Science and Freethinking

_{GilDodgen
September 23, 2011

Intelligent Design

2}_{Categories
Intelligent Design}

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Everyone has a religion, a raison d’être, and mine was once Dawkins’. I had the same disdain for people of faith that he does, only I could have put him to shame with the power and passion of my argumentation.

But something happened. As a result of my equally passionate love of science, logic, and reason, I realized that I had been conned. The creation story of my atheistic, materialistic religion suddenly made no sense.

This sent a shock wave through both my mind and my soul. Could it be that I’m not just the result of random errors filtered by natural selection? Am I just the product of the mindless, materialistic processes that “only legitimate scientists” all agree produced me? Does my life have any ultimate purpose or meaning? Am I just a meat-machine with no other purpose than to propagate my “selfish genes”?

Ever since I was a child I thought about such things, but I put my blind faith in the “scientists” who taught me that all my concerns were irrelevant, that science had explained, or would eventually explain, everything in purely materialistic terms.

But I’m a freethinker, a legitimate scientist. I follow the evidence wherever it leads. And the evidence suggests that the universe and living systems are the product of an astronomically powerful creative intelligence.

Comments

Apparently, it does not faze you that a split-off that on the conventional timeline is 150 MYA, and involves a major change/difference in manner of reproduction, is involved with such a genetic similarity that the scientists who discovered it were plainly shocked. Sadly telling.kairosfocus_{October 5, 2011
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BA: You strike gold again! Added as the very first video on the Intro-Summ page IOSE. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{October 5, 2011
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Joseph at 55: “Positive evidence [for an Intelligent Designer] has not only been found but has been presented. And all you can do is choke on it.” So choke me. I’d love to hear this evidence. Tell me the one about the ontological argument. That’s my favorite. “1- ID is not anti-evolution” All of Dembski’s and Behe’s "proofs" depend on evolution not working. They then say, “Therefore ID”. That’s pretty much ID in a nutshell right there. “2- No one has ever observed blind and undirected processes producing CSI” Apolipoprotein AI. Wish I had some. Of course, you’re right that nobody actually witnessed the DNA as it mutated to produce the new specification. Of course, nobody’s ever seen the Intelligent Designer at work either. Could you show us some examples of the Intelligent Designer designing? “the EF considers both chance and necessity operating together.” The only time I ever saw Dembski attempt that, he failed miserably. If I remember correctly, he described something like randomly putting a needle down on a record and then playing the selection. The fact is that the EF can only measure random OR lawful. You can’t even put a combination into it. The EF goes like this: Input item to be tested. . Is it random? Then it's not ID so Exit . Is it lawful? Then it's not ID so Exit If you get this far, it's ID Please show us how to fit random AND lawful into that. Maybe something like . Is it random AND lawful combined? Then it's Darwin. “Again ID is not anti-evolution and your position still doesn’t have any positive evidence” You keep saying that, but if evolution is true, every ID “proof” falls flat on its face. The whole ID argument can be stated, “Evolution can’t do it, so ID.” “Except that is NOT what Behe said” I read his book. He walked it back later. If I remember, he now holds to a variation of “Evolution can’t produce CSI, therefore ID.” What do you think of his admission that if ID is true, then The Designer must have Designed the malaria parasite? I thought that telling that amount of truth took a lot of guts.dmullenix_{October 5, 2011
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Pardon, burning strawman distraction led away to by a red herring. Design thought is not properly to be equated to "Creationism in a cheap tuxedo." Cf the corrective under UD's resources, here.kairosfocus_{October 5, 2011
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Pardon, distractively tangential. Please refocus. (Cf discussion here if you need further help on seeing the force of the points GD makes just above.)kairosfocus_{October 5, 2011
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3.3.1.2.29 dmullenix DMullenix, Your resorting to "science's guess" is the best give-away I have ever seen! If you label evolutionism as "science", I'd not choose "science" which tells nonsense. Fortunately, it is not proper science. I am afraid, it is down to you, evolutionists, to tackle the problem of infinite regression, not to ID.Eugene S_{October 5, 2011
