(November 2, 2017 at 7:19 pm)Mathilda Wrote: You must be deliberately misunderstanding me Steve to avoid showing up the flaw in your logic. The analogy of the financial system was not to explain biological evolution, it was to explain how religionists are using the flawed concept of irreducible complexity by applying it selectively only to biological systems and not also to financial systems.. Because if it was correct then you'd have to also argue that banks popped into existence all at once. It's a form of special pleading on your part.
Either different parts of a complex system can grow reliant on each other over time, in which case we can have banks and complex organs, or they don't in which case banks do not exist.
Special pleading??? That's just stupid talk. Your grasp on philosophy and logic are tenuous at best. Core to the irreducible complexity concept is that it is not possible to arrive at a function by small successive changes through natural selection (a non-intelligent, non-goal seeking process) because of interdependent parts. Your financial system analogy failed miserably because we have a very very clear understanding how the small successive changes made by an intelligence with an goal happened to get us to the complex system. As such, a seemingly irreducibly complex system such as the eye is not even close to be analogous to the well documented financial system.
I used your example of an eye. Now explain again how evolutionary mechanisms are scientific facts and tell us all about the mechanisms that can somehow get functions to do an end run around natural selection. I pasted my point below for your convenience when you answer it.
Quote: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.
