I have a bit of an issue with Dr.Naku and his musings about biology, especially after seeing him butcher and mangle the theory of evolution and say that humans have "by-and-large" stopped evolving. Which is bullshit. (http://bigthink.com/ideas/26647)

I'm sure Dr.Naku is an excellent theoretical physicist, but he has shown that he doesnt really master biology all that well. I have a feeling he does the same thing here. There are all sorts of problems that might not be solvable here. Animals are more, biologically speaking, than a DNA "recipe" that you can simply "put into an egg", there are all sorts of evo-devo that comes in to complicate this tremendously. It is not at all clear that simply sequencing a genome (assumming its a complete and 100% accurate sequencing, which I'm pretty sure it isnt for the neanderthal and mammoth) that comes into play here. In other words, the limitation might not be our technology. Its a bit like the zoom-in-and-enhance-it problem you have in Hollywood movies. it doesnt matter if you have a billion-dollar computer from the year 4350 if the original recording is an old VHS tape of a CCTV recording.

Ha! Reminds me of an old Soupy Sales joke ... Show me a butcher on vacation and I'll show you a meatloaf =oD

>> ^robbersdog49:

Or, alternatively, you could buy some good quality burgers from your local butcher and have something actually tasty. Seriously, who goes to McDonalds and thinks 'I really want to make this at home'?


Some people love their burgers. Accept it.

>> ^robbersdog49:

Or, alternatively, you could buy some good quality burgers from your local butcher and have something actually tasty. Seriously, who goes to McDonalds and thinks 'I really want to make this at home'?


I did and do. HONESTLY, I am not matching your jack ass comment with another one. That is the TRUTH !

Or, alternatively, you could buy some good quality burgers from your local butcher and have something actually tasty. Seriously, who goes to McDonalds and thinks 'I really want to make this at home'?

>> ^GenjiKilpatrick:

Switch this version for the shitty 80s techno cowbell one. I can't upvote that butchered shit.


ahhh.

man I am so torn between giving two shits what you think or want, and knowing what I want.

It is a tuff one I'll tell ya that !

Switch this version for the shitty 80s techno cowbell one. I can't upvote that butchered shit.

Any high school in a large American city where girls combine naivety, the desire to "fix the world" and wanting to be superior to others so they become VLUGS (vegetarians/lesbians until graduation)

>> ^Morganth:

"I was a vegetarian in high school like everybody else."
What in the world kind of high school did you go to?

Tags for this video have been changed from 'brookly, butcher, rude, strength' to 'brooklyn, nyc, butcher, meat, rude, strength, gender' - edited by legacy0100

Similarly, we can instantiate in enough physical rules to get the "chance" universe you describe going, and its rules could get it to the current state either determinalistically or with some element of randomness. I guess I understand how you're using "chance" here... but I don't know that it's terribly useful. Why should "what humans can predict" be of any relevance philosophically? And if we're using it that way, couldn't we similarly describe God's actions as chance? I mean, surely humans (or angels) can't predict everything he's going to do. Chance seems like a pejorative when applied to God.. and to me it seems like a pejorative when applied to the operations of the universe (except where, again, that operation is actually random).

However, again, I don't think this difference is terribly important. I think I understand what you're getting at, I just see things very differently.

The difference between chance and design is the most important distinction there is. If you don't like the word chance, I will use the word "unplanned", or "mindless". An unplanned Universe has no actual purpose; it is just happenstance. Meaning, your life is just a product of mindless processes, and concepts like morality, justice, and truth have no essential meaning. It means you are just some blip on a grid and there is no rhyme or reason to anything. It also means you will never find out what happened or why it happened because no one knows what is going on or ever will. This will *always* lead you to nihilism.

A designed Universe, on the other hand, does have a purpose. A purposeful Universe means that life was created for a reason. It means that there is a truth, a truth that only the Creator knows. Which means that all lines of inquiry will lead to the Creators doorstep, and that trying to understand the Universe without the Creator is completely futile. It is like looking at a painting with three marks on it..you could endlessly speculate on what the painter was thinking when he painted it. However, no matter how clever you were, you don't have enough information to be sure about anything. To refuse to seek the Creator would be to stare at that painting your whole life trying to figure it out when you have the painters business card with his phone number on it in your pocket.

