Because if its ultimate cause is an unreasoning process, both in the development of the brain, and in the current operation of the brain, that’s not just uncertainty, that’s reason to dismiss it. We never make exceptions to this rule, when we realize for example that a person telling us something is actually insane, and is therefore telling us something from their imagination.
Well, again, Wikipedia says “This term [body plan], usually applied to animals, envisages a ‘blueprint’ encompassing aspects such as symmetry, layers, segmentation, nerve, limb, and gut disposition.” This seems clear, would you expect them to also give say, ways to measure all these or something?
Time to dust off Mark Twain:
“Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin what what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.”
1 Like
On what basis do you decide this? The flippers in question are just wings repurposed, and as you have been told several times, many birds turn their wings into flippers while still retaining the ability to fly.
Your behavior suggests this is not true.
Why? Your attempts at reasoning always contain giant gaps, generally by failing to connect your premises to your conclusions.
That had nothing to do with your supposed rule.
1 Like
It may seem clear to you, but you don’t understand it. When you looked up “nerve disposition” you were directed to a surgical procedure performed on the ulnar nerve, and you didn’t seem to notice that it had nothing to do with how the words are used in that definition.
1 Like
I don’t know of anyone who says suffering is both meaningless and meaningful, and that isn’t my view. I hold that Christianity gives reason to believe suffering is meaningful. The conundrum is “why suffering?”, and the response is, it’s arguably meaningful. So a Creator could dislike suffering, and yet create a world where it would appear. And remove it in a new creation, that also is part of the Christian view.
But my point is that naturalism has no answer to the problem of suffering. You’re again attributing something to me that is not actually my view.
If you’re going by Wikipedia, the previous paragraph states this:
A body plan, Bauplan (pl. German: Baupläne), or ground plan is a set of morphological features common to many members of a phylum of animals.[1] The vertebrates share one body plan, while invertebrates have many.
Yet, you have claimed that penguins have a different plan than other birds. So it sounds like you’re not adhering to what is written in Wikipedia, but instead have your own private definition.
1 Like
I’m not sure what you are saying here, we cannot blindly do what?
Because our reasoning is imperfect, we both agree on that, you say that for one reason, I say that for another.
I mentioned a phobia of snakes, which would prevent people from getting bitten by venomous ones. So why wouldn’t a phobia of hunger pangs be as good as any other reason for gathering food and eating, as any other, as far as survival is concerned?
I gave phobias as being a good answer to this view, and Darwin thought there were reasons to doubt the validity of reason, in a letter to a friend.
But we do this all the time! It’s a reasonable conclusion, when we know a person is sane, we give consideration to their claim about a danger in the streets. When we know they are insane, we do not even bother to go look.
The response doesn’t answer the conundrum. A creator who is entirely free to make up what ever rules they please is not under any restriction (what else should ‘entirely free’ mean) to pick ones where suffering – meaningful or not – is part of the deal. If there is a creator who was free to make the world as they pleased, then having suffering in it was a free choice, not an unavoidable side effect. And since that was a free choice, it must have been made so because the creator wanted it to be so. Yet at the same time the creator also wanted it to not be so, or so the claim goes. This is a contradiction. “It’s meaningful” does not resolve this whatsoever; it’s not even an attempt at acknowledging it, let alone addressing.
That’s because naturalism doesn’t have a problem of suffering in need of answering. The “why is there suffering eventhough there shouldn’t be in a perfect world invented by a being who has all the power and all of the desire to make a world without it” question simply does not come up under naturalism, because everything past the ‘eventhough’ is not assumed in the first place under naturalism, so there is no conflict in need of resolving. There is no expectation under naturalism, that suffering should not exist, nor that it should at least be “meaningful” (what ever that means when it comes to childhood leukemia) if it must. If suffering exists, that’s too bad. If it’s meaningless, that’s very sad, too. But your or my emotional dissatisfaction with things being as they are is not an indication that they are in fact some other way, nor that an understanding of the world that does not make unwarranted assumptions is somehow incomplete as a descriptor of said world.
