Like everything you have written and all the reasons that we’ve given in every thread you’ve been on.
NONE of our objections have been ‘fully addressed’ to our satisfaction. Some of them haven’t been addressed at all – like my repeated objection to your repeated and anachronistic insertion of viroids into an Origin-of-Life scenario.
Will that next phase involve posting somewhere else?
Would you prefer if:
0 voters
Those are necessarily included in “all of them,” are they not?
I have been astonished at (1) the patience displayed by others here, and (2) Meerkat’s utter inability to appreciate that patience or to ever respond in a substantive manner to anything. I’d have thought that (2) would have ended (1) long, long ago, but no.
What’s particularly hilarious is the way he periodically does this, “well, that wraps all that up, is there anything else anyone has or am I pretty much ready to revolutionize all of biology without knowing the difference between a synapomorphy and a nucleotide?” – as though some of the voluminous things he’d posted were actually responsive, when they never are, to the issues raised. It would be hilarious, if it were not apparently in dead earnest. But it is, and it’s sort of horrifying.
Oh, that’s what you meant. Again, just because I am expanding Owen’s theory to include other life forms and mechanisms doesn’t change the fundamental nature of his theory or make it different. I am not modifying or subtracting from his theory anything fundamental. We have done the same thing with Darwinian evolution.
Most likely no if there’s no serious objections left
I don’t know you tell me
Like what?
Is English not your native language?
Literally all of it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single response by you to anyone which was of any value whatsoever, or any attempt by you to engage with actual, substantive biology.
This is problematical for a number of reasons:
You have in the past presented your ‘theory’ as being identical to Owen’s.
Your lack of in-depth familiarity with both Owen’s work, and of Biology in general (the latter point having been made clear to you by multiple people here), make you blatantly ill-qualified to expand his ‘theory’.
Owen’s “theory” is not a “theory” in the scientific sense of the word – a “scientific theory” being “an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that has been repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results.” Rather it is a “theory” in the “loose or general sense: A hypothesis proposed as an explanation; hence, a mere hypothesis, speculation, conjecture; an idea or set of ideas about something; an individual view or notion.” This is why I typically characterise it as “Owen’s viewpoint”.
I think it would be worthwhile turning this around and asking @Meerkat_SK5 if they can point to (link please) any substantive claim they’ve made that they’ve answered any objection to the satisfaction of the people on these threads with them?
I certainly can’t remember a single one.
How on earth do you know this if you are just an Amazon reviewer?
Yes, this is exactly the case with Owen’s theory. His explanation was first proposed before Darwin’s common ancestry theory was published and has built up a track record of successful predictions:
“Palaeobiologists flocked to these scientific visions of a world in a constant state of flux and admixture. But instead of finding the slow, smooth, and progressive changes Lyell and Darwin had expected, they saw in the fossil records rapid bursts of change, new species appearing seemingly out of nowhere and then remaining unchanged for millions of years-patterns hauntingly reminiscent of creation."
Pagel, M. Happy accidents?. Nature 397 , 664–665 (1999)
As implied by Pagel, the fossil record has revealed that the observed pattern of no evolutionary change punctuated by rapid biological innovations matches the patterns predicted if a common design/archetype accounts for life’s history and diversity. This has been this way for over 160 years now.
Furthermore, this activity explains how the instances of high gene-tree conflict (discordance in phylogenetic signals across genes) in mammals, birds, and several major plant clades correspond to increase rates in morphological innovation.
The flat earth society can say the same thing about round earthers. My point is that an unconvincing argument does not mean the argument is invalid. It may still be valid or stands up to scrutiny regardless of whether it convinces people it is valid.
Because he isn’t “just an Amazon reviewer.” The words “just” and “only” aren’t in the description.
But thanks for yet another view into the shallowness of your “research.”
