Irreducible complexity in biology

David, can you list any of those books? I'd like to check them out, possibly.

 

My impression, and I could be wrong as its been a long time since I've spent time with this topic, is that many Neo-Darwinists would claim that sometimes morphic changes can result as a result of mutation, and may not necessarily be beneficial or detrimental at the time, but just sort of hang out (so to speak) upon which at a later time it may become beneficial, if luck should so provide, either in itself or through participation in some other bodily system.

 

I don't think that inevitability is part of the standard claim. Actually, I've heard many evolutionists state or write about their sense of wonder that things happened the way that they did in order to get us here, and that they believe it to be quite remarkable that things have reached this point..

Edit-actually I have heard lots of talk about how big the Universe is and that given enough time, life is inevitable. Maybe thats what you meant. My sights were just set on Earth when I responded to your post.

 

Have any of you guys watched Kent Hovind debate against evolutionists? lol if nothing else its pretty entertaining. Hes quite the show-man. Setting aside his fundamentalism, he does a good job of showing a lot of the assumptions that are made in science and have reached the textbooks concerning evolution. Its too bad that the only people debating evolutionists are fundamentalists. Not that fundamentalists are not equipped to do so, but it carries all that Theological backagge and, to many, probably suggests that if you have questions or doubts concerning evolution that you must be a fundamentalist.

 

Amusing is definitely the best word for it lol. Hovind goes way off topic. I see him more as an entertainer. But he does do an interesting job at poking some holes in certain assumptions. That other professor has some anger issues. I’ll check out the video you posted later. I actually watch Hovind debate Shermer a while back.

 

Also, actually, (as per the thread title), when I was watching that Hovind-Shermer debate, at the end during audience Q and A, Shermer was asked by an audience member which ID argument was the strongest. He reluctantly answered “irreducible complexity.”

Moreso than on The creationists side, I’ve been really surprised at the lack of real evidence produced by evolutionists. Like the transitional fossil record for instance. Shermer; when challenged on the topic, produced 3 pictures of whales throughout the ages. The first had a blowhole at the front of the skull, the second in the middle, and the third nearer to the neck. And that seems to be the best transitional evidence they have. Out of the absolute wealth of fossils they posses, if evolution definitely happened the way they say, (I’m no anthropologist so my understanding is certainly incomplete) but wouldn’t you expect a whole ton of transitional fossils? Those whale bones, I wouldn’t even consider those transitional at all. They’re all whales!!

 

This is Meyer just speaking his case on his own. Its different than the above video because he gets more into ID than anti-Neo Darwinism.

The Cambrian explosion is interesting. I keep wondering, doesnt there have to be something we are missing? Something we havent thought of? Some reason that the fossils didnt form? It does seem bizzarre, but it was sooo long ago. So I have to keep reservations about drawing conclusions from it, but its certainly problematic. I do wish I understood it more thoroughly.

To me, the biggest case for some kind of supernatural intervention into the physical world has always been the simple phenomenon of consciousness. Even when I was very young, when I started asking myself the big question "are we just meat robots?", I would always remember that I am my mind. Simply, I am. And thats the only answer Ive ever really needed. The idea that this universe just popped into existence for no reason and gave rise to mind bogglingly physically complex and psychologically conscious beings just for no apparent reason, I find absolutely untenable.

I personally consider it absolutely probable that some supernatural agent guided our formation physically somehow in some capacity and essentially assigned conscious preformed spirits to these physical beings. I'm not sure how that looked. Did a designer program and reprogram DNA at different stages? That idea still seems outrageously bizarre to me, but I find the alternative (the above paragraph) even more ridiculous. More bizarre than either of those possibilities is the fact that anything exists in the first place. Existence itself is the grand miracle. I find the possibility of an intelligence guiding our formation to be a much less bizarre sounding phenomenon than the simple fact that anything exists in the first place.

The purpose of this grand and bizarre experiment (based on medium and NDE data) seems to be to create "a play" of sorts, where we can largely forget who we are exactly (the brain acting as a reducing filter) sufficient enough that we learn certain lessons and grow spiritually. The forgetting being necessary for some reason or another.

I wonder if Meyer would come on Skeptiko. He's really good at what he does. Ill email him. These people generally answer emails. Aben Alexander emailed me back once, as did Jeffrey Long. Raymond Moody never got back to me though lol.

 

I find all the analogies to human computers and designs, especially the mousetrap thing unhelpful. Whenever I hear the mousetrap analogy beginning to be talked about I skip to when they start actually talking about biology again. Seems like that time would be better spent actually talking about biology. I can see the analogy being used to help the general public understand, but whe they actually start going into it in debate, it seems a strange waste of time. The computer code analogy to DNA code is much more relevant and pertinent than the mousetrap, but still.

It’s a good point that this intelligence(s) may not be omniscient. It is always assumed that it is, and I’ve oretry much always assumed the same. But I have to think that’s due to my Christian upbringing and the theologies all around us.

 

The metaphorical using of the mousetrap to demonstrate irreducible complexity made famous by Behe. Its all over these videos and the ID literature.

 

Behe? Wasn't he the chap who in court claimed there was no evidence for something, only to be presented with around 50 peer reviewed papers?