As to the question why suffering exists, naturalism actually does have a perfectly adequate response: Suffering exists because genes that made bodies that put some adequate amount of effort into preserving their integrity flourished more than their competitors that happened to respond too weakly or too strongly to similar threats to it. Suffering is a subjective manifestation of what motivates such self-preservation responses. It is an adaptation for life in a world that’s not at all governed or controlled or designed by something that has any particular organism’s best interests at heart. It exists because the world is not deliberately made with perfectly suffering-free existence in mind.
1 Like
Are you being intentionally obtuse here? This is a serious question. You’re acting in bad faith.
I’m not changing anything. Both factors in combination matter for the result is what I am saying. We can’t just ignore the MIC, that’s the “standard of quality” against which the enzymes are being tested. Do you understand?
The quality of the enzyme matters AND the MIC matters.
I’m starting to think you geniunely have no actual understanding of anything that is going on, and all you can really do is quote Axe to me without truly understanding the implications of what he is saying or how the different factors affect the measurements he does.
So let me put you to a test here so I can determine whether you have any clue whatsoever what is going. Axe measures a temp-sensitive enzyme against a MIC he has measured in bacteria, carrying that temp-sensitive enzyme, to be ~10ug/ml. Axe measures the per-position pass rate of mutants to be 38% with this protocol.
Question 1) Without quoting Axe back at me, explain in your own words what you think the result would have been, had he measured the wt enzyme against a MIC of ~10 ug/ml.
Q1a) Would that be higher or lower than 38%?
Q1b) Why?
Question 2)What would the result have been if Axe had used the temp-sensitive enzyme, against a MIC of 5200 ug/ml?
Q2a) Would that have been higher or lower than 38%?
Q2b) Why?
Question 3) What would the result have been if Axe had tused the wt enzyme against a mic of 5200 ug/ml?
Q3a) Would that have been higher than 38%?
Q3b) Why?
No I seem like I am the only one of us who has the slightest clue what is going on here. All you ever do is brainlessly quote Axe’s response even when it doesn’t make sense, revealing that you likely don’t even know what the hell any of it really means.
No, he didn’t. Axe explains why he didn’t test the wt enzyme against the temp-sensitive enzyme’s MIC with an analogy. That does NOT explain why he didn’t test the wt enzyme against the wt-enzyme’s MIC. Can you fathom this elementary concept?
And you are just flat out factually incorrect. Read the paper. I linked it directly in the post you are responding to. The insertions/deletions are natural, spontaneous mutations that occurred in the course of the experiments.
Read the god-damned methods section then. It’s in the 2015 paper where the original experiments were run: Experimental evolution reveals hidden diversity in evolutionary pathways | eLife
The gene-gene fusion mutations identified in this evolution experiment (many others are discovered to also lead to the adaptive phenotype) are the ones specifically analyzed in the 2017 nature paper i linked. There is no manipulation of mutation rates going on.
No, that doesn’t seem unlikely at all to anyone with a clue. What a curious statement.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? If the probability (of what?) is inordinately low, then the rate (of what?), if it’s in the bounds of what we might reasonably expect (given what?)…
Rarely have I read such impenetrable gobbledygook. Please put more effort into your sentences.
What is the “rate” according to Axe’s experiment? How do you relate Axe’s extrapolated frequency of protein sequence space that corresponds to functional TEM-1 like proteins (his ~10-77 number) to a “rate”? Rate of what?
Please connect the two for me.
Rate of what? What “rate” does Axe supply? You’re not making logical sense. Your posts went from being mindless quote of Douglas Axe to being basically unreadable.
They aren’t.
Correct. Nothing. Bacteria grew in culture for 6 days, dilutions of these cultures were plated on agar. Agar plates were then incubated to wait for colony growth, and the colonies then visually inspected to find the ones showing the wrinkly spreader phenotype. Nothing was done to cause specific mutations to happen.
