I'm not asking why similar organisms are more similar than dissimilar ones.

Well, you're asking how ID explains it.

ericmurphy Says:
October 1st, 2005 at 10:06 pm

Here's what I mean by closely-related: all life on earth is organized into "nested hierarchies." In other words, there is no ape that is more closely related to fish than it is to other primates. There is no dog that is more closely related to birds than it is to other mammals. There is no tree that is more closely related to starfish than it is to other plants. But closely related in what sense, you ask? In multiple senses: related by physical structure, related by similar proteins, related by similar chromosomal structure, related by similar pseudogenes, related by similar mutations to functional genes. And the fascinating thing is that no matter which particular criterion you use for establishing relatedness, you get the same nested hierarchies.

IOW, closely-related means those organisms we've put into nested hierarchies based on similarities. I think ID would say they if we put similar organisms together in a classification scheme, that is what we should expect to see when we look at the classification scheme. Your logic is circular.

Now, I understand that you think that the reason the similarities exist is Common Descent, but neither the hierarchies you cite, nor the questions you ask of ID, shed any light upon whether CD is the explanation.

Be that as it may, let's do a bit of exploring. Specifically, let's say that, when it comes to expressed, protein-coding genes, Wagner's calculations are in a reasonable ball-park, and that I'm also correct about the low or nonexistent actual cost of gene duplication. What missing link(s) can help us reconcile these seemingly incongruous statements?

Interesting ideas regarding the possible non-terrestrial origins of the builders of the pyramids, but I think you'd agree with me that such hypotheses are pretty far out on the fringe, wouldn't you? Most archaeologists seem satisfied that the pyramids were built by human laborers for human kings. And at any rate, that's taking us pretty far afield from the subject at hand.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on "the" bacterial flagellum. Another source of disproof of Behe's and Dembski's argument would be Why Intelligent Design Fails, by Matt Young and Tanner Edis. The article in that book comes to the same conclusion as Miller does. I've read Dembski's response to Miller, and I have to respectfully disagree. I think Dembski's response for the most part completely misses Miller's point.

My argument about ID is not that being purely an eliminative argument is a fatal flaw (although it may well be, given how difficult it is to prove a universal negative). My argument is that given that the universal negative it attempts to prove, i.e., IC structures cannot evolve without design, has not in fact been proven (actually, the contrary evidence is substantial), ID's argument is fatally flawed.

In any event, you can find links I've provided in my responses to Joe G and others sprinkled through this thread, the "What If?" thread, and especially at the end of the "Memory Hole" thread.

I doubt if I've read everything you've read, onething, but I have to say the links you have provided have seemed distinctly crank-like, if I can say that without sounding too judgmental (but I guess assessments of credibility always come down to some sort of judgment, don't they?). But I think I've read enough from both sides at this point to make credibility judgments, and frankly I just don't find the ID position particularly compelling.

I'd also have to disagree that ID writers are better. Dembski's prose, just to take one example, is virtually impenetrable. His books take forever to read!

But seriously, onething. Read the links I've provided. Also, spend some time on talkreason and talkorigins. Panda's Thumb is a good resource too. I think they'll give you a better flavor for the consensus opinions of the scientific community on the evolution question.

I'm wondering what ID's explanation is for the lag-time between the earliest life and the earliest eukaryotic life. God's learning curve?

Well, I tend to think it may be something very like that going on, but it is difficult to see why the learning curve should be so flat there. I assume God is a quick learner. More likely, the reason is that the earliest bacteria were increasing the oxygen level of the planet or some such slow terraforming process.

We know they're humans, don't we?

No, we don't. How can we know that? All we know is that suddenly humans, for example, the Sumerians, came up with about 100 "firsts" for civilization, including knowing long-range astronomical facts, how many planets there were, the color of neptune and uranus (recently proven against predictions). Now, I have not personally checked all these facts but they are certainly intriguing. What Lloyd Pye has to say about the difficulties of creating domesticated plants and animals, for example.
We talk about how the pyramids could have been built, but according to his webiste, creating the pyramids at Giza as the are supposed to have been done would require placing 7 stones per hour, 24/7 for 100 years. the stones are very heavy. There has been no appreciable settling or cracking. And these guys just came out of the stone age and did this. Meanwhile, around the world, all the early great civilizations claimed that there were gods who just came out of the sky and gave this knowledge to humanity. They say this over and over but of course we don't take them seriously. The Bible also uses a plural for the word God, and the word Nephilim means those who came down from the dky. It is a plural.

Of course, the lines of inquiry about ancient civilizaitons and human origins fill whole books, and the only reason I take up the topic is that the ID people have often said, and I think some even seriously consider, that the intelligent designer could have been an alien.

In an era when Dawkins is talking about taking our own evolutin into our hands and when we already modify genetically many life forms, and can clone life forms, and when we talk of whether we can terraform mars, it isn't really necessary to act as if the possibility that this planet's history has something of the sort is totally crackpot.

Of course they built them for their kings. But who were their kings?

If you'd spend some times outside of the ID ghetto on sites like talk.origins.org, pandasthumb.org, and talkreason.org, you would have heard of it.

