Pharyngula

Posted by: Les Lane | August 31, 2007 9:43 AM

When I see the name Jonathan Wells I expect Unification Church apologetics. What else could one expect?

Posted by: Bronze Dog | August 31, 2007 11:19 AM

Lately, I've been growing more and more convinced that there are mustache-twirling villains out there who do evil for evil's sake. They're usually defending crap like Wells via misrepresentation, flagrant lying, etcetera.

Posted by: Jim | September 2, 2007 5:13 PM

When we want to know if unguided Darwinian mechanisms caused fish to evolve into men (by way of amphibians, reptiles, and some unknown mammal), we're hardly enlightened by Majerus's peppered moth research. Showing (as Majerus apparently did) that Darwinian mechanisms can cause minor adaptive changes in the coloration of moths doesn't also show that those mechanisms can do the kind of major creative work needed to produce all of life's diversity and complexity. Majerus's work doesn't, for example, show that Darwinian mechanisms brought peppered moths into existence in the first place. His claim that adaptive changes in the coloration of peppered moths "prove" Darwinian evolution can be persuasive only to those who - for philosophical reasons - are already committed to the "truth" of Darwinism. Skeptics are entitled to ask for more compelling evidence.

Posted by: Stanton | September 2, 2007 5:34 PM

Jim, do realize that Majerus works with moths, not hominid fossils.
Do also realize that Majerus is using moth populations to demonstrate how various traits (peppered, more peppered and black colorings) spread through populations, not how humans are descended from fish.
Do also realize that if you wish to be enlightened on human/mammalian evolution, please read books concerning human/mammalian paleontology.

Posted by: windy | September 2, 2007 7:11 PM

That's why Majerus's claim that his peppered moth research "proves" Darwinian evolution is utterly bogus.

The spread of adaptive variants in a population *is* Darwinian evolution, dumbass.

Posted by: windy | September 2, 2007 9:29 PM

Listen Jim, Jin or whatever your name is, ways to find the information you ask for were already suggested to you. Since you do not take friendly suggestions but continue to whine, I conclude that you might indeed be a dumbass.

As you may recall, windy, Darwin called his masterpiece "The Origin of Species," not "The Spread of Adaptive Variants in a Population." Darwinism purports to explain much more than the spread of adaptive variants.

Do you think it's possible that a theory might concern both small events and large events? And when you start explaining something, you might want to look at the small stuff first?

But maybe you are right, it's quite a leap of faith. Sort of like saying that rolling metal balls on an inclined plane is a step to explaining how the planets move! Wouldn't that be silly?

Posted by: Jim | September 3, 2007 9:17 AM

Stanton: "Jim, you're an idiot." And (with no trace of irony): "If you weren't so arrogantly moronic..."

I wonder what it is about Darwinism that causes its proponents - with few exceptions, in my experience - to arrogantly turn to namecalling, ridicule, and condescension in defending their beloved theory. Such argumentation is the refuge of those who have few (if any) good arguments (unless, of course, they're simply insufferable asses who are incapable of respecting those who hold opinions different from theirs). It's annoying that Darwinists resort to such childish argumentation with such regularity, but I don't discourage it. If they want to advertise the bankruptcy of their position, who am I to stop them?

In any event, I quite agree that Majerus's research - to the extent that it proved anything - simply proved that Darwinian mechanisms are capable of producing microevolution (or minor adaptive changes). But his claim was that he had proved "evolution," by which he obviously meant Darwin's theory (in its modern form). My criticism was to the effect that proving the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to produce microevolution (which is accepted by virtually everyone, including creationists and ID theorists) does not prove the more grandiose macroevolutionary claims of Darwinists - such as the claim that Darwinian mechanisms caused men to evolve from fish. Thus Majerus's claim was grossly overblown.

It should also be noted that even if it's true that the fossil record shows a clear evolutionary history leading from fish to men (a debatable point), the fossils (like gene comparisons) are entirely silent on the mechanism(s) of evolution. It may surprise you to learn that ID theorists don't dispute that evolution (understood as biological change over time, or as common descent, or as descent with modification) has occurred. They instead take issue with the claim that Darwinian mechanisms (primarily random mutations and natural selection) suffice to account for ALL of life's diversity and complexity.

With regard to my stupidity, let the record show that I'm a summa cum laude graduate in civil engineering and a lapsed member of Mensa with an IQ to the north of 150. I'm widely read in both evolutionary theory and ID theory. I've found Darwinism to be a satisfactory explanation for microevolution, but an inadequate explanation for macroevolution (i.e., the emergence of biological novelty in the form of new organs, new organisms, new biological systems, etc.). There's no chance that Darwinists will persuade me that I'm wrong by calling me stupid, although they do tell me a lot about the kind of persons they are.

Posted by: Stanton | September 3, 2007 11:57 AM

Really, if there is no evidence for macroevolution as you insist, then how do you explain the appearance of the Honeysuckle Maggot fly, Rhagoletis mendax × zephyria, the London Underground Mosquito, Culex molestans, or the Giant Evening Primrose, Oenothera gigas, species that have been documented as appearing within the last 300 years? How do you explain the hundreds upon hundreds of documented fossil lineages, including the brontotheres, from Eotitanops to Megalocerops, the Pontian Sea cockels from the Miocene, or even the lineage of Eusthenopteron to Panderichthys to Tiktaalik to Acanthostega to Ichthyostega?

Posted by: windy | September 3, 2007 12:39 PM

...does not prove the more grandiose macroevolutionary claims of Darwinists - such as the claim that Darwinian mechanisms caused men to evolve from fish. Thus Majerus's claim was grossly overblown.

Nonsense. Obviously he meant it was a proof of evolution among countless others, not the proof of evolution. If you think Majerus offers moths as the only necessary proof of evolution, I agree with Stanton that you are not nearly as well-read in the subject as you think.

They instead take issue with the claim that Darwinian mechanisms (primarily random mutations and natural selection) suffice to account for ALL of life's diversity and complexity.

So the answer is to make the system even more complex by assuming a designer? How do you propose to account for the designer's existence?

I've found Darwinism to be a satisfactory explanation for microevolution, but an inadequate explanation for macroevolution (i.e., the emergence of biological novelty in the form of new organs, new organisms, new biological systems, etc.)

Do you think the emergence of humans from earlier apes required a designer? No new organs or biological systems there.

Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | September 3, 2007 1:04 PM

Henry Gee (chief science writer for Nature, and an evolutionist) may have aptly observed: "The intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection though ancestry and descent....To take a line of fossils and claim they represent a lineage is not a scientific hypothesis that can be tested, but an assertion that carries the same validity as a bedtime story..."

However, you have also failed to prove that you are the same species as either of your grandmothers, unless one of them conceived a child by you. That may be another kind of bedtime story... but not trivial": how do you prove that we are the same species as a Cromagnon 5,000 years ago? That is, in terms of the species definition of ability to sexually reproduce without absolute barrier. We make a chain of inferences, and accept that we are the same species as our parents, grandparents, and so for n generations for some large value of n.

Posted by: windy | September 3, 2007 1:34 PM

That was a figure of speech, Jim, not a claim that Majerus didn't use the definite article. Did you also notice "ONE of the most visually impacting and easily understood examples of evolution in action?" But don't take my word for it, email Majerus and ask him if he meant moths prove man-to-fish evolution.

ID theory is about the detection of actual (or intelligent) design in biological systems;

How's that working out for them?

there is no inferential trail from the detection of design to the identity of the designer.

Why not?

Posted by: Stanton | September 3, 2007 6:00 PM

Jim, if the only reasons why you dismiss macroevolution is the miscontruing of an entomologist's figure of speech AND the infinitesimally idiotic creationist's stalking horse of "there is no mechanism for macroevolution," I stand firm in my calling you an idiot.
In fact, I'm wondering whether or not MENSA's standards have been deteriorating.
You also didn't respond to my examples of various species that appeared within the last 300 years, either.

Posted by: Stanton | September 3, 2007 9:33 PM

Actually, my mother taught me to always assume that Creationists and IDiots are going to give me bullshit in place of facts, and that people who bullshit me are undeserving of any courtesy.
I've also been taught to be extremely suspicious of the quotes Creationists and ID supporters whip out, as both are infamously notorious for quote-mining.
And as such, your quote-mining does not convince me. Would it be at all possible if you can explain to me, in detail and in your own words, why I should disregard the extreme anatomical similarities and geological placement of brontothere fossils that suggest that the dog-sized Eotitanops is the ancestor of the elephant-sized Brontotherium? Certainly, such a request would not be beyond the capability of a MENSA-caliber intellect, right?
Also, please explain why, if there is no traceable mechanism for macroevolution, scientists have been able to recreate the Honeysuckle Maggot Fly in the laboratory by breeding its parent species, the Snowberry and Blueberry Maggot Flies, as well as the Western Sunflower, Helianthus anomalus by breeding its parent species H. annuus and H. petiolaris? Why, then, are we able to deduce that the London Underground Mosquito, Culex molestans is descended from the European Mosquito, Culex pipiens?
Why was it that Hugo De Vries was able to observe the sudden appearance of the Giant Evening Primrose Oenothera gigas in a patch of Lamarck's Evening Primroses, O. lamarckiana, one spring, and why were we able to determine that O. gigas' genome was doubled that of O. lamarckiana?
If there is no traceable mechanism for macroevolution, then why have we been able to determine that bread wheat is a polyploid hybrid of at least 6 different wild wheats? Why are we able to determine that domesticated strawberries are octoploid mutants of wild European strawberries?
Furthermore, how do you explain the existence of ring species complexes? According to your logic, do the California Ensatina salamanders don't exist?
I've also noticed that you've never proposed how macroevolution can not occur. Do realize that biologists state that macroevolution occurs through the accumulation of multiple traits in individuals of a population with each passing generation until the current population X is different enough from the original parent population E that the two populations are considered two distinct species. Creationists have long alleged that this can not occur because there is a barrier that prevents this from happening. However, creationists have never ever elucidated what this barrier is, thus enabling them to dismiss whatever contrary evidence is brought before them, just like what you're doing now.
There has been one time when creationists tried to define a mechanism, that would be Intelligent Design. However, it's been shot full with so many holes that it makes a rotting fishnet look solid by comparison. Every single example of "intelligently designed systems" that Michael Behe used have been so thoroughly debunked that they've been demolished. Go google "Cilia Evolution," or "Immunoglobin Evolution" and see what turns up.
Do realize that Intelligent Design Theory is not a scientific theory and that its proponents are routinely derided by actual scientists because Intelligent Design proponents A) do not do science, B) have absolutely no interest or motivation in explaining absolutely anything with or about the mechanisms of Intelligent Design, C) do not do science, D) have an agenda that literally calls for the destruction of this country's educational system, and most importantly, E) do not do science.

That, and you still have not demonstrated or explained the logic of how an entomologist's hyperbole can be used to falsify the literal hundreds of libraries' worth of tetrapod fossils.

Posted by: Jim | September 3, 2007 10:45 PM

Stanton: "Actually, my mother taught me to always assume that Creationists and IDiots are going to give me bullshit in place of facts, and that people who bullshit me are undeserving of any courtesy."

Well, if you say your mother taught you to behave like an ass, I won't dispute it. The evidence seems to confirm it.

Stanton: "Would it be at all possible if you can explain to me, in detail and in your own words, why I should disregard the extreme anatomical similarities and geological placement of brontothere fossils that suggest that the dog-sized Eotitanops is the ancestor of the elephant-sized Brontotherium?"

I should think you could figure it out for yourself. Anatomical similarities suggest ancestor/descendant relationships, but they don't confirm them. They certainly don't confirm that the presumed evolution was caused by Darwinian mechanisms (principally, random mutations and natural selection).

Stanton: "please explain why, if there is no traceable mechanism for macroevolution, scientists have been able to recreate the Honeysuckle Maggot Fly in the laboratory by breeding its parent species, the Snowberry and Blueberry Maggot Flies, as well as the Western Sunflower, Helianthus anomalus by breeding its parent species H. annuus and H. petiolaris? Why, then, are we able to deduce that the London Underground Mosquito, Culex molestans is descended from the European Mosquito, Culex pipiens?"

The ability of Darwinian mechanisms to produce new flies from old flies and new mosquitos from old mosquitos is not in dispute. Evolution of that kind might satisfy the arbitrary definition of speciation as the development of
reproductive isolation, but observing it hardly confirms that Darwinian mechanisms caused men to evolve from fish. Neither does it confirm that the mechanisms causing Culex molestans to evolve from Culex pipiens have the ability to cause Culex whatever to evolve into, say, hummingbirds (by way of however many intermediate, transitional forms might be required).

Stanton: "Every single example of 'intelligently designed systems' that Michael Behe used have been so thoroughly debunked that they've been demolished."

Behe's concept of irreducible complexity has been disputed by Darwinists, but it doesn't follow that his concept has been "thoroughly debunked." Kenneth Miller, for example, claims that he's debunked Behe, but he does it by changing the meaning of irreducible complexity. He does a nice job of debunking the straw man he made of Behe's concept, but no sensible person should be persuaded by such intellectual sleight-of-hand. I've read a number of exchanges between Behe and his critics, and I think Behe gets the better end of those exchanges.

Stanton: "Do realize that Intelligent Design Theory is not a scientific theory and that its proponents are routinely derided by actual scientists because Intelligent Design proponents A) do not do science, B) have absolutely no interest or motivation in explaining absolutely anything with or about the mechanisms of Intelligent Design, C) do not do science, D) have an agenda that literally calls for the destruction of this country's educational system, and most importantly, E) do not do science."

Yep. I've heard all of that many times. But having read some two dozen books and numerous essays by design theorists, I know that it's mostly hyperbolic, paranoid nonsense.

Stanton: "That, and you still have not demonstrated or explained the logic of how an entomologist's hyperbole can be used to falsify the literal hundreds of libraries' worth of tetrapod fossils."

Majerus claimed that he had proven evolution, meaning that his peppered moth research proved that Darwinian mechanisms account for all of life's diversity and complexity. I've neither claimed nor suggested that his hyperbolic claim falsifies the tetrapod fossils (whatever that means). The fossil record, whose most prominent features are (as noted by Stephen Jay Gould) stasis (meaning that species show no directional change during their tenure on earth) and sudden appearance (meaning that species appear in the fossil record all at once and fully formed, with no evidence of gradual transformation from precursor species)
argues against the Darwinian tale of macroevolution proceeding by way of the gradual accumulation of a lot of microevolution more readily than it argues for it.

Posted by: Stanton | September 3, 2007 10:56 PM

So, it is beyond your MENSA-caliber intellect to explain why you insist that brontothere fossils do not suggest that Eotitanops evolved into Brontotherium.
Then again, it is painfully obvious that you know crap about biology or paleontology. If "Darwinian Mechanisms" can not account for the diversity of life, then what does?
Do you honestly expect us to abandon a theory without replacing it with a superior theory simply because you, yourself, are incapable of wrapping your brain around it?
Can you show us examples of Intelligent Design Theory in action? The Discovery Institute has not.

Posted by: Graculus | September 3, 2007 11:16 PM

Sorry, but I'm not going to do your homework for you. If you want to criticize ID without bothering to learn anything about it (aside from the gross distortions of ID peddled by the likes of PZ Myers), that's your business.

Projecting like a Cineplex.

You have to ante up before you can play the game.

Here's the ante.

-Define "irreducible complexity" in objective terms.
-Produce a metric that can measure it.

After that, we can play.

Posted by: Stanton | September 4, 2007 12:04 AM

Anyone else notice how Jim, with his MENSA-caliber intellect, has not bothered to demonstrate any scientific experiments done to further the study of Intelligent Design?
Then again, it may be far too much to ask of him, given as how the Discovery Institute has been wholly incapable of doing so, either, and that Jim is incapable of explaining why brontothere fossils do not suggest Eotitanops evolving into Brontotherium despite extreme anatomical similarities between the two genera, and between all of the rest of the genera in that family.

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 10:17 AM

Graculus: "Define 'irreducible complexity' in objective terms."

Since biochemist Michael Behe developed the concept, I'll let him define it: "By irreducible complexity I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."

Graculus: "Produce a metric that can measure it."

