Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

Just to be clear, you're rejecting a "Slartibartfast designer", "other type of god thing" or "some type of external intelligence just gifted [leaf-bug] with this appearance" as possible explanations?

As for the leaf-bug... is it really so different from say... a lacewing...

I'm not categorically rejecting or proposing anything other than some form of intelligence. I don't know what form that intelligence takes (as I've repeated so many times). Personally, I do not go with the idea of a designer god and his celestial drawing board. I prefer to think in terms of systems endowed with intelligence somehow - whether that be the some kind of consciousness in the cell, in the organism as a whole, in the species as a whole or in the biosphere as a whole. In fact I prefer to think of intelligence permeating all of those levels and beyond into whatever constitutes a spiritual environment.

Your trivialisation of my (and other's) position is frankly insulting.

As for the leaf-bug, if you can't see the difference, you should have gone to SpecSavers.

Cagey. Through personal incredulity, propose something vague, unspecific and untestable then complain when it’s dismissed with a hand wave?

Cagey. Through personal incredulity, propose something vague, unspecific and untestable then complain when it’s dismissed with a hand wave?

And the occasional contemptuous gibe adds so much more to the discussion, right?

And the occasional contemptuous gibe adds so much more to the discussion, right?

Anything postulated with a hand wave can be equally easily dismissed. The Ethical Skeptic over at Skeptiko adds so much more to the discussion here:

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/in...ost-127246

Unfortunately, Bailey wasn’t up to the battle

Cagey. Through personal incredulity, propose something vague, unspecific and untestable then complain when it’s dismissed with a hand wave?

Is this a recap of your behavior when you said rejection of materialism was based on a lack of imagination about what matter can do?

Just random mutation and natural selection are obviously untenable, there are clearly lots of mechanisms, and lots of ways for life to tap into them. But I see no reason to invoke a Slartibartfast designer. or other type of god thing. I’m damn sure that if you could ask leaf-bug’s millions of ancestors whether some type of external intelligence just gifted them with this appearance, they would tell you to bugger off with your intuition, as their lives had been very hard, and billions had died, or been killed on the journey.

I agree, positing that a God which can create all reality on a whim bothering with evolution leaves deep questions about the benevolence of such an entity.

But one can ask whether there are some kind of entities weighting the dice of random mutation, or some kind of non-mental teleological principles (Nagel's proposal) to account for some of the more incredible evolutionary examples.

Anything postulated with a hand wave can be equally easily dismissed. The Ethical Skeptic over at Skeptiko adds so much more to the discussion here:

http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/in...ost-127246

Unfortunately, Bailey wasn’t up to the battle

Actually, I don't really have a problem with this (from your link):

Right now it simply comprises a group of ideas along with a general distaste for natural selection.

He's probably right. The fact is that, apart from the few working at the Discovery Institute, little science is being done in the direction of ID so it can't compete as a mature theory (more science is happening with the so-called Third Way, however). My incredulity, as you like to put it, is towards NS+RM. I don't care about proving some god did it, I care that the mechanism we have been spoon-fed for 150 years seems inadequate. The fact that darwinists refuse to allow a place intelligence a priori doesn't help, even if the NS+RM skeptics like myself concede that the designer god insisted upon by the religionists is probably wrong. The debate is just as ideological from the darwinist perspective as it is from the religious one. 

My ideas are not science, they are just that: ideas. You have the luxury of plenty of support for darwinsim because that has been the only game in town for 150 years and before that it was some ludicrous Genesis myth. So hand-wave away but maybe pause along the way to ask yourself, what exactly was the sequence of steps required to paint that moth's wing?

I’m perfectly happy with people invoking a Slartibartfast BTW... but invoking Slartibartfast, at the same time as posting pictures of patterns, that look similar to other patterns, and asking the question “what good...” suggests something is being misunderstood.

Yeah I don't personally have much stake in this, as I said before any God worth worshiping isn't going to be found by, as Feser says, playing "Where's Waldo?" with mutations.

Can you go more into the advantage of gradual mutation? If that's the crux point of the issue seems like a good way to move the debate.