Colonies that exhibited the phenotype of interest were then sequenced to identify the mutations responsible. Many different mutations were identified in different colonies. Among the 200 cultures, 91 mutations were found that caused the interesting phenotype. Of these 91, 8 of them were gene-gene fusions.
Money quote from the paper:
Selection for new WS types and identifying mutations
200 independent glass microcosms were inoculated with the smooth (SM) ΔwspΔawsΔmws mutant. After 6 days growth in static microcosms, dilutions were plated on KB agar and the resulting colonies screened for types exhibiting the WS morphology. WS types were found in 91 microcosms, in contrast, when the founding genotype is ancestral SM SBW25, all microcosms harbour WS types after just 3 days of propagation (McDonald et al., 2009).
It’s also in figure 3.
Consider now how your intuition here was of no worth. Reading ID literature has misled you.
I’d be happy to do so if I knew which one you were referring to here. Are you merely referring to your belief that point mutations are numerically dominant in evolution?
When they generate nonfunctional proteins it can’t just be assumed they’re all neutral. Some gene-gene fusions are unavoidably going to delete portions of genes that have important functions, and so are likely to be deleterious. Some of the gene-gene fusions that destroy functions are going to be neutral due to redundancy (and thus lead to pseudogenes, of which we have actual thousands in the human genome), and some gene-gene fusions are going to be neutral because they don’t disrupt existing functions, while also not having any beneficial effects. There are likely to be gene-gene fusions resulting in all these types of outcomes, and more. Neutral ones either get lost by drift, fix by drift, or hitchhike with linked beneficial mutations. Beneficial ones are more likely to go to fixation by positive selection.
Now, do you know how many pseudogenes are in the human genome? Estimates are on the order of 12,000 to 20,000. In other words, our genome is littered with genes that died.
No, Axe doesn’t support his point at all. If you read carefully Axe actually just gives references that discusses the possibility of re-creating a protein with the same fold from fragments of homologous proteins, and cites a couple of studies that indicate this is likely to be deleterious (the mutations that have occured in homologue A are unlikely to be compatible with the mutations that have occurred in homologue B). Don’t believe me? Let’s read his dismissal again with care:
Axe 2004: A commonly accepted view is that new folds are pieced together from small parts of existing folds.32,33,39,40 But to the extent that a new fold is really new, its formation must require the joint solution of at least a considerable number of new local stabilization problems of the kind described above. How likely is it that sequences that carry the hydropathy signatures of other folds and provide joint solutions to the stabilization problems for those folds may be pieced together in such a way that they satisfy a new set of constraints, equally demanding but substantially different? The analysis provided here, bearing in mind the uncertainties, calls for careful examination of such piecing scenarios. The need for caution is underscored by a recent study of the structural and functional consequences of piecing together parts from homologous versions of the same fold.41 Because even close homologues employ substantially different solutions to their local stabilization problems,8 chimeras made by homologous recombination suffer considerable disruption unless the points of crossover minimize intermixing of these local solutions.41 So, if re-creating a fold by ordered assembly of sections of sequences that already adopt that fold is not a simple matter, generating new folds from parts of old ones may be much less feasible than has been supposed.
Axe tries to argue that we should discount the possibility of the evolution of novel folds on the basis that different portions of the same fold, from diverged homologous proteins, are likely to be deleterious. First of all this doesn’t give us a rate at all. The majority of gene-gene fusions are not unlikely to be deleterious. We cannot use that as a basis for simply discounting the possibility that they can still massively raise the probability of evolving novel genes, over and above the rate we might expect from having to generate an entirely new, random protein sequence de novo.
You may recall that I quoted Wikipedia’s definition of a body plan, adding “new organs” to more closely correspond with what I quoted about Bechly’s view.
