The origin of sexually reproducing organisms from asexually reproducing ancestors is a profound mystery which has baffled many an evolutionary biologist. Read More>>>
13 Replies to “Sex, the Queen of Problems in Evolutionary Biology”
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Can you explain what you mean by this?
So, what’s the advantage of sex according to ID? The IDer must have put it there for a reason, right? And put it into plants and microbes etc. long, long before humans were there to enjoy it.
Note: you don’t get to say “to increase disease resistance” or whatever, you just bashed biologists for making those functional explanations.
“So, what’s the advantage of sex according to ID? [blah, blah, blah]”
Translation: if you can’t answer my pointless questions — and I get to decide whether you have — then Darwinism is true!
Don’t you guys ever get embarrassed to constantly demonstrate, in front of God and all the angels, your strained relationship with rational argumentation?
OT llion, as to:
‘in front of God and all the angels,’
,,,I just heard this song for the first time today,,,
Trust in Jesus – Third Day
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6koz1p2Q6Bw
Sex – it boosts the immune system and self-confidence. It produces precious new little children. It even refutes Darwinism. What CAN’T it do?
So, what’s the advantage of sex according to ID?
According to ID, the advantage of sex is that it provides amusement to ID theorists as evolutionists develop contradictory theories to explain it.
Nick, does it not ever give you pause that you defend and attempt to propagate a theory that is capable of providing contradictory explanations for the same phenomenon?
Doesn’t that tell you there just might be something wrong with the theory?
No? I thought not.
“The advantage of sex”? Besides bringing pleasure to the people/animals/microbes doing it? Procreation, for the most part. You know, the whole ‘be fruitful and become many’ part.
Barb @ 8
Pleasure for pleasures sake? What a concept!
I once heard on NPR that the organ a woman has that supplies that pleasure has no other known function.
Barb – it’s possible to reproduce without sex (ask any bacterium). So why do some species use sex to reproduce – and indeed why do many of them only reproduce sexually? That’s the question here. Nick’s asking what the ID explanation is.
Regarding Nick Matzke’s comment, I thought I had explained quite clearly in my article what the advantage of sex was — it generates a remarkable amount of diversity. I also explained in my article why that doesn’t offer much help to explaining its origin in the first place.
Why did God create sex? While this is an interesting theological question, you’re asking the wrong question. ID looks at complex features and asks whether they require a goal-directed origin. Sex is the epitome of a feature that requires multiple fitting parts to work. So it definitely requires a goal-directed origin.
Chapter IV of prominent geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti’s book Why is a Fly Not a Horse? is titled “Wobbling Stability”. In that chapter he discusses what I have been talking about in other threads- that populations oscillate. The following is what he has to say which is based on thorough scientific investigation:
(snip a few paragraphs on peppered moths)
The point being, that IF it were left to direct scientific observations, evolutionism fails miserably and all that is left is wishful thinking supported by speculation.
Excellent quotes, thanks Joseph.