Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense.
Indeed, evolution’s proof texts are always religious.
I’m not sure which is more disgusting, evolution’s hypocrisy or its self-promotion. Evolutionists proclaim their religious lies and hypocrisy as though the world will be impressed. And we hear it again and again.
I recently mentioned a protein named p53 that is yet another example of how science contradicts evolution. An evolutionist responded with the usual phony scientific arguments:
Well, one could predict that if TP53 is involved in so many systems / pathways that are fundamental to a host of cellular processes including (but probably not limited to) cell cycle regulation, apoptosis and senesence, then it had to have originated around the time that the simplest forms of multi-cellular life emerged and therefore would be present in the simplest of life forms as well as the most complex. One could also predict that the separate genetic changes that may have affected this gene as different lineages diversified would allow scientists to generate some sort of phylogeny maybe? Perhaps, TP53 may even be part of a larger 'super-family' of genes that have homologs and orthologs throughout multi-cellular life forms that also, through genetic analyses, appear to form some sort of hierarchy... If only scientists could find such a thing huh.
Oh yeah, the p53/p63/p73 superfamily. Highly conserved genes found all the way up from C.elegans to H.sapiens.
http://cshperspectives.cshlp.org/content/2/7/a001131.full
I'd post more links but don't see the point. The info is out there for those who wish to see it. No amount of linking to primary data or peer-reviewed journal articles will help those that don't want to.
CH, p53 is not a good example if you want to poke a stick at the ToE.
When I explained the scientific problems he responded with the usual religion:
Problem I have Mr. H is that even if I were to accept your points I still can't think of any credible alternative. The OT/genesis/creation is obviously a fairytale, or at best an allegory. I don't see how ID is anything other than a kind of anthropomorphic projection that will probably be as guilty of everything you claim is wrong with ToE.
In other words, scientific problems don’t count. Evolutionists are religious fundamentalists who must have evolution. They bring their religion into science and their religion requires a naturalistic creation story, regardless of how absurd. So they will spin whatever scientific-sounding arguments they can to prop up evolution.
Evolution is a religious Trojan Horse that has penetrated science and gone viral. Evolutionists have entered science though a different door. They abuse science, manipulating and perverting the obvious evidence as the need arises.
CH: In other words, scientific problems don’t count.
ReplyDeleteWhat we lack is an explanation as to why God would create the particular proteins we observe in the particular timeframe we observe, as a means to build the particular biological complexity we observe. Supposedly being all powerful, he could have chosen a near infinite number of different ways to do so.
As such, the current crop of ID, along with traditional creationism, doesn't represent a good explanation. And when we define science as solving problems via explanations, we discard them.
However, evolution does represent part of a hard to vary set of explanations about the biological complexity we observe.
We do not claim to know the exact steps by which each protein evolve, but this is part of the scientific process. The explanation for one observation leads us to better questions. And when we define better questions as new problems, then yes. We do find ourselves with a "problem."
However, if we concede that "an abstract designer did it", we end up with neither good explanations or better questions. Instead, we have a dead end. No better questions can be asked because any claim of a supernatural cause renders the subject matter unexplainable.
Essentially, this draws a boundary at which human reasoning and problem solving supposedly cannot pass.
ID does NOT say, "an abstract designer did it" as Evolutionist Scott above says. ID says, when the complexity of "it" is "specified" (for example: the alphabetical characters in this paragraph are complex and specified), then the origin of "it" is best explained as having been intelligently designed. Complexity and specificity are properties of all intelligently designed things, even those that by design appear undesigned. But ID makes NO claims about the "designer" and will not.
ReplyDeleteSo when an evolutionist says that Intelligent Design says "an abstract designer did it", he is displaying willful ignorance which is what he constantly says ID displays.
Perhaps an example discussion on the Fabric of Reality list would help to clarify this….
ReplyDeleteThe question asked was if is 2+2=4 falsifiable. Someone proposed the following test.
If Tommy has two cupcakes in a box and then Tommy puts two more cupcakes in a box and Tommy doesn't now have 4 cupcakes in a box then the idea has been proven false.
David Deutsch, the Oxford Physicist and author whom's work the list is based on, pointed out the the problem with this conclusion.
The thing is, if carried out under the conditions implied, the outcome would not refute the theory that 2+2=4 but rather, it would refute the theory that the Tommy-cupcake-box system accurately models the numbers 2 and 4 and the operation of addition.
This is exactly analogous to why, as I argued, [a single] fossil rabbit in the Jurassic stratum would not refute the theory of evolution: experimental testing is useless in the absence of a good explanation.
