[EM] Russ's overlong, off-topic poting

[Russ Paielli]

Well, there you have it folks, straight from the "horse's mouth."

I don't think a reply is even necessary, but I would like to make a few 
points anyway.

Mike is a very intelligent person, but I think he fails to understand a 
some very basic concepts.

I made the mistake of trying to persuade him that the 9/11 attacks were 
unlikely to have been planned and organized by someone involved with the 
Bush Administration. However, I cannot "prove" that it wasn't, which 
apparently means to Mike that I have tried and failed to "refute" this 
conspiracy theory.

What I *can* do, however, is to demonstrate that such a conspiracy would 
be massive in its scope and absurdly risky for anyone to attempt. Recall 
that Nixon was forced out of office as a result of two or three guys 
breaking in to a vacant office. And we all know, of course, that nobody 
in the media is out to get Bush (we haven't forgot about Dan Rather 
already, have we?).

As I wrote before, Mike believes passionately that the WTC was wired 
with explosives that were detonated on cue to bring the buildings down. 
Now, you can amuse yourself without end by imagining the logistics of 
managing something like that without getting caught. But it goes way 
beyond that. In the course of our discussions, I sent Mike a link about 
an analysis of the WTC collapse by a prestigious team of perhaps dozens 
of structural engineering experts. I don't have the link handy, but I 
recall that they won an award for their work.

I haven't read their report, but I think we can safely assume that we 
would know it if they had concluded that the WTC couldn't have collapsed 
as it did without pre-installed explosives. They obviously came to no 
such conclusion. But Mike read a book by a *theologian* who makes that 
very claim -- that the WTC could not have possibly collapsed as it did 
with pre-installed explosives -- and that was good enough for him. He 
dismisses my citing of the professional study as an "appeal to authority."

By the way, I should have pointed out earlier that Mike told me via 
email that the EM group is already aware of his views on 9/11.

I have work to do, but let briefly discuss another off-topic that Mike 
brought up. He wrote

"The funny thing is that that comes from someone who believes that the 
evolution of species has never taken place."

Mike thinks he trumps me whenever he brings up my views on evolution. 
The only problem is that he distorts my views. I never said or wrote 
what he claims. What I have made clear is that I do not believe that we 
could have gotten here by purely naturalistic processes with absolutely 
no intelligent design or guidance (as the Neo-Darwinian Theory of 
Evolution (NDT) says).

Now perhaps some here consider that a wacky view. So be it. I have read 
six or seven books on evolution over the course of a decade or so 
(including two that argue in favor of the NDT). The most recent, and 
perhaps most compelling, is a book called "Not by Chance" by Lee 
Spetner, a prof. emeritus of physics (information theory) at MIT. I 
believe that Spetner effectively debunks the NDT.

I have been in several online discussions of evolution, and I am 
convinced that the proponents of the NDT don't even understand their own 
theory. The NDT says, basically, that evolution is based on random 
mutations that are "selected" by "natural selection" or "survival of the 
fittest." But when I ask what the ratio is of beneficial to harmful 
mutations, nobody has ever been able to answer it. Nobody has even been 
able to give me a ball-park figure for any species at any time anywhere.

Think about it. The proponents of the NDT routine belittle critics of 
their theory, yet it apparently never occurred to them to ask what the 
ratio is of beneficial to harmful mutations -- as if that has no bearing 
on the viability of their theory. Do you suppose "natural selection" can 
work if a million harmful mutations occur for every beneficial one? 
Radio engineers know that you cannot recover a signal if the 
signal/noise ratio is too low, but evolutionists apparently think that 
"natural selection" can "select" good mutations without being 
overwhelmed by the bad ones *regardless* of the ratio. That's nonsense.

I realize that this is off-topic, but please recall it was Mike who 
brought it up in an attempt to smear me.

--Russ