Dr.GH
Posts: 2333
Joined: May 2002
|
It has long been clear to me that the ID "argument" is unsupportable in an environment of open inquiry. They must either hide behind "moderation," or abandon any pretence of being scientific and go for purely political. Baptist YECs are more honest.
That said, it ought to be naively obvious that genetic novelty may be maladaptive under one set of environmental and adaptive under another. Thus, under conditions of a dynamic environment, the contribution of a genetic novelty to an organism’s fitness will occasionally shift from neutral or even mildly negative to positive or even strongly positive.
I have yet to see any way that the “front loading” argument can be distinguished from the instance of an environmental change resulting in improved fitness for some organism. The millions of extinction events also demonstrate the reverse condition. If there was ever any question in my mind as to the possible validity of “front loading” it would perish on the rocks of extinction.
The last time I engaged Nelson Alonso in a discussion (almost a year ago on ARN), I found that he was plagiarizing text from a 7th Day Adventist site. What locked the case was that the SDA text had miss referenced an original article in Nature, missing identifiying the author's name and making a page number error dutifully copied by Nelson. Nor did the original Nature article even support the SDA/Alonso argument. I would not have bothered to run a search engin check if I had not first made an effort to locate the original 1950s Nature article as referenced by the SDA/Alonso argument. As SDAs are the source of our 20th C YEC affliction, I would deduce from Nelson's parroting of their text as indicative of a YEC perspective.
--------------
"Science is the horse that pulls the cart of philosophy."
L. Susskind, 2004 "SMOLIN VS. SUSSKIND: THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE"
|
