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Machine metaphors are “engines of creationism”?

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From a 2015 journal paper, Engines of creationism? Intelligent design, machine metaphors and visual rhetoric:

Machine metaphors are ubiquitous in the molecular sciences. In addition to their use by scientists, educators and popularizers of science, they have been promoted intensively by the Intelligent Design (ID) movement in arguments for the necessity of a god-like designer to account for the complexities of life at the molecular level. We have investigated the visual rhetoric employed in a movie by ID proponents, with particular emphasis on machine metaphors. After presenting examples, we argue that science communicators could reduce the persuasive impact of ID visual rhetoric based on machine metaphors by emphasizing that selfassembly is fundamental to molecular complexes. Paper. (public access) – Gunnar E. Höst and Gustav Bohlin, 2015, Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, (48), 1, 80-81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/LEON_a_00905 More.

Organisms are not machines: They create machines. That is part of the intelligence embedded in nature. How?

So these people’s point is what exactly? That self-assembly just somehow happens, when we know dam well it doesn’t (unless magic is real)?

File under: Keep talkin’, guys, keep talkin.

See also: Self-organization: Can we wring information from matter — shake the bit out of the it?

and

What great physicists have said about immateriality and consciousness

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Comments
Machine metaphors are ubiquitous in the molecular sciences. In addition to their use by scientists, educators and popularizers of science, they have been promoted intensively by the Intelligent Design (ID) movement in arguments for the necessity of a god-like designer to account for the complexities of life at the molecular level.
What garbage.Mung
June 21, 2016
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Amen. they can't escape the observation. Everything working is clearly working on a well organized system. like a human machine. Or a human machine works like a organized system such as found in nature. So the word machine is good. Why does nature need to be so organized? why is it? it seems it needs it to work on its own without interference. So it does work like a human machine. So we study the machine in orddr to figure out how it came to be. Its reasonable somewhat made the machine. Its unreasonable to say it made itself or fell into place. Saying it could fall into place by small steps in a row is saying anything could be created however impossible. YES a flying spagetti monster. Show why small steps couldn't bring that critter to pass?!Robert Byers
June 20, 2016
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