Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

I guess the question here is also whether ID proponents are helping or hurting the field by raising objections in the form of unsolved or weakly solved problems. Even if they’re wrong, the net benefit is a plus for science. Same for parapsychology.

I would have thought you would be the first to recognise that religious mission statements are not scientific, and so can't really enter the debate

What you, and others, do not seem to understand, is that this mission statement prevents the DI from acknowledging scientific research that goes against their dogma.  
If the DI is true to these founding principles, as i believe it is, it means that it's output is not scientific, and therefore can not enter the debate.
 

- yet it is you (and Sparky) who constantly push the debate here away from science and back to religious questions.

David

What debate David? If the science proves you wrong, it must be a materialistic conspiracy, or you simply stop responding.
There can be no real debate if you keep relying on apologetics, instead of science.
What is the use of a debate if you put your own intuition above good research? 

And even then, what positive scientific evidence for ID is there? The only thing they do is point at a gap in the knowledge and say "design!".
I have never seen anything else than negative arguments that result in arguments from ignorance, and "designer of the gaps" arguments.

The basic premise of ID holds no water, if you try to get there from any sort of real evidence.

As, on the other hand, you already believe that there is some of sort intelligence governing our universe, DI probably makes all the sense of the world.
The problem is you can only get to that through a faith based belief. 
It makes no difference if that is the faith based belief that a deity exists, or it is based on the faith based believe in other supernatural forces.

The evidence brought forth should be strong enough to convince without relying on a previous belief in supernatural causes.

My post was in every way meant to help you -- not derail the thread with vague comments about politics and religion.  Do you have any commentary about counter-factual evidence to modern Darwinism, such as presented by Turner or academics involved with the Third Way.  Please note: that Dr Turner and Third Way of Evolution proponents do not ascribe to the DI.

Are organisms that can harness the "will to live" and other survival instincts more fit and pass on emotional intelligence in their genes.

It seems to me that in human breeding that alpha males do better at the club scene?  (my data may be out of date).  I think they do get lucky more often, especially when they have documented results as to winning in sports, titles and finances.

What is meant to you by the phrase "good genes"?

I haven't really read enough about Turner to have an opinion either way.
What i have seen from the Third Way movement (also not that much to be honest), leaves me a bit puzzled what their actual point is. It seems to me that the view points of individual members differ quite a lot. The only thing they seem to have in common, is an unease with standard TOE, which seems a bit of a strange rally point to me.

I admit I don't know a lot about the biochemistry of genetics or any of the general math of it so I can't comment on any of that. But I've had my own ideas on things that would be likely to evolve. If I'm correct, TOE states that the things that are most adapted to their environment are most likely to pass on those traits. Therefore a few things can be said with pretty much mathematical certainty:

1: Self-determination is more adaptable than random selection, thus,
        1-1: More control over the body is universally adaptable.
        1-2: More control of the environment is universally adaptable.
2: Accurate perceptions of reality create more adaptable self-determined changes than innacurate perceptions

If so then TOE predicts that evolution has a single endpoint. Entities that have complete control over both themselves and their environment. Effectively, they are the environment. I.E "gods". Nothing can possibly be more adaptable than that. If true what you should expect to see universally across all life is a slow, steady push towards increased control over both the body and environment and the knowledge that goes with it.

Do we see evidence of that? Well we unquestionably do for control over the environment. From simple rabbit burrows, ant hills, crows cracking nuts with car wheels at crosswalks, beaver dams, etc. Animals pretty much universally reshape the environment in some way to suit themselves and their own agendas. Some plants even do this, such as pine trees dropping needles to poison the ground to kill off competition for nutrients.

Do we see evidence of control over the body? At first I didn't think so except for a few fringe, paranormal things. But then I realized I was being too stringent. Think of something as simple as breathing. An automatic process that can be interrupted and controlled. Imagine what wouldn't be possible if you couldn't take control of it. Language and certain forms of fishing for starters. Genetic expression gets affected by the mind all the time. The placebo effect is another example. I've suspected for a long time that eventually they'll find evidence that the mind affects genetic mutation the same way it affects expression. Hasn't happened yet but pretty sure one day it will because of how adaptive it could be.

