From: Josh Bembenek (jbembe@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 10:35:16 EDT
Howard wrote:
>I'm not in a position to evaluate this particular mechanism or its
>potential
>significance for actualizing new phenotypes that differ substantially from
>ancestral phenotypes.
This mechanism appears to expand the amount of change available during some
sort of selection event, however it doesn't appear to give us any direction
toward a certain goal (like a flagellum to reach nutrients unavailable
without flagellum), thus the goals might still be difficult to find.
>However, this does illustrate that ID advocates must
>begin to deal with the actualization of new biotic structures at the
>genetic
>level, not at the phenotypic level.
-I certaintly feel that Behe deals mostly with issues on the genetic level,
do you disagree? I think it is quite important for them to be aware of the
most important and relevant mechanisms that can produce change, but then
there is alot out there to survey, and deal with them. However, it seems
that they need to get their aircraft off the ground and find some decent
level of scholarly support where scientists actually find what their doing
has merit. This requires some effort, as folks around here demonstrate.
>Dembski, for instance, paid little if an attention to genetics in No Free
>Lunch. I found his attempt to compute the probability of a bacterial
>flagellum forming from the pure chance gathering of just the right proteins
>in just the right proportions and in just the right locations at the E.
>coli cell wall to be pure silliness.
O.K. you have finally convinced me to purchase Dembski's book and read it
once and for all so I'll be better suited to analyze his specific claims in
various places. Then I'll know exactly what you mean about his lack of
genetic detail. I've only read "Intelligent Design." By the way, the
computer simulation published in Nature that supposedly refutes the ID
hypothesis by Lenski et al. (and is causing major commotions on the ISCID
website) was a very poor representation of molecular systems. Evolution
proponents have no problem with that when using it as a disproof of IC's
inaccessibility by RM&NS. In other words, mathematicians have to start
somewhere when analyzing biology, even if they deal with imaginary biology
that might represent biology to some extent.
"Your suggestion to look at the broad spectrum of genetic effects strikes me
as a far more realistic and potentially fruitful way of constructing
causally specific explanations for the appearance of some new phenotypes.
Thanks for the info."
It really surprised me that you were interested in this particluar post :)
Sarcasm aside, I heard about this "capacitance" in nature during a
University Lecture several years ago and was quite fascinated by it. It
slipped my mind in the course of time, and was brought back to me by this
recent nature article. God's creation is quite amazing indeed!
Josh
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