- Hey let’s just “adjust” the 10-24 number for no reason because it’s inconveniently probable.
- 10-53 is “similarly low” as 10-77, there’s only TWENTYFIVE ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE difference.
This is so dumb it boggles the mind.
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Are you? I’m genuinely unsure of whether you want to read and learn.
Respectfully, I have no clue what this means. Reasoning is a thing some brains do. “Reason” is not an object nor a substance that either flows out of anything or can generate something, including itself.
Well, clearly that’s false. I, for one, do not recognize or apply the principle that “reason must come from reason” because I have not the beginning of a clue of what that is even supposed to mean.
No, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that the thing you think provides for the reliability of reason – namely, an all-powerful being that is wholly apart from nature – has zero obligations to make anything consistent with anything else. There is absolutely no law stating that the minds it would equip us with have to be ones whose reasoning can to any extent be relied on, or, for that matter, that it should make a world that is in any way comprehensible at all, be it to our minds, or to any other conceivable ones. So to argue that they are reliable because they were made to be reliable is silly, not only because there is no evidence for it, but also because we have no reason to trust minds made by a being that has no obligation to equip us with reliable ones, even if it did. Meanwhile, to argue that our minds are somewhat reliable as a means to understand the world around us because they were molded by the same rules and processes that govern the rest of the world, while not entirely convincing either, I would suggest is somewhat more compelling than that.
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Of course there are a number. You’re avoiding the question: How many would you guess there are?
What I find fascinating is that you are afraid to know. You lack faith.
It is. If you had faith, you would use Axe’s extrapolation to predict the frequency. What are you afraid of? Don’t you want to know whether Axe is a charlatan or not? Why have you broken the Ninth Commandment so many times to defend him without having the slightest idea of whether he is right?
You’ve always been off track. I brought it back to your false denial:
I presented three. You did do precisely that, actually.
But you are clearly afraid of further evidence in the case of Axe.
I’ll ask again in a different way: rank yourself, Axe, and me on a scale of 1-10 on your perception of relevant expertise in the field of the effects of mutations on protein activity.
Don’t forget what you’ve said about others failing to meet challenges, Lee.
You’re actively avoiding searching for the truth.
I think a more accurate representation is that Axe doesn’t have to provide Lee with explanations–he just parrots Axe’s assertions.
While on the other hand, Lee refuses to learn anything that might help him to understand the many explanations we have provided.
He’s afraid to learn. My hypothesis is that IDcreationism is fundamentally about lack of faith.
I would note that McLatchie, like @lee_merrill , ignores the main point of my essay (I point this out in my response to the Uncommon Descent article by McLatchie, that one can find in the first comment to the post @lee_merrill points to).
Others note the cynicism or tone-deafness on the part of McLatchie, who seems to think a range of “results” that spans 60 or 70 orders of magnitude in some way supports Axe’s contentions. I share their response and opinions.
Also, many thanks to @sfmatheson for pointing out recent results that really nail shut the coffin that holds Axe’s thoroughly-refuted conclusions regarding the rarity of function in sequence space.
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And if Lee truly wants to
…he’d be looking at those results. Why don’t you present them in a journal club format?
True. If you get rid of everything the Wikipedia definition actually does say and then add something it doesn’t, then it gets much closer to Bechly’s view. Why do we care?
Doesn’t matter. I don’t say what you think is reasonable is incorrect, only that “it’s reasonable” is not evidence that it’s correct. We have no evidence that Basilosaurus had a counter-current exchange system. We also have no evidence that it didn’t. We would expect none either way. But you can’t use that system to show that Basilosaurus had a new body plan.
If so, he can’t say that the transition took the amount of time he claims.
Not if all the differences sum to the difference between the start and end points. They make the problem simpler, since the individual transitions are smaller.
Why are they different enough? If it’s just a matter of personal taste, then I can apply my personal taste to refute Bechly. His definition is useless. Nor does the presence of the word “limbs” but not the word “beaks” in the Wikipedia definition show anything useful. For one thing, the penguin flipper is not a different limb from any other vertebrate forelimb or pectoral fin. You have a talent for ignoring all context when it suits you. You will note again that Wikipedia says that all vertebrates have the same body plan.
Melons have the excellent property of showing up in fossils, because they affect the shape of the skull. Unfortunately for you, Basilosaurus didn’t have a melon. Don’t you see that you are just seizing upon any justification that you can use to defend your preconceptions rather than allowing the evidence to guide you? And you still don’t know what a counter-current system is, do you?
You may think you did, but remember that you aren’t good at saying what you mean. In this case what you claim is impossible, because you’re trying to defend the simultaneous truth of two mutually contradictory statements. But please present this statement again, or preferably a much clearer statement, and we’ll see.
Well, the term in the Wikipedia definition of “body plan” refers to what I said, the gross form of the nervous system, e.g. a nerve net in cnidarians, a dorsal nerve cord in vertebrates, a ventral one in several other phyla, and so on. But in your AI quote it refers to a surgical procedure to correct a flaw in some people’s ulnar nerve. Can you see that those two definitions are completely different? And you could have discovered that by actually reading the surrounding context in either case.
