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Can we distinguish human v. natural excavations?

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Large geometric shapes are being discovered beneath the Amazon forest. Have the discoverers evaluated their origins correctly? If so, why? Is there any way to distinguish between artifacts caused by human and extraterrestrial agents?
Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World By SIMON ROMERO January 14, 2012

RIO BRANCO, Brazil — Edmar Araújo still remembers the awe.
As he cleared trees on his family’s land decades ago near Rio Branco, an outpost in the far western reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, a series of deep earthen avenues carved into the soil came into focus.
These lines were too perfect not to have been made by man,” said Mr. Araújo, a 62-year-old cattleman. . . .
The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.

Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.

“What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,” said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane.

Hundreds of Geoglifos Discovered in the Amazon 2010.01.20

Geoglifos is the term applied in Brazil to geometric earthworks discovered after recent deforestation. Geoglyphs are not new in South American archaeology, but these are different—massive earthworks of tropical forest soil rather than desert surface alterations. The Amazon Geoglifos present geometric forms; circles, squares, ellipses, octagons, and more, with individual forms up to several hundred meters across. Some are connected by parallel walls. Their distribution spans hundreds of kilometers, and much of the area remains forested jungle.

POSTCARDS FROM THE AMAZON: Massive clues of Amazon area’s past 2010

The geoglyphs in Acre were made by digging ditches into the earth to create shapes like circles, squares, and diamonds. They are outlined by ditches up to 20 feet deep and range from 300 to 1,000 feet in diameter.

Squares

Circles

Ranzi geoglyphs Google search

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For a serious discussion see Kairosfocus’ comment

Comments
Joe,
Oh and the evidence for its design is already in peer-reviewed journals.
Citation please.Peter Griffin
January 18, 2012
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Joe, And what have you discovered so far then? Anything at all?Peter Griffin
January 18, 2012
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To OgreMk5- The point of ID is to determine whether or not agency involvememt was required to bring about the thing being investigated. That is why CONTEXT is necessary as I have tried to explain to you many times already.Joe
January 18, 2012
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Peter, stop with your ignorance already. ID does NOT prevent anyone from trying to figure out who the deigner is or how the design was implemented. Just because ID is not about that does not mean it is forbidden, duh.Joe
January 18, 2012
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Peter, I have produced the evidence and if you don't like the design inference wrt ATP synthase then just demonstrate that it can arise via stochastic processes. Oh and the evidence for its design is already in peer-reviewed journals. However it is note-worthy that not one evo has published how it evolved via accumulations of random mutations. But that is because no one can even produce a testable hypothesis for such a claim.Joe
January 18, 2012
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Geez Peter, the OoL and its evolution are directly linked in that if the OoL was designed then its evolution was also by design. And design does not depend on who the designer is.Joe
January 18, 2012
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Joe, Then why are you unable to produce that evidence when asked? E.G. do you have any evidence that ATP synthase is designed other then "cause and effect relationships"? Which is a claim, not evidence.
Highly effiecient, irreducibly complex, and no way- physiochemcially to get the two subunits to come together-> there's no attraction and no coupling.
If you really believe you know what you are talking about then why not publish your "evidence" in a ID friendly journal?Peter Griffin
January 18, 2012
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KF,
Let us free ourselves to think about what the design paradigm can allow us to do with all sorts of scientific and related fields. We have a revolution to build.
Please do so! Where do you intent to start? Why have you waited so long? Does this mean that you'll be publishing in the peer reviewed literature from now on? There are plenty of pro-ID journals that would publish your work.Peter Griffin
January 18, 2012
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DLH
That happens all the time in forensics, arson investigations, cold case files etc. There is often evidence for an un-natural cause that shows that an arson or murder etc has occurred. However, there are numerous unsolved cases where the agent remains unknown.