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Eugene S: “The whole issue at the heart of ID is being able to abductively assert that the *best explanation available* is intelligent interference, not chance/necessity alone or any combination thereof. So ID *is* capable of distinguishing between natural cause and intelligent interference.” Those two sentences encapsulate everything annoying about ID. Look at the first sentence: “The whole issue at the heart of ID is being able to abductively assert that the *best explanation available* is intelligent interference, not chance/necessity alone or any combination thereof.” Here’s the first line of Wikipedia’s entry on Abductive reasoning: “Abduction is a kind of logical inference described by Charles Sanders Peirce as ‘guessing’.” So ID guesses that intelligence is the best explanation, not evolution. Then look at the second sentence: “So ID *is* capable of distinguishing between natural cause and intelligent inferference.” You go directly from guessing to just plain asserting that ID can tell intelligence from evolution. Then, building on that non-sequitar you say you “…cannot accept your point about molecules as a plausible cause of nanometre precision machinery in the cell. Maths shows it is operationally impossible. Then you wind up by asking for all the details on first life and, apparently, a complete roadmap to present day life. Well, can I ask ID the same? What was the first living thing? When and where did it appear? How did it lead to modern life? And, in keeping with ID demands, I’d like a complete accounting of the transition, with every “poof” or whatever accounted for. And you close by demanding to see something reproduce right now. Never mind that the original replicator probably took millions of years to appear in a “laboratory” the size of the earth. Either produce another one right now, or ID wins. ScottAndrews “A very simple self-replicator that found itself through chance?” Science’s best guess is that a molecule simple enough to assemble through chance was self reproducing. ID’s best guess is that an Intelligent Designer, which necessarily has to be billions of times more complex that that molecule, either assembled itself through chance or somehow always existed. (The odds are the same in either case.) I’ll go with science. “As has been stated ad nauseum, there is no evidence of selectable pathways consisting of one or two bits at a time or duplication that lead to anything significant. On top of that, if there were such selectable pathways, there is no evidence that they would be or were selected. So what is the ID scenario? Start with describing the Intelligent Designer, in detail. Please don't forget to tell us how He came to exist. Then describe the first living thing He made, then tell us the pathways that incrementally lead to modern life and while you’re at it, explain why exactly those pathways were selected and not some others.dmullenix_{October 5, 2011
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So? If this is true, it only means that people are too hasty where they should not be. This is beating about the bush. Show us that bacteria or fruit flies can produce other distinct species.Eugene S_{October 5, 2011
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Dr Liddle,
And what I am saying above is that code for sets of tRNA molecules that provided a one-to-more than one mapping of codons to amino acids would tend to have selective advantage over sets that provided more-than-one to more-than-one mappings, so that is a perfectly viable Darwinian account of how such a mapping could have arisen.
I would like to be generous here. To say that a code (which produces products which were good at decoding it) would be favored over another code (which produces products which were less-good at decoding it) is not an answer to the origin or establishment of a code. If you’ll notice, in both of these two scenarios you've proposed, both the system and the code already exists, and the only question you’ve asked is if either of them works better than the other. There is nothing in your answer that even suggests a source of the code, as if codes are ubiquitous entities which are readily lying around. If the answers to science’s questions can be exemplified by the simplistic observation that living systems that function will exist longer than ones that don’t – then science has become a pointless enterprise. Please do not characterize your observation as a “perfectly viable Darwinian account” of how a code “could have arisen”. And if you insist on labeling it as such, then we can simply throw whatever remains of empiricism out the window. Dr Liddle, may I ask you to please spare me the Darwinian sales pitch? Having me react to it does neither of us any good whatsoever, and it’s time-consuming, and it’s boring. Can’t we just stick to evidence and reason? Those are the observations that I am interested in, and presumably, you would be too. Trust me; when you tell me systems that work better will survive longer than those that don’t, it does not cause me to gaze off into the distance and ponder the lavish explanatory power of the Darwinian project. It does something else altogether. - - - - - - - - In my prior post (#49), I had provided four physical entailments of recorded information. I described the observation of them as “logically coherent and demonstrable”. That description is explicitly tied to the codons being symbolic representations. You flatly stated that the system is not symbolic. I then asked you to provide (by observable evidence/reason) the support necessary for making that conclusion (in the face of contrary evidence). Let’s see what you’ve provided.
Well, it isn’t. It’s simply a physical system. A set of RNA molecules (tRNA) are coded DNA then RNA (probably originally just RNA). That set includes just one molecule for each triplet, although more than one for each amino acid (there being more possible triplets than amino acids). So we have a set of tRNA molecules, with different codon binding site at one end of each one, and an amino acid binding site at the other, right?
