That is true. There’s a lot of background information and concepts that one would need to know in order to debate a topic. I would also propose that it takes time working in the sciences to develop a nose for good science. I have worked with undergrads in summer internships a few times over the years, and one of the more rewarding aspects is seeing them develop these skills.
As a comparison, I am guessing you could look at a stormwater management design plan and automatically see problems with it that I would not see without a lot of studying. The same for scientists and the fields they work in.
Hi Ron
The sum of the parts themselves perform a function. The function is not added.
The capability of the parts to work together is endemic in the design of the parts. Take a computer and it’s components. The microprocessor and memory chips on their own do nothing but have the capability when assembled with other components to perform many functions. They are very complex on their own and this gives them the ability when working together with other components to be part of a functional system.
In this case the components were designed not to operate on their own but to be part of a system.
When assembled components come together to create a complex system how could we assume the components were simple vs being part of a larger system design.
Yes, but it’s not really about our questions and challenges. It’s that they lack the faith to test an ID hypothesis and do any science, which goes to the very highest echelons of the ID movement. They’ll also virtually always end up misrepresenting the objective evidence itself, as @Ahmed_AbdelSattar is doing here with protein differences. While they are doing so, they often falsely claim that ‘both sides are interpreting the same evidence differently,’ which cannot be said in good faith while lacking familiarity with said evidence.
Here’s the interesting part: while they avoid forthrightly stating and testing any ID hypotheses, they are actually doing so. This is because when they claim that the evidence that they are misrepresenting supports ID, they cannot have reached that place without a mechanistic ID hypothesis in mind. So by being wrong about the evidence (deliberately or not), they are in effect disproving an ID hypothesis!
Pretty easily, if you grasp the scientific method and understand that science is about trying to disprove your own hypotheses. It’s not about a pile of knowledge, it’s about a method of thinking in which one is always trying to prove one’s own self wrong. The evidence (what IDers avoid) is sacrosanct, IOW the Ninth Commandment.
Nails are designed not to operate on their own, but that does not entail that a house or ship or fence is endemic in the design of nails.
I do not have to assume anything; I have designed enough circuits. The concept of a circuit being just the sum of its parts is not so much wrong as it is nonsense.
Given an assortment of even simple devices such as capacitors, resistors, and coils, depending on the arrangement the product can be a wave generator, or a radio tuner, a metal press controller, or any of thousands of circuits. How on earth is this just the sum of the parts?
Complex electronic devices such as TTL and CMOS logic, and microprocessors can wind up in computers, oscilloscopes, coffee machines, traffic controllers, toys, and products not yet envisioned. Again, the applications are not inherent in the component parts. Further, the functionality all these complex devices are themselves emergent from just three electrical properties - resistance, capacitance, and inductance.
If you see differently, so be it; I am done with this aspect of the conversation. What is of more interest to me is - why the push back to what seems a simple idea, that complexity can emerge? Is it that you hold that complexity can never result from any other process than being bestowed by a higher power?
I know this wasn’t directed at me, I just wanted to add to this.
Emergent complexity are also exhibited by designed things, but the things that I specifically referred to was that the phenomena of emergence occurs in nature, simply by the presence of the parts themselves. No “master mind” or “orchestrator” needed. Ant colonies exhibit complex behaviors as a whole, which are not seen in the individual ants, and the “queen” isn’t a queen in the sense that it dictates her subjects. Water molecules under the right conditions form hexagon crystals that can take a near-infinite number of shapes without anyone actively organizing the molecules deliberately.
This is uncontroversial, so I don’t know how @colewd can even object to this.
Does he think God is actively designing each and every snowflake? Does he continuously command the ants of every ant colony? He must be very busy if that is the case, and there is no way to test this idea.
Alternatively, he could say that God designed the parts and the rules of their interactions which allows for emergence to proceed then he is pretty much arguing for the belief that God only at the beginning did he create the universe and its fundamental quantum fields and forces, and then simply let everything more complicated emerge by naturalistic principles…which basically says that the whole universe is God’s game of life like that of John Conway, but a lot more sophisticated (more parts and more fundamental rules).
Hmmm… maybe because proteins get their structure hence function from the amino acid chain that composes them?!!..
Do you have evidence that those mutations do not affect function?
Hi @CrisprCAS9
The examples you have give for language, intellect, math, and tools, are nothing to be compared to human abilities. if you want to make a case for any meaningful gradualism, then there is a huge gap there.
If there was any meaningful gradualism, then we should be seeing all the spectrum from what you mentioned, until close to human grade qualities in the rest of the great apes, at least, not to mention other creatures.
Yes, the current evidence do not support, in my opinion, a case where a great ape ancestor gradually morphed into homo-sapiens through random mutation and natural selection.
Too much is against it, and few is with it, with plenty of confounding factors as a backdrop, which I have already mentioned above… so no need to repeat.
Do you think that not having a competing hypothesis is enough to make this one true?
Does that not look like an argument from ignorance to you?
If we just say that we have general homoplasy with great apes, and remove the word “if we share common descent”, do you think the statement will be false?
Disagree: if they were not predominantly neutral, then fixation times for the beneficial ones will ruin the clock.
I don’t mind if you replace my statement by that the molecular clock evidence does not provide the “proper degree of support”.
