N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote | | Well I remember events from before last Thursday so there you go….. This argument just as easily throws all of science into question. How can you disprove the Omphalos hypothesis? |
As NoName said, your apparent memories provide no protection against them having been created, along with everything else, last Thursday. The Omphalos logic would indeed throw all science into question, except that (a) we have no way of testing it, (b) science works just fine without worrying about it, and ( c) we don't have any evidence for it (not that we know all the forms such evidence might take). Thus we ignore the possibility completely and leave the topic outside science. Laplace said about divine intervention, "I have no need of that hypothesis", and that has held up perfectly since then. It's impossible to disprove a deity, but it's very easy not to need one, and there's no evidence for one that does not beg the desired conclusions.
| Quote | But I noticed you said nothing about Ken Miller’s quote. Do you accept that evolution exhibits form-function design? That evolution is a design process? Is what Miller says accurate? ............................
Can you not see Miller’s point that many religious anti-evolutionists in the US and around the world subscribe to Santorum’s views, which is based on the misunderstanding that evolution is indeed a “totalist” random and accidental process, the implication of which render’s life meaningless? This misguidedness implies illusory morality. Miller is making a call to action in order to help provide clarity for these people by reframing the debate about design. To emphasize to the public evolution does not prescribe morality as illusion. That even if the sense of good and evil did socially evolve, this doesn’t preclude an ID agency handing down morality via this process. That evolution exhibits design and is non-random at some levels.
I don’t see many evolutionists emphasizing these points in debates with IDers or creationists. I share Miller’s assessment that until they do, IDers/creationists will continue to back us into a corner. I would agree that religion is not an exclusive source of morality, like NoName mentioned in a previous post, rather religion is mostly a “target” of morality as it was put. However, many religious, anti-evolutionists in the US I suspect, don’t see it this way. Miller’s proposal offers them a different perspective.
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I think Miller is spot on. If you accept as Miller says that there is exquisite correlation between form and function in nature, then how can one not interpret this as a form of design; one that deserves emphasis? Of course evolution is not perfect showing many improvisations (e.g. optic nerve fibers in front of the vertebrate retina creating a blind spot), but it is design nonetheless (i.e. ”jerry rigging”). |
I don't feel at all responsible for Miller's views on design and the deity. Although he holds his views sincerely, they strike me as unjustified words that serve only to provide comfort to those afflicted by religion. Yes, biology has much of the appearance of design. However, instances of really bad design and downright malicious design by almost any recent human standard are far more abundant than most people care to contemplate: viz. Cecidomyian gall midges, the abundance of parasites, cat penises, incomplete human adaptation to bipedalism, etc., etc., etc. Evolution does a really good job of explaining all these things, while the design hypothesis leaves one with a deeply repulsive and/or incompetent designer. Religion has not been a source of unalloyed good and morality, and its posited designer has not been competent and praiseworthy, and I'd rather go forward on that basis than proferring pablum and false palliatives to make the religious feel more comfortable.
Yes, the religious are in the majority, which presents political problems for science. Yes, Miller's views would lubricate acceptance of science. However, I don't think they are honest. Calling biology "design" as opposed to "the appearance of design" is done only so that one can elide from "biology shows evidence of design" to "ergo, there must have been a Designer". From Linnaeus on, where science has led us is to the position that evolutionary processes create much of the appearance of design by fitting form to function, within the constraints of branching lineages of related organisms. That's it, period, end of story.
| Quote | | Really? How does one explain the myriad instances of convergent evolution? There are common form-function solutions that appear again and again to solve organismal fitness problems. Physics and chemistry make predictable forms in living and non-living matter according to constructural laws. There are always variations but many common foundational forms are widespread. Am I misunderstanding something here? |
Yes, there's a lot of impressive convergence, but this supports evolution, not design. Designs don't converge, they import innovations wholesale from unrelated lineages. Car horns share identical features regardless of which brand of car they are on, but ceratopsian dinosaur horns and cow horns show different ancestries. Convergence in function in life does not always imply identical forms rather than equivalent forms (horses, antelopes, llamas, kangaroos), but even when it does, above the level of prokaryotes it always, always, always leaves telltale differences as a vestige of their different origins and different evolutionary pathways. Ichthyosaurs, dolphins, and some large fish share a lot in common, but their genes are different, only the cetaceans have hair and milk, only the fish have lateral line organs, only the ichthyosaurs have the downward bend of the spine into the lower lobe of the tail. Details of the bones of cetaceans are clearly mammalian (three inner ear bones; only one bone in the jaw; a mammalian jaw joint), while details of the bones of ichthyosaurs are clearly reptilian (multiple bones in the jaw, only one inner ear bone; a reptilian jaw joint). Unlike actual wolves, the Tasmanian wolf has a pouch, epipubic bones, two holes in the palate, extra molars, twinned hypocunulid and entoconid cusps on the lower molars, an extra upper incisor, incomplete dental replacement, paired vaginas, and an inflected jaw angle at the back of the skull, and they share all these features with other marsupials and not with placental mammals. Creationists have pointed to the tremendous similarities of wolves and marsupial wolves to argue for design and against evolution, noting that medical students at Oxford were unable to tell dog skulls from thylacine skulls. This speaks more to medical students not yet being competent comparative anatomists than to the skulls being identical. If they had been designed, the better versions in each case would have been imported to the other lineage, through licensing or copying.
| Quote | | Yes and what dictates the design of effective and efficient structures? The selective pressures of evolution. The fact that evolution selects for structures that, with time, are better and better at allowing specific functions so that organism can survive has “design process” written all over it in my book. |
All that we gain by such views of design as yours and Miller's is confusion with actual design and conflation from "design" to Designer.
| Quote | | I agree for such a discovery to be scientifically useful, we would have to know more attributes about any potential EvoIDer. But let me ask you a simple, straight forward, hypothetical question? If the existential question of an ultimate creator COULD be scientifically answered, wouldn’t you think it would be a worthwhile endeavor even if it didn’t add anything useful to science? |
Yes, but (a) it cannot be entirely answered scientifically, and (b) to the extent that it can be answered, it has been answered in the negative. If you want to consider it further, by all means go ahead and waste your time, but science shouldn't be told to go out and investigate phlogistons just because a bunch of people still strongly believe in phlogiston theory and who knows, they might be right.
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