Percy: You know, they do say that the Infanta’s eyes are more beautiful than the famous Stone of Galveston.
Edmund: Mm! … What?
Percy: The famous Stone of Galveston, My Lord.
Edmund: And what’s that, exactly?
Percy: Well, it’s a famous blue stone, and it comes … from Galveston .
Edmund: I see. And what about it?
Percy: Well, My Lord, the Infanta’s eyes are bluer than it, for a start.
Edmund: I see. And have you ever seen this stone?
Percy: (nods) No, not as such, My Lord, but I know a couple of people who have, and they say it’s very very blue indeed.
Edmund: And have these people seen the Infanta’s eyes?
Percy: No, I shouldn’t think so, My Lord.
Edmund: And neither have you, presumably.
Percy: No, My Lord.
Edmund: So, what you’re telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen.
Percy: (finally begins to grasp) Yes, My Lord.
This talk of FI of watches made me recall an old CDK007 video on the evolution of clocks:
according to this critieria we cant detect design in any object. including a UFO. if we will find a flying UFO we will say that “That does not make design automatically true”.
even if i will do that you can say that this doesnt prove that any flagellum is the result of design.
i dont think that definitions will help in this case. so or so the flagellum is clearly a motor that use several dififerent parts to rotate and moving a bacteria from place to place. this is clearly a real motor, unlike a accretion disk.
so do you think that we might find evidence that bacteria doesnt exist?
Wrong. Assuming the UFO bears resemblance to the sort of flying craft that we design and build ourselves, it would be clear that it had been designed and built by some sort of creature that is similar to a human being.
There are no examples of living things being designed and built by an “intelligent designer”, so the same does not hold.
Again: Complexity does not determine whether something has been designed, It is the fact that it is not something that is known to be produced by natural unguided processes… Bacteria arise thru natural unguided processes, including their flagella. Airplanes require human beings to build them.
This is really quite simple.
ok. so since a flagellum (or gears or bird wings) bears resemblance to designed objects made by humans- the flagellum is also the result of design?.
this isnt entirely true:
https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100520/full/news.2010.253.html
I think that the very first distinction that needs to be made is the difference between autopoeitic systems and things that require external manufacturing/assembly. Something that needs an outside agent to screw/bolt/weld/glue components together is obviously designed (unless it is a piece of random art?) whereas autopoeitic systems originate and grow under their own steam without necessarily needing a ‘third party’.
It is autopoeituc systems that the discussion should be about, not stuff that we all know needs external agency to come into existence. That is just a distraction.
so if someone will create a PC that can grow by its own that PC cant be used as evidence for design?
How would a PC grow by its own without needing any external agency to accomplish this? Does it walk in a field, grazing on grass? Or does it eat other computers (Apples maybe)?
say that for the sake of the argument it can do these things. will you conclude design about that PC? second question: why do you think that a regular plastic PC need design?
What is the null hypothesis? Which objects have no FI, and why?
Do individual atoms have FI? For example, we can describe atoms using their electron orbitals, such as carbon: 1s2 2s2 2px1 2py1. Is that functional information?
If a cloud looks like a dragon, is it a dragon?
I just wanted to comment on the argument that is alleged to show that there has been a jump in FI in evolution from fishes to humans. Can’t you just flip branches left-to-right at one fork on the phylogeny, so that the sarcopterygians, including the tetrapods, are on the left and the actinopterygians, including the teleosts, are on the right? It’s still the same evolutionary tree. But now measure how similar the sequences of each group are to a fish sequence, say one in a minnow. We will find that “FI” measured that way will be low in starfish, tunicates, lampreys, lungfish, amphibians, lizards, birds, and mammals. But it will jump up in the teleosts, with tuna, salmon, etc showing high “FI” when FI is measured that way. Do we need some special explanation for that jump?
It doesn’t.
Without adequate sampling from that time period, can you even say that there was a jump? It’s as if you have two movie frames that are 30 minutes apart, and from just those two frames you make the conclusion that there was a huge jump, ignoring everything that could have happened in the intervening 30 minutes of film. It reminds me a bit of Linnaean taxonomy, where the families and orders are more a reflection of extinction than they are of evolutionary change. It is the die off of lineages that can exaggerate the differences between groups of species.
I find your first question a really far-fetched scenario, some kind of cross between something living and something manufactured. I can’t say anything sensible about this entirely hypothetical construct and I don’t think pursuing it will lead to much useful insight.
Your second question is easy: plastic is manufactured, it doesn’t grow on trees. It won’t exist without humans producing it.
Can you point to coils of wire or metal pistons in the flagellum?
why? we already have something similar in nature. but instead of a PC we have a spinning motor (flagellum) and gears.
so? maybe there is a process that can make a plastic? we cant know for sure. we even know that a metal can be created naturally. does it means that a metal statue can evolve naturally?
if someone will make a spinning motor without these things do you agree that it willl still be a motor?
I was thinking of the supposed jump that their methodology is argued to find. I was pointing out that the same method would find a leap upwards in fishes when everything was compared to the noble minnow.
No. We have biological objects which superficially resemble human designed motors and gears. As soon as a deeper analysis is done the similarity completely vanishes.
That screeching sound you hear is the goalposts you are dragging across the field.