No, there is no evidence that ghosts murder people nor set fires. Yes, there is evidence that a fire occurred. And yes, there are cases where the "agent" remains unknown. But there is no example of an arson investigator going "well, we can't investigate this any further because the agent is of an type unknown to us and we cannot investigate it any further" is there? Whereas with ID any questions regarding the "agent" are rejected as "ID does not investigate the designer, only the design". So your arson investigation analogy fails. The specific cause of a set fire might be unknown but the fact that it was set by a physical entity is known from the start, be that entity a human or a ray of light focused through a window that starts a fire. The point is to determine which it was. And assigning blame to an unknown entity of an unknown type simply does not happen. When your designer starts to set fires and we determine that no material cause could have started it then perhaps your analogies will make sense, but until then, no.Peter Griffin
January 18, 2012
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DLH,
Try applying the Explanatory Filter
Perhaps you could give me an example usage, as you appear to believe it's possible to use in this situation. I don't know how personally, but it seems that you do so please do so.
Test: By inspection, can you tell the difference? Examine this bridge Is it a product of natural law? or does it exhibit evidence of engineering?
It sounds perfect for the EF! Please demonstrate the EF with regard to determining if a given bridge is natural or man-made.Peter Griffin
January 18, 2012
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TJG: That is where the Planck time quantum state resources of our solar system or the wider cosmos come into play. Just 500 bits worth of specified complexity is enough to effectively rule out stochastic processes as reasonably able to explain, as the max sample size to search space ratio maxes out at a skinny zero: 1 in 10^48 is only going to be credibly able to hit the BULK of the set of possibilities, if driven by blind chance as dominant force. That bulk of possibilities, of course, for good reason explained elsewhere, will be non-functional gibberish. (Let the naysayers show that they can think their way out of a wet paper bag to figure out why. This UD thread is still open if they are serious.) And, if there is a set of laws of nature out there that FORCES something like emergence of life in suitable environments, that is as strong a sign of cosmological design as you could want, especially sitting on top of the fine tuning of the cosmos that already led to the cosmological design inference. BTW, we know the sort of dynamics at work in say stream processes -- dunes are irrelevant here -- and they are pointing to a characteristic distribution of stream beds, gullies etc that points away from circles, diamonds and squares. We know that organised intelligence does do this sort of thing. We know such was feasible in the neolithic era of technology. We point to a way this can be expressed mathematically, and what is the response? Duck it, duck the huge raft of implications on what we know about history and science, and even the current climate change debates, and try to play rhetorical attack games. That tells me more and more that we are dealing with irresponsible agendas and ideologies, not those who are docile before the truth. (FYI, TWT & Anti Evo et al, docile here speaks of humble "teachableness.") Let's discuss what this discovery means for how we think about some serious things, including even how we think we can reconstruct the unobserved or unrecorded past based on traces in the present. I am sick of and fed up with irresponsible darwinista debate games. Let us free ourselves to think about what the design paradigm can allow us to do with all sorts of scientific and related fields. We have a revolution to build. Hey, let me climb off that soapbox. Let's have some good clean intellectual fun, instead of letting trolls spoil the party. (I like that about, say, Watts' climate change "skeptic" site.) GEM of TKIkairosfocus
January 18, 2012
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DLH: Very nice. I add that in the IOSE I have taken up the concept of a nodes and arcs mesh as a way to look at 3-d structures, Wicken wiring diagrams, etc. (Cf section d here of the introsumm, esp. the discussion surrounding figs I.2 and I.3. Notice, I am strongly suggesting that the integrated metabolic network of chemical reaction flows in the cell is designed. If you have not yet seen it, expand the full scale chart in fig I.2 (b). Amazing comparison to say a petroleum oil refinery! But this is within 20 microns or so, not acres!) Even a flat faced cuboidal monolith made from polycrystalline materials, has recognisable FSCO/I pointing to design. As of course is pivotal in a certain famous Sci Fi movie. All best KFkairosfocus
January 18, 2012
