Right, but that’s not the probability of interest. What I’m interested in is what is the probability that something like a flagellum evolved? Or what is the probability that some person will be born 10 generations hence?
You’re assuming your conclusion here, that the flagellum evolved.
So then there was function, before the two pieces came together, that’s all I’m saying.
But to repeat, the adaptation evolving has a probability of interest, and if it’s small, it means that probably that adaptation didn’t evolve. Forensics engages in this type of reasoning all the time: if the probability of this incident happening by natural causes is low, then we conclude it was not due to natural causes. Once one possible cause has been eliminated, then we can turn to other possible causes, there is no need to evaluate the probability of all possible causes first, before making a decision on evolution as a cause, or on a natural cause at a possible crime scene.
I have already answered your first two points previously.
It is a very different thing for there to be function in a complete ~3000 basepair long RNA molecule, and there being function in two small fragments of it when concatenated and translated into a sequence of amino acids.
Your response here simply doesn’t work in your favor at all. If you mean to say even small pieces of large ribozymes when translated into amino acid sequence are also likely to be functional simply because the large and intact ribozyme these pieces derive from was functional, then that would imply function is ubiquitous and overlapping in both protein and amino acid sequence space, and that the same sequence can have many different and totally unrelated functions in multiple reading frames and when transferred and translated into totally different types of biological polymers, then… you’d be right, and that would be one of the very things that make evolution unavoidable.
It doesn’t seem that way, given that we know that there is more than one flagellum in existence at present. That, in turn, would just be a tiny subset of all of the possible ways to generate a flagellum.
Why doesn’t Behe inform his readers of this fact?
No, you were saying that you knew nothing about the relevant evidence.
That’s past tense. After-the-fact.
That’s future tense. Before-the-fact.
No matter how often you pretend you aren’t mixing up a posteriori and a priori probabilities, it’s obvious that not only are you mixing them up, you’re also aware that you are doing so.
In his latest reply, Rosenhouse addressed this specifically. You may want to give that a read.
In both cases the odds are pretty much 100%. Unless you mean the odds of some specific person being born. In which case you just admitted to committing the Texas Sharpshooter.
Could you post the relevant portion here? I’ve been trying to follow that discussion, but I don’t recall the statement you refer to.
I would like to know how you conclude that the probability of something like a flagellum evolving is about 100%! And people in forensics look at the probability of natural causes generating a specific event, without committing the sharpshooter fallacy.
Well, the fallacy is when a statement mixes up past and future in referring to one event!
But if the probability of generating a flagellum is very small, then multiplying that by the number of types of flagella will also be small.
Well, I don’t know that evolution is constantly chopping up ribozymes! This would seem to be unusual.
Because there is an incalculably large number of possible “somethings” like a flagellum.
Yes, they generally understand logic. Whereas if one of them said “The odd of someone named John Doe being born on September 9th, 1948 and dying on July 15, 2022, of an atherosclerotic blockage of his left anterior descending coronary artery are so low that this must be murder”, he would be thinking like a creationist.
But I think of “something like a flagellum” as being a type of flagellum.
No, the creationist view is that some type of flagellum is unlikely to evolve, because of our knowledge of natural processes. Which is like forensics…
That’s part of your problem right there. Texas Sharpshooter.
It is not at all like forensics. Forensics will start with the knowledge that there is no known natural process that can cause a half-dozen bullets to enter a person’s body at high velocity. However, there is a well known and understood process by which this could happen if a person propels those bullets using a gun. Therefore, when a person is found who was killed by a half-dozen bullets, the forensic scientist concludes the person was killed by someone shooting the victim with a gun.
Sometimes, however, it is not immediately clear why a person died. And if a forensic scientist was using the “creationist view”, he would conclude that this person was killed by an immaterial being like a ghost or a demon who used supernatural means. And when a better forensic scientist finds that the person in fact succumbed to a myocardial infarction or some other natural cause, the creationist forensic scientist would refuse to accept this because he would have already decided that a demon or ghost had committed a crime.
We might even call the creationist forensic scientist “Nigel”.
Did that happen?
Of course not.
No ribozyme was chopped up. These portions of the gene encoding mitochondrial 26s rRNA were duplicated and inserted elsewhere in the genome. The original 26s rRNA gene is still intact.
And apparently these events are usual enough that T-URF13 evolved, so your point seems to be of no value or significance. What Behe appears to have convinced you can’t happen did anyway.
No, it’s that the flagellum is unlikely to evolve because you consider it a target out of all possible evolutionary trajectories. As explained in my earlier post in great detail.
He’s still right. There ARE an incalculably large number of possible flagella. No two flagella are identical and there is enormous diversity in variations of their structures and attributes. Even within the family of bacterial flagella they are different from each other from species to species, and of course flagella-like propulsion systems have evolved independently in both eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea. The archaeal flagellum has a totally different evolutionary origin than the bacterial one and a considerably different structure, despite functioning in essentially the same way.
On diversity of bacterial flagella:
Saying “the” bacterial flagellum is a bit of a misnomer since there are so many different versions.
Rough comparison of bacterial to archaeal flagella:
https://academic.oup.com/femsre/article/44/3/253/5800988
More like deliberate deception…