Foundations of ID

Paul:

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Gould and Eldredge produced punk eq by applying current evolutionary theory to the fossil record. And they came up with evidence to support it.

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Like what? Can you come up with papers that give punk eek intellectual weight experimentally?

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About the only serious mistake they made was to attribute extreme gradualism to Darwin.

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Darwin was a gradualist and there are many still today. He got this notion from his geologist buddy Lyle ( I know that's misspelled as I never could spell it correctly) and his notion of uniformitarianism.

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Evidence for punctuated equilibria ? How about Eldredge and Gould's original paper setting out the idea ? Or Cheetham's paper "Tempo of Evolution in Neogene Bryzoa" (1986)?

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I could not find the latter paper via PubMed or Google. Perhaps if you know where it is at, you will link to it. And a paper setting out an idea is not scientific research supporting that idea. But shouldn't there be tons of papers out there showing the research done on punk eek? I mean you guys ARE teaching this stuff as beyond scientific theories and "facts" of science. You mean you cannot come up with a single peer-reviewed research paper to support a fact of science?

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Darwin was a gradualist in the same sense that Eldredge is and Gould was. Punc eq is a gradualist theory. What it is opposed to is an extreme form of gradualism - that Darwin himself rejected.

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Nah....Darwin didn't reject gradualism he necessitated it:"[1] If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down."Here is my argument from authority in zoologist Mark Ridley's book:"Darwin’s explanation for complex adaptations is that they evolve in many small steps; that is what Darwin meant when he called evolution gradual. Evolution has to be gradual because it would take a miracle for a complex organ, requiring mutations in many parts, to evolve in one sudden step. If each mutation arose separately, in different organisms at different times, the whole process is more probable."Darwin’s gradualist requirement is a deep property of evolutionary theory. The Darwinian should be able to show for any organ that it could, at least in principle, have evolved in many small steps, with each being advantageous. If there are exceptions, the theory is in trouble."Evolution - Adaptive explanation[1] The Origin of Species, Darwin, p.154.

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Design Dynamics

Howdy Ned:

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Did you not read the direct quote from Darwin just above your post??? This is an error which I laboured under too. I thought that Darwin demanded a constant rate of change by evolutionary processes. It is clear from the given quote that he was, in fact, a "punk eqer" from the get go

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Constant or not, how does Darwinism explain the Cambrian explosion? I mean here we have nothing in the record leading up to these organisms and suddenly organisms start poofing out of seemingly nothing being fully formed and ready to go in their environment. There HAS to be some gradualism somewhere unless one believes in the hopeful monster conception or is duped by the magic of David Copperfield.
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Punk eq IS gradualism too. There is not suggestion that major changes arise in single steps. That has been rejected for a long time. Speciation can, on some occasions arise quickly in single steps but then species can be separate while being very, very, very similar.

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And you would know this how, Ned? Name the papers where species are observed doing this. Herein lies the major problem with this entire concept. You guys just throw this stuff out without a shred of experimental evidence, state this is the way things are and start teaching it as an accepted theory of science as if it had actually gone through the scientific method to achieve a theory status. How do you go back in time to do the breeding experiments to even establish what was, and was not a species? This is not science, let it die with other the other silly philosophies of the 19th century like Freudianism.

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Design Dynamics

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Well if you haven't even heard of Cheetham's paper, then how can you tell that there is no evidence for punc eq ? Have you even read Eldredge and Gould's original paper?

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Paul, do you really think I am so stupid as to allow you to argue a paper without actually presenting the danged paper? Please PRESENT THE PAPERS you wish to use in our discussions so that everyone can read them. I don't think I've actually ever had to point that out to anyone in these types of discussions, but there is a first for everything, I would suppose.

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The Cheetham paper costs money.

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Then you better cough it up if you expect to use it in debate. It's certainly not up to me to provide evidence to support your argument.

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Of course I don't need the paper itself. The simple fact that you have not even heard of it, when I found it in a few minutes indicates that you are not sufficiently familiar with the literature to claim what is and what is not in it.

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OK Paul, this particular discussion is going nowhere and it's getting really silly. I NEVER stated I had not heard of these papers, these are your words. I stated that I could not find them to have in front of me to debate you on them.And since you seem to think you can just throw out papers you never present and claim that they "prove" something, this discussion is over and I'll leave it to the readers to judge the contents.Thanks for your postsP.S. And readers: observe that Paul never introduced a SINGLE peer-reviewed paper to show this "fact of science" to be even a hypothesis of science.This message has been edited by Jerry Don Bauer, 05-04-2005 04:52 AM

Thanks Ooook. No hurry, duty may call at any time from my position as well. I do enjoy your well crafted posts that utilize logic and civility.

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What happened to observers and quantum universes?

