But he goes into detail with the cilium: "Because the cilium is irreducibly complex, no direct, gradual route leads to its production. So an evolutionary story for the cilium must envision a circuitous route, perhaps adapting parts that were originally used for other purposes. Let’s try, then, to imagine a plausible indirect route to a cilium using pre-existing parts of the cell.
Behe, Michael J… Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (p. 62). Free Press. Kindle Edition. Because the cilium is irreducibly complex, no direct, gradual route leads to its production. So an evolutionary story for the cilium must envision a circuitous route, perhaps adapting parts that were originally used for other purposes. Let’s try, then, to imagine a plausible indirect route to a cilium using pre-existing parts of the cell.
Behe, Michael J… Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (p. 62). Free Press. Kindle Edition."
Well, why not? Statistically independent events have the same probability, whether past or future, as long as you are viewing the probability of the event before the fact of the event occurring.
No. I am responding to your attempt to show that something couldn’t evolve with a hypothetical probability argument, and by applying the exact same reasoning to your own genome we can see how that argument isn’t capable of falsifying what actually happened.
I don’t have to assume evolution happened to see how the argument you are using logically can’t show that the flagellum didn’t or couldn’t evolve.
Right, but nobody is actually doing that.
My having explained why doing post-fact probability calculations to argue against evolution commits the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is not circular reasoning. I am explaining why the sort of argument you are trying doesn’t work, even in a case where we strictly don’t know how (or even whether) some structure evolved. Yes I use an analogy with your own history we know you had 10 consecutive ancestors, because doing this makes it more obvious why doing such calculations after the fact don’t have the potential to undermine what actually happened in history.
In cases where we hypothetically don’t know, even the fact that the structure could potentially have evolved, and you strictly don’t know that it didn’t, means the kind of argument you’re making is fallacious. Because we could be in the situation where the structure actually evolved (that it is one of those contingent outcomes of accumulating change), and thus the kind of argument you’re making would contradict actual history. And then you’d be making an argument that contradicts actual history, and that can only happen if your argument commits some sort of fallacy, either through invalid logical leaps, or because it has false premises.
Without the filament it isn’t a motility device. So whatever it’s doing it’s not motility, so it clearly has a function other than motility and hence functions with components necessary for motility missing. Incidentally there are multiple individual components of the flagellum that have functional homologues. The F1-F0 ATP synthase is an obvious example, so is the basic membrane pore system at the base of the T3SS.
That argument treats the flagellum as a target, rather than just another contingent outcome of accumulating change. And then we’re back to you trying to falsify history with a probability argument, now after the fact. Textbook example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
From my lay perspective it appears we do not know if the path leading to the bacterial flagellum and what steps were selectable or otherwise. Archaic bacteria had some billions of years to evolve motility before they were first observed under a microscope. How am I supposed to know the details of what transpired over all that time? It is legitimate to infer, speculate, and extend the boundaries of understanding, sure, but this is at the fringe of knowledge. By the same token, how can Behe know what or what not is possible or probable?
Other examples of supposed IC that I have seen for higher life, such as flight feathers and vision, have clear paths of selectable steps. So all of these exhibits sort into the unknown and very archaic, or known and readily explicable.
That’s clearly not a general response, and equally clearly limited by Behe’s ability to imagine a scenario. No disrespect to Behe - the sort of reconstruction required would be inherently difficult. If Behe really thinks he can do that with the level of rigour required it should be a scientific paper.
The point is not that the probability is different, but that the significance of the probability is different.
You’d agree, I hope, that predicting a lottery draw - not guessing and hoping but actually successfully predicting what it will be - is unlikely enough to be highly suspect. But nobody argues that the lottery draw is rigged just because the actual result is unlikely. Yet the probabilities are exactly the same.
Unlikely events happen and it takes a lot more analysis to reject an explanation on probability grounds.
In particular, unselected steps happen. There is nothing preventing evolution from taking advantage of unselected steps. And the longer the path, the more likely it is to include unselected steps. If the evidence indicates that evolution took a particular path then that fact is like the lottery draw - the probability does not rule that it did not happen.
If the evidence does not point to a particular path then the probability of that path is not greatly significant - you would need to consider all possible paths. (Similar considerations apply to the end result, too).
No, it would just show that the event was very improbable.
So you can’t compute the probability of drawing a full house? Treating it as a target.
But it would certainly be valid to argue that predicting the lottery implies rigging. Note Dembski’s probability bound, if an event is less probable than 1 in 10^150, it’s needing another explanation.
