East of Durham: The Incredible Story of Human Evolution

_{Cornelius Hunter

December 2, 2011

Intelligent Design}

Share: Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; Flipboard; Print; Email

Imagine if Galileo had built his telescope from parts that had been around for centuries, or if the Wright Brothers had built their airplane from parts that were just lying around. As silly as that sounds, this is precisely what evolutionists must conclude about how evolution works. Biology abounds with complexities which even evolutionists admit could not have evolved in a straightforward way. Instead, evolutionists must conclude that the various parts and components, that comprise biology’s complex structures, had already evolved for some other purpose. Then, as luck would have it, those parts just happened to fit together to form a fantastic, new, incredible design. And this mythical process, which evolutionists credulously refer to as preadaptation, must have occurred over and over and over throughout evolutionary history. Some guys have all the luck. Read more

Comments

I suggest that IDers stop using the analogy to human invention to argue against evolution. All of human invention is so clearly evolutionary. The materials, the ideas, the problems the invention solved, the very intelligence of the inventor.lastyearon_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
02:54 PM
2
02
54
PM
PDT}

The neo darwinian algorithm can do nothing like that. It is blind, and its “quasi-intelligent” part, NS, has extremely limited properties: it can only expand existing functions, which have to arise via RV. No really complex result can be achieved that way. That is the simple truth.
Ah, so does natural selection have a little intelligence in your opinion? If so, how do you know that it's not enough to create a "really complex result". How does one go about determining if an object is "really complex" anyway? May I suggest that this "simple truth" needs a little more rigor before it can be verified. I mean by people that don't already know how simply true it is.lastyearon_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
02:42 PM
2
02
42
PM
PDT}

dmullenix, since you think all inventions are purely gradual, this should interest you,,,
Electrical genius Nicola Tesla was born in Serbia in 1856,,, his father was a clergyman.,,,While walking in Budapest Park, Hungary, Nikola Tesla had seen a vision of a functioning alternating current (AC) electric induction motor. This was one of the most revolutionary inventions in the entire history of the world. http://www.reformation.org/nikola-tesla.html
Moreover it should interest you that the Wright Brothers were sons of a clergyman as well. In fact the modern science that you put so much faith in (actually you put your faith in 'materialism') was founded by Christians,,,
The Christian Founders Of Science - Henry F. Schaefer III http://vimeo.com/16523153 Epistemology - Why Should The Human Mind Even Comprehend Reality? - Stephen Meyer http://vimeo.com/32145998
bornagain77_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
02:27 PM
2
02
27
PM
PDT}

The 'planning and forethought' came in the invention of the telescope. Or are you suggesting that the notice of the children doesn't count as knowledge, or that 'planning and forethought' cannot emerge as a result of that knowledge?Upright BiPed_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
02:26 PM
2
02
26
PM
PDT}

Eric: "Yeah, you’re right. Probably no planning or forethought." One story of the discovery of the telescope is that Hans Lipershey saw children playing with eyeglass lenses and heard them remark that looking through two lenses made a steeple seem much closer. No planning or forethought there.dmullenix_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
02:09 PM
2
02
09
PM
PDT}

...and without a way to store and transfer information (semiosis) natural processes can do nothing at all. That capacity requires two discrete sets of material objects, each habouring an immaterial property (which are coordinated to one another). There are absolutely no exceptions to this observation anywhere is existent knowledge. In fact, no one can even come up with a logical exception and offer it as a counter-example. And as if the practice of Science had a rich sense of humor, it turns out that this very system of information transfer (the very heart of it all) is the most prolific form of irreducible complexity in the known universe. It's logically undeniable. Merry Christmas Michael Behe.Upright BiPed_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
12:24 PM
12
12
24
PM
PDT}

That is so obviously a lie that there should be no need even to discuss it
This is the part that astonishes me to no end. If someone is willing to believe that it is possible to routinely progress from a simple form to complex, innovative function in single increments of change, despite the absence of a single example, what could ever convince them otherwise? Math? Reason? Some will even allow for the possibility of a designing intelligence behind some initial form of life, and then, even having allowed for that, insist on explanations for the rest that assumes its nonexistence.ScottAndrews2_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
11:54 AM
11
11
54
AM
PDT}

Gordon: I certainly agree with you about the first part of your post. There is no doubt that human design is progressive, and that it relies heavily on previous design. I will add that the same thing is absolutely obvious for biological design. There, too, previous solutions are often reused, or improved, or added to a new context. I have to completely disagree, however, with the second part of your post. You say: IDists claim the critical element to generating highly complex functional designs is intelligence. I claim the critical element is the ability to pass on and elaborate on past designs. Intelligence (especially the ability to communicate ideas) is one way to achieve this; I claim that genetics is another way to achieve this, and that therefore biological evolution has the critical element for creating designs of arbitrarily high complexity. That is simply not true. The ability to pass on and elaborate on past design is certainly an important factor. But the point is, it's intelligence that creates previous designs, and it's intelligence that elaborates on them. Intelligence has two fundamental properties that are completely absent in non designed, non conscious systems: cognition and intent. Cognition and intent allow the designer to "pro-ject", to visualize a solution on the basis of what is already available and on the basis of what is desired. Nothing like that is possible in non designed systems. It's not that intelligence "accelerates" the emergence of complex functions. The simple truth is that complex functions are simply impossible without intelligence. Even in progressive design, inteliigence has to "recognize" the existing functions, has to "desire" and "visusalize" their improvement, their modifications, orsimply the emergence of new functions. The neo darwinian algorithm can do nothing like that. It is blind, and its "quasi-intelligent" part, NS, has extremely limited properties: it can only expand existing functions, which have to arise via RV. No really complex result can be achieved that way. That is the simple truth. And if no complex result can be achieve, no complex result can be passed, least of all elaborated on. So, what neo darwinists want us to believe is that simple results, each of which naturally selectable, are steps to complex results. That is so obviously a lie that there should be no need even to discuss it, but anyway, given that most people accept easily such nonsense, I would like to remind here that there is no support to that assumption, neither logical nor empirical. In all forms of complex functions we can easily verify that the function is never the result of the simple addition of simple functional steps. That is not true. That is a lie.gpuccio_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
05:06 AM
5
05
06
AM
PDT}

you are forgetting a key difference between biology and human constructed devices. Biological organisms grow - they construct themselves - this means the idea of different parts having to be made precisely so they will fit together a bit meaningless. The parts all grow at once, all together.GCUGreyArea_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
12:26 AM
12
12
26
AM
PDT}

I'm with Petrushka on this one. Humans don't just design complex, functional things out of nothing; they create them by elaborating on previous designs (which came from elaborations of previous designs, etc). Humans spent hundreds of thousands of years making sharp rocks. As far as we know, they were about as smart as modern humans, so that's not what kept them from making complex designs. I claim what was missing was engineering culture -- actually, two related things: the knowledge of how (& why) to design things, and second an ever-growing library of past designs to draw from. Why did the the Wright Brothers succeed where Leonardo da Vinci failed? I don't think it's because they were smarter (and that's not an insult to the Wrights), I think it's because they had more earlier designs and previous research to draw from. They didn't have to invent the internal combustion engine, or the propeller, or wings. AIUI they did improve somewhat on the efficiency of previous wing and propeller designs, but their biggest innovations were in controls: wing warping and 3-axis controls. Here's a small excerpt from the wikipedia article on the Wright brothers:
The Wrights based the design of their first full-size glider (as well as the 1899 kite) on the work of their recent predecessors, chiefly the Chanute-Herring biplane hang glider ("double-decker", as the Wrights called it), which flew well in the 1896 experiments near Chicago; and aeronautical data on lift that Lilienthal had published. The Wrights designed the wings with camber, a curvature of the top surface. The brothers did not discover this principle, but took advantage of it. The better lift of a cambered surface compared to a flat one was first discussed scientifically by Sir George Cayley. Lilienthal, whose work the Wrights carefully studied, used cambered wings in his gliders, proving in flight the advantage over flat surfaces. The wooden uprights between the wings of the Wright glider were braced by wires in their own adaptation of Chanute's modified "Pratt truss", a bridge-building design he used in his 1896 glider.
Note that while much of the previous work the Wrights drew on was specific to flight, quite a lot originated for other purposes: internal combustion engines were developed to power land- and sea-based vehicles and machines; the Pratt truss was for bridges; the cloth they used for the wings was for ... well, nearly everything; etc. Today's airplanes are far more complex than anything the Wrights came up with for the same reason: today's aeronautics engineers have a far bigger library of ideas, designs, research, etc to draw on. And their designs will provide the basis for even more complex designs in the future. IDists claim the critical element to generating highly complex functional designs is intelligence. I claim the critical element is the ability to pass on and elaborate on past designs. Intelligence (especially the ability to communicate ideas) is one way to achieve this; I claim that genetics is another way to achieve this, and that therefore biological evolution has the critical element for creating designs of arbitrarily high complexity. Mind you, intelligence is a much more efficient way to increase complexity than RM+NS -- foresight, planning, understanding, etc may not be absolutely necessary, but they speed things up hugely. In just 61 years, aeronautical engineering went from Wright Flier to the SR-71 Blackbird; if you want to see similar increases in complexity (and no, I don't know exactly how to measure complexity), expect to wait hundreds of millions of years. As long as evolution can add complexity faster than it looses it, I don't see an upper limit to the complexity evolution can produce. (I should probably note that evolution either adds or looses complexity at anything like a constant rate [even if we had a way to even define that rate]. There are certainly situations where it looses complexity rapidly. IDists generally claim it never adds complexity, but I think they're wrong about that. There's an active controversy in evolutionary biology over whether evolution has an overall trend in complexity, or whether it's essentially random whether it goes up or down, and the increase over the history of life is an artifact of having started from minimal complexity -- i.e. there was nowhere to go but up.)Gordon Davisson_{December 3, 2011
December
12
Dec
3
03
2011
12:12 AM
12
12
12
AM
PDT}

There is no evidence that the available parts were used for other purposes. I am simply responding to what you wrote. There are many things wrong with picking out bits that are beside the point on both sides of the argument.Mytheos_{December 2, 2011
December
12
Dec
2
02
2011
07:13 PM
7
07
13
PM
PDT}

The article referred to available parts formerly used for other purposes. I simply responded to what was written. There are many things wrong with such analogies on both sides of the argument.Petrushka_{December 2, 2011
December
12
Dec
2
02
2011
03:08 PM
3
03
08
PM
PDT}

Petrushka: "The Wright Brothers attached an existing engine to a kite and a bicycle frame." Congratulations, Petrushka. You've given us about the same level of detail (and uselessness) that we get from most virtually all evolutionary stories. Yeah, you're right. Probably no planning or forethought. Probably no measurements to account for velociy, weight, lift, or anything else. Probably no attempt to design the overall craft with the parts in the right place, with the right spacing, in the right location. Probably just walked outside in the yard one day, bolted an "engine to a kite and a bike frame" and took off. Yeah, that's it. What a joke.Eric Anderson_{December 2, 2011
December
12
Dec
2
02
2011
02:44 PM
2
02
44
PM
PDT}

Off the top of my head, telescopes were made from parts lying around due to their use in eyeglasses. The Wright Brothers attached an existing engine to a kite and a bicycle frame.Petrushka_{December 2, 2011
December
12
Dec
2
02
2011
11:40 AM
11
11
40
AM
PDT}

Prev 1 … 5 6 7

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Leave a Reply