(2019-06-29, 08:22 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: I notice that you don't challenge my main point about the unscientific, vague, ambiguous and probably desperate nature of both post-neo-Darwinist papers, and many others.
I didn't mean to imply that non machine-like systems necessarily lack complexity. But one of the problems of the paper is that the author doesn't explain how specific intracellular functions, like molecular transport, can be accomplished by something in the cell that is essentially at base something other than a machine. The word "machine" is defined as "an apparatus consisting of interrelated parts with separate functions, used in the performance of some kind of work". Somebody has to explain to me how intracellular molecular transport can be carried out by some sort of system that isn't at base a machine.
Certainly ID is at base an argument from probability, but the probabilities, or more accurately improbabilities, of the unguided purposeless neoDarwinian mechanism forming complicated irreducibly complex machines (like the bacterial flagellum, or the arthropod body plan including all the organ systems) in the age of the Earth much less the actual times observed in the fossil record is miniscule beyond microscopic.
I am just not convinced that being anti-mechanistic in the sciences is an attempt to challenge Intelligent Design. In some cases it might be, but I actually suspect most of these people are going against reductionist-mechanistic paradigms and ID may not even cross their minds?
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell
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