Eddie: “You shouldn’t call ID ‘creationism’ because that’s not how the term was used before ID existed!”
Also Eddie: “Everyone should use my own special, personal made up definition of ‘evolution’ which would include if God used his magical powers to instantly turn a monkey into Adam, because that’s what I want the word to mean!”
SMH.
Oh, yes, sometimes British scholars could be extremely combative. But usually the combativeness (Huxley may be an exception) contained a play-element, whereas American intellectual combativeness has tended to get personal. In old Oxford they could tell the other person (politely) that his position was completely wrong, and intellectually indefensible, and then go out and play cricket together and genuinely enjoy each other’s company personally, as if the intellectual debate had not happened. Can you imagine most of the atheists here doing that with any of the Christian ID folks here? I think there is a grand total of one atheist here who has ever had that sort of personal friendly relationship with any ID proponent. A friend of mine who did graduate work at an Ivy League school left it because he could not stand the atmosphere of bitter personal rivalry in the graduate seminars. He went to a university in a former Commonwealth country to do his PhD, and found grad students there were actually kind to each other. Of course, that was a few years back. The habit of treating intellectual opponents with personal aggression seems to be spreading everywhere now, as the university around the world becomes more and more politicized.
Do you mean this one?:
“Darwin’s “descent with modification” is the most useful definition of biological evolution.”
Well, I mostly know their personalities by writing only, and that’s sometimes misleading. I do know that when I was a lawyer we went after one another pretty roughly in court, and yet often had good personal relationships when not in the thick of it. But that was Philadelphia; when I moved to Seattle I discovered, to my complete astonishment, that people expressed hurt feelings sometimes when I did perfectly ordinary things like file an unexpected motion for summary judgment against them. Some of these people here would have withered in the heat of Philadelphian conflict, and sometimes I saw professional politeness extended in ways that seemed inconsistent with the best interests of people’s clients – for that reason I always felt the Philadelphian mode was the better one, and I never found it incompatible with friendly discourse in the off-hours.
Still, the culture war isn’t conducive to it. I have difficulty imagining Vic Walczak having a beer with Rudy Giuliani after their argument in central Pennsylvania. It is not always a mistake to judge that your adversary is evil – it depends upon the adversary.
I have been called harsh things by some of my dearest friends. And, you know, sometimes they were even right, though it did not seem so to me at the time.
There should be no debate between design and chance, because ‘evolution’ does not equate ‘chance’. The debate is actually between evolution guided by some unknown intelligence and evolution guided by the natural environment.
Instead of evolution we could have a similar debate about rivers being guided by intelligence or by their natural environment. Do rivers flow where they flow because they were intelligently designed that way, or because they are a consequence of the topography, geology and climate of their environment?
Or both?
I didn’t say it did. In fact, the definition of “evolution” I’ve been using (though it has been savaged by Faizal and others here) does not insist that evolution is caused by “chance.” I had already come to the conclusion that the issue was design vs. non-design – not (as traditional creationism represented it) special creation vs. (unguided) evolution – long before I ever heard of ID, as a result of my academic studies.
That’s more or less the position of Michael Denton.
Design vs. non-design is not the same as design vs. chance, so framing the debate as if is is the latter is still incorrect and leads to lots of misunderstandings.
Design vs. non-design is better, although it leaves out the option that mindless nature itself is capable of generating designs through intricate processes with lots of feedback loops.
So perhaps best would be ‘mindful evolution’ vs. ‘mindless evolution’. Which boils down to the age-old question if God exists, and if he exists, how he goes about his business. As someone said on here before, that is ‘more of a metaphysical question than a scientific one’.
I think that any two-way split is wrong. Intelligently guided evolution is very different from the idea of “created kinds”. Anyone who insists, for instance, that there was a “first rat” which was “assembled” is taking a position quite distinct from the idea that evolution was guided to produce rats.
Yes, but ID’s tent is big enough to include assembled rats, apparently. As long as (God) the Designer is involved somehow, it’s all good.
Yes, a very serious thinker who has made significant contributions to evolutionary science.
You think?
The way I see it: Someone who argues “That the bacterial flagellum evolved over many millions of generations thru the scientifically confirmed processes of mutation, selection, genetic drift and the other unguided natural processes that are entailed by the theory of evolution as it now exists is evidence that there is an intelligent creator who has designed our universe” is making an argument that is consistent with the known facts and which should be evaluated solely on the logical reasons he can provide for accepting his argument.
Someone who argues “The bacterial flagellum could not have evolved over thru the processes of mutation, selection, genetic drift and the other unguided natural processes that are entailed by the theory of evolution as it now exists, therefore there is an intelligent creator who has designed our universe” is making an argument whose premise is a falsehood, and therefore his argument can be dismissed out of hand. The question of whose definition of “evolution” his argument would fall under is really quite irrelevant after that.
What about the bacteria originally appearing with a flagella?
What if you replace could not have evolved with not likely to have evolved.
Could you be specific?
It would change nothing.
It shouldn’t make a difference. If ID actually wanted to be scientific it should be hashing out their disagreements, to come up with an actual theory. But they don’t - they prefer ID to be what the Wedge document called “just another attempt at indoctrination”.
The origin of the e coli bacteria included a fully formed organism with a flagella motor for mobility.
Then you have some explaining to do.
The organization of 40 genes or around 100k nucleotides translating to 40 proteins plus assembly proteins that can build this motor in 20 minutes. The idea that this arrived from reproduction and copying changes is quite challenging given the sequence problem. .
This is Bill’s new buzz-phrase. He has resisted all requests to explain just what it means.
Your still not making any sense. Try again.
More nonsense.
The issue with which ID’ers keep trying to bamboozle their potential financial benefactors is resolved quite simply:
We have a very good idea from genomic and paleontological evidence about when the MRCA of any two organisms would have lived.
We can sequence the genomes, or any part thereof of particular interest, of these two organisms.
We can then determine whether the degree of difference between the two genomes is consistent with the degree of change that would be expected, according to our models of population genetics, over the period of time that has elapsed since the existence of their MRCA.
And it always is.
Case closed
This is not a population genetics problem as much as the Howe diagram is. If the flagellum provides mobility then the selective advantage will drive the fixation in the populations.
This problem is the sequence problem where genes possible arrangements are almost infinite and their function is a subset of that arrangement.
This can be solved if a deterministic mechanism can be identified that can generate new genes that generate new protein complexes.
Your strategy of matching historic sequences will not help identify how the changes occurred.
Whatever.
Is there anyone who can make sense of that sentence?
Bill, are you on the verge of understanding the difference between nested hierarchy and the causes of changes? Are you actually admitting that differences are the result of changes?
Arrangements of nucleotides that translate into arrangements of amino acids. From a typical flagellar gene there are about 4^1000 possible nucleotide arrangements.