Darwinism and popular culture: Attacking Collins hurts science, Chris Mooney argues

_{Denyse O'Leary

July 20, 2009

theistic evolution}

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A friend draws my attention to “Defenders of the Faith: Scientists who blast religion are hurting their own cause.” by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (Newsweek, July 14, 2009), in which they warn against new atheist attacks on Francis Collins:

The critics, though, have it exactly backward: the United States needs more scientists like Collins—researchers who show by their prominence and their example that a good scientist can still retain religious beliefs. The stunning irony in the longstanding tension between science and religion in America is that many scientists who merely claim to be defending rationality from religious fundamentalism may actually be turning Americans off to science, doing more harm to their cause than good.

The poster boy for the so-called New Atheist movement today is biologist Richard Dawkins, author of the bestselling book, The God Delusion. He and other New Atheists attack faith without quarter, and insist that science and religion are fundamentally irreconcilable. In the process, they are helping to keep U.S. society polarized over science and likely helping to make it still harder for many religious believers to accept scientific findings in areas like evolution.

This is all well-meaning rot, of course.

The new atheists are making sure that if even a bland, “let’s just saw off the differences” figure like Collins can’t be left in peace, just think what would happen to a Christian who took issues like the importance of human life seriously?

As for evolution: The fundamental unbelievability of many propositions asserted in the name of “evolution” attracts skepticism from growing numbers of intelligent lay people, hundreds of whom have shared their doubts/scoffing with me. Remember, what lay people hear is the big bazooms theory of human evolution and ridiculous hagiography of Darwin. Or the recent “Ida” circus. (Also here and here for more tents in the Ida circus.)

You needn’t know much to know that that stuff just isn’t plausible – “Ida” was savaged even by the popular press, almost the first instance I can recall for an icon of “evolution”.

Evolutionary biologists’ insistence on defending the whole whack makes people wonder – very advisedly, I may say – just how much else they front to the public is either poorly sourced or known to be false.