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DLH Nice post!(12.2) That said, I think it was Peter who said this: "with Newton’s First Rule all design inferences can be refuted just by demonstrating stochastic processes can account for the thing being investigated." I am inclined to agree with him, but I think this is where the evolution story falls apart. You cannot demonstrate that stochastic processes can account for life, for the information in the cell, for the origin of the big bang(if there ever really was one), or even for transitions from one kind of animal to another that require multiple mutations/changes all the same time in order for the new animal to be able to survive. One example would be the transition from the dinosaur lung to the avian lung. Oh sure, there are a lot of guesses out there as well as just so stories. Some even claim the theory works on the computer, but it has not been demonstrated apart from lots of little changes within groups of animals. Plus, by far, most of the documented changes are ones in which there is a loss of genetic information or a resurrection of previous traits that went dormant or still existed in the genome of some of the population. There should be trillions of changes like this and they should be easy to identify, yet how many do we know of? Very few I'm sure, if any at all. The hard evidence just isn't there.tjguy
January 18, 2012
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DLH, thanks. KFkairosfocus
January 18, 2012
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Ogre: Threadjack, compounding outing behaviour that you plainly try to "justify." You have used up your welcome. Good day GEM of TKI And, BTW, I am not the troll mod so I don't follow every post, Joe does seem to be slipping again on language coarseness, and needs to clean up. As tot he attempt to dismiss the 500 bit limit, it simply refuses to acknowledge that this is saying, what is the upper limit for possible changes in an atomic system of 10^57 atoms? (And 1,000 bits carries that to A SYSTEM OF 10^80 ATOMS. That refusal to think responsibly is diagnostic; understand that I am through with such.) Nor, do you seem willing to see that say a living cell is a system that at its heart has in it 100,000+ bits of information as a lower end estimate. All of this shows that the purpose of your talking points is to play rhetorical games, not to responsibly seek the truth. (Such as, your bit string, if functionally specific, would probably be beyond the limit [I am not bothering to count, as it is obviously not serious], but the issue is not whether the design inference can catch any and all cases of design, but if when the filter does rule design, it does so reliably, which it plainly does, the case of the geoglyphs in Amazonia being yet another case in point. That conservative approach is enough to ground a scientific revolution you are so desperate to resist by all means, fair or foul.) Game over.kairosfocus
January 18, 2012
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Unsolved in the sense thar the perplex might be a ghost, or an alien, or Satan? I think you mean that the specific human is unknown. But we know some things about criminals. We can distinguish between human and animal attacks. We know a lot about the capabilities and motives of each. What makes ID distinctive is the complete lack of attributes assignable to the designer and the complete lack of theories of how design might be done. No one has demonstrated that biological molecules can be designed without using evolution.Petrushka
January 17, 2012
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Peter Griffin
Can you give me an example of two bridges and how you would determine one is designed and one is not?
Try applying the Explanatory Filter See: Definition: A natural arch, bridge or tunnel
is a void beneath still standing bedrock, usually of short extent, and allowing human passage from one end to the other, at least part of the time. A natural arch is an arch of rock formed by erosion (weathering). A natural bridge a bridge of rock spanning a ravine or valley and formed by erosion. A tunnel is a nearly horizontal cave open at both ends, fairly straight and uniform in cross-section.
The principles are well known and obvious to those who study them. See the Natural Arch and Bridge Society. The principles of engineering bridges are also well known and examples of applying those principles are well recognized. Compare: Images Bridges with Images Natural Bridges Can you detect which bridges are natural and which engineered? Perhaps you can begin by "counting the ways" and the reasons by which you can tell the differences. Test: By inspection, can you tell the difference? Examine this bridge Is it a product of natural law? or does it exhibit evidence of engineering? DLH
January 17, 2012
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Peter re
I’ve never heard a scientist determine a cause to be an entity we cannot investigate.
