(Part 2) Best products from r/DebateEvolution

My recommendations from books I read in the last year or so (yes, these are all VERY STRONG recommends curated from ~100 books in the last year) -

​

Science fiction-

Derek Kunsken's The Quantum Magician (I would describe it as a cross between Oceans Eleven with some not-too-Hard Science Fiction. Apparently will be a series, but is perfectly fine as a standalone novel).

Cixin Lu's very popular Three Body Problem series (Mixes cleverly politics, sociology, psychology and science fiction)

James A Corey's The Expanse Series (which has been made into the best sci fi tv series ever!)

Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief series (Hard science fiction. WARNING - A lot of the early stuff is intentionally mystifying with endless terminology that’s only slowly explained since the main character himself has lost his memories. Put piecing it all together is part of the charm.)

​

Fantasy-

James Islington's Shadow of What was Lost series (a deep series which makes you think - deep magic, politics, religion all intertwined)

Will Wight's Cradle series (has my vote for one of the best fantasy series ever written)

Brandon Sanderson Legion series (Brandon Sanderson. Nuff said. Creative as always)

​

Manga -

Yukito Kishiro's Alita, Battle Angel series (the manga on what the movie was based)

​

Non-Fiction-

Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind - Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (and how we are not as rational as we believe we are, and how passion works in tandem with rationality in decision making and is actually required for good decisionmaking)

Rothery's Geology - A Complete Introduction (as per title)

Joseph Krauskopf's A Rabbi's Impressions of the Oberammergau Passion Play, available to read online for free, including a fabulous supplementary of Talmud Parallels to the NT (a Rabbi in 1901 explains why he is not a Christian)

​

Audiobooks -

Bob Brier's The History of Ancient Egypt (as per title - 25 hrs of the best audiobook lectures. Incredible)

​

Academic biblical studies-

Richard Elliot Friedman's Who Wrote The Bible and The Exodus (best academic biblical introductory books into the Documentary Hypothesis and Qenite/Midian hypothesis)

Israel Finkelstein's The Bible Unearthed (how archaelogy relates to the bible)

E.P. Sander's Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63BCE-66CE ​(most detailed book of what Judaism is and their beliefs, and one can see from this balanced [Christian] scholar how Christianity has colored our perspectives of what Jews and Pharisees were really like)

Avigdor Shinan's From gods to God (how Israel transitioned from polytheism to monotheism)

Mark S Smith's The Early History of God (early history of Israel, Canaanites, and YHWH)

James D Tabor's Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity (as per title)

Tom Dykstra's Mark Canonizer of Paul (engrossing - will make you view the gospel of Mark with new eyes)

Jacob L Wright's King David and His Reign Revisited (enhanced ibook - most readable book ever on King David)

Jacob Dunn's thesis on the Midianite/Kenite hypothesis (free pdf download - warning - highly technical but also extremely well referenced)

> You're right. I should have clearly said that your view is definitely wrong.

Thank you. You are still wrong, but at least you seem to understand English this time. I wonder how many other words you will use wrong in this message, though?

> By the way, cameras are a total red herring here.

They really aren't. The human eye is directly analogous.

> Just because cameras have removeable film doesn't mean that we should have a removeable retina.

You've never heard of a digital camera?

Besides, what does that really matter? We are considering the functionality of the lens and light path to the light sensitive media. Whether that sensitive media is film, cells, a CMOS or whatever is irrelevant to the actual discussion.

> They have fixed lenses, we have flexible ones.

The vast majority of cameras do not have fixed lenses. All but the cheapest cameras have focusing lenses. The fact that the human eye has a flexible lens and a camera achieves the same thing by moving the lenses instead is an irrelevant detail to the end functionality.

> Cameras cannot perform all of the functions that our eye does.

Wow, that is vague. Please cite a single function that the eye can do but a camera cannot.

> You're trying to argue from an inferior object to a superior one.

So? If the eye were well designed, it should be at least as well designed as that inferior design, shouldn't it?

> “If the Human Eye Was a Camera, How Much Would It Cost?”

Lol, there is so much wrong with that article that it is clear that you didn't even stop and think about it. Either that, or you truly know nothing about what you are talking about, but that can't be true since you have done all that "research".

First off, nothing in that article shows a function that cameras can't do. One obvious way to know this is to note that every listed function has a price. If it couldn't be done, there would be no price.

Second, virtually every item there, with two exceptions (resolution and crop factor), is available in a modern, reasonably inexpensive digital camera. Hell, even many smartphones can outperform the eye on many of these stats.

It is true that no consumer camera has the resolution that he eye does, however the $48,000 Hasselblad The H6D-400c does 400 megapixels, and there are specialized scientific cameras that do far higher than that. The hubble Space Telescope has produced images that are 1.5 BILLION pixels.

