The number of organisms is adequate in my opinion what needs to improve is clear delineation of gene families. The issue he is surfacing that other papers have surfaced is that gene families are not following a pattern one would expect from common descent. The explanation is gene loss and gene gain. While gene loss and gene gain is an explanation this is very hard to empirically verify especially gene gain.
The interesting idea that Winston surfaced is that the gene pattern can fit into a dependency graph used for software design. This idea is immature at this point and maybe you are right that no more work will go into it.
Except Ewert’s idea is complete dog bollix. The only way he got the data to fit was by cherry picking examples which were wrongly annotated in the database. That’s why no one anywhere, even other ID-Creationists, has used his methodology. It was a clownshow written for illiterate laymen from the get go.
Except that I have had some communication with one of the authors of the paper documenting these “gears.” He is frustrated that his work is being misrepresented as supporting design. Since many things in biology work by one surface rubbing on another, and since one of the easiest things to do is to create little nubs on surfaces, there is simply no reason to look at that and think it resembles human design, much less unknowable supernatural design.
But that is simply a terrible misconception. If indeed the Polish trackway fossils do represent a quadrupedal animal, we do not know that that animal is a “tetrapod” in the phylogenetic sense of belonging to the clade of the tetrapoda. And if it does represent such an animal, this does not deprive later fossils of their explanatory power in terms of showing the types of modifications to lobed fins which led to full weight-bearing, land-walking tetrapods. If they are relict sister lineages, they still illustrate the transition. This sort of thing is a very common misconception; transitional anatomy need not be in a direct line to modern creatures in order to illuminate the transition.
I find that “burden of proof,” while a useful concept in the law, is not an important consideration. “Burden of proof” is about persuasion between two well-supported sets of views. Here, we have no such problem, and the truth does not depend upon rhetorical structures like “burden of proof” anyhow. What ID has a problem with is what, in the law, we call “burden of production” rather than burden of proof, and this is rather like the summary judgment motion problem of which I have spoken. A party that is wishes to put a fact in issue but is unable to produce any evidence in support of its position is simply out of court on the subject. That’s ID.
And if you don’t think that’s right: why is it that the substance of your posts is always about argument, not about evidence? Why are you always struggling to make some sort of analogy, rather than dealing with the demonstration that supernatural design actually happens? One tiny scrap of evidence that actually bears on the questions at issue would do you a thousand times the good that a thick volume of arguments would do.
Actually, yes it does follow the pattern one should expect from common descent. It may not follow the pattern an ignorant rube would expect from common descent, but that’s not anyone’s problem besides the ignorant rube.
Well other than the fact that these are commonly directly observed. What is difficult to “empirically verify” is the ID mechanism of “Poof! Magic!”
Evidently not, as that is not my assertion. I’m just suggesting that before you insist that intelligent action is at work, you have some evidence that this is actually so.
Since this has been provided by Tim, it is now your turn to provide an observed example of the mechanism by which a “mind” produced new genes, according to ID.
Ah. Well, if your assertion is that such intelligent action was at work in the distant past, when serpents spoke and the earth trembled under the very footsteps of the gods, but no longer is at work, this is of course a wholly non-testable assertion beyond the power of science to illuminate. If, like Behe, upon whom you rely, you need this to be something ongoing rather than a long-long-ago-in-the-times-of-dragons thing, then you have some facts to show.
There is an unlimited supply of speculative papers.
@Art actually showed a new gene being produced by recombination of existing exons in a commercial plant. These appear to be rare events therefore claiming 1000 new genes were created by this process is quite iffy.
Right, but that’s because for Behe, the designer is presumed to be inscrutable, because he’s God. For the rest of us this is no obstacle to inquiry, and it allows us to ask these questions empirically, and that’s good, because without asking those questions one cannot even formulate a scientifically-testable hypothesis, much less do any actual research that bears on any relevant question.
Or, it WOULD allow us to ask these questions empirically, were there any actual phenomena for which ID actually accounted. Since there are not, we don’t need to get there.
And, again, since Behe’s views actually clearly require this to be an ongoing process, it should be easy to find such phenomena if they did occur. But, no; nothing to test, nothing to look at, and nothing to test it with. Just horribly weak analogies and incredulity: I think this is complicated like a pocket watch (when it is actually complicated in ways that are completely UNLIKE a pocket watch), and pocket watches are designed, so Bingo! And I have a hard time personally imagining how it could have happened through any natural process, even though there is no way even in principle to exhaust all of the possibilities of natural processes, so, double-Bingo!
This is not correct. Einstein proposed mass/energy as a mechanism for gravity. While the detail of how mass was bending space time was interesting it was not part of Einsteins tested hypothesis. We still don’t know exactly how mass bends space-time.
No, it is correct. Note the difference between your example and ID.
First, gravity demonstrably exists, and operates observably on things. ID by supernatural entities does NOT demonstrably exist, and has never been known to operate upon anything.
Second, mass actually does bend spacetime. This has been confirmed by observation. It happens, all the time, and is measurable. ID by supernatural entities does NOT demonstrably exist, has never been known to operate upon anything, and, unlike Einsteinian gravitational theory, does not rely upon any known cause which itself has ever been demonstrated to actually exist or operate upon anything.
Now, when you DO have a phenomenon that demonstrably acts in the real world, like gravity, you can have a naïve pre-scientific view of it, like “things just fall to the ground. That’s what they do.” You can have a scientific theory of it, like Newton’s theory, which is a pretty accurate characterization of its actions for most purposes. You can then have a more nuanced scientific theory of it like Einstein’s that attempts to ask WHY there is an attractive force associated with mass.
When you do not have a phenomenon that demonstrably acts in the real world, you cannot even get to the naïve pre-scientific view. All you can have is naked philosophical speculation: if living things were designed, they might be designed by something so great and powerful that it could only be a god.
And there is the answer to the riddle. Why is creationism not science, and ID is science? Because creationism asserts that god made everything. ID asserts that everything was made by something that could only have been a god, and since the word “god” shows up later in the sentence, ID is science while creationism is not. It is hardly surprising that this revelation has not convinced a lot of philosophers of science.