Comments

RE: 10 - Cabal "I would like to believe in ID, I am just waiting for evidence that “Darwinian mechanisms” cannot account for evolution." Hi Cabal, try this. IF a good explanation must explain what needs to be explained and if (one of) the distinguishing characteristic of life is the presence of information and information processing systems, then "Darwinian mechanisms" must be able to explain information. In order to explain information, these "Darwinian mechanisms," then must be able to explain language. Since without language there can be no information. This seems obvious to me. If it isn't, I can elaborate on that. In order to explain language, these "Darwinian mechanisms," then must be able to explain symbols and rules. For how is it possible to have a language without symbols and rules? Indeed, that is the essence of what a language is. Now we get to it. "Darwinian mechanisms" means, at the end of the day, physics. If there is no Mind then all that is left with causal power is the laws of physics. But here's the insurmountable problem. Physics has NOTHING to say about why "cat" means a certain kind of mammal and "act" means to do something, something done, or a segment of a play. Symbols (letters, in this case) represent one thing for another, according to certain rules or conventions, to create, transmit, and receive information. Physics has nothing to say about language and never will have. This demonstrates the fundamental intellectual bankruptcy of naturalism and its explanation for life by Darwinian mechanisms. Naturalism denies the real existence of the abstract or immaterial yet that is precisely what needs to be accounted for. Information is not material or physical, even though it is encoded in physical structures. So we have the spectacle, the SPECTACLE, of allegedly intelligent people claiming to be defenders of reason who are being completely irrational from their foundational assumptions. The idea that Dawkins and his ilk are committed to the "truth" and servants of "reason" is laughable. His own ontology denies the existence of those very things.tgpeeler_{July 24, 2009
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R0b You said: "Can you provide references? I’ve read most of Dembski’s work, and seen no such calculation." Dembski's work produces the upper bound for a probablity to be beyond the probabilistic resources of the entire universe from the moment of the Big Bang, which he calculates to be 1/10^150. This appears in many of his works, including Mere Creation, The Design of Life, Science and the Evidence for Design in the Universe, No Free Lunch, and The Design Inference. (I'm sorry I don't have time to be more specific--I'm leaving for a week's vacation tomorrow morning.) When you couple this with the upper bound of the probability of even a small protein (100 amino acids in length) coming into being by chance, 1/20^100, and recognize that the genome of the simplest cell includes the coding for hundreds of proteins, the probability of its DNA arising by chance is well beyond the probabilistic resources of the universe. You also said: "I’ll ask you the same question I’ve been asking kairosfocus. How do you know that the agent is the ultimate source of the information? How do you know that it can’t be traced back to the agent’s designer and/or genes and/or environment and/or chance?" The short answer is, I don't. But that doesn't change the claim of ID: the action of an intelligent agent or agents is the most reasonable explanation for the existence of DNA and the information contained therein. How an intelligent agent produces information is a separate question which has yet to be answered. The long answer would take me too long under my current circumstances (leaving tomorrow morning). Each of your listed possibilities requires a separate treatment. The most interesting one to me is the agent's genes. This presupposes that our brains are the source of our creativity (it is creativity that produces information), and that our genes are entirely responsible for the size and organization of our brains. But this has not been established. Nor has the source of creativity been established. There are many questions yet to be answered here, and many materialist assumptions operating in the scientific community which may be (and I believe are) incorrect.Bruce David_{July 23, 2009
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Cabal, What I have posted above is just a tiny bit of the dozen or so relavent topics covered in the paper I posted. I strongly suggest you power your way through it. There are no concepts that are beyond understanding by someone truly wanting to know. - - - - - - (Today is my BD...so I am off to a surprise party I don't know about) G'nite all..Upright BiPed_{July 23, 2009
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Dave Wisker wrote: “Motoo Kimura showed how natural selection could increase genomic information back in 1961.” Newton devised his law of universal gravitation and then measured the force of gravity, Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism, correctly predicting the speed of EM waves, Einstein general theory of relativity predicted the bending of light in the presence of mass and his theory was stunningly corroborated. In order to be considered a serious science, you would expect that the most pressing question for Darwinists would be to put a reliable number on the rate at which RM and NS can generate new information. This question is surely the central question in evolutionary biology so there must be thousands of paper discussing it. Putting an actual number on what the creative power of NDE can do, would certainly bring it within reach of the serious sciences. I have checked Motoo Kimura's Wiki page, although it appears quite small as Darwinist entries go. Surprisingly, I found little recognition of his stunning achievement of measuring the rate of NDE experimentally, although it did mention that some scientists consider his theory of neutral evolution to be in opposition to Darwinism. I would be grateful if you can point me to some of the classic experiments used to measure the rate at which new information is generated, lest people think that you are trying to turn a liability into an asset.Alan_{July 23, 2009
