For Christians (or anyone else) who deny Darwinian evolution.

[I_am_not_mafia]

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.

[LadyForCamus]

LOL. Steveo special pleading? Shock and horror! 😏

[SteveII]

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. 

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.

[Minimalist]

Your grasp on philosophy and logic are tenuous at best.

And your grasp of reality is pathetic.

https://www.dnalc.org/view/16982-The-Eye...unked.html


Click - if you are not afraid of accidentally learning something.

[The Grand Nudger]

Irreducible complexity's proponents abandoned it....and yet you're still peddling it? Steve...lol, when the snake oil salesmen themselves admit it was a scam, there's no shame in packing it in. Consider how this looks from the outside. Not only are you objecting to scientific facts because of a fairy tale...you're objecting by way of a thoroughly discredited and completely unscientific weasel word.

[LadyForCamus]

Argument from personal incredulity, Steve. Even you can do better.

[downbeatplumb]

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.

There are a number of reasons why your argument here fails:
A: Something that appears irreducibly complex may not in fact be so.
B: Evolution can discard parts as well as add.
C: Parts can change their usage.

The eye has probably one of the best known evolutionary paths and I know you have been told about this on a number of occasions in the past.

But here we go.

Firstly a brief explanation of the evolution of senses. All senses rely on a similar process, electrical impulses. At the simplest level you can see paramecium use the deformation of its surface to sense hitting something by changing the level of negative and positive electrons internally and this reverses the pulses of its flagella by using waves of electricity, nothing that compares to a nervous system but you have the basis of sensing and reacting. From this you can evolve a brain.

The simplest known proto eye is an eyespot or light  sensing organelle found on algae and other unicelled creatures that senses when its dark or light and can use similar methods to the paramecium to move towards light/away from dark.

From there you can evolve the eye and associated neural functions.

From a light sensing spot if you add a bit of a dip you can sense the direction the light is and that gives more information for the evolving creature to use with its evolving neural system

The deeper the dip, the better the information, until you get a sphere.

Then you can have a number of light sensing spots, people grow extra heads from time to time so adding extra things is a common mutation, adding spots gives the ability to see  shapes.

I'm sure you can take it from there. I have shown you how to evolve a working eye, sensing apparatus and neural network there.

You can find similar processes for everything if you care to look.

By the way, what is your suggested alternative? I want an answer at least as detailed as the one I gave above.



So now you have a rudimentary eye

So

[downbeatplumb]

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.

There are a number of reasons why your argument here fails:
A: Something that appears irreducibly complex may not in fact be so.
B: Evolution can discard parts as well as add.
C: Parts can change their usage.

The eye has probably one of the best known evolutionary paths and I know you have been told about this on a number of occasions in the past.

But here we go.

Firstly a brief explanation of the evolution of senses. All senses rely on a similar process, electrical impulses. At the simplest level you can see paramecium use the deformation of its surface to sense hitting something by changing the level of negative and positive electrons internally and this reverses the pulses of its flagella by using waves of electricity, nothing that compares to a nervous system but you have the basis of sensing and reacting. From this you can evolve a brain.

The simplest known proto eye is an eyespot or light  sensing organelle found on algae and other unicelled creatures that senses when its dark or light and can use similar methods to the paramecium to move towards light/away from dark.

From there you can evolve the eye and associated neural functions.

From a light sensing spot if you add a bit of a dip you can sense the direction the light is and that gives more information for the evolving creature to use with its evolving neural system

The deeper the dip, the better the information, until you get a sphere.

Then you can have a number of light sensing spots, people grow extra heads from time to time so adding extra things is a common mutation, adding spots gives the ability to see  shapes.

I'm sure you can take it from there. I have shown you how to evolve a working eye, sensing apparatus and neural network there.

You can find similar processes for everything if you care to look.

By the way, what is your suggested alternative? I want an answer at least as detailed as the one I gave above.



So now you have a rudimentary eye

So

Dont know what happened at the end there. and I 'm out of editing time.

