And it is not just atheists saying this, but the majority of Christians in the world. Just because one is arguing for something which is true (i.e. that God exists) doesn’t mean the argument is valid.
One point in all of this; it seems to me that only a select number of genes are brittlely specific and exactly conserved. We still have on ongoing virus that, over the past couple of years, has constantly and markedly mutated its spike protein, with dozens of amino acid substitutions and hundreds of nucleotide combinations, although the basic function remains to bind the human ACE2 receptor. Homologous genes between species, sharing the same function, usually have some differences, and some regions of a given gene are more critical than others. So a simple calculation based on any exact found sequence does not account for the possible variants.
One can also argue with validity that atheism is false, while begging the question of God’s existence, since the cause of the universe may still be unaware of its action.
I love how you are saying this!
In mesoscopic human affairs, as the police and intelligence services know, there’s no such thing as coincidence. In computing and genetics they happen all the time because of the laws of improbability: the law of inevitability, the law of truly large numbers, the law of selection, the law of the probability lever, and the law of near enough.
Then there’s the law of cognitive bias which discount the previous laws of improbability with fallacies.
I did a fag packet calculation for one of these threads of the insane number of genetically defined and combined individuals based on this sort of information
Some truly large numbers:
In the past 4gy or 6ky (take your pick)
Number of species: 5bn
etc, etc
Number of organisms that have lived: 10^40
Number of protein molecules per cell >10^7
Number of different proteins per cell c. 10^5
etc, etc
99.9…9% of the 10^40 have 0.003 mutations per genome per cell generation.
(10^36 mutations conservatively, not counting in viruses.)
etc, etc
What astounds me is why evolution took so long.
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And for the most part, I think for myself and several others, your arguments have proven to be rather ineffective.
That’s the tricky thing though, since the only people who are making the arguments that you are (esp. about “improbabilities”) are not usually publishing scientists, but rather exclusively appear in anti-evolution intelligent design or creationism literature.
Or maybe evolution actually is true and a good scientific theory to explain the origin of species.
I can’t deny that that never occurs, but the real problem that a lot of Christians who accept evolution have is how the arguments against evolution are made. The least impressive thing for myself and many others I know of, is for Christians to publish their refutations of evolution in blogs, creationist/ID websites, youtube videos, forums like this one, etc. If your ideas or creationist ideas have any merit, they should be debated in actual scientific literature and judged by the same standards other scientific hypotheses are. If they are true, they will eventually win out at the end of the day.
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That would require you to prove that every atheist actually believes in God even though they claim otherwise. Good luck with that.
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The other issue is that ID/creationism can’t seem to stand on its own. ID/creationism is almost entirely anti-evolution. It doesn’t attempt to explain the evidence on its own merits. ID/creationism is all gaps.
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Maybe I didn’t say it correctly, but it doesn’t follow from atheism being false, that theism is true.
Or another example, just because the universe has a beginning, this does not require that it begin in the past.
I think that can become a problem, and I saw it in the Covid debates, where when attacked, the tendency is to double down on your position, be it pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and refuse to acknowledge the valid criticisms present. I see it as far less a problem with evolution, as there is much more known about it, and the basic framework is sound and firmly established. There is no lack of voices who chip away at the details, freely publishing their debates on how it works and how new data is integrated. YECist and IDist groups tend to criticize, but offer no new hard data or a viable option explaining the existing data that can stand up to examination. Those who are sincere are then also undermined by unscrupulous groups that seemingly seek to intentionally deceive.
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Where’s the deception, the Deceiver, in pro-vax? Let alone evolution.
It’s not 50:50, that enlightened rationality and unenlightened irrationality are qualitatively equal narratives, as bad as each other. In science or politics=human nature. Look at the chaos monster of the GOP.
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Your response does not recognise / give weight to the fact that evolution is the prevailing paradigm in biology (Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of scientific revolutions), and as such the scientific community is unwilling to publish evidence that undermines it.
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost. Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.
once a paradigm is accepted, those who don’t convert are marginalised
To give a recent (2020) example of this. A couple of authors published a paper https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519320302071 in the Journal of Theoretical Biology in which they argue that various biological systems are fine-tuned. But when, after publication, the editors realised the authors were ID proponents and that the paper challenges Darwinian thinking, they promptly issued a disclaimer https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022519320303118?via%3Dihub . The disclaimer does not fault the authors’ reasoning, only that ‘the authors are connected to a creationist group’ and that the journal does not ‘endorse in any way the ideology of nor reasoning behind the concept of intelligent design’.
As I have already mentioned, it is clearly inconsistent if not illogical to see similarities of later embryonic development as evidence of common ancestry, but not recognise the differences of early development (which should carry more weight) as evidence against common ancestry. Yet what do we find in textbooks etc.? Only the later similarities.
To give an example the other way – of a seriously flawed scientific paper which nevertheless was not only published but is very widely cited because it supports evolution: I expect many readers of this forum are aware of the 1994 paper by Nilsson and Pelger ‘A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve’. Not only is it cited widely as proof that eyes could evolve readily and quickly (just do a search for ‘Nilsson Pelger’) eg in Nature The eye in a twinkling | Nature , it has now been assimilated into text books eg ‘Evolution of the eye’ in Mark Ridley’s ‘Evolution’ which claims to be ‘the premier undergraduate text in the study of evolution’, and cited as an authority in reference works such as Oxford Reference Eye evolution modeling - Oxford Reference .