I don't think you're phrasing this in a terribly fair way. Yes, many people assume there's a natural explanation for abiogenesis. This is partly because having another explanation introduces arbitrariness into the system. Say I'm a geologist and I discover Devil's Tower. It's really weird, but my inclination from the very start is that it was formed by similar processes to ones that have explained weird things in the past. Even if I can't postulate even a guess as to why it has those weird columns, I'm not crazy to guess that eventually we'll figure out an explanation that doesn't involve, say, new physical laws or aliens. (And it's certainly not helpful to say "maybe it was made in the flood").

The whole thing is arbitrary to begin with. Naturalistic explanations are assumed apriori, and then the evidence is interpreted through the conclusion. That isn't how science works. You come to the conclusion because of the evidence, not the other way around. I would also note that you would never accept this kind of reasoning from a creationist. Neither does a mountain of circumstantial evidence prove anything.

Abiogenesis is a bigger problem and it's also one that's "lost to time" a bit. It almost certainly requires a mechanism we have yet to identify (or a mechanism someone has guessed at, but hasn't provided good details or evidence for). But, like Devil's Tower, there's no reason to expect that mechanism won't be identified - or that it will require significant changes to our understanding of the rest of science. Again, there's plausible ideas already floating around, and I think we'll probably recreate the process (though likely not with the same actual process) within the next 30 years or so.

Anything sounds plausible, apparently, when you have billions of years to play with. As the earlier quote said, time itself performs the miracles for you. How do you know that the mechanism hasn't already been identified but you have rejected it?

http://creation.com/devils-tower-explained

No... that, I think, is probably our strongest point of disagreement. I'm very much OK with "I don't know", and literally everything I believe has a bit of "I don't know" attached (kind of similar to how everything you believe in has a bit of God attached).

I'm not worshipping ignorance or something - knowing IS better than not knowing. But I'm also not scared of not knowing things - and I'm certainly not just going to pick something and believe in it because I don't like having some of my answer pages blank.

For you, is Scientology better than "I don't know"?

The point I'm trying to make is, I don't know isn't a theory. What most atheists mean when they say "I don't know" is "I know it isn't the Christian God, but otherwise I don't know". The next thing they say is, you believe in God because you're afraid. That I "chose" God because I am scared of death, or because the Universe is too big and scary for my mind to handle the uncertainty of not knowing.

I have to say that this idea of a bunch of hokey. The Christians I know believe in God because they have a personal relationship with Him. It has nothing to do with making a choice..God chose us. He would chose you too, if you were open to Him.

Neither was I afraid of death when I was an agnostic, and I wasn't afraid of saying I don't know (that's why I was an agnostic, because I didn't know). I believe in God because He revealed Himself to me, and that is the only reason. If He hadn't, I would still be an agnostic.

It is credible to believe that the Universe was designed and created by God. We can see that whomever made the Universe is unimaginably powerful, intelligent, exists outside of space and time, etc. Scientology isn't credible and explains nothing. God can explain everything.

Also, thanks for using the big boy version of the Bible. I quite like the Bible artistically, but I can't stand some of the new translations (despite whatever benefits some parts may have in terms of clarity).

Most of the new translations butcher the scriptures. They remove entire verses, words, water down meanings, or just flat out mislead. I can't stand them either. The KJV is the best word for word translation that we have, and although the language is archaic, it is comprehensible with a little research.

>> ^jmzero

>> ^bobknight33:

Disturbing, Fascinating, Remarkably clean.


You forgot 'terrifying.'

>> ^messenger:
My nuts crawled up inside me at 4:33 and they haven't been heard from since.
Yes. Fascinatingly unsettling.

>> ^kymbos:

How long till we completely disassociate meat from animals?


I'm pretty sure that's already happened, at least the meat packing companies hope so. It's not cow, it's "beef", it's now chicken, it's "poultry", it's not pig, it's "pork" - even the wording forces some disassociation.

Yum...Soylent Green


>> ^dhdigital:

and when we loose, the machines will process us in similar fashion...

>> ^zombieater:

It looks clean, but in comparison with farmers who butcher and prepare meat at their farms, almost all large factory-driven slaughterhouses are quite dirty using most standards of cleanliness (coliform counts, fecal counts, and other bacterial measures).
Ever seen Food, Inc? Yuck.


Well this place probably just opened... so it is still clean in that respect. I would be interested in seeing what their cleaning times and methods were. What is scary is there are blades at every turn in that sucker. Imagine being the one who has to repair and change out blades.

There WAS a distinct lack of spray guards so I am sure bits and pieces are flung all over that you can't see, but it is also compleatly possible that the entire room gets hosed with a cleaning solution infused water fire hose style since the hardware seems pretty sturdy and protected against elements.