(November 2, 2017 at 9:06 am)Jehanne Wrote:

(November 2, 2017 at 9:00 am)SteveII Wrote: 1. I don't disagree with any of that.
2. If the supernatural has affected the natural world, then there is no in incoherency.
3. You are just replacing God with "we don't know" and ignoring the possibility of God having a causal effect on the natural world. You are defining reality to exclude God and then saying why bring God into the picture. You are question begging.

1)  Theism is not well defined -- people of good will disagree on who or what is "god" or what his/her/its attributes and/or characteristics are; 2)  Theism is, according to many people of good will, incoherent and self-contradictory ("Can God make a rock so big that he cannot lift it"?); 3) Theism makes no strong predictions about the natural world; there is no dispassionate, disinterested observation that anyone can make in support of theism; 4)  Theism is not falsifiable -- there is no observation that one could ever make that could ever disprove theism; 5)  Theism is constantly changing -- religions change and contradict each other and themselves over time; it is impossible for any neutral observer to determine which one is "correct," if any.

But, but!  They just know cuz of those magical feelies, plus old book says so. If only Steve would hold the claims in his Bible to same standards of evidence that he holds evolution to, lol.

(November 1, 2017 at 4:14 pm)SteveII Wrote:

(October 31, 2017 at 3:53 pm)Mathilda Wrote: I've snipped the crap about definitions of evolution and what one person believes. It's a typical religionist tactic to get the conversation bogged down in irrelevant definitions so people are faced with a wall of text and no one making any progress. It makes it look like the debate is equal when it is not.


Learn to read.

You said "You are the one claiming that complex organs and traits evolved without any survival benefit until they were complete. No evolutionary scientist claims that, only creationists making strawman debates." Of course no evolutionary scientist claims that. They infer that it must be so.

No they do not and if you persist with your strawman arguments then please provide a citation. At every stage organs or traits are beneficial if the genes responsible for them are propagated throughout the popultion. This is why they are being propagated. Someone please post the youtube clip about how the eye evolved as an example. I had an eye operation yeterday and have only just been able to open both eyes so can't spend any length of time on my PC. I will deal with Steve's nonsense when I have recovered more.

Quote:Here's the thing, the theory is that parts can get co-opted from other systems.

That can happen but that's not primarily how complexity develops over time. I explained this in a previous post.


Let's have an example of why Steve's logic is flawed. According to the logic of irreducible complexity, the entire financial system had to be designed and popped into existence in one go, beause if you took away banks now the economy would collapse. Yet we know from history how banks developed over time. First as a way of storing your gold. Then people found that it was easier to give eah other paper promises of gold than to take it out and hand it over. Then banks realised that the gold just sat in their banks and they could lend some of it out and still be able to pay the gold to the actual owners if they ever asked for it. The gold they lent out had to be paid back with interest and so fractional reserve banking was formed. After a few bank runs, this became standardised so banks had to keepo a minimum fraction of the gold in reserve. Then the western economies left the gold standard and instead the money was not backed by a physical resource but by future earnings. Loans need to be paid back with interest, money that does not exist, yet gets paid into the lendee's bank account. This is why money gets created everytime a loan is made. This is why there will always be more debt than oney in existence.

Here's the point though, at every stage the banks were useful even though they started out simple and their operations became more complex. The rest of the economic system adapted to each stage and became dependent upon it. The same happens with ecosystems. Introduce a foreign species and the ecosystem can become dependent upon it after a while. Add a new feature to an organ or organism and other parts of the system can then adapt to become dependent upon it. But religionists like Steve refer to it as irreducibly complex without taking into accont that complexity developed over time with different parts of the system adapting to each other.

(November 2, 2017 at 12:19 pm)Mathilda Wrote: No they do not and if you persist with your strawman arguments then please provide a citation. At every stage organs or traits are beneficial if the genes responsible for them are propagated throughout the popultion. This is why they are being propagated. Someone please post the youtube clip about how the eye evolved as an example. I had an eye operation yeterday and have only just been able to open both eyes so can't spend any length of time on my PC. I will deal with Steve's nonsense when I have recovered more.

Yes, and it's almost Tea Time, and after that, hopefully, a good night's rest!

(November 1, 2017 at 4:14 pm)SteveII Wrote: I'm just pointing out that claiming evolution (in the all-encompassing sense of the word) is a fact is a philosophical claim, not a scientific one.

Yes it is.

(November 2, 2017 at 12:19 pm)Mathilda Wrote: Let's have an example of why Steve's logic is flawed. According to the logic of irreducible complexity, the entire financial system had to be designed and popped into existence in one go, beause if you took away banks now the economy would collapse. Yet we know from history how banks developed over time. First as a way of storing your gold. Then people found that it was easier to give eah other paper promises of gold than to take it out and hand it over. Then banks realised that the gold just sat in their banks and they  could lend some of it out and still be able to pay the gold to the actual owners if they ever asked for it. The gold they lent out had to be paid back with interest and so fractional reserve banking was formed. After a few bank runs, this became standardised so banks had to keepo a minimum fraction of the gold in reserve. Then the western economies left the gold standard and instead the money was not backed by a physical resource but by future earnings. Loans need to be paid back with interest, money that does not exist, yet gets paid into the lendee's bank account. This is why money gets created everytime a loan is made. This is why there will always be more debt than oney in existence.