Hi Ron
My point was initially that the argument was circular in that it was asserted that ants were dumb and basic matter was simple. @Nesslig20 tentatively agreed that matter and ants were not necessarily simple.
There is another flaw in the film that bypasses the information problem going from inert matter to cellular life. It talks about the appearance of proteins without mentioning the transcription translation system.
In your example I agree that humans can add complexity to a system. It is not clear that matter self assembling adds complexity that is not already contained in the structure and makeup of matter.
Yes. The whole computer is clearly more complex than it’s individual components, at all levels. A microprocessor is more complex than each individual semiconductor, or transistor.
So an ant colony, in essentially the same way, is more complex than any particular ant.
Yes they’re “very” complex on their own, and even more complex when they are together and form an actual computer.
Even if we stipulate that is true, that still makes the whole more complex than the part. How it came to exist makes no difference to whether one thing is more complex than another. Only the measure of complexity is what determines this, not what was responsible for creating that complexity.
That the complexity emerged out of the combination of parts does not mean it isn’t more complex than the parts. Someone doesn’t have to decide to put the ants together into a colony for the colony to be more complex than an individual ant.
Yes, and I gave it to you some time ago, but you ignored it. Essentially, the amino acid differences between humans and chimps show the same distribution as amino acid polymorphisms within the human population, but few of those polymorphisms affect function.
Notice that you are still conflating phemonenon (descent) with cause of change (mutation and selection). And you are ignoring the fossil record, which shows intermediates. And all the molecular evidence.
That isn’t what “homoplasy” means, so you should stop using that word.
In science you need more than opinion. You need evidence.
We have scientific evidence that chimps and humans share a common ancestor. Your opinion doesn’t change these facts, nor does it change the scientific conclusions based on those scientific facts.
The difference between the intelligence of the average chimpanzee and the average human is less than the extremes of human intelligence. So what you call a ‘huge gap’ is no gap at all.
I believe I have already answered that multiple times yet for some reason only the first part of my sentence is responded to.
To bring down the number to thousands, you must assert that only 1.5% of the human genome is functional. Argument from ignorance. If you consider that the number of mutations that cause the protein changes is in the thousands and then you extrapolate to the whole genome, you will be in the millions. Don’t forget to add the 5 million insertions too, which will bring you to the millions anyway (may be you will say they were neutral too? based on what?).
And once again, you need to consider that those needed fixation, and are harmonious changes (humans are obviously not abominations). The task is not possible to achieve by any imaginable task of change in any reasonable time frame.
I hope you’re misspeaking here, because otherwise you are very confused. To go from “80% of proteins have at least 1 amino acid difference between humans and chimps” to “80% of mutations are non-neutral” is a complete non sequitur. There is literally no connection whatsoever between these two claims.
BTW, as has been said several times now, it’s 71% of proteins of human/chimp proteins that are non-identical, not 80%. Please update the figure in your head.
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It is an inference by result. I agree it does not have to be this way, but would like that you justify to me why it would end up “much lower” than 70-80%.
PS: I made it clear in the debate (discussion) that even thousands of coordinated mutations are hopeless, apart from the matter of deleterious ones that also fixed!
If DNA is functional then deleterious mutations should occur in that section of DNA, and those deleterious mutations will be selected against. When we compare genomes we see this effect as sequence conservation. When comparing human genomes to each other and when comparing human genomes with genomes from other species we see sequence conservation in only ~5% of the human genome. The lack of sequence conservation in the vast majority of the human genome is the positive evidence for the vast majority of the human genome being made up of junk DNA. It isn’t an argument based on ignorance. It is an argument based on evidence. There are also other lines of evidence, such as the C paradox.
From the start, only about 5% of mutations are occurring in regions that have function. Many of those mutations occurring in functional DNA will be functionally neutral. There may have been 40 million mutations that separate the chimp and human genome, but only a tiny fraction of those are responsible for the differences in phenotype between the two species.
Where is the evidence for your claim?
Show us a single coordinated mutation in the human genome.
We don’t have to assert that <1.5% of the genome is functional in order to conclude that neutral mutations exist. You are the one who seems to be claiming that 100% of nucleotide differences between humans and chimps are responsible for functional differences between us. That’s not something you will be able to provide evidence for, it’s just laughable.
There is a big difference between “A mutation occurred in a functional sequence” and “A function-altering mutation occurred in a functional sequence”. Functional sequences still contain neutrally evolving sites, or at least sites with some flexibility to accommodate particular neutral changes.
We don’t argue that most of the genome lacks sequence-specific function based on ignorance, it’s based on many positive arguments, not merely saying “we haven’t found a function for this sequence yet so we’ll say it’s non-functional”.
Do you think fixation requires the change to be positive? Do you realise that neutral and deleterious mutations are fixed all the time?
I am asking you to lay out the logic of the inference, because at the moment, it sounds like saying “I had pizza for lunch, and that means the surface temperature on Mars will be unusually hot tomorrow”. I see absolutely no connection between the first and second parts of your sentence:
80% of proteins are different (actually 71%).
In coding regions at least 80% of mutations are not neutral.
I’m asking you to walk me through your logic for how you got from statement 1 to statement 2.