Well, in The Edge of Evolution Behe makes such a calculation, that developing chloroquine resistance is a two-mutation event, since it’s a 1 in 10^20 event, based on the rate of resistance arising, and the fact that atovaquone resistance, which requires one mutation, is about a 1 in 10^10 event. We now know that there are two likely paths to resistance, each requiring two mutations.
I was still referring to archaic features such as flagellum. Of course, for resistance appearing, calculations can be performed concerning mutation rates and such. Behe allows for a certain amount of adaptation, such as resistance, by evolutionary processes.
But here is yet another example of the inexorable probing of evolution. It is not just chloroquine resistance. Whatever chemical we throw at nature to bend it towards our interests, within years or decades nature finds a path to non-compliance, if not by one means then by another. Whatever it is, you name it, there is resistance. Waiting time? - barely an speed bump. It does not matter what the parasites and infectious agents involved, be it with people, agriculture, plant or animal, cancer or bacteria, eradication is the exception. We are locked into a perpetual arms race with tragic disease and pestilence. All this resistance, however much drift and non-selectable variation may have played a role, is clearly at the end of the day, selected.
So if it i really is the case the flagellum evolved, then you doing the calculation now is pointless. It’s like doing the calculation for the die after you’ve rolled it. It can’t tell you that the die wasn’t rolled and landed like it did, and for the same reason doing such a calculation for the flagellum can’t tell you that it didn’t evolve. The argument is patently fallacious and should not convince any rational person that the structure couldn’t evolve.
You can compute the probability before drawing, but if you already have drawn a full house, clearly the probability was 1. As you said.
You can, because we know the numerator. What happens to the probability if we add further rounds of selection and variation (multiple draws of random cards in poker)?
I have noted it. Have you noted that Dembski has never shown that it applies to any biological system?
That’s an odd euphemism for “quote-mines a single sentence from a review.”
Have you read the relevant primary literature?
It isn’t. If you disagree, how much money would you bet that I can show you a single-residue substitution that increases resistance? Do you trust Behe enough to do that?
You’ve been bamboozled.
We? You know this? How? Please don’t present hearsay from an unreliable source as fact.
Yet the probability of the draw itself is the same - and you do not say anything about that. A years worth of lottery draws - considered as a sequence of events - can easily be way under Dembski’s Universal Probability Bound. Yet nobody thinks that it is impossible to run a fair lottery for a year.
Yes, and any other imaginary series of events would look improbable too. Any one particular outcome that occurs will look like just one incredibly unlikely outcome out of the total set of conceivably alternative outcomes. But then no matter what happens, the same calculation can be performed to show that the outcome that happened instead would look unlikely too.
And so we could go though each and every single possible imaginary outcome, compute a very low probability of each (1 in total number of possible outcomes), and thereby show that what… history didn’t happen because all possible alternative histories are unlikely too?
Had some totally different series of mutations, drift, and selection happened instead, and produced a totally different structure instead of the flagellum (other insertion/deletion mutations had happened, other proteins duplicated, other components coopted and adapted in different ways instead), then we could still do a similar calculation where we treat that outcome as some unlikely product of compounding chance events.
And we can do this for all imaginary combinations of mutation, drift, and selection, and show that all imaginary histories with the same number of events have extremely low probability, and then if we go by the logic that “if the probability of an outcome looks unlikely from the perspective of a person in the past before it happened, then we shouldn’t believe it happened even now” we’d have to believe that it isn’t possible at all to have that many compounding chance events occur. Which would clearly be completely irrational.
The logic of the argument you are making doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for dice, it doesn’t work for cards, it doesn’t work for your own family history, and for the same exact reason it also doesn’t work for biological evolution.
Well that didn’t take long. Just 10 posts and 2 days until the first quote-mine.
Larry continues:
“However, several of us have pointed out that his explanation of how that event occurred is incorrect. …”
It’s also worth noting that @lee_merrill has been through all this before, including reading Larry Moran’s posts on chloroquire resistance, culminating in an admission that Behe’s calculations were based on a faulty assumption. Yet here he is writing as if those previous conversations never took place, as if he’s completely unaware of any problems with Behe’s discussion of chloroquine resistance.
This is @lee_merrill’s standard approach, repeating points that have already been refuted - sometimes in the same discussion within a few days - to the point he was nicknamed ‘Dory’.
At least this time he’s quoting from something he’s actually looked at.