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It seems now to be a settled matter. Good. We have moved on. Life is much too short for the beating of dead dogs.

Hello Ooook

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Because the thread is about the validity of ID, and not the perceived failings of ‘Darwinism’, I’m going to try and focus on the second part of your last post. There were, however, a few things that I just can’t leave hanging: either because you’ve asked me a question or because you’re just plain wrong

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This is impossible as I have NEVER been wrong. Just ask me.

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Predictions from DarwinSpecifically those relating to common descent).
The first thing to remember is that these are real predictions. Darwin obviously didn’t know about DNA, - he wasn’t even aware of Mendalian genetics - but once these things were discovered then predictions could be made directly from Darwin’s theory. Once the tools were there, they were tested and they could have been shown to be wrong.
Phylogenic trees constructed using DNA sequences would have to mirror those suggested by the fossil record. A separate origin for mammals, reptiles and birds would have been an almighty falsification, but the ToE stood firm. I’ve just done a Pubmed search with the words "molecular" and "phylogeny" and got over 13,000 hits, with the first ones dated to the mid 1970’s. That’s an awful lot of mileage out of something that’s not meant to be a prediction.

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Mileage yes, predictions no. You see, the entire structure of Darwinism is anathema to science because everything in it is circular. The conclusions explain the fossil record because the fossil record is used to glean the conclusions. Phylogenies validate the fossil record because the fossil record extrapolates the phylogenies.This reminds be of the fundies in the good old days when both sides would laugh at them when they went into something like: God is real because the Bible says He is, and God is infallible because the Bible says He is, and since God wrote the Bible, we know it is also infallible, so this all HAS to be true.What I think you're missing is that THE SAME PEOPLE DO ALL OF THIS. Get my point? Therefore, since everything in Darwinism is based on everything else in Darwinism you have independently confirmed no predictions from Uncle Charles.

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Similarly, if Darwin was right about evolution working by modifying structural elements already present then you would expect the patterning mechanisms during development to be conserved in the same way. Wings and other forelimbs would be modified versions of the same body plan, using the same genes, with similar expression patterns. Signalling events early on in development would be conserved throughout the tree-of-life. Some of these predictions have been tested, and some are being examined as I type (watch this space).

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The classical example of this is the expression pattern of Hox genes. The pattern of expression of these master control genes is strikingly conserved.

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But if I were the designer I would do this the same way when designing organisms. Why come up with a helicopter design for bats when the wings I designed for birds do the job perfectly well? Why not similar legs in both horses and dogs? Why not homologous hox genes in several different organisms?Can you imagine General Motors trying to reinvent the sparkplug for every different automobile they design? How silly would that be?We find stark similarities in organisms and this is exactly what I would expect to find. We also observe diversity in the species of planet earth. Neither of these lend credence to any particular view of origins, neither ID nor Darwinism.

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It would be nice and easy if life (and science) was a case of black and white, wouldn’t it?

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Somebody thinks there’s a problem with one aspect of a theory: some people agree, some people disagree, and some try to develop new ideas. Everybody discusses their point of view in relation to the evidence available.

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This sounds to me like a healthy, lively area of science. It would definitely be symptomatic of a sick and dogmatic system if one high profile person could declare a judgement and expect everyone to follow them.

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It was supposed to be an experiment. The results of that experiment then needs to be interpreted by the peers of those researchers. Instead of doing this, they simply did not like the results of that experiment because it showed no gradualism in the record to support the notions of Darwin, so they came up with punk eek. Not because they discovered any evidence to lead them to a new hypothesis, but because they knew that was the only thing that could still keep Darwinism in the public view.One can never know what lurks in the hearts of men.

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I find it odd that you state that Punk Eeek has no scientific basis, and yet you use it to justify your position. If it is a valid argument then you have to take the other parts of it into consideration (RM+NS, common descent). If it is scientifically unsound then why should you include it in your argument?

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I' not sure what you mean here. I do not use punk eek from an evolutionary stance in my argument, I just look at the fossil record. There I see organisms coming into the record fully formed. I suppose this is punctuated equilibrium, but it certainly is not Gould's version of it.

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I’m at home at the moment so I don’t have full access to journals. Here’s a review of the pre-Cambian evidence covering actual fossils, molecular evidence, and the fossilisation of worm tracts, some of which may date back to 1,000mya.
Oooops! That first bit lasted for a little longer than I expected.

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Fine. Feel free to use that review and others to bring an argument. As soon as you do, I will be happy to address it.

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This is one of my bug-bears. So far on this thread you have questioned common ancestry, used the classic ‘micro’ versus ‘micro’ argument and have failed to address the pattern in the fossil record.

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If it quacks like a duck

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OK, and.......? You didn't say anything here. Is it that you think 'micro' verses 'macro' and the fossil record are not concepts of science? I mean, I frankly don't see how a teacher of evolution could ever teach the concept without using these terms. Scientists use them, why wouldn't I?

