I suppose it’s possible. I’m particularly sensitive to the motor discussions because I spent a pretty significant chunk of my graduate career thinking about how to design, build, and test one. I see the CPU Fan argument quite often on PS, although to be fair it’s usually from the same person.
But if the flagella or similar biological motors are used as examples in “Behe’s argument”, which admittedly I haven’t read much of since Darwin’s Black Box , it seems as if it’s not a great one given what I’ve explained above, right?
His designer is one that doesn’t make mistakes, so that means he expects all cases of “alleged suboptimal design flaws” to evaporate or be seen as a tradeoff upon further inspection.
This was him shifting goalposts when you retorted that extinctions shouldn’t occur if God made every organism fit for their environment, and as a consequence made his claim in that regard untestable. It had nothing to do with his design flaws argument as far as I can remember.
Exactly.
In the very comment you replied to, I acknowledged that the consequences of GULOP inactivity can be offset by ingesting external vitamin C. Reading problem?
You are also missing the point. If Meerkat is right and God guided our evolution, then it is completely insane and evil to allow a gene that encodes a protein which makes a compound vital to many physiological processes become damaged. There are other pseudogenes, but for virtually all of them their inactivity is of little or no consequence to us, not so with GULOP unless you have a vitamin-C-rich diet.
Animals like dogs and mice don’t need vitamin C because they make theirs. That’s one substance off their nutritious materials list.
I don’t know.
Meerkat has failed to establish God-driven evolution based on the testable sections of his hypothesis.
He’s said a lot of things, many of them mutually contradictory. And he’s now said that mass extinctions also show God’s hand, because lots of speciation happens after them. Everything bad can be interpreted as good if you squint just right, and that’s how he works.
Yes. And he also seems to have said previously that there is only limited common descent, so that GULOP was probably created as a pseudogene and is not related in any way to functional GULOs in other species. Though he may have changed his mind on that and may deny having said so in the first place. Who can tell?
Oh yeah. He is all over the place like a Whack-a-mole mole.
And he is yet to realize this makes his God hypothesis impossible to test.
I must have missed this bit. He never brought it up with me on GULO. It doesn’t make sense anyway to create a nonfunctional gene and insert it into an organism that depends on the activity of that gene. More so, letting mice retain GULO or specially creating GULO in mice and not us makes me think mice were really made in God’s image.
I would agree a molecular motor is very different then a motor most of us are familiar with.
I don’t think it is unreasonable to infer design from observation of biological molecular motors such as the flagellum as we can also observe a reason or purpose for the flagellum molecular motor (bacterial mobility).
I think you should as it is critical for your argument to have any validity. If GULOP inactivity is due to a deleterious mutation than it cannot be the product of design. We also don’t know if there are positive Design Tradeoffs with the requirement to obtain vitamin C from food.
And there we have it. With this heuristic no evidence could ever be mounted to show that GULOP is a true pseudogene that evolved into nonfunctionality because creationists can always just rationalize that there’s some hitherto undiscovered functional purpose we just haven’t yet figured out how works.
Bill, you don’t know that there is a “design tradeoff”, so why believe there is in the face of the much simpler inference that it is a protein coding gene that was rendered nonfunctional by mutations that really would render a protein coding gene nonfunctional? It has exactly the kinds of mutations that destroy protein coding genes. Premature stop codons, missing exons.
This is why nonfunctionality makes for a much better null-hypothesis (and therefore better science), because a single observation can in principle refute it. Find the actual function of the locus by showing for example that the locus through (for example) it’s effect on development or metabolism contributes significantly to fitness, and you have refuted the null-hypothesis.
But with a hitherto undiscovered function as the null-hypothesis, you can keep rationalizing until the end of time that you just haven’t tested the system under the right conditions to find it’s true function.
Go with the simplest explanation (that explains the data) that is most easily refuted experimentally: It is a simple case of pseudogenization by deactivating mutations, that was subsequently inherited through multiple speciation events.
GULOP resulted after several mutations took away its ability to encode information needed to synthesize the GULO protein. This I know, but I can’t say same for Meerkat. However, whether or not I know this doesn’t affect my argument one bit.
In addition, the effect of a mutation is contextual. If you have access to adequate vitamin C in your diet, GULOP inactivity would be neutral to you. Otherwise, its strongly deleterious. In both cases, it is nonfunctional which doesn’t make sense under his version of guided evolution.
it works for both ways: we can argue that in that case a car motor can evolve naturally while a flagellum cant. so the fact that they are dissimilar doesnt tell us much.
so if you see a sand sculpture and an wood sculpture, you will not be able to determine that both were designed since they are too dissimilar?
By focusing on whether my hypothesis can potentially be useful scientifically, like what you are trying to do now. So far, most of the users on here have steered away from this topic and focused on whether it’s true or not or delved into theological topics. We can sort that out later.
