The problem is the lack of compelling evidence. What is trotted out as evidence is found on examination to be based on fallacies and is basically just suppositions and rhetoric.
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Evolution is His fingerprint – at least that’s what a lot of people have concluded, some of them previously atheists who due to studying evolution concluded that there must be a Designer and ended up turning to Christ. Where ID fails to convince anyone, the theory of evolution itself has shown people the glory of God.
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This. I’d love to find some examples, but the best seems to be the eye, but that doesn’t hold up well.
That should be kept in mind! Calling people “disciples of evolution” is not just silly, it’s disrespectful.
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And from that Darwin’s predicted pathway has been “proven essentially correct”?
How was it “proven” that the different light-sensing systems in question were part of an unbroken evolutionary lineage?
I am afraid that this is not a precise description of the situation. Darwin didn’t predict the existance of the whole variety of light-sensing systems, he already knew them and described them. He used them to train the imaginary of his auditory to make evolution conceivable. This is nicely described by McGrath in het book about Darwinism and the Divine.
It might make sense to look to this point another way. No biologist thinks that evolution can do all things that we can imagine. It is not expected that evolution gives humans facet eyes or wings like a fly. There are bounderies that evolution faces and can’t overcome. No doubt about that in the scientific field. The discussion now is whether we see structures in biology that have crossed this border or not. If we assume that we don’t see that in nature actually. Where do we think that the boundery lies then? What structures and functions can we predict, will be found when we proceed in biology or in time and what not?
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So, an example of irreducible complexity, and more broadly, an example of evidence of intelligent design, would be something that evolution cannot overcome, a boundary it cannot cross. Feathered wings on a mammal type thing. That helps define it for me.
But that is because of phylogeny, not anything to do with complexity. Evolution did give flies facet eyes and wings.
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Agree. I would rephrase your opinion a bit: The design that we expect for the future in descendants depends on the design that is already present in the ancestors.
Right?
Is that for you irreducible complex? I mentioned facet eyes for humans, to make a more extreme statement. For me it’s extremely ridiculous to think that we humans would develop facet eyes, and I think that it is so for everyone. May be from this clear example we can draw general statements about the bounderies of evolution. Might be nice to contemplate about. There are physical, chemical and biological limitations, I assume. Ron gave a biological one.
He knew of some. To imply he knew of them all is deceptive.
Yes or foolish.
That is correct. It’s not just that looking for the divine is outside its remit – it lacks the tools to address the question.
Not necessarily. Plenty of non-theists would like to believe in God. Also, you seem to be mixing categories here. Irreducible complexity is supposed to be scientifically testable evidence for intelligent design, not an untestable trace of the supernatural. Nor is it obvious what the connection is – why should divine action be associated with irreducible complexity? ID often claims to be presenting evidence for intelligent design per se (which is something science can and does address) while actually arguing that biological features are impossible by natural processes, i.e. arguing for the supernatural.
I can’t speak for others, but I can for myself. While I don’t think science has the tools to address the supernatural, I do think it’s well within its capabilities to ask whether known processes can explain some phenomenon. And that’s what most ID arguments, including irreducible complexity, boil down to: evolution couldn’t have done this, therefore God. My problem with these arguments, then, isn’t that they’re unscientific – it’s that they’re bad arguments. For example, there is no reason that irreducibly complex systems can’t evolve to be that way, so what is the point in arguing that some systems are irreducibly complex? So what?
Earlier in this thread, we were discussing a published paper making ID arguments. For support, that paper relied on Axe’s study to show that functional proteins are rare (which the study in question couldn’t possibly show) and on Dembski’s calculation of the bacterial flagellum’s probability of spontaneous assembly (which has nothing to do with its probability of arising through evolution), and it even brings in Sanford’s hopelessly misguided idea of genetic entropy. These are bad arguments, and they’re not just something dreamed up by random people arguing on the internet – these are the best arguments the ID movement has produced.
If both the people who are naturally opposed to your arguments and those who would naturally support them think your arguments are bad, maybe it’s the quality of the arguments that you need to be reassessing.
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That’s an interesting point. I think the concept behind that is that people think that well, water turning to wine isn’t probable, which males it a miracle; thus since a bacterial flagellum’s probability of just happening is tiny, then it must be a miracle. What that fails to consider is that God turns water to wine all the time, He just uses soil and rain and sunshine and fermentation – natural processes all – which tells us that God can make things like a bacterial flagellum quite nicely by using natural processes.