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In addition to this, you’ve still got to tackle the hurdle that all IDists fall at. If you are saying that ‘something’ designed life, then what did it do after that? Surely it would have to have designed it? Or did it just carelessly leave the blueprints lying around for someone to pick up?

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Do what?

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I’m not saying that the equations themselves are not proper maths. I don’t doubt that all of the adding up, taking away and various other squiggly bits have been applied correctly. It’s the assumptions on which they are based that seem to have a thinnish and airy quality.

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Take the infamous ‘protein probability’ equations for example. I’ve never seen one of these providing the probability of a process starting in a proto-cell which has a genetic code of 3-4 amino acids, which then changes a protein over millions of years (via an unknown number of useful intermediate steps) to it’s present form. You couldn’t possibly do that kind of calculation because of the amount of unknown parameters, but that’s what the evidence suggests happens.

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The evidence doesn’t bother ID though because it plucks the assumption that proteins just appear de novoout of thin air!!

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Oh. I think I see what you are saying. Many do not understand why we use that math. The reason we do is we are calculating the way things ARE not the way they got there. This math doesn't care what particular path a protein takes to get to be the way it is, all that matters is the way it is. Slow evolution through protocells, aptamers, lyposomes or organisms just jumping together by magic does not change the math.Can you show me mathematically why it would be any different if an organism suddenly jumped together or if it formed over a million years through many simpler organisms? No. Because there IS no difference. This is because the math then again multiplies together with each step in these cases. Observe:If I flip 12 coins together at once and want them to all come up heads, I will have 1 chance in 2^12 of this happening. But suppose the system slowly evolves into existence.I will flip 3 coins together, wait a year, flip another 3 and add them to the system, and continue this for four years.The first year, the odds I will get all heads is 1 chance in 2^3. And I will have those same odds each year for four years. Then to calculate the entire system, I have to multiply all the steps together:2^3*2^3*2^3*2^3 = 2^12 -- It's exactly the same!Hope that helps and wish you would study science and math rather than talk.origins. That site is a crock and EVERY anti-ID page there is easily refuted.

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Again, I’m sure the pure maths etc is OK, but the application to the real biological world is lacking. If I gave you two organisms would you be able to calculate which one was the more complex?

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Of course, providing you provide the information I need and define your view of complexity.

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If I gave you two DNA sequences, would you be able to declare which contained the most information?

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Yes, that one is easy as with protein coding sequences, the biggest one will contain the most information, of course.

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I’ll accept that you are trying to tie the physical world to your designer. But in addition to the number of problems that have been already been pointed out, it still boils down to The designer did it with Quantum Stuff!. This is a small step forward from the classic ID position - which states that the sole purpose of ID is simply to detect design — but it leaves a number of uncomfortable questions unanswered.

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There are no uncomfortable questions, have you seen me shy from any? And I don't see any problems presented with the quantum mechanics I presented. Attempts to diss an idea do not extrapolate to the refutation of that idea. No one presented anything to refute Heisenberg, Bohr, Young, Wheeler or Tipler. They just didn't like what that science says, so they attempted to twist it into a new meaning to suit their religion. You didn't find that obvious?

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When (precisely) is the presence of a designer detectable in the history of life on earth, and when can natural processes be said to be enough? When (and how) did the designer step in, in the past?

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Just look at the fossil record to find the when and the quantum mechanics I presented to find the how. I have spelled this out in great detail for this forum.

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Why do so many of the ‘Intelligent’ designs point to a botched job?

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They don't. You don't believe in evolution and the second law? Well, do you expect a 25 year old lawnmower to be in the same mechanical condition as a brand new one? It's just common sense.

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Why do you reject common ancestry?

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I reject it because there is not one shred of evidence to suggest it. It's just quite silly in that abiogenesis and common descent violate some of the most well proven laws in science. This is not science, it's pseudo-science that many Darwinists teach in schools as facts.

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1)If you want to say that the ‘universal’ code couldn’t have arrived on its own then that gets you to the first proteinatious replicator and no further.

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If you are suggesting that DNA in general can’t be produced without intelligence then I will point you towards your friendly neighbourhood E. Coli.

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As to the former, no it doesn't, I can take it far as I have to go. And you think E. Coli just magically makes itself? No, it uses pre-programmed code little different from a computer program . Code is intelligence. Do you really think that Window XP could just magically 'poof' out of a dead rock?

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2)If your prediction that an initial human population was ‘perfect’ and then started to degrade is correct then you’re going to have to show that the first humans were perfect. The data from great apes seems to contradict this, how would show this was the case?

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No I don't, I can back as far as I can and then use statistics to extrapolate. I did this in the other thread, BTW. Read the study I posted. It goes back 6 million years.