Because I can read. Your posts are some of the most voluminous inane blather I have ever read anywhere. You appear to believe that all of the core problems with your line of reasoning can be dealt with by a bit of shuffling words around and expressing your incoherent and bizarre misunderstandings in a slightly different way. You appear to have not the foggiest grasp of biology. You demonstrate, more clearly than anyone has ever done in my experience, the proposition that “if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” You issue the damnedest things – your various lists of “basic types,” over the course of the last thousand messages or so, have been astonishingly, mind-roastingly bad, and always unsupported and insupportable. You do not seem to realize that the problems with your views that others have raised are generally fatal and irremediable.
And yes, as @Mercer says, I am not just an Amazon reviewer. I do have a life which involves understanding rhetoric and understanding, to the limits of my amateur grasp, biology. I understand biology poorly compared to many of those here; I understand it spectacularly well compared to you, however.
Utter and idiotic BALDERDASH!
You have not read Owen’s works.
You have not demonstrated that he made any explicit predictions in his works, let alone what these predictions were.
Pagel’s piece was a (short) book review, so was a matter of opinion not fact – and so is not evidence, and so cannot fulfil any (non-existent) predictions.
Pagel’s review was of a book by Niles Eldredge, apparently promoting Eldredge and Gould’s Punctuated Equilibrium hypothesis. Whilst PE has not found much favor in the scientific community, it is not a rejection of Darwinian evolution, or even of Gradualism – merely a modification of the latter.
Eldredge himself is no friend of Design/Creationism and served on the Advisory Council of the National Center for Science Education, which works to keep Design/Creationism out of public school science education, for a number of years.
So we are left with no predications and no “track record”!
Let’s make one thing clear:
YOU are the "flat earth society in this scenario!
YOU are the one with no scientific expertise whatsoever (directly analgous to the FES) trying to convince the scientific community (which is the “round earthers” in the FES scenario) that they have everything wrong.
You also neglected to factor in two things in that paragraph:
Irrespective of whether your underlying thesis is right or wrong, the fact that your arguments are “unconvincing” means that they are bad arguments – arguments exist solely for the purpose of convincing people. If they don’t do that then you need to go back to the drawing board.
We aren’t basing our assessment of Design/Creationism solely on how poor your arguments are – we already have mountains of evidence (whole journals dedicated to the subject, churning out evidence every month for decades, in fact) showing that evolution is mostly right (subject to the need for occasional minor refinement) and creationism is completely wrong. Any successful argument would need to overcome all this contrary evidence – that is an enormously high hurdle.
But this doesn’t answer the question of why did you ask this:
… when you already knew that you’d settled NONE of our old objections?
You keep on pretending that everything is settled, when nothing has been settled.
It does not have to be explicit predictions in his works. The same methodology or model was used by different scientists to make different predictions that were later confirmed as Pagel has pointed out.
Then, explain how I am making flawed arguments right here…
According to the eternal inflationary theory, the acceleration of the expanding universe is thought to be produced from an explosion or collision of quantum fluctuations of particles—called the “cosmological constant”—that permeate the entire multi-verse where a billion (plus one) positive particles and a billion negative particles come into existence at once.
The cosmological constant is placed at a precise measurement of 10 to the 120th power. When scientists trace the rate of expansion back one second after the Planck scale of our universe, the value becomes an astounding 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power.
Hypothetically, this indicates that if our universe’s expansion rate had different values with larger amounts of dark energy, the universes created in the expansion that formed planets and stars, where life of any kind might evolve, would have most likely blown apart the cosmic material instead. If our universe’s expansion rate had different values with smaller amounts of dark energy, the universe created in the expansion would have most likely have collapsed back into a singularity before it ever reached its present size.
This would suggest that Penrose’s mechanism of gravity-induced collapse is not a mindless force that occurred by chance; it also does not seem computable or localized. For instance, our multi-verse will most likely accelerate forever in all directions and produce an infinite number of pocket universes from the universal wave-function, according to the eternal inflationary theory. Instead, it seems to reflect the hallmarks of not only a conscious agent due to the high precision but is also non-local because it suggests this “mind” not only exists in all possible configurations of matter but must exist in them by necessity.