What would a good explanation that 2+2 doesn't equal 4 look like? I can't think of one; that's because the theory that it's true is, in real life, extremely hard to vary. That's why mathematicians mistake it for being self-evident, or directly intuited, etc. And it is of course my opinion that 2+2 does in fact equal 4, so I'm not expecting to find a contrary theory that is at all good as an explanation. But, for instance, Greg Egan's science-fiction story Dark Integers explores essentially that possibility (albeit only for very large integers).
The analogy between the theory of evolution and the 2+2 theory is in fact closer than the mere difficulty of imagining a good explanation to the contrary. Both of them, if false, would seem to involve there being laws of physics that directly mess with the creation of knowledge, in what we would consider a malevolent way. This makes for very bad explanations, but that doesn't affect the logic of the issue so here goes: The analogue of creationism being true, then, would be something like that there is really no such entity as the number 4 because the axioms of arithmetic as we know them are blatantly inconsistent, and that the laws of physics act on neurons to make us unconsciously confabulate
excuses for ignoring the physical effects of that.
In case this isn't clear, given the observations of the experiment, we would assume that something was tampering with Tommy's box, the cupcake, our neurons, etc., rather than conclude that 2+2 doesn't equal 4. This is because the explanation that 2+2 actually equals 4, in reality, is very hard to vary. Nor can we think of a better explanation as to why 2+2=4.
Other possiblities exist, however they are based on the idea that there are laws or forces that interfere with the creation of knowledge in malevolent ways. Can we rule this out as being true with 100% certainty? No, we cannot. But neither can we rule out that 2+2 equals something other than 4.
So, to summarize, Hume showed us the problem of induction, Karl Popper showed that our use of induction in science was a myth (which caused a shift to falsification in science), and now Deutsch has pointed out that the creation of knowledge is based on seeking good explanations, which are hard to vary.
Red Reader: So when an evolutionist says that Intelligent Design says "an abstract designer did it", he is displaying willful ignorance which is what he constantly says ID displays.
ReplyDeleteRed,
Can we know how this designer managed to change just the genes he wanted, while leaving the rest unchanged? Can we know what method the designer used to determine exactly which genes to change to get the desired results? Is it possible to know how the designer coordinated all of the results for every organism to end up with the functioning eco-system we observed?
Note, I'm not asking if we can know these answers in practice, but I'm asking if we can know in principle.
Furthermore, if it were true that a designer did all of these things above, in reality, this would re-assign the cause to this designer - negating the existing explanation that evolution provides in the process.
However, we've left with the claim that "a designer did it" in just the way that happens to make it appear *as if* the explanation it displaced (evolution) was true, but is actually false.
At which point, we're back to my original comment.
Red Reader said...
ReplyDeleteID does NOT say, "an abstract designer did it" as Evolutionist Scott above says. ID says, when the complexity of "it" is "specified" (for example: the alphabetical characters in this paragraph are complex and specified), then the origin of "it" is best explained as having been intelligently designed. Complexity and specificity are properties of all intelligently designed things, even those that by design appear undesigned.
Where can I see the before-the-fact specification for a genome? Seems to me all IDCers have done is taken the after-the-fact mapping of the genome and declared it to be a specification. Then they claim 'design!' because the specification exists. That is a completely circular and completely worthless argument. It's like looking at the winning lottery numbers the day after the drawing, and declaring the sequence to be 'specified' (i.e designed) and not random because the winning numbers have a function, they won.
Unless you can come up with a before-the-fact specification you don't a case.
Red Reader,
ReplyDeleteComplexity and specificity are properties of all intelligently designed things, even those that by design appear undesigned.
The pattern of oil leaking from my car on the driveway vs an artist intentionally recreating the pattern,this would seem to be design appearing undesigned. Assuming both were exposed to natural effects after , how do you determine first which is designed and the differences in complexity and specificity between them?
Cornelius:
ReplyDeleteIndeed, evolution’s proof texts are always religious.
And you keep claiming this even though you have been shown heaps of examples when this is not the case. That sure makes the paragraph you wrote below the above quote:
I’m not sure which is more disgusting, evolution’s hypocrisy or its self-promotion. Evolutionists proclaim their religious lies and hypocrisy as though the world will be impressed. And we hear it again and again.
seem a tad ... disgusting, hypocritic, self-promoting. A religious lie. And we hear it again and again...
Good going, Cornelius!
Scott's restaurant
ReplyDeletetoday's special Hot Potato
"Can we know how this designer managed to change just the genes he wanted, while leaving the rest unchanged? Can we know what method the designer used to determine exactly which genes to change to get the desired results? Is it possible to know how the designer coordinated all of the results for every organism to end up with the functioning eco-system we observed?"
