Isn’t it kinda their rhetoric?
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Rhetoric is the only thing the ID community has produced for the last 20 years. Empty rhetoric at that.
I should have been more specific - the type of probability argument I am criticizing here starts with incorrect math and ends with overturning the entire field of evolution. We could find milder arguments for ID. What I mean is that science almost always works in very small steps, slowly building towards a consolidated theory. ID doesn’t have these small steps, yet tries to make an enormous step to Design.
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Can you be more specific?
The bits of plastic at the ends of shoelaces are called “aglets”. Their true purpose is sinister!
IOW: what would you like me to be more specific about? 
Did you just refer to someone as a color from the burgundy family? Or were you potentially referring to the cookie family intending to refer to him instead as a macaroon? At any rate, please tone down your conversations. We can disagree with civility and honor and make this a really great place to hang out, or it can get worse and we can start to throw people out.
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You two could Silence each other for a few days. Not only you you stop annoying each other, but you would take a load off my moderation stress. Give it a try?
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Here. Support this claim.
I apologize for letting Mung’s incessant trolling get under my skin. Mung has a long sordid history of trolling pro-science folks at places UD and TSZ and it just rubs me the wrong way. I’ll try harder to ignore him in the future. Thanks.
ETA is there a way to put someone on IGNORE with this board?
Don’t let him. I’ve seen him be persistent, but also back off when necessary…
YES!! Don’t respond!! Works miracles. (That’s a theological statement.)
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Yes, but I’m not sure just where it is, but look at Mung’s profile.
Did you see my earlier comment where that started?
Anyway, Statistical inference requires a likelihood for both hypotheses (null and alternative), not just one of them. The ratio of likelihoods creates a Likelihood Ratio test, or with a bit more math, a Bayes Factor.
The common claim of the form “Protein XXX cannot be created randomly because the probability is really small, therefore it must be designed”, is bad math because is involves only a single likelihood, and that is not enough for inference.
I’m being generous in assuming there has actually been any data evaluated in the first place. More commonly it’s simply an argument from incredulity and circular reasoning, disguised as bad math.
Hey wait, didn’t we have this discussion when I first got here? Anyway …
I could easily Google find someone making the claim that evolution is impossible (and disproven) based that form of argument. I won’t because I’m tired and hungry, and I think you already know exactly the sort of argument I’m talking about.
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The inference is that in any observation of a complex sequence like the one I am typing the cause is most likely conscious intelligence vs random neutral change.
In DNA and proteins we are observing complex sequences and the null hypothesis of neutral variation creating the observed sequences fails.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Greg on the Forum
That isn’t the null hypothesis. The probability you need to be calculating is that a continuous long-term process involving selection feedback over a huge number of iterations produced the results. Every probability calculation done by IDers I’ve ever seen always uses the demonstrably wrong method of multiplying a string of (supposedly) independent probabilities. Not once has any IDer ever done any calculations taking into account the beneficial feedback from selection.
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If you don’t have function in a sequence there is no selection.
How would you model this in a multicellular ubiquitin system that allows variable cellular division frequencies?
You first need all the parts that can build a living animal and that requires rapid cell division and precise differentiation. You need a central nervous system and an energy transport system as a minimum. There is no known natural process that can possibly model this. There are thousands of interdependent proteins involved.
Design is a reasonable inference here.
This is the null hypothesis proposed by Eugene Koonin.
Now all you have to do is show there were no functional simple precursors to the proteins we see today. HINT; Joe Thornton’s lab has already resurrected several simpler ancestral proteins.
Evolution models it by explaining all the parts co-evolved together. It’s a model supported by considerable scientific evidence. Your silly strawman “they had to all fall together from existing functional pieces” like someone was assembling a car is why your ID “it’s too improbable!” argument continually face plants in the scientific community.
Only if you believe the design and manufacturing was done by magic.
Sorry Timothy your simple to complex hypothesis fails here. You have no Idea what you are up against. You can’t drive a car until all the parts are together. A wheel is not functional on its own. Do you know what a ubiquitin system is?
It’s not my simple to complex hypothesis, it’s the one accepted by mainstream science. That you don’t or can’t understand it isn’t science’s problem.
Good thing then biological life forms aren’t assembled from parts like cars are.
Show me a paper that explains how the ubiquitin system evolved? You’re making an ad populum fallacy.