It isn’t necessary to show it’s wrong in order to show that it isn’t an argument. Absent evidence that a premise is correct, we can’t say that a conclusion is correct. The conclusion may in that case be true, or it may not. We can’t tell without evidence. You commonly conflate quite different things; here, “conjecture” and “wrong”.
And here you abuse the meaning of Occam’s razor, applying it to a something it was never intended to apply to.
Here, you confuse two quite different meanings of “basal”. The definition you mention applies to things like “basal metabolism”. But on a tree, “basal” just means “close to the root”. And before you confuse that word, the root is just the earliest point on a tree, from which all branches descend.
No, it isn’t basically incomplete, just incomplete. And whether or which of the various disagreements are serious is a matter of personal opinion.
Another non sequitur. Good clue for non sequitur in your posts: they’re often preceded by words like “so”, “therefore”, etc. “Serious” doesn’t follow from anything that preceded it.
It’s not speculation. It’s a necessary conclusion from the data. And nobody is postulating unknown ancestors in the Edicacaran, except when there are fossils in the Ediacaran. Though ghost lineages must exist, their lengths are not always specified. But if you could settle on some particular animals in the Cambrian we might make a little progress.
Not the base of the tree of life, just the base of the eukaryote tree. Why would we have to resolve the base in order to know there’s a tree?
All due respect, but you are not the best guide to what you are saying. But the simplest interpretation of your objection to the existence of a tree is that it’s not complete, i.e. we don’t know everything about it, and therefore can’t say the simplest thing about it, that it exists.
Yes. And that’s a good reason to accept common descent. If there were no common descent, why would intermediates exist?
What do you mean, exactly, by “real”? It seems that you mean “instantaneous”. But that’s another case of conflation of meaning. Anyway, what many other explosions?
No, you don’t examine evidence. You just pick what agrees with your preconceptions and ignore the rest.
Creationists would disagree with you. And we have another confusion of definitions. It should be clear that I’ve been talking about separately created kinds of the sort that creationists mean by the term. (“Baramin” is their coined equivalent, if you prefer it.)
Another snippet. But it doesn’t seem to respond to me. Were you intending to name trilobites as the group that arose without intermediates? But there are plenty of older ichnofossils that can be attributed to Euarthropoda; those are intermediates. There are plenty of Cambrian euarthropods, stem-arthropods, and stem-ecdysozoans that are more primitive than trilobites. There are also some non-mineralized trilobites that lack many of the features we associate with the group. And there are clear Ediacaran lophotrochozoans, the sister group of Ecdysozoa. All these are the intermediates you claim don’t exist for trilobites. Names for all of these on request. I don’t know whether Britannica says anything about them, but I’m suspicious that your snippet wasn’t the end of it. Spriggina is probably not an arthropod, but it probably isn’t a rangeomorph either. Unfortunately, the nature of its preservation doesn’t offer enough detail to tell us much. But it’s not anything I would have mentioned as transitional.
Why? Even assuming that the appearance is really instantaneous, why wouldn’t saltation cover it?
No, you misunderstand the story. The earth pre-exists the story. It’s “without form and void”. Light predates the sun, which doesn’t happen until Day 4, a day after plants. Land rises out of the water and doesn’t ever separate. The only separation mentioned is between the waters above and the waters below, and of course that’s done using a “firmament”, which doesn’t exist. Plants predate animals, birds predate land animals, the sequence is not simple to complex but water and air to land; Genesis knows nothing of a difference in complexity among species. Taken literally, the story corresponds to real history in no significant respect.
That’s just you equivocating between two different meanings of “reason” and “process”. I’ve explained this already. The analogy between a crazy person’s statements and the evolution of consciousness makes no sense, and just happens to use a few of the same words in each case. The product doesn’t have to share characteristics with the source. A reasoning source doesn’t have to produce a reasoning product, and an unreasoning source doesn’t have to produce an unreasoning product. We have to rely on evidence, period.
I don’t disagree, exactly. I just don’t think it’s relevant. If you had said that fish have fins I wouldn’t have disagreed with that but would have found it equally relevant. All your claims depend on this one analogy being meaningful, when it isn’t.
What is this self-existent reason?
You bleeped right over the reasoning, as you do habitually.
True enough. Though we can test at least for minimal self-consistency of observations and conclusions and compare ours with those of others. Still, we have to assume that we are capable of those things.
Why, because of the crazy person? You have to do better than that if you want to make any sort of case.
No, your training and experience are also deficient, but that’s a separate matter that I’m not talking about here. No, I’m talking about your ability to reason your way out of a paper bag with a dozen giant holes already in it.
That’s not really a good reason to believe that. Your ability to perceive what others are doing is faulty. But enough about you. Should we not get back to the general question of the reliability of human reason?