To say a code isn’t symbolic simply because it’s a physical system is no answer at all. Without exception, all codes are physically instantiated; after all, we live in a material universe. A red plastic ball is a physical thing Dr Liddle, but it cannot be explained without reference to something else. In any case, it appears here that you do not intend to provide any observable evidence to support your assertion that the mapping of nucleotides-to-amino acids is not accomplished by symbolic representation. You simply plan to assert it once again as a conclusion, and apparently intend to address none of the contrary evidence provided.
So we have an arbitrary mapping (arbitrary because presumably some other set of tRNA molecules could have done as well) between codons and amino acids. I don’t call this “symbolic” because the actual physical instantiation of the alleged “symbol” is crucial.
I agree that the mapping is arbitrary. You then go on to say that the alleged symbol can be disregarded as a symbol because its “physical instantiation … is crucial”. I am having a hard time parsing what exactly that means, but you’ve gone on to offer an example regarding the word “dog”.
The word DOG can be rendered in any material and still symbolise the animal we call a dog, which can then be expressed aloud or silently, in sign language However, a codon can only be rendered in nucleotides, and can only be translated into an amino acid by a specific physical molecule.
Oh boy. You are actually making a qualitative comparison between what can be accomplished by a human being (a conscious, prolific, symbol-maker) and what can be accomplished by a system dedicated to a specific effect. Shall we discontinue thinking of the machine code in an automated fabric loom as “symbolic” simply because (in that system) it can do no more than arrange the thread patterns in a fabric? For crying out loud, Dr Liddle! Dr Liddle, if it makes any difference to your way of thinking; under the right conditions, nucleotides could be used to operate a fabric loom, and the machine code from a fabric loom could be used to produce polypeptides. And the word “dog” can be spelled out in either system. I will leave it for you to figure out what the common denominator is.
But I do agree that the mapping is probably “arbitrary”. Not mysterious, however. Natural selection will favour non-ambigious mappings, and variants that code for sets of tRNA molecules that give ambiguous mappings will tend to reproduce less reliably.
So, having not made a single comment that stands supported by observation, you simply return to the Darwinian sales pitch. This is pointless. I think I will regret the tone of this post. I readily admit I personally cannot treat you as just any layperson – one with an open mind just wondering about the bigger issues of existence. Instead, you are a highly trained researcher with a specific position on these matters which you refuse to submit to scrutiny. Perhaps the unfortunate tone is simply a result of our positions. I must always lead with observable evidence because IDists are forever portrayed by your side as idiots and buffoons (if not threatening to civilization and evil among men). On the other hand, you can lead with fairy tales and broken logic for the simple reason that you are never called into question. Why don’t you do us both a favor? Take the physical entailments of recorded information as I provided them, and attack them directly. You say the system is not representational, then fine, provide some rationale that matches the observations that suggest it is. Allow me to respond to something besides the hogwash you typed out here. Substance – Dr Liddle – provide some!Upright BiPed_{October 4, 2011
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Well, we don't know exactly how the mapping molecules that link RNA codons to specific amino acids began, Scott, not least because not surprisingly, the very earliest life forms and proto-life-forms haven't left any fossils. However, we can still derive testable hypotheses from well-founded theories. More to the point, given that we know what the molecules are that accomplish the mapping process, we can test hypotheses about how such a mapping might have evolved. We can certainly try demonstrate that it is in principle evolvable, and I have some ideas about how to do such a demonstration using a simplified computer model. If the challenge is: could an arbitrary codon-amino acid mapping evolve by Darwinian processes? then I can see how it could (i.e. I can see how it could evolve by incremental steps, each conferring a reproductive advantage). I'm busy for the next few days, but if I have time, I'll try to write a simulation at the weekend, or the weekend following.Elizabeth Liddle_{October 4, 2011
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Maybe I need to stop reading this stuff, because I’m up to my waist in crazy. There were always left-handed people before we killed all the right-handed new people. Where’s the new information? How is being left-handed suddenly evolution?