OK. The irreducible complexity of a biological system can be assessed by performing knock-out experiments. For example, Scott Minnich (a Univ. of Idaho microbiologist whose research is centered on the genetics of flagellar biosynthesis, on type III protein secretion in Gram-negative pathogens, and on novel strategies for vaccine production) performed knock-out experiments that demonstrated the irreducible complexity of the bacterial flagellum.

Stanton: "So, it is beyond your MENSA-caliber intellect to explain why you insist that brontothere fossils do not suggest that Eotitanops evolved into Brontotherium."

Apparently you failed to notice that I've already agreed that the fossils can suggest ancestor/descendant relationships. But the fossils don't confirm those relationships. Indeed, the relationships are largely "established" by assuming the truth of Darwinian evolution, yet that's the very thing that needs to be validated. Zoologist Gareth Nelson (American Museum of Natural History) candidly described the identification of "ancestors" in this way: "We've got to have some ancestors. We'll pick those. Why? Because we know they have to be there and these are the best candidates. That's by and large the way it has worked. I am not exaggerating."
Obviously, labeling ancestors simply because Darwinian theory needs ancestors does nothing to confirm the theory. Such circularity in reasoning can't confirm anything.

Stanton: "If 'Darwinian Mechanisms' can not account for the diversity of life, then what does?"

That's an open question. I don't have the answer, but then, neither does anyone else. Unlike Darwinists, however, I don't dogmatically insist that Darwinism has solved life's mysteries, case closed. Call me naive, but I still cling to the idea that science is (or at least, it ought to be) a self-correcting epistemic enterprise. As forums like this one demonstrate beyond dispute, the last thing the proponents of Darwinism want is any corrective influences exerted by alternative theories, such as ID theory. The dogmatic condition of mainstream evolutionary biology is a sorry spectacle, but blogs like Pharyngula - which put that dogmatism on display - give me hope that the situation will change. Dogmatism exposed may lead to dogmatism defeated. That's an outcome that anyone who values the integrity of science out to desire.

Rey: "In real science, were we to find indisputable evidence of design, the next question would have to be who or what the designer is."

It may surprise you to learn that ID theorists agree with you on this point (so do I). They don't, however, think that science, relying on biological data, can provide the answer. They regard the question as one that belongs to philosophers and theologians. (By the way, "Who was the designer?" may not be "the next question." Another question that quickly follows the detection of design is "How was this design actualized?" That may be a question that ID tackles in the future, but for now it's focused on showing in a scientifically rigorous way that the apparent design of many biological systems is not merely apparent, rather it's actual.)

Rey: "So if we've apparently already reached the conclusion, then why would we even bother to 'develop the mathematical, logical, and scientific tools for detecting design in the biosphere? Cart before the horse. At least, unless we see some positive data for design, rather than the usual potshots at evolution."

If you'd like to acquaint yourself with the mathematical, logical, and evidentiary bases for detecting design, I suggest that you read design theorist Wm. Dembski's "No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence." Alternatively, you could rely on the persistent misrepresentations of ID peddled by the likes of PZ Myers and never understand ID.

Rey: "Evolutionary change takes place on geologic time scales. The onus is still on you to tell us where the boundary is, beyond which an organism's genome cannot change."

If your interest in this is sincere, I suggest that you read Michael Behe's latest book, "The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism."

Windy: "First, Margulis is wrong and speciation has been observed."

Actually, except for speciation among some flowering plants produced by polyploidy (which is not what Darwinian theory needs), she's right. The alleged instances of "observed" speciation (such as those mentioned by Stanton) are actually analyses of already existing (or newly discovered) species used to defend the Darwinian hypothesis of how speciation occurs. For example, no one has actually observed speciation occurring among Darwin's finches, but there's an inferential trail suggesting that they evolved from an original ancestor from the mainland of Africa. Nonetheless, it ought to be clear that analyzing existing species to test a hypothesis is a far cry from actually observing speciation.

Jim: "Majerus claimed that he had proven evolution, meaning that his peppered moth research proved that Darwinian mechanisms account for all of life's diversity and complexity."
Windy (with typical cordiality): "You are still the only one making this dumbass strawman inference."

If Majerus meant that his research confirmed the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to produce microevolution (or minor adaptive changes), he should have said so. Instead, he said that his research provided THE proof of EVOLUTION. Anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the subject knows that when the word "evolution" is used in that way, it's intended to mean Darwinian evolutionary theory, which purports to provide the complete explanation for life's diversity and complexity.

Posted by: windy | September 4, 2007 10:34 AM

Nonetheless, it ought to be clear that analyzing existing species to test a hypothesis is a far cry from actually observing speciation.

Nonetheless, it ought to be clear that analyzing existing species to test a "hypothesis" is a far cry from actually observing intelligent design.

Why is it all right for ID to rely on inferences when it demands that science doesn't?

Let me also ask again:

Since there are no new major organs or biological systems found in man that are not found in living or fossil fish, shouldn't intelligent design "theory" be silent on whether men evolved from fish? Or how does ID explain fish-to-man evolution?

Posted by: Stanton | September 4, 2007 10:45 AM

Jim, with his MENSA caliber intellect, fails to note that the experiments with knock-out Gram-negative bacteria actually produced fully motile bacteria that had only half of their flagellar protein genes functioning.
According to Behe's hypothesis, if there was so much as one flagellar protein gene non-functioning, the bacteria would be completely non-motile.
This goes back to my observation that all of Behe's examples have been shot full of holes.

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 10:59 AM

Windy: "Why is it all right for ID to rely on inferences when it demands that science doesn't?"

If you were actually familiar with the positions taken by ID theorists, you'd know that they don't "demand" that science shun inferences. Indeed, they contend that in a historical science like evolutionary biology, inferences to the best explanations are all that science can deliver.

Windy: "Since there are no new major organs or biological systems found in man that are not found in living or fossil fish, shouldn't intelligent design 'theory' be silent on whether men evolved from fish?"

ID theory is silent on that question. Since the theory (unlike Darwinism) doesn't need the hypothesis that men evolved from fish, it has nothing to say about it.

Windy: "Or how does ID explain fish-to-man evolution?"

ID makes no attempt to offer that explanation. Its focus is entirely on the question of whether certain biological systems, structures, processes, etc. can be attributed in a scientifically rigorous way to design. If all you know about ID is what you've learned from the likes of PZ Myers or Barbara Forest or Judge Jones, then you likely don't know that ID theory is quite compatible with Darwin's idea of descent with modification. ID theorists take issue with the notion that Darwinian mechanisms suffice to explain all of life's diversity and complexity; they don't dispute that biological change (or evolution) has occurred.

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 11:18 AM

Stanton: "Jim...fails to note that the experiments with knock-out Gram-negative bacteria actually produced fully motile bacteria that had only half of their flagellar protein genes functioning."

I googled that and failed to come up with the experiments you cited. Do you have a reference for them?

Stanton: "According to Behe's hypothesis, if there was so much as one flagellar protein gene non-functioning, the bacteria would be completely non-motile."

Which is precisely what microbiologist Scott Minnich's knock-out experiments with bacterial flagella demonstrated (see his testimony at the Dover trial).

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 11:59 AM

Jim: "...the last thing the proponents of Darwinism want is any corrective influences exerted by alternative theories, such as ID theory."
Windy: "try
-endosymbiosis theory
-neutral theory
-punctuated equilibrium"

OK. I overstated my case. Proponents of Darwinism will tolerate the corrective influence of some theories, just so long as those theories don't challenge the underlying assumption that unintelligent material causes fully account for life's origin and development.

Windy: "Why have you been ragging on the 'men from fish' example, then?"

If you'd been paying attention, you could answer this question for yourself. I introduced the "men from fish" hypothesis in my very first posting on this thread because it exposes Majerus's unwarranted claim that his peppered moth research provides THE proof of EVOLUTION, by which he obviously meant Darwinian theory, which (among other things) contends that Darwinian mechanisms caused men to evolve from fish. As I said at the outset, if we want to know if unguided Darwinian mechanisms caused men to evolve from fish, we're not enlightened by Majerus's peppered moth research.

Stanton: "...why is it that no Intelligent Design proponent has been able to perform a single, verifiable experiment with Intelligent Design Theory?"

Without conceding the merits of the assertion in your question, let me turn the question around: What verifiable experiments have Darwinists conducted to confirm their macroevolutionary claims? For example, what repeatable, verifiable experiments have they conducted that demonstrate that Darwinian mechanisms caused men to evolve from fish?

Stanton: "why is it that the Bio-tech industry still subscribes to (Evolutionary Theory)?"

Beats me. It's of no use to them. As Harvard biologist Marc Kirschner said in an interview with the Boston Globe: "Over the last 100 years, almost all of biology has proceeded independent of evolution, except evolutionary biology itself." Kirschner laments the general uselessness of Darwinism to biological research, but he doesn't deny it. As he further stated: "Molecular biology, biochemistry, physiology, have not taken evolution into account at all."
Chemist Philip Skell (member, National Academy of Sciences) wrote in The Scientist that his "own research with antibiotics during WWII received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution." In his essay, he also wrote that he had "recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought that Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: NO." With respect to a review he had made of the major biological discoveries of the 20th century, he concluded: "I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss."

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 12:34 PM

Graculus: "A pile of rocks is irreducibly 'complex' by this definition."

No, it's not. A pile of rocks may be complex (depending on the number of rocks), but what function does it perform? And if any one of those rocks is removed, would the pile of rocks cease to perform that function?

Graculus: "What *objective* measure does Behe use to to differentiate between a system of 'interlocking complexity' that has arisen through evolutionaty proceses and one that is the work of a designer?"

I imagine he'd say that "interlocking complexity" and "irreducible complexity" are not the same thing. He'd likely also say that no one actually knows that "interlocking complexity" arose through unguided evolutionary processes. But if you really want to know what he would say, why don't you read his books? I can't begin to do justice to his arguments in short postings to a talk forum. The recurrent request of ID foes that I educate them on ID is one of the things that frustrates me about "debates" like this one. Quite typically, I'm the only one in the debate who has actually read the works of ID theorists. While all participants in the debate have likely received an education (or an indoctrination) in Darwinian theory, and while many of them (like me) may have independently studied Darwinian theory, few of them have bothered to study ID theory as elucidated by ID theorists. That's why I say I'm not going to do your homework for you. I can't type fast enough to fill in any gaps in your knowledge of ID.

Graculus: "...are you claiming that species don't have ancestors?"

No, but I am arguing that the identification of ancestor/descendant relationships is so plagued by inconsistencies, contradictions, and missing links that claims about such relationships can't be taken as unassailable statements of reality.

Graculus: "That each one was created ex nihilo at all different times?"

Ex nihilo creation is a position taken by creationist, not ID theorists (it really would be helpful if you'd actually learn something about ID). At its core, ID theory is about the arrangement of already-existing matter in biological systems and about what kind of causes (intelligent or unintelligent) suffice to generate the complex specified information that shapes matter into biological systems.

Graculus: "What predictions does Behe make that are not exactly the same as predictions made without his assumption of design?"

Like all design theorists, Behe doesn't assume design. His argument (like theirs) is that analysis of biological systems often leads to design as the best explanation of those systems. If you want to understand how they arrive at design inferences, read their books.

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 12:53 PM

Rey: "If the designer interacts with the material world in an observable way, then the designer is part of the material world and is therefore subject to scientific study."

True enough, but ID theory doesn't contend that "the designer interacts with the material world in an observable way." The theory instead argues that if a designing intelligence has acted in life's history, then the effects (or designs) produced by that designing intelligence are amenable to scientific investigation. Biological data, ID theorists argue, often lead to design inferences, but the data don't reveal the identity of the designer. Because so many ID critics erroneously conflate it with creationism, they tend to think of it as intelligent designER theory, when in fact, it's simply intelligent design theory.

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 1:01 PM

Stanton: "Why is it that you are wholly unable to answer my simple request to show us an example of a scientific experiment done to further the study of Intelligent Design?"

I've already done that. Scott Minnich's knockout experiments with bacterial flagella were done within the rubric of ID to demonstrate a core concept of the theory: irreducible complexity. If you want to learn more about design-theoretic research, go to:

http://www.researchintelligentdesign.org/wiki/Main_Page

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 2:17 PM

Kseniya: "Now, Jim, you're a smart fellah, but THAT is idiotic. Or disingenous. Which is it?"

I'm no longer going to respond to posters who call me an idiot, a moron, a dumbass, etc - which likely means this will be my last submission to the forum. People who write in that way don't deserve the courtesy of a reply.

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 4:51 PM

Jim V: "I would like to think the author was saying this in reaction to previous claims by creationists that flaws in a previous moth study disproved the ToE."

I'm unaware of anyone - either creationist or ID theorist - who has claimed that flaws in the previous moth study disproved Darwinism (I know that Jonathan Wells - the subject of "Wells lies. Again." - never made that claim in his book "Icons of Evolution"). Their actual claim has been that the moth research (either previous or current) doesn't serve to confirm that Darwinian mechanisms have the vast creative powers that Darwinists attribute to them. The moth study confirms (to the extent that the scientific method ever confirms anything) the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to produce minor adaptive changes (or microevolution), which isn't in dispute.

Jim V: "I think all here would say that no scientific theory is ever totally proved..."

I quite agree. When Majerus declared that his moth research offered THE proof of evolution, he was going well beyond what the scientific method can deliver.

Jim V: "However, you go on to cite things like Behe's IC as refuting macroevolution. As an intelligent engineer, I don't see how you can claim this. It's like someone saying that a stone arch can never be built, because until the last stone is in place, the arch is not self-supporting. Obviously the arch is built with scaffolding, and after the arch is built the scaffolding is no longer necessary and is removed. In just that way, evolution can first form redundant structures, then eliminate the 'scaffolding' over time to produce an IC structure."

That's a possibility, and it makes for another fine just-so story (which Darwinists spin with great regularity), but without any detailed, testable accounts of what those redundant structures were and how they were formed by Darwinian means, I don't see why the arch analogy should be taken seriously. If you're suggesting that criticisms of Darwinism can always be rebutted by the imagination of Darwinists, then you're effectively suggesting that Darwinism can't be falsified, which - by Popper's criterion of potential falsifiability - makes Darwinism unscientific.

Jim V: "Also as previously mentioned, examples of intermediate forms have been found in nature which refute Behe's example of blood clotting..."

I suspect you're referring to systems of blood clotting that are less complex than the vertebrate blood clotting cascade. The existence of such systems doesn't falsify Behe's claim that the vertebrate blood clotting cascade is irreducibly complex. As you may know, Behe illustrated the concept of irreducible complexity with a 5-part mousetrap. If any one part is removed, the device ceases to trap mice (i.e., it loses its function). The irreducible complexity of the 5-part mousetrap is not falsified by pointing to less complex mousetraps. For example, you may be familiar with the 2-part mousetrap, which consists of a plastic box and a rotating door that traps any mouse lured into the box. That trap is clearly less complex than the 5-part trap, but that fact has no bearing on whether the 5-part trap is, or is not, irreducibly complex.

Jim V: "Given a planet billions of years old, with weather and geological activity, the fossils we have found are consistent with what we would expect from evolution."

The fossils embedded in the Cambrian strata are quite inconsistent with what we would expect from Darwinian evolution. Those fossils record the sudden appearance of nearly all the major animal phyla, with no trace of any likely precursor organisms. Darwin regarded this as perhaps the most serious challenge to his theory. Typically, the challenge is met by saying that the fossil record is incomplete, but skeptics are warranted in thinking that the problem is not with the fossils, it's with the theory.

Jim V: "Evolution is not totally proved, but everything we see is consistent with it."

In addition to the Cambrian fossils, I think there are a great many things we see that are inconsistent with Darwinian theory. For example, I submit that the existence of genetic programs, which consist of millions of bits of information that encode thousands of intricate algorithms that control, specify and order the growth and development of billions of cells into complex organisms, is quite inconsistent with the Darwinian notion that life's complexities were assembled by random mutations acted on by natural selection. One might as well believe that the Declaration of Independence was written by drawing Scrabble tiles from a bag.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 4, 2007 6:46 PM

I'm no longer going to respond to posters who call me an idiot, a moron, a dumbass, etc - which likely means this will be my last submission to the forum.

(Define "likely".)