The mechanism would be consciousness, which is called a Self-collasping wave-function according to quantum mind theory:
Now, here is also a video for the layperson that will explain how the quantum mind theory works and all the evidence supporting it in an easy, clear, and concise way for everyone. Keep in mind though, I am only referring you to IP’s video to help you understand better what I am trying to argue from a scientific standpoint and NOT referencing him as a primary source or as an expert. The guy who created the video has sources and links to his claims so you can read for yourself if you want :
When the observer chooses a particular set of natural conditions to work on, the observer has to first test and determine whether or not life can be developed within that condition without interference. Then, the observer must perform the same experiment with the same set of natural conditions following the previous one but impose unrealistic interference in the second round of experiments.
The combined outcomes of these experiments would produce evidence for the hypothesis. This is because even though the experimenter who guides evolution within each natural condition is finite and contingent, there could not be any conscious life before simple life emerged, hence why we have to include the first experiment to support the “necessary” attribute of this common designer .
This experiment has not been done yet but can be done. All a scientist needs to do is take one of Lenski’s failed E.coli populations and genetically modify those organisms to produce positive results according to the procedure I laid out.
In order to successfully disprove the hypothesis, the Lenski experiment needs to produce results similar to what we see from a protein engineer (or create a self-replicating molecule from prebiotic experiments). With that said, my hypothesis is testable at least in principle, which was my overall objective under this topic.
No, natural selection would also be a mechanism.
The infamous design flaws that have been discovered to be optimal in some way, such as the benevolent designs and Design Tradeoffs.
What I mean by “sinister” designs is a feature of an organism that is designed to impede on that organism or other organisms’ ability to survive, reproduce, and fit an environmental niche.
What I mean by “bad” designs is a design that is poorly constructed to achieve a particular goal involving the survival and reproductive capabilities of that organism.
Bingo, this is precisely why I only use this method to provide evidence for my hypothesis or to learn more about nature and describe other methods that would disprove it. There are simply too many examples of alleged design flaws that have turned out not to be flaws at all with increasing understanding of the design. However, @John_Harshman and @Michael_Okoko insist on dismissing this fact in favor of a “Darwin of the gaps” argument rather than err in the side of caution.
Instead, we should reexamine the remaining claims of design flaws by looking at the organism as a whole, even if it exhibits some features that may be perplexing, rather than make another argument from ignorance or personal incredulity
Actually, there are other theists who have made a similar argument:
“…Through the use of hypernaturalism, the dichotomy between natural process chemical evolution and Intelligent Design largely disappears. Instead, the origin of life can be seen to arise via hypernatural processes in which the Creator makes use of well-understood physicochemical mechanisms to affect the origin-of-life.
In this schema, the origin-of-life does not arise via the suspension of the laws and processes of nature but through them. The origin of life is a second stage interventionist miracle in which God intervenes within the created laws of nature (not a first stage miracle, in which God operates outside the laws of nature).
The point of applying hypernaturalism to the origin-of-life scenario is not to compromise a Christian’s position on God’s creative power, but to find as much common ground as possible with researchers and to avoid dismissing their hard work in the lab.”
This is not how I constructed my argument. Instead, I first pointed out that “experiments aimed at demonstrating chemically more complex processes, such as multistep syntheses mimicking biochemical pathways or genetic replication,” required repeated interventions by the human experimentalist.
Moreover, “There is nothing in the physico-chemical world [apart from life] that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence [the genome] and codes between sequences [the genetic code].” according to Hubert Yockey.
Then, from these observations, I inferred that there is probably a Divine intelligence that started and guides evolution since digital information is known to only come from minds and there could not be any humans before simple life emerged.
Then, I provided additional observations on mutations that seem to support this, such as the deleterious mutations showing how they appear to be fine-tuned to lower the risk of harmful genetic changes.
Then, I inferred that IF there is a Divine intelligence that guided evolution, it PROBABLY has a nature that is similar to humans rather than natural law because “the measurement of information in the genome and the transcription of information from DNA to RNA to protein are mathematically identical to the measurement of information and the transcription of written language. ” according to Yockey.
In short, my argument for design is supposed to be fundamentally different than ID theorists.
Actually, we are just dealing with the God of classical theism under this topic just to keep it as simple as possible. Once we are done here, I will incorporate the Judeo Christian God, which entails special creation and Genesis.
Your hypothesis is similar to the design hypothesis with added complexity. Why add the complexity? I think this may be simplified by a 2 stage argument. Stage one design and stage 2 who is the designer. If you go with this then you may be able to build a more coherent logic path.
The design argument is clearly testable. We can argue how good the test is but we can test a mind for its ability to arrange parts to the point of generating information with abstract symbols. If then man is made in Gods image (theological claim) this ties it all together.