Being left-handed isn't evolution, but the change in frequency of left-handers in the population is, by at least one definition of evolution and the information is contained in that prevalence. If righthandedness was caused by a single allele, and that allele disappeared completely from the population, later evolutionary biologists might note the shift, and infer, correctly, that at some point in our descendents' ancestry, there had been a selection bias in favour of left-handedness, i.e. would re-extract that information. But obviously in that case the bias would be due to "artificial selection", not natural selection. To take a different example: now that women are able to postpone motherhood voluntarily, there will be selective pressure in favour of a later fertility window. Women who first try to conceive in their thirties, and who carry a cocktail of alleles that render them fertile into their thirties, are more likely to pass those alleles on to offspring than those whose alleles render them less fertile in their thirties (most of us). Now, new alleles are being generated all the time, and some of those will be alleles of the current set of genes that govern women's fertility window; those new ones that tend to make it later will, with the existing ones, tend to become more prevalent, and those that tend to make it earlier will tend to become less so. Give women a few hundred more generations (or even a few tens - there is evidence that it is already happening) and it is likely that the fertile window for women will move later still, and fertility in our sixties or seventies may become quite common. Those women will bear alleles that do not now even exist. They may also live longer, as the same alleles are likely to be related to longevity. All this is speculation, of course, although well-founded speculation as already there are data that suggest this is happening. But speculation or not, I've just outlined how the environment (a culture in which fertility control is available to women) can imprint information (how to ensure that women who want to postpone childbirth can do so) on the human genome. This is not crazy, it's straightforward reasoning.Elizabeth Liddle_{October 4, 2011
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Petrushka, Here's where I'm going, and I honestly didn't expect to be spelling it out. Szostak performs a repeatable experiment. You say that it is not his intention merely to demonstrate a repeatable experiment, and you are correct. He has more in mind than performing a repeatable experiment. But he is still performing a repeatable experiment. Yes, his purpose is to demonstrate what unaided nature might do. He is not attempting to demonstrate "art." But he is demonstrating it anyway. His experiments are intelligently designed and executed. This does not mean that they cannot indicate what might happen unaided, but they certainly do demonstrate what can be accomplished deliberately. They demonstrate the latter even more than they demonstrate the former. The experiments are the work of an intelligent designer. If they relate to how life may have arisen without design, then they also relate to how it may have been designed. This last paragraph sums it up, so if nothing else ignore the rest. This is the point. This where I am going and have gone with it. (I might keep going, but you have to catch up. :))ScottAndrews_{October 4, 2011
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I’m not asking you to choose between one and the other. I’m asking you to decide which is demonstrated more conclusively by his experiment.
Well, a properly conducted experiment will give the same results if replicated independently. That is kind of the definition of a publishable experiment. But that is not the purpose of experiments, except when done as product research. Product research and development is a legitimate subset of science, but it isn't what Szostak is doing. ID seeks to determine whether an existing object is the work of unaided nature or of "art." Demonstrating that something could be a work of art does not contribute to answering that question. Demonstrating that it could be a work of nature does. so I ask again, where are you going with this?Petrushka_{October 4, 2011
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Elizabeth, Back to the question. You said, "the beginnings of such a mapping would tend to be advantageous." What do you mean by the 'beginnings of such a mapping?' How does it begin?ScottAndrews_{October 4, 2011
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Dr Liddle I see your response. I am off for a short while, but will return and be happy to respond.Upright BiPed_{October 4, 2011
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What on earth are the beginnings of a mapping? What begins to map something, or does something just begin to map something? Hey, look! There’s some proteins! They must be having a hard time making more of themselves exactly the same without some sort of mapping to copy from, so I’ll help out. And while I’m at it, I’ll map a transcription process too. Gee, thanks, that’s advantageous! I’m making more of myself than ever!
Well, obviously not :) "Mapping" here is metaphorical - what we are talking about is a set of tRNA molecules that have codon binding sites at one end (one for each of the set) and an amino acid binding site at the other. That means that if a string of RNA (mRNA) has a sequence of codons, each codon will tend to become occupied by the tRNA molecule that uniquely fits it, forming an array of tRNA molecules each of which then binds to its own amino acid, resulting in an amino acid sequence. That's what we call the "mapping". But set of tRNA molecules would work, as long as there is only one molecule for each possible codon, and sets that work (unambiguous sets, or, at least, less ambiguous sets) will tend to be selected over ambiguous sets.
Sorry, but even without my little drama the idea is divorced from science and reality. And that’s the mean kind where you take your friends with you and the ice cube tray while you’re at it.
Well, your cariacature certainly is :) Also divorced from anything anyone is suggesting! Not even divorced - not even a first date :)
Elizabeth Liddle_{October 4, 2011
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That is very much an end conclusion Dr Liddle. I find it very interesting that in one breath you say there is no supported theory of OOL as of yet, then just one breath away you begin asserting conclusions on that very topic.