Ah, so you ARE the same Jim who stirs the pot, then leaves in a huff over bad manners, never to return (for a given value of "never"). Your memory sucks, though, and your reading comprehension is questionable: First, I've always engaged you fairly in the past. Second, I didn't call you anything, other than to imply that you're smarter than I am. Wanna take another stab at it?

Posted by: Kseniya | September 4, 2007 8:11 PM

fossils record the sudden appearance of nearly all the major animal phyla, with no trace of any likely precursor organisms

Sudden? A lot can happen over a period of tens of millions of years. Yes, that's a short time in the life of the earth, but a very, very long time when compared to the life spans (and, more to the point, to the reproductive cycles) of the creatures of the day.

And I do suspect that "no trace" is overstating the relative dearth of precambrian fossils...

The "explosion" does toss out a few big question marks, though, that's for sure.

Posted by: Jim | September 4, 2007 9:06 PM

Kseniya: "Ah, so you ARE the same Jim who stirs the pot, then leaves in a huff over bad manners, never to return (for a given value of 'never'). Your memory sucks, though, and your reading comprehension is questionable: First, I've always engaged you fairly in the past. Second, I didn't call you anything, other than to imply that you're smarter than I am. Wanna take another stab at it?"

Not really, but I am curious to know how your referring to something I've written as "idiotic" implies that I'm smarter than you are. What you gave with one hand, you took away with the other.

Also, if your own memory is good, you might recall that in my two entries into conversational threads on Pharyngula, I didn't impugn the intelligence or character of anyone. In return, I was instantly called an idiot, a dumbass, a moron, etc. Naturally that reaction caused my desire to stick to a cordial exchange of views to suffer somewhat, but just who initiated the pot stirring? If disagreeing with most of the views expressed here amounts to stirring the pot, then I'm guilty as charged. But I suggest that the pot stirring - the poisoning of the level of discourse - has been the work of those who can't disagree without superciliously resorting to sneers, jeers, and ridicule (the standard set by PZ Myers). Apparently the forum exists primarily to allow Darwinian true believers to congratulate themselves on how smart they are and to insult everyone else. Anyone (like me) who expresses doubts about Darwinist dogma, or who sees merit in design theory, is about as welcome here as a turd in the punchbowl. Not that I mind all that much. Any skeptics of Darwinism who browse Pharyngula won't find any reasons to change their minds. As I previously said, a forum like this primarily serves the browsing public by putting the sadly dogmatic condition of evolutionary biology on display.

Posted by: Stanton | September 5, 2007 8:50 AM

The fossils embedded in the Cambrian strata are quite inconsistent with what we would expect from Darwinian evolution. Those fossils record the sudden appearance of nearly all the major animal phyla, with no trace of any likely precursor organisms.

Furthermore, I don't see Intelligent Design proponents coming up with better explanations for the Cambrian Explosions, in fact, I don't recall Intelligent Design proponents even so much as touch on the topic of paleontology. You routinely fail to realize that in order for one scientific theory to replace a previous theory, it must be able to explain everything that the previous theory could explain, as well as explain the relative events that the previous theory can not. As far as I know, not a single ID proponent has attempted to explain any paleontological event at all, let alone the Cambrian Explosion.

Oh, and speaking of which, when I said "experiment," I meant an experiment that's been peer-reviewed and with a report of it published in a credible scientific journal, such as Nature. Self-published reports are not credible in the scientific world unless they happen to be for an elementary school science fair.

Posted by: Jim | September 5, 2007 4:06 PM

Jim V: "IANAB (I am not a biologist)(credit Torbjörn Larsson), so I can only read the experts and try to judge who knows what he is talking about. By that standard and my reading of the following sources, Behe loses."

Since you seem to be a reasonable person, Jim, why don't you read some of Behe's replies to his critics before you make up your mind? Here are references for a few:

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3415

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=1831

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=579

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=465

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=442

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=441

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=443

While reading Behe's critics, you may have noticed that their "rebuttals" largely amount to story-telling. What he asks Darwinists to provide are detailed accounts of how Darwinian mechanisms might have produced irreducibly complex molecular systems. He aptly notes that no such accounts currently exist, although (as his critics rush to respond) there are numerous speculative hypotheses (or just-so stories) offered to fill the void (see message #17 above).

Jim V: "You seem to be saying you refuse to believe the ToE until a) someone invents a time machine and videotapes the Readers Digest Condensed version for you or b) somebody runs a lab experiment over the millions of years which the fossil record suggest are required to produce the kind of changes which you would accept as significant."

That's not really what I expect, but when (for example) Darwinists spin a tale about the unguided evolution of color vision from a light-sensitive spot, I'd find that tale more persuasive if:

1) the fossil record provided unambiguous evidence showing that such a transition occurred, and
2) geneticists could develop some plausible sequence of randomly induced genetic mutations that would have generated adaptive improvements leading from light sensitivity to color vision.

Jim V: "I can't comprehend what nature can or cannot do over billions of years, but I can comprehend that 'microevolution' change rates measured in the lab and in the field (as described by Ken Miller in 'Finding Darwin's God') are orders of magnitude larger than those needed to add up to the major changes seen in the fossil record over geological time."

I'd find this tale more persuasive if Miller (or anyone else) could document random mutations that introduce not just minor adaptive changes that leave an organism essentially unchanged (such as adaptive changes that make bacteria more resistant to antibiotics), but directional changes that begin to evolve the organism into an entirely different kind of organism (such as the kind of changes that would have been needed for some land mammal to evolve into whales). Mathematician/philosopher/scholar David Berlinski has calculated that at least 50,000 significant morphological changes would have been required for a 4-legged land mammal to have evolved into a whale. Most of those changes could not have occurred independently, but would have had to occur in concert with other changes. It's certainly a logical possibility that whales evolved from some land mammal, but it strains credulity beyond the breaking point to suppose that an unguided process (such as random mutations acted on by natural selection) could have accomplished such a marvelous engineering feat, even given hundreds of millions of years to complete the task. Darwinists, of course, will deride this as an argument from personal incredulity, but I've always wondered why their credulity - their willingness to believe anything, no matter how preposterous, about the creative powers of unguided material causes - offers their argument any epistemic superiority over the arguments of skeptics.

Jim V: "If there were an alterate, testable, falsifiable theory that explained all of the evidence better than the ToE, I for one would like to hear it. Until then, having a concept which you agree 'is a possibility', and which explains all of what you call microevolution is much better than to throw up one's hands and say, 'I don't understand how this was done; maybe something else which I don't understand either did it.'"

No one's asking you to throw up your hands and surrender, Jim. As an engineer, you know a lot about design, and I suspect that you would find design theory to be a credible alternative to unguided evolution if you were to delve into the works of design theorists. Contrary to all the misrepresentations of ID you'll read on forums like Pharyngula, design theory does not dispute evolution (understood as descent with modification). It instead takes issue with the notion that evolution can be entirely attributed to unguided (or unintelligent) material causes. By way of analogy, the Darwinian evolution of automobiles from horse-drawn carriages might occur as random mistakes on the assembly line very infrequently produced more complex (i.e., more technologically sophisticated), more survivable vehicles. The ID evolution of autombiles, on the other hand, would occur as an intelligent agent (or force, or cause) induced the technological changes required to evolve horse-drawn carriages into high-tech autos. Coming back to the real world, you know that the evolution of automobiles was intelligently guided. Shouldn't science at least consider the possibility that the evolution of life - which is orders of magnitude more complex than automobiles -also required the involvement of intelligence?

When you've finished thinking about that, think about this: How did unguided Darwinian mechanisms bring sexual reproduction into existence? What fortituous series of events caused the simultaneous, randomly-induced evolution of males and females?

It's nice talking with you, Jim. From what I've seen of this forum, it's rare to find someone who doesn't argue like an adolescent brat.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 5, 2007 7:45 PM

Oh, by the way, speaking of whales, if you insist on spouting questionable "findings" like this, don't act shocked when not everyone takes your otherwise eloquent arguments seriously:

Mathematician/philosopher/scholar David Berlinski has calculated that at least 50,000 significant morphological changes would have been required for a 4-legged land mammal to have evolved into a whale.

Posted by: Jim | September 5, 2007 8:34 PM

Kseniya: "At its root, ID is all about the designer(s) who MUST EXIST (or must have existed) for the 'theory' to have any foundation whatsoever."

I've never denied that a designer must exist. Quite obviously design implicates a designer. But it is never necessary to know the identity and nature of the designer to detect design. As I've already noted, in design theory, the designer is a theoretical entity whose existence is assumed, but whose identity is unknown. Theists can co-opt design theory and identify the designer with the God they worship, but non-theists may think that the designer is simply an intelligent operative force that is a fundamental aspect of the universe.

K: "So your charge of conflation is groundless, because ID by nature and necessity conflates the appearance of design with the existence of a designer."

If ID is reduced to "Designer = God," then the theistic implications of design theory are made a part of design theory - which they're not. ID requires neither a meddled world nor a meddling God. Indeed, it doesn't even require that God exists. It simply requires the operation of intelligence (of whatever source) in the universe.

If ID must be conflated with theism, then by the same token naturalistic evolution must be conflated with atheism, thereby reducing naturalistic evolutionary theory to "Darwinism = No God." But the truth of the matter is that both ID and Darwinism - as scientific theories - have nothing to say about God. They both speak to the God question only by implication. Thus theists see ID as congenial to their faith, while an atheistic Darwinist like Richard Dawkins can say that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." If it bothers you that theists try to obtain theistic mileage from ID theory, then you ought to be equally bothered that atheists try to obtain atheistic mileage from Darwinism.

Posted by: Jim | September 5, 2007 9:29 PM

Jim said:

Contrary to all the misrepresentations of ID you'll read on forums like Pharyngula, design theory does not dispute evolution (understood as descent with modification)

Who also said that

Since there is no evidence for species changes between the simplest forms of unicellular life, it is not surprising that there is no evidence for evolution from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells, let alone throughout the whole array of higher multicellular organisms.

Stanton: "Contradicting yourself again?"

Not really. The first statement was mine, the second was from British bacteriologist Alan Linton. Setting aside that minor point, it should be noted that Linton was discussing evidence for evolutionary theory (or Darwinism) - as he made plain in the preceding part of the quote you clipped. When he spoke of an absence of evidence for evolution, he was no doubt referring to an absence of evidence for evolution by Darwinian means. Even if my interpretation of his remarks is wrong, the regrettable reality is that "evolution" is a weasel word with numerous connotations. Among other things, it is used to mean both biological change over time and the theory (Darwinism) that purports to explain biological change over time. In fact, the word is so slippery that both of the following statements are true:

1. "Evolution is an unassailable fact."
2. "Evolution is not an unassailable fact."

According to the law of non-contradiction, both statements can't be true if the meaning of evolution is the same in both statements. The only way both statements can be true is if the meaning of the word "evolution" is different in the two statements.

Most commonly, when people hear the word "evolution," the thing that comes to mind is Darwin's updated theory of evolution (which I typically refer to as simply "Darwinism" rather than "neo-Darwinism" or "the modern synthesis"). If another meaning is intended, it should be made plain to avoid confusion. That's why I routinely clarify the meaning I intend for the word to carry. Thus, as I've already written, ID theory is quite compatible with evolution (understood as biological change over time, or as descent with modification), but it is often at odds with evolutionary theory (or Darwinism), especially in the macro sense.

Posted by: Jim | September 5, 2007 9:52 PM

*The fossils embedded in the Cambrian strata are quite inconsistent with what we would expect from Darwinian evolution. Those fossils record the sudden appearance of nearly all the major animal phyla, with no trace of any likely precursor organisms. Darwin regarded this as perhaps the most serious challenge to his theory.*

Josh: "The first two statements here aren't accurate. The second might have been accurate in 1859, but science has...evolved...from Darwin a bit since then."

"The most famous such burst, the Cambrian explosion, marks the inception of modern multicellular life. Within just a few million years, nearly every major kind of animal anatomy appears in the fossil record for the first time ... The Precambrian record is now sufficiently good that the old rationale about undiscovered sequences of smoothly transitional forms will no longer wash." (Stephen Jay Gould, "An Asteroid to Die For," Discover, October 1989, p. 65),

"And we find many of them [Cambrian fossils] already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history." (Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987, p. 229),

You're quite correct that additional pre-Cambrian fossils have been unearthed since Darwin expressed his concerns, Josh. But few - if any - of those fossilized pre-Cambrian organisms recommend themselves as credible evolutionary precursors of the Cambrian phyla. It's not enough simply to find organisms that came before; it must be shown that there is a reasonable probability that unguided Darwinian mechanisms could have generated the vast genetic information required to bring the Cambrian phyla into existence. It would also be helpful to Darwinian theory if the fossil record was packed with the innumerable transitional forms that must have existed between the pre-Cambrian and the Cambrian phyla if the former evolved into the latter by way of the gradual accumulation of randomly generated microevolutionary changes. Darwinism still doesn't have the Cambrian explosion under control, notwithstanding all the handwaving just-so stories Darwinists tell to paper over the problem with rhetoric.

Posted by: Jim | September 5, 2007 10:57 PM

Jim V: "My own intuitive feeling feeling is that most people who object to the ToE on such probabilistic grounds are guilty of the lottery fallacy. That is, they view the existence of the current biosphere, and specifically the human race, and perhaps more specifically themselves, as necessary outcomes in some grand scheme."

That may be a position many people take, Jim, but it's not a position taken by design theorists. They're not concerned with whether life as it is was a necessary outcome; they're concerned with the problem of whether unintelligent or intelligent causes can best account for life's structural and systemic complexities. I think you'd find Dembski's "No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence" of interest. In the book, Dembski writes at some length on probability (including the probabilistic resources of the universe) as it relates to life's complexities. He shows that incredulity with respect to the claims Darwinists make for the creative powers of unguided Darwinian mechanisms is not merely personal, rather it's rationally justified by both probability and the large, but finite, probabilistic resources of the universe. He essentially argues that when the probability of a specified event becomes too low, science must eliminate chance as a credible explanation of the event. Otherwise every event can be attributed to chance. It shouldn't be necessary to point out that a chance-of-the-gaps explanation is no improvement on a god-of-the-gaps explanation.

Jim V: "Intelligence plays a role, but as the complexity of a design increases, it becomes harder and harder to forecast unintended consequences of design changes, and the design process becomes more and more a matter of trial-and-error, incremental changes to existing designs, cross-fertilization with competitive designs, and survival in the marketplace - very similar to the mechanisms of the ToE."

I don't see any of that as being very similar to the mechanisms of ToE. All of those design changes - including the ones selected on a trial basis - are deliberately chosen (i.e., they are intentional acts of intelligent agents), not randomly generated. It may be hard to make forecasts as complexity of design increases, but forecasts are still made. The mechanisms of ToE, on the other hand, do not plan ahead.

Jim V: "...complex machines do not spring forth whole from the mind of a designer, but proceed in small, cautious steps, like evolution."

Quite so, but each of those "small, cautious steps" is deliberately taken by a designing intelligence. If complex machines evolved in a way parallel to Darwinian evolution, then each one of those small, cautious steps would have to be randomly generated. Design theory is not committed to the proposition that a given complex biological system had to be assembled all at once (or "spring forth whole from the mind of the designer"), although that is a logical possibility. Design theory is quite compatible with the idea that complex biological systems evolved, but it disputes the Darwinian notion that unguided material causes were sufficient to have produced all of life's structural and systemic complexities. In particular, it takes issue with the Darwinian notion that the vast amount of biological information that shapes matter into living organisms was composed by an essentially random process.

Posted by: Stanton | September 5, 2007 11:46 PM

http://www.peripatus.gen.nz/Paleontology/lagSirPas.html

"One of the twentieth century's most distinguished paleobiologists, [James W.] Valentine here integrates data from molecular genetics, evolutionary developmental biology, embryology, comparative morphology, and paleontology into an analysis of interest to scholars from any of these fields. He begins by examining the sorts of evidence that can be gleaned from fossils, molecules, and morphology, then reviews and compares the basic morphology and development of animal phyla, emphasizing the important design elements found in the bodyplans of both living and extinct phyla. Finally, Valentine undertakes the monumental task of developing models to explain the origin and early diversification of animal phyla, as well as their later evolutionary patterns." - --Stefan Bengtson, Nature

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 6, 2007 12:23 AM

I wonder what it is about Darwinism that causes its proponents - with few exceptions, in my experience - to arrogantly turn to namecalling, ridicule, and condescension in defending their beloved theory.

jim's full of shit on that point too, since it wasn't the defense of theory that caused the vehement response, but his own idiotic and inflammatory statements that did.

of course, a complete inability to comprehend the very things they write is characteristic of ignorant morons everywhere, not just creationists.

you should try taking a bath, Jim.

cause, damn boy, you stink.

now go shake your fist harder and scream ever louder how you're being repressed by the "darwinian establishment".

