Evolutionary Algorithms and ID

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Look at @Timothy_Horton comment at 140, where he said about the gear found in planthopper that it « SUPERFICIALLY looks like a human designed gear ».
Or at @Jordan comment at 157 where he seemed to suggest that the design inference draw by IDers in the case of the planthopper gears « was based on SUPERFICIAL similarity, AT BEST »

So, you see, I really wish I hadn’t had to waste a lot of time arguing the obvious, but given the denial of reality I’ve been confronted with here, I had no choice but to do it.

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I think your intuition is correct. Could you allow for the possibility that God designed it and built it using evolution? In other words, evolution is itself designed, ordered and guided.

If we could prove scientifically that the gear was designed, that would constitute proof for the existence of the Designer. You may have read elsewhere here that we have reason to believe that God does not want us to have proof of his existence, because proof would negate love. I’ve mentioned it several times, and @Ashwin_s and I talk about here.

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165

Before I proceed I just want to highlight the fact that you once again failed to deliver the design inference from these gears and is wasting time attempting to assign a position to people they don’t actually hold.

That said, he’s correct, the similarity is superficial. Not that they aren’t gears, just that they only look superficially like human-designed gears. Some obvious differences are they are much less smoothly shaped, and are made neither of metal, plastic, or wood.

He’s not saying they’re not gears.

Or at @Jordan comment at 157 where he seemed to suggest that the design inference draw by IDers in the case of the planthopper gears « was based on SUPERFICIAL similarity, AT BEST »

I would go further, it is not even obvious what the design inference is based on at all because you haven’t MADE the design inference. You’ve said they’re gears(which nobody here disagrees with, they just say they only think the similarity is superficial), and that you think they’re designed. We’re still missing they’re inference part.

So, you see, I really wish I hadn’t had to waste a lot of time arguing the obvious, but given the denial of reality I’ve been confronted with here, I had no choice but to do it.

No the problem is you failed to read for comprehension. You are so enamored with the fact that they are gears you take a (true) statement that they are only superficially similar to human-designed gears to be a denial of the fact that they are gears. Once again, you are wasting time.

Notice how you didn’t supply the inference, you AGAIN focused all your efforts on trying to make this discussion about whether they’re gears instead of supplying us with the inference parts.

They’re gears, they’re superficially similar to gears made by humans. Now, why do you think they were designed? Give us your inference to the best explanation please. The one that shows it’s the best explanation(which requires that you construct a proper evolutionary explanation, and then compare it with a design explanation that is more parsimonious and has greater explanatory power).

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166

ok.

can you expain to me why gears arent necessarily the product of design but a computer is?

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I don’t see any problem with that statement. The planthopper gear does indeed SUPERFICIALLY look like a human-designed gear. @Jordan already listed some ways in which the planthopper gear does NOT look like a gear a human had designed. Are you disagreeing? Both @Timothy_Horton and @Jordan made statements which are obviously true.

I could show you photos of lever structures in the human body. (See links below.) An arm flexed by a bicep muscle is a classic example. Would you object if I said that the human arm SUPERFICIALLY looks like a human-designed lever?

I’m a Bible-affirming Christ-follower so I have no problem believing that God designed everything we observe in the universe. My problem with “ID theory” is that I’ve never seen anyone use the Scientific Method to determine for any object, structure, or phenomenon whether or not it was intelligently designed. Everything I see in the ID literature appears to be philosophy applied to scientific topics. Philosophy (and theological intuition) is not the same thing as science. And I’ve yet to see any “ID theory” published with a falsification testing strategy or any meaningful predictions for future discoveries.

Furthermore, if an Intelligent Designer with the attributes commonly attributed to the God of the Bible designed everything in the universe, then ID/non-ID distinctions become meaningless. That is, if an Intelligent Designer designed everything we observe (including the laws of physics and chemistry), then non-ID structures and phenomena do not exist. Thus, if God is the Intelligent Designer, then absolutely everything is designed. Do you agree with that conclusion?

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I agree with this. This is where ID struggles because people claim there is a distinction between designed and undesigned objects in the Universe. The proper distinction in my opinion is that some objects exhibit a stronger design signal than others.

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I am afraid you don’t understand what superficial mean for the truth of the matter is exactly opposite to what you say. Indeed, the planthopper gears are different than human gears only at the superficial level, but at the most basic/important level of analysis, they are similar. This is why at the second we see them, we recognize they are true mechanical gears.