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Mousetraps, tornadoes in junkyards, computer programs, Cadillacs and speed guns

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They're not useless unless you can refute the logic behind them. Can you? You certainly haven't thus far.

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can you explain how making a mousetrap is anyway similar to making a protein?

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No. And I don't think I've ever seen anyone use a mousetrap to describe protein synthesis. Where did you pick up that little tidbit?

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But you see pigs giving birth to slightly different pigs don’t you? What is natural barrier stopping them changing to something completely different over time? This is why I gave you the horse example: surely there are examples in the fossil record of horses turning into other horses?!?

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I see pigs giving birth to slightly different pigs and slightly similar pigs. FACT: They are still pigs. Have you ever seen a pig give birth to an elephant? Something similar to this is what you're going to have to show if you expect anyone to actually swallow this stuff.

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Design Dynamics

Yes, a mama and daddy pig and it's not a pretty sight.

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Design Dynamics

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Again I'm at the limits of my knowledge here but doesn't your analogy have to have some element of selection to be meaningful?

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No, because we are talking the chemical evolution of abiogenesis, not the selection of genetic traits in evolution. There is no evidence to suggest that pre-biotic structures even had genes. In fact, most would propose an RNA critter to model this.

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Design Dynamics

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I would be interested in your view/rebuttal regarding what they say.

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1) This guy reads DBB and is so upset with that mellow book that he suddenly converts from Christianity to Atheism and then from Creationism to Naturalism? Am I supposed to take the rest of this stuff seriously? Oh well, I'll give it a shot.His math on getting dealt a pattern in a 5 card hand is a little off but no big whup and I'll let it go as this is not really his point.

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"That hand had only a 1 in 311,875,200 chance of occurring naturally, therefore it must have been intelligently arranged!"

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This is ridiculous as no one on my side would consider 311,875,200 as anything unusual in nature. That works out (rounded) to only 10^8. Is this anywhere close to the 10^150 we consider as an upper probability barrier? No, this could easily happen by chance and says not one iota about ID.The rest of the post is nonsensical as he completely ignores the laws of chemistry concerning polypeptides in those calculations. Had he studied chemistry, he would know that polymerization of amino acids to polypeptides (AAs to proteins) or of nucleotides to polynucleotides (DNA), happen via condensation reactions.This can be accurately calculated using the enthalpy change concerning the formation of a dipeptide from amino acids and is known to be 5-8 kcal/mole for a variety of amino acids, using data compiled by Hutchens. His chance calculations are simply daydreaming and ignorance of science.Believe anything in that post at the peril of your own ignorance.NEXT:I don't really know what Razd is trying to say here, but his 1 in 2595.1 doesn't relate to my calculations as I use a very large upper probability bound in mine. His little number may, or may not be designed. Nothing in ID relates to numbers probabilities that low.This message has been edited by Jerry Don Bauer, 05-09-2005 12:54 AM

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Design Dynamics

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the point is that the calculations you use to get to your "10^150 we consider as an upper probability barrier" is based on the same mathematical error that results in a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000 probability when a more proper calculation results in 1 in 2284.7

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from a 1 in 1015 to a 1 in 2285 is a big difference, and the ratio grows the further you extend it out

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and this still does not address other errors involved in the usual probability calculations, this is just the error due to one false assumption in your method of calculation.

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Well gee, Razd. Why don't you take this a step further, precisely point out what my major mathematical error is, actually address the "error due to one false assumption in your [my-insertion mine] method" and we can discuss it.

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Design Dynamics

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Perhaps here or in the thread you deserted (and I recently bumped for you), you can point out the understood mechanisms, or even proposed mechanisms, such that you know how to build a mathematical model of the chemistry.

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I suppose I would if I had any earthly idea what you were talking about. Why would I want to do this and a model of what??

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I have asked and am yet waiting a reply. In my experience we must accurately understand a system, meaning its full chemical environment, before modelling the system.
And if we have a model which ends in a result which is not supported by the evidence, we realize that our mathematical model is not accurate enough.

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Now you can state that your raw calculations of barebone atomic assembly into complete complex hydrocarbons reveal a probability of success that seems unlikely to occur in any practical sense. But that pretty much means your proposed mechanism is wrong (barebone assembly is not all there is and so your model is inaccurate),
Why can't it be that you are simply not using the right model?

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WHAT model? Is this something I was talking about with someone else? Please link to it as I'm totally lost as to where you are coming from.

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Design Dynamics

Ahhh....yes...I remember that exchange now. A moderator had to get involved to calm you down a bit.Considering your attitude, coupled with the fact that you are not making a lick of sense about anything I said in the post you linked to (I don't think you understood the chemistry I posted at all). I think I'll pass at further conversations with you.Thank you for your posts

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Design Dynamics