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Hello Cabal,
As far as I know, no physical law is violated by the development from a single cell, the fertilized egg, to a full grown frog. Right?
Please allow me to clean up the meaning of my comment... No physical law can account for the the organization of matter into living tissue. None. We violate rationality when we force feed ourselves the priori assumption that it MUST ANYWAY - when based on what we already know to be true, it cannot. This is telling ourselves a lie because some want to beleive it. It is without scientific basis. By scientific I mean to say - there is not a shread of empirical evidence that chance and necessity can organize even the most simple replicating, energy-metabolizing, heredity-producing cell on Earth.
But I was more concerned with information processing, which seems (but I may be wrong or ignorant wrt that), like a new fad in ID theory.
Information is a "fad" in ID theory? If this is so, then it is only because it is also a "fad" in biology. (“A central idea in contemporary biology is that of information. Developmental biology can be seen as the study of how information in the genome is translated into adult structure, and evolutionary biology of how the information came to be there in the first place."- John Maynard Smith)
WRT the pubmed link, I am afraid it is far too much for me, and I doubt there are many non-scientists or even non-specialists that are prepared to study a subject like that subject to the depth required.
I dont believe this even for a second (particularly in the days of the Internet search engine).
Could it not be said in plain words what exactly it is all about?
The sequencing of nucleotides in the chain of DNA (where the information is) has no reason to physically exist the way they do. In fact, as far as the laws of the Universe are concerned, they have no reason to exist at all. Yet they exist without any physical laws to explain them. They are symbols that represent something else. If I say apple, you and I must agree that "apple" stands for the red fruit with the white center and little black seeds. There is no reason it must be called an "apple" We must agree to it. In another language it would be called something else. So the symbol system in DNA is not based on chemistry, but on arbirtray rules that are physically inert - just as an "apple". The paper I pointed you to said it this way... "We repeat that a single incident of nontrivial algorithmic programming success achieved without selection for fitness at the decision-node programming level would falsify any of these null hypotheses. This renders each of these hypotheses scientifically testable. We offer the prediction that none of these four hypotheses will be falsified. The fundamental contention inherent in our three subsets of sequence complexity proposed in this paper is this: without volitional agency assigning meaning to each configurable-switch-position symbol, algorithmic function and language will not occur. The same would be true in assigning meaning to each combinatorial syntax segment (programming module or word). Source and destination on either end of the channel must agree to these assigned meanings in a shared operational context. Chance and necessity cannot establish such a cybernetic coding/decoding scheme." - - - - - Just so we don't continue to miss each others position, would you mind acknowledging that you ubnderstand this?Upright BiPed_{July 23, 2009
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Nakashima, I feel the same way about RNA hairpins as I do about hemoglobin. It serves its physical role. By the way (referring to the earlier thread) did you have a chance to come up with any examples of naturally-occurring complex algorithms where such analogous phenomena as a “stop” codon exist? I would love to study and compare them to DNA. Or, if not, then perhaps any naturally-occurring algorithms where transcription and translation of information takes place?Upright BiPed_{July 23, 2009
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Dave Wisker You said: "I’m afraid that isn’t correct. Motoo Kimura showed how natural selection could increase genomic information back in 1961." It is true that natural selection acting on random mutation can produce small amounts of information. It is still a very open question, however, how much information can be generated in this way over a given stretch of time. However, we are discussing, I believe, the amount of information present in the DNA of the first living cell. Since natural selection only operates on living organisms, whatever process produced that cell could not have included natural selection.Bruce David_{July 23, 2009
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Bruce David:
Natural law cannot, by its very nature, produce information. Information, by definition, requires contingency (see Shannon and others on this point), but the operation of natural law produces necessity.
Shannon information requires uncertainty. When the output of a natural process reduces someone's uncertainty, it constitutes Shannon information. Contingency is an ambiguous term, as is chance.
