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look, an elephant
Topic Started: Apr 20 2006, 08:37 PM (332 Views)
pianojerome
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HOLY CARP!!!

......... Imagine a room in which a body lies crushed, flat as a pancake. A dozen detectives crawl around, examining the floor with magnifying glasses for any clue to the identity of the perpetrator. In the middle of the room next to the body stands a large, gray elephant. The detectives carefully avoid bumping into the pachyderm's legs as they crawl, and never even glance at it. Over time the detectives get frustrated with their lack of progress but resolutely press on, looking even more closely at the floor. You see, textbooks say detectives must "get their man," so they never consider elephants.

There is an elephant in the roomful of scientists who are trying to explain the development of life. The elephant is labeled "intelligent design." To a person who does not feel obliged to restrict his search to unintelligent causes, the straightforward conclusion is that many biochemical systems were designed. They were designed not by the laws of nature, not by chance and necessity. Rather, they were planned. The designer knew what the systems would look like when they were completed; the designer took steps to bring the systems about. Life on earth at its most fundamental level, in its most critical components, is the product of intelligent activity........



-- Michael J. Behe, "Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference"
Sam
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pianojerome
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HOLY CARP!!!
Later in the same essay he writes:

Intelligent design is a good explanation for a number of biochemical systems, but I should insert a word of caution. Intelligent design theory has to be seen in context: it does not try to explain everything. We live in a complex world where lots of different things can happen... The fact that some biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent does not mean that any of the other factors [common descent, natural selection, migration, population size, founder effects, genetic drift, gene flow, linkage] are not operative, common, or important.
Sam
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John D'Oh
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MAMIL
He neglects to mention that the peculiar pachyderm is pink.
What do you mean "we", have you got a mouse in your pocket?
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Moonbat
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Pisa-Carp
Oh dear you're reading Behe, i must warn you, he has nothing to say - all he does is dress up the 18th century argument from design in scientific lingo.

The question how does evolution produce irreducibly complex systems can be answered in a single word: cooption. That's how hard it is to refute his argument, one freaking word. For this reason he was resolutely ignored.

Demski was better, he atleast attempted to provide some kind of test to see if we could tell the difference between darwinian selection and design, that in itself is not such a terrible idea. Unfortunately he failed, he misapplied information theory and was left with nothing.

Intelligent design is nonsense. Well it's nonsense from a scientfic standpoint, one can believe that evolution is guided, it's redundant but atleast its doesn't directly contradict anything. What you cannot say is that design is necessary, it's patently false. It's such a half baked idea that it hasn't even managed to make it into a single journal.

Anyhow if you are going to read the idiots then i'd recommend you atleast read the sane people too as they will actually give you some insight into the mechanisms of life instead of attempting to dress theology in scientific clothes. Dawkins "The Selfish Gene" or "The Blind Watchmaker" are very good in terms of giving people a grasp of the concepts.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
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pianojerome
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HOLY CARP!!!
Moonbat
Apr 21 2006, 12:22 PM
The question how does evolution produce irreducibly complex systems can be answered in a single word: cooption. That's how hard it is to refute his argument, one freaking word. For this reason he was resolutely ignored.

I don't know that word, "cooption." What does it mean?
Sam
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pianojerome
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HOLY CARP!!!
Moonbat
Apr 21 2006, 12:22 PM
Anyhow if you are going to read the idiots then i'd recommend you atleast read the sane people too as they will actually give you some insight into the mechanisms of life instead of attempting to dress theology in scientific clothes. Dawkins "The Selfish Gene" or "The Blind Watchmaker" are very good in terms of giving people a grasp of the concepts.

I read this paper (and actually am writing an essay about it) for my philosophy course.

We also read and discussed

--- Phillip Johnson, "Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism"
--- Robert T. Pennock, "Naturalism, Evidence and Creationism: The Case of Phillip Johnson"
--- Phillip Kitcher, "Born Again Creationism"



(Although for some reason I don't remember anything about that Kitcher article.... :whome:)
Sam
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pianojerome
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HOLY CARP!!!
Oh, and Stephen Jay Gould - "Evolution as Fact and Theory"
Sam
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Moonbat
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It means evolution can use systems that start off doing something different.

