Kitzmiller, the Universe, and Everything

Interesting. Are you part of the ID movement :slight_smile:

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Another new paper.

Precise temporal regulation of alternative splicing during neural development

Not yet. But I’m sure that the next word game of yours will push me over the edge. Here’s an idea: redefine “design” to include “undirected evolution.” That should do it.

The difficulty, of course, is that if we consider development of cellular structures to be “manufacture,” the word “manufacture” suddenly encompasses everything. Carrots are manufactured. Mushrooms are manufactured. Milk is manufactured. And why stop there? Rocks are made by a number of processes, so rocks are manufactured, too.

When you need to define words so broadly as to strip them of useful meaning, in order to make your argument, this is a sign that things are going badly wrong.

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Well, ‘manufactured’ originally meant ‘made by hand’, from the Latin manu factum. Flagella are not made by hand.

‘Manufactured’ later also came to also mean either ‘made on a large scale using machinery’, or ‘invented by the imagination’. Flagella are not made using machinery. Nor are they imaginary.

‘Manufactured’ is sometimes used to refer to cellular processes, using machinery as an analogy to cellular components, but in the context of generating chemicals such as sugars, not in the context of building the cellular machinery itself. So flagella aren’t manufactured in this sense either.

Flagella are grown on bacteria in the same way that leaves are grown on trees, or fingernails are grown on fingers.

Let it be said that there are no stupid questions, only people stupid enough to ask them.

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Eddie did exactly that a couple of weeks ago.

My point is that you are trying to make ID into a word game idea and then show it is a bad analogy. This is based on a misunderstanding of the scientific hypothesis. When fighting advocacy groups this works but it will only lead you to misunderstand the science.

In every sense the DNA to Protein process is a manufacturing process based on the designed code (DNA) and the manufacturing micro robots like the Ribosome. The closest human analogy is 3D printing.

This applies equally well to the verb “manufacture”.

The act of changing from any given state to another is a process. A whole host of English words apply to this category, formally and informally, both for human activity and natural processes. Their usage have no material bearing on the discussion of origins, which will not be decided by recourse to a dictionary. As is often the case, it is up the the writer to ensure that the words he chooses conveys the meaning he intends, and the reader to properly construe the writer’s intention.

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I once lived in a house where water stains in the bathroom had resolved themselves into a remarkably life-like image of a certain former Prime Minister of the Australian Commonwealth. I moved out as soon as decently possible.

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If you had a hypothesis, then I might misunderstand it. You don’t. You have a conjecture, which is far, far short of a hypothesis, and instead of testing the not-quite-a-hypothesis you make arguments by analogy.

But the existence of a “designed code,” as opposed to something which we refer to as a code, is precisely what you must establish. You can’t smuggle it in by a weak analogy to human manufacturing processes. Re-describing the unconscious actions of the cell as “manufacturing” does not in any sense imply that a conscious “manufacturer” was required to set those processes in motion, any more than the human capability to manufacture things requires that the original humans, in turn, were manufactured by someone. Nor do usages like “micro robots” help you here. You’re just trying to work the design assumption into the descriptive terms so that the assumption seems like it must be justified.

Not a very good analogy, though.

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We disagree here and that’s fine. We have a testable mechanistic explanation for the data. The test results are not yet robust enough to do the job but they are moving in the right direction. Please don’t repeat confusing the test method with the mechanism itself.

You are right that this was smuggled in. Good catch. As “evolved” is smuggled into thousands of papers in evolutionary science.

Binary Code generating a product is pretty close.

But you don’t. Earlier you were saying that “humans are the test bed.” That means you have an argument by analogy only, and it’s an argument which depends upon analogizing these two things:

(1) an unknown intelligence, whose physical manifestations or ability to interact with the physical universe are unknown, of unknown capabilities using unknown methods in an unknown manner to manufacture living things; and
(2) the known intelligence of human beings, who are known to physically exist, using known processes in known ways and contexts, to manufacture things.

We can indeed “disagree,” and that is indeed “fine,” but it does not change any of the above. You do not have a testable mechanistic explanation; you have a spectacularly weak analogy between your proposed mechanism and something which is known to exist and to function.

As soon as you can show that ID has the sort of empirical confirmation which evolutionary biology has, that will be a fair comment. I suspect I shall be waiting a while.

Not really. The analogy between computer programs and DNA sequences is quite weak, and the manner of translation of these two things into finished objects is completely un-alike. But the fact that humans CAN generate sequences of symbols does not mean that when you find sequences of chemical entities which do their work in the domain of chemistry, but which can, for limited purposes, be characterized as sequences of “symbols,” these chemical entities must have been created by something having a human-like intelligence.

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Really Bill? You finally figured out a way to test your disembodied mind used magic to POOF specific configurations of matter? Please tell us your secret test protocol Bill, we’re all ears. :slightly_smiling_face:

What Bill means is that human intelligence is a good test to see if ID makes sense, but when it fails that test (as it does, because humans can’t make life), that is no reason to discard ID.

Capisce?

Why is the analogy weak?

The grand claims of evolutionary biology have no empirical confirmation. What do you think empirically confirms universal common descent by reproduction and associated variation?

Why the straw man? The use of “must have” is simply rhetorical positioning.

Nothing there about a new code (defined as I did somewhere in this discussion) …

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Um, I don’t believe cartoons are very accurate reflections of reality. (Sorry to all you Marvel and DC fans.)

Was your claim is that we could get from animal to animal by random change?

Darn. All those millions of scientific research papers in dozens of different scientific disciplines over the last 160 years all for naught because an internet Creationist doesn’t like the results. :slightly_smiling_face:

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No, @colewd, I was speaking about your claim that there is some new splicing code in vertebrates. You’ve yet to produce anything that supports this claim.

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If Bill ever includes natural selection in his strawman versions of evolution the Debbil will take his soul!! :scream: