room temperature, in theory, but the
calculated rate is on the order of 10^-100, as I recall.
Unobservable. Utterly improbable.
But it is plasma reactions that are purely random. Condensed matter
can channel particles, and, in fact, by the early 1990s, Takahashi
had observed a shift in multibody fusion reaction rates due to the
condensed matter environment, bombarding PdD with deuterons, of 10^23
over naive random collision expectation. A step.
The largest error of the physics community was in rejecting
experimental evidence on the grounds of alleged impossibility. "Lack
of a plausible theory." Nature doesn't care if we have a theory or
not, apparently. She behaves as she behaves, regardless of what we
think. Unless we are doing experiments on thinking!
Here, "evolution" is being rejected based on an assumption that
observed mutations are random. They are obviously not random, that
is, the *process* of mutation might be hit-or-miss, but biological
process rapidly selects against and eliminates *effective* mutations
that cause actual harm, only allowing the immediate survival of
mutations that are, at least, mostly harmless. The idea that a
complex structure cannot form this way is simply an assumption, it's
not based on experiment.
Consider the monkey typewriting thought experiment. If the monkey
output is processed through a word processor that eliminates
non-words and ungrammatical constructions, quickly eliminating them,
so that only intelligible sentences result, the probability of
getting some snippets of Shakespeare, over a billion years of typing,
rises greatly.
It's certainly possible to do deeper analysis of the random process
problem, but to treat this as a "death" blow to evolutionary theory
simply reveals the bias of the writer.
No theory is true or false, that's a basic part of the ontology I'm
working with routinely. Rather, theories are useful or not useful.
Natural selection is obviously a useful concept, and it's observed to
be working.
It's certainly possible to imagine that natural selection is being
driven by a goal, or some ultimate "meaning" or "purpose" to life,
but that is not particularly a testable hypothesis, given realistic
limitations on what kinds of research are presently possible.
Nevertheless, if it floats your boat, that's fine by me. I tend to
think this way as well, that this is all meaningful in some way. I
just find that when I fix on some particular meaning, it tends to
limit me, to confine my thinking, to prevent me from being open to
what is possibly beyond that imagination.
I'll caution, though, that when our concepts of reality lead us to
define others as being wrong, they are, almost by definition, limiting us.
So, Jojo, what's important to you?
