Reflectorites
[continued]
On Sun, 20 Feb 2000 17:33:16 -0800, Cliff Lundberg wrote:
[...]
>SJ>"Message theory says life was designed as a biotic message. Life was
>>designed to look like the product of a single designer (the unifying
>>message). Yet life was also designed to resist evolutionary interpretation
>>(the non-naturalistic message)." (ReMine W.J., "The Biotic Message, 1993,
>>p261)
CL>How do you tell when something is merely difficult, and when it is actually
>designed to defy scientific explanation?
It is a falsifiable hypothesis. All science has to do is find *one*
"evolutionary interpretation" that fits all the facts and it is falsified.
>SJ>As a proponent of Progressive Mediate Creation, I have my own
>>"explanation for this unacceptable irregularity in the flow of history" and
>>unlike naturalistic evolutionary theories, one which *does* explain it. That
>>is, I take the pattern of Genesis 1 seriously. It really does depict what
>>Daniel Dennett (of all people) correctly identified as "successive waves of
>>Creation:
CL>I have to wonder why my model explaining the Cambrian evolutionary leap
>would be unwelcome to one who recognizes that there was a leap. The
>neo-Darwinian gradualists are the natural enemy of this model.
Again Cliff interprets *vigorous testing* of his hypothesis with it being
"unwelcome". If his hypothesis is truly scientific he should *welcome* my
testing it of it for him (at no charge)! :-)
I am not against Cliff's parabiosis theory. I am trying to poke holes in it to
see if it is robust enough for me to accept it. Remember my tagline: "Test
everything." (1 Thess. 5:21).
>SJ>Evolutionists of all stripes (including Darwinian, non-Darwinian, theistic,
>>etc) all make IMHO one fundamental mistake. They assume that life's
>>systems were designed to evolve. When all the evidence is that they were
>>designed *not* to evolve!
CL>There is stasis, and there is change. I don't see how to get along without
>both.
The point is that evolutionists (particularly Darwinians) just ignore the
stasis, when it it is the single most marked feature of the fossil
record. As Gould and Eldredge finally discovered, 120 years after Darwin,
that the history of life is basically *equilibria* only occasionally
punctuated by short bursts of change.
It is the massive *stasis* of life's history which needs to be explained:
"Stasis is a lack of biological change. It is effectively an anti-evolutionary
term because it means non-evolution. Paleontologists now acknowledge
that the fossil record documents stasis. Fossil species tend to remain
unchanged throughout their fossil history. This observation refutes
Darwin's predictions.
`Paleontologists just were not seeing the expected changes in their fossils
as they pursued them up through the rock record...That individual kinds of
fossils remain recognizably the same throughout the length of their
occurrence in the fossil record had been known to paleontologists long
before Darwin published his Origin. Darwin himself, .... prophesied that
future generations of paleontologists would fill in these gaps by diligent
search .... One hundred and twenty years of paleontological research later,
it has become abundantly clear that the fossil record will not confirm this
part of Darwin's predictions. Nor is the problem a miserably poor record.
The fossil record simply shows that this prediction is wrong. The
observation that species are amazingly conservative and static entities
throughout long periods of time has all the qualities of the emperor's new
clothes: everyone knew it but preferred to ignore it. Paleontologists, faced
with a recalcitrant record obstinately refusing to yield Darwin's predicted
pattern, simply looked the other way... Darwin's prediction of rampant,
albeit gradual, change affecting all lineages through time is refuted. The
record is there, and the record speaks for tremendous anatomical
conservatism. Change in the manner Darwin expected is just not found in
the fossil record." (Eldredge N. & Tattersall I., "The Myths of Human
Evolution", 1982, pp45-46, 48)
`[S]tasis, or nonchange, of most fossil species during their lengthy
geological lifespans was tacitly acknowledged by all paleontologists, but
almost never studied explicitly because prevailing theory treated stasis as
uninteresting nonevidence for nonevolution.... [T]he overwhelming
prevalence of stasis became an embarrassing feature of the fossil record,
best left ignored as a manifestation of nothing (that is, nonevolution).'
(Gould S.J, "Cordelia's Dilemma," Natural History, February 1993, p15)
(ReMine W.J., "The Biotic Message", 1993, p307)
>SJ>In my Mediate Creation general theory, the ultimate cause of why new
>>designs appear episodically and progressively in throughout the history of
>>life is because the Creator said "Let there be... and there was..." Let there
>>be ... and there was..." (Gn 1:3ff).
CL>Then, why get involved in scientific details at all? You've got the final
>answer, you're all set.
Cliff confuses *ultimate* causes with *proximate* causes. That God is "the
ultimate cause of why new designs appear episodically and progressively
throughout the history of life" is no reason why a Mediate Creationist
like me should not be *intensely* interested in what proximate causes
He used.
Just because I believe *that* God did it, does not mean I am not interested
in *how* God did it.
Cliff as a presumed naturalistic evolutionist would also believe in
an ultimate cause, namely naturalistic laws and constants, but that does not
mean that for him "There's no point in learning science".
CL>There's no point in learning science so you can teach theology.
Who is learning science so I can teach theology?
CL>When you get around to your final ID-argument, the
>scientists will tune out, insofar as they are scientists.
Who says that I will "get around to" a "final ID-argument"?
ID is a *scientific* metaphysical research program like naturalistic
evolution is. Like naturalistic evolution, ID does not aim to arrive at a final
argument, but rather attempts to get to grips with the overwhelming
evidence for design in nature. The essential difference between ID and
naturalism is that ID accepts that the evident design in nature is *real*
design, whereas naturalism tries to explain it away as only *apparent*
design.
