"Exposing Discovery Institute": video series by "Professor" Dave Farina

Meyer was interviewed by Joe Rogan a while back. JR pulled him up on that and referred to NDE's and some other paranormal phenomena. SM seemed interested in these and didn't try to argue back. I got the impression that maybe he had lived in a bubble of orthodox Christianity that he hadn't realised what there was outside that sphere!

SM seemed generally pretty happy to be stretched by JR - I guess that was more rewarding than battling against die-hard sceptics.

I just wish JR's podcasts were not so damned long!

Davids

That's good to know, Meyer overall seems rather likeable and willing to debate.

It does seem like NS+RM is getting challenged more & more, whether that is by ID or not. Sheldrake seems to be ok with ID but thinks it is too mechanistic from what I've gathered, but it's also not completely clear his ideas of Morphic Resonance are inline with ID.

Of course Sheldrake is a prominent theist, so I think his objection is more specifically about ID's claims that evolution works as Materialists described except for a few interventions at certain points.

[Laird]

Just a note that I've moved a few posts to the other thread, on James Tour, where they better belong: #15, #16, and #17 (numbering according to the thread to which they've been moved).

[Laird]

Yeah Farina seems to be manipulative by referring to himself as a Professor.

Nah, it was just a playful, tongue-in-cheek thing to which he didn't seem to give much thought:

Ask Professor Dave #2: Are You A Real Professor?

[Laird]

I think I would be interested in finding out specifically which of my 5 examples outlining my own understanding of the topic after several years of study, that you disagree with and why, or ones which you may not fully understand, so that I could possibly better answer your objections or explain them.

In post #19, I pointed you in the general direction of "Professor" Dave's (purported) rebuttals of those five claims. I'm just curious whether you intend to look into them, or whether my pointing was too general. As Smaw indicates above, there is a lot of content, which both of us (I and Smaw) have listened to mostly while doing other things, so it's difficult to find more specific references for you, but I might try to do that at some point.

I should say that when I finally grasped the fact that the whole of life did not get here by a random process, and that we are in some important sense designed, it rather overturned my world view.

I thought about what many NDEers report - that time isn't the same "out there". NDE's had already made me speculate that time might have two (or more!) dimensions, so that the stories that people can select the next life to live with a quick overview of the important points can be literally true. Spirits would work in T2 to manipulate our ordinary timelines (T1).

Maybe we were all spirits in T2 working on T1, cooperating to construct a boot camp in which we would all feel bound to matter for a while with our other memories suppressed.

In other words, we ourselves may have designed life!

Imagine if someone could be regressed back to remember their part in the design phase!

David

You should read this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darwin-Devolves...B079L6RTNT

Forget that Behe works for the DI - his scientific arguments stand on their own.

Behe is actually covered in the video series if you care to watch the vid, though it's a bit too much for me to sit down and watch again 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVQGQz-0Xeo

Most if not all of his arguments are addressed in the video.

I've never particularly liked Professor Dave's stuff, he's a bit heavy handed on the whole bashing religious people thing. But then I've never really liked the Discovery Institute either, so eh. 

The videos are a bit bombastic but they are good debunkings. The things he points out are so painfully, hilariously stupid that it hurts me to my soul that they were even ever made. The FIRST video demonstrating how they just selectively cut out gigantic swathes to make it seem like archeological evidence was being manipulated to disprove ID is just like WHAT, HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY DO THAT IN GOOD FAITH ARE YOU INSANE???

I listened to one of the key debunking videos generated by Farina, the 3rd one, which attempts to debunk Michael Behe's concept of irreducible complexity. I think it is rubbish. Every point he tried to make has been adequately addressed by ID advocates and researchers at the DI.

I'll try to summarize this:

This video starts with the trivial complaint that almost none of the papers published by the DI are in legitimate peer reviewed journals, while ignoring the fact that due to the strong bias of mainstream consensus science no such pro-ID findings and papers are allowed in their pages. 

Then there is the claim that there are many other mechanisms of gene altering in nature besides mutations, such as gene duplications. This is a true claim but it ignores the facts that all of these are random with respect to reproductive capability and that therefore being effectively really random all of them have the same very low probability of being somehow advantageous. The vast majority of random genetic variations are by their very nature random with respect to reproducibility, and more importantly, detrimental or fatal to the organism.

Farina also cleverly leaves out any attempt to debunk another major evidence of the operation of Intelligent Design in the history of life. To save time I'll just paraphrase the words I previously used to describe this: "...(There is) the evidence (in the actual physical) fossil record demonstrating that there is no fossil record of the Darwinist-expected and predicted slow gradual accumulation of tiny selectively advantaged mutational genetic changes via natural selection - the actual fossil record shows time and time again a pattern of major evolutionary innovations happening in drastic jumps, the most notable example being the Cambrian Explosion of virtually all the animal body plans and phyla about 500 million years ago appearing in only about 10-15 million years - a very short period as measured in evolutionary time." Such actually observed in the fossil record drastic jumps are in much too short a time to have possibly come about by undirected Darwinistic RM + NS.