You mean showing that Richard Owen’s theory of evolution is right. Darwin’s theory of evolution has yet to be proven.
How am I pretending it’s settled when I am asking you guys to point out where I didn’t address your objections and why?
Pagel makes no such claim.
If a prediction is made as an interpretation of the original author’s work, rather than being explicitly contained in that original author’s work, it would be the prediction of the interpreter not the original author.
To count as a “prediction” under the core meaning of that word, this explicit prediction-through-interpetation would need to be made before the evidence-being-predicted were discovered, as pre-diction quite literally means “say before” (“pre”=before, “diction”=say).
If it is not (explicitly) made before the evidence is discovered then it is NOT A PREDICTION.
The most blatant problem is this sentence:
Your previous scattergun cosmological babble “suggests” NOTHING OF THE SORT!
This pervasive issue with your writing, that of making non sequitors (conclusions that do not follow) has been pointed to you REPEATEDLY, both by myself and @John_Harshman, but you seem incapable of learning.
You appear to be conflating your own arguments with Owen’s hypothesis yet again.
No scientific theory is ever “proven”, they are confirmed by evidence. Proofs are for maths not science.
The modern Theory of Evolution is not “Darwin’s theory of evolution” – it has been refined considerably since Darwin’s day, and contains explicitly non-Darwinian mechanisms such as Neutral Evolution.
The modern Theory of Evolution has been repeatedly confirmed by the “mountains of evidence” I mentioned above.
Asking the question implied that “old objections that you feel did not fully get addressed” were some sort of rare, and thus easily forgotten, exception – rather than the pervassive rule.
Everything you have said on these threads has been objected to, and none of your replies have come even close to ‘addressing’ our objections.
Therefore, if you had been paying any attention at all, you would already know that the simple, obvious and accurate response to your question would be “everything”!
You are not clearing up a few, forgotten, loose ends before ‘moving on’ – you will be moving on leaving an entirely disputed, and largely dismissed, pervasive mess in your wake.
This would seem to not require any further explanation.
But doesn’t that cover 99% of what we’ve been explaining to @Meerkat_SK5? 
I fail to see how this derails my point. Again, the same methodology or model was used by different scientists to make different predictions that were later confirmed. This is no different than what Darwin’s theory predicted with natural selection and universal common ancestry in regards to genetics. Darwin never predicted the chromosome 2 fusion between apes and humans in his works even though he claimed they had a common ancestor.
Likewise, Richard Owen never predicted stasis and sudden appearances in his works even though he claimed vertebrate groups emerged from a common blueprint (not an ancestor).
In that case, I will just repost everyone’s main objections here and addressed them again. This will make it very clear to everyone that I did address their objections. It will be up to everyone else to follow-up and respond back to my latest response to their objections.
- If the Designer ONLY works in this way, then common design and common descent are inseparable. There is no way to distinguish one from the other, and saying that life was designed is the same as saying that life has evolved. There is no difference.
To be clear, there are two main ways to differentiate common design from descent:
Which families and orders are considered convergent in the common design model but are considered related under common descent? Second, what percentage of convergent genes are found in families and order?
To answer the latter question, we should find over 80% of convergent examples among families and orders, such as functional ERV’s/ psuedogenes and adaptive/mechanistic convergent genes. (I am guessing this percentage, BTW)
I have already answered the former question numerous times.
- Falsifying design requires evidence for something a designer cannot or will not create. Suggestions for what such evidence might look like are lacking.
If this theory is false, we would expect to NOT find:
(A) Animals with originally designed features that only reduce the probability of surviving, reproducing, and/or adapting, such as …
(i) Serum response factor
(ii) Human esophagus
(B) Animals with pathogens that are originally designed to reduce the population or another animal’s ability to survive, reproduce, and fit an environmental niche, such as….