One part of your thesis is God guided evolution. I think he guided creation of which evolution is one of the vehicles. At this point no one can clearly articulate the extent evolution played in the process.
I can. It played every part. All life is related by common descent, and all the evidence makes this clear. It’s possible you may even remember some of the evidence, which has been presented to you on countless occasions.
I fail to see any possible ambiguity. You have ancestors. Your ancestors have ancestors. Likewise, Homo sapiens, the species, has ancestors, and at some point those ancestors are also ancestral to chimpanzees. And so on back through time until the ancestors in question are also ancestral to all extant species and extinct ones too. Admittedly horizontal transfer of various sorts might introduce somewhat different ancestral pathways for different bits of your genome, but this becomes a source of real ambiguity only prior to the emergence of eukaryotes, and things are pretty straightforward in the group from there on. Bacterial lineages are more problematic, but not unmanageably so. There is clearly no evidence of separate creation of any species.
I have to say that it’s strange that at this late date you don’t know what “common descent” means.
Do you still stand by this part of your claim? Did it play the part of the creation of new animals with different gene sets (Sal’a flower) and different splicing patterns?
Just horizontal gene transfer?
How do you know at this point that no evidence exists? Maybe it is just the filter you are using with the existing information that brings you to this conclusion. You appear to believe that if you can explain it no other explanation exists.
There is a possible clear definition of common descent: all life started from a single ancestor and life’s diversity is the result of reproduction and natural variation from that single ancestor. The problem is there is not enough evidence to support this claim as it must include an explanation for biological innovation.
The bottom line is you cannot support the claim that evolution (common descent) is uniquely responsible for what we are observing. You have not refuted the claim in Genesis 1 that animals were specially created according to their own kind. Asserting there is no evidence for a claim does not refute it.
There is solid evidence for this claim (uniquely created animals) as population genetics math works when we start from existing populations.
We would expect to have found it by now, given the breadth and depth with which we have probed the biosphere.
Consider the analogy of detecting an elephant in your living room. How do you know there’s not one behind you? Well you can turn around and look. Did you see an elephant? No. Would you expect to see one if there was one? Yes. And yet you did not. You having looked for it thus constitutes evidence against the existence of an elephant in your living room.
It is like that with evidence for separate creation. We have looked for it and haven’t found it. It should be pretty obvious. And yet it isn’t there.
Maybe that whole thing about seeing things through “filters” is just you projecting.
No. It’s that alternative explanations don’t make sense of the data. You can of course concoct alternative explanations, for example that life was independently created to look like it shares common ancestry. Either way, we end up with the evidence expected of common ancestry.
You once again confuse the evidence for common ancestry with an explanation for innovation. The hypothesis of common ancestry is not supposed to explain the origin of novelty*(theories of evolutionary change do that), it is merely supposed to account for their nesting hierarchical distribution.
But there are innumerable evolutionary explanations for innovation.
True, in so far as we can’t rule out alternative causal influences on the data. But what we can definitely say with high confidence is that there is no need of more complicated hypotheses. In fact, there doesn’t even seem to be any offered alternative hypotheses that actually make sense of the data.
Yes, it actually does. Absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence when you expect the evidence to be there. Think of the elephant analogy again. Looking around your living room expecting to see an elephant if there really is one there - and not seeing it - becomes an observational refutation of the claim that there is an elephant in your living room. If you don’t see an elephant it’s because there is none. Having looked very intensely for it we don’t see evidence for special creation of animals because special creation didn’t happen.
That is you drooling on the forum. It’s obscene. Please stop.
To say that it is potentially useful, is to say that maybe somebody will find a use in a few hundred years from now. And nobody can do more than guess about that.
People have mostly been commenting on whether it is a currently useful hypothesis. And it seems fair to say that nobody has found it currently useful.
I watched the video – or, more accurately, I watched most of it.
Quantum physics is involved in just about everything, particularly at when looking at low level phenomena. So nobody doubts that there are some quantum effects going on in biology and neuro-biology. The important question is whether studying those will help explaining consciousness. There’s nothing in the video that addresses that important question.
As I see it, the problem of consciousness is a big picture issue, and not a small detail issue. This is why I do not expect anything to come out of current quantum consciousness theorizing.
Yes, of course it did. As you should know, the pattern in which these “different gene sets” are arranged supports a phylogenetic tree.
Yes. Of course several different phenomena fall under that general heading, viral transfers and hybridization being the ones we generally have to worry about in eukaryotes.
Would you care to present some, if you think it does? All I can say is that I don’t know of any, and I’m fairly familiar with the literature.
Bad definition. There’s no reason we have to restrict ourselves to natural variation, though there’s also no reason to expect anything else.
Agreed. But I make no such assertion. The positive evidence favoring common descent rather than separate creation is copious and overwhelming.
Sorry, but that was word salad again. Please present some of this supposed evidence, and explain why it supports separate creation over common descent.