N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (GaryGaulin @ Aug. 16 2015,13:47) | | Quote (N.Wells @ Aug. 15 2015,18:48) | | This is bad for your hypothesis. |
The only hypothesis that was being discussed was yours.
Claiming that it's somehow mine was another deception.
I am still curious though as to why you and others keep the hoax going even though it has been made clear that "The Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve Does Not Refute Intelligent Design":
http://www.ideacenter.org/content........507 |
The article that you cite makes a bunch of stupid mistakes and does a poor job of discussing the issues, so I am surprised to see someone cite it in an attempt to support their arguments.
Point 1:
First, you and the article you cite are lying about IDists not primarily being creationists ("Smith also purposefully mislabels ID as a form of creationism"). Although some IDists are not fundamentalist creationist christians and most claim not to be pushing a religious agenda, nonetheless most IDists are indeed creationists (sensu lato and in many cases also sensu stricto) and they are trying (but failing) to disguise their support for faith in the bible and the christian god. Possibly other than Gary, they essentially all favor an intelligent designer who is responsible for creating all things biological, so they are by the broad meaning of the word, creationists. The main IDist textbook republished a creationist text except for such minor tweaks as a global search and replace of "design proponent" for "creationist", leading to one notorious vestigial remnant of "cdesign proponentsists". Our judiciary has decided that IDists are mostly creationists trying to fly under the radar: in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, United States District Judge John E. Jones III also ruled that intelligent design is not science and is essentially religious in nature. The major ID website (UD) can't go more than a few posts without someone letting some christianity out of the bag. Major IDists are on record as admitting their religious motivations and goals: Philip Johnson one of the founders of ID, has said said,
| Quote | | "This isn't really, and never has been, a debate about science. It's about religion and philosophy." |
In the foreword to Creation, Evolution, & Modern Science (2000) Johnson says, | Quote | | "The intelligent design movement starts with the recognition that 'In the beginning was the Word,' and 'In the beginning God created.' Establishing that point isn't enough, but it is absolutely essential to the rest of the gospel message." |
| Quote | | If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this,...We call our strategy the "wedge". |
| Quote | | "So the question is: 'How to win?' That's when I began to develop what you now see full-fledged in the 'wedge' strategy: 'Stick with the most important thing' —the mechanism and the building up of information. Get the Bible and the Book of Genesis out of the debate because you do not want to raise the so-called Bible-science dichotomy. Phrase the argument in such a way that you can get it heard in the secular academy and in a way that tends to unify the religious dissenters. |
| Quote | | the next question that occurs to you is, "Well, where might you get truth?" ...I start with John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word." In the beginning was intelligence, purpose, and wisdom. The Bible had that right and the materialist scientists are deluding themselves. |
and | Quote | | "We are taking an intuition most people have [the belief in God] and making it a scientific and academic enterprise. We are removing the most important cultural roadblock to accepting the role of God as creator." |
| Quote | | "Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit, so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." |
William Dembski's clarification, | Quote | In writing The End of Christianity today, I would also underscore three points: (1) As a biblical inerrantist, I accept the full verbal inspiration of the Bible and the conventional authorship of the books of the Bible. Thus, in particular, I accept Mosaic authorship of Genesis (and of the Pentateuch) and reject the Documentary Hypothesis. (2) Even though I introduce in the book a distinction between kairos (God’s time) and chronos (the world’s time), the two are not mutually exclusive. In particular, I accept that the events described in Genesis 1- 11 happened in ordinary space-time, and thus that these chapters are as historical as the rest of the Pentateuch. (3) I believe that Adam and Eve were real people, that as the initial pair of humans they were the progenitors of the whole human race, that they were specially created by God, and thus that they were not the result of an evolutionary process from primate or hominid ancestors.
...................
Yet, in a brief section on Genesis 4-11, I weigh in on the Flood, raising questions about its universality, without adequate study or reflection on my part. Before I write on this topic again, I have much exegetical, historical, and theological work to do. In any case, not only Genesis 6-9 but also Jesus in Matthew 24 and Peter in Second Peter seem clearly to teach that the Flood was universal. As a biblical inerrantist, I believe that what the Bible teaches is true and bow to the text, including its teaching about the Flood and its universality. |
Dembski has also said | Quote | | (2007, Family Home Life) "I believe God created the world for a purpose. The Designer of intelligent design is, ultimately, the Christian God." |
and | Quote | | "Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." |
Point 2: You bought up the topic, and suggested that there was a lag in transmission between the right and left recurrent laryngeal nerves and that the giraffe's left recurrent laryngeal nerve did not constitute a poor design. You ascribed to us the corollary hypothesis in words of your choosing rather than ours, so we are discussing your hypotheses.