That happens all the time in forensics, arson investigations, cold case files etc. There is often evidence for an un-natural cause that shows that an arson or murder etc has occurred. However, there are numerous unsolved cases where the agent remains unknown.DLH
January 17, 2012
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Thanks Kairosfocus for your excellent introduction. As a reminder, on natural vs human causes:
The theory of intelligent design (ID) holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection.
So the issue on ID is whether these geometric features in the Amazon forests are best explained by an intelligent cause or by an undirected natural process. Readers should refresh themselves on the Explanatory Filter. First does a key aspect of the object have a law-like natural regularity? kirosfocus mentions the Giant's Causeway which has the appearance of a system of geometric objects. See: Mystery Of Hexagonal Column Formations Such As Giant's Causeway Solved With Kitchen Materials
" . . .thesis project of PhD student Lucas Goehring. Cooling lava sometimes forms strange column-shaped formations with a remarkable degree of order."
So though they are geometric, a natural explanation based on well known scientific principles has been provided. By comparison, Stonehenge in Britain is a large scale circular collection of very large stones.
In its first phase, Stonehenge was a large earthwork; a bank and ditch arrangement called a henge, constructed approximately 5,000 years ago. It is believed that the ditch was dug with tools made from the antlers of red deer and, possibly, wood. The underlying chalk was loosened with picks and shoveled with the shoulderblades of cattle. It was then loaded into baskets and carried away. Modern experiments have shown that these tools were more than equal to the great task of earth digging
The large Amazonian circles and other large geometric artifacts have no known natural causes. Rather, similar human excavation is known from other archeological excavations where artifacts have been discovered corresponding to known human activities. Natural water flows are known to form erosion networks with measurable properties. e.g. see: Spatial structures of stream and hillslope drainage networks following gully erosion after wildfire The explosion of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 resulted in rapid deposition damming a lake followed by a catastrophic breach of the dam and resultant rapid formation of a canyon. RAPID EROSION AT MOUNT ST. HELENS Natural water flows are understood. However there are no ways known for natural water flows to form large circles. The next issue is whether the object exhibits "complex specified information." In this case, we have a circle that can nominally be defined by a few parameters: X, Y location of the origin, and the radius. In these excavations, the cross section of the perimeter adds further parameters e.g. a trapezoid with depth, width at base and width at the surface. The next test is whether this could have been made by chance? kirosfocus provides the interesting insight of breaking the design down into an assemblage of components with decisions being made for each one. On that basis, it has much greater CSI than initially considered. For those wondering about the 500 bits, see the discussion at: Is the CSI concept well-founded mathematically, and can it be applied to the real world, giving real and useful numbers?DLH
January 17, 2012
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Ah well, since Joe is doing the same thing to me in this very thread and you didn't jump on him, I assumed that was acceptable behavior. I will refrain if you will also censure JoeG. Thanks. From your link:
xxiii: And, this raises the controversial question that biological examples such as DNA -- which in a living cell is much more complex than 500 bits -- may be designed to carry out particular functions in the cell and the wider organism.
That "may" is a pretty big qualifier there. But that's not really important here. The important bit is that le's say we have a piece of totally random bits (1s and 0s) that totals to exactly 500. Then, let's say that we have a phrase about 90 words long. Let's further say that we specifically design that phrase to have exactly 500 bits and then convert it to binary. If we run ANY calculations on those two strings of bits. We will get exactly the same answer (+- 2% for sampling, it's not a very big sample). So, the implication here is that anything over 500 bits is designed, even if it is pure randomness. I'll just continue using the solar system example from your link... I quote
But 10^150 possibilities is 10^48 times as much as that, so our solar system could not search out more than a negligible fraction of 10^150 possibilities. Where, we can see that a string of 500 bits has 2^ 500 = 3.27*10^150 possible configurations. For just 500 bits [[~ 72 ASCII characters], on the gamut of our solar system, there is just too much haystack to reasonably expect to find the proverbial lost needle.