Do we see evidence of increasing knowledge? Well how many animals do we see using tools these days compared to what we used to think? Hell some plants have now been found to be capable of prediction via classical and operant conditioning. Talking to our plants really does make a difference.

I have suspicions that reincarnation is an evolved trait since being able to plug into past experience as a child is way more adaptive than every offspring having to learn everything from scratch over and over
again every generation. When I successfully made a self replicating energy ball back at the end of Febuary 2017 I got a bit excited since I realized that a naturally occurring version of that could provide the mechanism for continuation of consciousness, reincarnation and preserving past life memories. Yes I know I can't prove that to anyone here, yet, but I think it's still worth mentioning.

Personally I still think, even if all this is true, it's still just natural selection. It's just selection for less and less random mutation and more and more self-directed mutation. I don't think this qualifies as intelligent design since if I'm right it is neither based in intelligence nor is it design. It's at best a form of conscious influence that would somehow be passed on.

I'd be curious to know though how these extra-DNA structures are passed on from generation to generation (other than morphogenetic fields, since those have their own explanation).

Two answers.

Time-space answer: We have agreed in order to have familial relations to the rule of the passage of traits genetically. Then we go about co-creating that physical reality under that (and other) rulesets.

Mechanical/Operative/Only Now answer: All generations exist Now. Our need to experience multiple POV requires that we 'grab' information from other, concurrent lives which we express as 'traits' within our creation of physical reality. As those lives 'borrow' from us in a web and flow of information.

Apparently, there is great power in attaching to the influences of family more so than any other connections we make...for most of us it seems.

Perhaps open-minded members of this forum would be interested to review the current state of science in paradigm-threatening areas.

There is an ongoing culture war that has recently somewhat hotted up, where materialism (which has become a sort of religion) has been winning the battle for a long time and has gotten used to it. But new evidence and new ideas are starting to threaten the culture and faith of reductive materialism, so naturally the establishment fights back. The materialist faithful, especially the zealots, fight back with amazing ferocity - after all, their most cherished belief system is being challenged. 

It is very unfortunate that Christian fundamentalist young-Earth Creationists are muddying the waters by promulgating their very unscientific Scripture-based beliefs.     

 

It would be unfortunate not to have their POV.

Let's say we think they are fuggin nutz. Let's place their POV over there ------------------------------------->
                                            Put yourself right here.
<----------------------- Place the polar opposite POV over here.

From that position of neutrality is power, power to choose by contrast.

If you don't believe me, invite a few Mormons or Jehovah's into your home and listen to them.

What you, and others, do not seem to understand, is that this mission statement prevents the DI from acknowledging scientific research that goes against their dogma.  
If the DI is true to these founding principles, as i believe it is, it means that it's output is not scientific, and therefore can not enter the debate.
 


What debate David? If the science proves you wrong, it must be a materialistic conspiracy, or you simply stop responding.
There can be no real debate if you keep relying on apologetics, instead of science.
What is the use of a debate if you put your own intuition above good research? 

And even then, what positive scientific evidence for ID is there? The only thing they do is point at a gap in the knowledge and say "design!".
I have never seen anything else than negative arguments that result in arguments from ignorance, and "designer of the gaps" arguments.

The basic premise of ID holds no water, if you try to get there from any sort of real evidence.

As, on the other hand, you already believe that there is some of sort intelligence governing our universe, DI probably makes all the sense of the world.
The problem is you can only get to that through a faith based belief. 
It makes no difference if that is the faith based belief that a deity exists, or it is based on the faith based believe in other supernatural forces.

The evidence brought forth should be strong enough to convince without relying on a previous belief in supernatural causes.

Please cite specifically what research goes against ID and rather than just post links, describe specifically how it does that.

Please explain specifically how DI's output is not scientific. 

I have already pointed out that it is a logical fallacy to object to an argument just because the person posing the argument has a particular religious or other belief system you don't like. It's called the genetic fallacy. An argument must stand or fall based on its own content. This is the fallacy of irrelevance of origins where an argument is attempted to be dismissed based solely on its history, origin, or source, rather than its current meaning or context. "This fallacy avoids the argument by shifting focus onto something's or someone's origins. It's similar to an ad hominem fallacy in that it leverages existing negative perceptions to make someone's argument look bad, without actually presenting a case for why the argument itself lacks merit."

