Henry J
Posts: 5786
Joined: Mar. 2005
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| Quote | | I've been doing just that - and will continue to do so. Have you ever tried it? |
I'm not the one accusing 100,000 scientists of clinging to unsupported conclusions.
| Quote | | You've got to be kidding! So, if we didn't know bricks, and we didn't know what humans do with them, we'd never be able to know that a perfectly square stack was not the result of natural forces? |
I didn't say "never". Somebody who had never encountered stacks of block shaped things would need more information before being certain what stacked the blocks, although they'd probably strongly suspect human involvement. But that isn't relevant to whether life forms evolved or not.
| Quote | | I am [looking at overall pattern]. Are you? |
Have you counted the times I've mentioned nested hierarchies, geographic distributions, and other such things? Those are the reasons scientists accept the general principles in the theory of evolution. Pointing to things that haven't yet been resolved won't change that.
| Quote | | Yes, that can be demonstrated to be true - outside of nature and usually with fairly narrow selective criteria. But, is such a mechanism capable of organizing the systems within life? That's the big question. |
Yes, and the people who've made careers of studying the matter have given their conclusion: no reason to think it couldn't have, no other mechanisms as candidates, the observed patterns are compatible with current theory.
Other mechanisms would probably produce distinct patterns that wouldn't be compatible with the current theory, although one does need to know what the proposed mechanism is before one can be certain of that. Consider what human engineers would do if designing life forms - they'd be copying and borrowing features from all over whenever designing a new type, just like they do with cars or computers. Ergo no unambiguous nested hierarchy in that case.
| Quote | | It has to be possible literally trillions of times. Now that's "luck" if you ask me. |
Trillions? I don't know that the number of distinct features is that high. Whether it's luck or not isn't the question.
| Quote | | That's fine. What you did was not science though - because you didn't put your pathway to the test. |
Put it to what test? If you mean seeing that entire progression in a species in a laboratory, that's highly unlikely outside of computer simulations. How a thing like that is tested is to infer what we are likely to see if that is in general how things happened: lots of different versions of eyes in various species, with different sets of features, different levels of complexity, and related to each other via the same nested hierarchy as the other features. Also different versions of the proteins and genes involved, with those also matching the nested hierarchy.
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