Posted by: Kseniya | September 6, 2007 12:43 AM

Jim, you wrote:

I've never denied that a designer must exist.

And I never suggested that you had. Note, also, that you're the one talking about God - not me. Slippery, indeed.

All I've said is that Evo relies on genetic variation and natural selection, both of which have been demonstrated countless times, and that ID relies, at a bare minimum, on the past existence of a designer, whatever it may be, which has not been shown to exist. If evidence of design can be proven to exist, a designer can then be assumed, but ID postulates the designer in advance and seeks not to draw conclusions from the data that exists, but to hammer away at math until the desired outcome is achieved. ID isn't science, it's creative accounting.

So. What about that Wedge Document?

Posted by: Kseniya | September 6, 2007 1:30 AM

Stanton: Uh... right. Of course. Geez, why didn't Jim say that a couple of weeks ago when I brought it up two or three times in one thread? Being so thoroughly ignored damaged my selfish steam.

Well, considering how Jim has been steadfastly denying that Design theory has anything whatsoever to do with theism, I wonder how he can reconcile this passage from the wedge document with the notion that it's nothing but Darwinist paranoia:

Governing Goals:

- To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies.

- To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.

Nope. No theism there. None.

That text is taken directly from the copy of the Wedge document that can be found on www.discovery.org site.

Check out the twenty-year goals:

- To see design theory as the dominant perspective in science.

- To see design theory application in specific fields, including molecular biology, biochemistry, paleontology, physics and cosmology in the natural sciences, psychology, ethics, politics, theology and philosophy in the humanities; to see its influence in the fine arts.

- To see design theory permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life.

(Gee... that kinda smells like Soviet Realism from way over here.)

Jim, given that these statements come from the Discovery Institute itself, perhaps you'd like to retract this statement you made earlier:

Theists can (and do) co-opt design theory and identify the designer with the God they worship, but such thinking occurs outside of ID theory, not within it.

Posted by: JimV | September 6, 2007 8:34 AM

If you agree with ISO-900x that an engineering design process can be codified into procedures and algorithms, then the correspondence I have outlined above between engineering design and evolution becomes quite close. Simply consider the processes and algorithms of evolution to be part of nature. In that sense, "The Origin of the Species" was the first draft of an ISO manual.

In regard to Dembski's NFL thesis, IANAM either, but I know that the originators of the theorem disagree with Dembski's interpretation of it, and my own math-fu is strong enough to see that Dembski employs the lottery fallacy in specific applications of his "explanatory filter". For example, as "Good Math Bad Math" has stated, if you deal out a set of hands for Double Hearts (I knew a fellow who would stand on his chair at the lunch-time game to slam a queen of spades down on someone who had previously laid one on him) from a double deck, and regard the results as CSI, then the EF is violated.

At bottom, and as other commenters have said, all I see "Design Theory" as doing is making arguments of incredulity against gaps in our present knowledge of evolution, and demanding detailed step-by-step demonstrations of evolutionary processes (which took millions of years) for which their own explanation is simply "the Designer did it." As I first said, saying that something else which you don't understand did something adds nothing to my scientific understanding.

I then go on to speculate at the powers and motives of a Designer who could do the things which you claim for her, and wonder why, to paraphrase Mark Twain, she didn't dream better dreams. (And where is she hiding and why? Perhaps she dreads that big Design Review or the inevitable post-mortem on her design errors.)

Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2007 9:25 AM

Jim: "I wonder what it is about Darwinism that causes its proponents - with few exceptions, in my experience - to arrogantly turn to namecalling, ridicule, and condescension in defending their beloved theory."

Ichthyic: "jim's full of shit on that point too, since it wasn't the defense of theory that caused the vehement response, but his own idiotic and inflammatory statements that did."

The following two postings were the sum total of my contributions to this thread before the Darwinists here began calling me "idiot," "dumbass," "moron," etc. I invite any reasonable person to find where my remarks are either idiotic or inflammatory, thus warranting personal attacks on me...

1. When we want to know if unguided Darwinian mechanisms caused fish to evolve into men (by way of amphibians, reptiles, and some unknown mammal), we're hardly enlightened by Majerus's peppered moth research. Showing (as Majerus apparently did) that Darwinian mechanisms can cause minor adaptive changes in the coloration of moths doesn't also show that those mechanisms can do the kind of major creative work needed to produce all of life's diversity and complexity. Majerus's work doesn't, for example, show that Darwinian mechanisms brought peppered moths into existence in the first place. His claim that adaptive changes in the coloration of peppered moths "prove" Darwinian evolution can be persuasive only to those who - for philosophical reasons - are already committed to the "truth" of Darwinism. Skeptics are entitled to ask for more compelling evidence.

2. Precisely. That's why Majerus's claim that his peppered moth research "proves" Darwinian evolution is utterly bogus.

Ichthyic: "you should try taking a bath, Jim. cause, damn boy, you stink."

I've been called ugly by a toad.

(Memo to Ichthyic: Look up "irony" in your Webster's.)
(Memo to me: Make this the last time you sink to this level of discourse.)

Posted by: windy | September 6, 2007 9:53 AM

I invite any reasonable person to find where my remarks are either idiotic or inflammatory, thus warranting personal attacks on me... 1. When we want to know if unguided Darwinian mechanisms caused fish to evolve into men (by way of amphibians, reptiles, and some unknown mammal), we're hardly enlightened by Majerus's peppered moth research.

What is it with you and goddamn fish? Non sequitur.

2. Precisely. That's why Majerus's claim that his peppered moth research "proves" Darwinian evolution is utterly bogus.

Calling legitimate, painstaking research "utterly bogus". Inflammatory.

HE. SHOWS. DARWINIAN. EVOLUTION. IN. MOTHS. NOT. IN. FISH.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 6, 2007 10:26 AM

If Darwinism is true, there are no design elements in living organisms. Design entails intention, and Darwinian evolution doesn't intend to produce any outcomes

Evolutionists use the concept of design as a metaphor for how features have evolved to suit the needs of the organism. Surely you know this. Kinda like how ardent IDers use the concept of a designer as a *cough* notheistic metaphor for that all-pervasive "intelligence" that guides evolution and junk.

Oh yeah, speaking of which, what about that Wedge Document, Jim? I've been asking you about it for weeks.

Majerus's work doesn't, for example, show that Darwinian mechanisms brought peppered moths into existence in the first place. His claim that adaptive changes in the coloration of peppered moths "prove" Darwinian evolution can be persuasive only to those who - for philosophical reasons - are already committed to the "truth" of Darwinism. Skeptics are entitled to ask for more compelling evidence.

I agree with Jim on this. Skepticism is good. However, I'd like to point out that Majerus's overstatement of the sweeping implications of his work disproves nothing, and that there IS more compelling evidence. I suspect Jim will disagree on the latter, which is why these conversations have a limited lifespan.

Kudos to JimV for his fine summary of the problem (#86).

Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2007 10:30 AM

Windy: "*groan* not the old "how could males and females appear simultaneously" canard!"

It's a legitimate question, which you failed to answer by quoting the following:

"To paraphrase Nozaki et al 2006: Males in oogamous volvocaceans such as Pleodorina starrii are homologous to the dominant, MT− mating type of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Evolution of the male in the family Volvocaceae thus appears to be based on the genetic system controlled by the dominant mating type locus (MT−) of its isogamous ancestor."

Homologous features in different organisms don't tell us HOW they became homologous. Homology suggests evolution from a common ancestor (it also suggests common design elements used in a variety of organisms), but it doesn't tell us anything about the mechanism or the process or the cause of evolutionary change. If you've offered the above quote as an explanation of how unguided Darwinian mechanisms produced sexual reproduction, I can only marvel that you think I'm being unreasonable by asking for something a bit more detailed. To my way of thinking, "appears to be" is somewhat lacking in scientific rigor.

Posted by: Stanton | September 6, 2007 10:50 AM

I've been called ugly by a toad.

Posted by: windy | September 6, 2007 11:03 AM

I agree with Jim on this. Skepticism is good. However, I'd like to point out that Majerus's overstatement of the sweeping implications of his work disproves nothing, and that there IS more compelling evidence.

Don't get sucked in by Jim's claims of Majerus's "overstatement". A single example proves that Darwinian evolution is possible. Nobody except Jim takes it as a claim that it proves the entire history of evolution.

Although it's a legitimate gripe that "proof" is a misleading word in science. But Jim ridicules both biologists that use more careful wording ("To my way of thinking, "appears to be" is somewhat lacking in scientific rigor.") and those that use more strong wording ("proof of evolution"). There is no pleasing him.

Posted by: windy | September 6, 2007 11:21 AM

Homologous features in different organisms don't tell us HOW they became homologous. Homology suggests evolution from a common ancestor (it also suggests common design elements used in a variety of organisms), but it doesn't tell us anything about the mechanism or the process or the cause of evolutionary change. If you've offered the above quote as an explanation of how unguided Darwinian mechanisms produced sexual reproduction, I can only marvel that you think I'm being unreasonable by asking for something a bit more detailed.

Why not read the article then? Naturally the history of life will never be traced in every detail. What we can make is the most reasonable inference based on the data.

And again here is the demand of detailed proof from evolution but not from ID. Where is the detailed ID account of the development of sexes in these algae?

Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2007 11:49 AM

Windy: "What is it with you and goddamn fish? Non sequitur

Jim: "...Majerus's claim that his peppered moth research 'proves' Darwinian evolution is utterly bogus."

Windy: "Calling legitimate, painstaking research 'utterly bogus'. Inflammatory."

Good grief. Please read what I wrote for understanding. I called Majerus's unwarranted claim bogus; I did not call his research bogus.

Windy: "HE. SHOWS. DARWINIAN. EVOLUTION. IN. MOTHS. NOT. IN. FISH."

Precisely. That's all he showed. That's why his claim that he had produced THE proof of evolution - by which he obviously meant Darwinism, which contends (among other things) that Darwinian mechanisms caused fish to evolve into men (by way of amphibians, reptiles, and some unknown mammal) - was utterly bogus.

Posted by: Graculus | September 6, 2007 12:04 PM

would the pile of rocks cease to perform that function?

"Function" is a pretty broad word, and there are many "functions" that rock piles perform. Erosion control, vole housing, etc. If they cease to be piles of rock then they no longer perform those functions.

I imagine he'd say that "interlocking complexity" and "irreducible complexity" are not the same thing.

I imagine he'd be wrong.

"a complicated machine ... whose effective working was dependent upon the interlocking action of very numerous elementary parts or factors, .... a dropping out of, or even a slight change in any one of these parts is very likely to disturb fatally the whole machinery" - Hermann J Muller, 1918.

He'd likely also say that no one actually knows that "interlocking complexity" arose through unguided evolutionary processes.

He'd have to come up with some evidence that they didn't, otherwise what he has is an opinion, not a "theory" or even a hypothesis.

But if you really want to know what he would say, why don't you read his books?

I've read his arguments in the original.

The recurrent request of ID foes that I educate them on ID is one of the things that frustrates me about "debates" like this one.

Oh, we aren't asking you to "educate" us, we're familiar with the material. It's a test to see if *you* understand the material, and a faint hope that you will provide novelty. The "arguments" for ID have been thoroughly debunked with varying degrees of politeness, this ground has been gone over so often that even crabgrass won't grow.

No, but I am arguing that the identification of ancestor/descendant relationships is so plagued by inconsistencies, contradictions, and missing links

What you call "inconsistencies" and "contradictions" we see as uncertainties. When a scientist sees an uncertainty they look for more data in order to resolve it. Look at past uncertainties that have been resolved by gathering data. "Missing links" are a strawman, a red herring, and a canard. Intermediate forms exist.

that claims about such relationships can't be taken as unassailable statements of reality.

You claim to have studied some science, this statement demonstrates that you haven't. Science doesn't make "unassailable claims on reality", it seeks the best explaination for reality.

Ex nihilo creation is a position taken by creationist, not ID theorists (it really would be helpful if you'd actually learn something about ID).

Nice try, being as I already said I didn't beleive this was your position. Meh, I've been quote-mined at Uncommonly Dense, you're only worth half a point.

what kind of causes (intelligent or unintelligent)

Unintelligent causes are responsible for Intelligent Design? Do tell.

suffice to generate the complex specified information that shapes matter into biological systems.

Define "complex". Define "specified". Define "information". Objectively, with metrics, of course.

It's a semantical shell game, ID "theorists" use the words in the non-specific sense, then try to use them in the specific sense. Behe uses "complex" as a synonym for "complicated", when in Chaos Theory the two things are very, very different. There's nothing wrong with the usage so long as you don't try to switch them around, however.

Like all design theorists, Behe doesn't assume design.

"Intelligent design does not propose a mechanism, it simply tries to support the conclusion that intelligent activity was involved in producing the structures." - Michael Behe, 2005.

Posted by: Josh | September 6, 2007 12:11 PM

His claim was bogus. He didn't prove evolution. We're scientists...we don't really prove things. I know it sounds like hair-splitting, but it matters. His work failed to disprove evolution. If he actually made the claim that he proved it, he was being a bit loose with science...he should know better, although I can imagine why he did it. Jim is correct in the sense that such a claim is...well...bogus. It is just as bogus, however, to say that his work in any way weakened evolution. Perhaps it's time to move on from this aspect of the discussion?

Posted by: Josh | September 6, 2007 12:29 PM

Ohhh...'example.' Very scary stuff there. We had better run from the temple of evolution (its a religion, didn't you know).

Posted by: windy | September 6, 2007 12:36 PM

I suspect that the Majerus claim was not that the moth experiments "proved" evolution, it's a ID/Creationist "paraphrase". The strongest term I can find Majerus using is "example".

No, he does say "proof of evolution". But come on, people. It should be clear that he doesn't mean it in the sense of "this proves evolution once and for all".

http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/Research/Majerus/Swedentalk220807.pdf

Posted by: Josh | September 6, 2007 12:46 PM

No, he does say "proof of evolution". But come on, people. It should be clear that he doesn't mean it in the sense of "this proves evolution once and for all".

No, but the reason we should quibble over terminology is that the Creationists will take a statement like this, even if proof is only insinuated, and will run with it. And they will say that he said 'proof of evolution once and for all.' It doesn't help things.

Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2007 4:40 PM

Graculus: "'Function' is a pretty broad word, and there are many 'functions' that rock piles perform. Erosion control, vole housing, etc. If they cease to be piles of rock then they no longer perform those functions."

True enough, but if a complex pile of rocks continues to perform the function of erosion control when any one rock is removed, then the pile of rocks is not irreducibly complex.

Jim: "I imagine he'd say that 'interlocking complexity' and 'irreducible complexity' are not the same thing."

Graculus: "I imagine he'd be wrong."

"a complicated machine ... whose effective working was dependent upon the interlocking action of very numerous elementary parts or factors, .... a dropping out of, or even a slight change in any one of these parts is very likely to disturb fatally the whole machinery" - Hermann J Muller, 1918.

OK. I was interpreting the phrase to mean functional complexity dependent upon the interlocking action of very numerous elementary parts or factors. I wasn't aware that
the phrase also meant that function would altogether cease with the removal of any one of those parts or factors. I was wrong.

Gracululs: "Oh, we aren't asking you to 'educate' us, we're familiar with the material. It's a test to see if *you* understand the material, and a faint hope that you will provide novelty."

You say you've read Behe's "Darwin's Black Box," so I'll take your word for it. But I'm going to go out on a limb and list the ID books that most of my critics here have read. The list follows:

1) None.

The critics can let me know if I've got it wrong.

Graculus: "The 'arguments' for ID have been thoroughly debunked..."

In your opinion they've been thoroughly debunked. There's no denying that they've been controverted. After all, because ID arguments are controversial, nothing significant has been said in claiming that they've been controverted. But, given the significant evidentiary and theoretical problems that still exist with Darwinism, it's mostly partisan bluster to declare that ID arguments "have been thoroughly debunked." A theory has been thoroughly debunked when even its advocates are persuaded that it's wrong, not when its foes persuade themselves that they've debunked it.

