Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: miracle in a peanut butter jar

aw, shucks, revere,

I think you just ruined my relationship with peanut butter, a much favored form of protein here at Harmony Hall.

Wow, this is almost as good as the argument for ID based on the shape of a banana, clearly 'designed' to fit perfectly in the human hand.

In the experiment performed in video the clip I am not entirely convinced that the researchers technique for identifying de novo emergence of novel life forms (visual inspection) is adequate to completely exclude the possibility of emergence. Further I believe he referred to this experiment having been performed before but feel that in at least some of these cases there is a possibility that those researchers may have consumed the experimental medium prior to exhaustive testing for novel biological compounds. Just a personal observation.

JJ: So you think that the answer to life's mysteries might be sticking to the roof of their mouths?

Christ! My effing peanut butter is contaminated, my dog food is contaminated, my cat is now contaminated! @%&!!% Whats next, the effing flu vaccine when it comes is contaminated with politics?

Couldnt resist a second post on this. So uh lets see, I subject the peanut butter to high bursts of radiation and wait a bit. Then I pull back the lid after 50,000 years and find a little person wearing green tights that hangs around with a chick named "Tinkerbelle" (well we think its a chick), both being chased by a pirate who is being chased by a crocodile. Oh and being around that little person gives you diarrhea and stomach cramps.

Are you sure we arent talking about an acid trip of some kind?

Randy: Interesting experiment. As always, I'll wait for the evidence.

The creationist argument which still annoys me comes originally from Fred Hoyle, who should have known better, and which says, "You never see a tornado go through a junkyard and assemble a pristine Boeing 747."

There seems to be a consistent problem in Western intellectual thought with the inappropriate application of mechanical metaphors to biological systems.

Which leads to silliness like the aforementioned Hoyle quip, and also to irritating coinages like "genetic engineering".

I can design and fabricate an engineered mechanical part, and go install it in a larger mechanical system, and when I do that, I have unshakable confidence that numerous copies of this part, some of them perhaps deformed and modified in unpredictable ways, will *not* be routinely and uncontrollably propagated into the internals of other nearby machinery.

Compare this to what happens with "genetically engineered" food crops, and the inaptness of engineering as a conceptual model for that undertaking ought to be perfectly clear. Yet that term, and its intrinsic semantic connotations of predictability and control, remain in wide currency to describe what is, rather, ignorant and dangerous garage tinkering with poorly understood and intercommunicating genomes.

(n.b. -- contemporary "software engineering" is also in many cases not worthy of being described as an actual engineering endeavor. This field, though, is capable of being made into a predictable, solidly grounded professional discipline, and it has been moving fairly steadily in that direction.)

One thing which a good engineering education will hammer home to its recipients, as was done with me when I submitted impenetrably worded laboratory reports, is that one "must communicate clearly in order to think clearly". The larger culture needs to learn that lesson as well.

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marquer: I'm not going to argue with your well reasoned and nuanced comment, except to say that it forces you to use a private language. People use "engineered" for things that have been deliberately designed or constructed, so genetic engineering isn't so inapt. Engineers frequently don't have a precise understanding of their systems. That's why the over design them. I spent ten years at a famous engineering school teaching engineers and I have a lot of sympathy and maybe some insight into how they are taught to think. They are primarily problem solvers, and in that sense the term "engineering" could be applied to many more things than it is now applied to, not less. In any event, you've lost this battle, I'm afraid, not because of my puny arguments but because the world talks differently than you wish it would.

As a Technical Writer revere I am compelled to agree with your last post.
I started out as an Engineering Secretary and advanced to Technical Writing. The entire job centers around taking what one, two or three engineers have written about a particular product(s) and then actually attempting to make sense of it through a manual, SOP or what have you.
Engineers don't always make sense but in having worked with them one begins to understand them.
In hindsight and being in this line of work it has now tweaked the way I communicate and write, which isn't all that efficient anymore.

Is there anything involving peanut butter that isn't funny?

Sandra, I worked with them and married one. It didn't help me understand. He also divided knowledge into three categories: pure science (physics, mathematics) the application of pure science (engineering) and "fussy studies." As a musician, I obviously fell into the latter category.

But I did learn how to design and make printed circuit boards.

This kind of crap really gets me going. It's worse than paper straw arguments. Someday, I hope we are able to get the money and safety equipment to try some real origin of life stuff.