If he had conveniently ignored them, then that makes him untrustworthy. If he didn't know about them, then that means he is in no position to be making the claims that he does.

Except no one is claiming mouse traps evolved.

 

Please post details of, or a link to, the specific example you mention, because it's a big ask to go through the whole Kitzmiller case to ferret it out.

Also, if you have the patience and open-mindedness, you can examine the ID movement's responses to what they term the myths arising from the Kitzmiller case, in order, here:

https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten_myths_about/
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten-dover-myths-2/
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten-dover-myths-3/
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten-dover-myths-4/
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten-dover-myths-5/
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten-dover-myths-6/
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten-dover-myths-7/
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten-dover-myths-8/
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten-dover-myths-9/
https://evolutionnews.org/2015/12/ten-dover-myths-10/

Incidentally, though no one is claiming mousetraps evolved, Darwinists are claiming that structures many times more complex than mousetraps evolved, driven purely by chance mutations coupled with natural selection.

ID doesn't claim that evolution hasn't occurred: it's perfectly compatible with evolution in the sense of change over time. Reptiles came before mammals, invertebrates before vertebrates, gymnosperms before angiosperms, and so on: there's no argument with that, and some ID proponents are even happy with common descent. The argument is really about how such evolution occurred. Was it through RM + NS, or some other mechanism, which latter involves intelligence?

It's hard to think of other alternatives, though they might conceivably exist, I suppose. The Third Way people are groping towards mechanisms involving epigenetics and horizontal gene transfer, etc, and I applaud them for loosening the stranglehold of Darwinism, but whether they're any closer to eliminating intelligence as a possible contributory factor is at the moment moot.

Finally, ID proponents don't argue against natural selection. In given conditions, they don't argue that environmental factors can't influence which species survive, nor that small phenotypic changes (microevolution) can't result from that. The argument is about how to account for the saltational nature of the appearance of whole new body plans in the fossil record (macroevolution). These are the so-called "explosions", such as the Cambrian, the mammalian, the avian, the rise of the angiosperms, and so on -- new phyletic groups appearing in the fossil record quite rapidly with precious little evidence for intermediaries between those and preceding clades.

 

Jägermeister, you might have been referring to something covered in the second link I provided above:

...For example, the ACLU claimed:

He [Behe] was confronted with the fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books and several immunology text-book chapters about the evolution of the immune system, P256, 280, 281, 283, 747, 748, 755 and 743, and he insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution — it was “not good enough.”
​

Judge Jones’s ruling contained a nearly identical statement,

He [Behe] was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not “good enough.”
​

But the transcript of Behe’s cross-examination shows that the ACLU and Judge Jones misquoted Behe:

Q. ….Now, these articles rebut your assertion that scientific literature has no answers on the origin of the vertebrate immune system?


A. No, they certainly do not. My answer, or my argument is that the literature has no detailed rigorous explanations for how complex biochemical systems could arise by a random mutation and natural selection and these articles do not address that.


Q. So these are not good enough?


A. They’re wonderful articles. They’re very interesting. They simply just don’t address the question that I pose.
​

And in another exchange:

Q. Is that your position today that these articles aren’t good enough, you need to see a step-by-step description?


A. These articles are excellent articles I assume. However, they do not address the question that I am posing. So it’s not that they aren’t good enough. It’s simply that they are addressed to a different subject. [Emphasis added.]
​

What Behe said was, “It’s not that they aren’t good enough,” yet the ACLU, and Judge Jones, claimed that he said that they are “not good enough.”

Behe meant that these papers look at DNA sequence similarity and infer common ancestry based upon that evidence. But his argument wasn’t against common ancestry. It was against the mutation-selection mechanism as a source of evolutionary creativity — a very different question. Judge Jones, guided by the ACLU, missed the point.

Similarly, on the issue of ID research, the plaintiff’s brief claimed, “Intelligent design is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications.” Likewise, Judge Jones in his ruling said, “The evidence presented in this case demonstrates that ID is not supported by any peer-reviewed research, data or publications.”

Yet, as John West and David DeWolf note:

Expert witness Scott Minnich testified at trial that there were between “seven and ten” peer-reviewed papers supporting ID, and he discussed a pro-intelligent design article in the peer-reviewed biology journal, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Additional peer-reviewed publications were listed in an annotated bibliography submitted in an amicus brief accepted as part of the official court record by Judge Jones.
​

As Casey Luskin wrote yesterday (“Ten Myths About Dover: #3, ‘Intelligent Design Has No Peer-Reviewed Research or Publications’“), quite a few peer-reviewed publications were documented to Judge Jones, and the ID movement has now published over eighty peer-reviewed publications reporting much ID research. But Judge Jones got this wrong, too — again, because he apparently copied false claims from an ACLU brief.

Judicial opinions are supposed to be carefully thought out and based upon solid evidence brought up in trial. Was Jones’s ruling on ID really the meticulous work of an impartial jurist? Hardly. His extensive copying and the errors this introduced should undermine confidence in his ruling. Any fair critic who wants to show that ID is something other than science needs to turn, for confirmation, to other arguments and other sources.​