1. The Jezebel = ID equation
Section 2 is a narrative featuring God Almighty. As a function of your belief system, such narratives you will treat positively or negatively, depending further on contents and perceived origin of the text. For instance, you may be an atheist and only agree to narratives featuring God Almighty if they form good satire. Or you may be of the sort of faithfuls who only agree to narratives featuring God Almighty if they can be shown to fit excerpts from some specific sacred book or compilation.
This narrative claims God Himself changes the climate to teach Transformism to the most ignorant. Transformism is a strategical component of Evolution Theory that many evolution deniers find acceptable because it is or can be made compatible with a Creator God who made us. It is the notion that species transform into each other and that all descend from a common ancestor. The theory of Intelligent Design (ID) marries Transformism to God by asserting such transformations follow God’s Will and Designs. The promoters/inventors of ID would have ID exposed in schools as an alternate explanation of Transformism that may replace Darwin’s explanation or more generally Evolution Theory.
The real problem with ID is that it doesn’t mind its own business.
What business can ID have to dispute the interpretation of what it admits as fact, in the name of protecting the faith of people who deny the fact?
What’s more worrisome is that the trench war against science over anthropogenic climate change gets inspiration from the similar attitude exemplified over evolutionary biology by the “intelligent design” movement. In other words, ID didn’t teach what it should to its real flock, and lead others to teach to it, what they should not. The narrative aims to rectify the situation and to bring an end to the said “trench wars against science”.
2. Climate Change Is Intelligent Design Enacted
How does this come to be? God locates the current range of his most faithful followers in the Bible Belt. But He regrets that most of them deny anybody ever saw a species change into the other. The time has come for the faithful – even evangelicals from Texas or Alabama – to discover that observing such a transformation is possible to man. Just by watching seagulls. This task, though, is currently somewhat difficult to repeat in person for the Westerner accustomed to comfort. Because it requires to go around the Arctic Ocean. And the latter cruise isn’t the easiest – since the Arctic Ocean cultivates a habit to freeze over since times immemorial.
The Almighty really takes it to heart, though, that His most preferred adepts open their eyes. He therefore decided to warm up the Arctic. The Arctic mind you, not the whole Earth – except as a side effect. God warms the Arctic so that His beloved can finally see with all the amenities needed, how one species becomes another. More precisely species of seagulls: for the faithful to observe with binoculars while lying on deck basking in the sun.
What is the exact purpose of God there? He wants His most beloved worshipers to learn that, contrary to what they generally believe, the Almighty has the might to create a distinct species by doing nothing – nothing but repeatedly changing by a trifle, a first species that serves as a starting point. Rather than starting from scratch. Just as Apple engineers enjoy doing with Mac models.
A late comment on this introductory post on dualities in the science2.0 alpha-meme blog by Sascha Vongehr
When non-euclidean geometries came about through their euclidean models, Kant first dismissed them as obvious fakes or make-believes (lines not really lines, etc) not to be taken seriously. But nobody afaik (not that much) ever pointed at self-dual projective geometry as a form of refutation to Kant’s objection – in the sense of a system symmetrically related to itself as non-euclidean geometries are asymmetrically related to euclidean geometries by modelling, so that the modelling relationship can’t be dismissed as foreign to the study’s main frame or even as incontrovertible stubble for the Razor (given also how the duality boosts local information economy inside the system, and how the symmetry denies a “side” to favor, duality is a theorem not an axiom, etc).
This is to hint that I find paradoxical or contradictory your insistence on a -fundamental- description embedding dualities, as long as you haven’t cleansed the taste for the foundational of what (for instance) drove Kant to his attitude and further riddles it in more subtle ways. Just dismissing “Occam’s Razor” as an incompetent would-be philosopher’s buzzword doesn’t cut it imo.
To me, the first thing to do of dualities is to examine the possibility to describe theoretical (unification) physics as a process driven by somewhat confused (especially as regards its sociological side: physics is -taught-) over-greedy ideas on information economy. And in such a way that dualities fit the form of natural endpoints or fixed points for this process. In that frame I find it frustrating that most non-technical discussions of dualities fail to bring the spotlight on perturbative dualities, as if it was a foretold conclusion that this character was contingent (maybe it is, but I don’t see why).
This is a response to a recent Azimuth blog post by John Baez.
John Baez writes:
(…)
The mathematics of viruses with 5-fold symmetry is fascinating. Just today, I learned of Reidun Twarock‘s recent discoveries in this area:
• Reidun Twarock, Mathematical virology: a novel approach to the structure and assembly of viruses, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 364 (2006), 3357-3373.
(…)
To understand these more unusual viruses, Twarock needed to use some very clever math:• Thomas Keef and Reidun Twarock, Affine extensions of the icosahedral group with applications to the three-dimensional organisation of simple viruses, J. Math. Biol. 59 (2009), 287-313.
This is a fascinating paper, thanks for passing it on. It prompts me to document a fun fact that I haven’t seen documented anywhere. It has at least in common with their work to suggest looking into 4D analogues – in turn a fun idea by itself, that mathematics would now allow to dream up 4D viruses in non-trivial logical detail !
I believe the right concise wording for my fun fact – and I would welcome rectification – is to say that the surface of the regular platonic dodecahedron
is isometric to the outer surface or shell of both Poinsot’s great dodecahedron
and to that of the first stellation of the icosahedron (aka small triambic icosahedron).
All three have icosahedral symmetry. The latter two are self-intersecting polyhedra so that a distinction needs to be made between their surface and the part of it that’s apparent to the outside; what I call the outer shell and what is usually the only surface considered when making paper models. To restate my fun fact in simpler words,
if you imagine these surfaces made out of paper, it is in principle possible to refold any one of the three without any cutting, to obtain any of the other two.
Easier in practice would be to cut up the surface enough to lay it out flat and then refold it and glue together the lips of the cuts.
This property has been well known to paper modelists for a long time in the case of the two self-intersecting polyhedra, but AFAIK it hadn’t yet been remarked that both are similarly related in turn to the regular dodecahedron. The reason this is not obvious is that the mapping from or to the regular dodecahedron preserves no edge or face, while in the case of the other two polyhedra the mapping relates both faces and edges one-to-one (when viewing the outer shells as polyhedra in their own right, or else we probably need to speak of “folds” for edges and “flat polygons” for faces).
