Population genetics is a great field and is very helpful in understanding problems like Covid.
ID theory on the other hand is giving you a possible reason as to why you are struggling to make your models more detailed.
Your starting point is populations of complex animal life. Is there any reason to believe a better starting point is likely to surface?
It also helps us understand why Dembski’s and Marks’s arguments are wrong. That’s helpful too.
A puzzling assertion, since getting illumination from wrong (or vacuous) arguments is difficult.
colewd must have missed thousands of scientific papers on the population genetics of protists, bacteria, archaea, and viruses. Including … the Covid-19 stuff colewd cited above as being “helpful”.
I hear there’s an entire field devoted to studying the evolution of morphology, called Evo-Devo. I believe I have a book about it too by some Sean B Caroll dude. Clearly no answers exist on these questions eh?
What if their argument was not set up to prove a negative? More like Behe’s arguments.
Would the right statement be that it starts from populations of irreducibly complex structures? Your point is well taken that viruses are not complex animals. As plants are not complex animals.
I get illumination from them all the time. They illuminate the motives and the poor mental hygiene of those who make them, however, rather than the subject to which they are addressed.
But they were. So your hypothetical is meaningless.
True, they’re complex plants. Some times with colossal genomes many many times larger than most “complex animals”.
Indeed. When has ID ever attempted to demonstrate anything other than by proving a negative? Almost the entire content of every ID book is evolution-negation work, with no suggestion how one would even investigate positive evidence for design.
Technically, only technically, Dembski’s ID arguments are not negative proofs, in that they do not prove that it is impossible for ordinary evolutionary forces to result in the high degree of adaptation that we see. Instead, they try to argue that it is very improbable that they can do so. So improbable that this would not happen even once in the whole history of the universe. A distinction without a practical difference, since most of us would agree that having such a low probability makes the event one which can be ruled out. Or rather, we would agree that it can be ruled out, if Dembski’s arguments actually worked. Which they don’t.
And all this has been explained to colewd many, many times.