I have found it. It appears you and John do not recognize it. Sal’s flower is evidence of special creation. It is an example of an elephant behind you that you deny exists.
This is a solid counter argument Rum :-).
The lack of a model is evidence that the mechanism you claim is problematic. Population genetics can show how genes get fixed in the population but cannot explain the origin of de novo genes. Sal’s flower requires thousands of those to be explained.
Explain how it is evidence of that. What is the theory of special creation, and in what way does it “predict” “Sal’s flower”?
An argument is not required to rebut an incoherent assertion.
But please enlighten me, what is this “population genetics math” which “works when we start from existing populations” that constitutes “solid evidence for uniquely created animals”?
What does any of that mean, and where are you getting it from?
“population genetics math” ← Reference please
“works when we start from existing populations” ← What does this even mean?
“solid evidence for uniquely created animals”? ← explain to me how the above is evidence for this.
Is it supposed to? The theory of plate tectonics does not explain the origin of the natural elements and their isotopes - and it is not supposed to - but there are theories that do.
There are theories of de novo genes that work perfectly well at explaining their origin. From non-coding DNA (look at any of the last decade and a half of work on this subject), from fusion and shuffling of of fragments of different genes(see this and it’s numerous related references), and from tandem duplications of smaller fragments (Dayhoff’s 1960’s hypothesis). Not to mention the continued divergence of duplicate genes.
But notice something here. You offer no explanation yourself. It’s blatant hypocricy.
And there are lots of perfectly good explanations given for novel genes. In stark contrast to the actual science of evolution we are offered no competing explanation on “special creation”. No models, no explanations, no data. Nothing. The whole things consists of “it was designed” repeated as if a mantra.
If you disagree, please point me to a publication that explains the “special creation” origin of the novel genes in “sal’s flower”.
This is the claim John made that neither of you can support. You have not refuted Genesis 1 that God created animals uniquely according to their kind. We all agree evolution plays a role but no one can articulate how much. For @Meerkat_SK5 here is Sals flower.
@Meerkat_SK5 your argument is correct. There is no reproductive model for the origin of the genetic information required for these patterns only vacuous explanations. The only question I have is how you form the logic of your argument.
Do I have to post my analysis again? As I’ve shown, it’s evidence for common descent.
OK, here we are again:
Do you need to have it explained to you again, or does that spark your memory?
Yes, but there are known mechanisms that do explain that origin. We’ve been over this before too. And the evidence shows that de novo genes arise within lineages, not by special creation of new species.
That attempt to dodge supporting your assertions is rather transparent.
Let’s try again. Please answer the following questions:
So it’s time to give your “population genetic math” that “works when we start from existing populations”, right? I assume you mean you’ve got some “population genetic math” that somehow transforms “Sal’s flower” into evidence for a hypothesis of special creation?
You weren’t just drooling out incoherent technobabble yet again, were you?
I’m sorry, but any time “Sal’s flower” rears its head, that should be a clear sign to most of you that the conversation is not worthwhile. It’s okay to decline to have the same inane discussion, over and over and over…
I think it’s worthwhile for Bill to have his nose rubbed into it from time to time.
I respectfully disagree and I think that comes down to what you mean by “explain”. You are explaining very little about the pattern and your assumptions are speculative. You can explain anything if your standards of an explanation are low enough. A solid explanation would be integrating a gene generation model into population genetics. @Joe_Felsenstein agrees that we are not ready for that. Until then special creation, as vague as it is in Genesis 1, is a viable alternative. When Darwin make the claim of parsimony as support support for common descent he had not idea how complicated the problem was.
@Meerkat_SK5 here is a paper that discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Darwins original inference of common descent.
Pitt…Darwin inductive reasoning.pdf (437.2 KB)
How about the same old rhetoric that there is “no evidence for special creation”.
ID has a mechanism that can generate the information required for the pattern. Specially designed gain of function viruses are evidence of this.
I agree? Where did I agree to that? (There are many papers about the mathematical theory of the evolution if duplicated genes, for example).
Anyway this discussion seems to be about common descent, and people should stick to that. Although at The Skeptical Zone and at Panda’s Thumb we’ve had discussions of the evidence for common descent with commenters who are in this thread, and after thousands of comments they still won’t admit that there is any.
Feel free. But you are impervious to evidence, and what followed in that post was largely word salad. I doubt you have any clear idea of what you meant by it.
That’s a quote mine.
“My concern is definitely not how we might presently make the case for the theory of evolution. The modern case rests on a much larger evidential base and has a greater reliance on supporting sciences, such as Mendelian genetic theory, unknown to Darwin.”
He also hasn’t refuted “Little Red Riding Hood” or “Jack and the beanstalk”. There’s no need to refute that for which no positive evidence has been provided.
Your reasoning is circular. You are predefining the Bible as a fairy tale. Your claim of “no evidence” is an argument from ignorance. I discussed evidence previously. I have watched you guys deny counter evidence for 5 years now yet @davecarlson accuses me of repeating myself and @John_Harshman accuses of a quote mine when I lift the same claim from his argument.
There is really “no evidence” for special creation?
Is the only argument you have is to deny your opponent has “evidence” for his claims yet you continue to argue. If there is no evidence what are we talking about? Lets look at the list of evidence.