Red Reader:
ReplyDeleteBut ID makes NO claims about the "designer" and will not.
And it can't. Precisely. So why do you then have the problem you write about next:
So when an evolutionist says that Intelligent Design says "an abstract designer did it", he is displaying willful ignorance which is what he constantly says ID displays.
When an evolutionist says that Intelligent Design says "an abstract designer did it", he sums up how much ID says about the process with which something with specified complexity came about.
I'd note that Deutsch was referring to a passage in his new book The Beginning of Infinity in which he addressed the discovery of a single pre-cambrian rabbit fossil.
ReplyDeleteOne reply, often attributed to Haldane, is that the whole theory would be refuted by the discovery of a single fossilised rabbit in a stratum of Cambrian rock. However, that is misleading. The import of such an observation would depend on what explanations were available under the given circumstances. For instance, misidentifications of fossils, and of strata, have sometimes been made and would have to be ruled out by good explanations before one could call the discovery ‘a fossilised rabbit in Cambrian rock’.
Even given such explanations, what would have been ruled out by the rabbit would not be the theory of evolution itself, but only the prevailing theory of the history of life and geological processes on
Earth. Suppose, for instance, that there was a prehistoric continent, isolated from the others, on which evolution happened several times as fast as elsewhere and that, by convergent evolution, a rabbit-like creature evolved there during the Cambrian era; and suppose that the continents were later connected by a catastrophe that obliterated most of the life on that continent and submerged their fossils. The rabbit-like creature was a rare survivor which went extinct soon afterwards. Given the supposed evidence, that is still an infinitely better explanation than, for instance, creationism or Lamarckism, neither of which gives *any* account of the origin of the apparent knowledge in the rabbit.
So what would refute the Darwinian theory of evolution? Evidence which, in the light of the best available explanation, implies that knowledge came into existence in a different way. For instance, if an organism was observed to undergo only (or mainly) favourable mutations, as predicted by Lamarckism or spontaneous generation, then Darwinism’s ‘random variation’ postulate would be refuted. If organisms were observed to be born with new, complex adaptations – for anything – of which there were no precursors in its parents, then the gradual-change prediction would be refuted and so would Darwinism’s mechanism of knowledge creation. If an organism was born with a complex adaptation that has survival value today, yet was not favoured by selection pressure in its ancestry (say, an ability to detect and use internet weather forecasts to decide when to hibernate), then Darwinism would again be refuted. A fundamentally new explanation would be needed.
In other words, that we wouldn't find any rabbits in the pre-cambrian isn't prophecy. It's a prediction that is dependent on our current best understanding of how geological processes work, the detailed history of continental drift and a number of other parallel explanations for other phenomena. For example, should there be some undiscovered geological process that folded more recent strata over and underneath part of the cambrian-era strata, then we might find such a fossil, yet evolutionary theory would not be falsified. This is why failing to take the underlying explanation into account when evaluating it's predictions represents naive empiricism.
Note: Deutsch included this passage in the following message on the Fabric of Reality list.
Here is what Stephen Jay Gould really said in
ReplyDeletethe Panda's Thumb:
"Thus, the paradox, and the common theme of this trilogy of essays: Our textbooks like to illustrate evolution with examples of optimal design—nearly perfect mimicry of a dead leaf by a butterfly or of a poisonous species by a palatable relative. But ideal design is a lousy argument for evolution, for it mimics the postulated action of an omnipotent creator. Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution—paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. No one understood this better than Darwin. Ernst Mayr has shown how Darwin, in defending evolution, consistently turned to organic parts and geographic distributions that make the least sense. Which brings me to the giant panda and its "thumb."
--- Stephen Jay Gould (The Panda's Thumb).
The bottome line, is that evolution allows us to make sense of both the optimal and the funny "designs" There is nothing of use from the perspective of an "intelligent" designer.
Indeed, the whole notion of "designer" falls flat when we recognize that the real business of science is to figure out processes of origin. No, we do not identify design---ever---we model processes of origin.
Consequently, evolutionary biologists are in the lab and in the field studying biology as it is, armed with the theory of evolution.
Contrast this with intelligent design "theorists" who sit around, engaging in philosophizing, quote mining, and making polemics consisting of out-of-context quotes, and armed only with sarcasm and self-inflicted stupidity to engage in intellectual vandalism.
Excellent, hard hitting post. You are stripping evolution bare of its just so stories to reveal the truth of a world full of intelligent design.
ReplyDeleteWhile the pervayers of scientific corruption (the evolutionists) attempt to flood this blog with trite, irrelevant verbiage, your great science reveals the truth of God's handiwork.
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