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As I said at 168, this is wrong. Let me quote myself: « the truth of the matter is exactly opposite to what you say. Indeed, the planthopper gears are different than human gears only at the superficial level, but at the most basic/important level of analysis, they are similar. This is why at the second we see them, we recognize they are true mechanical gears ».

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Are the plant hopper “gears” circles or not? Do they spin? Are they machined?

They are not circles. They do not spin. They were not machined. Seems obvious they are not gears at all, and the crop of the photo was misleading.

Why would anypne actually believe these are actually gears?

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Where is the design inference? Why do you think they are designed? They’re gears, why do you think they’re designed?

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Why?

Look at the abstract of the original paper in Science.

Or the report of the discovery by Philip Ball in Nature
https://www.nature.com/news/insect-leg-cogs-a-first-in-animal-kingdom-1.13723

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Because they obviously function like gears by using mechanical teeth to synchronize and transmit torque to each other. If that’s not a gear, then what is?

I want to know why we should think they’re designed. The extend to which anyone things they’re gears appears to be completely irrelevant to how we should think they originated. They’re here, they exist, they have the function they do. How did it come to be that way?

Giltil wants to say they’re designed, and you’re all wasting time letting him get away with not explaining why.

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@Giltil
So, why do you think they’re designed? Please make your inference to the best explanation.

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It appears they have something that looks like gear teeth, but not much else.

They are not circles. They do not spin. They have no axels. Gears always have these things. If you zoom out from that photo, the analogy to “gears” really breaks down.

I can agree that these look like gear teeth, but they do not even look superficially like gears.

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They DO superficially look like gears. They look so much like gears they accomplish the same mechanical function: transmit torque from one object to another with interlocking teeth.

There are mechanical objects that transmit torque using teeth in this same way without being circles.

This one is called a half-gear:

Clearly not a circle. What do you want to call those?

How about this?

You don’t want to call them gears. Okay, then call them something else. Half-gears, gear-couplings, cog-discs. I don’t really care because it doesn’t matter. How do they originate and why should we think that?

Giltil says design is the best explanation. We have still not been told why it is.

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178

Perhaps the engineers on Peaceful Science could weigh in. When I used to work on farm tractors long ago, there were gear-toothed parts which were incomplete circles. (For example, I recall what looked like a gear-wheel cut in half so that there was just a little bit less than 180-degrees of rotation back and forth.) In physics and engineering textbooks, are such things called gears or is there some other name?

The first time I saw photos of the planthopper structure, I thought of superficially similar tractor parts. We used to call them gears. Perhaps our terminology was wrong.

I recall one such “half-wheel gear” on the steering mechanism of an ancient “B” tractor from the 1940’s. (Or was it a Farmall H tractor?? I may be completely wrong in my memories) Before power steering, those were sometimes used to transmit steering wheel movements to the front wheels of the tractor.

[@Dan_Eastwood, I guess that is yet another of my stories from long ago—it’s just that the story doesn’t go much of anywhere.]

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Did you read the abstract of the original paper entitled «Interacting GEARS synchronize propulsive leg movements in a jumping insect ». The word gear is used 5 times! If you had had to peer review the paper, would you have refuse it because of a misuse of the word gear?

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i think it is very simple: all gears we know about are the product of design (its also true for a space shuttle for instance). thus design is the best explanation.

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Human design, except these, we don’t know about these. And they can’t be the product of human design.

thus design is the best explanation.

Why?

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So you’re saying that because (allegedly) all gears we know about are the product of design, you jump to the conclusion that no non-designed gear structures exist and that they will never be discovered in the future. I could identify the logical fallacy which that kind of thinking illustrates but the textbook name for it might sound rude to some readers. (Scientists used to be able to say that they knew of no examples of heavy-than-air flight which could be designed by humans. Those who assumed from that fact that humans would never be able to fly were committing a similar logical fallacy. And until Fredrich Wohler came alone, scientists generally assumed that organic chemicals—that is, chemicals thought exclusive to living things—couldn’t be synthesized by humans and never would be. They created the field of organic chemistry to deal with what they thought was the unique chemistry of God, the ultimate designer. Are you making the same mistake when you see a gear/gear-like structure in living things? Only the chronological sequence of the discovery is different.)

I’m still wondering if levers in living things indicate design in the same way as the gear/gear-like structure in the planthopper.

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