Denton does. But it’s presented in the form of a sustained argument in which the evidence presented in each chapter is interlinked with the evidence presented in all the other chapters. That’s the difference between a book and an article. An article makes one tiny argument in detail to establish one particular fact or set of facts. A book has more scope. It makes a sustained, interconnected argument in which smaller arguments are all tied together. If I took one single argument out of context, you’d no doubt attack it in your usual way, and use that as justification for not reading the book. But the force of argument of the book comes from its sustained nature. That’s why no summary of the book short of retyping the book would be of any value. And I don’t intend to invest my unpaid time retyping the book for you.
In my mind, any biologist worthy of the name would want to read such an interesting book about a question so fundamental as design in nature. This comes back my point that too many scientists these days seem to be interested in technical minutiae at the expense of broader and more comprehensive understanding.
You’re speculating about what I’d say about a counterfactual situtation. We never observe macroevolutionary change in real time, so I don’t know what my reaction would be. Regarding what we can observe, I’d say we can’t possibly tell regarding any single mutation. But if you affirm it as a fact (rather than a tentative hypothesis) that a whole series of unguided, unplanned mutations turned primitive artiodactyls into whales, then I would argue that this would be an unlikely result unless something was somehow lining things up. I wouldn’t dogmatize about how the overall result was achieved, but I’d argue that design was somehow operating. Just as I might not be able to explain how the dealer managed to give me three royal flushes in a row (I might not have enough knowledge of the techniques of a card sharp to figure it out), but would feel pretty certain that the result was engineered.
How do you know that they are? How do you know that the micro-changes can go beyond making a beak a little longer, conferring antibiotic resistance, making hair a little thicker, etc. to building previously non-existent complex machinery? You haven’t observed that in the lab or in the field. It’s a theoretical extrapolation on your part. I don’t claim to have proved it’s impossible, but you certainly can’t claim to have proved it’s certain. And prima facie, it seems unlikely. So design remains on the table as a possible explanation.
That doesn’t describe Denton’s book! He doesn’t argue against evolution understood as descent with modification; in fact, he assumes it. And he is at best a Deist, certainly by his own admission no longer a Christian, and none of his arguments rest on the Bible or any religious beliefs. He believes there is design in nature because he thinks the evidence points that way, not because the Bible tells him so. You seem to have trouble conceiving that any people like this exist. But they do.
Macroevolution is just the accumulation of single mutations. If you can’t tell if a single mutation is guided, how would observing millions of mutations be any different?
Why?
That’s easy to achieve as well. Start with 5 random cards. Draw one card at a time. If that card improves your hand, then keep it and discard one card. Keep repeating this process and you will end up with either a royal flush or 4 of a kind, every time. You are ignoring how mutation and selection works.
Because that is what the evidence indicates. The mutations that separate species are consistent with the mutations we see happening in real time. I discuss the evidence in this thread:
Has Denton ever been refused a job in a Biology department? Has he ever applied for one?
It is not universally agreed upon by evolutionary theorists that macroevolutionary change is nothing but the additive of effect of small microevolutionary changes. I’m surprised you don’t know this. But then, if the sort of evolutionary theory you read is largely written by people committed to the population genetics approach, it is not surprising that they would draw this conclusion. People who work in other areas of biology than genetics, e.g., physiology, developmental biology, are not quite so certain that just piling up little genetic changes is an adequate mechanism. This is part of what has been driving the various groups and conferences (e.g., Altenberg, Third Way, etc.) who think that the old neo-Darwinian synthesis (which was overwhelmingly gene-focused) needs serious modification to deal with what physiology, development biology, theory of form (coming into evolutionary theory from people with physics and physical chemistry background), etc., have to teach us.
Far too crude. You are speaking (as population geneticists typically do) in the abstract and mathematically. You aren’t speaking about the practical difficulties in terms of physiology etc. of constructing extremely elaborate new machinery, as opposed to making fur a bit longer or changing color or beak length. You need to bring to biology the mind of an engineer, a physicist, a synthetic chemist, etc., to perceive the difficulties with your simplistic narrative.
Incidentally, note how ironic it is that Joshua and other here have lectured ID people over and over again that neo-Darwinism is dead, that it was replaced long ago by neutral theory, yet that here your illustration of how evolution works is straight out of the neo-Darwinian playbook. Dawkins could have written it, or Miller, etc. Maybe you and Joshua should have a talk.
