I don’t believe IC systems can’t evolve because no one has presented evidence that this is the case. All that has been offered is “because I say so”. That’s not convincing.
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There is no such evidence. It does not exist in the present it cannot exist in the resent. And you cannot produce one doing it. That is the only demonstartion I would accept (And i am guessing that is the evidence you require for IC)
RIchard
If birds evolved from dinosaurs we would expect to see fossils with a mixture of dinosaur and bird features. That’s exactly what we observe in the fossil record in many different species, such as the species in the Microraptor genus.
This is evidence.
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Did you read the interview with Dr. Peltzer?
I didn’t say they did. I said that some people put very little effort into imagining how something might have happened. Stone archways are built using scaffolding, and the scaffolding is later removed. One hundred years later the bridge is still there and people have forgotten the scaffolding ever existed. The same principle applies in biology.
Sure there are things in biology that science has not untangled yet, but Irreducibly Complex is not falsifiable - not testable - and so not even a problem for science to consider.
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Skimming through it, Peltzer seems to be saying that he doesn’t think any of the past or current research is capable of telling us how life originated. He also states that he doesn’t think life could originate through unguided natural processes. His only recommendation for future research is to have a symposium where people will suggest the very things he already thinks aren’t viable. I wasn’t able to find any examples of scientific research he would do that would supply positive evidence for the processes he thinks started life.
Am I getting this wrong?
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Plus, there’s the persistence of streptomycin example above… The case is simple but it is both directly observable and very experimentally tractable. We know the ancestral sequences, distribution across strains and exact changes involved
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That is a good example. As with any iterable process like evolution, it is just rinse and repeat from there as more irreducible relationships are built on top of one another.
I often use cities as a non-biological example. When electricity was introduced it was a luxury for some. Over time, the use of electricity spread and people became more and more reliant on it. In the modern day, a city would utterly collapse in days to weeks if electricity wasn’t present, even though cities in the past got along just fine without it. It is the Mullerian Two Step: make it beneficial, make it necessary.
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Appreciate your thoughtful post. ID is a bit of a paradigm shift. It requires us to ask “What can we figure out?” but does not try to assert the answer “Everything!” If there has been intervention, not everything will be explainable by natural causes. But there is still so much we can work on!
Apart from origins of life, to me the most obvious interventions are the sudden appearance of phyla. Everywhere. Cambrian most obvious, but there are no gradually emerging phyla. Looks to me more like the work of a software engineer, like creating a new app.
Darwin’s finches show the extent of what evolution can accomplish in about 2.4M years. An aggressive naturalist paradigm prevents asking questions about whether this rate is adequate. The “microevolution produced all macroevolution” assertion is philosophical, not demonstrated. I don’t have faith that it’s true. 215 X 2.4M years is the history of all complex life. 215 times the changes in Darwin’s finches is not enough.
What I expect to see is more and more examples of the failure of natural causes to be able to adequately explain. Here’s a recent one: DNA in each of your cells has 10,000 lesions per day, plus repair mechanisms that fix it, but the DNA repair mechanisms are encoded in the DNA.
I think the first cell was probably simple, maybe a chemotroph, not too far from undersea vents. Work out the software there away from the more volatile surface. Photosynthesis might have been next. But it’s astonishingly brilliant, all of it! From the fine tuning up to a probably unique planet, to origins, through the development of species, and then consciousness. You cannot get the identity of the author from this, but it’s obvious to me it was intentional.
This argument doesn’t make any sense to me. The most obvious problem is that there are no phyla in nature. Phyla are human constructs that we use to organize species. From an evolutionary point of view, it isn’t surprising at all that phyla emerge in the first sediments that have complex life. That’s exactly where we would expect to see them since phyla would represent the earliest branches of the evolutionary tree.
I also don’t understand why, after looking at such a tiny, tiny fraction of the fossil record for such small, delicate, and rare fossils, that we would expect the fossil record to show us a gradual emergence.
What are you basing this on?
What isn’t adequately explained? Are you now arguing for a designer of the gaps?