I don’t know why one example being wrong upends my whole concept of a body plan. But I didn’t make an assertion without evidence, it does seem reasonable that organs have needed function in whales, and if whales need them, it’s reasonable to expect Basilosaurus needed them, too. That’s not just handwaving.
The timeframe was the one given by Bechly, and it’s worse if the intermediates, as in whale evolution, have substantial differences, too.
I conclude that flippers are more effective, otherwise there would be no advantage to modifying them for hydrodynamic properties.
And you just called them finches, too! Oh well. But are you saying beak differences do mean there is a new body plan?
That’s fine, the question is whether they are different enough to say they have different body plans.
My deduction of Bechly’s view, though, where is the contradiction in my statement of it?
That was an AI summary, and how is this the wrong meaning? I kind of had to use this definition, because the links listed were for other stuff.
Merriam-Webster defines counterargument as “an opposing argument”. I’m sorry, it’s an argument. I’m even more sorry you cannnot seem to see this.
No, I went into detail about why I thought this, it’s simpler to just correct Bechly on his definition of a body plan.
But “basal divergences” sound basic! This would be of interest, and would seem to contradict your claim that the tree is basically complete, with some needed finishing touches. And Wikipedia defines supergroups as follows: “A supergroup or super-group, in systematics, is a large group of organisms that share one common ancestor and have important defining characteristics. It is an informal, mostly arbitrary rank in biological taxonomy that is often greater than phylum or kingdom, although some supergroups are also treated as phyla.” I don’t know why I just took your word for this, their definition is quite different than yours.
I meant like what Wikipedia says: “A ghost lineage is a hypothesized ancestor in a species lineage that has left no fossil evidence, but can still be inferred to exist or have existed because of gaps in the fossil record or genomic evidence.” And that’s relevant to a claim that the tree of life is complete, if you have to fill in gaps with speculation about organisms we have no examples of.
Different supergroups is indeed a problem with the tree of life being basically complete, why do you dismiss this, especially if the Wikipedia definition is apt? And if you cannot reasonably explain how organisms got from one node to another, that’s a problem with this claim of a valid tree of life, as well. It’s like saying your GPS can give good routes, only it has trouble with turns that are absent.
I don’t claim that you, or Bechly, or that I am infallible. And I think I have good reasons to reject common descent, I gave a few of them above.
There isn’t a statement that one kind cannot become another kind, so the scientific data is relative here, of which admittedly I know very little. You asked me what I think, so I told you, but it’s not a hill for me to die on.
Therefore the Cambrian explosion is not a remarkable event that needs explanation? And do the intermediates begin with a sudden, surprising appearance? And are there a large number of Cambrian animals appearing without intermediates?
I’ve mentioned various difficulties with evolution explaining all the diversity of life, and organisms appearing suddenly, as reasons for my conclusions. I think both of these are understandable reasons.
Yes, I do, it’s certainly much more believable in view of modern science now, and as C.S. Lewis said, “if you compare it with the creation legends of other peoples—with all these delightful absurdities in which giants to be cut up and floods to be dried up are made to exist before creation—the depth and originality of this Hebrew folk tale will soon be apparent. The idea of creation in the rigorous sense of the word is there fully grasped.” Though I wouldn’t characterize it as a folk tale.
But I was addressing your view, I agree that my view resolves these problems, while claiming that your view takes refuge in remote improbabilities.
I quoted Chesterton because he describes well why I think we are exceptional, in rather self-evident terms! So this is not a response to his points, or to my view.
No, I’m not, so now you need to address this conundrum in your view.
I’m shaving with Occam’s razor! I see no reason to multiply hypotheses here, and I see no reason that I need to speculate on how exactly God acted in history. This seems to be an attempt to adopt current scientific explanations, while holding onto God acting in history as well. But given the difficulties I have seen and heard of in evolutionary theory, it seems more like deciding to board a leaky, if not a sinking ship.