(i) Toxoplasma gondii and its toxoplasmosis
(ii) Excretory or digestive systems of parasitic insects
(iii) Tongue-eating louse (a parasitic isopod)
(iv) Carnivorous behavioral genes of parasitic vertebrates
(v) The enzyme B-1 4 glucanase
3… Why would a designer not be capable of producing two or more completely independent designs for organisms? Having a common designer does not necessarily mean having a common design.
If this designer is human and immutable or perfect, then a common designer does imply a common design and vice verso. More importantly, an immutable being cannot violate his own nature. For this reason, we would expect God to be consistent with his human nature without the flaws that humans naturally commit because of their inherent physical limitations.
If this does not address this point of yours @Roy, please elaborate further for me.
Let me try this again then…
The cosmological constant is placed at a precise measurement of 10 to the 120th power. When scientists trace the rate of expansion back one second after the Planck scale of our universe, the value becomes an astounding 10 to the 10 to the 123rd power.
Furthermore, researchers have demonstrated from the Planck scale WMAP results that one of the fundamental constants in physics remained fixed over the history of the universe. For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the constancy of the physical laws to the entire geographical extent of the universe.
Although the Planck satellite results do not yet rule out models of dark energy that show change overtime, there is no evidence that the cosomological constant varied at all and we have evidence now that suggests it was probably constant throughout time and space.
Primary source:
[1306.1232] Constraints on Spatial Variations in the Fine-Structure constant from Planck (arxiv.org)
Secondary source:
Stronger and More Comprehensive Tests Affirm the Universe’s Unchanging Physics - Reasons to Believe
What this all suggests is that Penrose’s gravity-induced collapse not only carefully chose the right values needed to allow life of any kind, at the moment of creation, but was and continues to be involved in every moment of this expansion.
This non-computable consciousness seems to play a role in biology as well. For instance, Quantum tunneling needs to function no more or less correctly for hemoglobin to transport the right amount of oxygen to the cells of all vertebrate and most invertebrate species.
As astrophysicist Hugh Ross explains, “If the observer chooses to measure the momentum of a particle with precision, he or she discovers that the position of the particle is now known to only about ± half a mile. However, if the uncertainty in the position becomes much greater or smaller than half a mile, hemoglobin will not function as it does and advanced life becomes impossible.”
This means that despite being a so-called random process, the uncertainty in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle must be fine-tuned.
Primary source:
Natural engineering principles of electron tunnelling in biological oxidation–reduction | Nature
Secondary source:
Quantum Uncertainty and Relativity Especially Fine-Tuned for You! - Reasons to Believe
- Your hypothesis has to be mechanistic enough to predict direct observations.
That’s why I’m pointing out that your fake predictions are not empirical. They are subjective. The hypothesis needs to be mechanistic and clearly stated, so that everyone agrees on its empirical predictions.
Let’s try this again as well…
The common design theory states that the common mechanism for the construction of created animal kinds occurs according to a common blueprint.
Definitions
Common mehanism: Horizontal regulatory transfer (HRT)
Common blueprint: Optimal genetic code
It means that any supposed ‘predictions’ that were not made explicitly until after the evidence was discovered are not predictions. This would likely include all your supposed ‘predictions’.
Without specifics as to which “methodology”, which “model”, which scientists, which predictions, “confirmed” by what evidence – and published where, this is all meaningless BABBLE!
“Darwin’s theory predicted” no such thing!
It would have been a later version of the Theory of Evolution, containing the predictions of a later scientist.
The prediction belongs to the scientist who made it, not to anybody whose work they were basing their own off.
Why would you expect your latest attempt at ‘addressing’ our objections to be any more convincing than your previous failed attempts?
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
Why would I want to “let [you] try this again”, when all that it yields is another non sequitor!
It suggests NOTHING OF THE SORT!
It seems that every time you use the word “suggests” you make a (hopelessly) “flawed argument”!