What I have read about the flagellum is the Miller essay and Dembski's response. I assume these are the cutting edge. The Miller essay was weak and Dembski hardly broke a sweat. It has not been refuted. I also red Mike Gene's 5-part essay at teleologic, which I found quite impressive. I know you have given a lot of links, and I would be willing to look at them, but are they on this thread or the What If thread?

You claim that the fact ID is eliminative is a fatal flaw. Then you say that the guys are wrong - the structures are not IC. But that is not a flaw due to it being eliminative. What I said is that being eliminative is OK. Whether their inference is correct is a separate question.

I have to ask, Eric, if you have read what I have? Are you likewise avoiding reading the other side? Our writers are better! The Miller-Dembski refutations/counter-refutations are a good read.

And what evidence, short of watching the designer in action, would you accept for ID?

ericmurphy:
And you're not even satisfied with evidence of speciation …

That is a lie which makes you a liar.

bye-bye.

PS anytime you want to continue this I will but in person. I am not wasting any more of this blog's bandwidth discussing your absurd notions.

(where I said "heliocentric" theory in my response to Joe G above, obviously I meant "geocentric." And I failed, unaccountably, to mention the endlessly entertaining "epicycles.")

What I really fantasize about is how amazing it would be to go way back in time…imagine the hilarity of of the world of many millions of years ago…Protobirds get eaten by protofoxes because the protobirds wings are at a clumsy half-stage, but the fox doesn't get all of them because it is about the size of a house cat,etc.

I agree. I remember looking at some library book (I think I was looking for pictures of a glyptodont), and they had some artist's conceptions of early mammals, some of which resembled, e.g., rabbits, wolves, housecats, etc. And they all had this slightly comical look of prototypes, works in progress, etc. You know, a little clumsy, maybe not all that smart?

Oh, for a time machine. This month's Scientific American has an article about the very early (pre-biotic) earth, and I think it would be fascinating to travel back then. Of course, you wouldn't be able to breathe the atmosphere…

Given that it probably took between one and two billion years for this occur naturally.

Why did it take so long for that one step, compared to so many subsequent revolutionary changes?

I doubt anyone can give a definitive answer to this question, but I'm guessing it's because evolution works more slowly when there's less (i.e., a much smaller genome) to evolve, and that the jump from eubacterial to eukaryotic life may have been the most significant step in evolution short of the invention of sexual reproduction. But in any event, the first evidence for bacterial life is close to 4,000 million years old, and eukayotic life doesn't appear in the fossil record for almost three billion more years. Assuming a billion years of poorly-fossilized remains are missing, we're still talking about a lot of time. I'm wondering what ID's explanation is for the lag-time between the earliest life and the earliest eukaryotic life. God's learning curve? Or was he distracted by working on some other project?

We do not know who made Stonehenge, Nazca lines or the pyramids. It is false to say we do.

We know they're humans, don't we? Or do you posit, e.g., an extraterrestrial source? Do we assume at least that the Egyptians were lying when they said they built them for their kings?

in fact there is no known biological structure that cannot, in principle, have evolved through undirected processes.

What sort of principles? the ones which sound airy-fairy?

No. The standard posited theories, e.g., gene duplication, transposition, point mutation, genetic drift, co-option of function, co-adaptation.

Behe, Dembski, et. al. claim otherwise, but every single one of their examples has been disproved.

Oh, please. Not even close. If it had been disproved, we would have heard of it.

If you'd spend some times outside of the ID ghetto on sites like talk.origins.org, pandasthumb.org, and talkreason.org, you would have heard of it.

And since their claim is purely eliminative, this defect is fatal to the ID premise.

No logic here. Suppose there was a big theory that the moon was made of cheese, and someone pointed out several good reasons why that could not be so. does that make for a grand theory? No. But does it help the progress of truth if you point out a blind alley? Of course.

Logic here. Let's look at Behe's and Dembski's position with respect to allegedly IC structures. Both say that if a biological structure is IC, according to their definition, then it cannot have evolved through naturalistic mechanisms, and therefore must have been designed. This is, as I stated, a purely eliminative argument, i.e., once all the possible naturalistic explanations have been eliminated, design must necessarily be inferred.

Unfortunately for Behe, Dembski, et. al., biologists have demonstrated that 1) all of the structures Behe has actually identified as IC, such as "the" bacterial flagellum, the mammalian clotting sequence, and the complementary immune system, are in fact not IC (i.e., they can have parts removed and still retain some function, sometimes for the same function, sometimes for different functions). Further, biologists have identified some IC structures, such a bacterial mechanism for metabolizing nylon precursors, that we know have evolved recently, because nylon precursors did not exist in nature prior to about 70 years ago.

I know it will be a slog, onething, but I suggest you wade back through my previous posts, because I have covered most of these issues exhaustively, including citing references, before, and I don't want to waste any more bandwidth going over them again. This is why I'm starting to feel like I'm repeating myself endlessly. I think I've wrung about all the entertainment I can get out of this subject; I think I'm going to take up needlepoint.