Further to Goalposts? What goalposts? From Evolution News & Views:
Computer Scientist Joshua Swamidass Argues: Cancer “Casts Serious Doubt” on Intelligent Design
In what way does cancer, a destructive disease, have anything to do with evolving new species? Cancer involves single cells, not whole organisms, and it doesn’t build new features, it tears down existing ones.
The argument from cancer doesn’t hold up. It doesn’t even make sense. “If many ID arguments in molecular biology were true, then cancer as we know it would be mathematically impossible,” writes Swamidass. Either that or it would “regularly require the direct intervention of God to initiate and be sustained.”
Not at all. “Things fall apart.” That is the natural way, which needs no evolutionary explanation. More.
(Yes, it’s a weird argument. It amounts to saying that in what we all acknowledge to be a transitory world , design would require that some mortal beings be eternal. But … )
and
Ann Gauger at Evolution News & Views:
Does Cancer Build Anything New? A Response to Josh Swamidass
What I do object to in Swamidass’s argument is this: cancer is chaotic with incredible rates of mutation and chromosomal instability. That’s part of its destructive nature. What kind of constructive evolution can be accomplished that way, on the organismal level?
In fact, I would argue that cancer is an argument for intelligent design. For multicellular organisms to survive, it is essential that their cells behave cooperatively and not grow out of control. A complex layering of multiple pathways, checkpoints, and fail-safe mechanisms exist to maintain the balance. Without this regulation our lives would not be possible. I would argue that the existence of such complex regulation is due to design.
The Darwinian imperative is to multiply without limit; there is no Darwinian advantage to surrendering that potential. Cancer is proof of what happens when the Darwinian paradigm takes over. Yet our cells do maintain a balanced behavior in the face of so many ways to fail. That we exist at all, and that the balance is maintained nearly all the time, is in fact a wonder of design.More.
Good stuff, but one gets the distinct sense that it doesn’t really matter. The heart of Darwinism is, our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth,. The theory that prevails by any political or social means rules, regardless of truth, fact, or evidence.
Only a recommitment to the idea of truth can prevail against this sort of thing. Evidence alone is too weak. Even reason and common sense are too weak when emotion and codswallop are in vogue.
Theistic evolution thrives in this kind of atmosphere, marketing palatable rubbish to well-meaning people who do not grasp what is at stake. No wonder it is readily funded.
See also: Rossiter on Swamidass: Goalposts? What goalposts?
and
A cognitive scientist’s “evolutionary argument against reality” Critics, especially ID-friendly ones, tend to respond by asking: Why those who embrace this view think that their prejudices are somehow more valid than others?
It’s really hard to get this across to bookish, well-meaning types of people but here goes: The attitude is not new and the answer to the objection is quite simple. Their prejudices are not better than anyone else’s but once they have acquired political and cultural power, they can enforce them on the rest of us anyway. That is as good as reality for them. Actually better.
Also: Tom Wolfe on Evolution as a Theory of Everything (one that media bimbos easily grasp)
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Swamidass’s claim that “Cancer refutes intelligent design” is ludicrous. As Dr Gauger eloquently pointed out, it is against Darwin’s theoretical core to surrender “multiplying without limit”. Darwinists never seem to follow the logic of their theory out to its conclusion.
If evolution by natural selection were actually the truth about how all life came to be on Earth then the only life that should be around should be extremely small organisms with the highest replication rate, and with the most ‘mutational firepower’, since only they, since they greatly outclass multi-cellular organism in terms of ‘reproductive success’ and ‘mutational firepower’, would be fittest to survive in the dog eat dog world where blind pitiless evolution ruled and only the fittest are allowed to survive. The logic of this is nicely summed up here in this Richard Dawkins’ video:
In other words, since successful reproduction is all that really matters on a neo-Darwinian view of things, how can anything but successful, and highly efficient reproduction, be realistically ‘selected’ for? Any other function besides successful reproduction, such as much slower sexual reproduction, sight, hearing, thinking, etc.., would be highly superfluous to the primary criteria of successful reproduction, and should, on a Darwinian view, be discarded, and/or ‘eaten’, by bacteria, as so much excess baggage since it obviously slows down successful reproduction which is practically the central, primary, tenet of Darwinian theory.
Moreover, contrary to this central ‘survival of the fittest’ assumption of Darwinian evolution, instead of eating us, time after time we find micro-organisms helping each other, and us, in ways that have nothing to with their own ‘survival of the fittest’’ concerns. The following researchers said they were ‘banging our heads against the wall’ by the contradictory findings to Darwinian theory that they had found:
Off topic:
Did Swamidass make an argument, or a complaint?
What was his argument?
BA77 at #2
From the linked article:
Does this confirm the hypothesis that information is not matter nor energy, it’s information. Thus knocking out the legs from under all materialists? From Wiki: “Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are results of material interactions.”
awstar, Yes it does. In fact, in quantum mechanics, information is its own distinct entity separate from matter and energy. A distinct entity which enables quantum computation among other things. Moreover, in quantum mechanics it is information that is primarily conserved, not matter and energy that are primarily conserved such as they are primarily conserved in classical mechanics. Moreover, it is possible to erase digital information from a computer, via entanglement, without using energy. Which is in contradiction to Landauer’s erasure principle. Which demonstrates that classical digital information is a subset of quantum information.
Moreover, in quantum mechanics it is theoretically possible to teleport, besides information, an entire particle or photon. Thus, adding even more weight to the contention that reality is ‘information theoretic’ in its foundational basis.
references upon request.
as to “it is possible to erase digital information from a computer, via entanglement, without using energy.”
while this following article backs that statement up
the following article goes one step further and states that “more than complete knowledge” from quantum entanglement with the memory (negative entropy) leads to deletion of the data being accompanied by removal of heat from the computer and its release as usable energy.