Did Douglas Axe Disprove Evolution? Spoiler: No

[Tim]

@lee_merrill

But you ignored my questions. Saying “irritating and irrelevant” is not an answer, it’s a conclusion with no evidence.

The fact that your question was irrelevant is a a very good reason for not answering it.

The fact that A causes B and B has property X, does not mean that A must also have property X. @John_Harshman has pointed this out to you repeatedly. But you refuse to listen to him, and respond with a bunch of poorly-though-out nonsense.

Causation is therefore IRRELEVANT and I therefore reserve the right to dismiss or ignore such questions as nothing more than sealioning.

@lee_merrill

I think your answer here is where there is speculation without evidence!

That would appear to be a you problem.

@lee_merrill

But what exactly are you criticizing about the authors, if not their book, and by implication, what they say in it? You even mention “everything they say”.

What I said was “Lee believes everything they say” – making fun of the contrast between your pervasive credulity of ignorant blowhards and pervasive skepticism of genuine experts.

I was criticising them for writing a book on a subject they have no expertise in, not for the specific contents of the book.

@lee_merrill

I do think rejecting their expertise is a rejection of their book, and what they say. Or even “everything they say.”

That again would appear to be a you problem.

@lee_merrill

But pointing to flaws of reasoning is in no way showing a false dichotomy!

You were not “pointing to flaws of reasoning” Lee. You were FALSELY attributing me with your false dichotomy:

@lee_merrill

And here is another example of someone pointing to nonreasoning causes for statements, which can therefore be dismissed …

I was not “pointing to nonreasoning causes” Lee – because “nonreasoning causes” is irrelevant bullshit.

@lee_merrill

You need to show how reason and unreason somehow overlap, or don’t cover the whole spectrum. So I admit, I skipped it.

No I don’t need to do this Lee – because “reason and unreason” do not exist!

All reason is flawed.

It may be flawed because of lack of information, lack of time, lack of space, lack of imagination, lack of clarity, lack of motivation, or probably dozens of other reasons.

We are therefore NOT talking about “reason and unreason” but about different degrees of imperfection of reason.

And depending upon the context, different levels, and or different types, of imperfection may or may not be acceptable – it’s all a cost benefit tradeoff.

Of course this is a relevant detail about cognition and reason that most philosophers (and particularly most apologist Christian philosophers) appear to ignore.

[Mercer (John Mercer)]

@lee_merrill

@Mercer

You KNOW that’s not true, and another violation of the Ninth Commandment. You are grossly uninformed, so you have zero basis for judging anyone else as well-informed.

Your ONLY criterion is whether you want what someone else says to be true. You can’t even get yourself to look at the qualifications of those who don’t. Total hypocrisy.

Ah, so it’s reasonable to believe people who are trustworthy and well-informed?

What part of

@Mercer

You are grossly uninformed, so you have zero basis for judging anyone else as well-informed.

do you not understand?

@lee_merrill

You were saying recently that that is just “hear-say”.

No, I don’t use a hyphen. And I expect what people say to be backed up by evidence. You don’t use that criterion. Ever, at least here.

So, total hypocrisy.

@lee_merrill

And how do you know my exact motives?

I infer them from the incoherent things you write and your fear of evidence.

@lee_merrill

Like an atheist saying “I know there are no gods!”

Have any atheists here said that? If not, you are employing a straw man fallacy.

@lee_merrill

You know this, exactly, how? You have looked everywhere God might be, if he existed, everywhere, and all at once, and haven’t found him? That’s a claim of virtual omniscience, and omnipresence. You really should be worshipped, you supernatural being, you.

So now you’re literally accusing ME of saying that! That’s simply lying.

How did you become certain that anyone who disagrees with The Omniscient Lee Merrill must be an atheist? Walk us through that logic.

@lee_merrill

@Mercer

@lee_merrill

How is this in any way a refutation of my challenge?

I’m challenging you to stop being hypocritical.

But that’s not a refutation, either. It’s what’s known as an ad hominem.

No, it is not. As @John_Harshman pointed out, you’ve got it exactly backwards:

@John_Harshman

“We don’t believe you because you’re nuts” is ad hominem. “We think you’re nuts because you say absurd things” is not. See the difference?

If you can’t, just say so.

@lee_merrill

@Mercer

For starters, [Fred Hoyle’s] analogy reveals how little he knew, because I’m a geneticist and biochemist.

Do you mean his 747 analogy with the tornado? That wasn’t what I quoted, it was a quote about physics, and then a mention of chemistry and biology. There was no analogy there.

I didn’t say there was. You really have trouble with reading comprehension. I said that his analogy revealed how little he understood about biology.

@lee_merrill

@Mercer

@lee_merrill

And I don’t only do hearsay, I do try and investigate when I can,

You don’t go to the evidence. Your only “investigation” is regurgitating things you wish were true, regardless of source.

Ad hominem alert!

