I enjoy citing the estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 different possibilities for just one subset of the available electron transfer solutions.
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A decade back, I took a job back filling for a controls expert for a mine site in Guyana, who in turn was promoted to his manager’s position when it became vacant due to dying of malaria. He started feeling off when traveling home, double dosed the mefloquine, and made it as far as his Caribbean connection where he was hospitalized. Every antimalarial failed.
Why doesn’t Behe, being so expert on malaria, do something useful and come up with an effective antimalarial drug beyond the edge of evolution? He and his sycophants run around pointing to malaria as demonstrating why evolution cannot account for the variety of life on earth, all the while malaria evolving to frustrate everything we throw at it.
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One doesn’t “appeal to a fallacy.” We are simply pointing out that you, Behe, and Bill are using it.
No such assumption is being made.
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Because neither Behe nor his sycophants have any faith (neither religious nor secular) in the snake oil that they are selling. Their utter refusal to use their allegedly great scientific insight for anything is the biggest tell of all.
If ID had any relevance to anything, the biology professors at evangelical colleges would have labs full of evangelical undergrads, grad students, and postdocs churning out great science.
Inability to publish is no excuse, as they have their own journal.
Money is no excuse, as evangelical schools have plenty of it.
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What make these organisms « special » may be their plasticity, along the lines of the PRM model proposed by A. Hughes in the paper below:
https://www.nature.com/articles/hdy201197.pdf
You’ve already shown you don’t know what ‘plasticity’ even means.
Bill is derailing the thread with endlessly stupid repetitions. It’s almost like a form of damage control. The discussion up until the point where Bill got involved was at least somewhat interesting in that there were many good and informative replies to @Giltil and the ideas he referred to.
This is all now being buried in what will become a 1000-post thread about Bill taking his terminal lack of ability to have a rational argument for a walk on the forum. For the two-hundreth time.
@Dan_Eastwood can we move all of Bill’s posts and replies to him to a containment thread?
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What that paper presents is, more or less, the Baldwin effect. But that’s a pretty small-scale sort of thing, not the sort of macro-event you’re talking about, nor is there any saltation involved. It doesn’t turn a land mammal into a whale, much less produce new organs or body plans. Further, what makes you think that species with a degree of plasticity are in any way rare or special? Finally, since evolution is supposed to have stopped, your proposed process must be something that no longer exists, but we see phenotypic plasticity in the current world.
I will try to do that, though disentangling comments might be problematic.
In the long run tho, a better approach is DO NOT REPLY to empty questions. Taking the bait offered just makes it worse…
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To All,
Scanning through 400+ comments is not a good use of my time. Next time I’ll probably just close the thread.
It seems evident the some people really enjoy replying to Bill. I get it. I’ve done it too, but it’s not a good use of anyone’s time. If you simply must reply, try starting a new thread, and encourage others to reply reply to Bill in the new thread. A small effort up front will save everyone a lot of time in the long run.
OR maybe we need a “Byers Rule” like what Panda’s Thumb uses?
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A ‘Byers’ rule would be good, but what would the specific rule be? And how would you implement it?
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