While modular design allows for the mixing and matching of different modules, it does not necessarily contradict the existence of nested hierarchies. In biological systems, modules can themselves have a nested hierarchical structure. For example, within a complex organism, organs can be considered modules, and within organs, tissues can be considered modules, and so on. This nested modular organization can coexist with the larger nested hierarchy of evolutionary relationships.
It’s important to note that the specific relationship between modularity and nested hierarchies can vary depending on the context and scale of analysis. Modularity allows for variation and flexibility within and between modules, while nested hierarchies reflect broader patterns of evolutionary relatedness.
I was talking about my nested hierarchy of species model NOT the ability of modularity to produce nested patterns in general.
I’m not going to argue with a chat bot. If you have something to say then say it. If are making a claim then back it up with evidence and reason.
We are talking about a nested hierarchy of species, not of tissues within an organism or gene pathways within an organism. It is the nested hierarchy BETWEEN SPECIES which disqualifies common design and evidences common ancestry.
“Species” is an abstraction taken from the observation that the diversity of life is not uniformly spread out but is clumped. However, because the origins of species are gradual in time, a matter of degree at any one time, it’s hard to define all the species rigorously or to come up with a single, rigorous definition of the word. The most popular species concept, at least for obligately sexual, outcrossing organisms, is the so-called “biological species concept”, defined by Ernst Mayr as “groups of interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups”. But of course there are all degrees of reproductive isolation from zero to a hundred percent. Still, in practice, we can usually distinguish groups that it makes sense to call species, despite there being a great many questionable cases. Mayr’s definition will do as long as it isn’t interpreted too strictly. And this, in fact, is exactly what we would expect given common descent, though it’s difficult to justify from a separate creation perspective.
Nested hierarchy within species is compromized by sexual reproduction, but it exists in uniparentally inherited portions of the genome such as mitochondrial DNA:
Mixing and matching parts of animals IS THE MODULAR CONCEPT OF DESIGN!!! We should see many different combinations of these parts, and there is simply no reason why the relationship between these parts should be in a tree-like structure if modular design was used. NONE. This is why we don’t see a nested hierarchy of vehicles because modules are swapped in many different combinations.
What in the world are you talking about? For species that reproduce sexually, a species is a population of interbreeding organisms. That’s what we are talking about. When we compare between species we are comparing the parts those species have, and the DNA sequences they have. We could compare a dolphin species, a tuna species, a sparrow species, and a bat species, for example. We could compare a lot of species.
For example:
Notice where hair is on the phylogeny. That evolved on the mammalian branch. Therefore, only descendants of mammals will have that feature. On the bird (possibly dinosaur) branch we have the evolution of the flow through lung. Only the descendants on that branch will have flow through lungs.
However, for the modular design concept there is no reason why we can’t mix and match those parts. Why not have a species with hair and flow through lungs? That would certainly violate that nested hierarchy. There is absolutely no reason why these modules would have to be restricted to a branch on that tree in the modular design concept.
I did study set theory, both in high school and at university. Your application of it here is flawed. My explanation above still stands untouched by anything you wrote here. The most charitable explanation I can give is that you are still confusing ID as a social movement (which does have strong links with creationism) vs. ID as an intellectual effort at design detection (which is independent of creationism). If you could get that straight, you would see that my logic is unassailable. But I don’t think you want to get it straight, because if ID has any aspect that is not tied to creationism, your program of polemics against it can’t run as smoothly.
Thanks, vjtorley.
I have not, though he knows of my existence, through common friends.
This suggestion has been made before. The words at first blush seem to suggest it. However, the follow-up, instead of saying, “And the waters brought forth living creatures” – which would fit with abiogenesis perfectly – specifies that God created those living creatures. It seems likely that no capacity of the waters to produce life on their own was intended. (In contrast, the earth did bring forth plants, and the words “God created” are not found in that case, suggesting that earth does have at least some generative capacity of its own. But even that may be reading too much into the text.)
I don’t know what Tour thinks about abiogenesis and Scripture. When he talks about Scripture he seems more interested in Jesus than in Genesis. I have not heard him say anything suggesting that he rejects abiogenesis because of Scripture. I get the impression he thinks abiogenesis is scientifically unlikely, and that his judgment on that point does not rely on Scripture.
I have conversed with hundreds of ID proponents. I’m sure at least a hundred of those are scientists, but whether I could say “hundreds of scientists” I’m not sure. Certainly “scores of scientists” that I converse with are defenders of ID. And as vjtorley points out, there are many scientists in the world who, even if not ID proponents, think ID deserves a hearing, and we see their endorsements on the Eberlin book, on Meyer’s second book, etc.
Well, it has been going for 28 years now, with no sign of diminished activity. The DI Press puts out book after book, Bio-Complexity publishes several articles every year, other publishers publish books by ID authors, the ID people are frequent guests on various interview shows. A new crop of ID people has come up, many of them working in information theory, computer science, and so on, and their names are starting to appear in print, in journals of engineering, information theory and so on. As some of the founders of ID have passed on or begin to fade into the background, it looks as if a new generation is taking their place. Eight or ten years ago, The Skeptical Zone declared that ID was dead, but it’s the liveliest corpse I’ve ever seen. The idea of design in nature just won’t go away.
In fact, there is probably more interest in it now than there was in, say, the 1970s, when the public face of science was people like Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov. Now we have James Tours and Scott Turners and Michael Dentons out there in the public eye, selling large numbers of books or making large numbers of video appearances. Serious philosophical books have been inspired by ID, including one by Del Ratzsch and two by Rope Kojonen. Even atheists like Bradley Monton and Thomas Nagel have taken an interest in it. The ID people can take a great deal of credit. They’ve kickstarted a new social conversation. And the Amazon sales figures for ID-themed books seem to indicate that the conversation is not going to end any time soon.