I said there was no complete and supported theory of OOL. There are a number of theories, and parts of them are supported by data. And what I am saying above is that code for sets of tRNA molecules that provided a one-to-more than one mapping of codons to amino acids would tend to have selective advantage over sets that provided more-than-one to more-than-one mappings, so that is a perfectly viable Darwinian account of how such a mapping could have arisen.
In post #49 I described the physical entailments of recorded information. These are logically cohrerent and demonstrable. Yet you say that those entailments are wrong – you assert that despite the logic and observations, the the system “isn’t” symbolic.
Well, it isn't. It's simply a physical system. A set of RNA molecules (tRNA) are coded DNA then RNA (probably originally just RNA). That set includes just one molecule for each triplet, although more than one for each amino acid (there being more possible triplets than amino acids). So we have a set of tRNA molecules, with different codon binding site at one end of each one, and an amino acid binding site at the other, right? So we have an arbitrary mapping (arbitrary because presumably some other set of tRNA molecules could have done as well) between codons and amino acids. I don't call this "symbolic" because the actual physical instantiation of the alleged "symbol" is crucial. The word DOG can be rendered in any material and still symbolise the animal we call a dog, which can then be expressed aloud or silently, in sign language However, a codon can only be rendered in nucleotides, and can only be translated into an amino acid by a specific physical molecule. But I do agree that the mapping is probably "arbitrary". Not mysterious, however. Natural selection will favour non-ambigious mappings, and variants that code for sets of tRNA molecules that give ambiguous mappings will tend to reproduce less reliably.
Can you please demonstrate this conclusion with observable evidence?
Well, I could do a simulation I guess. I'll set up a sim where I start with no mapping and let one emerge via natural selection of mappings that tend to be less ambiguous, and thus more likely to produce a useful "protein". Would that do?Elizabeth Liddle_{October 4, 2011
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Petrushka, If you agree that Szostak did indeed perform the experiments he said he did, then which does it demonstrate better: 1) That his experiment could be repeated under the same conditions 2) That something similar could happen "in the wild" apart from such an experiment. I'm not asking you to choose between one and the other. I'm asking you to decide which is demonstrated more conclusively by his experiment.ScottAndrews_{October 4, 2011
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Attributing differences to regulatory systems doesn't change the picture much. Bats have longer forelimbs than rodents because their growths are regulated differently. But that doesn't explain bats. There are countless other changes to their physiology required for those regulatory differences to be beneficial. Imagine a mouse with unusually long forelimbs. It wouldn't live long. Beyond the physical changes there are the behavioral changes. Everyone likes to talk about the physical changes, but no one even wants to touch what sort of mutation, duplication, or regulation makes a rat with long forelimbs attempt flight rather than flopping around on the ground. To get an idea what that looks like, try gently tossing a rat. Shifting the explanation to regulatory networks changes nothing. The explanation still needs an explanation and the rest of the pieces have to fit together.ScottAndrews_{October 4, 2011
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Dmullenix,
The very first self replicator found a very simple sweet spot through sheer chance.
Need I point out the absurdity of this statement? A very simple self-replicator that found itself through chance? The sweet chariot of science must swing pretty low to touch that one.
The other information was added one or two bits at a time (or by duplicating already existing base pairs), which is how evolution works.
As has been stated ad nauseum, there is no evidence of selectable pathways consisting of one or two bits at a time or duplication that lead to anything significant. On top of that, if there were such selectable pathways, there is no evidence that they would be or were selected. We're talking about new species and functions, not about how evolution works.ScottAndrews_{October 4, 2011
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OOPSIE, did a recheck, missed a power of 10 in earlier calc. 3+ light days, makes no practical difference:
Say, a typical straw weighs about a gram. 10^48 grams, is 10^42 metric tonnes. And, if a straw bale is roughly as dense as water, a 10^42 tonne cube would be as many cubic metres, or 10^14 m across. A light year is 9.46*10^15 m. The ratio is about 100:1, i.e. the cube is about 3 1/2 light days across. [BTW, this corrects an earlier estimate, pardon.] Even if a solar system were hiding in the stack -- Pluto's maximum orbital distance is 7.4 *10^12 m, ~ 1/10 the distance across and the sun -- largest object in the solar system -- is 1.39*10^9 m across, a one straw sized blind sample, by overwhelming likelihood, would pick up straw, not anything else. Small but significant blind samples of a population strongly tend to capture what is typical, not what is atypical. Narrow, unrepresentative zones of interest will tend to be missed by such a sample.