Come now. You know that I never gave Denton as an example of someone who had suffered academic discrimination.
He of course did not start writing about design until late in his scientific career, and I believe he no longer has full-time faculty employment and is in effective retirement and can write books saying anything he likes. But if he were a young, untenured biology or biochemistry professor today, and put Nature’s Destiny on his c.v. for tenure considerations (or even if he didn’t put it on the c.v., but it was known that he wrote it), you can be sure that his fate would be the same as that of Gonzalez. The fact that he endorses macroevolution would not save him, any more than it would have saved Behe if Behe had published his books before receiving tenure. The biologists don’t want to hear any of that friggin’ crap about design in their departments. In your heart of hearts, you know this, if you know your colleagues at all.
First of all, I said single mutations, not small microevolutionary changes. Single mutations can have much greater effects, such as a larger recombination events and whole genome duplications.
As I have asked others, why don’t you show me a genetic difference between humans and chimps, and then show how this genetic difference could not be achieved by known natural processes.
Your card analogy didn’t deal with these, either.
Neutral theory has not replaced selection and mutation. They are both a part of the theory.
Our previous interactions have shown that you refuse to be objective about Gonzalez’s CV.
We know for certain that one faculty member with a vote said that Gonzalez’s support for ID influenced this thoughts on the tenure decision. It is certain that the opposition to ID in a biology department would be at least as great as the opposition in an astronomy department, and almost certain that it would be far greater, given that most ID argumentation focuses specifically on biological matters. My characterization of how most biology department members would react to the idea of hiring or giving tenure to an ID proponent is accurate.
Yes, I know, but your counterargument using the card example was purely in terms of mutation and selection.
You’re being pedantic-technical again, using “small microevolutionary changes” in some specialist sense. You keep forgetting that probably 3/4 of the people here aren’t biologists, and probably 3/5 of them aren’t scientists at all, and so will use terms like “microevolutionary” broadly, without checking up the usage of the term in technical journals. But when we get beyond the pedantry to the essence of what you are arguing, it is clear that you meant that if you add up enough events of the sort that make a finch’s beak a bit longer, you get the transformation from an artiodactyl to a whale. You don’t need any other kind of change; you just need lots of the little ones, and they add up. That was what you were driving at. And I said, quite correctly, that it is not universally agreed by evolutionary theorists that those little changes alone, added up, could do the trick. Many have suggested that other types of change of a more far-reaching kind might be needed. I am surprised that you are a biologist and have not heard these suggestions.
I am not at this point concerned to argue the case against your claim. My point was that not all evolutionary theorists would assent to it. I was merely recording something about current biological opinion, not taking a side.
I’m under no obligation to show that anything could not be achieved, because I have not claimed dogmatically that such changes could not be achieved. And I was talking about differences much greater than those between man and chimpanzee. It is up to those who believe the camera eye was generated by the addition of small changes to demonstrate this possibility, not abstractly through population genetics math, but concretely, by discussing epigenetics, developmental biology, and physiology, describing how such systems could be constructed. Again, I am not questioning common descent, and am speaking purely about the capacities of unguided mechanisms to build complex new machinery. You would like the whole world to believe that this can happen. The onus is on you to show how. If you can’t do this, because the mechanics of organisms are not your specialty, then maybe you could recruit someone who specializes in animal anatomy and physiology to come here and provide the detailed steps you seem unable to provide.
@eddie look how Lehigh University distances themselves from Behe and look how John Jay supports @NLENTS. What world do you live in? ID is a dead ideology.
I wasn’t aware that accurately describing the science was problematic.
That’s not what I am arguing. Single mutations can have large effects on morphology. For example, a single mutation is responsible for this change in human morphology:
That’s precisely the point I’m making to T. aquaticus, but he is denying that biologists have this reaction to ID. He is the one you should ask “What world to you live in?” His scrupulously fair and open-minded biologists don’t correspond to those in any university faculty I’ve ever heard of.
Not only read it (all of it, not just snippets), but studied it carefully, read much secondary literature on it, and taught it at the university level.