For those of you that are curious about the origin of life science. Check out Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origins by Robert Hazen. It's a relatively easy read and it's part expose on the history of the science, part science, and part humanity. Well worth it imo.

"The entire food industry in the world depends on the fect that evolution doesn't happen."

OK. I was wondering why we allow cattle to be "finished" in crowded feedlots, while being medicated with the latest antibiotics. I thought that this was the perfect way to evolve antibiotic resistant bacteria, but it turns out we can do this because "evolution doesn't happen".

(My fifth grader listened to that peanut butter spiel and didn't say much. Now I see she's written "Evolution is the thought that animals come from earlier animals." on the paper where I took my notes from the video. I guess she's saving me from the creationists.)

Nyah, my position as a believer is as follows. Peanut butter hit with radiation might eventually evolve into a life form. But which one came first the peanut or the peanut butter. Fundamentalists/Creationists leave me cold but I still believe that someone fired this rock out of something. Random chance? Maybe, but in the same breath I dont take my God as all powerfull, just one baddassed dude that each time he came and made his presence known, a lot of people generally got dead thru history. Yup, vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord. So I am down the beaten path of a believer, but its based upon what I believe right now but certainly not what I know. The I know is that I read what was happening in Olduvai Gorge, and Leakey, and Goodall and on and on. Thats something I can put my hands on for the requisite human touchy-feely. I means that there are many that would say there is no God because he didnt smite them or let them know he was here.

No one is able to prove the existence of God in peanut butter, but I have to believe that he is. If he wanted to change peanut butter into a life form then so be it. But peanut butter is not a life form by OUR definition, might already be by his. Screw hitting it with radiation, we have enough from the sun already. Evolution of atoms smacking each other about in a Universe that is already smacking atoms about in a number that you couldnt publish on paper that went around the Earth 20 times. Randomization? Maybe, but I'll stick with my belief system first. I like Peter Pan.....

You hit the nail on the head MRK: "But peanut butter is not a life form by OUR definition, might already be by His".

Kruger: "after 50,000 years"

Revere: "I'll wait for the evidence"

Is there something you haven't told us?

Greg: Yes. Donations can be sent to my Ministry here at the blog. We take all major credit cards, personal checks and cash.

Randy,

You'd better stick with firearms. That theological mess you just proposed won't pass muster with any mainline denomination in North America. The Catholic church formally accepted evolution in 1950 and it is a non-issue with the Protestant mainline and most of Judaism. I have no idea what Islam thinks, I haven't studied it, but the Imams tend to be silent if the Prophet and the haditha haven't spoken on a subject.

The Catholic church formally accepted evolution in 1950 and it is a non-issue with the Protestant mainline and most of Judaism.

A non-issue with the Protestant mainline, which is itself, well, a non-issue. The demographic preponderance of American Protestantism is with the snake-handlers and the tongue-speakers.

Please note that the fastest-growing ethnic group by far in America are Hispanics. People who aren't paying attention assume that this means a further Catholicization of American belief. But if you *are* paying attention, you are aware that the fastest-growing religious subcurrent within the Hispanic tidal wave is that of Pentecostalism. The adherents of which are going to provide a massive recharge to the most anti-intellectual and retrogressive factions of the U.S. Protestant community.

Note also for the record, with regard to that Catholic claim, that the newly mitered Benedict has been rapidly backing away from the idea of lending papal authority to evolutionary theory, as well he might be expected to, given his repeatedly expressed misgivings about scientific materialism.

Yes, the Papal Academy of Sciences said that "evolution is now beyond serious dispute" back in the 1980s, but no Pope has ever voiced that in those words. Don't wait up for one to do so.

I have no idea what Islam thinks, I haven't studied it, but the Imams tend to be silent if the Prophet and the haditha haven't spoken on a subject.

The bulwark of creationism in the UK is coming from Islamic sources.

Go take a look at the curriculum offered by, say, a university in Riyadh. It will disabuse you of many pernicious notions about human intellectual progress.

The 21st century is going to be a bad, bad one for poor old Darwin. Not because the science is going against him: every day that goes by accretes more evidence to shore up an already granitic foundation for the scientific truth of evolutionary biology.

No, it's all going wrong for Darwin precisely because his model is rational and scientific and evidentiary, in a passionately irrational and antiscientific era, the depths of which we have not yet begun to plumb. You and I will live to see university libraries sacked to purge the heresy. We will probably see unrepentant biologists killed by mobs. Deus vult!

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Revere, my check is in the mail.