Several hundred words later, and you still have not given your interpretation of the verse you referred to, and you still have not explained how the tenses of the verbs support your interpretation. That pretty well settles the question of how well you understand Greek.
Because no reputable academic or scholarly publisher will publish them.
LOL! That is mostly correct! “Several articles every year.” Your own words.
The DI set up the BIO-Complexity website to post PDF’s of the cutting edge scientific research that they claimed “ID scientists” were producing but which the mainstream journals would not publish.
And what were the results? Despite that fact that the “journal” had no apparent peer-review process and would publish anything of any quality so long as it supported the ID paradigm, between 2010 and 2022 they could manage to post no more than five, and as few as two, articles for an entire year. Most of these by members of the “journal’s” editorial board, and not a single one that would have received anything other than derisive laughter and prompt deposition into the circular file if submitted for peer review by an actual journal.
And as of this writing the Biologic Institute has ceased functioning and there has been no activity on the BIO-Complexity website since some time in 2022. So that appears to be that.
Great job, “Eddie”. I couldn’t have come up with a better illustration of the utter failure of ID as a scientific enterprise if I tried.
Ha ha ha! That’s right, “Eddie”. When you ask anyone who is not inside your insular little anti-science alt-right MAGA conspiracy theory bubble to name the modern day equivalents of Sagan and Asimov as science communicators, who do they list?
Not Neil deGrasse Tyson, or Brian Cox, or David Attenborough, or Richard Dawkins, or Malcolm Gladwell, or MIchio Kaku, or David Suzuki, or Brian Greene, or Bill Nye, or…
No. Over and over again, the first names to spring to their lips are “James Tour! Scott Turner! Michael Denton!”
So what? We weren’t talking about the attributes of ID in relation to the attributes of creationism. We were talking about ID in relation to creationism. Your attempt to try to shift the discussion to “attributes” is an illegitimate sleight-of-hand.
ID, crudely put, is the view that nature is designed, with no specification of the designer or of the process through which the design was embodied in nature; creationism (as commonly used in American popular discussions of origins from about the 1920s on) is the view that nature is designed by the God of Christian faith and that the process through which the design was embodied is given in Genesis. It’s quite evident that ID’s claim is more generic and creationism’s claim is more specific. With respect to the question of design, creationism is a form of ID, not the other way around.
If one wants to claim that the current American incarnation of intelligent design is historically inspired by Christian creationism, that’s arguably true (though only with caveats, since Behe does not come from the creationist tradition), but I have made clear for about five years here now that I am not talking about the historical question or the sociological question but the conceptual question, and conceptually, intelligent design is not a form of creationism (“as the term creationism has been commonly used in etc.”). Within the framework which I have consistently and clearly set forth, intelligent design does not equal creationism, nor is it intellectually dependent on creationism. And of course that’s exactly what it says on the Discovery website, but no one here is willing to read the statements specifically addressing the relation between ID and creationism there, statements to which I’ve provided the links on many occasions.
Serious thinkers on the question of intelligent design, such as Ratzsch and Kojonen, understand that it’s logically separable from belief in creationism.
No. You’ve missed the point again. There was almost no one in popular science back then writing in favor of teleology. Now there are many. That is a change. So the names I listed were essential to the point I was making.
Yes, there are still people, such as the ones you named, writing non-teleological popular science, but they were not relevant to the point I was making, and that’s why they were omitted.
Dan, the moderators are shifting stuff over to the Argument Clinic, not in blocks that make sense, but as isolated items, and thus separating them from their context. For example, above, someone has moved my reply to Boris here:
“Several hundred words later, and you still have not given your interpretation of the verse you referred to, and you still have not explained how the tenses of the verbs support your interpretation. That pretty well settles the question of how well you understand Greek.”
But as it stands here, not only is it missing the previous post of Boris without which it makes no sense, it doesn’t even include any reference that shows that it was a reply to Boris. Can you please restore it to where it was, under Boris’s last post?
You can’t read a word of Ancient Greek and everybody here knows it now. But go ahead and tell me exactly what is wrong with my analysis. Name it and claim it™.
That’s not unusual. At least once they’ve put nothing up until mid-November, then something appears just in time to prevent them having published nothing all year.
We were talking about the claims made by ID and creationism.[1] These are far more akin to attributes of mammals than they are to mammals, which would be analogous to creationists.
ID : attributes of vertebrates :: creationism : attributes of mammals
IDers : vertebrates :: creationists : mammals.
If you had been paying attention, you might have noticed that it was @Giltil that introduced “attributes”, so address your complaints at him, not me.
If you had been paying attention, you might have noticed that I have already said that ID is more generic. The reasons that ID is a form of creationism, rather than the other way around, are that (i) creationism came first; (ii) ID uses arguments from creationism; (iii) ID originated as a way of getting round the laws against teaching creationism.
You have never come up with anything to challenge the conclusion that ID is the pieces of creationism that do not explicitly reference God or the Bible.[2] Instead you keep accidentally confirming it.
I’ve read Kojonen’s thesis. He is not a serious thinker.
I was, anyway. You kept trying to avoid talking about them. ↩︎
I can’t say I’ve ever heard of Scott Turner. But the other two seem to be, at best, eking out careers as “science communicators” by giving talks and making videos exclusively for Church groups, the members of which likely couldn’t even spell “teleology” with a gun to their heads.
But, if you think that’s progress, who am I to rain on your parade?