Chance cannot account for the information in the DNA of even the simplest cell simply because there is too much of it. The probability of that much information arising by chance is so small as to be effectively zero. These calculations are well known. See Dembski or Meyer.
Can you provide references? I've read most of Dembski's work, and seen no such calculation.
Intelligent agents are well known to be capable of producing information.
I'll ask you the same question I've been asking kairosfocus. How do you know that the agent is the ultimate source of the information? How do you know that it can't be traced back to the agent's designer and/or genes and/or environment and/or chance?R0b_{July 23, 2009
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Cabal wrote “can you explain what makes it something else than chemistry at work? Isn’t what goes on inside an Intel or AMD CPU simply electric charges moving around, propelled by electric potentials?” This is a bit like asking “can't written text in a newspaper article be explained naturalistically - by considering the chemistry of ink bonding to paper?” While the chemical reactions may be well understood and the ink/paper consists of atoms and molecules, the causal chain in the production of the article does not end with chance events or laws of nature, but with the mind that arranged the letters. As with art, nature provides the materials and the artist imposes form on them. The arrangement of letters into meaningful text by randomly selecting letters from a pile quickly exceeds what could be achieved by chance over the entire life of the universe. We may expect to get a couple of sentences at most. While the scrabble letters, say, are composed of atoms, which are part of the natural world, the form imposed on the letters is best explained by intelligence. By analogy, we find huge amounts of information stored in the DNA (human DNA contains information equivalent to the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica according to Dawkins). We come to the conclusion that something must have imposed form on the DNA during the origin and development of life, not by identifying what or who that something is, but by excluding the naturalistic alternatives i.e. natural law and chance. Attempts to break highly improbable events into lots of smaller ones usually contain a lot of fallacious reasoning. While each small step may be more probable, you need much more steps to appear on time and in the correct order. Silly examples, like those propagated by Dawkins usually sneak information in, by way of a target phrase against which intelligent selections are made. In the case of life, for example, let's start with the enormous faith based assumption that there is a single random mutation by single random mutation path leading to the formation of a new organ. Lets also make the massive assumption that each step confers some survival/reproductive advantage, or is at least not harmful to the organism. Even with natural selection preserving and disproportionately replicating every successful mutation so that at each stage more copies are available to receive the next lucky mutation, the probabilities would still be enormous. No one knows how enormous because to put a figure on this (which is what Darwinists should be spending their time doing if they want their mechanism to be believed), you would have to specify the individual mutations in the chain and know their individual probabilities. In reality, its much easier to concoct headline grabbing just-so stories, talk up fossil finds and deal with the realy interesting and taxing problems by relying on philosophical arguments e.g. simply assume that the theory has to be true since design has been excluded a priori.Alan_{July 23, 2009
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I am saying that what we ALREADY KNOW about physical law is violated by the existence of matter being organized into a frog’s leg.
As far as I know, no physical law is violated by the development from a single cell, the fertilized egg, to a full grown frog. Right? WRT to pubmed link But I was more concerned with information processing, which seems (but I may be wrong or ignorant wrt that), like a new fad in ID theory. Are not the processing required to keep a living body alive dependent on continuous information, are there different kinds of information processing? If that's the case, what's the difference, how do we discriminate between them? WRT the pubmed link, I am afraid it is far too much for me, and I doubt there are many non-scientists or even non-specialists that are prepared to study a subject like that subject to the depth required. Could it not be said in plain words what exactly it is all about? Are studies to that level of sophistication required to arrive at a proper understanding of what the ID vs ToE dispute is about?Cabal_{July 23, 2009
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Bruce, I'm afraid that isn't correct. Motoo Kimura showed how natural selection could increase genomic information back in 1961.Dave Wisker_{July 23, 2009
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Mr BiPed, Do you feel the same way about RNA hairpins as you do about frog's legs?Nakashima_{July 23, 2009
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Mr Charrington, ------"I’d love nothing more then to continue the conversation but Clive has put me under moderation for pointing out that Jehu continues to misrepresent somebody’s position despite being corrected with the facts of the matter." False, I put you in moderation for calling him a liar.Clive Hayden_{July 23, 2009