Especially when so ID is pushed by YECists given that YEC is clearly a form of scientism since it assumes that if the scriptures aren’t 100% scientifically correct then the whole thing is false.
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We are about 100 million nucleotides different from primates. Given 150 000 haplotype blocks, this means 700 mutations per block. How do we imagine that these mutations were fixed and that hitch hiking of deleterious mitations in these blocks was prevented in an ample 300 000 generations?
- Welcome to my world: “The Problem of the Now”
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Makes me think of something a calculus professor said once, that if you observe something happening and write an equation to describe it, by the time you’ve finished writing the equation the thing it is meant to describe is no longer present. We had an enjoyable fifteen or twenty minutes batting that around!
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The human genome is separated from that of chimpanzees by about 40 million mutations (some of which involved more than one base), or about 20 million in each lineage. The vast majority of those were neutral, with no effect on fitness. How many deleterious mutations were there? Current estimates are that about 2.5% of human mutations are deleterious, which means that, were selection not operating, we could have expected roughly half a million additional mutations that were eliminated by selection. (In mechanistic terms, looking backward, the ancestry of each haplotype block does not go through the individuals in whom deleterious mutations in that block occurred.) That means three or four deleterious mutations occurred in each block – in total, over roughly 250,000 generations. One deleterious mutation per haplotype block every 60,000 generations – which is much slower than it takes to clear a deleterious mutation from the population – means that only a small fraction of blocks are occupied by deleterious mutations at any given time, which in turn means that most beneficial mutations will not occur in an occupied block.
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I see some aspects that might attenuate this statement.
- From all mutations that occur only a very low percentage reach fixation in the population. The chance for fixation is 1/Ne (effective population). Assumed an Ne of 10,000 this means that the chance is 1/10000. Which means that the millions of mutations, currently present in the genome is only a small part of them that occurred in our genome history: billions. This is relevant, since, when 2.5% is deleterious, this means that the load of deleterious mutations in ten thousand times higher than assumed. Additionally, we should assume that the initial load of deleterious mutations is higher, since these mutations were removed more efficiently compared to neutral mutations, but with a fitness cost.
- It is assumed here that 60 000 generations is by far enough time to get rid of an deleterious mutation. However, most deleterious mutations are only slightly deleterious (and I think that the percentage of 2.5% is used for the moderate of severe deleterious ones, so the % of slightly deleterious ones is higher if I am correct). Slightly deleterious mutations can stay in populations for tens of thousands of generations.
- Most beneficial mutations are only slightly beneficial. This means that the formula for neutral mutations is applicable. This formula says that the time necessary for fixation is 4Ne. When Ne was 10,000 this means that it takes 40,000 generations for fixation, which means that the chance that a beneficial mutation experience the emergence of a deleterious mutation is 66%.
The claims of ID often fall into the error of scientism. Christians who accept the evidence from God’s creation of the use of evolution as the primary pattern of creating new kinds of organisms are rejecting scientism.
ID falls into the error of scientism when it asserts that science should be the way that we look for evidence of God. In reality, we should see science as a description of God’s ordinary patterns of working in creation. Because of this, it’s not all that useful as a way of detecting Him. It’s a bit like trying to discern whether there is any intelligent purpose behind my post by analyzing the electrons involved or the physical properties of the electronics.
ID also falls into the error of scientism when it claims that failure to find ID evidence implies absence of God.
A further complication is that popular ID is generally not very good scientifically. One might be sympathetic to the idea of looking for scientifically detectable exceptions to the ordinary patterns of natural laws while objecting to the quality of popular arguments.
Also, ID includes a variety of views, including some that are not Christian. Besides the fact that the Raelians’ version of ID is “the aliens made humans through cloning technology”, their claims that Jesus was just a previous example of someone in touch with the aliens like “Rael” is and their promotion of their “free love” position with clothing-deficient parades should not meet with approval with Christians. More central in the ID movement, Jonathan Wells is in the Unification Church and endorses Rev. Moon, not Jesus, as the ultimate messiah. Christians can work with non-Christians, but marketing that as Christian apologetics is not sound.
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A major problem in any such calculation is meaningfully determining whether a mutation is beneficial, deleterious, or neutral and how beneficial or deleterious it is. Organisms are trying to survive in a complex and changing environment in which they need to balance many different aspects of survival. A mutation that provides an advantage in one setting may be disadvantageous in another and vice versa. Countless mutations have no evident effect. If a mutation is highly deleterious, to the point of non-functionality, then the organism dies and the mutation doesn’t get passed on. If the organism can survive and reproduce, then the DNA is good enough.
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