Bingo!
SIgh, no you have not. Trouble is, you see no need of it so the discussion is pointless.
No one here has got all the way through or been prepared to budge an inch from what they know or think they know. (or think that I do not know) Same old. Just forget it
Clearly this was a bad idea in the first place. No fun to be had here.
Richard
Yeah, I was sort of bypassing probability on the grounds that Nature (or God) does not have to conform to it.
Precisely. So is it really outrageous to take this further?
Maybe.
To be honest you, like the rest seem to want to loosen or redefine irreducible, There is some perverse logic in doing it backwards from a reducible system reducing it down to its minimum but that would seem to me to be going backwards.evolutionary as well.
I guess I was deliberately generalising in the hope that somewhere out there was a better-formed version that I could look up and argue with. Never mind.
Richard
But you never got past the introduction. Which is the whole idea of a left-field proposal. You have to start it, and follow it, not reject the first premiss and stop. FInd the bits that might work instead of concentrating on the bits that you reject out of hand. You know, play with it?
(Is this really such a foreign concept?)
Richard
But I did. I pointed out the problem with your entire idea and also your use of cancer.
I think everyone got the concept. You didn’t get the response you wanted.
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It’s not outrageous to take the concept further (and some have certainly attempted to do so). It’s not clear to me what endosymbiosis (the technical term for what I mentioned) has to do with your proposal, however, since endosymbionts are already functional.
I’m using Michael Behe’s original definition, and he’s the guy who introduced the concept into these discussion. (I believe he later tried out a different definition after he realized that his original definition made it too easy for IC systems to evolve, but it’s impossible to know whether a system is IC by the alternative definition, so it’s not very useful.)
Nothing perverse about it, and evolution isn’t bound by your notions of logic. It can be evolutionarily advantageous to streamline an existing system while maintaining its function. That streamlining can naturally lead to IC systems.
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What definition of “IC system” are you using?
I have been having a hard time getting that nailed down so I can evaluate what Richard is proposing.
Richard’s explanation was via an analogy to a machine…
Is that how you understand it. Or can you give me a different definition.
“a single system which is composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”
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Yes, that’s the one. Moderated by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. What an evening that was! It’s in several parts.
Things are hopping right now on my to do list and there is much to watch on television with K Burns’ Franklin which is interesting so far especially from the standpoint of religion.
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My only objection is that it is unlikely that any biological system is in isolation and so there would be lots of parts around that do not contribute to that basic function… unless… the irreducibly complex system is the entire organism. No… even in that case, I am very skeptical that there are no parts which do not contribute to the basic function. I would require evidence to believe that.
What do you think @RichardG ? This allows both the alteration of parts and the addition of parts without impairing the function of the system, which makes sense for biological systems. And then there can also be the alteration these other parts I mention so that they do have an impact on the basic function.
Thanks Mark. Of course watching that program will take considerably more time, but I have started on it. I suppose one might wonder why I didn’t look such things up for myself… I guess I didn’t want to even go that far in jumping to any conclusions, but once suggested by someone here I could hardly ignore it. And… I suppose I have never really taken this particular debate all that seriously, unlike many people here.
One of the things which immediately comes to mind listening to the first ID speaker is the development of the new AI programs with the ability learn and then teach us more than we ever understood about some things. This development gives serious doubt to the line the speaker is drawing between “material mechanisms” and intelligence. It has been demonstrated in fact that what has always been attributed to intelligence (even superior intelligence) very much can be achieved by material mechanisms.
Thus it has been my theological argument that the identification of God with intelligent design is a serious mistake that can largely be attributed to Deism. This should not be our God for it will lead to the conclusion that our computers will be much more in the image of God than we ever can be.
Can you imagine Jesus saying… if you would be great then you would be an engineer (a master of intelligent design). To me that suggests that our religious thinking as gone very much down the wrong road.
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Very interesting, one could compare your whole cancer hypothesis to pregnancy. A host needs to expend a lot of resources for very long time to a bunch of cells that start to form a creature that gets bigger and bigger and takes more and more resources, the creature gives no benefit whatsoever, acting much like a parasite, and giving benefits only after being born and even that is not guaranteed.
When one thinks that there were people without function like this and somehow, by cancer or random mutations some mechanism like this got created is mind boggling, and rightly so because change like that could not happen over one, two, or even thousand generations.
And even if we consider that we were bacteria at the beginning then it still seems nonsensical that from duplication we got to the point when such thing like pregnancy exists, it has nothing to do with how bacteria multiply, how could a change like that even be possible?
And to be honest, I don’t really know how we got from bacteria to human step after step, some things seem very tough to change, especially when the system that does the changes, evolution, doesn’t have a mind. It may seem impossible.
But even if it seems so unlikely it’s laughable then the same could be same about something like smartphone, the sophistication it has, it’s efficiency, with transistors thousands of times smaller than millimetre, thousands upon thousands lines of code, and it all works smoothly, lets you access all information in the world and let’s you contact with people everywhere.
If we said to a caveman that something like smartphone will exist in the future while all he has are some wooden spears also would seem laughable to him, even if his whole tribe would spend decades on trying to reach this kind of technology they will fail miserably making barely any progress. And yet we know for a fact thing like this is possible, it can be even mass produced.
