It’s amazing that he constantly explains the law to lawyers, psychiatry to psychiatrists, and of course science to scientists.
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But with psychiatry, I was making a painfully obvious point, that psychiatrists (even Faizal eventually admitted this) do consider that their clients’ thoughts and conclusions may be due to unreasoning or irrational causes, such as mental illness, specifically for example, chemical imbalances in the brain. Faizal said he tries to help people with illogical thinking by engaging in talk therapy. All right, that illustrates my point. Or for example, here: “Experiencing and recovering from psychosis can be isolating, especially if friends and peers can’t relate to what you are going through. With testimony from the author’s lived experience and using a range of practical therapeutic exercises that draw on ACT, DBT and Recovery-Oriented CBT, this workbook will support and inspire you throughout your recovery, and help you be the best possible advocate for yourself.”
”With practical guidance on everything from coping with paranoia to dealing with stigma, as well as mindfulness strategies and advice on returning to work or school - this guide is with you every step of the way.”
And psychosis and paranoia are symptoms of schizophrenia, for instance, for which people can be prescribed and helped by antipsychotics. So no, this is not some personal belief I am presenting, this is common knowledge, and it’s absurd for a real psychiatrist to deny this.
Well, I actually agree, I insist on good evidence for conclusions, for my conclusions and others’.
Exactly. So why has no one been able to point me to an unrefuted point the skeptics have made in the long thread? Will you do that?
Um, where is the evidence for your statement, where is the understanding that refutes Axe’s paper? That is what I challenge people here to point out, just one post, one point that has proved unanswerable, that has gone unaddressed, that has stood up here.
People do claim victory here, a lot! But this is another such assertion, without evidence. Again, I insist on good evidence for conclusions, for my conclusions and others’.
Indeed, I don’t know what McLatchie’s calculation was, but I do know that a molecule that is 1.6 times longer will be substantially more difficult to produce. And here is a quote from Taylor et al’s paper that confirms McLatchie’s conclusion: “Our estimate of the low frequency of protein catalysts in sequence space indicates that it will not be possible to isolate enzymes from unbiased random libraries in a single step.” Just McLatchie’s point, and Axe’s conclusion as well, sequence space is sparse, functional enzymes are very low frequency.
What people mean is never plain when apologists take a single sentence out of context. What was the chapter that Lennox extracted this sentence from talking about?
The archaic and clunky Aristotelian obsession with “causation” is yours, ID’s and apologetics’, not Hawking’s.
It seems likely that Hawking, like most psychiatrists, most courts, and most people generally, is not applying an Aristotelian framework – so imposing that framework on what they say and do is to misrepresent them.
Put simply, Hawking explicitly said “the universe can and will create itself from nothing” – he did not say that a law created the universe, or anything that could reasonably be interpreted as such. Therefore Lennox is misrepresenting him.
I could reasonably say that “the planets rotate around the Sun because of the law of gravity” – does that mean that I am asserting that the law of gravity caused the solar system, and that a law of nature created the solar system? Or is this just how the English language works, and Lennox was simply twisting Hawking’s words to make them appear to say something ridiculous?
No, because Chesteron’s nasty vacuous polemic did not legitimately indict or explain materialism either.
I have already given my answer. To reiterate, Chesterton’s tirade is nothing more than bald, unsubstantiated, vacuous asertion. He only says that materialism “has a sort of insane simplicity” – he does not demonstrate it. He only says that materialism “has just the quality of the madman’s argument” – he does not demonstrate it. He only says that “we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out” – he does not demonstrate it.
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Chesterton gives no evidence for his claims, so I need offer no evidence in rejecting them.
Yes, because none of those things are inherent in the universe (please present me with a kilogram of justice, if you think otherwise) – they are simply ideas that we humans impose on it. And because they are human ideas, they differ from person to person, pervassively at least slightly, but not infrequently to startling degrees.
As such, it would seem that we should expect psychologists and sociologists to explain this, not physical scientists.
But he didn’t leave it out, he explicitly discussed it. By “beyond all decent contemplation” he means that it is something that it is better not to dwell on it.
He didn’t “explain the outrage and recoil we still experience in view of such events” – because he is a biologist not a psychologist. The “outrage and recoil” exists in human minds, not in the ecologies that biologists study.
How? He does not analyse Materialism – he just tosses insulting labels at it – “insane”, “madman”, etc. Although the language is slightly more sophisticated, the intent is just the same as schoolyard taunts – Chesterton has essentially called materialists “a bunch of poopyheads”.
Given that you have demonstrated as little understanding of materialism as Chesterton, I likewise don’t give a rat’s arse about your vacuous thoughts.