And why is it clearly and seriously flawed?
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Because, although it claims to explain why eyes could have evolved readily through natural selection acting on morphological variations, the model they use is for domestic breeding!
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Not only that, their model uses an equation for the proportional change per generation in eye performance which they designate R and which is a function of a few constants such as heritability. And you need to know only that - you don’t even need to know what expression they use – to know that it must be seriously wrong! There is no way that an organ could evolve at a constant proportional rate, because it implies that the organ’s performance will improve geometrically, which is completely unrealistic. And for ever! At the very least there needs to be boundary conditions. For more on this see Nilsson and Pelger: evolution of eyes . Ok, so you’d need to have looked up the source for their equation to know it was for domestic breeding; but you don’t need to look up anything to know it must be wrong for this reason. Yet this paper has been accepted uncritically and cited widely as proof that eyes could have evolved readily.
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Of course the other major failing is that it doesn’t address at all the origin of the new genes etc. required to evolve an eye. Whether applying natural selection or domestic breeding, there has to be boundary conditions, and these are imposed by the available genetic material. To go beyond these requires new constructive genetic material. I was glad to see that some lecture notes from Harvard https://vcp.med.harvard.edu/papers/uba-3.pdf recognise that Nilsson and Pelger’s model is no better than Darwin’s because it is only based on morphology, and hence does not really address the origin of complex organs.
So it’s clearly naïve to think that the scientific community, and mechanism of peer reviewed publications, is impartial and objective and reliable.
Can you quantify that? How naïve? How un/impartial? How un/objective? How un/reliable?
Imagine a thief being accused in court. The evidence brought forward by the prosecution is that the thief was caught stealing on several occasions. The defense then rises and responds: “well, yes your honor - but all this is ignoring the many times when my client has gone into stores and paid the full and honest price for what he was purchasing! Your bias is privileging these unfortunate shoplifting episodes, and painting my client as a thief, but I suggest instead that the time he didn’t steal should carry equal weight in our view of him.”
When evidence for something is prolifically available (as it is for common ancestry), we don’t discount that evidence just because its most compelling exhibits don’t constitute the entire domain space being examined.
Yes, but here’s the difference between your position and that of the scientific community: they recognize all this about themselves! …and therefore submit to peer review and skeptical testing.
Whereas you would take all this science (which many times can be wrong - especially about details, and they know it) and you would replace it with conspiracy theories and ideologically-based doubt, - all stuff that (to a much, much greater extent than mainstream science) has proven its unreliability over and over again.
My response is that deception is minimal, but given the heart of man, is still present. Financial gain is a powerful motivator, and can bias things at the corporate level. I think both in the pro-vax world and the evolutionary world, as well as the automotive world (Ford vs Chevy) we all tend to defend our positions with confirmation bias and have blind spots. Those blind spots may be small in the overall picture, but in evolution, for example, may lead us to reject a novel mechanism just because it doesn’t fit our model, not because of its merits.
Certainly, I agree that it is a lot less of a problem on this side of the fence on those topics mentioned.
Biology is evolution, life in motion.
There is a great deal of contention over the weightings of evolutionary mechanisms which see publication, as well as some reassigning of phylogeny and timing and such, but there is no evidence undermining, say, the common ancestry of all vertebrates. The living world we see is a snapshot of evolution, and evolution is just biology over time. Biology knows no stasis. Everything living has evolved, is evolving, and will evolve further.
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As you say Phil. There’s no comparison. A million Americans died of Covid. Ten million person years? Where’s the confirmation bias? Where were you and I prey to it? MRNA vaccines are a miracle that will make inroads against cancer. And if you’ve got a novel evolutionary mechanism or can point to one in the past, ooooh, hundred years that was overlooked, please go ahead. Science is very hard work. Rigorous, meticulous, the tyres are ruthlessly kicked, the observations must be disinterestedly repeatable. One does not change the synthesis of that for the sake of even an equal antithesis. Does one. Social justice is even harder work.
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Boy did I ever miss one heck of a food fight here or what? Something drew my interest to an earlier post here. I started reading from there but my neck started getting sore the way it dies at a tennis match. Hopefully no one is developing tennis elbow. Had to admire some of tge strokes and form by the home team. Better luck next time, visitors.
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Opinions aren’t evidence.
Let’s see how their paper holds up.
So let’s see how that holds up. Specifically, let’s look at random Fab formation during V(D)J recombination in antibodies. As it turns out, scientists were able to isolate an antibody with beta-lactamase activity in a pool of random antibodies of about 10^9, many orders of magnitude less than that predicted by Axe.
Reality demonstrates that Axe is wrong, and so too is the argument in the paper you linked to.
It is completely illogical to cite differences as evidence against a theory that predicts differences.
The argument ID/creationists have been using for decades is that half an eye won’t work, so you have to have all of the parts present at the beginning. This is what the paper falsified. It demonstrated that you only need a few of the parts from a camera eye in order to have functional vision.
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