I know the passage from Darwin that you quote. The logic is laughably weak. Apparently you fail to notice the heavily conjectural nature of the argument. If you are really interested in learning something about the anatomy and physiology of the eye, and the difficulties it poses for unguided evolution, read Denton’s new book on Light. His biological expertise was the genetics of retinal cancer, and he knows a bit more about eyes than Darwin did.
Also, you fail to note that despite Darwin’s bluster in the Origin, after he wrote it, in a private letter to a colleague, he admitted that the existence of the eye still made him “shudder.” He knew that he was bluffing with a just-so story.
No insult was intended. I said that Darwin’s argument was weak, and that I thought you failed to notice the conjectural element in it. Maybe didn’t fail to notice it, but you certainly didn’t acknowledge it. And you should have.
I don’t think the biologists at Behe’s school are RIGHT. But I think they are typical of biologists around the world, when it comes to ID. T. aquaticus is making out that if only ID people would come up with good research proposals, biologists would welcome them with open arms. Rubbish. The biologists who are atheists will never accept any arguments for design anyway (because if there is design, the designer could be God, and they don’t want that), and the biologists who are TEs deny that design inferences belong in science.
There is plenty of evidence for design in nature, evidence that many rational people well acquainted with biological systems accept. However, most professional biologists don’t accept that this evidence counts at all. And this will not change in the short run. Only when biology itself changes will attitudes to design arguments change. But major paradigm shifts take time. The guys writing here will die in bitter opposition to design inferences. Fifty years from now biology may be quite different. I don’t expect open minds from this generation.
Simply demonstrating the existence of morphological gradations does not establish that eye evolution proceeded along that line. Further, even if did demonstrate that, for the crustaceans, how would it help the development of the human camera eye? Humans are not (according to either Darwin or current theory) direct descendants of crustaceans, and wouldn’t inherit that chain of development. Only pre-crustacean developments (coming from an earlier common ancestor) would affect the human line. So he would have to establish another morphological series for the vertebrate eye, and another for the mollusk eye, etc. And then he would have to provide a more detailed account of the mechanisms that could move things along – a tricky thing, since he didn’t know anything about inheritance, evo-devo, etc. In other words, this is a very superficial sketch, establishing loose plausibility, nothing like a rigorous reconstruction of anything.
And the logical connectives Darwin uses aren’t exactly demonstrative in force. “I can see no very great difficulty” – there’s no rigor in that. In fact, it’s the mirror image of what you call an argument from incredulity. It’s an argument from credulity. It amounts to “It seems plausible to me.” But when ID folks say, “It seems implausible to me…” you discount the argument. Yet what Darwin does here is just as flabby.
Finally, as I have already said (and here is where historical knowledge is useful), Darwin himself was not entirely convinced by what he wrote here, as his remark in the private letter shows. He still felt the strength of the design argument regarding the eye. He knew that he hadn’t completely laid it to rest. And we know much more about the eye than Darwin did, and the integrated complexity that made him “shudder” is now known to be much greater.
Denton’s book is filled with examples beyond the eye. But they won’t interest you, especially if you actually find Darwin’s argument here strong, rather than an exercise in creative storytelling.
Darwin was countering a common argument that existed during his time. People would argue that the eye is way to complex to have evolved through many steps because it wouldn’t work without all of its parts. Sound familiar? Darwin pointed out that there were eyes with fewer parts, and they worked. Not only that, but the gradation of eyes followed a tree like pattern in the case of crustaceans, just as we would expect from evolution.
What Darwin did is expose the argument from personal incredulity that was used to argue against evolution. “IT’S TOO COMPLEX, I CAN’T BELIEVE IT EVOLVED!!!”. As it turns out, nature isn’t limited by what humans believe it can or can’t do. You need to look at the evidence.
A single example is enough to show how arguments from personal incredulity are illogical.
You owe me money for a new irony meter.
How is ID anything but creative storytelling? Take all those criticisms you have of Darwin, and redirect them to ID. Show us the step by step process by which the human eye emerged.
Wrong. Biologists, regardless of religious belief, work from evidence, not lame handwaving. Inferences are not scientific if they fail to make empirical predictions.
Yet you never cite evidence. Odd.
No, but evolutionary theory predicts those observations. What does “ID Theory” predict? Everything and nothing.
According to the assumption of Denton’s horrible first book, they are.
But unlike you, Darwin provided new evidence and makes predictions.
That’s an incredible assertion from someone who doesn’t cite evidence.