This makes way too many poor assumptions. The first, and obviously wrong is that each atom is equivalent to one bit of information. That's totally bogus. I'm willing to bet you couldn't adequately describe a single atom in less than 500 bits. You would need to describe present position in three dimensions (with additional figures for uncertainty), reference frame, motion in three dimensions (with additional figures for uncertainty, type of atom, state of atom (ionization, excited electrons, etc) and you're still leaving a lot out. All that isn't even considering that information is not comparable to atoms. So, we have basically a false equivalency which is pretty meaningless to the real world. But let's take it a step further, because there is another fundamental mistake made on in that link. It's very simple. The things being described ARE NOT RANDOMLY ASSEMBLED. That's a major problem. Sure, you could easily designate a protein sequence of more than 500 bits and throw a bunch of aminos into a vat and wait for the sequence you designated to appear. I don't think that there is a scientist on the planet that would disagree that it is effectively impossible. Heck, it's even very likely that your designated sequence is impossible. There are a variety of chemical and physical restrictions on amino acid assembly. But what about the protein sequence that makes the A blood antigen in my blood cells? Did that just randomly assemble from a vat of amino acids? Of course, not. That protein was assembled by several molecular systems, the instructions for both the assembly systems and the protein came from my DNA which is, except for a miniscule percentage of random mutations, exactly the same as my parent who also had the 'A' allele. That all being said, those miniscule mutations can have dramatic effects on expressed traits as can be shown by any number of peer-reviewed articles. In conclusion: 1) You need to hold all visitors to the same standards. 2) The details of the linked article do not hold up to the simplest scrutiny. 3) It's all based on a fundamental mistake anyway. Tell me GEM (or Joe), what is the shortest RNA strand that is known to have catalytic functions?OgreMk5
January 17, 2012
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Ogre: For excellent reason, I have asked that my actual names not be used in internet discussions. There are denizens and hangers on at a certain hate site and a penubra of enabling sites who keep on violating a very simple request; obviously wishing to do harm. I ask you to cease and desist. If you cannot have enough respect to do so, then there is nothing to discuss. Good night. GEM of TKI PS: If you genuinely want to find out the whys and wherefores of the design inference [instead of playing at outing games], you may want to start here on, as those who are serious could easily enough find out, including a discussion of the 500 bit solar system threshold; the solar system being the practical universe for us for chemical interactions. In case you don't know, the threshold is very conservative, as 98% of the mass of our solar system is locked up in the dynamics of the sun. So, rabbit trail side tracks on well what about 498 or 501 bits are utterly irrelevant.kairosfocus
January 17, 2012
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Peter, You are asking me questions that are irreleavant to the discussion and are personal in nature. I don't know you well enough. And if you have read my blog then you would know that I have presented plenty of reasoning for my acceptance of ID. And taht includes seeing and understanding the total failure of your position. What is your position? As far as I can tell yours is the position of a belligerent howler.Joe
January 17, 2012
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Kevin, I and others have produced plenty of evidence in support of ID. All you do is choke and say "That thar ain't no evidence!" And yes it is true- the design infernec goes THROUGH your position- Newton's First Rule and all. I thought you knew something about science?Joe
January 17, 2012
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Kevin, {snip} Your test is irrelevant for the same reasons I have already told you and you have ignored- 1) It is based on a strawman 2) CONTEXT as in if someone went into a cave and saw both of your patterns carved into the wall it would be an indicator that some agency was there and did it THAT is what it is about- when is agency required and when can nature, operating freely, account for it. And BTW stop with your lies as I have never claimed that everything from termite mounds to DNA to every lab experiment ever done (and ever will be done) are designed termite mounds- yes- obviously they are the product of termites, duh. DNA? Not all DNA has to be designed and as for the experiments, well again you just pulled that from your strawman.Joe
January 17, 2012
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Peter:
I’ve never heard a scientist mention the EF.
Again what other process forces you to adhere to Newton's First Rule? They don't need to call it by name but it is what it is. And obvioulsy it is the only game in town.
I’ve never heard a scientist determine a cause to be an entity we cannot investigate.
