No, they evolve from non-coding DNA.
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Are you claiming they all evolve from non-coding DNA?
Depends on exactly what you lump into the term âde novo sequencesâ.
So your claim is that some evolve from non coding DNA.
A de novo sequence is a sequence that does not have a similar sequence that appears earlier in the fossil record.
There are no sequences in the fossil record. You get âde novoâ sequences from comparative genetics of extant organisms, and a few well preserved corpses.
The whole concept of a de novo sequence implicitly assumes common descent. Without common descent, it canât look like it emerged âde novoâ. It has to be present in some species, and not in others.
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I thought you would be able to extrapolate my meaning.
Yes, I understand there are no sequences in the fossil record. From the fossil record we can extrapolate the relative age of the animals of which we are comparing sequences.
If a sequence appears first in a mouse then it is de novo if it does not appear in other vertebrates that have earlier origins.
I think you should stop mentioning fossils, or the ârelative ages of the animalsâ altogether, as theyâre irrelevant to what I think you mean by âde novo sequenceâ. You are thinking of taxonomically restricted genes, so-called ORFan genes, right?
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So you accept common ancestry? Otherwise, all genes are âde novo genes.â
If we made a better mousetrap, Ken Miller would say that it wasnât designed but evolved out of a tie clip by means of exaptation.
And there are so many possible architects of the Great Pyramid. So I guess that makes the inference that the Pyramid was designed invalid. Amazing logic they teach people in Ph.D. programs in Biology.
Mainly because they apply to design inferences in biology a standard a thousand times higher than they would demand for design inferences in their daily practical lives. Juries have sent men to prison or even to death on the strength of design inferences, essentially employing an informal version of the Design Filter or an âinference to the best explanationâ or both. Teachers decide that a student has plagiarized on the same sort of probabilistic arguments (âWhat are the chances that this whole paragraph from Bertrand Russell could have been dreamed up by the student independently?â) that ID uses. Archaeologists will see a structure whose physical origin they know nothing about, and begin conjecturing whether it served as an ancient device for detecting equinoxes, implying that they think it must have been designed for something. All such inferences, design skeptics allow, but when deciding on the soundness of design inferences regarding biological structures or organisms, most biologists demand virtual Cartesian certainty. Obviously that standard can be met only in pure logic or mathematics, not in science.
So the anthropologists with their conclusion that the arrowhead is carved by design rather than produced by erosion are treated as doing real science, even though their conclusion is not certain, but only highly probable, while inferences of similar plausibility about the origin of life or of the origin of the camera eye are dismissed as outside of science. Whenever standards vary in this way, there is almost always an agenda, and almost always, when you dig deep enough, the agenda is metaphysical. Both atheists and TE/EC folks have metaphysical reasons (a different reason in each case) for not wanting design to exist and/or be detectable. And any argument for design in nature, since it cannot achieve logical or mathematical certainty, can always be regarded as too âpoorâ to establish design, and so the metaphysical bias never gets addressed, unless those unpleasant ID people make it the subject of discussion, as Paul Nelson has done above.
But as this thread is supposed to be about Bayesian inferences specifically, and all of these considerations are more general than that, I would suggest that everyone return to the narrower topic, so that we donât go back into the same cycle of re-used arguments that always comes up on these web pages.
It would be more useful if someone with knowledge explained to the group (in laymanâs terms, as far as humanly possible) how Bayesian reasoning differs from other probabilistic reasoning. For example, I believe that Dembski once wrote that he preferred the approach of Fisher to Bayesian thinking. If anyone would like to explain what he might have had in mind by that, that would be theoretically instructive, whereas âdesign inferences are all poorâ is pretty much uninformative polemics.
A thousand times? Perhaps the standards of evidence in science are generally just higher than peopleâs everyday lives, and biology isnât at all unusual in that respect (compared to physics, or chemistry). And the conclusion is evolution, not design. This is where you come up with your psychological and sociological conspiracy theory about the secret God-hating Darwin-inquisition, right?
