The math was reviewed. The relevance to any actual evolutionary biology was not. It’s still GIGO no matter how you try and spin it.
The first wouldn’t solve the problem of rapid fitness loss leading to extinction. The second wouldn’t either, unless that information is added frequently to correct the majority of deleterious mutations. The third is impossible given the data. So you’re left with nothing to explore.
Still, which one do you think is most likely? How could any of them be found credible?
Hi Giltil,
I appreciate that you are inviting discussion about interesting conjectures. In the spirit of give and take, I’d like to give a brief response.
The first conjecture, Behe’s version of front-loading, does not make sense to me because non-expressed sequences would not be conserved for billions of years. Now you could make a different form of the conjecture by claiming that all the laws of physics, chemistry, etc. were loaded at the instant of the Big Bang so that squirrels on Earth today would have fuzzy tails and I would eat an omelet tomorrow morning. You will recognize that this conjecture is entirely unfalsifiable and therefore is not scientific in nature.
The third conjecture (life is young) is contradicted by fossils that are literally over a billion years old. The only way they could be younger is if physics constants and equations have dramatically changed without leaving a trace. This notion is both highly unparsimonious and unfalsifiable.
I do find the second conjecture (injection of information) intriguing. In a world where what happens at the microscopic level can only be described probabilistically, information could be injected by a supernatural being without being detected. Again, though, this conjecture is not scientific and must find its support elsewhere, such as in the miracles recorded in Scripture.
Best,
Chris
Not only that, it would make the observed rate of favorable mutations equal to that needed to prevent Sanford’s scenario.
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I’m sorry but that’s just wrong. Sanford’s “genetic degeneration”(your words) arguments are presented to imply that purifying selection cannot maintain the genome against the onslaught of deleterious mutations. His point is clearly to show that life is unavoidably breaking down, not just that life didn’t evolve(and so life must be young). And you got the message, as you wrote:
Genetic Entropy results from the constant accumulation of mutations over generations, like rust in car. This mean that each generation will accumulate the same number of new mutations, which will translate to the same degree of fitness decline at each generation. IOW, fitness will decline at a rate proportional to its current value.
So according to Sanford’s genetic entropy, life can not have existed for billions of years as it would have gone extinct from genetic entropy long ago. That is his message. And you’ve given all appearances of agreeing with it up till now.
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The analogy is to comparing like protein sequences of different animals. green bricks are matches brown bricks and non matches and shots are the amino acids.
Hi Chris
This article does not represent Behe’s argument. It has the lead with your chin mistakes of many creationists.
I agree this adaption is in the reach of Darwinian evolution.
Behe’s claim is that IC systems offer a powerful challenge to the Darwinian mechanism. He does not make the claim that the Darwinian mechanism cannot evolve IC systems as not all IC systems have the same level of complexity.
You’re not addressing the claim here. A mind is a mechanism that we know can create a complex sequence and an irreducibly complex structure. Matter (and its properties) as a mechanism has not been modeled to create these structures. The paper you cited claimed its model can generate a 4 simultaneous mutational adaption. I am going to agree for arguments sake but it takes around 100K nucleotides to build a flagellum. The model is not up to the tasks required to evolve very complex adaptions like a flagellum.
Thanks for the citations.
No Bill, this is still false no matter how many times you repeat it. A disembodies mind by itself cannot create anything because it has no mechanism to physically manipulate matter. It’s well past time you realized POOF! MAGIC! is still a non-starter in science
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Hi Bill,
I am enjoying the conversation with you.
I did not ask you to defend the entire article; the only reason I cited it was for the quote from Behe. Are you saying that the article lied by attributing words to Behe that he never uttered?
I am glad we are in agreement on that. You are actually quite rare among ID proponents in accepting this scientific finding; many articles on ENV have inveighed voluminously against it.
This seems to be a contradiction on its face. Even adding this qualification…
…does not offer the shelter that you (and Behe) seek, in my view. In particular, a de novo gene contains a lot of nucleotides. Since biologists have empirically demonstrated evolution’s ability to generate de novo genes, there is no feature of biological life beyond its reach given an initial life form 3.5 BYA that encoded its design in DNA.