We can't investigate the designers of Stonehenge. We can only assume they were human. We can't investigate the designers of the Antikythera mechanism. You know how we know someone had the capability to design them? Because they were left behind for us to study.
You have determined the cause of life to be an entity that we cannot investigate, as ID only investigates the design and not the designer. As you have said several times already. So what’s left to determine? You know it all now.
Wow, just wow. Just because ID doesn't care about the designer doesn't mean the designer is out of bounds. That is what other research may hope to determine- all that stuff that ID doesn't cover. We study the design to uncover all its secrets- geez it's as if you have never investigated anything in your life. Also ID is not anti-evolution- your equivocation is duly noted.Joe
January 17, 2012
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Geez given what you accept as evidence for your position- but I will help you.Joe
January 17, 2012
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So, {GEM} the string of numbers I published (a hair over 500 bits) is designed. Is that correct? Question, why 500 bits? Is a system with 500 bits designed and one with 499 non-designed? Why? What is the probability for those 500 bits to be exactly setup the way they are in my challenge? ------------------ OgreMk5 - GEM has asked that his name not be posted. Honor it! DLHOgreMk5
January 17, 2012
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Kevin, Geologists and archaeologists can tell the difference. And FSCI would be the wrong tool to use-{snip}Joe
January 17, 2012
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Peter:
Perhaps you can settle this objectively then. Could you calculate the FSCI for a naturally eroded bridge and a man-made bridge? You can choose which ones.
Joe:
People have. Obviously you have issues though.
What people? Where is the FSCI calculation published? Is it on the internet or in a book (or both)? Give us a link or a page number and title... or you can admit that no one has ever actually calculated FSCI and other ID buzzword. I predict that you will do neither. But feel free to show that I'm wrong.OgreMk5
January 17, 2012
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H'mm: Ignoring the many side tracks above, this is a very interesting case. One obviously more akin to Stonehenge than to the Giant's causeway. 15 - 20 ft ditches, in geometrically defined structures 100's of metres across plainly bespeaks intelligence as the best explanation. So strong is this, that it is those who would propose a natural mechanism of chance and necessity capable of this, who would have to produce a very solid answer, especially in an area where there is just earth there, no big stones. One of the linked articles has a fascinating discussion, one that is worth it for its own value, and for how it underscores just how provisional scientific reconstructions of the remote and unrecorded past -- hint, hint . . . -- are:
The geoglyphs in Acre were made by digging ditches into the earth to create shapes like circles, squares, and diamonds. They are outlined by ditches up to 20 feet deep and range from 300 to 1,000 feet in diameter. It was only after Severino and others arrived here and began clearing the land for agriculture and pasture that people began to see the geoglyphs, which had been hidden by the dense rain forest . . . . there are more than 300 geoglyphs in Acre, with more discovered every day in the surrounding region. I went to get to know the geoglyphs with professor Alceu Ranzi, from the Federal University of Acre, who has studied the geoglyphs for more than 30 years. He thinks they date from around 1200 AD. While many questions remain as to who made these earthworks and why, their discovery forces us to question some of the most basic assumptions we have about the history of the Amazon basin and its inhabitants. When most people think about the Amazon before the arrival of European explorers (and even today), we envision nomadic bands of indigenous tribes living off the forest. After all, where are the enduring testaments to an advanced civilization, such as the Mayan temples in Mexico or the Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru? The geoglyphs challenge this vision of an unsettled and ageless Amazon rain forest. Small bands of nomads would have been spending much of their time and effort securing food and shelter; they would not have had resources to devote to building such massive structures. Such an undertaking requires a large, organized population with a sizable work force with a steady supply of food, characteristics of an advanced civilization. They also show, Ranzi says, that this area, which is now Amazon rain forest, was a different sort of