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To BillB: You have completely missed the thrust of my argument (which really isn't mine. I simply paraphrase the work of others). If you think that the information in DNA is in any way comparable to "noise" (other than that both are Shannon information) then you understand nothing. And by the way, those who believe that the information in DNA arose gradually do so entirely on faith. There is not only no scientific evidence that such a thing happened, no one has even the remotest clue how it could even have been possible.Bruce David_{July 23, 2009
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Cabal said: "Don’t you think that is a tall order? Maybe they are missing for the same reason we don’t find any of the people drowned by the Flood?" No, I do not think it is a tall order at all. In fact, if the Darwinian explanation is correct, there should be innumerable such examples all through the fossil record. Darwin himself recognized this. It is my opinion that the case is even stronger than I stated above. The fact that not a single example of such incremental change is visible anywhere in the entire fossil record is quite strong evidence that a Darwinian explanation of macro-evolution is simply wrong.Bruce David_{July 23, 2009
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Cabal, Regarding my repsonse at 38, you may ask what of our physical knowlwdge is being violated by the priori conclusion that material forces are at the heart of organizing a frog's leg into living tissue. That answer is already part of the scientific record. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1208958Upright BiPed_{July 23, 2009
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Hello Cabal (#37) It’s not the twitching of a frog's leg that must be explained. It’s the existence of the frog's leg itself. In other words, we know why a frog’s leg twitches under an electrical charge. We use our knowledge of physical laws to understand it. What we do not know is how matter came to be arranged into a frog’s leg to begin with. There is nothing is the physical laws that causes that. There is nothing is the physical laws that says such a thing should exists at all. Yet, it does. I am not just saying that there is something about physical law we simply do not yet know (which there surely may be), instead I am saying that what we ALREADY KNOW about physical law is violated by the existence of matter being organized into a frog’s leg. Under no other scenario do we see matter organizing itself into a frog’s leg by means of anything we know about our physical world (the Newtonian Mechanics, Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Field, Einstein’s Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics that give us the ability to understand a frog’s leg and build the tools in which to study it). If it did, then this conversation would not be taking place. The frog’s leg has come into being by means of a chemical symbol system containing the information (and information processing system) necessary to organize matter into living tissue. The proposed cause of this phenomenon violates what we already know to be true. So we are left to forever ponder a mystery Force X that we will know some day, or, we can consider the only natural force we ALREAD KNOW is capable of doing what we see - at that is the act of a volitional agent. Why can we not consider this? Because of the ideological personal preferences of some people. That is when science is no longer a pursuit of knowledge, and it is no longer science.Upright BiPed_{July 23, 2009
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Upright BiPed,
Genetics and heredity are actualized in the genome by information processing. Are you sure you understood that?
I don't think so, can you explain what makes it something else than chemistry at work? Isn't what goes on inside an Intel or AMD CPU simply electric charges moving around, propelled by electric potentials? Are not biological processes, from fertilized cell to fully grown body simply chemical processes? Is not "information processing" just a fancy label for entirely natural processes? When can see a frog leg move when we stimulate it with electricity. Is that movement a chemical process, or information processing? Where is the demarcation line between natural processes and information processing? Or are they the same thing under different names; different philosophical abstractions? Bruce David,
If the central thesis were true, then we should see some examples somewhere in the record of an organism slowly changing, incremental step by Darwinian incremental step, into something truly new.
Don't you think that is a tall order? Maybe they are missing for the same reason we don't find any of the people drowned by the Flood?Cabal_{July 23, 2009
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Mr Charrington wrote: “What would the lesson plan look like?” The lesson plan would begin by discussing some reasons why attempts to explain origins / evolution by undirected processes have stalled. e.g. They would explain that there are now straightforward indicators which imply that this failure does not appear to be through a lack of present knowledge (as promissory materialism would have it), such as the probability defying information contained in the genetic code or the Cambrian explosion. They would also explain that as science advances, and our knowledge of the technology crammed into living systems increases, the trend is that thing are getting worse rather than better for materialistic science. The teacher could mention that this is a global phenomena which is appearing in a number of different fields. The teacher might also dispense with some of the icons of evolution which were previously considered solid science, in order to improve the children's critical thinking