Now, you are missing the distinction that NoName makes between "bad design" and "no evidence of design" (contrary to how you always describe the situation, the latter is where many of our arguments lie). Nonetheless, contrary to NoName above, I do think that there are some anatomical feature that constitute poor designs, when compared to the Paley-school insistence on perfection in nature and the creationist position of creation by an omniscient and omnipotent deity who, they believe, proclaimed of his creation that "it was good..... it was good........ it was good.......... it was good.......... it was good....... it was good......... and God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good." I do argue that there are many undoubted instances of crappy, WTF design that, if actually designed by a creator/designer clearly argue against an omniscient and omnipotent designer and a perfect creator, indeed against even a marginally competent designer. However, my arguments certainly do not prevent someone from using nature as an argument for a crappy, sadistic, malicious, incompetent, twit of a designer.
As evidence for either a malicious and sadistic designer or natural evolution, I would cite cecidoymiidean gall midges, and also prions, mad cow disease, malaria, penises in the cat family:
http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static.....3-9.gif
various traumatic insertion mating methods in bedbugs, seed beetles, sea slugs, and cephalopods such as the Dana octopus squid and the greater hooked squid,
Tapeworm (and note the evolutionary intepretations)
http://www.livescience.com/3311-fo....ed.html
Ichneumon wasp larvae (which put Darwin off the idea of a perfect creation)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v....LWyNcAs
Cymothoa exigua:
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.p....-tongue
Ophiocordyceps (google it as Google images)
https://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203.....ion.htm
Botfly larvae
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v....YGKtnt4
Filariasis:
http://i.imgur.com/UJhGF.j....hGF.jpg
http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-p....ntiasis
Thelazia
https://eyepathologist.com/disease....=355050
Guinea worm:
http://www.cartercenter.org/resourc....i-3.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v....jLgu7wM
Hookworm:
http://www.cdc.gov/parasit....sionals
Someone who could create an ecology could easily design one without parasites (and without the mating systems mentioned above). If you must have a predator to "cull the herd and keep it healthy", just add a few more lions and wolves. Parasites are simply unbridled pointless misery of no value to anything or anyone except for the parasite itself. However, evolution can explain why the following organisms exist, although they are inconsistent with a perfect creation.
The whole idea behind natural selection is that whatever works for each evolutionary lineage during the lifetime of each member gets kept, and everything else is irrelevant. Natural selection should lead to parasitic lifestyle strategies time and time again. There's no particular need for predators either: a stable ecology of intelligent plants, or plants and intelligent herbivores if we are willing to ignore cruelty to plants, could be made simply by dropping fertility to replacement rates.
Point 3:
The article that you cite makes several bad ad hoc arguments regarding the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
First, a quick review. Human embryos, like fish embryos, fairly early on in development create a series of pharyngeal pouches. Each pouch develops an artery, a major nerve (a cranial nerve), and some cartilage and muscle. In fish the pouches develop openings and become gill slits, the first arch becomes the oral jaws, and the second becomes the hyoid and jaw support. The rest simply become gills, each with an arch of bones to flare open the gills, an artery to bring blood to the gills, and a nerve to control the muscles that flare the bony arches. In humans the pouches never progress to gill slits with openings, but gradually disappear. However, the arches of bones, the arteries and the nerves get modified and become a variety of important features. The arches develop in staggered fashion, rely on homebox genes for development, and involve features that do not require neural crest cell involvement, so they are thought to harken back to very early stages in the evolution leading to fish.
