I notice that your question has changed somewhat. Just what do you mean by "naturally"? As opposed to UN-naturally perhaps? Or SUPER-naturally?
Can only God make a tree?
Posted on 05/17/2004 12:55:05 PM PDT by Michael_Michaelangelo
Correct, for reasons I laid out in post #13. And additionally, such a discovery would hardly make vanish all of the mountains of evidence which indicate that Darwinian evolution *has* and *does* occur. At most such a single example indicate that something *more* was involved, not that a wholesale "rejection of present theories" was called for. In a like manner, classical/Newtonian physics was not "invalidated" by the discoveries of quantum physics and relativity, instead they were expanded upon. And classical physics is *still* valid in the domain for which it was developed.
but one example of biological claim you believe to be fallacious is enough to discard the entire essay which contains it.
I concur. It's an example of the rule that I like to call, "if they can't get even the easy stuff right, how can we trust them on the hard issues?" In this case, the error being made is elementary, and shows such a fundamental lack of logical reasoning ability due to True Believerism(tm), that I really doubt the author(s) will be able to produce any worthwhile insights.
Nope, no hypocrisy here.
None at all. But thanks for trying to make force such a grossly apples-and-oranges comparison into some sort of cheesy claim of "it's the same thing, but you're treating them inconsistently, you hypocrite". I think you owe the man an apology.
Btw, even if that assertion is wrong, it is not set up as a logical fallacy.
Sure it is.
Things which are incorrect are not de facto logical fallacies.
Neither are they de facto *not* logical fallacies. You sort of "forgot" to indicate why you're under the mistaken impression that it isn't one. Simply waving your hands about "incorrect things are not automatically logical fallacies" (thank you, Mr. Obvious) does nothing to support your implication, son.
The reason it *is* a logical fallacy is because it's an example of the False Dilemma Fallacy". The author relies on the notion that life must be the result of either wholly design OR wholly evolution, and thus concludes that if a speck of design is found, evolution would be "overturned" because they *both* can't be true to some degree. In fact, they both *can* be, as I showed in my prior post, which is just one of the the many ways in which both Darwinian evolution *and* intelligent design could be compatible.
There's also more than a bit of the Complex Cause Fallacy in the author's error.
Using one unrelated argument to "disprove" something else, however, is. Just for your consideration...
Believe me, I've given your post more consideration than it was worth.
...and emptily derisive non sequiturs...
No, or we wouldn't be arguing about it with scientific illiterates.
Hey. Your dealing with folks who cannot articulate the relationship between intelligence and design, let alone whether one can exist without the other. Don't expect to see much more than a snowflake or two. Ice cold.
Please do not mention that here, lest creationists be held down to a single theory of their own.
Well, the discovery of some intelligently designed feature in living things would certainly undermine some elements of certain people's belief system, but it would nonetheless coexist just fine with evolutionary science. Personally, I have no problem whatsoever with the idea in the abstract, despite there being no evidence whatsoever for that at this juncture.
Most people would embrace the implications without hesitation. Most want to 'believe' even if it's against their better rational judgment. Many who currently don't would seize on the slightest rationale to do so..
No.
Is that object in the proportions 1:8:27?
Thanks for the ping!
TOPS has mistated what evolutionary theory said. This has nothing to do with validity, only with the TOPS writer's misunderstanding or dishonesty with respect to evolution.
It was supposed to be, but the prop department screwed up. (Really)
OK, so I have no idea what a centriole is or whether his hypothesis that overactive centrioles lead to chromosome damage during mitosis has merit. But I see two problems with his paper that haven't been mentioned yet:
Take, for example, research on the vast regions of vertebrate genomes that do not code for proteins. From a neo-Darwinian perspective, DNA mutations can provide the raw materials for evolution because DNA encodes proteins that determine the essential features of organisms. Since non-coding regions do not produce proteins, Darwinian biologists have been dismissing them for decades as random evolutionary noise or "junk DNA." From an ID perspective, however, it is extremely unlikely that an organism would expend its resources on preserving and transmitting so much "junk." It is much more likely that noncoding regions have functions that we simply haven't discovered yet.Recent research shows that "junk DNA" does, indeed, have previously unsuspected functions. Although that research was done in a Darwinian framework, its results came as a complete surprise to people trying to ask Darwinian research questions. The fact that "junk DNA" is not junk has emerged not because of evolutionary theory but in spite of it. On the other hand, people asking research questions in an ID framework would presumably have been looking for the functions of non-coding regions of DNA all along, and we might now know considerably more about them.
This is not true. How much of our DNA is junk depends on how strong the selection pressure should be against junk. IOW, it depends on what the cost of carrying the extra DNA around would be to the organism. I have no idea how much all our DNA weighs, or how many calories per day we expend in maintaining & duplicating our DNA, but I have a hard time believing that, over time, there wouldn't be a cost to having a genome that's 95% junk.
Furthermore, since sections of DNA can get deleted just as easily as sections can get duplicated or moved around, then 95% of all deletion mutations should occur in regions of junk. At the very least they should be neutral WRT fitness. Even in that case it should never have been possible for us to accumulate 20 times as much junk as coding sequences.
So, evolutionary theory leads me to predict that the amount of actual junk in our genomes should be much less than 95%.
Ah, but then consider the fact that many exons inside genes roughly correspond to functional domains of the resulting proteins (something you wouldn't expect to see if it was all random), and you start to see hints at a longer-term evolutionary reason why junk sequences would be selected for: If sequences get duplicated & shuffled around at random, then if 95% of the sequence is noncoding then there's a 1 in 10 chance that a duplication will start and stop in a noncoding region. This would preserve self-contained coding sequences that have already "proven themselves" to produce functional protein domains. This would be a great advantage for evolution of new proteins. It would greatly increase the chances of the duplicated gene(s) finding new work as they mutate further away from their original sequences.
This would actually help explain why bacteria have no junk DNA at all: You need duplication of functional genes & gene parts to generate the kind of biochemical complexity found in complex multicellular organisms like ourselves. To test this hypothesis you should be able to correlate the number of differentiated cell types in various species vs. how much of their genomes are noncoding "junk". The more complex the species, the more junk you should find.
So evolutionary theory actually contains hints that point both ways - both for more junk DNA (in higher organisms at least) and for less junk DNA.
The second problem I have with his paper is his contention that ID implies that "if centrioles look like turbines they might actually be turbines". There's no reason to think that both unguided evolution and intelligent design can't both come up with an obvious solution to the same engineering problem. In fact, I'll bet that some engineering grad student somewhere has used evolutionary algorithms to design a better turbine!
Mainstream biologists look at a biological mechanism's evident purpose all the time, and don't have any problems assigning their origin to evolution. And every time they do refer to the "design" or "purpose" of some biological phenomenon, creationists sneer at them for using the metaphor.
Only with base ten numbers....
So there is no way for science to prove that something like a watch did not occur naturally? Or that a tree did?
I notice that your question has changed somewhat. Just what do you mean by "naturally"? As opposed to UN-naturally perhaps? Or SUPER-naturally?
That's a different question. You will get a better grasp of the problems involved when you figure out why the questions differ.
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