How much homology vs homoplasy there is dependent on how big the tree is that we are looking at and how far back it goes as well as how many species we compare; as you may know, “placentae” is a big tree which goes very far back with a great many species.
The more time has passed, there will be an increase in homoplasy vs homology.
What is important, however, is the relative proportion of homoplasy as compared to random homology and comparing that to what we would expect if common descent was or was as not true.
@Swamidass therefore should have specified the comparators - specifically, human and chimpanzee as compared to orangutans, gorillas and gibbons.
If you have a look at the following
you can see for yourself this fact which demonstrates humans and chimpanzees have a common ancestor quite clearly.
Utterly irrelevant. An “educated individual”, lacking a thorough grounding in Evolutionary Biology, would not be able to detect the misrepresentation and distortions contained in Behe’s Bad Book.
Given that TBW was written 20 years before DBB, and therefore was not intended as a rebuttal of its claims, this is likewise irrelevant.
Yes, if your “goal” is to demonstrate that you can convince people who don’t understand evolution, that evolution is “impossible”, then you have achieved this goal.
But I would suggest that this goal is likewise worthless.
How about people of high education reading a book on evolutionary mechanisms and one on the design argument, both books written for the public and seeing which one was more persuasive? A simple test of public opinion.
Utterly worthless for deciding any scientific issue. But given ID’s utter inability to convince the scientific community that their claims has any merit whatsoever, I’m unsurprised that they/you would wish to move the goalposts.
How about biology graduates – so that they will actually know when Behe is misrepresenting and distorting the facts? Otherwise it’s just an exercise in seeing how good Behe is at fooling people who know even less about evolution than he does.
How about Why Intelligent Design Fails, edited by Matt Young and Taner Edis – so that it’s a book that actually addresses ID’s misrepresentations and distortions?
While that is indeed a goalpost move as judged against the Wedge Strategy document, I suspect that they always knew that the goals in the WS document were not remotely attainable and that the purpose of the statement of the goals there, for the benefit of potential donors, was precisely this: convince people who have no understanding. ID has always been 99.9% rube-fooling, and I’m not sure the other 0.1% is science.
Its either you have some sort of amnesia or you just love to tell lies. This is your first time citing this paper. The paper you cited first is on the God hypothesis thread:
Then Faizal linked a follow-up study:
Which is it amnesia or dishonesty? So far the evidence points to the latter.
This is irrelevant since it was never the topic of our discussion until now. This is the mess you get into when you cite or say things you are clueless about.
There isn’t. Its your strawman problem.
I don’t agree. Evolution uses whatever is available be it one or ten parts. You don’t need to calculate how long a feature would take to evolve if that feature already exists. Instead you need to estimate how long it took an existing feature to evolve to its current state. What is the point in calculating the probability of you existing at this moment, if you already exist?
No we don’t. Instead we need to isolate the system of interest, get it’s genes and/or proteins and use them to estimate the number of genetic changes that happened and how long since they happened.
Let me let you in on a secret: nature cheats, get over it.
When I read Darwin’s Black Box still as a biochemistry undergrad, I was unconvinced by his IC arguments despite it’s strong appeal to my intuition. Luckily at the time, I knew that the universe didn’t give a hoot about what I thought was right or wrong and that I had to do some digging to unearth the facts about nature. When I read Behe’s section on IC, I knew that discoveries like the recently evolved PCP-degrading pathway of Sphingobium chlorophenolicum strongly contradicted his claims therein of unguided processes being unable to generate IC systems.
Behe’s arguments have morphed over time, but those discoveries were excellent counters to his original views on IC.
There are no gradations of IC. An IC system made up of two parts is every inch as IC as another IC system with a thousand parts.
More importantly, the evolution of IC systems have been observed in realtime and they provide good insights into how more ancient IC systems could have evolved as well.
Behe’s presentation there can be summarized as (paraphrasing) “I think it appears designed for a purpose” because “things stick together to accomplish the function”. He uses a lot more words, and some pretty figures and pictures, to say essentially only that.
