Posted on 08/23/2009 11:49:00 AM PDT by neverdem
THE “war” between science and religion is notable for the amount of civil disobedience on both sides. Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight. Whether out of a live-and-let-live philosophy, or a belief that religion and science are actually compatible, or a heartfelt indifference to the question, they’re choosing to sit this one out.
Still, the war continues, and it’s not just a sideshow. There are intensely motivated and vocal people on both sides making serious and conflicting claims.
There are atheists who go beyond declaring personal disbelief in God and insist that any form of god-talk, any notion of higher purpose, is incompatible with a scientific worldview. And there are religious believers who insist that evolution can’t fully account for the creation of human beings.
I bring good news! These two warring groups have more in common than they realize. And, no, it isn’t just that they’re both wrong. It’s that they’re wrong for the same reason. Oddly, an underestimation of natural selection’s creative power clouds the vision not just of the intensely religious but also of the militantly atheistic.
If both groups were to truly accept that power, the landscape might look different. Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
The believers who need to hear this sermon aren’t just adherents of “intelligent design,” who deny that natural selection can explain biological complexity in general. There are also believers with smaller reservations about the Darwinian story. They accept that God used evolution to do his creative work (“theistic evolution”), but think that, even so, he had to step in and provide special ingredients at some...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
==As previously posted in a different thread, one of the first abilities that evolved was the ability to evolve rapidly to adjust to changing circumstances.
LOL...you are assuming what must be proved. If you cannot empirically demonstrate that evolution evolved the ability to “evolve” (read: adapt) rapidly, then it comes down to which explanation explains rapid adaptation better, evolution or intelligent design. And since these incredibly complex, rapid and targeted adaptations benefit the organism and help it survive in real time, intelligent design is the inference to the best explanation by far.
Dyin's a hard way to make a living, son.
All your supposed "rapid and targeted adaptations" involved die-offs on a massive scale. Now, nature, she don't care much. She has an endless supply of new soldiers springing up to lay their lives on the wire, but that seems a bit more extravagant and wasteful than targeted.
Besides, it was your thread. Don't you read them?
Clearly, they reach a stage of development and enlightened understanding in which they simply refuse to accept evolution.
This is my thread? Whatever gave you that idea?
As for the rest of your reply, just to be clear I’m referring to the ability of organisms to redesign targeted genes, and to rearrange regulatory networks, to adapt to environmental stresses on the fly. Not only that, many of these targeted adaptations can be passed on to offspring. These findings make intelligent design the inference to the best explanation hands down.
No, I was speaking of this thread, in which you posted this clarion observation:
"Evolvability is thus built-in, and the pre-existing molecular machinery facilitates the incorporation of new DNA sequence changes that occur via recombinations and mutations."As to this portion of your statement: "... I’m referring to the ability of organisms to redesign targeted genes, and to rearrange regulatory networks, to adapt to environmental stresses on the fly. Not only that, many of these targeted adaptations can be passed on to offspring."
I shall be intrigued to read your paper when it is published.
Anything but God. The personification of what is supposed to merely be a process in attributing *creative power* to natural selection, shows that people just can't get away from the design that is so obvious in a cursory look at nature.
Evos attribute to natural selection what creationists attribute to God.
Natural selection has just become a replacement for God for them. Rename it and one doesn't have to answer to it, or have it put any inconvenient demands on one's life.
I wouldn't get to hung up on the word "evolvability", as the author is merely summarizing Kirschner and Gerhart's theory of facilitated variation. Both Kirschner and Gerhart are Evos. Therefore they assume evolution in their otherwise fascinating book. Alex Williams goes on to show why facilitated variation is much better explained by creation/intelligent design. Perhaps William's conclusion, complete with a startling admission from Kirchner and Gerhart, escaped your attention:
"Let’s stand back consider the big picture of how life works at the molecular level.
Life consists of conserved core processes and modular regulatory circuits. All the special properties of the conserved processes had to be in place before regulatory evolution could take place. Where did they come from? ‘They may have emerged together as a suite, for we know of no organism today that lacks any part of the suite.’
‘The novelty and complexity of the cell [the most important conserved core processes that has modular regulatory circuitry built-in] is so far beyond anything inanimate in the world of today that we are left baffled by how it was achieved.’
A living organism is ‘a poised response system [that] responds to mutation by making changes it is largely prepared in advance to make.’ ‘Genetic variation or mutation does not have to be creative; it only needs to trigger the creativity built into the conserved mechanisms.’
It could not be otherwise, because invariable life would soon become extinct.
Who will be game enough to say the words? Only intelligent design can explain such data. There are no naturalistic explanations."
==As to this portion of your statement: "... I’m referring to the ability of organisms to redesign targeted genes, and to rearrange regulatory networks, to adapt to environmental stresses on the fly. Not only that, many of these targeted adaptations can be passed on to offspring." I shall be intrigued to read your paper when it is published.
Surely you have heard of adaptive mutation and epigenetic inheritance????
PS I'm still waiting for your empirical evidence that evolution evolved the ability evolve rapidly. If you don't have the goods, then it comes down to a historical inference to the best explanation, and as the above makes clear, creation/intelligent design wins this contest hands down.
As if the Temple of Darwin fanatics aren’t religious...LOL!
I should like to delicately point out that you are shaving with the wrong side of Occam's Razor.
Mathematics is no less dogmatic than religious doctrine. Does that make it a religion too?
I’m game. Why don’t you start by demonstrating why random processes plus survival are a better explanation than creation/intelligent design for the origin of the digital code contained in our DNA.
That's it? You're baffled?
Okay, fine. Just step aside, scratching your head, while the rest of us try to learn something.
If it helps, I can commiserate. I have much the same problem in regard to nuclear physics. The apparent fact that there are particles that make up what I had learned in school were the basic building blocks of everything, neutrons, protons, and electrons, is something that I find extremely perplexing. It just seems needlessly complicated.
However, I'm not entirely ready to give up quite yet. If I have a prayer at all, it is that God will show me how to make dirt.
Why, I'm not entirely sure that they are.
Have you any evidence that creation/intelligent design constitutes a better explanation than random processes plus survival for the origin of the digital code contained in our DNA?
I doubt that either is provable at the moment. How would you go about testing these hypotheses to determine which has more relevance to the matter under investigation?
Perhaps you will be willing to stipulate that random processes and selection are responsible for the current digital code in our DNA, and we'll try some recursion analysis to see if these phenomena can be extrapolated backwards a bit.
==That’s it? You’re baffled?
That was your fellow evos Kirschner and Gerhart talking, not me. They are the one’s scratching their heads.
==Have you any evidence that creation/intelligent design constitutes a better explanation than random processes plus survival for the origin of the digital code contained in our DNA?
All we have is historical science, which relies on inference to the best explanation to rank multiple competing hypotheses. And since intelligent design is the only known cause of complex, specified, digital
codes, intelligent design is not only the best inference for the existence of DNA, but it is also the only inference that is supported by empirical empirical reality.
It doesn’t take much to reach a stage of bafflement.
The question is what do you do after that?
See last.
That kind of thinking might convince you that horses designed horse-drawn wagons.
Good tagline concept.
ID is evolution intermittantly sparked with design. How can a YEC’er like you support an evolution based theory of mans common descent?
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