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Nonsense. Thereâs a world of difference between the plausibility of the examples of âdesign inferencesâ you gave from everyday life and the inference to a designer of life or the universe. I really shouldnât have to spell this out. In all the cases you listed, there are countless precedent cases that underpin those inferences. Teachers know that students cheat by copy and pasting paragraphs, archeologists know that ancient peoples designed objects using certain techniques and materials for certain purposes. To jump from these mundane examples to âthe universe was designedâ or even just âlife was designedâ is utterly different. If you really believe that these inferences are on the same level, I really donât know how to help you.
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The inferences to the best explanations employed in court cases, in so far as they have âinferred designâ, have used knowledge of the designer: Humans and their means, opportunity, and motives.
You canât do an inference to the best explanation if you donât have an actual designer whoâs means, motives and opportunity you have no idea about. And if your designer is literally unlimited in means, motive, and opportunity, then you could conclude it did everything, including making you type the very words you do into the browser window while having you persist in the delusion youâre doing it out of your own will.
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So letâs see how that works. Me and my siblings have similar DNA. Is that due to design or common descent? Iâm thinking the design inference is really poor in this instance.
The design inferences in biology arenât supported with the same evidence as that in other areas.
Thatâs because arrowheads donât reproduce all on their own. Arrowheads arenât subject to evolutionary mechanisms.
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The irony here is killing me
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Also, there is a whole field called experimental archaeology where they test if past human activities can account for the subject (I flint knap) at hand. A lot of testing and hypothesizing. You donât get that from ID. Maybe thatâs why they are held to a higher standard. They donât do what should be done
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In every last case you mentioned the researchers 1) hypothesize the identity of the designer (almost always a human or humans) along with the designerâs capabilities and limitations and 2) compare the unknown object with previous examples of similar things known to be designed by the hypothesized designer (again usually humans).
What are the capabilities and limitations of your hypothesized Designer? What other designed things known to be created by your Designer are you comparing biological life to?
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âEvolution, not designâ shows a misunderstanding of what ID theory claims. ID theory, as opposed to the view of some people endorse ID, admits the possibility of common descent. I have scores of times on other sites, and probably at least once here, linked to Discovery pages which allow the combination of design with common descent. Many ID writers assume common descent as the most reasonable explanation of the data, even as they argue for design.
Yet the example adduced above by evograd was anthropology, which most people count as a science; and inferences of far less than absolute certainty are accepted as part of reasonable anthropological practice.
Why so? Ultimately, when all the fancy jargon some people use to obscure the core issues is eschewed, and the arguments in either everyday examples or science are stated in plain language, they amount to: âI donât believe that this happened by chance; some intelligence, somewhere along the way, was involved.â The structure of the argument is the same. You of course have to modify the exact wording depending on the particular claim involved, e.g., âI donât believe that the camera eye arose by chance mutations, not even if those mutations were filtered by natural selection,â or âI donât believe that this arrowhead arose by chance rubbings of the stone, or even chance rubbings of the stone plus natural laws.â But the core reasoning remains the same. So to demand Cartesian certainty for judgments of improbability when the case concerns organic nature, but to relax the standards and allow considerably less than Cartesian certainty in other cases, is a selective approach to inference that demands explanation.
To those who know the history of ideas, this debate is as old as the hills. The ancient Greeks had exactly the same arguments, with the Epicureans taking essentially the side that you favor, and the Stoics and Platonists taking the side that ID favors. The knowledge of how nature works is more detailed now, but the basic lines of argument can still be discerned.
There is still no such thing as ID âtheoryâ despite your continued misuse of the word.
No, it doesnât. Once again you are misrepresenting how actual design inferences are done in current scientific research. You need a hypothesized Designer with hypothesized capabilities and a known designed object to compare to. The ID-Creationist camp has neither unless you hypothesize your omnipotent God, in which event you have no falsifiability and no scientific case.
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