kairosfocus_{October 4, 2011
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3.3.1.2.23 dmullenix Dmullenix, Wonderful! The whole issue at the heart of ID is being able to abductively assert that the *best explanation available* is intelligent interference, not chance/necessity alone or any combination thereof. So ID *is* capable of distinguishing between natural cause and intelligent inferference. That is the whole point you disregard. So I cannot accept your point about molecules as a plausible cause of nanometre precision machinery in the cell. Maths shows it is operationally impossible. Could you present such a chemical reaction or a chain of reactions that effectively haphazardly can lead *now* to a self-assembling complex system? The answer is, no. The reason for this is strikingly simple: life is way too complex for that. You wish not to notice that. Well, it is your choice. I have long been fascinated by evolutionists' ability to talk about non-existing evidence. If something is missing then, quite simply, it must have been experminated by predators. I won't comment on this because it is below scientific standard. My argument was that for something to come about by chance (as is assumed about the first replicators), similar processes *must have been going on in huge numbers*. And it is not unreasonalble to assume that something like that must be going on massively now. Otherwise one is compelled to explain in pathetic detail why the conditions were so special then and not now. The question remains: why can we not observe something like that today? No clear answer.Eugene S_{October 4, 2011
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If I am not mistaken, I have read about certain genome metrics showing that mice and humans are more closely related to each other than two specific species of fruit flies.
Mice an humans are mammals, and mammals are separated from each other mostly by changes in regulatory networks. Check out the Shapiro book on this. I don't know the specifics on the fly case, but genetic differences are a function of time since divergence. Flies are fast breeding and have had more time to accumulate differences. Mammals are relatively recent.Petrushka_{October 4, 2011
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ES: It is plain that P and ilk refuse to look at the significance of the simplified expression, the log reduced form of the Dembski metric, e.g. here: Chi_500 = I*S - 500, bits beyond the solar system threshold. A solar system scale blind search tracing to chance and necessity -- it is a strawman that we ignore combinations -- is looking at the equivalent of blindly pulling a one straw sized sample from a cubical haystack a light month across. Even if a solar system lurks therein, sampling theory tells us that overwhelmingly, such a sample will pull a typical result: straw. The only credible search for functionally specific configs in complex contexts, is intelligence. And, such designs can build in adaptability so that hill-climbing to niches within islands of function is not a credible counter argument. You need to give us a basis for seeing blind arrival at islands of function as less than a statistical miracle. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{October 4, 2011
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Eugene S. “ID is a litmus test that reliably identifies intelligent interference in cases where a priori knowledge of such interference is available independently. “ Let me rephrase that for you: “In every case where we know men have designed something, our empirically tested and reliable signs reliably indicate intelligent design.” No surprise there. The problem is that your tests and signs can’t distinguish between something “designed” by evolution and something designed by man. (Are you listening KF?) Where would you look for a self-replicator today and what would it look like? We’re talking about molecules here, something way too small to show up on any optical microscope. And maybe not even individual molecules. Some theories think the first self replicators were chains of chemical reactions that wound up producing the original molecule. You also have Darwin’s problem – if anything did get produced today, it would be eaten by some already existing advanced form of life. You believe that a “self-assembling nanometre precision machinery without a designer is a nonsense”. I believe those are called molecules. KF: ID has no “empirically tested, reliable signs of design”. I’ve gone through the main ID arguments and their fatal flaws in 3.3.1.2.6 above. If you have objections to anything I say there, please tell us all. But merely restating that ID is empirically tested and reliable cuts no ice. I will stick with I said in 3.3.1.2.6 Where are the experiments in Thaxton? There are none. That’s a great DI list. Where is the OOL research of Abel and Trevors? They did none. Do you realize that list includes outright cranks like John A. Davison? He’s so loopy he’s been kicked off of every blog in the world including this one! “You also simply assert that evolutionary processes produce CSI without intelligent direction…” As I showed on another thread a month or two ago, Dembski himself shows the math that shows how changing any bit in a string produces new information that was not in the original string. “ABCDEFF” is different from “ABCDEFG” If the password is “ABCDEFF”, “ABCDEFG” will not be accepted because the two strings are different and contain different information. If you change one to the other, you have created new information. Meanwhile, you are still hung up on DNA and von Neumann replicators, neither of which has anything to do with the OOL. In 11 you are hung up on intelligently designed algorithms that are indeed designed – to mimic naturally occurring phenomena. ScottAndrews: The very first self replicator found a very simple sweet spot through sheer chance. The other information was added one or two bits at a time (or by duplicating already existing base pairs), which is how evolution works.dmullenix_{October 4, 2011
