Uses of logical arguments in debate

@Rumraket
Thanks. What do you make of their proposal?

We know for a fact that Rube Goldberg machines are made by humans.

@T_aquaticus I am not talking about just Byzantine pathways. I am talking about chicken and egg pathways, interlocking chicken and egg pathways. As far as I can tell so far, and this is where I am asking for help if I am wrong, there is no way to make ATP from scratch without using ATP. NAD requires NAD and ATP. CoA requires ATP, NADP etc. Folate requires Folate. Is it possible to argue this is because of an ancient underlying metabolism that didnt have this problem? Is it reasonable?

Beyond it being interesting, and revealing some curious connections between ideas that have been circulating in the origin of life field for decades, not much. Whether the kind of metabolism extracted from the data actually ever existed as the basis for some early form of life is of course an unknown.

So is ice.

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The chicken and the egg offer the solution for you. The ancestors of chickens laid eggs, but weren’t chickens.

150 years ago, no one knew of a way to build a heavier-than-air flying machine.

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We don’t know how to make ATP without using ATP. Some alternative scenarios, though unproven, have been suggested. What can we conclude at this present time?

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Here’s the question. Is this pattern of chicken and egg pathways wide-spread in biological systems?
Why should that be? Is there a way to start from an ur-pathway using iron sulfur, for example, to another using ATP?
Can you build an evolutionary biosynthetic path that is causally circular using evolutionary mechanisms? These are all questions of both design and evolution, because it is just as legitimate to ask why a designer would use causally circular pathways. I suspect there is a basic principle at work and it may have nothing to do with intelligent design or evolution per se, but with efficiency within well-established networks and their regulation.

This whole thread started because I was asked how I would do ID research. I have said all along I would be by looking at what was already there in biology, looking for patterns and trying to discern if there was anything that spoke clearly of design. This is the sort of thing I had in mind.

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Why would you have to ask about evolutionary pathways in order to discern design?

Do you agree not being able to reconstruct biochemical pathways which arose over 4 billion years ago is not positive evidence for Design?

Obviously one would have to ask about them. Even though others don’t it makes sense that Gauger is.

No one asks about intelligent design when researching how these pathways could have evolved. So why is it that we can’t determine design independently of evolution?

ID can’t form any testable hypotheses unless and until they make predictions about the capabilities and limitations of the Designer(s). The only candidate they have is their omnipotent Christian God which they can’t admit to for First Amendment Establishment Clause reasons. So they’re kinda stuck with no way to proceed with their 'science".

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She is talking about a chicken and egg problem that we observe in biology. Chicken and egg problems can be solved by design. They are difficult for step by step processes to explain. So are the collection of observed chicken and egg problems in biology evidence of design?

The chicken/egg problem was already solved by evolution. The solution is to evolve egg laying before you evolve chickens.

Long story short, the chicken and the egg isn’t a problem.

@Agauger, far more succinctly and colorfully, this is precisely what I meant when we discussed this.

@T_aquaticus

We are talking about the problems of metabolism–how to get something you need before you have it, if the only way to get it depends on having it. By the way, that facile answer, to evolve chicken’s first, is ridiculous on the face of it. You are better than that.

Oh good. :slight_smile:

Not really. Explaining them is not the problem. Finding out whether any of many proposed explanations is actually true, however, is the hard part.

So are the collection of observed chicken and egg problems in biology evidence of design?

No.

Analogies are great as far as they go. But what is the ancestor of ATP? And does it not at least pique your curiosity as to why central metabolic cofactors, essential for energy metabolism, biosynthesis, DNA and protein structure and synthesis, molecular motor activity should show autocatalytic features? No need to worry about ID. It’s a question worth asking and answering on its own merits. What I have found so far is not nearly enough to make a case for design,