The eye
The Brain
The central nervous system
The skeletal muscular system
The flight feather
The transcription translation system
The spliceosome
All systems and components that require significant Genetic information that is part of @Meerkat_SK5 thesis. Where does this genetic information come from? How do you eliminate special creation by God as a cause? If you cannot it is evidence.
Are these designed?
My point is, you just can’t look at things and “just know” whether they were designed or not. Some things are obviously human-designed (like the car motor and CPU fan), other things are harder or perhaps impossible to tell. Sometimes things are intentionally designed to not look designed! For instance, camouflage, random number generators, and white noise machines. So why would we have any confidence that just looking will always give us insight.
I look at bacterial flagella and marvel at it … but I really don’t know what level of design went into it. I’ve seen nature do some pretty amazing and complicated things on its own. So personally I feel like it’s not my place to judge what is and isn’t design in nature. I might speculate and certainly science helps guide what’s likely or not, but ultimately I can’t read God’s mind so it would take revelation to know. When it comes to revelation, my experience is that God is not particularly concerned about the “design question” and is much more concerned about relate to each other and to himself (the greatest commandments).
So you are now retracting your word salad nonsense about “population genetic math” that “works when we start from existing populations” and you’re instead moving on to something new entirely. So we can now completely forget you said up to now and instead move on to try to make sense of this latest total gibberish of yours. Okay.
What specially designed gain of function viruses? - and how are they evidence of that? Sal’s flower and special creation are related in what way to specially designed gain of function viruses? Please elaborate.
I used fairy tales as examples. But I was not redefining the Bible as a fairy tale. What matters is the lack of any evidence for the genesis account.
Yes, exactly that.
You might see evidence, but I don’t. I’ll grant that what counts as evidence can be subjective.
That’s evidence for the eye. It is evidence for special creation of the eye. And I could say about the same for all of your examples.
Information, including genetic information, is an abstraction. And, like all abstractions, it is a human invention. We use “information” in our discussions because it is a convenient way of talking about causation. The “information” arguments are all bogus.
And sure, origin of life is still unexplained. It might never be explained. But the existence of life is not enough to make a case that life required special creation.
No you didn’t. Zero evidence was provided. You gave titles of things you appear to think is evidence, but have so far refused to explain how it constitutes evidence. That’s because you don’t really know what you’re saying.
You just type whatever you can think of in the moment of word-blather that maybe sorta kinda sound related to the subject.
And how is any of this evidence for special creation? Bill can you explain what evidence even is? What does it mean to say that X is evidence for something, and in what way does that list of things constitute evidence for special creation?
No Bill, that reasoning doesn’t work: I can’t rule out there isn’t an invisible being called Thor that causes thunder and lightning storms, but my being unable to rule that out doesn’t constitute evidence that Thor really is causing thunder and lightning storms.
You’re really proving with every one of your posts that you have no understanding of any of the topics you take up. You don’t understanding science. You don’t understand biology or evolution, and you don’t even know what evidence is.
I’m not sure that means what you think it means. Just because we use quantum-mechanics to model some specific phenomena at very small scales (proton-tunneling, etc.) and perhaps a quantum-like model could be use help understand psychology/consciousness doesn’t mean the two things are in any way connected. Additionally, what reason would we have to think that God’s consciousness works in the same way as human consciousness. I think this element needs to be thought out more. Can we actually determine a mechanism that would tie God’s choice to the biochemistry of DNA/RNA mutation?
How much time do you think scientists have? 
Seriously though, what do you mean by “determine whether or not life can be developed within that condition”? I’m not aware any such experiment. What does “interference mean”? These need to be worked out. I’m struggling (though I’m not a biologist so I could be missing something) to see how this is testable yet.
OK, interesting. So would this be like God somehow “tilting the table”, biasing the selection in some “favorable” way?
But how do we know if something is a design tradeoff or just “bad design”? Again, my problem is that a critical element of this hypothesis is that we know design/intentions/purposes of a being that we can neither know exhaustively nor control in any way. In other words, God is not amenable to human experimentation.
But how much evidence is it really?
I don’t know where @Michael_Okoko is, but I’m not sure why you would expect @John_Harshman or any atheist to be anything but dismissive to this type of argumentation. They deny the premise out of the gate, so what’s the point? And this is why, even thought I am a Christian (and a fairly conservative one at that), I don’t think God is a useful scientific hypothesis. Science just doesn’t work that way. As @swamidass showed with GAE, you can have a “mixed” hypothesis that includes both scientific elements and theological elements, but the result is not a proper scientific hypothesis. It’s fine to have non-scientific hypotheses, I think Christians should do it more, but I’ve never seen a good outcome when we try to shoehorn theology into science or vice versa.
I don’t see how the RTB quote is in any way related to what I said. Having a model (the RTB quote) doesn’t address whether we know God’s mind/purpose/intentions or are even run “design experiments” similar to the question (all life on Earth). I can completely take apart a watch and see all its parts at once and see how the work independently of each other, can we do that with the history of life?
The leaps here are enormous with many disputable underlying assumptions. The problem is that it just loses any power to persuade when you do that. You aren’t able to bring the reader along, they just get jerked off the wagon when you take a hard turn.