Graculus: "Define 'complex'. Define 'specified'. Define 'information'."

As I previously said, I'm not going to do your homework for you. If you're versed in ID literature, you should already know the definitions of those terms that are relevant to design theory.

Jim: "Like all design theorists, Behe doesn't assume design."

"Intelligent design does not propose a mechanism, it simply tries to support the conclusion that intelligent activity was involved in producing the structures." - Michael Behe, 2005.

Contrary to what you apparently think, this doesn't contradict what I said. Behe is quite clearly saying that the purpose of ID theory is to see if scientific research can lead to (or support) the conclusion (not the assumption) that many biological systems resulted from intelligent causes (or "activity"). As a scientist, he knows quite well that assumptions precede research, but that conclusions are reached (if they are reached at all) only after the research has been done.

With regard to mechanism, it should be noted that intelligence is creative, not mechanistic. No one - not even Beethoven - could explain how he composed his 9th Symphony, but no one who found a score of the symphony lying out in the desert would doubt that the score (which exhibits specified complexity) was designed. Because it is not a mechanistic theory, ID has different tasks to perform than Darwinism, but it is no less scientific on that account.

Posted by: Brownian | September 6, 2007 5:04 PM

A theory has been thoroughly debunked when even its advocates are persuaded that it's wrong, not when its foes persuade themselves that they've debunked it.

So, because a few morons refuse to see the horizon for the seas, the Flat Earth Theory remains undebunked?

Wait. Hmm. UN + DE + BUNK = BUNK?

Okay, I guess I'll accept your contention that ID is bunk.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 6, 2007 5:09 PM

A score of a piece of music transcribed from a recording of windchimes against a backdrop of tugboat horns and thunderstorms would exhibit a similar degree of complexity. How could you know which piece had been composed and which had been produced by natural forces? You wouldn't - unless you already knew. Arguments based on Beethoven or on "a painting implies a painter" or on the idea of tornadoes creating jets out of junk are nonsense. Beethoven is known to have existed. Ditto Monet. There is no evidence whatsoever for an intelligent force guiding evolution or any other natural process known, and yet proponents of ID insist that this is the more plausible explanation.

Posted by: windy | September 6, 2007 5:19 PM

He is correct about the wording, but not about what it means. It doesn't mean "man came from fish".

Posted by: Kseniya | September 6, 2007 5:26 PM

Windy, Josh... LOL... yes.

Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2007 5:55 PM

Jim: "But few - if any - of those fossilized pre-Cambrian organisms recommend themselves as credible evolutionary precursors of the Cambrian phyla."

Josh: "Huh...really? Upon what are you basing this?...So...which Ediacaran organisms are you thinking of here?"

Since this is apparently your field, Josh, I'll turn the question back to you. Which Ediacaran organisms present themselves as credible evolutionary precursors of, say, trilobites? What is the evidence showing that those presumed precursors (if there are any in the fossil record) evolved by Darwinian means into trilobites? Why do trilobites appear in the fossil record with their extraordinarily complex eyes already fully formed? Where is the evidence showing that those eyes were formed step by tiny Darwinian step?

Josh: "Describing Darwinian mechanisms as unguided...well, I suspect you're trying to say that evolution is random."

You're right, but I'm only repeating what evolutionary biologists like Ken Miller and Douglas Futuyma say about Darwinian evolution. For example, in his textbook "Biology," Miller wrote: "It is important to keep this concept in mind. EVOLUTION IS RANDOM AND UNDIRECTED." (emphasis in the original)

Josh: "Darwinism at best is a philosophy."

I quite agree, Josh. Some 150 years after Darwin wrote his theory, the chief prop of the theory (in the macro sense, and in its present form) is materialistic philosophy, not empirical evidence. But when I use the term "Darwinism," all I intend it to mean is modern evolutionary theory, or neo-Darwinism, or the modern synthesis. Microevolution by Darwinian means has some fairly solid evidentiary support - such as Majerus's research with peppered moths (assuming his research wasn't methodologically flawed). But the evidentiary support for the macroevolutionary claims of Darwinists - such as the claim that color vision evolved by Darwinian means from a light sensitive spot, or the claim that men evolved from fish by Darwinian means - is most conspicuous by its virtual absence. Homology, phylogenetic trees, the fossil record, DNA comparisons, etc. all provide evidence that evolution occurred, but they don't provide evidence that evolution (in the macro sense) was caused by Darwinian mechanisms. To show that Darwinian mechanisms caused all of life's evolution (both micro and macro), there must be something other than evidence showing that evolution occurred if the question is not to be begged. A mechanistic theory like Darwinism must produce evidence showing that its mechanism can do all the creative work attributed to it. With regard to macroevolution, that work remains undone.

Josh: "Physics doesn't have gravity 'under control.'"

Quite so. Physicists still don't know how gravity works, but so far as I know, they don't claim that any of their theories have that unknown under control. Evolutionary biologists, on the other hand, claim (in so many words) that Darwinian theory (what I call "Darwinism") has all of the problems presented by the Cambrian explosion under control. That unwarranted certainty is reflected on this forum by references to me as an ignoramus when I pointed out the problems the Cambrian explosion presents to Darwinism.

Josh: "Do you perceive that as a crippling blow to physics? If so, I presume you don't fly very often?"

Not any more. But I have flown a lot. I'm a retired airline captain.

Josh: "...our current level of knowledge of Cambrian biotas doesn't present some crippling blow to evolution."

Perhaps, but at least you seem to recognize that the Cambrian phyla remain an unresolved problem for Darwinism, unlike those who claim that Darwinism has the problem under control.

Josh: "...for you to accuse us of creating just-so stories is a little obnoxious."

Oh, come on, Josh. I suspect you know quite well that Darwinian literature is chock full of just-so stories. Harvard evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin brought attention to that when he wrote (in a book review): "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism."

Posted by: Brownian | September 6, 2007 6:09 PM

I've never denied that a designer must exist. Quite obviously design implicates a designer. But it is never necessary to know the identity and nature of the designer to detect design. As I've already noted, in design theory, the designer is a theoretical entity whose existence is assumed, but whose identity is unknown. Theists can co-opt design theory and identify the designer with the God they worship, but non-theists may think that the designer is simply an intelligent operative force that is a fundamental aspect of the universe.

Of course the nature of the designer is important. If ID proponents accept evolution at some level, then they've got to draw the line somewhere to differentiate between designed features and undesigned ones (or ones that do not show evidence of design). Where and when that line gets drawn says a lot about the designer. If the designer set everything in motion then recused him or herself for a 3.8 BY vacation, then it's a deist position. Fine enough. Evolution is not inconsistent with a deist deity, but it doesn't require one. The position does require deist IDers to accept that macroevolution can happen without the interference of a designer. If macroevolution can't happen, as some anti-evolutionists contend, then they either have to deny speciation events in the past or present, or they have to posit that the designer stepped in at those points to design new species. That violates the principle of uniformitarianism by suggesting that the designer chooses some life processes to intervene in and not others (nor non-biological processes, unless ID proponents are willing to posit that the designer makes the occasional mountain too). Again, feel free to do that if you wish, but that does say something about the nature of the designer too. For ID to sit back and say "it is never necessary to know the identity and nature of the designer" is at worst disingenuous and at best poor science.

Call a spade a spade: ID attempts to describe some features as having the characteristics of design. What features do and what features don't says a lot about the nature of the designer. I can speculate on why IDers won't do this (the wedge strategy is one; the possibility that the designer that you are forced to posit conflicts with the deity you pray to is another), but whatever their motivations are, their refusal to describe the elements of the designer that their very research purports to invoke is tantamount to academic dilettantism.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 6, 2007 6:19 PM

Jim:

By analyzing those pieces to see if the pattern of notes conformed to any independently given specification(s).

Who supplies the specification, and upon what is the specification justifiably based?

Posted by: Brownian | September 6, 2007 6:23 PM

ID theory makes no claims about the designer.

Wrong. The theory does, even if the theorists deny it.

Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2007 6:38 PM

Kseniya: "Who supplies the specification, and upon what is the specification justifiably based?"

I'm going to dodge your question, Kseniya. Not because I can't answer it, but because I firmly believe that if people want to take issue with ID, they really ought to inform themselves on it first. For a brief overview of ID, I'd suggest you read Dembski's "The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions about Intelligent Design."

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 6, 2007 7:01 PM

OK. It's almost 1 at night over here. I'll come back later. Just so much for now: I'm a paleontologist, and I can't see what problems "Darwinism" is supposed to have with the Cambrian Explosion. Are you aware that it is full of intermediates between arthropods, tardigrades, and onychophores? Between trilobites, chelicerates, crustaceans, and the aforementioned intermediates? Between annelids and brachiopods? Are you furthermore aware that it took some 15 million years and had a prelude that lasted another 15? Furthermore, are you aware that the oldest known mollusk, Kimberella, is again ten million years older? (It's a very simple mollusk as far as we can tell from its remains, but the radula is there, the creeping sole is there, and the tough dorsal covering is there.)

Next, please suggest a definition of "species". For your information, there are at least 25 species concepts out there (not all, but most of them, applicable to all of life), and the biologists can't agree on one, even though the number of endemic bird species in Mexico (to pick one example) varies by a factor of over two depending on the species concept. Some, unsurprisingly, suggest that species don't exist, that we can't cut the tree of life into pieces unless those pieces are arbitrary. But if you can't suggest a species concept, you can't start from the assumption that a difference between "microevolution" and "macroevolution" has to exist. So, tell me one, and I'll point out the holes in it.

Unlike others here, I won't doubt your IQ. It is, however, apparent that you have read very little about certain topics that you believe to have understood very well.

Posted by: JimV | September 6, 2007 7:51 PM

Jim: CSI as you have defined it sounds workable. It may have been invented in parallel by ‎James Randi as the condition for winning his million-dollar prize (specify in advance ‎what you claim your supernatural powers can achieve, and set up the experiment so that ‎chance is eliminated). However, in practice I have yet to hear of it being used that way ‎by Design Theorists. What I hear is that they point to things that already exist and claim ‎they could not have been achieved by evolutionary mechanisms, without considering all ‎the other possibilities in the evolutionary deck that could have been dealt, and the fact ‎that after billions of years, many things, including quite unexpected ones, would ‎necessarily have to be dealt. That is where the lottery fallacy comes in, IMO.‎

The other problem I have with this line of reasoning is that the theorist assumes the ‎human race is smart enough so that if no detailed proof of something has yet been ‎determined, none exists. Personally, I think that if the human race lasts millions of years, ‎there will still be things that its smartest members are not capable of figuring out and ‎explaining to the rest of us. Imagine a bunch of chimpanzees around a smoldering log ‎after a lightning strike. They will never figure out the theory of combustion, but that does ‎not entitle them to conclude that the fire gods did it.‎

‎(Thanks to Kseniya for the kudos; a kind thought, but you and others here are much ‎better at writing things clearly than I am.)‎

‎(I have been trying to post this in response to #101 since around 12 PM today but kept ‎getting an error message. Sorry if the conversation has moved on. I am now trying from a public library, so this may be my last comment until the webmaster replies to my call for help.)

Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2007 8:05 PM

Jim: "ID theory makes no claims about the designer."

Brownian: "Wrong. The theory does, even if the theorists deny it."

Aside from the implicit claim that an intelligent designer (or agent, or force, or cause) exists, just what claims does ID theory make about the designer, Brownian? The claim made by theists - that the designer must have been God - is not a claim made by ID theory. So what claims do you have in mind?

Posted by: Stanton | September 6, 2007 9:17 PM

Anyone else notice how Jim has yet to demonstrate how Intelligent Design can allegedly explain the Cambrian Explosion better than Evolutionary Theory?

Posted by: Jim | September 6, 2007 9:32 PM

David: "I'm a paleontologist, and I can't see what problems 'Darwinism' is supposed to have with the Cambrian Explosion. Are you aware that it is full of intermediates between arthropods, tardigrades, and onychophores? Between trilobites, chelicerates, crustaceans, and the aforementioned intermediates? Between annelids and brachiopods? Are you furthermore aware that it took some 15 million years and had a prelude that lasted another 15? Furthermore, are you aware that the oldest known mollusk, Kimberella, is again ten million years older? (It's a very simple mollusk as far as we can tell from its remains, but the radula is there, the creeping sole is there, and the tough dorsal covering is there.)"

I have no quarrel with what the fossil record tells us about the existence, structure, and age of the organisms you mention, but I suspect that the "intermediates" among them are identified by reference to the needs of Darwinian theory, which makes their identification self-referential (or circular), a kind of reasoning that confirms nothing. If you didn't view those "intermediates" through the lens of Darwinian theory, is there something about them that cries out "We are intermediate, transitional forms"? Don't you first have to assume unguided (or Darwinian) evolution before you can label an organism an intermediate, transitional form? Wouldn't it be senseless to label an organism an intermediate, transitional form without first assuming unguided evolution? And isn't Darwinian evolution (in particular, its mechanism) the very thing in question? What would you label those "intermediate, transitional forms" if you were labeling them without reference to the needs of Darwinian theory?

Let me ask you this, David: Is the platypus an intermediate, transitional form? If so, is it on its way to becoming fully reptilian, or fully mammalian?

The problem Darwinism has with the Cambrian explosion is that its primary mechanism (random mutations acted on by natural selection) has not been shown to be capable of producing such an explosion of new, complex life forms in such a short (geologically speaking) period of time. In fact, that mechanism has not been shown to be capable of producing new life forms if it is given hundreds of millions of years to operate.

David: "For your information, there are at least 25 species concepts out there (not all, but most of them, applicable to all of life), and the biologists can't agree on one..."

I know. That's what makes claims that speciation has been observed so unenlightening. If you define species down far enough, you're bound to observe speciation and find that Darwinian mechanisms can produce it.

David: "...you can't start from the assumption that a difference between 'microevolution' and 'macroevolution' has to exist. So, tell me one, and I'll point out the holes in it."

OK. Adaptive changes that leave organisms essentially unchanged (such as adaptive changes in the coloration of peppered moths, or in the size of finches' beaks, or in the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics) are microevolutionary changes. Creative changes that cause organisms to evolve from one kind (say, fish) to another kind (say, amphibians) - or creative changes that introduce biological novelty (i.e., new organisms, new organs, new structures, new processes, new systems) - are macroevolutionary changes. If we confirm the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to accomplish the former, we haven't confirmed the abilities of those mechanisms to accomplish the latter.

Posted by: Brownian | September 6, 2007 9:55 PM

Jim, please define 'kinds'. It's a meaningless term that fits the very definition of goal-post shifting.

The Linnaean system of taxonomy categorises life according to a hierarchy described with levels, but they are arbitrary and tend to shift over time. None of those levels pose insurmountable barriers, however. For example, Genera are merely groupings of species that appear to have more in common with each other than those without. As are paleontological knowledge increases, such levels move to reflect what we believe to be the history of the development of such species.

If you're going to posit that the macro/micro divide exists at some level called 'kinds', then you'd better define 'kinds' and posit the mechanism by which 'kinds' can't change but species can.

That's two big errors about biology and evolutionary theory in your last post.

Posted by: Graculus | September 6, 2007 10:22 PM

A theory has been thoroughly debunked when even its advocates are persuaded that it's wrong, not when its foes persuade themselves that they've debunked it.

So heliocentrism has not been thoroughly debunked? Velikovskianism? Aliens built the Pyramids? Mayan civilization was an import form West Africa? There are UFO bases at the South Pole? Denver airport is the center of operations for reptiloid aliens that control the world? That the WTC towers were destroyed by controlled demonlition/cruise missiles disguised by holograms/death rays from outer space?

If you think I'm joking, search the net, there are adherents to each of these. "Debunked" to me, and to most people, means that the evidence has demonstrated that the positions are untenable.

As I previously said, I'm not going to do your homework for you. If you're versed in ID literature, you should already know the definitions of those terms that are relevant to design theory.

I know what they *claim* to mean, but that doesn't make them meaningful.

By analyzing those pieces to see if the pattern of notes conformed to any independently given specification(s). A score transcribed from windchimes would be complex, but if it could not be shown that the score conformed to an independent specification (or specifications), no design inference would be warranted.