To show what absurdities this naturalistic assumption leads naturalists into,
consider these words by Dawkins in my Biology text, rhapsodising about
apparent design:
"My reason for beginning The Blind Watchmaker was Paley. He really saw
the magnitude of the problem of adaptation when most people just didn't
see how elegant, how beautiful, apparent design in life is. Paley saw that,
and Darwin saw that." (Dawkins R., "Interview", in Campbell N.A., Reece
J.B. & Mitchell L.G., "Biology", 1999, p412).
Dawkins plays on the two meanings of apparent: 1. visible to the senses;
and 2) illusory. The difference is that Paley by "apparent" mean 1. and
Dawkins by "apparent" means 2. That is, Paley thought the design was
*real* while Dawkins thinks it is an illusion. For Dawkins it is like getting
worked up over a mirage!
>SJ>Unlike "the arrangement of rocks on the surface of the moon",
>>which are random and unstructured, a gene (like the 200 nucleotide
>>base-pair Hist4 gene which codes for Histone-4) has a precise
>>"rung" structure, held in place by hydrogen bond "fixings" within a
>>sugar-phosphate "ladder" backbone (correct me if I'm wrong Mike!).
>>...
>>Since there are only about 10^80 elementary particles in the whole
>>universe, and there have only been about 10^18 seconds since the Big
>>Bang 15 bya, it is vastly improbable that even *one* string of 200
>>nucleotide base pairs came into existence to form a gene by chance.
CL>This mathematical objection ignores the basic evolutionary concept
>of bootstrapping, of complexity being conserved and facilitating the
>accretion of further complexity. This argument demands that complex
>patterns fall into place all at once, which is hardly the evolutionary
>position.
Evolutionist usually get away with this general purpose hand-waving
argument because they can always imagine a chain of hypothetical
functional intermediaries building up complexity step-by-tiny-little-step in
the macroscopic plant and animals world.
Even there, there are major problems with the evidence, but evolutionists
can always point to a whole raft of possibilities (like the imperfection of the
fossil record, etc), to explain away the difficulties. This BTW makes there
theory unfalsifiable.
But we are talking here about the *molecular* world of which there is no
comparable chain of functional intermediaries between proteins:
"From the actual experimental results of Sauer's group it can easily be
calculated that the odds of finding a folded protein are about one in 10 to
the 65th power. To put this fantastic number in perspective, imagine that
someone hid a grain of sand, marked with a tiny X, somewhere in the
Sahara Desert. After wandering blindfolded for several years in the desert
you reach down, pick up a grain of sand, take off your blindfold, and find it
has a tiny X. Suspicious, you give the grain of sand to someone to hide
again, again you wander blindfolded into the desert, bend down, and the
grain you pick up again has an X. A third time you repeat this action and a
third time you find the marked grain. The odds of finding that marked grain
of sand in the Sahara Desert three times in a row are about the same as
finding one new functional protein structure. Rather than accept the result
as a lucky coincidence, most people would be certain that the game had
been fixed.
The number of one in 10^65, arrived at by Sauer's experimental route, is
virtually identical to the results obtained by Yockey's theoretical calculation
and his deduction from natural cytochrome c sequences! It therefore
strongly reinforces our confidence that a correct result has been obtained.
Sauer's group obtained closely similar results for two different
proteins...This means that all proteins that have been examined to date,
either experimentally or by comparison of analogous sequences from
different species, have been seen to be surrounded by an almost infinitely
wide chasm of unfolded, nonfunctional, useless protein sequences. There
are no ledges, no buttes, no steppingstones to cross the chasm."
(Behe M.J., "Experimental Support for Regarding Functional Classes of
Proteins to Be Highly Isolated from Each Other", in Buell J. & Hearn V.,
eds., "Darwinism: Science or Philosophy?", 1994, pp60-78.
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/fte/darwinism/chapter6.html)
The conclusion that a reasonable person draws from this is that the laws of
nature are insufficient to produce functional proteins and, therefore,
functional proteins have not been produced through a nondirected search.
The Histone-4 protein is a case in point. It has 102 amino acids, of which
only 2 are variant. The remaining 100 amino acids are invariant across the
whole of eukaryotic biology. Histone-4 is thus, on the evidence, irreducibly
complex in the sense that:
"By irreducible complexity I mean a single system composed of several
well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function,
wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively
cease functioning. An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced
directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which
continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive
modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an
irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition
nonfunctional. An irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a
thing, would be a powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution. Since natural
selection can only choose systems that are already working then if a
biological system cannot be produced gradually it would have to arise as an
integrated unit, in one fell swoop, for natural selection to have anything to
act on." (Behe M.J., "Darwin's Black Box", 1996, p38)
Now evolutionists can always, like Darwin, use their "imagination" to "fill
up the very wide blanks" (as Darwin advised Asa Gray), but in this case of
Histone-4, they cannot even do that!
Steve
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"From 1860 onward the more distant fossil record became a big issue, and
over the next two decades discoveries were made that at first seemed to
give support to the theory particularly the claimed discovery of a well-
ordered sequence of fossil horse' dating back about 45 million years.
Successes like this continue to be emphasized both to students and the
public, but usually without the greater failures being mentioned. Horses
according to the theory should be connected to other orders of mammals,
which common mammalian stock should be connected to reptiles, and so
on backward through the record. Horses should thus be connected to
monkeys and apes, to whales and dolphins, rabbits, bears. ... But such
connections have not been found. Each mammalian order can be traced
backward for about 60 million years and then, with only one exception the
orders vanish without connections to anything at all. The exception is an
order of small insect-eating mammal that has been traced backward more
than 65 million years..." (Hoyle F., "Mathematics of Evolution", [1987],
Acorn Enterprises: Memphis TN, 1999, p107).
Stephen E. Jones | sejones@iinet.net.au | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sejones
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