Can you present McLatchie’s calculation, then? If not, why do you make such conclusions?
Yes, my point remains that both of their estimates are extraordinarily improbable. And that was the primary question of interest, if I tell you I have a lottery ticket with 1 in 10^53 chance, and another with 1 in 10^77 chance, are you going to run out and buy the first ticket? Saying, “look how much more probable it is!”
Well, fine, but I do find articles such as the one on Wikipedia speaking of folds as real entities, without mentioning them transitioning into other types of folds. As also here: “A fold refers to a characteristic spatial assembly of secondary structure elements into a domain‐like structure that is common to many different proteins.” Again, no mention of fold transitions to other folds, they speak as if a fold is a known entity, “a domain-like structure”, apparently not subject to becoming another structure, or another fold. Exceptions therefore being, exceptions.
I do admit I’m not a biologist. But do you mean I need to do his experiment again? Or redo his calculations? I’m not sure what you are asking for here. But I’m taking the approach of asking people how Axe has been refuted, since that claim is made even in this thread’s title! So when people give me their refutation, then I dig into Axe’s paper, and his response to criticisms, and try and answer what people here give as refutations of Axe’s paper. So far, so good, I keep challenging people to point to one unanswerable point that has been made here, one solid refutation, with no good reply. Do you have a refutation? Can you point to one, please?
All right, here is the exact quote:
How is this somehow different than what I said you were saying?
Well, here’s one:
And I don’t think that was your initial challenge. Here’s another:
I think there were more…
I have said repeatedly that I am not a biologist.
If it’s about the whole point of the paper, why are these challenges all different?
So why do you ask me these questions? If not to find out if I know something.
How so? I keep asking this.
Actually, I have coauthored a note in a journal. I have experience in academia.
Well, when people say “Axe didn’t respond”, the best way to disprove that is to quote from his response. When you say “Axe only studied one [function]. Globalizing that is absurd,” the best way to respond to that is to quote Axe saying his results apply to beta-lactamase domains in general: “Using these simplifications, the difficulty of specifying a working beta-lactamase domain is assessed here.” How are these not valid and appropriate responses? Demonstrating understanding?
And I also restate Axe’s work in my own words, as I can, and as appropriate.
So I would appreciate if you would show us the correct calculation. And maybe send a note to McLatchie.
Actually, Axe worked with a “150-amino-acid section analysed from Beta-lactamase”, so the protein would be longer. Which also might explain McLatchie’s estimate of 10-53 .
So how are these questions not basic questions?
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Linking of amino acids into chains (aka polypeptides)
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Linking of nucleotides into RNA molecules
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Linking of simple sugars (aka monosaccharides) into chains known as polysaccharides
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Origin of biological information
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Assembly of components into a cell
This article would imply otherwise: “Four decades ago, several scientists suggested that the impossibility of any evolutionary process sampling anything but a miniscule fraction of the possible protein sequences posed a problem for the evolution of new proteins. This potential problem-the sampling problem-was largely ignored, in part because those who raised it had to rely on guesswork to fill some key gaps in their understanding of proteins. The huge advances since that time call for a careful reassessment of the issue they raised. Focusing specifically on the origin of new protein folds, I argue here that the sampling problem remains.”
So Axe was reassessing previous results, wanting to clarify them and update them. The hypothesis he refers to above as “the sampling problem,” all this would imply he was aware of this, when he embarked on his work.
As far as I have seen, Axe’s estimate is the lowest probability, is that what you meant? But all the estimates I have seen are also low, inordinately improbable.
Ah, that would be the reason the video is titled “The Incompetence of Evolution”? And indeed, the papers weren’t trying to disprove a hypothesis about a two-mutation limit, the hypothesis was Tour and Stadler’s, and the papers examined either found a limit at about two mutations, or were shown not to overturn the hypothesis, they were found to be irrelevant.
But Bechly doesn’t equate Darwinism with the idea that species pairs should occur at least about every 5-10 million years, he was saying this would be an expectation, if evolution is happening consistently and continually.
Well, what Bechly actually said was, he proposed two alternatives, one was “scientists who consider the biological difference between humans and chimps as marginal”. The other was those who “consider humans as very different from chimps, based on their different bipedal locomotion and especially their mental capacity and cultural achievements.” So it seems you subscribe to the latter view, and deny that humans are marginally biologically different. So locomotion and especially brain development differences require more than an evolutionary explanation, and I would refer here to the about-two-mutation limit mentioned above, and the challenge that “millions of species specific potentially impactful features” mentioned here therefore presents, in getting from chimps to humans. It seems very unlikely, based on such considerations, and thus it’s not a good counter-example to Bechly’s challenge.