ecosystem in the not so distant past. It would have been nearly impossible to clear the large areas of forest to make these massive earthworks without steel or stone tools. These materials were not available in the Western Amazon, leading Ranzi to believe that “the forest was much smaller or was a sort of savanna.” The lack of stone is interesting to note for another reason: The awe-inspiring works of the Mayans and Incas are still intact today because they were made with stone, a long-lasting building material. Those structures are also well-preserved thanks to their locations in dryer or cooler climates. In this part of the Western Amazon, however, there is no stone, and everything but the earth itself is quickly worn down by the rains, humidity and heat, as well as the ravenous insects, animals, and fungi that immediately go to work eating any mention of human existence, aside from pottery shards. In this challenging context, researchers must search for other ways to understand the past. I went out with Ranzi and American researcher William Balee to a geoglyph in the middle of the forest. We made square transects of about 50 feet by 50 feet in the middle of the geoglyph. The team will catalog all of the trees in each transect to see if there are some species that would indicate that people used to live there. Balee, who is an expert in the ways humans alter their environment, knows how to identify an astounding variety of plants in the forest, and is able to discern the plants associated with human habitation — both those that people plant and those that come after a settlement has been abandoned. Although we often think of the forest, especially the Amazon rain forest, as a place devoid of human intervention, Balee is able to see the forest as a landscape that has been constructed not only by nature, but also by years of conscious management and use. The geoglyphs of Acre bring up more questions than answers, but Ranzi and his colleagues are confident they are on the right track with these sorts of new techniques. In the meantime, the mysterious geoglyphs force us to question not only how long the Amazon rain forest has been a true forest, but also our image of the wandering Indian searching the forest for food. When Portuguese and Spanish explorers pushed to the center of the Amazon long after encountering Indians along the coast and main rivers, they often encountered small groups of Indians. They did not know that their European diseases had preceded them throughout the region, wiping out the majority of the Indians, who had no immunity, before they even arrived. They encountered the decimated survivors on the run, not a civilization at its apex. The rain forest quickly consumed and covered the physical remnants of indigenous society, which were made from wood and other biodegradable materials. The soil upon which they lived and fashioned into geoglyphs is one of the few vestiges of these Pre-Colombian civilizations. The estimate of the indigenous population of the Amazon basin, once thought to be mostly uninhabited, is now generally accepted to have been in the millions. It is hard to imagine large cities of native people living on open savanna that has now become a sparsely populated forest, but this is one of many possible depictions of the past . . .
If the forest succession and erosion etc point to 1200 AD or so, that is only a few hundred years before the explorers came by. How transient and fading is glory! And, how easily lost and then dismissed is the real history; when it does not fit our prejudices. Oh yes, Newton's famous rules of reasoning in [presumably, Natural] Philosophy, from Principia (Joe you need to give links, tut, tut . . . ), commentary by Wiki:
Perhaps to reduce the risk of public misunderstanding, Newton included at the beginning of Book 3 (in the second (1713) and third (1726) editions) a section entitled "Rules of Reasoning in Philosophy". In the four rules, as they came finally to stand in the 1726 edition, Newton effectively offers a methodology for handling unknown phenomena in nature and reaching towards explanations for them. The four Rules of the 1726 edition run as follows (omitting some explanatory comments that follow each):
Rule 1: We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Rule 2: Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes. Rule 3: The qualities of bodies, which admit neither intensification nor remission of degrees, and which are found to belong to all bodies within the reach of our experiments, are to be esteemed the universal qualities of all bodies whatsoever. Rule 4: In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurately or very nearly true, not withstanding any contrary hypothesis that may be imagined, till such time as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to exceptions.