Here's the point though, at every stage the banks were useful even though they started out simple and their operations became more complex. The rest of the economic system adapted to each stage and became dependent upon it. The same happens with ecosystems. Introduce a foreign species and the ecosystem can become dependent upon it after a while. Add a new feature to an organ or organism and other parts of the system can then adapt to become dependent upon it. But religionists like Steve refer to it as irreducibly complex without taking into accont that complexity developed over time with different parts of the system adapting to each other.

You want to go with that analogy? You are explaining how complexity was designed and introduced by degrees by an intelligence to achieve a known purpose. That's what you are going with to explain biological evolution? Do you see the irony? 

Since you brought it up, take the eye. Did you know that just one simple light-sensitive spot on a simple organism is incredibly complex. Here is a scientific description:

Quote:When light first strikes the retina a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. (A picosecond [10^-12 sec] is about the time it takes light to travel the breadth of a single human hair.) The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein, rhodopsin, to which the retinal is tightly bound. The protein’s metamorphosis alters its behavior. Now called metarhodopsin II, the protein sticks to another protein, called transducin. Before bumping into metarhodopsin II, transducin had tightly bound a small molecule called GDP. But when transducin interacts with metarhodopsin II, the GDP falls off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. (GTP is closely related to, but different from, GDP.)

GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II now binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located in the inner membrane of the cell. When attached to metarhodopsin II and its entourage, the phosphodiesterase acquires the chemical ability to ‘cut’ a molecule called cGMP (a chemical relative of both GDP and GTP). Initially there are a lot of cGMP molecules in the cell, but the phosphodiesterase lowers its concentration, just as a pulled plug lowers the water level in a bathtub. (Michael Behe (biochemist), Darwin's Black Box; p.46)

Even if we presuppose an already vastly complicated cell to kick off the evolution of the eye, an eye makes absolutely no sense on its own. You need a mechanism to process the information and be able to do something about it to relate it to a survival benefit--or no increase in functionality will evolve. But wait again, you don't need a light processing center to make decision if you don't have any light sensitive information to process. What came first, the ability to move, the ability to sense light or the processing center to ascertain some survival benefit from light and effect movement?  Seems like all three are needed for any survival benefit to occur. But wait, it's worse than that. For there to be an evolved increase in functionality in the eye (like to discern shapes), you would need a massively more complex processing unit for there to be any survival benefit---but what survival benefit led to the evolution of the processing unit without the complexity of the eye already present? How did that happen? For reference, this would be the "mechanism" sense of the definition of evolution which you said was fact. 

BTW, this had to happen in something like 30 branches of the old tree of life all independent of each other.

(November 2, 2017 at 3:59 pm)SteveII Wrote: Even if we presuppose an already vastly complicated cell to kick off the evolution of the eye, an eye makes absolutely no sense on its own. You need a mechanism to process the information and be able to do something about it to relate it to a survival benefit--or no increase in functionality will evolve. But wait again, you don't need a light processing center to make decision if you don't have any light sensitive information to process. What came first, the ability to move, the ability to sense light or the processing center to ascertain some survival benefit from light and effect movement?  Seems like all three are needed for any survival benefit to occur. But wait, it's worse than that. For there to be an evolved increase in functionality in the eye (like to discern shapes), you would need a massively more complex processing unit for there to be any survival benefit---but what survival benefit led to the evolution of the processing unit without the complexity of the eye already present? How did that happen? For reference, this would be the "mechanism" sense of the definition of evolution which you said was fact. 

BTW, this had to happen in something like 30 branches of the old tree of life all independent of each other.

Things don't all have to happen one after the other you know, eyes and nervous systems can both gain complexity at the same time.

(November 2, 2017 at 4:20 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote:

(November 2, 2017 at 3:59 pm)SteveII Wrote: Even if we presuppose an already vastly complicated cell to kick off the evolution of the eye, an eye makes absolutely no sense on its own. You need a mechanism to process the information and be able to do something about it to relate it to a survival benefit--or no increase in functionality will evolve. But wait again, you don't need a light processing center to make decision if you don't have any light sensitive information to process. What came first, the ability to move, the ability to sense light or the processing center to ascertain some survival benefit from light and effect movement?  Seems like all three are needed for any survival benefit to occur. But wait, it's worse than that. For there to be an evolved increase in functionality in the eye (like to discern shapes), you would need a massively more complex processing unit for there to be any survival benefit---but what survival benefit led to the evolution of the processing unit without the complexity of the eye already present? How did that happen? For reference, this would be the "mechanism" sense of the definition of evolution which you said was fact. 

BTW, this had to happen in something like 30 branches of the old tree of life all independent of each other.

Things don't all have to happen one after the other you know, eyes and nervous systems can both gain complexity at the same time.

Link didn't work.

You are just restating the theory--not explaining any of it. If the mechanism of evolution is a known scientific fact, my questions should have fairly straightforward answers: How do seemingly irreducibly complex systems evolve when the development of the component parts require each other to confer a survival benefit? Don't use generalities. They eye is a good example.

I wish you a speedy recovery, Mathilda, and look forward to your return to Dodo Land.

(November 2, 2017 at 4:48 pm)SteveII Wrote:

(November 2, 2017 at 4:20 pm)downbeatplumb Wrote: Things don't all have to happen one after the other you know, eyes and nervous systems can both gain complexity at the same time.

Link didn't work.

You are just restating the theory--not explaining any of it. If the mechanism of evolution is a known scientific fact, my questions should have fairly straightforward answers: How do seemingly irreducibly complex systems evolve when the development of the component parts require each other to confer a survival benefit? Don't use generalities. They eye is a good example.

The eye probably started out as a few cells that could detect light. It's not mysterious.