avocationist
Posts: 173
Joined: Feb. 2006
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Chris,
| Quote | | You appear to have responded to some of my points in the gay gene thread: |
Disconcerting, wasn't it?
You ask why emergent order of some kind changes the nature of the universe. I guess it all comes down to what we find. But the fine tuning that seems to be turning up just makes this universe a more and more fantastic place. It begins to take more credulity to suppose pure materialism than to suppose consciousness precedes matter, or perhaps that they operate together.
| Quote | | Fair enough, if this is true we should be able to detect it with more than arguments from ignorance. |
From the IDEA site: intelligent design theory is not merely a negative argument against evolution. Intelligent design begins with positive predictions based upon our observational experience of how intelligent designers operates.
| Quote | | Do you have anyone other than Dembski in mind, I think his is the only information based argument I have read, and as applying it to biology relies on IC, it amounts to an argument from ignorance. |
I believe the phrase CSI is his, but others have argued the same or similar points. He was not the first. At least, I don't think he was. I should dig up some. Let me think.
Here is Meyer:
"Experience teaches that information-rich systems … invariable result from intelligent causes, not naturalistic ones. Yet origin-of-life biology has artificially limited its explanatory search to the naturalistic nodes of causation … chance and necessity. Finding the best explanation, however, requires invoking causes that have the power to produce the effect in question. When it comes to information, we know of only one such cause.
"Indeed, in all cases where we know the causal origin of 'high information content,' experience has shown that intelligent design played a causal role."
| Quote | | Fair enough, if this is true we should be able to detect it with more than arguments from ignorance. |
We should have infinite patience for the unknown and unsolved if it relates to NDE, but we should have no patience at all for anything that ID theory has failed to answer up front. Darwin's argument for natural selection was an argument from ignorance, because he was so utterly ignorant of what he was dealing with. So a kid could make up a fairy tale, and that is positive, but if someone says the fairy tale events could not be true, why, it is an argument from ignorance, and incredulity too. And it's negative.
Meyer on the argument from ignorance accusation:
Well, Chris, (wasn't you was it?) all scientific theories are based on inferences from evidence. If we could see everything directly, we wouldn’t need to theorize. And Darwin’s theory is in fact an inference from a number of different classes of evidence. And Darwin justified the theory not because he could make observable predictions in the laboratory – after all he was trying to reconstruct the distant past – instead he justified it because it provided a better explanation of the evidenced than the main competitor hypothesis, and that’s precisely how the theory of intelligent design is formed, framed, and justified. We argue that our theory provides a better explanation of some of the critical pieces of evidence of biology, namely the irreducibly complex molecular machines and circuits that we seen in cells and the presence of this informational software that drives everything in the cell as it’s embedded in the DNA molecule.
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Well, what you’re getting at is that our argument is an argument from ignorance, but it’s not an argument from ignorance, it’s based on the evidence that has been discovered of the complexity in the cell, the information-bearing properties in particular, but it’s also based on what we know about it takes to build informational systems. That in our experience, our repeated and uniform experience, intelligence is always involved in the production of information. So when we find information in the living system, the most natural inference to draw is that there was an intelligent source. Now that form of reasoning happens to be precisely the form of reasoning that is always used in the historical sciences, where our present knowledge of the cause and effect structure of the world guides our judgment as to what is the most likely explanation of what happened in the past.
| Quote | | Does that happen? Im not to up on this, I was under the impression it was to do transposons. In any case Demski says this does not count as gsin of CSI. |
I'll need to look into it more because someone else has said there's no evidence for it, and I have run into articles about it more than once, but I'll have to see if they were right. But that was my understanding. I'm not sure what you mean about doing transposons. Genetic shuffling during meiosis? It was not meant as an argument for CSI, just as something pretty impressive, hard to imagine it evolving via luck.
Try this:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-05/sri-tse051805.php
| Quote | | Behe also said he requires a list of every single mutation and the time at which each one occured, I dont expect to see that any time soon. |
Did he really? Because I was not aware of that, and it isn't what I recall reading.
| Quote | | Yes, it is known that mutations in regulation can produce quite different yet viable phenotpyes, which if selectable may appear as a jump in the fossil record. |
What is a mutation in regulation?
| Quote | | Do you mean different transcription factors activate them in the developmental cycle? |
I'm not sure. Wells gives the example of a gene called Distal-less that is involved in generating appendages in 5 phyla (mouse, worm, butterfly, sea urchin and spiny worm) but the structures are not homologous. He also says that gene transplant experiments show that developmental genes from mice and humans can replace their counterparts in flies. So this indicates that genes do not control structure, but something else.
He quotes Gavin de Beer: "Because homology implies community of descent from...a common ancestor it might be thought that genetics would proovide the key to the problem of homology. This is where the worst shock of all is encountered...[because] characters controlled by identical genes are not necessarily homologous...[and] homologous structures need not be controlled by identical genes."
Says the Crevo guy: If homologies are continually found outside the expected evolutionary tree, then it can't be said that homologies provide evidence for evolution.
and
| Quote | But first, let's take note of why evolutionists don't think that convergent evolution is a problem for them. They believe that there are perfectly valid explanations other than evolution for homology. The main one they point to is environmental selective pressures which select the same mutations across two lineages. There are a number of problems with this stance:
* If evolutionists agree that there are other possibilities for the origin of homologies than common descent, then they should also agree with us that this makes the use of homologies as evidence of common descent null and void, since homology can be just as much evidence of other mechanisms.
* The idea that the same set of beneficial mutations can occur randomly twice is astronomically low. First of all, the chances of getting one beneficial mutation is astronomically low. The chances of finding a sequence from point A to point B with all containing beneficial or at least non-lethal configurations is astronomically low. The chances of two different organisms finding the same configuration from the same random space is even more astronomically low. |
| Quote | | As an example John Davison published a paper in the journal of theoretical biology, it goes over a lot of data and describes a potential mechanism. Im really not sure what ID has that it could publish at this point. |
I think it is not quite the case that there have been no research proposals or papers, but it isn't a serious drawback for me. One thing is that they may come. Another is that ID is just another supposition like Darwinism, but in the real world, research will go on just the same. Same data, different spin.
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Furthermore, I actually respect him as a fairly spiritually advanced person. See, in my weird view of things, one's professed beliefs or lack thereof has only a little to do with one's spiritual life. 
