Show me a bird wing that can support the weight of 200 people while moving at supersonic speeds.
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According to evolutionists, many different layouts would have been possible for the primitive tetrapod limb. So why on earth did evolution pick up precisely the one layout that happened to be the best general architecture for limbs of the other vertebrate groups that appeared latter in evolution, such as the flippers in whales, the wings in birds or the legs in humans? This suggests foresight to me.
No, but they mentioned « adaptability », « flexibility » and « modifiability ». Together, these traits reflect a systemâs capability to handle a wide range of tasks or conditions, which, I donât doubt a second that you know it, is the essence of versatility. You are playing with words here, which is not to your credit.
There appears to have been no evidence presented that this layout is âbestâ for âother vertebrate groupsâ â and, as I pointed out above, reasonable.e suspicion that it resulted in a suboptimal layout for bats.
It is unclear to me that anybody on this thread, other than you, accepts this assumption â so making it the basis of your argument would appear would appear to be completely futile. (but then, I suppose the argument could be made that the entire ID movement has been one long exercise in futility.)
A better question is:
So why on earth do ID apologists keep making unsubstantiated assumptions Gil?
To me, this suggests empty rhetoric, with no factual basis and so no probative value.
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We donât know that it is âthe best general architecture for limbsâ.
You are starting with a premise that has not been established.
And no, the Burgess paper you cited doesnât establish this either. Until this claim can be substantiated, asking why evolution did such-and-such, or claiming that foresight was involved is meaningless.
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Texas sharpshooter or, alternatively, Adamsâs puddle⊠The groups that appeared later were those for which the vertebrate limb architecture was suited, or those for which the architecture was able to be heavily modified to fit (Iâve already mentioned horses). If the ancestral tetrapod had been different, the descendant adaptations would have been different too. And you havenât actually shown that the ancestral architecture is the ideal form for either wings or flippers or anything else. If, for example, itâs so great to have two bones in the lower leg, why to birds have only one?
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Maybe you could take this off-topic discussion somewhere else?
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It has still not been shown that this IS the âbest general architectureâ. You still havenât shown any actual data in which the performance of different range of architectures are compared on any metric of relevance.
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Burgess in his paper provides support for the optimality of six vertebrate limbs. Burgess is a skilled engineer, and as such, he has the relevant qualifications for assessing optimality of systems that evolutionists seldom have. Moreover, his case for optimality has been peer rewiewed and published in a reputable journal that aims to draw on biology to enrich engineering and to draw from engineering to enrich biology.
So I think it would be an understatement to say that Burgess claim regarding optimality of the vertebrate limb is more substantiated than the claim that ATP synthase or the morphing of land-dwelling mammals into a whale were caused by a blind and unguided process such as RV + NS.
Could you quote where he explains why a wing that allows a bird to fly no faster than 60 MPH (unless they are in a dive) is more âoptimalâ than the flight system that allows jets to break the sound barrier? Much appreciated.
Thatâs a very weird thing to write, because that is exactly what you are saying happened. You are saying the fin of a fish was able to change into the limb of a land-dwelling tetrapod and then into the fluke of a whale, all by unguided processes such as mutation, drift and natural selection, because the original fin was so âoptimal.â
Make up your mind.
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No it does not. E.g. his argument for the optimality of the human relies on a single comparison to a single, biologically-irrelevant counter-example â that of a âhumanoid robotic upper limbâ. So his argument is essentially that
A human arm is better than an artificial imitation human arm.
That an imitation isnât as good as the real thing is hardly evidence that this real thing is better than every other real thing.
I can see no evidence that Burgess even attempted to compare the human arm to any (let alone every) biological alternative that a designer-of-lifeforms, freed from the constraints of keeping to an evolutionary pathway, traversable solely by evolutionary mechanisms (which for several decades has included considerably more than IDiocyâs tired canard of âRV + NSâ) could conceive.
âBurgess is aâ religious apologist, and thus more concerned with winning arguments, and thereby winning souls, than with the truth. He is also a YEC, so denies a wide swath of science, Further he is a member of AiG, so will have signed the AiG Statement of Faith, including that
The various original life forms (kinds), including mankind, were made by direct, supernatural, creative acts of God (i.e., not by natural, physical processes over millions of years) âŠ
This means that Burgess is incapable of admitting that either anything he believes to be âGodâs creationâ is suboptimal, or that evolution is possible. This removes ALL credibility from his âassessmentâ.