And how wopuld you identify an independently given specification without knowing anything about a specifier? If you did not know of the existance of human composers, could you tell the difference between a concerto and a windchime? I know you've already dodged this, but it's not that easy. Dembski admits that his usage is subjective, and I asked for an objective definition.

My original question still stands, avoided by you. Define "specified", "complex" and "information". SHow your work.

the chief prop of the theory (in the macro sense, and in its present form) is materialistic philosophy

No, it's not. It is methodological naturalism, also known as empiricism. The ToE is no more a philosophy than quantum mechanics is.

Sounds a bit silly that way, doesn't it?

Sounds a bit mendacious, because we have evolutionary mechanisms galore. You may have heard of this guy called Charles Darwin, he wrote a book describing mechanisms of evolution. It is the mechanisms that define the ToE, in fact.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 6, 2007 10:47 PM

Meyer doesn't offer an explanation for the Cambrian explosion so much as he offers food for thought.

so, even your reference doesn't answer the simple question posed.

shocker.

just like every other creationist apologists, you're long on preaching and short on evidence, theory, and testing.

you just keep on deluding yourself there, boy, until you figure out (if you ever do) that science actually attempts to answer questions by testing hypotheses, instead of sitting in an armchair and describing the smell of their farts.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 6, 2007 11:40 PM

Jim V: I'd say you're doing a good job of presenting your case clearly and intelligently.

OT, sorta:

‎(I have been trying to post this in response to #101 since around 12 PM today but kept ‎getting an error message. Sorry if the conversation has moved on. I am now trying from a public library, so this may be my last comment until the webmaster replies to my call for help.)

You must have banged up against the word/spam filter. If your comment includes a word that's been proscribed by the filters, you'll get an error message. The filters seem to be designed more for blocking links to porn sites than for preventing people from saying "fuck". (See?) The filter seems tuned to specific sex words (like "inсest") and specific drug references.

It's even more picky with the text that appears inside an [a][/a] block, in that it reacts to embedded strings that might be non-delimited naughty word components of URLs. My fave example of this is the time I couldn't post a link with "Neil DeGrasse Tyson" inside the [a] block because of the embedded "ass" in "DeGrasse". Strange, but true.

You can trouble-shoot a post by breaking up suspect words with an underscore (or something) and clicking the Preview button. If you see the preview, you've gotten past the filter. If not, you can hit your Back button and keep trying.

Posted by: Jim | September 7, 2007 10:22 AM

Jim: "Let me ask you this, David: Is the platypus an intermediate, transitional form?"

Brownian: "Sorry Jim, but if you understood the theory of evolution, you'd know off the bat that the (answer) to that (is) yes (everything's an intermediate form to something else, unless it dies before reproducing)..."

Thanks for lending support to my argument, Brownian. As you aptly note, if ToE is valid, then every organism is an intermediate, transitional form. But since we don't know that ToE is valid, how do we know that the platypus (or any other organism) is an intermediate, transitional form? Don't we first have to assume that ToE is valid before we can label the platypus an intermediate, transitional form? And isn't the validity of ToE (in the macro sense) the very thing in question? If we don't assume the validity of ToE, what is there about the platypus (or any other organism) that unambiguously indicates that it's an intermediate, transitional form?

Also, if every organism is an intermediate, transitional form, then labeling the platypus an intermediate, transitional is unenlightening. We need to know the organisms that it's intermediate and transitional between before anything meaningful has been said about it being an intermediate, transitional form.

Brownian: "Jim, please define 'kinds'. It's a meaningless term that fits the very definition of goal-post shifting."

I suggest that pedantically obsessing on the correct taxonomic terminology does nothing to help us understand whether Darwinian mechanisms can, or cannot, do all the creative work that Darwinists attribute to them. Darwin called his masterpiece "The Origin of Species." Presumably, if we could show that Darwinian mechanisms can generate new species, we would confirm Darwinism (to the extent that science ever confirms any of its theories). Yet, as David has noted, there are at least 25 definitions of species. Suppose that we define species in terms of reproductive isolation. Suppose, also, that we experimentally produce the reproductive isolation of a new strain of bacteria from a founding population by randomly inducing mutations and applying selective pressure. This, we declare, is a new species of bacteria produced by Darwinian mechanisms; therefore, we have confirmed Darwinian theory. But an observer who was not locked into our definition of species - an observer who was looking at the situation from the perspective of common sense - would no doubt say: "But they're still bacteria. I thought Darwinian mechanisms were supposed to be capable of generating descendants that are quite different from their ancestors - amphibians from fish, for example. How in the world does this new species of bacteria you've produced confirm that claim?"

Posted by: JimV | September 7, 2007 11:58 AM

To follow up if I may on Kseniya's point in #151, I don't think it would be very controversial if Jim simply claimed that there might be further, undiscovered mechanisms of evolution which help account for the phenotype transformations which he considers unlikely to be accounted for by known mechanisms. There have been many advances, including genetics and the discovery of DNA, since Darwin's time, and there may well be many more to come. The leap from there to an Intelligent Designer is what many of us consider a leap of faith, rather than logic.

However, there would still be many who consider further mechanisms unnecessary, although not disproved. Similarly, many would consider the formation of round planets from dust by gravitational attraction to be a sufficient explanation, although it takes millions of years and no one has observed it from start to finish. Others might consider that a "just-so story".

I'm baaack - still ignorant of why I couldn't comment here from my home PC yesterday, but unwilling to assign supernatural causes - thanks, Kseniya, for the helpful advice at #150; it may not have been directly relevant since I was able to post the comment unchanged from a library PC, but I learned from it anyway.

Which brings me to another aspect of design engineering - teamwork. I often wonder how many people who have had much actual design experience are espousing ID (and how many True Scotsmen, for that matter), since as I have said, in my experience it rapidly teaches the limits of intelligent design. Those that do design work also learn that it helps to work as a team (not a committee - there is a big difference), with different people bringing different skills and viewpoints. So Kseniya, windy, Stanton, Josh, ..., and Brownian: you're doing a heck of a job. (Sorry if you've heard that one before, Brownian.)

Posted by: Brownian | September 7, 2007 12:19 PM

Jim: "The data can lead only to design." Graculus: "When you bring some we'll stop laughing."

Sorry, but I'm not going to do your homework for you. If you want to criticize ID without bothering to learn anything about it (aside from the gross distortions of ID peddled by the likes of PZ Myers), that's your business.

Jim, take your own advice: your comments, questions, and criticisms are indicative of someone whose knowledge of the theory of evolution is second hand, passed down through the filters of all the ID propaganda you've read. Gross distortions indeed.

You seem to be an erudite, clear thinker. I wish you all the best in your studies, but please pick up and digest a few basic textbooks on the matter before you waste our time with your uninformed criticisms.

Posted by: Jim | September 7, 2007 12:56 PM

Kseniya: 1. The "implicit claim that an intelligent designer (or agent, or force, or cause) exists" is a huge, HUGE claim in and of itself. What other claims need be made in order for skeptics such as myself to be justified in questioning the validity of that central, foundational, irreducible claim?

Please note my use of the word "implicit." ID theory contends that many biological structures, systems, processes, etc. are the products of actual (or intelligent) design. Clearly, design implicates a designer, but the claims of ID theorists relate to the former, not to the latter. The work of design theorists is to develop the mathematical, scientific and logical tools to support design inferences, not designER inferences.

Kseniya 2. One of the "governing goals" of the DI is explicitly stated as being "To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."
See that word, "God"? G.O.D. God? GOD? GODGODGODGODGOD? Do you see it? Yes or no?

Yes. I've never denied that ID theory has theistic implications and that theists can try to obtain theistic mileage from it. DI hopes to leverage those theistic implications so that science can be brought into harmony with a theistic conception of reality, much as it was pre-Darwin. Bringing science into harmony with theism is not the same as turning science into religion. Science would still be able to deliver materialistic explanations, but it wouldn't be committed (as it is now) to the proposition that materialistic explanations fully account for everything in nature - including the existence, nature, and mental abilities of human beings. The wording chosen to express that "governing goal" was unfortunate, in my view. It conveys an impression of a looming religious assault on science that a wider reading of the works of ID theorists/proponents allays.

In any event, regardless of whatever theistic mileage theists try to squeeze out of ID theory, the theory itself - just like Darwinian theory - is utterly silent on the God question. Thus it's arrant nonsense to reduce ID theory to "Goddidit."

Posted by: Jim | September 7, 2007 1:29 PM

Jim V: "There have been many advances, including genetics and the discovery of DNA, since Darwin's time, and there may well be many more to come."

Those advances are posing increasing problems for Darwinism. Darwin thought the cell was a simple blob of protoplasm. I wonder if he would have proposed his theory if he knew what we know today about the cell - that it's an enormously complex "factory" containing an elaborate network of interlocking "assembly lines" - that it's jam-packed with power plants, automated workshops, recycling units, miniature monorails, sensors, gates, pumps, identification markers, and (in some cases) rotary outboard motors - that a single cell contains (as Richard Dawkins has observed) more information than a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I wonder how seriously he would have taken the notion that the complex machinery of the cell arose by way of unintelligent material mechanisms.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 7, 2007 2:08 PM

Jim, we may have to agree to partially-disagree about the DesignER issue. I understand what you're saying, but I still don't get why you gloss over the importance of the foundational claim of ID - that the designer EXISTS.

Simply saying it's no big deal because design theory makes no OTHER inferences about the designer kinda misses (or dodges) the point. That one inference, implicit or not, is huge - and unsupported. There's no evidence for it, and Dembski is trying to "prove" design (and, by implication, the existence of a designer) by number-crunching. (Badly, too, or so I am led to believe.)

Note that nowhere in the above paragraph do I mention God or theism.

The wording chosen to express that "governing goal" was unfortunate, in my view

Of course you do, but I must disagree, for in my view it's to everyone's advantage to have as many cards on the table as possible. Regardless, neither your opinion, nor mine, makes that wording (which was without doubt the work of a Writer and not the result of unguided natural processes) any more or less significant that what the words themselves mean in the context of the document in which they appear.

It's not just that one sentence, either. Neither your opinion nor mine have any bearing on the significance of the 20-year goals of the DI as stated. I'm not sounding any alarms about looming Theocracy, so please don't put words in my mouth, but The Document says what it says. Its goals are theistic (if not theocratic) and its long term goals are to see design theory - and, inescapably, its clearly stated theistic foundation - applied in natural science, psychology, ethics, politics, fine arts, and to "permeate our religious, cultural, moral and political life."

Make of that what you will.

Thus it's arrant nonsense to reduce ID theory to "Goddidit."

I will agree with that, if you permit me to add that any claim that ID theory, with its obvious theistic implications, is "utterly silent" on the god question, is equally nonsensical. The theory's disinclination to identify the intelligent force or agent behind the apparent design of nature and life does NOT relieve it of its responsibility for demonstrating (or of its reliance upon) the existence of such a force or agent. It can never be utterly silent on that question, for it is making the claim that there's something out there that is, on some level, in charge of what goes on here.

Posted by: JimV | September 7, 2007 3:20 PM

Darwin thought the cell was a simple blob of protoplasm. I wonder if he would have proposed his theory if he knew what we know today about the cell - that it's an enormously complex "factory" containing an elaborate network of interlocking "assembly lines" - that it's jam-packed with power plants, automated workshops, recycling units, miniature monorails, sensors, gates, pumps, identification markers, and (in some cases) rotary outboard motors - that a single cell contains (as Richard Dawkins has observed) more information than a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I wonder how seriously he would have taken the notion that the complex machinery of the cell arose by way of unintelligent material mechanisms.

I can't speak for Darwin, but sign me up. As I've said, I can't claim to know what chemical reactions and evolutionary mechanisms could or could not accomplish over billions of years, but assuming that something else which I understand even less and have no direct evidence for was responsible does nothing for me.

Posted by: Brownian | September 7, 2007 3:31 PM

Having said that, let me ask you this: If design theorists are obligated to demonstrate the existence of the designer before design theory can be taken seriously, aren't Darwinists also obligated to demonstrate that matter is all there is before Darwinism can be taken seriously?

No, not anymore than chemists are obligated to demonstrate that matter is all there is before that they claim that sodium and chlorine ions will precipitate out of solution to form sodium chloride crystals or that physicists are obligated to demonstrate that matter is all there is before they can use a game of marbles to demonstrate that momentum is conserved.

Posted by: Josh | September 7, 2007 3:55 PM

Huh...well, ok...Jim...all your comments were in italics in the preview...I tried...seems something got screwed up...hope it be read.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 7, 2007 4:03 PM

Hi Jim,

It is never necessary to know a thing about a designer to justify a conclusion of design.

True, and I have not said otherwise.

Having said that, let me ask you this: If design theorists are obligated to demonstrate the existence of the designer before design theory can be taken seriously, then [...]

I cannot and will not answer that, for two reasons: First, there is no such obligation, and again, I have never said otherwise. They are obligated to produce the evidence of design, and if they succeed in doing so they will have also demonstrated the existence (if not the nature) of a designing influence or entity. The two are inseparable.

Note that, even then, it would not be necessary to know anything about the designer (though it would surely become a very hot issue of great interest to virtually every human being on earth!)

Second, as you've often said, neither ID or the ToE speaks directly to the god issue. However, Evo does not rest on the assumption that "matter is all there is" - it simply does not REQUIRE supernatural intervention or (currently) undetectable intelligent guiding influences. The same cannot be said for ID.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 7, 2007 6:09 PM

Thanks, Josh, but now I'm going to blow it... LoL..

I suggest that pedantically obsessing on the correct taxonomic terminology[...]

Jim, I have to back Brownian on this one. He wasn't being pedantic, he was insisting on a more precise definition of "kind" as a means of facilitating a discussion about the alleged limitations of evo. We all agree that evolutionary mechanisms can produce incremental changes in populations (cf Majerus) and that these changes can accumulate. But where do you draw the line between micro (demonstrably possible) and macro (allegedly impossible) evolution? What is the threshold?

Leaving Beethoven, Boeing, Martian calculators, and the Declaration of Independence behind for the moment, let us consider - as a change of pace, at least - something that's actually alive. Like a frog. Let's call it Notobatrachus degiustoi.

Ok, I admit it's a dead frog, now sadly extinct these past 150 million years, but it used to be alive, and would have appeared, to the human eye, to be a fairly ordinary (if small) frog. In your opinion, Jim, are "unguided" evolutionary processes capable of producing, say, both the huge, venomous Cane Toad and the tiny, innocuous, tree-dwelling Spring Peeper from the raw genetic materials of Notobatrachusthe over the course of 150 million years? Or, more to the point, do you think that evolution from paleofrogs to modern frogs and toads has been demonstrated by the evidence? Surely they are all the same "kind". Or are the acquisition of size and venom, or the loss of size and the acquisition of the ability to climb trees, beyond the scope of what unguided darwinian mechanisms can produce?

Now consider the Mudskipper. This is an amphibious fish with eyes on top of its head that runs around on land, breathes air cutaneously like an amphibian, and climbs trees. Perhaps Skippers who are better air-breathers and more mobile out of the water have a slight advantage over their peers. Do you think it impossible that a population of this unusual fish could, over the course of 150 million years, evolve into something very much like a modern frog or salamander? Surely fish and amphibian are not the same "kind", and yet this particular fish is, in a few striking ways, more like a frog than a flounder...

Regarding the wind chimes, I contend that I could write a piece, which I might prosaically title Duet for Windchimes and Tugboats, a performance of which would be essentially indistinguishable from a recording of unattended windchimes and tugboats. I further contend that design theory would either be unable to detect the design in my composition, or would incorrectly detect design in the transcription of the unattended recording, and would therefore be unreliable and arguably useless in distinguishing between the products of intelligently managed processes and "unguided" natural processes.

I'd like to add to Brownian's more amicable comments, Jim, that you express yourself well and comport yourself admirably. I do regret the shallow, ingracious comments I made the other day at the top of this thread.

Posted by: Jim | September 7, 2007 7:20 PM

Kseniya: "(ID theorists) are obligated to produce the evidence of design, and if they succeed in doing so they will have also demonstrated the existence (if not the nature) of a designing influence or entity. The two are inseparable."

Quite so. As I have repeatedly said, design implicates a designer. But ID theory deals only with the former, not the latter.

