Much as we’d like to discuss ID hypotheses, experience here and elsewhere has shown conclusively that there aren’t any.
Why sign up for a meeting to talk about something that doesn’t exist?
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Am I alone in trying to look at that slide deck and finding it excruciating to the point that I stopped reading after a couple dozen slides? Please make your argument here, using plain old sentences and paragraphs. It will be both clearer and less painful.
Incidentally, that was a hideous presentation, incorporating the worst of what PowerPOint encourages. Don’t use slides to tell; use them to show. If you have nothing to show, don’t make a slide.
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I have a lot of objections. Here’s a few:
This slide seems particularly unjustified:
Functional triangulation, as you describe it, is only relevant to inferences about modern systems, the question of how it originated is quite separate. Your entire example about the adaptor hypothesis seems to rest on Watson’s intuition about such a complex system being difficult to evolve at the origin of life. Are you arguing that because he believed in abiogenesis as opposed to design, his intuition led him astray? This seems like an incredibly weak objection. It could equally be applied in the opposite direction - belief in abiogenesis has led to very fruitful research into primitive chemical and organic systems, from isolated nucleic acids and peptides to metabolic cycles. Should we argue that a belief in design would make one more likely to believe that simple the idea that such prebiotic systems would be impossible/unlikely?
This slide, too:
By what metric is moving from a single cell to multiple clumped cells “the wrong direction” relative to the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity with body plans? Obviously it’s not sufficient, differentiation is also required, but “not all the way there” is very different from heading “in the wrong direction”.
And this one:
It seems trivially obvious that instruction 1 can exist on its own, as I mentioned earlier. Instructions 2 and 3 might seem independent at first glance, but can also be one and the same genetic change. For example, the instruction might be “under condition X, differentiate this daughter cell into mode Y that is incapable of reproducing” - just like that, you have a separation between a germ line and soma. No requirement for “entire lineage” of changes appearing in one go. I find it hard to believe you can think so simplistically about this issue.
Your point about C. elegans is quite opaque from the slides alone.
I’d like to understand it better, but before anything else, you realise these early cleavage patterns are quite variable in nematodes and show a nice stepwise acquisition of defined cleavage patterns? C. elegans doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you want think about it evolving from a unicellular ancestor you kind of have to consider, y’know, the evolutionary history of its lineage?
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Not alone at all. That presentation was just brutal. I’d hate to be stuck in an audience where that presentation was being given. To shamelessly steal from Douglas Adams, a presentation like that could cause one’s major intestines to leap up one’s neck and throttled one’s brain in a desperate bid to save life and civilization. 
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But there you have good evidence that creationism, though not necessarily ID per se, stifles science, since Paul doesn’t believe there’s such a thing as evolutionary history.
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No. It’s horrible. Incoherent, disjointed, tangential and anachronistic.
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I was disappointed to find out that “design triangulation” is just a fancy term for expecting additional functionality.
For example (spoiler alert):
If a car would be damaged if a sliding door was opened at the same time as the fuel cap, the designer would implement a mechanism for preventing this happening. And they did.
However:
If a car would be damaged by driving with the handbrake is on, the designer would implement a mechanism for preventing this happening. But prior to the introduction of electronic handbrakes, they didn’t.
Into the WPB it goes.
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That’s a fine example of bad design, too. If the design causes a problem, rather than fix the design, add on a kludge. Does Paul expect God to work that way? So far, I haven’t been able to get any expectations or model of design out of him.
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No.
That being said, I must say that I was pleased to read in the first slide that:
Sooner or later one must explain the data for oneself
But after that becomes testing the hypothesis, which was predictably ignored. And even worse, “design triangulation” was never stated as a hypothesis. It’s just another notion.
So back to your baby metaphor, @pnelson: do you not realize that the vast majority of hypotheses are never named before they are empirically tested; moreover, that the testing is far more important than any naming can ever be?
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One other confusing point about this (that @pnelson must have wanted comment on, since this slide is duplicated): Instruction 3 is most baffling. @pnelson, are you suggesting that individual cells in this newly-evolved multicellular organism have different genomic compositions? Because this is what Instruction 3 implies to me. This is absurd.
Also, the blue star (“Natural selection only operates after reproduction”) makes no sense. For this is not what we see in nature today. Some clarification is needed.
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Design triangulation will have to wait in line behind ontogenetic depth. Perhaps a second Paul Nelson Day?
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Well, maybe the corrected version incorporating the final edits is much, much better. Could be, right? I guess we’ll never know unless @pnelson decides to share it with us.
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Thanks to all for the comments, including the zero-star comments. 
The design triangulation slide deck is not an actual lecture, btw. It’s a study and reference file for students, cobbled together out of several different lectures, with a greatly increased amount of text which I added for those parts of the talk where ordinarily there wouldn’t be a slide, as I would have summarized the point verbally.
This will amuse (or disgust) you: here’s the reaction (emailed, verbatim) of an ID proponent to the same slide deck that won such plaudits here:
Overall comment: Outstanding! You ‘weave’ a great story - like a novel that one is anxious to see what comes next. Very compelling arguments.
Selection effect / audience bias, call your office.
The zero-star, sound of violent heaving & wastebasket filling responses to the slide deck have been noted. To the substantive comments from evograd and Art:
– Art, I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about this before, in some detail, so I will look through my old email to see if I can find your responses to a much earlier version of ontogenetic depth, and my replies.
– Evograd, I went through the C. elegans and nematode phylogenetic literature, with respect to the origin of cleavage patterns. It is not illuminating.
BUT – in honor of the approach of Paul Nelson Day 2021, I’m doing an online seminar about ontogenetic depth, updated, on April 6, and will post the PPT here. I’ll try to work in replies to Art and evograd in that talk.
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Freakishly so. I’ll never forget a talk by Einhard Schierenberg at an evo-devo meeting, where he discussed some of the differences observed within the phylum, like this:
I was wondering if that might be the case. Still, I feel like it’s in limbo between a PowerPoint for a lecture and an essay, not enough text to follow every line of reasoning completely (and obviously too much for a lecture, which is fine if that’s not the intent). I think the same information would be much better formatted in a long blog post rather than a series of slides.
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Exactly, and with the faults of each and the virtues of neither.
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Even though I’m the target (sigh), that sentence is a keeper.
SO on point that it will be impossible not to steal. Excuse me, borrow with credit. 
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@pnelson, in case my comment is not clear (always a possibility), when, for Instruction 3, you state “One cell lineage remembers all the instructions”, I think it wise to avoid the implication that each cell in the 4-cell organism you draw actually has a different set of instructions (a subset, which is what “all the instructions” may suggest to some). All four cells have the same set of instructions, right? You aren’t suggesting that each cell in our newly-evolved entity has different genomes, are you?
I hope not. This is the point of confusion I am raising. I will leave it to you to sort this out.
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Thanks, though technically it isn’t a sentence. But I’m more curious about why you avoid any substantive conversation.
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Of course not. What they will have is differential expression. If this hypothetical four-celled entity is going to produce gametes (the single-celled “reset” point for the reproductive cycle), those cells will be totipotent, enabling another round of cleavage and differentiation, with production of gametes, etc.
Which only makes the puzzle more interesting, but that’s a topic for next week’s ontogenetic depth seminar.