Wat? Two things work together to perform some other function means it’s evidence of design? So now the wind blowing on trees is evidence they were designed to make noise?
You took this out of context. Read it again.
Probably? How do you know? Have you read any literature on what it takes for the Krebs cycle to run?
I don’t see what context should change the meaning of what you wrote. Can you explain it in other words?
The design inference has more strength depending the number of parts and the characteristic of the function. Two parts working together were not meant to represent a strong design inference.
That is probably the most ignorant statement about genetic algorithms that I’ve ever seen.
Would that be the GA that was intended to produce a tone generator but produced an antenna instead?
So genetic algorithms use random mutation and selection of those that generate the next generation. Just like natural selection, in fact, for which the ‘problem’ is “survive to reproduce” and the fitness function is level of reproduction.
If you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn’t have just refuted yourself.
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Yet another after-the-fact prediction from the ID camp.
It’s part of the search space, of course.
Wow, ID is easy.
I think this is significant. I think it would be beneficial to think though what it looks like to separate origin from function. The citric acid cycle (Krebs cycle) is a set of chemical reactions. I don’t know specifically in practice, but at least in principle all those reactions would be easily done outside a cell or living organism.
One of the primary principles in chemistry is that the origin of a reagent makes no difference, only the chemical makeup of the reagent. As long as it’s pure, we can’t distinguish between natural and artificial, a compound is a compound.
It might be worth checking into these. The citric acid cycle is made up of pretty common reactions (oxidation, hydration/dehydration, aldol condensation, phosphorylation, and decarboxylation), and outside of the enzymes all the chemicals are pretty ordinary as well.
Then I’m not sure why I’ve seen this so often:
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It was in Behe’s last book. There a gears that power some type of insect legs. I just blasted human mouse of a specific Krebs cycle enzyme, pyruvate dehydrogenase, and got 97% match. By gpuccio’s measurement that looks like maybe over 500 bits of FI for just one enzyme. Will do some more compares when I have time.
The thing is that my image is a magnification of a true mechanical gear. So you have to replace it in the larger story, which you will find in the abstract below:
« Gears are found rarely in animals and have never been reported to intermesh and rotate functionally like mechanical gears. We now demonstrate functional gears in the ballistic jumping movements of the flightless planthopper insect Issus. The nymphs, but not adults, have a row of cuticular gear (cog) teeth around the curved medial surfaces of their two hindleg trochantera. The gear teeth on one trochanter engaged with and sequentially moved past those on the other trochanter during the preparatory cocking and the propulsive phases of jumping. Close registration between the gears ensured that both hindlegs moved at the same angular velocities to propel the body without yaw rotation. At the final molt to adulthood, this synchronization mechanism is jettisoned. »
IOW, a splendid example of design!
More on this in the article below, which I hope you will appreciate at its true value the full flavor of the title!
Okay.
In 2013, a pair of British entomologists observed that a juvenile stage of a planthopper species called Issus coeleoptratus was equipped with mechanical gears.
It happens that mechanical gears have been invented long before 2013, sometime around 300 B.C.E.
Can you see the before the fact specification ?
Are you claiming planthoppers and their “gears” didn’t exist before 300 BCE? That the “Intelligent Designer” had to wait for humans to invent gears before adding them to the insect “design”?
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They can’t possibly do that! Then they can’t change the specification later to make it fit the claim!
It seems obvious to me that they lack sufficient faith in IDCreationism to do anything before-the-fact.
Is there any other explanation?
No. ID-Creation as a rule doesn’t make predictions or propose any testable hypotheses because they don’t want to run the risk of being falsified. Much easier just to provide empty blustering rhetoric than do actual science.
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I think that’s more than Bill is willing to digest. @colewd, is that an accurate assessment?
Of course not. But because the discovery of the planthoppers gears was made long after the invention by humans of mechanical gears, one cannot in this case charge IDers of making the Sharp Shooter fallacy, which was what you were suggesting when you said « So show us the before-the-fact specification for anything in biology. All I see are ID-Creationists making after-the-fact measurements and calling them specifications ». With my planthopper example, I took up the challenge and showed that you were plainly wrong on this matter.
You didn’t show any before-the fact specification for biological planthopper gears. The fact humans invented similar things before the planthopper was discovered doesn’t make the plathopper pieces be “specified” by the human design.
Humans invented wings for heavier-than-air flying machines back in the late 1800’s. That doesn’t mean bird and bat wings which existed millions of years before were “specified” by the human design.
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Wrong again. IDers predicts that a very large amount of what is now seen as junk DNA will prove to be functional.