I unfamiliar with any claim by ID that @NLENTS doesn’t understand evolution.
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At 46:20-47:00 minutes he mentions “arguing for Darwinian principles.” I interpret this as Behe saying someone doesn’t understand evolution. He was arguing for a paradigm shift. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltmhpG8fydM
Sanford also argues for a paradigm shift at 27:30 - 27:50 https://youtu.be/i-y_dmi_oF4
For instance, my understanding is that they are saying that this…
The tendency to see intelligent design in nature is an old one, but science moved past it long ago. As François Jacob wrote in Science over 40 years ago, “Natural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer — a tinkerer who does not know exactly what he is going to produce but uses whatever he finds around him… to produce some kind of workable object.”
…is arguing for Darwinism still - They’re saying an up-and-down process where selection or any other evolutionary force creates/produces a “leap up” that’s large enough to overcome damaging mutations we observe doesn’t actually exist. It’s a myth. That’s the theme of every one of Sanford’s papers. So I was asking what these forces were. How powerful are they? Does anyone write about that?
If I understand him correctly, Behe likewise was saying this definition of exaptation is a Darwinian magic wand because it’s ignoring all of the molecular level changes required:
The evolutionary ancestors of whales lost their ability to walk on land as their front limbs evolved into flippers, for example, but flippers proved advantageous in the long run.
Behe is saying that design must occur somewhere in the process because of the complexity. Sanford is saying that all the diversity and design is front-loaded.
Take away the fossil record and pretend it doesn’t exist. You pointed to a few papers that may show new functions arising. But I understand them as saying all the other examples, such as the polar bear one, show benign and possibly damaging mutations are what actually happens. The common proves the point, rather than the rare.
I think that so far the argument from ID and creationism seems to be that Darwin only knew about phenotype and not genotype, so biologists now are still unable to understand and view evolution merely and only through genetics OR biologists misapply Darwinian principles such as natural selection to genes in ways they can’t occur, or a combination of both.
That’s what I’m understanding from the Sanford’s book so far, and I think Behe may be arguing something similar as well. More reading to do…
I came to this thread to comment on the ‘scientist hat’ comment, but it seems to have morphed to a discusion of the Nathan Lents video…
The comment was just that some folk seem to consider the ‘cognitive dissonance’ of being a Christian and a scientist impossible to reconcile, but I think that’s projection of one’s own need for internal consistency onto others.
Not all of us have minds that work that way. Perhaps my favourite quote in the world:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; (I am large. I contain multitudes).” - Walt Whitman
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Valerie this is a sensible claim, but we have waited a really long time for the ID community to support it with good evidence.
This could be true, but how do we know? Sanford doesn’t say, but if he wants to be taken seriously, he has to show other geneticists rigorous data to back it up.
I am not surprised you wrote this despite the comments from actual population geneticists on PS which not only disagree with Sanford’s arguments, but details why his arguments are baseless.
I can wake up tomorrow and tell all protein chemists that goblins or fairies fold proteins, which would explain why it is difficult to predict the 3D structure of a protein from its primary sequence, but if I don’t provide serious evidence to support my claim, it will forever remain a conjecture.
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But Behe is ignoring the nature of the complexity, which is what we expect from a massively iterative process like evolution, not intelligent design. He knows that you’re not going to dig down to the evidence; you’re only going to tell others what he is saying.
Which is not consistent with the evidence, so you stop with what he is saying.
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This always seems like a terrible argument.
The entire purpose of design is to acquire the knowledge needed for building whatever was to be designed. But the idea of God having to acquire knowledge is incompatible with the idea that God is omniscient. So it seems to me that it is really bad theology.
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Sanford was not at Dover. Can you please take these thoughts back to any of the open threads which do discuss Sanford, so that every single topic that touches on genetics does not get muddled into yet another GE rehash.
In you find Lents engaging, please do avail yourself to these very fine publications.
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I’m currently reading Edward Hume’s Monkey Girl, which has a couple of chapters on Kansas, including one devoted to the hearing, and am reminded what a ridiculous partisan farce it was – three creationist board members as judges (including one who announced that “Evolution has been proven false. ID is science-based and strong in facts.” at the start of the hearings) and a boycott by pro-evolution scientists. The result was often a muddled inconclusive mess. The (creationist) witnesses generally admitted that they had not even read the (pro-evolution) Majority Curriculum Committee report. It was described in closing by the lawyer cross-examining the creationist witness as “an unjustified waste of taxpayer money” and “show trial hearings”.
The press coverage it seems was likewise uncomplimentary.
If this was “what they really hoped for” then the DI had very low expectations.
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This quote in Monkey Girl from Eugenie Scott herself, seems a good summary:
The Kansas hearings are a show trial, like in the sense of the Soviet Union back in the fifties. The board already has its conclusion. They're just going through these motions, making a big show for the public, to get an idea out.
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