Kseniya: "(ToE) simply does not REQUIRE supernatural intervention..."

Neither does design theory.

Kseniya: "...or (currently) undetectable intelligent guiding influences."

If design is discerned, the existence of a designing influence will have been implicitly demonstrated - as you wrote above. But we won't know who or what that designing influence was, or how it actualized its influence.

Posted by: Josh | September 7, 2007 7:43 PM

Yeah...that's you, Kseniya...always with those bad words.

Posted by: Josh | September 7, 2007 7:50 PM

Yeah...that's you, Kseniya...always with those bad words.

Posted by: Kseniya | September 7, 2007 8:51 PM

Geez... rub it in, whydontcha!

Posted by: Jim | September 8, 2007 9:14 AM

Kseniya: "...do you think that evolution from paleofrogs to modern frogs and toads has been demonstrated by the evidence? Surely they are all the same 'kind'."

I don't know that it's actually been demonstrated by specific evidence for the presumed evolution that you cite, but in general it's been demonstrated that Darwinian mechanisms can produce minor adaptive changes in organisms, even to the point of producing reproductive isolation (which is one definition of speciation). It's reasonable to conclude that Darwinian mechanisms can produce frog to frog (or frog to toad) evolution, but it's unreasonable to extrapolate from that and say that those mechanisms can also cause, say, frog to otter to human evolution (don't take that evolutionary sequence literally - it's only meant to demonstrate the Darwinian claim that humans evolved from some unknown mammal, which evolved from some unknown amphibian, which evolved from some unknown fish, and so on and so on - all by way of unintelligent Darwinian mechanisms).

Kseniya: "I contend that I could write a piece, which I might prosaically title Duet for Windchimes and Tugboats, a performance of which would be essentially indistinguishable from a recording of unattended windchimes and tugboats. I further contend that design theory would either be unable to detect the design in my composition, or would incorrectly detect design in the transcription of the unattended recording..."

If the sounds heard on the recording were indistinguishable from a recording of unattended windchimes and tugboats, there would be no reason to think that the sounds conformed to an independently given specification (or specifications). Thus there would be no reason to draw a design inference. Dembski's explanatory filter can produce false negatives (inferring no-design where design is actually present), but (he argues) it won't produce false positives (inferring design where there is no design).

Posted by: Kseniya | September 8, 2007 9:52 AM

(Wow... weird... my frogs & windchimes comment magically appeared in the chronologically expected spot in the comment list, but it wasn't there last night. Same goes for some comments by Jim and Windy...)

Posted by: Jim | September 8, 2007 10:28 AM

A request of Josh, Kseniya, and Jim V -

I wonder if you'd take the time to read design theorist
Stephen C. Meyer's essay, "Intelligent Design: The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories." I don't expect you to agree with everything Meyer says, but what I'd like to know is if you think it was improper of the editor (Richard Sternberg) to approve the peer-reviewed essay for publication in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, and whether the subsequent abuse heaped on Sternberg by the Darwinian establishment was justified.

You can find the essay at:

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=2177

Posted by: Jim | September 8, 2007 10:40 AM

Kseniya: "I'd like to add to Brownian's more amicable comments, Jim, that you express yourself well and comport yourself admirably. I do regret the shallow, ingracious comments I made the other day at the top of this thread."

I appreciate your "attitude adjustment," Kseniya. The debate can't make any progress when it's just an exchange of insults, exemplified by the title of this thread: "Wells Lies. Again."

Posted by: Jim | September 8, 2007 11:33 AM

Graculus: "It looks very much like you are trying to work 'meaning' into Shannon IT. Don't do that, it's silly."

As I understand it, in Shannon IT, any complex pattern or sequence carries information. With regard to biological systems, however, the only relevant information is that which is meaningful (i.e., the information that shapes matter into biological forms). The differences between you and a rock lie in the vast amount of meaningful information that shaped matter into you.

Graculus: "There is a very, very large difference between philisophical materialism and methodological materialism. The ToE, like all science and all sane human beings, is wedded to methodological materialism, not to philisophical materialism."

Why should science be wedded to methodological materialism? If the material evidence leads to design inferences (which imply the actions of an immaterial intelligence), why can't science follow the material evidence to design inferences? The reason doesn't lie in an attachment of science to methodological materialism, rather it lies in an attachment to philosophical materialism. Science defined in terms of its methods can employ all three explantory modes: chance, necessity, and design. It is only when science is defined in terms of materialistic philosophy that it is limited to considering only chance and necessity.

Posted by: windy | September 8, 2007 12:27 PM

If we look at different kinds of frogs, we see an unbroken nested hierarchy of morphology and genetics.

If we look at fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, apes, and humans, we see an unbroken nested hierarchy of morphology and genetics.

Posted by: Stanton | September 8, 2007 1:13 PM

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v303/n5916/abs/303415a0.html

Posted by: Stanton | September 8, 2007 2:07 PM

Other Precambrian trilobite precursors include Bomakellia, Vendia, Praecambridium, Onega, and the "Flinders Soft-Bodied Trilobite."
Furthermore, some experts suspect that Vendia is the ancestor of the Cambrian arthropod Skania.

Posted by: Josh | September 8, 2007 2:31 PM

Josh wrote: "Describing Darwinian mechanisms as unguided...well, I suspect you're trying to say that evolution is random. It isn't. The mechanisms aren't guided in the sense that you're hoping for, but to describe them as unguided is rather too crude."

Jim replied: George Gaylord Simpson (one of the creators of the neo-Darwinian synthesis): "Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind."

Well, that is broadly true. It's accurate to describe evolution as not having a goal. But that doesn't actually argue against my statement that describing evolution as unguided is too crude to discuss what is really going on. Also, I would caution how much you want to cite *as law* stuff said by someone who left the scene 37 years ago. It isn't as though we've all been sitting around watching the clouds and smoking dope for the last four decades. As I said in my last post, drawing conclusions from a synthesis of Cambrian paleontology that is even 10 years old would be erroneous today...and as you might have inferred from what I've written about the Cambrian, it is reasonable to predict that most of biology has moved rather further in that time from where it was a decade ago than has the study of Cambrian invertebrate fossils.

Jim continued: Simpson's words reflect something that is repeated over and over again in Darwinist literature: that Darwinian evolution has no purpose and no goals. In what sense, then, could it be said that such evolution is guided? If Darwinian evolution has no goals, what is it being guided towards?

There is no purpose and no goal (other than a general trend for taxa to become more 'fit'), but I think you can describe selection loosely as being guided.

Jim wrote: At its very core, Darwinian evolution is a random process because the variations it requires for evolutionary progress are always randomly produced (or so the story goes).

I doubt we understand enough about the world to use the word 'always' here. And again, no...it's not random.

Jim wrote: Natural selection operates with law-like regularity in preserving advantageous variations, but its operation in no way counters the randomness of the mutations.

OK, here again is another statement that I'm going to ask you to support, because it runs totally against my understanding of biology. What biological literature are you reading that declares that natural selection operates with 'law-like regularity' in any sense and that declares that only advantageous mutations are preserved? Over what time frame are you using the term 'preserved?' Can you also provide evidence to support the assertion that selection's operation in no way counters the randomness of the mutations?

Posted by: Jim | September 8, 2007 5:35 PM

Josh: "You were the one who argued against there being evolutionary precursors for trilobites. You claimed that the pre-trilobite fossil record contains few, if any credible trilobite precursors. I asked you to support the claim."

Based on statements like that made by Darwinist Richard Dawkins, who claimed that the Cambrian phyla appear to have been "planted" without any evolutionary history, I inferred that paleontologists had found little in the fossil record in the way of likely precursors to the Cambrian phyla (otherwise, why would Dawkins, who would love to see a plethora of precursors, say such a thing?). Therefore, I deferred the question to your expertise. By naming only one credible precursor to trilobites, you helpfully corroborated my claim that few (if any) precursors have been identified. Stanton has since named a few more, without revealing why we should regard them as precursors. Is it enough that Spriggina and the "precursors" named by Stanton have morphological similarities suggesting that they might be ancestral to trilobites? Or should we expect to see in the fossil record a clear lineage before we make such a claim with the air of certainty displayed by Stanton?

Josh: "Why should there be thousands of trilobite precursors in the fossil record?"

Because, as you surely must know, Darwinian evolution doesn't take you directly from Spriggina to trilobites in one giant leap. That would be saltation. Instead, Darwinian evolution allegedly proceeds by baby steps as advantageous mutations gradually accumulate. So, where in the fossil record are all the baby steps between Spriggina and trilobites? Each intermediate, transitional form between the two must have had advantages over its predecessors on the Spriggina-to-trilobite family tree, otherwise natural selection wouldn't have favored any of those intermediate, transitional forms and added them to the family tree. Where, then, are the many organisms that had to be on the family tree between Spriggina and trilobites?

(To save me the effort of googling, I wonder if you could answer a couple of questions for me: Did Spriggina and trilobites exist coterminously, or was their existence separated by many years? If so, how many years separated them?)

Josh: "If you have enough knowledge to assert that there are no credible pre-trilobite precursor candidates of Ediacaran age in the fossil record, then surely I don't need to point out the factual problems with implying we have thousands of Ediacaran-age taxa."

I wasn't implying anything about the number of taxa; I was asking. But I don't think I need to point out that if you don't have a great many Ediacaran-age taxa, the argument that there must be precursors to the Cambrian phyla in the Ediacaran fossils is weakened, not strengthened.

Posted by: Anton Mates | September 8, 2007 6:28 PM

Based on statements like that made by Darwinist Richard Dawkins, who claimed that the Cambrian phyla appear to have been "planted" without any evolutionary history, I inferred that paleontologists had found little in the fossil record in the way of likely precursors to the Cambrian phyla (otherwise, why would Dawkins, who would love to see a plethora of precursors, say such a thing?)

In Dawkins' own words:

"I once introduced a chapter on the so-called Cambrian Explosion with the words: "It is as though the fossils were planted there without any evolutionary history." Again, this was a rhetorical overture, intended to whet the reader's appetite for the explanation. Inevitably, my remark was gleefully quoted out of context. Creationists adore "gaps" in the fossil record."

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 8, 2007 6:53 PM

Sorry for the long post. This is one time-consuming thread!

------------------

This might get a little tough to follow. Jim, I'm going to use your convention of name followed by colon followed by comment in quotes. I'm putting all previous comments from either of us in italics. I've also separated things into artibrary numbered blocks. Let me know if this isn't clear. -Josh

I recommend HTML: start quotes with <blockquote> and end them with </blockquote>. That's what I use, and why it says "you may use HTML tags for style" above the comment window.

It is possible to nest any number of blockquote tags within each other. <blockquote><blockquote>a</blockquote>a<blockquote> produces

a

a

(I put line breaks in. I don't know if that's necessary.)

-------------

Jim, you explained how to choose between necessity, random, and design. But you overlooked the fourth possibility: evolution.

Obviously, evolution doesn't apply to a deck of cards. Cards don't reproduce, so they cannot evolve. So when you exclude necessity and random, it follows that design is the answer. But organisms aren't cards. They reproduce, inherit, and mutate -- and those which have certain mutations and lack others have more surviving fertile offspring than the rest.

Hey, think of languages. Languages are inherited (even though not in the biological way), mutate, and spread. Give Latin 2000 years, and you arrive at French, which is a completely different language. That much is documented. So if you find a language, you can rule out necessity and random, but you don't have the slightest reason to assume design.

-------------------

the chief prop of the theory (in the macro sense, and in its present form) is materialistic philosophy

Is ToE open to the idea that an immaterial cause (intelligence) played a role - perhaps the key role - in life's evolution? If not, then ToE is wedded to materialistic philosophy.

What a bunch of nonsense. The theory of evolution is science, not philosophy.

It seems you are thinking of methodological naturalism. All science is built on methodological naturalism, which is the assumption that miracles do not happen so often as to make the world wholly unpredictable. Perhaps ironically, but fortunately, that assumption is itself a scientific hypothesis, because it is testable -- and it is tested in every single experiment and every single other observation! It still hasn't been disproved, so it looks like a quite safe assumption.

You know Popper and the concept of falsifiability. Fine. But how do we decide between two hypotheses that are both testable, tested, and unfalsified, and explain the same amount of evidence? We apply Ockham's Razor, the principle of parsimony. Of such two hypotheses, the one must be preferred that requires the smallest number of ad hoc assumptions.

So given the fact that it has been shown that a designer is not necessary (see below), we should, for the time being, not assume that one exists. After all, we simply don't need to, and the assumption that a designer exists is "a huge, HUGE claim in and of itself" (Kseniya).

As far as I know, the principle of parsimony is the only reason why the phlogiston theory of combustion was already universally considered disproven before it was possible to play with single molecules and atoms. It had to make more and more ad hoc assumptions (phlogiston has negative mass, yet still somehow doesn't flee the Earth; oxygen is dephlogisticated air; and so on) that the oxygen theory of combustion simply didn't need.

Now, be careful not to confuse methodological naturalism with metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is the assumption that nothing supernatural such as miracles --no matter how little it meddles with observable nature -- exists. As its name says, it is metaphysics, it is philosophy. That is not what science is built on.

This is why not every scientist is an atheist: science doesn't require it. Even dogmatic Catholicism, according to which every single saint has (by definition) worked at the very minimum one miracle, is (barely, but still) compatible with methodological naturalism and therefore with science. Result: the Papal Academy of Sciences.

I have no quarrel with what the fossil record tells us about the existence, structure, and age of the organisms you mention, but I suspect that the "intermediates" among them are identified by reference to the needs of Darwinian theory, which makes their identification self-referential (or circular), a kind of reasoning that confirms nothing. If you didn't view those "intermediates" through the lens of Darwinian theory, is there something about them that cries out "We are intermediate, transitional forms"?

Oh yes.

Ignore all fossils and look around yourself. Every species and subspecies is, in many features, intermediate between others. And indeed, the botanist Jussieu thought in the 18th century that nature is a continuum: everything is intermediate, and all lines we draw are arbitrary.

Now, the interesting thing is that we find intermediates between some groups, but not between others (contrary to what Jussieu had assumed). We have the platypus and echidna, but we don't have an intermediate between mammals and butterflies. Why is that?

Common descent is an easy explanation. It's also a testable explanation, because it makes testable predictions. It predicts intermediates between placentals and marsupials, and between those two together and the monotremes, as well as between those three together and the "reptiles". Lo and behold, we have plenty of fossils of just such animals.

Don't you first have to assume unguided (or Darwinian) evolution before you can label an organism an intermediate, transitional form? Wouldn't it be senseless to label an organism an intermediate, transitional form without first assuming unguided evolution?

No, as explained above.

Let me ask you this, David: Is the platypus an intermediate, transitional form?

In many respects, yes.

If so, is it on its way to becoming fully reptilian, or fully mammalian?

Like everything else, it's on its way to become ever more unique.

In many respects, we are intermediate between the chimps + bonobos on the one hand and the gorillas on the other.

The problem Darwinism has with the Cambrian explosion is that its primary mechanism (random mutations acted on by natural selection) has not been shown to be capable of producing such an explosion of new, complex life forms in such a short (geologically speaking) period of time. In fact, that mechanism has not been shown to be capable of producing new life forms if it is given hundreds of millions of years to operate.

How would you do that? What would such a test look like?

What we see confirms to the predictions. We see a wild bush in the fossil record and in today's world that grows in all directions. That's what we expect from evolution by mutation, selection, and drift. It's not what we expect from anything that leads towards progress or suchlike.

David: "For your information, there are at least 25 species concepts out there (not all, but most of them, applicable to all of life), and the biologists can't agree on one..."

I know. That's what makes claims that speciation has been observed so unenlightening. If you define species down far enough, you're bound to observe speciation and find that Darwinian mechanisms can produce it.

How would you define it, then?

David: "...you can't start from the assumption that a difference between 'microevolution' and 'macroevolution' has to exist. So, tell me one, and I'll point out the holes in it."

OK. Adaptive changes that leave organisms essentially unchanged (such as adaptive changes in the coloration of peppered moths, or in the size of finches' beaks, or in the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics) are microevolutionary changes. Creative changes that cause organisms to evolve from one kind (say, fish) to another kind (say, amphibians) - or creative changes that introduce biological novelty (i.e., new organisms, new organs, new structures, new processes, new systems) - are macroevolutionary changes.