The initial cell is a big “given,” of course, and I am not asking you to accept it. I do think it wise not to lay a foundation of any kind, apologetic or theological, on the falsification of abiogenesis. The hypothesis currently lacks the vast empirical support that evolution enjoys, though, so I will not contend affirmatively for it.
We have no scientific evidence that a mind can produce such things in the realm of biology, or that there was such a mind 3.5 BYA. I actually agree with you, but I do not classify our shared belief in divine design as scientifically tractable.
Given the initial condition of a cell with reproductive capability, it has.
In a single step, no. At the same time, the single-step model isn’t a scientific model. The scientific models in the field of biology employ concepts like scaffolding, neutral drift, de novo gene generation, the Mullerian two-step, copy number variations, etc. They have been validated by empirical observation, so they are up to the task.
Best,
Chris
P.S. I am not sure what you mean by “Darwinian mechanisms”; the field has evolved dramatically in the past 160 years since the publication of The Origin of Species. Do you mean just inheritance, slow change, and natural selection? Consensus biology has detected an enormous number of mechanisms at work in our observations of evolution–stuff Darwin couldn’t have dreamed of. Referring to them as Darwinian is ambiguous and thus poor form. I suggest the term “evolutionary” in its place.
I’m confused by what De-evolution predicts. I take it to mean, given enough time, a species ought to die out due to an accumulation of negative mutations. But at the same time, the Discovery Institute like to point out various examples of forms that “have not evolved” for tens to hundreds of millions of years. This would also mean, if true, they had not devolved either.
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Yep. Just today the DI’s sciency-sounding journal “BIO-Complexity” published a paper claiming evidence modern humans could have come from a single mating pair 500,000 years ago. According to Sanford the lineage should have died out from genetic entropy after the first few thousand years. Oops!
Of course no one expects consistency from Creationists. 
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Please, consider what Sanford said in his book about the objection according to which persistence of various forms of life disprove Genetic Entropy:
« These objections do not reflect a clear understanding of what I am saying about genetic entropy. My primary thesis is not that everything is going extinct (although I do hold that view), but is that many levels of evidence show that the neo-Darwinian theory is false. The mutation/selection process cannot create the genome, it cannot even stop the genome continuous degeneration. Given only mutation/selection (given only neo-Darwinian theory) - all species must go extinct. I realize that conceivably there may be a counter-force to genetic entropy other than natural selection. That counterforce might be God, or aliens, or some unknown natural force. But if we are given only strict neo-Darwinian theory — yes, all life forms are doomed to extinction »
What do you think he means by that?
He doesn’t. He has convinced you and others like you that he has shown that, true. And since you are the people buying his books and making donations to his organization, that is his primary goal. But that is immaterial to the scientific soundness of his claims.
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I’m sorry really can’t make sense of what you’re saying here. Green bricks are “matches” of “like protein sequences of different animals”? What does that even mean? In what way is an amino acids analogous to a shot in the analogy?
I just can’t make sense of this Bill. It reads like nonsense.
If a shot hits a green brick that is equivalent to an amino acid at position 10 from the left matching the sequence in another protein. We know that this could be by chance as there is a one in 20 chance of this happening. The same could be true in the brick analogy where a gun not aimed could hit a green brick. In blast you have an E value where you can calculate predicted number of chance hits. The further the result is from the E value the more likely the mechanism is deterministic.
That’s not what BLAST does, Bill. The assumption that @gpuccio is using is objectively false.
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Accusation of lying involves intent which is very hard to know. The article mis represented Behe’s argument.
It is not a contradiction. It makes it difficult to falsify his claim with rhetorical tricks.
Here we disagree. The transition to the eukaryotic cell requires more functional information then the origin of life.
Science requires you show they can do what you claim. First a model and a test of that model. Or simply a test. If we start at the prokaryotic to eukaryotic transition and try to account for all the new large macro machines I think you will realize the limitations of the proposed Darwinian and non Darwinian mechanisms.
Great Bill! We’ll be looking forward to you modeling and then testing your “a disembodied mind went POOF! MAGIC! to create new proteins from scratch” claims.
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What has convinced me is the lack of coherent counter arguments. As your reply here is only an assertion. What have you seen that is more than speculative proposals?