As for crop factor-- do you even know what "crop factor" is? Why is it being smaller on the human eye better? Shouldn't you be able to explain the benefit before claiming it makes the eye better? Well, it is, but that improvement comes with a really substantial disadvantage.

The article cites two numbers-- the crop factor and the angle of view-- but and both are accurate as far as they go, but neither are actually true. Yes, we have a wide angle of view and tiny crop factor, but that is only because our vision outside of the center of our vision is terrible. It is useful for detecting motion, but that's about it.

And it's worth noting that there is nothing particularly technically challenging about making a camera with comparable optical characteristics... But why would we want to make such a poorly designed system?

Third, the prices he cites are just random things that he found that meet the criteria, then he just adds them all up... Never mind that virtually all of them can be found in a single camera in most cases.

Fourth, why are you ignoring all that cameras can do better than the human eye? These are values where just from one single $1000 camera (the Nikon COOLPIX P1000) beats the human eye:

• Focal length (adjusted to a comparable scale as the human eye): ~8-1500mm
  
• Field of view: The nikon at its shortest focal length is a narrower, but unlike the human eye, the image is very sharp throughout the imaging range. If you only consider the area that is sharply focused, the Nikon is far wider. You can also add a $199 lens attachment to increase the FoV to comparable to the human eye while remaining sharply focused (though distorted).
  
• ISO: 100-6400
  
• Bit depth: 24 bits, 16777216 colors.
  
• Shutter Speed: 1/4000 to 30 seconds
  
• Frames per second: Your article is seriously misleading on this one. While it is true that the human eye can detect those speeds in some cases, it is virtually useless for most purposes. The Nikon can shoot 7 high-resolution, high quality images per second in still mode, and shoot HD video at 60FPS.
  
  Those are just the values in your article, but let's look at a couple others that pop to mind:
  
  
• Magnification: The human eye has a fixed magnification of 1x, so this wasn't even cited in your article. The nikon has a magnification of roughly 0.5x to 125x. Can the eye do this?
  
• Macro focus ability: Unaided, the human eye can typically focus to about 6", though it varies among individuals. The Nikon can focus to 0.4". Can the eye do this?
  
  And that is all one consumer grade camera-- and not even a particularly good one at anything other than it's zoom range. There are other, better cameras at virtually every other statistic cited.
  
  Seriously, this is just flagrant rationalization to let you avoid answering the question.
  
  Edit: The more I think about it, crop factor is simply nonsense in this context. It's clear that the author of the article doesn't really understand crop factor any more than you do.

> Wow, your attitude is pretty toxic.

Naah, I just don't have a whole lot of patience for bullshit.

>"A good design is one that performs a function efficiently and effectively. If someone claims that something is a bad design, and yet (i) it works well, efficiently and effectively, and (ii) that person can not demonstrate a better design that still performs all of the original functions, then we can dismiss the claim that that object is badly designed"

Stupid question: Why are you so all-fired determined to shoehorn you gotta be able to work up a better design into your criteria for determining whether or not a given Design is bad? Seems to me that if we can recognize the function (or functions) of a given Design, we can justifiably infer something about the quality of that Design just from observations of how well or poorly it performs that function (those functions), without being able to Design something better. Likewise, from observations of the operational characteristics of the Design, plus known qualities of the materials and suchlike from which the Design was manufactured; for instance, if we know the standard operating temperature of a given Design, and we observe that the Design includes parts whose melting point is at or below that standard operating temperature; I think we can justifiably infer something about the quality of that Design, regardless of our ability, or lack thereof, to improve on that Design. And so on, and so forth.

> By the way, when you're talking about not knowing how a calculator is designed, weren't you the person who argued that you can't tell if something is designed or not unless you know how it was manufactured?

No. I argued that if you want to make a scientifically valid inference that some arbitrary whatever-it-is is Designed, you need to work up a testable hypothesis of Manufacture, and you need to, you know, test that hypothesis. Not the same thing at all.

I also acknowledged, in an earlier comment, that In the mundane business of day-to-day life, "it looks Designed to me" is good enough. Because in most cases, something that looks Designed is Designed. But in the mundane business of day-to-day life, it sure looks like the Sun moves across the sky, doesn't it? When, in fact, real science tells us that what's really happening is that the Sun is pretty much staying where it is, and the Earth's rotation is what makes it look like the Sun is what's doing the moving. So there's an obvious chasm between What It Looks Like and What's Actually True.

By the way, I don't demand that every inference one makes in day-to-day life must necessarily be scientifically valid. But you ID-pushers? You ID-pushers absolutely do make noise about how your alleged Design inferences are scientifically valid. So, I'ma gonna be a real hardass about the blatant lack of scientific validity in the Design inferences made by ID-pushers.