I regret to say that this is exactly the non-answer I would have expected from a creationist.

Let's start with your seventh word: "essentially". Can you define that?

Then please tell me which changes are "creative" and which aren't. To get from Tiktaalik to Acanthostega you need to do very little: modify the way the ends of the paired fins grow (that could be just a small change in the amount of expression of a single gene, though I'm admittedly guessing here), switch off the production of fin rays at their ends (that might even be a result of the same mutation, and if not, a small change in the area of expression of another gene is necessary), and mess a little -- just a little -- with the proportions of... mainly the skull. That's it. Why are such changes "creative" while a color change in a moth is not?

Lastly, you use the term "kind". As several others have mentioned above, only creationists do that.

I am not quibbling over the fact that you didn't use terms like "class", "order" or "family". The ranks traditionally used in classification are undefined, and you will not find anyone who denies that they are subjective. The groups are real; the ranks that their names get are not. There is no way to define "class", and there is no way to define "kind". Moreover, the term "kind" carries the assumption that there are no intermediates between "kinds", which is simply not the case.

If we confirm the ability of Darwinian mechanisms to accomplish the former, we haven't confirmed the abilities of those mechanisms to accomplish the latter.

Eh, no. But you have yet to show me that we need to assume that "creative changes" exist in the first place. If you can't do that, I'll bring Ockham's Razor.

If changes that leave the organisms "essentially unchanged" are demonstrated to occur now, the principle of parsimony says we have to consider them demonstrated at all times. Show me there are "creative changes", or give up.

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Suppose that we define species in terms of reproductive isolation. Suppose, also, that we experimentally produce the reproductive isolation of a new strain of bacteria

What, don't you know that bacteria don't do sexual reproduction?

They do engage in activities termed "parasexual" or "conjugation" -- and that is the (one- or two-sided) exchange of DNA with anything. Absolutely anything. It probably doesn't matter statistically, but you are not isolated against conjugation from any of the bacterial "species" in your gut.

Ernst Mayr, the most famous proponent of the reproductive isolation criterion as a species concept, said outright that "bacteria do not form species". (I don't know if that's an exact quote.)

---------------

would no doubt say: "But they're still bacteria. I thought Darwinian mechanisms were supposed to be capable of generating descendants that are quite different from their ancestors - amphibians from fish, for example. How in the world does this new species of bacteria you've produced confirm that claim?"

If you really believe a frog and a trout are more different than an Oscillatoria cyanobacterium and a Rickettsia alpha-proteobacterium, you have a lot to learn...

-------------------

Those advances are posing increasing problems for Darwinism. Darwin thought the cell was a simple blob of protoplasm. I wonder if he would have proposed his theory if he knew what we know today about the cell - that it's an enormously complex "factory" containing an elaborate network of interlocking "assembly lines" - that it's jam-packed with power plants, automated workshops, recycling units, miniature monorails, sensors, gates, pumps, identification markers, and (in some cases) rotary outboard motors - that a single cell contains (as Richard Dawkins has observed) more information than a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I wonder how seriously he would have taken the notion that the complex machinery of the cell arose by way of unintelligent material mechanisms.

Aaaah... that talking point again. It's an argument from ignorance. Take the microtubuli in your cells, composed of alpha-tubulin and beta-tubulin. These two proteins are very similar, except that the beta one functions as a GTPase, while the alpha one is a defunct GTPase -- it has a pointless inbuilt GTP, so to speak, and can't destroy it. It is very easy to figure out which mutations -- and there are few -- were necessary to derive both from a common ancestor that was a functioning GTPase. Then the next step. Behold FtsZ, a protein with an important function in the cell division (it pinches the cell together in the middle) of bacteria (including chloroplasts and many mitochondria) and archaea. It, too, is a globular GTPase that forms long chains which change their curvature and become less stable when the FtsZ hydrolyzes its GTP. Not only that, its precise shape is very similar to that of the two tubulins of eukaryotes. Why should that be?

---------------

Now the biggie. I mentioned alpha-tubulin with its inbuilt GTP above, a GTP that has to be produced using energy. What a waste of energy. That's my last question: How does ID "theory" explain stupid design?

I bet it doesn't.

By "stupid design", I mean things that a halfway reasonable designer would not have done. Our eyes correct for chromatic aberration only in having a very small number of blue receptors -- the error is still there, but we don't see it, at the price of seeing blue very badly. Then there's the fact that the retina and all is inside-out: light traveling through the eyeball has to traverse a layer of blood vessels and nerves and then the whole retina to strike the light receptors at the back end. The trachea and the oesophagus join in the pharyngeal cavity; as a result, we can die from choking. (The whales have solved this problem: their trachea grows through the pharyngeal cavity all the way up to the nasal cavity. This limits the size of the prey they can eat; after all they don't chew. A stupid solution to a stupid problem.) Our kidneys first let everything pass that's water-soluble and then frantically work to transport the valuable stuff from the primary urine back into the blood, using a lot of energy. Our urogenital system... the word says it all. Our knees and intervertebral discs can barely stand the usual stresses of life. And it's not just us humans, mammals, or tetrapods who's botched up: about 800 amino acides occurred in living organisms last time I checked, yet only 20 (OK... 22) occur in proteins and are coded for in the DNA. Why this restriction? More amino acids could make a lot more versatile proteins. Then there's DNA itself. It slowly but steadily falls apart when you keep it in water. What a stupid idea to use that as the carrier of heredity! You spend most of your energy constantly repairing your DNA, especially (but not only) replacing bases that have fallen off. It doesn't have to be that way: for biochemical experiments that DNA wouldn't survive, the so-called PNA was developed. It has a protein backbone, and it does not react with water to a noticeable extent. But no, we are stuck with the stupid solution.

Evolution can explain all of these cases of stupid design, and it can explain why we use DNA and not the even more unstable RNA. (Ask, and I'll explain them; this post is really long enough.) ID runs into a contradiction at worst and is silent at best, right?

---------------------------

Josh again:

I think Spriggina is a very credible possibility as a trilobite precursor.

I disagree. (See? Those evilutionists can't agree on anything! Obviously they're all wrong! ;-) ) First, trilobites are arthropods, so when we look for a trilobite precursor, we must look within the arthropods. (Indeed we have found plenty of animals that look very closely related to trilobites, and others that are closely related to both trilobites and chelicerates.) Spriggina has indeed been interpreted by some as an arthropod relative, but it's probably a vendobiont. The closest known relatives of the arthropods -- anomalocaridids and water bears especially -- are quite different. Jim, note that the anomalocaridids are part of the Cambrian explosion, and that they are only preserved as fossils under very rare circumstances.

Trilobites do appear suddenly (in a geological sense) with already pretty well developed eyes. There isn't any direct evidence for trilobites right now (that I know of) as to earlier stages of those eyes.

The chelicerates have simpler eyes than the trilobites (and, independently, the insects).

the trilobite record overall is a rather striking example of increasing complexity through time, with gradually increasingly complex forms appearing as one goes up from the Lower Cambrian into increasingly younger rocks...

Nope. What increases through time is the range of complexity. :-)

------------------

Like you (apparently), I think all the other pre-trilobite organisms don't recommend themselves as credible evolutionary precursors of trilobites. So we have one credible precursor (why is Spriggina credible?) and - what, thousands? millions? - of non-credible precursors. To me that sounds like the pre-trilobite fossil record contains few, if any, credible trilobite precursors (which is the claim I made).

Jim, you seem to have rather odd ideas about the Precambrian fossil record and our knowledge of it. There aren't millions, there aren't thousands, there are probably not even 100.

And why should the Precambrian record be full of trilobite precursors? One (or, rather, an arthropod-tardigrade-onychophore precursor) should suffice, shouldn't it?

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 8, 2007 7:10 PM

Based on statements like that made by Darwinist Richard Dawkins, who claimed that the Cambrian phyla appear to have been "planted" without any evolutionary history, I inferred that paleontologists had found little in the fossil record in the way of likely precursors to the Cambrian phyla (otherwise, why would Dawkins, who would love to see a plethora of precursors, say such a thing?).

He's exaggerating. Perhaps for dramatic effect, probably out of ignorance (not everyone has read the necessary papers, and he's not a paleontologist, let alone one who works on the Cambrian).

Hm... I wrote the above before I read comment 203. Looks like I was right. :-)

Or should we expect to see in the fossil record a clear lineage before we make such a claim with the air of certainty displayed by Stanton?

No.

Imagine a very bushy bush -- not really a bush because all branches have the same (and very small) thickness. Take a few cross-sections at not too small intervals. Throw away on average 99.99 % of each cross-section, less from the higher ones and more from the lower ones, roughly. (And that not at random; introduce a complicated bias.) Then compare any two successive cross-sections. What is the probability that you will find any particular branch in both? What is the probability that we should find a direct ancestor of anything we know in the fossil record?

I haven't commented the brontothere example yet. I don't know the details of that particular one, but, if taken literally as an ancestor-descendant sequence, it's almost certainly wrong. Most supposed ancestors in the... terrestrial vertebrate record before the Pliocene anyway have turned out to have innovations of their own, which makes it an unparsimonious assumption that they are direct ancestors of anything known. That includes, for example, Archaeopteryx.

If taken less literally, the brontothere example is still a nice illustration: it is what we expect to find.

Edward Reed, among others, has argued that natural selection may be a law of nature.

I don't know who that is, but I don't need to know that to see that the claim is not very intelligent. Natural selection is already inescapable, based on what we already know. It's almost a tautology: after a while, most will be descendants of those who have had the most surviving fertile offspring; those have had the most surviving fertile offspring who were best equipped to do so. If reproduction, inheritance, and mutation exist, natural selection is impossible to avoid.

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 8, 2007 8:42 PM

...aha... comment 203 is now 204...

Posted by: Jim | September 8, 2007 8:56 PM

Jim: "As I understand it, in Shannon IT, any complex pattern or sequence carries information."

Graculus: "Negative. In Shannon Information any sequence, no matter the length or 'complexity', *is* (does not 'carry') information."

http://www.iscid.org/encyclopedia/Shannon_Information

>Shannon information is concerned with quantifying information (usually in terms of number of bits) to keep track of alphanumeric characters as they are communicated sequentially from a source to a receiver. The amount of Shannon information contained in a string of characters is inversely related to the probability of the occurrence of the string.

If Shannon information is "contained in a string of characters," aren't those characters "carrying" the information? Whatever point you're trying to make, it seems that you're drawing a distinction without a difference. In any event, Shannon information theory and ID theory have different concerns with respect to information. ID theory is concerned with information (specifically, complex specified information) that is biologically meaningful (or useful).

From the same source cited above:

>Unlike specified complexity, Shannon information is solely concerned with the improbability or complexity of a string of characters rather than its patterning or significance.

Graculus: "'Meaning' is entirely subjective, and not measurable, even in biology."

In that case, why bother doing science? If all science can deliver is subjective meaning, what's the point of it?

Graculus: "You are caught in a semantical game regarding 'meaning' and 'information'."

Not really. "Meaning" and "information" aren't synonymous, but some information is meaningful and some isn't. ID theory isn't concerned with meaningless information.

Posted by: Stanton | September 8, 2007 9:07 PM

Unlike my critics, none of whom have been completely indoctrinated into the Darwinian point of view.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 8, 2007 9:21 PM

Unlike my critics, none of whom have been completely indoctrinated into the Darwinian point of view.

well, see, that's the difference, Jim. all of us actually went to school and learned how to evaluate the actual evidence for this theory, and many others, all by ourselves.

that's called e-d-u-c-a-t-i-o-n.

indoctrination is what you get at church.

do you know what projection, is, Jim?

Posted by: windy | September 8, 2007 11:05 PM

Kseniya wrote: "I'd like to add to Brownian's more amicable comments, Jim, that you express yourself well and comport yourself admirably."

I guess, if you like moving goalposts. "Why is there no trace of a Precambrian trilobite precursor? Oh, there may be some? Ok, but why aren't there thousands of them?"

I am still at a loss what difference the presence or absence of precursor/transitional fossils makes, if ID-theorists accept common descent anyway.

Posted by: Ichthyic | September 9, 2007 3:03 AM

I don't know, but I say let's sprinkle on some Old Bay and call 'em "dinner"!

I hear they taste like chicken.

or is it chicken taste like them?

hmm.

Posted by: Stanton | September 9, 2007 11:33 AM

I don't know, but I say let's sprinkle on some Old Bay and call 'em "dinner"!

I hear they taste like chicken.

or is it chicken taste like them?

hmm.

Posted by: Stanton | September 9, 2007 12:03 PM

Kseniya, do realize that Jim has routinely and arrogantly dismissed all of the arguments presented to him, and he has yet to demonstrate exactly how Intelligent Design is better than "Darwinism."
Saying that Intelligent Design is just an "infant science" does not excuse its proponents from doing science.

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | September 9, 2007 12:17 PM

Or, maybe not (has he mentioned "frontloading"? "new body plans, organs, tissues, or cell types"?))
But if not, remarkably convergent in certain details of wording...convergent or (shudders) imitative.

Posted by: windy | September 9, 2007 12:39 PM

Plus, Sven, Jim has never mentioned how Intelligent Design explains the appearance, rise and decline of Biston betularia var. carbonari, let alone how it explains it better than how "Darwinism" does.

They explain it by natural selection, of course. Rather than let them cherry-pick biology, we should point out that we have already established that they are materialist evolutionists, and now we are just haggling over the price.

Posted by: Stanton | September 9, 2007 1:19 PM

The oldest trilobites are the fallotaspid redlichiid trilobites, such as the Moroccan trilobite, Fallotaspis.
They appeared near the start of the Cambrian, and died out almost immediately before the first olenellid redlichiid trilobites, such as Nevadia and Olenellus, appeared around 550 million years ago.

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 9, 2007 1:35 PM

The 550 figure must be outdated -- the Cambrian only began 542 million years ago. http://www.stratigraphy.org/gssp.html

Given their calcified armor, we should expect the trilobites to turn up in the fossil record long before their relatives. However, what definition of the base of the Cambrian was used in Morocco?

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 9, 2007 1:59 PM

Scholar.google.com finds this Geological Society of America meeting abstract for Fallotaspis which shows that Fallotaspis is Atdabanian in age, at least in North America. The next pages of results seem to show that, in North America anyway, the base of the Cambrian was put at the base of the Fallotaspis zone in the 1960s and 70s.

Figure 2 (on p. 6) of this Google Scholar result shows that there is a "pre-trilobite" part of the Cambrian underneath the Fallotaspis zone, which begins in the Atdabanian. Warning: if you click on that link, you start downloading a pdf that has over 5 MB.

Posted by: David Marjanović | September 9, 2007 3:24 PM

OK, Parvancorina it is then. :-)
GSA abstract
explanation

Posted by: Stanton | September 9, 2007 5:17 PM

Actually, Jim says that Intelligent Design and Creationism are two totally different things...
It's just that he has never stated how Intelligent Design does science, beyond alleging that a lack of visible progress is due to it being an "infant science," nor does he acknowledge the Discovery Institute's decidedly pro-Creationist motives.

Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | September 9, 2007 7:18 PM

[The missing ingress in the previous comment:]

I read this thread with gratification, great comments from David Marjanović, windy, Stanton, et cetera. And who will forget JimV's new theory: "The Murphy Method, or, The Theory of Intelligent Failure"?

We are getting used to creationists who claims IQ's "to the north of 150" and still are ignorant. I'm reminded of that genius bartender who suggested that he had explained nature and science by philosophy...

[Cont.]

With regard to biological systems, however, the only relevant information is that which is meaningful (i.e., the information that shapes matter into biological forms).
[Later:] "Meaning" and "information" aren't synonymous, but some information is meaningful and some isn't. ID theory isn't concerned with meaningless information.

Information isn't an especially useful characteristic or concern for biology. Also, as for "specification", information needs models (are semantic) to be useful. And genetic or phenotypic information is contingent on the environment.

But FWIW we can measure information in some cases. In its technical sense it is slightly related to complexity as for example in Kolmogorov complexity. And as no one complexity measure can characterize all possible structures, Kolmogorov complexity is not well defined. In practice you can pick a specific compression scheme to compare information content, but you can't do much else with that type of information.

Specifically, we can identify both Shannon and Kolmogorov information associated