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

@Laird @stephenw

I realised that there is another possibility regarding experiments that show evolution without a Darwinist mechanism.

The "Third Way", popularised by Dennis Noble seems to claim that you can have evolution by mechanisms other than RM+NS. My feeling is that this group want to explore non-Darwinian evolution without ever really explaining how it is supposed to work, or admitting that they are exploring nonmaerialistic ideas.

We have, of course discussed this subject before.

David

@Laird @stephenw

I realised that there is another possibility regarding experiments that show evolution without a Darwinist mechanism.

The "Third Way", popularised by Dennis Noble seems to claim that you can have evolution by mechanisms other than RM+NS. My feeling is that this group want to explore non-Darwinian evolution without ever  really explaining how it is supposed to work, or admitting that they are exploring nonmaerialistic ideas.

We have, of course discussed this subject before.

David

This might be true but can a layperson really examine these options and come to a conclusion as to which one is correct?

It seems to me the data, let alone the options, are incredible in how detailed the biological domain is. If there are platonic forms, teleological principles, or morphic fields allow the search space of mutations to be narrowed down then those are also nonmaterialist alternatives to ID.

This isn't to say all Design would be false, Cosmic Fine Tuning could be true while evolution is just running its course without intervention by conscious entities.

Perhaps ID ultimately wins out, and maybe once I go through the back & forth between Farina and the Discovery Institute I'll lean toward Design at the biological Earth level just as I lean toward Design at the Cosmic level..

This might be true but can a layperson really examine these options and come to a conclusion as to which one is correct?

Intuitively, perhaps, by weighing them against experience, immediate and recalled.

It seems to me the data, let alone the options, are incredible in how detailed the biological domain is. If there are platonic forms, teleological principles, or morphic fields allow the search space of mutations to be narrowed down then those are also nonmaterialist alternatives to ID.

Indeed, but these stink of "God" to the Physicalist / Materialist, so they a priori ruled out.

This isn't to say all Design would be false, Cosmic Fine Tuning could be true while evolution is just running its course without intervention by conscious entities.

In a Deist sense, most certainly ~ indeed, this might be the case, for the most part, though events like the Cambrian Explosion suggest that the intelligent designers do occasionally create new forms, though on timescales unfathomable to us.

Perhaps ID ultimately wins out, and maybe once I go through the back & forth between Farina and the Discovery Institute I'll lean toward Design at the biological Earth level just as I lean toward Design at the Cosmic level..

I lean more strongly towards the Discovery Institute simply because Intelligent Design is blindingly obvious. The only things I might disagree on are the conclusions about the nature of the Designer/s, which veer immediately into philosophical and / or religious territory.

Perhaps I just have zero patience for the true Neo-Darwinist believers.

I lean more strongly towards the Discovery Institute simply because Intelligent Design is blindingly obvious. The only things I might disagree on are the conclusions about the nature of the Designer/s, which veer immediately into philosophical and / or religious territory.

Why do you think it's blindingly obvious?

I honestly cannot tell. There do seem to be issues in the RM + NS story, but I think we're talking about such vast timescales it is difficult to say what can and cannot happen across millennia.

I definitely disagree with the DI's idea that ID points to a God that has all the Omni-qualities. That's just obviously wrong to me, because such an entity - if All Good - would not utilize so much suffering and death across millennia to get to the current forms. Don't even know what purpose that would be for....

Why do you think it's blindingly obvious?

Because lifeforms are so exceeding complex and complicated in structure and design. Every substructure of a lifeform is interconnected in extremely intricate ways. So, the designed nature of lifeforms is just... fact for me at this point, and that requires intelligence/s that are fittingly profound, no matter its ultimate nature.

I honestly cannot tell. There do seem to be issues in the RM + NS story, but I think we're talking about such vast timescales it is difficult to say what can and cannot happen across millennia.

