Intelligent Design (ECP forum rules apply)*

I hope this is the right place to post this.  I was reading the comments under a Dr Douglas Axe video and I came across this.  I'm not a statistician or mathematician so I can't vouch for its accuracy.  Maybe somebody else can look at this.


Here is the video in case it is relevant.  I haven't seen it yet.

Based on the quote you gave, I think you can understand the essence of the problem. Those probabilities are inconceivably small. For example, 1/10^80 means 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

I want to talk about the time after life started and is evolving. No scientists claim to have worked out the first part - how did life get started (and indeed some try to dodge the problem by proposing that life evolved even further back in time and that the Earth was seeded with life from space), but they think/pretend that they do have a solution to how things evolved from then on. The phase after life kicked off is the most interesting because for years they have pushed the concept of evolution by natural selection by ignoring the difficulties with that idea. It is often called RM+NS, standing for random mutations followed by natural selection.

I think Darwin's theory wasn't unreasonable when he proposed it, because nobody had any idea what a gene really was. However once genes were identified (roughly) as strings of nucleic acids (DNA) and random mutations were identified as point damage to a string, or sometimes the deletion/swapping of bits on that chain, there was a huge problem.

Let's say you try to imagine one gene changing by random mutations into another gene (G1 => G2). The problem is that you can't do that transformation in one step, you have to do it step by step, and most of the way the gene in question is neither one thing or the other and it is completely useless to the body - so natural selection is impossible. Once you realise this (and I am sure plenty of conventional biologists have thought it but suppressed it) Darwni's theory just can't possibly work. If you break a watch (say), and then break it in another way the result is just the same - a broken watch.

Once genes were recognised as strings of nucleotides (chemicals) Darwin's theory should just have been abandoned.

I'd like everyone to realise just how stupid it is to believe in DNA-genes and also believe in evolution by natural selection.

David

Let's say you try to imagine one gene changing by random mutations into another gene (G1 => G2). The problem is that you can't do that transformation in one step, you have to do it step by step, and most of the way the gene in question is neither one thing or the other and it is completely useless to the body - so natural selection is impossible. Once you realise this (and I am sure plenty of conventional biologists have thought it but suppressed it) Darwin's theory just can't possibly work. If you break a watch (say), and then break it in another way the result is just the same - a broken watch.

Once genes were recognized as strings of nucleotides (chemicals) Darwin's theory should just have been abandoned.

I'd like everyone to realize just how stupid it is to believe in DNA-genes and also believe in evolution by natural selection.

David

I am a strong advocate that the neo-Darwinian "reinterpretation" of the work of Charles Darwin should be rejected.  Likewise, modern teaching about the scientific observations of Charles should be decoded from 19th century politics.  His work on recording animal behavior is amazingly thoughtful and detailed. He ended his career working on the evolution of instinctual behaviors.  He advocated mental evolution as an important process!  This key direction of his work has been suppressed.

Darwin's and George Romanes's idea about mental evolution are about to be rediscovered.  August Weissman et all, shouted down Darwin and his hand-picked successor.  Later the idea that DNA was "magic" chemistry took over.  Have the DNA do a random-walk search and - magic happens.
The problem with this illusion is the magic chemistry.  DNA can be defined as chemistry, but the causal outcomes of the system of cellular communication are what made the chemistry evolve!!  Pragmatically there is no magic, just an advanced language designed for processing the hell out of local information.
The illusion works only as long as the audience looks at the chemistry with awe, while the bio-information processing does beautiful magic tricks like instinct and adaptation.  In this thread about ID, I would point to intelligence and strategy in the natural world, long before the sciences of humanity.

Similarly ID proponents make a logical inference that since intelligence is the only phenomenon we know of that can create, design, and produce information, that without any good natural explanation, intelligence is the best explanation for events like the creation of the universe, the fine tuning of the universe and the information needed for life to arise and evolve. 

Jim,
I haven't heard much from William Dembski lately.  Do his ideas about information still resonate with ID proponents?

I offer as thought for those who think human minds commune at a non-local level.  (should be some here)  Following-up the post I just made, here is some of this being of interest in the modern context.
https://www.queensu.ca/academia/forsdyke/mind02.htm

 Inspired by Darwin and well versed in the classic languages, mathematics, philosophy and theology, Victorians such as Clifford, Romanes, and Butler, seem to have been better able to think broadly on biological problems - see the big picture - than many, detail-laden, later scientists and philosophers. The information concept entered biology with Hering and Butler, and passed by way of Semon and Schrodinger to illuminate the emergent discipline of molecular biology (1945-1966). Romanes was able to extrapolate Clifford's ToM hypothesis from individual humans to their societies - a 'stepping stone' to mind in the universe. The relationship, if any, of this higher order of subjectivity ('world eject') to that of individuals, was clouded by his persisting theological concerns. However, recent reports of normal memory, and even advanced intellect, in rare individuals with greatly reduced brain volume, would be consistent with an accessible extracorporeal long-term memory that might be part of such a higher subjectivity. Whether of external or internal origin, mentalese-information-flows ('thoughts') interact to generate the 'meanings' that, when we are awake, exist as information-flows in our conscious and unconscious minds and, when we are asleep, exist as information-flows in our unconscious minds (Majorek, 2012; Mashoura and Alkire, 2013).

[Laird]

This thread has been moved to this sub-forum, per the guidelines on posting about science and scientific controversies in the forum.

[Ninshub]

Meta-discussion about the forum placement of this thread moved here.