[quote=“Biosemiosis.org, post:222, topic:4930”] I suggest you pay particular attention to Pattee, Crick, Barbieri, and Koonin, for technical matters
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You have to be kidding me - are you really including Eugene Konin’s multiverse hypothesis in your “supporting evidence”? Do you realize that his response to reviewer #1 flat out denies ID by stating “Again, there is absolutely no teleology involved, I could not insist more strongly on this point”.
You truly are either confused or trying way too hard to deflect attention from questions you simply cannot answer or do not like the answer to. I truly praise @Jonathan_Burke for his patience to try to keep you on topic - it’s certainly more than I find the time or interest to do.
Koonin’s understanding of the coupled-translation apparatus is the issue at hand. Not his worldview, nor mine. Cannot the members of this blog grasp the distinction between themselves and physical evidence?.
Is it the case that you must misrepresent what is being said in order to deal with it? If not then why did you just misrepresent this?
Perhaps you should be more explicit about how you believe Koonin’s work provides any kind of support for ID. Especially since he denies it so strongly.
I did exactly what you recommended. How exactly have I misrepresented anything you said in your paragraph above? You made absolutely no point about Koonin’s paper other than including it in your bibliography so I am at liberty to question any aspect of it that contradicts your claims.
No you are not free to suggest that Koonin’s denial of ID diminishes his technical observations regarding the coupled translation apparatus, and therefore my use of his observations reflects confusion on my part. That is an attack on my comment to Jon that has no merit.
And as far as Koonin’s paper goes, guess what else he doesn’t involve in the origin of the coupled translation apparatus?
Perhaps you can gather from the title of his paper?
The cosmological model of eternal inflation and the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life
Koonin describes the intellectual need for an infinite number of universes, specifically in order to give chance an endless number of opportunities to establish the coupled translation apparatus.
“even in this toy model that assumes a deliberately inflated rate of RNA production, the probability that a coupled translation-replication emerges by chance in a single O-region is P<10-1018.”
And what again was Behe’s definition of irreducible complexity?
It’s not rhetoric to ask you how you believe Koonin’s paper supports ID. When you cite a paper which you claim supports ID, it’s your responsibility to explain why you believe this. Otherwise I have no incentive to read the paper in the first place.
If I am misrepresenting you then please let me know how. You seem to be telling Nuno that Koonin’s work provides support for ID, right here. If Koonin’s paper doesn’t provide support for ID, then what’s the point in me reading it?
Here is what Behe has to say about irreducible complexity:
I never wrote that «there could never be any functional intermediates that natural selection could have selected for on the way to any irreducibly complex system. Those are Pennock’s words. On the contrary, on page 40, I point out that, although irreducible complexity does rule out direct routes, it does not automatically rule out indirect ones.» [in Darwin’s Black Box, Ten year edition, page 285]
In other words, irreducible complexity is not really useful to show anything about intelligent design. If irreducible complexity can emerge by natural processes then it is a dead end for proving that an external designer must exist.
I have to agree with @Jonathan_Burke here as well. What you write is mostly ‘rant’. You elevate intense rhetoric against inconsequential points. Example? Your unsupported statement:
Eddie wrote to Jon: "Also factually incorrect, as my remarks did not constitute a “rant.” ’
(content deleted for attributing negative motivations to other people. Bad George. )
George - I for one welcome Eddie’s contributions and challenges as all views help us better understand where we all stand, especially those that are as well informed and gracious as Eddie has repeatedly shown to be. Let’s not lose track of all those positive points just because of any one post or conversation.
I agree with your reading of Behe’s views - the sentences following the excerpt I sent continue to extend his position in that direction. But the main point I was making, and that Behe and you also make to some extent, is that irreducible complexity is different from whether a system of parts can emerge by natural processes. In brief, to say that a system S is irreducibly complex just means that if you remove any of its parts then it will cease to perform its typical function. This, of course, does not preclude that a system T with 95% of the same parts could have existed with a different (though probably somewhat similar) function and that T could thus have been the precursor from which S emerged with a lot less need for novelty than if S just emerged out of nowhere in just one step.
I would also not be exceedingly surprised if new mechanisms of genomic evolution were discovered - it was not so long ago that the importance of RNA and epigenetics was seriously underestimated so I don’t think you’ll find many people defending that we’re definitely done defining how genomes can evolve. As such, a formal proof could likely be easily constructed showing that nucleotide polymorphisms are not enough to generate the diversity of life we see today - even a single reversal or crossover can already generate way more variation than would be probabilistically reasonable with just polymorphism rates within a single generation. But this only proves that certain mechanisms are not enough - it does not establish the impossibility that other mechanisms (e.g., duplications, etc.) cannot help things move faster and eventually bridge the “evolutionary rate gaps” that we observe today.
Denton’s hypothesis is an interesting twist on the ID conversation - isn’t it somewhat contradictory to argue on the one hand that a) only intervention by an external intelligent being can bridge gaps in evolution or abiogenesis (e.g., Meyer) and on the other hand argue that b) the laws of nature are so predetermined that the outcomes we see today are all nearly inevitable (Denton)? How are these views reconciled within the ID realm?
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