I mean what people conclude all the time, and with good reason! If I hear a sane person warn me of a danger outside, I’ll pay attention. If I hear a paranoid person say the same thing, I won’t pay much, if any, attention. That’s the pricinciple, we give credence when there is a valid, reasoning cause to a statement. If there is an unreasoning cause, we will reject it. Why did you just reject my statement? “That was gibberish”, you said. This illustrates my point very well.
I agree it’s a necessary starting point, I don’t think it’s circular, though, any more than starting with axioms is a good way to embark on mathematics.
I depend on reason, I want evidence in order to believe something. And the Bible, in case you weren’t aware, has books that primarily present evidence! It’s called prophecy, where God actually challenges the idols, the other gods, to tell the future, and then he demonstrates that he can. Isaiah 41:22-29 is a prominent example, and a whole section of the Old Testament is called “the prophets”. And the gospel writer of John says at the end of his book, that he’s been giving evidence for belief. Then there’s archeological evidence, and historical evidence. Christianity is really unique in this regard, today, Judaism has mostly abandoned its roots, and Islam is basically “trust what I say without questioning”, and Hinduism and Buddhism don’t really rely on history, and they don’t have prophecy, and so on.
Which is why people reject unreasoning nature as a good cause for a statement, whenever they encounter it? We never make exceptions to this, in real life. John Lennox is fond of asking scientists who, when prodded, claim the brain is the product of unreasoning processes, if the laptop they use at work was the product of such processes, would they trust it? The answer, invariably, is no. He then remarks, “I see you have a problem, don’t you?”
But what I’m saying is there are two different problems with naturalism, both along the same lines. I’m interested in hearing your response to what I have said about both. Do you believe people who are raving in their schizophrenia? Why or why not?
No, I’m saying gathering evidence is the way to determine if a person is trustworthy. This is not circular, and we (you!) do this all the time, and it’s the way to do this.
I listen to talks, I read what he writes, I find he presents good reasons for belief, and he likes to test what he believes, by discussing with people who disagree with him. I like to do that, too! It’s one reason I’m here. And this indicates that he not just spouting ill-considered nonsense.
Blindly trust reason. We often have check it with others, and even then there are situations where mistake happens.
How does citing a single example overrule the general case that correctly reasoning about the world should be thought more likely to correlate with survival?
You need some way to show that for the majority of situations an organism is expected to face in the world (including ones where you actually have time to sit down and think about what to do next), an incorrect inference is more likely to promote survival than an correct one.
You don’t do that simply by mentioning examples of phobias people can suffer from.
I don’t think you’re really understanding the argument I am making.
Consider the problem again that you’re faced with a diminishing supply of food. Now consider the total space of all possible inferences, both correct and incorrect, a person could engage in. There are going to be many incorrect inferences, and many correct inferences. The incorrect inferences likely outnumber correct inferences. But the key question is if the majority of survival-promoting inferences are found among the incorrect, or in the correct inferences.
For your argument to succeed we need to assume that in this incredible space of possible inferences a person could come up with (blue+red), the number that promote survival(box that overlaps both) but are arrived at through fallacious reasoning(orange), outnumber the number that promote survival but are arrived at through correct reasoning(green). You are basically arguing that we should think the orange area is bigger than the green area.
Can you give any sort of argument for why we should think the space of possible behaviors should have such a distribution where the majority of the ones that promote survival are in the incorrect inferences (orange are is bigger than green area) set?
“Some people have phobias” just doesn’t show that. You’re simply pointing to one inference in the orange area, which simply shows that there are such inferences. It doesn’t tell us their relative proportions.
It just seems intuitively obvious to me that correct inferences that promote survival (green area) would outnumber incorrect inferences that promote survival (have bigger area than orange area).
I really don’t care. I don’t consider Darwin infallible.
I’m sorry but it just doesn’t follow that “the validity of reasoning is guaranteed because our ability to reason has a source that also reasons.”