But Behe has argued that some aspects of human physiology (blood-clotting, complex brain, ATP synthase) are irreducibly complex, and thus not amenable to evolving. Humans being the intended target of front-loaded evolution is incompatible with evolution being unlikely to produce humans. Once again, Behe’s objections to evolution also apply to front-loading.
Why man? Why not dolphins? Or eagles? Or something we know nothing about because it’s found in other galaxies?
And even if the end goal is something very much like man, why does it have to be a primate, a mammal or a vertebrate? There are myriad concepts of intelligent humanoids that are none of those things.
So it does eliminate free will, and the adopted solution is ad hoc claims that non-humans don’t have free will (which AFAICT is only asserted, never demonstrated) and that the goal of front-loading was reached once humans evolved (ditto).
If Behe’s front-loading relies on concepts from Christian theology to resolve its shortcomings, that again shows that ID is dependent on religion.
As you’ve already noted, there is a wide range of variation in front-loading speculations, and I can’t see why any ID front-loading views wouldn’t go that far unless they were excessively entangled with religion.
I took the argument to be “humans are the end goal, what critical events in natural history would be needed to ensure they got here?” not “given natural history, are humans the end goal?”
But isn’t that a different question than @John_Harshman’s:
And of course we would need to know just what range of outcomes the fuzzy billiard shooter is supposed to have planned for.
We have to assume that humans are the target to try to answer the question of the range of outcomes that would need to be planned. Whether humans are the target seems to be a separate, but related, question.
Modern scientists do have knowledge of mutation, and I think Behe was referring to the modern theory, not the theory as it was originally conceived by Darwin.
A critical element of the modern theory is lineage specific mutations which is what produces a nested hierarchy when combined with common ancestry and vertical inheritance. The main concept since Luria, Delbruck, and the Lederbergs’ seminal works in the 1940’s and 50’s is that the processes causing mutations do not appear to be directly guided by the needs of the organism, and that remains in the theory today. When they grew up bacteria and exposed them to challenges like antibiotics or bacteriophage they found that the mutations conferring resistance already existed in the population due to background mutations that happened prior to a change in the environment, something you should have some appreciation for.
Why do we have to assume that? Obviously it’s difficult to assume that the target is some unknown life-form inhabiting Andromeda, but I see no reason why one couldn’t equally well assume that the target was cormorants, or wombats, or amphioxi. If whatever process is used to work out the range of outcomes can’t cope with different assumed targets, it ought to be rejected.
Yes, the process of analysis could/would be the same I’d think, but the results would likely be different. An analysis of what critical “forks in the road” are needed and how “fuzzy” they are depends greatly on what the target is. A billiard shot to bacteria would be, very different from a billiard shot to dinosaurs, which would be different than a billiard shot to humans.
We could also ask if God missed. Perhaps God wasn’t intending for any intelligent species to evolve, and what we see now was a missed shot. Going even further, maybe God just wanted a universe full of pretty nebulae, and is totally unaware that life has sprouted up in some backwater planet in one of billions of galaxies.
I don’t think it’s really either one of those. There are multiple arguments going on here, but the one you’re referencing is about what Denton claims, what that means, and whether that makes any sense. There is considerable ambiguity over whether humans are supposed to be the end goal, or perhaps something rather like humans, and if so what “something like” means, and whether there can be only one “something like” or many.
No, we do not. If humans are the target, that introduces all manner of questions, most importantly how that degree of specificity could possibly be achieved by setting up the big bang. Denton, it appears, only claims “something like humans”, and not particularly on this planet as well. Behe of course avoids making any sort of claims.
Which raises the reverse question: if humans are the end goal of creation, what’s the point of all those galaxies? Why not just a 6000-year-old earth with a scattering of pretty lights in the dome that covers it?
You finally understand. There’s no place to go. You know it now. I could have told you, but you might not have believed me, so it was better for you to see it yourself. And after all, John, why would I build a universe that large, or have it last that long? Even the omnipotent conserve resources. If a thing has to be full-scale, I build it that way. But there wasn’t any need to in this case.
What do you mean by “Darwinian” here? Lineage-specific mutations are 100% critical for understanding phylogeny, which is certainly an important part of evolution from my point of view.
What you would seem to be talking about here is microevolution over a short timescale. Certainly evolution can run for quite some time on standing variation. But so what? The stuff that people who aren’t population geneticists generally think of as evolution, like the evolution of birds, or whales, or humans, depends on mutations. Even peppered moth color evolution depends on mutation.
No. I’m talking about how we should introduce students to evolution to immunize them against propaganda.
We are not doing a good job. We are using creationists’ framing. It doesn’t work.
Because if people don’t have that knowledge, as @Jordan did not, they will intuitively conclude–correctly–that Darwinian evolution won’t work.
John, do YOU think that if we turned a large population of inbred lab mice, homozygous at every locus, loose in a field, that new mutations and selections would permit them to survive?
No, but I truly don’t see the importance you attach to this. Is it really preventing people from understanding evolution? I can’t see any evidence. It should be obvious that standing variation had to come from someplace. There are much worse public misunderstandings than that.