You are the one who simply doesn't respond when challenged to engage with the details of the arguments.

How is ID theory mere intuition?

Concerning the "God of the gaps" claim. First, to assume that every phenomenon that we cannot explain yet must nonetheless have a materialistic explanation is to commit a converse “materialism-of-the-gaps” fallacy. It assumes what is in contention, as an inherent assumption of and prior allegiance to metaphysical naturalism. But more importantly, even making the unwarranted prior assumption of metaphysical naturalism (the belief that absolutely all of reality is physical), ID is proposing a positive scientific testable hypothesis, and is then proceeding to test it by observation and experiment, rather than just making a "God of the gaps" claim. As an aside by the way, ID research has shown that there is in reality a giant explanatory gap for neo-Darwinism, a gap that continually gets wider and wider with continued research in the molecular biology of cellular structures. All that this discipline can come up with in the problematical areas are various fanciful just-so stories, or most often, various promissory notes that somehow  future research will come up with the answers. This has been the case for many decades and shows no signs of ever ending, as long as teleology of any nature is rigidly excluded.

Anyway, the scientific method goes from observation, to formulating the hypothesis, to formulating the predictions of the hypothesis, then to testing of the hypothesis by experiment or observation. Science is all about having hypotheses and then testing them. Science can only support or refute hypotheses that are empirically testable. The problem is when Darwinist critics say that ID isn't science, isn't such a testable hypothesis. We can indeed empirically know and understand the actions of intelligent agents, so then we can make testable predictions about what we should find if intelligent causation was at work. That’s exactly what ID proponents do. And the predictions of ID can be put to the test. 

ID is a historical science, meaning it employs the principle of uniformitarianism, which holds that the present is the key to the past. Design proponents use the standard uniformitarian reasoning of historical sciences to apply an empirically-derived cause-and-effect relationship between intelligence and certain types of informational patterns to the historical scientific record in order to account for the origin of various natural phenomena.

ID as a historical science is a legitimate use of abductive reasoning, a form of logical inference. This is the inference to the best explanation among several contenders. This methodology asks, “Given what we know about the explanatory efficacy of the various competing hypotheses, which cause best explains the evidence we observe?"

The two main contenders in this case, for the origin of certain biological structures, are neo-Darwinian evolution by random mutation plus natural selection, and some kind of intelligent agency. In these cases of biological structures combined with behavior, origin by random mutation plus natural selection is shown to be extremely implausible (though remotely possible), given factors like the complexity and sometimes irreducible complexity of the structure, the time observed to have been available, etc. But, another source of such complex machine-like structures is actually observed in the present - namely intelligent agents. 

Abductive reasoning has a long tradition of being useful in various areas of science and technology, such as philosophy of science, artificial intelligence, medicine, and analysis of competing hypotheses in intelligence.

I could go into some of the details of this, but from the quality of your previous posts you are probably not interested.

Please cite specifically what research goes against ID and rather than just post links, describe specifically how it does that.

No, Nb, you are trying to flip the burden of proof.

Modern evolutionary theory is enough to explain the diversity of species, enough is known about the mechanisms, principles behind it, etc... More than enough is known to make this a mature theory that is not easily overturned.

It is ID that needs to show research that goes against TOE, please provide credible, peer reviewed, research that goes against the basic tenets of modern biology.  

Please explain specifically how DI's output is not scientific. 

Again, this is not about a religious bias of some individuals, i have seen religious scientists work around that perfectly.
This is about the founding principles of an organization, founding principles that simply leave no room to follow the science if it goes against their central dogma.

Let us try something else, because this seems so hard to understand. 
Compare the "Wedge Document" withe the constitution of a nation, in that case the DI is constitutionally unable to be honest if the science goes against their creed. 

I do not expect you to agree, but you could at least try to see what my point is, and not put up a straw man.

How is ID theory mere intuition?

That is not what wrote, i was talking to David, with whom i had debates about this in the past, go back to my post and see if that remark makes more sense in that context. 