Two of many articles explaining why Behe's case fails can be found here:

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/...n?fulltext=true

and here:

http://bostonreview.net/BR21.6/orr.html

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pianojerome
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HOLY CARP!!!
I'll read those after I write my paper.

Actually, we did discuss cooption then in my class. I suppose that's possible, but not quite convincing to me yet (from the little that I know).
Sam
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Moonbat
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I'm suprised you haven't read Dawkins he must be the most obvious target for the Darwinism == Dogma category. (Though it's false).

But really the selfish gene was huge, it changed the way people thought of darwinism, the way we think of evolution, the way we think of life.
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Moonbat
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Quote:
 

Actually, we did discuss cooption then in my class. I suppose that's possible, but not quite convincing to me yet (from the little that I know).


That's reasonable enough, to be fair it's not the sole reason Behe's argument is flawed, (Orrs article doesn't really refer to cooption) but the whole irreducible complexity thing seems such a non-issue given that we know genetic algorithms that mimick darwinian behaviour produce irreducible complex systems!
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
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pianojerome
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HOLY CARP!!!
Moonbat
Apr 21 2006, 01:17 PM
Quote:
 

Actually, we did discuss cooption then in my class. I suppose that's possible, but not quite convincing to me yet (from the little that I know).


That's reasonable enough, to be fair it's not the sole reason Behe's argument is flawed, (Orrs article doesn't really refer to cooption) but the whole irreducible complexity thing seems such a non-issue given that we know genetic algorithms that mimick darwinian behaviour produce irreducible complex systems!

So the question is, yes that may be possible, but did that happen?

It may be that we can design algorithms and scenarios in which this could happen, but is that really how these systems actually evolved?
Sam
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Moonbat
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Quote:
 

So the question is, yes that may be possible, but did that happen?

It may be that we can design algorithms and scenarios in which this could happen, but is that really how these systems actually evolved?


Ya see this is why you should read the selfish gene.

I cannot do justice to Dawkins insight, clarity and knowledge, and i'm very rusty on evolutionary stuff because i've been doing molecules and crystal for ages now but i will try and lay out a few reasons:

We know that organisms replicate, we know that replication occurs with mutation, we know that organisms exist in a complex environment which exerts complex selective pressures..

We know that replication + mutation with selective pressure results in complex functionality, even irreducibly complex functionality.

If complexity emerged this way we would expect to evidence of gradual phenotypic change in the fossil record, and that's exactly what you see. With modern genomic data this has passed beyond doubt because the relationships between living organisms are exactly what you would expect given the tree of life. If the gradual change we saw in the fossil record was illusionary then the genomic data would have blown it out of the water.

Merely given the properties of life (replication mutation) evolution _has_ to happen, there is no alternative, for it not to be happening God would have to be reaching down and stopping it happen. We know it has to be happening and we know it can produce really complex stuff so it begins to get obvious that this is what's going on.

It becomes even more obvious if you then compare examples of design (the only examples of design we know of- our design) with the output of genetic algorithms. You immediately notice that design is hierachical, it fits a blue print be it car or computer, genetic algorthims produce a sprawling mass of interconnections, when they used genetic algorithms to make clock circuits the engineers couldn't figure out how the damn things were working because they are so unlike the way we would make a clock circuit. So then when you look at nature what do you see? You see exactly the same thing as the clock circuit, no hierachy, what you see looks just like an emergent systems, The hallmarks of darwinian selection are can be seen in the kind of interconnected complexity, and in the kind of screw ups, because the process is blind and hence can't see what change is going to come next inefficiency arise that would not arise if we were designing it. You get poor solutions (like the blind spot at the back of your eye or the pandas thumb), because once it's got there it can't go back and fix it as doing so would be too unfavourable for the generations caught inbetween. I don't if you've ever programmed but sometimes you start off doing something then you realise half way through you've chosen the wrong way, and you go back to the start and begin again - with the knowledge you gained doing i the wrong way. Perhaps it is the same with music composition, i havent done it so i don't know, in any case evolution (and genetic algorithms) cannot do that, they can't go back so sometimes you find non-optimal solutions (infact probably every solution is non-optimal).

In short life looks like the output of a genetic algorithm not like a designed process. Given that genetic algorthims were designed to mimick darwinian processes this seems pretty strong.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
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