>Does this mean that you can't tell if a calculator is designed or not?

I, in common with the vast majority of all human beings, have a store of just a whoooole friggin' lot of background information about Designed thingies whose Designers are human beings. Designed thingies whose Designers are anything other than human beings… not so much. Given that background information, which includes a number of relevant facts, not least the relevant fact that calculators are Designed by human beings, I think I am rationally justified in concluding, at least on a tentative basis, that any random calculator I see is, in fact, Designed. If there were some particular calculator that I wanted to be more certain of its Designed nature than I can infer from my store of background information about human Designs, I would form a hypothesis of how that particular calculator was Manufactured, and I'd test that hypothesis of Manufacture.

Now, that background information about human-produced Designs… is not necessarily relevant to Designs produced by Designers who are not human beings. And I'ma go out on a limb here to declare that if Life On Earth was Designed, that Designer was not, in fact, a human being. Ergo, any intuitions about human-produced Design should not be considered reliably applicable to Life On Earth.

> I'm not seeing where this is evidence of the existence of a god.

I don't think I can explain it well since I'm slugging through the math myself all over again to sort it out. But I'll try to explain as best I can.

So for now, I'm accepting the quotes from respected physicists including Richard Conn Henry from my graduate Alma mater.

So I'll fumble through my understanding as best as I can...

When we study a single system, like say an electron. Our observation can bring its position into existence. The quarrel between Einstein and Bohr was to the effect, "does the moon have to be observed in order to exist." Well the usual answer is "no", but in the quantum atomic world, it's "yes". Observation creates a collapse of the ordinary evolution of hypothetical probabilities and brings to existence the position of the electron. The mathemagicians and physicists said this is the most consistent way to model experimental results. Hence, we have paradoxes like Shrodinger's cat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat

So the cat is not made dead or alive till it is observed. Of course that seems to not make any sense! But at the atomic level, that's par for the course.

>Schrödinger intended his thought experiment as a discussion of the EPR article—named after its authors Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen—in 1935.[9] The EPR article highlighted the bizarre nature of quantum superpositions, in which a quantum system such as an atom or photon can exist as a combination of multiple states corresponding to different possible outcomes. The prevailing theory, called the Copenhagen interpretation, said that a quantum system remained in this superposition until it interacted with, or was observed by, the external world, at which time the superposition collapses into one or another of the possible definite states. The EPR experiment showed that a system with multiple particles separated by large distances could be in such a superposition. Schrödinger and Einstein exchanged letters about Einstein's EPR article, in the course of which Einstein pointed out that the state of an unstable keg of gunpowder will, after a while, contain a superposition of both exploded and unexploded states.

Now in the world of quantum computing, we try to leverage this sort of strangeness. So it's more than a mere academic curiosity, but has now practical applications. The difficulty is preventing the quantum bits from "collapsing" in the wrong way by an inadvertent "observation" or "measurement". This creates a hardware nightmare of creating such an isolated environment....

Ok, so suffice to say, some mysterious act of observation brings to life a hypothetical position of an electron into a definite position of the electron.

By way of extension, at the beginning of the universe, some observation brought to life the laws of physics and matter. That observation is in the future, because in Quantum Mechanics the future is causal of the past. We see this especially in the Double Slit Delayed Choice experiment.
http://www.dhushara.com/book/quantcos/qphil/qphil.htm

>Psychic Photons

>The astronomer's choice of how to observe photons from the quasar here in the present apparently detemiines whether each photon took both paths or just one path around the gravitational lens-bdhons of years ago. As they approached the galactic beam splitter, the photons must have had something like a premonition telling them how to behave in order to satisfy a choice to be made by unbom beings on a still non-exstent planet. The fallacy giving rise to such speculations. Wheeler explains is the assumption that a photon had some physical form before the astronomer observed it. Either it was a wave or a particle; either it went both ways around the quasar or only one way. Actually, Wheeler says, quantum phenomena are neither waves nor particles but are intrinsically undefined until the moment they are measured. In a sense, the British philosopher Bishop Berkeley was right when he asserted two centuries ago that 'to be is to be perceived.


I actually worked in a nano-systems group and one of my co-workers was working on the problem of ensuring quantum computers would be sufficiently isolated from future events such that present time computation are not affected by future events. This may sound bizarre, but in the atomic world, this is par for the course.

So one unsolved mystery is why the macroscopic world behaves so classically but the atomic world so bizarrely.

But in any case, if one can accept the notion that observation brings something into existence that was in an indefinite amorphous spooky condition, then by way of extension some observation brought the universe into existence.

