Cobol - Re: Any comments? (Answers to Pete)

Author

Re: Any comments? (Answers to Pete)

Alistair

2006-04-13, 6:55 pm

Donald Tees wrote:
> LX-i wrote:
>
>
> Nonsense. Are you saying we only imagined all those fossils, and that
> breeding of farm animals never happened? Survival of the fittest as the
> main evolutionary force may be a theory, but it is not theory that
> evolution actually happened. There is a huge body of factual data
> available, and it is as provable as the fact that 1+1=2. Creationism has
> no evidence whatsoever. It is based on the folklore of people with a
> religion to sell, and a vested interest in selling it.
>
> Donald

Whereas 1+1=2 is a known and provable fact, there are mathematical
theories that are unprovable (see this month's edition for an article).

Before anyone reads the rant below: I am not getting at anyone in this
newsgroup (past or present) and the offensive language I use is to
express how deeply felt are my irreligious scientific beliefs.

<Angry scotsman mode> I have to admit that it really p***es me off to
have some jumped-up religious bigot announce that the theory of
evolution is unproven and, after all, is only a theory like creationism
or intelligent design. </Angry scotsman mode>

Creationism is not a theory; it is a story made up to explain the
inexplicable to people who lived at a time when the concept of an
almighty creator was as good as any other. If one wishes to consider
creationism and id as anything other than myths and stories, then it
must be as unproven unscientific theories. Creationism, and it's thinly
disguised bastard brother intelligent design, have no relevance in the
real world. A true religion would understand the need to modernise and
would junk the old rubbish when it became patently false, rather than
crucifying those who can see the light.

As an aside: Do creationists/intelligent designers refuse life-saving
medical treatments because they are only theories with no proof? I
believe that Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses do permit blood transfusions
in certain circumstances.

Finally, in the last w

scientists have revealed fossils to the world
which go some way to bridge the gaps between sea-life and land-forms (a
fish capable of limited movement on land and with hand-like
articulating bones in their fins), and the one between
Australopithecines and the Homo genus.

Michael Wojcik

2006-04-14, 7:55 am

In article <1144939350.392018.252820@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>, "Alistair" <alistair@ld50macca.demon.co.uk> writes:
>
> Whereas 1+1=2 is a known and provable fact, there are mathematical
> theories that are unprovable (see this month's edition for an article).

Unprovability is just the tip of the iceberg.

Gregory Chaitin has shown that the vast majority of mathematical
facts (*all* mathematical facts, to a first approximation :-) are
uncompressible: they can't be proven using less information than they
themselves contain, so they can't be proven in any useful sense.[1]

As Chaitin notes, mathematical incompleteness isn't strange - what's
unusual, statistically speaking, is that there are some elegant
theorems that can be proven from a given set of axioms.

(Kolmogorov Complexity demonstrates this from another angle: most
strings are "at least close to algorithmically random", as one source
puts it, due to the pigeonhole principle - there are more longer
strings than shorter strings.)

1. See
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS...standablePapers

I particularly like the UMass-Lowell version of "A century of
controversy":
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/lowell.html

--
Michael Wojcik michael.wojcik@microfocus.com

Most people believe that anything that is true is true for a reason.
These theorems show that some things are true for no reason at all,
i.e., accidentally, or at random. -- G J Chaitin

Sponsored Links