Or @bjmiller referring to “the Harvard study” when the corresponding author is from Austria. Any occasion in which a study is referred to by university (even correctly) instead of investigators’ names is an excellent marker for pseudoscience.
I beg your pardon?
If you want to know anything about the scientific study of convergence I suggest looking into Improbable Destinies by Jonathan Losos.
What new book?
I see that at the bookstore all the time. Now I have a reason to buy it. Thanks for the recommendation
Convergent evolution is not mysterious. There are only a finite number of solutions available to the physical problems animals have to solve to survive. Tuna, seals and sharks are streamlined because that shape moves most efficiently through water, not because the Designer happens to like curved surfaces. Even with molecular convergent like echolocation in cetaceans and bats it’s the biomechanical properties of the prestin protein (which resonates at frequencies good for echo detection) which caused the convergence.
@Mark He’s not thinking of most of them as patterns, he’s thinking of them as mechanisms. Maybe some of the mechanisms may produce patterns of a sort, like mutational clusters, or, maybe with some sequence preference for integration like LINEs and SINEs–that leads to a pattern-- but ERVs have no pattern that I know of. And these are not the sort of patterns I am thinking about.
You’re simply giving me the scientific explanation which I don’t deny. I’m not saying the designer intervened. But that especially your bit about molecular convergence and biochemical properties, it seems to support the idea that evolution is at least somewhat predictable and a consequence of law-like features of the universe. I see evolution through natural law or through law-like constraints as quite consistent with a quasi-platonic worldview, and quite consistent with the outcomes of evolution being the result of a mind who desired the universe to evolve in a particular way. I am doing philosophy and not science, but I don’t think it’s terrible philosophy. Under atheism, I find the response that “well of course we find the world to be orderly and somewhat consistent, if it weren’t, we couldn’t be here to observe it,” quite unsatisfying.
This seems to make ANYTHING unsurprising. No matter how fine tuned the universe is to support life, one could always respond this way. When does such a response become unreasonable? Certainly the answer can’t be “never.”
I am often surprised. But we have to be cautious about jumping to conclusions based only on that surprise.
I don’t think I ever give that response.
We don’t actually “find” the world to be orderly. Rather, we order the world of our experience. The order that we observe comes from us.
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Presumably he is not opposed to people like me helping fund that kind of work. 
This leads me to believe that something must be lacking from the current theory.
So for you, they are Godless mechanisms?
No, ID is not an argument against evolution. It’s an argument against a particular kind of evolution. The kind of evolution that I find myself rather surprised to see that you are now supporting.
Yes there is something lacking. The hubiris of claiming we have it all figured out is lacking, and in its place we find a grand invitation to discovery.
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They even go so far as to assert that genetic drift is non-Darwinian.
Does the reasonable effectiveness of mathematics to describe the physical world only speak to orderliness because we impose order on a disorderly world? Is it really just chaos and we order it?
This sounds like a very hardcore phenomenological view. Like a tree only makes a noise because we are there to hear it. Is there an objective reality to the world? Or are we talking past each other?
Retroviruses can have insertional bias as well. For example, 80% of HIV insertions are found in transcription units (Mitchell et al., 2004). The HERV-K retrovirus rescued from consensus sequence also demonstrated a possible preference for gene rich regions (Dewannieux et al., 2006). The most likely mechanism is that it is easier for the retroviruses to gain access to DNA that isn’t wound up tightly around histones. Going from hazy memory, I think there are also biases towards AT rich regions for some retroviruses.
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Could you clarify? As you also appear to believe God does so without the input of “conscious inttelligence” for any natural mechanisms.
Personally I believe in God’s conscious intelligent activity in every process or mechanism that we call “natural” and I’d like to understand how your view differs from mine.
There’s a lot to unpack, and a lot of points that could be raised, but I will try to be concise.
First, there are others who believe in a designer and find evolution to be antithetical to how a designer would act. If someone is going to make the claim that a belief in a designer can help us better understand how natural history proceeded, then how do we square that with Young and Old Earth Creationists as well as ID supporters who reject common ancestry and evolutionary mechanisms? If nothing else, you seem to have a post-hoc explanation, where science makes the discoveries first and then design supporters claim that it makes sense in a design framework after the fact. Are there any First Principles in design theory that would lead us to evolution being the process that produced biodiversity? I don’t think there are any such First Principles, but am very open to be proven on this point.
The second problem is that a designer seems superfluous to our explanations of how nature works. If biodiversity is produced by natural processes, what additional explanatory power does a designer add? At first blush, evolution without a designer and evolution with a designer look like identical theories at the scientific level.
The third problem is tied to the second. What does design have to offer scientists when it comes to real world questions? For example, how do we use design theory to determine which parts of a genome have function? Right now, we use sequence conservation as a tool for finding function, and that is based on natural processes. I don’t see how design theory adds anything to this.
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Perhaps the words that we use do not describe things well.
We introduce things like distance, height, weight, force, etc. Let’s describe that by saying that we parametrize the world, where distance, height, etc count as parameters.
Both “order” and “chaos” are terms that best apply to a parametrized world. By parametrizing it, we make it possible to perceive order.
How we parametrize is vastly underdetermined by reality. We could parametrize in many different ways. And the order that we see depends on how we parametrize. As a mathematician, I am well aware that we can change how we parametrize (make a change of variables).
The Ptolemaic astronomers saw an ordering in cycles and epicycles. Kepler saw an ordering in confocal ellipses. That’s an example of how the way that we parametrize the world can change the order that we see.
It depends on what that means. There is a reality that is independent of us. But I don’t think that there’s a truth that is independent of us. What we take to be true depends on how we choose to describe. The Ptolemaics took cycles and epicycles to be part of what they saw as true. Today, we take confocal ellipses as part of what we see as true.
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@nwrickert and @T_aquaticus,
Thanks for your thoughtful responses. It seems that once we go into metaphysics and leave the claim that ID is science, things get a lot less heated! Gotta go, I might respond later, but I just wanted to say I appreciate this.
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