Nope. It’s what you do.

@lee_merrill

Also another claim of supernatural knowledge of my motives.

No, that was a description of your writing here.

@lee_merrill

as in when people here say “This paper shows thus and so!”

@lee_merrill

All right, here’s one:

“Which is just plain silly. Here’s an example of real OOL research:

Isoprenoids enhance the stability of fatty acid membranes at the emergence of life potentially leading to an early lipid divide - PMC ” (John Mercer)

And where, exactly, did I make any claims about what the paper showed, Lee? I simply pointed out that it’s real OOL research.

@lee_merrill

The discussion continued, and I said further: “One basic problem is that complex molecules go to pieces in the kind of temperatures found in hydrothermal vents.”

Then you have to explain how organisms with very complex molecules live there TODAY:

https://www.science.org/content/article/entire-ecosystem-lives-beneath-scorching-hydrothermal-vents

We all know you won’t.

@lee_merrill

@Mercer

@lee_merrill

Chesterton says the materialist explanation explains everything, yet it also in a real sense, leaves out everything. Like the madman’s explanation of reality! “The thing has shrunk”, as someone put it.

No evidence there, just more hearsay

Well, I also gave a quote from Dawkins,

More hearsay.

@lee_merrill

to illustrate Chesterton’s point,

More hearsay.

@lee_merrill

Dawkins says there is just “blind, pitiless indifference”, that is all.

More hearsay.

@lee_merrill

But strange to say, he starts out his argument by painting a picture of terrible animal suffering

More hearsay.

Do you not see there’s not a speck of evidence cited in anything you write?

@lee_merrill

@Mercer

@lee_merrill

@Mercer

Why do you completely disregard the diplomas (and more importantly, the expertise) of everyone with whom you disagree? Isn’t that just reiterating the same hypocrisy?

I don’t disregard them…

You most certainly do, utterly. I challenge you to support your claim that Axe deserves a 9/10 in my field. I challenge you to regard my qualifications and compare/contrast them with Axe’s.

All right, have you worked at Cambridge, or at a comparable institution?

Sorry, first we need to evaluate your initial claim that Axe is a 9/10, your burden of proof for that. But are you saying having merely “worked at” a prestigious place makes one a 9/10?

@lee_merrill

Have you published a paper that has had such scrutiny and held up for 20 years?

My last paper from my PhD thesis is still being cited 39 years later.

Axe’s paper hasn’t held up.

Ball’s in your court. You’re claiming that Axe is a 9/10 in my field, the effects of mutations on protein activity. Were you deliberately violating the Ninth Commandment when you wrote that? If not, show (with evidence) that he’s in the 90th percentile relative to everyone else in the field (we have metrics for that) and then we’ll talk about me. It’ll be fun, for me at least!

@lee_merrill

Actually, I do listen when people tell me an ion pump isn’t an ion channel. Or that Basilosaurus didn’t have a melon organ.

But you don’t listen when people tell you you’re wrong about complex molecules holding together in organisms that live in hydrothermal vents. If you’re right, they literally cannot exist today.

But you don’t listen when people tell you you’re wrong about what ATP does in living things.

And a host of other claims you’ve made.

[Gisteron]

@lee_merrill

In this case, someone was claiming I am not invested in the subject, and yet I speak, that would not be a reasoning cause.

Says you, but not the “someone”. If you want to argue with what you put in other people’s mouths, be my guest – watching you fail to argue with yourself is far more hilarious than watching you struggle against what people actually say to you.

@lee_merrill

Um, I said more, directly addressing your challenge,…

That is a lie. You said more about what you believe about why people are not p-zombies. You made no attempt to address the challenge of how one would go about telling the difference. You said under what conditions this would be a concern, said that according to your beliefs these conditions are not met, and then proceded to make no attempts at addressing the actual question.

@lee_merrill

And that is what you asked for, and that is what I meant.

No, it is not. That’s a lie again. I asked about what is the practical distinction between beings with souls and beings without, so we could try telling which of the two we are. The Turing test, had you actually read the passage you quote, is about whether the text a language generator produces is systematically distinguishable from text produced by a human.

If you wish to claim that the Turing test is what distinguishes a being with a soul from a being without, then fair enough. In that case, since you say that we have had language models that can fool at least some judges into believing they might be human, then it stands to reason that at least in the opinion of such judges, language models can have as much of a soul as humans, or, alternatively that humans have as little of it as some such language models. If that’s what you want to go with, I’m happy to rest my case.

@lee_merrill

… there is good evidence for a God, a particular one, who is self-existent…

You do understand, do you not, that existence is not a predicate, right? There are very silly paradoxes that treating it as such leads to, like one could define things that have existence, yet also do not exist. Necessary existence, or “self-existence”, as you put it, is self-contradictory. It is as absurd as a married bachelor. Given this is the case, how on earth could there even possibly be any evidence of such a thing?