Re: West Virginia creationism

On 30/03/2024 20:33, Ron Dean wrote:

erik simpson wrote:

On 3/30/24 11:11 AM, Ron Dean wrote:

Bob Casanova wrote:

On Fri, 22 Mar 2024 06:51:17 -0500, the following appeared
in talk.origins, posted by RonO <rokimoto@cox.net>:
>

https://www.science.org/content/article/west-virginia-opens-door-teaching-intelligent-design >
>
Last year this boob tried to slip in teaching intelligent design by
adding one sentence to a decades old act to allow teaching intelligent
design in the public schools.  The bill didn't make it to the governor.
This year she took out the words "intelligent design" but admits that
intelligent design could be taught using her legislation.  It is sort of
like Louisiana not stating what they wanted to teach about scientific
creationism.  The Supreme court ruled that even though the dishonest
legislators tried to slip it through, there was little doubt about what
they wanted to teach.  If the governor signs this bill we will see how
it gets interpreted.
>

Obviously, all of those listed in the section "Monotheism"
in this article...
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creator_deity
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...as well as those shown in this one...
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https://medium.com/@mythopia/twelve-creator-gods-abridged-article-c32c5ae26930 >
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...will have to be included, as will multiple others, most
not part of monotheism (Creation can be a "team effort",
after all...). Inclusion and equity, y'know...

>
This again is testing the ID perp's "not required" to be taught scam.
They are not requiring ID to be taught, they are even lying about
wanting to teach it, so we will see how it goes if some stupid, ignorant
and likely dishonest teacher wants to use it to support their religious
beliefs in the science class.  Really, how honest could a teacher be at
this point after decades of the ID scam bait and switch going down on
any hapless rubes that have wanted to teach the lame junk in the public
schools.  No school board or legislator that has wanted to teach ID in
the public schools has ever gotten any ID science to teach from the ID
perps at the Discovery Institute.  There has never been a public school
lesson plan put out for evaluation, and the Discovery Institute used to
claim that Of Pandas and People could be used as a text to teach the
junk, but that ended after the name change from creationism to ID was
exposed in Kitzmiller.
>
I went to the ID scam unit web site at the Discovery Institute and it
looks like they did not refill the staff position that they had for the
person that was responsible for running the bait and switch on hapless
rubes that wanted to teach ID in the public schools.  She left after
running  the bait and switch on the Utah rubes back in 2017.  It looks
like Oklahoma and West Virginia have been missed.  My guess is that the
ID perps needed to save money and didn't think that they needed someone
to track the rubes and make sure that the bait and switch went down.  It
looks like they were wrong.  As crazy as it may seem there are still
creationist rubes that want to teach the junk when the bait and switch
has been going down for over 2 decades, and no one has ever gotten any
ID science to teach.  All anyone has ever gotten is an obfuscation and
denial switch scam that the creationists do not like because they do not
want to teach their kids enough science for them to understand what they
have to deny.

 >
Advocates can point to empirical evidence which they claim supports intelligent design. However, they can not point to any evidence that they can claim points to the identity of the designer. But
in their world that's sufficient. Evidence of design is the Cambrian explosion where a myriad of new body plans appeared abruptly, geologically speaking.
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The problem is information. How and from where did the information to build the bodies of the Cambrian animals come from? If the present is key to the past. At the present time, today information comes only from mind. So, must it have been during the Cambrian.

>
Ron Okimoto

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You need to educate yourself about the "Cambrian Explosion".  It's been a subject of great interest for many years, and there's a great deal that's been learned about it.  "Intelligent design" has presented no such record of accomplishment regarding this period, nor the preceding Ediacaran period.  In fact, it hasn't any record of accomplishment regarding any subsequent period.  "It looks designed, so it must be" isn't evidence of anything except ignorance.  Ignorance itself isn't bad, since there's an available remedy. Hint; information doesn't come from the mind.  It goes IN to the mind.

 >
Really, if information goes into mind, this still does not answer the source of information, especially the origin of highly complex information contained in DNA. Have researched this topic?

>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aA-FcnLsF1g
 

I think a more useful way of looking at the question isn't from the POV of "how does information get produced" but "how do entities that use information use it".
And the answer is that entities that use "information" are actually making inferences, or not even that - behaving according to regularities so regular that they don't need to make inferences they can just hardwire the behavior. For example if some organism has a metabolism that releases some specific chemical as a waste product we can think of this chemical as carrying information about the presence of the organism - not on purpose but just by virtue of the fact the chemical tends to be present when the organism is and to be absent when it's not. And if this organism belongs to a species that benefit from running into each other - for mating for example - they could via mutation & natural selection evolve an attraction to this chemical that leads them to running into each other more often. These organisms would be unwittingly *using* the information latent in the presence of the chemical to find others of their kind.
In this sense there is kind of two ways we can see information. If systems A and B interacted, one of the ways is to say all the features of B that changed after the interaction in unique ways such that some hypothetical observer *could* deduce things about A just from looking at B are information. Another is to say information is the features of B that changed after the information and that are *effectively* used by some system C to infer things about (or simply change behavior *as if* they'd inferred things about) A.
The first meaning has information potentially be anything and the second limits it to what some specific information-processing system can process, but they're really in continuity with each other. An information-processing system can only process something as information if it's information of the first type to begin with (developing an attraction to a chemical because it benefits one to move towards the organism that emits it only works if the chemical and the organism are effectively associated in a consistent way). And information that's of the first type but not of the second type can become information of the second type if the information-processing system changes - for example we think of the spectra of stars carrying information because we developed the tools and knowledge to deduce things from it - before those tools and knowledge we didn't know there was any information there to be gleaned so we didn't, and so in a sense that information wasn't there for us. Just like a flower's patterns in UV light transmits information for pollinators but not for us.
But that last example really gets us to a third kind of information doesn't it - information that's *produced*, not just *perceived*. So that's D specifically tuning interactions between A and B in order for C to infer things about A when it sees B. That's the leap from cue to signal; from the organism that passively excretes some chemical that other organisms will be attracted to because it benefits them, to (if it benefits the first organism to attract others - in the case of mating for example it may) *actively* emitting the chemical because of selective pressure to attract those that evolved to be attracted to it.
That third kind is most of the very specific things we most think of as "information" - probably because they're things that can exist *only* to be information, as opposed to the first which is just "things being things" and the second which is "things being things but being interpreted by a different thing". Like, if you're evolving to emit a substance that others evolve to be attracted to you've got a runaway loop that's more about the attraction itself than the specific substance being emitted, which leads to this extra level of abstraction where what matters is the interaction of the counterparties and not the medium by which they interact, which becomes arbitrary. Human writing, language etc is of that type. So is DNA code, which can be seen as the signalling medium between the different cellular systems of replication & translation.
The thing is, as suggested by my examples, the processes of evolution can totally produce that third type, given that it is in continuity with the first (which requires no process to appear at all, it just is) and the second (which does require something like evolution to appear but only on one end).