Concerning the "God of the gaps" claim. First, to assume that every phenomenon that we cannot explain yet must nonetheless have a materialistic explanation is to commit a converse “materialism-of-the-gaps” fallacy. It assumes what is in contention, as an inherent assumption of and prior allegiance to metaphysical naturalism. 

We are not talking about every phenomenon that we can not explain, we are specifically talking about the gaps in the knowledge concerning TOE.

TOE is based on observation and evidence, it does not start from an unproven central dogma, it makes predictions based on previous observations.

The gaps that are highlighted by the DI are not lacking in principle knowledge, they are just fragmentary by nature. 
For instance the fossil record can, by it's very nature, not be complete. The same goes for molecular biology, we can not trace the history of every protein, some information is lost for ever, some things we are finding out.

Filling in these gaps with predictions based on the tested principles is only logical. Do not forget that these gaps are also getting smaller and smaller, so the space to inject the supernatural gets smaler and smaller.

There is a fundamental difference between ID/creationism and TOE, you can not simply return the ".... of the gaps argument"
TOE is a scientific theory based on observation, hypothesis, evidence, and prediction.
ID/creationism is based on unfalsifiable ideas.  

The way the DI tries to falsify TOE is ridiculous, pointing at the gaps is doomed to fail, if the gaps get smaller, the assumed veracity of the idea gets smaller.
Since the launch of the DI large parts of these gaps must have closed, have you seen anything, by the DI that acknowledges that?

Again, this also illustrates the unfalsifiable nature of ID/creationism, no matter how detailed the historical record gets, be it DNA, fossil record, the goalpost can always be moved.
Even if we have a complet record of every individual of every species, even if we know exactly which random mutation happened at what time, the ID/creationists can point to  that mutation as the hand of god, or the action of a generic omnipotent designer.
          

But more importantly, even making the unwarranted prior assumption of metaphysical naturalism (the belief that absolutely all of reality is physical), ID is proposing a positive scientific testable hypothesis, and is then proceeding to test it by observation and experiment, rather than just making a "God of the gaps" claim.

How is the idea of ID testable?, what is that positive evidence? i need some credible arguments for that.
And yes, i am assuming that evidence is given within the realm of scientific naturalism, if have to accept evidence from supernatural cause, things are going to get circular very fast. 

Anyway, the scientific method goes from observation, to formulating the hypothesis, to formulating the predictions of the hypothesis, then to testing of the hypothesis by experiment or observation. Science is all about having hypotheses and then testing them. Science can only support or refute hypotheses that are empirically testable.

I am glad you don't deny that.
  

The problem is when Darwinist critics say that ID isn't science, isn't such a testable hypothesis. We can indeed empirically know and understand the actions of intelligent agents, so then we can make testable predictions about what we should find if intelligent causation was at work. That’s exactly what ID proponents do. And the predictions of ID can be put to the test. 

No, as shown above, ID/creationism can always move the goalpost, even into the absurd. To many people, including me, it already has reached that point. 

But that goes to the core assumption of the DI, short version goes a bit like this:
We find great complexity in nature, human design is complex, therefore complexity in nature is designed.  

The obvious logical problem with that this human design capability appears, in an evolutionary time frame, only the very last moment of our history.

So we recognize design from human design, but the intelligent designer(s) can not be human? Now we are in the situation that we have to assume a race of beings, or an individual, that are human like? Or "design" itself is some sort of supernatural force?         

But, maybe even a bigger problem for that basic premise, the capability of complex design, as we know it from humans, is itself a product of evolution as far as we can see, without making any further assumption. 

So to the basic premise of ID becomes that evolution is the result of evolution?   

ID is a historical science, meaning it employs the principle of uniformitarianism, which holds that the present is the key to the past. Design proponents use the standard uniformitarian reasoning of historical sciences to apply an empirically-derived cause-and-effect relationship between intelligence and certain types of informational patterns to the historical scientific record in order to account for the origin of various natural phenomena.

What?