Some have hypothesized a Universal Wave function. That is the Schrodinger equation encompassing all of material reality. You can see it is mentioned here in the last column which interpretations accord with the existence of the Universal Wave function:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics#Comparison_of_interpretations

This is discussion of that Universal Wave function:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction
>The universal wave function is the wavefunction or quantum state of the totality of existence, regarded as the "basic physical entity"[8] or "the fundamental entity, obeying at all times a deterministic wave equation."[9]

So if there is a universal wave function, there is the possibility of an Ultimate Observer (aka God) who will observe this function and bring it to life much like we bring the existence of electron position to life through the act of observation.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XF1EKO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Is this proof airtight? No. But it puts an option on the table.

This was what I said over at r/creation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Creation/comments/82osbh/laws_of_physics_especially_qm_suggests_the/dvegfrw/
>If I may point out one of my reasons for taking this line of inquiry.

>It would be easy for someone to imagine and believe in imaginary beings that could work all sorts of wonders. This would be akin to fairy tales.

>Now, if have something like life that couldn't naturally evolve, then we could invoke such an imaginary hypothetical being with all sorts of magical powers to explain life. At least that is a little more justifiable.

>But when atheistic physicists make a 180 degree turn toward ID because solutions to their physics equations imply God, I really take notice! At that point, when physics can be used to argue for the existence of God, then ID becomes far more legitimate in my mind than kids inventing fairy tales. It provides the missing element to ID, a Designer. But up until that point most design arguments are God of the Gaps with no other line of reasoning except the gap itself. I wanted something more to point to God than a mere Gap. Quantum Mechanics provided an alternate argument for God than just mere gaps.

So this is not a PROOF of God or ID, it is a feasibility argument from physics and math. The feasibility argument was how I could alleviate worries that I was just making up fairy tales in my own mind. Whether ID is ultimately true, I do not think a formal resolution of the question is possible, we can only examine the evidence and form our best guess or belief.

Okay, so that makes sense with Mormons I've met then. The "bible talking" Mormons, as I call them, seemed to me to be of the creation viewpoint. That's why I was confused about your view on it. I didn't know the church had no official position.

I read some of your blog posts. Very nice! It is interesting and intelligent. Your post about the genetic 1% is good. Incidentally, that is also why many folks are hypothesizing about the extreme danger of artificial intelligence -- the singularity, they call it, when AI becomes just a tiny bit smarter than humans, and potentially wipes out humanity for its own good. That is, if we are merely 1% more intelligent than some primates, then if we create an AI a mere 1% more intelligent than us, would we just be creating our own master? We'd make great pets, as the saying goes. I somehow doubt it, but Nick Bostrom goes on and on about it in his book, Superintelligence, if you haven't already read it.

Continuing with the "genetic 1%", it is possible we may be alone in our galaxy. That is, while abiogenesis may be a simple occurrence, if we think about the fact that in the 4.5 billion years of earth's existence there is only one known strain of life that began, it might be extremely rare for life to evolve to our level of intelligence. Some have speculated that we may be alone because we developed early. The idea is that the universe was cooling down for the first few billion years, which completely rules out life anywhere. Then another few billion years to create elements heavy enough for complex compounds and new star systems to emerge from the debris. Then the final few billion years when we came to be. Who knows?

From what I remember, this book is pretty good. I disagree with the conclusions, but they are very well laid out and addressed. After that I would search for responses to Plantinga.

This is an interesting one, but I can't find the full thing for free. I will keep looking.

I'm glad I could clear things up.

In addition to Demon-Haunted World, you might also enjoy AronRa's series The Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism. He goes into more detail about why people like Hovind are wrong, and often purposefully dishonest.

If you'd like an excellent entry-level book into evolution, I'll suggest Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True.

/r/evolution has some additional resources in the sidebar there - recommended reading and viewing - you might find some things in there, too, if you're interested.

Just finished Rat Island and Where the Wild Things Were by William Stolzenburg. Very well written, and really great if you like being depressed--turns out humanity is destroying the planet for other living things.

As in the Dover, PA federal court trial the tactic of misrepresenting another theory does not provide evidence your theory is true.

You are though proving it's a good time for these public service messages:

https://psmag.com/news/the-god-drug-when-religion-becomes-an-addiction

https://www.recoveryplace.com/blog/5-signs-you-may-be-addicted-to-religion/

https://www.promisesbehavioralhealth.com/behavioral-process-addictions/can-religion-be-an-addiction/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addicted-brains/201505/religion-and-addiction-void-fillers

https://www.amazon.com/When-Religion-Addiction-Robert-Minor/dp/0970958129

> Genetic Entropy presents compelling scientific evidence that the genomes of all living creatures are slowly degenerating - due to the accumulation of slightly harmful mutations. This is happening in spite of natural selection.

https://www.amazon.com/Genetic-Entropy-John-C-Sanford/dp/0981631606

My argument is about recessive mutations not being effected by natural selection, and not about slightly harmful mutations occurring in spite of natural selection.