skills. The child would be taught that while the failure of present materialistic explanations do not rule out the possibility that others may be found in future, it does critically shift the burden of proof onto the materialists. After explaining the standard Darwinian dogma as well as the reasons why some scientists think that some features of the natural world really are designed (rather than merely having the overwhelming appearance of being design “as if by a master watch maker”). The children would then apply Darwins (and Charles Lyell's) method of reasoning about the distant past in order to decide which explanation best fits the evidence. They would consider currently acting causes such as chance , natural laws and intelligence. This is a win win situation. Tomorrows scientists will be encouraged to follow the evidence, unhindered by dogmatic preconeptions. They can consider both sides of the argument (as Darwin would have wished). Children who retain a materialistic inclination will at least know the reality of the problems their world-view faces and will grow up with a better chance of discovering credible materialistic alternatives(and hopefully a little more humility than the present batch).Alan_{July 23, 2009
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atural law cannot, by its very nature, produce information. Information, by definition, requires contingency (see Shannon and others on this point),
Information in the Shannon sense does not require an intelligent origin. You could apply information theory to study how much information is transmitted through ripples created as a rock falls into a river.
For example, a perfect salt crystal, although highly organized, contains no information, because its form is dictated by the laws of physics and chemistry and cannot be other than it is.
You define the word information so it excludes anything generated by the known laws of physics, you also claim that nature cannot generate information. If I define an aeroplane as a machine that is incapable of flight then I have NOT proven that machines cannot fly.
The probability of that much information arising by chance is so small as to be effectively zero.
Almost, the chances are close to zero but then no one (except people like Dembski and Meyer) is claiming that DNA popped into existence all at once.
Intelligent agents are well known to be capable of producing information.
Yes they are. We can also gather (Shannon) information from natural sources as well, in fact if you want to assemble a message with maximum information content then you just need to sample the 'noise' produced by the laws of physics.BillB_{July 23, 2009
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I'd love nothing more then to continue the conversation but Clive has put me under moderation for pointing out that Jehu continues to misrepresent somebody's position despite being corrected with the facts of the matter. So if Clive cares to remove the moderation and the unpredicitable delay that goes along with it I'll be happy to respond. If not, well, I guess it's the thought police all over again!Mr Charrington_{July 23, 2009
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To Mr. Charrington, et al: I'm sorry, but I feel compelled to put my two cents in to this conversation. The first thing to understand, in my opinion, is that science never proves anything. You only find proofs in mathematics and logic. Science consists of data (observations and experimental results) along with (often competing) explanations of that data. Progress in science consists in refining the data through better experiments and/or more accurate and comprehensive observations, and in creating better explanations of the data (scientific theories). The observed data under consideration in this case is DNA, in particular the information content of DNA. The competing explanations are 1) that it arose through some combination of chance and natural law, and 2) that it was designed and engineered. The claim of ID is simply that the second is the better (more reasonable) explanation, given the current state of our knowledge. The reasoning to back up this claim is actually fairly simple. It consists of three propositions, to put it formally: 1. Natural law cannot, by its very nature, produce information. Information, by definition, requires contingency (see Shannon and others on this point), but the operation of natural law produces necessity. For example, a perfect salt crystal, although highly organized, contains no information, because its form is dictated by the laws of physics and chemistry and cannot be other than it is. 2. Chance cannot account for the information in the DNA of even the simplest cell simply because there is too much of it. The probability of that much information arising by chance is so small as to be effectively zero. These calculations are well known. See Dembski or Meyer. 3. Intelligent agents are well known to be capable of producing information. There are literally billions of examples of this, from a mother writing a letter to her son to a Shakespeare play or the computer on which I am writing these comments. To sum up, since neither natural law nor the operations of chance are capable of producing the information content of DNA, but intelligent agents are, the most reasonable explanation is the it was produced by an intelligent agent or agents. Notice that I did add the caveat "given the current state of our knowledge", above. It is always possible that some new theory will emerge that somehow overcomes the objections expressed in propositions 1 and 2. Paul Davies, who fully recognizes the seriousness of the challenge to materialist philosophy represented by the information residing in DNA, believes that such a thing is possible and that we need to somehow get out of the box of current scientific thinking to find such a theory. But (and this is a very important point in my opinion) the belief that such a theory is possible is a matter of faith, not science. Basically, it is the faith that the materialist paradigm is correct, or at least the faith that all natural phenomena must have purely naturalistic explanations. Furthermore, it is the same faith, not science, that rejects out of hand the explanation that the source of DNA was intelligence.Bruce David_{July 22, 2009