If anything, it is TEO that uses uniformitarian principles to come to a full understanding of the evidence.
Uniformitarianism applied to modern TOE, is what allows us to fill the gaps in the record  with what we know from previous observation, an observationally derived principles.  
To do anything else, would necessitate us to make large, and unnecessary assumptions    

I would compare this to a train that goes into a tunnel. We can not see what happens in that tunnel, but we see the train coming out at the other end on the tracks. We also know that that everywhere we see trains, they run on tracks.

Now if we ask anyone to tell us, on what do the trains rides in the tunnel? Most people will say tracks, what else?
But if draw an analogy to what ID says, we must assume that the moment the train enters the tunnel, it starts to be supported by rainbows an unicorn farts. The moment it leaves the tunnel, the train neatly returns to well understood running on tracks.          

ID as a historical science is a legitimate use of abductive reasoning, a form of logical inference. This is the inference to the best explanation among several contenders. This methodology asks, “Given what we know about the explanatory efficacy of the various competing hypotheses, which cause best explains the evidence we observe?"

But in that case ID is the least efficacious in explaining evolution, because it has to assume a supernatural force or being that we do not have any evidence for. 

An assumption that does not help explaining, it only adds an new level of unknowns. If we assume a supernatural force/being, we have to explain how that works, how that came about, en so much more.

The only way i can see the ID explanation being the most parsimonious, is if we know from other evidence that such a force/being exists.
Any other way, it is simply not needed.

The two main contenders in this case, for the origin of certain biological structures, are neo-Darwinian evolution by random mutation plus natural selection, and some kind of intelligent agency. In these cases of biological structures combined with behavior, origin by random mutation plus natural selection is shown to be extremely implausible (though remotely possible), given factors like the complexity and sometimes irreducible complexity of the structure, the time observed to have been available, etc. But, another source of such complex machine-like structures is actually observed in the present - namely intelligent agents. 

As said above, these intelligent agents are themselves at the last known point of a long, and continuing, evolutionary process.

Abductive reasoning has a long tradition of being useful in various areas of science and technology, such as philosophy of science, artificial intelligence, medicine, and analysis of competing hypotheses in intelligence.

My guess is , that in this case, it is used far beyond what is legitimate.

No, Nb, you are trying to flip the burden of proof.

Modern evolutionary theory is enough to explain the diversity of species, enough is known about the mechanisms, principles behind it, etc... More than enough is known to make this a mature theory that is not easily overturned.

It is ID that needs to show research that goes against TOE, please provide credible, peer reviewed, research that goes against the basic tenets of modern biology...etc.

There's so much twaddle in this post it's hard to know where to start. However, I'll start with one claim that has already been disproved: that ID makes no predictions. ID predicted that so-called "junk DNA" would be found to have a function.

Why did it predict this? Because if there was conscious design of some sort in nature, it wouldn't have created the majority of genomes to comprise largely useless junk, any more than anyone would design a massively over-engineered bridge, containing many times more material than was necessary to make the bridge function as a bridge. There would be a high energy cost of maintaining in every cell of every organism a massive amount of junk DNA.

Why didn't evolution through RM+NS eliminate all this junk if it were superfluous? The advantage to the organism would be quickly apparent: more energy available for metabolic processes, e.g. digestion, in fact for the functioning of all the organs of any given species.

The typical defence against this argument is that RM+NS aren't the only mechanisms of evolution: there is genetic drift, for example. But if true, that would imply that genetic drift can produce a structure with a very large proportion of junk and that RM+NS can't remove that junk; so much for their putative power in Darwinian evolution.

Increasingly over the last decade or so, more and more functions have been found for so-called "junk" DNA. Darwinists are fighting a rearguard action against the claims that non-coding DNA has functions essential for cellular processes. Increasingly it's becoming apparent that they're just playing silly buggers: clinging on to zombie science as long as they can before admitting the truth.

The claim that the DNA of human beings differs very little from that of chimpanzees is based largely on the similarities in coding (rather than non-coding, i.e. "junk") DNA. But if the whole genome is taken to be characteristic for a given species, there are much larger differences between humans and chimpanzees.

This doesn't mean that common ancestry isn't a possibility, by the way: I myself think there might well be common ancestry. It's even possible that all life shares a single common ancestor. I don't dispute the idea of descent with modification; what I do dispute is that modifications arise through random mutation. I suspect they arise as a result of intelligence/consciousness of some sort -- and having arisen, are then subject to the forces of natural selection.

