Tribune7: You're the one making assumptions about my motivations.
No, that was a critique of the horse-donkey-zebra/camel-llama argument. The author described a very logical consequence of evolution as "freakish" and invited the reader's incredulity. If it's not the bulk of a large article, the rest is no better. "They're still just (lizards/guppies/finches)!" "The progression wasn't logical and directed!" (I.e., it undid itself later.) Arguments of this latter sort are based upon hidden, false assumptions that might slip past the uncritical reader. Evolution has no goal. If the environmental pressures whip you back and forth, back and forth you go.
From Behe's mousetrap article:
(1) McDonald's reduced-component traps are not single-step intermediates in the building of the mousetrap I showed; (2) intelligence was intimately involved in constructing the series of traps; (3) if intelligence is necessary to make something as simple as a mousetrap, we have strong reason to think it is necessary to make the much more complicated machinery of the cell.I haven't had time to read the whole article, but I'm not impressed with what he claims will be proven in the details. The injection of intelligence anywhere is cited to invalidate evidence against ID/creationism. ("But it took intelligence, a designer, to set up the experiment!") Now we see that it apparently takes intelligence to rebut a creationist argument.
Yeah, but only so much.
Fair enough.
The author described a very logical consequence of evolution as "freakish" and invited the reader's incredulity. If it's not the bulk of a large article, the rest is no better. "They're still just (lizards/guppies/finches)!" "The progression wasn't logical and directed!" (I.e., it undid itself later.) Arguments of this latter sort are based upon hidden, false assumptions that might slip past the uncritical reader.
You're saying there is a hidden, false assumption. How do you know this?
Evolution has no goal. If the environmental pressures whip you back and forth, back and forth you go.
You're committing a similar taboo to the one you criticize the ID people as doing. Namely, you make the assumption that macro-evolution is right and any observation must be in accordance with it.
Now, I've never heard of McClarren (note my earlier misspelling.) I'm basing my comments assuming his observations are accurate. Are they? If so, he feels they refute macro-evolution. Would they? Does macro-evolution require "slow, steady change" as McClarren claims?
I haven't had time to read the whole (Behe) article,
You'd have to read more of it to get the gist of it. McDonald fails to show a gradual single-step evolution into the mousetrap as we know it. Behe makes McDonald look pretty silly for even trying.