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Mr Carrington, You’re going to need to step up your bait and switch game a notch or two. You typed in your reply:
Upright BiPed, “You assume your conclusions in place of having evidence”.
Indeed. So when you said
“Firstly, ID is not intended to do anything but acknowledge what is evident about the mechanisms that we employ in order to explain the natural world.”
you are not at all assuming your conclusion. If design is “evident” they why do you need to prove it? After all, it’s “evident” right?
Of course, your entire response is at first silly, then petty. Please take note where you bolded the word evident in my comment, and then switched what I was talking about being evident. Did you assume that I would not notice? If you had any inclination of actually addressing what was being said you would have bolded the three words that followed the word evident. Those words were “about the mechanisms”. Evident about the mechanisms… not evident about my conclusions. In fact, I said nothing of my conclusions at all. I said ID is an attempt to acknowledge what is evident about the mechanisms we use to explain the natural world. Having said that… perhaps I’ve been too difficult on you Mr. Charrington. Originally, I was asking for any examples of “naturally-occurring complex algorithms where such analogous phenomena as a “stop” codon exist.” I admit it’s a steep order to fill. In order to move the conversation along I could just drop the whole bit about the stop codon (at least for the time being) Do you have any examples of naturally occurring algorithms being transcribed and translated between disparate physical objects?Upright BiPed_{July 22, 2009
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Alan, What would the lesson plan look like?Mr Charrington_{July 22, 2009
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Given the quality of argumentation coming from the Darwinists these days, I'm starting to think that maybe ID really is ready for schools and that we are being too modest.Alan_{July 22, 2009
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Upright BiPed,
You assume your conclusions in place of having evidence.
Indeed. So when you said
Firstly, ID is not intended to do anything but acknowledge what is evident about the mechanisms that we employ in order to explain the natural world.
you are not at all assuming your conclusion. If design is "evident" they why do you need to prove it? After all, it's "evident" right?
He is both an ideological bigot and an ardent fan of circular reasoning. He makes no pretenses about the issue. His conclusions are the core of his assumptions (and it all makes perfect sense). He might as well say “dammit, because we said so”. Anyone who cares about the observational details must be demanding too much.
Hmm. Tell me, what "observational detail" have you provided that life is designed? Only that "the stop codon" exists and does not have an analogue other then it's instantiation in DNA. Well, color me unconvinced.Mr Charrington_{July 22, 2009
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Mr Charrington, You assume your conclusions in place of having evidence. In other words, you are a perfect ideologue, convinced of an non-falsifiable worldview.Upright BiPed_{July 22, 2009
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Upright
You may start by posting the examples of naturally occurring algorithms that include such phenomena as a stop codon. Surely
DNA.
Then you can decimate me with the evidence of naturally occurring symbol systems.
DNA
I may then be further trounced by the observational evidence that chance does not act at 100% maximum uncertainty at every juncture.
Mutations are random with regard to fitness. Selection is not random.Mr Charrington_{July 22, 2009
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Upright BiPed, when I said "replace the theory of evolution as it stands today", I was of course referring to the fact that TOE today relies heavily on RM&NS and related subjects as causes whereas ID rely on – ID. I take it you see ID as a better candidate for causation that RM&NS? What I’d like to see more of though, is some research into the how, when and where of ID.Cabal_{July 22, 2009
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Mr. Charrington, I just read your attack of my question on other threads. Please, bring it on. I am right here. Go for it. You want to debate the nature of DNA? So do I. You may start by posting the examples of naturally occurring algorithms that include such phenomena as a stop codon. Surely this must be the empirically observable evidence that empowers your certainty on the issue. Then you can decimate me with the evidence of naturally occurring symbol systems. I may then be further trounced by the observational evidence that chance does not act at 100% maximum uncertainty at every juncture. Given your certitude on the issue, there must be plenty to talk about. BUT...don’t worry, we will quickly work our way through other issues. I can guarantee it. It’s your move skippy.Upright BiPed_{July 21, 2009
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