For these reasons, on this, and similar, issues, âaccording to Burgessâ has about as much credibility as "according to Charles Ponzi.
Peer review is imperfect, and occasionally substandard work gets through.
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No, he does not. Him declaring, stating, insisting, or fantasizing reasons isnât providing any actual support. It is worth even less than personal testimony when assessing drug efficacy, because with drugs some times the desired effect is that of altering the state of your consciousness (painkillers, to pick an example).
Hereâs an example of someone with engineering qualifications declaring on the basis of their intuitions and experience what is and isnât possible, and being laughably wrong. For the entire thread.
I laugh every time someone makes this fatuous appeal to âdude Iâm a PhDâ. It is worthless. This âbow before my academic credentialsâ S H I T E people pull, some on this very forum. And youâre the worst of them all, appealing to literal crackpots just because they have sort sort of title. Itâs pathetic.
Yes as an engineer he should have the capacity to do some sort of test and/or simulation work at the very least, but does neither.
So it remains an unsubstantiated assumption, and in fact a suspicious one when he should have the qualifications to do tests but never does them.
Data, got any? No.
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Where did you get the notion that I believe that the fin of a fish was able to change into the limb of a land-dwelling tetrapod and then into the fluke of a whale, all by unguided processes such as mutation, drift and natural selection ? It would be very weird indeed if I ever said that for I donât believe it at all.
To my knowledge, common descent is the best available theory for explaining a lot of observations. So yes, we are in agreement on common descent, although not necessarily on universal CD.
No, development can refer to other, less strictly define meanings. For example, one can speak of the development of a civilisation, a conflict etcâŠ
Yes, something like that or like front-loading.
I donât see why the programming could not involved some built-in mechanisms allowing species to adapt to their environment. In this regards, here is an interesting piece by Emily Reeves.
Could you refine that a bit? How much common descent are you allowing?
Should those mechanisms not be detectable? Your cited article is a ridiculous overinterpretation of data and does not point to a programmed mechanism.
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Expanding on this a bit, I highly doubt Burgess capacity to just sorta intuit the consequences for innumerable possible alterations, or worse, bottom-up total re-designs of the tetrapod limb architecture.
All he has really done is state reasons why the various iterations of the tetrapod limb is well-suited, or well-adapted to itâs various roles. No work has been done, even in fantasy/though-experiment, to show that this architecture is the best among all possible limb architectures. I highly doubt his capacity to run any significant number of such simulations with a good and accurate understanding of itâs consequences, in his head/on intuition alone.
This is exactly why, in science, empirical data matters and mere argumentation generally does not. The consequences quickly become unpredictable when the number of factors grow. There are emergent properties of complex ensembles that simply canât be extracted from your intuitions.
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Youâre mixing apples with oranges here for the correct, relevant comparison is between birds and small air vehicles of similar sizes, not jets that are several thousand times bigger than birds. I invite you to have a look to table 14 of Burgessâs paper titled « flight performance of birds and small air vehicles »
Because that is entailed by your claim that the original fish version of the limb was âoptimizedâ to be adapted to other environments. If the âdesignerâ, instead, has to directly tweak and modify it along the way, then it is not âoptimized.â
I find it strange that you donât even understand your own arguments, and others have to explain them to you.
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So far so good. But then, where are the empirical data supporting the claim that ATP synthase or the morphing of land-dwelling mammals into a whale were caused by a blind and unguided process such as RV + NS + drift + horizontal transfer�
Well, for starters, we can consider all of the publications in this venerated journal. Your job, @Giltil, is to look back into more than 100 years of biochemistry research and find any - a single, solitary instance - of empirical data that indicates anything other than chemistry and physics (which is what the euphemism âblind and unguided processâ means) is behind any of the tens or hundreds of thousands of biochemical processes that have been documented in this journal. There are, in these pages, an overwhelming preponderance of empirical data that supports the conclusion that âblind and unguided processesâ underlie everything in living things.
Happy hunting! And enjoy the process.
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