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No, there really isn’t. It is giving up on finding any explanation at all, and any possibility of understanding. This is why ID has nothing new to offer; no inventions, no patents, no new medical treatment, no new areas of research and discovery, nothing. OTOH evolution offers all those in plenty, with more yet to come.
Nothing about this takes away from belief in the slightest. It’s just a matter of rejecting unfounded arguments that have no benefit to anyone.
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Yes, you’re getting this wrong, but not in the way you are asking. You are asserting scientific research can demonstrate the pathway, and requiring him to help with that. That’s a philosophical materialist assumption. Instead he has looked at the problems and recommended basic areas for research.
Imagine you came to the conclusion that life is not an accident. Would you stop doing science? Would you cancel the study of autocatalytic cycles? Would you no longer want to study electron gradients?
Isn’t there a delight in figuring out how things work?! Why must we adopt philosophical materialism for that to be true?
It was stated earlier that ID was a science stopper (paraphrasing). You seem to be agreeing with this sentiment.
But you don’t think we can use scientific research to figure out how life originated.
I also don’t understand why you would need to adopt philosophical materialism to believe that life originated naturally. There are scientists here at BioLogos who reject philosophical naturalism but still think life could have originated naturally in the same sense that anything originates naturally.
Oh, Dan! That is so disappointing. Am I correct that you have not engaged directly with the serious thinkers in the ID community? They are creative, fun, thoughtful, intelligent. Yes, there are plenty of idiots out there (truly on both sides), but it looks like you’re getting your data from ID haters.
Watch Bechly’s testimony and tell me he’s insincere or trying to shut down science:
Perhaps you could link us to their primary research papers where they report on the positive evidence for intelligent design? Or perhaps you could link us to their papers explaining the data already well understood through evolution, such as why we consistently see the same values for non-synonymous and intron substitution rates, or why we see the same spectrum of mutations occurring in living populations as seen in both human genetic variation and in comparisons of the human genome and other vertebrate species.
No, of course not. That’s what you want me to say. You’re reading it in.
Point granted. Deism and forms of providential theism go that way. But in practice per this discussion, they are indistinguishable from philosophical naturalism.
In your link, Venema uses the term “antievolutionary apologetics.” There is too much of that out there, for sure. However for me and many others, it’s the realization that some places in the data falsify the theory. Evolution needed help.
Then what scientific research is being done by ID proponents into what they believe to be the process that led to life?
Perhaps you could start a thread on the topic, including the ID scientific research that details these conclusions and the data that supports it?
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Hi Marty. Many thanks! I appreciate learning about your thinking on the matter. My earlier reply was my quick impression on the matter and details involved.
I think that is a not uncommon speculation among design theorists. I just wished there were positive, independent, proposals and frameworks beyond the notion that ‘evolution can’t do that’. I’ve heard of a number of Christian bioscientists that could get on board if a well-considered design theoretic could be developed that was more coherent and workable. There have been some attempts, like Walter ReMine’s Biotic Message Theory, which made some positive assertions based on how he suggested a designer might try to communicate its hand in species creation, but generally they haven’t managed to take even the ID world by storm. Phil Johnson liked ReMine’s book for the anti-evolutionary commentary but the meat of Biotic Message Theory didn’t seem to tickle a lot of interest. Dembski once reported on attempts to model human design practices on what we see in organisms, but that was almost 20 years ago. I suspect it didn’t catch on. Paul Nelson tried to work out a concept of Ontogenetic Depth but it was never released.
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Specialized ecological niches will allow for limited specialized adaptations. Larger changes in environment or niche opportunity will promote more substantial adaptations. Sharks and crocodilia display plenty of evolution over epochs, but have retained their recognizable forms throughout because they are pretty successful as is. For whales, the transition to open seas presented both opportunity and novel selective pressures, so the adaptations are much more visible. Evolution is not a force continuously driving animals to change into something else. Darwin’s finches do not provide any guidance to the general evolutionary rate of change, because there is no set rate of evolutionary change.
You could, and some do. Extending the catalog of scientific facts has its own merits. The most interesting science for many, however, is in the fundamental dynamics and processes of nature, and those investigations inevitably tie into questions concerning the wellspring of our existence.
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Gunter, RIP. He had quite the unconventional journey.
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