This section of Rules for philosophy is followed by a listing of 'Phenomena', in which are listed a number of mainly astronomical observations, that Newton used as the basis for inferences later on, as if adopting a consensus set of facts from the astronomers of his time . . . . it appears that Newton wanted by the later headings 'Rules' and 'Phenomena' to clarify for his readers his view of the roles to be played by these various statements. In the third (1726) edition of the Principia, Newton explains each rule in an alternative way and/or gives an example to back up what the rule is claiming. The first rule is explained as a philosophers' principle of economy. The second rule states that if one cause is assigned to a natural effect, then the same cause so far as possible must be assigned to natural effects of the same kind: for example respiration in humans and in animals, fires in the home and in the Sun, or the reflection of light whether it occurs terrestrially or from the planets. An extensive explanation is given of the third rule, concerning the qualities of bodies, and Newton discusses here the generalization of observational results, with a caution against making up fancies contrary to experiments, and use of the rules to illustrate the observation of gravity and space. Isaac Newton’s statement of the four rules revolutionized the investigation of phenomena. With these rules, Newton could in principle begin to address all of the world’s present unsolved mysteries. He was able to use his new analytical method to replace that of Aristotle, and he was able to use his method to tweak and update Galileo’s experimental method. The re-creation of Galileo’s method has never been significantly changed and in its substance, scientists use it today.
The first rule is a rule that proposed causes must be adequate and economical. This can easily be extended form the world of specifically natural phenomena to empirical phenomena, that include the possibilities of cause by intelligences acting by art, such as Plato discussed. Now, these geoglyphs are comparable in scope to small streambeds or gullies, i.e. there is a source of energy and motive power in nature sufficient to cause a 15 - 20 ft deep ditch, with lengths on this scale or longer. But, this leaves out the gap between natural stream courses and the like, and the specific patterns involved here. Obviously, no direct digital code is involved, but we are dealing with a nodes and arcs 3-d framework. Constancy of cross section, sustaining of a path specified by a figure such as a circle, etc, are all relevant. In effect, a natural gully will not maintain a steady cross section, on the scale of a few metres, and it will normally deviate in the usal meandering zig-zag way. So, we can fairly easily specifiy a metre-scale mesh, and define a certain resolution that is acceptable, then use the structured yes/no questions to distinguish a natural streambed or the like, from a dry or wet ditch. That gives us an information metric, that will estimate the information implied by the structures. For the scope of entities we are looking at, this easily exceeds 500 bits, and we have clear functional specification: fitting geometrical images that are known to appeal to intelligences. A calculation could be done, but we do not have enough details on the cross section. But to sustain a circular path, metre by metre for something 100 m across, is going to already be 300 Y/N decisions, plus a further set of decisions as to the trajectory taken. Well beyond 500 bits, if even we think of taking eight possible tracks per metre for the onward path, i.e 4 bits per nodal point, and over 300 nodal points. 1200 bits, minimum, on just the circular track. Ciruclarity, i.e. a tight specification, so this is specified, the dummy variable goes to 1. In short, even a simple calculation on nodes and arcs will strongly support the intuitive inference, design. (BTW, this is similar to how we would make a decision as to whether if there had actually been a network of ditches on Mars like this, that would have pointed to a Martian civilisation.) So, we see Chi_500 = [1200*1] - 500 = 700 bits beyond the solar system threshold. Design. And, inferred from the artifact, not from a priori knowledge of designers in situ. THAT TWEREDUN IS REASONABLY SETTLED. What about whodunit? Ditches of the scope are feasible for a reasonably settled and sustained agricultural community with hundreds to thousands of people, whether for military or ritual reasons or whatever. (Remember,the trenches of WW I ran for 400 miles and were hand dug.) So, we have an adequate and credibly effective cause: the people whose descendants and survivors still live in the general area. let's hope there can be enough found to identify the civilisation further. The reconstruction of its history must be a fascinating endeavour. But also, the hitherto unexpected discovery of a large scale civilisation in a region long thought to be virgin forest, is fascinating. And, BTW, I gather that similar ditches are in the eastern end of Amazonia too, forming canals. I trust the sort of mocking undertone and subtext in many of the anti-design comments above, will be surrendered. And, I trust a little more respect will be had for the ways in which we can infer the information content and specificity of an object. Good day GEM of TKIkairosfocus
January 17, 2012
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