With small steps taken one after another, we can complete a marathon. It all seems impossible if we try to look at beginning and immediately at the end, and it’s the same with many things that happen during our lifetimes, but if we look at every small step along the road, it starts to makes sense.
Evolution is not that effective though, it takes hundreds of thousands of years to make a change that is substantial, and there simply wasn’t humans around to record those changes happening. We still have a lot of evidence that seems to match though, and if you give up on trying to see some substantial change happen next generation, and try to accept that very small changes can make a difference over a long period of time, even though they are so small that it’s hardly possible to see them, then evolution makes quite a lot of sense.
There does seem to be some confusion over irreducible. As far as I know the word means that the system cannot be broken down into parts Now if that is not what Behe described then I can understand people’s reluctance to accept a more rigid definition.
To find an example? I have been reluctant to. But let’s take the metabolic system, that is the proverbial heart of an organism. It involves regulation of temperature, digestion and release of energy, senses to identify internal (and sometimes external) temperature, Epidermal structure that insulates (or not in the case of reptiles) Oxygen intake and processing.
OK so some of this can be done several ways, but in the case of endothermic metabolism there are critical factors that the reptilian system cannot produce (and to a lesser extent the Mammalian system would upset or ruin the reptilian one.) So in terms of complexity, it would be almost impossible to “build” either system bit by bit because of their interdependence. A reptile would overheat with mammalian skin because it does not have any means to release heat.
Irreducibility, as I see it, means that you cannot build the system slowly and the component parts are system specific so they cannot have other purposes en-route as it were.
Whenever this point is raised the answer is always
Anything is possible over time, which basically ignores the “impossible” that caused so much problems before I latched on to IC as a recognisable condition. (wrong terminology meant ignorance)
I really do not want to go there again. So I was asking people to accept the possibility that a system or organ could be irreducible and go from there.
(Bit that seems to be impossible ironically)
Richard
Careful definition is needed for accurate discussion. What is an “irreducible” system? Consider a zeolite mineral. It has a complex structure requiring a precise arrangement of particular types of atoms in a repeating pattern, and it has a distinctive suite of useful physical and chemical properties as a result of that structure (such as being a “molecular sieve” or a catalyst. But it forms under a particular set of geochemical conditions, with no intervention by an intelligent agent needed.
Endothermic metabolism is not an all or nothing situation. Various animals, such as many insects, large active fish, sea turtles, and monotremes have an intermediate condition where they keep somewhat warm and more metabolically active but not as warm as a standard mammal or bird. There are various strategies possible
The basic weakness of most ID complexity arguments is that they are looking for “here is a way that complex biochemical systems are like human-designed things” and not checking questions such as “can other things be complex, also?”
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I guess it is easier to comprehend human-made systems because we can follow how they came to be. The “evolution” of a car would be fairly easy to document and we have the added advantage of their being plenty of comparable data to use. A car is complex but it is not irreducible in the way I described. Because there have been simpler designs, and it sprung from earlier machines with different power sources and engines that did not need wheels and so on…It makes an ideal analogy for Evolutionary theory as it stands. You can compare and contrast very effectively.
The problem with IC is actually defining an irreducible system that people can agree on. And some people will refuse to accept it for that reason alone. (Examples are on this forum)
I have neither the time nor the inclination to trawl through every natural system to try and define an irreducible one that people will accept, But, because of this I cannot get a sensible conversation based on the rather common precept of “what if…”
Science was born with “what if…” so why is it so wrong now?
My other frustration is that it seems that many people here can only understand a concept in the form they learned it. So parasitism must be a parasite?
Parasitism is the situation where something is taking out of the system without putting anything back in. it grows and develops at the expense of the “host”. As mentioned before a foetus is basically a parasite on the mother. But also an organ that is either redundant or alien to the creature that has grown it is parasitic. it grows inside the creature, using resources and not giving anything in return. If that organ is transmitted genetically but not fatal it could persist. And it is not beyond the realm of impossibility for it eventually to develop into something that is beneficial thus no longer being parasitic. It this organ was not part of the basic creature structure it could be considered an independent life, but most organs cannot perform all the necessities of life for themselves, that is the whole definition of an organ, it has a function. But if that function is superfluous or not required then it is parasitic. (not a parasite)
It is the difference between an example and a principle. And if you understand the principle you can then apply it to other examples from the one you know (Also true of using an analogy)
A prime example being IC. I have been talking about impossible jumps and being unable to construct a system slowly for weeks, but because I did not use the words Irreducible System or mention Behe I was talking rubbish!
I think that is enough for now.
Nothing I say now will change the view some people have of both me and my understanding of Evolution.
Richard
You use examples like the difference in a reptile and mammal. Of course that is a hugh leap and would well look impossible. But what about smaller jumps? How about salamander to reptile? Would that be micro or macro evolution? How different are these two groups?
Do you honestly want to know about the transition from reptile to mammal? If so, watch this:
An example sequence of organisms that are thought to be fairly close to the line between stem amniotes and mammals: Casineria, Archaeothyris, Edaphosaurus, Biarmosuchus, Biseridens, Viatkogorgon, Lycosuchus, Cynognathus, Chiniquodon, Morganucodon, Docofossor.
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