Well, let us consider just the humble single cell ~ how many random, undirected, entirely independent mutations would be required? Millions. To say nothing of each random, undirected, entirely independent mutation needing to have the sheer blind, dumb luck of being beneficial every single time, doing the exact thing needed for each step in the chain.

70 million years, as a generous estimate, wouldn't be enough ~ you'd need a perfect mutation every 70 years.

I definitely disagree with the DI's idea that ID points to a God that has all the Omni-qualities. That's just obviously wrong to me, because such an entity - if All Good - would not utilize so much suffering and death across millennia to get to the current forms. Don't even know what purpose that would be for....

What about an Omni-God, minus the "all good" quality? That seems to be an all too human trait ~ subjective in its nature.

Omnipresence, Omnipotence and Omniscience are the only valid qualities for a truly infinite being.

And yet, because these are qualities, they imply being and form ~ so they only appear "infinite" from our vastly limited perspective.

A true Infinity has no distinguishable qualities, because it has all of them at once.

What about an Omni-God, minus the "all good" quality? That seems to be an all too human trait ~ subjective in its nature.

Omnipresence, Omnipotence and Omniscience are the only valid qualities for a truly infinite being.

And yet, because these are qualities, they imply being and form ~ so they only appear "infinite" from our vastly limited perspective.

A true Infinity has no distinguishable qualities, because it has all of them at once.

Yeah, I mean if we assume a mysterious entity that can do whatever it wants then it could, for reasons all its own, create the world as it is.

[Laird]

Thanks for your reply, @nbtruthman. It seems that this is not as open and shut a case as Dave Farina has made out, and that he has been overconfident in making his own case.

Re your later post:

I would be interested in a response from Laird that successfully refutes the 6 points I made in my post 66. I would like to know exactly how each of those points I made were invalid - the points were:

- on the DI publishing a paper in a mainstream peer-reviewed journal, 
- on the rarity of advantageous random genetic variations, 
- on the ID researcher findings that there are very many unexplainable by Darwinism sudden saltational jumps in complexity in the history of life shown by the fossil record, 
- on the Darwinist claim that so-called "co-options" refute irreducible complexity, 
- on the wait time problem afflicting Darwinism, and
- on the Darwinist claims that long-term evolution experiments have proven Darwinistic evolution in microorganisms.

I would really like to know, so as to be able to try to make better arguments (or to know that there are no successful refutations of these points).

Having not looked in depth into all of this, it is hard for me to get at the truth, especially when it comes to the fossil record stuff. I did read the articles to which you linked though.

That's another way of saying that I don't feel qualified to assess the validity of your points. I do appreciate you taking the time to address this with references though.

What most of this seems to me to hinge on is the likelihood of any given random mutation being beneficial, and of the rate at which random mutations occur. I'm impressed that Sci is taking the time to dig into and summarise all of this in separate threads. Perhaps he will have some insights into this issue by the end of it.

I'm also trying to keep my metaphysical bias in check, because, obviously, as a dualist, a neo-Darwinian explanation of life is a lot harder for me to accommodate, so I am naturally (accidental reverse pun) inclined to affirm alternative explanations, like ID.

[Laird]

Do you have a link to that fascinating paper?

I linked to it earlier, in this post.

Intuitively, perhaps, by weighing them against experience, immediate and recalled.

I definitely would not think that intuition is at all ever a good means for a layperson to decide between which seems more or less likely. If science is good for one thing it's proving intuition false time and time again.

I definitely would not think that intuition is at all ever a good means for a layperson to decide between which seems more or less likely. If science is good for one thing it's proving intuition false time and time again.

Science should not be treated as a belief system. Science should be treated as a tool for examining hypotheses.

Many scientists believe in stuff that is not scientific at all ~ like Physicalism and Materialism.

The institutions of science are only as good as their weakest link... as scientists are only fallible and human.

Throughout history, many paradigms have been shattered ~ and their adherents never went quietly.