Tellingly, studies of another aspect of the fossil record - the completeness of it - have shown that the fossil record is more than extensive enough to rule out the reason for this being just the incompleteness of the fossil record, the reason that is claimed by Darwinists. Darwinists claim that the missing intermediate fossil forms are just caused by an incomplete mostly spaced-out in time fossil record.

Another example of his invalid debunkings concerns Farina's claim that ID completely ignores the supposed high likelihood that something called "cooption" can occur in the Darwinistic RM + NS process, where random genetic changes can come about having very different biological functions, and which later might by chance be available to cobble up the actual complex adaptation that he is trying to explain.

Finally in this summary overview, Farina conveniently leaves out in his debunking attemps the fact that the "wait time" for three or more coordinated mutations to randomly appear is much longer than allowed in the time actually observed from sudden jumps in the fossil record like the Cambrian Explosion. Most of the Darwinist-required multi-coordinated random mutation occurences are where the change requires more than two coordinated simultaneous mutations.

Behe is actually covered in the video series if you care to watch the vid, though it's a bit too much for me to sit down and watch again 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVQGQz-0Xeo

Most if not all of his arguments are addressed in the video.

OK. I hope I will debunk enough of this to make you wary of any of the professor's other arguments, because my enthusiasm for this project may flag a bit. Also, please note that I was a chemist (long ago) never a biologist.

The professor gives a list of alternatives to Darwin's theory. This is somewhat deceptive, because I don't think any of these contain a mechanism that continuously improves something, in the way that Darwinian selection would appear to do.

Genetic drift is literally just that. Over time gene sequences which are not vital to the survival of an organism will drift. This forms a "molecular clock" which is used to date stuff in the fossil record:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock

These changes don't make the organism fitter unless perhaps they use the Darwinian mechanism.

Sexual selection

This is a fun example. Basically males or females develop exaggerated traits which happen to excite the opposite sex. For example male peacocks 'compete' with longer and longer tails because these seem to excite the females. Their elaborate tails obviously do not make these birds more fit in that they must be more vulnerable to predation.

Recombination

I'm not quite sure what this relates to unless it is that hybrids are often more fit than pure-bred animals.

Horizontal gene transfer

I am pretty sure that this refers to a mechanism other than sex that can transfer genes from one organism to another. Typically a virus, which remember reproduces using its host's cellular reproduction mechanism, accidentally gets a host's gene into its offspring particles. When the new virus particles infect another organism, the gene may be passed on. Again, that mechanism does not work to improve either organism, it just shows up from time to time.

Niche construction

I think this refers to the fact that organisms seem to evolve into particular niches, for example (I think) Darwin's finches which evolved slightly to suit the islands on which they found themselves. As I said before, this kind of fine-tuning is consistent with Darwin's theory, but it cannot possibly be generalised.

epigenetics

This is a fascinating molecular mechanism that is believed to control the whole process in which cells diversify into different types inside the body - e.g. skin cells liver cells, nerve cells etc. This happens because molecular tags are added to DNA or the proteins that surround the DNA inside chromosomes and modify the gene's expression - enhancing or suppressing expression. Interestingly, sometimes these tags are added to DNA in the germ line, and get passed to the next generation or even to several generations. For example, a study found that children born to parents who had lived under starvation conditions were better able to resist starvation. The evidence for these effects used to be dismissed because it was inconsistent with biological theory because it involves the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In any case, nothing is passed on in the long term so it isn't really an example of evolution at all.

Although the professor mentions the bacterial flagellum, I don't think he makes it clear that this flagellum doesn't just flap up and down, it rotates at quite high speed to propel the organism. This is a most remarkable mechanism - not least because you might expect it to leak the contents of the cell into the external fluid.

@nbtruthman Please feel free to correct or augment any of the above!

Clearly it would be a long job to debunk even one of these videos, but I hope it illustrates my point - note that I did not select (pun intended) a convenient place to start in this video, I just ploughed in from the beginning.

David

Sexual selection

This is a fun example. Basically males or females develop exaggerated traits which happen to excite the opposite sex. For example male peacocks 'compete' with longer and longer tails because these seem to excite the females. Their elaborate tails obviously do not make these birds more fit in that they must be more vulnerable to predation.

Doesn’t this only apply if there are actually predators within their environmental niche that could take advantage of the change in tails?

The general feeling I get is DI overemphasizes current questions in evolution, and Materialists underplay how troubling those questions might be for the idea that matter precedes and generates consciousness.

I also question how much people can assess Farina's claims just by watching the videos in the background, to be honest. I'd have thought people would be bringing specific examples to bear where DI folks are wrong, not saying they got a strong sense of fraud on the DI's part while leaving the Farina videos running in the background...

That being said, it still seems to me at best the DI can show that there are points of intervention that are perhaps best explained not by aliens or teleology but some actual immaterial entities assisting NS+RM...still doesn't seem like God to me, certainly not an Omni-God when you look at all the death and suffering evolution entails...

But regarding this question of whether immaterial entity intervention is the best conclusion from examining evidence of evolution...I do wonder if it's worth going through the back & forth here step by step, line by line?