Hence it's not a case of random mutation plus natural selection, so much as, in some sense, purposeful mutation plus natural selection. This is best analogised with the history of human design. For many millennia, we had variations on two- and four-wheel carriages drawn by animals, often horses but occasionally donkeys, mules or oxen. We might call that variation within the "phylum" non-human-powered vehicles.

Then the idea of the internal combustion engine led to the "order" of internal-engine-driven vehicles with "families" such as locomotives, human driven cars with four wheels, propellered aircraft, and so on. And in due course, other orders such as helicopters, jet-propelled aircraft, and rockets arose. Over time, a number of such taxonomic groupings became extinct or very nearly so because what replaced them was so much better: they became "selected out" by "natural selection" as it were. I doubt that staunch Darwinists would dispute any of this: the way we categorise things into ordered hierarchies isn't in question, and nor is the way that various technologies become obsolete.

But when it comes to living forms, although Darwinists have cheerfully borrowed the idea of hierarchical ordering for taxonomic purposes, they deny all possibility that a similar principle might apply in naturally occurring organisms. No: it had to arise quite accidentally (witness Richard Dawkins' statements about it all being down to "happy accident" and it being purely coincidental that life gives only the appearance of being designed).

I say it's an entirely reasonable hypothesis that life gives the appearance of being designed because it is designed. By what, who, or in detail how, I don't know, but I make that inference because of the remarkable parallels between human inventions and the biological taxonomic "inventions" we describe as Phyla, classes, orders, families, genuses and species.

By contrast, the idea that all this order arises out of pure happenstance, with no purposive conscious awareness, is more fraught with difficulty. The gaping gaps in what was predicted should be a fossil record showing many fine gradations between species; the pliability of RM+NS, which can be bent in seemingly endless ways to accommodate any living entity; the never-ending just-so stories that are increasingly being shown to lack substance -- all these and more are making Darwinists look more and more like religious fundamentalists clinging to ideas they can't live without, regardless of the evidence against them.

Bart or Sparky or whatever the heck you like to call yourself, you're ten times more religious than I am: with your god, the alternative to the Abrahamic God (which I don't believe in either), is one where:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

-- as Macbeth put it. Yours is effectively a doctrine of purposelessness, despite which, unaccountably, all living forms, with all their seeming beauty, and yes, sometimes seeming ugliness, arose.

Well, if that's true, what the heck are you doing here? Why does any of it matter to you? Why is it so very important to crusade against the notion that the universe might have a purpose? What do you find so threatening about that idea, and why do you take solace in its opposite? What purpose is there in your fight, and why does it matter if you lose?

The very tenacity of Darwinists contradicts their professed belief that there is no purpose in the universe. If they really believed that, they'd also believe there's no useful purpose being served by arguing with those who do believe in a purpose -- at least when the latter argue, they are being consistent with their expressed beliefs. Where's the consistency on the other side? I'll be buggered if I can see it.

The very tenacity of Darwinists contradicts their professed belief that there is no purpose in the universe. If they really believed that, they'd also believe there's no useful purpose being served by arguing with those who do believe in a purpose -- at least when the latter argue, they are being consistent with their expressed beliefs. Where's the consistency on the other side? I'll be buggered if I can see it.

From what I can see it is because they are atheists first and Darwinists second. Atheism has adopted many of the bad things about religion while, at the same time, attacking them. So Darwin has become a kind of saint who must not be blasphemed. And science has been co-opted to the atheist cause. That's why, whenever evolution is discussed, religion and God are pushed front and centre by both atheists and religionists - as though it is a binary choice: the God of the bible or Darwin and his disciples.

I wish, I crave for a time when religion can be sidelined and people can debate these questions with an open mind. But Sparky-Bart and Steve001 will always bring it back to religion so as to continue the atheist crusade.

I suggest watching this video on YouTube but I can only echo the first comment on the YouTube page:

If you are reading this, WARNING: DON'T READ THE COMMENTS BELOW!!!!!!! It's full of pointless and relentless debates from atheists and religionists!!!!!