The video of the debate (with good audio) was just posted today. Link: YouTube
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I take it Behe didnât show any of the structures in related insects to determine whether there are degrees of friction-enhancing morphologies? Weird, itâs almost like youâd think it should have been relevant if youâre going to claim some thing is designed, to look at how such structures look in both close and more distant relatives. If youâre going to make an inference to the best explanation, youâll want to look at all the data to be explained. And if youâre going to claim design is a better explanation than evolution, youâll need to look at the kind of data the evolutionary model would be derived from, to see how well it explains it, and then give your putatively superior design-model. But Behe doesnât have a design-model. He didnât offer any.
On the storytelling point, can someone enlighten me here: How is saying âit was designedâ NOT storytelling? The gears were popped into existence by a designer that wanted to give these planthoppers gears. Ta-da! Not a âjust-soâ story at all. Nope.
Also, Iâm sorry but I have to say this: Tourâs question is bordering on stupid. There isnât a pretty way to say this. What is he expecting should be explained to him here? The chemistry of mutation? How enzymes work? What is he asking for? How changing one amino acid for another in a protein alters distance between atoms in catalyst and substrate? As if he canât just go open a biochemistry textbook to learn about this stuff. But he can of course always just demand more detail. So enzyme acts on substrate, and then what? And then what?
His question is misleading rhetoric designed to make it seem like you have to know everything that happens at some atomic resolution before you can make good, evidence-based inferences about how they happen. Iâm pretty sure I donât have to understand at the level of chemistry how exactly erosion happens, to know that it happens, and be able to infer that it has happened for billions of years and shaped innumerable geological features.
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Thank you @zacharylawson!!! That was quick!
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Indeed. Two things:
(1) Itâs a bit like the three-year-old who asks why grass is green, and then responds to the answer with âwhy?â and then responds to the answer to that question with âwhy?â and so on. Eventually, all chains of âwhyâ devolve to something unexplainable. But when we are seeking proximate causes and helpfully descriptive explanations, we do not need to always drill down to âwhy is there anything instead of nothing?â
(2) What I find galling about this sort of approach is that, as often as not, the unknown explanation is unknown precisely because we only recently discovered the phenomenon in need of explanation. On the day that you first observe gear-like nubs on planthoppers, of course, you do NOT have a detailed genetic/biochemical explanation of how this happened. What you DO have is some morphological info that you didnât previously know about. But so often the reaction of the ID Creationist is to demand that science explain, to the uttermost detail, every aspect of a phenomenon NOW â and to insist that if this cannot be done, design is the only plausible answer.
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Wow. I somehow missed the memo.
Thatâs what I get for not keeping current on the news. I canât believe that I didnât see or hear the âAll Evolutionary Processes Grind to a Halt!â headline. Go figure.
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I think that it always has been a business, not a scientific movement. The question is how to generate revenue, and the answer is that religious fundamentalists will give money if they are persuaded that somebody is being persecuted for spreading the Word of God. The importance of âengagingâ scientists has never been that there was any hope; the importance has always been that the rejection of pseudoscience by the scientific community helps to tell the persecution tale which is the key to the revenue stream.
But I think that what theyâre finding is that their members arenât really interested in the scientific aspects. Very few people interested in ID are interested in biology for biologyâs sake â they are largely interested in it because they hope to find a salve for their doubts in it, or an argument they can finally win with someone. You canât get someone who has read Darwinâs Doubt to pick up the Erwin and Valentine book on the Cambrian explosion â it is a mistake to assume that the fact that they read Darwinâs Doubt reflects ANY interest in the Cambrian at all.
So why spend money? Why get Axe and âgreen screenâ Gauger to write more papers that will be ignored? It is as easy to be rejected when you present pseudoscientific claims without data as when you present them with data. Do you need an expert in primate evolution to write a couple of chapters of a book? Get an unemployable lawyer to write them! Who needs a biologist, or a paleontologist, to weigh in on such matters? When the object is to say something that sounds sciencey, and to be rejected so that you can claim youâve been treated unfairly, this works just as well.
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A follow-up note on this quote from p. 227 of Axeâs book: I didnât have the book at hand when citing it earlier today so could not recall if there was anything which would make the statement slightly less absurd if read in context. Iâve now examined the book and can assure you that there is not.
Is there anyone â anyone â who can honestly say that this statement is consistent with Axe being both honest and competent? I have already given my view, in other contexts, here: that such things are a hideous mishmash of dishonesty mixed so well with incompetence that the two present as one flavor. But if there is anyone who can explain how Axeâs statement is both competent and honest, I would love to hear it.
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Can you first explain why the statement is both incompetent and dishonest ?
Is it your opinion that Douglas Axe is correct to say that âThe current stance is that evolution was so successful that it perfected life to the point where modern forms no longer evolveâ?
This âWe donât observe evolution transitioning new species todayâ trope brings to mind the related lame claim âI sure donât see any monkeys evolving into humans anywhere I ever looked!â That one was very popular among evolution deniers back in the 1960âs. I even heard it at the barber shop as I was getting my âcrew cutâ, which was close to a buzz cut.
Iâve already read that this argument has been used by evolutionists in response to the observation that evolution seems to have stopped recently. Is it a general stance? I havenât explored the issue enough to answer, but that would not surprise me.
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Iâm going to call bovine excrement on this one.
Gilbert I have to say that your post reads like one youâd have composed trying to look for a way out without admitting that you know what Axe says is false.
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The truth is that I really donât know yet if what Axe says is false. But can you explain me why you think it is false?
How about this: Iâve never heard or seen any biologist (including me) make the claim that Axe attributes to âthe current stanceâ. If youâve âread that this argument has been usedâ, it sounds as if youâre relying on unfounded statements from anti-evolutionists, like the one Axe made.
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Here are Axeâs claims:
Axe: âThe current stance is that evolution was so successful that it perfected life to the point where modern forms no longer evolve, making the whole process even further removed from the category of observable phenomena.â
The first part is demonstrably false as nowhere does evolutionary biology posit modern forms no longer evolve. Axe made that up whole cloth.
The second part about evolution not being observed we may charitably attribute to Axeâs ignorance, although itâs hard to believe heâs never heard of the Lenski LTEE. There are also any number of easily found examples of incipient speciation described in the scientific literature.
Axe is either dishonest, incompetent, or both. Why do you believe the claims of such people?
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Evolutionary science does not make this claim. I donât even think this is a minority position.
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Okay. But then how do evolutionists explain the fact that creative evolution appears to be amortized, decadent or nearing to an end?
Why would you expect evolutionary biologists (I donât really think there are any âevolutionistsâ anywhere, at least not these days) to want to explain a âfactâ that is false?
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Easy. That isnât a fact and is demonstrably false. Wherever did you hear that Creationist canard?