[I_am_not_mafia]

Which string contains the most data and which contains the most information?


String A:

0000000000000000000000000000000000000000


String B:

123456789012345678901234567890


String C:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234

 There equal because non of them represent information nor data. The numbers and letters have nothing assigned to them to believe they are anything at all.

Way to go avoiding answering a question. Using the same argument DNA contains no information because G, T, A and C have nothing assigned to them. Yet we know for sure that you accept that DNA contains information because otherwise you wouldn't be describing how recessive genes lead to a white spot in rottweilers. So we can see that you are deliberately being intellectually dishonest here.

OK, let's say that the strings above describe a system of 30 or 40 mechanisms that interact with each other. Each letter corresponds to the type of mechanism. The order in which the mechanisms appear is also important and affects how the system works.

If I want to give you the simplest recipe for recreating the system without losing information about it then I would tell you:

System A is 40 mechanisms of type 0.
System B is 3 sequences of mechanisms where each sequence is '1234567890'
System C can only be described as a single sequence of 30 mechanisms of types  'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234'

So I could encode this as:

System A: 40x0
System B: 3x1234567890
System C: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ1234

String A has more data (40 characters) but the least information is required to recreate it
String C has the most information but the same amount of characters (data) as String B.

Now imagine we mutated the type of one of the mechanisms of String A to get String D:

0000000000Z00000000000000000000000000000

The simplest way of describing this system without losing information is 10 mechanisms of type 0, 1 mechanism of type Z following by 29 mechanisms of type 0.

System D: 10x0, 1xZ, 29x0

See, new information has been added to the description of a system because of a mutation.

[SteveII]

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.

There are a number of reasons why your argument here fails:
A: Something that appears irreducibly complex may not in fact be so.
B: Evolution can discard parts as well as add.
C: Parts can change their usage.



The eye has probably one of the best known evolutionary paths and I know you have been told about this on a number of occasions in the past.

But here we go.

Firstly a brief explanation of the evolution of senses. All senses rely on a similar process, electrical impulses. At the simplest level you can see paramecium use the deformation of its surface to sense hitting something by changing the level of negative and positive electrons internally and this reverses the pulses of its flagella by using waves of electricity, nothing that compares to a nervous system but you have the basis of sensing and reacting. From this you can evolve a brain.

The simplest known proto eye is an eyespot or light  sensing organelle found on algae and other unicelled creatures that senses when its dark or light and can use similar methods to the paramecium to move towards light/away from dark.

From there you can evolve the eye and associated neural functions.

I missed the part where you explain how the eye and the associated neural function developed through successive small changes where both are needed to provide a survival benefit. Further, just recognizing light is not a survival benefit. The organism has to be able to do something about it. So, what function evolved first when all three require the others for any survival benefit? 

From a light sensing spot if you add a bit of a dip you can sense the direction the light is and that gives more information for the evolving creature to use with its evolving neural system

The deeper the dip, the better the information, until you get a sphere.

Then you can have a number of light sensing spots, people grow extra heads from time to time so adding extra things is a common mutation, adding spots gives the ability to see  shapes.

There are several things wrong with that sentence, but let's stick to the one point. You would need a massive increase in complexity in the processing center to go from the binary light/no light to recognizing shapes and doing something about it that would be a survival benefit. What survival benefit preserved the increasingly complex (but useless) eye until the organism developed the vastly improved processing center? 

I'm sure you can take it from there. I have shown you how to evolve a working eye, sensing apparatus and neural network there.

You can find similar processes for everything if you care to look.

By the way, what is your suggested alternative? I want an answer at least as detailed as the one I gave above.

I am not the one claiming something!! People left and right here claim evolution is a scientific fact. It is NOT. It is a philosophical claim. This is not a difficult concept. 

I'm not even saying that evolution is a bad theory. It's absolutely the best naturalistic theory we have. To deny there are large gaps of knowledge in how it works and how it played out is just stupid. I for one am waiting until we either fill in the gaps with facts (or better theories) or fail to. My beliefs don't hang on it either way.