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Onlookers: On p 1 at 3+ above, DM said:
But evolution produces CSI
T%his is a typical example of 6the rhetoric of confident assertion driven by a priori evolutionary materialism. Translated: we "know" it all happened by evo, so macro-evo mechanisms [presumably Darwinist ones] MUST be capable of producing CSI. Therefore, we see the triumphalistic conclusion and declaration: "But evolution produces CSI." Only problem: the only empirically and analytically well warranted causal source for CSI is design. And, that is driven by the challenge of getting TO islands of function in beyond astronomical config spaces, as has been explained in details over and over and over again, but willfully ignored. But, we don't know that life forms exist in islands of funciton! Oh, yes we do, starting with the reality of deeply isolated protein fold domains. Multiply by the other reality that is so often denied: the genetic code for making proteins is exactly that, a CODE, working in the context of an algorithm. One further constrained by the need to create functionally folding proteins that do just what the cell needs, where it needs it, when it needs it. All, using machinery that comes form an earlier application of the same irreducibly complex system. Constraints such as above, eliminate the vast majority of the relevant config spaces of possible components and configurations of said components. Whether in pre life warm ponds etc, or in living forms that somehow must generate dozens of novel body plans. But, you see the realities of the information and organisation challenges and the resulting combinatorial explosion of possibilities, are given scant attention. For, we "know" that evolution has the magical capacity to surmount any and all barriers, as that is the only explanation allowed on the table by the a priori materialist magisterium in the holy lab coat. It happens that way because it "MUST" have happened that way. So, we "know" it happened that way. And if you object or question, that's because you want to smuggle in -- shudder -- God into the hallowed halls of science. In short, question-begging on the grand scale. Oops. Time to de-program, and then actually think seriously about the information and organisation challenges we now know. And nope, these are not primarily biological challenges, they are challenges in embedded digital controller based system design. And any competent engineer will tell you trial and error just will not work for a complex, functionally specific, deeply integrated system. Which is Gil Dodgen's main point that keeps on getting drowned out by the waves of distractive tangential rhetoric. GEM of TKIkairosfocus_{October 4, 2011
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Petrushka, I am not a specialist in bioinformatics but I can say from an engineer's point of view that even though a motorbike and a bike look almost the same, there is a huge difference at to how they work. IOW, I think that the differences in genomes must be measured objectively instead of just showing %-age differences. If I am not mistaken, I have read about certain genome metrics showing that mice and humans are more closely related to each other than two specific species of fruit flies. On another point, the number of various proteins in a bacteria and that in a human being are only one order of magnitude different. But what a difference it brings about! To be objective you have to have different metrics. This is a basic engineering (and common sense) consideration of relative importance of various constituents of a complex system. Bacteria remain bacteria in long lasting experiments in a test tube, which does not give a lot of confidence to common descent.Eugene S_{October 4, 2011
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Why do you keep asking me if I disagree with something I've agreed with half a dozen times. I'm asking for the other shoe to drop. Why is this important?Petrushka_{October 3, 2011
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Rocks, water, gases, crystals, some chemicals, self-replicating creatures made of self-replicating molecular machines carrying abstract blueprints of themselves, more rocks, more water. Hmmm, nothing stands out against that background of consistency.
Things are concrete. Descriptions are abstract. Things are neither consistent nor inconsistent. Processes can be consistent or inconsistent. So point out the violation of physics or chemistry required by Shapiro's description of the processes in evolution. Processing information does not violate any known physical or chemical regularity. The immune system violates no laws of nature. Why would any adaptive system violate laws of nature?Petrushka_{October 3, 2011
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Petrushka, Szostak suggests that the formation of fatty vesicles is a possible step toward the formation of life. He then details the steps taken to create such vesicles in the laboratory. Will you tell me that the paper only suggests how they might occur naturally but does not explain how one might create them deliberately? Again, that they might form outside the experiment is unknown, although I am explicitly not stating that is is impossible. I am not doubting the research. But it demonstrates even more conclusively that this possible component of early life can be deliberately engineered. Are you saying that Szostak did not in fact perform the experiments he said he did, or did not produce the results he published? I believe him.ScottAndrews_{October 3, 2011
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