Details for the next part can be found in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.......al_arch
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyng....pharyng
However, the short version is that the first arch becomes the front of the jaws (all the jaws in mammals) and parts of the front of the face, while the second becomes the back of the face including the back of the jaws (but the outer two earbones in mammals). The third arch becomes below the back of the mouth, and the fourth becomes the thyroid and epiglottic cartilages of the larynx. (Note how we are progressively working our way down into the throat.) The nerve for the fourth arch becomes the superior laryngeal nerves of the vagus nerve, and the right and left 4th aortic arch arteries become the subclavian and aortic arch arteries respectively. The fifth arch disappears during development. The sixth arch becomes the bottom of the larynx, the inferior laryngeal nerves, and the pulmonary artery. Thus the inferior laryngeal nerve passes posterior to the aortic and subclavian arteries. At the embryo stage, and in fish, all these nerves and arteries are laid out progressively in a nice tight series. However, as the heart gets bigger and descends into the chest in later vertebrates, the aortic arch descends with it (functioning best near the heart), and takes the left branch of the inferior laryngeal nerve with it, ending up in a ridiculously long detour in giraffes. Even without the part of the story involving the giraffe, this is an insanely bizarre way to develop jaws and structures of the throat and upper chest that make sense only in terms of an evolutionary history.
One of the bad arguments in the article you cite is that branches of the inferior (left) recurrent laryngeal nerve go off to the cardiac plexus, and mucus membrane glands in various parts of the esophagus and trachea, so it is necessary for the nerve to be routed past the heart. This argument fails on multiple levels. First, even the right inferior nerve is recurrent, so it takes too long a route and must reverse course without needing to detour down to the heart: branching off in a more logical position could have prevented this. Second, the recurrent laryngeal nerves are branches of the vagus nerve which is primarily responsible for the heart and most of the organs, so having involvement of the left recurrent laryngeal nerve as well is not so strange. However, the latter connections are filaments only (hence, not major), and the SUPERIOR laryngeal nerve also connects through to heart nerves (the exterior branch to the superior cardiac nerve) and to the inferior nerve as well, so things are less than ideal all around. The article may mix up chicken-and-egg ordering here: as nerves develop (evolutionarily and embryologically) they tend to branch out and connect to nearby organs and muscles and so forth, so the connections may now be locked in but began deep in the ancestry of tetrapods because the nerve was in the vicinity of the heart. The main failure of the article lies in assuming that the only alternatives are either a direct connection or the loop around the aorta and that the connections to the heart and lower throat preclude the direct route and require the bizarre and problematic route of the RLN down to the heart and back. A conceptually easy third alternative would be for the nerve to the larynx to branch off early and go directly to the larynx, and for the filaments reaching to the heart and the esophagus to branch off at some point and head down directly without taking the rest of the nerve with it. In fact, almost any more straightforward development of the bones and cartilage from the jaws through the ears to the larynx would make for a markedly more sensible design and production. Regardless, the third alternative avoids either branch of the nerve being recurrent, and it avoids the potential problems of creating a time lag between arrival of signals of the different-length superior and inferior nerves with regard to the larynx, and moreover it obviates the need for the jury-rigged fix of differential degrees of myelin sheathing to avoid difficulties in coordinating signals that arrive at different times.
The article argues that because a small % of people (0.3 to 1%) have the right recurrent laryngeal nerve take a shortcut to the pharynx, such a route is available via mutations and would have happened by now if the longer route was really a bad design rather than a necessary one. There are a few instances that look like the left nerve is the one taking the short-cut, but as these occur in people with left-side / right side reversals (heart on the right side of the chest and such like), so these are just more instances of short-cuts by the right nerve. The article tries to bolster its point by saying that the shorter route for the right nerve is typically accompanied by difficulties in swallowing and breathing, suggesting that the shorter route is actually the worse alternative. However, this argument does not follow logically. Instances of short-cutting are always accompanied by an abnormal growth of the right subclavian artery from the aortic arch on the left side. If the abnormal growth forces the realignment (or even if it is just an inevitably but passively associated feature) then no simple, unproblematic, genetic change is available. Whether the abnormal artery is is the cause of the displacement or merely an associated condition, it does not follow that the direct route was always the worse alternative, just that alternative routes can no longer be accessed at this stage in evolution by a simple problem-free and genetically-based redirection of the nerve. The absence of direct left-branch rerouting (contrary to what Chris B. said over at Sandwalk) suggests that that branch can no longer be rerouted either. Although direct problem-free routes may no longer be accessible, clearly in the fish stage when all the features under discussion were much closer together it would have made no difference whether the nerve lay anterior or posterior to the artery in the fifth arch. Also, note that an elongated left recurrent nerve is not free of its own problems, such as Recurrent Laryngeal Neuropathy in horses http://www.ed.ac.uk/polopol....rln.pdf
Overall, we see a system that is locked in to constraints that are contingent on inherited ancestral conditions, rather than being well designed from the start.
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